English School
States form a society, not merely a system, bound by shared rules and institutions.
The English School sits deliberately between realism and cosmopolitanism. Its central claim, argued by Hedley Bull in The Anarchical Society, is that states form an international society and not only an international system: they are conscious of common interests and common values, and they conceive themselves bound by a set of rules in their dealings with one another.
That society is held together by institutions in a broad sense, older and deeper than any organisation with a headquarters: diplomacy, international law, sovereignty and the mutual recognition it implies, the balance of power, the conventions that limit war, and the special responsibilities of great powers. Order in this account is an achievement produced by practice, not a by product of the distribution of capabilities.
The tradition's long internal argument is between pluralists and solidarists. Pluralists hold that the society of states can agree only on a thin set of coexistence rules, above all sovereignty and non intervention. Solidarists hold that it can and does reach further, towards shared standards of justice and human rights, and that this is what expansion of the society has meant.
Key thinkers
Hedley Bull, Martin Wight, Adam Watson, Barry Buzan, R. J. Vincent.
Core concepts
international society, order and justice, pluralism and solidarism, sovereignty, diplomacy, the expansion of international society.
English School applied to 45 historical events
Every event on Theoria is read through all six theories. These are the readings English School gives, moment by moment. Open one to compare it against the other five, or explore them on the interactive map.
American Revolution
1763-1783Stamp Act Crisis: Colonists argued as Englishmen claiming the rights of Englishmen, inside a shared constitutional tradition, and that shared membership is why the dispute took the form it did. Both sides appealed to the same conventions . Revolutions between strangers begin di...
8 moments read through English School
Arab Spring
2010-2012Bouazizi Self-Immolation: Governments across the world had dealt with these regimes for decades as ordinary members of international society, whatever their domestic conduct. The uprisings exposed how far recognition had been detached from any judgment about how states treat their own ...
8 moments read through English School
Bandung Conference
1955Colombo Powers Meet: These states were asserting a right to participate in shaping international order rather than merely to be admitted to it. The claim was that international society's rules had been made by Europeans for Europeans, and that its new members had standing to revis...
8 moments read through English School
Berlin Conference and Scramble for Africa
1884-1914Leopold Expands Congo Claims: Whether a polity's consent mattered depended on whether Europeans counted it as a state, and the standard of civilisation decided that question in Europe's favour every time. African societies with courts, armies and diplomacy were treated as objects of the st...
8 moments read through English School
Bretton Woods System
1941-1973Atlantic Charter Economic Aims: Two states issued a declaration of common principles for a world neither yet controlled, and other governments adhered to it in growing numbers. The Charter functioned as a claim about what the postwar order should be, and acquired authority through accumulate...
8 moments read through English School
Chinese Communist Revolution
1945-1949Japanese Surrender in China: China had just been made a permanent member of the Security Council, recognised as one of the world's great powers, while lacking control of its own territory. Status in international society was conferred on a government whose authority at home was about to b...
8 moments read through English School
Cold War
1947-1991Truman Doctrine: The English School sees 1947 as international society splitting into two camps that still, crucially, remained members of one society of states. Even as they divided the world, both superpowers kept the shared institutions of diplomacy , embassies, and the Uni...
12 moments read through English School
Congress of Vienna and Concert of Europe
1814-1822First Treaty of Paris: France was invited to the coming congress as a participant rather than summoned as a defendant, and Talleyrand exploited that opening for a year. Admitting the defeated party to the conversation is the practice that distinguishes a society of states from a sim...
8 moments read through English School
COVID-19 Pandemic
2019-2023Wuhan Cluster Reported: Disease control has been an object of international cooperation since the nineteenth-century sanitary conferences, and it is one of the oldest functional areas the society of states manages. The machinery is genuinely old and it has never been given teeth.
8 moments read through English School
Cuban Missile Crisis
1962Soviet Deployment Begins: Stationing weapons in a sovereign state that requested them was not obviously unlawful, and the Soviet Union said so. The dispute was about a change in the strategic balance presented as a legal question, which is how great powers usually argue with each other...
8 moments read through English School
Fall of the Assad Government in Syria
2024Opposition Offensive Begins: The state had been readmitted to the Arab League the previous year on the assumption that the regime was permanent and normalisation was the realistic course. That judgment by international society was overturned within eighteen months.
8 moments read through English School
World War I
1914-1918Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand: The murder of an heir to a throne was an attack on the dynastic order itself, and the society of states had settled such crises before by protest, mediation, and a conference of the great powers. What followed instead was an ultimatum written to be refused. Fo...
12 moments read through English School
Founding of the United Nations
1941-1945Atlantic Charter: Two states set out principles for the society of states as a whole, on their own authority, and were largely accepted as entitled to do so. That presumption is what great-power responsibility looks like in practice: leadership exercised by declaration and vali...
8 moments read through English School
French Revolution
1789-1799Estates-General Convenes: An assembly not called since 1614 was revived because the monarchy needed legitimacy only an ancient form could supply. The crown reached for tradition as a resource and found that reviving an institution also revives its claims. Old forms are not inert when t...
8 moments read through English School
From GATT to the World Trade Organization
1947-1995GATT Signed: States accepted binding limits on a core sovereign power, the setting of their own tariffs, in exchange for reciprocal limits by others. That exchange is the basic form of most international economic law, and it began at scale here.
8 moments read through English School
German Unification
1848-1871Frankfurt Parliament: Frankfurt asserted that a nation might constitute a state by its own act, without a sovereign's grant. Europe's monarchies found the claim intolerable precisely because it was general. Admitting nations as members of international society alongside dynasties w...
8 moments read through English School
Global Financial Crisis
2007-2009Subprime Losses Surface: No forum existed with authority over globally active banks, whose supervision remained national while their balance sheets were not. International society had permitted an activity to outgrow its regulation , and the gap became visible in a single August week.
8 moments read through English School
Great Depression
1929-1939Wall Street Crash: Economic management had not yet been accepted as a matter of common concern among states. Sovereignty over money and trade was regarded as absolute, and the idea that a government owed others any consideration in setting them was barely present. That understan...
8 moments read through English School
Gulf War
1990-1991Iraq Invades Kuwait: One member state extinguished another, which is the clearest possible violation of the rule on which the whole society rests. The near-universal response reflects that this was not a border dispute but an attack on the principle of sovereign existence.
8 moments read through English School
Hamas-led Attack and Gaza War
2023-2025October 7 Attack: Deliberate killing of civilians and the taking of hostages are prohibited absolutely, without exception for any cause. That prohibition is among the least contested rules international society has, and this was the gravest single breach of it in the region in ...
8 moments read through English School
Indian Independence and Partition
1946-1948Cabinet Mission Arrives: Britain was transferring sovereignty rather than being expelled, and the forms mattered: negotiations, constitutional plans, a legislated transfer. Decolonisation conducted through the procedures of the society of states allowed the successor to inherit member...
8 moments read through English School
Iranian Revolution
1978-1979Qom Protests: Iran was a member in good standing of the society of states, an American ally, an oil supplier and a regional pillar, and its internal collapse was nobody's business under the rules. Non-intervention meant the crisis developed without external involvement unti...
8 moments read through English School
United States-led Iraq War
2002-2011Security Council Resolution 1441: Whether force required a further decision was a question about the Charter's rules on the use of force, argued by every government in legal terms. That the argument was conducted in law rather than in interest matters, even where the law did not determine the ...
8 moments read through English School
Korean War
1950-1953North Korea Invades: An organisation founded five years earlier authorised force against an aggressor, which is exactly what the Charter had envisaged and what everyone expected never to happen. For one summer, collective security operated as designed, and the circumstances that a...
8 moments read through English School
Rise and Failure of the League of Nations
1920-1946League Enters into Force: For the first time the society of states acquired a permanent address. Ambassadors had existed for centuries and congresses met when crisis demanded; now there was a standing assembly with a secretariat and a seat. That institutional innovation survived the Le...
8 moments read through English School
Napoleonic Wars
1803-1815War Resumes after Amiens: Both governments published their cases, each accusing the other of violating the terms, each addressing an audience of European courts whose opinion still counted for something. The elaborate arguing over who had broken faith shows that obligation mattered eve...
8 moments read through English School
Creation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Regime
1957-1970IAEA Statute Enters Force: An international body was given authority to inspect activities inside sovereign states, which was a considerable innovation in 1957. The society of states accepted intrusive verification as legitimate in this domain and nowhere else at the time.
8 moments read through English School
Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials
1945-1948London Charter Signed: Defining crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity asserted that some conduct is criminal under international law regardless of domestic legality. That claim about the reach of the society of states over individuals was genuinely new and rem...
8 moments read through English School
From Rio to the Paris Climate Agreement
1992-2016UN Framework Convention Adopted: The atmosphere is not any state's territory, so managing it required a form of collective authority the society of states had rarely attempted. Extending governance to a global commons is among the harder things the society has tried.
8 moments read through English School
Treaty of Versailles and Paris Peace Settlement
1919-1923Paris Peace Conference Opens: Germany was not admitted to the negotiations, unlike France at Vienna a century earlier. That single procedural decision meant the settlement was imposed rather than agreed, and the defeated power never accepted it as binding in the way a negotiated peace is a...
8 moments read through English School
Genocide Convention and Universal Declaration of Human Rights
1945-1951UN Charter Human Rights Commitments: Sovereignty and human rights were written into the same document with no way of reconciling them, and international society has argued about the relationship ever since. The Charter did not resolve the tension ; it institutionalised it, and that may have been ...
8 moments read through English School
Rome Statute and Creation of the International Criminal Court
1989-2002Trinidad and Tobago Revives Proposal: The claim was that some crimes concern all states and that a standing institution should be able to try them. That proposition had been asserted at Nuremberg and never institutionalised , and the gap between assertion and machinery was about to close.
8 moments read through English School
Russia Annexes Crimea
2014Yanukovych Leaves Kyiv: The Budapest Memorandum of 1994 had given Ukraine assurances of territorial integrity in exchange for surrendering nuclear weapons, and the assurances proved to be worth nothing. What that episode taught about guarantees has been noted by every state consideri...
8 moments read through English School
Russia's Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine
2022-2023Russia Recognizes Separatist Entities: Recognising separatist entities within a member state's borders violates the rule against interference that Russia had itself invoked in Kosovo and elsewhere. The inconsistency was noted immediately by states that had heard the earlier argument.
8 moments read through English School
Russian Revolution
1917-1922February Strikes in Petrograd: Russia was an ally in a coalition war, and Britain and France watched an autocracy fall with mixed feelings: relief that the alliance now had cleaner credentials, alarm at what might follow. A revolution in one great power is immediately the business of all th...
8 moments read through English School
Rwandan Genocide
1990-1994RPF Invades Rwanda: An invasion across an international border by forces based in a neighbouring state engaged the clearest rules available, and nothing followed. Where no great power's interest is engaged, the society's rules operate as description rather than constraint.
8 moments read through English School
World War II
1939-1945German Invasion of Poland: Germany did not merely break a rule, it denied that rules applied, erasing a sovereign state and treating its people as material for empire. A member of the society of states had become its enemy. For the English School September 1939 is the moment a revisioni...
12 moments read through English School
September 11
2001-2021The September 11 Attacks: The English School reads September 11 as an attack not merely on a state but on international society itself, on the ordered world of embassies, borders, and law that al Qaeda explicitly rejected. That is why condemnation was universal, from Tehran to Havana. ...
8 moments read through English School
Six-Day War
1967Egypt Moves Forces into Sinai: Both sides were parties to an armistice regime supervised by the United Nations, and moving armies into the demilitarised area tested what that regime actually required. Arrangements that depend on restraint reveal their emptiness the moment restraint is withd...
8 moments read through English School
Suez Crisis
1956-1957Aswan Finance Withdrawn: Great powers do claim a licence to withhold favours, and the society of states has always tolerated it. What it tolerates less is the manner. Dulles announced the refusal publicly and pointedly, denying Cairo the face-saving formula that diplomacy exists to pr...
8 moments read through English School
Syrian Uprising and War
2011-2023Daraa Protests and Crackdown: Condemnations, envoys and observer missions followed over the next year, and each was obstructed or ignored. International society's instruments short of force were tried systematically in Syria and comprehensively failed, which is worth recording precisely.
8 moments read through English School
Thirty Years' War and Peace of Westphalia
1618-1648Defenestration of Prague: Christendom already had a formula for confessional difference in the Peace of Augsburg, and Bohemia had its local version. The defenestration was staged as a legal act, in the castle, against officers rather than the king, precisely because its authors wanted ...
8 moments read through English School
Vietnam War
1954-1975Geneva Accords Divide Vietnam: A conference of great powers settled the future of a country whose representatives were present but not decisive, in the manner of a nineteenth-century congress. Decolonisation was proceeding, and the practice of disposing of territories at a European conferen...
8 moments read through English School
Yom Kippur War and Arab Oil Embargo
1973-1974Egypt and Syria Attack: Attacking on Yom Kippur was noted as a choice and defended as the day on which Israeli mobilisation would be slowest. Wars begun on religious holidays test whatever residual restraints the calendar still imposes, and the answer here was that it imposed none.
8 moments read through English School
Yugoslav Wars and Dayton Peace Agreement
1991-1995Slovenia Declares Independence: Recognition was the instrument that mattered, and Germany's pressure for early recognition of Slovenia and Croatia has been argued about ever since. Deciding when an entity becomes a member of international society is among the society's most consequential col...
8 moments read through English School