In an earlier paper Dr. R. D. McKinlay and I argued that the concept of interdependence was useless as a research tool since it was used to cover such wide and disparate ranges of phenomena that it virtually became a summary description of the current state of the international system, in which it was impossible to disentangle cause, consequence, and manifestation. We suggested that the varieties of literature subsumed under the term did none the less call attention to a number of important questions that need to be explored, among them the following:

“The great extent and rapid increase in international trade, in being the principle guarantee of the peace of the world is the great permanent security for the uninterrupted progress of the ideas., institutions and the character of the human race”. The identification of trade as a major source of human progress has a long intellectual tradition of which John Stuart Mill was only one, though possibly its most distinguished propagator. In the U.S.A. the assumption of a positive association between free trade and, at the international level, peace and security, and, at the domestic level, democracy and the guarantee of individual liberty, has been most explicitly associated with the Secretary of State, Gordell Hull: “International commerce conducted on a fair basis … is the greatest civilizer in the experience of the world”. It was Hull in concert with a number of like-minded officials at the State Department just prior to and after the end of the Second World War who laid down the intellectual framework for American foreign economic policy which successive Presidents and Secretaries of State have consistently endorsed, though with differing degrees of emphasis.

Charles Anthony Woodward Manning, a distinguished authority on law and jurisprudence, a controversial writer on South Africa, and for over 30 years (1930–1962) Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science in the University of London, died at the age of 83 at Constantia, Cape Province, South Africa, on 10 March 19780 Though most of his life was spent in England – he went to Brasenose College, Oxford, as a Bishops Rhodes Scholar in 1914 – he left for his homeland for the last time in September 1977, a few months after the death of his wife Marion (or ‘Maisie’), whom he married in 1939 when she was a pupil of his at the LSE. They had no children.

It is disturbing for a student of foreign policy to read Tolstoy. It is even more disturbing for anyone interested specifically in the implementation of foreign policy, for in several respects he said it all in War and Peace in a way that makes twenty-five years of theorising about foreign policy look ridiculous. Tolstoy is greatly interested in the execution of policy and his conclusions are not only distinctive but they attack some of the most basic assumptions on which foreign policy is based. For in his elaboration of a view of historical causation, he is concerned to examine the elusive forces which motivate events and to ridicule the notion that policy-makers shape history by making effective decisions. He demonstrates this most vividly in describing the business of war, where he adopts a tone of devastating sarcasm in his accounts of the generals, “who of all the blind instruments of history were the most enslaved and involuntary’. Thus, he states starkly:

This yearly commemoration of Martin Wight by means of a lecture is doubly appropriate. An annual lecture keeps his memory green among his friends and pupils. And in the second place, it is a peculiarly fitting celebration because Martin Wight was a teacher whose greatest and most seminal influence was in large measures exercised in lectures tutorials, seminars and discussion groups. Exercised that is by means of the spoken, the living, word transmitted directly person to person, mind to mind. When it is contrasted with, say, a book, mere speech is thought to be something fleeting and evanescent, not to be compared with the tangibility, fixity, durability of the written and the printed word. But this is the merest superstition, for that which is fixed is also dead and inert. If the written word has power to speak to us, to move us, this is because it is the emanation and the embodiment of the living spirit. I am, here, put in mind of a striking passage which occurs in that most moving of Plato's writings, the writing known as the seventh epistle – a passage where Plato describes how his teaching is transmitted. This teaching he declares is not to be found in anything written down. The knowledge with which he is concerned is of the kind which “after long-continued intercourse between teacher and pupil, in joint pursuit of the subject, suddenly, like light flashing forth when a fire is kindled, it is born in the soul and straightway nourishes itself. ”The light of Martin Wight's discourse, its rayonnement, an irradiation now felt by many who never knew or met him – it is this which has brought us together on this occasion, and which illuminates the issues I am about to consider – issues which we have reason to believe interested him closely, and in more ways than one.

Hobbes' conception of relations between states has attracted attention from two directions. Students of political theory who have focused on Hobbes have from time to time looked beyond their central preoccupations and noted briefly the relevance of his doctrine for the international arena. The external relations of Leviathan are for them on the fringe of Hobbes' theory. Students of international relations on the other hand invoke Hobbes' name frequently as a kind of shorthand for a particular approach to the international world, one that is also associated with Machiavelli, and usually called the ‘realist’ approach. By contrast with the political theorists, they tend to look from the outside into Hobbes’ theory and to ask whether and how far the ‘domestic’ situation of individuals in a Hobbesian state of nature bears an analogy with the ‘external’ situation of states in relationship to one another.

Between 1919 and July 1921 British Crown forces and the Irish Republican Army fought a sporadic and brutal conflict, usually referred to as the ‘troubles’, or, more formally, as the ‘Anglo-Irish war’. At 2.30 a.m., on 6 December, 1921, British and Irish plenipotentiaries signed ‘Articles of Agreement for a Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland’; the document which they signed was to dominate Anglo-Irish relations for thirty years, and certain parts of it are live issues still. Aspects of the relationship between Britain and Ireland have been explored in recently published monographs, but there is no general survey of the period, and little attempt to examine the significance of the ‘Ulster question’ in this context. A general treatment of some of the main themes in the Anglo-Irish relationship between 1921 and 1950 will therefore be of interest, not only for its own sake, but also because it throws light on a small but significant aspect of international relations in the second quarter of this century.

In the last decade a number of scholars have criticized the dominant paradigm in international relations inquiry. Two major criticisms have been levelled at some of the advocates of paradigm change: they do not clearly demonstrate the dominance of a specific paradigm, and they have produced no data-based studies to demonstrate the obsolescence of the fundamental assumptions of the field. This paper attempts to meet these criticisms by systematically testing what has become known as the “Colour It Morgenthau” thesis, namely the claim that the Realist paradigm has dominated quantitative international relations and has up to this time failed to explain behaviour adequately.

During the years following the Second World War, intensive research was undertaken on the subject of response to threat. Confronted with the baffling yet recurrent inability of nations to respond adequately to warnings of an impending attack, many scholars concentrated on such events as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour and the outbreak of the Korean War, and produced a voluminous empirical literature, as well as a considerably meagre body of theoretically oriented works. Thus alongside the plethora of works that sought explanations solely in terms of certain specific conditions operating at the time of the event analyzed, a few other inquiries attempted to integrate the case under scrutiny into a broader theoretical context in order to better elucidate the patterns by which nations cope with situations of crisis and threat.

What theme is increasingly dominating the behaviour of international politics? The answer appears to be the task of peace-building at the global level. Reality shows how far we are from completing that task, however. Our inability to complete the task is still, alas, the case in the 1970s. It is true that the international system has changed from one dominated by a bipolar-cold war to a multipolar-interdependent system since the middle of the 1960s. Global peace, however, still seems to be only a remote possibility: There is ample evidence of this, and the Middle East war of 1973 is-only one illustration.

Associated with the concept of the nation state and system is a latent threat structure which this article seeks to delineate and to explore empirically. Why do the Japanese perceive the Russians as a serious political threat while discounting the potential military impact of the Chinese? Why did the United States consider the threat to its interests sufficiently grave in Indochina to fight a 10-year war against communism there while virtually ignoring the Castro regime less than 100 miles off the Florida coast ? What combination of German attributes and behaviour convinced France and Britain in the presence of aggresssive capability that they could disregard the threat posed to Czechoslovakia by Hitler in 1938? The latent threat structure of the nation state is neither obvious nor of trivial importance to global security and peace.

Since twentieth century society has been so badly scarred by wars between the major industrial powers it is difficult to understand how it was that capitalist industry was once held to be the great material and moral force which would bring peace to the world. The idea was, nonetheless, firmly implanted in the minds of many men in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Richard Cobden, the English radical politician, was one of these and the eradication of international conflict became the central concern of his life.

National integration and the legitimation of authority

The study of foreign policy leadership is characterized by a number of conceptual and methodological problems for the researcher. It is located on the divide between the study of the individual and the idiosyncratic, on the one hand, and the structural and patterned on the other; it stands at the crossroads of the internal political system and the international arena; and it lends an aura of personalized comprehensibility to complex processes of change and development, integration and disintegration, in the multidimensional political, social and economic environment in which it is set. Its very choice of subject matter seems to assume that political actors, although working within specific systemic constraints, also possess opportunities to make and/or enforce choices under permissive conditions which allow a significant amount of conscious manipulation. Furthermore, such studies often take for granted that the nation-state is the most significant unit of analysis – in the sense that it is treated as given rather than as problematic. This essay attempts to chart a course through these complex waters by developing a set of interrelated hypotheses about a particular type of foreign policy leadership and the uses to which it is put – namely the legitimation of the authority of the state itself within what have been called “modern national culture societies”.

There can be no enterprise more important to the student of International Relations than to understand the bearing on his subject of the tradition that asserts the existence of natural law. Natural law played a vital historical role in the emergence of the European states-system: in the period during which the positive law of Christendom was ceasing to command attention, but that of modern international society had not yet taken shape, the idea that princes and peoples were bound by rules in their relations with one another rested substantially, even if by no means exclusively, upon natural law doctrine. The natural law tradition is also central to the critical investigation of normative issues in world politics: for any inquiry into e.g. the justification of force, the obligation of treaties, the rights of sovereignty or the legitimacy of intervention, it provides a rich source of argument.

Generalisation about foreign policy is inevitable. It is the external face of a country, turned toward the world and taken by others to characterize the society behind it. Politicians and commentators continually search for ways in which to describe the essence of their nation's foreign policy, partly for themselves, and partly to convey its direction and values to interested parties at home or abroad. One of the most natural and time-honoured solutions they have hit upon has been the concept of ‘role’

There can be little doubt that of the three approaches to the international system which Dr. Little explores,1 what he calls the “organized complexity model” is the most useful and valid for an understanding of international relations. While the first of the models he considers, the mechanistic one, has “no room for evolution, adaption or self-regulation,” the second, the organic model still focuses problematically on structures which are supposed to maintain a given system and so both lack what the third seeks to provide: a fluid, dynamic perspective which can account for change.

In my study, The Natural Law Tradition and the Theory of International Relations, reviewed in Hedley Bull's interesting article, there are no chapters devoted to natural law thinkers before the thirteenth century. Any lengthening of an already long manuscript might have diminished its prospects of publication. In the absence of a full survey of the strengths and weaknesses of earlier theories, there are various explicit or implied judgements on positions of Aristotle, the Stoics, Cicero and Augustine in chapters dealing primarily with other matters. Whilst referring to sources of Aquinas's doctrine, I did not give a detailed account of the historical formation of his teaching. I concentrated upon St. Thomas's discussion of the various kinds of law and especially upon the doctrine of eternal law which he brought to a certain perfection. In doing this, I was consoled by the view which I shared with Vincent McNabb that “it was always the thought of Aquinas never the history of that thought which seemed of greatest worth…” Indeed, given the incompleteness of so much of the discussion on the intellectual reconciliation of natural and divine law before Aquinas, it is arguable that McNabb was hardly exaggerating very greatly when he wrote that Aquinas's treatise on law in the Summa theologiae “would seem be the first great treatise ever written on law”.