Many regard Thucydides as the first genuine International Relations theorist and a writer of continuing, even timeless importance. His history of the Peloponnesian War is certainly a remarkable work that obviously has had an enormous influence on the development of the field. Its influence, however, is largely pernicious. This article explores why.

This article calls for a widening of the debate about humanitarian intervention to incorporate insights from constructivism, ‘Welsh School’; Critical Security Studies, and critical approaches to Third World International Relations. After identifying a series of problems with the contemporary debate, which is dominated by the English School, it calls for a broadening of the concept of intervention and suggests a need to rethink the meaning of humanitarianism and terms such as the ‘supreme humanitarian emergency’.

This article examines British preferences on European monetary integration. It challenges dominant theories of preference formation, suggesting an alternative explanation focusing on governmental majority. Empirical evidence is presented on both UK economic behaviour and the views of domestic economic interests, as well as government majority. The article also analyses first and second-hand accounts of the main players involved in three cases: the decision not to join the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1979, the decision to join the ERM in 1990, and the decision to opt out of stage 3 of Economic and Monetary Union.

Global public goods (GPGs) are vital to human welfare and security worldwide. Yet often they suffer from under-provision and free-riding, and are not accessible or beneficial to everyone. They illustrate starkly problems of collective action. This article examines multilateral negotiations in which countries seek agreement on the terms for collaboration in providing GPGs. It argues that common obstacles to an effective agreement concern justice and fairness issues, which arise from the earliest phase when the agenda is set to the final stage of securing implementation and compliance. Drawing on recent negotiation practice, it proposes a framework and a set of strategies for how such issues could be tackled.

Dieter Senghaas, Klänge des Friedens: Ein Hörbericht (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), pp. 188.

Ekkehart Krippendorff, Die Kunst, nicht regiert zu werden: Ethische Politik von Sokrates bis Mozart (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), pp. 467.

Realism remains the dominant approach in America to international relations. Modern American realism has developed into a neorealist strand focused on the structure and outcomes of the international system, and a neoclassical strand concerned with the behaviour of individual states. Within each of these are hard-core offensive realists who see a world full of opportunities for aggressive ‘power maximisers’, and defensive realists who see more possibilities for cautious cooperation between ‘security seekers’. At its heart, however, realism remains a world-view where states and power rule. Realism's great claim to fame is that it explains those aspects of world politics that matter most to policymakers. However, three developments in this past decade give reason to question the relevance of the realist world-view.

The editors of the Review of International Studies have posed a timely challenge to what they term American realism. In broad terms, their editorial makes two points: first, realism has lost its relevance to current international policy; and second, realism does a poor job of explaining the behaviour of the world's major powers. In this brief essay I argue that both of these points are greatly overstated, if not simply wrong. At the same time, I accept that realism provides less leverage in addressing the full spectrum of issues facing the major powers in the post-Soviet and now the post-9/11 world than it did during the Cold War. However, this is neither surprising nor a serious problem, because scholars who use a realist lens to understand international politics can, and have, without inconsistency or contradiction also employed other theories to understand issues that fall outside realism's central focus.

‘No one loves a political realist’, Robert Gilpin once lamented. A major reason for this hostility towards realism is its sceptical view of the role of ethical norms (principled beliefs about state action) in international relations. Some critics dislike realism because they think it leads to an immoral international order. Thucydides' famous adage that the ‘strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’ is widely interpreted as evidence that one of realism's founding fathers was an advocate of an immoral approach to statecraft. Niccoló Machiavelli's well-known advice to his Prince that it is politics that determines ethics, not vice versa, reinforces these widely-held views of realism's amorality. The fact that modern realism has been influenced by unsavoury individuals like the German theorist Carl Schmitt, whose indisputable intellectual brilliance was tainted by his overly close association with the Third Reich, leads many to see a continuing link between realpolitik and evil in the international system. Thus, Richard Ashley spoke for many when he concluded that

Over the past decade, the English School of International Relations (IR) has made a remarkable resurgence. Countless articles and papers have been written on the School. Some of these works have been critical, but most have applauded the School's efforts to provide a fruitful ‘middle way’ for IR theory, one that avoids the extremes of either an unnecessarily pessimistic realism or a naively optimistic idealism. At the heart of this via media is the idea that, in many periods of history, states exist within an international society of shared rules and norms that conditions their behaviour in ways that could not be predicted by looking at material power structures alone. I f the English School (ES) is correct that states often follow these rules and norms even when their power positions and security interests dictate alternative policies, then American realist theory – a theory that focuses on power and security drives as primary causal forces in global politics – has been dealt a potentially serious blow.

This Forum has two main aims. First and foremost, it is designed to assess the relevance of American realism in the wake of developments that are considered to have transformed international relations over the past decade. A second aim, but one that is central to my contribution, is to assess whether or not the resurgent English School provides the foundations for an approach that can account more effectively for developments in the post-Cold War world than American realism.