That nations dwell in eternal anarchy has been one of the defining assumptions that have shaped the socialization of several generations of students of international relations. While political struggle inside the state takes place in the shadow of the law (conceived as the sovereign's command), this mediation was thought to be absent in the international arena. However, the demise of the Soviet Union and the increase in the volume, scope and speed of transnational interactions challenged this traditional assumption of anarchy and nonco-operation. Departing from the presumption that war was now a less plausible defining characteristic of the international arena, and the subsequent subversion of the foundational distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ arenas, it was naturally tempting to conceive of these fundamental changes as constituting a transformation of the international system into a global or ‘world society’. This chapter will consider to what extent this argument is valid.

Several strands of argument converged to produce this new ‘synthesis’ of global change. First, so successful was realism's imposition of its own conception of the world system that, when the premises of anarchy were called into question, it seemed that no other vocabulary was as readily available as that of a ‘society’. Second, the failure of socialism seemed to prove the impossibility of an alternative to the liberal political project and thus suggested the ‘end of history’. Third, the ‘sociological’ vocabulary also pointed to a way out of the conceptual impasses of earlier debates, in which states were conceived of not only as rigid billiard balls but also as ‘containers’ for their respective societies.