If hell, as Thomas Hobbes once said, is truth seen too late, the road to hell must now be paved twice over with the thousands of books claiming to discover the ‘truth’ about Russia.

The Second World War acted like an earthquake on the international law of war and left some of it in ruins. This essay attempts to explain why. But before analysing the nature of the historic forces, and, so far as they are relevant, specific events which produced this disturbance, it will be helpful if we remind ourselves of something even more basic: the intrinsic fragility of the law of war – a fragility which exists and has its unsettling effects even when historic forces happen to be helpful. The law of war of course shares in the chronic weakness of international law in general, that is it is a law without a sovereign – rules without a ruler. But before that, the law of war rests uniquely upon a paradox which hostile critics have not hesitated to call an absurdity. It offers mediation between the demands of on the one hand Humanity, on the other Military Necessity. It opens a middle path between the peaceable brotherly conduct which civilized men believe they would, in favourable circumstances, like to observe towards their neighbours, and the lethal violence they find themselves using when the circumstances are those of war. It requires a cohabitation of logical inconsistencies which some – certainly not all – interpretations of Humanity or Military Necessity have alleged to have been no more practical than squaring the circle. Yet the idea of the law of war has survived, something about which the philosopher and psychologist at any rate might have much to say. The historian, however, feels obliged to pass by those deeper levels of his theme with the reflection, for what it is worth, that such tolerance, even appetite, for inconsistency need not surprise anyone whose idea of human nature includes a divided mind or whose idea of the human condition includes tragedy.

The subject of nonverbal communication, or signalling, as it is usually called, between states, has received some attention in the literature in the past, usually within the context of conflict or crisis studies. John W. Burton argues that ‘military smoke signals’ are used by parties to conflict when direct communication is ruled out. James Cable, in a study of gunboat diplomacy, suggests that displays of naval power can perform the ‘expressive function’ of emphasizing attitudes, lending verisimilitude to otherwise unconvincing statements or providing an outlet for emotion. Specific examples of nonverbal signalling are common: among others Charles McClelland describes its use in the Berlin and Quemoy crises; Coral Bell shows how the superpowers have developed the mechanism to a fine degree of sophistication.

The formulation and execution of economic policy towards the Soviet block has generally been based on the presumption by Western governments of the inevitable and demonstrable economic superiority of capitalist over communist systems. Expectations derived from theoretical analysis of the misallocation of economic resources that would obtain in an economy lacking a rational price system appear to be sustained by empirical investigation of the Soviet Union. The impossibility of ensuring consistent and optimal plans, the failure to meet demand in terms of both quantity and quality of consumer goods and the requirement of excessive inputs of factors and resources per unit of output in both industry and agriculture compared with the mixed economies have been well documented, and appear to be endemic in Eastern Europe. Although it is more difficult to make international comparisons of dynamic efficiency due to the lack of an appropriate conceptual framework, both theoretical and empirical analyses appear to sustain the conventional orthodoxy. Material balances planning, and in particular the system of factor rewards prevailing in the U.S.S.R., give rise to expectations of bias against technical progress. The most comprehensive investigation into the sources of technological progress in the Soviet Union shows that in the period 1945–65, only 11 per cent of the technologies then in use had been internally generated, the rest being imported from capitalist sources. It has been estimated that, the technology gap between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. may be between 10 and 25 years. The impressively high growth rates achieved by the Soviet Union in the 1950s and early 1960s, it is further claimed, are not evidence of the eventual dynamic superiority of the planned system, as Soviet economists insist, but are no more than a reflection of the low level of economic development which the Soviet economy had attained by the beginning of the period of the Five Year Plans. Once abundant and under-utilized factors of production were fully absorbed into the economy, the requirement of the extensive growth model for large inputs of labour and capital per unit of output would cause a deceleration of growth rates. Statistics for the 1970s appear to bear out the prediction.

There now exists a substantial body of publications on international relations which may be fairly described as the output of a distinct school. Though its seminal thinkers, Charles Manning and Martin Wight, are no longer with us, the core of its extant membership (Hedley Bull, Michael Donelan, F. S. Northedge, Robert Purnell and others) is still in its prime and young recruits are constantly coming forward. Though delighted by this human prospect, its literary possibilities find me something less than enthusiastic. For it seems to me that repetition has set in and is likely to get worse as the years pass.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the notion that liberal democracies are more prone to inflation than other types of regime. In this section we establish the context of this research by briefly rehearsing some of the main themes in the literature on the political economy of inflation. Sections II and III deal with the analytical methods employed in this paper and the results of these analyses respectively. In our Conclusion we re-examine the debate on the relationship between liberal democracy and inflation in the light of our findings.

…This paper is based on my personal experience during the six years, from the beginning of 1945 until the end of 1950, when I was responsible for Austrian affairs at the British Foreign Office. That period included being what the film industry might call our ‘continuity man’ for the Treaty negotiations in their active phase, from 1947 to 1950. For it is worth emphasizing that, while eight years were to elapse between the start of the negotiations and the actual conclusion of the Treaty, virtually all the real negotiation took place in the first half of the period: after which, another four years and more were to pass without any substantial development over the Treaty itself, until this was with comparative suddenness resurrected, and signed, very much in the form in which it had been left in 1950. My account will therefore give due weight to the initial years when the Treaty was under intensive negotiation, involving as this did several hundreds of meetings at various levels, from Foreign Ministers to experts and specialists, nearly all of which I took part in. (They included a special 4-power Treaty Commission in Vienna, which by a nice coincidence started work here exactly 33 years ago today [16 May, 19801.)

Among the school of scholars of international relations, neatly called by Roy Jones the ‘English School’, the work of Martin Wight is placed in particularly high esteem. More perhaps than anyone else, he is regarded as the scholar who did international relations as it ought to be done. I suppose no one would assert that this form is exclusive and needed no complement. The need for the discussion of economic factors in international relations for example would presumably not be denied, nor that such a discussion might not need other methods. What I take to be asserted, however, is that the sort of problem which Wight faced is central to international relations (and given the generality of some of these problems, for some issues, at least, this would not be widely denied) but more importantly that the way he tackled them is the right way.

Gibraltar provides an instrumental lesson in the study of international affairs. In some areas, and on some subjects, reasoned rational compromises and solutions to disputes and differences between peoples and sovereign states are rendered impossible because of the emotional arguments which are introduced and which lead to entrenched, immutable negotiating positions. No issue is more likely to generate these situations than disputes over areas of land and differences over sovereignty. History supports this conclusion; territorial disputes concerning rights to entitlement have proved the most common cause of disagreement leading, first, to acrimonious relationships, then to the breakdown of communication and, finally, to overt physical hostilities and war.

This paper sets out to investigate the importance to less developed countries (LDCs) of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a source of short to medium term finance. A discussion of longer term concessionary aid falls outside the scope of the analysis, though this will be alluded to at times.

Since Rousseau political theorists have had frequent recourse to a contrast between the fragmented nature of modern social and political life and the allegedly communitarian character of the Greek polis. At the heart of this opposition was the belief that the polis represented a condition of unsurpassable harmony in which citizens identified freely and spontaneously with their public institutions. Unlike their ancient counterparts, modern citizens exhibited less identification with their public world than resolution to advance their separate individual interests and pursue their private conceptions of the good. Nevertheless, the disintegration of the polis was not depicted in the language of unqualified loss. History had not been simply an unmitigated fall, because the individual's claim to scrutinize the law of the polis on rational grounds involved a significant advance in man's self-consciousness. The positive aspect of its decline was man's transcendence of a parochial culture in which neither the right of individual freedom nor the principle of human equality had been recognized. If the modern world had lost the spontaneous form of community enjoyed by the ancients, it surpassed that world in its understanding and expression of freedom.

With the widespread usage of systems analysis in political science over the last twenty years it is axiomatic that the problem of adaptation has been a recurring theme in the literature. At the level of the individual political system this concern has been germane to the work of Easton, the structural functionalists and the developmental/modernization writers. In International Politics writing, the problem of adaptation is central to both the applications of systems theory, at whatever level of analysis (for example Kaplan, Rosecrance at the systemic level, and Hanrieder and Modelski at the state level) and the less overtly theoretical works which still emphasize the importance of a state adapting to its environment.

1980 was not a good year for detente. The year began with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the ensuing state of East-West relations was reflected at the year's end in a deadlocked C.S.C.E. Review Conference in Madrid. The second phase of the Conference began with a sombre declaration by the United States' delegate that ‘detente does not today exist’ though it remains ‘an objective to be sought’. The invasion of Afghanistan gave sustenance to those who had been arguing for some time that detente was merely, in the words of Senator Jackson, ‘appeasement in its purest form’. For many indeed, like Mr. Kampelman, Afghanistan signalled the final end of detente. Others could argue however that the fact that the Madrid Conference could take place at all in such a political atmosphere, thus maintaining the momentum of the ‘Helsinki process’, is a clear indication that detente is at least alive if not well.

There have been three dominant approaches specific to the study of the foreign policy of the Federal Republic. Perhaps the most influential has concentrated on relating the dynamics of West German foreign policy to changing inter and intra bloc relationships. This approach has started from the premise that both German states are simultaneously embedded in their respective bloc systems and occupy a crucial strategic position at the point where these blocs directly impinge on each other. It has therefore cast its explanation in terms of inter and intra bloc relationships.