The English School (sometimes called the "international society" or Grotian tradition) is an approach to International Relations that occupies a middle ground between realism and liberalism. It argues that states, while operating in an anarchic system, form a society in which they recognise common interests, rules, and institutions that moderate their behaviour.
The school grew out of the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics, convened in 1959, and is most associated with Hedley Bull, Martin Wight, Adam Watson, and later Barry Buzan and Tim Dunne. Bull's The Anarchical Society (1977) is the canonical text, distinguishing three concepts:
- International system — states in regular contact, calculating each other's behaviour (realist focus).
- International society — states that share rules, institutions, and values (the school's distinctive contribution).
- World society — transnational bonds among individuals and non-state actors (a more cosmopolitan vision).
Wight famously identified three recurring traditions of thought: Realist (Hobbesian), Rationalist (Grotian), and Revolutionist (Kantian). The English School itself sits within the Grotian middle.
Core "primary institutions" of international society typically include sovereignty, diplomacy, international law, the balance of power, great-power management, and war (as a regulated practice). These are durable social practices, not formal organisations like the UN or WTO, which the school calls "secondary institutions."
A key internal debate divides pluralists (e.g., Bull, Robert Jackson), who emphasise coexistence and non-intervention among states with differing values, from solidarists (e.g., Nicholas Wheeler, Andrew Linklater), who argue states can share thicker commitments such as human rights enforcement and humanitarian intervention.
The English School is methodologically distinctive for blending history, political theory, and law rather than relying on formal modelling, and it has shaped debates on norms, sovereignty, and the expansion of international society from Europe to a global order.
Example
In debating the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya under UNSC Resolution 1973, solidarist English School scholars cited the Responsibility to Protect as evidence that international society had moved beyond pluralist non-intervention norms.
Frequently asked questions
Both stress norms and shared ideas, but the English School is older, more historically and legally oriented, and centres states as the principal members of international society, whereas constructivism is a broader social-theoretic approach to identity and interest formation across many actors.
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