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Cornelia NavariThe concept of practice in the English School

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European Journal of International Relations

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DOI: 10.1177/1354066110368143

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Article

Corresponding author:

Cornelia Navari, University of Buckingham, Hunter Street, Buckingham, MK18 1EG, UK.

Email: [email protected]

The concept of practice in theEnglish School

Cornelia NavariUniversity of Buckingham, UK

Abstract

The English School concept of practice is what Stephen Turner in The Social Theory of Practices calls a ‘telic’ notion. A telic practice is an activity seeking a goal ‘which isconceived as a result of following certain general principles of procedure’. Examples of telic practices are playing a game of chess, holding a seminar, baptizing a baby or going

fly-fishing. Such practices are carried out according to standards of excellence set forthin some tradition of interpretation. Maurice Keens-Soper has placed de Caillèires’ De la

maniere de negocier avec les souverains in a tradition of interpretation applied to diplomacy,and one that set standards. A practice in the English School sense is not a private idea:a commitment to communal standards is required if one is to talk meaningfully of a

practice. A telic notion of practice may be contrasted with a causal notion. In the causalnotion, a practice is a form of mentalist ‘object’ which impinges on behaviour. PierreBourdieu (1977), for example, is interested in practices as hidden convictions or habits

shared by a group; his ‘habitus’ informs social action. Either as a kind of presupposition,or as a kind of mental trace, a practice in the causal sense disposes thought or action in

a certain way. In this form, practices are not directly accessible, their existence must beinferred, and the means of accessing them are fraught with difficulties. A person engagingin a telic practice is guided by its standards rather than being caused to perform, and

telic practices are directly accessible to empirical investigation.

Keywords

discourse, English School, norms, performativity, social practices

IntroductionIn considering the cultural inputs and social facts that influence the conduct of interna-

tional relations, the English School has been at the forefront. It was in the 1930s that

Charles Manning, professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics,

first formally advanced the idea that international relations constituted a set of socialrelationships. He pointed to a plethora of ‘games’ among states, understood as activities







612 European Journal of International Relations 17(4)

demonstrating mutual comprehension among putative rivals, shared and agreed customs

and even agreed rules (Manning, 1975). The British Committee, meeting from 1964,

spent most of its meetings puzzling the notion of an international society, not merely as

a historical product but also as a theoretical construct that could illuminate the common presuppositions, as well as the cultural (and ultimately political) rifts, among states

(Vigezzi, 2005): it was in the British Committee that Martin Wight formulated his famous

argument concerning Western values as the basis of contemporary international rela-

tions. Hedley Bull’s Anarchical Society, appearing in 1977, well before the ‘cultural

turn’, stipulated the five institutions underpinning international order; and Bull made

clear that these were social institutions, and ones that made international relations

possible. Contemporary constructivists, such as Martha Finnemore and Peter Katzenstein,

have recorded their indebtedness to the English School as a forerunner in the idea that

norms influence behaviour, and that foreign policy is value-laden (Finnemore, 2001).

There has been, however, a certain puzzle concerning the English School approach to

‘norms’ and ‘values’, and even a certain discomfort. Keohane (1992), reviewing Wight’s

(1991) International Theory: The Three Traditions, valued the historical reach, but was

worried by the absence of ‘contingent generalizations’. Finnemore (2001), while record-

ing her debts, notes the difficulty that American constructivists have had with the English

School’s theoretical claims and explanatory strategies, as well as its methods. Noting that

‘American IR tends to be interested in causation’, she is ‘not sure that the English School

shares this interest’ (2001: 510). Barry Buzan (2004) has criticized what he takes to be a

fundamental confusion between the normative and explanatory elements in English

School thought, and Sheila Grader (1988) notes the rational, interest orientation of Hedley Bull as opposed to the cultural orientation of Martin Wight.

In part, this discomfort has to do with the observably varied approaches to norms and

values taken by members of the British Committee — the source of most English School

theory (and largely definitional of it). Butterfield, for example, considered international

society as a historical development out of the religious stand-off of the Reformation, and

an outgrowth of an emerging practice of liberal toleration, in contrast to Bull for whom

it was, originally at least, a necessary product of the coexistence of equal and indepen-

dent political entities, and one that could be found among the most primitive tribes and

ancient empires, as well as in post-Reformation Europe. Such different historical place-ments of ‘international society’ imply different epistemological as well as ontological

positions. There were also the structural elements in English School thought — system,

society, community — whose relationship to norms, values and cultural ‘facts’ was vari-

ously drawn, and was not always made explicit. But it also has to do with a certain theo-

retical lacuna in the cultural literature itself.

In American scholarship, cultural facts have traditionally been studied via a fairly

simple form of sociological normativism — the idea that there is a direct causal rela-

tionship between a socially internalized norm and a resultant behaviour. This form of,

essentially, sociological institutionalism posits a direct causal relationship betweennorms and behaviour. But this approach is not shared by English School scholars.

Despite some cavilling, the English School does not consider norms as ‘causes’ in any

formal understanding of that term (see Jackson, 2000). Alternatively, there are those







Navari 613

continental, generally post-Foucauldian approaches, which theorize cultural facts as

the result of some more fundamental structure, variously defined, such as the ‘habitus’

of Bourdieu, and which explore the unconscious elements of practice. But the English

School’s empiricism obviates against what British historians refer to, somewhat dis- paragingly, as ‘hidden motivators’. Since it does not follow either of the two major

templates for the study of norms, the English School treatment of ‘cultural facts’ has

not been easy to place.

Recently, however, this has begun to change. A new sort of literature has emerged

which has formalized the concept of the ‘social practice’. Beginning with Searle’s The

Construction of Social Reality and continuing explicitly in the works of Wenger (1998)

and Turner (2000), practices have been defined as bundles of rituals, words and even

physical placements, to which autonomous individuals look as guides for appropriate

social behaviour. In the social practice literature, norms and values appear as parts of

wider systems of intelligibility. Marriages, birthday parties and fox hunts, among other

social forms, are identified as social practices, which embed norms in particular social

repertoires. Moreover, an English School literature has emerged that has made explicit

use of such formalized concepts to understand practices among states. Jackson’s The

Global Covenant (2000) as well as Bain’s work on trusteeship (Bain, 2003) each use

concepts of social practice to select and to theorize the customs, norms and values that

guide international conduct. In addition, each has related his own work to traditional

English School treatments of ‘social facts’ (and which indeed conform remarkably

closely to the formal characteristics defined in the social practice literature). The notion

of a practice has given a theoretical basis to Hedley Bull’s notion of ‘institutions’ and ithas thrown welcome light on Martin Wight’s notion of a diplomatic tradition.

If social practice theory has given the English School a recognizable theoretical

grounding, the English School has returned the favour and given practice theory a sub-

stantial body of empirical evidence. In general, the social practice literature has stayed at

a fairly high level of theoretical abstraction, with only a handful of attempts to analyse

actual social practices. Wenger’s Communities of Practice (1998) is a notable exception.

But in international relations, the English School has called attention to an impressive

repertoire of identified social practices, and to a lesser extent has even considered how

such practices might change and evolve (see Bibliography of practices). Indeed, theEnglish School may prove to have been among the most thoroughgoing efforts to put the

concept of social practice to an empirical test. Emmanuel Adler, who is encouraging a

‘practice turn’ in International Relations (Adler, 2008), has been exploiting the English

School as an explicit exemplar of such a ‘practice turn’.

This article will begin by identifying the particular type of social practice that the

English School has identified as operative between states, and will trace its origins and

development in the formal literature. It will then examine more closely the English

School method of analysing social practices, together with the identification of some of

the social practices operative between states. It will close by clarifying the distinction between social practices referred to as ‘telic’ and a causal notion of practice. The English

School concept of a social practice is a purposive goal-oriented conception and is not to

be confused with causal concepts of practice.









Telic practice in the social sciences

It was Stephen Turner in The Social Theory of Practices (2000) who distinguished a

‘telic’ notion of practice from a ‘sociological’ notion. He calls a ‘telic practice’ an activ-ity seeking a goal ‘which is conceived as a result of following certain general principles

of procedure’ (Turner is quoting from Kant’s ‘This may be true in theory but does not

apply to practice’). He gives as examples playing a game of chess, holding a seminar,

baptizing a baby according to the way it is done in a particular denomination, or going

fly-fishing. In the English School, diplomacy would qualify as a form of telic practice,

and trusteeship, the ‘standard of civilization’ used to classify political entities in the

19th-century period of imperial expansion and even war may all be understood as telic

practices. Each establishes some sense of a standard which ought to be obeyed, if the

practice is to be accomplished.

Telic definitions have their origin in Aristotle, who interpreted social behaviour in

terms of a natural aspiration to the ‘virtues’, or following the good. MacIntyre and

Oakeshott are major exemplars of contemporary thinkers using this notion. By exten-

sion, the contemporary focus on practices is generally understood as a counter to positive

approaches to social phenomena, which seek to avoid the subjective and conscious ele-

ments in human and social behaviour. Turner, for example, while pinning down the dis-

tinction, is not so much interested in telic practices as with the more unconscious

motivators of social behaviour. For MacIntyre and Oakeshott, the focus of research is not

on behaviour but on conduct (as in Oakeshott’s On Human Conduct ), and they reject the

notion that behavioural approaches can ‘explain’ what human beings are doing in socialsituations.

MacIntyre provided an early and famous, if slightly opaque, characterization of a telic

practice in After Virtue (1981). He called it:

any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through

which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those

standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partly definitive of, that form of activity

(1981: 175)

In this definition, we may note that a practice is an activity — a form of action. It is

‘socially established’ — it is a social artefact. And it is marked by ‘standards of excel-

lence’ — standards which define the activity. Thus, fly-fishing implies (and means) a

particular use of the rod, such that spear fishing is not fly-fishing; baptizing is defined by

the use of water to bathe, and, accordingly, dusting with talcum powder would not be

baptizing; and diplomacy is defined by a particular attitude and a particular range of

language. It is not spying, shouting, threatening or ‘whacking’. Another term for a practice

in the more traditional sociological literature is a procedural norm.

The English School inherited its orientation towards practice from Charles Manningwho insisted that the proper study of international relations must include ‘the sufficiently

general and sufficiently unqualified acceptance of the appropriate set of conventional

assumptions’ (1975: xxiii). In his ‘games’ approach to inter-state relations, he treated

games as purposive and rule-following activities which were intelligible as systems of







Navari 615

meaning. Martin Wight’s assumption that the study of international relations should

include the cultural conceptions behind diplomatic practice was also critically influential.

But those English School commentators who have formalized their use have tended to

draw on Michael Oakeshott’s notion of a practical enterprise and the conceptions of agency, and knowledge, which lay behind it. Robert Jackson and Will Bain, as well as

Maurice Keens-Soper before them, have each drawn inspiration from Oakeshott.

In his classic, On Human Conduct , Oakeshott distinguished two forms of social activ-

ity; the instrumental activity, in which action is directed to achieving some instrumental

or useful goal, and the practical activity, which is marked by being rule-governed in

itself (he called such practical rules ‘adverbial qualifiers to action’). ‘Practical rules’

generally have no reference to instrumental outcomes; instead, their focus is ‘how to

proceed to the outcome’. (An example would be the standards of good driving, as

opposed to the particular destination of the driver or his purpose in going there.)

Oakeshott’s notion of the practical rule was informed by a theory of knowledge, and

a critical distinction between technical and practical knowledge. Oakeshott argued that

technical knowledge was consciously formalized rationalistic knowledge, like the rules

of physics or the abstract bodies of theory proposed by social scientists, while practical

knowledge was largely unconscious, inarticulable and not easily amenable to technical

formulation. John Gray (1989) has elucidated the subtext behind the distinction: ‘For

Oakeshott, science is only one idiom of understanding among many. It is in no sense at

the apex of a hierarchy of modes of thought.’ (p. 201) Manning’s concept of academic

‘connoisseurship’ is close to Oakeshott’s understanding of a practice. Peter Wilson

defines Manning’s academic connoisseurship as a skill gained ‘through refined judgment born of familiarity with and feel for a subject’ (Wilson, 2008: 184). Oakeshott’s oft-quoted

example is the master chef and the cookbook. If a master chef made recipes of all his best

dishes and put them in a cookbook, still it would not be possible to duplicate the results

of the master chef. Even if the recipes were very detailed, the novice would require a

whole range of skills that the master chef had internalized and could scarcely recount as

a whole. Both Bain and Jackson make frequent use of this metaphor in expounding their

notion of a practice.

But it is Wittgenstein’s broader meta-theory of knowledge that provides the ontologi-

cal and epistemological grounding to a concern with practices. Oakeshott seems to haverather disdained Wittgenstein’s contribution to practice theory. When his colleague at the

London School of Economics, Professor Minogue, asked him who had been at Cambridge

during his time there, he merely remarked that ‘there were a lot of Austrian comedians

around the place at the time’ (Minogue, 2002: 68). But Wittgenstein’s theory of knowl-

edge gives Oakeshott’s categories the philosophical grounding without which they

remain at the level of the declaratory and stipulative only.

Wittgenstein grounded his theory of knowledge in a social theory of concept forma-

tion. According to Wittgenstein, ‘knowing’ and ‘understanding’ are not the products of

simple mental operations on the part of rational calculators, as rational choice theorists,for example, might lead us to suppose. According to Wittgenstein, language, gesture and

other communicative signals function within a wider social context that renders them

intelligible. His example was swearing in court. This particular form of speech, he argued,

was only intelligible within a juridical tradition, a placement of judges and witnesses and








a specific setting. The total constituted ‘a practice’. Wittgenstein argued that meaning

generally functioned within sets of practices; and that we must share a ‘form of life’ for

interpretation, and mutual comprehension, to be possible. A practice in the Wittgensteinian,

telic, and also the English School sense, is not a private idea: a commitment to communalstandards is required for one to talk meaningfully of a practice. Wittgenstein’s language-

games, ‘forms of life’ and rule-following were intended to elucidate the social dimensions

of understanding.

Wittgenstein’s modern interpreter, who formalized Wittgenstein’s concept of prac-

tices, is the American philosopher Ted Schatzki. Few English School theorists would

probably have encountered his work, and may not even know Schatski’s name. But in

aims and structure, his notion is the closest to the English School concept of practice, and

it is a valuable aid to understanding that conception. In a critical work of quite recent

vintage, Schatzki provided a generic understanding of the Wittgensteinian notion of

practice and gave it a more precise range of sociological applications, most of which

would be recognizable to English School practioners. More importantly, he laid out their

empirical referents.

Drawing directly from Wittgenstein, Schatski argues that practices organize, and

indeed constitute, the social world. He refers to the concept of ‘practices’ as a ‘primary

social thing’ (Schatzki et al., 2001) — that is, practices are the basic building blocks of

social life. In other words, wherever we see sociability, that is, regularized social interac-

tion, we will see practices. Second, there is his important analytical distinction between

‘dispersed’ and ‘integrative’ practices. The former include describing, ordering, follow-

ing rules, explaining, questioning, reporting, examining, imagining: ‘[t]heir “dispersion”consists simply in their widespread occurrence across different sectors of social life’

(Schatzki, 1996: 98). (Mervyn Frost has adapted Schatski’s notion of a dispersed practice

to include any practice which is widespread and not established by authority; so, for

example, Frost has identified a practice — indeed, a set of practices — involved in being

a professor of philosophy; and he considers the society of states to be a form of dispersed

practice, in the same manner as markets would be a form of dispersed practice [2003:

98].) By contrast, ‘integrative practices’ are ‘the more complex practices found in and

constitutive of particular domains of social life’. (p. 98) (Examples Schatzki gives are

farming practices, business practices, voting practices, teaching practices, celebration practices, cooking practices, recreational practices, industrial practices, religious prac-

tices and banking practices [1996: 98].) In the English School, diplomacy would be a

form of integrative practice. Third, he has suggested the requisite elements of a practice,

which gives the concept its empirical grounding.

Schatski’s three requirements, which allow for the identification of a practice, are

(1) practical understandings, (2) rules and (3) ‘teleoaffectivities’. Practical understandings

involve three abilities: ‘knowing how to X, knowing how to identify X-ings, and knowing

how to prompt as well as respond to X-ings’ (1996: 78). For example, in the practice of

state recognition, we know, or can find out how to, initiate processes of recognition;we know what an act of recognition looks like; and we know the appropriate range of

responses to claims for recognition. The second requirement — rules — are those prin-

ciples, instructions and formulations that people adhere to or take into account when they

act or speak. (In the case of recognition, it is a general rule that UN membership







Navari 617

completes the process of recognition.) The rather clumsy term ‘teleoaffectivity’ refers to

the coincidence between the goals associated with a practice and the attitudes to it.

Schatzki refers to teleoaffective structures as, ‘a range of normativized and hierarchically

ordered ends, projects, and tasks, to varying degrees allied with normativized emotionsand even moods’ (1996: 80). In undertaking a practice, the subject is not neutral; the

activity is ‘normativized’. Achieving, accomplishing or being denied recognition matters.

Theorists of practice have quarrelled with some of Schatzki’s notions, not least his

concept of rules. According to Schatzki, in genuine practices the rules are fairly explicit,

as for example the rules regulating marriage. But this leaves little room for tacit under-

standings and silent rules. Wenger, for example, would argue that rules are both explicit

and tacit: he would include ‘cues, untold rules of thumb, recognisable inhibitions’

(Wenger, 1998: 48). This parallels Hedley Bull’s own understanding of what should be

included in a practice: Bull speaks of ‘understandings which are not embodied in a treaty,

and which may arise from reciprocal declarations of policy, or simply from behaviour of

the parties which is as if in conformity with a rule, even though that rule is not agreed, not

enunciated nor even fully recognized’ (1977: 223; emphasis in original). Thus, during the

Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States ‘did not … break off diplomatic rela-

tions, withdraw recognition of one another’s sovereignty, repudiate the ideas of a com-

mon international law or cause the break-up of the United Nations into rival organizations’

(1977: 43). In other words, there appeared to be a rule of limitation in the conduct of their

conflict. (This is a sensitive question, since it shifts the focus to behaviour instead of

conduct , but it is also clear that some genuine rules are tacit.)

Second, there is a certain static quality present in philosophical accounts of practicewhich Schatzki does not overcome, and which derives from an over-reification of the

concept. The republican historian J.A. Pocock, in an important commentary on Oakeshott,

contrasts prescriptive with historical notions of practice, the former unchanging and

always having been, and the latter amenable to invention, innovation and change (Pocock,

1968). He is critical of Oakeshott for ignoring the difference, a criticism shared by John

Gray who denies that ‘such relics of practical knowledge [as understood by Oakeshott]

are to be found to any considerable extent in any twentieth-century modern society

(except, perhaps, Japan)’ (Gray, 1988). (Gray speaks of ‘decayed practices’; others speak

of ‘innovation’.) One consequence of reification is a confusion concerning the locus of practice, between ‘tradition’, on the one hand, which pre-exists the agent, and, on the

other, agents in their interaction. Wenger insists that the actual locus of practices is agents

in interaction, leading him to emphasize the ever-present possibility of slippage. ‘Yet

because meaning is always negotiated anew and because participation and reification are

not locked in, there is always an uncertainty, an opening for a “slippage” of practice’

(Wenger, 1998: 93). (Recognition provides a good example of slippage, from a declara-

tory tradition to the presently predominant Estrada doctrine: Estrada allows states to deal

with other states without the formality of declared recognition.) In Wenger, slippage is not

treated as an abandonment of rules or standards, but an adaptation of them.‘Agents in interaction’ points up not only the social, but the communal , basis to the

acquisition of knowledge and, by extension, to the emergence and evolution of practice.

Wenger ties the emergence of practice to localized communities, and Schatski (2002)

to particular sites. Both argue that practices develop over time, within fairly stable








communities and among participants who interact with one another. They echo the

famous statement attributed to the social anthropologist Clifford Geertz, that ‘all knowl-

edge is local’; that is, located in particular places and among particular groups of people.

The English School focus on diplomatic communities, networks of international lawyersand summit meetings reflects a parallel notion of the importance of ‘agents in interac-

tion’. Robert Jackson (2000 and below) makes the connection explicit.

As a concept, practice straddles a middle ground between the classic ‘economic’

theories of the autonomous rational actor on the one hand, and the more holistic ‘socio-

logical’ theories that emphasize large structures and social determinants on the other.

Reckwitz (2002) identifies a focus on practice as one of several ‘cultural’ perspectives.

But, in contrast to either ‘economic’ or ‘sociological’ perspectives, cultural perspec-

tives ‘introduce the collective cognitive and symbolic artifacts — the shared bodies of

knowledge — that enable and constrain the agents in their interpretation of the world’

(p. 244–245). The socially shared way of ascribing meaning to the world influences

what is regarded as desirable and which norms are considered legitimate. Moreover,

social order is embedded in such cultural constructs. Accordingly, social action should

be understood (and explained) by reconstructing cognitive-symbolic structures.

Such structures are not, however, to be understood apart from the agents’ participa-

tion in them. In empirical terms, the social theory of practice requires the analyst to

stay close to the agent, and he looks for evidence of his particular cognitive-symbolic

structures in what the practitioners are saying and doing. This bias reflects the ontol-

ogy of social practices. On the one hand, they are in the world as well as ‘in the mind’;

but, on the other, they do not determine or cause; at best they guide. The agent is ‘rela-tively autonomous’. Warde has made explicit the sociological implications: ‘The rou-

tine character of practices and their bodily-mental embeddedness imply that they tend

to be carried out in the same way, but not all practitioners perform in the same way

(adding to the complexity of identifying a practice), and sometimes practitioners

improvise and experiment, so established conventions will be challenged’ (Warde,

2005: 136).

The English School practice of practiceThe first explicit use of the concept of practice in the English School tradition is within

a little-remarked but critical essay of 1978 by Maurice Keens-Soper on ‘The practice of

a states-system’. Keens-Soper had been a participant in the British Committee in the

early 1970s. He presented a paper on ‘The awareness of diplomacy: Francois de Callières’

in April 1972 (Dunne, 1998: 133, n. 39), a paper of clear Oakeshottian influence. In the

same context, Keens-Soper invited Adam Watson to participate in writing a book on

diplomacy, a book that eventually appeared under Watson’s authorship alone (Neumann,

2001). In the 1978 essay, he declared his intention to pursue the identity of the ‘frame-

work of European foreign affairs’, and that the exercise was to be one of ‘imaginativereconstruction … rather than of contingent ascription’. If imaginative, however, the

framework was also to be reconstructed in the same terms in which it ‘was considered to

exist by those directly engaged’. In a formulation dear to Oakeshott, the framework was

to be identified in terms of ‘what the evidence obliges us to pronounce’ (1978: 25).








Navari 619

The first piece of evidence that we are obliged to consider, in reconstructing the

‘framework of European foreign affairs’, is a letter of 1458 from Pope Pius II to

Mohammed II, the conqueror of Constantinople. Keens-Soper trawls this letter to recon-

struct the writer’s conception of the political order of the time and the one that he (thewriter) represents. From it, he extracts two critical aspects. First, at the time, ‘Christendom’

and Europe were interchangeable concepts such that while ‘Mohammedans … might

interact with the princely powers of Christendom, enter into their calculations and

impinge upon their fortunes … they were incapable of belonging to the body of the

Christian commonwealth.’ Second, from Pius’s use of the term ‘European’, Keens-Soper

deduces that Christendom is not only a threatened frontier; it also has an ‘interior’ or com-

mon culture (1978: 27). Moreover, ‘Europe’ and ‘Christianity’ remained interchangeable

concepts, both geographically and culturally, until the beginning of the 18th century, as

evinced by the treaty record. Treaties, accordingly, also provide evidence that we are

obliged to accept.

It is not only words that constitute evidence but also deeds — ‘activity’ in the sociologi-

cal sense — and the precepts behind action. Drawing on Baxter’s history of William III,

Keens-Soper tells us that William’s ‘doggedness in the face of the Sun King’s might

animated the alliances of European Powers’ and that these alliances were directed towards

‘defending the liberties of Europe’. He proposes that sometime between the Nine Years

War (1697) and the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession, ‘Europe’ had ‘come

to acquire a political meaning’ — a meaning that it did not previously have — and a

meaning that consisted in a clear association between its ‘liberties’ and the independence

of its several states (1978: 28). He draws his evidence from William’s actions, not only asexpressed in declarations of intent but also in the actions themselves — in Kant’s terms, by

reconstructing the precepts behind action.

But the evidence must come full circle. The new practice is verified via an explicit

statement in the Treaty of Utrecht, which closed the War of the Spanish Succession and

delimited the ambitions of the Sun King. The official explanation, contained in the treaty

and presented as its rationale, was ‘the great danger which threatened the liberty and

safety of all Europe from too close conjunction of the Kingdoms of Spain and France’.

Moreover, its remedy was held to be, in the words of the treaty, ‘an equal balance of power

which is the best and most solid foundation of mutual friendship and of a concord … last-ing on all sides’ (quoted by Keens-Soper, 1978: 28). The balance of power has become the

new practice.

This new practice, identified by Keens-Soper, and inscribed in the treaty, conforms to

all the requirements of a practice as understood by Schatski. First, there seems to have

emerged a clear understanding of how to prompt and respond to balances of power.

Second, it has a rule or standard — counter-union to those with hegemonial ambition.

Finally, it is teleoaffective: the goal is to protect liberty.

At the same time, Keens-Soper’s usage points up several distinctive features of the

English School conception. First, there is the orientation towards text. English Schooltheorists follow Keens-Soper in appearing most comfortable when their analyses are

confirmed in written acknowledgements. Second, there is the attention to declarations of

intent, expressed in speech, which brings the English School into a family relationship

with discourse theory (see Neumann, 2002) and John Searle’s ‘speech acts’. We should








observe, however, that the English School generally probes language in its ordinary

sense, and without those structural distinctions considered necessary by such language

theorists as Gadamer. In the English School, language is expressive of meaning, and its

analysis is directed towards recovering intent, not detecting its structural constraints.Third, there is the English School conception of practice as an ‘institution’. It may be

observed that what Keens-Soper initially identified as a practice was later inscribed by

Hedley Bull as an ‘institution’. Bull’s ascription of order in international society to the

‘institutions’ of law, war, diplomacy, the balance of power and the great powers actually

means the regulative standards, routines and repertoires which belong to the activities of

law-making, war, diplomacy and so on. In fact, Bull’s concept of an ‘institution’ is identi-

cal to Schatski’s conception of a practice.

There is also a concern with the actuality of practice (‘performance’ in the formal

literature) as opposed to mere speech or, alternatively, ideas. Long before there was any

formal theory of social practice, Manning was calling for the study of ‘the real-life situ-

ations that are its [academic international relations’] raison d’etre … [b]ecause it is

real-life situations that have to be assessed, situations as they actually come about’

(1975: 160). Equally, Wight was maintaining that diplomacy must be something other

and more than a pattern of ideas. A practice is more than a theory about practice: there

are ‘requirements of social existence’ and ‘the constant experience of diplomatic life’

(1966: 116), and these things should be, in Iver Neumann’s words, ‘a crucial site of

study’ (2001: 3). Bull, among many, points to the role of the resident embassy in diplo-

macy; that is, a physical site that is an integral part of the practice of diplomacy and part

of diplomacy’s intelligibility, while Jackson insists that ‘international society’ is ‘anactivity, and not merely a framework’ (2000: 113), and one that involves ‘pragmatic

encounters’ (2000: 103).

Not all international activity conforms to a practice. Jackson reminds us ‘that warfare

rarely accommodates categorical evaluations’ and that international security, ‘as a gen-

eral value to be enjoyed by all states’ (2000: 363), had a precarious existence during the

Cold War. Security, in general, and security practices in particular are subject to such

continual reformulation that security norms struggle to achieve stability. He also observes

that democracy ‘has been brought into existence in a country by the efforts and resources

of outsiders only in the most unusual circumstances’ (2000: 363). In other words, thereis, so far, no settled practice of democracy that holds ascendance among states, but rather

a range of contested practices. There are also ‘coincidences’ and fortuna. Jackson quotes

Machiavelli, who held that about half of human activity was determined by forces outside

of human control (Jackson, 2000: 32).

Also, a good deal of activity among states is instrumental rather than genuinely socia-

ble, a critical distinction in the English School. Wight, for his part, denies that the Chinese

Central Confederacy’s regular assemblies, apparently well established by the 7th and 6th

centuries BC, amounted to an ‘inclusive international institution’ (or a practice), since

‘its aims seem to have been defensive against other Chinese powers, and not inclusive’(1977: 32). The concern of the interpretive sociologist is not only with intentional

activity but also the mores that lie behind it . Contingency, habit and instrumental

behaviour that ignores procedural constraints all fall outside an empirical understanding

of practice.








Navari 621

For this reason, not all English School theorists remain within the compass of a

singular concern with practices. Navari and Keene, for example, are both concerned

with the larger social structures of which practices are a part, which each apprehend

through historical sociology. Richard Little and Barry Buzan have been concerned withillucidating the range of causal explanations that were implicit in the classical English

School approaches and have focused their work on the more structural aspects of

English School theory rather than on the values implicit in conduct. James Mayall has

been concerned with norms, not merely in the sociological sense but also in the ethical

sense, of what ought to be done.

English School practices and social sites

Where these rules or standards are situated is not an irrelevant question. The social science

literature gives witness to a decided difference of emphasis between ‘institutionalists’

who stress a variety of pre-existing social sites, traditions and institutions, and ‘individu-

alists’ who emphasize mental and bodily locations. Reckwitz attempts to comprise both

when he writes that practice ‘is a routinized type of behaviour which consists of several

elements, interconnected to one other: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities

[bodily and mental locations], “things” and their use, [but also] a background knowledge

in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge’

(2002: 249).1 Giddens’ practical consciousness (1984: 2–3), which is a close analogue to

a practice, concentrates on what Giddens calls the ‘habitual actions and discourses of

routine and confident performance’, an understanding that implies traditions and eveninstitutions. But Wenger’s community of practice is more individualist: it is a community

of individuals which, coming together, ‘produces abstractions, tools, symbols, stories,

terms and concepts that reify something of that practice in congealed form’ (Wenger,

1998: 58). Theorists with an individualist, bodily and mentalist orientation will, accord-

ingly, tend to see practice constantly being recreated on site.

The English School, not surprisingly, inclines towards institutions and traditions.

Martin Wight’s ‘three traditions’ was a heroic, if somewhat misguided, effort to locate the

varied sources of contemporary practice, partly in individual thinkers and partly in his-

torical experiences. (And read in that manner, it makes much more sense than as a stipula-tive typology.) Keens-Soper locates the diplomatic standards of excellence in a tradition

of interpretation which begins with Adam de Cailleires: he considers de Caillèires’ The

Perfect Ambassador as initiating a tradition of interpretation applied to diplomacy of

which Burke, Gladstone and Nicolson are a part. Bain uses the term ‘conversation’ in a

clear echo of Burke, who held that politics was ‘a conversation between the living and the

dead’, a ‘conversation’ moreover that is capable of being identified with specified locales

— notably, in the reflections of some practitioners and in the official writings and speeches

of others. In the English School, practices tend to be carried out according to standards of

excellence set forth in some tradition of interpretation. Not every English School scholar with a practice orientation maintains a steady focus

on the actuality of practice. In his account of the treatment of diplomatic practices, Iver

Neumann notes with especial perspicacity the tension in Martin Wight between practice as

an activity and practice as a tradition of thought. Wight was bothered by the contingency








of diplomatic practice and was constantly drawn to the ‘rumination of philosophers and

historians’ (Neumann, 2001: 2). Jackson likewise encourages the student to begin with

‘those theorists who have something to say which is … precise … concerning the sub-

ject’, recommending Thucydides on political necessity, Burke on prudence, Kant on therule of law and so on (2000: 92–93). He may have influenced Will Bain in his account of

trusteeship, although Bain does not range so widely as Wight or Jackson. Bain is concerned

to explicate the ‘rule’ or standards or implicit goals of trusteeship as expressed by state

practitioners, and this leads him to concentrate on the language of justification, and essen-

tially on texts, and not on the actual conduct of colonial officers within trust territories or

on the varied policies of the trustee states.

It should be noted, however, that a focus on discourse or text alone threatens to leave

practice behind. Reckwitz (2002) has distinguished four distinct ‘cultural’ approaches,

only one of which is practice. He has located ‘culture’ respectively in the human mind,

in discourse or ‘texts’, in interactions between human agents, as well as in practices as

suggested in practice theory. The latter should demonstrate, first, a coordinated entity

(a more or less coherent entity formed around a particular activity) and, second, a perfor-

mance (the carrying out of some action). A focus on text alone could not be said to dem-

onstrate a practice. As Wenger observes, ‘histories of interpretation create shared points

of reference, but they do not impose meanings’ (1998: 83). In a recent paper, Vincent

Pouliot has identified the revival of Cold War language currently in vogue among a

group of NATO civil servants as a practice (2008). But it is not clear that any practical

understanding in Schatski’s sense follows from the use of this language; nor does any

basic rule or standard seem to be entailed. It would appear to be a case of keeping Russiaat a distance from NATO decision-making; that is, a self-conscious political tool, draw-

ing on shared points of reference.

International practice and international law

The communal basis of meaning points to a set of important distinctions, pressed by the

English School, between international law and practice. International law in English

School treatments is a repository of the norm or standard that is one of Schatski’s requi-

sites for a practice. International law is full of procedural restraints and instructions thatare intended to qualify action; for example, the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of

prisoners, the Vienna Convention on how treaties are to be read and the various conven-

tions on the treatment of diplomats. Peter Wilson describes the body of international law as

‘a reasonably clear guide as to what is the done thing, and what is not, in any given set of

circumstances, of what can be expected and what not, and what will be tolerated and what

will likely be met with a disapproving, perhaps vociferous, response’ (2008: 168.).

International law is, accordingly, a critical checklist in the consideration of practice, both

in identifying it and characterizing it. It is also a crucial site in the evolution of practice.

International lawyers involved in particular issue areas form communities of practice inWenger’s sense and are often critical sites in its development. (Indeed, epistemic com-

munities in general are communities of practice in Wenger’s sense.) But it is not practice

in the full sense of that meaning.








Navari 623

First, there is the important distinction, pressed by Terry Nardin, between international

law as procedure, as adverbial qualifier to action, and international law as expressing

goals (1983). One such goal might be ‘development’. Nardin, following Oakeshott,

would not consider ‘development’ to be either a legal phenomenon or a practice, butrather a form of policy or a goal. In the English School, declarations on development are

not of interest except in the degree to which such declarations impinge on practice or

become a practice; that is, come to embody a specific rule of conduct. Robert Jackson

follows Dorothy Jones in detecting the emergence of a declaratory tradition in interna-

tional law, interesting as a phenomenon but which he distinguishes from practice: ‘twen-

tieth century and especially post-1945 international law frequently consists of declared

goals and ideals towards which statespeople avow to strive in their foreign policies. These

are declarations of intent regarding future conduct rather than acknowledgements of

actual practices’ (2000: 123).

Some declared goals of international law may have implications for conduct. The

goals of peacekeeping, for example, clearly have implications for how peacekeepers

should conduct themselves, and the United Nations is presently devising a code to

regulate the behaviour of peacekeepers. But others do not. It is difficult to imagine what

the ‘correct’ manner of conducting development might be, outside of the behavioural

injunctions — the dispersed practices — that fall on all civil servants. If there are no

standards in carrying out ‘development’, it is not a practice, whatever its status in inter-

national law. So far as the law is concerned, the English School shares something of the

approach of 19th- and early 20th-century legal positivism, which regarded law in terms

of a distinction between the legal form and the normative goal and deplored the confusion between them. Geoffrey Best reflects such an approach when he deplores the entry of

‘soft’ declaratory law into the law of humanitarian warfare as confusing the status of the

law and devaluing the standard or the rule (Best, 1980).

More importantly, international law as written text, even when it qualifies conduct,

does not exhaust the concept of practice. Both the practical understandings — the knowing

how to prompt and respond — and the teleoaffectivities lie beyond the law and are

reposed in traditions and mental and physical embodiments. When de Gaulle said ‘no’ to

British entry into the Common Market, he was drawing on a tradition of great power lèse

majesté that was quite recognizable even to avowed ‘pro-Europeans’, much as they mayhave deplored it. In addition, there are those ‘rules’ and standards that are not expressed

in legal terms. Bull argues that to be a great power involves ‘a rule of membership’ of a

club of great powers (1977: 200), whose standards of conduct would be familiar to a

Kissinger, but which are not primarily expressed in legal terms (though Security Council

procedures reflect some of them).

Robert Jackson as the pre-eminent English School theorist

of practiceIf the formal tradition starts with Keens-Soper, the most complete account of contemporary

international practices is Robert Jackson’s The Global Covenant (2000). It covers, inter

alia, the sets of principles that inform contemporary conceptions of national and








international security; the constraints in contemporary warfare; and the rules that are

being applied to regulate armed intervention (as well as the actual ‘performance’ of these

activities). He considers whether contemporary international administration (in Kosovo,

for example) is evolving into a practice akin to traditional trusteeship, and the status of the international boundary ‘as a planetary institution’. The selection has been made with

an eye to contemporary diplomatic practice. Contemporary diplomats are currently

engaged in international administration; they are considering the possibility and limits of

armed intervention and they are redrafting borders. Jackson’s practices involve ‘real-life

situations’ in Manning’s terms.

Jackson’s practitioners are those whose words and deeds reflect upon the framework,

the rules and standards, within which foreign affairs are conducted. The most important

are ‘statespersons’, whom he defines in terms of the carriers of formal authority and legal

responsibility. It is the actions and speech of those who hold formal authority that reveal

‘the framework of foreign affairs’, as Keens-Soper would call it. (Jackson also identifies

these as the ‘primary subjects of international ethics’, meaning those directly subject to

international norms.) Of these, he counts some 20,000 worldwide. However, ‘the most

consequential political people’ are the five serving permanent members of the Security

Council and the seven leading economic powers; and he puts this figure at under 1000

(2000: 132). He calls world politics ‘an exclusive game’, and it is this exclusive game

that he considers the proper focus of the study of international relations.

Jackson’s insistence on practitioners is directly drawn from Oakeshott, but it is also

entirely consistent with Wittgenstein’s notion of meaning as a social artefact and his

proto-theory of its emergence. Wittgenstein’s meaning is a socially shared phenomenon.It emerges from participation within, and interaction among, the members of a specific

community with a location and an existence over time. Jackson’s diplomatic community,

likewise, has continuity, locale and a stable membership. Moreover, it is a shared enter-

prise; it is ‘an activity that involves agents or representatives of different states who are

interested in or concerned about the same issue and who have every right to voice their

interests and concerns to the other statespeople’ (2000: 37).

In the sociological understanding of this process, meanings and rules emerge from

‘communities of practice’, the felicitous expression of Etienne Wenger. Wenger argues

that any regularized social setting will produce rules of how to go on, as well as ‘cues,untold rules of thumb, recognisable inhibitions’. This is so ‘even when the practice of a

community is profoundly shaped by conditions outside the control of its members … its

day-to-day reality is nevertheless produced by participants within the resources and con-

straints of their situations’ (Wenger, 1998: 79). In Jackson’s terms, the ‘[s]tandards of

conduct are conventional and historical: they are crafted by the people involved in an

activity and they are formed by them from time to time in response to changing ideas and

circumstances’ (2000: 131). For Jackson, rules and standards emerge from a locale and

one which may be understood as a community of practice in Wenger’s sense and as the

‘sustained pursuit of a shared enterprise’ (Wenger, 1998: 45).His practice is somewhat more static than that proposed by Wenger, betraying perhaps

its roots in Oakeshott’s notion of a practice. Recalling Pocock’s criticism of Oakeshott’s

notion of practice for its static quality, it may be observed that Jackson also tends to

ignore slippage and experimentation, and he generally relates international practice back







Navari 625

to an underlying set of slow-to-change norms. Moreover, it is the underlying norm that

interests him and not the twists and turns, the slippages and innovations that also charac-

terize practice. But, as Frost observes, ‘Practices are not static but change over time as a

result, among other things, of the debates that take place within them’ (2003: 89).The focus on unchanging norms may relate to Jackson’s wider goals, in which he is not

alone among English School theorists. One of these is to ‘retrieve the human sciences’,

and particularly, as part of that project, to defend a Verstehen, hermeneutic and ‘under-

standing’ approach to international relations, as opposed to ‘explanation’ as understood

by Smith and Hollis (1990). Another is to defend the ‘pluralist architecture’ of the

contemporary state system against the more recent advocates of ‘solidarism’.

But the defence of unchanging norms is not the defining characteristic of the English

School, much as some would suppose. Jennifer Jackson Preece, who shares much with

Jackson and is clearly committed to a practice orientation, is quite definitely concerned

with slippage, with new enterprises and even with explanations. She has traced the emer-

gence of a new practice, that of national minority standards, in its various institutional

settings; that is, as diplomats and international civil servants have evolved those stan-

dards. She has also suggested some reasons why these standards should have become

accepted: that is, she has even proposed an explanation. She argues that if Bulgaria

adopted measures that demonstrated a ‘new found willingness to comply with national

minority standards in the treatment of its Turkish minority’, this was ‘in order to ensure

COE [Council of Europe] membership’ (Jackson Preece, 1998: 62).

Also, ‘if most national minority/majority disputes did not escalate into violent con-

flicts between 1990–1995’ and if ‘the parties concerned confined their actions to thoseforms of opposition permissible within a democratic system … this counterfactual,

should be taken seriously’. Why? Because the code of international conduct, she writes:

is not concerned with promoting certain types of action, but with preventing behaviour that

would disrupt the system. In other words, structural principles [such as national minority rights

standards] [sic] operate successfully if nothing is seen to happen, nothing, at any rate, that is not

routine in character. As a result, the importance of these principles and even their very existence

go largely unnoticed. (Jackson Preece, 1998: 62)

She is quoting from Andreas Osiander (1995: 6–7) who is decidedly cool on the question

of whether the procedural norms of international society represent the highest apogee of

civilization. For Osiander, it is not a requirement of a procedural norm that it necessarily

be the right norm.

Telic notions and causal notions

The English School concept of practice is sometimes confused with a Bourdieuian or

post-structuralist understanding of practice. Ole Waever has suggested that this approachshares an orientation with ‘semiotics’, a focus on ‘implicit cooperation (and thereby also

dominance), the invisible non-questioned assumptions which impute “order” into politics

exactly because they are not questioned and therefore not thought of as institutions’. He

cites Richard Ashley’s work as the exemplar (Waever, 1992: 110). Iver Neumann detects








correspondences between the English School approach and continental social theorizing

(‘more wide ranging projects of social theory’, 2001: 2) and suggests making the connec-

tions more explicit. He also proposes that diplomacy might be as well understood within

a linguistic turn as within a cultural turn (Neumann, 2001, 2002).The latter, however, are not telic but causal notions. In post-structural approaches, a

practice is understood as a form of mentalist ‘object’ which impinges on other objects. In

these theories, practice is conceived cognitively, as a kind of presupposition, or causally,

as a kind of mental trace, which dispose thought or action in a certain way. Turner, for

example, is interested in practices as hidden convictions shared by a group. In the causal

conception, ‘practice’ is treated as a kind of presupposition that acts directly upon

behaviour, almost as a habit. Understood in this manner, we may observe that Foucauld’s

notion of a practice is implicitly causal, much as Foucauldians would be uncomfortable

with such a characterization. It is the ‘power’ that wings through the post-Enlightenment

world that causes the panoptikon. The causal notion of practice has several sources,

including American sociological institutionalism. But its most prevalent source in the

formal literature on social practices is with structural linguistics. Bourdieu comes out of

the structural linguistics stable, in which habits of speech and the underlying structure of

concepts inform behaviour even though the actual setting of any specific behaviour

might dictate a different response.

Understood as such, it should be clear that there will be considerable tensions between

an English School understanding of practice and a post-structuralist or Bourdieuian

concept. Those in the latter tradition are looking for an anchor in which to ground habitual

behaviour. In ontological terms, the form of explanation that is proffered is a form of naturalist explanation, reflecting the Marxian stable from which such theories derive.

Epistemologically, post-structuralists would consider those in the English School to be

‘naive empiricists’. In addition, there are critical methodological differences. In the post-

structural form, practices are not directly accessible, and the means of accessing them

indirectly are fraught with difficulties. The causal theorist of practice must posit some-

thing behind the empirical manifestation of practice, something moreover with which the

subject cannot consciously interfere. It may be a Freudian alter-ego, or a post-imperial

cognitive legacy, or an orientalist tendency (which imposes a characterization of ‘orien-

talness’ upon ‘the oriental’). (Post-structuralists have dispensed with ‘modes of produc-tion’, by definition, as it is that that makes them post-structuralists.) As Gulick (1998: 11,

emphases in original) observes, ‘a person engaging in a telic practice is guided by its

standards rather than being caused to perform in some manner, and the practice is directly

accessible to empirical investigation’. In the English School conception, there is nothing

‘behind’ the balance of power or ‘behind’ the practice of recognition and the method-

ological approach is a direct encounter with self-understanding.

In the English School, diplomacy is not a habit, and diplomats do not practise diplo-

macy as habitual action. It is a set of standards which are, moreover, amenable to acts of

judgement. Just as the mountaineer is guided up the mountain (and exercises judgement both in the decision to climb the mountain and in the method of doing so), the diplomat

uses the textbook of diplomacy to guide his encounters with relevant others. The best

diplomats operate with repertoires. Where these repertoires come from, and how they are

learnt, is not without interest. David Armstrong has identified some of the sources of

‘state socialization’ in his treatment of the taming of the Chinese revolution (Armstrong,







Navari 627

1993); and we know that the failure of the revolution in Germany forced the nascent

Soviet Union to reinstate the old imperial diplomatic service. Barbara Roberson has

exposed the role of legal transplants in spreading categories of rule and in implanting

diplomatic standards abroad, critical in the expansion of international society (Roberson,2009); and the British Council has understood the potential social and political role of the

university department in training Eastern Europe’s new corps of diplomats in Western

habits of diplomatic practice.

Elements in these processes may have a causal status; that is, they may be the neces-

sary conditions for the emergence of a practice. It is possible that had the revolution in

Germany not failed, for example, Soviet diplomacy might indeed have taken on quite

a different form. Certainly, Soviet diplomatic practices among the socialist democra-

cies displayed quite different characteristics from Western diplomacy, practices not

unconnected with the wider social form of socialist internationalism. Practices them-

selves may also have a causal role in the Weberian sense, where the practice plays a

critical role in an overall social formation. Giddens’ structuration theory is a contem-

porary adaptation of a Weberian approach as is that of Alexander Wendt, and neither

would be viewed with hostility by the English School theorist of practice (see, for

example, Keene, 2009).

Conclusion

But neither approach implies a direct causal relation to behaviour. Agents in the English

School sense (and indeed by definition) do not have causes, they have intentions. The practices guide them in expressing their intentions. Practices in the English School are

best apprehended in the manner described by Clifford Geertz, in Local Knowledge (1983:

59): ‘seeing their [the practioners’] experiences within the framework of their own idea

of what selfhood is’.

Note

1. But he also somewhat confusingly refers to ‘both the bodily and mental patterns that constitute

the practice’ (2002: 252) and he emphasizes the physical aspects of practice.

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Biographical note

Cornelia Navari is Visiting Professor of International Affairs at the University of

Buckingham and Honourary Senior Lecturer in International Affairs at the University of

Birmingham. She has recently edited Theorising International Society, English School

Methods for Palgrave Macmillan (2009) and is currently completing Public Intellectuals

and Foreign Policy for Brill’s Republic of Letters series.

2010 the Concept of Practice in the English School

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