How does the English School of international relations differ from American approaches?

Donika D.

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How does the "English School" of international relations differ from American approaches?

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Abstract

According to Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time, "a theory is a good theory
if it satisfies two requirements: It must accurately describe a large class of observations on
the basis of a model which contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite
predictions about the results of future observations". This definition is of course one that
comes from a scholar of physics, a science where the ability of a theory to predict is a
fundamental element ensuring its survival. It nevertheless demonstrates the rigorous scrutiny
a claim carrying the label of a "theory" undergoes independent of the discipline it belongs to.
The field of international relations (IR) has thus been subjected to the same strict
requirements and demands for empirical proof and outcome prediction. These demands,
could be argued, have been the main challenge the discipline has brought upon itself once it
crossed into the "science" realm and established departments of "political science" in major
research universities across the West.

Introduction
Steven Hawking: A Brief History of Time
The English School's pluralistic, multi disciplinary intuitive approach
The intellectual frustration characterizing the English School and American School debate
Conclusion
Works cited

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[...] To use the ideas of IR scholars themselves, according to the English School identities are important, and as defined by the social constructivist perception, "it is not a case that a state exists first and then goes on to perform its foreign policy; rather it is in the continual act of delineating itself from things presented as 'foreign' --outside as well as inside itself --that a state's identity is constructed"10 Hence, as an interaction between two sides, perhaps the current transatlantic debate is contributing to the maturation of the field itself and the construction of its identity. [...]

[...] theoretical fields of study, The English School of international relations, starting from its very name, does not easily render itself to clear-cut definitions. With its main literature produced in the 1970s and 1980s, the English School (which should in fact be called the British School), emerged as an academic discipline within the IR field in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics under the lead 1 Steven Hawking, A Brief History of Time the framework of the classical liberal tradition while exhibiting a wide variety of influences on part of functionalism, social constructivism, realism, and critical theory2. [...]

[...] Scholars such as Hedley Bull, however, argue that this attempt to quantify events, predict outcomes and reduce human behavior to a select number of variables goes against the very nature of international relations and the discipline's inherent, unchangeable characteristics: unmanageable number of variables of which any generalization about state behavior must take account; the resistance of the material to controlled experiment; the quality it has of changing before our eyes and slipping between our fingers even as we try to categorize it; the fact that the theories we produce and the affairs that are theorized about are related not only as subject and object but also as cause and effect, thus ensuring that even our most innocent ideas contribute to their own verification or falsification”6 Hence, the English School's pluralistic, multi-disciplinary intuitive approach to highly relevant contemporary ideas such as globalization and fragmentation, universalism and particularism, are at the core of the main differences separating the former from other disciplinary perspectives such as the American one7. [...]

[...] It could be thus argued that the two approaches to the study of international relations are not only different due to their differing methodological starting points, but also diverge based on their countries' of origin underlying ideological beliefs. Both English School and American scholars are largely the products of their environments and the principles characterizing the societal structure they came from. Hence, it is inevitable in this sense that the discipline of IR is under the influence of the domestic environment where IR theories are being conceived. [...]

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