The non-use of nuclear weapons since Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 has emerged as a major puzzle in international politics. Traditional International Relations scholarship views this largely as a function of the deterrent relationship that emerged between the nuclear powers, especially during the Cold War era. The fact that nuclear weapons have not been used against non-nuclear states, despite temptations to use them, remains a challenge to the deterrence-only explanation. More normatively oriented scholars have argued that a taboo has emerged against the non-use of nuclear weapons. Nina Tannenwald's book, The Nuclear Taboo is the most comprehensive study on this subject which relies on constructivist logic of inter-subjective taboo-like prohibition in accounting for the puzzle. While I see much merit in Tannenwald's empirical case studies, it is far-fetched to call the non-use largely a function of a taboo-like prohibition. For, taboos by their very nature forbid discussions of their breaking, whereas nuclear states have national military strategies that call for nuclear use under certain circumstances. They have also in many crises situations considered the use of nuclear weapons. I have argued in my book, The Tradition of Non-use of Nuclear Weapons (Stanford University Press, 2009), that a more modest tradition can be given partial credit for the absence of nuclear attacks on non-nuclear states. The tradition emerged because of a realisation of the horrendous effects of nuclear attack (a material fact) which generated reputation costs for a potential user. These reputation costs in turn generated self-deterrence which has helped to create a tradition which is partially restraining nuclear states from using their weapons for anything other than existential deterrence. Unlike Tannenwald, I contend that the tradition is not a strict taboo and hence it can be altered if material and political circumstances compel nuclear states to do so. The recent policy changes that have taken place in nuclear powers such as the US, Russia, UK, and France do not augur well for the tradition as the conditions for atomic use have been expanded to include prevention, pre-emption and other non-proliferation objectives involving rogue states and terrorist groups.

It certainly has a past.For the Greek foundations, see H. C. Baldry, The Unity of Mankind in Greek Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965). An informative recent article focusing on the Roman period (though rather misleading on Alexander the Great's importance in the history of cosmopolitan thinking) is Lisa Hill, ‘The Two Republicae of the Roman Stoics: Can a Cosmopolite be a Patriot?’, Citizenship Studies, 4 (2000), pp. 47–63. And that past, especially in its Stoic foundations, reveals a clear ethical purpose: ‘As long as I remember that I am part of such a whole [Universe],’ explained Marcus Aurelius, ‘. . . I shall . . . direct every impulse of mine to the common interest’.Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (trans. C. R. Haines), The Communings with Himself (i.e. Meditations) (London:Heinemann and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1961), X, 6. Moreover, the word ‘cosmopolitan’ derives from kosmopolites, citizen of the universe, and polites, citizen, notably in its Aristotelean definition, has a decided ethical content. Accordingly, if the citizen of a state (polis) should be possessed of civic virtue (arete), by extension, the citizen of the universe (kosmopolis) should live a life of virtue, guided by his perception and understanding of the divine, natural law. True, in non-academic parlance the word ‘cosmopolitan’ has, from the eighteenth century, acquired the vague and vulgar connotation for an individual of enjoying comfortable familiarity with a variety of geographical and cultural environments. None the less, the more precise, political–ethical sense of a kosmopolites is so much more apposite to our present purpose that this essay will be framed in the main by this meaning.

Introduction

After years of retirement in the academy, macro’historical commentary on contemporary events has returned to fashion. Radical domestic changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and new patterns ofEast’West relations-in short, the collapse of communism and the end othe Cold War’mark the end of an era and present an invitation to international theorizing.1 Few would deny that these changes are momentous, but there is little consensus concerning their origins, trajectory, and implications. Explaining these events will necessitate a reweighing of fundamental theoretical issues. Thesize and speed of these changes were largely unexpected,reminding us how primitive our theories really are and encouraging us to broaden our theoretical perspective. To capture these events, theorists must reach across the disciplinary divides of Sovietology, international relations theory political economy, and political sociology.

The emergence of the transnational as a site and object of governance has triggered concern amongst both affected publics subject to these effects, and scholars keen to locate the democratic potentials therein. Increasingly, public sphere theory is being promoted as a lens for interrogating the democratic potential of the transnational. However the project of transposing public sphere theory from its Westphalian origins to the transnational has been frustrated by a lack of empirical examples in which the properties of a transnational public sphere can be easily identified. In this article, examining the encounter between La Vía Campesina and the UN Committee on World Food Security, I argue for the existence of a nascent transnational public sphere in the specific domain of transnational food and agricultural policymaking. The existence of this concrete example, I argue, defends public sphere theory’s transnational turn against either the charge of utopianism, or the need to suspend some of the framework’s core conditions in order to accommodate the ‘actually possible’. It also allows us to advance public sphere theory’s empirical research agenda, and in this article I introduce an analytical framework to take this further.

Hobbes' conception of relations between states has attracted attention from two directions. Students of political theory who have focused on Hobbes have from time to time looked beyond their central preoccupations and noted briefly the relevance of his doctrine for the international arena. The external relations of Leviathan are for them on the fringe of Hobbes' theory. Students of international relations on the other hand invoke Hobbes' name frequently as a kind of shorthand for a particular approach to the international world, one that is also associated with Machiavelli, and usually called the ‘realist’ approach. By contrast with the political theorists, they tend to look from the outside into Hobbes’ theory and to ask whether and how far the ‘domestic’ situation of individuals in a Hobbesian state of nature bears an analogy with the ‘external’ situation of states in relationship to one another.

Both relationality and separateness are aspects of our everyday lives. How we engage these phenomena hinges on the particular existential assumptions that we take for granted. Within the discipline of International Relations (IR), both relationality and separateness have informed how global politics is studied and practiced. How states and their relations are conceived has, for instance, varied by the distinct degrees of privilege given to separation and interconnection: from notions of completely autonomous units like billiard balls to always emergent phenomena co-constituted through relations. The plurality of trajectories that inform this Special Issue illustrate how much broader the spectrum of relational engagement can be when we are cognisant of the impact of these existential assumptions on forms of life, knowing, and knowledge production in International Relations. By highlighting a spectrum of relational engagement, we raise important questions about the way the various knowledge frames in IR are acknowledged, legitimised, limited, and reproduced.

Even leading globalizers—that is, proponents of the continued liberalization of the global economic order occupying positions of influence in either the public or private domain—now concede that in its failure to deliver a more just global economic order, globalization may hold within it the seeds of its own demise. As James Wolfenson, President of the World Bank, noted in an address to the Board of Governors of the Bank in October 1998, ‘. . . [i]f we do not have greater equity and social justice, there will be no political stability and without political stability no amount of money put together in financial packages will give us financial stability’. An economic system widely viewed as unjust, as Ethan Kapstein recently argued, will not long endure. These views, of course, are not new. Adam Smith himself acknowledged in Wealth of Nations that no society could survive or flourish if great numbers lived in poverty. Ethan Kapstein, ‘Winners and Loses in the Global Economy’, International Organization, 54:2 (2000), pp. 359–84.

This article explores the uses of history in contemporary Eurosceptic discourse in Britain. It does so in the knowledge that studying an essentially contested concept such as Euroscepticism poses severe methodological problems, and in the first section I situate my article in the emerging scholarly literature on the subject. Having explained why I limit my research to popular Euroscepticism in the tabloid press, in the second section I critically analyse the rhetorical strategies employed by the Sun and the Daily Mail to garner support for their line on Europe, suggesting that the appeal of their discourse resides in its recourse to national history of the school textbook variety. In the third part I use this finding to argue that the discipline of history has been an unwitting accomplice in making Euroscepticism so popular amongst the British public, press and politicians. This has considerable ramifications both for the theoretical study of Euroscepticism and the political efforts to counter its popularity, and I consider all of these in the conclusion.

Throughout the 1980s and continuing into the 1990s the academic discipline of international relations has witnessed a prolonged period of intense intellectual ferment about the contemporary identity of the field. The significance of this academic controversy is evidenced by the designation that it most fundamentally represents the discipline's third ‘Great Debate’. The importance of the third debate to a field characteristically immune from meta-theoretical self-reflection has been aptly acknowledged by those who recognize the changed nature of philosophical and theoretical inquiry in the post-positivist age. The variety of contending classifications that have been put forth to elucidate the overall character of the third debate is but another indication of the considerable importance that scholars have attached to the outcome of this dispute as we approach the next millennium.

The International Relations (IR) literature has strongly criticised the invasive and top-down nature of liberal peace, facilitating a reinterpretation of the practice of international intervention in conflict-affected societies. Today, sustaining peace policy approaches advance longer-term missions, give a secondary role to external practitioners, and increasingly accept risks and failures. What is striking is that even when these policy discourses hold out the promise of liberating peacebuilding from dominant and top-down models of liberal intervention, the mood in the field is one of despair. By drawing on John Dewey's work on pragmatism and interviewing practitioners in Bosnia and Kosovo, the article reflects on the morass practitioners find themselves, diagnoses the source of the frustrations, and anticipates the direction of sustaining peace. Pragmatism adumbrates the idea of ‘peacebuilding without peace’, encouraging practitioners to experiment, give primacy to their doings and explore this world without hope of success and dreams of otherworldliness.

The 1980 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference will chiefly be remembered for the inability of the delegates to agree on a final document. There were several visible reasons for this, some related to the immediate political concerns of the participants, some linked to the nature of the treaty itself. The statements of the participating states indicated that they held differing conceptions of the purposes of the treaty, and possessed very diverse views on the action that should be taken to achieve them. Four sets of assertions dominated the discussions: that the nuclear states had not fulfilled their obligation to negotiate measures of nuclear disarmament as specified in Article VI of the treaty; that the advanced industrial states had not fulfilled their obligations to assist and encourage the global development of peaceful uses of nuclear energy contained in both Articles IV and V of the treaty; that the attempts by the United States government to discharge its obligations under the 1978 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act by threatening to terminate fuel supply contracts to both treaty parties and non-parties, unless they accepted International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards on all their nuclear installations, was inequitable and improper (the same accusation was also directed at Canada); and that the major danger of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and Africa originated in the threats posed to the states in these regions by the regimes in Israel and South Africa. One issue on which there did appear to be agreement, however, was that the safeguards regime foreshadowed by Article III of the treaty had functioned satisfactorily, in that no Feaches of it had been reported to the Review Conference by the IAEA. Yet the differing interpretations of the balance of rights and obligations contained in the treaty masks a much deeper set of issues: what precisely is the problem of nuclear proliferation, to what extent is the predominant diplomatic rhetoric of nuclear non-proliferation discussions unrepresentative of the real concerns and interests of the participants, what was and is the relationship between nuclear weapons and nuclear power, and does the NPT itself address (or was it ever intended to address) the problem of nuclear proliferation in the form in which it seems likely to be encountered in the 1980s?

While there is much discussion of the need for democracy in transnational institutions, there is less discussion of the conditions for their democratisation. To address this deficit, a general account of democratisation is necessary. I propose that democratisation is dependent on the joint realisation of two conditions: communicative freedom and communicative power. Democratisation thus requires, first, publics and associations in which communicative freedom is realised on the one hand; and, second, institutions that link such freedom to the exercise of communicative power to decision making on the other. In order for these conditions to be met, civil society must be expanded into the public sphere. The transformation of communicative freedom into communicative power can be promoted only by institutions that recognise the decisional status of publics, which in turn depend on civil society to generate the deliberative benefits of the plurality of perspectives. Communicative power is not merely spontaneously generated through publics, but also through publics expressly formed through democratic institutional design.

‘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.

Critics of global democracy have often claimed that the social and political conditions necessary for democracy to function are not met at the global level, and are unlikely to be in the foreseeable future. Such claims are usually developed with reference to national democratic institutions, and the social conditions within national democratic societies that have proved important in sustaining them. Although advocates of global democracy have contested such sceptical conclusions, they have tended to accept the method of reasoning from national to global contexts on which they are based. This article critiques this method of argument, showing that it is both highly idealised in its characterisation of national democratic practice, and overly state-centric in its assumptions about possible institutional forms that global democracy might take. We suggest that if aspiring global democrats – and their critics – are to derive useful lessons from social struggles to create and sustain democracy within nation states, a less idealised and institutionally prescriptive approach to drawing global lessons from national experience is required. We illustrate one possible such approach with reference to cases from both national and global levels, in which imperfect yet meaningful democratic practices have survived under highly inhospitable – and widely varying – conditions.

The concept of hegemonic overreach proposes a revision of Kennedy's notion of imperial overstretch that puts more emphasis on policy choices of hegemonic states. Previous long-cycle theories of hegemonic breakdown have focused on the contradiction between the hegemon's growing military-political commitments and its slipping economic capability relative to rising challenger states. Another key contradiction in US foreign policy is between the imperatives of hegemony and the ideology of messianic mission developed long before the US stepped up to its current global role. Hegemonic overreach, driven by this sense of messianic mission, is a major cause of failure in US foreign policy.

Drawing on the IR theories of norm translation and strategic narratives, this article focuses on how states translate international norms to their own advantage by producing strategic narratives to advance their soft power ambitions abroad. Using the example of feminist foreign policy (FFP), the article compares Sweden, Canada, France, and Mexico in their attempts to translate international feminist norms into their countries’ strategic narratives. This comparison is based on three strategic narrative types (issue, national, and international system narratives) and two types of feminism (liberal, intersectional). Issue narratives reveal that Sweden and Mexico give more priority to social policies, while France and Canada emphasise the role of the market in addressing gender inequality. International system narratives demonstrate that Sweden and Mexico perceive global challenges as drivers of gender inequality, while France and Canada see gender inequality as a cause of global problems. National narratives show that Sweden and Mexico refer to other FFP countries to ‘back up’ their feminist initiatives, while France and Canada do not relate to other states. Finally, while liberal feminism dominates all four FFPs, each state either prioritises particular aspects of it (legal, market, security, rights-based) or incorporates elements from intersectional feminism.

This article argues that the modern concept of the state of nature as the defining claim of IR theory was developed in the course of the intercultural/international encounter between the Spaniards and the Amerindian peoples after the discovery of America. The analysis of the Spanish debate at the time demonstrates that the concept of the state of nature was itself the product of a highly charged moral discourse. Its continuous and unreflected use in the discipline of International Relations, where it supposedly describes a precultural, presocial, premoral condition between states, therefore hides the cultural, social and moral meanings the concept carries with it and suppresses a normative discourse of International Relations past and present.

Fifth century Greeks distinguished between hegemonia (legitimated leadership) and arkhe (control). Thucydides employed this distinction to track the changing nature of the Athenian Empire during the Peloponnesian War, and the ways in which a diminishing concern for balancing self-interest against justice corroded Athenian authority, made survival of the empire increasingly problematic and encouraged the disastrous expedition to Sicily. The Melian Dialogue—often cited by realists to justify a power-based approach to foreign policy—is intended to symbolize this decay. Building on our analysis of Thucydides, we examine the British, Soviet and American experiences with hegemony. A striking feature of the contemporary American situation is the extent to which American leaders claim hegemonia but deny any interest in arkhe. Rightly or wrongly, much of the rest of the world has the reverse perception. This seeming contradiction has important implications for US foreign policy and world politics more generally.

Immanuel Kant and Samuel Pufendorf were both exercised by the relationship between politics, morality and lawful authority; a relationship that goes to the heart of the sovereign state’s existence and legitimacy. However, while Kant defended the authority of the moral law, believing morality provides higher authoritative norms than the sovereign state, Pufendorf defends the political morality of authority, believing the sovereign state should submit to no higher moral norms. The rivalry between these two positions is reprised in current debate between cosmopolitanism and statism over humanitarian intervention. Arguing against statism, this article defends a Habermasian-style critical international theory which affords a ‘cosmopolitanism without imperialism’.

The trans-Atlantic dispute over application of the European Union's Data Directive (1995) is discussed as a case study of an emerging geographic incongruity between the reach and domain of the territorially-defined Westphalian state and the deep and dense network of economic relations. The article reviews significant EU-US differences about the meaning of privacy and the means to protect it, the history of attempts to apply its provisions to information transferred to the US, and the less than satisfactory attempt at resolution – the Safe Harbor agreement. It then argues that attempting to apply the Directive to transactions on the Internet raises fundamental questions about the meaning of borders, territorial sovereignty and political space and explores the implications for territorial jurisdiction and global governance at some length.