In the history of relations between the worlcfs leading states since the end of the eighteenth century certain features stand out prominently. One is that infrequent wars have alternated with long periods of peace. From the 1760s to the 1790s these states were at peace; from the 1790s to 1815 they were at war; from 1815 to 1854, peace; 1871 to 1914, peace; 1914 to 1918, war; 1918 to 1939, peace; 1939 to 1945, war; and since 1945 another 36 years of peace already. Another feature, no less pronounced, is that each of these infrequent wars has been more demanding and devastating for all participants, more nearly total, than that which preceded it. In these respects, as also in a third on which I shall enlarge later on, international conduct in the past 200 years has differed from international conduct in all earlier times, when states were more or less continuously engaged in wars that remained limited in scale – and so much so that the rise of the modern system may safely be traced back to the end of the eighteenth century.

With the demise of the Federation of the West Indies in 1962 and the failure of the parties to agree to a ‘truncated’ federation in the smaller Eastern Caribbean islands, the British Government was confronted, for the first time, with the issue of how best to treat the decolonization of island micro-states.

The United States security guarantee to Western Europe enshrined in the North Atlantic Treaty has been not only the most important and enduring of American foreign policy commitments since the late 1940s, but also the least controversial Few critics have challenged the view that the Atlantic Alliance is vital to American security. The manner in which the commitment has been implemented, however, and in particular the extent to which it requires a substantial presence of American conventional forces in Europe has been much more controversial Indeed, the troop deployment policy of the Executive Branch has been challenged by Congress on several occasions. The first challenge came in 1951 when leading members of the Senate questioned both the legitimacy and the wisdom of President Truman's decision to send US troops to Europe. During the latter half of the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, the issue arose once again as Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield articulated doubts about the need to maintain the existing troop level in Europe. From 1966 to 1970 Mansfield introduced several Sense of the Senate Resolutions advocating troop reductions; in 1971 and again in 1973 and 1974 he pressed amendments to legislation which, had they been approved, would have mandated reductions.

The study of international political economy is beset with complexity: the complexity of the empirical referent and the variety of intellectual perspectives. The complexity of contemporary international economic relations was discussed in the first of these two papers. This paper is devoted to a critical review of the major established perspectives on the global political economy and a discussion of some of the bases upon which it might be possible to construct a synthetic, and hopefully more satisfactory, approach.

Many readers will have long known Professor Michael Walzer's remarkable book Just and Unjust Wars. The most interesting thing I can do is to discuss the way it has been received in some centres of the study of international relations in Britain. Professor Hedley Bull, Professor W. B. Gallic and Mr David Watt have reviewed it with Important differences but all to the same ultimate effect. Oxford, Cambridge and the Metropolis conclude that It Is a shallow book, lacking In philosophical depth.