My first task is to thank the editors for creating a forum in which four authors from very different branches of social and political theory discuss my recent book on the transformation of political community. I am no less indebted to the authors involved for their participation in this debate. I hope this short reply does justice to their insightful comments and searching criticisms.

Randall L. Schweller is most sharply at odds with my position and I begin by responding to his criticisms. I then turn to the comments made by R. B. J. Walker and Jean Bethke Elshtain who subscribe to the critical project, broadly conceived, though not to my version of it. This essay ends with some responses to Norman Geras who shares my commitment to building on the Kantian and Marxian tradition but who has a rather different method of taking it further.

They tell us that the Pharoahs built the pyramids. Well, the Pharoahs didn't lift their little fingers. The pyramids were built by thousands of anonymous slaves . . . and it's the same thing for the Second World War. There were masses of books on the subject. But what was the war like for those who lived it, who fought? I want to hear their stories.

Writing about international relations is in part a history of writing about the people. The subject sprang from a desire to prevent the horrors of the Great War once again being visited upon the masses and since then some of its main themes have been international cooperation, decolonisation, poverty and development, and more recently issues of gender.

At the inception of the twenty-first century—not to mention the next millennium—books on ‘the American Century’ proliferate monthly, if not daily. We now have The American Century Dictionary, The American Century Thesaurus, and even The American Century Cookbook; perhaps the American Century baseball cap or cologne is not far behind. With one or two exceptions, the authors celebrate the unipolar pre-eminence and comprehensive economic advantage that the United States now enjoys. Surveys of public opinion show that most people agree: the American wave appears to be surging just as the year 2000 beckons. Unemployment and inflation are both at twenty-year lows, sending economists (who say you can't get lows for both at the same time) back to the drawing board. The stock market roars past the magic 10,000 mark, and the monster federal budget deficit of a decade ago miraculously metamorphoses into a surplus that may soon reach upwards of $1 trillion. Meanwhile President William Jefferson Clinton, not long after a humiliating impeachment, is rated in 1999 as the best of all postwar presidents in conducting foreign policy (a dizzying ascent from eighth place in 1994), according to a nationwide poll by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. This surprising result might also, of course, bespeak inattention: when asked to name the two or three most important foreign policy issues facing the US, fully 21 per cent of the public couldn't think of one (they answered ‘don't know’), and a mere seven per cent thought foreign policy issues were important to the nation. But who cares, when all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds?

Humour has recently emerged as an important research topic in International Politics. Scholars have investigated how states and state leaders practice humour as part of their diplomatic exchanges, in misinformation campaigns, and nation-branding. Important knowledge has been gained as to how humorous practices partake in constituting identities, managing recognition, and international anxieties or contesting global orders. Yet, little attention has been devoted to interrogating the risk that humorous practices may give rise to in international politics, to the underside of humour's productive power. This article aims to begin unpacking these risks both theoretically and empirically. To do so, it engages with the critical thinking on humour by Kierkegaard and Foster Wallace in particular, suggesting three challenging implications: (1) humorous entrapments; (2) facile forms of detached engagement; and (3) ambiguous blurring of fiction and reality. It then shows how these unfold empirically in: Iran's meme war with the US, a Yes Men's parody during COP15, and the Pyongyang Nuclear Summit, developing a three-pronged analytical strategy for studying humorous practices and their different relations to formations of power/knowledge.

Chiefly for the wrong reasons, diplomacy has recently made some notable incursions into international relations programmes at British universities. For, in the field of money-spinning taught Master's degrees, this subject has been perceived as a crowd puller. Out there, beyond the European Community with its aggravatingly-low fee levels, are, it is calculated, many who will be attracted by an MA with 'diplomatic' in its title. With some ground, it is believed they see that sort of degree as a passport to a position in the much-sought-after diplomatic ranks. Furthermore, in the same regions lie beginning diplomats who could be said to need some vocational underpinning,not to mention those longer-employed in diplomacy who would benefit in mid-career from intellectual refreshment. The British Statue of Education beckons, its own distinctive torch held high aloft. And, to ensure that its light does not go unnoticed, Vice-Chancellors despatch glossy brochures to the British Council and their recruiting officers, hot foot, to distant parts.

This volume was produced in the context of the crisis of legitimacy that occasioned the 2003 Iraq War. As is well known, a bitter feud broke out in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) over the legality of using force against Iraq. The US government justified going to war in the context of a new doctrine of preventive use of force for self-defence – a doctrine that was soon named after President George W. Bush. The British government anchored its case for war in two previous UNSC resolutions; res. 678 which originally authorised use of force against Iraq in the 1990–91 Gulf War, and res. 687 which suspended res. 678 on a number of conditions including the disarming of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) stockpiles, facilities and programmes. Both the US and British positions were underpinned by intelligence, subsequently proved to be flawed, that Iraq had failed to get rid of its WMD. Opponents of the war disputed this intelligence and, moreover, argued that the Bush Doctrine was plain illegal and ridiculed the British idea of resurrecting twelve-year-old UNSC resolutions.

I start this article by addressing Kant's question why rightful interactions require both domestic public authorities (or states) and a global public authority? Of central importance are two issues: first, the identification of problems insoluble without public authorities, and second, why a domestic public monopoly on coercion can be rightfully established and maintained by coercive means while a global public monopoly on coercion cannot be established once and for all. In the second part of the article, I address the nature of the institutional structure of individual states and of the global authority. Crucial here, I argue, is Kant's distinction between private and public right. Private right concerns rightful relations between individual legal subjects, where public right concerns legal subjects’ claims on their public institutions. I propose that the distinction between private and public right should be central to liberal critiques of current legal and political developments in the global sphere.

This article examines the liberalisation of immigration policy in Canada and the US in the post-World War II era. I argue that shifting norms pertaining to race, ethnicity, and human rights cast longstanding discriminatory policies in Canada and the US in a highly critical light. Opponents of racially discriminatory immigration policies exploited this shift in normative contexts to highlight the disjuncture between Canada and the US’ postwar commitments to liberal norms and human rights, on the one hand, and their extant policy regimes, on the other. The resulting pressure set in motion comparable processes of policy stretching and unravelling, which culminated in policy shifting in the mid-1960s. Policy shifting was, however, subject to very different political dynamics. Whereas Canada's institutional configuration granted the executive branch and bureaucracy a high degree of autonomy that enabled experimentation, the greater openness of the American political system led to a more politicised process, marked by compromises and deal-making. Thus while changing norms prompted the liberalisation of immigration policies in both countries, differences in their domestic political contexts resulted in very different admissions regimes.

Debates over ‘modernity’ have been central to the development of historical-sociological approaches to International Relations (IR). Within the bourgeoning subfield of International Historical Sociology (IHS), much work has been done to formulate a historically dynamic conception of international relations, which is then used to undermine unilinear conceptions of global modernity. Nevertheless, this article argues that IHS has not proceeded far enough in successfully remedying the problem of unilinearism. The problem remains that historical narratives, informed by IHS, tend to transhistoricise capitalism, which, in turn, obscures the generative nature of international relations, as well as the fundamental heterogeneity of diverging paths to modernity both within and beyond western Europe. Based on the theory of Uneven and Combined Development, Political Marxism, and Robbie Shilliam’s discussion of ‘Jacobinism’, this article first reinterprets the radical multilinearity of modernity within western Europe, and then utilises this reinterpretation to provide a new reading of the Ottoman path to modernity (1839–1918). Such a historical critique and reconstruction will highlight the significance of Jacobinism for a more accurate theorisation of the origin and development of the modern international order, hence contributing to a deeper understanding of the international relations of modernity.

Marx always predicted that the development of capitalism as a social system would be punctuated by major crises, which would become progressively deeper and broader until the system itself was swept away. What he could not have foreseen was that the development of Marxism as a theory would also be marked by crises, both of belief and of method, which have periodically threatened its survival. In this respect at least Marxism has achieved a unity of theory and practice. No crisis has been so profound for Marxism, however, as the crisis brought about by the collapse of Communism in Europe after 1989. With the disappearance after seventy years of the Soviet Union, the first workers' state and the first state to proclaim Marxism as its official ideology, Marxism as a critical theory of society suddenly seemed rudderless, no longer relevant to understanding the present or providing a guide as to how society might be changed for the better. Marx at last was to be returned to the nineteenth century where many suspected he had always belonged.

Despite the increasing centrality of Internet memes for everyday political circulations and practices, their emergent implications as low-cultural artefacts of global politics have received little theoretical attention. In this article, I develop a critical theory of memes to provide a conceptual apparatus to understand the global political implications and possibilities of this pop-cultural phenomenon. I argue that, in order to attend to the emergent implications of memes and consider their differentiations from other pop-cultural phenomena, we need to unpack the spatial logic through which memes emerge and circulate. Analysing this spatial logic through the concept of the ‘memescape’ and deploying Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notions of striated and smooth spaces, this article articulates the spatial logic of the memescape as comprising rhizomatic, decentralised circulations of digital content; nomadic, playful, and humorous disruptions of once-stable signs; and affective congregations of a multiplicity of subjects. Through two examples exploring how these smooth spatial tendencies produce divergent political potentials in the resistant memes of Indigenous digital communities and reactionary memes of the Alt-Right, I conclude that the global politics of the memescape is open-ended and undetermined which requires careful and nuanced political and ethical attention to actualise its futures for emancipatory horizons.

In the last decade a number of scholars have criticized the dominant paradigm in international relations inquiry. Two major criticisms have been levelled at some of the advocates of paradigm change: they do not clearly demonstrate the dominance of a specific paradigm, and they have produced no data-based studies to demonstrate the obsolescence of the fundamental assumptions of the field. This paper attempts to meet these criticisms by systematically testing what has become known as the “Colour It Morgenthau” thesis, namely the claim that the Realist paradigm has dominated quantitative international relations and has up to this time failed to explain behaviour adequately.

It is rarely sensible to reply to an unsympathetic review. If I could not persuade in 150,000+ words, it is not likely that a thousand or two by way of rebuttal will accomplish much. However, since two generations of editorial command of this excellent official organ of ours have invited me to break my rule of never writing an apparently whingeing response, here goes.

In this article I outline the case made by the British government for UN economic sanctions on Iraq, and indicate many of the silences in, and counters to, it. When these silences and counters are taken into consideration, the British government's denial of any share of the responsibility for the devastation of Iraqi society becomes unsustainable. Iraqis have had their human rights violated on a vast scale not only by the regime but also by UN economic sanctions which have exacerbated the effects of the UN coalition's bombing of Iraq in 1991.

In the April 1984 issue of this journal, Mark Imber resurrected Mitranian functionalism. His well-reasoned elucidation of David Mitrany's writings and of the writings of Mitrany's major critics ended in five propositions for further research. Unfortunately, one cannot be sure that these five propositions represent Mitranian functionalism or a new species of functionalism, Imberian functionalism. In any case, the five propositions hardly advance our knowledge of functionalism, even if they are only intended to show the possibility of functionalism's existence.

In 1987, Paul Kennedy predicted in his best-selling book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, that the Pacific region, especially Japan and China, would rise in power, while the then Soviet Union, the United States and Europe would decline in power. Except for Russia, his predictions have not fared well. Why? His realist model of international politics ignored the role of national identities. National identities involve domestic institutions and policies that motivate citizens to create and use wealth and power. Nations compete through domestic reforms as well as international military and economic rivalries. Domestic changes in the United States and Europe revitalized American and European power, while delays in domestic reforms doomed Soviet/Russian power and dramatically slowed Japanese and Asian growth.

The legitimacy of international institutions has in recent years received growing interest from scholars, yet analyses of stakeholder perceptions of the legitimacy of institutions that coexist within a governance field have been few in number. Motivated by the proliferation of institutions in the field of global climate and energy governance, this study maps stakeholder perceptions of legitimate institutions and their sources of legitimacy in global renewable energy governance. Specifically, the article makes three contributions to the existing literature. Theoretically, it unpacks the legitimacy concept and offers a multidimensional conception of legitimacy. Methodologically, it captures these different dimensions of legitimacy by relying on three open survey questions. Empirically, it maps legitimacy perceptions among climate and energy experts and not only shows which institutions are considered most legitimate, but also why they are considered legitimate and how this varies between different stakeholders. The article thereby contributes to the literature on legitimacy by providing new insights into the sources of legitimacy among international institutions that operate under institutional complexity.

John Baylis and Steve Smith (eds.), The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations, Oxford University Press, 1997

Charlotte Bretherton and Geoffrey Ponton (eds.), Global Politics: An Introduction, Cambridge, MA, Blackwell Publishers, 1996

Chris Brown, Understanding International Relations, London, Macmillan, 1997

Ian Clark, Globalization and Fragmentation: International Relations in the 20th Century, Oxford University Press, 1997

Brian White, Richard Little and Michael Smith (eds.), Issues in World Politics, London, Macmillan, and New York, St Martin's Press, 1997

Ngaire Woods (ed.), Explaining International Relations since 1945, Oxford University Press, 1996

The UK's domestic intelligence agency, MI5, has become increasingly involved in the realm of law enforcement over the last decade. This article puts the British experience in perspective by comparing it with France's main domestic intelligence agency, which has pushed deep into the law enforcement arena in recent years. A similar perception of Islamist terrorism underpins these parallel developments in the two countries. However, differences relating to accountability, legal systems and conceptions of the state mean that the French intelligence agency has expanded its role considerably more than its British counterpart. The analysis indicates that MI5's move into law enforcement is likely to remain a relatively conservative one.

Machiavelli believed that diplomacy, unlike military service, was of no significance for civic virtue, and that in foreign policy it was no substitute for arms and money. Nevertheless, it enhanced the virtù of even the strongest prince. It was for this and other reasons that Machiavelli also believed that the good faith on which negotiation depends was generally observed. His view that promises need not outlast the conditions that produce them is an escape clause that is equally necessary. Machiavelli does not deserve the charge, laid at his door by Harold Nicolson, of corrupting the art of diplomacy.