No-one seriously doubts the importance of E. H. Carr in the history of the study of international relations. The publication of The Twenty Years' “Crisis, 1919–1939, in 1939 marked a turning point in international theory, ending, as it did in Britain, the dominance of the more traditional ‘pro-gressivist’ or ‘idealist’ schools of thought characterized in the writings of, for example, Norman Angell, Bertrand Russell, Alfred Zimmern, Arnold Toynbee, G. Lowes Dickinson and others. The bulk of Carr's work in the field was written in the twenty or so years between 1936 (when he accepted the Woodrow Wilson Chair of International Politics at Aberystwyth) and 1955 (when he accepted a Fellowship at Trinity, his old Cambridge College), and since then his energies have been concentrated on his abiding concern with the history of Soviet Russia. Nevertheless, he is still an important figure in the field and although international relations has not been his life' work, his unique contribution to its understanding, ensures him a permanent place in the British tradition of international studies.

The aim of this paper is to consider the way the main political groups of states, as well as important individual states, promote their interests in the Security Council and, where relevant, the General Assembly. It examines the composition, cohesion, interests and voting behaviour of these states and groups of states (and the way they have changed) between 1980 and 1994. It also discusses how they have used their political assets to increase their power overall within the whole system and how this has affected the development of both the Security Council and the General Assembly as well as their interrelationship.

The United States has in recent years come under considerable criticism for its apparently cynical attitude towards international law. While the US administration refers often to the importance of the international rule of law it appears unwilling to itself be bound by that law. While the US took the lead in the post World War II years in establishing international law and institutions it has in recent years appeared unwilling to give those same institutions its full support. This article begins by examining a range of explanations for the seemingly undesirable US attitude towards international law. Dismissing each as inadequate on its own, the article demonstrates how what often appear to be contradictory aspects of the United States' relationship with international law can in fact be reconciled through the application to United States' behaviour of the basic tenets of classic modern realism as it pertains to the conduct of foreign policy. This is surprising since international law and realpolitik are more often contrasted. The United States' ‘attitude’ towards international law is better explained not as a post-Cold War anomaly but as having been an integral aspect of the rise of the United States to sole superpower status.

Is social theory possible without a positive ontology? Do we need ontology as the very first step toward/of theorisation? Is or isn't ontology a consequence of the theorisation process? Is a meta-theory/theory delineation nothing more than a rhetorical/discursive artifice? If that were the case, why should we give priority to one assumption/consequence (for example, ontology) over others? What are the conditions of possibility and/or limitations for giving priority to any ontological assumption? It is almost unthinkable among social scientists nowadays to envision a formulation of social theory that does not posit an ontological beginning point, that is, by making explicit/implicit assumptions on the most basic entities – subjects, objects, agents, structures, and/or processes – that one takes to be the foundations of the (world-) view being explored or posited. This is usually considered a theoretical necessity of, as much as a desire for, soundness driven by our conception of what theorising means, or should mean. The issue is even put at the heart of what politics is, or is about. ‘Politics is the terrain of competing ontologies’, says Wight. He, and, well before him, Walker, and Wendt, as well as most of today's social scientists, all assert that theories necessarily presuppose a basic positive ontology upon which all other considerations are built and that there is no social theory without ontology.

David Davies, or Lord Davies as he became in 1932, was a remarkable man who achieved some remarkable things. In the academic sphere he is perhaps best remembered for his founding of the Chair and Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth, but establishing a new university discipline was only part of a larger vision and concern: that of securing, no less, the peace of the world. Lord Davies was not alone in this, nor in the inter-war period did such an endeavour appear as farfetched and quixotic as it does when viewed from the more sceptical and worldly-wise perspective of the late twentieth century. There were many who harboured similar ideas and ideals, but few had the energy, time and money to do what he did in attempting to translate thoughts and hopes into schemes of positive action.

A decade ago it was possible to argue with some confidence not only that the Soviet Union and the United States had spheres of influence but also that they had a tacit understanding about them. The existence of a tacit understanding seemed to be confirmed, for instance, at the time of the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, in that while the United States denounced the Soviet action it nevertheless acquiesced in it. At that time it could be claimed that the Soviet Union had merely acted in eastern Europe in the same way as the United States had on various occasions in Latin America, the most recent being the intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965. Further, the doctrines each power used to justify intervention were alike. The Brezhnev Doctrine justifying the intervention in Czechoslovakia seemed similar to the Johnson Doctrine legitimizing intervention in the Dominican Republic in that both claimed hegemonic rights within a sphere of influence. And from this a reciprocal understanding was inferred about what each would allow the other to do in its respective sphere. Both superpowers denied it. The United States did so because spheres of influence transgress the doctrine of the sovereign equality of states and because the practices associated with them violate the norms of interstate behaviour. The Soviet Union did so because it counterposed the Soviet Union to other socialist States and it would have followed that the Soviet Union would not have been acting, as it claimed, in the interests of socialism.

Despite the fact that democracy promotion is a major part of liberal foreign policies, the discipline of International Relations has not paid much systematic attention to it. Conversely, the study of democracy promotion is dominated by comparative politics and pays hardly any attention to the international system. This mutual neglect signifies a core weakness in the theory and practice of democracy promotion: its failure to comprehend the development of liberal democracy as an international process. This article argues that a thorough engagement with John Locke explains the failures of democracy promotion policies and provides a more comprehensive understanding of the development of liberal democracy.

I support Buzan's call for a reconsideration of the English School as an important approach to International Relations. The challenge is to avoid introspection and scholasticism (is it a school? who belongs? what are the core articles of faith?) and instead to use the intellectual apparatus provided by English School ideas to raise interesting questions, identify intellectually important puzzles, and to help structure answers to real moral and political dilemmas. In this comment I would like to raise five issues.

This article offers an analysis of precisely how civil society and its relation to democracy were conceptualised by its East European and South American proponents in their pre-democratic contexts, through an examination of declarations, newspaper articles, samizdat essays, diaries, letters from prison, academic articles and prize acceptance speeches written at the time. The analysis of these source materials is organised under three main themes: the first concerns activists' understanding of the nature of the regime, its aims and its relation to society; the second relates to the features of the emergent civil society the writers of these documents desired, observed, and helped to create; and the final section discusses their strategies and aspirations in relation to ‘democratisation’. On the basis of an analysis of commonalities in ideas across these two very different regional and ideological contexts, hypotheses are formulated as building blocks for a political theory of civil society under authoritarian rule, which may apply in yet other, contemporary contexts.

US exceptionalism is a hot topic in contemporary political discourse in the United States and in recent years it has attracted increasing attention from International Relations (IR) scholars. Unfortunately, however, analysis of US exceptionalism in has been compromised by its failure to historicise the concept and by its reliance on myths cultivated in other disciplines. This article offers a critical genealogy of US exceptionalism in order to expose it for what it is: a discourse that works to legitimate the United States' exceptions to domestic and international law in the minds of its citizens and foreign observers.

Although the Westphalian model takes many forms the association of Westphalian and sovereign equality is a prominent one. This article argues firstly that sovereign equality was not present as a normative principle at Westphalia. It argues further that while arguments for sovereign equality were present in the eighteenth century they did not rely on, or even suggest, a Westphalian provenance. It was, for good reasons, not until the late nineteenth century that the linkages of Westphalia and sovereign equality became commonplace, and even then sovereign equality and its linkage with Westphalia were disputed. It was not until after the Second World War, notably through the influential work of Leo Gross that the linkage of Westphalia and sovereign equality became not only widely accepted, but almost undisputed until quite recently. The article concludes by suggesting that not only did Gross bequeath a dubious historiography but that this historiography is an impediment to contemporary International Relations.

Scholars of international organisation commonly differentiate among three dimensions when studying the legitimacy of international institutions: input, throughput, and output legitimacy. I argue that the study of global governance needs to consider a fourth ‘face’ of legitimacy: constitutional legitimacy. This dimension addresses the normative and practical questions related to the constitutive justification for an institutional order – such as in whose name it is founded, whose interests it should serve, and how authority should be distributed within that institutional order. These questions are distinct from the procedural features of institutions emphasised by other dimensions and concern the constituent power that should ground the authority of governance institutions. In this article, I develop this fourth dimension of legitimacy, explore its varied expressions in world politics, and show how it has implications for the constitutional structure of global governance arrangements. I argue that different representations of constituent power shape the legitimacy of different authority relations within international institutions and illustrate these claims with an analysis of the politics of legitimacy in three cases: the ongoing effort to reform the UN Security Council, the negotiations over the founding of the International Criminal Court, and the debates over the Responsibility to Protect at the UN.

Novice Lee (‘Frank’) seeks world peace and thinks he has found it in the Liberal world order. He informs the Learned One, head of the monastery. Through their discussions, Frank discovers that the Liberal world order, despite its promises, offers neither ‘democracy’ nor ‘peace’. Turning to the Confucian world order of ‘all-under-heaven’ (tianxia), they find it similarly top-down and one-way. Finally, Frank and the Learned One, now joined by their brother monks and sister nuns, consider the life of the 7th century monk, Xuanzang. He inspires Frank to imagine a ‘worldly world order’ where humility and learning drive one's engagements with others, rather than what we have today: hegemony and imperialism.

This article develops contextually grounded accounts of emancipation in general and notions of collective rights based emancipation in particular by identifying a form of emancipatory politics in which collectives demand rights for themselves. The article develops the idea of collective, rights based emancipation by focusing on the practices of two related social movements, the Landless Workers Movement (MST) and la Via Campesina. The MST and Via Campesina seek to replace existing rights to ‘food security’ with a human right to ‘food sovereignty’. While food security agendas emphasise the role of international governance agencies in providing food on behalf of others, food sovereignty is secured by peasant social movements themselves. Furthermore, practices of active citizenship and democratic organisational structures, built through the grassroots and transnational struggles through which peasants raise their demand for human rights, are vital in enacting rights to food sovereignty. In instances where victims are not entirely silenced and powerless, this combination of a demand for human rights and the development of practices of citizenship that enable people to demand and secure rights for themselves provides a contextually grounded emancipatory alternative to interventionist politics that, however well intentioned, risk reinforcing the dependence of purportedly powerless victims.

This article applies E. H. Carr’s analysis of utopia and reality, and a Searlean-constructivist analysis of rules and norms, to the concept of ‘sovereignty’ in general, and Stephen Krasner’s argument in Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy in particular. In doing this, the article charts a theoretical space that incorporates insights from classical realism, scientific realism, and philosophical (social) constructivism. To view ‘utopia’ and ‘reality’ as distinct yet equally important planes of International Relations (IR) inquiry, thereby treating ‘sovereignty’ as a single concept with descriptive and normative elements, highlights both the merits and the shortcomings of Krasner’s approach. Furthermore, this type of analysis suggests a fruitful way to continue a contemporary normative discussion about what sovereign entities ought to do.

During his eight years in office Ronald Reagan attempted not only to dominate the US political scene but to establish a clear neo-conservative agenda for the American nation. When he came to power he had two main objectives. The first was to roll back the hand of government, for as he put it, ‘the ills of a nation stem from a single source: the belief that government… has the answer to our ills’. The second was to rebuild America's position in the world after the so-called ‘decade of neglect.’ Naturally, Reagan delighted the new right with his attacks on liberalism at home and the Soviet Union abroad. However, one suspects he frightened an equal number by raising issues (like abortion) which many had long thought settled, while implying that the only solution to complex international questions was American firepower. And even though many American intellectuals may have despised the new President for his apparent simple-mindedness, his optimism about the American future and his heroic view of the American past did much to endear him to a large cross-section of the American people. Reagan believed in the American dream and attempted to convince his fellow citizens that they ought to believe in it too.

In reviewing any set of books, it is not often that one has the pleasure of welcoming an obvious classic. There is one here: John Vasquez's The Power of Power Politics, and much of this review article will be devoted to saying why. The other books fit together with it very well. They comprise two undergraduate textbooks, by Chan and by Russett and Starr; two lively contributions from the redoubtable John Burton; and an interesting collection of papers on the inter-paradigm debate, edited and commented upon in a rather muddled way by Maghroori and Ramberg. In different ways, all the books are concerned with the same two problems. How can we explain international relations? And how should we present to students what we think we know about it?

Have you noticed how academics specializing in British or American foreign policy are considered generalists while specialists on Chinese or Japanese foreign policy are considered 'mere' practitioners of area studies? Is it not curious when supposed journals of International Relations (like this one) have special numbers on balance of power theory and rarely draw examples from East Asia? This myopic mid-Atlanticism among students of International Relations reaches 'down' to the media world: how many realize that the majority of the troop cuts announced by Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1988 are coming from Asia.

A.Mc. A common preoccupation of much contemporary writing about world politics concerns the dynamic interrelation between continuity and change. The end of the Cold War, the intensification of globalization and the 'postmodern turn' have delivered powerful challenges to the orthodoxy of realism. Among the most significant of these challenges is the cosmopolitan approach advocated by David Held, Andrew Linklater and others. In contradistinction to realism, which assumes a strict analytical separation between politics within and amongst states, the cosmopolitan approach proffers a more unified conception of political life. In this discussion Barry Buzan, a prominent advocate of realism, and David Held debate the merits of their respective positions and assess the strengths and limits of both realism and cosmopolitanism as frameworks for understanding contemporary global politics and its potential for transformation. I began by asking Barry to explain the fundamentals of contemporary realism. What are its constituent elements?

The spread of nuclear weapons outside the Western world has become the most important nuclear issue since the end of the Cold War. By contrast, the debate about Europe's nuclear strategy has subsided. Nuclear collaboration in Western Europe now seems an unlikely prospect and so too does proliferation, despite instability in the former Soviet Union, and occasional speculation about Germany's nuclear appetite. A very different atmosphere prevailed during the Cold War, when the need for a European nuclear force was endlessly debated, without any prospect of this political demand being fulfilled, and, in the late 1950s and 1960s, several European countries appeared to be at the threshold of obtaining nuclear power.