Discussion of what is ‘(post)-Soviet studies’ has become one of the most lively sub-fields of the discipline (if, indeed, it is a discipline), reflecting the mood of introspection and self-doubt that prevails in the area today. What precisely, is the subject in question? There is no consensus even over the name. The title of this short review was initially set as ‘post-Soviet studies’. Although from the outset aware of the shortcomings of the term, it was only as I began to think how to approach the subject that I realised that it was impossible—or at least profoundly misleading—to work under such a rubric. The concept of ‘Soviet’ grounds the emerging discipline too narrowly in the experience of a single country. The notion of ‘post-Sovietology’ is also emerging as a contender to describe the field, but that is doubly misleading, inheriting at best a mixed intellectual baggage and controversial legacy of the original subject of ‘Sovietology’, now compounded by the addition of the prefix ‘post’. The subject is indeed as much about the terms it uses and the methodologies it applies as it is about the events and processes it describes.

George M. Fredrickson, The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1997)

Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)

Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995)

In The Comparative Imagination, historian George Fredrickson insists that ‘would-be comparativists originally trained as conventional historians need to become interdisciplinary’. He argues that scholars ‘should immerse themselves in the literature on their thematic interest (race relations in my case) produced by sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and even those in the new and controversial field of cultural studies. One does not have to become a theorist to use theory productively’.

It seems almost churlish to criticize a book as well-intentioned and clearly argued as The Transformation of Political Community. There is much in the volume to admire and to endorse. But there are also problems—there always are—and I will move to address these shortly. First, however, I want to point to some of the book's undeniable strengths. Perhaps the most refreshing aspect of Linklater's argument is the manner in which he takes on board a number of the perduring vexations of political and moral theory and addresses these within the context of international relations. For too long political theory and ‘IR’ have occupied separate niches, as if these two enterprises had little to do with one another. The result of the separation has been an impoverishment of both realms. ‘IR’ could move along as if questions of war and peace, security, order, power, engagement, citizen and soldier were not inescapably political and ethical issues impossible to deal with adequately in a manner that models sophisticatedly but falls flat conceptually. Too many underlying presuppositions in such undertakings are not brought to the surface and dealt with as is painfully evident in rational choice accounts with their impoverished views of what makes human beings tick.

The confessions of a neoclassical realist

In 1972, Hedley Bull wrote that ‘the sources of facile optimism and narrow moralism never dry up, and the lessons of the “realists” have to be learnt afresh by every new generation.‘ He proceeded to claim, with undue emphasis, that ‘in terms of the academic study of international relations, the stream of thinking and writing that began with Niebuhr and Carr has long run its course.’ The scholarly problems with classical realist theory are indeed severe. However, it would be a most grievous error to consign such theory to the bin marked ‘yesterday's solutions for yesterday's problems.’ If the academic study of international relations can find little save period-piece interest in the ideas of the classical realists, that is more a comment upon the competence of scholarship today than upon any change in world conditions.

David Campbell's recent review article of single-authored monographs on the Bosnian conflict serves as a vehicle for him to sketch the outlines of what he calls ‘a different objectivity’. The article is interesting insofar as it represents a serious attempt by a self-proclaimed postmodernist/poststructuralist writer, although perhaps not a card carrying one to use his own phrase, to grasp the epistemological nettle. For despite the many trenchant critiques of prevailing epistemologies by post-modernist writers and much talk of a ‘postmodern epistemology’, there has been very little, if any, attempt to elaborate just what such an epistemology might involve. Campbell highlights what is a stake here by noting that ‘how one goes about making a judgement as to which narrative of the Bosnian War is better raises the thorniest of historiography's issues.’ Unsurprisingly, Campbell's answer to this issue is the standard postmodern fallback position of Nietzscheian perspectivism.

Richard G. Lipsey and Patricio Meller (eds.), Western Hemisphere Trade Integration: A Canadian-Latin American Dialogue (London: Macmillan, 1997)

Elizabeth Joyce and Carlos Malamud (eds.), Latin America and the Multinational Drug Trade (London: Macmillan, 1998)

Barry Bosworth, Susan M. Collins and Nora Claudia Lustig (eds.), Coming Together? Mexico-United States Relations (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997)

James F. Rochlin, Redefining Mexican ‘Security’: Society, State and Region under NAFTA (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1997)

Lawrence E. Harrison, The Pan-American Dream: Do Latin America's Cultural Values Discourage True Partnership with the United States and Canada? (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997)

Antonia Darder and Rodolfo D. Torres (eds.), The Latino Studies Reader: Culture, Economy, and Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998)

International studies of the Americas have been dominated for at least the last forty years by an orthodoxy which framed the field of study as constituting the relations of the United States with the governments of something called ‘Latin America and the Caribbean’ (hereafter LAC). Often, as it happens, the Caribbean part of that construction was largely excluded from vision, especially the non-Spanish-speaking parts of that region; Canada was ignored almost as often; and the United States, needless to say, was automatically viewed as central. In power politics terms, this was understandable enough. The US perceived itself as a hegemonic power and associated its credibility in the eyes of both its enemies and allies in all parts of the world with its capacity to maintain and demonstrate control of its own hemispheric community—its ‘backyard’. Yet what we can now see is that the politics of this recent past (defined essentially as the Cold War period) were distinctive, not typical, in the longer history of US interactions with the rest of the Americas.

Alan Collins is to be congratulated for highlighting the role Gorbachev’s strategy of Graduated Reciprocation in Tension Reduction (GRIT) played in ending the military conflict between East and West. By offering an alternative view to the conservative opinion that America’s material strength forced the Soviets into submission, it suggests that statesmen caught in security dilemmas have real options and are not simply forced to compete for power. As a policy that fostered transparency which assisted the creation of security regimes, GRIT undoubtedly played a role in the way the military conflict ended. Yet the Cold War was not simply about the military balance. Collins’ account of this period is restricted by his bias towards state-centric and rationalist explanations of state behaviour. He underestimates the role ideology played in ending the Cold War and as such only offers half a Cold War story. The influence of the US during this period, as a cautious agent of liberal individualism, is completely ignored, yet, as this reply demonstrates, it is crucial to understanding the way the US reciprocated Soviet policies. Moreover, if ‘debate over what the Cold War was is part of the politics of deciding what the post-Cold War is’, the significance of this criticism is not merely academic. The implication of Collins’ unwritten assumption that state’s identities are egoistic is that a security community based on a common identity is impossible. The lesson that the Cold War, as opposed to the military conflict, only ended when a common identity based on liberal individualism was instituted, suggests that a transatlantic security community including Russia was and still is a possibility.

I applaud Linklater for dreaming the impossible dream: a triple transformation of political community, whereby social relations become more universalistic, less unequal, and more sensitive to cultural differences. The primary mechanism posited for this change is the expansion of dialogic communities, in which insiders and outsiders recognise one another as moral equals and the special ties and ‘harmony of dispositions’ inherent in bounded communities do not preclude membership within a universal communication community or the right of free movement in a global society. Linklater offers sophisticated and original analysis of a possible post-Westphalian international order centred on this ‘thin conception of cosmopolitanism’ that should provoke wide debate. Unfortunately, I am not persuaded in the least by his thesis, despite its being repeated like a mantra throughout the volume.

Until the second half of the 1990s, Western commentary about the former Soviet Union and the new Russia basically divided into two camps. On the one side stood those who not only welcomed the end of the USSR but looked forward to the ‘brave new world’ they hoped would be built on the debris left behind by the old order. Having failed to anticipate the demise of Soviet communism,< the optimists now predicted a bright new capitalist future for Russia. With excellent access to those in power, they were clearly the most favoured group with Western governments in general and the American government in particular. Certainly, within the US foreign policy elite it was broadly assumed that successful reform in Russia and Russia's integration into the larger capitalist system, was both feasible and necessary. As Strobe Talbott, the architect of American strategy towards Russia, observed in the early days of the Clinton administration, reform in Russia was not just about Russia but the shape of the new international order waiting to be born in the wake of the Cold War. Others were always more sceptical.

Colin Wight has been obviously waiting some time to make his point. Much like a hunter who, with an old weapon and a handy supply of ammunition, has been frustrated by the lack of the right quarry, Wight has unloaded both barrels on the best available target. And what better target than ‘MetaBosnia’! For one who might be a member of an imaginary Epistemic Realist Shooters Association – where the motto is evidently something like ‘show us your epistemological framework so we can keep the relationship between world/word, fact/value and theory/practice conceptually clear and methodologically rigorous, damn it’ – this review must have seemed like the ideal beast. With the plumage of a pomo, the cry of a relativist, and a pedigree that incorporates the misogyny and proto-fascism of its turn-of-the-century German forebears, perfect prey indeed.

It is some time since I wrote GRIT, Gorbachev and the End of the Cold War and I am grateful to Jason Ralph for giving me an opportunity to re-examine the piece. It is always nice to be ‘congratulated’ and to be noted for providing ‘instructive’ analysis, even if, apparently, the article ‘suffers from epistemological flaws’ and ‘obstructs’ the future construction of security communities. The latter is particularly puzzling since the pursuit of GRIT-type strategies is an aid, not a hindrance, to the creation of security communities.

The changing structure of European order poses, for any student of international relations, some fundamental questions about the evolution of world politics. Concepts of European order and of the European state system are, after all, central to accepted ideas of international relations. Out of the series of conflicts and negotiations—religious wars, coalitions to resist first the Hapsburg and then the Bourbon attempt at European hegemony—developed ideas and practices which still structure the contemporary global state system: the equality of states; international law as regulating relations among sovereign and equal states; domestic sovereignty as exclusive, without external oversight of the rules of domestic order. The ‘modern’ state system, modern scholars now agree, did not spring fully-clothed from the Treaty of Westphalia at the close of the Thirty Years' War; it evolved through a succession of treaties and conferences, from 1555 to 1714. It remains acceptable, nevertheless, to describe the European state order as built around the Westphalian system.

In a recent article in the Review of International Studies Hans-Karl Pichler argues that Hans Morgenthau's intellectual universe was saturated by ‘typically European philosophical problems’ which he transferred to an American political context. He shows this by looking at how Morgenthau tried to overcome the value determinacy of social science, as pointed out by Weber, by grounding his political realist theory in a Schmittean understanding of the political, which defines war – the friend/enemy distinction – as the essence of the political and founds it anthropologically in the evil, dangerous nature of human beings.

Since the end of the Cold War, many of America’s closest allies have complained about the rise of American unilateralism, a tendency in Washington to take decisions without much regard for the interests or views of its own allies or the rest of the world. Prime examples of what most offends America’s partners would be the restrictions America has attempted to apply to allied trade with Cuba or Iran, in clear violation of traditionally understood rules of international law.

To respond to Andrew Linklater's The Transformation of Political Community is to walk a very fine line between admiration and perplexity. I have admiration especially for his willingness to confront some of the most important and difficult questions of contemporary political theory. To pursue the claim that we need to rethink the accounts of political community that anyone with credibility as a political analyst would much prefer to leave as a constitutive assumption of almost everything they want to say, takes some courage. And this is certainly a bold book, both in its sweep and its ambitions. It is one of the very few books in the contemporary theory of international relations that provokes more than passive surrender to the tediously familiar and the three-fold typology. Even so, I remain perplexed at the way Linklater manages to keep retying himself up in all the knots he tries so vigorously to disentangle.

As we enter the new millennium, the Third World, far from disappearing, is becoming global. The dynamic of economic driven globalization is resulting in the global reproduction of Third World problems. Growing inequality, risk and vulnerability characterize not simply the state system, but an emerging global social order. This is part of an historical process underway for five centuries: the expansion of capitalism across the globe. Technological developments speed up the process. The demise of the communist bloc and the associated rejection of ‘real existing socialism’ as a mode of economic organization have provided a specific additional fillip to the reconfiguration of the ‘Third World’. The 1980s, and more particularly the 1990s, have witnessed the mainstreaming of liberal economic ideology via the Washington consensus. This approach to development has been legitimated in several global conferences such as United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) and the Copenhagen Social Summit. It has been applied practically through institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and World Trade Organization (WTO). In its wake we have seen a deepening of existing inequalities between and within states, with a resulting tension—contradiction even—between the development targets agreed by the United Nations (UN), and the policies pursued by international organizations and governments to facilitate such results.

As the old blues song goes, ‘if it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all’. Same goes for scholarly attention. So I am grateful to Professor Gray for his article.

Despite his frequent use of adjectives about my work which suggest a desperation to inoculate future generations of scholars against it, we actually agree on a great deal. We share a basic ontological understanding of international relations and security studies in particular. We agree that strategic cultures—which admittedly we do define very differently—are none the less critical explanations for the way different groups of people think and act when it comes to the use of force. We also agree that these strategic cultures are not epiphenomena of unitary states acting under anarchy and constrained by material power structures, but are independent of these structures, influenced perhaps by both domestic and international normative structures (though I am not sure Professor Gray accepts this latter possibility for reasons I will return to in a moment). I think we also agree that rigour is better than confusion. Indeed, Professor Gray notes that ‘from the perspective of methodological rigour, it is hard to fault’ my work.

In The Transformation of Political Community Andrew Linklater has given us a most impressive synthesis of critical normative thinking about international relations theory, and I might as well begin by emphasizing that I will not be able to do justice to the rich detail of its content in the space here allotted to me, and so I shall not try. I offer just an individual response to Linklater's book, addressed to its core theoretical assumptions. I shall propose a critique of it in two particulars. These relate to a central ambiguity in its underwriting of discourse ethics on the one hand, and to a certain too ready levelling, so to say, vis-à-vis modes of social oppression and exclusion on the other.

Harold Laski was a writer who exercised enormous influence in the turbulent environment of the early to mid-twentieth century. Though normally regarded as a political theorist, Laski frequently wrote on the problems of international politics. Certainly, his work was fully engaged with world issues in the inter-war and post-war periods. Like many critical and idealist thinkers of the time, he initially hoped that the League of Nations would usher in a new, international democratic system. However his early hopes gave way to a more pessimistic (and more radical) perspective, and from the late 1920s onwards he believed that the only way of transcending the existing system of sovereign states was by moving beyond capitalism. Combining a critique of both the Westphalian system and the market which he assumed underpinned it, Laski raised major questions – relevant to his own times and to ours too. Mainly ignored since his death, it is perhaps time that the work of this unduly neglected figure should be revisited.

Typical of the opposing trends that have been a part of the decade 1989 to 1999, many of the states in the Asia-Pacific in these ten years have shifted from ‘miracle’ status to crisis. From being the political and economic model for other countries in both the developing and the developed world, they now signal how best to avoid the less savoury pitfalls of rapid development. The miracle status, deriving from two decades or more of impressive growth rates on the basis of a presumed distinctive politico-economic model, was supposed to herald a Pacific Century. The key characteristics of this new era were a newfound regional coherence and a related transfer of economic and above all political power from the Atlantic community towards Asia-Pacific. The crisis, in turn, is seen as marking the end of that shift in the economic and political centres of gravity.