Debates about the future of relations among the advanced industrial countries after the Cold War hinge on theories about the sources of international political order. Realism advances the most defined—and pessimistic—answers drawing on theories of anarchy, balance, and hegemony. But these theories are not able to explain the origins and continuing stability of relations among the United States and its European and Asian partners. This article develops a theory of liberal international order that captures its major structures, institutions, and practices. Distinctive features mark postwar liberal order—co-binding security institutions, penetrated American hegemony, semi-sovereign great powers, economic openness, and civic identity. It is these multifaceted and interlocking features of Western liberal order that give it a durability and significance.

The case of the French Revolution supports the proposition that principles of political legitimacy which shape state identities are linked to domestic social structures, and help determine the resources states mobilize in international competition. To the degree that they are shared across states, legitimacy principles also shape international society. The enactment of a deviant principle of legitimacy by a major power will have systemic consequences because it undermines the existing rules of the game; it may have transformative effects if the efficacy of the new principle is demonstrated in competition. Closer attention should be paid to the complex manner in which new principles interact with existing rules of international society.

That states are sovereign units interacting under conditions of anarchy has long been the core assumption of the discipline of International Relations. Operating largely with an anthropomorphic conceptualization of the state, 'statists' create a stunted ontology of the international system dominated by the concepts of state survival and an assumed state survival interest. By constituting sharp lines of demarcation between being and non-being, between 'life' and 'death', statists ignore a host of more subtle changes in the ontological status of states which are ill-treated by reference to 'survival'. This Westphalian ontology leads ultimately to a dead end, for such a definition rejects from the outset an ontology of overlapping political authorities in a single territory but at distinct scales which is characteristic not only of the present international system but of the so-called Westphalian era as well.

This article challenges two prevailing views of the failure by African polities to attain sovereign statehood in the late 19th century by providing evidence from two case studies showing that many African polities were not 'quasi-states,' lacking the empirical political and economic capacity to join the international community of sovereign states. Nor were they unable to sustain or promote international commerce. Instead, when heightened international economic competition threatened the profits of European traders, European interests pressed for pro-expansionist policies and for conditions deemed necessary for the success of European commerce.

Recent interest in the work of Historical Sociologists has concentrated on their renewed interest in the state. There is considerable regard for the historical account of state formation and development produced by writers such as Mann, Skocpol and Tilly. Surprisingly there has been less attention paid to another feature of their writings—the locating of states in an inter-state context. This article examines the international context envisioned by four historical sociologists. It argues that, although these writers have been successful at historicising state formations, this powerful account has not been matched with a historical account of international relations. If this project is to move forward, a complementary historical account of international contexts, or global structures, is required.

Increasingly, International Relations (IR) theorists are drawing inspiration from a broad range of theorists outside the discipline. One thinks of the introduction of Antonio Gramsci's writings to IR theorists by Robert Cox, for example, and the ‘school’ that has developed in its wake. Similarly, the works of Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault, and Jurgen Habermas are all relatively familiar to most IR theorists not because of their writings on world politics per se, but because they were imported into the field by roving theorists. Many others of varying success could be cited as well. Such cross-disciplinary excursions are important because they inject vitality into a field that – in the opinion of some at least—is in need of rejuvenation in the face of contemporary changes. In this paper, I elaborate on the work of the Canadian communications theorist Harold Innis, situating his work within contemporary IR theory while underlining his historicism, holism, and attention to time-space biases.

Stafano Guzzini, Realism in International Relations and International Political Economy: The Continuing Story of a Death Foretold, London and New York, Routledge, 1998

Brian C. Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of International Relations, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1998

The philosopher and mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead, cautioned many years ago that ‘A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost’. If this injunction is true, then there would appear to be very little hope for the study of international relations. Although there is considerable debate about who constitute the founding fathers – names as different as Thucydides, Grotius and Kant come to mind – without doubt, interest in the seminal thoughts about international relations of such figures has never been higher.

During the 1980s the proliferation of new technologies transformed the potential of the news media to provide a constant flow of global real-time news. Tiananmen Square and the collapse of communism symbolised by the fall of the Berlin Wall became major media events communicated to Western audiences instantaneously via TV news media. By the end of the decade the question was being asked as to what extent this ‘media pervasiveness’ had impacted upon government – particularly the process of foreign policy making. The new technologies appeared to reduce the scope for calm deliberation over policy, forcing policy-makers to respond to whatever issue journalists focused on. This perception was in turn reinforced by the end of the bipolar order and what many viewed as the collapse of the old anti-communist consensus which – it was argued – had led to the creation of an ideological bond uniting policy makers and journalists. Released from the ‘prism of the Cold War’ journalists were, it was presumed, freer not just to cover the stories they wanted but to criticise US foreign policy as well. The phrase ‘CNN effect’ encapsulated the idea that real-time communications technology could provoke major responses from domestic audiences and political elites to global events.

David Campbell's recent review article of single-authored monographs on the Bosnian conflict serves as a vehicle for him to sketch the outlines of what he calls ‘a different objectivity’. The article is interesting insofar as it represents a serious attempt by a self-proclaimed postmodernist/poststructuralist writer, although perhaps not a card carrying one to use his own phrase, to grasp the epistemological nettle. For despite the many trenchant critiques of prevailing epistemologies by post-modernist writers and much talk of a ‘postmodern epistemology’, there has been very little, if any, attempt to elaborate just what such an epistemology might involve. Campbell highlights what is a stake here by noting that ‘how one goes about making a judgement as to which narrative of the Bosnian War is better raises the thorniest of historiography's issues.’ Unsurprisingly, Campbell's answer to this issue is the standard postmodern fallback position of Nietzscheian perspectivism.

Colin Wight has been obviously waiting some time to make his point. Much like a hunter who, with an old weapon and a handy supply of ammunition, has been frustrated by the lack of the right quarry, Wight has unloaded both barrels on the best available target. And what better target than ‘MetaBosnia’! For one who might be a member of an imaginary Epistemic Realist Shooters Association – where the motto is evidently something like ‘show us your epistemological framework so we can keep the relationship between world/word, fact/value and theory/practice conceptually clear and methodologically rigorous, damn it’ – this review must have seemed like the ideal beast. With the plumage of a pomo, the cry of a relativist, and a pedigree that incorporates the misogyny and proto-fascism of its turn-of-the-century German forebears, perfect prey indeed.

In a recent article in the Review of International Studies Hans-Karl Pichler argues that Hans Morgenthau's intellectual universe was saturated by ‘typically European philosophical problems’ which he transferred to an American political context. He shows this by looking at how Morgenthau tried to overcome the value determinacy of social science, as pointed out by Weber, by grounding his political realist theory in a Schmittean understanding of the political, which defines war – the friend/enemy distinction – as the essence of the political and founds it anthropologically in the evil, dangerous nature of human beings.

Harold Laski was a writer who exercised enormous influence in the turbulent environment of the early to mid-twentieth century. Though normally regarded as a political theorist, Laski frequently wrote on the problems of international politics. Certainly, his work was fully engaged with world issues in the inter-war and post-war periods. Like many critical and idealist thinkers of the time, he initially hoped that the League of Nations would usher in a new, international democratic system. However his early hopes gave way to a more pessimistic (and more radical) perspective, and from the late 1920s onwards he believed that the only way of transcending the existing system of sovereign states was by moving beyond capitalism. Combining a critique of both the Westphalian system and the market which he assumed underpinned it, Laski raised major questions – relevant to his own times and to ours too. Mainly ignored since his death, it is perhaps time that the work of this unduly neglected figure should be revisited.