THERE is no lecture which I could feel more honoured to have been asked to give than one which commemorates the name of Martin Wight. Just twenty years ago I made the same journey I have just made – from Oxford to the London School of Economics – to take up a position as assistant lecturer in the Department of International Relations. I had not done a course of any kind in International Relations, nor made any serious study of it, and as I arrived in Houghton Street I wondered how I was to go about teaching the subject and even whether it existed at all.

Thirteen years – almost to the day – after formulating its Basic Principles of the International Socialist Division of Labour, at a ‘Summit’ of Communist Party First Secretaries (in Moscow in June 1962), Comecon established its Agreed Plan for Multilateral Integration Measures, at a meeting of Heads of Government in Budapest in June 1975. The causes of delay to economic integration within Eastern Europe's trading bloc have been political, but the foundation of the body in 1949 was as political in origin as was the renewed impetus given to economic collaboration by the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Indeed, as a brief retrospective readily shows, international politics have been instrumental in every turning-point in Comecon's life of 27 years (one fewer than its nearest Western counterpart the O.E.E.C, since 1961 the O.E.C.D.).

THE study of foreign policy has, until recently, lacked conceptual clarity. This has been primarily the result of the failure to delineate the boundaries of Foreign Policy as a concept. Consequently, many professed studies of foreign policy have, in fact, been concerned with surveying the bilateral or multilateral relations of one state with other states in the international system. However, in the last two decades there has been an increasing tendency towards more precise and orderly methods for analysing foreign policy in its theoretical and operational dimensions. This has led to a proliferation of theory-oriented studies concerned mainly with explaining foreign policy behaviour.

In discussing this (understandably?) neglected question, this paper attempts to make clear what is meant by the word ‘torture’; expresses doubts about the best known moral positions on torture; offers what seems a better account of the matter; and demonstrates that the question of what is wrong with torture merits consideration in any worthwhile study of international affairs.

Several articles and editorials have already appeared presenting the argument that the “ceilings” on strategic nuclear weapon systems, and within these on ‘MIRV’s, that were agreed upon at Vladivostok are too high. But none of these articles have even raised the question, no less attempted to answer it, as to why they are so high. Why were such high “ceilings” agreed to, and not lower ones.

When Harold Wilson first became British prime minister in 1964 the possession of an independent nuclear capability had for some years been a major political issue which divided the political parties from each other and within themselves. But few of those who so boldly entered into polemics on the subject had any detailed knowledge of the origins and the development of the project over the previous quarter century. For until 1964 the subject had not been one evoking much serious academic enquiry. A decade later the position has been strikingly reversed. Wilson, with masterly sleight of hand, used the abortive Atlantic Nuclear Force (A.N.F.) scheme to kill simultaneously the Multilateral Nuclear Force (M.L.R) plan and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (C.N.D.) with the result that nuclear weapons have not been a serious issue in any of the last four general elections; while during the same period there has been a flowering of academic interest, official and unofficial, to the point where it almost qualifies as a distinct new sub-branch of international studies.

Over the last two decades none has done more than Fritz Fischer to compel major reinterpretation of German ambitions between the 1890s and the end of the Third Reich. In 1959–60 this Hamburg historian published two articles that hinted at the coming storm. It broke dramatically in 1961 with the appearance of his huge Griff nach der Weltmacht This densely documented treatment of Germany's objectives in the First World War was striking enough to become before long the object of official displeasure at Bonn. Nor did Fischer's thesis win any easy support from professional colleagues, who argued bitterly about it during the 1964 German Historical Convention. Its still wider impact was clear from the deliberations of the International Historical Congress held at Vienna in 1965. That same year saw the publication of Fischer's Weltmacht oder Niedergang, a brief volume in rebuttal of criticism, and soon scholars in many countries were swelling the tide of relevant literature. By 1969 this included Kreig der Illusionen in which Fischer greatly amplified his original arguments. All three books are, at last, available in English. The translation of Griff nach der Weltmacht dates from 1967, but only lately have the other two been similarly treated. It seems appropriate to review these alongside recent works by Dr John Moses, on Fischer's revolutionary place in a national historiographical tradition, and by Professor Norman Rich, on the German aims associated with the war that broke out in 1939.

When Philip Reynolds opened the first issue of the British Journal of International Studies with an examination of the “state of the art” in Great Britain,2 he omitted any mention of the Open University as a source of such studies. In the sense that Reynolds was seeking establishments with full-time students of International Studies, the omission was justified; in the sense that the Open University forms a seat of learning whose students are concerned with the study of International Relations, it was not. Indeed, it is possible that the Open University may have, at any one time, more students reading International Relations than any other single institution in the United Kingdom. These several hundreds of part-time students, pursuing the single course under review, are distributed rather unevenly across the face of Great Britain. They have varying access to library facilities; the greatly varying environment of their own homes in which to work; greatly varying amounts of contact with their tutors, either on a “face-to-face” basis or by letter or telephone. In short, the student for whom this course is designed is different – he represents, perhaps, the “new actor” in academic life in Great Britain. He is ignored at our – the traditional academics, – peril, for whilst we may be concerned with standards of academic excellence there are many in high places who now judge success by such criteria as staff-student ratios, cost effectiveness, and the like.

When Harold Wilson first became British prime minister in 1964 the possession of an independent nuclear capability had for some years been a major political issue which divided the political parties from each other and within themselves. But few of those who so boldly entered into polemics on the subject had any detailed knowledge of the origins and the development of the project over the previous quarter century. For until 1964 the subject had not been one evoking much serious academic enquiry. A decade later the position has been strikingly reversed. Wilson, with masterly sleight of hand, used the abortive Atlantic Nuclear Force (A.N.F.) scheme to kill simultaneously the Multilateral Nuclear Force (M.L.R) plan and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (C.N.D.) with the result that nuclear weapons have not been a serious issue in any of the last four general elections; while during the same period there has been a flowering of academic interest, official and unofficial, to the point where it almost qualifies as a distinct new sub-branch of international studies.