In post–cold war Europe, international institutions associated with an earlier era of U.S. hegemony in the Western hemisphere continue to exist and in some cases are playing a significant role in managing a broad array of challenges. New institutions are also being created to manage new challenges. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) may be the most visible example. On 29 May 1990, forty states and two European organizations signed articles of agreement to establish this new institution, whose declared purpose is “to foster the transition towards open market-oriented economies and to promote private and entrepreneurial initiative in the Central and Eastern European countries committed to and applying the principles of multiparty democracy, pluralism, and market economies.”

Why do states contribute to alliances? Is relative size the principal factor influencing the size of contributions, as many studies suggest, or are perceptions of threat, dependencies on other alliance members, and domestic institutions and policies equally important? These questions hold unusual interest in the wake of the cold war. The end of bipolarity promises more ad hoc coalitions, which will widen opportunities for research on alliance burden-sharing beyond the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). At the same time, because the political fault lines of the cold war have disappeared, there are few accepted political criteria for sharing those security burdens that are perceived collectively.

Despite growing international environmental interdependence, the international system lacks a central authority to foster environmental protection. As a consequence, countries have adopted different policies to reduce international environmental problems. More specifically, costly regulations are not universally supported. In order to explain the success and failure of international environmental regulation, it is necessary to systematically focus on the factors that shape the environmental foreign policy of sovereign states. Since such an approach is missing from the literature, we develop an interest-based explanation of support for international environmental regulation and postulate what impact it should have on state preferences for international environmental regulation. Specifically we apply our framework to two prominent cases of negotiations on atmospheric pollution control, namely, efforts to protect the stratospheric ozone layer and the regulation of transboundary acidification (“acid rain”) in Europe.

The international relations literature regularly embraces sovereignty as the primary constitutive rule of international organization. Theoretical traditions that agree on little else all seem to concur that the defining feature of the modern international system is the division of the world into sovereign states. Despite differences over the role of the state in international affairs, most scholars would accept John Ruggie's definition of sovereignty as “the institutionalization of public authority within mutually exclusive jurisdictional domains.” Regardless of the theoretical approach however, the concept tends to be viewed as a static, fixed concept: a set of ideas that underlies international relations but is not changed along with them. Moreover, the essence of sovereignty is rarely defined; while legitimate authority and territoriality are the key concepts in understanding sovereignty, international relations scholars rarely examine how definitions of populations and territories change through-out history and how this change alters the notion of legitimate authority.

International relations scholars are prone to claiming that the ancient historian of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides, is a realist of one kind or another. Paul Viotti and Mark Kauppi tell us that Thucydides “is usually credited with being the first writer in the realist tradition as well as the founding father of the international relations discipline.” Michael Doyle writes, “To most scholars in international politics, to think like a Realist is to think as the philosophical historian Thucydides first thought.” Kenneth Waltz found in Thucydides an expression of his “third image,” in which the balance of power states find themselves in largely determines their actions. Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye use Thucydides as a representative of their “overall power model” or the “traditional” international relations paradigm. Both classical realists, who begin with an understanding of human nature, and neorealists, who emphasize the international structure, can find support for their theoretical viewpoint in Thucydides.