With undue and perhaps false modesty, E. H. Carr described his brilliant contribution to what he called ‘the infant science of international polities’, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations, as ‘already a period piece’ in 1946 when a second edition appeared.1 Teachers of the subject have not accepted Carr's ‘period piece’ characterization. For more than forty years it has been prescribed reading for many of their students and has had to be reprinted many times.

This paper is an effort to overcome a major obstacle to a creative system orientation in international relations—a dearth of knowledge about system-level change. To accomplish this goal two tasks are necessary. First, building upon earlier contributions, a new definition of international system is offered and its essential properties—structure, process, equilibrium, stability—are discussed. The second requirement is to create a new approach to crisis and to forge links between its unit and system levels, the focus of the rest of the paper. This, in turn, will facilitate the analysis of crises as catalysts to system change, that is, as international earthquakes.

‘Northern Ireland Is free to determine its own future. It is a fundamental part of the United Kingdom, If the majority of the people in Northern Ireland wish not to be obviously we would honor their wish, whether it was to be independent or to join up elsewhere. Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom because of the wish of the majority of its people.’

Duff Cooper fell in love with France during his first visit to Paris in 1900 and he remained faithful to her for the rest of his life. The fact that Paris in 1900 was deeply Anglophobic, because of the Boer war, had no effect upon Cooper's feelings for the city. His affection for France was no fair-weather plant. It was deepened by the experience of nine months in the trenches in the Great War and was, thereafter, proof against all discouragements. As a young Foreign Office clerk in 1923 he did not join in the fashionable disparagement of France inspired by the French occupation of the Ruhr. As Minister of War from 1935 to 1937 he fought for the creation of a British army which would be large enough to play a continental role and later, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he was a leading advocate of Anglo-French co-operation. After his resignation in protest against the Munich agreement, Cooper spent his time fostering the idea of an Anglo-French alliance as the corner-stone of a European combination against Hitler's Germany. His love for France even survived the fall of France in June 1940 and, at a time when many francophiles were repenting of their former faith. Cooper renewed his pledges of devotion. Speaking on the wireless as Minister of Information on the eve of the Franco-German armistice, he declared his faith that France would rise again: ‘This is not the first time that a great nation has been defeated and has recovered from defeat. They have fought with heroism against superior numbers and superior weapons; their losses have been terrible.’ At the Ministry of Information Cooper was one of the earliest patrons of General de Gaulle and his Free French Movement. Given such a long history of Francophilia what could have been more natural than that he should have been appointed as Britain's first post-war ambassador to France. It was not, however, quite so simple as that.

The title of this article is the sub-title of Adam Watson's book, and is, I hope, just as helpful in describing the scope of the article as it is in explaining what the book is about. Each of the six books considered here is concerned with communication between states at a variety of levels, with the effectiveness of the dialogue, and with possibilities for the future. I intend first to discuss them briefly and then to consider some of the problems involved in diplomacy, and the extent to which light is thrown on them by these worthy volumes.

These excellent books mark the reception in American thinking of the doctrine that economic and social rights (Shue, Brown/Maclean, Hoffmann, Vogelgesang, Falk) are at least as important as the civil and political rights of Henkin's ‘International Bill of Rights’. The English contribution to this literature, the collection of documents edited by Brownlie, makes no distinction between sets of rights; and by reprinting work by Prebisch and Figueres, Brownlie promotes the thesis that development and human rights go together. However, it is worth noticing that all these authors ignore the efforts by the majority of countries in the UN General Assembly and the Commission on Human Rights to assert the related concept of rights to development, notably in GA Resolution 32/130 (1977).