Robert McLaren is to be commended for his stimulating response to my article ‘Re-Reading Mitrany’ (Review of International Studies, 10, 2, 1984). He suggests that my discussion constituted the creation of ‘…an interpretive subset of Mitranian functionalism’. I would like to disclaim the attribution and attempt to demonstrate that the set of propositions derived from my discussion are: (a) genuinely attributable to the thrust of Mitrany's original formulation; and (b) sustainable as a prescription for the reduction of interstate violence in the international political system, I would not suggest that any inevitability may be attached to the possibility of a ‘working peace system’, but McLaren's commitment to the impossibility of functionalism invites a response:

In spite of an ever increasing interest in Caribbean affairs the signing, by representatives of seven Commonwealth governments, of the treaty establishing the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) in June 1981 aroused little academic or media comment outside the region. Indeed, in the years which followed, this experiment in collective self reliance continued to be largely ignored by the academic community notwithstanding the incorporation of a number of relatively bold innovations in the structure and scope of the institution which had been created.

The title of this article is the sub-title of Adam Watson's book, and is, I hope, just as helpful in describing the scope of the article as it is in explaining what the book is about. Each of the six books considered here is concerned with communication between states at a variety of levels, with the effectiveness of the dialogue, and with possibilities for the future. I intend first to discuss them briefly and then to consider some of the problems involved in diplomacy, and the extent to which light is thrown on them by these worthy volumes.

In reviewing any set of books, it is not often that one has the pleasure of welcoming an obvious classic. There is one here: John Vasquez's The Power of Power Politics, and much of this review article will be devoted to saying why. The other books fit together with it very well. They comprise two undergraduate textbooks, by Chan and by Russett and Starr; two lively contributions from the redoubtable John Burton; and an interesting collection of papers on the inter-paradigm debate, edited and commented upon in a rather muddled way by Maghroori and Ramberg. In different ways, all the books are concerned with the same two problems. How can we explain international relations? And how should we present to students what we think we know about it?

The problem of strategy in the nuclear age is simple–how to prevent the outbreak of nuclear war. Unfortunately, the solution to the problem is far from simple, Philip Lawrence's belief that students of strategic studies do not appreciate the moral, political and military complexities of the issues is both unfair and unscrupulous. To be sure, strategic studies like most disciplines has its fair share of crazies. But to label such extremists as models of the discipline is akin to blaming all politicians for the horrors-of Hitler or Pol Pot. Students of strategy have shown themselves to be far more sophisticated, and the problems they analyse are more complex, than Lawrence admits. Strategic studies deserves a better press.

Somebody reading these books in rough chronological order of subject matter without previous knowledge of Japan might well end up bemused and sceptical. In the early part of the story we have a militarized and expansionist power, colonizer of Korea and Taiwan, creator of the puppet state of Manchukuo, extending Its control over large tracts of China, competing In military might and especially naval tonnage with the great powers of Europe and North America, then destroying the American fleet at Pearl Harbor and carving out a huge empire stretching from the Gilbert and Ellice islands to the borders of the Soviet Union, from Attu and Kiska in the Aleutians to Java and Sumatra in the far south.

The United States and the Soviet Union have been the subjects of a vast out-pouring of literature during the post-war period. While that literature has generated a number of memorable images, from the two scorpions trapped in a bottle to President Carter as the cowboy who got on his horse and rode off in all directions at once, it has not been so successful in other regards. Most notably, and perhaps inevitably, it has failed to produce any objective, or even consensus, overall view which might provide statesmen and scholars with a reliable guide to the motives and actions of the two super-states. What it has done has been to furnish us with a rich variety of competing perspectives and frameworks from which to choose when trying to understand the workings of the two puzzling giants.

These excellent books mark the reception in American thinking of the doctrine that economic and social rights (Shue, Brown/Maclean, Hoffmann, Vogelgesang, Falk) are at least as important as the civil and political rights of Henkin's ‘International Bill of Rights’. The English contribution to this literature, the collection of documents edited by Brownlie, makes no distinction between sets of rights; and by reprinting work by Prebisch and Figueres, Brownlie promotes the thesis that development and human rights go together. However, it is worth noticing that all these authors ignore the efforts by the majority of countries in the UN General Assembly and the Commission on Human Rights to assert the related concept of rights to development, notably in GA Resolution 32/130 (1977).

Gerald Segal's paper is an attempt at a scathing indictment of my analysis of some of the dilemmas and contradictions inherent in strategic studies. By way of a riposte I shall deal with the general and specific points which Segal makes, but more significantly I will show that he ignores the most fundamental arguments advanced in my paper.