To stand outside. Is it possible to stand outside the discipline of International Relations to see, for instance, how the cosmopolitan and communitarian divide might be seen in the orient; whether Richard Rorty might advise, if asked to advise, a group of theologians and former statesmen in terms of global ethics, when his sense of pragmatism has always been rendered as there being no single ‘skyhook’ for anything, no universalism?

My first task is to thank the editors for creating a forum in which four authors from very different branches of social and political theory discuss my recent book on the transformation of political community. I am no less indebted to the authors involved for their participation in this debate. I hope this short reply does justice to their insightful comments and searching criticisms.

Randall L. Schweller is most sharply at odds with my position and I begin by responding to his criticisms. I then turn to the comments made by R. B. J. Walker and Jean Bethke Elshtain who subscribe to the critical project, broadly conceived, though not to my version of it. This essay ends with some responses to Norman Geras who shares my commitment to building on the Kantian and Marxian tradition but who has a rather different method of taking it further.

For a quarter of a century, Susan Strange—who died in October 1998—was the most influential figure in British international studies. While she held a number of key academic posts in Britain, Italy and Japan (including a ten-year stint as Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at LSE from 1978–88) and although she was a major figure in the professional associations of both Britain and the US (founder member and first Treasurer of BISA, President of ISA in 1995), it was predominantly as a creative scholar and a forceful personality that she exercised this influence. She was almost single-handedly responsible for creating ‘international political economy’ and turning it into one of the two or three central fields within international studies in Britain, and she defended her creation with such robustness, and made such strong claims on its behalf, that her influence was felt—albeit not always welcomed—in most other areas of the discipline.

At the inception of the twenty-first century—not to mention the next millennium—books on ‘the American Century’ proliferate monthly, if not daily. We now have The American Century Dictionary, The American Century Thesaurus, and even The American Century Cookbook; perhaps the American Century baseball cap or cologne is not far behind. With one or two exceptions, the authors celebrate the unipolar pre-eminence and comprehensive economic advantage that the United States now enjoys. Surveys of public opinion show that most people agree: the American wave appears to be surging just as the year 2000 beckons. Unemployment and inflation are both at twenty-year lows, sending economists (who say you can't get lows for both at the same time) back to the drawing board. The stock market roars past the magic 10,000 mark, and the monster federal budget deficit of a decade ago miraculously metamorphoses into a surplus that may soon reach upwards of $1 trillion. Meanwhile President William Jefferson Clinton, not long after a humiliating impeachment, is rated in 1999 as the best of all postwar presidents in conducting foreign policy (a dizzying ascent from eighth place in 1994), according to a nationwide poll by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. This surprising result might also, of course, bespeak inattention: when asked to name the two or three most important foreign policy issues facing the US, fully 21 per cent of the public couldn't think of one (they answered ‘don't know’), and a mere seven per cent thought foreign policy issues were important to the nation. But who cares, when all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds?