In recent years a new group of ‘virtual states’—analogous to the virtual corporation—has emerged in world politics and economics. In order to concentrate upon high level services (research, development, product design, financing, marketing and transport), these countries have transferred much of their manufacturing production elsewhere. Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Switzerland, Holland, and others have earned large returns from producing abroad as home labour costs escalate. To some degree every major industrial nation has moved in a virtual direction as manufacturing declines to 20 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and services rise to 65, 70 per cent or more. This evolution conflicts with traditional security assumptions about the necessity of a powerful and compact economic base. Now countries' economic potential is frequently divided between home and host nations, and security may depend upon reliable access to the economies of other states. Virtual states and nations moving in a ‘virtual direction’ may improve their position through economic growth in normal times, but may become vulnerable when security threats arise. In war they have to co-ordinate supply from a range of allied nations to carry on the struggle against opponents. It might be thought that their pattern of peacetime interdependence undermines their long-term security.

Ethical cosmopolitanism is conventionally taken to be a stance that requires an ‘impartialist’ point of view—a perspective above and beyond all particular ties and loyalties. Taking seriously the claims of those critics who counter that morality must have a ‘particularist’ starting-point, this article examines the viability of an alternative understanding of cosmopolitanism: ‘embedded cosmopolitanism’. Using moral justifications for patriotism as points of contrast, it presents embedded cosmopolitanism as a position that recognises community membership as being morally constitutive, but challenges the common assumption that communities are necessarily bounded and territorially determinate.

The language of human rights, along with much else in international relations, presently exhibits the features of globalisation and fragmentation. Globalisation in that human rights is used throughout the world at many levels to discuss moral approval and condemnation. Fragmentation in that human rights means different things to different people, and may well be used in contradictory ways by agents of social change. Yet most advocates of human rights wish to retain the adjective ‘universal’ along with a sense of the moral objectivity of human rights. This article suggests that a better way to ensure human rights universalism is to think of the concept as a tool, not an objectively existing moral standard or entity.

Qualifying a realist interpretation, this essay argues that the dialectical involvement of the state as an individual with its external relations exposes international politics as a matter of both anarchy and war, and mutual recognition and practical morality among states in Hegel's theory of international relations. With the absolute distinction between internal community and external anarchy removed, Hegel's account of civil society becomes relevant to his theory of international relations. Both as an analogy and concretely, it provides indications for a partial transcendence of sovereign statehood and international anarchy by institutionalised co-operation and political (self-)regulation in a transnationalising civil society.

The structure of international trade is determined not only by market forces, but also by the political objectives of states. Weak states participate least in the open international trading system. The strong states that do participate channel trade largely within regional trading blocks. The major states in Europe and East Asia have an incentive to diminish their dependence on the hegemonic power, that is, the United States, which has reacted with its own regionalism (NAFTA). Moreover, regionalism is interpreted as a strategy that reduces states' exposure to major shocks in the global economy. Additionally, it permits them to support weak sectors of their economies at a regional level without entirely undermining the long-term growth benefits of international trade, since a substantial degree of autarky is more feasible and efficient at a regional rather than at the national level.

Poverty reduction is now a prime concern of global policymakers. Renewed global efforts for poverty reduction are presented as the post-Washington Consensus. In this context, I identify an emerging ‘global development architecture’ that entails new patterns of interlinkages between the WTO, IMF, World Bank, Regional Development Banks and Bilateral and Multilateral Development Agencies. Through the example of microcredit and poverty reduction I address the political economic implications of the emerging global development architecture. I argue that microcredit (1) facilitates financial sector liberalisation and the global trade in financial services; (2) functions as a political safety-net, containing or dampening resistance at the community level to liberalisation policies and economic austerity measures. The article critically probes the emerging global development architecture and argues that it is incorporated into the reconfiguration of global political economy as a strategy of ‘crisis management’. Normative discourses underpinning the post-Washington Consensus are argued to be instrumental to efforts to legitimate the consolidation, ‘constitutionally’, of what continues to be the Washington Consensus.

The September 11 terrorist strikes prompted renewed interest in a debate about just cause that has been increasingly open since the demise of the Cold War and the shift to a more multilateral and interventionist world order. This article contributes to that debate by looking first into the just war tradition to argue for a conceptual revision that equates just cause with jus ad bellum (just recourse to war). It then seeks to specify the component parts of just cause understood in this way, holding that demonstrable injustice should take the place formerly occupied by just cause in just war theory. Towards the end it uses three real-world cases to develop a mechanism for validating just cause claims. The argument is that a cause is just only when its proponents can convince an international forum of intractable injustice, responsible intervention, and an appropriate balance of contingent factors. The article closes by considering how the current war on terrorism might be assessed in such a forum.

Both policy articles about US post-Cold War foreign policy and the recent rhetoric of US policymakers appears to be slipping back into the language of the ‘arrogance of power’, against which Senator Fulbright warned America in the 1960s. In what follows, the USA's style of foreign policy; its criteria for intervention; its invasion of Panama; its capabilities; its intervention in Bosnia; and the impact of contending theories about changes in the international sphere will be examined with a view to casting some light on how the USA has responded to the world outside its boundaries after the Cold War. Finally, in the light of Senator Fulbright's criticisms of US interventionism in the recent past, the essay draws towards its conclusion by specifically addressing the key questions of the whens, whys and wherefores of US intervention into and exits from international crises. It explores some of the problems posed by continuity and change in the struggle to adjust US foreign policy to a non-Cold War world and examines the wisdom of enthusiastic calls for the US to spread democracy abroad.

The article deals with NATO's intervention in Kosovo. Instead of focusing on the military and diplomatic interventions, the article looks at how NATO developed a humanitarian interest in providing assistance and protection to the Kosovo Albanian refugees. In the name of the refugees—and to a lesser extent, of internally displaced persons—NATO entered a humanitarian field and was partly transfigured into a humanitarian agency during the crisis in Kosovo. The political significance of NATO's humanitarianism was that its reputation for competence and its image of respectability and honour depended to an extent on how well it supported the international assistance to the Kosovo Albanians. The stakes were not limited to the immediate Kosovo context, however. The symbolic struggle for reputation and honour resonated directly in the political struggle for the conservation and transformation of the European security complex. The success of the humanitarian operation became an additional element of demonstrating the value of military capital for acquiring political authority in the definition and management of security problems in post-Cold War Europe.

Kalevi J. Holsti retired from his position as Killam Professor Emeritus in the Political Science Department of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in June 1999. Prof. Holsti's long and wide-ranging career has produced a number of classic works in the IR field, among them The Dividing Discipline (1985), International Politics: A Framework for Analysis (7th edn., 1994), Peace and War: Armed Conflicts and International Order, 1648–1989 (1991), and The State, War, and the State of War (1996). The following interview was conducted in January 2001 in Vancouver. A number of alterations were subsequently made to the raw transcript in consultation with Prof. Holsti.