THERE is no lecture which I could feel more honoured to have been asked to give than one which commemorates the name of Martin Wight. Just twenty years ago I made the same journey I have just made – from Oxford to the London School of Economics – to take up a position as assistant lecturer in the Department of International Relations. I had not done a course of any kind in International Relations, nor made any serious study of it, and as I arrived in Houghton Street I wondered how I was to go about teaching the subject and even whether it existed at all.

IF the policy of “Appeasement” is inextricably associated in the historical consciousness with the efforts of Neville Chamberlain's government to preserve peace with the dictators in the 1930s, its origins have been recognized by numerous writers as going back many years before the immediate crises concerning the Sudetenland, Prague and the Polish Corridor. Some have traced its roots to the failure to prevent Japanese aggression in 1931 or Italy's attack upon Abyssinia in 1935; others, with more sense of the positive side of “Appeasement", have focused upon the attitude of the British government and public towards Germany during and after the Versailles settlement; while Mr Gilbert, going a little further back in time, has argued that “appeasement was born” at the moment of the British declaration of war in 1914. Few, if any, commentators have suggested that one should seek the beginnings of “Appeasement” before that event, however.

The United Kingdom's defence effort has undergone profound transformation in the thirty years since the end of the Second World War. Further change is foreshadowed in the programme for the forthcoming decade which emerged from the Labour Government's 1974 Defence Review. Indeed, as Britain's economic distress persisted through 1975 it became apparent that the budgetary projections yielded by this “most extensive and thorough review of our system of defence ever undertaken by a British Government in peacetime” would themselves come in for further scrutiny and revision. Even the future is not what it used to be.

International politics in the 1970s are multi-layered and characterized by fluidity and multipolarity. The decline of security issues as the primary focus in many regions is paralleled by the ascent of welfare issues and the blurring of the line between internal and external policy. These are reflected in the heightened specificity of power, between military capability and the ability to influence, in the prevalence of many simultaneous games in the international system (subsystems of activity) and the relative autonomy of the politics of the region.

Thirteen years – almost to the day – after formulating its Basic Principles of the International Socialist Division of Labour, at a ‘Summit’ of Communist Party First Secretaries (in Moscow in June 1962), Comecon established its Agreed Plan for Multilateral Integration Measures, at a meeting of Heads of Government in Budapest in June 1975. The causes of delay to economic integration within Eastern Europe's trading bloc have been political, but the foundation of the body in 1949 was as political in origin as was the renewed impetus given to economic collaboration by the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Indeed, as a brief retrospective readily shows, international politics have been instrumental in every turning-point in Comecon's life of 27 years (one fewer than its nearest Western counterpart the O.E.E.C, since 1961 the O.E.C.D.).

The implied assumption about Ancient History, which in the present discussion will comprise mainly Graeco–Roman history, is that ‘relevance’ obtains. What this will chiefly mean is that in some sense history does teach lessons, and that specifically Ancient History has lessons to teach students of international affairs at the present day. A massive assumption, it may be thought. Some suggestions towards a defence of the proposition appear later. What might seem more readily defensible is the view that it is the present which may illuminate the past. Here the lessons of history, if we admit them, become retrospective. If Winston Churchill in certain aspects of his career in the 1930s resembled the orator Demosthenes in the fourth century B.C. pronouncing his Anti-Philippics, even more revealingly, perhaps, in enhancing contemporary understanding of the latter period, did Demosthenes fulfil the role of Winston Churchill in his “wilderness years”.

Oil is a highly political commodity and has more than once taken the centre of the stage in international affairs. This is not surprising in view of its importance in industry and transportation as well as for military activities. Mesopotamian oil was a crucial consideration in a number of the political settlements in the Middle East after the First World War, with the French, British and Americans playing the leading roles, just before that war the British navy had converted to oil, and Britain considered the security of her oil supplies to be an important objective of foreign policy. She had no domestic production. In the 1920s the United States began to fear that her oil reserves were becoming dangerously depleted and she also felt that her security as well as her prosperity depended on obtaining control of oil abroad. The United States sought access to oil concessions in the Middle East, and the diplomatic skirmishes were sharp as the British and Dutch tried to keep her out, not merely from the Middle East, but from south-eastern Asia as well, where production was dominated by the Dutch. Thus oil was an important source of controversy in the foreign policy of a number of countries in the inter-war period.

THE study of foreign policy has, until recently, lacked conceptual clarity. This has been primarily the result of the failure to delineate the boundaries of Foreign Policy as a concept. Consequently, many professed studies of foreign policy have, in fact, been concerned with surveying the bilateral or multilateral relations of one state with other states in the international system. However, in the last two decades there has been an increasing tendency towards more precise and orderly methods for analysing foreign policy in its theoretical and operational dimensions. This has led to a proliferation of theory-oriented studies concerned mainly with explaining foreign policy behaviour.

“There's Dilke that has done it all”, remarked Wilfrid Scawen Blunt to Lord Blandford as they watched Dilke walk down Piccadilly one day in July 1882.1 The “it” was the British intervention in Egypt which entangled Britain in Egyptian affairs for two generations. More soberly, Louis Mallet, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the India Office, wrote to Evelyn Baring a year later that the Liberal government of William Gladstone had made themselves “the unconscious, and some of them (not all) the unwilling instruments of a policy from which Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury would have shrunk, and which is big with future disaster”. “Dilke and Chamberlain” he wrote, “I consider mainly responsible for the Egyptian war.” In The Trouble Makers, A. J. P. Taylor came to the conclusion, “The occupation of Egypt in 1882 marked Gladstone's decisive breach with Radicalism. Indeed it ruined Radicalism for more than a generation. It began modern British Imperialism…”. How ironic if the ruin of British radicalism was brought about by the two leading radicals of Gladstone's predominantly Whig administration. What do the Dilke and Chamberlain papers among others reveal about the exact role of the two men in the crisis ?

The term “national interest” has been used by statesmen and scholars since the founding of nation-states to describe the aspirations and goals of sovereign entities in the international arena. Today foreign ministers, military strategists and academicians discuss the vital interests of their countries in ways suggesting that everyone understands precisely what they mean and will draw correct inferences from their use of the term. Nothing could be further from reality. In truth, the study of international politics as well as the art of diplomacy suffer from widespread ambiguity about the meaning of national interest, with the result that some scholars have proposed that the concept be abandoned and replaced by some other phrase. To my mind, this would be an abdication of the scholar's responsibility because, whether we like it or not, the term national interest is so deeply ingrained in the literature of international relations and diplomatic language that it is unlikely to be dismissed from our vocabulary simply because some scholars find it useless. Were we to attempt to substitute some new phrase, we would likely find even less consensus and could become engaged in yet another round of jargon-creation. A better alternative, I suggest, is to strive for a more precise definition of national interest and then provide a conceptual framework in which serious discussion of foreign policy and international politics can become more fruitful. That is the purpose of this paper.

As a research subject this title had its origins in the four years (1969–73) the author spent in Pakistan as Head of Chancery at the British Embassy in Islamabad, followed by a year as Foreign and Commonwealth Office Fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies at Cambridge. He took as his general area of study the relations from about 1800 onwards between the Tsarist and Soviet Governments and those of South Asia, as defined by the FCO, namely India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Ceylon and Nepal. More specifically, Soviet relations with South Asia were the subject of a paper read by the author at one of Professor Kinsley's seminars on international relations in the summer of 1974. A revised version of that paper forms the basis of this article.

In discussing this (understandably?) neglected question, this paper attempts to make clear what is meant by the word ‘torture’; expresses doubts about the best known moral positions on torture; offers what seems a better account of the matter; and demonstrates that the question of what is wrong with torture merits consideration in any worthwhile study of international affairs.

Since the term ‘strategy’ is now generally used to describe the use of available resources to gain any objective, from winning at bridge to selling soap, it is necessary to make clear that, in this paper, I shall use it in the traditional sense only: that is, as meaning the art of the strategon, or military commander. ‘The strategic approach’ is thus one which takes account of the part which is played by force, or the threat of force, in the international system. It is descriptive in so far as it analyses the extent to which political units have the capacity to use or to threaten the use of armed force to impose their will on other units; whether to compel them to dos ome things, to deter them from doing others, or if need be to destroy them as independent communities altogether. It is prescriptive in so far as it recommends policies which will enable such units to operate in an international system which is subject to such conditions and constraints.

The collapse of the British Empire in south-east Asia in the early months of 1942 brought to the fore in Anglo-American relations the different attitudes of the two countries towards colonialism. Surprisingly, their long standing disagreement about the merits of colonialism was not pushed to one side by the need to defeat Japan. On the contrary, Britain's humiliating setbacks in Malaya and Burma reinforced doubts and confirmed prejudices in the United States about the probity of the British Empire – doubts and prejudices that were powerfully articulated throughout 1942 and succeeding years in the American press as well as in private exchanges between members of the Administration and their British counterparts.

Several articles and editorials have already appeared presenting the argument that the “ceilings” on strategic nuclear weapon systems, and within these on ‘MIRV’s, that were agreed upon at Vladivostok are too high. But none of these articles have even raised the question, no less attempted to answer it, as to why they are so high. Why were such high “ceilings” agreed to, and not lower ones.

Dr Savigear's ‘Philosophical Idealism and International Politics: Bosanquet, Treitschke and War’ is especially welcome because this important topic has not been much discussed. However, on a subject so complex and controversial, some disagreement is to be expected. I shall suggest that Dr Savigear's argument requires qualification because it underemphasizes the cosmopolitanism which provides continuity to this aspect of Idealist moral and political philosophy.

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.

When Harold Wilson first became British prime minister in 1964 the possession of an independent nuclear capability had for some years been a major political issue which divided the political parties from each other and within themselves. But few of those who so boldly entered into polemics on the subject had any detailed knowledge of the origins and the development of the project over the previous quarter century. For until 1964 the subject had not been one evoking much serious academic enquiry. A decade later the position has been strikingly reversed. Wilson, with masterly sleight of hand, used the abortive Atlantic Nuclear Force (A.N.F.) scheme to kill simultaneously the Multilateral Nuclear Force (M.L.R) plan and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (C.N.D.) with the result that nuclear weapons have not been a serious issue in any of the last four general elections; while during the same period there has been a flowering of academic interest, official and unofficial, to the point where it almost qualifies as a distinct new sub-branch of international studies.

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.

The process of education, for all its centrality to the civilized mode of living, is but imperfectly understood. Yet if teaching is to be efficient, the preconditions for and means of learning must assuredly be appreciated; and to this end educationists have started to unravel the awesome complexities of how learning takes place – philosophers identifying the different forms of knowledge, the psychologists the different mental activities involved and the sociologists the different contexts in which learning can take place. As a consequence revolutionary changes have been effected in the syllabus-content and teaching methods of, for example, mathematics and the sciences. However, the amount of research effort that has been deployed on the various traditional school subjects varies considerably. But even the task of surveying an established school subject most patchily investigated would be more straightforward than an examination of the work carried out in the field of international studies.