Abstract
Adam Watson is one of the classical figures of the English School (ES). Scholarly appreciation of his contributions, however, has almost exclusively focused on his comparative work on historical regional ‘systems of states,’ the role of ‘hierarchy’ within an anarchical society, and the ‘evolution’/‘expansion’ of international society. The concept of ‘raison de système,’ for its part, although widely acknowledged as one of Watson’s main conceptual contributions, has received comparatively little attention from fellow members of the ES. In this context, this article reassesses the relevance of raison de système in Watson’s overall thinking by rooting it in a number of earlier intellectual influences emanating from the collaborative efforts of the British Committee. Watson’s raison de système, therefore, must be understood as a richer concept giving substance to how all classical ES thinkers collectively came to conceive of international society, thus giving this theoretical tradition its distinctiveness in the larger spectrum of international thought.
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Notes
Preliminary versions of this paper were presented at EISA’s 15th Pan-European Conference on International Relations, 1–4 September 2022, in Athens, Greece; and ISA’s 64th Annual Convention, 15–18 March 2023, in Montréal, Québec, Canada. I want to thank the editorial team of International Politics and the two anonymous reviewers for their clear and constructive criticisms, for these made the quality of the final version substantially better. I am also indebted to Filippo Costa Buranelli for first inviting me to participate in this collective project, as well as for presiding over all the earlier workshops in preparation for this volume. Multiple other colleagues also offered their generous advice and insightful comments during the previous public presentations of this article. In this sense, I want to specially acknowledge Thomas Linsenmaier, Cornelia Navari, Carolina Zaccato, Onur Erpul, and Thomas Diez for the feedback and suggestions.
In the late 1970s, Watson was initially going to co-author Diplomacy (1982) with Maurice Keens-Soper—who also employed the term raison de système in a few of his writings (e.g., Keens-Soper 1978: 36). Therefore, the concept’s actual origin might be a matter of shared authorship. Further studies of the personal papers and archives of these two scholars could, in the future, perhaps clarify this point.
In the early stages of the ES (before The Anarchical Society), Martin Wight and others after him used the concepts of ‘system of states’ and ‘society of states’ interchangeably, but with an implicit common understanding referring to what later Bull (1977) referred to as ‘international society’ or ‘society of states’ proper. In many of his writings, therefore, Watson showed this earlier use of ‘state-system’ and ‘state-society’ as synonyms. See, e.g., Watson (1990).
Among the papers of the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics, located in the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford, under the ‘Hedley Bull Papers’, Box 8, some papers (still) unpublished that were written by Adam Watson in 1977 seem to be the earliest instances of his use of the term ‘raison de système’. See, e.g., Box 8, File 3. This adds further support to the idea that raison de système was not just a central concern for Watson and the British Committee, but also that it might have been already known and debated as such in some of the meetings of the British Committee.
In this instance, Watson shows a more contemporary use of the term, similar to Hedley Bull’s (1977: cf. 9–10, 13ff). This also shows that by 1982 Watson had already internalized Bull’s standard differentiation between ‘systems’ and ‘societies’ of states.
I want to thank Thomas Linsermaier for suggesting this point. This argument gains practical relevance in the present context, marked by the latest Russian aggression against Ukraine in February 2022 (the first one being the invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014), and the reaction that its egregious violation of the ‘rules of game’ has elicited from those international actors who self-perceive as part of the (aggressed) international society. This reaction has certainly been characterized by a deeper association with common values and a collective sense of identity. That is: a self-awareness toward raison de système that has led to ‘doing more’, rather than less, in assisting Ukraine while also implementing sanctions on Putin’s Russia and establishing a clear message to the rest of the international community. Importantly, as well, is that those involved have willingly accepted to incur serious strategic ‘costs’ and risks in doing so, not simply in terms of the raising costs of gas but also militarily.
This critically important disassociation is famously captured by two well-known French expressions: from ‘l'État, c’est moi’ to ‘le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!’.
Directly underpinning his conception of raison de système in the framework used by Butterfield and Wight in their ‘Preface’ to Diplomatic Investigations, Watson concluded in his ‘Epilogue’ to The Evolution of International Society that: ‘The evidence indicates that to function successfully a concert of great powers needs a number of conditions. First, none of the states that operate the concert can be stronger than the others combined. However, they need not be equal in strength; nor need all, or indeed any, be “satisfied” powers, committed to the status quo, as is sometimes argued, though in practice one or more of them usually will be. Second, the concerting powers need not agree all the time; but they must all recognize the advantage of managing the pressures of the system and making the society work: they must have a sense of raison de système. They must be willing to implement “the principles of prudence and moral obligation that have held together the society of states”.’ (Watson 1992: 322; cf. Bull 1977: 10).
Following Bull’s own criteria, one could also add ‘trade’ to the list (see, e.g., Terradas 2020b: 113–114).
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Terradas, N. More than a catchphrase: rethinking Adam Watson’s raison de système in international society. Int Polit (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-023-00479-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-023-00479-z