The world today, Benjamin Barber points out, is “falling precipitantly apart and coming reluctantly together at the very same moment.” While states from Canada to India are threatened with breakup due to fractious nationalist impulses of their peoples, the power of technology and markets is forcing ever-tighter economic integration worldwide. From a common-sense perspective, these two impulses are among the most important processes in contemporary world politics. Yet, there has been remarkably little attention paid to developing a theory of the international system that examines the effects of both. Hegemonic stability theory considers economic integration but not nationalism; the few studies of nationalism as a systemic force play down the effects of economic integration; and neorealism, the most widely accepted theory of the international system, has no room to address either trend. The field is, partly as a result, a cacaphony of voices largely talking past one another.

In recent international relations theory debates, constructivists have argued that explanations based primarily on interests and the material distribution of power cannot fully account for important international phenomena and that analysis of the social construction of state identities ought to precede, and may even explain, the genesis of state interests. This claim has proved difficult to operationalize empirically, though some persuasive results are now emerging. This article analyzes the relationship between state identity and state interest in the development of American neutral rights policy from U.S. independence to the War of 1812.

Scholars focusing on international relations generally or foreign policy decision making are now paying increasing attention to the ways in which mental constructs—ideas, beliefs, ideologies, or worldviews—affect political actors' perceptions and behavior. The influence of mental constructs in political interaction is particularly visible when actors are trying to extend interaction into new areas or to establish new modes of cooperation. This study will illuminate the impact of mental constructs in these situations by examining the development of outer space law. The Soviets' successful launch of Sputnik in October 1957 shifted outer space from the realm of science fiction and speculation to the realm of real international concerns. Governments were faced with the problem of determining not only what they wanted to do in space but also what sorts of rules for unilateral activity and mutual interaction should prevail there.

At some point during 1991–92, something substantial changed in the way Israel's security agencies interrogated Palestinian detainees. The change was not in the number of detainees interrogated; on any given day in 1993, some four hundred to six hundred Palestinians continued to be interrogated by either the General Security Services (GSS) or the military (Israel Defense Forces; IDF). Overall, Israel interrogated some five thousand Palestinians every year from 1988 to 1994. Nor was the change one of interrogation results: the conviction rate of Palestinians in the military courts remained above 96 percent, with most convictions based on confessions obtained during interrogation. According to official statistics, of the 83,321 Palestinians tried in military courts in the West Bank and Gaza Strip between 1988 and 1993, only 2,731, or 3.2 percent, were acquitted. The security forces were still questioning a remarkable proportion of the adult male population, obtaining vast amounts of information on Palestinian social, political, and military activities.

An analyst of U.S. foreign economic policy observes that each wave of antiforeign sentiment associated with the surge of foreign direct investment (FDI) coming into the United States washes ashore a flotsam of restrictive and exclusionary laws that recedes slightly or becomes buried and forgotten in the sand only to advance again with a new wave. During the late 1980s, the controversy generated by the sharp rise of Japanese acquisitions in the United States washed ashore the latest flotsam of regulatory measures and further advanced the tangle of rules and regulations targeting inward foreign direct investment (IFDI). Of the various types of FDI, the present study is concerned mainly with the policy change toward foreign investment in an already established domestic business. This type of investment often involves merger or acquisition and is distinct from a “greenfield” investment where the foreign investor establishes “from scratch” a new business in the host economy.