The English School

In brief

The English School is a tradition in the study of international relations built around a single claim: sovereign states, recognising no ruler above them, nonetheless form a society, not just a mechanical system of pushing and shoving. Its central text is Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society (1977), whose title states the paradox it means to resolve. World politics is anarchical in the strict sense that it has no central authority, no world government, no sovereign over the sovereigns. Yet it is not chaos. States trade, negotiate, keep most of their promises most of the time, observe borders, exchange ambassadors, and go to war under recognisable rules. Bull argued that this order is produced by shared institutions the states themselves maintain: diplomacy, international law, the balance of power, war conducted within limits, and the special managerial role of the great powers. The school occupies a deliberate middle ground, a via media, between the realism that sees only power and the liberalism that hopes for a community of humankind. Its sharpest internal argument, between pluralists and solidarists, is over how thick that society can safely become.

The full treatment

The problem it answers

The founding puzzle of the study of international relations is anarchy. Within a state there is a sovereign, a body that makes law, enforces it, and monopolises legitimate force. Between states there is nothing of the kind. This is the fact that realism builds its whole picture on: with no enforcer, each state must look to its own survival, trust no one absolutely, and treat the accumulation of power as the first law of political life. On the realist account, anarchy tends toward a war of all against all, restrained only by fear and calculation.

The trouble is that this picture does not match the observed conduct of states. Most borders hold for decades. Treaties are honoured far more often than they are broken. Diplomats pass unharmed between hostile capitals, and have done so for centuries. There is a recognisable body of international law that states cite, argue over, and mostly comply with even when no one can force them to. If anarchy produces only a scramble for power, why is there so much order?

The English School answers that the states of the world are bound together by more than fear. They form what Bull called an international society: a group of states that, conscious of certain common interests and common values, conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and share in the working of common institutions. Anarchy is real, but it is anarchy among members of a society, which is a very different thing from anarchy among strangers.

The three concepts that structure the argument

Bull's most useful move was to separate three ideas that are easily run together. First, an international system exists wherever states have enough contact, and enough impact on one another, that they must factor each other into their decisions. Two states that can war on or trade with each other are in a system. This is the bare minimum, and it is what realism describes.

Second, an international society exists when states in a system go further and recognise common rules and institutions binding on them all. A system becomes a society when its members share a diplomatic language, treat certain agreements as obligatory, and accept limits on how they may treat one another. The states of eighteenth-century Europe were both a system and a society. Two isolated civilisations that occasionally raid each other are a system but not yet a society.

Third, and distinct again, is world society: a condition in which the primary bearers of rights and duties are not states but individual human beings, a cosmopolitan community of humankind. This is the horizon that liberal and Kantian thinkers point toward. The English School insists it must be kept separate from international society, because the two can pull in opposite directions. A duty owed to all humans may cut against a rule owed to states.

The whole tradition lives in the gap between the system that realists see and the world society that cosmopolitans want. Its distinctive claim is that the middle term, an actual society of states, is real, historically grown, and doing most of the work of holding world politics together.

How the order is produced: the institutions

If there is no government, what generates the order? Bull's answer is that the members maintain a set of institutions, meaning not organisations with buildings and staff but durable practices, habits, and shared understandings. He named five.

Diplomacy is the settled practice of communication and negotiation between states, with its own immunities, protocols, and language of restraint. It allows states to do business without violence and to signal intentions short of war.

International law is the body of rules states accept as binding, from the law of treaties to the law of the sea. It has no legislature and no reliable enforcer, yet it structures expectations and gives states a common vocabulary for asserting rights and protesting wrongs.

The balance of power is, on this account, not merely a fact that emerges from states seeking security but an institution the great powers consciously tend, because a rough equilibrium prevents any one state from swallowing the rest and so preserves the plurality of states on which the whole society depends. (This is where the English School and the tradition of the balance of power meet: Bull treats balancing as something states deliberately do to keep the society alive, not only as a mechanical outcome.)

War, paradoxically, is counted an institution: not because war is good, but because organised violence conducted within accepted limits, for recognised causes, and terminated by recognised procedures, is itself a form of order, an instrument the society uses to enforce law, adjust to change, and preserve the balance. War outside all limits is the breakdown the institution exists to prevent.

Great-power management is the frank recognition that the strongest states carry special responsibilities as well as special rights. They manage crises, uphold the balance, and act, at their best, as custodians of the system as a whole. The concert of European powers after 1815 is the school's favourite example of great powers self-consciously managing order.

Later writers, especially Barry Buzan, extended and reorganised this list, adding sovereignty, territoriality, nationalism, and the market as deeper institutions from which the others follow. But the core insight holds: order among states is manufactured by states, out of practices they choose to sustain because they share an interest in doing so.

The key text and its author

Hedley Bull (1932 to 1985) was an Australian who spent much of his career in Britain, at the London School of Economics and then at Oxford, with a period at the Australian National University in between. The Anarchical Society, published in 1977, is the book that gave the tradition its spine. Bull wrote against two opponents at once. Against the realists, he argued that they had mistaken a society for a mere system and so could not explain the order they lived inside. Against the emerging behavioural and scientific approaches then sweeping American political science, he defended what he called the classical approach: reasoning from history, philosophy, and law rather than from models and data. His 1966 essay "International Theory: The Case for a Classical Approach" is a founding manifesto of that methodological quarrel.

Behind Bull stood Martin Wight (1913 to 1972), whose lectures, published after his death as International Theory: The Three Traditions (1991), sorted all thinking about world politics into three lineages. Wight named them for representative figures. The Machiavellian or realist tradition sees international politics as a struggle for power. The Kantian or revolutionist tradition sees a latent community of humankind straining to be born. The Grotian or rationalist tradition, named for the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583 to 1645), sees states bound by law and reason into a society even in the absence of a ruler. The English School is, in essence, the elaboration of that Grotian middle path. The tradition took institutional form in the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics, founded in 1959, whose members included Bull, Wight, Adam Watson, and Herbert Butterfield.

Pluralism versus solidarism

The deepest argument inside the school is over how much the society of states can be asked to agree on. This is the pluralist versus solidarist debate, and it turns on the tension between order and justice.

Pluralists hold that states agree only on a thin set of rules: mutual recognition of sovereignty, non-intervention in each other's affairs, the keeping of treaties, and limits on the conduct of war. The society is a society of coexistence. Its members may have wildly different values, religions, and forms of government, and the whole point of the rules is to let them live together despite those differences. On this view, sovereignty and non-intervention are not obstacles to justice but the very conditions of order, and pressing for more, for a shared standard of human rights enforced across borders, risks tearing the fabric that keeps the peace. The pluralist is willing to tolerate a great deal of internal injustice for the sake of order between states.

Solidarists hold that the society can and should be thicker. States can reach agreement not only on coexistence but on shared purposes: the enforcement of international law against aggressors, the protection of basic human rights, even a collective duty to rescue populations from slaughter. On this view, a society that watches genocide behind the shield of sovereignty has purchased order too cheaply. Nicholas Wheeler, in Saving Strangers (2000), made the leading solidarist case that humanitarian intervention can be a legitimate act of international society, not a violation of it, when a state grossly abuses its own people. The doctrine of the responsibility to protect, endorsed at the United Nations in 2005, is the solidarist tendency written into practice.

The debate is genuine and unresolved. The pluralist warns that solidarism, by making order conditional on shared values, invites powerful states to dress domination as humanitarianism and erodes the non-intervention rule that protects the weak. The solidarist replies that an order indifferent to justice will not command the loyalty that keeps it stable, and that the society has in fact grown thicker over time. Bull himself moved cautiously across this ground, sympathetic to solidarist hopes but wary of getting ahead of what states could actually agree on.

Lineage

The intellectual ancestor of the English School is Hugo Grotius, whose De Jure Belli ac Pacis (On the Law of War and Peace, 1625) argued that there is a law binding nations even where there is no common superior to enforce it, a law grounded in reason and sociability rather than command. This is the seed of the whole tradition: society, and therefore law, without a sovereign above the parties.

The school also draws on Immanuel Kant (1724 to 1804), but selectively. Kant's vision of a pacific federation and a cosmopolitan right belonging to individuals is exactly the world society that the school keeps distinct from international society; the English School treats Kant as naming the horizon rather than the present. From Thomas Hobbes (1588 to 1679) it takes the sober analysis of anarchy while rejecting his conclusion that anarchy must mean war: the school agrees that there is no sovereign over states but denies that this leaves only the state of nature.

Institutionally, the tradition grew from the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics after 1959 and was consolidated by Bull in the 1970s. The label "English School" was fixed by a critical 1981 essay by Roy Jones that called for the school to be "closed down." The name stuck, and the school did the opposite of closing. Barry Buzan's From International to World Society? (2004) reconstructed it for a new generation, arguing it offers a genuine third theory of world politics alongside realism and liberalism, with its own account of structure and change.

The strongest case for it

The tradition's great strength is that it explains what its rivals struggle to explain. Realism captures conflict but cannot account for the vast, mundane, daily reliability of world politics: the treaties kept, the ambassadors received, the law cited even by law-breakers. Liberalism captures cooperation but tends to assume shared values that plainly do not exist across a divided world. The English School accounts for both order and its limits with the same idea: states form a society, but a society of states, not of humans, so its rules are the thin rules that mutually suspicious sovereigns can actually sustain.

It is also historically serious in a way much of the field is not. Rather than build a timeless model, it studies how a particular European society of states expanded, through empire, decolonisation, and diplomacy, into the global society that now includes nearly two hundred members, and it asks what was gained and lost as non-European states were admitted to rules they had no hand in writing. This gives it purchase on questions of legitimacy, cultural difference, and the moral standing of the current order that formal theories cannot easily touch.

Finally, it keeps the ethical question open. By separating order from justice and pluralism from solidarism, it provides a vocabulary for the hardest real dilemmas of world politics, such as when, if ever, sovereignty may be pierced to stop atrocity, without pretending the tension can be dissolved.

The strongest case against it

The most persistent objection comes from structural realists, above all Kenneth Waltz (1924 to 2013), whose Theory of International Politics (1979) argued that international outcomes are shaped by the anarchic structure of the system and the distribution of power within it, not by any "society" or shared rules. On this view the English School mistakes epiphenomena for causes: states obey rules when it suits their interests and break them the moment it does not, so the apparent society is just power politics wearing a legal costume. Rules and institutions, Waltz insisted, do not restrain great powers; they are made and unmade by them.

A second objection is methodological. Because the school reasons from history, law, and judgement rather than from testable models, critics from the more scientific wings of the field charge that its central concepts are too loose to be pinned down or falsified. What exactly distinguishes a "system" that has thickened into a "society"? How much rule-following is enough? The categories can seem to describe rather than explain, and to be applied after the fact.

A third line of attack comes from constructivists, who are in some ways the school's closest cousins and who share its stress on norms, rules, and shared understandings. Their complaint is that the English School named these forces but never adequately theorised how they arise, spread, and change, leaving "international society" as a static description rather than a dynamic account of how norms are constructed and contested. Constructivism, on this reading, does the theoretical work the English School gestured at but left undone.

A fourth objection is political and comes from critical and postcolonial scholars. The "expansion of international society" story can read as a polite gloss on conquest: the rules of the so-called society were written by a handful of European powers and then imposed on the rest of the world through colonialism, so calling the result a society of equals obscures a history of coercion. The standard of "civilisation" that once governed admission to the club was, they argue, a tool of hierarchy, and its legacy persists in who gets to write and break the rules today.

The solidarist strand faces a sharper version of the realist worry from within: that dressing intervention in the language of international society hands strong states a licence to override the sovereignty of weak ones under humanitarian cover, so that the thickening of the society can serve domination as easily as justice.

Where it stands now

The English School is one of the recognised major traditions in the study of international relations, taught alongside realism, liberalism, and constructivism, and strongest in Britain, Europe, and Australia. Barry Buzan's reconstruction gave it renewed theoretical ambition, and its concepts, primary institutions, international society, the pluralist and solidarist poles, now circulate well beyond scholars who identify with the school.

Its questions have only grown more pressing. The debate over the responsibility to protect, the argument over whether a rising power such as China accepts or contests the rules of the existing international society, and the wider worry about whether that society is fragmenting are all English School questions in substance, whatever labels the disputants use. The tradition's central intuition, that order among states is real, largely self-made, and neither the mere absence of war nor the presence of justice, remains one of the most durable ways to think about a world that has no ruler and is not, for all that, in chaos.

Test yourself

Pick a rule that states mostly follow: the immunity of ambassadors, the freedom of the high seas, the prohibition on conquest. Ask why they follow it. If your answer is "only when it serves their interests," you are reasoning as a realist. If it is "because they recognise it as binding, and share an interest in a world where such rules hold," you have just described an international society. Now ask the harder question: how much internal injustice, inside a fellow member state, should that society tolerate for the sake of the order between its members? Where you draw that line is where you fall on the pluralist to solidarist spectrum.