English School educational philosophy and international relations theory

¶ … English System: Order out of chaos through non-State connections

According to English School, why is there such a high degree of order in the international system?

The recent tumultuous events in international affairs, dating from September 11, 2001, may make the English School's stress upon cooperation and order, rather than upon chaos, within the international system, seem fundamentally awry. However, despite these attacks by non-state actors upon a state's integrity, as well as numerous other violent, similar incidents in recent memory, the international system continues to function. For the English School theorist, this challenge to the system demonstrates the strength and fundamental order of the international system of human communities. While terrorism shows the power of non-state actors to harm the international environment, non-state actors also have the power to generate community and consensus to fight such resistance, as in the case of international aid organizations.

According to the English School, nation-states, even rogue nation-states are not designed to self-destruct. They are based upon order within their borders, and strive to create order within the international system, society, or community, regardless of someone defines the world's sense of intuitive and official governance. States are based upon structure for their own survival, this generates order in the international community, and the citizens who invest their sovereigns with the power to negotiate upon their behalf also desire order to function and live. Also, human beings, because they possess multiple identities and ways of associating with one another, can create sub-national groups of identity that transcend border and formulate order as well as threaten order.

The English School of international relations is most closely associated with the London School of Economics. In contrast to the American philosophy of rational actors, which tends to stress the ruthless pursuit of self-interest of 'black box' nation-states, the lack of importance of ideology in the real world of politics, and the conflict inherent in the international system, the English System stresses the potential for cooperation. This cooperation, moreover, is not something that needs to be 'forced' by an outside authority, creating Hobbseian order out of disorder. Rather, the English school sees the international society as a society that is voluntarily entered into and is based upon the fundamental human desire for survival. This nay occasionally be thwarted but is still real, because as states are designed to facilitate order, harmony and morality, so can international institutions (Hill & Rusciano, 2004).

The English School might be said to take a Lockean view of international society. Nation-states are the main, legitimate groupings for the organization of human activities. But all created communities, whether they are nation-states, civilizations, or global communities need order to function. "Historically, patterns of discourse and communication are instrumental in defining the primary units of political order" (Hill & Rusciano, 2004). Thus, in contrast to the Rational Actor Theory, states are not seen as cohesive, single units or black boxes, but conglomerate entities. This conglomerate nature makes the sovereign states themselves open to debate and consensus within, and also to debate and consensus outside of national borders.

The English School's proponents argue that within every nation-state there must be a general consensus to create a functional form of governance. The people give the sovereign their confidence, and the right to pass laws and agreements. The authorities are invested with enough trust to create agreements, with other legitimate sovereigns who similarly operate under a basis of trust (Hill & Rusciano, 2004). Trust, of course runs counter to the idea of the Prisoner's Dilemma, which stresses how conflict and mistrust are generated by the inevitably imperfect information of the chaotic international community. The English School stresses the communitarian spirit as the best means for ensuring cooperation amongst individualistic actors to generate positive solutions to international problems. Even if the notion of international community is a fiction, or constructed, creating this ideal of a community, and the greater the sense of community, the more likely that such barriers to group cooperation as and individual preferences that conflict with harmony and order will be overcome.

This is why that promoting international cooperation on issues such as human rights, environmental protection, stemming regional conflict, arms control and reducing nuclear proliferation is contingent upon creating a sense of an international political community within which such collaboration is can occur on national and sub-national levels. A shared global discourse and language is required, to create a true sense of international order (Hill & Rusciano, 2004). This language can take place between communities and identities that transcend national borders.

Dealing with regional and interstate conflicts are more important, more important than the rational pursuit of self-interest which the English School sees, in its own way as fundamentally irrational because of the inevitable result of this supposedly rational drive -- warfare, nuclear proliferation, and environmental destruction. Ultimately, order and negotiation, the means with which harmony is created, will be accepted by nation-states, even nation states with long histories of conflict. Once, most of the nations of the European Union existed in conflict and a state of intractable hatred, today they exist in an economic unit out of mutual self-interest in maximizing their ability to create on the world stage.

The English School, although idealistic, is not irrationally exuberant about the obstacles to cooperation. Justice, of course, is difficult, even in a cohesive society with a common culture of laws. "In the relations among nation states there is no government but order and justice issues are far from absent -indeed the problems of war and peace and of disparities of wealth are often more extreme among states than they are within most states" (Armstrong, 2007:1). "Transnational society is almost by definition less amenable to geographical classification than either interhuman or interstate society. Nevertheless, and again in very broad brush, the view is one in which higher intensities of norms, rules and institutions are found on the smaller scales than on the larger ones. Clubs, firms, lobbies, associations, and suchlike are all for the most part more intensely organized locally than globally" (Buzan and Ana Gonzalez-Pelaz 2005:6).

This stress upon the cohesive potential of organizations to hold the 'whole' together is why the English School has often been characterized by theorists as the 'international society school' because it stresses the need for a sense of society and community to make up for international disparities of wealth, and because quite often the dangers posed by war and peace are of a much higher stake than within a nation (Bania-Dobyns, 2005:1). The nature of these high stakes, however, ideally facilitates rather than impedes social order and communication.

Many theorists believe that concept of international society is the school's most significant contribution to the discipline of international relations in general. It should be noted that even within the English School, some theorists disagree with the international system or society concept. Within the school, this idea has never been uncontroversial. "The criticism within the ES usually begins with questioning [the] distinction between an international system and an international society" (Bania-Dobyns, 2005:1). Some English School theorists stress that although the international community embraces and has a tendency towards order and equilibrium rather than disequilibrium, an "international system requires regular interaction but lacks any shared rules, whereas in a society there are common interests" and institutions to keep the society 'alive' thus the international system is still a system, and not a society that obeys commonly accepted rules and laws (Bania-Dobyns, 2005:1).

However, regardless of whether it is called a society or a system, in defense of the notion that the international world is a cohesive unit, whether system or society, "for a system to exist, the units need to have some kind of shared interest or else the system could not maintain itself," and all states have some fundamental stake in self-perpetuation or survival (Bania-Dobyns, 2005:1). "The key distinguishing factor between a system and a society is the shared identity that is the consequence of states' recognition of each others' equal legal status within an international society. This equal legal status arises because of the likeness of the units" (Bania-Dobyns, 2005:1). In other words, not all states accord one another legitimacy, as in the case of the Middle East and the status of Israel, however, all entities have an interest in their own survival and are part of a system, if not a society.

The Middle East's conglomeration of warring states must seem to be a fundamental challenge to English School theory. But the English School does not deny that conflict does not occur. According to one analogy, "looking first at the interstate domain, it is perfectly clear that a global scale pluralist interstate society exists on the basis of effectively universal acceptance of basic... institutions such as sovereignty, territoriality, diplomacy and international law. But it is just as clear that this global society is unevenly developed to a very marked degree" (Buzan and Gonzalez-Pelaez, 2005: 6).

English School theorists state that agreement and the desire for consensus is present, however, the world community expresses this desire to varying degrees. One example of this is the "famous egg box metaphor of international society (in which states were the eggs, and international society the box), one might see this unevenness as a pan of fried eggs. Although nearly all the states in the system belong to a thin, pluralist interstate society (the layer of egg-white), there are sub-global and/or regional clusters sitting on that common substrate that are both much more thickly developed than the global common, and up to a point developed separately and in different ways from each other (the yolks)" (Buzan and Gonzalez-Pelaez, 2005: 6).

For example the EU and North America, for example are "sub-global interstate societies that are more thickly developed within themselves. Lesser attempts to create thicker, liberal, regional interstate/international societies by cultivating joint economic development can be found in...various other regional economic cooperations," such as OPEC (Buzan and Gonzalez-Pelaez, 2005: 6). "Above some of these regional efforts one can find larger, looser, thinner, versions of the same thing labeled the 'West' or the 'Atlantic Community'" (Buzan and Gonzalez-Pelaez, 2005: 6).

Shared values and an investment in the order is not homogenous, as in the case of the varying surface of an egg, but it is cohesive, and there is an interest in maintaining that the egg does not fracture, because all of the 'egg' must remain intact. The multiplicity of often uncomfortable identities that make up the international system, however, is not unlike that of how the actors, or nation states, function. For example, all human beings, regardless of their national, religious and local identities have a variety of individual personas or identity they hold simultaneously, "the question is how the patterns of distribution overlap, and which takes priority as a mobilizer or legitimator of political action. Some identities will fit inside others, like Russian dolls (e.g. Danish, within Scandinavian, within European, within Western), whereas others may be relatively diffuse, and have complicated patterns of overlap" (Buzan and Gonzalez-Pelaez, 2005: 6).

Conflict is generated quite often when these identities overlap, like a person who is 'both' Russian and from the region Chechnya, or a Saudi who is both of the Middle East, a member of OPEC, yet who also strives to be an accepted and legitimate part of the United Nations. But there still is a common investment and 'center' that holds all of these identities together, within a nation, and within the international community. Subglobal level identities exist on "the interstate and interhuman domains and perhaps in the transnational one," even though the "diplomatic and political structure of global international society, and the regimes and institutions of the global economy, are altogether more substantial than either the faint glow of shared identity as humankind or the distant prospect of a pure transnational society" (Buzan and Gonzalez-Pelaez, 2005: 6).