I Have thought it appropriate, in a lecture that bears the name of Henry Sidgwick, to choose a theme that focuses on individual rights and on questions of reform and change, with which he was, of course, so much associated.

I Am not concerned in this paper to discover what is peculiarly western about western conceptions of a world moral order, but merely to assemble some ideas about morality that recur in western thought - which may or may not be features of other civilizations as well. It is my ignorance of other civilizations that prevents me from undertaking the seductively neat task of deciding what is unique about western values, but it is the same ignorance that saves me from making the mistake of arriving at what is essentially western by subtracting from its history that which it shares with other cultures. “Western Values in International Relations” is a field that has been pioneered by Martin Wight in such a way as to stay the hand of a glossator, but it is the word “universal” in my title that distinguishes the present undertaking from Wight's work. His aim was to follow some lines of thought derived from domestic politics in the West into the field of diplomacy and international relations. My aim is to pursue them further, beyond international society to world society, and to take into moral account not merely the state and the order of states, but also the individual and certain actors and institutions in world politics whose concerns have been regarded conventionally as falling outside the domain of ‘diplomacy and international relations’.

In his Lees-Knowles lectures on the Mediterranean strategy in 1966, Professor Michael Howard largely disposed of the concept of a British politically motivated “Balkan Strategy” and went some way towards disposing of the larger and more general concept of a “Mediterranean Strategy” itself. In so doing he may be thought to have presented Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. However, those four lectures on the subject indicate that even after this rigorous scrutiny something is still left of the concept - the smile on the face of the Cheshire cat perhaps.

For a discipline aspiring to the understanding of international relations in their totality, the accusation of omitting the insights of a theory purporting to structure the foreign policies of some one-third of the states and also the ideas of many western thinkers is rather serious. I take, therefore, the liberty of examining the validity of the accusation at some length and to state another, to my mind, much more serious omission on the part of the two authors.

Any review article has an element of pot luck. An editor receives volumes for review, sorts them into piles according to subject and then thinks of a possible reviewer. The reviewer suggests a few additions and the parameters of the article are set. They are set by what publishers think will sell at a particular time and, more rarely, by what publishers and their academic advisers think ought to be published. A review article is thus frequently about a fashionable topic with a strong emphasis on the current state of conventional wisdom as reflected in the contemporary literature. Terrorism is a topic which fits this bill. It is constantly in the headlines and not surprisingly it has generated some scholarly interest.

Discussions concerning development aid and its planning have fallen into a rut. Those interested in this area have focused on certain problems, namely, the concentration of resources for purposes of productive investment and the direction of investment into the correct channels. The first problem has elicited methods of resource raising via nationalization of foreign investment, land-reform and the growth of primitive capital accumulation or an agricultural surplus, private investment (industrial or otherwise) and the prevalent importation of foreign aid.