In 1948, Hans J. Morgenthau wrote his classic text, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, that was largely responsible for establishing realism as the prevailing theory in the field of International Relations (IR). In 1979, Kenneth N. Waltz wrote an immensely influential book, Theory of International Politics, that resulted in a new structural version of realism – neorealism – becoming the dominant theory in IR. John J. Mearsheimer, who is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, has written a profoundly important book that rightfully deserves a prominent place along with Morgenthau and Waltz in the canon of realist thought about international politics. Mearsheimer's clearly written book puts forth a new structural theory of realism that he terms offensive realism. This version of realism argues that the observable patterns of behaviour among all of the great powers throughout history, most notably their ubiquitous power-seeking, can be explained by the fact that they exist in a condition of anarchy in which there is no higher source of authority above them. While sharing many of the same basic assumptions with neorealism, offensive realism, as elucidated by Mearsheimer, provides a fundamentally different account of the essential dynamics of international politics than that which Waltz and his students have been offering for the last twenty years or so.

In 1959, Arnold Wolfers published an essay entitled ‘The Actors In World Politics’ in which he suggested that the importance of the state as an actor, although undeniable, needed to be submitted to ‘empirical analysis’ and clearer theorisation if its precise role was to be ascertained. Unfortunately, almost no one seems to have heeded his advice, and the question about what we might call the person-hood of the state virtually vanished from the agenda of mainstream International Relations (IR) theory. Realists, neorealists, neoliberal institutionalists, theorists of international society, and even many Marxists were content to treat states as, in effect, big people, endowed with perceptions, desires, emotions, and the other attributes of person-hood. Significantly, they persisted in these practices even though they often admitted that – in Robert Gilpin's words – ‘strictly speaking . . . only individuals and individuals joined together into various types of coalitions can be said to have interests’ and therefore really be actors.

The trans-Atlantic dispute over application of the European Union's Data Directive (1995) is discussed as a case study of an emerging geographic incongruity between the reach and domain of the territorially-defined Westphalian state and the deep and dense network of economic relations. The article reviews significant EU-US differences about the meaning of privacy and the means to protect it, the history of attempts to apply its provisions to information transferred to the US, and the less than satisfactory attempt at resolution – the Safe Harbor agreement. It then argues that attempting to apply the Directive to transactions on the Internet raises fundamental questions about the meaning of borders, territorial sovereignty and political space and explores the implications for territorial jurisdiction and global governance at some length.

The following exchange builds upon, and reassesses, the intellectual trajectory of Robert Jervis since The Logic of Images. It is organised around three interrelated sections that, tentatively, squeeze out the gist of Jervis' contribution to IR during his three and half decades of remarkable scholarship. The purpose, however, is not to offer a comprehensive view of Jervis' work; instead I want to set signposts that will help us get smoothly into his ‘system of thought’ and substantiate the salience of his account. In the first section, we concentrate on issues of images and (mis)perceptions. Here, Jervis reasserts that political psychology, a crucial site of relevance of actors' behaviour, is perfectly amenable to a rigorous analysis, and should thus be granted a pivotal role in understanding the dynamics of world politics. Insights of political psychology, with their various implications, are taken up into the next section, the rationale of which is to dialogically sketch out the paradoxical ethos of deterrence theory. The third section, on complexity theory, brings forward the breadth of Jervis's reorientation, characterised by a systematic integration of various ideas that have been at the centre of his endeavour since the 1980s. We use contemporary world politics as a thread that connects the aforementioned segments of the discussion and thereby gives the journey its overall coherence.

The words used to describe things sometimes tell us less about the thing itself and more about those telling the story: and in the case of the words ‘American Empire’ one could more or less tell in the past that the story was being told by a critic. Not any longer. Indeed, since 9/11 those who have been at the forefront of promoting the idea have not been radical opponents on the left but defenders of the United States on the neo-conservative right. Under conditions where the US dominates the earth like no other power, Empire they argue not only describes what America has become – even though its own leaders invariably fail to recognise the fact; it also indicates to us what has to be done if we are to tackle the threat posed by catastrophic terrorism. And in this the United States now needs to do what it normally does worst: namely learn from the history of other great powers. As one of the new gurus of Empire has suggested, in a world of failed states and terrorist threats, the US has to abandon the idea that it is unique and see how its predecessors, the British and the Romans, created the conditions of order before.

Alexander Wendt holds that states are ‘purposive actors with a sense of Self’. He draws on hermeneutic scholarship from Paul Ricoeur (1991) to Erik Ringmar to argue that this self is a narrative structure.

Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

Charles Kupchan, The End of the American Era (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2002).

Ivo H. Daadler and James M. Lindsay, America Unbound (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2003).

Did 11 September 2001 change everything about the United States including its foreign policy? Have the subsequent US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq altered the scholarly calculus of what should be studied and how? Must authors determined to assert the continuing importance of history, geopolitics or domestic factors as explanatory variables recast or abandon their existing conclusions to highlight the newer realities after the terrorist attacks and their aftermath? If so, how? These questions lead to others. Is there a usable American past that helps illuminate the dilemmas of the present? If so, where is it found? Is there a sustainable future role for the US in the world, beyond ideology or improvisation? If so, what are its contours? Is the Bush administration truly ‘radical’ or even ‘revolutionary’ in its imperial thrusts? After Afghanistan and Iraq, is American foreign policy still largely a success story? Or is the United States en route to becoming an ordinary country, albeit one with extraordinary resources in both hard and soft power?

This review article explores several latest endeavours that theorise the state and globalisation. The aim is to reflect further on some of the wider follies that lie within the ambition of debates on the state and globalisation. By uniting common themes throughout the review – revolving around issues of state capacity in the post-colonial world, the relationship between globalisation and international relations, and the very meaning of globality – the review raises a series of questions for further research on the state and globalisation. Most significantly, it seeks to question the future of critical theorising on the state and globalisation within international studies. It does so by arguing that there remain serious question-begging assumptions about capitalism that lie at the core of present general theories of the state and globalisation that, if overlooked, might also blunt the precepts of critical international theorising.

What are we to make of the state? According to Hegel, it was the ‘Divine Idea on Earth’. For Hobbes it was an ‘Artificiall Man’. Nietzsche declared it the ‘coldest of all cold monsters’. And for Alexander Wendt it is a ‘person’. Wendt is absolutely serious about this; it is not that the state ‘is like’ a person; it literally is a person; ‘states are people too’. Wendt's literalist take on the state marks a watershed within that broad category of scholars committed to a scientific International Relations. Previous generations of scientifically orientated IR scholars, many of a positivist persuasion, have been happy to personify the state only insofar as this is understood as an instrumental device aimed at facilitating explanation. Talk of a state acting was admissible only as long as it was understood that this implied no ontological commitment to the state possessing any of the properties assigned to it. It may seem ‘as if’ the state acted; it may even seem ‘as if’ states existed. But as David Easton knew only too well, the state was only a ‘ghost in the machine’. A necessary ghost, of course, but a spectral apparition nonetheless. Wendt, whatever one thinks of his treatment of the state, has at least reopened the question of state ontology and state agency.

It is an empire without a consciousness of itself as such, constantly shocked that its good intentions arouse resentment abroad. But that does not make it any the less of an empire, with a conviction that it alone, in Herman Melville's words, bears ‘the ark of liberties of the world.

If all history according to Marx has been the history of class struggle, then all international history, it could just as well be argued, has been the struggle between different kinds of Empire vying for hegemony in a world where the only measure was success and the only means of achieving this was through war. Indeed, so obvious is this fact to historians – but so fixated has the profession of International Relations been with the Westphalian settlement – that it too readily forgets that imperial conquest, rather than mere state survival, has been the principle dynamic shaping the contours of the world system from the sixteenth century onwards. Empires, however, were not just mere agents existing in static structures. They were living entities that thought, planned, and then tried to draw the appropriate lessons from the study of what had happened to others in the past.

Hans-Martin Jaeger argues in this Journal that Hegel endorses a ‘reluctant realism’, whereby Hegel's theory of international politics institutionalises a transnationalising civil society of states. In Jaeger's view, Hegel's conception of individuals in civil society is analogous to states in international politics. On the contrary, I argue Hegel's conception of abstract right is far more commensurable with his theory of international politics. The mutual recognition existing in civil society – which helps to produce legal relationships – does not exist beyond the state where there are no legal relationships. Thus, Hegel is a realist of a more familiar sort, without any ‘reluctance’.

Gunther Hellmann, Klaus Dieter Wolf, and Michael Zürn (eds.), Die neuen Internationalen Beziehungen. Forschungsstand und Perspektiven in Deutschland (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2003), pp. 614.

The intensification in recent years of interest in the history and sociology of IR (as a discipline) has been manifested in a growing number of publications dealing with aspects of different IR communities. The appearance of a weighty and semi-official volume summarising the state of the art in German IR is therefore a noteworthy development, and one that merits attention beyond the German-speaking world where it will find its main audience. I refer to this volume as ‘semi-official’ because it has been published under the auspices of the Section for International Politics of the German Political Science Association (Deutsche Vereinigung für Politische Wissenschaft, DVPW). The book does not attempt to speak for IR scholars in Austria or Switzerland and so represents a national rather than a linguistic community, though not all the contributors teach at universities in Germany.

I would like to thank Martin Weber for his interesting and thoughtful response to my article ‘Waltz, Kant and Systemic Approaches To International Relations’. I am aware of the intrinsically controversial nature of any comparison of Waltz and Kant, and am therefore grateful for the opportunity to respond formally to the criticisms that Weber makes. Weber raises doubts about interpreting Kant as a systems theorist, interpreting Kant as advocating a scientific approach, and my understanding of the role of world society in Kant's account of international relations respectively. I will respond to these criticisms in the order that the original article dealt with these three issues, dealing with Kant as a social scientist first before discussing international systems and the role of world society in Kant's theory.

Are states people too? Yes, they are. In this I agree with Alexander Wendt's contention that the state is an ‘emergent phenomenon which cannot be reduced to individuals’, although I disagree with the methodology (scientific realist abduction) that he uses to make his argument and the consequent implication that the state is a ‘real’ (as opposed, presumably, to a ‘fictitious’) thing. Indeed, I would rather invert the claim that states are people too, and claim that people are states too, inasmuch as both are social actors – entities in the name of which actions are performed – exercising agency in delimited contexts. Instead of trying to ascertain what makes something a ‘person’, we should focus on processes of ‘personation’ in world politics, in order to enhance our understanding of how social actors in general are produced and sustained in the first place. Doing so allows for a much broader catalogue of actors in world politics, and affords the possibility of studying social action in a more consistently constructionist manner.

In ‘Beyond Economism in International Political Economy’, Marieke de Goede argues that the study of International Political Economy (IPE) fails to take seriously the insights generated by poststructuralism and discourse analysis. Specifically, much of IPE ‘remains wedded to a profound separation between the ideal and the realm of the real, whereby the politics of representation are seen to have a bearing only on the former domain, leaving the latter intact as an incontestable reality’. The result, especially apparent in analysis of international finance, is economism: the assumption of ‘a prediscursive economic materiality’ constituted independently of ideas, identity and discourse. Getting beyond economism requires using poststructualism to challenge the separation of the ideal and the real in the analysis of international finance and IPE more generally. Drawing on well-established literatures in geography and accounting, de Goede highlights the necessity of analysing the practices through which financial knowledge – and by extension capital itself – is produced.

The United States dominates the world as no state has. It emerged from the Cold War the world's only superpower, and no geopolitical or ideological contenders are in sight. Europe is drawn inward and Japan is stagnant. A half-century after their occupation, the United States still provides security and garrisons troops in Japan and Germany – the world's second and third largest economies. US military bases and carrier battle groups ring the world. Russia is in a quasi-formal security partnership with the United States, and China has accommodated itself to US dominance, at least for the moment. For the first time in the modern era, the world's most powerful state can operate on the global stage without the counterbalancing constraints of other great powers. We have entered the American unipolar age.

To say that states are ‘actors’ or ‘persons’ is to attribute to them properties we associate first with human beings – rationality, identities, interests, beliefs, and so on. Such attributions pervade social science and International Relations (IR) scholarship in particular. They are found in the work of realists, liberals, institutionalists, Marxists, constructivists, behaviouralists, feminists, postmodernists, international lawyers, and almost everyone in between. To be sure, scholars disagree about which properties of persons should be ascribed to states, how important state persons are relative to other corporate persons like MNCs or NGOs, whether state persons are a good thing, and whether ‘failed’ states can or should be persons at all. But all this discussion assumes that the idea of state personhood is meaningful and at some fundamental level makes sense. In a field in which almost everything is contested, this seems to be one thing on which almost all of us agree.

American foreign policy has been recently dominated by the venture into Iraq. This has not gone well. Most criticism has focused on ‘mistakes’ – there were not enough US troops, or they were of the wrong type, the Iraqi army was mistakenly disbanded after it surrendered, looting was not anticipated, oil expectations were unreal, the US depended too much on Iraqi exile claims, and so forth. Indeed, these were mistakes. 250,000 troops trained also in police roles would have made a difference. So might Iraqi army units converted into security police. So might better planning all round. But the mistakes were only the surface phenomena of a more profound American failure. The Iraq venture was doomed from the outset by the attempt to create what some neo-conservatives styled a ‘New American Empire’. This exaggerated American powers, made facile historical comparisons with previous Empires, mis-identified the enemy, and mis-identified the century we live in. This early twenty-first century attempt at Empire is failing. There will not be others.