I welcome this opportunity to respond to Martin Hollis and Steve Smith's ‘Beware of Gurus: Structure and Action in International Relations’, their reply to my review2 of their book, Explaining and Understanding International Relations. Their constructive comments have helped me clarify my own thinking, and I hope by extending my previous remarks in the same constructive spirit I can return the favour. In ‘Beware of Gurus’ they took up both issues I raised about their book: the relationship between the levels-of-analysis and agent-structure problems, and that between causal and interpretive explanations. In part for reasons of economy and interest, and in part being more persuaded by their comments regarding to the latter, I shall limit myself here to the former, taking issue in particular with what I see as their reduction of the agent-structure problem to one of levels-of-analysis.

A study of justice in world politics must begin with the question: what is it and why study it? I will argue that justice is constitutive of social life generally and that various practices of justice are operative in world politics. Normative issues arising from the Gulf War are used to illuminate the argument. A major war is always a tragedy but it is also an opportunity to reexamine our received ideas about war as a human transaction. My approach is that of a political scientist and not a moral philosopher: I am more interested in the practices than the theories of normative international relations.

Evan Luard, a prolific author of works on international relations, died on 8 February 1991 at the age of 64. He had contracted throat cancer in the mid-1980s, and in the Spring of 1990 it has been confirmed that he had lung cancer. His reaction to the grim news was typical of him. Not a religious man, he could realistically and calmly accept death. His major concern was that his written work should survive him. This was a true reflection of the extraordinary part that his writing had in his life.

In the publisher's blurb George Liska's The Ways of Power is described as ‘the culmination of the life's work of one of the most distinguished scholars of international relations’. The same might be said of Turbulence in World Politics, except that I suspect that James Rosenau, still young in mind and spirit at 67, may yet have more to contribute. That two such outstanding scholars could write two such totally contrasting books, in method, in epistemology, in content, in focus (and in style) is a daunting indicator of the continuing lack of an agreed core in the study of international relations. The obvious point should be made at the outset that in so fundamental a contrast a reviewer's own predilections must affect his perception of what he reads, and my own bias towards Rosenau must therefore be explicitly stated.

All great powers have a grand strategy—including great powers on the verge of collapse. Each power develops its code of national security ends and means differently. Among the myriad factors which explain particular grand strategies, the most important consideration is the distribution of power capabilities in the international system. Regardless of each state's desire to operate independently—to be master of its own grand strategy—the structure of world politics offers little latitude to do so. As in the case of decision-making processes in organizations and bureaucracies, the international system imposes its own constraints and incentives on the security goals of individual states. Primarily addressing the international environment, however, systems theory ‘provides criteria for differentiating between stable and unstable political configurations.’ The first objective of this essay is to explore the role of structure as an indirect influence on the behaviour of its constituent actors, in this case, states. ‘The effects [of structure] are produced in two ways: through socialization of the actors and through competition among them.’

Martin Wight once claimed there was no international political theory worthy of the name. In this I believe he was mistaken. But he also maintained, as Benedict Kingsbury and Adam Roberts put it, that ‘the most fundamental question you can ask in international theory is, What is international society? Hedley Bull likewise drew a basic distinction, as several contributors to the volume edited by J. D. B. Miller and the late R. J. Vincent remind us, between the system of states and the society of states. Each of these volumes takes up Wight's question and explores Bull's distinction in various ways, most of them engaging and enlightening. For an overview of the main approaches and controversies in the study of normative international relations today one could scarcely do better than consult them.

In her article on the early history of the Cold War, Beatrice Heuser throws out at a challenge to those of us who have, over the past few years, cast doubt upon the idea that the USSR represented a serious military threat to the West after the Second World War. Basing her argument upon ‘American intelligence estimates’ as well as other sources, she attempts to show that Western policy-makers, hither to much criticized by many academic analysts for having exaggerated Soviet capabilities and over-dramatizing its intentions, had good reason to be fearful of the Soviet Union. ‘American and British governments’, according to Dr Heuser, ‘had information which led them to fear Soviet aggression in Europe and elsewhere’ after 1948. In the light of this information—not to mention the North Korean attack upon the South—rearmament, she argues, ‘may well have been an appropriate response to the Soviet threat’. It certainly ‘worried Stalin’ and possibly prevented Soviet aggression in Europe. It was, in short, a reasonable response to a real problem and probably contributed (although by how much can never be known) to the successful containment of the USSR. NSC-68 may not have been such a flawed document after all.

We were at first puzzled by Alexander Wendt's latest rejoinder, since systemic theorists need concede nothing in recognizing states as self-interested actors with identities and interests. They have only to add that these identities and interests are shaped by the system in general and are given specific direction at any one time by the systemic pressures operating in the previous period. After all, ‘self-interested’ is a dummy term, until supplied with content, and systemic theorists can regard the system as the source of what matters. Explanations which proceed ‘top-down’ by explaining the behaviour of the units in terms of the system need some kind of feed-back mechanism involving the units. It is no objection to systemic theory that the units contribute to the process, provided that they do so in ways shaped by the demands of the system. In short, why does Wendt believe that the identities and interests of actors cannot be formed by the system? Waltz certainly offers a powerful explanation cast in precisely these terms.

Whatever else the twentieth century is remembered for, one development which will assuredly rank high on the international list is the huge change which has occurred in the world's political configuration. In one quick but limited burst immediately after the First World War, the multinational empires which lay within Europe were largely recast in the shape of about a dozen successor states. And in the decades following the Second World War a series of more wide-ranging happenings on the other four continents saw the dismantling of colonial empires in a manner and on a scale which was truly heroic. Within one life span, the great European-based imperial edifices, which had hitherto seemed so permanent a part of the firmament, either collapsed or were abandoned. In their wake came getting on for 100 new states, leaving the map makers hard put to keep up with the tumble of events. Only now, as the century enters its final years, is the pace of this historical process relaxing.

It is a great thrill to find that someone has picked up the gauntlet thrown into the arena at a time when the Cold War seems to many to be nothing but remote history. Here are my brief answers to Michael Cox's gallant repartee:

• Tito did not ‘defect’ he was expelled from the Cominform by Stalin. Moscow did not ‘stay put’ altogether; Tito's expulsion was supposed to be followed by a putsch by the Stalinist faction within the CP of Yugoslavia, which failed, however. Here, as with the Berlin Blockade and later in condoning aggression in Korea (hardly ‘cautious, circumspect’ policy decisions), Stalin made a great mistake.

• Western analysts did predict the attack on South Korea. In May 1950 Kennan himself thought Stalin was looking for an area to have a ‘limited war’, and thought Yugoslavia a likely danger area. Mr Kennan's later Memoirs and memory are here, once again, not very reliable.

• The Communist victory in China and the Soviet explosion of an atomic device, far from being of little concern to the West, caused Truman to ask for NSC-68 to be written.

• The economically weak USSR was far from inferior to the West in manpower, as Dr Cox rightly notes, and it should be remembered that the Red Army had held its own against the formidable Wehrmacht for quite a while. The massive rearmament of the satellites of the USSR only started in 1948. Matthew Evangelista's article only deals with the period up to 1948, and its findings can not be applied to the 1949–1953 period. Satellite rearmament took off in 1950, peaking in 1952. By 1952 Rumania, Hungary and Bulgaria alone had as many forces (including small naval and air forces) as the 800,000 Western troops available on the Central Front in 1948.

It has not been easy for those in the relatively new field of international relations to find an intellectual niche, and a great deal of ink has been spilled in debates about the nature, sources and role of the discipline. The most basic area of the debate is between the largely British-based historical traditions and the North American behaviourist and ‘scientific’ schools. No doubt many international historians have winced at the vague phrase ‘history shows us that...’, which still appears in some textbooks. And no doubt international relations theorists have despaired of international history monographs in which the author appears to fail to draw any general conclusions after years of painstaking study in the archives. In institutions of higher education the professionals continually struggle to get the balance right between the different elements of an international relations degree, and the paucity of departments devoted solely to international relations is witness to the still ambiguous place of the discipline in the academic world. despite unrelenting student demand—but it also shows that the discipline is very much alive, vigorous, developing and innovative. It is also fairly obvious that intellectual disciplines do not have to be mutually exclusive, and perhaps one of the closest, even symbiotic, relationships is the key one between the study of international history and international relations, particularly foreign policy analysis.