International Relations theory has recently turned its attention to the study of comparative regionalism in economics and security. As part of this new research agenda, this article explores what we might learn from the Southern Cone's experience with denuclearization that might be applicable to the Middle East. The two regions differ with respect to security dilemmas, military capabilities and doctrines, and the prior availability of a cooperative regional institutional infrastructure. Yet two aspects of the Southern Cone process seem potentially relevant to other regions. The first relates to improving our understanding of the appropriate domestic political conditions that underpin denuclearization. In particular, the nature of domestic coalitions and of their respective approaches to the global economy and political institutions deserve far more serious consideration than they have gained thus far. The second relates to the nature of the regional denuclearization regime initially fashioned in the Southern Cone, which set an international precedent. A regionally-based system of mutual inspections could help remove some of the most intractable barriers to a future Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction.

This article explores a fundamental division among contemporary liberal internationalists regarding the relationship between state sovereignty and the goal of freedom. The article suggests that, in spite of his popular status among a wide variety of contemporary liberal international theorists, Immanuel Kant's political philosophy is an extraordinarily ambiguous ‘legacy’ because of the dualistic doctrine of state sovereignty to which he subscribed. Kant's thought is committed to state sovereignty while providing the grounds for a profound critique of its existence. The reason that sovereignty is ambiguous in Kant's political theory is that it is justified by his bifurcated understanding of human freedom.

Ancient Greece is not unfamiliar to International Relations scholars. Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War has been especially influential in shaping our understanding of the ancient Greek international system, not only because it is the best historical source available, but also in light of the status it has achieved as the foremost classic of International Relations. Of particular interest to International Relations have been questions concerning the character of the system and the units within it, and how these have affected the dynamics of conflict and co-operation in the international arena. Many find the antecedents of the modern European states-system in the pattern of relations that emerged between the independent city-states of Hellas roughly between the eighth and fourth centuries BC. Like our contemporary international system, the ancient Greek international system was anarchic in the sense that it lacked an overarching common government.

C. A. W. Manning, Professor of International Relations at the LSE (1930–1962), was a key contributor to the formation of the discipline in Britain. He wrote on Jurisprudence, which was his main strength; on the League of Nations, of which he was a keen supporter; on South Africa, concerning which he gained notoriety as the defender of Apartheid; on International Relations as an independent academic discipline, which, to him, was due to the sui generis character of international society as a formally anarchical but substantively orderly social environment. He was a Rationalist in Martin Wight's sense, and early constructivist, who saw that the society of states as a social construct was subject to interpretation, reinterpretation, and reshaping.

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.

This article argues that conventional understanding of how IR theory conceptualizes the state is in need of revision. By relocating IR theories of the state within the ‘second state’ debate, we find that neorealism underestimates the power of the state in world politics, while neoliberal institutionalism exaggerates its power. Moreover, liberalism, constructivism, Marxism, postmodernism, and ‘second-wave’ Weberian historical sociology, all endow the state with greater degrees of agential power in the international realm than does neorealism. The significance of the second state debate will be not merely to reconfigure our understanding of how IR theory conceptualizes the state, but to turn conventional understanding of IR theory upside-down.

This article challenges the idea that IR theory is in the midst of a ‘third debate’ between ‘positivistic’ and ‘post-positivistic’ approaches, by showing that neither the ‘first’ nor the ‘second’ debates have lost any of their relevance, and by arguing that the ‘third debate’ and the allegedly new paradigms it generated do not constitute a challenging innovation. While the ‘first debate’ is a debate between two visions of human nature, the ‘second debate’ is a debate between two visions of knowledge. A critical stance vis-à-vis rationalism does not imply a rejection of political realism, nor an endorsement of postmodernism or constructivism.

The capacity of the Kurds—a scattered, divided and stateless people—to make headline news never ceases to astonish. Perhaps most sensational were the extraordinary events early in 1999 which accompanied the seizure in Kenya and subsequent extradition to Turkey of Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the Kurdish Workers Party, with its now familiar acronym, the PKK. Ocalan's arrest, and his sentencing to death by a Turkish court in June 1999, are only the most recent in a series of Kurdish-related events that have captured the imagination of the international public. The post-Cold War period alone has witnessed the massacre, by chemical weapons, of Kurdish villagers in Iraq after the Iran–Iraq war (1980–88) and a failed Kurdish uprising and massive refugee crisis after the Gulf War (1991), to be followed by the creation of a Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq. In 1992, far away in Berlin, which saw some particularly ugly scenes at the time of Ocalan's capture, three Iranian Kurdish opposition leaders were murdered. So significant has been the Kurdish imprint on the contemporary International Relations agenda, that some have suggested that the Kurdish issue today can be likened in some respects to that of Palestine.

As for the philosophers, they make imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths, and their discourses are as the stars, which give little light, because they are so high.

Francis Bacon

The article argues that Doyle's interpretation of Kant's first definitive article in Perpetual Peace is mistaken. I distinguish between Kant's pragmatic argument (his democratic peace proposition) and his a priori, or transcendental claim. Both are distinct from Doyle's approach which emphasizes institutional restraint and shared cultural norms. Doyle must be criticized for taking Kant's transcendental claims as statements that can be verified empirically. I propose that we drop Doyle's juxtaposition of liberal and illiberal as a fallacy of essentialism. Kant's distinction between republican and despotic is a methodological abstraction belonging to ideal theory (the system of rights). Kantian non-ideal theory (his political philosophy) sees the distinction among states as a matter of degree rather than kind. Kant favours an inclusive global federation encompassing liberal as well as non-liberal states, rather than an exclusive federation and ‘separate peace’ of liberal states.

In the discipline of International Relations (IR), it seems to be an uncontroversial point that the passage of European civilization from the middle ages to the early modern period was also the transition from a system with a single supreme secular regent, the emperor, to one with plural supreme regents. This is implied in the ubiquitous view that the Thirty Years' War was a struggle between the ‘medieval’ conception of imperial suzerainty and hegemony over christendom and the ‘modern’ conception of a system composed of independent ‘sovereign’ states, with the 1648 peace that ended the war enshrining the victory of the latter.

More than a decade after the revolutions of 1989, we can see these as a high point of a new, worldwide and increasingly global wave of democratic revolution and counter-revolution. Violent struggles between the political forces unleashed have produced genocidal wars and stimulated global state formation. These developments present concerned citizens and students of international relations and politics with new challenges. This article criticizes two trends in the responses of political intellectuals in the West: the ‘new anarchism’ of some critical thinkers in the academic discipline of international relations, and ‘yesterday's radicalism’ which has led some left-wing critics to revive the defence of sovereignty for repressive and genocidal non-Western states. The lecture concludes by outlining an alternative ‘new politics’ of international relations

The conceptual foundations of the eighteenth century international system, long neglected in narrative diplomatic histories, are enjoying increased attention with the recent contributions of Jeremy Black, Paul Schroeder, and Michael Doyle. Nevertheless, in political science literature the period is routinely treated as an interesting—yet quickly dispatched—‘prequel’ to the post-1815 order which matured in the Bismarckian alignments of the late nineteenth century. Indeed, as a field of study the period has been all but ignored in the discipline of international relations.

William Wohlforth has provided a clear, concise response to the final section of my article on ‘Ideology and the Cold War’. Because Wohlforth's own research on the end of the Cold War has been so stimulating and valuable, I had to devote special attention to his work. I welcome the opportunity to reply to his latest comments. Although I agree with him on some points, I disagree on others. In what follows, I will explain why.

At present, International Relations scholars use the metaphor of ‘state socialization’ in mutually incompatible ways, embarking from very different starting points and arriving at a bewildering variety of destinations. There is no consensus on what state socialization is, who it affects, or how it operates. This article seeks to chart this relatively unmapped concept by defining state socialization, differentiating it from similar concepts, and exploring what the study of state socialization can contribute to important and longstanding theoretical debates in the field of international relations.

Theory, politics, and the Cold War

In this review I examine academic study on Russian foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, with special emphasis on relations with the United States. It is common, when discussing the study of international politics during the Cold War, to refer to the ‘dominance’, or ‘hegemony’, of Realism, and then to argue that the unanticipated end of the ‘bipolar’ conflict demonstrates the failure of the theory for not having been able, due to its focus on structural features of material power, to foresee its peaceful conclusion. Although there is much wrong with Realism as a theory in explaining international politics at this time, it should be noted that there were other contending approaches that also got the Cold War wrong. Similarly, those specialists writing on Soviet foreign policy who shared realist assumptions, and hence constructed their analytical frameworks on the basis of geopolitics and the pursuit of the national interest, were also unable to conceive of an end to the bipolar conflict. Others, who did perceive change on the basis of alterations in the relative power capabilities between the two major powers, predicted that this would lead not to a peaceful resolution of the Cold War, but to violent conflict. This was the view of Edward Luttwak, who suggested in 1983 that the weakness of the Soviet economy would lead to declining faith in the political regime and ultimately to a greater willingness to engage in military adventures.

Andrew Williams, Failed Imagination? New World Orders of the Twentieth Century (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1998)

International relations (IR) has had an opportunistic relationship with history. IR scholars have used the past, as Conal Condren has written of political theorists, as ‘a quarry ... [as a] ... source of useable facts; of entries to, and illustrations of, theoretical issues’. The result was an IR canon, of the ‘Plato to Nato’ variety, which was substantially anachronistic. Its dismantling over the last twenty years has much to do with efforts in the area of conceptual history. Despite this, and the keenness of post-positivist IR theorists to display an historical consciousness, IR and history maintain an uneasy association. Where the past is approached in contemporary IR writings, there is a tendency to build out of historical materials, or more worryingly commentaries on them, conceptual superstructures which are then accorded a determining force. Notions like the Enlightenment Project are the result of such acts of reification and are no less anachronistic than were the pantomime Machiavellis which used to pop up in IR text books. (It is doubtful that such a Project ever existed. Robert Wokler observes that the expression is of ‘more recent pedigree than “the Manhattan Project“‘.) What is purported to be historical explanation may seem more like a ghostly ballet in which structures, processes and agencies execute precisely choreographed routines.

Histories of European international politics are punctuated by turning points. Typically, these watersheds have been connected to major wars. What do such histories have to tell us about nineteenth century Europe? What, if anything, is left out in the telling? My purposes in posing these questions are, first, to suggest that these histories focus too narrowly on war and, second, to propose an alternative perspective on modern European politics.

RIS.Can we begin with one of your own favourite questions? What in our field has most surprised you recently?

CE. Perhaps it's how much is going on with feminist informed scholarship in lots of different parts of the world. For instance, I hadn't been aware of how much work was being done by Turkish feminist scholars, Japanese feminist scholars, and Korean feminist scholars. We all like to think this kind of feminist scholarly work is going on, but I don't think I fully understood how much there now is. That's very exciting and hopeful, but very surprising.

In his article Aid and Sovereignty: Quasi-States and the International Financial Institutions, David Williams, ‘Aid and Sovereignty: Quasi-states and the International Financial Institutions’, Review of International Studies, 26:4 (2000), pp. 557–73.David Williams claims that ‘(t)he activities of the IFIs [international financial institutions, RL] in their relations with many developing countries certainly suggest that the substance of state sovereignty does not amount to very much more than a show’ (p. 573). In my reply, I beg to differ with respect to the causes of the changing state sovereignty in developing countries and the role of international financial institutions, and of the World Bank in particular, in this process.However, as Stephen Krasner has sophistically shown, the violation, compromise and truncation of sovereignty has been a central feature of international relations since the very inception of the ‘Westphalian system’ in 1648. See Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).By offering a comparison concerning the structure of the interactions developing countries have with the IFIs and private capital markets, respectively, I conclude that the relationship between developing countries and private capital markets has more substantial effects on the changing nature of state sovereignty in the developing world.

The environment is now an established area of theoretical and empirical work in the field of International Relations, but the central question remains whether existing institutional structures, intellectual and political, are being in some respect transformed by this development. This review article examines the concept of environmental security as a reflection of the centrality of the environmental challenge. This relatively novel perspective on a defining feature of the field tests the domain of discourse and inquiry, and thus has implications for the study of international relations, perhaps to the extent of justifying the enclosure of its key concepts within the environmental perspective.