Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society School

The English School of international relations theory from time to time also denoted to as liberal realism, the international society school or the British institutionalists which sustains that there is a society of states at the international level, in spite of the condition of anarchy that is, the lack of a global ruler or world state. The English School can also be seen as a via media between realism and liberalism/cosmopolitanism, but also has independent elements that clearly distinguish it from these theories. Its most influential members include Hedley Bull, Martin Wight, and Adam Watson whose main publications appeared in the period between the mid-1960s and late 1980s Robert Jackson, Tim Dunne and Nicholas Wheeler have been among the

Bull’s The Anarchical Society provides the most detailed analysis of the foundations of international order. He argues that all societies – domestic and international – have arrangements for protecting the three ‘primary goals’ of placing constraints on violence, upholding property rights and ensuring agreements are kept. The fact that these primary goals are common to domestic and international society explains Bull’s rejection of ‘the domestic analogy’ which is the idea that order will come into being only if states surrender their sovereign powers to centralized institutions of the kind that provide order within nation-states. Bull’s approach argues that states are usually committed to limiting the use of force, ensuring respect for property and preserving trust not only in relations between citizens but in their dealings with one another as independent political

There were four dominant regional international orders such as Chinese, European, Indian and Islamic. Moreover, most of the governments in each group had a sense of being part of a common civilization superior to that of the others. Although European states were committed to the principle of sovereign equality within their own continent, they rejected the view that other societies had the same sovereign rights. For instance, China saw itself as the Middle Kingdom which deserved tribute from other societies which were thought to be at a lower stage of development. Traditional Islamic views of International Relations distinguished between the House of Islam (Dar al Islam) and the House of War (Dar al Harb) – between believers and infidels – though the possibility of a temporary truce (Dar al Suhl) with non-Islamic powers was allowed. With the expansion of Europe, other peoples were forced to comply with its conception of the world and, gradually, most of those societies came to accept European principles of international society. But they came to enjoy equal membership of the international society of states only after a long struggle to dismantle Europe’s sense of its own moral superiority and political invincibility. Bull called this struggle ‘the revolt against the West’ and argued that it had five main components. The