From an international political economy perspective, the international political system of states claiming exclusive authority and the monopoly of legitimate violence within their territorial limits—the so-called Westphalia system—is inseparable from the prevailing capitalist market economy which also first evolved in Europe. Each was a necessary condition for the evolution of the other. To prosper, production and trade required the security provided by the state. To survive, the state required the economic growth, and the credit-creating system of finance, provided by the economic system. But the latter has now created three major problems that the political system, by its very nature, is incapable of solving. First, there is the major failure to manage and control the financial system—witness the Asian turmoil of 1997. Second, there is the failure to act for the protection of the environment. Third, there is a failure to preserve a socio-economic balance between the rich and powerful and the poor and weak. The Westfailure system is thus failing Capitalism, the Planet and global (and national) civil society.

The principle of the self-determination of peoples is enshrined in the United Nations Charter and based on liberal and democratic values. However, the international community has, until recently, interpreted this principle very restrictively, so that it has amounted to little more than the right to be free from European colonialism. The collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia, as well as persistent ethno-nationalist conflicts around the world, have provoked new thinking about the right of self-determination in political theory. This article reviews six theories, and identifies what they have in common and on what they differ. It draws some cautious policy conclusions from this analysis and, in doing so, seeks to clarify the role and limits of theory in international politics.

This article traces the evolution of the political meaning of secession from an action taken by a state within a compact or union, to an action available to a nation within a state. It is argued that this evolution, often forgotten in the customary attention given to national self-determination in international law and international relations theory, is associated not only with the modern emergence of nations and of states, but also with the emerging importance of the United States in international affairs at the turn of the twentieth century. The article puts the phenomenon of secession, currently dominated by attention to the Balkans, in a broader context by examining features of four cases: the American South, the Irish Free State, Bangladesh and Quebec.

The end of the Soviet period in Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans has seen the open development of tensions in the region based on the presence of minority groups in states trying to reassert their individual identity. There has been a flurry of international activity by various organizations to establish minority rights standards and to ensure their implementation. It is the thesis of this article that the idea of minority rights in international law stems originally from the treatment of religious minorities, and subsequently minorities defined in other terms, in this region, and that modern mechanisms to guarantee minority rights can be seen to have developed from the perceived need to make minority rights a matter of international concern rather than one solely for the kin-state. The various mechanisms in use now directly build upon the perceived successes and failures of earlier systems.

This article argues that the modern concept of the state of nature as the defining claim of IR theory was developed in the course of the intercultural/international encounter between the Spaniards and the Amerindian peoples after the discovery of America. The analysis of the Spanish debate at the time demonstrates that the concept of the state of nature was itself the product of a highly charged moral discourse. Its continuous and unreflected use in the discipline of International Relations, where it supposedly describes a precultural, presocial, premoral condition between states, therefore hides the cultural, social and moral meanings the concept carries with it and suppresses a normative discourse of International Relations past and present.

There has been a fashionable tendency in some recent scholarship on European history to look for some of the most important roots of European identity formation in the cultural, social and political interaction with the Islamic world. This article argues that this view is an exaggerated and over-simplistic one. In a long historical survey from the era of the Crusades to the nineteenth century, it seeks to show that the theme in European continental identity was frequently subordinated to political and diplomatic rivalries. While cultural themes in IR are important, they do need to be distinguished from realpolitik in the dynamics of international power politics.

Feminist discourses have changed the vision of the issues and sites of political encounter that are important for study in IR. IPE scholars have also been reframing the discipline by their focus upon other agents besides states, and other structures of power and change, besides those of security and production. But these discourses could also complement each other to mutual benefit. This article suggests ways to do that, by positing a framework of analysis through which IPE, Feminist, International-Legal/Institutional, Peace and other critical discourses could intersect. It suggests that world political economy be conceived of in terms of seven intersecting, dynamic structures, in which some common historical processes unfold. These include bargaining and rivalry, realist self-interest and morally enlightened action. This goes beyond the four structures already recognised in critical IPE discourse, and the dichotomous materialist or idealist assumptions about agent motivations, in mainstream IR. By including Nurture/Reproduction as one of the seven structures, women’s agency, with its possibilities and limits, cannot be missed in the normal business of the discipline.

While it is commonplace to argue that international relations reflects a ‘masculinist’ world of men, this article reverses the argument and asks whether international relations might also discipline men and help produce masculinities. In thinking through this question, the article provides an alternative route to understanding the feminist argument that the ‘gender variable’ cannot simply be added to mainstream analysis. By drawing attention to the epistemological and methodological problems which would arise even with empirically oriented research on the subject, the limitations of mainstream approaches to this hitherto largely neglected area of research are highlighted, and alternatives suggested.

George M. Fredrickson, The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1997)

Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)

Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995)

In The Comparative Imagination, historian George Fredrickson insists that ‘would-be comparativists originally trained as conventional historians need to become interdisciplinary’. He argues that scholars ‘should immerse themselves in the literature on their thematic interest (race relations in my case) produced by sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and even those in the new and controversial field of cultural studies. One does not have to become a theorist to use theory productively’.

Richard G. Lipsey and Patricio Meller (eds.), Western Hemisphere Trade Integration: A Canadian-Latin American Dialogue (London: Macmillan, 1997)

Elizabeth Joyce and Carlos Malamud (eds.), Latin America and the Multinational Drug Trade (London: Macmillan, 1998)

Barry Bosworth, Susan M. Collins and Nora Claudia Lustig (eds.), Coming Together? Mexico-United States Relations (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997)

James F. Rochlin, Redefining Mexican ‘Security’: Society, State and Region under NAFTA (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1997)

Lawrence E. Harrison, The Pan-American Dream: Do Latin America's Cultural Values Discourage True Partnership with the United States and Canada? (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997)

Antonia Darder and Rodolfo D. Torres (eds.), The Latino Studies Reader: Culture, Economy, and Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998)

International studies of the Americas have been dominated for at least the last forty years by an orthodoxy which framed the field of study as constituting the relations of the United States with the governments of something called ‘Latin America and the Caribbean’ (hereafter LAC). Often, as it happens, the Caribbean part of that construction was largely excluded from vision, especially the non-Spanish-speaking parts of that region; Canada was ignored almost as often; and the United States, needless to say, was automatically viewed as central. In power politics terms, this was understandable enough. The US perceived itself as a hegemonic power and associated its credibility in the eyes of both its enemies and allies in all parts of the world with its capacity to maintain and demonstrate control of its own hemispheric community—its ‘backyard’. Yet what we can now see is that the politics of this recent past (defined essentially as the Cold War period) were distinctive, not typical, in the longer history of US interactions with the rest of the Americas.

Since the end of the Cold War, many of America’s closest allies have complained about the rise of American unilateralism, a tendency in Washington to take decisions without much regard for the interests or views of its own allies or the rest of the world. Prime examples of what most offends America’s partners would be the restrictions America has attempted to apply to allied trade with Cuba or Iran, in clear violation of traditionally understood rules of international law.

As the old blues song goes, ‘if it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all’. Same goes for scholarly attention. So I am grateful to Professor Gray for his article.

Despite his frequent use of adjectives about my work which suggest a desperation to inoculate future generations of scholars against it, we actually agree on a great deal. We share a basic ontological understanding of international relations and security studies in particular. We agree that strategic cultures—which admittedly we do define very differently—are none the less critical explanations for the way different groups of people think and act when it comes to the use of force. We also agree that these strategic cultures are not epiphenomena of unitary states acting under anarchy and constrained by material power structures, but are independent of these structures, influenced perhaps by both domestic and international normative structures (though I am not sure Professor Gray accepts this latter possibility for reasons I will return to in a moment). I think we also agree that rigour is better than confusion. Indeed, Professor Gray notes that ‘from the perspective of methodological rigour, it is hard to fault’ my work.

To stand outside. Is it possible to stand outside the discipline of International Relations to see, for instance, how the cosmopolitan and communitarian divide might be seen in the orient; whether Richard Rorty might advise, if asked to advise, a group of theologians and former statesmen in terms of global ethics, when his sense of pragmatism has always been rendered as there being no single ‘skyhook’ for anything, no universalism?

For a quarter of a century, Susan Strange—who died in October 1998—was the most influential figure in British international studies. While she held a number of key academic posts in Britain, Italy and Japan (including a ten-year stint as Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at LSE from 1978–88) and although she was a major figure in the professional associations of both Britain and the US (founder member and first Treasurer of BISA, President of ISA in 1995), it was predominantly as a creative scholar and a forceful personality that she exercised this influence. She was almost single-handedly responsible for creating ‘international political economy’ and turning it into one of the two or three central fields within international studies in Britain, and she defended her creation with such robustness, and made such strong claims on its behalf, that her influence was felt—albeit not always welcomed—in most other areas of the discipline.