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 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’.

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 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.

For a country of its size and population, the Soviet Union may often seem rather isolated from the affairs of other members of the world community. In part, at least, this reflects the influence of Soviet history and of the political tradition that has derived from it. With its broad and relatively open frontiers, Russia is a country that has been invaded and occupied many times by outside powers. Foreigners, since the earliest times, have been required to live in special residential areas and have been regarded popularly as well as by officials with a good deal of suspicion and hostility. Strong currents of Slavophilism, particularly from the 19th century, influenced public as well as governmental opinion and helped to create an attitude towards the West which combined an admiration for its prosperity and efficiency wth a deep repugnance towards its individualistic chaos and petty-minded commercialism. In the Soviet period, attitudes of this kind were strengthened by communist ideology, which saw the USSR as the leading force in a global struggle for socialism, and by the attempts of outside powers, immediately after the Revolution and during the Second World War, to overthrow the Soviet government and install a more compliant regime in Moscow. In economic terms, similarly, the Soviet period saw the strengthening of tendencies towards economic autarchy which had their origins in the pre-revolutionary period. Even today foreign trade, with socialist as well as capitalist countries, accounts for a relatively small proportion of Soviet national income, the Soviet currency is not freely convertible, and the movement of people or information across Soviet frontiers is closely regulated and very limited.

Uneven development is not a new phenomenon; it has always been with us. It can be identified on a global scale, a continental scale, or a national and subnational level. World history, furthermore, is not without many instances of political concern about relative economic prosperity between states and regions or of occasional policies seeking to increase prosperity and to deal with poverty.

According to the late Professor Hedley Bull, the ‘domestic analogy’ is:

the argument from the experience of individual men in domestic society to the experience of states, according to which the need of individual men to stand in awe of a common power in order to live in peace is a ground for holding that states must do the same. The conditions of an orderly social life, on this view, are the same among states as they are within them: they require that the institutions of domestic society be reproduced on a universal scale.