Diplomats, whose historical reputation in earlier times has so often been unsavoury, have more recently been highly regarded, except perhaps in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, for which catastrophe they were held by some to be to blame. The privations of the Cold War and the occasional severe maltreatments endured in unsettled states have from time to time since 1945 made them heroes. The change of status has, particularly since the nineteenth century, been associated with a rising sense of belonging to a recognizable and separate profession, with its own body of knowledge and skill, for which suitable candidates could be trained. This development was slow in gestation and its first signs cannot be reliably identified until the seventeenth century with the appearance of the first clutch of semi-professional manuals. From that time, a potential semantic confusion has existed arising out of the use of the adjective ‘diplomatic’ sometimes to describe the process of international political argument and its eventual success or failure in reaching agreement, and sometimes to describe the administrative mechanism of diplomacy itself. it was this latter aspect of diplomacy, seen separately from the content of policy, which from the mid nineteenth century began to attract a new kind of attention, driven particularly by international lawyers, to the point where it was beginning to seem desirable to attain a general international agreement as to what were the rules of the game.

The theory (or rather the notion) that the international economy functioned more or less effectively for roughly a century down to 1914 because Great Britain provided the ‘public goods’ required for the smooth operation of the ‘liberal international order’ has become a textbook generalization. That notion emerged quite recently and can be traced to Kindleberger's attempt to explain the pronounced cyclical fluctuations experienced by the world economy during the interwar years 1919–39, as well as the severity and duration of the Great Depression from 1929–33 in terms of the American failure to sustain conditions necessary for the financial stability of an interdependent global economy. In Kindleberger's view, Britain, which had acted as a hegemonic power before 1914, lacked the resources to continue with its historic role after the Great War, while the United States (which by 1918 enjoyed a position in the world economy of arguably greater weight and significance than the United Kingdom had ever possessed during the long nineteenth century) commanded neither the knowledge nor the political will to replace Britain as the responsible hegemonic power until after the Second World War.

At the end of the Second World War, Arnold Toynbee sat down to complete the last volume of his magnus opus, A Study of History. What was his main conclusion? That the world had just entered the last phase of Western history—the ‘post-modern’ era, an age that would be marked by anxiety and despair. A Study of History has gone the way of all meta-historical studies. Toynbee himself is now less regarded than Oswald Spengler. But if he is remembered for nothing else, it might be for giving a name—post-modernity—to a concept with which we are still coming to terms.

In this paper I am going to argue a familiar but still controversial thesis about the relation between international ethics and international law, which I would sum up in the following list of propositions:

First, international law is a source as well as an object of ethical judgements. The idea of legality or the rule of law is an ethical one, and international law has ethical significance because it gives institutional expression to the rule of law in international relations.

Secondly, international law—or, more precisely, the idea of the rule of law in international relations—reflects a rule-oriented rather than outcome-oriented ethic of international affairs. By insisting on the priority of rules over outcomes, this ethic rejects consequentialism in all its forms.

R. B. J. Walker recently noted that far from its largely accepted status as an ‘essentially contested’ concept, state sovereignty is instead an essentially uncontested concept. This is a seemingly paradoxical comment for an international relations theorist to make in light of the recent revival of academic scrutiny concerning sovereign statehood. Rather than marking an inattention to recent trends in the sovereignty literature, Walker's statement is a commentary on the way sovereign statehood has been studied. Walker writes of sovereign statehood:

Arnold Toynbee was Director of Studies at Chatham House from 1924 until his retirement in 1954. His fame rests on two monumental projects to establish a global perspective. The Annual Survey each year reviewed the world as a geographical whole, selecting four or five themes for special treatment. It was not an edited volume. The Study of History put Western civilization in the context of a historical survey of all previous civilizations. Quite apart from his considerable journalistic output, the thirty-four volumes of the Survey and the ten volumes of the Study show how seriously Toynbee had taken a schoolmaster's injunction ‘first to see your subject or your problem as a whole’. Toynbee believed that a global perspective in terms of both time and space was of practical use.

E. H. Carr's Nationalism and After, which first appeared in 1945, receives little note in our recent discussions of nationalism. That it seems to have been forgotten is unjust; t i is certainly wrong on my own part. I know that I read this book in my youth, and that I was greatly impressed by it. What however had impressed me at the time was a kind of general characteristic of the book and of the intellectual orientation of its author: the fact that it was clearly about the real world. I was not at all used to that.

The Italian city-state system occupies a special place in the canon of orthodox international relations. For, as Martin Wight says, ‘it was among the Italian powers that feudal relationships first disappeared and the efficient, self-sufficient secular state was evolved, and the Italian powers invented the diplomatic system’. And of course this was not all they invented. In addition to the earliest modern discourse of Realpolitik (‘Machiavelli’, Carr tells us, ‘is the first important political realist’), it is in the Italian city-states that we find the first routine use of double-entry book-keeping, of publicly traded state debt, of marine insurance, of sophisticated instruments of credit (such as the bill of exchange), of commercial and banking firms coordinating branch activity across the continent, and so on. Here, too, the citizen militias gave way earliest to the mercenary armies that would later characterize European Absolutism; and within the town walls, a population given over increasingly to commerce and manufacture elaborated new forms of urban class conflict.

The school of thought known as Realism (with a large R) has been a central focus of debate in international theory. Nevertheless, its content and epistemological status (and therefore the criteria for its evaluation) remain elusive. In part this is due to the variety of contexts and debates within which Realism has been discussed in the field. In the 1930s and 1940s the debate was framed around a Realist-Idealist axis. In the 1970s Realism was contested by liberal analyses of the causes and consequences of an allegedly growing global interdependence. In the 1980s there emerged a three-cornered debate between competing Kuhnian ‘paradigms’, among which Realism dominated. Given that the meaning of Realism has been partly constructed by historically variable theoretical and political issues, its identity has also varied over time. If, however, one chooses to think about Realism outside of these various contexts within which it has been both defined and evaluated, it remains unclear how such diverse thinkers as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Carr, Morgenthau and Kenneth Waltz can coherently be considered as part of a single tradition of thought. Sensitivity to their differences may be a virtue for the historian of ideas, but it runs the risk of undermining the point of the exercise! Despite these problems, which are only partially corrected by distinguishing between types of Realism (notably classical and ‘neo’ or ‘structural’ varieties), most scholars would agree with Alan James that Realism is a school whose members harbour shared assumptions about the primacy of states as international actors, the separation of domestic and international politics, and who describe the latter in terms of anarchy and a concomitant ubiquitous struggle for power and security.

Perpetual peace projects constitute a largely undervalued intellectual tradition that has attracted many polemical arrows. One of the most frequent criticisms levelled at the projects is that their authors too often abandon themselves to utopianism. Yet this tradition has proved to be much more influential than is generally recognized: contemporary international organizations, from the League of Nations to the United Nations, from the European Parliament to the International Court of Justice, were sketched out, if only in embryonic form, in these perpetual peace projects. Yet it is rare to find their authors numbered among the founders of internationalist theory.

One of the central objectives of the field of international political economy (IPE) in the last 20 years has been to introduce insights from the field of international relations into the study of global economic affairs. Although this effort has been largely successful in the study of international trade, much less attention has been focused on the financial sector of the global economy. Seemingly highly technical and arcane, the study of international finance has been left largely to specialists in international economics, financial journalists, and international financial practitioners.

The Financial Agreement signed between the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom on the 6th December 1945 (popularly known as the Washington Loan Agreement, and hereafter referred to as ‘the Agreement’) is widely interpreted as an agreement which imposed fundamental constraints on British external economic policy and is even seen as a benchmark in postwar international relations signalling the subordination of Britain to the level almost of a client state of the United States.

The death of Hirohito on 7 January 1989 provided the Japanese with an opportunity of reappraising the Showa era, as Hirohito's reign is called in the Japanese calendar. This lasted for sixty-two years, which the press described as years of ‘turmoil and drastic changes.’ While the role of the Emperor and, to a greater degree, the role of the military in imperial Japan have been long-running themes for historians, intellectuals, and journalists, Hirohito's death certainly encouraged the publication of a large number of books, including reprints of works about the Pacific War, from semi-official histories, the memoirs of some of the leading decision makers and a series of histories of Japan from 1868 to 1945. Television programmes showed for two full days panel discussions by historians and documentary films of the Showa era—a series of bloody wars in China and eventually with the Americans, the British and the other Allied powers, leading to unconditional surrender and occupation.

International relations is one of the areas of social science which most clearly brings home the tensions involved in the dual relation of inquirer to object of inquiry, as both scientific observer and moral judge, particularly in times of war. As social scientists, we are required to understand and explain our object, as moral beings, we are required to judge or evaluate it. Received wisdom in international relations premises the possibility of the former on its rigid separation from the latter, so that the understanding of, for example, war, is necessarily distinct from the question of the justice or injustice of war. The former is the task of the science of international relations, the latter task is within the province of the moral philosopher or the normative theorist. I will be arguing in this article that this separation of the realms of morality and politics, on which so much social science and moral philosophy is founded, can be traced back to Kant's critical philosophy, and that this separation has problematic consequences for the possibility of both explanation and evaluation in the international sphere. My argument falls into three parts. In the first part, I will put forward a condensed reading of the Kantian critical position and the problems that it poses. In the second and third parts, I will demonstrate how the discussion of international relations both in moral philosophy, and in political theory, is constructed by the Kantian morality/politics dichotomy, and how this limits and distorts both our moralizing and our theorizing. One contention in the third section of the paper will be that even the recent challenges to traditional international political theory, posed by critical theory and post-structuralism, are in danger of slipping back into a reliance on the morality/politics division, in spite of efforts to overcome it.

‘World order’ has become a current catchphrase of political discourse and journalism. ‘Multilateralism’ has become something of a growth sector in academic studies. What current events have brought into prominence, scholarship has an obligation to subject to critical analysis. This article raises some of the questions that should be probed in this analysis.