Diplomats, whose historical reputation in earlier times has so often been unsavoury, have more recently been highly regarded, except perhaps in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, for which catastrophe they were held by some to be to blame. The privations of the Cold War and the occasional severe maltreatments endured in unsettled states have from time to time since 1945 made them heroes. The change of status has, particularly since the nineteenth century, been associated with a rising sense of belonging to a recognizable and separate profession, with its own body of knowledge and skill, for which suitable candidates could be trained. This development was slow in gestation and its first signs cannot be reliably identified until the seventeenth century with the appearance of the first clutch of semi-professional manuals. From that time, a potential semantic confusion has existed arising out of the use of the adjective ‘diplomatic’ sometimes to describe the process of international political argument and its eventual success or failure in reaching agreement, and sometimes to describe the administrative mechanism of diplomacy itself. it was this latter aspect of diplomacy, seen separately from the content of policy, which from the mid nineteenth century began to attract a new kind of attention, driven particularly by international lawyers, to the point where it was beginning to seem desirable to attain a general international agreement as to what were the rules of the game.

In this paper I am going to argue a familiar but still controversial thesis about the relation between international ethics and international law, which I would sum up in the following list of propositions:

First, international law is a source as well as an object of ethical judgements. The idea of legality or the rule of law is an ethical one, and international law has ethical significance because it gives institutional expression to the rule of law in international relations.

Secondly, international law—or, more precisely, the idea of the rule of law in international relations—reflects a rule-oriented rather than outcome-oriented ethic of international affairs. By insisting on the priority of rules over outcomes, this ethic rejects consequentialism in all its forms.

One of the central objectives of the field of international political economy (IPE) in the last 20 years has been to introduce insights from the field of international relations into the study of global economic affairs. Although this effort has been largely successful in the study of international trade, much less attention has been focused on the financial sector of the global economy. Seemingly highly technical and arcane, the study of international finance has been left largely to specialists in international economics, financial journalists, and international financial practitioners.

International relations is one of the areas of social science which most clearly brings home the tensions involved in the dual relation of inquirer to object of inquiry, as both scientific observer and moral judge, particularly in times of war. As social scientists, we are required to understand and explain our object, as moral beings, we are required to judge or evaluate it. Received wisdom in international relations premises the possibility of the former on its rigid separation from the latter, so that the understanding of, for example, war, is necessarily distinct from the question of the justice or injustice of war. The former is the task of the science of international relations, the latter task is within the province of the moral philosopher or the normative theorist. I will be arguing in this article that this separation of the realms of morality and politics, on which so much social science and moral philosophy is founded, can be traced back to Kant's critical philosophy, and that this separation has problematic consequences for the possibility of both explanation and evaluation in the international sphere. My argument falls into three parts. In the first part, I will put forward a condensed reading of the Kantian critical position and the problems that it poses. In the second and third parts, I will demonstrate how the discussion of international relations both in moral philosophy, and in political theory, is constructed by the Kantian morality/politics dichotomy, and how this limits and distorts both our moralizing and our theorizing. One contention in the third section of the paper will be that even the recent challenges to traditional international political theory, posed by critical theory and post-structuralism, are in danger of slipping back into a reliance on the morality/politics division, in spite of efforts to overcome it.

Evan Luard, a prolific author of works on international relations, died on 8 February 1991 at the age of 64. He had contracted throat cancer in the mid-1980s, and in the Spring of 1990 it has been confirmed that he had lung cancer. His reaction to the grim news was typical of him. Not a religious man, he could realistically and calmly accept death. His major concern was that his written work should survive him. This was a true reflection of the extraordinary part that his writing had in his life.

In her article on the early history of the Cold War, Beatrice Heuser throws out at a challenge to those of us who have, over the past few years, cast doubt upon the idea that the USSR represented a serious military threat to the West after the Second World War. Basing her argument upon ‘American intelligence estimates’ as well as other sources, she attempts to show that Western policy-makers, hither to much criticized by many academic analysts for having exaggerated Soviet capabilities and over-dramatizing its intentions, had good reason to be fearful of the Soviet Union. ‘American and British governments’, according to Dr Heuser, ‘had information which led them to fear Soviet aggression in Europe and elsewhere’ after 1948. In the light of this information—not to mention the North Korean attack upon the South—rearmament, she argues, ‘may well have been an appropriate response to the Soviet threat’. It certainly ‘worried Stalin’ and possibly prevented Soviet aggression in Europe. It was, in short, a reasonable response to a real problem and probably contributed (although by how much can never be known) to the successful containment of the USSR. NSC-68 may not have been such a flawed document after all.

It is a great thrill to find that someone has picked up the gauntlet thrown into the arena at a time when the Cold War seems to many to be nothing but remote history. Here are my brief answers to Michael Cox's gallant repartee:

• Tito did not ‘defect’ he was expelled from the Cominform by Stalin. Moscow did not ‘stay put’ altogether; Tito's expulsion was supposed to be followed by a putsch by the Stalinist faction within the CP of Yugoslavia, which failed, however. Here, as with the Berlin Blockade and later in condoning aggression in Korea (hardly ‘cautious, circumspect’ policy decisions), Stalin made a great mistake.

• Western analysts did predict the attack on South Korea. In May 1950 Kennan himself thought Stalin was looking for an area to have a ‘limited war’, and thought Yugoslavia a likely danger area. Mr Kennan's later Memoirs and memory are here, once again, not very reliable.

• The Communist victory in China and the Soviet explosion of an atomic device, far from being of little concern to the West, caused Truman to ask for NSC-68 to be written.

• The economically weak USSR was far from inferior to the West in manpower, as Dr Cox rightly notes, and it should be remembered that the Red Army had held its own against the formidable Wehrmacht for quite a while. The massive rearmament of the satellites of the USSR only started in 1948. Matthew Evangelista's article only deals with the period up to 1948, and its findings can not be applied to the 1949–1953 period. Satellite rearmament took off in 1950, peaking in 1952. By 1952 Rumania, Hungary and Bulgaria alone had as many forces (including small naval and air forces) as the 800,000 Western troops available on the Central Front in 1948.