In the chronicle of relations between distinct groups and polities, conquest and empire-building figure prominently. History is in significant part a story of the rule of one “people” over others. Empires, not nation-states, have been the predominant forms of political organization throughout recorded history. Some empires, as typified in the Mongol sweep into Eastern Europe and the fertile crescent areas in the twelfth to fourteenth century, were based on systematic violence, plunder, destruction, and depredation. Such polities seldom endured beyond the lives of the great conquerors (e.g., Tamerlane, Ghengis Khan). Others, like the Roman Empire, while created primarily by force and subjugation, eventually developed legal systems that gave them a modicum of longevity and legitimacy. The colonization of the “New World” starting in the early sixteenth century resembled – at least for those who were conquered – more the Mongolian pattern. The early European colonial ventures in the New World amounted to a system of massacres, ethnic cleansing, forced labor, and coerced religious conversion. Though it had some legal underpinnings, it was more a process of conquest than of institution-building. Our concern is not with this early stage of European expansion, but with the creation of the modern empires that began in the early 1880s. This phase had all of the characteristics of international institutions as we have defined them.

Modern colonialism as an international institution

Here was a form of expansion in many ways distinct from its fifteenth- to eighteenth-century European predecessors and scarcely resembling most historical conquests.

Societies and smaller groups throughout history have formed organizations that provide and sustain them with security, access to resources, social rules, and means of continuity. Frequently they also devised, embodied, or sought more ephemeral objectives or qualities such as identity, glory, renown, and reputation. The institutional forms they have taken have varied greatly. Even terms we commonly use to designate polities – tribes, clans, empires, principalities, city-states, protectorates, sultanates, or duchies – would not begin to cover the actual diversity of political forms.

In contemporary parlance, all these actors are “polities” (Ferguson and Mansbach, 1996) in the sense that they have distinct identities, authority structures, and leadership. Such types of polities have probably numbered in the hundreds of thousands throughout recorded history. But most did not survive their leaders' lives, while a few have had a continuous organized history, in the case of the Roman church, of almost two millennia.

Our concern, however, is with states, the only contemporary political organizations that enjoy a unique legal status – sovereignty – and that, unlike other types of polities, have created and modified enduring public international institutions. They are thereby the foundational actors of international relations. Other types of polities may ultimately become states but until they have transformed themselves into public bodies – moral agents representing some sort of community – they do not have the legal standing of states.

When a layperson asks scholars and theorists of international relations “What do you do?” the answer is more likely to puzzle than to enlighten. The idea that there are big pictures to describe, generalizations to establish, and essential characteristics to discover, explain, and debate eludes those who are more likely to see the field as one involving expertise on the latest world crisis. Even media people, when telephoning to ask an academic if they will comment on the new crisis in Bhutan or Tuvalu, are not easily put off by the answer that the “expert” knows nothing more about those places than is already available in a reasonably competent newspaper. An expert in International Relations is supposed to know everything about everywhere in the immediate sense. Theory simply will not do because it does not explain or provide adequate background to a series of events in location a at time b. Few laypeople are interested in questions about relative gains, international norms, the construction and change of identities, prisoner's dilemmas, agent–structure debates, and the like.

However, when the question of change comes into the discussion, everyone has opinions and immediately the conversation between the layperson and the theorist becomes engaged. One conversation might go as follows:

We have now examined eight international institutions. More would be possible, but they are not necessary to allow us to make some judgments about one important marker of change in international politics. This concluding chapter has five purposes:

1. to map, collectively, the pattern of institutional change in international politics over the past three centuries, approximately;

2. to evaluate the types of changes in these institutions;

3. to offer judgments about the degree of institutionalization in each domain of international politics;

4. to outline some of the sources or explanations of change; and

5. to explore the “so what” question: do institutions matter?

Table 10.1 summarizes the discussion of the foundational and process institutions.

All four foundational institutions were new in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. They had no precedents in European or world history. All have changed in the past three centuries, but the main type, with the exception of territoriality, has been complexity, not transformation or obsolescence. The state, for example, has taken on many new tasks and functions, developed ever-expanding sources of revenue, and instilled loyalties that were unknown or only nascent three hundred years ago. Yet, its late seventeenth-century antecedents are clearly recognizable as states. They had many of the same functions, although more limited in scope, and they had institutional continuity not typical of earlier types of polities. Similar comments could be made for sovereignty and international law.

War has been a common form of interaction between independent polities since they first arose in the mists of history. There is evidence of organized warfare more than 10,000 years ago in the ruins of Jericho. The recorded history of the great early empires, including Assyria, Egypt, Chou China, Mongolia, and Persia is in large part a chronicle of organized violence. As Quincy Wright (1965) notes, the polities of the Mediterranean basin and Europe between 700 BC and the mid-seventeenth century AD sustained themselves in large part through subduing neighbors, defending themselves against “barbarians,” and protecting their trade routes through armed conquests and more defensive measures. Where they failed in these tasks, they often collapsed or were conquered by their competitors. The polities of China during the “Warring States” period (403–221 BC) were similarly “fighting states” constantly faced with security dilemmas and the backdrop of war in their daily lives. As one illustration, Duke Huan of the state of Ch'in went to war twenty-eight times in a reign lasting forty-three years (Li, 1965: 50). Although punctuated by short periods of peace, the Chinese polities during the “Warring States” period and the Greek city-states between 492 and 404 BC were in almost constant multilateral wars. Bilateral armed contests of some kind were taking place within these domains on an annual basis.

A general portrait of trade in Europe and the rest of the world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries combines the largely local and regional, land-based economies of continental Europe with a rapidly growing, conflict-ridden and competitive sea trade that centered on the Baltic, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the seas of the East Indies. Most economic activity in Europe circulated around towns and villages, where production and exchange were largely local. The average person was hardly touched by economic activities that had a longer reach, for this was mostly trade in luxuries and only on occasion in staples such as wheat or hides. However, with improvements in shipping technology and the great explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, long-distance seaborne trade grew rapidly. By the seventeenth century, trade routes around the world were well established and many of the developing monarchical states had become involved in the game of establishing settler colonies in the New World and trade outposts (factories) on the shores of Africa, India, and the East Indies.

While the volume of trade increased rapidly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it still remained a small fraction of any polity's total economic activity. One estimate is that it comprised only 1–2 percent of world GDP (Held et al., 1999: 154). There is thus a paradox: while international trade, though rapidly expanding, constituted only a small portion of a state's economic activity, it was a major source of conflict, competition, and war.

The records of historical prototypes of diplomacy are rich with examples, but little systematic analysis. Examples include the delegations sent by various Chinese states to each other prior to the imperial unification of China in 221 BC, the evidence in the al-Armana tablets sent between Egyptian pharaohs (Cohen and Westbrook, 2000), the Babylonians, and other polities that occupied the Middle East in the second millennium BC, the more highly articulated diplomatic practices of the Greek city-states, and the regularized procedures for foreign contacts in the Byzantine Empire (cf., Holsti, 1967: ch. 2; Hamilton and Langhorne, 1995; Ferguson and Mansbach, 1996). The practices varied according to local customs and changed over time, but there were rough similarities across cultures. These included the sending of emissaries of high rank; considerable ceremony attending the arrival and departure of delegations; great concerns over the rank and status of sending and receiving parties; and various forms of diplomatic immunity. The last constituted a type of universal norm across cultures but in ancient polities, the norm was frequently violated. We know of numerous instances where messengers were put in captivity or executed by their ostensible hosts.

Early diplomatic prototypes lacked the essential ingredients of an international institution. There were fairly regularized practices within and between cultures and diverse polities, but they lacked a set of defining ideas that gave the practices a distinct and commonly understood meaning.

One essential attribute of our definition of statehood is fixed territoriality. Like the state itself, this is a relatively new phenomenon, one that is historically unique. The lineal, surveyed borders that separate contemporary states are a practice going back only to the seventeenth century. Territorial limits of most historical empires, traditional kingdoms, city-states, and tribal and lineage groups were mostly floating zones of indeterminate extent. Traditional Chinese conceptions of territory, for example, bore little relation to those that underlie the doctrines of contemporary international law. For them, territory was defined primarily in cultural terms. The Chinese world was one of hierarchy, with the Han civilization in the middle and the barbarians on the peripheries. Since there was constant intermingling and movement of populations, the exact location between centers and peripheries could not be established in lineal terms. Malcolm Anderson (1996: 88) explains:

China was typical of pre-modern polities in the sense that its rulers defined themselves primarily in terms of centers rather than peripheries.

In what ways is sovereignty an international institution? Many would argue that it is such a nebulous and contested concept that it has no fixed or essential meaning or application in international life. But if we think of sovereignty as a set of practices, ideas, beliefs, and norms, its significance as a foundational international institution becomes clearer. Without it, the life of political communities, even if organized into states, would be vitally different. Consider some of the common individual and state practices that we take for granted, yet are the consequences of sovereignty. At the individual level, when a traveler commits a crime in a foreign country, he or she is immediately subject to the host's laws. He or she cannot appeal to some other authority for protection or release. That same traveler does not stop to ponder why a passport is necessary to enter another country. It is just done, and that is the way things are. But passports are a creation of the twentieth century (although they existed shortly during the French Revolution as well). They are an expression of sovereignty in the sense that they identify the citizenship of the bearer, which means that he or she has differential rights based on location. The passport does not confer anyone's right to enter a country. The host can exclude anyone it wants. So we travel abroad because governments agree to let us enter. Consent is a critical fact of sovereignty.

The summer of 2001 in North America was one of unusual political torpor. In Canada, the daily headlines reported on an uncivil war within the opposition party. In the United States, the media had little to report other than a peccadillo involving a Congressman of little note. The presidency was slipping into a mediocrity that even the most ardent critics of George W. Bush could not have predicted at the time of the inauguration.

The attacks of September 11 changed all of this. Symbolic of the humid dog days of summer, the American president on that day was reading a book to a school class, yet another photo opportunity to show his devotion to “compassionate conservatism.” Several days later, the president delivered a speech to the joint houses of Congress, inspiring Americans and many others around the world to mobilize in a war against terrorism. The most common comment in speeches at the highest level and among ordinary folks was that the “world will never be the same,” “everything is now changed,” “we live in a new world,” and “forget everything that has happened before; we are now in a new era.”

This type of response is typical of armchair analysts following major world events. We would find numerous parallels in the discourses surrounding the end of the two World Wars of the twentieth century.