E. H. Carr is a thinker on international affairs who defies easy classification. His best-known work on the subject, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, delivered a powerful realist critique, still resonant today, of the idealist approach to international relations and helped bring about a renewed emphasis on the role of power in international affairs. Less familiar to students of international relations are Carr's more optimistic works. In Conditions of Peace and Nationalism and After, written during World War II, he was sanguine about the prospects for a peaceful postwar order and outlined the steps required to bring about that happy state of affairs. The same hopeful themes were sounded in the years after the war in The Soviet Impact on the Western World, The New Society and other shorter essays.

During the postwar era, much scholarship was concerned with understanding the causes of the Cold War and with identifying ways in which East—West tensions might be reduced. Since the 1980s, however, an increasing number of analysts have chosen to characterize the years following World War II as a ‘Long Peace’, during which, contrary to many fears and expectations, a major war never occurred. Rather than focusing on the sources of hostility between the leading powers of the period, these scholars have sought to explain how military conflict between them was avoided for an extended length of time.

The high level of protection for the textile, clothing and footwear industries in the developed countries is well recognized in the literature. What is not so well recognized is the significant variations in the level and form of protection accorded them and the crucial role that international forces have played in shaping the variations. The studies that do focus on international factors deal with the largest state and therefore provide little insight into trade protection in smaller states. These shortcomings persist despite the fact that trade protection is perhaps the most intensively studied phenomenon in political economy. This paper attempts to plug these gaps in the literature through the study of textile, clothing and footwear industries in Canada.

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.

Historical analogies

On 2 August 1990, much to everyone's surprise, Hitler invaded Kuwait. The ensuing conflict was mired in history—as Francis Fukuyama might say—or at least in historical analogy. The ruling analogy was with the Second World War; more exactly, with the origins and nature of that war. George Bush's constant reference during the Second Gulf War was Martin Gilbert's Second World War, a monumental construction well described as ‘a bleak, desolate evocation of the horrors of war, a modern Waste Land, an unremitting catalogue of killing, atrocity and exiguous survival’. The paperback edition of this exacting volume weighs three pounds. The text runs to 747 pages. Understandably, the President stashed his copy on board Air Force One. ‘I'm reading a book’, he informed an audience in Burlington, Vermont, in October 1990, ‘and it's a book of history, a great, big, thick history of World War II, and there's a parallel between what Hitler did to Poland and what Saddam Hussein has done to Kuwait’. As Paul Fussell has reminded us, the wartime refrain was Remember Pearl Harbor. “ ‘No one ever shouted or sang Remember Poland’? Not until 1990, that is. Of course, Bush himself had served in that war, as he was not slow to remind the electorate: he flew fifty-eight missions as a pilot in the Pacific. For those who wondered what he knew of Poland, Gilbert's book—at once a chronicle of remembrance and an indictment—told him this:

Much of the work that has been done by feminist International Relations (IR) theorists thus far has been to critique the existing discipline for its obvious inattention to questions of women and gender. It is time now to turn to more substantive work and explore not only the ways in which gender is absent from the study of international relations, but to document also the ways in which gender informs the various institutions and practices of international relations. To this end, feminist analyses of political economy, militarism, state-building, diplomacy and so on have begun to emerge. The present study is part of this project and seeks to develop an account of gender and international organizations and then apply it to an illustrative study of the International Labour Organization (ILO).

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.