From an international political economy perspective, the international political system of states claiming exclusive authority and the monopoly of legitimate violence within their territorial limits—the so-called Westphalia system—is inseparable from the prevailing capitalist market economy which also first evolved in Europe. Each was a necessary condition for the evolution of the other. To prosper, production and trade required the security provided by the state. To survive, the state required the economic growth, and the credit-creating system of finance, provided by the economic system. But the latter has now created three major problems that the political system, by its very nature, is incapable of solving. First, there is the major failure to manage and control the financial system—witness the Asian turmoil of 1997. Second, there is the failure to act for the protection of the environment. Third, there is a failure to preserve a socio-economic balance between the rich and powerful and the poor and weak. The Westfailure system is thus failing Capitalism, the Planet and global (and national) civil society.

The shock waves of what happened in 1989 and after helped make the 1990s a peculiarly interesting decade, and while all periods in history are by definition special, there was something very special indeed about the years following the collapse of the socialist project in the former USSR and Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, this has not been reflected in the theoretical literature. Thus although there have been many books on the end of the Cold War, even more on the ‘new’ history of the Cold War itself, and several on the current state of international relations after the ‘fall’, there has been relatively little work done so far on the landscape of the new international system in formation. Moreover, while there have been several post-Cold War controversies and debates—we think here of Fukuyama's attempt to theorize the end of history, Mearsheimer's realist reflections on the coming disorder in Europe, the various attempts to define the American mission without a Soviet enemy, and Huntington's prediction about a coming clash of civilizations—not much serious effort has been made to bring these various discussions together in one single volume.

Debates about the future of relations among the advanced industrial countries after the Cold War hinge on theories about the sources of international political order. Realism advances the most defined—and pessimistic—answers drawing on theories of anarchy, balance, and hegemony. But these theories are not able to explain the origins and continuing stability of relations among the United States and its European and Asian partners. This article develops a theory of liberal international order that captures its major structures, institutions, and practices. Distinctive features mark postwar liberal order—co-binding security institutions, penetrated American hegemony, semi-sovereign great powers, economic openness, and civic identity. It is these multifaceted and interlocking features of Western liberal order that give it a durability and significance.

The meaning of ‘civil society’ has evolved considerably since its use in the context of the 18th century European Enlightenment. Then it signified the realm of private interests, in practice the realm of the bourgeoisie, distinct from the state. While one current of thought retains that meaning and its implications, others view civil society rather as the emancipatory activity of social forces distinct from both state and capital. Antonio Gramsci's thought embraced both meanings: civil society was the ground that sustained the hegemony of the bourgeoisie but also that on which an emancipatory counterhegemony could be constructed. Is civil society today in the latter sense, a surrogate for revolution that seems a remote possibility towards the attainment of an alternative social and world order? It is useful to test this proposition by examining the potential for civil society in different parts of the world.

Western scholars have long disagreed about the role that ideology played in the Cold War. The release of crucial documentation from the former East-bloc archives has shed new light on this question, but no consensus is likely to emerge. Even if all the archives are eventually opened, the new evidence will not—and cannot—provide full vindication for either realism or an ideology-based approach. A key task for scholars will be to reexamine the broad and often unspoken assumptions on which specific US and Soviet policies were based.

Basil Liddell Hart is the most influential military writer of the modern age, revered and reviled by three generations of strategists, armchair and armipotent. This article focuses on his master thesis, ‘The Indirect Approach’, in relation to another coinage of Liddell Hart's, ‘The British Way in Warfare’, a parallel gestation. Both concepts smack of the invented tradition; both continue to resonate. They are in every sense characteristic of their creator.

This article contends that the interaction between domestic circumstances in the USSR and the radical change in the international environment occasioned by the advent of the first Reagan administration played a substantial part in the early emergence of ‘New Political Thinking’ in the Soviet Union. That process had begun shortly after Brezhnev’s death. The Reagan factor loomed large in an internal Soviet debate over the direction of Soviet foreign policy. Four types of causal association are identified. While the Reagan administration was not the sole cause of the Soviet crisis that brought new thinking to the fore, it certainly contributed to a climate that strengthened the position of advocates of this perspective within the Soviet ruling elite.

Much of the discussion of the end of the Cold War starts from the premise that Gorbachev's domestic reforms and foreign policy initiatives set in motion a process that radically transformed the nature of East-West relations. The emphasis on the Gorbachev period is natural enough given the consensus among Western and Russian scholars that Gorbachev's domestic and foreign policies were the proximate cause of the end of the Cold War. The near exclusive focus on the causes and consequences of Gorbachev's policies nevertheless frames the analytical puzzle too narrowly. The Cold War was not a static conflict that continued unchanged from its origins in the late 1940s to the advent of Gorbachev some forty years later. Gorbachev's initiatives ushered in the terminal stage of a process of accommodation that had been underway, albeit with fits and starts, for several decades. The Gorbachev foreign policy revolution needs to be put into broader historical context.

The case of the French Revolution supports the proposition that principles of political legitimacy which shape state identities are linked to domestic social structures, and help determine the resources states mobilize in international competition. To the degree that they are shared across states, legitimacy principles also shape international society. The enactment of a deviant principle of legitimacy by a major power will have systemic consequences because it undermines the existing rules of the game; it may have transformative effects if the efficacy of the new principle is demonstrated in competition. Closer attention should be paid to the complex manner in which new principles interact with existing rules of international society.

The principle of the self-determination of peoples is enshrined in the United Nations Charter and based on liberal and democratic values. However, the international community has, until recently, interpreted this principle very restrictively, so that it has amounted to little more than the right to be free from European colonialism. The collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia, as well as persistent ethno-nationalist conflicts around the world, have provoked new thinking about the right of self-determination in political theory. This article reviews six theories, and identifies what they have in common and on what they differ. It draws some cautious policy conclusions from this analysis and, in doing so, seeks to clarify the role and limits of theory in international politics.

That states are sovereign units interacting under conditions of anarchy has long been the core assumption of the discipline of International Relations. Operating largely with an anthropomorphic conceptualization of the state, 'statists' create a stunted ontology of the international system dominated by the concepts of state survival and an assumed state survival interest. By constituting sharp lines of demarcation between being and non-being, between 'life' and 'death', statists ignore a host of more subtle changes in the ontological status of states which are ill-treated by reference to 'survival'. This Westphalian ontology leads ultimately to a dead end, for such a definition rejects from the outset an ontology of overlapping political authorities in a single territory but at distinct scales which is characteristic not only of the present international system but of the so-called Westphalian era as well.

‘Strategic Culture as Context: The First Generation of Theory Strikes Back’ takes the scholarly argument about the study, and meaning, of strategic culture to a new stage. Specifically, this article is a direct reply to recent criticisms of so-called first-generation theorists of strategic culture. The author reconsiders both the subject of strategic culture, and what he first wrote about it fifteen and more years ago. He finds that although there is noteworthy room for improvement in what he wrote then, the recent theorising by Alastair Iain Johnston, in particular, rests upon a misunderstanding of the nature, character, and ‘working’ of strategic culture. Of particular note is the insistence by Johnston on a separation of ideas from behaviour, for the dominant purpose of developing falsifiable theory. ‘Strategic Culture as Context,’ therefore, revisits in some detail questions of definition, with particular reference to the ideas-behaviour nexus. The article proceeds both to register arguments that should advance understanding of how strategic culture ‘works,’ and to suggest a better set of discriminators, different perspectives, for better consideration of evidence of strategic culture. Overall, the article suggests that strategic culture provides context for understanding, rather than explanatory causality for behaviour.

This article traces the evolution of the political meaning of secession from an action taken by a state within a compact or union, to an action available to a nation within a state. It is argued that this evolution, often forgotten in the customary attention given to national self-determination in international law and international relations theory, is associated not only with the modern emergence of nations and of states, but also with the emerging importance of the United States in international affairs at the turn of the twentieth century. The article puts the phenomenon of secession, currently dominated by attention to the Balkans, in a broader context by examining features of four cases: the American South, the Irish Free State, Bangladesh and Quebec.

This article argues that the end of the Cold War can be told as a story of the development of trust. Despite its centrality as a political concept, trust has only recently received focused attention in the field of international relations. Development of trust cannot be reduced to changing relationships of power or redefinitions of interests but requires communicative elements. The argument is demonstrated through a comparison of German–Soviet and Japanese–Soviet relations at the end of the Cold War. The key point is that trust and the lack of it, respectively, were a major factor in the profound transformation of the former relationship and led to stalemate in the latter.

The end of the Cold War was an event of great significance in human history, the consequences of which demand to be glossed in broad terms rather than reduced to a meaningless series of events. Neorealist writers on international relations would disagree; most such see the end of the Cold War in terms of the collapse of a bipolar balance of power system and its (temporary) replacement by the hegemony of the winning state, which in turn will be replaced by a new balance. There is obviously a story to be told here, they would argue, but not a new kind of story, nor a particularly momentous one. Such shifts in the distribution of power are a matter of business as usual for the international system. The end of the Cold War was a blip on the chart of modern history and analysts of international politics (educated in the latest techniques of quantitative and qualitative analysis in the social sciences) ought, from this perspective, to be unwilling to draw general conclusions on the basis of a few, albeit quite unusual, events. Such modesty is, as a rule, wise, but on this occasion it is misplaced. The Cold War was not simply a convenient shorthand for conflict between two superpowers, as the neorealists would have it. Rather it encompassed deep-seated divisions about the organization and content of political, economic and social life at all levels.

The end of the Soviet period in Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans has seen the open development of tensions in the region based on the presence of minority groups in states trying to reassert their individual identity. There has been a flurry of international activity by various organizations to establish minority rights standards and to ensure their implementation. It is the thesis of this article that the idea of minority rights in international law stems originally from the treatment of religious minorities, and subsequently minorities defined in other terms, in this region, and that modern mechanisms to guarantee minority rights can be seen to have developed from the perceived need to make minority rights a matter of international concern rather than one solely for the kin-state. The various mechanisms in use now directly build upon the perceived successes and failures of earlier systems.

This article challenges two prevailing views of the failure by African polities to attain sovereign statehood in the late 19th century by providing evidence from two case studies showing that many African polities were not 'quasi-states,' lacking the empirical political and economic capacity to join the international community of sovereign states. Nor were they unable to sustain or promote international commerce. Instead, when heightened international economic competition threatened the profits of European traders, European interests pressed for pro-expansionist policies and for conditions deemed necessary for the success of European commerce.

This article considers some implications of the Moldovan conflict from 1991 to the present for thinking about International Relations (IR) and conflict theory, as well as more specifically about the complexities of the conflict itself. This encompasses an examination of the roles of key external actors, and particularly of the Russian Republic and of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) as well as a subjective view of the role of the internal actors and their aims. The analysis is based on an on-going involvement in a ‘problem-solving’ exercise in the area.

Though usually assumed by scholars of international relations to have been one-of-a-kind, the Cold War—the global East-West rivalry that ended with the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union—resembled in many of its features an earlier match usually assumed by scholars of American history to have been entirely exceptional: the continental North-South rivalry that ended with the War Between the States. Each was a contest of ideologically ambitious, institutionally immiscible, and territorially extensionist socioeconomic systems. Each rivalry evolved a mechanism for the procrastination of conflict. In both cases this mechanism was initially deliberative—based on debate. It remained deliberative in the North-South case, which deteriorated from cooperation to catastrophe, but it switched from deliberative to confrontational—based on threat—in the East-West case, which ended in voluntary unilateral abandonment of ideology, institutions, and territory. The irony of the outcomes of these two rivalries, whose likelihoods of violent end would probably have been misranked at their respective midpoints, is discussed.

‘Regardless of how you define or measure it, globalization is real and its impact on state power is significant’, says the globalist. ‘But how do you know?’ replies the sceptic. In this opening interchange one sees the origin of a controversy that after almost a decade shows few signs of abating. Globalists continue to maintain that there are big, fin-de-siècle transformations under way in the world at large, which can be laid at the door of something called globalization. This new era—popularized as a ‘world without borders’ and symbolized by the dismantling of the Berlin Wall—ostensibly came into its own where the Cold War left off. Globalists of all shades see a new world order in the making, marked by the de-territorialization of economic and political affairs, the ascendance of highly mobile, transnational forms of capital, and the growth of global forms of governance. By the same token, globalization sceptics, scrutinizing very similar empirical terrain, continue to pose the same insistent question. The dispute between globalists and sceptics is not about the reality of change; it is about the nature and significance of the changes under way as well as the driving forces behind them. ‘There is something out there’, agree the sceptics, but it is not necessarily, or even primarily, responsible for what is going on ‘in here’. The changes that fundamentally interest globalists are usually less economic than political. That is to say that their efforts to analyse or demonstrate economic change—the extent to which national economies have become more interconnected through trade, production, finance, and the growing web of international rules and institutions—are often a prelude to the political project.