Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

Pluralism and international society
Huntington’s work is best seen as a reaction to two bodies of contemporary
International Relations theory – on the one hand, the work of neo- and clas-
sical realists who argue that, one way or another, the state remains at the
heart of IR and will continue to act in terms of ends–means rationality, and,
on the other, the work of theorists of globalization who see the emergence
of a borderless world in which legal structures will no longer be dominated
by the state. Plausibly enough, Huntington argues that both are mistaken
but both have caught hold of one aspect of the emerging world order – realists
are right that intergroup conflict will continue to be a central feature of that
order, while globalizers are right to doubt that the state will remain the most
important actor within that conflict. Instead conflict will persist but be
intercivilizational – unless, that is, the West gives up its attempt to impose
its values on the rest of the world, in which case the basis may exist for a,
somewhat uncomfortable, modus vivendi.
In fact, there is a body of work that comes close to addressing the ques-
tion that Huntington poses while remaining statist in inclination – namely
the work of the English School and theorists of international society,
encountered in Chapter 3 above, in the context of the constructivist critique
of neorealism. As noted there, English School writers focus on the state
rather than sub-state or universal categories, but – in contrast to neorealists –
they argue that when states interact they may form a society, a norm-
governed relationship whose members accept that they have at least limited
responsibilities towards one another and to the society as a whole.
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These responsibilities are summarized in the traditional practices of inter-
national law and diplomacy. The international society that these writers
describe was, in its origins at least, a firmly European phenomenon, but there
are at least two reasons to think that it could be made to work in a largely
non-European world. First, although as we have seen the modern world is
incontestably and increasingly multicultural in social terms, the Western
invention of the nation-state has proved remarkably attractive to a great
many different cultures – even those societies that are very critical of allegedly
Western notions (such as human rights) are strong promoters of the equally
Western notion of the sovereign state. Whether because they genuinely meet
a need, or because, given the existing order, sovereign territorial political units
are more or less unavoidable, nation-states seem to be desired everywhere –
at least by political elites. The only part of the world where the institution is
under serious threat from an alternative form of political organization is at its
place of origin in Western Europe in the form of the European Union.
A more fundamental reason for the possible relevance of notions of inter-
national society in a multicultural world is that, on some accounts, the very
rationale of the idea is precisely its ability to cope with cultural diversity. An
important writer here is Terry Nardin, whose account of international soci-
ety as a ‘practical association’ has been highly influential in recent years
(Nardin 1983). Nardin’s point is that, unlike a ‘purposive association’ such
as NATO or the WTO which is built around a concrete project (collective
defence or the expansion of trade) and assumes common purposes amongst
its members, all of whom have voluntarily joined the organization in ques-
tion, international society is an all-inclusive category whose practices are
authoritative on every state precisely because they do not involve common
purposes or a concrete project. The only common purpose is to live together
in peace and with justice, and in this context justice is a procedural rather
than a substantive notion. It is clear that, if these distinctions hold, the
origins of the practices of international society in the European states sys-
tem are irrelevant to their authority today. These practices are authoritative
precisely because they do not privilege any one conception of the ‘Good’,
and this means that they are ideally suited for a world in which many and
various such practices are to be found.
This ‘pluralist’ conception of international society has received quite a lot of
attention in recent years, most noticeably via a major book by Robert Jackson
(2000), and does, on the face of it, appear to offer a way to cope with the new
politics of identity that is, in certain respects, superior to Huntington’s call for
a modus vivendi between civilizations, or the frequent suggestion that the
world should engage in a large-scale intercivilizational dialogue to iron out our
differences (Parekh 2000). Rather than relying on the hazy and controversially
essentialist notion of a ‘civilization’, the pluralist account rests upon an
institution – the state – which is concrete and widely accepted. Still, pluralism
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does seem to rule out the very notion of an international human rights regime –
it would be difficult to argue that respect for human rights is a necessary
practice for international society on a par with, for example diplomatic immu-
nity – and many people would be reluctant to abandon this notion altogether,
even if they are conscious of how the pursuit of universal human rights could
indeed create the kind of clashes that Huntington describes. There is a genuine
dilemma here, one response to which has been offered by ‘solidarist’ theorists
of international society, in particular Nicholas Wheeler and Tim Dunne
(Wheeler 2000; Dunne and Wheeler 1996).
Their point is that although an international society constitutes a rational
political order for humanity taken as a whole (because problems of scale make
global government impossible, laws lose their effectiveness at a distance, and
tyranny is less likely if political society occurs on a human scale), the ultimate
referent object of international society ought to be individual human beings
rather than states as such. The telos of international society is not, in the last
resort, simply to preserve a multiplicity of separate states, but ultimately to
promote human flourishing; thus, although theorists of international society
from Grotius, Pufendorf and Burke through to Bull and Nardin have argued
that this goal is best achieved via a society of legally autonomous, sovereign
states, sovereign rights cannot be employed to justify conduct that clearly
prevents human flourishing, such as large-scale human rights violations.
It should be noted that this solidarist version of international society can-
not drift too far away from the pluralism more normally associated with the
idea of a society of states without losing contact with the tradition as a
whole. Gross violations of human rights may be regarded as a modern ver-
sion of ‘gross violations of human dignity’, justifying external intervention
on the part of any one who can prevent them, but this is a long way away
from the cosmopolitan notion that universal standards in all areas of
human life should supplant the local. Adherents to the idea of a society of
states may agree that there are some things that ought not to be tolerated,
but they are coming at matters from a different angle from human rights
activists, and alliances between these two groups will always be uneasy and
unstable. The solidarist account of international society amounts to a
reimagining of what is involved in a society of states, an amendment to plu-
ralist accounts rather than an alternative to them. These matters will be
addressed in further detail in Chapter 11.