In a period when international relations theory has painfully awakened from its dreams of a decontextualized account of international reality, some theorists of international relations are likely to do what some political scientists already have done: turn to disciplinary history in search of remedies against what they take to be a threatening disciplinary anarchy:

The object of this article is to examine the impact of the Marshall Plan (ERP) on the strategy of reparations from Germany that was pursued by the British government in the postwar era. In order to put this into some kind of context it will first be necessary to provide a brief survey of the mechanism of reparations and then of the rationale behind the system of financial assistance afforded by the USA to Western Europe known as Marshall Aid (its title derived from the US Secretary of State, George Marshall, who pioneered the scheme). The idea of extracting some form of compensation from Germany, to be apportioned among the victors, came to be debated in Whitehall during hostilities, but little attempt was made to coordinate plans among the Allies until the conference at Yalta in February 1945. No consensus could be attained there among the participants (the UK, the USA and the USSR). Stalin lodged a claim for $10 billion of reparations in ten years, which entailed that the Soviet Union would be allocated half of all payments from Germany. The lack of assent from the Western powers led to a new body, the Allied Reparations Commission (ARC), being convened in Moscow, which also failed to reach a conclusion. Reparations were then settled at the Potsdam Conference between the same three powers in July–August 1945.

One might try to determine just what constitutes a sovereign state empirically, by examining the characteristics of states whose sovereignty is indisputable. All sovereign states, it might be observed, have territory, people, and a government. Curiously, however, cogent standards do not seem to exist either in law or in practice for the dimensions, number of people, or form of government that might be required of a sovereign state. Indeed, a United Nations General Assembly Resolution declared that neither small size, nor remote geographical location, nor limited resources constitutes a valid objection to sovereign statehood.

In the last two decades, the classical tradition in international relations has come under sustained attack on a number of fronts, and from a diverse range of critics. Most recently, feminist thinkers, following in the footsteps of neo-Marxists and critical theorists, have denounced IR as ‘one of the most gender-blind, indeed crudely patriarchal, of all the institutionalized forms of contemporary social and political analysis’. Feminists have sought to subvert some of the most basic elements of the classical paradigm: the assumption of the state as a given; conceptions of power and ‘international security’; and the model of a rational human individual standing apart from the realm of lived experience, manipulating it to maximize his own self-interest. Denouncing standard epistemological assumptions and theoretical approaches as inherently ‘masculinist’, feminists, particularly those from the radical band of the spectrum, have advanced an alternative vision of international relations: one that redefines power as ‘mutual enablement’ rather than domination, and offers normative values of cooperation, care giving, and compromise in place of patriarchal norms of competition, exploitation, and self-aggrandizement.

By now there is a very considerable volume of work on the general subject of women, women's rights, feminism and gender in international relations. This has both engendered and been engendered by the development of undergraduate and graduate courses and seminars on these themes. By contrast the allied discipline of international history has been slow to develop a parallel literature or courses. Courses in women's history per se have multiplied; there is a respectable literature and a number of equally respectable learned journals, not only in the Englishspeaking countries, but also in Western Europe. But their concern has been very much focused on the issues of women in each particular society; they have tended, that is, to develop the study of women within the study of the history of a particular country, political culture or linguistic region. Confronted with questions about the lack of similar courses in the history of international relations, historians drawn from both sexes have tended either to take them as a comic act or to indicate that in their view there is a lack of relevant material or issues adequate to justify any isolation of the topic from the more general themes of inter-state relations, with the great issues of peace and war with which as members of the discipline they are chiefly concerned.