International Orders

John A. Hall

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745666846
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

This book examines the different ways in which order has been achieved in world affairs with a view to understanding current political dilemmas and opportunities.

International Orders begins by distinguishing between world order and international order in the spirit of Hedley Bull. This leads to an analysis of five different principles of international order - the principles of the balance of power, the concert of great powers, liberal regimes, interdependence, and the exercise of hegemony. However, principles of international order are rarely simply clear cut in their operations, they intermingle with the perceptions of human agents and the plans of political leaders who have sought to structure the world polity to serve particular aims.

The core of this volume comprises a detailed historical sociology of how international order was achieved at three crucial phases in the history of the states system. Theories and evidence are deployed to examine: the emergence of the European states system; the development of the European state from Westphalia to the rise of Nazism; and the emergence and impact of the Cold War. Throughout, the theories of world order are examined, tested and, in the light of evidence, improved.

In conclusion, considerable attention is given to the forces of integration and disintegration which might strengthen or undermine world order in the future, and an argument is offered concerning the ethical grounds on which intervention in the affairs of another state might be justified.

1

Groundwork

In order to understand what is happening to contemporary world politics, it is first necessary to establish why President Bush’s heralding of a new world order was conceptually mistaken. There is no better guide to the nature of sociability, states, and justice than Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society.¹ Discussion of these key concepts is followed by an exposition of five ideal types of international order; this necessarily goes beyond Bull’s position, for all that he was aware that international order came in varied forms, given notable intellectual development since his death. Justification is then offered for giving the inquiry an historical turn. The logic of the realism/liberalism mix is first noted in remarks concluding this chapter.

KEY CONCEPTS

Perhaps the most important characteristic of social life is one that is taken for granted, namely the success with which we manage most social encounters. Most of our relations in public are with strangers, yet they proceed on an orderly and regular basis, whether piloting a car through traffic lights or negotiating the pitfalls of cocktail parties.² That the very notion of society implies a way of life opposed to random violence lay behind Raymond Aron’s criticism of Pierre Bourdieu’s use of the term “symbolic violence”:

A curious vocabulary because it no longer enables one to distinguish between different modes of socialization: on the one hand, the inevitable and diffuse influence on individuals of the social group which tends to reproduce itself, on the other hand, constraint which presupposes resistance, whether conscious or not, on the part of those who feel the pressure of social milieu and authority. Violence only retains a specific meaning when it designates a relationship between men which comprises the use of physical force or the threat to use physical force.³

Aron is here rejecting the residues of the thought of Jean-Paul Sartre, so evident in Bourdieu’s concept. Socialization is less a permanent threat to authenticity than an enabling condition for humanity; the fact that many do not find that daily life resembles the triangular hell of No Exit suggests, moreover, that sociability may be more natural than Sartre’s supremely protestant hyper-Hobbesianism allows. The sharing of norms offers the possibility of banishing violence, and thereby of moving towards justice. This mattered enormously to Aron from the early 1930s. How could it have been otherwise? Aron was of Jewish background. Witnessing the Nazi book burnings made him realize that the destruction of all baselines of social reciprocity was on the historical agenda.⁴

Aron’s notion of sociability has everything to recommend it, but its acceptance should not close off interesting sociological complexities. Let us move from the Kantian essence of sociability to broader reflection on the nature of society. Consider Susan Watkins’s impressive recent demonstration that Western European demographic behavior came to be patterned by nation-states in the period between 1870 and 1960.⁵ If this strikingly supports the notion that a society can provide a way of life, it also suggests opening out debate in two ways. On the one hand, nation-states had not been unitary societies beforehand, just as they may not be completely so any longer; indeed, the territorialization of social relations is usually more ambition than achievement. If we are to understand the social world in general and international politics in particular, attention needs to be paid both to the processes that build and undermine unitary societies and to the complexities of social identity that exist in their absence. On the other hand, the fact that unitary societies are not natural, even if sociability is, raises the question as to who benefits from a particular set of rules established within a nation-state. If the violence of the Nazis towards some elements within Germany made their rule a revolt against the very notion of sociability, that is, a triumph of force and arbitrariness over settled expectations, the creation of societal order has never yet been the same as the establishment of social justice.⁶ In consequence, radicals and conservatives are always likely to differ in their political judgements. But division need not be absolute: there is no reason why one cannot have a reverent appreciation for the importance of the rule of law in combination with an insistence on extending social justice.⁷

Whatever the exact nature of the relations between sociability and society, there can be no doubt but that they are qualitatively different from relations between states. Hobbes makes the point with characteristic brutality:

But though there had never been any time, wherein particular men were in a condition of war one against another; yet in all times, kings, and persons of sovereign authority, because of their independency, are in continual jealousies, and in the state and posture of gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their forts, garrisons, and guns upon the frontiers of their kingdoms; and continual spies upon their neighbours; which is a posture of war. But because they uphold thereby, the industry of their subjects; there does not follow from it, that misery, which accompanies the liberty of particular men.

To this war of every man, against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be unjust.⁸

Sartre’s position was deemed “hyper-Hobbesian” a moment ago because he thinks that the war of all against all permanently characterizes “being-in-itself.” That is not Hobbes’s view. Life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” only in the absence of government.⁹ As there is no Leviathan to rule over the conflict between states, violence is natural. This is not to say that no international order can ever be achieved. But such order is likely to be the product of artifice rather than of socialization. Insofar as there are contacts between states, it is possible to talk of a system of states: still, the essence of that system remains anarchic. It was almost inevitable that this position, which can be dubbed that of brute realism, would be theorized so as to stress that states, in a world bereft of justice, seek nothing but power – or, more precisely, the maximization of their “national interest.”¹⁰

This picture needs as much qualification as did that of sociability. Just as there are elements of power within the nation-states to which we are accustomed, so too can there be sociability in the relations between states. International order is likely to be strengthened by the extensive sharing of norms and practices, that is, from the presence of international society. That we live, to some extent and for some of the time, in a society of states was Hedley Bull’s central analytic point. The morality appropriate to such circumstances was noted by Montesquieu: “The right of nations is by nature founded on the principle that the various nations should do to one another in times of peace the most good possible, and in times of war the least ill possible, without harming their true interests.”¹¹ Aron so loved this prudential maxim that he used it to introduce his great treatise on peace and war.¹²

The nature of international society can be highlighted by returning to demographic patterns. Watkins’s study pays most attention to the ways in which nation-states have replaced provinces: Bretons came to behave, for example, as did the rest of France, thereby making Breton identity essentially supernumerary, an option rather than a condition. But as important as this has been the attempt to cage relations which exist outside states within their territorial boundaries.¹³ Ambivalent attitudes exist towards such caging. On the one hand, the control of feudalism’s violence, that is, the ability of states not just to claim the monopoly of violence but actually to achieve it, has received a good press.¹⁴ On the other hand, understanding between states, each jealous of their sovereignty, is likely to be enhanced by shared by understandings of foreign policy makers.¹⁵ The solidarity of eighteenth-century Europe’s cosmopolitan, French-speaking upper class helped ensure the smooth workings of international order, for example, quite as much as did calculations of power and advantage in the abstract. In this spirit, the creation, maintenance, and increasing social reach of international norms is often seen to be nothing less than part of the process of civilization. This can be accepted as long as the norms in question are universal and not just widespread, that is, as long as their content includes the recognition of the rights of other societies and of humane conduct when at war with them – in contrast, that is, to the extensive “norms” of fascism and Bolshevism, as well as those endemic to the racism of the European powers at the height of imperialism.¹⁶ No attempt to strike a balance between what should and what should not be contained within states has yet been successful. Much of this book concerns the changing balance between the two.

No international order has yet created a world order, that is, an arena of justice in which human beings would be welcome as universal strangers anywhere at any time, entitled to the treatment habitually given to a social group within territorial boundaries. The concept of international order is not then purely aseptic; to the contrary, it has a troubled relationship to morality. An international order may systematically favor the interests of some states rather than of all states. It is worth recalling in this context the comment made by the British general Calgacus on the Pax Romana: “To robbery, butchery and rapine, they give the lying name of ‘government’; they create a desolation and call it peace.”¹⁷ Equally, the world restored by the Congress system was directed against revolution, whilst America’s ordering of capitalism gave few favors to the developing world, despite the extension to it of the norm of sovereignty and non-intervention;¹⁸ more generally, the long peace established by the freezing of social relations in the postwar era meant very different experiences for those living in the East from those familiar to us in the West. As was the case with social order, opinion is likely to be split between radicals and conservatives as to whether international order is a good per se. Again, there is little need to take sides: one can very often (but not necessarily always) favor international order, not least since this now means the absence of nuclear war, whilst wishing to press for an extension of international society so as to allow for greater justice in world politics.

These distinctions allow us to make two points about the heralding of a new world order. Most obviously, a category mistake was being made. A new international order was in question rather than the creation of world order. A second reason for scepticism was the absence of any positive specification of what a new world order would comprise. The presumption was that the removal of evil would allow truth, peace, justice, and all good things to flourish automatically. Such carte blanche laxity, taking to be natural what needs to be justified, is very much the intellectual fashion of the age.¹⁹ As the nature of the good is deeply contested, this style of argument is useless.

If the distinction drawn by Bull between international order and world order retains validity, this does not for a moment mean that we can sit back in idleness. To the contrary, very great intellectual labors are desperately needed. Is the contemporary world polity ordered? If so, how should we characterize this order, and how distinguish it from its predecessors? Which social forces in the contemporary world are likely to support and which to undermine international order? Bull’s early death necessitates finding our own responses to these questions. Whilst answering these questions, moreover, it is important to bear in mind that Bull’s concepts have prescriptive as well as descriptive content – in itself no bad thing, provided that the two are not mingled in any licentious manner. For one thing, ...