Bras. Political Sci. Rev.2008;2(1):148-52.
On Global Order: Power, Values and the Constitution of International Society
DOI: 10.1590/1981-3843200800010007
Since the 1990s, the English School of International Relations has re-emerged as a research program. The work of its classical authors has been taken up again and new theoretical investments have projected it onto the centre of the debates on transformations in the international order after the Cold War. The English School has thus gained a renewed momentum. In spite of the remark by as to the alleged development of two streams within this tradition — classical theorists of international society and critical theorists of international society — what one has been able to observe is the theoretical-analytical dispersion around and based on the main concepts inherited from classical authors — Butterfield, Wight, Manning, Bull, Watson and Vincent, among others. However, such dispersion denotes not fragility but the vitality of a theoretical architecture that has plasticity as its central characteristic. Such plasticity has allowed contemporary authors to recover the concept of “international society” — a distinctive element of the English School of International Relations — and to place it, in the first instance, within a dialogue with the main theoretical debates of the field, and, secondly, at the service of an understanding of the problem of international order (see , , ). Such dispersion allows one to understand the recent writings of , on the one hand, and of , on the other. Both seek to confront one problem: how to deal with the growing density of international society in the light of the concepts inherited from the tradition and, in particular, in the light of the debate between pluralist and solidarist perspectives that marked the intellectual history of the English School. Linklater and Suganami take up again the tradition with a view to offering it a cosmopolitan orientation. In this sense, the authors propose to treat systems of States in the light of a “comparative historical sociology” that has a markedly transcendental orientation (, 191ff). Such treatment allows for the construction of an ideal type of international citizenship resulting from a progressive process of civil socialisation of States and other international actors. Barry Buzan, for his part, reconstitutes the tradition through its dialogue with Wendtian constructivism. His work seeks to capture the transformations in the international order by means of the reconstitution of the dimensions of International Relations in terms of the triad interhuman societies/transnational societies/interstate societies (, 90ff). In the author’s perspective, the pluralist and solidarist positions convert into two poles of a spectrum that permits one to understand the degree of socialisation present in each of the dimensions of his triad. In spite of their analytic potential, the propositions lose sight both of the specific dimension of power relations and of the normative tension inherited from the classical authors.
This context allows one to understand the delineations of Andrew Hurrell’s book On global order: Power, values, and the constitution of international society (2007). It is an ambitious piece, as it sets out to discuss the possibilities of promotion of a legitimate global political order by an anarchical society of sovereign States. Such a challenge is even more meaningful since the author proposes to shed light on the problem of manufacturing the international order based on three prisms, expressed on the book’s frontispiece: “the need to capture shared and common interests, to manage unequal power, and to mediate cultural diversity and value conflict” (, 2). The reading of international politics proposed by Hurrell also repositions the English School within the theoretical-analytic debates in the field of International Relations. Hurrell, though, takes up what is certainly the most fruitful element of the tradition: the tension between order and justice. Indeed, since he aims to comprehend the dynamic of international politics in the light of power relations and of the normative constitution of international society, Hurrell recovers that which at another moment he identified as the most ambiguous point in the work of Hedley Bull: “this point where justice becomes a constituent part of order and where power-political and moral arguments come together, but never wholly coincide” (, 39).
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