Manufacturing Inter-National Cooperation — The English School

Abstract

This chapter will discuss main ontological questions of the so-called English School, which was founded by international relations scholars in the late 1950s and has experienced a kind ‘re-invention’ (Dunne, 1998) and ‘re-evaluation’ (Little, 2002) during the past ten years or so. The English School can be identified for methodological, epistemological and ontological reasons with the idea of ‘international society’; it is said to present, and its representatives perceive themselves to promote, a distinct approach to the study of international politics whose distinctiveness can be found in exploring and developing a third way between a seemingly well-established ‘realist’ outlook on power politics and anarchy as the main and inevitable characteristics of state relations, on the one hand, and a supposedly ‘idealist’ and naïve vision of cosmopolitanism and world order on the other hand.¹⁴⁸ Although this distinctiveness, especially as distinguished from structural realism or neo-realism, can be confirmed with regard to methodological and epistemological questions, such as the normative nature and the historicity of theorizing as well as the English School’s anti-positivist stance towards the role of empirical research, hypotheses generation, and deductibility (see more on this Dunne, 1998, p. 186; Hoffmann, 1986, pp. 181-4; and Bull, 1995, p. xviii and p. 7), some doubts seem to be justified about whether the claim of directing a third way can any longer be proclaimed when we look at ontological issues.