The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (133 page)

See
IMF
.

 
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Noted more for vigour than rigour, international political economy (IPE) emerged as a heterodox approach to international studies during the 1970s as oil price rises and the breakdown of the Bretton Woods international monetary system alerted Anglo-Saxon academic opinion to the importance, contingency, and weakness of the economic foundations of world order. Traditional study of international relations was held to have placed excessive emphasis on law, politics, and diplomatic history. Conversely modern economics was accused of abstraction and inaccessibility. Drawing heavily on historical sociology and economic history, IPE instead proposed a fusion of economic and political analysis. In addition, many adherents—both Marxist and liberal—protested against the reliance of Western social science on the territorial state to define the unit of explanation, preferring a holistic approach to the international system. By the 1990s IPE had partly succeeded in transforming the old orthodoxy yet, with its own canon, texts, debates, and journal, it stood in some danger of succumbing to respectability as a tolerated subfield of
international relations
. See also
political economy
;
politics and economics.
CJ 

 
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The discipline that studies interactions between and among states, and more broadly, the workings of the international system as a whole. It can be conceived of either as a multidisciplinary field, gathering together the international aspects of politics, economics, history, law, and sociology, or as a meta-discipline, focusing on the systemic structures and patterns of interaction of the human species taken as a whole. The discipline acquired its own identity after the First World War. Its principal branches additional to theory include
international political economy
, international organization, foreign policy-making, strategic studies, and, more arguably, peace research. If area studies is added to these, the label international studies becomes more appropriate. When spelled wholly in lower case, the term refers to the totality of interactions within the international system. The emphasis is often on relations between states, though other collective actors such as multinational corporations, transnational interest groups, and international organizations also play an important role.
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The doctrine that socialism ought to come by international revolution. Marx and Engels called for ‘Workers of all countries’ to ‘unite!’ in 1848. The International Working-men's Association (First International) was founded by Marx in 1864 and effectively dissolved by him in 1876 when he moved its headquarters to New York in order to prevent it falling into the hands of his opponents. The Second International was founded in 1889. It embraced both Marxists and non-Marxist socialists, but fell apart in 1914 when the majority of the socialists in all the combatant countries in the First World War embraced their country's war effort. The Third (communist) International was founded in 1919 and dissolved in 1943. Official doctrine in the Soviet Union promoted international socialism at some times, and
socialism
in one country at others, according to the perceived needs of the USSR. Trotskyists founded a rival ‘Fourth International’. Groups calling themselves International Socialists in capitals are therefore Trotskyist.

 
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The main concept of the so-called English school of
international relations
, its central idea being that states can form a society by agreeing amongst themselves to establish common rules and institutions for the conduct of their relations and by recognizing their common interest in maintaining these arrangements. This idea goes back to
Grotius
. It is closely related to the contemporary American concept of regimes which also stresses the development of common norms, rules, and institutions among states as a way of regulating their relations. But whereas ‘regimes’ refers to specific instances of co-operation or co-ordination on particular issues, international society refers more broadly to the whole construction of international relations in a system of states.
International society has states as its units, as opposed to world society, which is based on the idea of a shared identity amongst individuals. Up to a point, international society can function without any element of world society at the level of the mass of the population. As international society becomes more developed, however, it increasingly requires parallel development of mass world society in order to remain stable. It is sometimes argued that international society and world society are opposed ideas, with the state and national identity blocking the development of world society, and world society undermining the identity and purpose of the nation-state. But a case can be made that they are complements, with world society providing the political consensus to sustain the high levels of openness and interdependence of advanced international society, and international society providing the political framework for world society, so rescuing it from the fate of having either no political structure, or being dependent on an unattainable world government.
The most widely cited cases of international society are those of classical Greece and modern Europe. In both cases, international society was underpinned by a shared cultural heritage that embraced all of the states concerned. There is no necessity for an international society to embrace the whole of the international system, and most historical cases occur within regional subsystems. This raises the question of whether there can be a global international society in the absence of a global culture. During their imperial heyday, the European powers imposed their own form of political order, the territorial state, onto the rest of the planet. This legacy provided the post-colonial foundations for a global international society by making almost universal the mutual recognition of claims to sovereignty amongst all of the states in the system. This exchange of sovereign recognitions establishes states as legal equals, and provides the basis for a shared identity as members of international society.
The existence of an international society means that states can begin to move away from the regular use of military conflict to operate the
balance of power
, and towards a more managed form of relations. The
European Union
is a good example of a highly developed international society. The contemporary global international society is unevenly developed, with some states sharing many more norms, rules and institutions than others. At its centre lies a Western core, surrounded by concentric circles of states in each of which states share fewer of the norms, rules, and institutions as one moves further outward. A few pariah states are outside international society altogether.
By emphasizing the bases for co-operation amongst states, and by seeing this as a natural outcome of relations in an anarchic international system, the idea of international society moderates the conflictual assumption about the nature of
international relations
that tends to be associated with
realism
. It is a way of synthesizing many of the core elements of realist and liberal thinking, and it is vital to any understanding of rights and responsibilities concerning intervention by states into each others' affairs.
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