Legitimacy in International Society

"I see this as another book in the tradition of Hume and Williams, without that being up front in the book itself. In fact, given scholarly criticism of the English School of international relations lacking a principled grounding, we can say the English School needed a Scotsman. The first thing to say is that Legitimacy in International Society is a fascinating read. I read quite a few history books, and many histories of wars or conflicts are devoted to the causes of the conflict and the navigation of the conflict. Then the conflict comes to an end, there’s a treaty, and everyone goes home. End of book. Alternatively, people sometimes write about the circumstances and negotiation of particular treaties (as in Margaret MacMillan’s book about the post-WWI Versailles Treaty). Thank goodness those books are written, but books that put a series of treaties in the broader context of the evolution of international law, norms, and order are rare. Clark’s book takes some of the key moments of the past half-millennium—Westphalia, at the end of the Thirty Years’ War ; Utrecht, at the end of the war of Spanish Succession; the Congress of Vienna, after the Napoleonic Wars; Versailles; and then the collection of treaties after the Second World War—and sets out descriptions of the negotiations, the contexts of the treaties, and most important the evolution of norms of legitimacy among powerful states. It’s not a long book. It says that what’s always going on in these really big international pacts are questions about legitimacy, which are: who has to be included in the ‘we’ for order to be restored and sustained, and what are the norms they will sign up to, to try to sustain peaceful coexistence in the period ahead? This shows that norms are both tools and something that we live with, but then can be found wanting if a new crisis arises. The book also tells the story of a familiar but still vital point for our generation. Whereas the Vienna Congress brought France back into the fold pretty quickly after Napoleon was defeated, that didn’t happen with Germany after the First World War and the Versailles Treaty, which of course didn’t bode well. Clark also makes slightly less familiar points. After the Vienna Congress and the treaties that came out of it, some of the great powers (including Austria-Hungary, led by Metternich) wanted to agree a substantive principle of legitimacy that underpinned absolutist monarchy. Castlereagh, for Britain, didn’t want that at all. He wanted norms of peaceful coexistence, but he wasn’t going to sign up to their way of governing themselves. “Clark effectively shows how norms and institutions can grow out of particular situations involving the interaction of power, accommodation, and compromise” Although Castlereagh was trying to solve some of the problems the French Revolution had led to, one of which was continental war, he wasn’t trying to set up the norms of legitimacy in ways that prescribed the Austrian, Prussian, and Russian way of governing themselves under absolute monarchy. He wanted to avoid revolution but didn’t want to go further than that. Clark effectively shows how norms and institutions can grow out of particular situations involving the interaction of power, accommodation, and compromise. For example, in some respects, the practices of the balance of power with a norm of consensus among the Powers ended up being crystallized and codified around the Treaty of Utrecht and afterwards. Another interesting development, setting in train a process that accelerated during the 20th century, is that at the Congress of Vienna, the leading powers agreed to meet quite regularly. That met with some scepticism from some of Castlereagh’s colleagues in London, but it went ahead. It was successful on the whole, for a little under a century, at least until the Franco-Prussian War. Of course, it’s done for by the time of the First World War. But the key thing for us, I think, is that this practice of meeting regularly starts to spawn other fora that are recognisable to us. For example, in the latter decades of the 19th century, there were international conferences on subjects beyond war and peace, including on the monetary system, essentially held under the auspices of the system of international relations that Vienna had ushered in. The system had the capacity to broaden participation, with the United States initiating some conferences towards the end of the century. Earlier, after the Crimean War in the middle of the 19th century, the Ottomans had kind of joined the Concert, but not wholeheartedly for uncomfortable reasons. Both Neff and Clark describe a distasteful international hierarchy, in which the Chinese, the Japanese, and differently the Ottomans, were regarded as civilised but incompletely civilised in what, god protect us from ourselves, was known as a ‘standard of civilisation .’ They’re participants in international law but not at the top table. That’s deeply unattractive, but we live in a world where there is still a top table, and not everyone’s there, which is a product of the conditions of some kind of basic order being sustained (power, not values). In fact, we live in a world where there’s a contest going on right now about who should be at the top table. I think Clark’s book is instructive in the way that in the real world of policy-making power, order, norms, interests, commerce, war, and peace all come together, underlining the utility of drawing a higher level framework from Hume and Williams.."