This article reformulates liberal international relations (IR) theory in a nonideological and nonutopian form appropriate to empirical social science. Liberal IR theory elaborates the insight that state-society relations—the relationship of states to the domestic and transnational social context in which they are embedded—have a fundamental impact on state behavior in world politics. Societal ideas, interests, and institutions influence state behavior by shaping state preferences, that is, the fundamental social purposes underlying the strategic calculations of governments. For liberals, the configuration of state preferences matters most in world politics—not, as realists argue, the configuration of capabilities and not, as institutionalists (that is, functional regime theorists)maintain, the configuration of information and institutions. This article codifies this basic liberal insight in the form of three core theoretical assumptions, derives from them three variants of liberal theory, and demonstrates that the existence of a coherent liberal theory has significant theoretical, methodological, and empirical implications. Restated in this way, liberal theory deserves to be treated as a paradigmatic alternative empirically coequal with and analytically more fundamental than the two dominant theories in contemporary IR scholarship: realism and institutionalism.

Modern states have constructed a multiplicity of issue-specific regimes to facilitate collective action. The majority of these institutions are specific instances of the deeper institutional practices that structure modern international society, notably the fundamental institutions of contractual international law and multilateralism. Two observations can be made about fundamental institutions. First, they are “generic” structural elements of international societies. That is, their practice transcends changes in the balance of power and the configuration of interests, even if their density and efficacy vary. The modern practices of contractual international law and multilateralism intensified after 1945, but postwar developments built on institutional principles that were first endorsed by states during the nineteenth century and structured international relations long before the advent of American hegemony. Second, fundamental institutions differ from one society of states to another. While the governance of modern international society rests on the institutions of contractual international law and multilateralism, no such institutions evolved in ancient Greece. Instead, the city-states developed a sophisticated and successful system of third-party arbitration to facilitate ordered interstate relations. This institution, which operated in the absence of a body of codified interstate law, is best characterized as “authoritative trilateralism.”

Nearly half a century has passed since Harold D. Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan generated a treatise on political theory that advocated analysis of power as a framework for analysis of political process. Fully half a century has passed since Hans J. Morgenthau confidently assured us of the universality, in politics as in nature, of the principle of the balance of power and defined the interests of states in terms of power. More than half a century has passed since Edward Hallett Carr set out to disabuse institutionalists and “idealists” of what he regarded as their utopian illusions and asserted a fundamental precept of the realist critique of prewar institutionalism, that politics is “in one sense always power politics.”3 The central role of power as an analytic construct in classical realist, structural realist, and structural neorealist scholarship has been so pervasive that the assertion requires no further elaboration. Still, the notion of “power” in the discipline and its usefulness as an analytic construct remain “essentially contested.”

In recent decades a great expansion has occurred in world environmental organization, both governmental and nongovernmental, along with an explosion of worldwide discourse and communication about environmental problems. All of this constitutes a world environmental regime. Using the term regime a little more broadly than usual, we define world environmental regime as a partially integrated collection of world-level organizations, understandings, and assumptions that specify the relationship of human society to nature. The rise of an environmental regime has accompanied greatly expanded organization and activity in many sectors of global society. Explaining the growth of the environmental regime, however, poses some problems. The interests and powers of the dominant actors in world society—nation-states and economic interests—came late to the environmental scene. Thus these forces cannot easily be used to explain the rise of world mobilization around the environment, in contrast with other sectors of global society (for example, the international economic and national security regimes).

Propelled by the oil boom of the mid-1970s the Middle East emerged as the world's fastest growing region. Hopes and expectations were high for Arab political consolidation, economic advancement, and cultural efflorescence. With falling oil prices and a devastating war between Iran and Iraq, these hopes had dimmed somewhat by the early 1980s. In 1985, however, the spectacular image of an Arab great power was still tantalizing. A Pan-Arab state, wrote two experts on the region, would include a total area of 13.7 million square kilometers,

This article examines the domestic political sources of immigration control in advanced market economy countries after World War II. Immigration control can be distinguished from the broader concept of immigration policy by its emphasis on state policies that define the permissible level of resident alien admissions. The analysis is based on the well-established fact that immigrant communities are geographically concentrated. I argue that this geographic concentration creates an uneven distribution of costs and benefits, providing a spatial context for immigration politics. In this context, net public demand for tighter immigration control increases in localities where immigrants concentrate when those areas experience higher unemployment, rapid increases in immigration, higher immigrant proportions, and more generous immigrant access to social services. Each of these conditions aggravates competition between immigrants and natives, and hence native hostility, in these communities while employer support for immigration usually diminishes. Yet national politicians may ignore changes in the demand for immigration control unless these constituencies are also able to swing a national election from one party to another. The larger and less “safe” the local constituencies, the greater their influence in this sense. Evidence from the United Kingdom between 1955 and 1981 is consistent with these propositions.

With the end of the Cold War, many observers expected that international conflict would be less likely to occur and easier to manage. Given the successful resolution of the Gulf War and the European Community's (EC) efforts to develop a common foreign policy, observers expected international cooperation to manage the few conflicts that might break out. Instead, the disintegration of Yugoslavia contradicted these expectations. Rather than developing a common foreign policy, European states were divided over how to deal with Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia. Germany pushed for relatively quick recognition of Croatia and Slovenia, whereas other members of the EC wanted to go slower. Some observers expected Russia to fall in line with the West because of its need for investment and trade, but instead it supported Serbia. It is puzzling that Europe failed to cooperate regardless of whether greater international cooperation could have managed this conflict. How can we make sense of the international relations of Yugoslavia's demise? Since secession is not a new phenomenon, we should study previous secessionist conflicts to determine if they share certain dynamics, and we should consider applying to Yugoslavia the arguments developed to understand such conflicts.