On Global Order: Power, Values and the Constitution of International Society

S ince the 1990s, the English School of International Relations has re-emerged as a research program. The work of its classical authors has been taken up again and new theoretical investments have projected it onto the centre of the debates on transformations in the international order after the Cold War. The English School has thus gained a renewed momentum. In spite of the remark by Tim Dunne (1998) as to the alleged development of two streams within this tradition -classical theorists of international society and critical theorists of international society -what one has been able to observe is the theoretical-analytical dispersion around and based on the main concepts inherited from classical authors -Butterfield, Wight, Manning, Bull, Watson and Vincent, among others. However, such dispersion denotes not fragility but the vitality of a theoretical architecture that has plasticity as its central characteristic. Such plasticity has allowed contemporary authors to recover the concept of "international society" -a distinctive element of the English School of International Relations -and to place it, in the first instance, within a dialogue with the main theoretical debates of the field, and, secondly, at the service of an understanding of the problem of international order (see Weaver 1992Weaver , 1998Weaver , 1999)). Such dispersion allows one to understand the recent writings of Linklater and Suganami (2002), on the one hand, and of Barry Both seek to confront one problem: how to deal with the growing density of international society in the light of the concepts inherited from the tradition and, in particular, in the light of the debate between pluralist and solidarist perspectives that marked the intellectual