Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics is premised on the idea that states form a society without government. In citing that apparent paradox, Bull upholds the position of Hugo Grotius on international reality against the traditions of both Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant. In the Hobbesian or realist tradition, international relations are defined by conflict between states, peace being but “a period of recuperation from the last war and preparation for the next”. In the Kantian or universalist tradition, by contrast, humans seek companionship in transnational relationships, with the horizontal conflict of ideology between liberators and oppressed cutting across the boundaries of states and possessing the potential to sweep the system of states away.

In between these two grand extremes stands the Groatian or internationalist tradition, which argues that sovereigns or states are limited in their conflicts by common rules and institutions, but that they do not thereby lose their character as the principal players in international politics. Between the nightmare of perpetual war in the making, and the dream of perpetual peace, intervenes the imperative of commerce. “The particular international activity which, on the Groatian view, best typifies international activity as a whole is neither war between states, nor horizontal conflict cutting across the boundaries of states, but trade — or, more generally, economic and social intercourse between one country and another.” Grotius' emphasis on the freedom of the seas is an early indication of the importance of trade in the proper functioning of the international system, a leitmotif of Singapore's worldview as well.

Indisputably, Singapore's foreign policy does not correspond to every element of the Groatian tradition that other authors have identified. Martin Wight, for example, emphasizes the primacy of domestic policy in the Groatian paradigm, contrasting it with both the realist approach — which declares the primacy of foreign policy — and the revolutionist promotion of international ideological bonds in Kantianism. Clearly, the primacy of domestic policy over foreign imperatives does not apply to a trade-dependent city-state.