Considerable support has emerged over recent years among scholars of international relations for the theory that ‘democracies do not go to war with each other.’ Bruce Russett and Harvey Starr note that over the last two centuries ‘Democracies were very unlikely to fight each other.’ This finding is supported, R. J. Rummel argues, by both ‘Historical studies and empirical social science research’. Some authors hail it as a law—perhaps the only one we have—of international relations. References in the literature suggest that the theory has acquired the status of a received truth. It is ‘the one argument that all the analysts agree on’, concludes Robert Rothstein. ‘Scholars of contemporary international relations are nearing consensus, suggest the Embers and Russett. In the latest, most comprehensive study of the phenomenon, Russett even finds evidence for it in non-industrial societies. Believing the facts of the matter to have been established, theorists have moved on to seek the causal mechanism generating the phenomenon.

This article takes a concern with gender as the starting point for looking at some of the political processes and structures that have grown up within the European Community. Such an approach reveals new contours to the EC system and throws a fresh light on features hitherto regarded as ‘normal’. Though the focus is on the EC, it is argued that the results of an analysis of this kind have a wider significance. Thus the article is intended as a contribution to the growing engagement between ‘women's politics’ in its broadest sense and the theory and practice of international relations.

So stark and swift was the collapse of the Cold War structure of international relations that few yet pretend to have been expecting it. The magnitude of the changes involved has forced practitioners and theorists alike into radical rethinking. For practitioners, the old certainties have gone and it is unclear what political and security structures will replace those of the Cold War: whether it will be a New World Order or a New World Disorder is still very much open to debate. But for international relations theorists the events have focused attention on the nature of international political structures. What kind of structures can international systems represent if they can be changed so fundamentally and so easily? Neo-realists especially have to rethink a dominant discourse which relies heavily on established regularities and on the stability of the bipolar system. What does it say for Waltz's conception of international structure if it can be so easily transcended by unit factors? If structural theories of international relations can say nothing about an event as momentous as the collapse of the Cold War system, what can they say anything about? Neo-realists could ignore the fact that their theories could not account for transformations of international structure precisely because these theories did explain the regularity and stability of bipolarity. Now that is gone, theorists have to look again at what they mean by a structure. Moreover, the nature of agency has to be reexamined; for neo-realists human agency was essentially irrelevant at the structural level of explanation, yet the collapse of the Cold War system seemed to depend very largely on active and calculating agents. Questions concerning the nature of agency and the meaning of structure and the relationship between them are now more relevant than ever in international relations theory.

The spread of nuclear weapons outside the Western world has become the most important nuclear issue since the end of the Cold War. By contrast, the debate about Europe's nuclear strategy has subsided. Nuclear collaboration in Western Europe now seems an unlikely prospect and so too does proliferation, despite instability in the former Soviet Union, and occasional speculation about Germany's nuclear appetite. A very different atmosphere prevailed during the Cold War, when the need for a European nuclear force was endlessly debated, without any prospect of this political demand being fulfilled, and, in the late 1950s and 1960s, several European countries appeared to be at the threshold of obtaining nuclear power.

E. H. Carr is a thinker on international affairs who defies easy classification. His best-known work on the subject, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, delivered a powerful realist critique, still resonant today, of the idealist approach to international relations and helped bring about a renewed emphasis on the role of power in international affairs. Less familiar to students of international relations are Carr's more optimistic works. In Conditions of Peace and Nationalism and After, written during World War II, he was sanguine about the prospects for a peaceful postwar order and outlined the steps required to bring about that happy state of affairs. The same hopeful themes were sounded in the years after the war in The Soviet Impact on the Western World, The New Society and other shorter essays.

Some years ago, in a joint affirmation of faith, Professor Walker identified himself as a ‘dissident’ producer of ‘works of thought’ at ‘margins’ distant from ‘all presumptive sovereign centres of interpretation and judgement’. From these remote sites, or heights, he and his critical colleagues aim to exacerbate ‘the crisis of the discipline of international studies’ by upsetting its ‘notions of space, time, and progress’ and thus questioning its status as a ‘discipline’ (pp. 375–6). This particular academic crisis must be understood as one among many others. It is made to connect with ‘a crisis of the human sciences, a crisis of patriarchy, a crisis of governability, a crisis of late industrial society, a generalized crisis of modernity’ (p. 377) to mention but a few. So enormous is this congeries of crises that the ‘possibility of truth is put in doubt’ (p. 378) and ‘words manifestly fail’ (p. 376). An academic without words is without a job. Critical dissidents are not at a loss.