The corruption of international society? General and complete disarmament from the perspective of the practitioners
| Author | Laust Schouenborg |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13540661221102930 |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
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JR
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https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661221102930
European Journal of
International Relations
2022, Vol. 28(3) 616 –639
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/13540661221102930
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The corruption of
international society?
General and complete
disarmament from the
perspective of the practitioners
Laust Schouenborg
Roskilde University, Denmark
Abstract
This article investigates whether practitioners argued that general and complete
disarmament (GCD) would corrupt international society during the two major debates
of this issue in the 20th century, namely in 1927–1928 and 1959. The purpose and value
of this analysis is to learn more about the workings of international society. Following
Bull and other English School scholars, GCD probably represents the most radical
challenge to the traditional conception of international society and its institutions. The
only challenge of similar magnitude would appear to be the creation of a universal state
or world government, fundamentally removing anarchy from the ‘anarchical society’.
The article thus investigates whether those concerns about corruption, raised by
scholars, resonate with the expressed public opinion of practitioners – diplomats and
statesmen – in the actual deliberation of GCD in international fora: the Preparatory
Commission for the Disarmament Conference, 1927–1928, and the United Nations,
1959. The main finding is that the corruption argument does appear in these public
deliberations, and in intriguing and complex ways. The article thus offers a novel analysis
of how practitioners publicly deal with a supposedly radical challenge to international
society.
Keywords
English School, international society, diplomatic history, international history,
disarmament, world government
Corresponding author:
Laust Schouenborg, Roskilde University, Universitetsvej 1, 4000 Roskilde, Denmark.
Email: lausts@ruc.dk
1102930EJT0010.1177/13540661221102930European Journal of International RelationsSchouenborg
research-article2022
Article
Schouenborg 617
Much thinking in the West in the last fifty years has been concerned less with understanding this
society (international society) and the conditions of its preservation than with dismantling or
even abolishing it. One of its institutions has been national armaments; and one of the
preoccupations of Western thinking has been disarmament, the attempt to do away with or
drastically curtail them. Yet if armaments are an integral part of the whole system of
international relations, and stand or fall with it, there are serious objections to the notions both
of the possibility and the desirability of disarmament.
(Bull, 1959: 41)
Hedley Bull (1959), one of the leading figures of the so-called English School (ES)
approach to International Relations (IR), believed that war and armaments were a central
cog in the wheel that was international society, and that war contributed directly to the
production of international order. This was a position he further developed in his land-
mark book The Anarchical Society (Bull, 1977), as well as in The Control of the Arms
Race (Bull, 1965). He was committed to the idea that disarmament would, in his words,
‘corrupt’ international society and ‘bring to an end such acceptance as there is of interna-
tional law and diplomatic orthodoxy’ (Bull, 1959: 47, 49). In this article, I shall explore
the extent to which practitioners – actual diplomats – agreed with this assessment. This
is the article’s central question. I shall do so specifically in relation to the most ambitious
programme of disarmament yet proposed by states, namely general and complete disar-
mament (GCD).1 The logic is that GCD will offer fertile terrain for diplomats to voice
their potential objections to the society-corrupting consequences of that programme.
Based on Bolton’s (2016) short but insightful history of GCD, two key moments have
been selected for analysis.
The first moment was when the Soviet Union introduced the idea of GCD in 1927 and
the subsequent sustained debate of it in the Preparatory Commission for the Disarmament
Conference (PCDC) 1927–1928. The Soviet Union reintroduced the concept at the actual
World Disarmament Conference in 1932. However, at that time it was dismissed without
much debate. The second moment was the UN General Assembly’s acceptance of the
idea of GCD in 1959. This moment includes Khrushchev’s re-launch of the idea in his
speech to the assembly on 18 September and the extensive debate of it over some 17
meetings of the assembly’s First Committee, tasked with disarmament and international
security.
The purpose and value of this analysis is to learn more about the workings of interna-
tional society. Following Bull, GCD probably represents the most radical challenge to
the traditional conception of that society and its institutions. The only challenge of simi-
lar magnitude would appear to be the creation of a universal state or world government,
fundamentally removing anarchy from the ‘anarchical society’. GCD should thus be of
central concern to ES scholars interested in the functioning of international society, as
well as all other IR scholars who accept that IR are partly or predominantly social rela-
tions.2 Moreover, the analysis should go some way towards satisfying those scholars who
have expressed the need for a more grounded focus on practitioners’ concrete experience
of, and articulations of, international society and its institutions (e.g. Wilson, 2012), as
well as those calling for more research on practitioners as sources of international thought
(e.g. Keene, 2014: 398–400, 2017: 352).3
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