A distinctive feature of the evolution of the modern international system has been the emergence of ideologies so universalist in their assumptions that they have ignored, or worse, denied the cultural and political diversities of mankind—diversities which constitute the ineluctable framework of international politics and which make the conduct of foreign affairs such a complex and difficult craft. One major obstacle, however, to understanding the problems which this development poses for the theory and practice of international relations is the fact that the correct usage of the term ‘ideology’ is very much broader than that which is generally accepted today.

On the face of it, the title of this article must look rather odd, especially to any non-specialist who happens to light upon it. For ‘Realism’ surely connotes enterprises and appraisals of a realistic kind, ones which take full account of the facts and constraints of life. Accordingly, it might well be thought clearly superfluous to assert that such things, already identified as realistic, are indeed so.

Contemporaries who witnessed the fall of the Bastille did not doubt that an event of shocking significance had occurred. On 19 July 1789 the Ambassador of Saxony reported that so important and extraordinary a revolution ‘cannot fail to bring about a considerable change in the political system of France’. The Portuguese Ambassador wrote that if he had not witnessed it himself ‘he would not dare to describe it, for fear the truth should be considered a fable… A king of France in an army coach, surrounded by the bayonets and muskets of a large crowd, finally forced to display on his head the cockade of liberty.’ If it was not immediately clear that this attack on the legitimacy of the ancien régime would also involve an attack on the diplomatic practices and conventions of the European states-system, it quickly became so.

‘Who is the founder of modern international relations theory?’ is a popular question and much ink has been spilt trying to answer it. JL C. Scott championed Vitoria's claim to the title; T. E. Holland, Gentili's; Hedley Bull, Grotius's. Whatever the merits of these and similar claims, they do little to explain the origins and evolution of modern international relations theory. They may describe pieces of the puzzle, but they do not, either individually or collectively, reassemble those pieces to reveal the nature of the whole development. It is the aim of this article to redress, in some small measure, this comparative neglect.

In 1962 I published Power and International Relations, a book in which I undertook to analyse, criticize, and compare balance of power, collective security, and world government, treating these as the three leading theoretical approaches to the management of power in the global arena. Each of these approaches had its band of adulators and advocates who doubtless found my efforts at critical appraisal offensive. For a young American scholar of that era the adoption of an irreverent attitude toward balance of power was particularly problematic, because that approach figured prominently in the prevailing orthodoxy of Political Realism. It would have been safer to assume, rather than to examine, the merits of balance of power. I gave balance of power, like its two competitors, a mixed review.

No assessment of new or recently re-established democracies in Latin America can overlook the threat to these regimes posed by debt service obligations that are often heavier and more durable than the reparations imposed on Weimar Germany. No discussion of the weakening of the liberal international economic order (the trend towards trade protection, chronic instability in currency and financial markets) can disregard the extreme pressures to export, to compress imports, and to conserve foreign exchange that shape the economic policies of the heavily indebted LDC nations. No analysis of the scope and limitations of monetary policy in the developed countries (and especially in the United States) will be complete unless it takes into account the consequences for the major banks of a sovereign debt exposure which remains even now very large in relation to shareholders' equity, and which still frequently appears in bank accounts at an unrealistically optimistic valuation.

In 1976 Robert A. Kann, the well known authority on Habsburg history, wrote a Research Note in World Politics called ‘Alliances versus Ententes’.1 This rescued a distinction which had not been entirely overlooked in the post-war literature of international Relations2 but was certainly in danger of extinction at the hands of a broad, all-purpose concept of ‘alliance’.3 An alliance, Kann claimed, is distinguished by its ‘airtight commitments’; by contrast an entente entails ‘no definite commitments’ and is altogether a looser and more flexible kind of association between states. The entente he alternatively described as a ‘consultation pact’ or ‘flexible agreement’. Kann, however, was not concerned only with conceptual explication. Indeed, his main purpose seems to have been (he was a little vague on this) to advance the argument that although ‘many examples of workable alliances and meaningless ententes can easily be adduced’, the entente is in principle a more efficient device for serving ‘the interests of peace’ than the alliance. This is an argument which can be challenged both on internal as well as historical grounds.

In 1919 when the first tentative steps were taken to establish the study of international relations as an independent discipline, liberals in the United States and Europe believed that the First World War had been caused by European statesmen who had been pursuing policies designed to promote a balance of power. It was gloomily predicted, moreover, that the continuing influence of balance of power thinking would precipitate another world war. One of the major objectives of the nascent discipline was to identify alternative ways of organizing international relations so that the pernicious influence of the balance of power could be permanently eliminated.

‘The characteristic feature of the crisis of the twenty years between 1919 and 1939 was the abrupt descent from the visionary hopes of the first decade to the grim despair of the second, from a Utopia which took little account of reality to a reality from which every element of Utopia was rigorously excluded… The Utopia of 1919 was hollow and without substance,’ So wrote E. H. Carr in the conclusion to his Twenty Years Crisis, which he sent to the press in the middle of July 1939. Fifty years later one cannot but agree with him that the peace settlement of 1919 ‘failed’: Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin wiped it off the map of Europe. But though the Second World War created a very different ‘realistic’ world, some of the ‘Utopian’ ideals of 1919, so brusquely dismissed by Carr, re-surfaced irrepressibly after 1945, and some of their practical applications returned to the agenda of international politics.

David Davies, or Lord Davies as he became in 1932, was a remarkable man who achieved some remarkable things. In the academic sphere he is perhaps best remembered for his founding of the Chair and Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth, but establishing a new university discipline was only part of a larger vision and concern: that of securing, no less, the peace of the world. Lord Davies was not alone in this, nor in the inter-war period did such an endeavour appear as farfetched and quixotic as it does when viewed from the more sceptical and worldly-wise perspective of the late twentieth century. There were many who harboured similar ideas and ideals, but few had the energy, time and money to do what he did in attempting to translate thoughts and hopes into schemes of positive action.

Approximate parity in power capabilities between states creates uncertainty of victory if war were to occur. Whether, therefore, decisional uncertainty inhibits war between states or makes a breaking of the peace likely, is a central question in the host of ‘balance of power’ theories of interstate conflict. Some argue one way; others a different way; and some appear to argue one way, then the other. For along time each found support in armchair reflection—common sense bolstered with diplomatic anecdotes from ancient and modern state systems. Arguments could be made to command diverse historical examples because they rested upon the common assumption that calculations of power, security and conflicts of interest are essentially the same in any system of sovereign states. Anarchy, if you will, orders anachronisms. Now, however, each side can find support in quantitative evidence from far more systematic empirical analyses. The latter analyses are intended to bring some order and discipline to contrary insights by replacing anecdote with data.

1939 was neither one thing nor the other. It was not the last golden year of peace at the end of a period of expansion and confidence, as 1914 had seemed to be, and it was not the start of a dramatic new era, as war had been in 1775 and revolution in 1917. Rather, 1939 was the ante-chamber through which the nations of Europe were slowly ushered into war, and its association with reactive and hesistant policy–making has compounded the sense of determinism. This article will challenge such a perspective in two ways: first it will suggest that the events of 1939 are in themselves rather more significant than is sometimes assumed, and second it will see 1939 and the war which then unstoppably unrolled, as having initiated changes which are still being worked out in the nature and quality of international relationships, as well as major particular developments like the rise of American power and the division of Germany.

In his lively essay on Hans Morgenthau Peter Gellman points out that the school of realism was essentially ‘an association based upon a common repudiation of unfounded hopes for a new world’. But he cautions that ‘beyond this shared purpose, the diversity of theoretical priorities among “Realists” … limits the utility of realism as a word that can either describe or enlighten’. Certainly, on the nature of power, the ends of politics, the role of morality, the national interest, the meaning of theory itself Morgenthau had his own views. On many of these matters Gellman sets us right. We have here, I believe, a fair account of Morgenthau's views and a profound analysis of his theoretical approach.

According to Fred Halliday's ‘Vigilantism in International Relations: Kubálková, Cruickshank and Marxist theory’ (Review of International Studies, Volume 13, Number 3, July 1987) our article entitled ‘The ‘New Cold War’ in ‘critical International Relations studies’’ (Review of International Studies, Volume 12, Number 3, July 1986) along with the rest of our work suffer from serious defects. It appears according to Halliday that we ‘do not understand’, we ‘wouldn't understand’, ‘couldn't understand’, nor could our readers ‘divine from our work’. We are, according to Halliday, ‘simplistic’ and ‘given to overstate’. We are ‘ideological’ and ‘tendentious’, our work is ‘inapposite’ and ‘misleading’. It ‘misrepresents’ and it ‘ignores’, it is ‘disputable’ and ‘contentious’, ‘historically and theoretically inaccurate’, ‘dense and meandering’, ‘spurious’ and ‘ill-intentioned’. We ‘obscure issues with polemic’, our ‘simplifications are underpinned by other simplifications’, we ‘erect on a flimsy base’. ‘More attentive reading’, Halliday feels, would ‘tell us a thing or two’. We are guilty of ‘elisions of argument’, ‘dubious imputation of motive’, and ‘foreshortening of logic’. Others have a ‘historical and theoretical erudition’ that we, Halliday feels, ‘as yet’ cannot ‘muster’. There is more: Halliday finds it necessary to make comparison of our credentials and writing with those of others whose writing he finds less difficult to follow. The credentials of some gain recognition as (somewhat obscurely) ‘second to none’, and the works of some others are judged ‘fine’, ‘able’, and ‘most competent’. He extends his approbation to yet other authors who unlike Kubálková and Cruickshank manage to talk about their subject (Marxism and International Relations) ‘appreciatively’, ‘calmly’, and ‘positively’. In an ad hominem turn Halliday expresses his misgivings as to Kubálková’s scholarship for he again feels she ‘transposes’ (‘with ease’) ‘totalitarian method’ and the ‘conformist disciplining’ of debate ‘from the eastern bloc’ on to Western academia.