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English School (ES) writers have never developed a systematic account of hegemony, and most set out with assumptions that are `antihegemonial'. The writings of Hedley Bull, in particular, appeared to reject any notion of a legitimate hegemony. However, a social theory of hegemony that emphasizes its consensual nature does appear consistent with other ES positions, particularly on the role of the Great Powers. This article excavates an ES theory of hegemony. It develops the argument for hegemony as a potential institution of international society, by analogy with the role of the Great Powers, and by extension of other ES principles. This stresses not just the material power of the Great Powers, but their degree of social recognition. Accordingly, it suggests that such a view of hegemony is no more paradoxical than, say, ES acceptance of war as a similar institution. This fills a major void in ES theory which otherwise has nothing of interest to say about international order in conditions of primacy.

AbstractThis article takes as its starting point the failure of the so-called normative
wing of the English School to theorise the foundational determinants of value
from which international society derives its normative character. In other
words, they have not adequately thought through 'the law behind the
law'; that is, the underlying basis of obligation in international
life. Thus, English School theorists are able to describe and to explain various
norms but they cannot make sense of the reasons why any of these norms should be
regarded as obligatory. Failure in this regard is attributable in large part to
the way in which pluralist and solidarist conceptions of international life are
typically understood as representing conflicting moral claims. This article
seeks to move beyond these seemingly incommensurable claims, and the debate to
which they give their names, by putting forward an account of obligation that
reconciles the unity of human community and the freedom of international society
in a single, intellectually coherent argument. The article concludes by arguing
that a normative version of English School theory formulated in this way opens
space for thinking through much of what still confounds the English School,
including the normative character of political economy, the existence of a
rational order of values, and the ever elusive meaning of world society.

While generally accepted as an interpretive theory, Bull's emblematic text demonstrates strong structural characteristics. Subsequent attributions move between the interpretive or 'reflexive' and the institutional and structural. Recently, however, the idea has come forward that English School theory is, and maybe have been from the beginning, a form of structuration theory, a theory in which structures are not quite the hard determinants generally understood in structural theories, and interpreting agents are not quite so free to interpret structures in any tradition that seems appropriate to a matter at hand.

This article argues that the debate between pluralism and solidarism in English School theory has been cast in such a way as to hand the progressive cause to solidarism, taking for granted that moves towards the emergence of world society further a solidarist normative agenda. This article suggests this is because of assumptions about the nature and location of such changes within English School theory. However, an alternative understanding of change, as emerging from tensions arising within the pluralist understanding of international society, has been overlooked. This enables a challenge to be raised to the assumption that world society must be solidarist, producing an initial defence of a potentially ethically desirable pluralist form of world society.

This article maintains that the treatment of the Ottoman/Turk in the English School of International Relations, as in broader Western scholarship, is Eurocentric and highlights less frequently utilized concepts to restructure our thinking on the Ottomans. In Eurocentric historical narratives, the Ottomans are represented as an abnormal entity or as the very opposite of Europeanness. This peculiar representation anachronistically impacts upon European Union–Turkey relations today as the Europeans conflate the dissolved Ottoman Empire with contemporary Turkey. In an attempt to move forward, I turn to Martin Wight's concepts to recast the Ottomans as a potential European superpower rather than as an abnormality in European life and then to Herbert Butterfield's "academic history" as one way of dissociating the Ottoman past and the Turkish present. Both moves can help reimagine the Ottoman/Turk on more positive and balanced terms.

International Society and the Middle East brings together a distinguished cast of theorists and Middle East experts to provide a comprehensive overview of the region's history and how its own traditions have mixed, often uncomfortably, with the political structures imposed by the expansion of Western international society.