International and world society: toward an English School theory of legitimate supranational systems

This dissertation seeks to contribute an English School theory of legitimate supranational systems to the literature. It places the legitimacy question of such systems around the School’s key concepts of international and world society, and examines the three different interrelationships of these concepts as proposed by the School within the context of the European Union. In the empirical section, a critical moment in the history of European integration, the drafting of the Constitutional Treaty (2002-3), is analyzed with a view to determining which particular interrelationship best fits our theoretical frameworks. It concludes by suggesting that while the moralistic perspective within the English School is superior to the culturalist and communitarian alternatives; even this does not offer a full scheme to understand the process of building legitimate supranational systems. The main problem, the study contends, is the omission of the state in the School’s theoretical framework, and, to that end, Neo-Weberian approaches into the nature of the state need to be injected into the English School account for a thorough picture of how and why a supranational system becomes legitimate to its members. Through this Neo-Weberian link, the thesis achieves its purpose of formulating a more coherent English School approach to legitimate supranational systems