Renewed interest in international institutions makes clear the need for a better theory of institutional possibilities. Friedrich Hayek held that institutions are either designed, though badly, or emerge spontaneously, and providently, as an unintended consequence of agents' self-interested choices. Hayek's historical sketch misses a third set of possibilities reflecting the claim that agents make institutions in keeping with nature's design or, as we say today, make them on some occasions to suit large social purposes. The English School treats institutions as spontaneous developments. Liberal scholars in the US start with the rationalist position that agents design institutions as they see fit, but end up closer to the view that institutions constitute a purposive whole.

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.

International peacebuilding operations seek to stabilise countries that have recently experienced civil wars. In pursuing this goal, however, international peacebuilders have promulgated a particular vision of how states should organise themselves internally, based on the principles of liberal democracy and market-oriented economics. By reconstructing war-shattered states in accordance with this vision, peacebuilders have effectively ‘transmitted’ standards of appropriate behaviour from the Western-liberal core of the international system to the failed states of the periphery. From this perspective, peacebuilding resembles an updated (and more benign) version of the mission civilisatrice, or the colonial-era belief that the European imperial powers had a duty to ‘civilise’ dependent populations and territories.

‘The limits of the possible in moral matters are less narrow than we think. It is our weaknesses, our vices, our prejudices that shrink them.’

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract Book II, Chapter 12.2

[cited from John Rawls The Law of Peoples, p. 7]

After presenting a brief sketch of John Rawls's theory of justice, his international political theory is outlined and evaluated. Rawls develops a classification of ‘peoples’ based on whether or not they are ‘well-ordered’. The Law of Peoples covers ‘liberal’ and ‘decent’ peoples who adhere to minimum standards of human rights and are not aggressive in their international relations. This is in the realm of ‘ideal’ theory; ‘non-ideal’ theory must cope also with societies that are not well-ordered, such as outlaw states and burdened societies. The long-term aim is that all should be part of a confederation of decent peoples. Rawls's theory has been criticized by cosmopolitan liberals for its communitarian tendencies, but has much to offer scholars of international relations, including a systematic basis for classifying states, a helpful discussion of the distinction between reasonableness and rationality, and a powerful restatement of the importance of utopian thinking in international relations.

It is often said that reciprocityÑreturning good behaviour for good behaviour and bad for badÑstabilizes co-operation by making nonco-operative behaviour unprofitable. Nevertheless, our understanding of how reciprocity works in international politics is unnecessarily limited. Only two patterns are now well recognized. In one of these, both actors in a relationship insist that the value of their concessions must be equivalent and that each must be made highly conditional on the other. The polar opposite pattern is one in which the actors consider both the value and timing of individual concessions to be irrelevant. What is not well understood is that there are two other exchange patterns that actors may also see as mutually satisfactory. In these situations, even though the value and timing of individual concessions both clearly matter to the actors, the pattern of exchange on oneÑthough not bothÑof them is clearly ‘unbalanced’. We lack a way to make sense of such partially unbalanced relationships. This article develops a typology that specifies four types of reciprocity, analyses the conditions under which they are likely to evolve, and draws out the implications of each pattern for actors' strategic choices and bargaining behaviour. The utility of this typology is demonstrated through an analysis of the shifting patterns of reciprocity in Russian-American relations from 1947 through to 1997.

To be explained are the Great Power versus Great Power wars, 1816–1989. Familiar strands of ‘realist’ thinking are twisted into a good simple balances of power theory to explain peace, war and the extent of war. The evidence, quantitative and qualitative, is that non-separated approximate equals in power capabilities formed dangerous balances. Generally, would-be-combatant great powers used alliances to restrain stronger third parties and to add the capabilities of weaker states to their own. The critical importance of political geography, a state's political capacity, and alliance commitments to the balance of power are made plain.

This article subjects to a close philosophical scrutiny the internal logic of Wendt's extensive argument regarding his work's location in the field—in particular, how it relates to, and differs from, the American ‘rationalist’ orthodoxy in IR, comprising neorealism and neoliberalism. I argue that his empirical hypotheses regarding collective identity formation are plausible in their own right, but that his complex philosophical argumentation, by means of which he tries to locate his work within the American scientific orthodoxy, but away from its individualist core, is unconvincing.

Ethical cosmopolitanism is conventionally taken to be a stance that requires an ‘impartialist’ point of view—a perspective above and beyond all particular ties and loyalties. Taking seriously the claims of those critics who counter that morality must have a ‘particularist’ starting-point, this article examines the viability of an alternative understanding of cosmopolitanism: ‘embedded cosmopolitanism’. Using moral justifications for patriotism as points of contrast, it presents embedded cosmopolitanism as a position that recognises community membership as being morally constitutive, but challenges the common assumption that communities are necessarily bounded and territorially determinate.

In this article I outline the case made by the British government for UN economic sanctions on Iraq, and indicate many of the silences in, and counters to, it. When these silences and counters are taken into consideration, the British government's denial of any share of the responsibility for the devastation of Iraqi society becomes unsustainable. Iraqis have had their human rights violated on a vast scale not only by the regime but also by UN economic sanctions which have exacerbated the effects of the UN coalition's bombing of Iraq in 1991.

Recent literature on the disciplinary history of IR has furthered our understanding of aspects of the discipline without specifying its own methods clearly enough. ‘Critical’ or ‘internal discursive’ disciplinary historians have rejected Quentin Skinner's contextual approach to the history of ideas in ways that suggest they have misunderstood it, and have failed to appreciate its potential. Furthermore, ‘critical IR’ itself can and should be subjected to intellectual-historical examination. The article suggests that ‘critical IR’ has been a form of anglophone academic radicalism specific to the late Cold War and early post-Cold War periods, and advocates further comparative work on the history of non-anglophone IR communities.

For realists regionalism remains a difficult phenomenon to explicate. A particular puzzle for realists is why major states should want to pursue regional institutionalisation. Nor are pluralist accounts satisfactory given the empirical evidence of state actor prominence in processes of regional institutionalisation. This article sets out to account for the formative phase of regionalist endeavours, proposing an ideational–institutional realism as the basis for understanding regionalism. On this basis a specific theory of co-operative hegemony is developed. Stressing the importance of the grand strategies of major regional powers and their responses to the balance-of-threat in a region, the author argues that major states may advance their interests through non-coercive means by applying a strategy of co-operative hegemony which implies an active role in regional institutionalisation and the use of, for instance, side payments, power-sharing and differentiation. The article outlines a number of preconditions for regional institutionalisation, stressing what is called the capacity for power-sharing; the power aggregation capacity and the commitment capacity of the biggest power in a region. While regionalising state elites are constrained, they possess a much greater freedom of choice than neo-realism claims.

The language of human rights, along with much else in international relations, presently exhibits the features of globalisation and fragmentation. Globalisation in that human rights is used throughout the world at many levels to discuss moral approval and condemnation. Fragmentation in that human rights means different things to different people, and may well be used in contradictory ways by agents of social change. Yet most advocates of human rights wish to retain the adjective ‘universal’ along with a sense of the moral objectivity of human rights. This article suggests that a better way to ensure human rights universalism is to think of the concept as a tool, not an objectively existing moral standard or entity.

Realist international relations scholars have approached the connection between economics and security in two ways. Cold War-era realists derived the national interest from the international balance of power, and assessed the utility of both military and economic instruments of statecraft. A second realist approach, advanced by E. H. Carr in his 1939 The Twenty Years' Crisis, places interstate competition in the context of another struggle over wealth and power in which no-one's primary concern is the national interest. That is the realm of capitalism (and resistance to capitalism). That deeper set of connections between economics and security was overlooked in Cold War IR literature, at considerable cost to our understanding of world politics. Understanding why Carr's ‘historical realism’ was bypassed can help pave the way for a more fruitful realist approach to comprehending a new era in world politics.

This article addresses the inadequate analysis of modern social revolutions within orthodox International Relations due both to the historical context and the trajectory of the discipline. A critical review of the literature that has more recently come to acknowledge the relevance of revolutions and revolutionary states to IR reveals a number of enduring shortcomings. The present article suggests an alternative framework for the study of revolutions by conceiving them as rooted in the dynamics of the globally dominant socio-economic system, capitalism. It is argued that the uneven global expansion of this system and its peculiarity contribute to the explanation of revolutionary upheavals in the modern world. This is illustrated in the final section of the article by a case study of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which also challenges recent explanations of the revolution in terms of ‘Islam’ or ‘Islamic culture’.

This article proposes that instances of ethnic violence can profitably be viewed through the concept of a societal security dilemma. It begins by arguing that the explanatory value of the security dilemma might be enhanced by shifting the focus of the concept away from its traditional concern with state sovereignty to an emphasis on ethnic identity instead. This is proposed through combining the security dilemma with the Copenhagen School's notion of societal security. In this way, the article claims that the resultant societal security dilemma is able to capture certain dynamics between ethnic groups that its traditional variant necessarily misses. The article then goes on to show how ethnic violence between Hungarians and Romanians in the Transylvanian city of Tirgu Mures can be partly explained by the societal security dilemma concept. It argues that many Romanians were mobilized on the basis of the misperception that Hungarian societal security requirements necessarily threatened their own identity. The article concludes that misperceptions on both sides were enabled by the weakness of the Romanian State; that insufficient mechanisms existed for the clear, unambiguous signalling of intentions.

Qualifying a realist interpretation, this essay argues that the dialectical involvement of the state as an individual with its external relations exposes international politics as a matter of both anarchy and war, and mutual recognition and practical morality among states in Hegel's theory of international relations. With the absolute distinction between internal community and external anarchy removed, Hegel's account of civil society becomes relevant to his theory of international relations. Both as an analogy and concretely, it provides indications for a partial transcendence of sovereign statehood and international anarchy by institutionalised co-operation and political (self-)regulation in a transnationalising civil society.

The structure of international trade is determined not only by market forces, but also by the political objectives of states. Weak states participate least in the open international trading system. The strong states that do participate channel trade largely within regional trading blocks. The major states in Europe and East Asia have an incentive to diminish their dependence on the hegemonic power, that is, the United States, which has reacted with its own regionalism (NAFTA). Moreover, regionalism is interpreted as a strategy that reduces states' exposure to major shocks in the global economy. Additionally, it permits them to support weak sectors of their economies at a regional level without entirely undermining the long-term growth benefits of international trade, since a substantial degree of autarky is more feasible and efficient at a regional rather than at the national level.

Sir Herbert Butterfield, Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge (1955–68), Regius Professor of History (1963–68), and author of The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), was one of the leading historians of the twentieth century. A diplomatic historian and student of modern historiography, Butterfield was deeply concerned too with contemporary international relations, wrote much on the subject and, in 1958, created the ‘British Committee on the Theory of International Politics’. Drawing upon published and unpublished material, this article seeks to sketch an outline of Butterfield's career and thought, to examine his approach to international relations, and to reconsider his reputation in the field.

How do the terms ‘community’ and ‘communitarianism’ apply in non-Western contexts? How useful are they as social science terms in understanding Iranian and, generally, Middle Eastern politics? What is the impact of communitarianism as a political project in one of the few countries where it has been tried, namely Iran after the Revolution of 1979? This article seeks answers to these questions as a way of modestly advancing the liberal-communitarian debate in international relations theory. Its argument, built on limited but precise evidence, is that the concept of ‘community’ suffers from irremediable conceptual problems and ambiguities and that the project of communitarianism has pernicious political implications. The critique is in three parts. The first points to the inapplicability of the term ‘community’ to national society and its superfluousness as a social science term, using Iran and the Middle East as testing grounds. The second part develops the anti-essentialist argument on Islam and culture as a way of refuting the essence of ‘community’. The third part is an exposition of the links between ‘community’ as a political project in Iran with ideology, hierarchy and corruption.

The article proposes to conjoin the analysis of European integration and a modern systems theory of society. At first identifying some deficiencies in current debates on governance and democracy in Europe, it then introduces some tenets of modern systems theory relevant for the argument, focusing on the notions of ‘world society’;, ‘structural coupling’, and ‘social evolution’;. Using the debate on an emerging European constitution as an example, it then demonstrates how a systems-theoretical perspective can help to resituate the account of a European constitutionalism in the overall evolution of world society's legal and political systems. In an equal fashion, it proposes to sharpen the theoretical discussion on democracy in Europe by first outlining the function of legitimacy in a functionally differentiated political system. A concluding section comments on the ‘value added’ of a modern systems-theoretical perspective which is still uncommon in European Studies and IR.