Interpolity, Transnational and Interhuman Domains

The English School has so far mainly thought about integrated world society as something not yet achieved, but which might lie in the future as something to be aspired to (e.g. Vincent, Reference Vincent1986). In this book, I stand this assumption on its head by using the idea of three domains, defined by the type of actor and activity dominant with them (Buzan, Reference Buzan2004a: 118–28, 257–61; Buzan and Schouenborg, Reference Buzan, Lawson and Thompson2018: 27–8). The scheme of three domains is intended to replace the traditional ES triad, by clarifying and separating its essential components, and making them the component parts of integrated world society.

The inter-polity/state domain is about the second-order society of states/polities, which has been the main focus of the ES. Given that states are relatively recent, I use Ferguson and Mansbach’s (Reference Falkner and Jaspers1996) useful term ‘polities’ to cover the quite wide range of political entities, and the interactions among them, in play over the course of human history: chiefdoms, city-states, kingdoms, empires, states, etc. Generally, I will use the term interpolity domain, though in modern times I will also use interstate domain. The defining activity of the interpolity domain is politics, and the reason for treating it separately is that political actors usually claim primacy over all other types of organisation.Footnote ³

The transnational domain is about collective non-state/polity actors (e.g. guilds, firms, religious organisations, many kinds of interest groups from sport to stamp collecting), and how they relate both to polities, and to each other as transnational actors (TNAs) across polity boundaries. The transnational domain does not have a single defining activity. Many of the organisations within this domain will have advocacy as one of their purposes, both up to the interstate domain (e.g. lobbying government, participating in diplomacy), and down to the interhuman one (e.g. proselytising/recruiting, marketing). Some of the actors here will be uncivil, such as criminal and terrorist entities.Footnote ⁴

The interhuman domain is about people, and its defining activity is collective identity formation, a rather subtle and amorphous process, but one with big consequences for the social structure of humankind. In the interhuman domain, only individuals have actor quality, and the main social structure is patterns of collective identity ranging from the universal one of humankind as a whole, through civilisational and religious identities, to racial, national, tribal, and kinship ones, all of which are subglobal in extent. These identities do not in themselves possess actor quality, but they do act powerfully as constraints and opportunities to enable or restrain various kinds of actors in the transnational and interpolity domains, for example, religious institutions and nation states.

When the analytical lens of the three domains is deployed instead of the classical ES triad, it quickly becomes apparent that integrated world society has been around for a very long time, and that the nature of primary institutions cannot be understood apart from it. Demonstrating and illustrating this is a key theme of the book. These three domains are, like functional differentiation and sectors (on which more below), another way of approaching the social whole. The interhuman domain is the closest to the traditional sociological understanding of society as being composed of individual human beings sharing an identity. As noted, the classical ES’s discussions of ‘the great society of humankind’ suppose that no such society exists at the global level in practice, and its main function in the ES has been as a moral referent against which to judge interstate society. I think there is more to it than that. ‘Humankind’ is becoming a significant collective identity, and there are many powerful collective identities (e.g. religion, civilisation, race, nation) operating below the global level and across the political structures. Interpolity and transnational societies are both second order societies in which the members are not individual human beings but organised collectivities of people (polities of various kinds, and the various types of NSAs). In practice, as I will detail in the chapters that follow, there is a lot of crossover of both interaction and social structure, among these three domains. That crossover is the key to integrated world society, and eventually to global society. Seeing integrated global society as stretching across the three domains, rather than being largely located in the interpolity domain, brings into focus some primary institutions that have been obscured because they are not primarily located in the interpolity domain, religion, science and sport most obviously. The key to much of what follows is the idea that primary institutions are normally located across, and embedded within, not just one, but two or three domains.Footnote ⁵

Primary and Secondary Institutions

The English School’s understanding of institutions differs from most of mainstream IR in focusing on the deeper rather than the shallower meaning of this concept. Its main concern is with primary institutions, which are deep and relatively durable social principles, and the practices associated with them. In ES work starting from Bull (Reference Bull1977), primary institutions have mainly been thought about as an artefact of the interpolity domain, and within that mostly the modern interstate one. A key aim of this book is to show how limiting a view this is: Primary institutions can and should be thought about across both the three domains and the history of humankind. This book emphasises that primary institutions are as much or more constitutive of the three domains, as constituted by them. In particular, I argue in the empirical chapters that for the interpolity domain, there is a useful approach to polity-formation through primary institutions in which territoriality, sovereignty, dynasticism and nationalism play central roles.

Traditional English School thinking has not devoted much attention to whether primary institutions could also be embedded in, or even stem from, the other two domains. Nothing stops actors and ideas from crossing between domains. State and non-state actors interact with each other all the time, and it is difficult to understand primary institutions like religion, trade, nationalism and sport without seeing them as operating across the interpolity, transnational and interhuman domains. Both in theory and in practice, all sorts of mixtures are possible. Primary and secondary institutions stretch across domains, and that fact is the key to shifting the social structural perspective of the ES first towards an integrated world society framing, and then to a global society one.Footnote ⁶

Primary institutions in ES thinking are deep in the sense of having evolved more than being designed. By evolved I mean that something like territoriality, or war, emerged out of practice, eventually becoming a recognised principle, in a way similar to the development of customary law. This is different from designed, where a secondary institution such as the League of Nations was negotiated into being at a specific point in time, and for a specific purpose, by a group of states. The distinction between evolved and designed might blur for latecomers to an international society who accept, or have imposed on them, institutions that evolved earlier. The obvious example here is sovereignty, which became both a prize, and a condition, of decolonisation. Primary institutions must not only be substantially shared amongst the members of global society, possibly across all three domains, but also be seen amongst them as defining both membership and legitimate behaviour. They are the axioms that human societies agree to live by, and are thus about the shared identities of the members of integrated world society within all three domains, and how those identities are understood to relate to each other. They are durable, often lasting for centuries or even millennia, but as will become clear in the chapters that follow, they are also malleable, and may undergo significant changes in how their basic principles are interpreted, and what practices they do and don’t legitimise. Mayall (Reference Mayall1990), and Holsti (Reference Holsti2004), pioneered the study of how primary institutions arise, evolve and sometimes fall into obsolescence. Primary institutions are the key to understanding the classical ES’s social structural approach to analysing interpolity society, but they also work across integrated world society, or global society, more broadly. I demonstrate in Chapters 2 and 3 how they work for the long span of human history preceding modernity. The classical ‘Westphalian’ interstate set includes sovereignty, territoriality, the balance of power, war, diplomacy, international law and great power management, to which can be added monarchy/dynasticism, nationalism, human (in)equality, science, sport, and more recently and controversially, the market and environmental stewardship. The featuring of primary institutions in what follows not only maps out the normative structure of global society, but also highlights those values and practices as they were understood and practised in the context of their own time.

It is important to flag up here what some might think of as my own perhaps idiosyncratic understanding of the question of how to define and classify institutions in general, and primary institutions in particular. In this book, I take the position argued at length in Buzan (Reference Buzan2004a: 163–90), rejecting the differentiation in the literature between constitutive and regulatory institutions, and all similar constructions. I see this distinction as incoherent and unworkable because as regime theorists argue, and I concur, all social institutions have constitutive effects. My definition of primary institutions is therefore both fairly general, and more homogenous, than, for example, Holsti (Reference Holsti2004: 9–10), and Reus-Smit (Reference Meadows and Meadows1997: 556–66), who prefer layered approaches to institutions in terms of their depth and function. I stick with the simpler distinction between primary and secondary institutions. As I have also argued earlier (Buzan, Reference Buzan2004a: 182–4), I accept the idea that primary institutions might well be arranged in hierarchies of master-derivative, and that there is important interplay between primary and secondary institutions (on which more below).

That said, how to identify whether something counts as a primary institution is still not straightforward (Buzan, Reference Buzan2004a: 161–204). After much thought on the question, my own conclusion is that primary institutions cannot be deduced from any prior set of principles or functions. Their potential number and variety are open to the infinity of human social inventiveness, and therefore identifying them has to be a matter of systematic empirical investigation. Societies will range across a broad spectrum, from relatively simple ones defined by a few institutions, to complex, elaborate ones with many institutions interwoven across the three domains. There is no basic, given, or minimal, set that can be put between bookends (Buzan, Reference Buzan and Zhang2014: 173–8).Footnote ⁷ In this book, I am looking for all of the highest level of primary institutions that define integrated world societies, and global society, generally. In order to answer this question, Robert Falkner and I devised a four-tiered analytical framework to test empirically the status of any candidate to be a primary institution (Falkner and Buzan, Reference Acharya and Buzan2019). We were looking specifically at environmental stewardship in the context of modern interstate society,Footnote ⁸ but with a bit of flexibility, the general idea of this framework can be applied to premodern integrated world societies as well. First, we expect to find the emergence of a clearly defined value or principle applicable as a norm across international society (whether global or regional). Second, we expect to see the creation of secondary institutions reflecting and embodying the underlying norm. Third, we expect to see observable and significant patterns of behaviour by states (or polities) in accordance with the core norm. Fourth, we expect to see the new norm, and its associated practices and secondary institutions, making an impact on the existing array of primary institutions, whether reinforcing them, amending them, disrupting them, or making them obsolete. Like Holsti’s (Reference Holsti2004) approach, this analytical scheme uses a set of empirical criteria, albeit different ones from Holsti’s, to show both the rise and consolidation of new primary institutions, and the decline and decay of ones becoming obsolete. I see no obstacle to applying it generally across the three domains.

The scale of this book prevents me from applying this scheme in close detail to all of the primary institutions discussed. But it sets the standard for the selections I have made, and how I have told the various stories along the way. It also gives the reader a standard by which to hold me to account. By claiming to offer a complete list of primary institutions in human history, it also offers a foil against which others can either contest particular inclusions or exclusions, and/or contest the definitional criteria for identifying primary institutions generally. I would be very surprised indeed if mine were the last word on this issue!

Secondary institutions are usually thought of as those featured in regime theory and by liberal institutionalists, and relating to the shallower organisational usage of the term. In this view, they are consciously constructed, instrumental arrangements. Within a classical interstate perspective on modern international society, secondary institutions are mainly the product of liberal orders, and are for the most part intergovernmental arrangements consciously designed by states to serve specific functional purposes. They include the United Nations, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the Nuclear Non-proliferation regime, and myriad others. This type of secondary institution is a relatively recent invention, first appearing in the later decades of the nineteenth century. They link to interstate primary institutions in the sense both that they are reflections of underlying primary institutions (e.g. the UN reflecting sovereignty, diplomacy, multilateralism, international law) and that they serve as forums where primary institutions are produced, reproduced, renegotiated and sometimes made obsolete (e.g. the role of the UN in promoting human equality, development, and environmental stewardship, and in making colonialism and human inequality illegitimate). A key function of modern secondary institutions is to reflect and reproduce the primary institutions that make up the international normative structure. They both socialise states into the norms and practices of international society, and are sites of political contestation and conflict over those norms and practices. Secondary institutions thus play important roles in the embedding, reproduction, development and sometime decay of the primary institutions of global society (Spandler, Reference Spandler2015; Navari, Reference Navari2016; Knudsen and Navari, Reference Knudsen and Navari2019).

Although the ES has not explored it, secondary institutions can also be found through a much longer run of history, mainly associated with religion and trade, and more recently, sport. The transnational domain is not new, but as I show in Chapter 3, has been there since the dawn of civilisation, and historically has been a significant source of primary and secondary institutions. Even for the modern era, work towards widening the understanding of primary and secondary institutions within a global society context has barely begun, and I hope this book will contribute towards it. It seems unlikely that a single set of primary and secondary institutions operates equally across all three domains. It is true that individuals can and do accept things like nationalism, sovereignty, territoriality and human equality, and that TNAs can and do accept sovereignty, international law, diplomacy, and so on. Individuals and TNAs thereby become part of the social processes that reproduce and legitimise these institutions. Clark (Reference Clark2007) has made a useful start on making explicit the role of the transnational and interhuman domains in the institutional structures of interstate society. It seems unlikely, however, that this happens evenly across the three domains, and this question is explored in the empirical chapters of this book.

In what follows, I also make the radical move of including polities in the category of secondary institutions. The ES is mainly ambiguous about how to position the state within the scheme of primary and secondary institutions. Despite his huge contribution to developing the concept of primary institutions, Bull was party to this fudging. He does at one point say that ‘it is states themselves that are the principal institutions of the society of states’ (Bull, Reference Bull1977: 71), but he does not develop the idea, and does not give either states or sovereignty (or, indeed, territoriality, monarchy/dynasticism and nationalism) a chapter alongside the other primary institutions he discusses, instead treating them as givens in his scheme (Buzan, Reference Buzan2004a: 52–6, 169–70). It strikes me that there is an unexplored opportunity here to formulate a distinctive ES approach to state, and more broadly polity, formation. Like other types of secondary institution, polities are consciously constructed for instrumental purposes. And also like other types of secondary institution, polities produce, reproduce, renegotiate and sometimes make obsolete, primary institutions. Thus, while primary and secondary institutions remain conceptually quite distinct, there is an eternal sense of practical co-constitution between them of which polities are an important part. If one counts polities as secondary institutions, then, as noted above, it becomes possible to analyse polity-formation in terms of the primary institutions that define and support different types of polity. In the empirical chapters that follow, the principal theme is how empires were generated by the primary institutions of sovereignty, territoriality and monarchy/dynasticism, while modern states were generated by sovereignty, territoriality and nationalism. This approach to polity-formation through primary institutions opens up a novel and quite powerful way of understanding not only both empires and modern states in their own terms, but also the nature and process of the transition from one to the other as the dominant form of polity during the first century-and-a-half of the transition towards modernity.

Solidarism and Pluralism

Within the ES, and particularly related to the debates about order and justice, human rights and (non)intervention within modernity, two positions have emerged, which are labelled pluralist and solidarist. The terms were coined by Bull (Reference Bull, Butterfield and Wight1966), and have remained central structuring concepts for the core normative debates within the English School (Wheeler, Reference Wheeler1992; Dunne and Wheeler, Reference Duvall and Havercroft1996; Bain, Reference Bain and Denemark2010).

• Pluralism represents the communitarian disposition towards a state-centric mode of association in which sovereignty and nonintervention serve to contain and sustain cultural and political diversity. It is in this general sense status quo orientated and concerned mainly about maintaining interstate order, and the cultural diversity that is the legacy of human history. As a rule, pluralists, following Bull, will argue that although a deeply unjust system cannot be stable, order is in important ways a prior condition for justice. Pluralists see the prospects for international society as limited to a fairly narrow logic of coexistence.

• Solidarism represents the disposition either to transcend the states-system with some closer mode of association based on humankind, or to develop the states-system beyond a logic of mere coexistence to one of cooperation on shared projects such as managing a global economy, pursuing human rights as a universal principle, and/or environmental stewardship for the planetary ecosystem. In principle, solidarism could represent a wide range of possibilities (Buzan, Reference Buzan2004a: 121, 190–200), but in practice within the English School it has been mainly linked to liberal cosmopolitan perspectives and to concerns about justice. Solidarists typically emphasise that order without justice is undesirable and ultimately unsustainable. Most of the debate about solidarism has linked it to the interhuman domain in the form of universalist cosmopolitan values, notably human rights. But solidarism can also be rooted in the interpolity domain, in such projects as managing a shared global economy (Buzan, Reference Buzan and Zhang2014: 114–20).

In the English School context, it is important to see pluralism and solidarism not as opposed and mutually exclusive positions. Their proponents may sometimes think of themselves as opposed, and the language of the debate may sometimes take oppositional form. But in a detached perspective, their core function is to define the central, permanent tension in the English School’s ‘great conversation’ about how to find the best balance between order and justice in international/global society.

Raison de système and raison de famille

Raison de système was coined by Watson (Reference Watson1992: 14) and defined as ‘the belief that it pays to make the system work’. This concept can be seen as a way of encapsulating the English School’s core normative debate between pluralism and solidarism. It stands as the main counterpoint to the idea of raison d’état, which is central explicitly to realism and implicitly to much Western IR theory. Raison de système is fairly specific to modernity. When taking a longer historical perspective, one should add to this set raison de famille, as the logic of kinship systems generally, and in particular the dynastic imperial systems preceding raison d’état (Green, Reference Green2013). Raison de système is not yet widely used in the ES literature, but has a good claim for more general deployment. It neatly encapsulates the logic underlying international and global society, and therefore what differentiates ES thinking from most other lines of IR theory, particularly realist and rationalist ones.

Interaction Capacity

The concept of interaction capacity developed with work that I and others did that was aimed mainly at neorealism: Buzan, Jones and Little (Reference Buzan, Jones and Little1993: 66–80); Buzan and Little (Reference Buzan and Cox2000: 80–4). Interaction capacity is a way of looking at international systems/societies in terms of their carrying capacity for information, goods and people, and the speed, range and cost with which these things can be done. Interaction capacity determines not only the size of such systems, but also how loosely or tightly they are integrated, and consequently how weakly or strongly the neorealist logics of socialisation and competition can work. This concept was not initially inspired or framed by ES thinking about international society but is compatible with it. Interaction capacity is a key aspect of the material conditions of international systems/societies, particularly in determining the limits and shape of trade, war, empire and cultural exchange. There is a huge difference between systems/societies in which information can be sent instantaneously from anywhere on the planet to anywhere else, and those in which it might take nine months to get a message from London to Australia, or from Beijing to Istanbul. Interaction capacity also has a social side in the extent to which primary and secondary institutions facilitate interaction. International law and diplomacy work this way as primary institutions, and secondary institutions such as banking systems and forum organisations like the UN respectively facilitate financial transactions and diplomatic interaction.

Evolution

The concept of ‘evolution’ as used in this book is not strictly Darwinian in the sense of being driven by mutation and natural selection in a struggle for survival. As Tang (Reference Tang2013) and Neumann (Reference Neumann2020: 23–5) point out, the social world evolves in ways different from, and not analogous to, the biological one.Footnote ⁹ Social collectivities evolve not only in themselves, from their internal dynamics, but also in interaction with both other social collectivities and the material environment. Social evolution is Darwinian in the sense that it is partly about how living things adapt (or not) to the environment they inhabit, and to changes in that environment, however such changes might be caused. Evolution in this sense is not teleological (Tang, Reference Tang2013: 28–9, 35). The idea that evolution is a process with outcomes that are contingent, rather than predetermined, fits well with the ES tradition that international society is a contingent phenomenon whose fortunes wax and wane over time. Evolution exposes the logic of change without supposing any particular outcome. The idea that it is the fittest that survive is contingent rather than absolute. What might be fittest for one set of conditions might be a weakness when those conditions change. Ask any woolly mammoth, or any empire, about that. Evolution charts the successes, but also the failures and extinctions. A non-teleological view of evolution also leaves open the question of how to evaluate progress: evolution as a process can move towards lower levels of complexity and diversity as well as higher ones. A useful way of approaching social evolution is through the idea of dialectics as the mechanism of social change.

Dialectics

Since biological analogies for social evolution are a bit limited, dialectics offers a useful complement for looking at how social structures evolve. It is not my intention here to get involved in any deep philosophical rumination on the complexities of dialectics. Nor do I want to accept, or get involved in the debates about, the peculiarities of Marxian dialectical materialism with its assumptions that social evolution is teleological.Footnote ¹⁰ I do not want to go much further than the idea that in the social world one can often see the primary institutions of integrated world societies falling into paired contradictions, or even antagonisms, that have somehow to be worked out because the tensions they generate cannot be left unaddressed. In the contemporary context, think, for example, of globalisation and territoriality, or human inequality and human equality, or human rights and state sovereignty, or monarchy/dynasticism and popular sovereignty, and many more. These contradictions, and their dynamics, provide one of the engines, alongside changes in material conditions, that drives the evolution of societies at all levels.Footnote ¹¹ The emphasis in what follows is on dialectics as process, not as teleology.

That leaves one complexity needing to be addressed. There are at least two ways of understanding the mechanism of dialectics, a situation that feels amusingly appropriate to the concept. The first is generally referred to as Hegelian, and reflects broadly how dialectics is understood in the West. The second is Chinese (zhongyong dialectics), and is probably not yet widely understood outside those familiar with Chinese culture.Footnote ¹²

Hegelian dialectics is built around the resolution of contradictions, and starting the cycle over again from a new place. This is expressed in its concepts (not Hegel’s terminology) of thesis and antithesis ending in synthesis, with the synthesis becoming the new thesis that restarts the cycle by generating an antithesis, and so on. This form of dialectics may or may not be progressive (a matter of normative judgment), but it is certainly a mechanism for continuous evolution. Its driving force is that contradictions are socially unsustainable and have to be resolved, and therefore its central mechanism is conflict. A potential problem with this form of dialectics is its assumption that each synthesis must start the cycle over again. This has an appealing dynamism and simplicity, but seems at odds with the fact that historically, many societies achieved sufficient stability and longevity to belie that kind of permanent turbulence. It seems possible that some syntheses will actually constitute islands of stability rather than springboards for a new contradiction. Constitutional monarchy, for example, might be seen as a durable synthesis from the contradiction between monarchy/dynasticism and nationalism/popular sovereignty. As I show in the empirical chapters, there can be mutually supportive clusters of primary institutions that form islands of stability. Hegelian dialectics are therefore sometimes resolvable by negotiation and compromise.

This idea of stabilised contradictions points to zhongyong dialectics. Zhongyong dialectics starts from the same idea that there are dyadic contradictions in society that need to be addressed if society is to be stable. From there, however, it takes a different route, based on the well-known yin/yang symbol in Chinese philosophy.

In the perspective of zhongyong dialectics, the polarity in Chinese dialectics is contradictory, but not necessarily conflictual. There is a yin/yang complementarity and co-evolutionary process, whereby the ‘thesis’ and the ‘antithesis’ always contains an element of the other, and the balance between them shifts according to circumstance. The point of zhongyong dialectics is not to resolve contradictions that are seen as intolerably zero-sum, but to manage contradictions that are seen as a permanent feature of the social structure. Good management in the light of ever-changing circumstances is the path to achieving social harmony in the presence of contradiction. That, and not a new synthesis, is the essence of Chinese dialectics. In contrast to Hegelian thinking, Chinese zhongyong dialectics favour ‘co-theses’ (Qin, Reference Qin2018: xvii). As Qin (Reference Qin2018: xvii) puts it, ‘while the Hegelian tradition tries to diagnose the key contradiction, which is key to crumpling the old and creating a new synthesis’, the ‘zhongyong dialectics always tries to find the appropriate middle where the common ground lies’. Conflict exists but does not have any ontological status (Qin, Reference Qin2018: xvii).

One clear implication of zhongyong dialectics as a way of thinking is in the perspective it gives on social contradictions. In the Hegelian perspective, contradictions are basically unsustainable. But in the Chinese perspective, contradiction is the natural condition of being in society. Contradictions change in form and significance, and need to be handled in order to achieve harmony, but they do not disappear. The Chinese way of thinking is therefore much more comfortable with contradiction than the Western one, and this might go a long way to explaining what to a Western eye often looks like the incoherence of China’s foreign policy.Footnote ¹³ But from a zhongyong perspective the pursuit of contradictory policies may not look like a problem at all, just the normal way of responding to complex situations in which policy needs to be continuously manoeuvred within standing contradictions.

In principle, both the Hegelian and zhongyong approaches look like viable understandings of dialectics. Yet in a dialectical perspective, each by itself, looks too narrow and extreme an interpretation. Not all contradictions have to be fought through to a new synthesis and a new cycle of conflict, and not all are endlessly manageable without needing some deeper resolution. The point here is not that all Western thinking is Hegelian and all Chinese thinking Zhongyong. Marxism, still influential in China, and especially in its ruling party, is strongly Hegelian in its view of dialectics. The point is that all contradictions and dialectics can and should be viewed in both of these perspectives. The example given above of constitutional monarchy as a stable synthesis, although a mainly Western one, might fit quite comfortably into a zhongyong perspective of managed contradiction. But the challenge of fascism in the 1940s had to be fought, and was a strong enough challenge to unite communists and liberals, albeit temporarily, to do so. I therefore keep in mind both understandings of dialectics, and apply them pragmatically. And since the evolutionary dynamics of societies are generally complex, and seldom reducible to simple dyadic contradictions, I add to this framework the idea that in either the Hegelian or zhongyong schemes, it is not uncommon for two or more dialectics to intersect in such a way as to entangle their dynamics. I will refer to such situations as multilectic.

Differentiation Theory and Sectors

Differentiation theory and sectors are partly overlapping ideas, but with quite different origins and implications. Differentiation theory comes from Sociology, and is a deep idea aimed at defining the fundamental structure of societies. It offers three basic principles of differentiation applicable to all forms of society: segmentary, stratificatory and functional (Buzan and Albert, Reference Buzan and Albert2010; Albert, Buzan and Zürn, Reference Alexandrowicz2013):

• Segmentary (or egalitarian) differentiation is where every social subsystem is the equal of, and functionally similar to, every other social subsystem. This points to families, bands, clans and tribes. A segmentary form of differentiation is the one most prone to be organised in terms of territorial delimitations, although this is not necessarily so.

• Stratificatory differentiation is where some persons or groups raise themselves above others, creating a hierarchical social order. Stratificatory differentiation covers a wide range of possibilities and can be further subdivided into rank and class forms distinguished by whether or not there is significant inequality not just in status (rank), but in access to basic resources (class). This points to feudal or caste, or aristocratic or religious, or military social orders. As this suggests, stratification can occur in many dimensions: coercive capability, access to resources, authority, status, level of skill, etc. In IR it points to the many forms of hierarchy: conquest and empire, hegemony, a privileged position for great powers, and a division of the world into core and periphery, or First and Third Worlds.

• Functional differentiation is where the subsystems are defined by the coherence of particular types of activity and their differentiation from other types of activity, and these differences do not stem simply from rank. It is closely related to the idea of a division of labour in the sense understood by economists, but when applied to society as a whole it points to its increasing division into legal, political, military, economic, scientific, religious and suchlike distinct and specialised subsystems or sectors of activity, often with distinctive institutions and actors (Albert and Hilkermeier, Reference Albert, Buzan and Zürn2004). The study of functional differentiation is closely, and as I will show wrongly, associated almost exclusively with modernity.

The sense of history in differentiation theory involves an idea of evolution in which more complex forms grow out of the simpler ones that precede them. The orthodox view is that segmentary hunter-gatherer bands precede the stratified city states and empires of ancient and classical times, which precede the functionally differentiated societies characteristic of modernity. In this view, segmentary, stratificatory and functional differentiation form a sequence in that the higher tiers depend for their existence on having developed out of, and overcome, the ones that came before. The sequence is thus both empirical (roughly corresponding to the general pattern of human history) and qualitative (from simpler forms of differentiation to more complex ones). Although such evolution is common, it is certainly not inevitable. Specific societies can end up in stasis, or can revert back to simpler types (Diamond, Reference Diamond2005). Evolution does not mean that higher forms of differentiation eliminate those below them. The logic is structural: social orders are characterised by the co-presence of different forms of differentiation, the key question being which form is dominant in shaping the social structure as a whole. Looked at the other way around, one can find elements of functional differentiation even in segmentary hunter-gatherer societies (shamans, tool-makers, pottery makers). As shown in Chapter 3, there was a lot of functional differentiation in the stratificatory societies of agrarian civilisation. Differentiation theory sets up a helpful context within which the social function of primary institutions can be understood.

The concept of sectors is more a practical taxonomy than a theory. Sectors differentiate on the basis of the type of relationship – military (coercion), political (power), economic (exchange), societal (identity), etc. – and therefore lean strongly towards a functional differentiation of society. Within IR, it was developed in the context of security studies to provide a functional parallel to the scale-based differentiations of levels of analysis that were widely used in IR (Buzan, 1991: 107–19; Buzan, Jones and Little, 1993: 30–3; Buzan and Little, Reference Buzan and Cox2000: 72–7).Footnote ¹⁴ Buzan and Little (Reference Buzan and Cox2000) combined sectors and levels of analysis into a matrix in an attempt to capture the social whole. The practice of thinking in terms of functionally differentiated sectors is also not uncommon amongst historians and sociologists (e.g. Braudel, Reference Braudel1985: 17; Mann, Reference Mann1986: ch. 1). In IR analyses of the social world, there are five commonly used sectors: military, political, economic, societal and environmental, with law as an arguable sixth. Similar to primary institutions, the concept of sectors neither specifies any particular set nor set limits to how many there might be, nor explains why we have this particular set. It merely observes empirically that modern society and academia operate in ways that reproduce this particular set, and so differentiate society functionally along those lines. Sectors provide a useful way of grouping primary institutions in functional terms.

• The military sector is about relationships of forceful coercion, and the ability of actors to fight wars with each other. It usually focuses on the interplay of the armed offensive and defensive capabilities of actors in the international system, and their perceptions of each other’s intentions. Institutions are war, balance of power, and partly imperialism (because empires are mainly created and sustained by force).

• The political sector is about relationships of authority, governing status and recognition. It concerns the organisational stability of systems of government and the ideologies that give them legitimacy. Do polities accept other polities as equal in law and rank? Or are relations hierarchical, with superior and inferior status acknowledged by both sides? Or do polities deny each other recognition, in effect treating each other as unoccupied territory available for seizure (terra nullius)? The political sector can be interpreted in a more state-centric sense as being about government, or in a looser, more liberal, sense as being about governance, including norms, rules, and institutions above, or instead of, the state. Some might wish to differentiate a legal sector from the political one. Institutions are sovereignty, territoriality, monarchy/dynasticism, diplomacy, international law, great power management. Partly also imperialism (when it is a legitimate framing for rule), religion (where tied to the polity), nationalism, and human equality/inequality.

• The societal sector is about social and cultural relationships. It concerns the patterns of collective identity by which humans place themselves into groups, and how those groups relate to each other: that is, the various principles of differentiation and stratification in social orders. It involves the sustainability, within acceptable conditions for evolution, of traditional patterns of language, culture and religious and national identity and custom. Interactions in this sector are about the transmission of ideas between peoples and civilisations. They may involve ideas about knowledge, technology or about political and religious organisation. Institutions are kinship (family to tribe/clan), partly religion, nationalism, human equality/inequality, science, sport.

• The economic sector, is about relationships of trade, production and finance, and how actors gain access to the resources, finance and markets necessary to sustain acceptable levels of welfare and political power. For most of history, economic interactions have been about trade and the financing of trade. Only in very recent times have they also come to be about the far-flung organisation of production and finance. Institutions are trade, trade diasporas, market/mercantilism, development, and partly imperialism, human equality/inequality (wages versus slavery).

• The environmental sector is about the relationship between human activity and the planetary ecosphere as the essential support system on which all other human enterprises depend. The most traditional environmental interaction is disease transmission, but since the Chinese and European voyages of discovery in the fifteenth century, one must add the intercontinental movement of plants, animals and peoples, and local and global pollution. The environmental sector, and the debates about an anthropocene era (Dalby, Reference Dalby2020), become increasingly important in the later chapters on modernity. Institutions: environmental stewardship, sustainable development.

It is quickly apparent that sectors, despite their absence of theoretical grounding, fit quite comfortably within functional differentiation, even if as nothing more than convenient labels (Buzan and Albert, Reference Buzan and Albert2010: 316–18, 328; Albert and Buzan, Reference Albert and Buzan2011, Reference Albert and Buzan2013). Both are approaches to understanding the social whole by differentiating it in terms of types of functional relationships (Albert and Buzan, Reference Albert and Buzan2013). In this usage, they are close to being synonyms for sociological labels such as subsystems or function-systems. But sectors, like functional differentiation, also resonate widely within the social sciences, many of whose disciplines have set themselves up along functionally differentiated/sectoral lines: for example, Economics, Law, Politics, Sociology. Within IR, there is a long-standing division of opinion as to whether the discipline is a subfield of Politics (International Politics) or an amalgam of the macro-ends of most of the social sciences plus history. I am firmly of the latter view, and that will be reflected in this book. Neither IR as a discipline, nor the global society approach, can be confined to the political sector.

Uneven and Combined Development

The concept of uneven and combined development (UCD) has been developed in several works by Rosenberg (Reference Rosenberg2010, Reference Rosenberg2013a, Reference Rosenbergb, Reference Rosenberg2016, Reference Rosenberg2020, see also Buzan and Lawson, Reference Buzan, Lawson, Anievas and Matin2016) to provide a framework for understanding modernity, and indeed the dynamics of international relations more generally. In terms of explaining the global historical dynamics of modernity, UCD stands as an alternative to Waltz (Reference Strange1979). Both Waltz and Rosenberg see ‘socialisation and competition’ as consequences of ‘combination’ (units unavoidably interacting with each other within the same system). But they disagree deeply about their effects: Waltz famously favours homogenisation into ‘like units’, while Rosenberg stresses that the particular timing and circumstances of socialisation and competition necessarily produce varied outcomes. The extreme conditions created by macro-historical transformations such as the one that took place during the long nineteenth century expose the logic of the latter with great clarity. Major transformations of this kind have a distinct point or points of origin in which a particular configuration emerges and is sustained. This configuration is produced and reproduced through inter-societal interactions across time and space, generating diverse outcomes. These interactions can be coercive, emulative and/or reactive, and each social order that encounters the new configuration has its own way of adapting to it. Some social orders resist the new configuration, and may be eliminated as a result. Others develop indigenous versions of it. ‘Late’ developers are not carbon copies of the original adopters, but develop their own distinctive characteristics.

Interactions between different social orders therefore produce not Waltzian convergence, but (sometimes unstable) amalgams of new and old. Modernity sometimes displaces, but just as often reconfigures, ideas, rituals and symbols associated with ‘tradition’: monarchies, religions, class hierarchies, and suchlike. Each society finds its own blend of new and old: for example, the British version of constitutional monarchy, the modern Japanese emperor, the contemporary reworking of Confucianism in China. During the nineteenth century, German, American and Japanese industrialisations were not replicas of British development, but distinct amalgams. Even as they borrowed both from the British experience and from each other, they adapted modernity to their own contexts and traditions, often trying to use the modern state to accelerate the process so as to ‘catch-up’ with the leading edge. Likewise, Soviet and, more recently, Chinese developments also maintained their own characteristics, combining new technologies and productive forces alongside inherited social formations. As ideas spread, they are adapted to local cultures and conditions (Acharya, Reference Acharya2004). Each society has to find its own way of coming to terms with the multiple challenges presented by modernity, and each encounter is shaped by local histories, cultures and institutional contexts, as well as by the timing and circumstances of its encounter. There is both convergence (most obviously in the common assuming of aspects of functional differentiation, nationalism and forms of rational statehood); and divergence (ideological, cultural and organisational, and understanding of class structure).

Through the analytic lens of UCD, it becomes clear that development is multilinear rather than linear; proceeds in fits and starts rather than through smooth gradations; and contains significant variations in terms of outcomes. One indicator of the ways in which polities adapted in diverse ways to the nineteenth-century global transformation is the variety of ideologies that have emerged to define different assemblages of economy, politics and culture in the modern world: liberalism, social democracy, conservatism, socialism, market socialism, communism, fascism, patrimonialism, and more. Another indicator is the literature on varieties of capitalism (Jackson and Deeg, Reference Jackson and Deeg2006; McNally, Reference Land2013; Buzan and Lawson, Reference Buzan and Lawson2014b; Milanovic, Reference Milanovic2019). A third is the idea of ‘multiple modernities’ (Eisenstadt, Reference Eisenstadt2000). UCD underlines how and why the deep pluralist world order (see Part III) now emerging from the ongoing spread and deepening of modernity, will be as much, or more, culturally, economically and politically differentiated than homogenised. The perspective of UCD resolves the long-standing, and politically charged, equation of modernisation with Westernisation, which assumed that adopting modernity must mean becoming a clone of the Western model. It doesn’t.

Although this book focuses on the similarities that come into view when human history is observed through the lens of primary institutions, it is essential not to lose sight of the fact that primary institutions operate at quite a high level of abstraction. Underneath that, one must not lose sight of the widespread diversities of culture and politics that differentiate civilisations even when all face the pressures of modernity.Footnote ¹⁵

Era

The term era is commonly used in IR in a flexible way to define longish periods marked by a particular dominant characteristic, such as the nuclear era. It works alongside other, usually vaguely defined periodising terms such as ‘age’ (e.g. Bronze Age), ‘epoch’ (as in geology), and ‘period’ (e.g. interwar period). As Guillaume (Reference Guillaume, de Carvalho, Lopez and Leira2021) points out, history can always be periodised in various and overlapping ways, with common themes being modes of government (type of dominant polity), modes of production (Marxism), modes of destruction (weapons, wars), and modes of social differentiation (classical Sociology). Any subdivision of history presupposes a pattern of continuities and ruptures or transitions, and it is up to the periodiser to specify ‘the working hypothesis and the conceptual premises behind it’ (Guillaume, Reference Guillaume, de Carvalho, Lopez and Leira2021: 565–6). Epple (Reference Epple, Erhart and Grave2021: 49) helpfully sums up the act of periodising as follows:

Here I use the term era in a strong sense to identify long – often very long – time-spans. These are defined internally by a specific pattern of material conditions and social structures that remain dominant throughout an identifiable stretch of time; and externally by transition periods during which those defining variables change. My premise is that significant patterns of continuity and rupture/transition can be found even when one combines modes of government, production and destruction. In Epple’s terms, I am less concerned with pinpoint dates, because I see eras as separated by transition periods. I am much more concerned to use my material and social-structural framing to find new patterns of common features and general trends. My working hypothesis is that the English School’s concept of primary institutions can be used to open a detailed look at the social structure as a whole, and that patterns occurring there can be matched to developments in the material condition of humankind. The key to identifying such long eras is to differentiate between changes occurring within a relatively fixed set of material and social conditions, and changes that transform those conditions themselves. The dual framing of material conditions and primary institutions I use to shape the empirical analysis is designed to generate an analytical level of generality that brings these long eras clearly into view. An era is therefore defined by a specific form of socio-material order. The resultant level of analysis is higher than those used by most historians to identify continuities and ruptures.Footnote ¹⁶ My scheme also uses clusters of big changes that occur together not only in material conditions but also across a range of primary institutions, to identify the continuities and changes that define these long eras. The empirical material used in this exercise is not in itself new, though most readers will probably find things in it with which they were not familiar. It is the way that the material is organised that generates new insights about continuity, change and periodisation in the long view of history.

This usage makes eras the longest form of socio-historical periodisation for humankind. Each era may contain a variety of periods, phases, stages, etc. defined by narrower criteria. Eras are both separated and connected by transition periods in which one set of material conditions and social structures morphs into another. These transitions may themselves be quite long. In earlier eras, when humankind was scattered into separate civilisations with often very thin connections, they occurred at different times in different places, as for example with agriculture. The focus in what follows will be on the earliest transitions, and these were usually in Eurasia. As with functional differentiation, each era contains legacies from its predecessors as well as the new material conditions and social structures that define it. In this sense, eras are a bit like genomes: the genome of Homo sapiens, for example, still contains significant traces of the DNA of extinct hominin species such as Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Social Glue

The second repurposed concept, social glue, is not used much if at all in IR, though the idea that the term represents – what is it that holds social orders together? – is strongly present in many IR discussions.Footnote ¹⁷ Although he does not use the term social glue, Wendt (Reference Wendt1999: 247–50) provides a simple and very useful answer to the question: coercion, calculation and/or belief.Footnote ¹⁸ Close to pure forms of these three types of social glue are imaginable: for example, coercion in rule imposed by alien conquest; calculation in pure systems of market relations; and belief underpinning religions and secular ideologies. But blendings are the standard form. Religions and secular ideologies might well have a core of belief, but also be supported and promoted by force, or adhered to out of calculation. Market relations start from calculation, but can also involve an element of ideological belief, and for others might be influenced by elements of coercion from criminals or political leaders. Invaders might find support from a ‘fifth column’ on the basis of calculation or belief. There is a strong general sense that these forms of social glue stand in a hierarchy of efficiency. Social structures held together mainly by coercion, such as empires of conquest, will be costly to maintain, will inspire resistance, and will evaporate once the coercion weakens. The Assyrian and Qin Empires are often given as examples of coercion-heavy social structures (e.g. Lieven, Reference Lieven2022: 49, 94–100). Those held together by calculation, such as markets, are stable only so long as they deliver the desired goods. They are vulnerable to changes in circumstance, such as war, that alter the calculations negatively. Those held together by belief are the easiest to maintain, and because they have the deepest roots they are likely to be the most durable. Christianity outlasted the Roman Empire, Islam outlasted the Abbasid Caliphate, Buddhism outlasted the Mauryan Empire, and Orthodoxy outlasted the Soviet Union. It is important to note that belief does not have to be nice. Warrior cultures and fascist societies often believe that war promotes the health and progress of a society, cultivates masculine values, leads to the survival of the fittest, and is therefore a desirable activity.

This hierarchy of forms of social glue is about the degree to which a social order is internalised within its members. Coercive orders are shallow. They can generate the conformity of behaviour that marks a society, but not in an internalised, self-sustaining, way. Calculated orders are by definition dependent on the maintenance of particular conditions. They are partly internalised, but not in a deep way. They might or might not be durable. Orders held together by shared belief are deep because they are internalised. This is one explanation for the relative durability of religion in global society, and for the success of nationalism since the nineteenth century. It is what secular ideologies such as liberalism, socialism, fascism and communism hope to achieve. In IR, neorealists, neoliberals and other forms of rationalist focus mainly on the shallower orders of coercion and calculation. Constructivists and the ES focus mainly on deep order.

In Wendt’s scheme, ‘belief’ is very close to what Anderson (Reference Anderson1983; see also Harari, Reference Harari2011: 361–4) famously labelled imagined communities: groups of people who identify themselves as a society or community on the basis of some agreed myth that binds them together. The reason why these communities are ‘imagined’ is that they are too big for all of their members to have any chance of meeting or knowing each other personally, as they might expect to do in a local kinship community. Despite this limitation, imagined communities can develop great depth and power, easily forming the basis on which people will treat other members of the group as if they were kin, and kill outsider, non-members if they are thought to be threatening. Whether the binding myth is true, partially true, or pure invention, does not matter. All that matters is that the relevant group of people accept it. This myth could be an extended version of kinship, like a common ancestor. It could be a religion whose stories and god(s) and rituals all adherents accept and bind themselves to. It could be a national myth, where the shared identity is constructed out of some mixture of language, ethnicity, culture and history. It could be an ideological myth, in which the community defines itself by adherence to some secular doctrine. Like many conspiracy theories, it could be complete and unsubstantiated nonsense, but nonsense that is packaged into a compelling story. Some imagined communities are fairly closed and difficult to join (e.g. ethno-national ones), while others are relatively easy (e.g. proselytising religions, conspiracy theories).

The blends and mixtures of these three forms or social glue change over time and place, and at all levels of society from family to global. They are one factor in what can be used to define eras.

Globalisation and Global Society

In IR, globalisation has many layers of meaning, ranging from the spread of humans across the planet in Neolithic times, through the connecting up of the continents by the opening of oceanic shipping during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the two modern views focusing on massive increases in the depth and intensity of global interactions of all kinds, one highlighting the nineteenth century, and the other the world since 1945 (Buzan and Lawson, Reference Buzan and Lawson2015: 311–14). All but the first of these layers tends to privilege the economic sector, because that is generally the one in which humans connect on the largest scale, mainly through trade, in any given era (Buzan and Little, Reference Buzan and Cox2000; Acharya and Buzan, Reference Acharya and Buzan2019: 181–2). In its economic meaning, globalisation allows space for the non-state actors who conducted trade, traditionally merchants, to be a significant part of the picture.

In what follows, I take a broad view of this concept embracing all of these meanings. I am basically interested in using globalisation to capture the increasing scale of how humankind organises itself across the interpolity, transnational and interhuman domains eventually generating a global society. This encompasses much more than just trade. Global society enables an important differentiation to be made from the ES’s world society. World society, and some other uses of ‘world’ in IR theory, suggests the encompassing of the whole of a social system without that necessarily requiring planetary scale. It is common to talk about the Roman or Sinic ‘worlds’ during classical times. Global society means planetary in scale. In what follows, therefore, globalisation in the sense of increasing scale works in tandem with the concept of integrated world society discussed above. Globalisation carries the factor of scale, and integrated world society captures the extent and intensity with which the organisation of humankind works in a connected way across all three domains. For much of human history these define mainly separate civilisational tracks that are lightly linked. At most there was progress towards planetary scale as the size of human societies increased. But once the scale of human society reached planetary extent, as it had by the early sixteenth century, these two tracks started to merge. By the nineteenth century, integrated world society had effectively become global society, turning the story from one mainly about expanding scale, to one almost wholly about intensification within global scale.

At this point many readers will be thinking about global governance, an idea that has been active in IR thinking for several decades. Such thinking emerged partly from IPE, where the role of non-state actors, particularly firms, was obvious; and partly from liberal cosmopolitans wishing to challenge the narrow state-centrism of realists (Gilpin, Reference Gilpin1987; Strange, Reference Stopford, Strange and Henley1988; Stopford and Strange, Reference Neumann1991; Rosenau, Reference Rosenau, Rosenau and Czempiel1992; Held et al., Reference Held, McGrew, Goldblatt and Perraton1999; Karns and Mingst, Reference Karns and Mingst2010; Zürn, Reference Zürn, Enderlein, Wälti and Zürn2010; Weiss, Reference Weiss2013). Global governance emphasised the deterritorialisation of world politics as states opened themselves to both economic flows and issues such as the environment that could not be dealt with effectively even by superpowers. It highlighted the significant roles played in contemporary international relations not just by some minor states as well as for great powers, but also by both intergovernmental organisations, and a wide range of non-state actors from multinational corporations to civil society actors acting not only as lobbyists, but also as providers of resources and expertise. The main drift of the global governance literature was to see great powers more as a problem than a solution to global troubles, and to emphasise that a much wider range of actors and networks were powerfully in play. It mostly wanted to see great powers as increasingly enmeshed in cobwebs of networks from which they could no longer escape. Great power management was seen as ineffective at best, and part of the problem at worst. The idea was of an emergent multi-layered form of global management that was more diverse, more democratic, and often more efficient, than great power interventions, and whose development should be supported.

The ES played little part in this. It was handicapped by its focus on the society of states, its failure to engage with IPE, and its relative disinterest in secondary institutions. Within the ES, Hurrell (Reference Hurrell2007) was notable for acknowledging and engaging with global governance. A few others within the ES noted the effective merging of global governance, on the one hand, and great power management, on the other hand, as the agenda of global governance issues grew ever wider (Bukovansky et al., Reference Bukovansky, Clark and Eckersley2012; Cui and Buzan, Reference Cui and Buzan2016). Global governance lost momentum within IR after the economic crisis starting in 2007–8 exposed the dependence of the global market on state management and rescue. It was further battered by the emergence and intensification of the second cold war after 2015.

The idea of global society that I am raising here has two resonances with global governance. Both focus on planetary scale. And both incorporate a wider range of actors than states/polities, bringing in corporations, intergovernmental organisations, and civil society organisations. But there are substantial differences too. I argue that the linked ideas of integrated world society/global society can and should be pushed back a lot further in time than the last few decades or centuries that preoccupy global governance. I also argue that the framing in English School terms as society, and the explicit analytical approach through the three domains (interpolity, transnational, interhuman), differentiates global society from global governance. The framing as society opens up for deployment of the ES’s concept of primary institutions, which, except for sovereignty and territoriality, are not much present in global governance. The three domains both transcend the narrowly political emphasis implied by ‘governance’, and bring in patterns of identity in a much bigger way. Global society could thus be seen as a way of putting global governance onto much firmer theoretical and historical foundations. Multi-layered governance involving a range of actors other than polities stretches back a very long way. In some respects, it is the norm of how humankind has organised itself on the largest scale for several thousand years. Global governance thus suffers badly from presentism. By focusing far too much on contemporary developments, it occluded a long and highly relevant prior history. It thereby set up as exceptional and unique, what was in many ways normal and routine.

Global society is thus aimed at re-founding global governance by putting it into a much wider historical and theoretical perspective. The term is not (yet) associated with the English School, though one purpose of this book is to argue that it should be, and to demonstrate how and why. Within an ES framing, global society means an integrated world society on a planetary scale, bringing the interpolity, transnational and interhuman domains under a single heading, and ensuring that all of them are given equal opportunity in analysis without any automatic privileging of one over the others. In the manner of the English School’s three traditions, let the historical record set the relative strengths in any given place and time. Bull’s differentiation between international society and world society has been extremely useful and productive in shaping ES thinking by creating space for normative concerns and dynamics. There was a definite need to fill the space left by Sociology’s disinterest in second-order societies.Footnote ¹⁹ But as a result, the ES has tended strongly to privilege the interpolity/state domain as the practical site of international society, and to underplay both the non-state societal aspects in themselves, and the extent to which primary and secondary institutions in fact often operate together within and across the three domains in very significant ways. Global society is not about rejecting the interpolity domain, but about viewing the interplay of social structure – primary and secondary institutions – across all three domains. The aim is to shift the vocabulary of both the ES, and IR more generally, to talk about the three domains and institutions of global society within a single framework.

My purpose in this is to find a framework at a general enough level of analysis so that the similarities amongst the various polities, cultures and civilisations come into the foreground, putting their everyday differences into the background. It is these everyday differences – whether Rome and China, or Western and Confucian, or many others defined by polity, culture or civilisation – that normally structure historical analysis. This book is not about comparative civilisations, but about the history of humankind as a whole. Global society, and its history, is the book’s contribution to making a more global discipline of IR. With an analytical level that foregrounds similarities, one can have more confidence that when discontinuities do appear, they are of major significance. My choice for the social element defining that transcendent analytical level is primary institutions. Alongside material conditions, primary institutions work nicely to highlight continuities and similarities, and to identify deep discontinuities and differences when they appear. Transcending the everyday differentiating approach in this way provides a firm grip on the kinds of changes that mark out eras.

A key idea here is that integrated world society, and eventually global society, is to be found in the way in which primary institutions integrate the three domains. Most primary institutions have their main roots in one of the domains (e.g. diplomacy, war, international law and great power management in the interpolity domain), but many of them stretch significantly into one or both of the other domains (e.g. trade, nationalism, religion, human (in)equality, sport). It is pretty obvious that some of the primary institutions rooted in interpolity society penetrate deeply into the transnational and interhuman domains. As noted, the obvious example of this is nationalism, which within the transition towards modernity, resonates powerfully between the interhuman and interstate domains. This has been a two-way street, with states promoting nationalism downward, and interhuman identity dynamics pushing it upward. Nationalism, like football, has almost everywhere now been deeply internalised and naturalised in both the interstate and interhuman domains. It meets more resistance in the economic and religious cosmopolitanism within the transnational domain. Similar, if less dramatic, cases could be made about several other interpolity institutions. The ideas of sovereignty and territoriality are pretty widely and deeply embedded in the public mind, and accepted as legitimising the organisation of political life within states. Think of the way Boris Johnson used sovereigntism to promote Brexit, and Donald Trump and Xi Jinping to promote their visions, respectively, of America and China. The values of human equality and development are also embedded across the three domains. Increasingly environmental stewardship, despite many ongoing breaches in practice, is also accepted across the three domains (Falkner and Buzan, Reference Acharya and Buzan2019). The right to war under specified conditions (e.g. self-defence), and not others (e.g. imperialism), also probably has wide support. Most of these institutions are widely and popularly supported as matters of belief almost everywhere.

The market and international law probably have less resonance in the interhuman domain, but are hugely important to the transnational one because they legitimise and support the non-state organisational forms and activities within that domain. Whereas many of the institutions just discussed are held in place mainly by belief, the market almost certainly has a more mixed profile, being held in place partly by belief, partly by calculation, and partly by coercion, and with complex possibilities for the distribution of support and opposition between and among people and elites. Some of the other institutions of interstate society are mainly of interest to state elites, and only occasionally resonate strongly into the other two domains. This might be said of diplomacy, great power management, the balance of power, and war. There are times when peace movements and organisations mobilise around these institutions, for example in the peace movement of the interwar years that opposed secret diplomacy and ‘the merchants of death’, and the various anti-nuclear movements that accompanied the Cold War. But these more technical institutions generally don’t play strongly into the identity and organisational rights of the transnational and interhuman domains.

Looking at this traffic across the three domains, it is clear that there is also much that goes from the interhuman and transnational domains towards the interpolity one. Some collective identities, most obviously nationalism and religion, but also in significant ways humankind as a whole, have substantial legitimacy as the basis for making claims in the proceedings of interstate society. Think, for example, of the Kurds, the Tibetans and the Palestinians; or of Russia’s claims concerning ethnic Russians living in neighbouring countries; or of organisations such as the Islamic Conference, the Arab League and the Nordic Union. Think also of the interstate machinery around human equality and human rights, which, since the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) are now embodied not only in the Charter of the UN (Clark, Reference Clark2007: 131–51), but also in many UN Conventions and Committees, and in many regional bodies. The UN has a Human Rights Council, and there is a body of international humanitarian law. Nationalism, indeed, stands alongside sovereignty and territoriality as one of the key primary institutions that define the modern state.

Transnational diplomacy is now widely and deeply accepted in interstate society. There is a very long history of political authorities negotiating not only with religious ones, but also with powerful guilds of transnational merchants. At times, indeed, such as in post-Roman Europe, the transnational authority of the Roman Church was the dominant social structure, and merchants controlled powerful polities such as the Hanseatic League, Venice and Malacca. For the two centuries of the transition towards modernity, states have welcomed, or at least allowed, non-state actors to participate in many of their diplomatic activities. From the Congress of Vienna, through The Hague Conferences and the League of Nations, to the UN system and the many specialised IGOs and international conferences, many INGOs and firms are now deeply and formally embedded in the processes of multilateral diplomacy. They are still there only by permission, making this fall short of a fully integrated world society. But they are now firmly part of the process, and play an important role in both strengthening its legitimacy and providing resources and expertise. It is on this basis that the term ‘global governance’ took on its meaning. When one thinks, for example, about environmental stewardship, it embodies a mix of state and non-state entities and activities: not just the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), but also the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the 1972 Stockholm Conference, the Rio summit of 1992, conferences in Copenhagen (2009) and Paris (2015), Greenpeace, and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), among others.

Global society in this integrated and open sense, with primary and secondary institutions stretching across and through the three domains on a planetary scale, is the guiding idea of this book.