CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

underpinnings. As well as making the point that liberals can be as aggressive (more
so?) than realists, this perhaps also supports Wight’s view, as will be discussed below,
of international relations comprising an interaction of competing voices.
The key point here, and notwithstanding a degree of positivism evident amongst some
neo-liberal viewpoints, is that the liberal school of thought is, by and large, explicitly
normative in its view of international relations. The next section now turns to a third
school of thought that firmly rejects positivism and sees international relations very
much as a human activity and a normative field of study; it is a school that seeks to
occupy ground between classical realism and classical liberalism.
1.1.3 International Society
The International Society approach to International Relations, also sometimes called the
English School as its early proponents were largely working in England – principally at
Cambridge – cannot trace its lineage back as far as the other traditions here described.
Yet it can claim to be among the first attempts formally to determine an International
Theory, standing in relation to international interaction as political theory does to
domestic society. 67 It grew initially from ideas formulated by the British Committee for
the Theory of International Politics, meeting under the chairmanship of Herbert
Butterfield (Master of Peterhouse) and including Martin Wight, Hedley Bull, George
Kennan, Garret Fitzgerald and Adam Watson, in the late 1960s/1970s. Its fundamental
view is that the international order * comprises a system of states that over time become
so involved with one another that each becomes obliged to take account of the others
and modify its actions accordingly. In doing so they become more than a ‘system’;
interaction becomes institutionalised, shared values and even some degree of common
identity emerge; they develop, in short, into a ‘society.’
It is elemental to International Society thinkers that international relations is a human
activity – the course of events is determined by the actions of individual men and
* A value-free term, simply meaning the totality of states and the institutions whereby they interact.
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