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发表于 2007-7-28 16:47:44
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This summary is inspiring because it is clearly getting at something basic and important about international social structure that is not covered either by secondary institutions or by Wendt’s broad classification of basic types of social order. It is also both instructive and a bit depressing. It is depressing because it reveals something approaching indifference towards both conceptual clarity and cumulative debate. The English school’s interest in primary institutions might be a candidate for the ’coherent research program’ that Keohane (1988: 392) accuses the reflectivists of lacking, but to qualify will require much more systematic thinking than it has received so far. The summary is instructive on two grounds. First, because it suggests that there is a lot more to primary institutions than sovereignty. As Onuf (2002: 228) astutely observes, it is a feature of Realist thinking that ’sovereignty is the only rule that matters for the constitution of anarchy’. Second, primary institutions do have some kind of life-cycle, generally long in human terms, in which they rise, evolve, and decline, and this dynamic itself needs to be a focus of study. The summary also suggests a recurrent desire to differentiate primary institutions into some sort of hierarchy between the deeper and more constitutive, and the less deep and more procedural. This question of hierarchy is a useful way into the problem of defining and identifying primary institutions.
Is There a Hierarchy Within Primary Institutions?
What lies behind the persistent tendency in writings about primary institutions either to finger some one institution as ’primary’ or ’master’, or to make some more general distinction (Mayall’s institutions and principles; Holsti’s procedural and foundational institutions; Reus-Smits’s constitutional structures and fundamental institutions). The idea of a ’primary’ or ’master’ institution implies that one deep practice essentially generates or shapes all of the others. The idea of two layers of primary institutions implies that some are ’deeper’ than others.
Looking first at the notion of layers, Holsti’s and Reus-Smit’s distinctions are based on the idea that some (procedural/foundational) institutions are about repetitive practices and interactions, while others (foundational/constitutional structures) are about how the actors and the basic rules of the game among them are constituted. A distinction along these lines is strikingly similar to the one used by Ruggie (1998) and others (e.g. Kratochwil, 1989: 26; Searle, 1995: 27-8; S鴕ensen, 1999) between regulative and constitutive rules. Since, as argued in 6.1, norms, rules, principles and values all overlap, and since institutions embody all of them, it seems reasonable to transpose the logic developed around constitutive and regulatory rules, to the discussion about different types of primary institution. Regulative rules are intended to have causal effects on a pre-existing activity, while ’constitutive rules define the set of practices that make up any particular consciously organized social activity…they specify what counts as that activity’ (Ruggie, 1998: 22). Searle (1995: 114) argues that ‘institutions always consist in constitutive rules (practices, procedures) that have the form X counts as Y in context C’. It seems that the strange status of the state in Bull’s scheme, and his silence about sovereignty, reflect the positioning of his institutions within his ’rules of coexistence’ category, which leaves out the institutions to be found under his constitutive rules. Bull thus comes close to falling foul of the criticism made by Ruggie (1998: 25) of neorealists and neoliberals, that they exclude constitutive rules, and that ’the scope of their theories … is confined to regulative rules that coordinate behaviour in a pre-constituted world.’ Yet that would not be quite fair, since several of Bull’s institutions do seem to fit under Holsti’s ’foundational’ category and Ruggie’s ’constitutive’ one. At first glance, it is not exactly clear how one would interpret Bull’s three types of rules in the light of Holsti’s and Ruggie’s dyadic classifications. Bull’s constitutive rules probably fit within Holsti’s foundational institutions and Ruggie’s constitutive rules. His rules of cooperation probably fit within Holsti’s procedural institutions and Ruggie’s regulative rules, and may also overlap with secondary institutions. But quite where Bull’s rules of coexistence, and hence his five institutions, fit, is not immediately obvious. We are in the murky waters signposted by Hurrell (2002: 145) when he noted the absence of any clear answer as to what actually are ’the most important constitutive rules in international relations.’
Just what does count as constitutive in relation to international societies? Since the English school has in part justified its distinctiveness from regime theory by pointing to the constitutive quality of what it means by institutions, getting some sort of coherent answer to this is essential to the standing of English school theory. In one sense, Bull’s idea of constitutive rules is the social structural analogue to Waltz’s first tier of structure, comprising the ordering principle of the system that defines whether it is a society of states, a universal empire, a cosmopolitan society or whatever. Bull’s rules of coexistence are heavily shaped by the prior choice of states within this first tier of constitutive rules. They set out the minimum behavioural conditions for society, in other words a kind of bottom line necessary for some sort of international society to exist. Holsti’s and Reus-Smit’s deepest layers define both the key actors and the fundamental principles, rules and norms upon which their mutual relations are based. Ruggie’s idea is that constitutive rules define the set of practices that make up any particular consciously organized social activity, with the example of a game (e.g. chess - Searle, 1995: 27-8) giving clear guidance - i.e. the rules define the pieces, the environment in which the pieces act, and the ways in which the pieces relate to each other and that environment. Taking all these ideas together, and staying with a game metaphor (chess, or Manning’s game of states) it becomes apparent that there are two core elements in the idea of constitutive institutions: one is that such institutions define the main pieces/players in the game; the other that they define the basic rules by which the pieces/players relate to each other.
This sounds relatively simple, but unfortunately is not. One problem concerns the separability of pieces/players on the one hand, and the rules of engagement on the other. These might be separate (as in chess), but they might also be linked, as in the mutual constitution resolution to the agent-structure problem. Sovereignty as the defining quality of states (pieces/players) cannot be disentangled from anarchy as the defining quality of system structure (and therefore the rules of the game). This link is dynamic, and as the several accounts of the evolution of sovereignty noted above make clear, unlike the pieces and the rules in chess, both states and the game they play change over time. A second problem lies in the conflation of ’pieces’ and ’players’. In chess, the pieces are constituted by the rules, but the pieces are not the players, and although the activity of chess may be constituted by its rules, the people who play it are not (except in the very limited sense of being constituted as chess players). In the game of states, this distinction is much less clear: the pieces and the players are more closely interlinked, as captured in the distinction between ’role’ and ’idiosyncratic’ variables in the study of foreign-policy making. Where the pieces (states) are composed of sentient social actors, then what the pieces are and how they relate to each other will inevitably be connected. On this basis Holsti and Reus-Smit would seem to be correct in proposing that for the game of states, constitutive institutions must define both the main actors and the basic rules by which they relate to each other.
What does such a conclusion mean in practical terms? The clearest candidates for the status of constitutive institutions will be those that bear directly on the definition of the principal actors/players in the game. Taking the cue from Bull’s discussion of constitutive principles, for the game of states in Westphalian form the key constitutive institutions would be sovereignty and territoriality, for the game of empires, it would be suzerainty, for a cosmopolitian community it would be human rights, and for a neomediaeval system it would be the set of principles that differentiated the main types of actor and set out their rights and responsibilities in relation to each other. For something like the EU, the constitutive institution remains sovereignty, but accompanied by integration and ’subsidiarity’ (the investment of authority at the lowest possible level of an institutional hierarchy - McLean, 1996: 482). It is not impossible for some of these rules to coexist. During the colonial era, for example, the European states system was constituted by sovereignty, but the European powers related to the rest of the world on the basis of suzerainty, which defined a range of entitites from dominions through protectorates to colonies. Holsti (and Keene, 2000) are thus quite right to identify colonialism as an institution of pre-1945 European international society. Thinking just about what constitutes the actors/players pushes one towards the idea of ’master’ or ’principal’ primary institutions, where perhaps one or two key foundational practices do seem to set up the rest of the game.
Moving to constitutive institutions focused on the basic rules of engagement is more difficult. Where is the boundary between what counts as ’basic’ or ’fundamental’ rules (coexistence for Bull, rules that define the game for Ruggie, fundamental principles defining relations for Holsti and Reus-Smit), and cooperation/regulative/procedural rules? Bull’s idea of rules of cooperation as about secondary issues (those more advanced rules agreed by states beyond mere coexistence) looks immediately problematic. Such rules can include trade and human rights, both of which might well count as constitutive in the sense that they impact quickly and deeply on how the key players are defined. Both Holsti’s and Reus-Smit’s procedural rules and Ruggie’s regulative ones are trying to define a level that is relatively superficial in the sense that it downplays or eliminates the constitutive element. Holsti’s procedural institutions are: ’repetitive practices, ideas and norms that underlie and regulate interactions and transactions between the separate actors’, Ruggie’s regulative rules ’are intended to have causal effects on a pre-existing activity’. The idea here is to capture, as it were, the regular practices that sentient players engage in once the actors are established, the basic rules are in place, and the game of states is underway. But this seemingly clear distinction is hard to sustain. Even at the level of secondary institutions there are claims that the buildup of networks of regimes eventually entangles states to such an extent as to change quite fundamentally the nature of relations among them (more legal and institutionalised, less war) and thus to call into question the (neo)realist understanding of what anarchy means. Such claims are intrinsic to much of the discussion of globalisation and world society, and are not difficult to find in other literatures (Keohane and Nye, 1977; Wendt, 1999; Milner, 1991). In effect such claims elevate even secondary institutions, at least in their cumulative effect, to constitutive status. Holsti counts both trade and war as procedural institutions, yet there are compelling arguments that both have major effects on the constitution and behaviour of states (e.g. Keohane and Nye, 1977; Tilly, 1990).
One key element in the difficulty of drawing a boundary between constitutive institutions and regulatory rules is the breakdown of the analogy between games such as chess where the pieces are not the players, and games such as ’states’ where the pieces and the players are more closely intertwined. In the game of states, the players can reinterpret existing institutions as they go along. Ashley’s (1987: 411) definition of international community is close to the sense of primary institutions, and captures this idea of essential fluidity well:
international community can only be seen as a never completed product of multiple historical practices, a still-contested product of struggle to impose interpretation upon interpretation. In its form it can only be understood as a network of historically fabricated practical understandings, precedents, skills, and procedures that define competent international subjectivity and that occupy a precariously held social space pried open amidst contending historical forces, multiple interpretations and plural practices.
As Holsti’s discussion makes clear, within the game of states, even quite basic institutions (colonialism in his set, which does define actors in the system) can disappear, or at least atrophy to the point where the label is no longer an acceptable way of characterising practices, as the game evolves. Holsti tracks substantial changes of interpretation in other primary institutions as well, such as sovereignty (see also Keohane, 1995; Reus-Smit, 1997; Barkin, 1998; S鴕ensen, 1999), war and international law. The shared norms or principles represented by primary institutions can endure in a general sense, while the particular rules and institutional facts that they legitimise undergo substantial change. The problem is how to distinguish between those institutions that change the nature of the game and the character of the key players, and those that don’t. Drawing any such distinction in a definitive way is certain to be both difficult and controversial. There is endless scope for dispute about to what extent new institutions (the market, or human rights) change either the game or the players, and over what time periods they do so. The question is: does solidarism change the game of states, and at what point do those changes add up to a new game for which the name ’game of states’ is no longer appropriate? The tendency of EU studies to drift away from both IR and Politics suggests that at least in the minds of many of those who study it, the EU cannot be adequately understood either as a state or as a game of states.
Taking all of this into consideration, one can make the following general characterisation of the primary institutions of international society:
§ Primary institutions are durable and recognized practices structured around shared values (or perhaps shared practices, if values is seen as problematic) held by the members of international societies, and embodying a mix of norms, rules and principles.
§ In order to count as a primary institution, such practices must play a constitutive role in relation to both the pieces/players and the rules of the game. There is probably not a useful distinction to be made between constitutive and regulatory (or fundamental and procedural) primary institutions.
§ Although durable, primary institutions are neither permanent nor fixed. They will typically undergo a historical pattern of rise, evolution and decline that is long by the standards of a human lifetime. Changes in the practices within an institution may be a sign of vigour and adaptation (as those in sovereignty over the last couple of centuries) or of decline (as in the narrowing legitimacy of war over the last half-century). One needs to distinguish between changes in and changes of primary institutions.
There remains the question of hierarchy among primary institutions. Although I have argued that a constitutive/regulatory distinction cannot be used as the basis for such a hierarchy, the sense that there needs to be such a hierarchy is quite strong in the literature. The simplest solution to the hierarchy problem is to treat it as an issue of nesting. Some primary institutions can be understood as containing, or generating others. International law, for example, can be seen as a general institution, a set of fundamental principles, and also as the container of the potentially endless particular laws about a wide variety of specific issues that can be built up within it, and which mostly fall under what I have labelled here secondary institutions. The trick is to find primary institutions that stand alone. Looking again at table 1, it is clear that some of the candidates stand alone, whereas others are derivative.
Sovereignty is a good candidate for a master institution of Westphalian international society. Within it one could bundle up Mayall’s ’principles’ of non-intervention, self-determination and non-discrimination. A good case could be made for seeing international law as derivative from sovereignty. Although there could, in principle, be international law without sovereignty, as Mosler (1980: 1) argues, before sovereignty, in ancient and classical times, there was no conception of a universal community of rules or laws (for a more detailed study of this question see Onuma, 2000). Without international law, it is difficult to imagine much international relations among sovereign entities other than war.
Territoriality, or territorial integrity, is distinct from sovereignty and not necessary to it. Sovereignty can in principle exist without being territorial, even though in practice that might be difficult to implement. Territoriality is therefore a distinct master institution of Westphalian international societies (Ruggie, 1993). As argued above, sovereignty and territoriality together constitute the essence of the Westphalian state, and so eliminate Bull’s and Holsti’s attempt to see the state itself as a primary institution.
Diplomacy is another good candidate for a master institution. In historical terms, it predates sovereignty, and it easily bundles up Wight’s messengers, conferences and congresses, diplomatic language, and arbitration, and Reus-Smit’s multilateralism.
Balance of power is a clear fourth Westphalian master institution. When understood as a recognized social practice, and shared value, rather than as a mechanical consequence of anarchy, balance of power contains alliances, guarantees, neutrality, and great power management. It also contains war, again when understood as a social practice (Searle, 1995: 89-90), which as Wight noted is ’the institution for the final settlement of differences.’
Of the list in table 1, that leaves religious sites and festivals, dynastic principles, trade, human rights and colonialism as not clearly derivative or subordinate to any other master institution. Religious sites and festivals have dropped away as a feature of modern European international society, but clearly played a central role in ancient and classical times, and retain unquestion importance in subglobal international societies, notably that of the Islamic world. Dynastic principles have also faded out of European international society, but they were crucial in its early phases, and were also prominent in ancient and classical times. Trade is another very old practice in human affairs and does not depend on any of the four master institutions listed above (Buzan and Little, 2000). Whether trade as such is the institution, or particular principles applying to it, such as protectionism, or the market, is an interesting question needing more thought. A good case can be made that over the past century and a half, there has been a battle between these two principles of how to govern trade, and that since the end of the Cold War, the market has emerged clearly as one of the major primary institutions of contemporary international society. As noted above, human rights is a cosmopolitan institution, but it can also be picked up as a shared value in an international society. Probably it is not a master institution in itself, but derivative from the principle of equality of people. Colonialism clearly was a master primary institution of international society up to 1945.
Setting aside religious sites and festivals, and dynastic principles on the grounds that they are mostly of historical interest, one thing that is noticeable about trade, human rights and colonialism in relation to sovereignty, territoriality, diplomacy and balance of power, is that they don’t fit comforably together. Sovereignty, territoriality, diplomacy and balance of power are a harmonious set. They do not guarantee peace, but they complement each other comfortably and contain no necessary contradictions. The market, human rights and colonialism raise contradictions. The contradiction between human rights on the one hand, and sovereignty/nonintervention on the other is well developed in the English school literature (Bull, 1977; Mayall, 2000; Jackson, 2000). Colonialism contradicts sovereignty by creating a society of unequals, a mix of Westphalian and imperial forms. The market principle creates tensions with sovereignty and territoriality, not to mention balance of power, in ways that have been well explored in the literatures of IPE and globalisation. With the notable exception of Kapstein (1999) realists have never resolved, or even much addressed, the obvious contradiction between balance of power logic on the one hand, and the hegemonic stability thesis on the other.
Table 1 does not contain all of the possible primary institutions. Given the pluralist dispositions of the authors involved, it has not only an international, but also a specific Westphalian bias, and even there is not complete. It is perhaps not without significance that nationalism which, given its importance as the political legitimiser for sovereignty, might well be thought a master institution of contemporary international society, is not in the lists of table 1. Like trade, human rights and colonialism, nationalism, and its corollaries popular sovereignty and the right of self-determination, creates contradiction with some of the other master institutions (sovereignty, territoriality, trade, even at times diplomacy), a story well told by Mayall (1990). Nationalism, as Mayall (2000: 84) notes, sacralises territory by making sovereignty popular. It can also underpin the solidarist call, derided by Jackson (2000: 366) to make democracy a universal institution of international society. It is perhaps no accident that the English school classics avoided talk of trade and nationalism for fear of disrupting the harmony of their core Westphalian set of institutions. That would be of a piece with their often fierce resistance to human rights, which creates similar tensions. Environmentalism is discussed by Jackson (2000: 175-8) as a fourth area of responsibility (after national, international and humanitarian) involving stewardship or trusteeship of the planet. This was little, if at all, discussed by earlier English school writers, in part because the issue was not then as prominent as it later became. Environmental stewardship can, up to a point, be fitted into a pluralist logic of coexistence, but it can also become a solidarist project.
The nested hierarchy of international institutions is sketched in table 2.
Primary Institutions Secondary Institutions
Master Derivative (examples of)
Sovereignty Non-interventionInternational Law UN General AssemblyMost regimes, ICJ, ICC
Territoriality
Diplomacy Messengers/diplomatsConferences/CongressesMultilateralismDiplomatic languageArbitration United NationsMany specific examples…Most IGOs, regimes
Balance of Power Anti-hegemonismAlliancesGuaranteesNeutralityWarGreat power management NATOUN Security Council
Equality of people Human RightsHumanitarian intervention UNHCR
Colonialism Right of conquestInequality of peoples
Trade MarketProtectionismHegemonic stability GATT/WTO, IBRD, IMF, MFN agreements
Nationalism Self-determinationPopular sovereigntyDemocracy
Environmentalstewardship CITES, Kyoto treaty
Table 2 - The Nested Hierarchy of Contemporary International Institutions
The idea of tensions among the primary institutions of international society deserves more space than I can give it here. Among other things, it would seem to offer a key insight into the dynamics of the institutions of international society, and why some institutions flourish while others atrophy.
The Range of Institutions and the Types of International Society
So where does this discussion leave us? I draw two conclusions. Most obviously, I am unable to escape the ’etcetera’ problem for which I earlier pilloried Mayall and others, although at least now one can see why. Social systems can take many forms and shapes, and therefore the overall possibilities for primary institutions are, if not infinite, at least very numerous, even when one confines the enquiry to the macro-scale of international societies. That said, any particular international society will probably be defined by a relatively small number of primary institutions. One would expect fewer institutions at the Hobbesian and Lockean end of the spectrum, as in the Westphalian case sketched above, and more at the Grotian and Kantian end. Exactly what the primary institutions of any given international society are is a matter for close empirical enquiry. In this sense, Holsti is quite right to link the study of institutions to the question of how to benchmark change in international systems. In games where the pieces and the players are closely intertwined, both the constitutive and the regulatory institutions are open to change, whether change of meaning and practice (e.g. sovereignty, war), or rise/decline of the constitutive principle as such (e.g. market, colonialism). Such change is not inevitable, and one can easily imagine a basic distinction between international societies whose primary institutions remain relatively stable, and those that do not.
Although one cannot set out a definitive list of primary institutions for all times and places, it is still interesting and instructive to try to think through the question of primary institutions in relation to a general spectrum of international social orders. I derive this spectrum from Wendt’s (1999) distinction amongst Hobbesian, Lockean and Kantian international social orders, combined with the English school’s emphasis on Grotian models.
A Hobbesian international society is based largely on enmity and the possibility of war, but where there is also some diplomacy, alliance making and trade. Survival is the main motive for the states, and no values are necessarily shared. Primary institutions will be minimal, perhaps not amounting to more than diplomacy and trade. Secondary institutions are unlikely to exist at all. Sovereignty might or might not be an institution in a Hobbesian society, which could just as easily rest on suzerainty. It seems likely that some sort of territoriality would be important because of its intrinsic relationship to the processes of war and conquest. War would be a strong candiate for an institution in Hobbesian international societies, in the sense of a general acceptance of conquest as a legitimate way to establish political claims. It is also quite conceivable that political institutions such as dynasticism, might play a key role in structuring Hobbesian international societies, as it did for much of classical history and also early modern European history. It is easy to find historical cases where diplomacy and trade existed without there being any shared political principle. In most of ancient and classical times, for example, international systems were composed of a mix of city-states, empires, nomadic barbarians, and hunter-gatherer bands. But a Hobbesian international society could also feature shared political institutions such as dynasticism or suzerainty.
A Lockean international society is based on the model of a Westphalian balance of power system in which the balance of power is accepted as an organizing principle by the great powers, and sovereignty, territoriality, diplomacy, great power management, war and international law are the core institutions of international society. This is Bull’s pluralist international society, close to the experience of modern European history up to 1945. Yet the classical pluralist presentation of institutions in the English school literature does not exhaust the possibilities. As Holsti (2002) and Keene (2000) have observed, colonialism is an option for such a society provided that it has room to expand outside its core. So also is dynasticism, as it was in Europe well into the nineteenth century. Lockean international societies can also generate economic institutions more sophisticated than the basic trading practices that can be found even in Hobbesian international societies. Lockean international societies might well keep the mercantilist practices and principles inherited from Hobbessian forbears, but they might also seek to improve on them. In the case of nineteenth century Europe, the Gold Standard could be seen as one such development, as, perhaps, could the attempts to move towards liberal trading practices, such as agreed tarriff reductions and most-favoured-nation agreements. As Lockean societies move towards the Grotian model, they may well begin to generate secondary institutions in the form of regimes and IGOs, as began to happen during the late nineteenth century.
The most important institution missing from Bull’s essentially Lockean set is nationalism (if we assume sovereignty and territoriality to be covered by Bull’s remarks about the state as the most important institution). Mayall (1990, 2000) has long been the champion of giving full recognition to this as a primary institution, arguing that during the nineteenth century it melded with the institution of sovereignty and transformed it in a number of quite fundamental ways. National self-determination not only displaced dynasticism as the key to political legitimacy, it also sacralized territory (Mayall, 2000: 84) and imposed limits on the legitimate uses of war. Hurrell (2002: 145) reinforces Mayall’s position with his suggestion that ’national self-determination is the most important constitutive norm of the modern era’. It would be hard to refute this assessment. Nationalism, like sovereignty, has spread well beyond its European origins. It has been instrumental in the demise of colonialism as an institution of Western international society. It is part of the explanation for the decline of war as an institution, and through its link to popular sovereignty, is also implicated in the rise of the solidarist agendas of human rights and democracy.
A Grotian international society is based on developments that go significantly beyond coexistence, but short of extensive domestic convergence. This definition implies a considerable carry-over of institutions from the Lockean model. It is not difficult to imagine that sovereignty, territoriality, nationalism, diplomacy and international law remain in place, albeit with some elaboration and reinterpretation. Judging by the UN Charter, the practices within the EU, and the still vigorous and interesting debate about unipolarity and multipolarity, great power management can also remain in place. It seems quite likely, however, that Grotian international societies will downgrade or even eliminate war as an institution. Recall Mayall’s (2000: 19) remark that in the twentieth century war became regarded more as the breakdown of international society than as a sign of its operation. If international society is engaged in solidarist cooperative projects, then allowing free scope for war as a legitimate way of changing political control becomes problematic. Neither the liberal economic project nor the big science one can be pursued, at least not universally, in an international society where war remains one of the core institutions. War may not be eliminated, but its legitimate use gets squeezed into a relatively narrow range closely centred on the right to self-defence, and not in violation of the right of national self-determination. The squeezing of war in this way seems likely to downgrade the balance of power as an institution, at least in the robust sense of its meaning in a Lockean international society. In the contemporary international system, this whole nexus of questions is under test by the apparent desire of the US to reassert a right to war for the purposes of combatting terrorism and containing rogue states.
Whether and how this downgrading of balance of power happens may well depend on what kind of solidarist project(s) a Grotian international society pursues, and the question of what other primary institutions such a society might have also hangs on this question. It will make a difference whether the joint project is big science, human rights, collective security, the pursuit of joint economic gain, environmentalism, universal religion, or some combination of these or others. If contemporary Western international society is taken as a model for the possibilities, then the most obvious candidate for elevation to the status of primary institution would be the market. The market means more than just trade. It is a principle of organization and legitimation that affects both how states define and constitute themselves, what kind of other actors they give standing to, and how they interpret sovereignty and territoriality. The market does not necessarily eliminate balance of power as an institution, but it does make its operation much more complicated and contradictory than it would be under mercantilist rules. Whatever its form, it would be surprising if a Grotian international society did not possess a fairly rich collection of secondary institutions.
A Kantian international society is based on the development of a substantial enough range of shared values within a set of states to make them adopt similar political, legal and economic forms. Exactly what this type of society would look like depends hugely on what model of political economy its member states were converging around: liberal democracy, Islamic theocracy, absolutist hereditary monarchy, hierarchical empire, communist totalitarianism, etc.). This choice would largely determine the practices and legal systems that would define the institutions. Some pluralist institutions might well still be in play, though it seems unlikely that war and balance of power would play much of a role. In a liberal version of Kantian international society, the market, property rights, human rights, and democratic relations between government and citizens might well feature as primary institutions. But if the convergence model was Islamic, communist, or some other, then the institutions would be radically different. All three of these forms would probably bring sovereignty and territoriality seriously into question, not necessarily, in Holsti’s (2002: 8-9) scheme, by making them obsolete, but either increasing their complexity or transforming their main functions. Kantian convergence would almost certainly push non-intervention as a corollary of sovereignty towards obsolescence for many purposes. As Kantian developments moved towards confederalism, and the border between international systems and unified ones, one would expect a change in the character of its secondary institutions. There would not just be significant intergovernmental organizations of the forum kind, like the UN, but also secondary institutions of a more integrative sort, like those in the EU. By this stage war would have to be obsolete, balance of power vestigial at best, diplomacy largely transformed into something more like the process of domestic politics, and international law transformed into something more like domestic law, possibly with institutions of enforcement to back it up.
To sum up, one can draw the following conclusions:
§ That it is possible to go some way towards identifying the institutions that would go along with different forms of macro, second-order, societies, but that the possible range of such societies is large, and all of their particularities impossible to predict.
§ That norms, and therefore institutions, can change. This change may be driven by changes in the domestic societies of the member states, or as Hurrell (2002: 146-7) argues about contemporary international society, by promotion by TNAs, by the discursive tendency of norms to expand by filling in gaps, by analogy, by responses to new problems; and/or by debate in IGOs.
§ That there are ’master institutions’ in the sense that some primary institutions nest inside others, but not in the sense that some are constitutive and others regulatory.
§ That while solidarist evolution does build on pluralist foundations initially, it does so not just by direct accumulation, but as solidarism thickens, by dropping or downgrading or transforming some key pluralist institutions.
§ That as Hurrell (2002: 143-4) observes, the set of institutions constituting any given international society may well contain contradictions/tensions among themselves. These contradictions/tensions may well be a key dynamic in the evolution (or decay) of any given international society.
§ That one needs to beware of the limitations of a purely politico-military approach to conceptualising institutions. Economic, societal and environmental institutions can be just as constitutive of players and rules of the game in international societies as can the narrow set of strictly politico-military ones.
If the English school is to sustain its claim to distinctiveness, then it needs to think much more coherently about primary institutions than it has done so far. Primary institutions lie at the core of English school thinking, and they constitute a vital research agenda for both the English school and constructivists. Without a better developed sense of what primary institutions are, and how they constitute international societies, no balance between the rationalist and reflectivist approaches to institutions will be achieved, let alone the synthesis called for by Keohane (1988: 393).
Notes
1. I would like to thank the following for comments on all or parts of earlier versions of this work: Tim Dunne, Stefano Guzzini, Bob Keohane, Anna Leander, Richard Little, Noel Parker, John Ruggie, and Ole W鎣er. I am grateful to the ESRC for funding a two-year teaching buyout which enabled me to focus on this project.
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