I Have thought it appropriate, in a lecture that bears the name of Henry Sidgwick, to choose a theme that focuses on individual rights and on questions of reform and change, with which he was, of course, so much associated.

Evaluative statements concerning the performance of the international polity diverge dramatically from one another. On the one hand, there are those whose views border on the apocalyptic. They assert that the performance of this political system is imacceptably poor and that the international polity is currently headed toward catastrophe. They are convinced that the existing international political system cannot be reformed, a conclusion that implies the necessity of repudiating the existing system. Therefore, it is not surprising that those who hold such views are prominently associated with calls for a new world order. At the same time, many students of international affairs have views concerning the performance of the international polity which border on the complacent. The adequacy of the performance of this political system is often tacitly assumed. Such views are not uncommon even among those who are active in various reformist movements at the level of domestic politics.

THE topics chosen for inaugural lectures often fall into one of three categories. First, there is what might be called the ‘state of the discipline’ lecture, in which the newly-appointed Professor takes an overall look at his subject. He may chart its recent progress, discuss its current health, consider its distinctive intellectual characteristics, explain its relevance to the world's concerns, or even justify its appearance in the academic curriculum. In any event, his intention is to present a synoptic picture. Many of those who have come to hear him may be presumed to represent other disciplines and it is, therefore, his intention to guide them along some of the wider paths which are to be found in his particular neck of the academic woods.

I Am not concerned in this paper to discover what is peculiarly western about western conceptions of a world moral order, but merely to assemble some ideas about morality that recur in western thought - which may or may not be features of other civilizations as well. It is my ignorance of other civilizations that prevents me from undertaking the seductively neat task of deciding what is unique about western values, but it is the same ignorance that saves me from making the mistake of arriving at what is essentially western by subtracting from its history that which it shares with other cultures. “Western Values in International Relations” is a field that has been pioneered by Martin Wight in such a way as to stay the hand of a glossator, but it is the word “universal” in my title that distinguishes the present undertaking from Wight's work. His aim was to follow some lines of thought derived from domestic politics in the West into the field of diplomacy and international relations. My aim is to pursue them further, beyond international society to world society, and to take into moral account not merely the state and the order of states, but also the individual and certain actors and institutions in world politics whose concerns have been regarded conventionally as falling outside the domain of ‘diplomacy and international relations’.

Introduction

Two distinctive views of the modern state can be found in recent political science literature. One group of writers, drawing attention to the expansion of international agencies and transnational processes and organizations, have argued that these developments have precipitated an increase in the level of interdependence between states, eliminating the distinction between domestic and foreign policy and constraining the activities of governments within their own states. At the same time, another group of writers, focusing on the domestic system, have pointed to the expanding power of governments, expressed in terms of the growing range of their activities and the increasing number of policy instruments employed to monitor and control behaviour within the state. These two approaches present something of a paradox—the power of governments is depicted as expanding on the one hand, while being constrained on the other.

RECENTLY the problem of public disaffection from the Community has given rise to concern in EEC circles. The problem became increasingly acute with rising unemployment throughout the Community, but what in addition to this focused EEC decision-makers' attention on the needs of EEC citizens was the public debate over EEC membership in Britain and subsequent referendum campaign during which anti-marketeers emphazised the lack of benefits that ordinary citizens could expect from the EEC. Independent surveys of citizen attitudes towards the Community moreover revealed disaffection to be greatest in the EEC's periphery regions and among those with least knowledge of the Community, its goals and activities. Therefore, partly in response to a perceived need to alter the public's image of the EEC Community decision-makers began to accord greater attention to socio-economic matters believed to be of interest to the Community's urban masses and to revitalize the EEC's social policy.

THE United Nations Conference on Trade and Development came nto existence in 1964. Its creation was viewed with a degree of cautious enthusiasm by the Third World and with a certain amount of apprehension by the rich countries. Its performance has dampened the enthusiasm and heightened the apprehension. Its contribution to substantive changes in trade policies has not been spectacular. Whatever improvement in commodity prices and hence in the terms of trade of the poor countries that occurred in the early 1970s was attributable to fortuitous circumstances – not to a negotiated settlement between the rich and poor countries, enabling the latter to retain a larger portion of the gains from trade. Can we3 therefore3 say that UNGTAD has been ineffective? That it has failed to perform its global task? And if so, what is the cause of this failure? Is the organizational ideology unsuitable in the sense that it is not representative of the national objectives of viable coalitions among UNGTAD constituents? Or has the leadership failed to evolve a strategy which links the pursuit of specific sub-goals to the transformation of the system in accordance with the organizational ideology? This present paper attempts to look at the first question and to venture an opinion on the effectiveness of UNGTAD in the light of these findings.

In his Lees-Knowles lectures on the Mediterranean strategy in 1966, Professor Michael Howard largely disposed of the concept of a British politically motivated “Balkan Strategy” and went some way towards disposing of the larger and more general concept of a “Mediterranean Strategy” itself. In so doing he may be thought to have presented Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. However, those four lectures on the subject indicate that even after this rigorous scrutiny something is still left of the concept - the smile on the face of the Cheshire cat perhaps.

According to Professor Northedge,

It is well known that the expression ‘international’ came into use through the famous mistake made by Jeremy Bentham when he coined it to describe the system of law between sovereign states as a translation of the term ius gentium, which the Romans used to refer to the corpus of rules, controlled, of course, by Rome itself, between themselves and the tribes of Italy and later the various parts of the Roman Empire.

During the last ten years the Department of International Politics at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, has been using the technique of crisis gaming as a supplementary part of its undergraduate programme. After being the first university in Britain to introduce crisis gaming as a teaching technique in 1966, the Department's initiative has been fairly widely followed at other British universities and polytechnics, most notably by Edinburgh with the GONEX series of games in 1967, Dr. Michael Nicholson's games at Lancaster1 and more recently by the University of London.

THE British Empire after 1919, Liddell Hart once observed, was the greatest example of strategical over-extension known to history. Like the Roman or Spanish empires in earlier centuries, the gap between the country's obligations and its capacity to carry them out had become alarmingly wide – too wide, in fact, to be ever closed. The blunt fact was that, by the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century, Britain was well into a process of decline, militarily, economically and geopolitically, vis-à-vis certain of the other Great Powers, who were soon o t usurp her predominance in various parts of the globe.1 To a large extent, the First World War and its consequences – the defeat of Germany and the seizure of its colonies, the Soviet revolution in Russia, the American retreat into isolationism – had suggested to the public mind that the British Empire was still as formidable as ever and thus was masked this process of decline until, by 1945, it had become clear to almost everyone. In the secret discussions and analyses of British statesmen and their advisers, however, the weaknesses within the system of home and imperial defence were all too apparent long before that date. To the ‘official mind’, the 1930s in particular was a decade of almost continuous anxiety as the ever more frequent international crises exposed the inadequacies of the armed services and affected the country's diplomacy. Because this topic relates directly to the discussion upon ‘appeasement’ and, indirectly, to the origin and course of the Second World War, it has always been one ofgreat interest to historians; but the restrictions upon the use of government records of the inter-war years made it impossible until a few years ago to know more than that which was related in the memoir literature and in the official war histories written in the post-1945 period. Now that the archives are open and new studies based upon their holdings are appearing in large numbers, it is possible to obtain a much more detailed picture of the workings of British defence policy during the “Twenty Years Crisis”. What follows, then, is an attempt to summarize the findings of a variety of such publications which have appeared over the course of the past two years.

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.

In November, 1934, the British Council for Relations with Other Countries was founded on the initiative of the Foreign Office. The decision to establish a body specifically designed to conduct cultural propaganda overseas on behalf of the British Government was, perhaps, the most constructive peacetime response to the growing realization that more positive measures were required to counter the detrimental effects of aggressive foreign propaganda upon British interests and prestige. The British Council, which continued to operate under the auspices of the Foreign Office, offered a new and alternative approach to the traditional conduct of foreign affairs: the practice of cultural diplomacy. It was believed that cultural propaganda — broadly interpreted as the dissemination of British ideals and beliefs in a general rather than specifically political form – would not only serve to enhance British influence and prestige abroad, but would also effectively further the wider ideals of international peace and understanding.

1976 was a vintage year for Clausewitzian studies. No less than three major works were published; Raymond Aron's two volume study Penser la Guerre, Peter Paret's Clausewitz and the State and a new English translation of Vom Kriege by Michael Howard and Peter Paret. In curious way all three works are complementary; we have a modernized text complete with introductory essays by Michael Howard, Peter Paret and Bernard Brodie, together with a reader's guide; a full biographical study placing Glausewitz in his intellectual and political milieux; and an extensive critical analysis of his thought with an attempt at relating it to the modern world. There is no longer any excuse for Glausewitz to be “well-known, but little read”. Taken together they make an impressive oeuvre, of interest to the historian, whether of ideas or of war and to the strategic theorist. One thing all these writers have in common is their conviction that Vom Kriege has a continuing relevance to the study of war. It is with this, in particular the relation between theory and practice, that this article is primarily concerned. Consequently, it is first to Aron, who devotes most of his study to this question, that I turn.

Any review article has an element of pot luck. An editor receives volumes for review, sorts them into piles according to subject and then thinks of a possible reviewer. The reviewer suggests a few additions and the parameters of the article are set. They are set by what publishers think will sell at a particular time and, more rarely, by what publishers and their academic advisers think ought to be published. A review article is thus frequently about a fashionable topic with a strong emphasis on the current state of conventional wisdom as reflected in the contemporary literature. Terrorism is a topic which fits this bill. It is constantly in the headlines and not surprisingly it has generated some scholarly interest.

Discussions concerning development aid and its planning have fallen into a rut. Those interested in this area have focused on certain problems, namely, the concentration of resources for purposes of productive investment and the direction of investment into the correct channels. The first problem has elicited methods of resource raising via nationalization of foreign investment, land-reform and the growth of primitive capital accumulation or an agricultural surplus, private investment (industrial or otherwise) and the prevalent importation of foreign aid.

Brian White has taken me to task for my review article on British Foreign policy “claiming that an important opportunity in this journal was lost” and that the tone of the review was “complacent”. My two broad responses to these comments may sound contradictory. The first is that he was less than fair on the review article and the books which formed its basis, but second I applaud his initiative in raising a debate about the study of British foreign policy.

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.