It is fitting that Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis should be the point of departure for the first Special Issue of the Review of International Studies. One of the earliest appraisals of Carr's contribution to international relations appeared in the very first issue of the journal of the British International Studies Association.1 More recently, by publishing the annual E.H.Carr memorial lecture, the Review has been partly responsible for the Carr revival that has gathered momentum.2 Although these lectures have rarely had Carr's general work or The Twenty Years' Crisis as their central theme, they have consistently shown how Carr's thought can be applied to the various sub-fields of international studies. In this first Special Issue we have likewise used Carr's work as the point of departure in this survey of both subject and subject-matter spanning the 80 years since the subject was placed in an academic setting.

The story of international relations (IR) is conventionally told in terms of a series of ‘great debates’. The first ‘great debate’ was the so-called idealist- or utopian-realist debate which took place in the late 1930s and the early 1940s. It was triggered by a number of ‘real-world’ events — Manchuria, Abyssinia, the failure of the League, Munich, the slide into war — but most importantly by the publication of E. H. Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis. This book, it is said, had a devastating impact on the discipline. Idealism, the predominant mode of thinking about international relations, was revealed as ‘bankrupt’, ‘sterile’, ‘glib’, ‘gullible’, a ‘hollow and intolerable sham’. The rout, indeed, was so complete that some authors have contended that it led to a Kuhnian-style paradigm shift: idealism, the normal mode of enquiry, was thrown into a state of ‘scientific crisis’, particularly by the ‘anomaly’ of World War Two, the occurrence of which it was utterly unable to explain; realism, Carr's alternative scientific standpoint, offered not only a cogent explanation, but also the prospect of accurate prediction and effective policy prescription. It soon replaced idealism as the ‘normal science’ of the field.

To analyse an academic field of study in a particular era assumes two things: (1) that a particular era has properties that distinguish it clearly from predecessors and successors, and (2) that a field of study necessarily reflects or takes on a colouration of actual social conditions. Both assumptions are arguable, but the first is less contentious than the second. The Cold War was in many ways a distinct era, an era of anxiety caused by nuclear weapons, and an era in which diplomatic and military ideas, practices, and norms differed in significant ways from those prior to 1945 and after 1989. There were significant continuities, of course, but one would have little difficulty drawing compelling contrasts between the major characteristics of international politics in the 1920s and those of the 1950s.

. . . it is, contrary to what one would expect, the future which drives us back into the past. Hannah Arendt

It is almost two decades ago that the Review published Roy Jones' famous ‘case for closure’ against what he christened the English school of international relations. While that case was couched in an anxious foreboding that the school was ‘still in its prime’, that its bonds ‘are proving much too strong’, and that ‘young recruits are constantly coming forward’, it arguably registered a growing sense at the time that its target was a safe one, a spent force — one whose attraction defied explanation. For the work of the English school was a ‘sterile regime’. It lacked intellectual coherence, rigour, passion, and acquaintance with such important social-scientific fields as economics. Whether Jones had cast his polemical net too widely over a heterodox group, or missed the mark with his criticisms, the absence of any spirited, sustained reply along these lines seems, in retrospect, to reinforce the impression that the approach identified most closely with Martin Wight and Hedley Bull had run out of steam. It had made little impression in the United States. In British circles it had become the faintly embarrassing traditionalism which scholars were obliged to overcome, a synonym for scholarly provincialism, one that engaged the world from such insular vantage points as the common room of the London School of Economics. It stood accused of inhibiting access to the fruits of American social science while inclining, at bottom, to the same political realism that had predominated in the U.S. The mostly unspoken accusation of anachronism has never gone away.

For Carr, the contrast between utopians and realists was between ‘those who regard politics as a function of ethics and those who regard ethics as a function of politics’. In other words, can we direct society in benevolent directions, perhaps to a utopia, or do we take what we are given and try to rationalize this into some form of moral acceptability? In the context of International Relations, the utopian aspires to a world without war and where power is not the primary determinant of relationships. The realist is more sceptical. Broadly, the realist stresses the constraints in life; the utopian stresses the opportunities. At this level, they are not social theories but temperamental attitudes.

The end of the Cold War has prompted a good deal of soul-searching in the academic discipline of International Relations (IR). Some results of this process are already apparent; the dominant version of realism, neorealism, is developing in new directions in an attempt to address major areas where the theory has been shown to contain weaknesses (e.g. domestic politics, international cooperation, the analysis of change). Liberal IR-theory is becoming less focused on international institutions and has devoted more attention to the larger issues of democracy and democratization, sovereignty, and change in the context of modernization and globalization. Some bodies of established theory are receiving fresh attention, including the International Society (or English) School, and there is a renewed interest in the field of international political economy.Many thanks to Kenneth Glarbo, Knud Erik J¿rgensen, Michael Nicholson, Steve Smith, and Alexander Wendt for very helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Within the community of academic students of international politics today there is a deep epistemological rift over the extent to and ways in which we can know our subject. Speaking very broadly, on one side stand what have become known as 'positivists', who think we can get closer to the truth about international politics, but only if we follow the methods which have proven so successful in the natural sciences. And on the other side stand ‘post-positivists’, who think we do not have privileged access to the truth about international politics, and least of all through the methods of natural science. Although it can seem far removed, this epistemological disagreement actually matters quite a lot to our collective efforts to make sense of the real world, since we cannot avoid taking some position on it, and those positions affect the questions we ask, the methods we use to answer those questions, and ultimately the kinds of knowledge that we produce. Perhaps for this reason what may seem more a dispute for philosophers than political scientists has become one of the ‘Great Debates’ (the Third) in the discipline of International Relations (IR), and, indeed, it arguably underlay the ‘Second’ Debate between behaviouralists and traditionalists in the 1960s as well.

In everyday life we often engage in ethical argument about what ought to be done in international affairs; in a rough and ready fashion we engage in normative theory. It is odd then to find that for most of its history, scholars in the discipline of International Relations (IR) have seldom explicitly engaged in this kind of theorizing. The reasons for their avoiding it are now well known. Certain developments in the discipline over the past few decades, however, suggest that the discipline might now have taken the normative turn. But has it?

Power is one of the most commonly used concepts in the social sciences and in ordinary political discourse. It would seem to be central to the study of international relations. Before we consider the role of power in international relations in the short twentieth century, it is necessary to clear up some preliminaries about the concept in general. This is because power is a frustrating concept; its use seldom lives up to our expectations. To begin with there is a fundamental ambiguity; is power a phenomenon to be explained or an explanatory tool, a dependent or an independent variable? On closer inspection, the explanatory power of the concept of power is low. It is difficult to explain social relations and their outcomes, at either the national or the international level, in terms of power as it is normally conceived in the social sciences. Yet, however theoretically sophisticated we try to be, we are driven to use some such concept for want of an alternative.

Until recently, International Relations (IR) paid remarkably little attention to identities, including its own. IR called up the nation-state, while displaying very little interest in either nation or state, or the meaning(s) of the hyphen in between. Assuming state-nations removed from view the contested politics of identity and boundary making within the state. This article seeks to make these politics visible. It considers, first, why IR might have missed nationalism, and then reviews different conceptions of nation. It analyses the gendered and global politics of nationalism, and concludes with the prospect and possibility of the nation in new transnational times.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, the time for peace has come.’ The late Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister of Israel

The conditions in which peace can exist are now just what they have always been (even if time and place make them appear different): a higher expected utility from peace than from war; a ‘civic culture’; a commitment to the peaceful resolution of disputes; strong institutions; an ethical code; mutual legitimization; peacemakers (because peace is socially constructed); a social-communicative process; material and normative resources; social learning (to take us from here to there); shared trust; and, most important, a collective purpose and social identity. As I will explain below, these are not ‘necessary’ conditions in any formal sense. Nor are there really sufficient conditions of peace, other, perhaps, than lobotomy and the total elimination of weapons, including fingernails.

The best proof that E. H. Carr has written a true ‘classic’ is that The Twenty Years' Crisis provides much food for thought even now when some of its alleged foundational verities have become problematic. Rather than being limited to a ‘realist’ understanding of politics pure and simple, the reader encounters an analysis that is much more subtle though much less scientific than later realist interpretations would suggest. True, the first chapter is entitled ‘The science of international politics’ but the discussion about ‘purpose’, Carr's invocation of Marx, and the intellectual history he paints with a broad brush, make it clear that it is not a conception of natural science that informs his inquiry. Besides, as with every classic, different readings are possible.

In reflecting upon the prospects for world order, in the concluding chapter of The Twenty Years' Crisis, E. H. Carr advised that ‘few things are permanent in history; and it would be rash to assume that the territorial unit of power is one of them’. Based upon his observation that world order was being reshaped by the contradictory imperatives of progressive economic integration and a ‘recrudescence of disintegrating tendencies’, Carr concluded with a confident prediction that ‘the concept of sovereignty is likely to become in the future even more blurred and indistinct than it is at present’.