For reasons that need no explaining, 1989 is surely the most memorable of the last 50 years of international relations. 1989 was also a signal year for International Relations as a field of study, thanks to three books expressly written to challenge the way scholars think about their subject. Two of these books— Friedrich Kratochwil's Rules, Norms, and Decisions and my own World of Our Making— are now reckoned as founding texts for the contructivist movement in International Relations, along with two papers of Alexander Wendt’s. The third book is International/Intertextual Relations, which James Der Derian and Michael Shapiro edited, and to which they and a dozen other scholars contributed.

While all three books reflect philosophical and theoretical developments that had originated in Europe and already unsettled disciplines from literature to sociology, International/Intertextual Relations is the most open in its challenge to prevailing ways in International Relations. Its authors drew on a pantheon of variously provocative French thinkers— Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Jean-François Lyotard— with extraordinary fluency and not just a little flamboyance. Although Nietzsche looms in the background, the conspicuous absence of such fashionable figures as C. S. Peirce, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Thomas Kuhn, not to mention a long century of post-Kantian philosophy, suggests an unusually tight focus for an edited volume, though hardly a uniform one. While the constructivist texts from 1989 ranged more widely, none of these three books give an adequate sense of the impact of feminist scholarship at the time. Had Cynthia Enloe's Bananas, Beaches and Bases appeared a year [or even a few weeks] earlier, it would have contributed even more to the sense that 1989 was a banner year for the field. I should also note that 1989 is the year Francis Fukuyama published ‘The end of history?’— a piece undoubtedly read by more students of international relations than any book published that year.

Of the contributors to International/Intertextual Relations, nearly half are political theorists (William Connolly, Jean Elshtain, Timothy Luke, Diane Rubenstein, Michael Shapiro, R. B. J. Walker), no doubt reflecting one source of contagion in the hermetic community of scholars identifying with International Relations as a field. Alfred Fortin seems to have studied with Shapiro but took his doctoral degree in health politics.