‘History is too important to be left to the historians”.

The relationship between history, international history and international relations has never been an easy or a particularly amicable one. To talk of a cold war may be something of an exaggeration, but it does capture something about the way in which the various subjects tended to regard the other for the greater part of the post-war period. Thus practising historians and international historians appeared to have little time for each other, and together had even less for those seeking to establish the new discipline of International Relations.

The Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War in 1648, is generally understood as a critical moment in the development of the modern international system composed of sovereign states each with exclusive authority within its own geographic boundaries. The Westphalian sovereign state model, based on the principles of autonomy, territory, mutual recognition and control, offers a simple, arresting, and elegant image. It orders the minds of policymakers. It is an analytic assumption for neo-realism and neo-liberal institutionalism. It is an empirical regularity for various sociological and constructivist theories of international politics. It is a benchmark for observers who claim an erosion of sovereignty in the contemporary world.

Two criticisms have long been directed at the theorization of international relations (IR): ahistoricism and Eurocentrism. Westphalia, it is argued, has been so stigmatized that it has become synonymous with the beginning as well as the end of what we understand as international relations. Rationalist theorizing in general, of both the neorealist and neoliberal persuasions, has produced a set of deductive theories that aim and claim to transcend history.

Africa's relation to the concept and practice of ‘state’ and ‘states system’ has been problematic since its first encounters with those who were armed with the concept. In observing the collapse of authority and governance in a number of African states, some scholars have suggested that Africa presented the states system with alternative political organizations. Others argue that so long as there is a kernel of armed authority in territorially demarcated areas, a state exists. Africa's polities have often responded unconventionally, yet strategically, to interaction with the sovereign state system first elaborated by the Europeans. To comprehend the novelty, or lack of it, in the ‘state system’ of contemporary Africa, we need to know something about its pre-colonial political structures and organizations and about the imprint of empires (the construct which effectively limited the ‘international’ system of sovereign states to the West) on Africa. Did colonialism and the Western system of sovereign states rule out alternative structures for the newly independent African states? What might alternative structures have looked like? What impact did colonial rule have on the development of states in Africa? Does contemporary Africa have a ‘state system’? This article addresses these questions in the context of the Special Issue's concern with both the structure of the international system and developments among and between the units.

Ancient Greece is not unfamiliar to International Relations scholars. Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War has been especially influential in shaping our understanding of the ancient Greek international system, not only because it is the best historical source available, but also in light of the status it has achieved as the foremost classic of International Relations. Of particular interest to International Relations have been questions concerning the character of the system and the units within it, and how these have affected the dynamics of conflict and co-operation in the international arena. Many find the antecedents of the modern European states-system in the pattern of relations that emerged between the independent city-states of Hellas roughly between the eighth and fourth centuries BC. Like our contemporary international system, the ancient Greek international system was anarchic in the sense that it lacked an overarching common government.

In the discipline of International Relations (IR), it seems to be an uncontroversial point that the passage of European civilization from the middle ages to the early modern period was also the transition from a system with a single supreme secular regent, the emperor, to one with plural supreme regents. This is implied in the ubiquitous view that the Thirty Years' War was a struggle between the ‘medieval’ conception of imperial suzerainty and hegemony over christendom and the ‘modern’ conception of a system composed of independent ‘sovereign’ states, with the 1648 peace that ended the war enshrining the victory of the latter.

The conceptual foundations of the eighteenth century international system, long neglected in narrative diplomatic histories, are enjoying increased attention with the recent contributions of Jeremy Black, Paul Schroeder, and Michael Doyle. Nevertheless, in political science literature the period is routinely treated as an interesting—yet quickly dispatched—‘prequel’ to the post-1815 order which matured in the Bismarckian alignments of the late nineteenth century. Indeed, as a field of study the period has been all but ignored in the discipline of international relations.

Histories of European international politics are punctuated by turning points. Typically, these watersheds have been connected to major wars. What do such histories have to tell us about nineteenth century Europe? What, if anything, is left out in the telling? My purposes in posing these questions are, first, to suggest that these histories focus too narrowly on war and, second, to propose an alternative perspective on modern European politics.

The United States is today a global superpower without historical precedent. It stands at the centre of an expanding democratic-capitalist world order that is itself, fifty years after its creation, the dominant reality in world politics. Despite expectations that American hegemony would disappear and trigger the emergence of a new and unstable multipolar post-Cold War order, the opposite has in fact happened. American power has grown even greater in the decade since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although American power is not uniformly welcome around the world, serious ideological challengers or geopolitical balancers are not to be found. Scholars who a decade ago were debating the prospect of co-operation and conflict in a post-hegemonic world are now debating the character and future of world politics within an American unipolar order.

Russia is by some measures the most successful imperial enterprise in history. Surpassed in size only by the British and Mongol empires, Russia and its Soviet successor proved far more durable than either one. It retained its peak territorial extent longer than any other empire, and for most of the last 400 years it has been the largest polity on earth. Moreover, both St. Petersburg and Moscow were hugely successful as great powers, playing major roles in European and world politics for the three centuries after 1700. And their influence as great powers peaked in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—an era in which states based on nations appeared to have the competitive edge over old-fashioned polyglot empires.

This collection of essays grapples, historically, with the complex issues involved in understanding system transformation. Often these transformations have taken the form of a shift along the spectrum of independence-centralization, and it is within the framework of such declining or emerging imperial systems that the degree of change has tended to be measured. The task of this contribution is to locate the specific case of the end of the Cold War within the broader reflections on these themes. It will respond to this challenge by applying a different litmus test for change from that already found in the existing literature about the significance of the end of the Cold War. Instead, it will broach the topic by an examination of prevailing concepts of legitimacy within international society. In short, it argues that a study of the role of legitimacy might be a useful way of documenting and measuring the kinds of changes taking place within an international system. Moreover, while the end of the Cold War might be thought to have nothing to say about the issue of empire as such (beyond recording the expiry of the Soviet version), it will additionally be suggested that the resultant extension of shared concepts of international legitimacy can be understood as a defining attribute of the contemporary imperial project.

A sea change of major proportions is taking place in the historical social system forming the modern world, creating a widespread sense of uncertainty about the present and foreseeable future. In the words of Eric Hobsbawm, as ‘the citizens of the fin de siècle tapped their way through the global fog that surrounded them, into the third millennium, all they knew for certain was that an era of history had ended. They knew very little else’.

Policymakers and scholars have to deal with the difficult problems of variation, change, and transitions in world politics. Practitioners have to estimate the capabilities and intentions of those with whom they are interacting and need to determine the kind and extent of variety in their environments. Detecting, diagnosing, and dealing with change also is particular difficult. Scholars have shown the wide range of units and systems that human beings have created, but need to also examine the extent to which they are characterized by common processes and dynamics. The balance of power generally operates through unintended consequences and can characterize systems even when no one seeks balance. Change may be more common than scholars often appreciate. Nuclear weapons undermine much traditional international politics and even greater changes will flow from the fact that the leading powers in the world no longer contemplate war with each other.