It has been argued for beyond some fifty years that if an 'International Society' exists then it is the constitutive normative institutions that colour its form and quality. Although there is no common conceptualisation or definition of ‘institutions’ within the field, broadly conceived, institutions are themselves thought of as patterns of values, ideas, norms, rules and practices crystallised into a (re)productive schema which, by virtue of this, manifests into an ‘order.’ (Buzan, 2004: 167-170; Holsti, 2004: 20-22; Hurrell, 2007: 3; Bull, 2012: 13; Friedner Parrat, 2017) What constitutes a ‘practice’ in this manner must be subsequently considered as greater than any lone, calculated or mimicked action taken by a single political unit or grouping.
In this
frame, ‘Practices’ are actions undertaken by a plurality of units across a
common temporality and oriented toward the pursuit of similarly common
elementary goals, which, through repetition and proceduralisation, generate and
sustain institutionalised order as an emergent outcome rather than a
presupposed end. ‘Practices’ here thus appear as:
- Telic, in that they are undertaken for the pursuit of specific collectively established goals, as opposed to being ad hoc or isolated actions. (Navari, 2011)
- Generative, in that practices actively instantiate the shared meanings, norms and, hence, culture
through which international society is constituted, emerging through
interaction rather than presupposing them as prior or causal conditions.
- Normative, insofar as the ends toward which practices are oriented are evaluated, prioritised and legitimated through the shared norms that form preferences and are as such implicit in any functional goals. (Neumann, 2001; Williams, 2011)
- Iterative, being the reproduction of particular actions over time for the pursuit of common goals and as such the norms (re)generated therein, often via the participatory mechanisms of organisations and regimes. (Watson, 1982, 2002; Navari, 2021:137-140)
- Social, in that these actions acquire the status of intersubjective facts through their embeddedness within historically constituted relational contexts and processes. Here, shared norms, values, expectations, and rules render these patterns of action intelligible, recognisable, and hence institutionally consequential for the crystallisation of an international ‘order’ itself. (Buzan, 2004, 2006; Bull, 2012, 2019; Dunne and Reus-Smit, 2017)
- Contestable,
insofar
as the plurality of interests and transformation of political units themselves,
not least through their relationality or values-based discrepancies, subjects
these iterative and institutionalising actions to interpretation, rupture and
contention over both their enactment and the legitimacy of the ends they pursue.
(Clark, 2007; Buzan and Falkner, 2022; Paikin, 2022; Friedner
Parrat, 2024) This
renders the reproductive iteration of such institutionally constitutive social
actions neither inherently predetermined nor uncontested.
In this
manner, the institutions of international society and the iterated, routinised or recurring practices that
they are constituted by may be thought of as telic. They are not, as Kalevi Holsti (2004: 21)
contended, teleological following their ‘design’ to achieve
functional ends. International institutions are telic in the limited sense that
they are defined by functional ends, but this does not make them teleological.
Telicity here refers only to the fact that institutions such as diplomacy,
international law, or the balance of power are intelligible in terms of what they
are for. As such, institutional practices are ‘performative’ to the ends of
their function. (Basu-Mellish
et al., 2023: 592) In contrast, teleology involves attributing
meaningful direction, velocity, or necessitous design to causality within
historical development itself.
In her
exploration of this distinction, Cornelia Navari (2009: 17, 18) lays out that ‘a
telic notion of practice may be contrasted with a causal notion. In the causal
notion, a practice is a form of mentalist ‘object’ which impinges on other
objects, in this case behavior’ and ‘engaging in a telic practice is [to be] guided
by its standards rather than being caused to perform in some manner.’ Thus, the
institutional practices of international society – be it diplomatic rituals,
forming trusteeship councils, trade negotiations, adherence to international law or the rules of
war - understood through telicity ‘can be considered as such because each establishes
some sense of a standard which ought to be obeyed, if the practice is to be
accomplished.’ (Navari, 2011: 614)
To give
a contemporary example, Costa Buranelli (2026) explores the Central Asian
consultative meetings between heads of state as an institution of its regional
international society. The consultative meetings are an informal, leader-level
diplomatic forum through which Central Asian states collectively manage
regional order and inter-state relations without formal bureaucratic or
organisational entrenchment. Costa Buranelli (2026: 124) isolates this durable,
indigenous and replicated practice as being institutionally oriented toward the
shared ends of reproducing regional order among Central Asian states, affirming
sovereign equality without formal juridification or delegation. Consequently, the
consultative meetings become an institutionalised practice that has not been externally or explicitly designed
to cause behaviours or overturn others, but broadly provides a replicable
procedure to guide actions without any predetermined outcomes by the very agents the practice concerns.
Practices
in the institutionalist vein are hence a commitment to communal and
intersubjective standards that guide as opposed to cause behaviours
– that orient as opposed to engender. As such they imply a
greater degree of agency than any teleological or progressivist historicism
afford as causal predeterminations of activity.[1]
It is
precisely when such institutional practices are misread as teleological rather
than telic that ‘the expansion’ of international society itself comes to appear
as a normatively predetermined historical process. This is the kind of
teleological reading of history that Wight, Butterfield, and Bull sought to
move beyond, even if their narrative of the expansion of international society does
not always fully escape it.
Here, the
‘expansion story’ concerns the historical process through which the practices,
norms, and institutions that constituted European international society were
extended from within its initial bounds to incorporate new ‘external’ political
units into its existing, though evolving, social order. Despite a sincerity to
‘take seriously cultural differences’ through the holistic telling of ‘when the
Europeans embarked upon their historic expansion,’ one characterised as
Eurocentric according to ‘the historic record itself,’ (Bull and Watson, 1984: 2,5,9) the lack of critical or
reflexive postcolonial faculty in such a historical interpretation has led to a
number of critiques of this narrative, not least for the wide variance of
non-European norms, testimonies, injustices, identities, counter-narratives and
tales of colonial violence omitted. (Keene, 2002; Keal, 2017; Acharya and Buzan, 2019; Buzan and
Acharya, 2021; Green, 2021)
Even so,
the historicist character of this narrative does not in itself determine a
strongly teleological reading. It is this very historicism that Roger Epp (1998: 57) once identified as the ‘near-teleological
character’ of this narrative ‘in which a Vattelian world exclusively of states
unfolds over centuries,’ expanding from explicitly Western ideals.[2]
Nonetheless, as discussed above, although historicist in frame, this narrative
need not be read as teleological in a strong sense. As Andrew Phillips (2017)
details, an institutionalist expansion story need not be rejected in its
entirety, but only detached from its ‘vanguardist,’ unidirectionally
historicist and Eurocentric form. Rather, foregrounding a historically ‘polycentric
pattern of expansion’ that highlights the ‘two-way’ seminal interaction between
European and non-Western international societies reframes the institutionalist expansion narrative
into an open, ‘syncretist’ form defined by practices of common ends yet not
causally bound to some grander historical development. (Buzan, 2014: 71; Phillips, 2017: 60-62) The institutionalist
expansion story thus becomes better understood as a mutually contingent
extension of practices and practical judgements across conditions of plurality,
rather than the linear unfolding of a predetermined causal normative end.
On these
bases, Holsti’s claim that an ‘international society’ approach to institutional
practices is teleological can be resisted. These institutions are better
understood as historically contingent practices, reconstructed through
classical and post-classical interpretivist methods. Practices, as such, are
not expressions of an immanent purpose at work, engendering behaviours, in
international history. To neglect this would be to forget (a) the tragic
Realist logic that both Butterfield and Wight
sought to critically engage with and distinguish themselves from, (Epp, 1996; Molloy, 2003) not least (b) the
teleologically progressive rendering of history that Butterfield (1965: 185-8) had become a noted
critic of that Wight was a disciple to. (Bain, 2007: 568)
It is
precisely through their telic and generative dimensions that practices come to shape
the international society of which they are part. Importantly, practices do not
merely operate within culture; they actively instantiate the intersubjective
meanings, values, and norms through which international society is constituted,
emerging through interaction rather than presupposing them. In this way, the
patterns of shared practice open the path to understanding how culture itself
develops alongside, and through, participation in international society.
It has
often been argued that culture permeates all aspects of international society,
whether understood as a discourse, an object of study, or a political
phenomenon. (O’Hagan,
2004: 209-210) Wight
was among the first to foreground this issue, asserting that ‘a states-system
will not come into being without a degree of cultural unity among its members.’
(Wight, 1977: 33)
Nevertheless,
as a number of scholars have since observed (Dunne, 1998; Vigezzi, 2005, 2013; Epp, 2013; Dunne and
Reus-Smit, 2017), the
question of causality between culture, civilisation, and international society
remained a central, yet unresolved, concern of the first British Committee on
the Theory of International Politics. This uncertainty was compounded by a lack
of conceptual precision, most notably the implied analytic interchangeability
between ‘states-system’ and ‘society of states’ evident in the thought of both
Butterfield and Wight.
It was
Bull (2012: 9-16) who later articulated
this analytic distinction more clearly. In doing so, he sought to emphasise the
prevailing supposition, shared by Butterfield, (1973: 185) that culture precedes
international society. Yet, as Brunello Vigezzi reminds us, Butterfield himself
documented as early as 1961 a significant divergence between Wight and other
members of the Committee regarding a definition of international society. In
contrast to others, Butterfield states that Wight framed international society
as coming into focus through ‘participation’ in a common culture, (Vigezzi, 2013: 41). This reading indicates
that Wight’s formulation does not presuppose a unidirectional causal link, but
highlights the significance of participation.
Resultantly,
how does Wight understand “culture” at all? For Wight, “culture” is definitively
delineated as ‘the social result of living together in time.’ (Wight, 2022: 250) Situated as such, a common culture cannot
logically precede the formation of common society; rather, it emerges through
the very participation that constitutes it. Culture becomes neither a
pre-existing condition nor a deterministic cause. Conceptualised in this way,
culture entails a constellation of shared values, long-held yet slowly evolving
traditions and customs, and unified forms of thought and expression that take
an institutional form instantiated through the iterative performance of
practices.[3]
(Wight, 1966a, 2023: 69)
Viewed
through this lens, it would be an analytical misinterpretation which privileges
a mechanistic reading of Wight’s historical conception to suggest that the 'culture' generated by shared practices is rigidly either causally prior to or distinct
from international society in whole or by degree. (Buzan, 1993, 2010: 1; James, 1993; Linklater and Suganami,
2006: 27) Common
culture, one read without an assumption of causality, embodies
the social norms and values made intelligible through the generative
performance of practices over time, rather than preceding or determining them.
As Adam
Watson (1992: 318) observed, ‘regulatory
arrangements always come into being between civilized polities when the volume
of contacts becomes worth regulating. Anything more intimate, a society that
goes beyond rules and institutions to shared values and assumptions, has
hitherto always developed within a cultural framework.’ Watson’s insight
underscores that culture is not a causal prerequisite for international society
either, but rather emerges through the very interactions and practices
of plural political units. For Wight, nothing causally precedes international
society and its attendant culture except the condition of plurality itself; it
is only through the repeated enactment of practices that participation, shared
values, and the emergent social order we call international society come into
being. In this sense, ‘culture’ is both equally enabling of and produced by
the patterns of practiced interaction that co-constitute international
society.
___
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[1] Navari (2009, 2011, 2013) develops this argument utilising a discussion of practice
that breaks somewhat with a specifically Bordieuan ‘sociological’ account, one
undertaken by Turner (1994) in his The Social Theory of Practices.
[2] Emphasis added.
[3] This resonates with the claim made by
both Linklater (1990: 8-9) and Epp (1998) that the International Society approach
is one of phronesis, grounded in practical wisdom concerning how
knowledge of its primary object is intersubjectively and hermeneutically
articulated. It also adds a further layer to this phronetic orientation; the
object of study itself is not of a pre-given form, but rendered manifest
through practices.