Reframing the Pluralist— Solidarist Debate
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
| Author | Matthew S. Weinert |
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829811406036 |
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
MILLENNIU
M
Journal of International Studies
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
40(1) 21–41
© The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829811406036
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Corresponding author:
Matthew S. Weinert, University of Delaware, 403 Smith Hall Newark DE 19716, USA.
Email: mweinert@udel.edu
Article
Reframing the Pluralist–
Solidarist Debate
Matthew S. Weinert
University of Delaware
Abstract
The pluralist–solidarist debate in English School theory – which concentrates on discerning the kind
of international society in which we live – encourages overgeneralisations that either overstate
international society’s presumed solidarity or vigorously defend instrumental commitments that
underplay actual ethical advances. Building upon insights by Bellamy, Buzan and Hurrell, I attempt
to extricate the debate from its current impasse by recasting pluralism and solidarism as ideal-
typical assessments of agreements within particular issue areas. The argument is illustrated with
reference to human security. Two reasons are behind this choice. Firstly, it allows me to pose
more pluralist-friendly claims on a terrain that is presumably ceded to solidarists. Secondly, the
contested nature of human security allows me to highlight the fluidity of the concepts, which
reveals not necessarily solidarism’s cooperative potential or pluralism’s minimalist pledges, but
rather fissures, uncertainties and dissonances that in the end are resolved by continual mediations
between the two.
Keywords
English School, human security, pluralism, solidarism
Determining whether contemporary international society, as a whole, is either pluralist
or solidarist remains a fraught, if not futile, exercise. For instance, reliance on ‘whether
primacy of right is to be allocated to individuals or to states’1 has served as a chief
1. Barry Buzan, From International to World Society? English School Theory and the Social Structure of
Globalisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 48. Buzan adds other criteria: whether
‘unity of interests and sympathies … is … sufficient to generate capability for collective action’, 141;
‘the pursuit of joint gains and the pursuit of knowledge’, 150. For similar accounts, see Timothy Dunne
and Nicholas Wheeler, ‘Hedley Bull’s Pluralism of the Intellect and Solidarism of the Will’, International
Affairs 72, no. 1 (1996): 91–107; Alex Bellamy and Matt McDonald, ‘Securing International Society:
Towards an English School Discourse of Security’, Australian Journal of Political Science 39, no. 2
22 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 40(1)
criterion of assessment, but it has narrowed the applicability of the concepts and to a
degree cast the pluralist–solidarist debate in a veil of subjective estimation. While
Andrew Linklater, Nicholas Wheeler and I might adjudge a world of human rights,
human development and human security, of individual criminal responsibility in interna-
tional law, and of declarations of common values as indicative of a solidarist international
society that may even blur the boundaries between it and world society,2 pluralists such
as Jackson and Mayall3 can challenge us for selection bias and overstating (superficial)
rhetorical agreement at the expense of recognising very real enforcement and compli-
ance irregularities and inconsistencies. Though we might, after considerable argument,
concede these grounds, we could retort by appealing to the global entrenchment of lib-
eral economic principles, or to bans on slavery and slave-trading and other cosmopolitan
harm conventions4 as evidence of deep solidarist veins in international society – and our
less obdurate critics (i.e. Williams5) might very well grant us those points. In the end,
such a debate would be unproductive, for its framing invites pitting litanies of examples
to support one position against the other.
Though much attention has been devoted to clarifying the English School’s (ES)
conceptual triad of international system, international society and world society the
pluralist and solidarist concepts remain troubled.6 Employed as macro judgements of the
nature of international society, they strongly encourage overstatement of particular facts
and normative judgements at the expense of other equally valid facts and judgements,7
(2004): 307–30; John Williams, ‘Pluralism, Solidarism and the Emergence of World Society in English
School Theory’, International Relations 19, no. 1 (2005): 19–38.
2. Andrew Linklater, ‘Human Interconnectedness’, International Relations 23, no. 3 (2009): 481–97;
Nicholas Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000).
3. Robert Jackson, The Global Covenant: Human Conduct in a World of States (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000); James Mayall, World Politics: Progress and Limits (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
4. See Andrew Linklater, ‘Citizenship, Humanity and Cosmopolitan Harm Conventions’, International
Political Science Review 22, no. 3 (2001): 261–77; A. Linklater, ‘Human Interconnectedness’; Matthew
S. Weinert, Democratic Sovereignty: Authority, State and Legitimacy in a Globalizing World (London:
University College London Press, 2007).
5. Williams, ‘Pluralism, Solidarism’.
6. In English School theory, an international system is said to exist when two or more states have sufficient
contact between – and impact on – one another that they behave ‘as parts of a whole’. A society of states
‘exists when a group of states, conscious of certain common interests and common values … conceive
themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and share in the
working of common institutions’. And a world society concerns ‘not merely a degree of interaction
linking all parts of the human community to one another, but a sense of common interest and common
values, on the basis of which common rules and institutions may be built’. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical
Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 9, 13 and 269,
respectively. See also Richard Little, ‘Neorealism and the English School: A Methodological, Ontological,
and Theoretical Reassessment’, European Journal of International Relations 1 (1995): 9–34.
7. See Hedley Bull, ‘The Grotian Conception of International Society’, in Diplomatic Investigations: Essays
in the Theory of International Politics, eds Martin Wight and Herbert Butterfield (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1966), 51–73; Buzan, From International to World Society?; Andrew Linklater
and Hidemi Suganami, The English School of International Relations: A Contemporary Reassessment
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
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