Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) is usually thought of as a playwright: author of such works as St. Joan and Major Barbara; winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. What is often overlooked is that he first achieved prominence in public life as a leading member of the Fabian Society, advocating a piecemeal, reformist, evolutionary brand of socialism which he considered more appropriate to the British political tradition than revolutionary Marxism. The Fabian Society—largely through the work of Sidney and Beatrice Webb—is often credited with having played a crucial part in the formation of the welfare state, and more generally it is looked upon as the major source of new ideas and policies in the British Labour Movement. Shaw served on the Society's executive committee for over two decades, acting as resident propagandist and original thinker, often tackling neglected themes. It was in this way that he developed an interest in international relations. He eventually resigned from the executive in 1911, seeking inter alia greater freedom to express his views on world events. His thoughts on the Great War, therefore, cannot be read as statements of Fabian doctrine in any strict sense. Nevertheless, his association with the Society remained close enough for those thoughts to be seen as belonging to the broadly Fabian school of social democracy. This, in essence, was the intellectual context within which he operated.

The most striking feature of the British Cabinet's decision for war on 2 August 1914 is the absence of any attempt by the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, to convince his colleagues of the necessity for intervention on the grounds of British interests. According to the fullest contemporary source, the diary kept by L A. Pease, President of the Board of Education, Grey simply presented the Cabinet with the alternative of his resignation. In so doing, he made the decision a matter of politics rather than policy. At no stage did he place before his colleagues the considerations that had convinced him of the necessity for the step on which he insisted. Although Britain's treaty obligations were examined on 29 July, British interests, as such, were not spelled out. Even on the morning of 3 August, by which time the decision had effectively been taken, Grey was urged merely to ‘allude’ to unspecified British interests in his forthcoming meeting with the French ambassador.

In the study of International Relations few terms cause more confusion than sovereignty. As all the territorial participants in international life proclaim themselves to be sovereign it is a difficult term to get away from. But it also seems enormously difficult to get hold of, at least in any way which combines clarity and helpfulness. The matter is not assisted by the common suspicion that sovereignty has something to do with law, for law is widely taken to be an element to which any level-headed student of the international scene will give little time. On the other hand, sovereignty is also often supposed to have something to do with power—and that is a factor which, it is generally agreed, commands attention. However, in addition sovereignty has at least the smell, if not the clear suggestion, of absolute power—and that surely is something which is hardly applicable to any of the world's states, not even the super-states. All that can be said with confidence about them is that they are stronger than the others—but in that case what price the equality which sovereign states profess on the ground that they are all sovereign?

Some time before the middle of this century Europe ceased to be a self-regulating political system. This is much the most upsetting event in European history for centuries. It means that Europeans now look beyond their continental confines, not if and when and where they wish, but because they must. During the past 500 years or so—from the emergence of strong centralized French and English monarchies to the disruption of the polyglot empires of eastern Europe by self-determination—Europe has been increasingly articulated into secular sovereign states constructed and fuelled by national languages and national passions. These states have existed in a condition of conflict with one another. But their conflicts, however intense, were never perpetual, so that conflict itself became systematized and found its most characteristic expression in two things: in changes of alliance for the purpose of preserving the multinational system and in war. Europe was a political system which operated through alliances, reversals of alliances and war; and whenever one state threatened to become powerful enough to destroy or atrophy the system, there was always at hand an alliance of other states capable of checking its advance and ensuring the system's essential fluidity. There was, in consequence, no need to go outside the system in order to preserve it.

During 1982 the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) was conspicuous largely for a lack of any effective role. Paradoxically, however, Fiji had earned a measure of distinction for its contribution to international peace through UNIFIL, and was in consequence asked to participate in the Sinai peacekeeping force in 1982. At the same time, Fiji's first experience in international peacekeeping also exposed it to many of the constraints and frustrations of such ventures. As has been shown elsewhere, UNIFIL's experiences are in keeping with the history of UN peacekeeping. The argument in this paper is that the experiences of the Fijian component of UNIFIL are equally at one with the experiences of national contingents generally in UN forces; that in certain areas the Fijian involvement displays unique features that are partly a function of its ministate characteristics; and that Fiji's contributions to peacekeeping is an effective answer to old doubts about UN membership for ministates.

The history of recent efforts to establish a science of international politics may be usefully viewed as elaborate glosses on David Hume's powerful philosophical programme for resolving, reconciling or dissolving a variety of perspicuous dualities: the external and the internal, mind and body, reason and experience. Philosophers and historians of ideas still dispute the extent to which Hume succeeded but if one is to judge by the two leading ‘scientific’ research programmes1 for international politics—inductivism and naive falsificationism —these dualities are as unresolved as ever, with fatal consequences for the thesis of the unity of the sciences. For the failure to reconcile or otherwise dissolve such divisions shows that, on the Humean view, there is at least one difference between the physical (or natural) sciences. and the moral (or social) sciences: namely, that while the latter bear on the internal and external, the former are concerned primarily with the external. How much this difference matters and how the issue is avoided by the proponents of inductivism and naïve falsification is the subject matter of this paper.

David Mltrany's functionalism has provided an inspired, if widely criticized approach to the study of international organization,1 Although originally conceived without regional restrictions in its application, it has been interpreted as a prescription for European integration hence the development of the formerly pervasive but now largely discredited neo-functionalist school.2 The contention that will be advanced here is that Mitrany's work may still usefully guide our analysis of international organization. This is especially so with regard to understanding the stubbornness of sovereignty, and the complexity of decision making in a new generation of multilateral conference diplomacy, as typified by UNCLOS and UNCTAD. These forums are likely to feature more prominently in coming attempts to develop codes and rules of conduct in fields of global conflict and co-operation such as technology transfer, economic development, basic health and other ‘common heritage’ resource management issues. The grounds for promoting Mitrany's approach are that a close reading of his principal works reveals a more subtle, conservative and realistic appreciation of sovereignty than many critics have permitted, and furthermore, within this more cautious appraisal there lie a number of procedural pointers to the constructive, if undemonstrative circumvention of the restriction of sovereignty.

Burke did not count himself a theorist. Metaphysics, abstraction, was stuff for professor So If the speculation of the classroom was brought too close to the life of politics the result was unsettling, dangerous, revolutionary. Politicians should be people of practice not theory, attending to circumstance before principle, working within a tradition not innovating, reforming before countenancing revolution. They should be concerned with the whole of human nature and not just with human reason, with feeling as well as with thought.

Two consequences of the internationalization of economic activities that has taken place since the early 1960s have been that, within the international trading system, participant states have become more vulnerable and sensitized to the economic conditions obtaining in other countries; and economic actors have, in general, become more transnational and universal in their orientation and more aware of worldwide business possibilities. Consequently, visible trade flows have been progressively transformed through global raw material sourcing, production location and marketing; and invisible trade has been restructured by global deposit sourcing and lender servicing. Both types of international exchange required extensive external production networks which had to be newly created by international capital transfers and institutional migration. Despite the outward manifestation of these infrastructures, international exchange tensions nevertheless remained because of ‘the continued existence of still mainly nationally based political systems’ and the conflicts of interest and uncertainties created by the asserted extra-territorial orientation of national tax and legal system's, These problems were largely untouched by the harmonization and liberalization processes attempted by industrial nations under the aegis of GATT and other international institutions. As a result, the transnational operations of multinational companies have often had to be channelled to parts of the world where their activities are least frustrated by obstructive interventionist policy in order to secure particular objectives.

The founding fathers of Marxism provided an analysis of the contradictions of capitalist society and an indication of the means by which its revolutionary overthrow might be accomplished. They had less to say, however, about the colonial world into which the capitalist society of their day was rapidly expanding, and in their scattered writings on the subject they leave the clear impression that they shared the views of most of their socialist contemporaries that the colonies were the objects rather than the subjects of history, and that their destiny would be determined by the success or failure of the revolutionary movement in the major metropolitan countrieSo1 Marx and Engels were generally unsentimental about the nature of imperialist rule in the colonies, and they drew attention to the plunder, corruption and destruction by which it had usually been accompanied. They had little sympathy, however, for the ‘undignified, stagnatory and vegetative life’ in which most of the colonial peoples were believed to dwell, and they followed Hegel and much of Victorian social theory in regarding its displacement by the way of life of the major metropolitan countries as both inevitable and in accordance with a general scheme of social evolution by which ‘all, even the most barbarian nations are drawn into civilisation’, as the Communist Manifesto put it.

In the early hours of 18 September 1939, before crossing the Roumanian frontier, the Polish foreign minister sent the following instructions to Poland's ambassadors in London and Paris.

The military situation in Poland in the current conflict is such as to necessitate the transfer abroad of the seat of the President of the Republic and of the Government. The Polish Government has the honour to inform the Government of His Britannic majesty that it is today contacting the Government of the French Republic concerning the extraterritorial exercise of its powers on French soil.

The systematic critique of scientific approaches to international politics began with Stanley Hoffmann's provocative 1960 essay, climaxed with Hedley Bull's popular piece in World Politics six years later and breathed its last gasp with Oran Young's attack on Russett's International Regions and The International System in 1969, Since then, the traditionalists have chosen to ignore the behavioralists.

Scientific research, because it requires the explicit, rigorous specification of hypotheses and the equally rigorous, explicit empirical investigation of those hypotheses, facilitates and invites penetrating examination, empirical replication, and intelligent criticism. Yuen Foong Khong's (hereafter Khong) commentary on The War Trap is an able, sincere effort at exactly such examination, replication, and criticism. He has raised important questions, the response to which may help to further communication and understanding between what Khong calls the behavioralists and the traditionalists. Indeed, if Khong's essay succeeds in re-establishing serious communication and cross fertilization between the ‘traditionalists’ and the ‘behavioralists’ he will have made an important, and hopefully lasting, contribution.

While economic growth is not a sufficient condition for the elimination of hunger and abject poverty, it certainly looks like a necessary condition, particularly in the poorest countries (Ahluwalia, Carter and Chenery? 1979), So economic growth is desirable, and desired, in the third world (irrespective of one's evaluation of the effects of growth in industrialized, high income countries). As well as pressures for growth? there are internal and external pressures for the democratization of the political systems of less developed countries. Yet some authors claim that democracy and economic growth are incompatible. A strong version of the incompatibility thesis is maintained by the sociologist Andreski (1969: 266): ‘Democracy is compatible with rapid economic growth only in countries which already have enough resources to make heavy investment a relatively painless process. There is no case of a democratic government breaking through a vicious circle of misery and parasitism.’ Though qualifying the incompatibility proposition and restricting it to ‘later phases of development’, Huntington and Nelson (1976: 42–3) similarly argue that ‘… higher levels of political participation tend to produce lower rates of economic growth’. While political participation is not identical to democracy, the latter obviously permits the former. If democracy and growth were indeed incompatible in LDCs (or some subgroup thereof), then a major problem of choice has to be faced.

The central but ambiguous position of the state in international relations retains its fascination for theorists of the subject. Is the state a permanent feature of the political landscape or a transitional stage in the evolution of political life? Does it protect or endanger basic human values? What parallels are there between politics within states and politics between states? What forms of union can states embark upon without sacrificing their identity as states? It is to such questions as these that the three books under review address themselves.

Of the family of war conferences the Atlantic meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill in August 1941, has been a neglected relation. It has been covered in general histories but only one substantial account of the conference has appeared to date. This state of affairs is regrettable given the intrinsic importance of some of the issues which were raised at Argentia and the fact that T. A. Wilson's account, The First Summit, was written before some of the official records were released. However, though there is a need for an overall review of the conference, this paper has the modest goal of reconsidering the economic questions which resulted in point four of the Atlantic Charter. The reasons for a new account of the genesis and formulation of the main economic provisions of the joint declaration are three-fold. First, the context of economic discussions in which the conference took place has never been adequately described; consequently the reasoning behind certain decisions, as well as some of the nuances of the talks, have been misunderstood. Secondly, the injudicious character of Welles' proposals for point four and the nature of America's diplomatic defeat at the hands of the British have never been properly explained. Finally, it has not previously been detected that Churchill evaded full consultation with his Cabinet and ignored some of their advice which, ironically, resulted in a less serious set-back for American economic goals than would otherwise have been the case.