PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Thirty-three years after the publication of the highly influential volume The expansion of international society (Oxford University Press, 1984), edited by Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, The globalization of international society's goal is both timely and ambitious: it seeks to reconsider the central parameters and diagnoses of the earlier volume, in the light of the scholarly debates that have taken place in the time since its publication. The general motive is to acknowledge the value of the earlier work and the impact it had, but also to point out its shortcomings and how these might be remedied in providing a more nuanced, and conceptually different, account of the globalization of international society. Central to this exercise is the editors' engagement in the introduction and in the second chapter, that set the stage for the 20 chapters that follow. Comparing it to four alternative accounts of the globalization of international society, the second chapter praises Bull and Watson's as the only one that ‘has a robust conception of the social order that became global’; however, it criticizes it for lacking an ‘explicit theory of international social change’ (p. 27). While the present book barely offers such a theory itself, its strong core claim is that the globalization of international society must be thought of not in terms of its global expansion from a core of European (colonial) powers, but in terms of its global production. International society and its ‘expansion’ was always a process in which the ‘core’ European international society was inextricably linked with the ‘peripheries’ it seemingly expanded to. The ‘expansion of international society’ always was the globalization of a proto-global society. Offering a systematic and comprehensive exploration of that globalization is a task that the The globalization of international society cannot possibly aim to complete. What it does, however, is to supplement the thriving literature in ‘global history’ with the conceptual content still lacking in that literature. In a sense, it provides the prolegomenon of a history of the globalization of international society still to be written. Its success rests on an array of individual chapters that seek inroads into its vast subject by exploring the global context, the dynamics of globalization, its institutional contours and the moments of contestation that characterize global international society.