What, this essay asks, is the relation between contemporary IR scholarship and the existentialist intellectual and cultural tradition? How is our discipline informed and animated by existentialist thinking? Is existentialism a heritage to be recovered, claimed, and embraced by IR scholars, or a shadow to be escaped? And what resources does it furnish us for thinking through the kind of issues that IR scholars are called upon to grapple with today? These questions are not purely theoretical. There are practical and political reasons, not only for considering them, but for considering them now. Living through what has been termed an unfolding ‘Age of Anxiety’, we find ourselves confronted by existential questions and existentialist ideas at almost every turn. It is, however, unclear how substantive or meaningful this apparently existentialist moment truly is. Does existentialism have something to say to contemporary IR, or does it flatter to deceive? We think the time is ripe to take stock of existentialism as it relates to IR and global politics. This is the purpose of this article and of the collection of essays it introduces.

This article employs newly declassified documents from the National Archives in Washington and London to re-examine foreign policymaking of the Nixon Administration during the Cienfuegos crisis of 1970. The article seeks to answer two fundamental questions with regard to policy decision-making during the crisis: why did the Administration pursue a public policy of ‘business as usual’ while cloaking the crisis in extreme secrecy, and how was this achieved? Answers to these questions can be found in the unique situation the Administration found itself during the ‘Autumn of Crises’, and in Kissinger’s manipulation of NSC mechanisms and procedures, respectively.

Richard G. Lipsey and Patricio Meller (eds.), Western Hemisphere Trade Integration: A Canadian-Latin American Dialogue (London: Macmillan, 1997)

Elizabeth Joyce and Carlos Malamud (eds.), Latin America and the Multinational Drug Trade (London: Macmillan, 1998)

Barry Bosworth, Susan M. Collins and Nora Claudia Lustig (eds.), Coming Together? Mexico-United States Relations (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997)

James F. Rochlin, Redefining Mexican ‘Security’: Society, State and Region under NAFTA (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1997)

Lawrence E. Harrison, The Pan-American Dream: Do Latin America's Cultural Values Discourage True Partnership with the United States and Canada? (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997)

Antonia Darder and Rodolfo D. Torres (eds.), The Latino Studies Reader: Culture, Economy, and Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998)

International studies of the Americas have been dominated for at least the last forty years by an orthodoxy which framed the field of study as constituting the relations of the United States with the governments of something called ‘Latin America and the Caribbean’ (hereafter LAC). Often, as it happens, the Caribbean part of that construction was largely excluded from vision, especially the non-Spanish-speaking parts of that region; Canada was ignored almost as often; and the United States, needless to say, was automatically viewed as central. In power politics terms, this was understandable enough. The US perceived itself as a hegemonic power and associated its credibility in the eyes of both its enemies and allies in all parts of the world with its capacity to maintain and demonstrate control of its own hemispheric community—its ‘backyard’. Yet what we can now see is that the politics of this recent past (defined essentially as the Cold War period) were distinctive, not typical, in the longer history of US interactions with the rest of the Americas.

It is only fair to readers that I declare my unusually personal interest in the book that is the principal subject of this review essay. I was a (overall favourable) reviewer of an early version of Plowshares into Swords—albeit for a university press other than the one finally chosen by Grant Hammond—as the author attests in a generous acknowledgement. In addition, and rather more to the point, Hammond suggests strongly that the conceptual provenance of his study owes some debt to a 1971 article of mine. In Hammond's words:

Robert McLaren is to be commended for his stimulating response to my article ‘Re-Reading Mitrany’ (Review of International Studies, 10, 2, 1984). He suggests that my discussion constituted the creation of ‘…an interpretive subset of Mitranian functionalism’. I would like to disclaim the attribution and attempt to demonstrate that the set of propositions derived from my discussion are: (a) genuinely attributable to the thrust of Mitrany's original formulation; and (b) sustainable as a prescription for the reduction of interstate violence in the international political system, I would not suggest that any inevitability may be attached to the possibility of a ‘working peace system’, but McLaren's commitment to the impossibility of functionalism invites a response:

In the short space allotted mes I, shall address the major issues raised by Brace Bueno de Mesquita's response to my review of The War Trap. His five most important points are as follows:

In recent years a new group of ‘virtual states’—analogous to the virtual corporation—has emerged in world politics and economics. In order to concentrate upon high level services (research, development, product design, financing, marketing and transport), these countries have transferred much of their manufacturing production elsewhere. Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Switzerland, Holland, and others have earned large returns from producing abroad as home labour costs escalate. To some degree every major industrial nation has moved in a virtual direction as manufacturing declines to 20 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and services rise to 65, 70 per cent or more. This evolution conflicts with traditional security assumptions about the necessity of a powerful and compact economic base. Now countries' economic potential is frequently divided between home and host nations, and security may depend upon reliable access to the economies of other states. Virtual states and nations moving in a ‘virtual direction’ may improve their position through economic growth in normal times, but may become vulnerable when security threats arise. In war they have to co-ordinate supply from a range of allied nations to carry on the struggle against opponents. It might be thought that their pattern of peacetime interdependence undermines their long-term security.

The idea of Gaia—of life on earth as a self-sustaining natural system—is not a gratuitous, semi-mystical fantasy. It is a really useful idea, a cure for distortions that spoil our current world-view. Its most obvious use is, of course, in suggesting practical solutions to environmental problems. But, more widely, it also attacks deeper tangles which now block our thinking. Some of these are puzzles about the reasons why the fate of our planet should concern us. We are bewildered by the thought that we might have a duty to something so clearly non-human. But more centrally, too, we are puzzled about how we should view ourselves. Current ways of thought still tend to trap us in the narrow, atomistic, seventeenth-century image of social life which grounds today's crude and arid individualism, though there are currently signs that we are beginning to move away from it. A more realistic view of the earth can give us a more realistic view of ourselves as its inhabitants.

While proponents of Chinese IR pursue a national school based on the identification of Chineseness with the Chinese national culture, its critics find a limited value in the ‘Chinese’ school as a mere temporary site for non-Western agencies. In contrast, I argue a distinctive and enduring Chinese IR is possible if it adopts a non-national and non-essentialised transcultural conception of Chineseness. This transcultural Chinese IR is based first on the contested and transcultural conception of Chineseness and second on the ontology of Chineseness as immanent humanity. Chineseness has been a fiction of a privileged descent from antiquity, which various contestants claimed by redefining the meaning of Chineseness. The shi elites, in particular, developed Chineseness as an aspirational ethos that propelled it to transcend its cultural boundary by incorporating foreign influences and thereby rendered Chineseness transcultural. Also, drawing on the ontological turn and Roy Wagner's work in anthropology, I show how Chineseness as immanent humanity transcends the category of culture, transforming the division of innate nature and constructed culture. The transcultural Chinese IR, with its own complexity and universal aspiration, uses its history and ontology to complexify both its tradition internally and other IR traditions externally, promoting the pluralisation of IR.

International Relations theory has recently turned its attention to the study of comparative regionalism in economics and security. As part of this new research agenda, this article explores what we might learn from the Southern Cone's experience with denuclearization that might be applicable to the Middle East. The two regions differ with respect to security dilemmas, military capabilities and doctrines, and the prior availability of a cooperative regional institutional infrastructure. Yet two aspects of the Southern Cone process seem potentially relevant to other regions. The first relates to improving our understanding of the appropriate domestic political conditions that underpin denuclearization. In particular, the nature of domestic coalitions and of their respective approaches to the global economy and political institutions deserve far more serious consideration than they have gained thus far. The second relates to the nature of the regional denuclearization regime initially fashioned in the Southern Cone, which set an international precedent. A regionally-based system of mutual inspections could help remove some of the most intractable barriers to a future Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction.

Andrew Williams, Failed Imagination? New World Orders of the Twentieth Century (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1998)

International relations (IR) has had an opportunistic relationship with history. IR scholars have used the past, as Conal Condren has written of political theorists, as ‘a quarry ... [as a] ... source of useable facts; of entries to, and illustrations of, theoretical issues’. The result was an IR canon, of the ‘Plato to Nato’ variety, which was substantially anachronistic. Its dismantling over the last twenty years has much to do with efforts in the area of conceptual history. Despite this, and the keenness of post-positivist IR theorists to display an historical consciousness, IR and history maintain an uneasy association. Where the past is approached in contemporary IR writings, there is a tendency to build out of historical materials, or more worryingly commentaries on them, conceptual superstructures which are then accorded a determining force. Notions like the Enlightenment Project are the result of such acts of reification and are no less anachronistic than were the pantomime Machiavellis which used to pop up in IR text books. (It is doubtful that such a Project ever existed. Robert Wokler observes that the expression is of ‘more recent pedigree than “the Manhattan Project“‘.) What is purported to be historical explanation may seem more like a ghostly ballet in which structures, processes and agencies execute precisely choreographed routines.

Over the past quarter-century, Fred Halliday has distinguished himself as a prolific and insightful scholar of international affairs. He has imbibed a generous dose of Marxist theory without being intoxicated by it, and one might say the same for his consumption of other types of theory as well. Not content to be an armchair academic, Halliday is personally acquainted with a number of revolutionary movements and his writings combine an obvious sympathy for their aspirations with a clear-eyed sense of their shortcomings. The result is a combination of intellectual range and personal experience that is nearly unique among contemporary scholars of world politics.

Disciplinary debates within IPE often leave as an open question how contemporary scholars may build on and incorporate insights from its rich intellectual history. In this article I examine the work of three scholars who are rarely grouped together, but who should be recognised today as engaged in an IPE-inflected debate: Karl Polanyi, E. H. Carr, and David Mitrany. They advanced distinct IPE-centred ways of framing the central problems of the post-1945 world, which are remarkable for how they prefigure important themes in modern IPE scholarship. By assembling and considering their work collectively, I make two arguments: (1) we should recognise their contributions as a precursor to modern IPE; and (2) their work, with certain caveats, provides valuable intellectual resources for contemporary scholars. Their combined work should be considered as part of the common heritage of IPE.

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.

THERE are several reasons why we understand so much less about social processes and conditions at the global level than we do about comparable processes and conditions at lower levels of aggregation. One is, of course, that we are dealing with a larger empirical domain and one that is apparently more heterogeneous and complex. Another might be that the behaviour of nations – the key actors at this level of aggregation – has been shrouded more in mystery and taboo than the behaviour of other classes of social entity. By keeping diplomacy and military strategy in the category of the arcane, elites have inhibited serious inquiry, even if there were those unpatriotic enough to ask. A third and related factor may be the extent to which the national state has been the major source of material and psychic sustenance for the world's people over the past century or so and thus not an agency whose external behaviour will be questioned or examined closely. Others might be added to our list, but one that surely merits closer attention may be the way in which we conceptualize world affairs.

Between 1919 and July 1921 British Crown forces and the Irish Republican Army fought a sporadic and brutal conflict, usually referred to as the ‘troubles’, or, more formally, as the ‘Anglo-Irish war’. At 2.30 a.m., on 6 December, 1921, British and Irish plenipotentiaries signed ‘Articles of Agreement for a Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland’; the document which they signed was to dominate Anglo-Irish relations for thirty years, and certain parts of it are live issues still. Aspects of the relationship between Britain and Ireland have been explored in recently published monographs, but there is no general survey of the period, and little attempt to examine the significance of the ‘Ulster question’ in this context. A general treatment of some of the main themes in the Anglo-Irish relationship between 1921 and 1950 will therefore be of interest, not only for its own sake, but also because it throws light on a small but significant aspect of international relations in the second quarter of this century.

Republicanism is getting increasing attention in International Relations. Engaging Daniel Deudney's Republican Security Theory, it is argued that republicanism should be interpreted in ideological terms, that it is a polysemous tradition of political thought, and that it matters because it is socially embodied in world political practice. Special attention is given to republicanism's relationship to the question of technology. A short case study of the Cold War illustrates the central claims of the argument.