Sociology is a scientific study of social relations either at the elementary level of interpersonal relations or the wider study of large groups, classes, nations and civilizations, or to take a current expression global societies (Aron 1967a : 16)

In the first francophone Treatise on international relations ever to be edited, Frederic Ramel finished the chapter which he devoted to “sociology” by the following: “Undeniably, the questions concerning the existence and the relevance of these national tendencies [in International Relations] – French Touch, English School, etc. – will follow the path of sociology” (Balzacq, Ramel 2013: 518). This statement is most true for the French ‘Touch’, which one of the characteristic features is the development, right after Second World War, of a sociological tradition of international relations.

The discipline of International Relations became academically recognized in Great Britain after the First World War, with the development of liberal institutionalism and the creation of the first chair of international politics at the University of Aberystwyth. The discipline continued to develop after the Second World War in the United States with the blossoming of realism, which has since become the dominant paradigm. International Relations is originally therefore an Anglo-Saxon discipline which studies the international milieu, which is anarchical, that is to say, a lack of State’s superior authority (Bull 1977).

This structural insecurity has led the first Internationalists to give conflict a central position in their reflections. Therefore, diplomacy, collective security, commerce, law or even institutions per se are all seen in the light of anarchy and war. The increasing institutionalization of international relations plus globalization and transnationalism have led to the enlarging of the epistemological platform of the discipline to add sociology besides of philosophy, law, history, economics and political science. Studying international relations sociologically means considering them as “social facts”, which take place in a “milieu: the international society”, which is one particular form of society (Vernant 1952: 299).

In the Anglo-Saxon tradition of International Relations, the sociological contribution appears mostly from the 1970s, even though some precursors had already opened the way. This American sociology of international relations studies, in the Behaviorist tradition, the emergence of new actors, integration processes, transnational flows, and then from the 1980s with the development of the Constructivist approach, representations, identities, social roles and, with its post-positivist variant, the place of theory in International Relations.

In the history of the discipline in France, this interest for the study of sociology of international relations appears earlier, maybe because of the French origins of sociology.Footnote 1 This sociological approach takes a different path from that taken in diplomatic history by the analysis of “deep rooted forces” produced by Jean Baptiste Duroselle and Pierre Renouvin or those followed in law by Robert Reslob or Georges Scelle.

This French tradition of the sociology of international relations was founded by four important figures in sociology: Emile Durkheim, whose ground-breaking work was inspired by pre-sociologists, Marcel Mauss, himself inspired by Durkheim, Marcel Merle, who is part of the positivist tradition of Durkheim, and Raymond Aron, who introduced in this tradition the German sociology and notably Max Weber’s work.

Therefore, while in France international relations have been a subject which has primarily been the concern of historians and lawyers, interested in the study of historic facts and international norms, and while in the Anglo-American tradition it’s the moment of the founders’ debates to the discipline, between Idealists and Realists, and then between Ancients and the Moderns, these founding figures go on to produce an original sociological analysis of international relations. This will terminate with the emergence of two schools which, even if they have points in common, distinguish themselves by the objects they study and the methods they use.

How this French tradition of sociology of international relations has been constituted historically? Who are the precursors, who are founders and the continuators of this tradition? What are their respective specificities and contributions? How has this tradition been divided into two schools which study different objects, interstates and transnational relations, each with their own methods?

Revisiting works of the pre-sociologists to find in their reflections traces of a sociological thought on international relations may seem at first sight as a useless task considering the secondary place that international relations take in their works. However, such a study permits us to appreciate certain elements which bear witness to the existence of an embryonic sociology of international relations. The First and the Second World Wars will give a rise to this embryonic sociological thought regarding international relations through the reflections of Durkheim and Mauss. Their precursors work announced the foundation of a French tradition of the sociology of international relations whose the two emblematic figures will later be Raymond Aron and Marcel Merle. These two founders are the source of inspiration of two approaches: the first one analyses the sociology of international relations exclusively from the interstates point of view, the second one proposes a sociology of transnational relations. These two schools, which will be presented separately in this article, will produce numerous researchers whose work is of great interest for the discipline of International Relations.Footnote 2

Pre-Sociologists and the Object of International Relations

Pre-sociologists’ interest in questions of external affairs is evident with the rise of industrialization which brought about major political, economic and social change. These first sociological thoughts on relations between nations, go to make up the foundation of the French tradition of the sociology of international relations. The internationalists who later will follow the path of studying international relations from a sociological point of view “are, the heirs and successors of the so called pre-sociologists” (Aron 1967a: 15).

Montesquieu is the first pre-sociologist where we observe sociologically biased thoughts on international relations. His place as precursor is debated by certain sociologists such as Raymond Aron who sees him having the specific intention of being a doctrinarian of sociology (Aron 1967a: 27). Durkheim also sees him as being the founder who “has established the principles of a new science” (Durkheim 1966: 28). The sociological intentions of Montesquieu, in L’Esprit des lois, in accordance with Aristotelian tradition, is as evident in his analysis of political regimes as in his analysis of different causes which influence the organization of societies. His thought is a thought of entirety, ambitious. It unites a theory of politics and political sociology which permit a “setting out of the main problems of general sociology” (Aron 1967a: 43; see also Birnbaum 1970). This “politological” analysis integrates at the same time considerations on the internal political system, the political regimes and their effects on the law; “necessary relationships which originate from the very nature of things”, and also on States external affairs.

In spite of his interest in foreign politics, Montesquieu does not differentiate between internal milieu and international milieu. He considers there is a continuity between men’s life of and that of nations. War, in itself, does not possess a particular characteristic as with Hobbes, where contrary to the internal hierarchical order it becomes anarchy between States. It is a social phenomenon which one finds just as easily between individuals as between States. For Montesquieu, the first law of nature is therefore not war, as the author of Leviathan thinks, but rather peace resulting from the “feeling of weakness” of the man in the state of nature. War, then, does not derive from human nature. It finds its origins in society and in political regimes. It is useless, therefore, to try to eliminate it definitively. It starts when men come together to form a society, this is also what Rousseau thinks, when the feeling of weakness and equality of the state of nature disappear.

Montesquieu admits that since violence is always possible in society, individuals more often than not use tribunals to settle their disputes, and thus assure their own preservation and their property, by the rule of law. He observes that outside society the constraining force of the rule of law is not the same. The heterogeneous nature of nations and political regimes limits its effects. In order to ensure their survival, States use defensive wars (wars of conservation) in accordance to the natural law. Montesquieu follows the line of thought already opened by Aristotle and considers that the cause of foreign wars could be found in the nature of political regimes. Every regime, according to the principle on which it is based and the size of its territory, possesses a particular relationship with war. Despotic regimes, which have vast territories, are based on the principle of fear and equality between of citizens in face of fear. These immoderate regimes wage wars of conquest. Monarchies, which have territories of average size, are based on a principle of honor and inequality between citizens. These moderate regimes tend toward empire and lead wars of extension. Republics, which have small territories are based on the principle of virtue and equality of its citizens before the law. These regimes tend to be more pacific and moderate. Republics frequently lead wars of defense to protect themselves from other States. Montesquieu uses this idea to say that “small societies have a greater right to make war than bigger ones because they more often exposed to the fear of being destroyed” (Montesquieu 1831: 263).

This “right” to go to war on the part of republican regimes is moderated by the principle of separation of powers that govern them. In so far, as a republic is organized in such a way as to enable “power to constrain power”, the power to make war cannot be the decision of one man or a group of individuals who might, abusively, act with the aim of satisfying their own interests regarding for prestige or power. The political freedom at the basis of a republican regime cannot exist without a “peace of mind” that the government has to guarantee to all citizens. In a republic, the purpose of diplomacy and war is to assure citizens’ security in order to allow their political freedom. Montesquieu also explores the question of creating international institutions destined to prevent or limit the effects of war.

The structural and functional analysis of Montesquieu, with its perspective of the importance of political regimes to explain conflict (internal and external), emphasizes the particular nature of republican regimes, the institutionalization of international relations as a factor limiting and preventing wars as well as the benefits of cooperation. These analyses bring to mind the ideas developed by liberal Institutionalists after the First World War.

Montesquieu’s thoughts on international relations and war were followed up by Alexis de Tocqueville, also one of the founding figures of sociology (Aron 1967a: 223–303; Elster 2009, see also Leca 2011). There is a central theme to his thesis: the end of the Old regime implies the end of inequality and the rise of “equalization of social conditionsˮ of individuals. Tocqueville is not just an observer of social and international reality, but also an acting magistrate and after 1849 Minister for Foreign Affairs. He often touches on the subject of international affairs in his major work, De la démocratie en Amérique, in his unfinished book, L’Ancien régime et la revolution, in his correspondence and also political addresses and writings.

With Tocqueville, as with Montesquieu, foreign policy and war are explained by internal factors of the society. These “subjects are national by nature, that is to say, they are to do with the nation concerned and cannot be handled by one man or by the assembly which represents the majority of the whole nation” (Tocqueville 1848 vol. 2: 331). He also establishes a relationship between the political regime and the function of war. “Feudal aristocracy was born from war and for war; power was to be found in arms and maintained by arms; the most important thing therefore was military courage; and it was natural to glorify it above all else” (Tocqueville 1848 vol. 4: 146). In a democracy things were quite the opposite.

In Chapter 22 of De la démocratie en Amérique, Tocqueville formulates a rule according to which the more equal the conditions between individuals are, the rarer warlike passions become. However, even if an increase in equality leads to a decrease in warlike passions, which means there is a natural tendency for democratic peoples to prefer peace, there are dangers overshadowing democratic regimes.Footnote 3

Is war inevitable? For Tocqueville war is an “accident to which all peoples are prone” (Tocqueville 1848 vol. 4: 206). With this argument he precedes Durkheim’s thesis which presents war as an abnormal pathology of the international system. War is also sometimes a necessary evil, a remedy to ills of democratic societies. It can have an appeasing effect on the ambitions of armies and the risks of military revolutions, as also on the individualistic withdrawal of its citizens. Tocqueville considers that the extension of the principle of equality to other States, in spite of a heterogeneity of languages, behavior and laws, favors the emergence of the same fear of war. Equality, because this pushes societies to develop commerce and industrialization and leads to a convergence of interests between nations, produces interdependence so that no State can “inflict on others the evils which are their own, and that everyone finishes by considering war as a calamity almost greater for the vanquishers as for the vanquished” (Tocqueville 1848 vol.4: 242). He deduces that democracies have less chance of making war between themselves because their interests, their needs and their public beliefs are linked one to the other.Footnote 4

Both Montesquieu and Tocqueville figures bear witness to a sociology, inspired by English and American history which seeks to “understand modernity”, that is to say the logics of “decomposition” and “re-composition” intern and international (Baechler 2004: 153). In France, two complementary movements explain the development of sociology: the French Revolution and the industrial revolution, as well as the specialization of knowledge (see Nisbet 1984: 20).

The thinking of Saint Simon, and more extensively the socialist ideas which develop in France in the nineteenth century, illustrate the interest of sociology for the study of these political, social and economic transformations. This “social physiology” has influenced French sociology (Comte, Durkheim and Mauss notably). For Marcel Mauss, notes Frederic Ramel, “the emergence of a positive tradition of international relations can be traced back to Saint Simon and his disciples, notably Enfantin and Littré” (Ramel 2006: 102). Saint Simon’s study of the industrialization of society sets out the basis of a scientific law of history which foreshadows Comte’s law of three states, and an antagonism between the classes which bring to mind the Marxism. For him, industry is the motor of social progress. “All by industry, all just for it” one reads at the beginning of L’Industrie ou Discussions politiques, morales et philosophiques, dans l’intérêt de tous les hommes livrés à des travaux utiles et indépendants. Saint Simon thus analyses “revolutionary forces” at work since the fifteenth century which lead to the end of the theological and feudal system (Saint Simon 1965: 33–34). In the eighteenth century, he observes the beginnings of the transition from the apparent feudal-military system (the “hornetsˮ nobles from the Old regime and the Revolution), towards an industrial/scientific system not yet in evidence, but which was in the process of developing (the “bees” which produce honey, that is to say money). According to him the real power was no longer political and military, but industrial and intellectual. In the industrial era, positive age, the temporal power of the nobility was replaced by the industrialists, and the spiritual power of the priests by scientist. In his text De la réorganisation de la société européenne, a project of positive politics, Saint Simon presents a social organization on a European scale, which allows this social change to take place beyond the frontiers of the State. He proposes the creation of a European confederation structured around institutions inspired by those of the English parliament. This organization would be the model for a larger association, universal, based on production, economic prosperity, circulation of goods and people and the development of networks of communication which would enable to overcome all the conflicts.

Saint Simon, with Fourier, Proudhon and Marx share a global, unitary and holistic conception of society which excludes all separation between the internal and external. It is marked by the seal of historic progress, transcending the State and the inherent conflict of the society by its reorganization (Catholic pattern of social organization, phalanstery, federalism, etc.). These sociologies are sociologies of change, ranging from society to international society or even global society. These sociologies approach the international object from the point of view of globalism and are strongly marked by ideologies which have a teleological purpose: the suppression of conflict and the reconciliation of society with itself, “the culmination to a final end state of the human spirit” (Aron 1967a: 97).

So what about the founder of the term sociology? What attention has he pay to international relations and to the issue of war? August Comte confirms the rise of sociology in France, a science at the same time old and new, eventually becoming independent of metaphysics and theology. The philosophy positive of August Comte, as Raymond Aron points out, is thought of unity, “human and social; of the unity of human history” which bring to mind the philosophy of Saint Simon or of Marx (Aron 1967a: 79; see also Comte 1966, 1969). It is also a thought on order whose ambition is to classify knowledge using laws, that is to say relationships we can observe between phenomena.Footnote 5

As astonishing as it may seem, this positive science which targets the reorganization of the social order does not take into consideration international relations or war. However, in the tradition of Saint Simon, various aspects of these subjects are highlighted at two different moments in the elaboration of the positive system. Firstly, in the first two lessons of the Cours de philosophie positive, when Comte presents the primitive theological and military state in his law of three states (Comte 1975). Wars of conquest which characterize the polytheistic Antiquity have led to the formation of large societies. These wars of conquest, at the Middle Ages, became defensive wars which explains, at the metaphysical age, the appearance of a relatively homogeneous Christian Europe. According to Comte, this European monarchic system, unable to form a “government of States”, depended on a precarious system of balance which did not in fact prevent war but often was the cause. Even if war is an engine of transformation of societies, work, which is a constructive activity, and industry will progressively substitute for destructive military activities. Finally, with progress, war itself will become a mean to stimulate and give importance to industry. As Saint Simon already presents it, the reorganization of the social order will finish by replacing those who hold spiritual power by scholars and those who hold temporal power by industrialists. August Comte also touches on these questions when he talks about the positive science of politics or political science, the internal and international pacification of the political orders, whose activities are completely turned towards industrialization and production. The globalization, at the scale of humanity, of this model would mean the disappearance of war and peace in international relations thanks to a universal moral order (Comte 1978). This unity of humanity, the “Great Being” (Grand Être), implies as with Saint Simon a reorganization of the society, first of all the Western society, under a federal structure. The proximity of Comte’s thinking to that of Saint Simon bears witness to a common platform of positive and socialist thinking, which one also finds with Emile Durkheim, the father of the French school of sociology.Footnote 6

Durkheim, if he agrees with research into the evolution of societies, such as that carried out by August Comte or Herbert Spencer, criticizes Comte’s reduction of sociology to one program of research: that of the law of social dynamics. On the contrary, he considers that “the very nature of positive science is that it should never be completed. The subjects considered are much too complex to ever be so. If sociology is a positive science, it is certain that it cannot be contained in one issue, and on the contrary is made up of different parts, separate sciences, corresponding to different aspects of social life” (Durkheim 1970b: 147).

In spite of this affirmation, Durkheim does not include either political sociology or the study of international relations in his classification of sciences. However, international relations and war are “'social phenomena of which it should be possible to make into a science′, but for him this science does not exist even in an embryonic state”. (Durkheim cited in Favre 1982: 8). The absence of any explicit reference to political sociology or to sociology of international relations and war does not mean that Durkheim is not interested in these questions, on the contrary. One finds in L’Année sociologique a heading entitled “Political organization”, and in volume 5 another on “War” which wasn’t retained, but the contributions on “this social phenomenon, wrongly identified as the same and unique phenomenon throughout the ages” are presented later under the heading entitled “international morals” (Favre 1982: 18). Finally, Durkheim is very interested in political geographic studies, notably these pioneer of Friedrich Ratzel. They are classified under the heading in L’Année devoted to “political morphologies”.Footnote 7 For Durkheim, political questions are a “constant preoccupation” (Lacroix 1990: 113; see also Lacroix 1981). Bernard Lacroix even considers that the whole of Durkheim’s work should be seen as a preliminary study of the genesis of political phenomena.

One can read the whole of Emile Durkheim’s work as the essay to realize this preliminary initiative which ultimately allows a better understanding of political phenomena, without it containing anything superfluous or arbitrary. In this perspective, the fact that the sociologist considers phenomena or mechanisms which we consider to be explicitly political, is of minor importance (Lacroix 1990: 114).

Lacroix and other critics of Durkheim, such as Frederic Ramel, remind with precision that the founder of French sociology and his work are inseparable from the socio-historic context of the IIIe Republic when social and political crises are linked. The Dreyfus Affair, the Commune, the defeat of 1870, make up the historical episodes which have marked Durkheim and his sociology. His works such as, La division du travail social or Le suicide are the fruit of his reflections on the impact of industrialization on society and individuals. Socialism is seen as a consequence of industrialization of society. In this context of uncertainty, Durkheim’s ambition is to contribute to the moral reform of society and to its unity. His desire to create a scientific moral - an inheritance of Charles Renouvier whose disciple he was - based on solidarity, is embedded in a positive rationalism, the purpose of which is pragmatic (“without this, these researches would not be worth one hour of one’s time”).

The sources of Durkheim’s work are two-fold. On the one hand they are to be found in his readings of the precursors of sociology, mainly Aristotle, Montesquieu and Comte.Footnote 8 With the latter he shares the ambition of producing an autonomous field of social science. The other source is that of German thinkers such as Schaeffle, Wundt, Wagner, Ihering, Tönnies, and Simmel, which Durkheim had the opportunity of discovering on a study trip to Germany in 1885 (Mucchielli 1993: 8).Footnote 9 Durkheim, just as Raymond Aron before the Second World War, had the opportunity, during his trips to Germany, to perceive the mind-set which had developed the other side of the Rhine. The First World War inspired him to write two books: L’Allemagne au dessus de tout. La mentalité allemande et la guerre, published in 1915, and Qui a voulu la guerre? Les origines de la guerre d’après les documents diplomatiques. Etudes et documents sur la guerre, published in 1915 with Ernest Denis (Durkheim and Denis 1915). Frederic Ramel draws attention to a third contribution to complete the two preceding ones. The fifth lesson of L’Education morale (Ramel 2006: 13; Durkheim 1963). This publications bear witness to the evolution of Durkheim’s stance, in that a few years previous, he would have considered that even though diplomacy and war were subjects of sociology, no such science of these social phenomena existed, not even in an embryonic state.

With these three works, Emile Durkheim changed his opinion and situated himself as founder of sociology of international relations, a few years before the official birth of the discipline of International Relations in 1919. Contrary to most of his predecessors who tackled the questions of relations between socio-political units and the question of peace and of war, Durkheim used a specific methodology, which he had developed in Les Règles de la méthode sociologique, in order to highlight the causes of the First World War.

In spite of his interest in political geography, Durkheim considers that the First World War “cannot be explained in geopolitical terms because the location of the State at the heart of its strategic environment does not constitute a prime factor. The First World War rather finds its origin in the ‘German soul’ which, despite its different expressions is characterized by an inherent state or special mentality” (Ramel 2006: 14). This soul, illustrated by the works of the German historian Heinrich von Treitschke, is marked by a will to power (Wille zur Macht) and explains why the State in international relations should continually be driven by its desire for power. This is the reason for the violation of international law and a conception of international relations which is universally (it is the essence of the State to seek power) and eternally (State as a political entity cannot be transcended) violent. The behavior of Germany is therefore explained by the all-powerful State, which is above the will of individuals and groups and above the law and morality. War between great powers, from which small States are excluded, is a normal activity because it is the expression simply of their will to power. Durkheim contests this theory of the State and this conception of international relations which for him are directly inspired by Machiavelli (Durkheim 1991: 36; Machiavel 1952). For him “this morbid hypertrophy of the will, this mania of the desire” evident in Germany at the outbreak of the First World War is a “social pathology” (Durkheim 1991:84, 85; Ramel 2006: 18–19). This behavior is abnormal because it does not take into account of the international milieu which, like the internal milieu, has judicial and moral constraints which impose on States a certain moderation in their relations (Durkheim uses terms in his sociology of international relations such as milieu, normal, pathological, which were developed initially in physiology by Claude Bernard, see notably Ramel 2006).

Durkheim, therefore makes a distinction between two milieu on the basis of what is normal and abnormal: the internal milieu, which is a place of organic solidarity and the external milieu which is mechanical.Footnote 10 Internal conflicts (revolutions, civil wars, homicides) can be considered as normal because they become legitimate as soon as social inequality is too great (Ramel 2006: 26). On the other hand, foreign wars are always the exception, an abnormal, pathological state.

Unlike his precursors, Durkheim does not see a remedy to this pathology of the international milieu. He does not propose a world State or an international society ruled by organic solidarity on humanity scale. He thus avoided the stumbling block which tripped up Saint Simon and his new catechism, and August Comte and his religion of humanity. If the solution is not to be found on an international scale, Durkheim considers that it exists at the point in society where the action of the State will favor individual development:

Formerly, the action of the State has been facing without, it is now destined to turn more and more within. Because it is by the organization of the whole and by that alone, that society will manage to arrive at the objective that it must follow above all else […]. Organize social milieu in such a way that a person can fulfill himself most completely, revise the collective machine so that it does not weigh so heavily on individuals, assure the pacific exchange of services and the competition of those idealistically inclined and of good will, all carried out peacefully together. Isn’t that enough to keep the public domain busy? (Durkheim 1950: 67)

The origins of change are not to be found outside society. They are in society and in every man. These considerations bring to mind the importance that Aristotle, Montesquieu and Tocqueville give to the State and to political regimes in the fulfillment of its citizens. The condition for change in society is the fulfillment of human individuals and this goes far wider than the international milieu. This “organization of the cult of man” must be for him the only function of the State. Durkheim’s project is far from being idealistic. On the contrary it appears to be objective and realistic. He realizes that the organization of the cult of man by the State can only happen if:

Each society lives isolated from others, without having to fear hostilities. But we know that international competition has not yet disappeared; that even civilized States live partly in fear of war in their mutual relationships. They threaten one another and since the most important duty of a State regarding its citizens is to maintain intact the collective unity, it has to organize itself with this end in mind. A State has to be ready to defend itself and also to attack if it feels menaced. But for this type of organization there must be a moral discipline different from that necessary for the cult of man. It is oriented in a different direction. It does not have the needs of the individual in mind but the collective. It is the traditional discipline which survives because the old conditions for the survival of the collective have not yet disappeared (Durkheim 1950: 67).

Marcel Mauss was the nephew and disciple of Durkheim and he would perpetuate the tradition of this French school of sociology. Obtaining a Doctorate in philosophy in 1895, he was named professor of sociology at the College of France in 1931. He was one of the pioneers of ethnology and inspired, through certain of his texts, the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss. The two World Wars were to have a profound effect on him (he had an active role as interpreter with the British troops at the time of the First World War) and were to influence his thoughts notably on war and the life of nations. As a journalist and militant socialist he would devote several newspaper articles in La Vie socialiste and in Le Populaire to these questions. This interest in international politics would also find an echo in his scientific work. In the tradition inherited from Saint Simon, Comte and Durkheim, Marcel Mauss considers that the study of human society, general sociology, must take into account both national social phenomena and international.Footnote 11 Mauss considers that, contrary to other subjects of sociology, international relations and war are the areas where work could still be done by sociology, because these are subjects of recent knowledge the study of which dates back to the jus gentium Middle Ages’. Mauss therefore “intended to found a real positive sociology of international relations because international relations are social relations of a superior type that sociology must recognizeˮ (Ramel 2006: 31; see also Mauss 1969: 455).

In his study on The nation, Mauss makes two observations.Footnote 12 The first concerns the process of forming larger and larger groups which themselves collect together both small and large societies. This process can be established as an historical law. The second bears witness to the importance that the increasing interdependence of nations has in making the constitution of these groups larger.

International phenomena, as before with national phenomena, have become more and more numerous and increasingly important. That is to say it is evident that if they have always existed, as we have seen with regard to the notion of civilization, they have, in the last thousand years of history, increased in strength and frequency. Commerce which stretches over larger areas, wider and more complete exchanges, ideas and fashions borrowed more swiftly, waves of religious and moral movements, the conscious imitation of institutions and legal and financial regimes; finally resulting in the increasing and deeper knowledge of literatures and languages has led both big and small nations and even today some of the most backward societies in the world to a state of permeation and increasing dependence (Mauss 1969: 607).

The originality of Mauss’s sociology of international relations resides in his reformulation of positivism, as a successor to Comte and Durkheim, whose objective was to study the “milieu des milieuxˮ that is to say “all the international conditions, or better, inter-social conditions, of life between societies” (Mauss, 1969: 608). For the disciple of Durkheim, a society is a mileu composed of individuals. International society is the milieu for societies which have already a milieu. Marcel Mauss insists on the complexity of international relations. It is the consequence of the increasing interdependence of nations at the heart of the milieu des milieux and the processes which enlarge society. His sociology of international facts or “inter-social” (as opposed to “intra-social” facts or national facts), originates in the physiological order, that is to say the dynamics of social structures which can be warlike, peaceful or supranational (civilizations). Frederic Ramel rightly notes that the interdependence and intensification of international relations in Mauss concerns different domains, which gives him an originality in the sociology of international relations: “absolute economic interdependence; considerably increased moral interdependence (notably since Wilson’s fourteen points were established); the desire by the people to no longer make war; the desire for peace; the limitation of national sovereignty” (Ramel 2006: 88; Fournier 2004: 210).

Marcel Mauss’s sociology of international relations, unquestionably demonstrates his personal engagement with socialism in the context of his time.Footnote 13 The post-World War One period is marked by a wish to prevent another conflict. It is for this reason that the first Chair of international politics was created at Aberystwyth in 1919. The emblematic figures of pacifism and the institutions which were to be created in the period between the two wars - such as Wilson and his fourteen points, presented before Congress in 1918 which, after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, lead to the establishment of the League of Nations, platform for Aristide Briand and Gustave Stresemann to present, in 1929, their project for the construction of a “European Union”, and in 1928 Frank Kellogg’s and Aristide Briand’s signature to a pact declaring that war “illegal” - all this bears witness to an internationalism ideal to which Mauss adheres.

The originality of the times with the increasing interdependence of nations and the creation of the League of Nations, led to the emergence of an international morality which, henceforth, States were obliged to take into account when taking action. Even if Mauss did not consider the League of Nations had sufficient means to carry out sanctions in order to apply international law, nevertheless the result was a moral constraint on States to limit resorting to violence in their relations.

In Mauss’s communication on Nations and internationalism published in 1920, he applied the concept of organic solidarity coined by his uncle, to describe the international milieu and thus further developed the embryonic sociology of international relations initiated by Durkheim (Mauss 1969: 626–634). This so called organic solidarity was to allow the development of conditions for peace at an international level. This process is inscribed in the continuity of the idea of progress after which the movement for the intensification of international relations, notably thanks to increased exchanges, networks and technological tools of communication, produced an increase in membership and a transformation of the morphology of society. However, this process, even if it led to a rapprochement between nations, did not lead to a world society and a universal peace. Just as Emmanuel Kant, Marcel Mauss considers that this universal peace was more a horizon towards which one should aim but which was still far from being realized. Where he is optimistic, is concerning the progress being made in bringing nations together which, like Saint Simon and August Comte, should go to make up ever larger entities and take the form of confederations or federations. The formation of a group of countries which have been pacified, that is to say an international society, having the same traits as a national society, will happen little by little. For Mauss, peace will ensue from these new forms of organization which were to be developed as time passes using the League of Nations as model.

This step, sociologically speaking, is limited to highlighting the features of this dynamic. He observes that this process of interdependence is paralleled by a dynamic of penetration of the internal and external milieu and in this, notes the importance of political regimes (and bring to mind the observations of Aristotle, Montesquieu and Tocqueville).Footnote 14 He also mentions the risks of nationalistic tensions and regressions in his analysis. Mauss is conscious of the risks that can stem from such changes at an inter-social level and the traps that can be formed. His contribution to a new light being cast on socialism is a response to this danger. Mauss does not see socialism and nationalism in opposition to one another. Nationalization, he writes “is the most recent form of socialism and that which has the most future”. Neither does he see nationalism and internationalism in opposition to one another. For him, the nation is the vector of internationalization. This is the reason for which he does not immediately envisage bypassing the nation in creating a world society, but rather sees a process of rapprochement by nations which will eventually produce federations or confederations of States. Mauss’ thinking is above all a though on modernity and questions the disruptions taking place on an international scale. It is setting out the ground-work for a positive sociology of international relations but nevertheless remains limited by his commitment to his political ideals. In this sense, Marcel Mauss is more an author of transition.

With Mauss, there is, therefore, as with Frederic Ramel, a sociology of international relations founded on a fact, the international character of modern society: increasing interdependence of nations, whether economic, political or cultural, and the growth of social belongings and political identities. This is a sociology, as with the whole of Mauss’ work, that is backed up by epistemological and methodological principles: empirical necessity and defense of positivism, rejection of a primary explanation whether it be economic, cultural or political, the notion of total social fact and linkage of social facts. But Mauss’ analysis remains embryonic and has its limits, one of which ideological: Mauss is a committed intellectual and supports Wilson believing in the virtues of arbitration as a way of solving conflict (Fournier, Marcel 2004: 12-13).

In spite of work which is unfinished, Marcel Mauss is not just a successor to Emile Durkheim’s sociology of international relations. At a time when the discipline of International Relations is being institutionalized in the Anglo-Saxon world with an initial big philosophical debate between idealists and realists, he appears as the last precursor or the primary founder of a positive sociology of international relations, the aim of which is to explain the complexity of groups of international phenomena in studying the international milieu and inter-social conditions.

Raymond Aron’s Comprehensive Sociology of Interstates Relations

The tradition of a positive sociology of international relations dates back to Durkheim and Mauss. However, their contributions, even though important, still remain the seeds of the discipline. Paradoxically, it is in breaking with this positive and holistic influence that the sociology of international relations will take a new departure with the founding works of Raymond Aron.Footnote 15 His thinking is influenced by his precursors, notably Montesquieu and Tocqueville, also by English and American thinkers (his empathy of the United States will eventually bring him criticism) but mostly by German.

I would happily say that when I try to philosophize, my culture is German in French, and when I reflect on politics, I’m in the Anglo-American world. In last analysis, I do not think in German, neither do I in American, neither in French (Aron 2006: 906).

Aron was one of the first (together with Maurice Halbwachs) to introduce in French, in 1936 with his book La Sociologie allemande contemporaine, the works of German sociologists, notably those of George Simmel, Leopold Von Wiese, Ferdinand Tönnies, Alfred Vierkandt, Othmar Spann, Franz Oppenheimer, Alfred Weber, Max Scheler, Karl Mannheim and especially Max Weber (to whom he devoted a complete chapter) (Aron 1935). Raymond Aron chose not to follow the positivist thought of Saint Simon, Comte and Durkheim. He also refused the methods used in the behaviorist revolution in the United States, as the systemic analysis something that Marcel Merle was using at this time. Raymond Aron opted for the comprehensive approach of Max Weber, which was for him a stimulating sociological approach to international relations. As Frederic Ramel emphasized regarding Weber:

His thought almost immediately penetrated the field of international relations. It represents one of the sources of realism which was making its mark after the Second World War and constitutes today a necessary place in the increasing importance of the history of the sociology of international relations (Ramel 2006: 63; see also Guilhot 2017: 63).

The political sociology of Weber makes a break with the tradition of Durkheim. This is one of the reasons which pushed Aron to find his motivation there, the political sociology of Weber studies politics in its agonal dimension.Footnote 16 Weber’s sociology is one of the study of struggle, both inside and outside the State. “He was not one of these sociologists, such as Durkheim, who believed that the military functions of the State belonged to the past and was fast disappearing. He believed that conflicts would always exist between the big powers and he wanted Germany to unify in order to hold an important place in the world’s arena” (Aron 1967a: 562). In his political sociology, Weber studied the allocation of power inside the State and outside the State. Within the State, the monopoly of legitimate physical violence is in the hands of the State itself (Weber 1959, 1979). At an international level, this monopoly did not exist. Relations between States are marked by permanent struggle. Conflict is therefore a constant of social life, in spite of the shape of it and origin changing from time to time. In international relations a system of law is insufficient to limit the conflicts which States are prone to. Weber does not envisage a superior structure to States such as a world society or world State, which would temper this situation of permanent conflict. There are two reasons for this: first of all because conflict is an essence of politics and then because the Nation-State represents an impassable horizon. The specificity of international relations, the absence of a monopoly of legitimate violence superior to the State, reminds us of Hobbes’s view of the state of nature. In spite of the anarchy which is characteristic of the international system, Weber does not vindicate Realpolitik. On the contrary, he criticizes it and considers that reason of State is the only form of objective rationality which can serve to organize the priorities of the State, which are mainly those of survival (see especially Ramel 2006: 71–76).

The reason for the interest which Raymond Aron has for Weber’s sociology of international relations can be understood no doubt in view of his own personal experience of the war. Man and his thoughts are the product of two separate contexts. The first is intellectual, being that of the debates ensuing from existentialism and communism, the second is political, that of war, first of the Second World War and then the Cold War which was characterized by a balance of the reign of terror and a series of major international crises with the impossibility of direct confrontation between the two great powers (“impossible peace, improbable war”). These two things will have a lasting effect on the thinking and work of Aron (Soutou 1991). The first because it sets the foundation of the intellectual debate of the time, in which Raymond Aron will take part as commentator of Marx, of Kojève, and of Sartre, as journalist and analyst of the internal politics of the State. The second will lead him to consider strategic questions and develop his thinking on foreign politics and also produce a sociology of international relations, that is to say a sociology of the bipolarity of the international arena, more precisely a sociology of bipolarity (Aron 1963b, c). Raymond Aron is soon to write his first works on international relations, war and strategy, namely Le Grand Schisme (1948), Les Guerres en chaîne (1951), La Coexistence pacifique, Essai d’analyse (written using the pseudonym of François Houtisse and published in 1953), La Société industrielle et la Guerre (1959b). The numerous articles on “the theory and method of international relations”, written in Etudes politiques and later Les societies industrielles also date from this period (Aron 1983: 299, 1972, 2005b). His major work on international relations, Paix et guerre entre nations, and also the publication of numerous newspaper articles written during and after the Second World War are his crowning achievement.

After reading Marx and Weber, Aron then reflects on the subjects of conflict and domination. According to the tradition of Weber and Clausewitz, he considers international relations and war as sociological objects. The specificity of these subjects is found in the difference which exists between the internal and external order: society is characterized by the monopoly of legitimate physical violence, the international order is characterized, on the contrary, by the absence of this monopoly of coercion, that is to say by the legality and legitimacy of resorting to armed violence by the different actors (Aron 1967b: 843–845; see also Launay 1995). This distinction is of fundamental importance to the sociology of international relations because it defines the subject of study. The internal, the space where the monopolization of violence has led to the suppression of “the war all against allˮ is the concern of political sociology. The external, space where the absence of monopoly of violence implies maintaining permanent conflict of States one against another, is a matter for the sociology of international relations. War is the central subject of this sociology. It exists at an international level, writes Kenneth Waltz, “because nothing can prevent it” (Waltz 1959: 188). Aron does not consider it to be a pathology of the international system but a normal phenomenon. It is an invariable which structures the history of the international system. War is undeniably an historic fact and also a social reality, but of a particular type:

International relations are driven by the alternatives of war or peace; evidently, war is an historic event of considerable importance, inherent to centuries’ history, since there is no civilization which has not known war and even protracted wars of varying frequency; but this historical phenomenon seems not to be a social phenomenon at first sight or, if I can say, it has the unique character amongst the subjects of sociology to be at the same time both social and asocial. It is sociality because of a certain social relationship between those who fight, but simultaneously it is the very negation of the term social, because those who fight agree upon their enmity and the breakdown of social relations. Sorokin puts civil wars and foreign wars in the same category, calling the phenomenon breakdown of social relations. In other words, in this quite classical perspective, war is more a dissolving of social ties than a social phenomenon itself (Aron 1963c:308).

The sociology of international relations must therefore study this particular social phenomenon: war. This specific sociology is all the more important in the nuclear age when the political costs of a conflict have profoundly changed and require a rethinking of the traditional scope of thought which has prevailed up to the present in the study of international relations:

Why am I so interested in military affairs? This started during the last war. I felt ashamed that no French intellectuals had reflected on war. And then, there is another reason which seems to me to be more important, and that is nuclear arms. Using nuclear arms is no longer warfare in the ordinary sense of the word. Nuclear warfare has become a subject of philosophical consideration. In fact, when using an arm so as not to deploy it effectively or where the arm becomes the way of avoiding the war, we leave the competence of military specialists and enter that of the political philosopher (Aron 2006: 906)

This philosophical reflection on the nature of war is complementary to a sociology of war, and concerns different forms of war during the Cold War (guerilla warfare, war of liberation, etc.) and the “concrete study of international relations” which for Aron, is both historical and sociological (Aron 1967b: 852; see also Launay 2007). A theory of international relations must contain the three dimensions of philosophy, sociology and history. The theory that Aron puts forward concerns the international system, that is to say the entity constituted of political units having regular relations with each other and which are susceptible to being implicated in a general war (Aron 1984a: 103). This theory, the aim of which is praxeologic, puts the accent on three emblematic figures of international relations: the diplomat, the soldier and the strategist (in Paix et guerre Aron only makes reference to the diplomat and the soldier, but in the rest of his works he shows the importance of the strategist). Through these key actors, it is possible to separate, among general international phenomena, the specific diplomatico-strategic relationships between independent political units, in order to study them.

From an ontological point of view, since war is not a relationship between one man and another but a relationship between States (Aron 1984a: 113), the international system which Raymond Aron studies is the interstate system, more precisely of a whole composed of political units (the States) which have “regular diplomatic relations” and which are susceptible to make war (Aron 1984a: II). Aron does not reject the idea of a transnational society, such as that described by Marcel Merle, evidenced by “commercial exchanges, migration of people, common beliefs, cross-border organizations and finally ceremonies or competitions open to members of all these units” (Aron 1984a: 113). On the other hand he does not accept the idea of a world society or an international society which would encompass “the interstate system, the economic system, transnational movements, the different forms of exchange (of commerce in the wider 18th century view) from civil societies to civil societies, supranational institutions” (Aron 1984a: VIII). In short, such a society would include all the aspects of “international life” and would no longer have the characteristics of a society. Thus, Raymond Aron, contrary to Marcel Merle, uses the concept of a system “in a non-rigorous way” (Aron, 1984a: VIII). He does not seek to produce a systemic analysis of international relations, neither to produce an explicative global theory of international phenomena. For Aron, it is a meaningless task to try and produce a general theory of international relations (Aron 1962b, 1967b). Just like Weber, he refuses all causal, deterministic and absolute explanations. His theory is part of a comprehensive logic, that is to say one which permits the understanding or interpretation of international facts. He seeks to establish sociological typologies (a method using the ideal type inspired by Weber and Tocqueville) developed using principles (in Montesquieu’s sense of the word) rather than determining laws (Aron 1984a: 179 et 180). His method, inspired by the hermeneutic tradition of Hans-Georg Gadamer and also weberian tradition, has as aim to understand the behavior of actors and make the meaning they give to their behavior more objective. This objectification is made possible thanks to the construction of concepts useful to analysis.

Anarchy, that is to say absence of monopoly of legitimate violence, existing at an international level, provides insights into why there is the quest for permanent power on the part of States which seek to assure their security and prestige on the international scene. The behavior of States is the result of the material configuration of these power relationships expressed in terms of polarity (bipolarity or bi-monopolarity, oligopolarity, multipolarity or polypolarity) and in terms of homogeneity and heterogeneity according to the degree of legitimacy of the political regimes (these concepts were inspired by Panayis Papaligouras, see Papaligouras 1941; Aron 1984a: 103, 1983: 302; see also Piquemal 1978). Therefore, the behavior of States can be understood according to the configuration of the structure of the system (polarity) and the nature of the international system (homogenous, heterogeneous) (Aron 1984a: 103).

From the first the works of Raymond Aron had an important resonance on the other side of the Atlantic. The ideas have been taken up or commented on by influential internationalists such as Hans Morgenthau, Morton Kaplan, Hedley Bull, Henry Kissinger, Robert Tucker, Oran Young, Kenneth Waltz and of the Franco-American, Stanley Hoffmann, who would contribute widely to the international diffusion of the works of Aron (Hoffmann 1965, 1983a, b). As Dario Battistella points out:

An enquiry by APSA, in the 1970s, puts Aron amongst the six most important theoreticians, and Paix et guerre entre les nations is considered to be the third most influential work in the discipline, behind Politics among Nations by Morgenthau and System and Process in International Politics by Morton A. Kaplan, but placed in front of Twenty Years’ Crisis by Edward H. Carr, Political Community and the North Atlantic Area by Karl Deutsch, Man, State and War by Kenneth N. Waltz, and Strategy of Conflict by Thomas C. Schelling (Battistella 2013: 167).

Raymond Aron still occupies an important place in the discipline both in France and abroad. Jean-Vincent Holeindre indicates that Aron is still today the most cited author in the two most important manuals of the discipline in France (Dario Battistella and Jean-Jacques Roche) and the most cited author in America (for this last point see Brown and Ainley 2009 cited in Holeindre 2012; 322).

Was Aron a realist or a neorealist? Even today this question is the starting point of interesting debates between mainly French internationalists. First of all, because of the indefinable character of his work. Then, because Aron himself mistrusted the categorization of schools or trends. During the second debate of the discipline between Ancients and Moderns, he does not take part in the quarrel between Morton Kaplan and Hedley Bull. Even if he is intellectually drawn towards the traditional approach associated with history, philosophy and law rather than the “modern” approach inspired by the behaviorist revolution, he nevertheless recognizes its value. Finally, because he was a complex man with his contradictions and personal conflicts.

His political work and his work on international relations follows in the wake of Tocqueville, Weber and Clausewitz with whom he had “chosen affinities”. “All three have in common split or torn personalities. All three are men who are fundamentally sad, because they see reality as ruthless such as it is, and besides they are either romantics, or nostalgic of an order which has disappeared, or just passionate” (Aron 2006: 906). Raymond Aron shared with them the same hurt and the same sadness in front of 20th century violence which he would also study in an unpitying way. As a young Jewish student in Germany between the wars and resistant during the war, he saw the end of one and the birth of a new order divided ideologically where the balance of terror ruled. He therefore understood the importance of producing a thought on the question of the relationship between societies and politics without sacrificing his objectivity towards a philosophical ideal, with realism.

I have discovered different people from myself in modern society, of the likes of Hitler and those who followed him. From this time on, I have, so to speak, been purified once and for all, of that I would call academic idealism. I have had the feeling at one and the same time, that politics is tragic and that one could only have reasonable opinions if one respected, as far as is possible, others and accepted differences of opinion (Aron 2006: 904-905).

Raymond Aron was resolutely realistic, both with his attitude towards politics and in his own intellectual thought process (see Frost 1997; Hassner 2007; Roche 2011a, 2011b; Battistella 2002, 2012a, b). Steadfastly anti-totalitarian, he thought that a “sincerely humanistic society” such as inspired by Kant was possible and he shared with Rickert, Dilthey and Weber a “liberal conception of the philosophy of history” (Aron 1981: 315; Canguilhem 1985). His attachment to the freedom of human action was totally incompatible with a teleological and deterministic view of history (Aron 1984b; Bourricaud 1985; Holeindre 2012). As an adept of reasonable and moderate thought, he believed in virtue and prudence in politics and in the importance of having conduct which was “reasonable”, especially in this nuclear age.

This agonizing of the “committed spectator”, between realism and liberalism, sometimes taking the form of a rift, produced with him the desire to overcome, by criticism, the limitations of the two approaches (Châton 2012; Holeindre 2012: 331). This desire sometimes took him to be more skeptical than realist, more relativistic than rational. His skepticism pushed him to discuss all the hypotheses in order to develop his thoughts, his relativism taught him to beware of ideas that were too rigid. His both realistic and rationalistic perspectives, his “liberal realism” (Jangène Vilmer 2013), led him to consider the State as the central player in international relations. His skepticism and his relativism made him avoid considering the national interest in a rigid sense and power seeking to be the essence of politics, as is presented by the classical realists since Hans J. Morgenthau (Aron 1967b: 862; Montbrial de 1985). His interest in the endogenous factors of political units, mainly his reflections on homo-heterogeneity and the legitimacy of political regimes and on democracy and totalitarianism, differentiates his thoughts from those of the neorealist, Kenneth Waltz, whose area of study is the structure of the international system and relations between the units of the system, excluding all the internal factors to the State. In short, Aron’s sociology of international relations goes beyond the two dominant paradigms of the discipline. Even more, with the place given to “ideas and intersubjectivity”, this sociology could be envisaged as an “opening” to the constructivism perspective (Holeindre 2012: 330 and 331; for a constructivist approach to the war see Lindemann 2008).

Aron’s historical sociology of international relations would suffer criticism notably from Alain Touraine, François Châtelet, Marcel Merle and Bertand Badie in France, and Ben Kerkvliet and Oran Young in America.Footnote 17 This criticisms generally relate to the place that Aron gives to the State as central actor in international relations, to the importance he gives to the war, to the under estimated role of non-state actors, to the lack of space given to social and economic movements, to international law, to the inequality between the North and the South, and also to the rejection of the idea of a world society. Even if criticism is valid regarding some of his arguments and hypotheses, Aron is nevertheless recognized, by the majority of specialists, as having given International Relations an important position in France, which in its turn has given space to a fruitful debate between the Anglo-American approach to sociology and the more comprehensive historical French approach of German inspiration. His contribution to the sociology of international relations is fundamental (Friedrichs 2001). He has produced a theory of international relations which is original because it is a mixture of philosophy, as a way of forming concepts, sociology, which describes international life with a view to understanding the dynamics, and history, which gives a view in time of the evolution of political forms and societies.

In spite of the originality of his thought and his work, Aron did not wish to create either a school or a place of worship (Riesman 1985). It happened naturally. “Master without a doctrine” (Baechler 1985b: 64), passionate about debating, he opened a door for researchers who wished to subscribe to this intellectual and multidisciplinary tradition, generally during seminars which brought his “disciplesˮ together (Jean Baechler, in his homage to Aron entitled Maître and disciple, shows us the way in which these seminars unfolded, see Beachler 1985a, b). His name has been given to a research center, Le Centre d’Etudes Sociologiques et Politiques Raymond Aron (CESPRA) which unites researchers from all horizons to work on political questions from a philosophic, sociologic, historic or anthropological perspective.Footnote 18

The diversity of work originating from the ideas of Raymond Aron is enormous. This continues to be true both in France and abroad. Among the successors to this tradition, it is important to note three of his “disciples”, who each in their way, have given a new dynamic to Aron’s tradition: Jean Baechler, Julien Freund, Jean-Pierre Derriennic.

The work elaborated by Jean Baechler lies within the framework of this tradition of an historical sociology of international relations and of war.Footnote 19 This sociology is rooted in a precise epistemology because Jean Baechler distinguishes between sociology as a discipline and sociology as a science:

As a discipline, sociology, as for philosophy and history, does not have its own study objective. The complete human adventure is its objective. But our comprehension is such that we can only understand segments of what goes to make up humanity. Each segment is governed by a scientific subject such as demography, politics, criminology, suicide studies, economic science and so on […] There is one or more sciences of realities that one can call “social”, just as others are called economic, political or religious, but this or these social sciences must for cognitive necessity resort to the philosophical, historical and sociological point of view (Baechler 2004: 152)

According to Jean Baechler, the sociology of international relations is a science because it studies a specific segment of reality. As a science it is indissociable from an historic and philosophic approach, which Raymond Aron also puts forward in his sociology of international relations. Philosophy has the function of defining the object. The function of sociology is the method used to study this object. Historical situations serve to verify the theories developed.

Jean Baechler’s sociology of international relations is inscribed in the tradition of Simmel and Weber. Man, the political animal, is a conflictive being. This affirmation requires to reflect philosophically on conflict as the essence of politics and on politics as a means, both historical and material, of resolution of conflicts.

The concepts of politie and transpolitie, which are philosophical constructions, give us a way of studying different social morphologies and their relations (band, tribe, city, cast, feudal system, market center, capital city, nation). These polities are endowed with “institutions for the resolution of conflicts and have the capacity to lead actions, notably wars against other polities” (Baechler 2005: 7). A politie is therefore a “group with pacific internal tendencies and virtual tendencies to war externally. War supposes and results from the existence of at least two polities which make up a transpolitie” (Baechler 2005: 113). Jean Baechler advances an historical sociology of relations between polities or an historical sociology of transpolities. This comparative and historical sociology of transpolities opens the way to an exploration “of the fabrication of modernity in its international dimension” (Ramel 2013: 515; see also Baechler 2011b). At the base of this sociology we find the weberian and aronian idea of a difference between the internal, where the tendencies are to pacifism, and the external where conflict is always possible. The exercise of power, where the political aim, both inside the polities and outside, consists in putting a term to opposition in society. At the heart of a politie pacification has the objective of installing justice as a mean of settling differences. At the level of the transpolitie, it is a question of assuring safety for each politie, by negotiation, diplomacy, or by war.

In the logic of game theory and in the tradition of Aron, Jean Baechler, considers that the number of polities influences the strategy of the rational actors who try to maximize their power or reduce their vulnerability in order to guarantee their security. He defines four ideal types of transpolitical configurations: the monopolar, dipolar, oligopolar and polypolar systems. Each configuration implies a particular strategy for war and peace. The oligopolar system is reputed to be the most stable because it unites five to ten polities which prevents one of them from being more powerful than the others. The strategy is chiefly defensive, war is limited and peace as a synonym for “non-violence” rests on balance (Baechler 2003: 7–10; Baechler 1994). The definition of the ideal types of transpolities implies the consideration of the political regimes of the polities, which go to make them up, which reminds us of Aron’s logic of homo-heterogeneity.

In Baechler’s reflexions on globalization which is part of his work on universal history, he considers the possibility of going beyond national State and foreign war, and over and above war and peace, thus giving an unexpected angle to the tradition of Aron. He considers that in order to guarantee individual sovereignty there has to be a world politie. “The benefits would be enormous, because war, which has existed from Neolithic times, will disappear completely from the history of mankind” (Baechler 2003:13). The monopolar, dipolar or polypolar structures will not allow the transition towards this world politie. Only the installation of a stable oligarchic structure, bringing together the chief powers of the international system, will allow a gentle transition towards the world politie (Baechler 2007; see also Baechler 2002). Finally, with Beachler, war, which is of Neolithic origin and is inherent in the relations between polities, could be overcome by putting in place a world politie (unitary or federal). Even so, conflict will not disappear completely since it would always be present in the heart of a politie in the form of civil war.

In parallel with Jean Baechler, another disciple of Raymond Aron, Julien Freund has also produced a sociology of international relations concerned primarily with conflict. This particular sociology of conflict is completely within Aron’s tradition.Footnote 20 Together with Gaston Bouthoul, he has developed a new French branch of sociology: polemology or the science of conflicts. Even if there is a similarity between the two men, their approaches are different. Julien Freund is influenced by the German sociology of Georg Simmel and Max Weber (whom he has translated) and by the political theory of Carl Schmitt.Footnote 21

His thought, marked by agonistics, is also at the heart of his reflections on the essence of politics. Julien Freund considers that hostility is a constitutive part of society. This proposition has both an existential and intellectual explanation. Freund has an existential experience of war which has drawn him to the subject of conflict. And, just as Aron reproached “second generation of Durkheimians”, “the serenity of their choices, their implacable optimism, their indifference to Marx, their inclination to avoid conflict”, Freund wanted to break free from a French sociology which he found to be too “dull” and full of “clear conscience” (Aron 1971: 19; Freund 1983: 7). He chose a less intellectual, more authentic and more existential sociology. The sources of his thought, from an intellectual point of view: Aristotle, Machiavelli, Simmel, Weber and Aron all have in common that they consider conflict to be a characteristic of human nature and society. Aristotle, in opposition to Plato’s idealism, to the separation of matter and form, to the search for principles regarding a static and eternal supralunar world, developed a dynamic ontology turned toward to an end (Τέλος), the order and stability of the city. The nature of beings and things in the tangible reality, sublunar, is in the making. It is marked by the corruption of time, that is to say by a process of inevitable change of matter. Man, rational animal, sociable and political being has as his aim the search for happiness. Making this objective reality, means using politics, that is to say using the best possible regime. But Aristotle knows that no political community is perfect, nor is any political system, each has within it the deviant form of its own objective.

Julien Freund, inspired by the philosophy of Aristotle which for him was a revelation, sought to establish a theory of the essences. The ‘social’ is the fruit of interactions of activities such as politics, economics, judicial, artistic, religious, moral, etc. Freund, like Aron through his praxeology, questions the patterns of political activity and seek its essence. There are three antithetic couples or universal categories which make up politics: commanding and obeying, the public and the private and the friend and the enemy. The first, commanding and obeying, is the supposed basis of all political relations. The second, of public and private, concerns internal politics and differentiates between the two orders. Finally, the third, the friend-enemy, concerns external politics and is characterized by peace and war.

For Freund, history is the product of this dialectic of the essence and that of antithetic couples. Politics, just as with the legal system, has the function of creating a space where violence is the exception. It manages this in opposing one collectivity to another. If this tendency towards peace is possible within political units, it is not completely possible outside. And wars, even if they are not common phenomena, bear witness to the hostility which exists on the international stage. Even if Julien Freund considers the unifying function of politics and the possibility of friendship in international relations, he thinks that the creation of a world State or a world society is utopian. It would, by definition, mean the end of politics.

Jean-Pierre Derriennic is another “disciple” of Raymond Aron.Footnote 22 His original contribution to International Relations derives from the sociology of international relations and also in the sociology of conflict. In his article on the actors and strategies of international conflicts, Jean-Pierre Derriennic draws attention to the tendency which consists in “denying this traditional distinction between internal and international politics and substituting new conceptual frameworks” (Derriennic 1971: 817):

Thus, one has attempted to apply systematic and functioning methods of analysis, which first of all were used for the study of national societies with a minimum of integration, to the study of international relations: the international system is itself a social system where there are functional specializations working within and where regulatory processes operate. It is not surprising that such an endeavor would give weak results in analyzing conflicting aspects of international relations but would be fruitful in the analysis of phenomena which relate more to internal politics: the process of regional integration, the function of international organizations, the appearance of a worldwide public opinion and of international arbitration procedures (Derriennic 1971: 818).

If Jean-Pierre Derriennic recognizes the fundamental importance of the separation of internal and external, on which Aron has based his sociology of international relations, he insists equally on the interdependence of internal and external, that is to say the manner in which the external politics of a State are determined by internal constraints and conversely the influence of international relations on internal politics (Derriennic 1974: 817; see also Derriennic 1980). The internal divisions of a country can have consequences on foreign policy and on war. At the same time, decisions which are taken by policymakers of a country can be motivated by internal politics without considering that there might be international or military implications. As Tocqueville has already shown, public opinion can mobilize in favor of extreme positions in an argument, and can also have a negative effect on international negotiations or in conducting war (Derriennic 1974: 290). Conversely, the international environment can be a constraint on internal politics, it can influence certain polls or the politics of certain actors, political parties or unions or even public opinion (Derriennic 1974: 293).

In fact, this is a criticism directed at observers who consider that “the distinctions between internal politics and international politics, or between civil war and war between States, have lost their pertinence” (Derriennic 2001: 16–17). He recognizes that transformations which are currently taking place in the international system (an increase in transnational exchanges, porous borders, multiple allegiances, criminalization of violence, etc.) are important. But in the face of these changes it is not appropriate to challenge the structures of traditional analysis of international relations. On the contrary, he proposes using sociology of international relations to elaborate his own sociology of conflict, the main subject of which is civil war.

The aronian tradition is present in all of his work on civil war. The introduction, prefaced by Pierre Hassner, admits that “this essay of Jean-Pierre Derriennic is certainly the best book in French on civil war and probably the best on war, since Paix et guerre entre les nations” (Hassner 2001: 11). Besides mentioning Pierre Hassner, Jean Baechler’s and Julien Freund’s ideas are used in the book to present Derriennic’s arguments on political regimes, democracy, ideology (Baechler), or on polemology (Freund).

Jean-Pierre Derriennic takes up the distinction between war and conflict established by Raymond Aron, and also that between the international system, marked by the absence of a monopoly on legitimate violence, and the national society, marked by the monopolization of violence. The characteristic trait of the international system does not only reside in the possibility of using violence, which exists in all societies, but in the legality and legitimacy of using violence. On the contrary, in national societies use of private violence is illegal and illegitimate. Paradoxically, civil war produces in the heart of a society more anarchy than exists in international relations. This is explained notably by the multiplicity of actors present (governments, organization or groups whether subnational or transnational).

From a methodological point of view, Jean-Pierre Derriennic does not look for one rule or law, but rather for tendencies. In his work on civil war, he uses methodological individualism and, in the tradition of Weber, he elaborates three ideal types of war: partisan wars (of religion or political party), socioeconomic wars (of slavery, revolution, violent enterprises) and wars of identity (ethic and nationalistic).

The question of the future of civil wars does not have as back-ground the idea of “the progress of humanity”, nor even the negative idea that nothing will change. Even if one observes a reduction in slavery and in wars between States since the eighteenth century, the same does not go for civil war. However, Jean-Pierre Derriennic is optimistic about the future. According to him, democracies, which are the most powerful States of the international system, normally cooperate and intervene “benevolently” together in countries affected by civil war (Derriennic 2001: 268–269). This hypothesis partly echoes the optimism with which Aron regarded the rational conduct of politics in the nuclear age. In the actual context, however, most people would hold to Pierre Hassner’s formula of “agnosticismˮ or even Aron’s skepticism regarding the future of civil wars.

The Rise of a Holistic and Positive Sociology of Transnational Relations

Aron’s sociology has played a fundamentally important role in the development of International Relations in France. However, a challenge to this appeared very quickly with a positive and holistic school of sociology following the lines set out by Durkheim and Mauss (see notably the presentation of the history of the discipline in France by Dario Battistella, Battistella 2013: 164–173; see also Battistella 2012a). The internationalist who will continue this current of sociology, of which transnational relations is the main subject, is Marcel Merle who is a trained lawyer.Footnote 23

Merle’s afiliationˮ with Durkheim and Mauss, is explained partly by the legacy and by the fertility of the work of the disciples who continued the spirit of L’Année Sociologique. The main objective of this project was to present sociology as a new discipline in France with the sociological contribution of these “special sciences”. In fact, the disciples of Durkheim will continue to explore numerous areas such as ethnology (Marcel Mauss, Paul Fauconnet), economics (François Simiand, Maurice Halbwachs, Georges and Hubert Bourgin), religion (Henri Hubert, Robert Hertz), criminality (Paul Fauconnet, Jean Ray), psychology and the sociology of knowledge (Célestin Bouglé, Dominique Parodi, Paul Lapie) or geography (Albert Demangeon and Antoine Vacher). In these fields of study, law has an important place because of its link to religion and morals. In fact, the contributors to this field are numerous (Gaston Richard, Louis Gernet, Paul Fauconnet, Georges Davy, Emmanuel Lévy, Paul Huvelin notably). However, political sociology is still not considered a science:

Political sociology appears to have a specific status, within the field as a subject that is not clearly defined and even neglected. In teaching, is it not often engulfed in an ill-defined general body of work: “general sociology and politics”? And the area it covers, is it not less studied and consequently is less well defined than other areas of sociology? Without doubt the reasons for this go back a long way: let us not forget that political sociology was never classified in the plan of L’Année Sociologique, plan which was a real category of knowledge for generations of sociologists. The existence of a “political science”, which has sometimes been used as a synonym for political sociology, but more often than not has argued its specificity, has been institutionalized for the last thirty years not in the Faculties of Human Science, but in the Faculties of Law and Political Studies Institutes [IEP], where the teaching of other branches of sociology, has served to make the status of political sociology more ambiguous and its area of study less distinct (Chazel, Favre 1983: 365; see also Leca 2001).

There are three dates of fundamental importance to French political science: the creation of the free school of political science by Emile Boutmy in 1871, the publication in 1913 of the Tableau politique de la France de l’Ouest by Andre Siegfried and in 1951 the publication by Maurice Duverger of Les partis politiques. The refusal by the followers of Durkheim to classify political sociology has for a long time limited political science to judicial analysis in the domain of public law, before opening up to other areas such as sociology.

The study of international relations proposed by Marcel Merle follows the same route. In Sociologie des relations internationales, of which he will publish three versions (1974; 1976; 1982), he proposes a critical and methodological study of the approaches which have developed in the discipline since the end of the Second World War.Footnote 24 Then he redefines the subject matter of the discipline apart from those already existing. For him, international relations are to do with “all the transactions or flows across borders and even those that might cross” (Merle 1976: 141).

For Marcel Merle, sociology which is a science with a global vocation, the role of which is explicative but which goes beyond a viewpoint of simple description, is the best adapted to understand these transnational flows. His thinking takes up some of the analyses originating in the positive tradition of Saint Simon, Comte, Durkheim and Mauss. Merle seeks to produce a sociology of international relations which proposes a systematic view of all international phenomena. For him, the questions of society do not stop at the borders of States but must be considered in their globality.Footnote 25 This global analysis has been made possible by “the closing off of the international system”, that is to say “the progressive occupation which today has been completed, of all space which is habitable by man [this] has united the limits of the international system with those of the planet. It is because the system has become global that it appears to have closed in on itself” (Merle 1976: 440).

Merle’s objective is not to elaborate a general theory of international relations. He agrees with Raymond Aron in that such an enterprise would be useless in the current complexity of the international reality. His objective, similar to that of current Anglo-Saxon sociologists who seek an explanation regarding the function of the international system, is to establish a method of analysis for international facts. He is particularly drawn to systemic analysis, pioneered by such people as David Easton. He studied the international system, its milieu and its actors:

I intend to refer to the international system as the group of relations between the principal actors which are the States, international organizations and transnational forces. Consequently, the environment will be made up of a group of factors (natural, economic, technologic, demographic, ideological) the combination of which influences the structure and function of the system (Merle 1976: 146).

These factors, making up the environment, which influence the structure and function of the system, are the constraints which weigh on the actors and influence their behavior. Henceforth, the actors are many: States now share the international scene with intergovernmental organizations, non-governmental organizations (religious organizations such as Churches, unions and organizations of similar type), multinational firms and international public opinion (Merle 1974, 1986, 1988). Just as did Marcel Mauss, Merle observes an increasing interdependence between these different actors which leads to, from the point of view of “international life”, a decline in the central role of the State (even if the State remains a major actor) and also the political and military factors to the advantage of the socio-economic. As a consequence, this leads to the progressive erosion of the barrier between internal and external (Merle 1963).Footnote 26 Foreign policy and war are an illustration of this blending of the internal milieu and external milieu.

Modernity has moved foreign policy or “that part of the activity of the State turned towards to exterior” (Merle 1984: 4), into a new age, where international affairs are not the concern only of the Prince, as was the case in Machiavelli’s time. Consecutive social changes and the increase in technological progress, economic and political changes linked to the weakening of the executive and legislative powers, and leading to the increasing importance of both internal forces and transnational forces (political parties, pressure groups and regional, national and international public opinion), have brought about a change in attitudes which means rethinking foreign policy, not any longer as a monolithic whole but as the result of decisions of an executive under multiple influences (this is also the opinion of Jean-Pierre Derriennic) (Merle 1995). Henceforth, foreign policy is subordinate to internal politics which explains the “irrationality” of certain diplomatico-strategic actions, as was the case in the decolonization of Algeria and the war in Vietnam. Marcel Merle is in agreement with Montesquieu and especially Tocqueville as to the manner in which choices concerning external policies are conditioned by the orientations of internal politics (Merle 1996). In fact, decisions in foreign policy (except, he says, for matters concerning the nuclear) are essentially the fruit of internal constraints. In pluralistic political systems, the political parties, he thinks, do not appropriate international questions or if they do, give clearly identifiable reference points to their citizens, with which they can feel comfortable.Footnote 27 And so, in order to make politically coherent choices, he suggests approaching the question of foreign politics in terms of “compénétration” (in the sense of mutual penetration) of internal and external milieu. His analysis offers an interesting point of view on the existence of competing foreign policies (multinational firms, non-governmental organizations, international organizations and private groups) to those of the State. The State does not control them because they are initiated by private interests whose objective is to influence and structure their own environment (see mainly Charillon 2002: 13–29).

In contrast to Aron and his followers, Marcel Merle does not devote the most part of his work to the issues of peace and war. He concludes that these are particularly complex phenomena. He refutes the dualism of internal/external and privileges a pluralistic approach. He also refutes the classical distinction between peace and war which according to him is no longer obvious. Guerilla warfare, international crises and tensions which are characteristic of a period of decolonization and the ideological conflict between East and West, have produced “grey zones” and are the result of disorder and instability created by important movements or groups. Even if the international system achieved his closure his evolution is in the making and this is evidenced though by movements or turbulences which are the consequences of the crisis of the nation-State and implies the rethinking of his role at the dawn of the interpenetration of the internal milieu and external milieu. This crisis coincides with the development of transnational forces and networks which are in economic, political and ideological competition with it (Merle 1981, 1983). This crisis also corresponds to the rise of regionalism and federalism, as shown by the European project, which weakens the sovereignty of States. Thus, the causes of the transformation of conflict are “placed alongside other more important causes present simultaneously on three levels: the closure of the Westphalian system, the transformation of the role of the State, the subjectivation of violence at an individual level, which bring us back to the question of the increasingly ill-defined limits between internal and external (Bigo 1998: 329).

Marcel Merle, contrary to Raymond Aron, has seen the end of the bipolar world and witnessed the emergence of a new post-Cold War international world. In his Bilan des relations internationales contemporaines he confirms that the State remains the actor par excellence of the international milieu even if it is no longer possible for it to control the activities of other actors of the international system. Is this the sign that there is a tendency for the international system to move towards a global society, as described by John Burton in 1972? Marcel Merle does not see a way open, in these transformations, for the creation of a world society of this type. He does not believe in the creation of an authority above States, utopia which would resolve all international conflicts. He believes in the possibility of an international society based on law, but he considers that it is up to States to bring this into being. Even more, he is particularly critical of the idea that an international and stable order can be instituted in this post-Cold War era (Merle 1995). Examples of this can be found in the Gulf War and the various conflicts which have occurred in the ex-Soviet Union. They, in fact, show the limitations of collective organizations of security such as the United Nations or other international and regional organizations. The inefficacity of law and democracy, in pacifying the international system, is also illustrated (Merle, 1991).

Looking at Marcel Merle’s work one can legitimately question two aspects: First, why his sociology of international relations has not drawn on other sociology specializations, such as the sociology of organizations or the sociology of war and conflict, which developed round about the same time? In fact, the birth of polemology after the Second World War with Julien Freund and Gaston Bouthoul (in reaction to the irenic spirit of conciliation which marked the beginnings of the discipline of International Relations between the two wars) could well have been fed by the works of Marcel Merle. Especially since the work of Gaston Bouthoul on the function of wars is marked by a positive approach following the durkheimian sociology.Footnote 28 In the same way that Durkheim sought to observe scientifically the phenomenon of suicide, Bouthoul observed scientifically the phenomenon of war. His positive sociology of war could be considered complementary to the positive sociology of international relations developed by Marcel Merle.

Then, in the French context where the theories of international relations are experiencing a boom notably with the contributions of Raymond Aron (1962) or even Jean-Baptiste Duroselle (1981), why did Marcel Merle not produce a theory of the international system, inspired by American internationalists (see Morton Kaplan 1957 or Kenneth Waltz 1979), which examine the actors and configurations which are possible in the international system in terms of balance and polarity? Finally, rightly or wrongly, Marcel Merle can be reproached for voluntarily limiting his development of a method of analysis of the international system. Why? Because for him, it seems that the international milieu is fundamentally dependent on the internal milieu and socio-political factors. It is in using the tools developed by political sociology that it is possible to comprehend these mechanisms. One could suggest that Marcel Merle, when considering the interpenetration of the internal milieu with the external milieu (he affirms that the international milieu has an impact in all areas of social, cultural, economic and political life) and in giving in his explanation of the function of the international system a major importance to internal phenomena on international phenomena, removes all specificity to the international dimension. In sum, the sociology of international relations should be seen as a method of understanding international phenomena and explaining them by means of the convergence of national societies with the international system.

Later, the works of Marcel Merle will inspire lawyers such as René-Jean Dupuy and Alain Pellet (Dupuy 1989; Pellet 2014). Also inspired will be the numerous internationalists of Durkheim’s positive school of thought. One of their chief characteristics being to form a global viewpoint of political phenomena and their dynamics. This blurred line between the internal and external is confirmed by the absence of an international environment. The characteristic trait of this is to imagine international subjects from an internal point of view, using the classical tools of political science, with the risk of denying all specificity to the international environment.Footnote 29

The turbulence in the international system, for which the 1990s are known, led the internationalists to revise their framework and their tools of analysis of international relations. In France, Bertrand Badie and Marie-Claude Smouts developed a research program in response to this agenda. Their work is part of the current of the sociology of globalization which dates back to the 1960s.Footnote 30 They will give a new élan to the French school of international relations by proposing “a new study of international relations, on the basis of what they call Le retournement du monde” (Leca 2003, Badie, Smouts, 1998, 2002). In their book on Les nouvelles relations internationales they assemble researchers from different generations who share the same study point of view of international relations, that is to say for which:

There has never been a distinction between international relations and cultural areas (areas studies), domestic political systems and international sociology. […] For the authors of this book the subject of international relations is the function of the planet, or to be more precise, the structuring of world space by networks of social interactions (Smouts 1998: 13-14).

In the course of this work, Marie-Claude Smouts and Bertrand Badie inaugurate in 1991 a course in the sociology of international relations at the Political Studies Institute (IEP) which will form the basis for their work Le retournement du monde. This publication is part of the tradition of Durkheim, Mauss and Merle and opens the way to a current which, without being the dominant one, is certainly influential in the field of French international relations.Footnote 31 As Marie-Claude Smouts says:

One of the principal characteristics of International Relations (IR) in France can be found without doubt in the existence of this current of thought [illustrated notably by certain researchers of IEP of Paris, of the Centre d’Etudes en Relations Internationales (CERI) and of the review Cultures et conflits directed by Didier Bigo] originating from internal political science, of which the findings, the methods and the questions have been very fruitfully transferred to the international level (Smouts 2002: 84; see also ​Guilhot 2017: 50-52).

This school will not form part of the approach and debates of the mainstream of the discipline, that is to say it is not part of neo-realism, or neo-institutionalism which are the dominant currents of international relations in the years from 1990 to 2000. Their approach is similar to that of Marcel Merle, proceeding with a critical look at existing theories, outside of the inter-paradigmatic debates (chiefly influenced by “preoccupations with the American superpower” and also the most important American authors) (Smouts 1998: 11). These two aspects, a distancing from the major inter-paradigmatic debates, which are mainly American, and critical analysis, taking distance also with regard to international relations theory, are the characteristic traits which one finds with certain internationalists who belong to this French school of the sociology of international relations.

Bertrand Badie is without doubt one of the most important successors to this French school of the sociology of international relations inspired by Durkheim. He shares the views of Marcel Merle and James Rosenau, who observe that the transnationalization of the international system is tending towards a “world without sovereignty” (Badie 1999). The world has been subjected to great change with the end of bipolarity of power. It has become in fact “a-polar” and is characterized by increasing complexity due to the appearance on the world scene of new actors: the “emerging”. The deterritoralization of the flow of people and of their identities, the increase in networks (economic, of merchandise, religious, and of the mafia) the increase in the flow of goods, of information, of new allegiances, of new ways of mobilizing and claims (regionalism) make up the principal characteristics of this world turnaround which is imposing new forms of international relations because the traditional theories are no longer suited to the changes that are happening (Badie, Smouts 1992; Badie 1995, 2004). Power is no longer exclusively military, it is measured, according to the expression of Joseph Nye, on the three-dimensional “international chessboard” (Nye 2004:136–137). Henceforth, the State has to confer with a multiplicity of contradictory actors, economic, social, non-governmental organizations, all with different rationalities and a plurality of interests, which escape its control. The study of these new interactions can only be undertaken using a sociological analysis which is complementary to the traditional theoretic approaches (Badie and Smouts 1992; Badie and Pellet 1993; Badie 1995, 1999).

The post-Cold War, post-Westphalian world according to Bertrand Badie, defies Weber’s conception of the State as the only possible entity to monopolize legitimate physical violence within borders. It also defies the view of Hobbes that the State is obliged to behave like a “gladiator” in a permanent struggle for survival (Badie 2005a). Globalization which has produced “interdependence, inclusivity and uniformity”, have allowed numerous non-state actors, such as multinational firms and non-governmental organizations, media and churches for example, to join the international scene. Progress in the fields of technologies of information and communication (radio, television, internet and today the social networks), and also the technics in the field mobility, which have been highlighted by Marcel Merle and before him Marcel Mauss, have contributed to underscore not only the autonomy of the actors but also their interdependence, their integration and uniformity. These logics of integration and interdependence is however counterbalanced by logics of exclusion or as Rosenau calls it “fragmegration” (Rosenau 1997). These exclusions and inequality which carry the weight of humiliation result in insecurity.

This double movement, of exclusion and inclusion between heterogeneous actors, produced by globalization, has created issues of transnational security such as terrorism, maritime piracy, organized cross-border criminality, etc. It bears witness to the increasing privatization of violence by transnational non-state actors, who are always increasing in number (terrorist groups, militias, private security companies, mafia networks, etc.) and with an increasing interpenetration between the internal and external milieu. Security is becoming a global problem and cannot be limited to a strict politico-military approach (this idea is close to the work initiated in the 1980s by Barry Buzan and the school of Copenhagen). This is transformed into the idea of human security and concerns the individual and the questions of justice, environment or well-being, health and human rights. This transformation of the question of security is also evident in the conflicts which are more and more infra-state. The mixture of civil and military makes it more difficult for the classical army to respond, in spite of the means available.

Bertrand Badie poses the question of “denaturation” of the role of the State in a world where notions of sovereignty, territoriality and of power are questioned more and more. This “dilution” of sovereignty and power, this decentralization of international relations making things increasingly complex is obliging States to modify their behavior in negotiating with transnational actors or to modify the rules of international play according to the situation (the right of intervention or the responsibility to protect are examples of such modifications of the rules) (Badie 2004, 2013).

The passage from the old world, centered around the West, “the ‘entre-soi’ of western nations alone in the world”, to a new globalized world has several consequences: that “competition is no longer competition for power but for weakness”, that war between States no longer explains new forms of social and international conflict, that violence has taken multiple forms: nationalism, religious fanaticism, populism, etc. (Badie 2016). In the face of this assessment two options appear to exist. The first is for the States to maintain an asymmetric violence with other actors. Such a situation would logically lead to a weakening of power confronted by multiple threats which are sometimes very diffuse. Military action, economic sanctions, diplomatic connivance or club diplomacy (G7, G8, G20) either produce or amplify the inequalities which are a source of humiliation and exclusion (some go back to colonization). Humiliation, as the Arab Spring has shown, is a particularly efficient springboard for social movements. It was also the basis of extremism and is an argument to justify the use of violence (for the diplomacy of connivance see Badie 2011; for humiliation in international relations see Badie 2014).

The other solution is on the contrary to take action regarding the pathologies of the international system and the anomalies produced by globalization. It means reducing inequality, developing a social interdependence with a solidarist multilateralism in answer to the anomies of the post-Cold War international system. This alternative is the wish of international public opinion which is in the process of being formed (Badie, Devin 2007). Therefore, for Bertrand Badie and conforming to durkheimian tradition, the solution to international conflict is to change mentality, to replace the logic of humiliation by a diplomacy of recognition which would favor the integration of the most fragile countries. Such a “diplomacy of otherness” would lead to international solidarity founded on the principle of justice. In the tradition of Léon Bourgeois, this solidarity intended as a right and duty founded on the principle of responsibility and fraternity will come to pass in a global civil society as envisaged by John Burton (Burton 1972). It will be the product of States, non-state actors, multilateral organizations, and the convergence of civil national societies. It will be the consequence of a multiplication of exchanges, an increase in interdependence, of the construction of a common identity and the realization of common objectives (Badie 2008, 2011). Bertrand Badie realizes that this world civil society has not yet happened and that the State remains the principal actor in international relations. However, “the international banalization of the theme of the human rights, increasingly brings diplomatic relations to an “inter-social” level. This veering towards the inter-social is probably our main achievement and touches even the grammar of diplomacy and its law. It modifies in depth the stakes of the old international relations: non-state-actors, who refer to law have certainly not reached the point where they can rival the States, to make them do something or prevent them from doing something. They do not bring peace nor stop wars. On the other hand they can today characterize peace and war, and decide almost alone on the legitimacy or illegitimacy of war and so influence ever more strongly its evolution (Badie 2007: 84; see also Badie 2002).

Other internationalists are developing this area of thought following this tradition of sociology.Footnote 32 This is the case of Marie-Claude Smouts whose attention is drawn mainly to international institutions, especially the UN (Smouts 1972, 1983; Devin, Smouts 2011), to international opinion (Smouts 1997), to the environment (Smouts 2001a, b, 2003) or to post-colonial studies (Smouts 2007, 2010).

Guillaume Devin also follows this tradition. For him, the sociology of international relations consists of studying “the international phenomena such as social events […] underscore the continuity or discontinuity in modes of action, the constraints and the dynamics that the actors continue to create, but in which they are also involuntarily involved. This is the perspective proposed here under the name of “sociology of international relations”, but which could also be entitled “World Politics” or “International Politics”. It is evident that the use of term sociology does not cover a one dimensional panorama of the contemporary world. It implies a rigorous look at international reality as social reality as much on the micro-level of the actors as on the macro of the ensemble of its composing partsˮ (Devin, 2009: 3–4). This definition does not limit the sociology of international relations to the relations between States. It is up to sociology to study all that exists regarding the social in international relations. His work - on international organizations, on international cooperation, multiculturalism, multilateralism and transnational solidarity (Smouts 1987, 1998, 2002; Badie, Smouts 2003; Devin 2004, 2011, 2013, 2014; Badie, Devin 2007), on the contributions of Norbert Elias, the importance of which has been also under-ligned by Frederic Ramel (Devin 1995: 305–327; Ramel 2006: 91–93) and on the sociological concepts of international relations (Devin 2015) - all continue to make important contributions to transnational analysis.

The work of Zaiki Laïdi on globalization and the place of Europe should also be mentioned (Laidi, 1997a, b, 1998a, b, 2001, 2004, 2008), as should be the contributions inspired by the international political economics of Josepha Laroche on the development of transnational relations, globalization and global governance (Laroche 1998, 2003), on the decline of the role of the State on the international scene and the “brutalization of the world” (Laroche 2011a), on loyalty as principle in a globalized world order (Laroche 2011b) or even on the sociology of the transnational elite (Laroche 2012), all can be labeled with this same tradition.Footnote 33

Last of all, the works of Didier Bigo - director of the Center for the study of Conflicts, Liberty and Security (CCLS) and editor of the quarterly journal in French of Cultures et conflict, founder and co-editor with Rob Walker of International political sociology - concerning international political sociology and critical approaches to security (PARIS school: Political Anthropological Research on International Sociology) particularly on the issue of the link between security and liberty within the framework of political anti-terrorism mainly in Europe (Bigo and Hermant 1988, 1991; Bigo 1992, 1996, 2007; Bigo and Guild 2005; Bigo and Tsoukala 2006, 2008a, b; Bigo et al. 2008, 2010a) and also the questions linked to migratory flows (Bigo 2005a, b, c; Bigo et al. 2010b, 2013) should be mentioned. All can be considered as a new version, this time post-positive, of this transnational sociological tradition.

The discipline of International Relations, in France, has not ceased to develop since the end of the Second World War. A body of work which is scientific, diversified and of good quality has not ceased to increase since the 1950s up to today. This French ‘connection’ or French ‘touch’ is enriching a discipline which still remains very American. At the heart of this French connection it is possible to identify, amongst the difference approaches, a tradition of sociology of international relations which dates back to the reflections of pre-sociologists. The objective of this contribution is to trace up to the present, the itinerary in the field of French international relations of this sociological tradition, from Montesquieu and Tocqueville, of which the work, even if in a fragmentary way, questions the relations between the internal milieu and the international milieu. This contribution also has the aim of showing the influence of their precursors on the sociological reflections on international relations of Raymond Aron and Marcel Merle and on more contemporary authors. This influence is also evident in their conception of international relations (importance of internal over external, interpenetration of the two orders, the idea of the historical progress of mankind), their methodology (explicative or comprehensive, the method of the ideal type and comparative method) and the findings of their analyses (the importance of political regimes in studying external politics, the rise in the means of communication and exchange, the relationship between industrialization and war, etc.).

It is undeniable that in this panorama of the sociology of international relations in France, the figure of Raymond Aron has been and remains fundamental for the discipline. His work, inspired by Weber, marks a break with Emile Durkheim’s and Marcel Mauss’s tradition of sociology. Nevertheless, this has not prevented a parallel development of an area of study, driven by Marcel Merle, which finds its place in the continuity of the paths opened by Durkheim and Mauss.

In France, the discipline has had great precursors, but Raymond Aron played a decisive role in so far as he was the first to draw together the disciplines of sociology, philosophy and history and to be interested in international relations. Before him the field was dominated by a school of very talented historians such as Pierre Renouvin and Jean-Baptiste Duroselle and also remarkable lawyers of the ilk of Georges Scelle. But I believe that international relations in the sense that we use it today - as a study of all the component of the international system including geostrategic, integrating internal dynamics and the role of the actors - dates from the works of R. Aron. His work Paix et guerre entre les nations, published in 1962, without doubt marked a boom. And still today, it is still a great book, always as stimulating to consult, even if Aron did not envisage some recent developments. But it is not a manual. And in order to launch a discipline a manual is necessary. For this, on the pedagogical side we have a lot to thank Marcel Merle for. In 1963 he published a work, La vie internationale, which introduced students to the sociological and political dimension of international relations. Following this, his sociology of international relations, reedited three times, initiated whole classes of students to IR (Smouts, 2002: 83).

Marie-Claude Smouts makes a distinction between two founding figures of the French tradition of the sociology of international relations. Raymond Aron was the first to envisage a theoretical approach at the outset of international relations (which linked sociology, philosophy and history) with his major work Paix et guerre entre les nations. The second is Marcel Merle who was the first to produce a manual of international relations, La vie internationale, which became a work which was indispensable in making the subject part of academia in France. The subjects treated and the methodology used are different in these two scientific approaches and this has led us to conclude that the French tradition of international relations can be divided into two schools.

The first school, inspired by Weber and Simmel, is comprehensive, historical and comparative. It distinguishes the internal milieu from the external milieu, making its specificity the international environment. The subject of study of this sociology is exclusively concerned with interstate relations. Anarchy, the State and war are all given a central role. It is for this reason, rightly or wrongly, that these authors frequently follow the realist or neorealist trend. Raymond Aron is the founder of this comprehensive school which today is in the minority in France.

The second school, inspired by Durkheim, is both positive and explicative. The object of study of this sociology is transnational relations. It does not make a radical separation between the internal milieu and the external milieu and, consequently, considers that there is no difference between social phenomena located within the national society and outside (Merle 1976). Globalization and its effects have a central place, the implication of which is to consider the actors, the relations and processes of integration as a whole. It considers that the pathologies and anomies of the international system are the consequence of a lack of integration and that the progressive decline of the State and its power are the effects of globalization. Marcel Mauss is the precursor of this school. Marcel Merle is the founder of the behaviorist version. Bertrand Badie has renewed the lines and foundations. This school is the one that currently dominates the sociology of international relations in France.

Finally, a third school has developed. This is a school which has united the constructivist and post-positive approaches of the emblematic figures of Thomas Lindemann and Didier Bigo. Thomas Lindemann proposes a constructivist perspective to such subjects of international relations as war and recognition. Didier Bigo’s program of international political sociology is “to modify the debate which has been presented by the internationalists”. He endeavors to overcome the usual oppositions of internal and external, State and society, enemy and friend, micro and macro etc., using a materialistic and constructivist epistemology inspired by the works notably of Bourdieu, Foucault, Deleuze and Elias (Bigo, 2016). The two approaches which are different from the traditional schools open a third way of development and yet another vision of international relations.

Each one of the above tackles an aspect of international reality with a specific intellectual tool. The image proposed by Joseph S. Nye of the repartition of power on a three-dimensional international chessboard is an interesting way of understanding how complementary these different schools of sociology are to one another (Nye 2004).

Aron’s sociology of international relations gives an understanding of diplomatico-military relations that States weave. These are essentially bilateral and take place at the top of the board. We can look to durkheimian tradition for an understanding of the multilateral relations which exist between States and international organizations at the middle of the board and for transnational relations which escape control of governments taking place at the bottom of the board. The constructivist point of view identifies the way in which each intersubjective space influences the behavior, identity and interests of the agents. The post-positive approach allows the questioning of concepts and tools used by the internationalists in considering international relations.

The French tradition of sociology, as the transatlantic connections of its founders, Raymond Aron and Marcel Merle, bear witness and also today new generations of internationalists, has alimented the different approaches to the discipline and continues to do so. These different approaches: liberal, transnational, Marxist, constructivist and critical analysis all find in sociology a source of inspiration in understanding the complexity of international relations.