These three books cover the gamut of argument about deterrence, ranging from its politics to its theoretical status and its morality. The authors, while diverse in their professional status, being government 'experts', lawyers, theologians, political scientists and philosophers, all have this in common: they seek to tell us what to do. They attempt to relate theory to practice either to justify instrumental means or goals or to prescribe them. In this sense they are all contributors to the field of strategic reasoning.

For a discipline aspiring to the understanding of international relations in their totality, the accusation of omitting the insights of a theory purporting to structure the foreign policies of some one-third of the states and also the ideas of many western thinkers is rather serious. I take, therefore, the liberty of examining the validity of the accusation at some length and to state another, to my mind, much more serious omission on the part of the two authors.

National integration and the legitimation of authority

The study of foreign policy leadership is characterized by a number of conceptual and methodological problems for the researcher. It is located on the divide between the study of the individual and the idiosyncratic, on the one hand, and the structural and patterned on the other; it stands at the crossroads of the internal political system and the international arena; and it lends an aura of personalized comprehensibility to complex processes of change and development, integration and disintegration, in the multidimensional political, social and economic environment in which it is set. Its very choice of subject matter seems to assume that political actors, although working within specific systemic constraints, also possess opportunities to make and/or enforce choices under permissive conditions which allow a significant amount of conscious manipulation. Furthermore, such studies often take for granted that the nation-state is the most significant unit of analysis – in the sense that it is treated as given rather than as problematic. This essay attempts to chart a course through these complex waters by developing a set of interrelated hypotheses about a particular type of foreign policy leadership and the uses to which it is put – namely the legitimation of the authority of the state itself within what have been called “modern national culture societies”.

The League of Nations was a new factor to be considered during the formulation of any country's foreign policy after 1919, even if it was an experiment which has often been dismissed as doomed to failure on account of the desire of the great powers to limit its evolution.1 The refusal to allow the ex-enemy states to join the League immediately, as well as the non-membership of the United States and of Russia, meant that initially Britain and France emerged as the dominant members of the League and as the leading ‘producers’ of security, and thus they have received a large part of the blame for thwarting the League's development. In particular, in the case of Britain, the Conservative Party was regarded as less sympathetic to the League than the Labour Party, and consequently a Conservative government, such as that of Stanley Baldwin from 1924–1929, which rejected the Geneva Protocol, has been interpreted as a restrictive, even harmful, influence upon the League.

The development of new kinds of weapons in the immediate post-war period led to a great increase in academic interest in strategic problems. After occasional forays into the field by thinkers such as Bernard Brodie, the output of literature on strategic matters by academics has grown enormously. Most of the work has been done by Americans and reflects an American perspective of the world. It deals with problems that the United States has faced, and is facing, in strategic policy matters.

These last ten years have witnessed a remarkable development of Chinese academic writing on International Relations. The late Premier Zhou Enlai had recommended the expansion of such studies in 1964 on his return from a tour of Africa after having found the relevant Chinese expertise weak and ill-informed. But the Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976 not only prevented that development, but along with most other intellectuals those few scholars engaged in the subject were humiliated and persecuted. Since 1977, in common with the other social sciences, International Relations has begun to flourish. Although it is a fairly new independent subject of study more than five hundred scholars are engaged in a variety of research institutes and several universities offer courses in it. As in the other social sciences, research in International Relations is carried out under the general guidelines of serving China's long term policies of modernization and the open door.

The last 11 years have witnessed a revolution in the political organization of the oceans, a revolution that has found expression, at the global level, in the third United Nations Law of the Sea Conference, which held its first, procedural, session in New York in 1973 and began its seventh at Geneva this spring, having already consumed 41 weeks of diplomatic time in pursuit of its breath takingly ambitious target of a single comprehensive convention to govern the oceans. Today it, and the issues with which it is concerned, attract little public attention; but they have provoked a wealth of serious studies, conferences, and papers. Those examined here are among the more important of them, but they are far from exhausting the field.

By now there is a very considerable volume of work on the general subject of women, women's rights, feminism and gender in international relations. This has both engendered and been engendered by the development of undergraduate and graduate courses and seminars on these themes. By contrast the allied discipline of international history has been slow to develop a parallel literature or courses. Courses in women's history per se have multiplied; there is a respectable literature and a number of equally respectable learned journals, not only in the Englishspeaking countries, but also in Western Europe. But their concern has been very much focused on the issues of women in each particular society; they have tended, that is, to develop the study of women within the study of the history of a particular country, political culture or linguistic region. Confronted with questions about the lack of similar courses in the history of international relations, historians drawn from both sexes have tended either to take them as a comic act or to indicate that in their view there is a lack of relevant material or issues adequate to justify any isolation of the topic from the more general themes of inter-state relations, with the great issues of peace and war with which as members of the discipline they are chiefly concerned.

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.

The theologian Reinhold Neibuhr oftentimes warned that moralists who entered the foreign policy sphere were likely to be more destructive of a nation's ideals than were cynical realists. Evidently he feared that those who lacked a sense of the limits of foreign policy would proceed as if the values and goods which were attainable in the more intimate communities of the family, the locality and the nation were attainable in the international community as well. Whatever Neibuhr's quarrels and debates with classical Greek thought, he was at one with Plato and Aristotle and their present day followers in believing that justice could be more effectively pursued by the smaller communities, such as the city states. He insisted on a recognition of the differences between such communities and the major present day world powers. From World War II until his death, he wrote more about foreign policy than any other aspect of public policy. He wrote scores of articles, some published in less prominent journals, about American foreign policy and its moral basis.

Many readers will have long known Professor Michael Walzer's remarkable book Just and Unjust Wars. The most interesting thing I can do is to discuss the way it has been received in some centres of the study of international relations in Britain. Professor Hedley Bull, Professor W. B. Gallic and Mr David Watt have reviewed it with Important differences but all to the same ultimate effect. Oxford, Cambridge and the Metropolis conclude that It Is a shallow book, lacking In philosophical depth.

Suddenly, in the summer of 1988, the United Nations was in the news. Positively. The process had got under way earlier in the year with the little-noticed (at the time) provision of UN military observers to watch over the Afghan-Pakistani agreements and the associated withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. Then it was discovered that, after a ten-year hiatus, the UN might soon be called upon to implement the plan for its involvement in the accession to independence of Namibia, as South Africa seemed to be preparing to leave. There had been too many false all-clears on this particular front for it to be confidently assumed that the South Africans would in fact go.

Like nuclear weapons, the literature on the end of the Cold War continues to proliferate. Much of this work it has to be said has been limited in its depth (if not range) by the simple fact that the structure of the new international order has yet to assume a finished form. Writing meaningfully about a constantly evolving subject is no easy undertaking. There is also the added problem of perspective. In many ways we are still living too close to recent events to say much that is particularly profound about them. Finally, understanding the new world has been made all the more difficult by the sheer scale of the changes that have occurred since 1989. Because of the triple collapse of communism as an ideology, the Soviet Union as a European power, and the USSR as a united country our known political universe has fallen apart. Making sense of the global results is no easy job; indeed it is turning out to be an extraordinarily difficult task—one for which we may not yet have the proper conceptual tools.

If there is a single event since the end of the Second World War that has seriously punctured America's sense of confident invulnerability it is, surely, not the withdrawal from Vietnam—that could always be explained away as a masterful reassessment of the nature of the communist threat—but the taking of American hostages by Islamic fundamentalists in Teheran in 1979. That event, more than any other, showed that America's faith in modernization, foreign aid, and a gradual injection of political liberalism as a means of drawing nations into the western orbit rested on brittle foundations. Until the Shah's overthrow Iran had seemed the perfect ally; despite the anti-libertarian blemishes of the Shah's regime, Iran had a prosperous middle class, a formidable standing in the region, a sound economy based on expensive oil, and was emerging from what was thought to be the constricting effect of Islam.

Member governments of the European Community have frequently urged the necessity of closer cooperation and collaboration in meeting the challenge posed by new technologies and in countering the lead achieved by the United States and Japan. After delays which seemed almost to contradict any sense of urgency, the Council of Ministers of the Community agreed to a multi-annual Framework Programme of Scientific Research in 1983. A critically important element of that Programme, the European Strategic Programme of Research and Development in Information Technology (ESPRIT), was agreed only after further extensive delays in February 1984. The renewal and extension of the Framework Programme was proposed by the European Commission in early 1986 but was finally agreed only in September 1987, the delay having been caused by the opposition of Britain, France and West Germany, the three member states largely responsible for the protracted negotiations on ESPRIT in 1984. Much attention has been paid to the history of the Framework Programme and ESPRIT, but the budgetary aspects of the decisions, aspects that were highly significant in delaying agreement, especially on the part of Britain and West Germany, have tended to be ignored.

In the initial section of his article, Ersun Kurtulus criticises the approach to sovereignty which I advanced in my Sovereign Statehood (1986). There I argued that the characteristic which distinguishes a sovereign from a non-sovereign state is constitutional independence—that is to say, a territorial entity's possession of a constitution which is not subordinate to that of another territorial entity. The most obvious and graphic way of identifying this distinction is to compare the position of a sovereign state with that of a territory which is part of a federal state. Thus Iceland is a sovereign state; Texas is not. It is her constitutional independence which, in international practice, is deemed to confer sovereignty on Iceland, and so make her eligible for full international actorhood. By contrast, non-sovereign territorial entities do not enjoy such actorhood, and most have none whatsoever.

Andrew Linklater’s projected trilogy of books for Cambridge University Press rests distinctively on the work of the sociologist Norbert Elias (1897–1990). Linklater is creating a powerful theoretical orientation for the field of International Relations by synthesising the ideas of Martin Wight and the ‘English School’ of IR with those of Elias. Though Elias is best known for his theory of civilising processes – on which Linklater draws most prominently – his writings are far more extensive. In particular, his sociological theory of knowledge and the sciences underlies Linklater’s recent writings, even if that is not immediately apparent on a cursory reading. This article spells out some of the ‘Eliasian infrastructure’ that may not be familiar to many of Linklater’s readers. It also discusses ways in which common misunderstandings of Elias’s ideas may lead to parallel misunderstandings of Linklater’s. The article concludes by asking whether, even if Linklater’s vision of the growth of ‘cosmopolitan responsibility’ may prove correct in the long term, we may nevertheless be experiencing something of a (possibly short-term) reversal towards ‘cosmopolitan irresponsibility’.

Some years ago, in a joint affirmation of faith, Professor Walker identified himself as a ‘dissident’ producer of ‘works of thought’ at ‘margins’ distant from ‘all presumptive sovereign centres of interpretation and judgement’. From these remote sites, or heights, he and his critical colleagues aim to exacerbate ‘the crisis of the discipline of international studies’ by upsetting its ‘notions of space, time, and progress’ and thus questioning its status as a ‘discipline’ (pp. 375–6). This particular academic crisis must be understood as one among many others. It is made to connect with ‘a crisis of the human sciences, a crisis of patriarchy, a crisis of governability, a crisis of late industrial society, a generalized crisis of modernity’ (p. 377) to mention but a few. So enormous is this congeries of crises that the ‘possibility of truth is put in doubt’ (p. 378) and ‘words manifestly fail’ (p. 376). An academic without words is without a job. Critical dissidents are not at a loss.