Securing international society: towards an English school discourse of security

Abstract

English School approaches to international politics, which focus on the idea of an international society of states bound together by shared rules and norms, have not paid significant explicit attention to the study of security in international relations. This is curious given the centrality of security to the study of world politics and the recent resurgence of English School scholarship in general. This article attempts to redress this gap by locating and explicating an English School discourse of security. We argue here that there is indeed an English School discourse of security, although an important internal distinction exists here between pluralist and solidarist accounts, which focus on questions of order and justice in international society respectively. In making this argument, we also seek to explore the extent to which emerging solidarist accounts of security serve to redress the insecurity of security in international relations: the tendency of traditional security praxes to privilege the state in ways that renders individuals insecure.

Notes

We borrow this phrase from Steve Smith (1999).

The difference between invocation and evocation, as it applies here, is that while the former involves the direct and explicit description of an issue as a security threat, the latter entails the use of representational practices that indirectly describes an issue as a security issue. For example, the Australian government describing asylum‐seekers as a threat to national security involves the invocation of security, whereas the description of asylum‐seekers as undermining Australia's ‘national interests’ may be viewed as an evocation of security.

Barry Buzan, for instance, has so far resisted the temptation to ask what his recent findings from constructivist research on security (the Copenhagen School) tell us about security in an international society despite his self‐professed adherence to both Copenhagen and English Schools.

Bull's (1977, 255) conception of a new medieval order, characterised by criss‐crossing and overlapping centres of authority and identity from the local to regional to national to global, intimated the possibility of constructing a more solidarist conception of security.

This is not to suggest that pluralism and realism share similar worldviews. Pluralists insist that understanding relations between states require knowledge of system‐wide norms and institutions, whereas realists tend to focus solely on states and power politics (Donnelly 2000, 156–7). Nevertheless, there is a strong correlation between the security practices espoused by pluralists and principled realists.

Alex J. Bellamy is a Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Queensland. He is the author of several books, including Kosovo and International Society (Palgrave, 2002), The Formation of Croatian National Identity: A Centuries‐old Dream? (Manchester University Press, 2003) and (with Paul Williams and Stuart Griffin), Understanding Peacekeeping (Polity, 2004). He is currently writing a book on Just Wars (Polity) and editing International Society and its Critics (Oxford University Press). Matt McDonald is a Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of New South Wales. His major research interests and journal publications are in the areas of security theory, environment‐security relations and Australian foreign policy. The authors thank Jacinta O'Hagan, Anthony Burke and this Journal's anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

This vagueness may ultimately be read as indicative of Human Security's role as a normative political project and a criticism of traditional accounts of security, and as indicative of efforts to open up space for the realisation of its ends to a range of actors, including states (Paris 2001, 95–6).

Of course, it should be noted that norms of human rights and sovereignty are not in necessary competition. Indeed, Reus‐Smit (2001b) points to the preservation of human rights as an important justification for state formation and sovereignty.

While we may certainly point to the role of undemocratic regimes in actively suppressing human rights in the name of security, we can also see the well being of citizens undermined in the case of broadly Leftist political movements in the United States during the Cold War (Campbell 1992), as well as the amount spent in all states on military hardware rather than social security, education, health, etc.

The example of Brazil linking its national security to continued deforestation of the Amazon prior to the onset of international pressure in the late 1980s and early 1990s may be used again here. For a discussion of how these practices were grounded in a Realist conception of security, see Filho (1990).