Description
This chapter engages with big picture normative theorizing about and within international society. The English school has always seen the normative aspect of international society as important to its distinctive position within theories of international relations, and international society, as the school’s ‘signature concept’ is no exception. The pluralist-solidarist debate has played the most important role in attempts to capture the big picture of international society’s normative characterization. In some instances, especially amongst pluralists, that has been linked to an underpinning empirical assessment of the extent to which a single ‘civilisation’, to borrow Martin Wight’s term, exists that provides underpinning commonalities to international society’s members that give substantive meaning to the ‘common good’ granting an international society its specific normative character. Others, mainly solidarists, have been more willing to argue for the need for international society’s members to create such commonalities based on universal truths, indebted to philosophical reflection. Buzan’s English school theorizing brackets out normative theorizing, with his position typically being that it requires a different skill-set from the social structural and explanatory focus he emphasises. This chapter looks at the costs of this pragmatic argument for functional specialisation in English school theorizing of international society, and aims to offer a counterpoint to Buzan’s normative agnosticism by arguing that the normative big picture of
international society, and of English school analysis of international society, is inescapable. Engaging Buzan’s arguments for historical contingency, his deployment of world history, and his account of social structure, the chapter draws out the inherent normativity of historical and social structural choices, and how the narrative Buzan creates of international society’s mixture of stasis, change and transition further reveals the normative strengths and limitations of English school theory.
