Thinking about justice in international politics is a particularly frustrating activity for a number of reasons. In the first place, there is the problem of demarcating justice from other moral concepts such as benevolence and charity and defining the respective spheres of these concepts. Too narrow a band for justice will tend towards cynicism, too wide a band will tend to equate justice and morality. In the second place, there is an enormous literature from Plato and Aristotle onwards on justice in social and political philosophy which ought to be explored before applying the concept to international politics. Decisions need to be made about which parts of it are relevant to international politics, i.e. what structural features there are in international politics which are analogous to community or society in domestic contexts. Thirdly, there is little evidence that justice actually plays a role in the deliberations of statesmen and political leaders.

If Churchill's aphorism about Russia being ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’ was an apt formulation of Western puzzlement about that nation, several further layers of obfuscation would be required accurately to depict Western perceptions of China. Since 1949 a number of conflicting conceptions of China's nature and purpose have vied with each other to gain the allegiance of analysts, governments and the general public alike. There was, for too many years, the China of American demonology: aggressive, expansionist and cruel, conspiring with the USSR to bring about world domination, its implacable rulers brooding malevolently over their nation of docile ants. Even while this notion held centre stage, an alternative perspective was available from such eminent Sinologists as C. P. Fitzgerald and I. K. Fairbank: that China had not undergone such a dramatic metamorphosis under the communists as many believed but was still ‘eternal China’, reproducing the same age-old patterns of behaviour that had persisted with little change through many centuries, if not millennia. Then, during the 1960s a new image emerged: China the ultrarevolutionary power, itself engaged upon a process of radical transformation through the turbulence of the Cultural Revolution, while simultaneously acting as the principal inspiration of violent revolution elsewhere in the world. The Sino-American rapprochement soon produced an entirely different perspective: China was now a responsible great power, maintaining a global balance of power in accordance with the Nixon–Kissinger vision of international order.

For a country of its size and population, the Soviet Union may often seem rather isolated from the affairs of other members of the world community. In part, at least, this reflects the influence of Soviet history and of the political tradition that has derived from it. With its broad and relatively open frontiers, Russia is a country that has been invaded and occupied many times by outside powers. Foreigners, since the earliest times, have been required to live in special residential areas and have been regarded popularly as well as by officials with a good deal of suspicion and hostility. Strong currents of Slavophilism, particularly from the 19th century, influenced public as well as governmental opinion and helped to create an attitude towards the West which combined an admiration for its prosperity and efficiency wth a deep repugnance towards its individualistic chaos and petty-minded commercialism. In the Soviet period, attitudes of this kind were strengthened by communist ideology, which saw the USSR as the leading force in a global struggle for socialism, and by the attempts of outside powers, immediately after the Revolution and during the Second World War, to overthrow the Soviet government and install a more compliant regime in Moscow. In economic terms, similarly, the Soviet period saw the strengthening of tendencies towards economic autarchy which had their origins in the pre-revolutionary period. Even today foreign trade, with socialist as well as capitalist countries, accounts for a relatively small proportion of Soviet national income, the Soviet currency is not freely convertible, and the movement of people or information across Soviet frontiers is closely regulated and very limited.

Uneven development is not a new phenomenon; it has always been with us. It can be identified on a global scale, a continental scale, or a national and subnational level. World history, furthermore, is not without many instances of political concern about relative economic prosperity between states and regions or of occasional policies seeking to increase prosperity and to deal with poverty.

The Final Act of Congress of Vienna was signed on June 9, 1815. More accurately, because of Napoleon's escape and the consequent battle of Waterloo, the Vienna settlement was completed with the signature of the second Treaty of Paris on November 20s 1815. There is thus no doubt that last year marks the 170th anniversary of the settlement. There is equally no doubt that in many ways 1815 has come to seem very remote. There are no great historical arguments in progress about it, nor does it seem to attract any great interest from the students of international relations, unless their attention is actually drawn to it. So it may be as well to remember that the Vienna settlement has generated much more substantial debate at other times. Very soon after its making, it began to be said that the settlement represented a failed attempt to control, at worst, or suppress, at best, the two doctrines that were to be the political foundation of the 19th century: liberalism and nationalism. By the end of the century this attitude had intensified. In any case, the immense social and political changes which were moulding the modern state structure were beginning to create a new kind of international environment in which the ‘unspoken’ as well as deliberate assumptions of 1815 were less relevant. Approved or not, in practical terms, the settlement remained as a basis for the conduct of international politics until 1914, and thus was the obvious point of departure for discussion about the new settlement which would have to be made when the First World War ended. It is not surprising therefore to find that part of the British preparation for the Paris Peace Conference, which were made by the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office, was a study of the Congress of Vienna by C. K. Webster. It is a somewhat routine piece, and his treatment of the subject was much better based and wider ranging in his monumental study of British foreign policy under Lord Castlereagh. It contained, however, one conclusion which may have had an important effect on the way in which the 1919 settlement was arrived at. Webster said that it had been an error on the part of the allies to have permitted the French to be present at Vienna because of the successful attempt by Talleyrand to insert France into the discussions of the other great powers. It has of course been subsequently felt that one of the cardinal respects in which Vienna was more, sensible than Versailles was precisely in that the French were included and became in effect joint guarantors of the agreement. Whether anything fundamental would have been different had the same been done for the Weimar republic is open to question, but there can be no doubt that the circumstances at the time and afterwards would have been greatly easier had the agenda of post-war international politics not had to include the status of Germany as a first item.

According to the late Professor Hedley Bull, the ‘domestic analogy’ is:

the argument from the experience of individual men in domestic society to the experience of states, according to which the need of individual men to stand in awe of a common power in order to live in peace is a ground for holding that states must do the same. The conditions of an orderly social life, on this view, are the same among states as they are within them: they require that the institutions of domestic society be reproduced on a universal scale.