ABSTRACT
There are three main ways to assess the English School’s contribution to International Relations (IR) theory. The first is to follow Barry Buzan in arguing that the English School is an ‘underexploited resource’ and that ‘the time is ripe to develop and apply its historicist, and methodologically pluralist approach’ to the subject (Buzan 2001: 472). Buzan argues that the English School has become recognized as a distinctive worldview that has much to offer the discipline. At the other end of the spectrum, some writers call for the School’s closure. The ‘English School’ label was first written down by Roy Jones in 1981 in an article calling for the School’s closure (Jones 1981). More recently, Hall (2001) went one step further and argued that the School no longer existed because it had been distorted by contemporary proponents such as Dunne (1998) and Wheeler (1992). According to Hall, Dunne and Wheeler’s commitment to solidarism and constructivism eschew some of the English School’s foundational ideas such as the centrality of states, importance of power politics and a deep skepticism about the possibility of different political communities reaching agreement on substantive political matters. A third perspective, somewhere between these two poles, has arisen as a result of the increased dialogue between English School ideas and other worldviews – most notably realism and constructivism. Both realists and constructivists alike have called for the further development of English School thinking to give it a more ‘refined’ theory capable of identifying the motors for change and lines of causation in world politics (Copeland 2003; Finnemore 2001). The purpose of this chapter is to evaluate these positions by investigating the English
School’s contribution to IR theory in the twenty-first century. A frequent source of confusion about the School stems from the idea that there is a single common view within it. By contrast, as this chapter will demonstrate, there is not one but many theories and accounts of IR embedded within the School, which is united by ‘family resemblances’ (Dunne 1998). Thus, as Suganami (2005: 29) argues, the English School is best understood as ‘a historically constituted and evolving cluster of scholars with a number of plausible and interrelated stories to tell’. This chapter substantiates this claim by focusing on core contemporary debates within the English School. It does so in four parts. The first briefly considers the School’s evolution and relationship with constructivism. The second and third focus on the School’s defining ideas of three traditions of international thought and three pillars of world politics respectively. The final part evaluates a central question about contemporary international society (is it under threat from US hegemony?) in order to illuminate how English School theorizing can help make sense of IR today and the potential for conversations with other disciplines and approaches.
