Manning's Quasi-Masterpiece: The Nature of International Society Revisited

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Manning’s Quasi-Masterpiece: The Nature of International Society Revisited

(For publication in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs, Sept 2004).

Peter Wilson, Senior Lecturer in International Relations, LSE, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE. Email:

I am grateful to Barry Buzan, Michael Donelan, Christopher Hill, Carsten Holbraad, Robert Jackson, Alan James, Hayo Krombach, Brian Porter, Geoffrey Stern and Hidemi Suganami for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

Abstract

Manning’s The Nature of International Society was the consummation of a lifetime’s thinking about the fledgling subject of International Relations (IR). Many have found its pages impenetrable. For this reason it has become almost invisible in contemporary debates about IR theory. Yet for some it is a highly influential work, and one of rare originality and creative flair. This article seeks to restore the reputation of this neglected work. It analyses Manning’s understanding of international society as a ‘notional society of notional entities’, one of many different layers of world social and political reality. It examines his belief, more generally, that the social world is by and large comprised of notions. It explores his commitment to the relationship between understanding and social progress. It highlights the continued importance of Manning’s view of an education in IR as an education, at its best, in ‘connoisseurship’. Finally it identifies Manning’s chief legacy for thinking about international relations today.

Keywords: Manning, international society, English school, holism, personification, connoisseurship.

It is apt that the recently celebrated 75th anniversary of the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) coincided with the fortieth anniversary of the publication of the crowning work of its chief architect. Charles Manning, initially Cassel then Montague Burton Professor of International Relations, 1930-1962, dedicated his life to forging ‘out of next to nothing’ International Relations (IR) as a distinct and recognisable academic subject, and establishing a secure and respected place for it at the LSE and in the wider university curriculum. The comings and goings of states and other significant international actors was, he believed, a vital facet of what he termed the social cosmos, and its rigorous and systematic study was therefore as integral a part of ‘social cosmology’ as the established fields of Economics, History, Government, Law, and Sociology. ‘Global social cosmology’ (or with characteristic concern for terminological precision, ‘global quasi-sociology’), was an alternative name he gave for it, as was ‘Prolegomena to the Study of World Affairs’, and somewhat anomalously, ‘the structure of international society’. 

Published in the year of his retirement, The Nature of International Society is the consummation of a lifetime’s thinking about the ‘elementals’ of this new-fangled subject, as Manning then conceived it, International Relations. It is a remarkable work, one of the most original contributions to general thinking in the IR field, and the work of a highly creative, indeed poetical, mind. Yet despite this, and despite the recent resurgence of interest in the ‘international society approach’ of the English school--with regard to which Manning was not only a member but arguably its founding-member--little attention is paid these days to Nature. This article is an exercise in intellectual conservation. It seeks to bring to the attention of relative newcomers to the field the existence of this neglected though important work. It points to certain shortcomings that account in part for its decline in popularity. It also suggests why the work retains considerable value for thinking about international relations today.

Facts and Thinking

As its author was at pains to point out, Nature is not a work of research. It contains few facts, at least not of the empirical kind. On the actual day-to-day conduct of business in the international society it says little. There is not much on the Cold War, very little on decolonisation, hardly a word on ‘Europe’ and Britain’s relation to it. Even nuclear weapons receive only a few moments of Manning’s scholarly attention.  

Oddly for the modern reader, the world event that receives most attention is the seizure by India, in December 1961, of the Portuguese colony of Goa. The insouciance of the transgressing state towards the accepted practice of offering at least some sort of legal justification, and the passive response with which the transgression was met by the ‘international establishment’, suggested to Manning that a sea change in respect for the law had taken place. It was as if ‘a beautiful young woman, apprehended in the theft of a neighbour’s infant, were not only to be pardoned by the Queen, but allowed to keep the baby’! Propriety and a reputation for it seemed no longer diplomatically at a premium. The law had been ‘definitively devalued’.  Even Hitler had sought to keep up appearances! The game of ‘let’s-play-sovereign states’ had been replaced by the game of ‘let’s-merely-play-at-playing-let’s-play-sovereign-states.’ But it was the absence of ‘reference group’ pressure that was the real blow. ‘Where nothing cannot be got away with,’ Manning bleakly concluded, ‘bad behaviour drives out good’.

So there’s a lot on Goa, a fact that can be attributed to the reverence for international law that Manning and many others of the ‘League generation’ felt, a reverence far thinner on the ground today. At least, that would be the conclusion one would reach solely from reading Nature. But there are other factors involved, the complexity and importance of which merit careful treatment in their own right. As this article focuses on Nature, more in the spirit of Leavisian close textual reading than a Skinnerian exploration of intellectual context, I do not intend to go far down this road here. It is clear, however, with the benefit of hindsight, that Manning made too much of the Goa incident. The sea change that was taking place was not so much respect for law per se, but the law as it related to the practice of colonialism. Manning failed to appreciate the rapidity with which the ethical and legal tide against colonialism in international society was turning. This is largely explained by his background and general outlook on colonialism. A South African of English, Scottish, and Huguenot descent, Manning was an imperialist of the Milnerite kind. He held Britain’s achievements in the colonial field in high esteem, and conceived its empire in terms not of economic extraction or political aggrandisement but of global responsibility. In the language of the Covenant of the League of Nations, the well-being and development of colonial peoples constituted a ‘sacred trust of civilisation’. And Britain was its foremost trustee. The British commonwealth of nations, as the empire was then in the process of becoming, was a great force for good in world politics. In a world plagued by centrifugal tendencies, it represented, most importantly, one of the few effective sources of peace and international political unity. (The League, which Manning also set great store by, being one of the others).

This set of attitudes gave rise in the 1960s to a general hostility to new states, and perhaps a particular hostility to Nehru whom he regarded as the chief engineer of British imperial disintegration. Events in Goa may also have represented for Manning a sign of things to come in his native South Africa. If the law could be swept aside for the sake of geo-political convenience in Goa, might it not with equal impunity be swept aside for the sake of diplomatic convenience with regard to South Africa? Notoriously, and rather crankily, Manning spent a large part of his retirement, through inter alia his chairmanship of the British South Africa Society, defending on legal and moral grounds South Africa’s right to pursue its policy of apartheid. It would be reasonable to infer from this that there was a large element of racial prejudice in his hostility to the emerging, highly heterogeneous, world order. It should be noted, however, that Manning’s conception of apartheid was highly abstract. Failing to comply with some of his own analytical strictures (‘adelphi’, ‘SOBs’… see below), he took its literal meaning seriously, and the doctrines of Malan and Verwoerd at face value. In Nature he interprets apartheid as a means of cultural defence, no more a product of racial prejudice than Afrikaner resistance to the Uitlanders in 1899. One of the virtues of the British Commonwealth was that it offered a degree of political unity while allowing the distinctive personality of the groups it comprised to remain largely in tact (cf. la mission civilitrice). It was this virtue that was being seriously undermined by Nehru and other Asian and African nationalist leaders, and also by an increasingly craven West, eager to appease the newly independent states--whose stance on apartheid he regarded as purely opportunistic--and prepared to abandon old friendships and ties of wartime comradeship in the process. Manning’s near-obsession with Goa, therefore, does not admit of easy explanation.  Rather, it derives from a matrix of psycho-cultural-historical causes, the complexity of which I can only hint at here.

With regard to broader international events and phenomena, the best one can say is that Nature contains an excellent chapter on the place of the League of Nations and the United Nations in international society (or, as Manning called them, ‘League-Number-One’ and ‘League-Number Two’). This is one of the best short accounts of the relationship between these organisations and their wider social milieu in the literature, and should be required reading for all students of international institutions. But even here the analysis is abstract, conceptual, and linguistic rather than concrete.

Part, but only a small part, of the explanation for this lack of attention to then-current affairs, is that the work is a product of a long and slow process of evolution, reflecting in the sixties ‘thinking done, or at any rate embarked upon, in the twenties’. The main explanation is that Manning conceived the book, in many ways one of the most difficult books in the front-rank of the field, as a work for absolute beginners.

A First Year Primer?

One of the many ironies that dawn upon one reading this book forty years after its initial publication is that although intended for beginners, very few beginners actually read it. This is largely due to the fact that many teachers of the subject to first years, if they are aware of the book (and not all are, given the diverse background from which many IR teachers are presently drawn), have judged it too difficult, too abstract, and too idiosyncratic to be put in a prominent place on their reading lists. For Manning it was a work of ‘propaedeutics’, a ‘first year primer’, ‘not an XYZ book but an ABC’. If the book were to be proscribed to first year students, but prescribed for either sixth-formers or graduates, but not for both, it was to the former, he felt, that it would be of ‘most timely help’.

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        Today this strikes one as wildly, and from a historico-pedagogical viewpoint, fascinatingly optimistic. A reflection, no doubt, of the Olympian educational ideal that Manning imbibed during his formation as a pupil at Bishops, one of  South Africa’s leading public schools, and as a Rhodes Scholar at Brasenose College, Oxford, during the golden era of British imperial hegemony before the Great War. For The Nature of International Society is an essay in ontology, of international society in particular and the social world in general; and the sort of students who are attracted to the study of international relations at the ripe young age ...

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