Description
This paper recalibrates Hedley Bull as a theorist of informality with special reference to informal institutions. Bull gives little weight to formal International Organizations. The United Nations is deemed a ‘pseudo institution’. And core IOs, notably the International Monetary Fund and World Bank are marginalized in his examination of the ‘world political system.’
Yet, although it is commonplace in the International Relations literature to emphasize Bull’s privileging of fundamental institutions (including balance of power, international law, diplomacy, war, and great power management) as ‘a set of habits and practices,’ little in the way of analysis has been made of the implications of this framing in terms of the contest between formal IOs and informal institutions – a contest that has attracted increased scholarly attention.
What is striking albeit little acknowledged is the essential informality embedded in Bull’s cluster of fundamental institutions. This paper aims to fill this analytical gap, focusing attention specially on what is termed in the paper: concertation. Bull’s focus on the sustained use of modes of informal institutions with the putative use as directorates in world politics: not only in the format of older (and stigmatized) concerts of power but ‘fluid’ representation vis-à-vis the existence of self-selected clubs.
