By a world society we understand not merely a degree of interaction

linking all parts of the human community to one another, but a sense of
common interest and common values on the basis of which common
rules and institutionsmay be built. The concept of world society, in this
sense, stands to the totality of global social interaction as our concept of
international society stands to the concept of the international system.
(Bull 1977a:279)
From international to world society:57
In substantive terms, pluralism describes thin international societies
where the shared values are few, and the prime focus is on devising
rules for coexistence within a framework of sovereignty and
non-intervention. Solidarism is about thick international societies in
whichawider range of values is shared, and where the rules will be not
only about coexistence, but also about the pursuit of joint gains and the
management of collective problems in a range of issue-areas. Thinking
about pluralismand solidarism in terms of thin and thick sets of shared
values runs usefully in parallel with Ruggies (1998: 33) constructivist
understanding of international systems:
the building blocks of international reality are ideational as well as
material . . . At the level of the international polity, the concept of structure
in social constructivism is suffused with ideational factors. There
can be no mutually comprehensible conduct of international relations,
constructivists hold, without mutually recognised constitutive rules,
resting on collective intentionality. These rules may be more or less
thick or thin . . . Similarly they may be constitutive of conflict or
competition.
If one takes this view, then pluralism and solidarism become ends
of a spectrum. They represent degrees of difference rather than contradictory
positions. This position also allows one to keep solidarism as a
feature of international society (i.e. a society of states) and therefore to
59
From International to World Society?
keep distinct the idea of international society as being about states, and
world society as about non-state actors.World society encompasses the
individual and transnational domains, and it remains a question to be
investigated as to whether and how these tie into the development of
solidarism. Contrary to the Vincentians, world society becomes not the
necessary absorption of international society intoawider universe of individual
and transnational rights, but a distinct domain of actorswhose
relationshipwith the statedomain needs tobeunderstood.Amongother
things, this perspective requires closer attention to the question of what
the shared norms, rules and institutions that define solidarismand pluralism
are about, and what values they represent. Answers to that may
well condition the type of relationship between international and world
society that develops, and whether and how individuals and transnationals
become players in solidarism; more on this in chapter 5.
Up to 60
65-68
91-93

But on a deeper reading of globalisation, GCS is itself part of the
process. Capitalism is a principal mover in the process of globalisation,
but not the only one, and not necessarily the principal definition of
what globalisation is about. In this reading, interestingly prefigured by
Rosenau (1990), the key is the development of powerful people and a
consequent across-the-board shift in the nature of authority structures
and political relationships. Starting fromthe industrial revolution, it has
served the interests of both state and capital to have better-educated,
healthier and wealthier citizens and workers. Only by improving the
capacities of their citizens/workers could the state increase its power
and capital increase its returns. But as more and more individuals have
become more capable, they have become less subservient to authority,
more willing to define their own agendas, and more able to create their
ownnodes and networks in pursuit of those agendas. This development
underpinned the flowering ofWestern democracy during the twentieth
century, and has a certain teleological force. The question is not only the
happy liberal one of what happens if democratising and decentralising
forces begin seriously to transcend the state, but also, post 11 September,
the darker Hobbesian one ofwhat happens if powerful people express
themselves by organising crime and pursuing extremist agendas? (103)
coclusions 107
149
Collective security, human rights and environmentalism still represent
the aspirational more than the empirical side of solidarism a campaign
for collective self-improvement of the human condition. There
have been some practical developments, but these are small in relation
to what most solidarists would like to see. What strikes me as peculiar,
is the way in which the focus on human rights has resulted in the
almost complete ignoring of two other areas in which real solidarist developments
have been most spectacular: the pursuit of joint gain and
the pursuit of knowledge. (170)
171

158 TNA Conclusions

Finally, the reflectivist approach appears to be as much an ontological or
metatheoretical claim for the social constructivist, generative approach to identity
and interests as anything else. Recall that Wendt himself emphasized that the
generative view of structure is a metatheoretical position devoid of substance. To
argue that anarchy is what states make of it is not in itself a statement on the
quality of this social construction. By this view, then, the primary contribution of
the reflectivist approach as concerns agency values is to emphasize that these
values are learned and transformed through social interaction. (111-agent, structure,and ir from ontology)

The conceptions of the person that we will use for this original
position are persons as producers, consumers, and owners of internationally
generated economic goods and bads (hence this original
position is corporatist). These economic roles are defined by their
interests. Producers have interests in income, employment opportunity
and stability, decent working conditions, and control over hours
of labor. Consumers have interests in the variety, availability, and
affordability of goods and services but also in avoiding dangerous
products and pollution. Owners have interests in maximizing profit
or shareholder value. The individuals inhabiting each of these three
roles also have generic interests simply as human beings: interests in
their continued health, and in developing and maintaining basic
abilities rationally to direct their own activities. I will further assume
that there is a limited partial ranking among these interests: for
example, physical health is more important than the consumption
of luxuries. (Global Justice, 77)
79
226
Given a recent wave of celebration of civil society as the potential
cure to all ills of democracy, it is important to recall that the dominant
forces in transnational civil society remain businesses and organizations
tied to business and capital. Businesses are important in
ways distinct from marketsthey operate as institutions that organize
much of the lives of employees and coordinate production as
well as exchange on several continents. The business dimension of
global civil society is not limited to multinational corporations; it
includes nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that set accountancy
standards and provide for arbitration and conflict resolution,
a business press, lawyers, and a range of consultants. The point is not
whether this is good or bad, but that this is civil society on a global
scale but not totally unlike what Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson
saw on a local and national scale in the late eighteenth century. Civil
society meant then and still means the extension of more or less selforganizing
relationships on a scale beyond the intentional control of
individual actors and outside of the strict dictates of states. It offers
many freedomsbut so do states. Neither is automatically liberal or
democratic. (307)
282(puzzle)
Once international norms are in place they empower and legitimate the
transnational networks and coalitions that promote them. Daniel Thomas argues
that nonstate actors that are otherwise weak can exploit the legitimacy
inherent in international norms to construct transnational networks and
transform prevailing conceptions of state interests. In this way, he says, networks
serve . . . as teachers of norms to reluctant states. A number of the
chapters stress the constitutive aspects of the norms. Networks promote
norms that not only stress the appropriate behavior, but help define the very
notion of what a state is. Thus, Karen Brown Thompson stresses the ways in
which the norm about womens human rights reconstitutes the boundaries between
the public and the private spheres. Human rights norms also demarcate
the boundaries of the appropriate limits of international intervention and define
the behavior that constitutes the necessary attributes of the liberal state. (restructuring,16)
289

The expanding global backlash (Broad 2002) unites around certain
common themes, such as those expressed in the Turning Point ads: Globalization
is the process, dominated by greedy corporations, of imposing a
rapacious economic system bound to produce social inequality, cultural
blight, and environmental devastation. Neoliberal globalization is exploitative
and therefore unjust. (Lechner, 24)
Unlike companies, they
do little to market themselves, and many reject marketing in principle;
unlike states, they cannot impose or coerce, and most find the very notion
of coercion abhorrent. They focus on developing principles, rules, ethical
codes, technical know-how, philosophical precepts, and many other types
of world-cultural abstractions without being restricted or hampered by the
pragmatic economic and political exigencies that face companies and states. (123)
134
This thesis has an affinity with the critical view of multinational corporations
exemplified in our brief discussion of Sklairs work (1995) in
Chapter 2. As he and others maintain, TNCs (transnational corporations)
seek to quench their thirst for profits by mobilizing their superior resources
to create similar practices, tastes, and lifestyles. The world culture they
create is a culture of consumerism, not only adapted to but actually generating
the demands of the world market. Rather than cultivating distinct tradifferentiating
world culture 139
ditions, individuals become uniformly attached to commodities to satisfy
material desires. This amounts to a kind of ideological take-over of the
world; some have dubbed it Coca-Colanization. 140
Over the last two decades of the twentieth century mainstream approaches
have been subjected to criticisms from a number of different
perspectives. Once the state was brought back in to both social theory
and international relations theory in the 1980s, this opened up consideration
of how states, rather than being pre-social facts, are constituted
through social, political and cultural practices. From this perspective, the
state is seen as a normative order, and it is intersubjectively constructed
normative values that provide the unifying standards and symbols that
legitimate authority and allow us to perceive the state as a unitary and
sovereign actor. Thus, sovereignty is negotiated out of interaction within
intersubjectively identifiable communities6 and it is this institution which
legitimates the state as an agent in international social life. As Michael
Walzer notes, unity can only ever be symbolised,7 but it is through the
claim to sovereignty made on the states behalf, and how this is articulated (31, state identities)
From a constructivist perspective, understanding the construction
of identities and interests is the key to understanding political
action and change in the international system. Thus constructivists seek
to trace how intersubjectively constituted identities at both the domestic
and international levels translate into political action. Furthermore,
identities themselves come out of and are rearticulated in political
practice they are both motivations for, and outcomes of, action. Social
agents and social structures are viewed as mutually constitutive, so as
Alexander Wendt argues, while social structures influence the identities
and actions of agents, social structures are only instantiated by the
practices of agents.28 (37)
Wendt draws a helpful distinction between the corporate and social
aspects of state identities but he then goes on to argue that although corporate
identities do indeed have histories, a theory of the states system
need no more explain the existence of states than one of society need
explain that of people.29 He argues that the domestic aspect of state
identity construction can be bracketed off, as it is the interaction of states
with other already existing states which constructs the social identity of
states. This view rests on an isomorphism which assumes that individuals
in society and states in the states system can be treated as like units,
but the very fact that the corporate identity of the state is just that
corporate and not an individual identity, means that we need to look
at how this identity is constructed, how the we to which Wendt refers is
constituted and maintained. In this respect, Wendts systemic constructivism
differs little from the way mainstream theories of international
relations bracket off identities and interests.30 As a consequence, his conception of the relationship between agents
and structures is relatively
narrow, and his model of world politics remains static in the absence of
any non-systemic sources of state identity such as domestic political
culture.31 This reliance on the systemic level alone undermines Wendts
constructivist approach so that he is only marginally better equipped to
explain the constitution of states or the states system than neorealists (37)
One crucial aspect of this
relationship is investigated in the following four chapters, in which I trace
the construction of corporate state identities, and how the practices by
which corporate identities are constructed also constitute the boundaries
between states as moral boundaries. In these practices, elites draw on the
cultural and symbolic resources of their time and place in order to recast
and reinvent collective identities within the state. (38)
International norms do indeed arise out of the social interaction of
states, but Wendt ignores the fact that it is through this interaction that
the society of states evolves standards of legitimate corporate state behaviour.
34 International society thus plays an active role in state-building,
as international principles of legitimate state action define, in part, how
corporate state-building should occur. What is more, this is a two-way relationship.
As the criteria of political legitimacy within states have changed,
and with them the domestic principles which underpin corporate identity
construction, so too have the international principles that structure the
state system. As chapter 6 explains, international norms that set the standard
of legitimate state behaviour can be understood as both a response to
corporate state-building and part of societal state-building.