Original citation

Introduction
As discussed in Chapter 1, the years between 1914 and 1991 were 
disturbed, even ‘dark’, ones that had a very marked impact on the 
way in which IR developed as an academic subject. But how did the 
international system arrive at that point? Was it an inevitable outcome of 
historical events? And what forces produced an international system that, 
by the outbreak of the First World War, was dominated by Europe and 
Europeans? 
In this chapter, we will try to answer some of these questions by looking 
at the history of IR – a branch of history called international history 
(IH). We will not be able to cover the whole of IH in one chapter. Nor do 
we need to. Instead, we will focus on a few specific instances that will 
inform your understanding of current events. It is vitally important to 
look at the present through the prism of the past. This is partly because 
we need to understand the deeper sources of what became the extended 
crisis of the twentieth century, and partly to alert students of world politics 
to something they should never lose sight of: although nothing stays the 
same forever, some of the key problems in world politics have remained 
remarkably durable.
Rethinking the ‘international’: the English School and 
international history
Stop and read section 1 of Chapter 2, pp.36–37
What distinguishes the English School’s approach to IR from that of the Realist 
approach?
Before looking at a few events from international history, we first need to 
think about the notion of the international itself. At what point in time – 
and where – did ‘the international’ actually emerge as a way of thinking 
about a specific kind of relationship? There are two rather different 
answers to this fundamental question. 

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Chapter 2: Europe and the emergence of international society
31
The first, more traditional response argues that it is impossible to conceive 
of something called ‘the international’ without there being something 
national against which to define it. Both terms are therefore intimately 
connected to ideas of the nation and the state. According to this line of 
historical reasoning, we can only begin to think of the international – and 
IR – after the rise of sovereign states in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century 
Europe. According to this definition, the international can therefore be 
understood as a description of the state system, first developed in 
post-Reformation Europe, inhabited by autonomous political units, and 
organised according to a collection of shared principles and practices such 
as sovereignty and non-intervention. These principles and practices – 
known as institutions by members of the ES – bring some level of order 
to IR in what is otherwise an anarchic system. This institutional order, 
based on shared principles and practices, is what Hedley Bull refers to as