This article examines representations of the League of Nations as a creature of early twentieth century modernity. In particular it focuses on the propagation of the doctrine of rationalization in that forum from mid-1920s until early 1930s. Rationalization came to signify not only the scientific organization and control of social development, but also world interpenetration in technical, industrial, cultural and political spheres. Conjuring images of a globe crisscrossed by streams of electric energy, League functionaries and devotees spoke of a bright new dawn. Industrial flow would meld the ‘minds of men’. Discussions of globalization today have a similar repertoire of arguments and many of the same linguistic items as of rationalization. In the inter-war period rationalization was held out as the destiny of the world's people, promising both harmonious integration and cultural profusion. Its rapid evaporation from intellectual and public discourse in the face of the crises of the 1930s serves as a warning to those who would weave fantastic tales of globalized tomorrows.

This article addresses the issue of the information revolution and international affairs. It makes three arguments. First, the evolution of a global digital information network is likely to diminish state capacity and autonomy, but the specific nature of the effects of new information technologies are indeterminate because the technology and the politics are inextricably intertwined and the technology itself is not yet ‘complete’. Second, the effects of a mature digital information infrastructure are best understood as the outcome of a three-way political struggle between centralized political authorities (states), centralized economic entities (firms) and individuals as both consumers and citizens. Third, in spite of the indeterminacy of technological change, a matrix of possible outcomes can be constructed. The globalization argument is partially correct: state capacities will drop, relatively speaking, and firm capacities will increase unless states and people can reconceptualize their relationship and guide technological development to suit their interests. The article analyses three representative pieces of a mature global digital information network—the physical network media, cryptography, and digital money—to show how the new information technologies are deeply political and their effects therefore indeterminate.

This article offers an assessment of the ethical status of territorial borders, arguing for a partial defence of their role in international relations. Utilising the English School as one way such a defence has been developed, it assesses pluralist and solidarist arguments, suggesting both are flawed. The article develops a notion of territorial borders as contributing to the value of tolerating difference in international relations, and that this is an ethically desirable thing to do. It doing so it utilises the political theory of Hannah Arendt as an alternative to more common, if usually implicit, liberal understandings.

Poverty reduction is now a prime concern of global policymakers. Renewed global efforts for poverty reduction are presented as the post-Washington Consensus. In this context, I identify an emerging ‘global development architecture’ that entails new patterns of interlinkages between the WTO, IMF, World Bank, Regional Development Banks and Bilateral and Multilateral Development Agencies. Through the example of microcredit and poverty reduction I address the political economic implications of the emerging global development architecture. I argue that microcredit (1) facilitates financial sector liberalisation and the global trade in financial services; (2) functions as a political safety-net, containing or dampening resistance at the community level to liberalisation policies and economic austerity measures. The article critically probes the emerging global development architecture and argues that it is incorporated into the reconfiguration of global political economy as a strategy of ‘crisis management’. Normative discourses underpinning the post-Washington Consensus are argued to be instrumental to efforts to legitimate the consolidation, ‘constitutionally’, of what continues to be the Washington Consensus.

The September 11 terrorist strikes prompted renewed interest in a debate about just cause that has been increasingly open since the demise of the Cold War and the shift to a more multilateral and interventionist world order. This article contributes to that debate by looking first into the just war tradition to argue for a conceptual revision that equates just cause with jus ad bellum (just recourse to war). It then seeks to specify the component parts of just cause understood in this way, holding that demonstrable injustice should take the place formerly occupied by just cause in just war theory. Towards the end it uses three real-world cases to develop a mechanism for validating just cause claims. The argument is that a cause is just only when its proponents can convince an international forum of intractable injustice, responsible intervention, and an appropriate balance of contingent factors. The article closes by considering how the current war on terrorism might be assessed in such a forum.

In recent years, some scholars have argued that there has been a convergence of the immigration control policies of the industrial democracies. This article demonstrates that, in fact, there has been an extraordinary similarity among the immigration control policies of the major receiving countries for over a century. It examines six alternative explanations for these similarities in immigration control policies: (1) a global hegemon that forces or persuades various countries to act in unison; (2) global or regional migration regimes and organizations; (3) interdependence between the immigration control policies of various countries; (4) emulation of immigration control policies of one country by other countries; (5) the world system approach; and (6) interdependence between the socioeconomic and foreign policy factors that lead to immigration control policies. The article argues that it is the last factor that explains most of the similarity among the immigration control policies. It demonstrates how global economic cycles, shared migratory pressures, alliances that produce common foreign policy considerations, wars that receiving countries are involved in and global ideological cycles produce the convergence of immigration control policies in various receiving countries.

This study demonstrates the link between rising levels of capital mobility and European financial and monetary integration. State policies are driven and constrained by the financial structure of the international political economy. However, political adaptation to structural conditions can itself force changes in the structure – a process of ‘structuration’. Practically, the study outlines the rise of capital mobility in the post-war period, and argues that the creation of a European Financial Area was an imperative of the associated deregulatory dynamic. The consequences of this development for state sovereignty are outlined in terms of the Capital Mobility Hypothesis. The proposition is advanced that political motivation to reassert some degree of state autonomy is the driving force behind the move to a single currency. In taking this innovative policy step, the EU countries will have challenged the financial structure by reasserting some degree of political control over the way finance flows around the global economy.

The article is a critical assessment of three explanations in relation to the question of which types of entities actually enjoy sovereign rights. Concluding that two of these—constitutional independence and legal criteria of statehood—are empirically untenable, it then focuses on a third, more plausible, answer: recognition as a state. Pointing out the almost consensual attitude toward the issue adopted by political scientists and finding the two doctrines of recognition formulated by international lawyers to be imbued with logical inconsistencies, the article concludes by remarking on the impossibility of discovering any clear pattern of state behaviour in this respect.

The concept of authority has recently received heightened attention in the international politics literature. Unfortunately, considerable confusion still exists regarding who possesses authority, how authority is constituted, how it erodes and how it differs from other means of generating compliance, most notably power. Drawing on work from international political economy and political theory, this article sets out to clarify some of the many ambiguities surrounding authority. It builds hypotheses regarding state/market authority relations and tests these hypotheses in the context of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) crisis of 1992–93. The article concludes that the ERM crisis did not represent a mere ‘bump in the road’ on the way to European Monetary Union, but rather the break-up of policy consensus in a dramatic way.

This article compares Waltz and Kant as theorists who explicitly advocate a systemic approach to international relations. Waltz and Kant are compared with respect to their views on the nature of systemic approaches, the composition and dynamics of the international system, and the relationship between the international system and world society. It is argued that there are deep underlying similarities between their views on the nature of systemic approaches to international relations that may facilitate a much broader account of the international system. A final section examines the relevance of a Kantian view of the international system to the post-Cold War era by comparing its insights to those offered by neorealist and classical realist perspectives.

…the best way to understand the writings of philosophers is to seek out the questions they were attempting to answer.

Both policy articles about US post-Cold War foreign policy and the recent rhetoric of US policymakers appears to be slipping back into the language of the ‘arrogance of power’, against which Senator Fulbright warned America in the 1960s. In what follows, the USA's style of foreign policy; its criteria for intervention; its invasion of Panama; its capabilities; its intervention in Bosnia; and the impact of contending theories about changes in the international sphere will be examined with a view to casting some light on how the USA has responded to the world outside its boundaries after the Cold War. Finally, in the light of Senator Fulbright's criticisms of US interventionism in the recent past, the essay draws towards its conclusion by specifically addressing the key questions of the whens, whys and wherefores of US intervention into and exits from international crises. It explores some of the problems posed by continuity and change in the struggle to adjust US foreign policy to a non-Cold War world and examines the wisdom of enthusiastic calls for the US to spread democracy abroad.

In the initial section of his article, Ersun Kurtulus criticises the approach to sovereignty which I advanced in my Sovereign Statehood (1986). There I argued that the characteristic which distinguishes a sovereign from a non-sovereign state is constitutional independence—that is to say, a territorial entity's possession of a constitution which is not subordinate to that of another territorial entity. The most obvious and graphic way of identifying this distinction is to compare the position of a sovereign state with that of a territory which is part of a federal state. Thus Iceland is a sovereign state; Texas is not. It is her constitutional independence which, in international practice, is deemed to confer sovereignty on Iceland, and so make her eligible for full international actorhood. By contrast, non-sovereign territorial entities do not enjoy such actorhood, and most have none whatsoever.

Sovereignty is heavily contested by existing states which view the survival of territorial sovereignty as vital to international order and many ethnic groups that see states as an obstacle to their own claims to sovereignty. This article looks at how and why ethnic claims to sovereignty arise. It examines when such claims may emerge, what forms such claims may take, the benefits ethnic groups perceive may accrue, and the implications for the international system and the emerging post-Westphalian international society.

The article deals with NATO's intervention in Kosovo. Instead of focusing on the military and diplomatic interventions, the article looks at how NATO developed a humanitarian interest in providing assistance and protection to the Kosovo Albanian refugees. In the name of the refugees—and to a lesser extent, of internally displaced persons—NATO entered a humanitarian field and was partly transfigured into a humanitarian agency during the crisis in Kosovo. The political significance of NATO's humanitarianism was that its reputation for competence and its image of respectability and honour depended to an extent on how well it supported the international assistance to the Kosovo Albanians. The stakes were not limited to the immediate Kosovo context, however. The symbolic struggle for reputation and honour resonated directly in the political struggle for the conservation and transformation of the European security complex. The success of the humanitarian operation became an additional element of demonstrating the value of military capital for acquiring political authority in the definition and management of security problems in post-Cold War Europe.

Proliferation optimism is the controversial theoretical and worrisome practical product of neorealism. This article reviews and ultimately rejects proliferation optimism by showing how it actually reproduces what it seeks to eliminate: pessimism. This article interprets proliferation optimism through the lens of Burkean conservatism and contends—adopting the formative reasoning of neorealism and optimism—that as the ideal nuclear society which optimism envisions resembles the ideal conservative society Burke describes in his Reflections, that optimism reproduces a core belief of conservatism: flawed human nature. The article contends that, contrary to the first principles of neorealism, an unheralded view of human nature operates within optimism to yield its reservations about widespread proliferation which, in turn, reveal optimism's essential pessimism. Illustrating how optimism is pessimism may diminish its theoretical and practical allure.

To scholars researching the connections between international relations and globalisation, such as those in the five books reviewed here, ‘foreign policy’ is becoming functionally and descriptively rivalled in a globalising context. Foreign policy, once the theoretically exclusive prerogative of the nation-state, is violated daily by new developments in non-state actorness arising from transnational technical and welfare issues such as trade, finance, labour standards and environmentalism. These books under review introduce the displacement lexicon of transnational politics, global civil society, non-state resistance and complexity into policymaking consciousness; in short, the post-international era. The conclusion proposes to tease out the preliminary outlines of the post-international challenge to foreign policy on the basis of ‘plus non-state’ actor-interest considerations.

The article responds to a recent call for a more systematic interrogation of the persistence of the dichotomous relation between ethics and International Relations. The addition of ethics into International Relations, it has recently been claimed, has left unquestioned the ethical assumptions encompassed in the ‘agenda’ of International Relations itself. Thus, the article examines the ethics implicit in the ‘agenda of IR’ and, in so doing, considers the condition of possibility for a movement beyond the dichotomy ‘ethics and IR’ and towards ‘an ethical International Relations’. To achieve this task the article calls for an understanding of ethics as ethos. It further illustrates how the ‘dangerous ontology’ of realist IR is discursively created through an exposition of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political. In this anarchical ontology of danger an ‘ethos of survival’ has come to be the relational framework through which the other is conceptually encountered as an enemy. Subsequently, the article considers what repercussions this ethos has for the reception of ethics into IR.

In the class of political sciences, they invited us to speak. We told them about what we are living in our villages, about why we decided to struggle, we talked about what we know. And they told us that although they are students and have read a lot, these things that we were telling them they had never heard, what we have lived they have never lived. Afterwards we told them, ’but we have not come just to talk, also to listen, we want to listen to what you have to tell us’.

(Lucio and Argel, delegates of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) to the Universities in Mexico City in the EZLNÕs consultation with civil society, March 19992)

Kalevi J. Holsti retired from his position as Killam Professor Emeritus in the Political Science Department of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in June 1999. Prof. Holsti's long and wide-ranging career has produced a number of classic works in the IR field, among them The Dividing Discipline (1985), International Politics: A Framework for Analysis (7th edn., 1994), Peace and War: Armed Conflicts and International Order, 1648–1989 (1991), and The State, War, and the State of War (1996). The following interview was conducted in January 2001 in Vancouver. A number of alterations were subsequently made to the raw transcript in consultation with Prof. Holsti.

My aim in this review article is to advance the argument that some of the best accounts of how we relate internationally are to be found outside the conventional boundaries of international relations (IR). In a recent review article in this journal, Kate Manzo also suggests that international relations might profit from a closer engagement with examples of disciplinary boundary crossing located in—or, perhaps more accurately, between—other fields of study. She advocates a widening of the ‘international imagination’ so as to incorporate categories of analysis and approaches to the study of power usually seen as falling outside the remit of IR as it is traditionally understood. It is, of course, the very nature of this ‘traditional’ IR that finds itself under question today. Manzo convincingly demonstrates how the work of writers such as Roxanne Lynn Doty and Arturo Escobar refigures debates about colonialism, race and development such that their intrinsic import to the international is laid bare. Although I find myself in almost complete agreement with Manzo—particularly as regards her point about mainstream IR's neglect of other sites and forms of power—I want in this article to highlight a different, although equally subversive, dimension of doing multidisciplinary work in international relations.