Charles Anthony Woodward Manning, a distinguished authority on law and jurisprudence, a controversial writer on South Africa, and for over 30 years (1930–1962) Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science in the University of London, died at the age of 83 at Constantia, Cape Province, South Africa, on 10 March 19780 Though most of his life was spent in England – he went to Brasenose College, Oxford, as a Bishops Rhodes Scholar in 1914 – he left for his homeland for the last time in September 1977, a few months after the death of his wife Marion (or ‘Maisie’), whom he married in 1939 when she was a pupil of his at the LSE. They had no children.

This yearly commemoration of Martin Wight by means of a lecture is doubly appropriate. An annual lecture keeps his memory green among his friends and pupils. And in the second place, it is a peculiarly fitting celebration because Martin Wight was a teacher whose greatest and most seminal influence was in large measures exercised in lectures tutorials, seminars and discussion groups. Exercised that is by means of the spoken, the living, word transmitted directly person to person, mind to mind. When it is contrasted with, say, a book, mere speech is thought to be something fleeting and evanescent, not to be compared with the tangibility, fixity, durability of the written and the printed word. But this is the merest superstition, for that which is fixed is also dead and inert. If the written word has power to speak to us, to move us, this is because it is the emanation and the embodiment of the living spirit. I am, here, put in mind of a striking passage which occurs in that most moving of Plato's writings, the writing known as the seventh epistle – a passage where Plato describes how his teaching is transmitted. This teaching he declares is not to be found in anything written down. The knowledge with which he is concerned is of the kind which “after long-continued intercourse between teacher and pupil, in joint pursuit of the subject, suddenly, like light flashing forth when a fire is kindled, it is born in the soul and straightway nourishes itself. ”The light of Martin Wight's discourse, its rayonnement, an irradiation now felt by many who never knew or met him – it is this which has brought us together on this occasion, and which illuminates the issues I am about to consider – issues which we have reason to believe interested him closely, and in more ways than one.

Between 1919 and July 1921 British Crown forces and the Irish Republican Army fought a sporadic and brutal conflict, usually referred to as the ‘troubles’, or, more formally, as the ‘Anglo-Irish war’. At 2.30 a.m., on 6 December, 1921, British and Irish plenipotentiaries signed ‘Articles of Agreement for a Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland’; the document which they signed was to dominate Anglo-Irish relations for thirty years, and certain parts of it are live issues still. Aspects of the relationship between Britain and Ireland have been explored in recently published monographs, but there is no general survey of the period, and little attempt to examine the significance of the ‘Ulster question’ in this context. A general treatment of some of the main themes in the Anglo-Irish relationship between 1921 and 1950 will therefore be of interest, not only for its own sake, but also because it throws light on a small but significant aspect of international relations in the second quarter of this century.

Associated with the concept of the nation state and system is a latent threat structure which this article seeks to delineate and to explore empirically. Why do the Japanese perceive the Russians as a serious political threat while discounting the potential military impact of the Chinese? Why did the United States consider the threat to its interests sufficiently grave in Indochina to fight a 10-year war against communism there while virtually ignoring the Castro regime less than 100 miles off the Florida coast ? What combination of German attributes and behaviour convinced France and Britain in the presence of aggresssive capability that they could disregard the threat posed to Czechoslovakia by Hitler in 1938? The latent threat structure of the nation state is neither obvious nor of trivial importance to global security and peace.

National integration and the legitimation of authority

The study of foreign policy leadership is characterized by a number of conceptual and methodological problems for the researcher. It is located on the divide between the study of the individual and the idiosyncratic, on the one hand, and the structural and patterned on the other; it stands at the crossroads of the internal political system and the international arena; and it lends an aura of personalized comprehensibility to complex processes of change and development, integration and disintegration, in the multidimensional political, social and economic environment in which it is set. Its very choice of subject matter seems to assume that political actors, although working within specific systemic constraints, also possess opportunities to make and/or enforce choices under permissive conditions which allow a significant amount of conscious manipulation. Furthermore, such studies often take for granted that the nation-state is the most significant unit of analysis – in the sense that it is treated as given rather than as problematic. This essay attempts to chart a course through these complex waters by developing a set of interrelated hypotheses about a particular type of foreign policy leadership and the uses to which it is put – namely the legitimation of the authority of the state itself within what have been called “modern national culture societies”.

There can be little doubt that of the three approaches to the international system which Dr. Little explores,1 what he calls the “organized complexity model” is the most useful and valid for an understanding of international relations. While the first of the models he considers, the mechanistic one, has “no room for evolution, adaption or self-regulation,” the second, the organic model still focuses problematically on structures which are supposed to maintain a given system and so both lack what the third seeks to provide: a fluid, dynamic perspective which can account for change.