All states are equal, but…*

1. Carr, E. H., The Twenty Years Crisis, 1919–1939 (London, 1939), p. 166.

2. For a recent discussion of this see Bull, Hedley, The Anarchical Societv (London, 1977), p. 205n.

3. Thucydides, , The Peloponnesidn War (trans. Warner, Rex, London, 1954), Bk. V. Chap. 7.

4. See, for example, Brzezinski, Zbigniew, ‘U.S. Foreign Policy; The Search for Focus’, Foreign Affairs, 51 (1973).

5. Quoted in Tucker,op.cit. p. 51.

6. Ibid. p. 49.

7. Western Europe and Japan are not yet irrevocably committed to being permanent ‘civilian powers’, and Tucker clearly hopes that along with the U.S.A. they will soon rediscover the utility of military power for purposes other than deterrence and defence (p. 88).

8. See Levi, W., ‘Are Developing States more equal than others?’, The Year Book of World Affairs, 32 (1978), p. 286.

9. Tucker,op. cit. p. 140.

10. (London, 1945).

11. Martin Wight,op. cit. p. 291.

12. Ibid. p. 293.

13. The same, I think, cannot be said of Systems of States (Leicester, 1977).

14. The nearest Martin Wight comes to discussing this issue in these terms is in Chap. 20,The United Nations, p. 231, where he observes that the new states of Africa and Asia were ‘politically aloof, because they were preoccupied with their sense of independence and the difficulties of their economic development; they thus reproduced the attitudes seen more than a century earlier in the history of the United States’. Perhaps a more appropriate illustration in this context is the quotation from Bismark on the same page: ‘liberated nations are not grateful but exacting’. Wight does not develop this insight beyond the underlying conviction that Western values will prevail.

15. This is all the more surprising in view of Martin Wight's earlier career when he was closely concerned with the problems of colonial constitutions.(Systems of States, op. cit. p. 5). Perhaps ‘the Westminster mode! ’ and ‘the European states-system model’ really are the appropriate internal and external arrangements for these new states. But again, perhaps not.

16. Wight,op. cit. p. 56.

17. Ibid. p. 10.

18. Howard,op. cit. p. 11.

19. Quoted in Clark,op. cit. p. 10.

* R. W. Tucker, The Inequality of Nations (Martin Robertson, London), 1977.