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There is no such thing as society: beyond individualism and statism in international security studies*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2010

Martin Shaw
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Extract

This article offers a sociological perspective on a major conceptual issue in international relations, the question of ‘security’, and it raises major issues to do with the role of sociological concepts in international studies. For some years now, the work of sociological writers such as Skocpol, Giddens and Mann1 has attracted some interest in international studies. International theorists such as Linklater and Halliday have seen their work as offering a theoretical advance both on realism and on Marxist alternatives. At the same time, these developments have involved the paradox that, as one critic puts it, ‘current sociological theories of the state are increasingly approaching a more traditional view of the state—the state as actor model—precisely at a time when the theory of international relations is getting away from this idea and taking a more sociological form.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , April 1993 , pp. 159 - 175
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1993

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References

1 See for example Skocpol, Theda, Stales and Social Revolutions (Cambridge, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Giddens, Anthony, The Nation State and Violence (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar; Mann, Michael, States, War and Capitalism (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar.

2 Linklater, Andrew, Beyond Realism and Marxism (London, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fred Halliday, ‘State and Society in International Relations’, in Michael Banks and Martin Shaw (eds.), State and Society in International Relations (Hemel Hempstead, 1991), pp. 191–210.

3 Faruk Yalvac, ‘The Sociology of the State and the Sociology of International Relations’, in Banks and Shaw (eds.), State and Society, p. 94.

4 Martin Shaw, ‘State Theory and the Post-Cold War World’, in Banks and Shaw (eds.), State and Society, pp. 1–24.

5 Booth, Ken, ‘Security and Emancipation’, Review of International Studies, 17 (1991), p. 317CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 See, for example, the discussion in Greene, Owen, ‘Transnational processes and European security’, in Pugh, M. (ed.), European Security: Towards 2000 (Manchester, 1992), pp. 141–61Google Scholar.

7 My discussion of Buzan, People, States and Fear, is based o n the second edition, newly subtitled An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era (Hemel Hempstead, 1991).

8 Steve Smith, ‘Mature Anarchy, Strong States and Security’ (review article on Buzan), in Arms Control, forthcoming.

9 Booth, ‘Security and Emancipation’, p. 317.

10 Booth, ‘Security and Emancipation’, p. 317.

11 Mayall, James, Nationalism and International Society (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 2–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Buzan mentions almost in passing that ‘In modern usage a nation is denned as a large group of people sharing the same cultural, and possibly the same ethnic or racial, heritage’ (p. 70). This loose formulation is hardly satisfactory.

13 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities, 2nd edn (London, 1991)Google Scholar.

14 The inadequacy of such a view was indicated long ago in Marx's critique of ‘political freedom’ in his ‘On the Jewish Question’ (1844): see Bottomore, T. B. (ed.), Karl Marx: Early Writings (London, 1964), pp. 1–41Google Scholar. While 1 would not uphold Marx in toto, his discussion of the limitations of the view which considers individuals purely from the standpoint of their participation in the state is of general sociological significance. A current attempt to make this aspect of Marx's work effective in a critical account of international relations can be seen in work in progress by Justin Rosenberg (LSE).

15 He describes it as ‘a powerful modifier of the state-centric view’ in a comment on an earlier version of this paper (reviewer's note).

16 Smith, ‘Mature Anarchy’.

17 Booth, ‘Security an d Emancipation’, p. 320.

18 Booth, ‘Security and Emancipation’, p. 321.

19 Weber, Max, The Philosophy of the Social Sciences (Glencoe, 1949)Google Scholar.

20 I am indebted on this point to the very interesting discussion of Paul A. Chilton, ‘On the Embedding of the Term “Security” in Language and Conceptual Systems’, to appear in Beer and Hariman (eds.), Refiguring Realism.

21 A most paradoxical feature of the debate in international studies is that while denying ‘society’ in the more fundamental sense in which it is used by sociology, international relations theorists do use the term ‘society’ in an altogether different context, in the sense of ‘international society’. It is beyond the scope of this paper to enter fully into the discussion of this paradox, which is discussed more fully in my paper, ‘Global society and global responsibility: the theoretical, practical and political limits of international society’, Millenium: Journal of International Studies (forthcoming, 1993).

This conception compounds the statism of international security studies which has been criticised above. The crucial point is that the ‘society’ referred to is one composed of states. From the standpoint argued here, this is a highly misleading usage. The members of ‘society’, those involved in social relations, are human individuals. States are forms of, indeed results of, society, not members of it. To use the term ‘society’ to refer to the relations of states confirms the misplaced abstraction which fails to understand th e dependence of these specific social institutions on the general complex of social relationships.

‘International society’ in a sociologically acceptable sense would refer to all those social relations which exist in international terms, across the boundaries of nation-states. Such international relations take many forms, which we could designate as economic, cultural and ideological as well as political. ‘International society’ in this sense would be a concept closer to that of ‘global society’, which is a commoner sociological usage, because it indicates the extent to which social relations exist not merely across nation-state boundaries, but even in disregard of them.

The sense in which ‘international society’ has been used in international relations thus indicates part of the problem—the attempt to separate off state relations from social relations generally—rather than a solution. There is no theoretical reason why the relations between states should not merely be described in terms of an ‘international system’, with growing integration among them being described i n terms of stages of development of that system, rather than resorting to the term ‘society’ with its inherent confusion of relations among states with those among human individuals.

22 Booth, Ken, ‘Security in Anarchy: Utopia n Realism in Theory and Practice’, International Affairs, 67 (1991), especially pp. 540–1 ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 So much so that, when we renamed our Centre for Defence and Disarmament Studies at Hull as a ‘Centre for Security Studies’—omitting the specializing ‘International’ which Buzan gives his book—we found ourself in some difficulty with the criminologists in our School!

24 Giddens, Anthony, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge, 1990).Google Scholar

25 Giddens, Anthony, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar.

26 Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, pp. 154–8; Booth, ‘Security in Anarchy’, especially pp. 533–9.

27 Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, p. 214.

28 Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, p. 214.

29 Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, p. 230.

30 Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, and The Consequences of Modernity, pp. 158–63.

31 Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, pp. 226–7.

32 See Lawrence Freedman's contribution to Gerald Segal (ed.), New Directions in Strategic Studies (London, 1989), in which he argues for what I criticise (in the same symposium) as an ‘imperialistic’ view of strategic studies in relation to the social sciences. There is however a difference between ‘strategy’ and ‘security’ in that the former has specifically military origins—see my ‘Strategy and Social Process: Military Context and Sociological Analysis’, Sociology, 24 (1990), pp. 465–73—while the latter does not.

33 Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence.