Abstract
The paper begins with praise of Watson’s historical work and goes on to criticize it for downplaying the agency of agents other than European great powers and the USA. The key point here is that entrants from Europe’s periphery and beyond were not only ‘expanded upon’ by a growing international system but came to it with their own experiences of having been part of other systems. The historic memories of life before entry were kept alive by mnemonic techniques that also changed as a result of interaction with other members of the system. What ensued was not an effortless expansion of the international system, but a meeting of cultures that may be conceptualized as the intertwining of different narrative sociabilities emanating from different memories. This matters today, for entrants like China and Russia preserve memories of previous experiences, and these memories inform how these states read ongoing political developments.
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Notes
The theoretical inspiration for that attack was the post-structural conceptualization of identity, where the key point is that any identity is predicated on delineation from something outside itself. The corollary is that the outside is constitutive of identity. I have further developed on this theme in Neumann 2011 and Neumann and Wigen 2018, works on which this article build.
All these attacks on the concept of international society for papering over how inclusion spells exclusion were also part of a rather extensive debate within the School about whether the concept of international society may best be understood as a stylization of historical sequences, or as a functional construct. Mayall (1990: 151) saw it as basically historical, James (1993) would see it as basically theoretical, whereas Barry Buzan (1993) once saw it as a hybridization, arguing that the emergence of international society may be understood as an ideational process turning on meaning that provides a core, but that is inextricably tied up with the functional emergence of an international system, which providers an outer tier. In a later work, Buzan (2004) did away with the distinction between the ideational and the functional altogether.
For them, however, this should preferably be a typically modernist and historiosophical undertaking sketching ‘long-term historical processes in which visions of the unity of the human race influence the development of the states-system’; Linklater and Suganami 2006: 190.
The prerequisite is that it does not come out of a situation of non-system, or of heteronomy; the claim that there are only two categories in play here is Watson’s, not mine.
A correspondence is often assumed between the four sons and the subsequent Mongol-led polities in China, Persia, Central Asia and Russia, but as pointed out by Jackson 1999, this is too neat.
The two other cities to be ruled by Grand Dukes, Nizhniy Novgorod and Ryazan’, came up short on both counts.
The alternative is to postulate a universal animus dominandi whereby all polities would aim for the top.
As late as the seventeenth century, the emigré Muscovite bureaucrat Gregorii Kotoshikin explained that the ruler of Muscovy was a tsar’ by virtue of Ivan IV’s conquest of Kazan’’; Halperin 1987: 100.
For a discussion of one possible outcome of this process, see McKeil in this special issue.
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I should like to thank the editors, two anonymous referees and the participants on the workshop on this special issue held on 28 February 2022 for comments on an earlier draft.
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Neumann, I.B. The study of international society after Watson. Int Polit (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-023-00494-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-023-00494-0