Our social circumstance is fundamentally changing, so we are told on this historical morning after the Cold War. What was formerly called the ‘Second World' has suddenly disappeared; apartheid appears to be in final retreat; class structures and gender relations are said to be undergoing substantial shifts; there are increased hopes for disarmament and a wider demilitarization of international life; existing state boundaries and to some extent also the nature of the state itself are deeply in question. At the same time, we of the late twentieth century are allegedly experiencing a world-wide upsurge in religious revivalism, an unprecedented global ecological awareness, a shift from states to markets and from globalism towards regionalism in the organization of the world economy, cascading democratization across the continents and so on. There is widespread talk of ‘a new world order’, of the emergence of what is variously called ‘post-industrial’, ‘post-capitalist’ or ‘post-modern’ society, and of ‘the end of history’. Symptomatic, too, of the pervasively felt sense of transition are insistent calls for new theories, new language, new politics, new institutions and new norms that will be equal to the challenges posed by this purportedly revolutionary world situation. True, sceptics might well argue that dynamism and upheaval of the kind that we are witnessing today constitute defining features of modern social life, and that our generation is but the latest in a long string t o succumb to a secular millenarian delusion that it has been granted the historical privilege of living through the dawn of a new epoch. However, whether they adopt a prophetic or an agnostic stance on the matter, most commentators would agree that the question of social change sits high on the agenda of current world affairs.

This essay examines John Quincy Adams' diplomatic and ethical thinking and explores the implications of this legacy for the exercise of American power in contemporary world affairs. Both as America's most accomplished Secretary of State i n the nineteenth century, and through his voluminous public and private papers, Adams helped to identify the normative foundations of the national interest. In particular, he defined the limits of America's obligations to defend human rights and t o intervene on behalf of revolutionary principles in the quarrels of distant nations. Attention focuses here upon Adams' contribution to historic debates concerning: (1) individual and national rights which must be defended if freedom is to be maintained; (2) the basis for American neutrality in the 1790s; and (3) the claims upon American diplomacy generated by the independence movements of South American and Greek patriots.

The issue of ‘interpretive’ approaches to the study of international relations has achieved prominence in recent meta-theoretical discussions of the discipline. It has been suggested, for example, that the work of interpretive theorists, such as Hayward Alker, Richard Ashley, Friedrich Kratochwil, John Ruggie and Robert Cox, represents an approach which is qualitatively different and distinct from the traditional, positivist-inspired approach to the study of international politics.

The fundamental change occasioned by perestroika, the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc, the reunification of Germany, and the end of the ‘Cold War’ has become a crucial test for the explanation of change provided by the established paradigm of international politics, neo-realism. In at least three respects, this approach was embarrassed by the chain of events.

It is obvious that today the facts of international relations do notfitinto any general framework of which people are aware (perhaps they never have). As descriptions, concepts such as state, sovereignty, federation seem more than ever stabs in the dark. In prescriptive political theory, we are even more at sea. Old prescriptive certainties such as nationhood must be conceded to be at best the most provisional of guides to action. The interface between domestic sovereignty and international organisations (and what a wilderness of phenomena that term is supposed to describe) needs to be comprehended anew. This is urgent if we are to make sense of, and have a sense of direction through, the problems of the European Community, the Commonwealth of Independent States, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, not to mention a host of problematic multi-ethnic polities as diverse as India and Iraq. Wherever we look in the world today, the relationship between ‘state’, ‘nation’ and ‘community’ seems to be in crisis: from the Balkans to Canada, from Scotland to Kurdistan. This no more has the appearance of an aberration from some historical norm than does the tie between state and nation in previous European history. It makes more sense to regard both as shifting patterns of collective human consciousnesses. The idea that there is something ‘out there’, ‘given’, that preordains human beings to live in nations, and nations t o form states, was certainly a myth; and as a myth had a certain real force. The problem today is, first, that the myth is reviving in some places at just the time when it is being swept aside in others (in parts of the European Community, for example); and, secondly, that the idea of imprescriptible national rights seems to be a postulate of democracy whenever the majority in a territory embrace it, and at the same time a recipe for carnage and the vilest known abrogation of all other human rights. The revival of this nationalist idea around 1990 has also to be set beside the real feelings of belonging that arise amongst groups other than nations; which, whenever they do have such a feeling of corporate identity, we may describe by the general term ‘communities’.

Chiefly for the wrong reasons, diplomacy has recently made some notable incursions into international relations programmes at British universities. For, in the field of money-spinning taught Master's degrees, this subject has been perceived as a crowd puller. Out there, beyond the European Community with its aggravatingly-low fee levels, are, it is calculated, many who will be attracted by an MA with 'diplomatic' in its title. With some ground, it is believed they see that sort of degree as a passport to a position in the much-sought-after diplomatic ranks. Furthermore, in the same regions lie beginning diplomats who could be said to need some vocational underpinning, not to mention those longer-employed in diplomacy who would benefit in mid-career from intellectual refreshment. The British Statue of Education beckons, its own distinctive torch held high aloft. And, to ensure that its light does not go unnoticed, Vice-Chancellors despatch glossy brochures to the British Council and their recruiting officers, hot foot, to distant parts.