The title of this paper contains three terms which require definition—sovereignty, vitality and the state. I shall begin by defining these, and shall then discuss various reasons why the state acquires vitality from its possession of sovereignty. Finally I shall ask whether sovereignty is likely to become less significant as a source of vitality, and? if so, what is likely to take its place.

In the historiography of the Cold War a small but active group of American historians influenced by New Left radicalism rejected the view prevailing in the USA at the time in regard to the assignation of responsibility for the beginning and continuation of the Cold War.1 Although their reasoning took them along different routes and via different perceptions as to key dates and events, there were certain features all US revisionists had in common (some more generally recognized than others). Heavily involved as they were in the analysis of the US socio-economic system, the Soviet Union was largely left out of their concerns and it was the United States who had been found the ‘guilty’ party. The revisionists, of course inadvertently, corroborated Soviet conclusions, a fact gratefully acknowledged by Soviet writers.2

Martin Wight once compared ‘the increasing number of small states which are the debris of colonial empires’ to ‘the increasing number of small principalities’ of an earlier period in international history which were ‘the debris of feudalism’. The citystates, monarchies, republics, confederations and various other emergent states of Europe eventually found an alternative to the mediaeval societas Christiana on which their independence and intercourse could be legitimately based. This was, of course, the practice of dynastic legitimacy or what Burke glorified as ‘prescription’: the right of inherited and established states to international recognition which sufficed as the constitution of European international society until the French revolution. Burke invoked it to condemn the revolution and justify foreign intervention not only to destroy the Jacobins and restore the monarchy but also to defend ‘the college of the ancient states of Europe’.3 It was a lost cause.

As a specialist in international politics, I have always believed that my primary business is to study states, those important political, legal and administrative units into which the world is divided. That preoccupation is not, of course, limited to my professional clan. All of political science, whether or not it is formally held to include international politics as a sub-discipline, focuses on the state, although it necessarily deals with other kinds of entity as well. Our academic brethren in such fields as history, economics and sociology also pay quite a lot of attention to the state. For that matter, no human being in today's world can escape the profound influence of the state, even though he may study nothing at all.

Although it is natural to consider the development of the comparative approach known as Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) as the most obvious source of theories of foreign policy behaviour, it is important to remember that all perspectives on the subject of international relations contain statements about foreign policy. Historically this has been the case because virtually all approaches to the study of international relations took the state to be the central actor. Thus, approaches as diverse as those concentrating on political economy, international society and Marxism have all included a notion of what the state is and how its foreign policy results, regardless of the way in which policy might be defined. Theories of foreign policy are therefore intrinsic to theories of international relations, even for those who deny the centrality of the state as an actor in international society.

Bargaining power is a somewhat neglected concept in the study of international negotiations. Who comes on top in the negotiating process and why, i.e. its power or influence aspect, has never been a central perspective of negotiation theorists. The ‘classical’ negotiation theorists of the 1960s1 make only passing references to the effects of differences in power resources on international negotiations, and even though more recent works pay considerably more attention to such variables,2 they can hardly be said to be central to the field. Nor has bargaining as a particular instance of the exercise of power been an important preoccupation of power theorists. Perhaps for these very reasons, the concept has remained a rather tricky one, often being used as an ad hoc or residual factor to ‘explain’ what cannot otherwise be accounted for. However, Christer Jönsson has argued that ‘focussing on bargaining power promises to be… an avenue to further clarification of the perennially elusive concept of power’.3 To what extent what he calls the ‘bridge-building and cross-fertilization between power analysis and bargaining studies’4 may also contribute to a better understanding of international negotiations, is an empirical question to which this article will attempt to give at least a preliminary answer.

In the opening paragraphs of his article Professor Miller argues that to become sovereign a political entity must satisfy two requirements. In the first place? it must ‘appear to be independent in the sense of not being subject to another state's control. … [It must] look independent in terms of the power to make its own decisions’. And, secondly, the entity in question must be ‘accepted as such by others’. This, ‘in political terms [is] the basic question’ inasmuch as the lack of acceptance restricts ‘its opportunities for intercourse with other communities’.

China and western Europe share a common concern—their powerful neighbour the Soviet Union. Yet it is only in the past three years that Chinese and west European attitudes towards the Soviet Union have begun to converge. The absence of any previous Sino-European agreement on the role of, and reaction to, the Soviet Union has primarily been due to the vagaries of Chinese policy. Despite Chinese assertions and west European self-flagellation, in the past 35 years the west has been stable and largely secure, whereas China has been changeable and largely insecure. Yet despite recent converging trends in Sino-west European views of the Soviet Union, there are important reasons why both China and western Europe will continue to differ in how they meet the Soviet challenge.

Many books, both scholarly and popular, consider how wars begin. There has also been a large number written on the question of limiting war in general and creating peace. Yet the question of how specific wars end has received far less attention. Except for memoirs and historical accounts of final battles and peace negotiations, it is difficult to find more than a handful of general works on war deescalation and termination.

The publication in 1936 of Sir Alfred Zimmern's The League of Nations and the Rule of Law is now, fifty years on, little mentioned. It was ‘perhaps…the most polished work of the “idealist” writers’ who dominated the academic study of international politics in Britain and America for most of the inter-war years;1 and Zimmern (then Montague Burton Professor of International Relations in Oxford) was ‘the most influential representative of our field’ in that period.

Josip Tito first met a leading British statesman, in August 1944, when he had discussions in Naples with Winston Churchill about the future of the Yugoslav resistance movements.1 After the war however the Yugoslav communist leader did not meet another leading statesman from the West until September 1952. The visitor on that occasion was Churchill's Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden. Between the two dates there had been remarkable changes in Anglo-Yugoslav relations. In the years 1944–1948, as the world slipped towards Cold War, the British aid given to Tito's guerillas in wartime seemed to have been wasted; Yugoslavia apparently became firmly rooted in the Soviet bloc. Many now argue that Churchill ought to have supported other Yugoslav resistance groups who were supporters of the Yugoslav monarchy and, presumably, more pro-western. British support for Tito during the war, however, had logical force: Tito was popular with his countrymen and able to unite them, a capable leader who knew how to use the geography of his country against its enemies, and a man who was ultimately able to liberate Yugoslavia without large-scale Soviet assistance.2 And, in 1948, to the surprise of many in the West he proved that he was no mere Russian puppet either. He opposed attempts from Moscow to extend its influence over Yugoslav government and politics and, in June, was expelled by Stalin from the Soviet-led ‘Cominform’ Faced by economic blockade from the East, Tito turned increasingly to the West for support. In November 1951 he took a major step by accepting American military aid. As yet there were limits to his western commitment: he was still a communist, on poor terms with some of his western neighbours (especially Italy), and determined, whilst accepting western aid, to keep his distance from both power blocs. But it seemed that he could be won over securely to the West in the long-term. Recently released British files on the Eden visit reveal much about the state of Tito's relationship with the West at this time.

This essay attempts to apply concepts of hegemony to the case of contemporary North American—Western European—Japanese (‘Trilateral’) relations and, more specifically, to analyse the role and importance of a unique international organization the Trilateral Commission (TC), within Trilateral relations. The essay comprises: (i) a comparison of the Realist and Gramscian concepts of hegemony and relates them to aspects of the post-war international order; (ii) a more extended discussion of the Gramscian concept of hegemony and related concepts; (iii) an exposition of aspects of the ‘Trilateral’ approach, a discussion of the TC and an interpretation of the TC using Gramscian analysis; and (iv) a discussion of the long-term structural pressures on the Trilateral relationship in the context of a reconstituted hegemony.

The literature on the role of regions in international relations is extensive. A ‘region’ is variably defined in terms of proximity or separateness, homogeneity, interdependence? common political orientations, institutional membership, transaction flows, or other ad hoc issues. Regions are thought to be important to the study of international relations because it is somehow assumed that regions lead to regionalism, i.e. the idea that the region has its own characteristics and logic of interaction and thus should be differentiated from outside.

When, in May 1945, the Allies finally defeated Nazi Germany and began their military occupation, no-one expected that within five years the country would be divided into two political halves, one tied to the West and the other to the Soviet Union. Germany, despite its defeat in 1918, had remained the most powerful state in central Europe and had been an undoubted great power since 1870. If anything, the fear was that Germany would revive quickly and become a menace to the peace again. That it did become divided between East and West was of course due to the start of the ‘Cold War’ after 1945, with the Americans and British on the one side and the Russians on the other seeing, not Germany, but each other as the post-war ‘enemy’. In 1946 Winston Churchill was already able to speak of an ‘iron curtain’ stretching from Trieste, on the Adriatic, to Stettin, on the Baltic. By 1949 each side had established control of its own bloc—the Russians predominating in the Eastern European ‘People's Republics’, the Americans drawing the West Europeans together with the Marshall Aid Programme and the North Atlantic Treaty.

This paper purports to contribute to the development of a theory of international mediation by considering, in some detail, the experience at Camp David and more specifically the role of President Carter. The uniqueness of this event cannot of course be ignored, but even unique cases can contribute to theory development especially if they are considered as one of a class of events. Single cases can provide a powerful impetus to the development of a general explanation as long as they are historically grounded and their description is not couched in purely idiosyncratic terms.