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The first part of the conclusion summarizes the findings from the historical cases. These fall into four categories. The first is where a strong world society constituency is able to influence the policy of a leading state, or group of leading states, as in the case of the slave trade or social justice in 1919. In the second case, the same holds true, but it is actually the leading states that proactively encourage world society action, as with human rights at San Francisco. In the third case, as at The Hague, there was no specific state ‘norm entrepreneur’. Fourthly, there is the negative case where the state sponsor was not strong enough to have the norm accepted, as with Japan and racial equality in 1919. Theoretically, the argument points to a degree of normative assimilation between international and world society, and a corresponding degree of social integration. The relationship is one of complementariness rather than displacement. This develops English School discussions of the topic. However, there is a warning that past coalitions between world society groups and leading states — that seem to have stimulated humanitarian norms — could in the future promote less attractive norms.

This chapter examines the question of what triggered the emergence of informal groups of states in the form of the advisory committees in the 1950s, and argues that their establishment has to be seen against the background of great power tensions in the Security Council. The early stages of UN peacekeeping saw a shift of governance from the Security Council to the Secretary-General and the General Assembly, which fostered the emergence of informal ad hoc groupings of states. The formation of advisory committees reflected the desire of the Secretary-General to strengthen his voice vis-á-vis the Security Council. When the lack of unanimity of the permanent members prevented the Council from assuming its responsibilities, the General Assembly took charge by recommending collective measures. However, when the Security Council was able to act, its resolutions and mandates entrusted to the Secretary-General often reflected a political compromise based on the lowest common denominator among its members. The workings of the two advisory committees established in the context of crises at the Suez Canal (1956-67) and in the Congo (1960-4) illustrate these points further.

Unlike the other cases, the two conferences held at The Hague are not normally identified with a single normative principle. Nonetheless, the meetings were characterized by a great emphasis upon humanitarian concerns, and also upon the need for the acts of state representatives to be endorsed by a wider public. This was best captured by the language of the ‘public conscience’ employed during the conference and embodied in the famous Martens clause. The first conference was held in response to the Imperial Rescript of Tsar Nicholas II, and the subject matter covered disarmament, the laws of war, and international arbitration. The meetings were the subject of major attention from a variety of popular pressure groups, much of it orchestrated by the international peace movement, and publicists such as W. T. Stead. The long term significance, however, lay in the idea that there was a wider public constituency to which international legitimacy principles had to appeal.

As part of the ending of the Cold War, a summit of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe agreed the Charter of Paris in 1990. Amongst other things, it expressed a commitment to democracy ‘as the only system of government of our nations’. If international society is considered to be pluralistic, this was a puzzling development: it was making an international principle of legitimacy out of a form of internal government. The chapter attempts to explain this development in terms of the role of world society, in the context of the dramatic events of the end of the Cold War. It shows that the commitment to democracy served obvious state purposes, but also responded to a wider social constituency of expectations. This case was pressed by a transnational network acting in support of democratic principles, and which organized parallel summits to shadow the CSCE process. This also responded to developments in international law where some theorists, such as Thomas Franck, claimed to have identified an emerging democratic entitlement.

This is the first of three chapters that set out the differing contexts through which the dilemma in the laws of war over the distinction between lawful and unlawful combatants can be viewed: political and diplomatic (this chapter), social (Chapter 2) and intellectual (Chapter 3). The narrative begins by summarizing the diplomatic history of the conferences at Brussels in 1874, at the Hague in 1899 and 1907, and at Geneva in 1949. While the negotiations of the laws of war proved successful in many respects, they consistently failed to agree on a common legal understanding of a lawful combatant.

Sir Harold Nicolson’s international thought, more specifically, his thinking on international order, diplomacy, a united Europe, world government, and global peace, was shaped by his upbringing in a diplomatic household, an Oxford classical education, and two decades as a diplomat in Europe and Asia Minor. Especially significant were his Foreign Office service in London during the First World War and his involvement in peacemaking at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, which culminated in the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Nicolson also made important contributions at the Lausanne Conference (1922–23), en poste in Germany between 1927 and 1929, and as an anti-appeasement MP prior to the Second World War. His fifty-year career, from the time of the Balkan Wars to Suez, represented an attempt to resolve the question of how best to secure international stability: through power politics, idealism, or an amalgam of realist and idealist approaches.

This chapter includes recollections by Elias Burstein about his meetings with L. V. Keldysh in 1960s. It describes research links between US and USSR condensed matter physicists over four decades ago, and the difficulty of organizing joint research meetings at that time.

Examines the internationalization of trusteeship as it arose in the context of British colonial administration in Africa, the Berlin and Brussels Conferences, and the experience of the Congo Free State. It is out of these experiences and events that the idea of trusteeship emerges as a recognized and accepted practice of international society. The chapter has five sections: the first discusses British attitudes towards Africa; the second looks at Lord Lugard's ‘dual mandate’ principle of colonial administration—the proposal that the exploitation of Africa's natural wealth should reciprocally benefit the industrial classes of Europe and the native population of Africa; the third discusses the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 and the Brussels Conference of 1890; the fourth describes trusteeship in relation to the Congo Free State. The fifth section of the chapter points out the progression from the idea of trusteeship in the East India Company's dominion in India—in which the improvement of native peoples would come about rapidly and result in institutional forms and practices that closely resembled those in Europe—to a new incrementalist approach in which societies and people were thought of as occupying different rungs on a progressive ‘ladder of civilization’, and, depending on their stage of development on this ladder, were suited to different forms of constitution.

The place and purpose of trusteeship in the post‐Second World War world order aroused passions and suspicions that were no less pronounced than those which threatened to disrupt the peace negotiations at Versailles two decades earlier, and these tensions, which divided the US and Britain in particular, emanated from a fundamental disagreement over the purpose of trusteeship and its relation to the future of empire in world affairs. British commentators on empire tended to interpret the idea of trusteeship in the context of an imperial tradition that dated back to Edmund Burke's interest in the affairs of the East India Company, invoking trusteeship as a principle against which to judge colonial administration and, therefore, understood the tutelage of dependent peoples as a justification of empire. Americans, who were born of a very different colonial and political experience, were a great deal less inclined to see trusteeship as a justification of empire than as an alternative to the perpetuation of empire. Interrogates the claims that structured the terms of this debate, how they shaped the purpose of trusteeship as contemplated in the Charter of the UN, and the ideas upon which the anti‐colonial movement seized in order to destroy the legitimacy of trusteeship in international society. There are five sections: The Atlantic Charter and the Future of Empire; The Reform of Empire; Trusteeship and the Charter of the UN; The End of Empire; and Human Equality and the Illegitimacy of Trusteeship.

Taking up the tension between democracy and science, the discussion in this chapter seeks to reformulate the relationship through the social constructionist perspective, emphasizing science as a socio-political activity; rather than taking scientific practices to be the ideal for politics, the question asked is to what degree scientific practices might be democratized. Towards this end (and after first examining the challenge posed by democracy), the discussion outlines the contributions of citizen participation to both policy-making and collaborative inquiry; by transforming citizens’ ways of knowing and acting, participatory deliberation can build new political cultures capable of preserving and extending decision-making capabilities. Against this background the more challenging question of the citizen’s ability to engage collaboratively in the scientific inquiry process is considered. The discussion then turns to numerous participatory experiments that more specifically illustrate the possibilities and practices of citizen inquiry, in particular outlining the consensus conference developed by the Danish Board of Technology (which has emerged as the most elaborate form of citizens’ panel) and the methodology of participatory policy analysis. Citizen participation is not advanced as a cure-all for economic and social problems, nor is deliberation or argumentation meant to direct attention away from questions of interest and power, but it does hold out the possibility of bringing forth new knowledge and ideas capable of creating and legitimizing new interests, reshaping understanding of existing interests, and, in the process, influencing the political pathways along which power and interest travel.

By the time of Charles Wesley's death in 1788 his public and Methodist profile outside London and Bristol was greatly diminished. His relationship with his brother had been strained since the beginning of the 1750s, while some important preachers expressed little sadness at his death. Charles Wesley's Church‐Methodist viewpoint did not, however, die with him; many lay people and some preachers retained a dual loyalty to both Methodism and the Church of England and carried on the struggle into the 1790s and after. The legacy of Church Methodism was an inclusive 19^th century Wesleyan denomination whose members were at liberty also to regard themselves as Anglicans if they wished. Also, as late as the 1880s, important features of Wesleyan Methodist polity and worship referred back to the movement's origins within the Church of England.

By 1749 Methodism had put down firm roots in communities across the British Isles. The movement's size and the increasing sophistication of its structure and worship life imposed a distance with the parent Church of England and this was worsened by the hostility of many Anglicans. Some Methodist preachers started to react against the Church and also against the discipline imposed by the Wesley brothers. The rising tension boiled over in 1754 when preachers in London and Reading administered the Sacraments contrary to Anglican practice. The resulting crisis was worsened by Charles Wesley's suspicion that his brother was sympathetic to the separatists. John eventually decided against separation from the Church of England, but his brother's fears for the future were not eased, establishing a pattern for the future of his relationship with John Wesley and the Methodist movement.

After retiring from the itinerancy in 1756, Charles Wesley exercised a localized preaching and pastoral ministry in Bristol, and then from 1771, in London. He also established himself as the foremost member of an unofficial pro‐Anglican Church‐Methodist party that included some of the wealthiest and most influential lay people in the movement. The strength of this pro‐Anglican feeling, which has often been ignored by Methodist scholarship, can be seen to best effect by close examination of local reactions in London and Yorkshire to the Norwich sacramental dispute of 1760.