Key Points

• International society is an association of member states who not only interact across international borders but also share common purposes, orga­nizations, and standards of conduct.

• There are different historical versions of interna­tional society the most important of which is the contemporary global international society.

• In understanding international society it is important to keep in mind contrasting group relations, such as empires, which are far more common historically.

• Political independence is the core value of inter­national society.

Ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy

In an important survey Adam Watson (1992) iden­tifies, among others, the independent city-states of Classical Greece, the states-system of Renaissance Italy, the anti-hegemonial Peace of Westphalia, the Concert of Europe, the globalization of the European states-system, the era of the two super­powers, and the contemporary international soci­ety. So we are dealing with a large historical subject of which only a few highlights can be examined in this chapter.

In this section I shall briefly discuss two incipient and important forerunners of the idea and institu­tion of international society: ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy. The first historical manifestation of an international society is ancient Greece, then known as Hellas, which was a geographical area and a cultural unity but not a single political entity or state. Hellenic international society comprised a large number of city-states based geographically on the lower Balkan Peninsula and the many islands in the surrounding Aegean, Adriatic, and Mediter­ranean seas. The Hellenes thought of themselves as sharing a common ancestry, language, religion, and way of life, all of which distinguished them from neighbours whom they regarded as 'barbarians'— those who did not speak Greek—of whom the Persians were the defining case (Wight 1977: 46-7; 85). Athens was the most famous of the Greek city-states but there were also many others, such as Sparta and Corinth, which taken together formed the first international society in Western history. It is important to emphasize, then, that ancient Greece was not a state: the Greeks referred to them­selves as Hellenes. Hellenic international society consisted of city-states which were more or less independent of each other but shared a common culture that was essential to their cohesion as an international society. Furthermore, as indicated, the ancient Greeks sharply distinguished Hellas from neighbouring non-Greek 'barbarians', such as the Persians, with whom they had political rela­tions but no cultural affinities or political associ­ation.

Box 2.3. Approximate Chronology of International Society
500-100 BC	Ancient Greek or Hellenic
1300-1500	Renaissance Italian
1500-1650	Early Modern European
1650-1950	European cum Western
1950-	Global

There were extensive and elaborate relations between the city-states of Hellas. Their religion, customs, traditions, and politics were similar even though each city-state had its own identity, cere­monies, cults, oracles, and political arrangements.

The Oracle at Delphi was consulted as a source of authority in disputes between city-states. The ancient Greeks evolved a special political vocabu­lary that included 'reconciliation', 'truce', 'conven­tion', 'alliance', 'coalition', 'arbitration', 'treaty', 'peace', among other translated words. They had a concept of neutrality which was expressed by a word that translates 'to stay quiet' (Nicolson 1954: 3-14). They did not possess an institution of diplo­macy based on resident ambassadors which was an invention of the Italian Renaissance. They never­theless developed a comparable institution, known as proxeny, which served the same basic function and involved local residents from other Greek cities (Wight 1977: 53-6).

Whether there existed an international society as defined above by Hedley Bull, of which the Greek cities were self-consciously members, is less clear and more controversial. The ancient Greeks did not articulate a body of international law because they could not conceive of the polis — the city-state polit­ical communities in which they lived—as having rights and obligations in relation to other city-states on some basis of rough equality (Wight 1977: 51) The ancient Greek city-states were politically self-contained even though they were based on a common culture and religion; they were not part of a larger political association consisting, for exam­ple, of a common body of international law. Their international society, to the extent that it existed, was cultural-religious rather than legal-political.

Even though the ancient Greeks had no explicit conception of international law as such, they did nevertheless recognize that certain principles ordained by the gods or dictated by practical reality should govern the conduct of international affairs between the city-states of Hellas. Treaties were under the special custody of Zeus, the all-powerful ruler of gods and men, and it was considered an offence to break a treaty without a recognized justi­fication, or to abandon an ally in the middle of a military campaign. According to Harold Nicolson (1954: 5), among the ancient Greeks 'there seems... to have existed a religious sanction, mitigating the unrestrained barbarities of war and analogous to our Geneva Convention'. That analogy might be misplaced because the Geneva Conventions are an elaborate and explicit body of international law. But narrow expediency and strict opportunism in both war and foreign policy were considered wrong: it was immoral to engage in a surprise milit­ary attack; atrocities were associated with the con­duct expected of barbarians but not Greeks. Some states, such as Sparta, were censured for their diplo­matic unreliability. And apart from the laws and customs which obtained among the cities of Hellas, according to Nicolson (p. 10) the Greeks did dimly recognize the existence of certain standards of con­duct which applied to all mankind, civilized and barbarian alike.

These practices obviously come close to Hedley Bull's concept and so it is not surprising that ancient Greece is often seen as the first significant international society in the Western tradition. But it should again be emphasized that the Greeks did not operate with a concept of equal sovereignty. Some states clearly were more equal than others: there were a few major powers, such as Athens and Sparta, and many lesser powers who often became entangled in their rivalries, coalitions, and wars. Minor states were not the equals of major powers. That is made clear by Thucydides in his account of the Peloponnesian war (431-404 BC) between Athens and Sparta which polarized Greek interna­tional society. In a famous dialogue the people of Melos, a small city-state, appeal for justice from the powerful Athenians, who have presented them with an ultimatum. But the Athenians spurn this appeal with the response that justice between states depends on equality of power: 'the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept... This is the safe rule— to stand up to one's equals, to behave with defer­ence towards one's superiors, and to treat one's inferiors with moderation'. (Thucydides, trans. Warner 1972: 402; 407). Here is the classic state­ment of the political ethics of Realism in the Western tradition (see Ch. 6).

Hellas was finally overwhelmed by imperial Macedonia, which was a continental state based on the Balkan peninsula. Even the greatest power in the ancient Greek world, Athens, lacked the power to withstand the Macedonian bid for supremacy over the Hellenes. That ushered in an age of hierar­chy and empire in the relations of political com­munities in that part of the world. The Romans, who eventually displaced the Macedonians, devel­oped an even greater empire in the course of con­quering, occupying, and ruling most of Europe and a large part of the Middle East and North Africa. Although the Romans recognized a primitive law of nations (jus gentium) it was not an express law for independent or sovereign states. Rome was the only sovereign and its relations with all other political communities in its domain were imperial rather than international. Instead of dialogue and concil­iation between independent states, under the Roman imperium there was only the alternative of obedience or revolt.

After a long period of decline the (Western) empire at Rome disintegrated in the fourth century ad under the impact of 'barbarian' assaults from the imperial peripheries. It was eventually succeeded by a theocracy—that is, a government based on organized religion, in this case Latin Christendom which was one of two successor empires to that of Rome. The (Eastern) empire at Constantinople— which also was a theocracy—was not overthrown but lived on for another thousand years in the incarnation of Greek — i.e. Orthodox—Christianity (Byzantium). It was finally destroyed in the mid-fifteenth century by the Ottoman Turks, a rising Muslim imperial state. In North Africa the Roman empire was eventually succeeded, after the passing of several centuries, by rising Islamic states; that same area came to be dominated much later by the Ottoman empire. The Middle Ages were thus an age of empire, and the relations and conflicts of differ­ent empires, and not an age of international society based on sovereign states.

Medieval Europe in the West, which lasted for about a thousand years from the year 500 until about 1500, has been called a Respublica Christiana: a universal society based on a joint structure of reli­gious authority (sacerdotium) and political author­ity (regnum) which gave at least minimal unity and cohesion to Europeans whatever their language and wherever their homeland happened to be (Wight 1977: 47). That at least was the formal arrangement acknowledged in medieval political theory (Gierke 1987: 13) In practice, of course, medieval Europe was fragmented along feudal lines at both the regional and local level of society. Medieval Europeans had a customary political loy­alty to their immediate feudal superiors in those numerous local communities in which the vast majority lived out their lives. Their loyalty to the king (or in other words the secular state) was weak. Medieval Europeans as a whole nevertheless did have a customary religious obedience to the (Western) Church which was an overarching hier­archy of bishops and priests headed by the Bishop of Rome, the Pope. The Pope could also assert, and occasionally he did assert, his vocation as judge in disputes between secular rulers. Even as late as the start of the early modern period (1500-1650) the

Pope was still revered in many parts of Europe and periodically he performed the role of a mediator between sovereign rulers, as when Pope Innocent IV settled the division of the newly discovered American continent and surrounding oceans between Spain and Portugal.

In the course of time, however, the European kings beat down the feudal barons and challenged the Pope and in that way they became state defend­ers against internal disorder and external interven­tion or threat. This political transformation is perfectly summarized by Martin Wight (1986: 25): 'The common man's inner circle of loyalty expanded, his outer circle of loyalty shrank, and the two met and coincided in a doubly definite circle between, where loyalty before had been vague. Thus the modern state came into existence; a nar­rower and at the same time a stronger unit of loyalty than medieval Christendom.' The medieval ecclesi­astical-political order began to unravel during the sixteenth century under the impact of the Protestant Reformation and the new political the­ology of Martin Luther which enhanced the authority of kings and the legitimacy of their king­doms. By that time the papacy itself had long since become a state and indeed a significant power: one among several rival Italian powers (Burckhardt 1958: 120-42). The Renaissance papacy, infamous for nepotism and corruption, nevertheless went on to contribute innovations in diplomacy, such as resident ambassadors and rules for the diplomatic corps at Rome. It is one of the curious paradoxes of European history that the papacy acted not only to resist and undermine but also to foster the institu­tion and expansion of early modern international society.

The second noteworthy historical experiment in the evolution of international society involved the small states of the Italian Renaissance which were the first to break free from the medieval empire and flourished in northern Italy between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries. The Renaissance was an enlightenment in the arts and sciences launched by the recovery of ancient learning, particularly that of Greece and Rome, which had been kept alive by Arabic scholars in the Muslim world during the Middle Ages. In inventing the Renaissance the Italians also invented the modern independent state, or stato, of which the most prominent exam­ples were Venice, Florence, Milan, and the Papal states. They were usually based on a city and its environs—although they sometimes extended farther afield, as in the case of the Venetian republic which occupied extensive territories along the northern and eastern Adriatic Sea. By instituting their own free-standing political systems the new Italian men of the stato were of course defying and breaking free from medieval religious-political authority (Burckhardt 1958:26-44). The republic of Venice, the predominant trading state of that era, brought many diplomatic practices and institu­tions of international society to Europe having acquired them from their political and trading rela­tions with Byzantium. The Venetian republic set the standard for other Italian states, later for France and Spain, and eventually for Europe as a whole (Nicolson 1954: 24).

The conviction that the interests of the state and the conduct of statecraft must be guided by a sepa­rate political ethics was given a free rein by the Italians. That Realist kind of political thinking based on what we would term 'power politics' and the 'national interest' came to be known as reason of state and later as realpolitik in which the morality of the state and the ethics of statecraft is distin­guished from universal religious ethics or common morality and is elevated above them (Vincent 1982: 74). The Italian city-states did nevertheless institute among themselves for about a century (1420-1527) a social order based on diplomatic dialogue. The Renaissance Italians also had an acute insight into the importance of the balance of power for main­taining international order among themselves. But the agreements they made were all too often based on expediency, which was an inadequate founda­tion for the development of a permanent inter­national society among themselves. It also encouraged intervention by external powers in the support of one Italian state (or combination of states) against another, which eventually destroyed the society of Italian states and put in its place a sys­tem of foreign domination from across the Alps.

In the end the Italian city-states were too small, too weak, and too divided to defend themselves against the far larger territorial states which were being politically engineered by ambitious rulers in Western Europe. France or Spain by themselves were as large as all the Italian states put together. The Italian states were thus confronted by a new and altogether more dangerous external challenge to their independence than had ever come from among themselves. They might have resisted the new territorial states more effectively had they been able to unite politically and militarily into one large territorial state of their own. Machiavelli (1965) called for a united Italy in the early years of the six­teenth century, and devoted much thought to how it might be brought about not only politically but also militarily in a book on the art of war. But Italian rulers were unable or unwilling to do that probably owing to the exceptionally well-entrenched rival­ries between their various city-states and the extent of their personal or dynastic ambitions. In the six­teenth century they were overwhelmed by the Austro-Spanish Habsburgs and the French whose long hegemony over the Italian peninsula did not finally end until the mid-nineteenth century.

Box 2.4. Renaissance Theories of Statecraft

Statecraft was theorized by Machiavelli (1469-1527), particularly in his classic study of The Prince, as an instrumental foreign policy outlook in which political virtue was equated with astuteness in the develop­ment and employment of state power, and political vice was a naive (i.e. Christian) faith in justice. Honour, glory, fortune, necessity, and above all virtue—in the strictly secular sense of adroit statecraft—are central ideas for Machiavelli and other Renaissance political commentators (such as Francesco Guicciardini the political historian of Florence). These ideas form an important part of what has come to be known as the classical theory of realism (Angelo 1969: ch. 7).