The relevance of history

The title of this essay may sound odd, if not inexplicable. ‘Entering the future backwards’ —the quotation comes from the French poet, Paul Valery and it seems to me to have utility in this context in both a theoretical and practical mode. Theoretical, because the term reminds us that as scholars and teachers we have an obligation when we reflect upon a confused and alarming present to think historically, i.e., to ask ourselves what is unique about our current global circumstances. We can only do this by probing the past to determine whether there are any significant parallels which might illustrate an understanding of the present. But the idea that states and statespersons—apart from scholars—enter the future backwards also has some substance: after all, politicians—understandably—confronted by unexpected cataclysmic change attempt to understand that change in terms of traditional assumptions about the structure, process and philosophical bases of international society. They may do it intuitively, but they do it none the less. And this, one might argue, applies to the scholarly community as well.

Considerable support has emerged over recent years among scholars of international relations for the theory that ‘democracies do not go to war with each other.’ Bruce Russett and Harvey Starr note that over the last two centuries ‘Democracies were very unlikely to fight each other.’ This finding is supported, R. J. Rummel argues, by both ‘Historical studies and empirical social science research’. Some authors hail it as a law—perhaps the only one we have—of international relations. References in the literature suggest that the theory has acquired the status of a received truth. It is ‘the one argument that all the analysts agree on’, concludes Robert Rothstein. ‘Scholars of contemporary international relations are nearing consensus, suggest the Embers and Russett. In the latest, most comprehensive study of the phenomenon, Russett even finds evidence for it in non-industrial societies. Believing the facts of the matter to have been established, theorists have moved on to seek the causal mechanism generating the phenomenon.

The Gulf crisis of 1990–1991 was, by any standards, one of the more significant international crises of the post-1945 epoch. It involved the mobilization of around one million armed men, the diplomatic involvement of much of the international community, and a war that, for all its limited character, was a significant case of inter-state conflict. In what follows I do not want to dwell on the actual course of this war or to examine in detail specific aspects of the history, not least because the broad outline of what happened is already well known. I do, however, want to look at this conflict in broader perspective, and from two vantage points in particular, each pertinent to the study of international relations (IR).

The capacity to transfer wealth abroad had long served wealth-holders as a potent restraint on state encroachment. The creation of movable wealth, Montesqueau wrote in the eighteenth century, meant that ‘rulers have been compelled to govern with greater wisdom than they themselves might have intended’. In the years since then, new technology and increasing interdependence have greatly magnified this capability; one recent book argues that the increased mobility of capital and growing integration of economies means that all governments ‘have lost the vestiges of unchecked economic sovereignty’ and that they ‘must concede to the implied threats of quicksilver capital’ When enormous quantities of wealth travel across the world with a single tap of a computer key, a country risks paying heavy costs if it adopts the wrong policies. So if the nation-state is not yet dead, it appears to be severely weakened in its ability to pursue measures at odds with the wishes of mobile-asset holders

This article takes a concern with gender as the starting point for looking at some of the political processes and structures that have grown up within the European Community. Such an approach reveals new contours to the EC system and throws a fresh light on features hitherto regarded as ‘normal’. Though the focus is on the EC, it is argued that the results of an analysis of this kind have a wider significance. Thus the article is intended as a contribution to the growing engagement between ‘women's politics’ in its broadest sense and the theory and practice of international relations.

International non–governmental organizations and their influence over policy in international relations have become subjects of scholarly attention in recent years. One sector of the international policy-cum-analytic community that has received little attention, however, is that group of nationally based non-profit independent policy research institutes—popularly known as ‘think tanks’. This is a strange omission. Foreign policy think tanks and institutes of international affairs are of interest to the wider debates in international relations for two reasons. On the one hand, they aspire to be participants—if mostly marginal ones—in the foreign policy making process. On the other hand, notwithstanding the tension between these two roles, some contribute directly to international relations as a field of study. Yet a common theme prevails. All foreign policy institutes are founded upon a conviction that ideas are important. Researchers and executives of institutes, as well as their corporate, government and foundation supporters, often believe that their intellectual input into policy debates makes a difference. While this can be the case, we suggest that it is less so than many advocates often assume.

The purpose of this article is to provide a theoretical analysis of the conditions affecting the emergence of a great power concert, in order to gain a better understanding of this phenomenon. In contrast to some recent important theoretical works which underline the role of various systemic factors in the formation of a concert, I will argue that it is unit-level factors that make the difference with regard to great power concerts. The article will also provide historical illustrations for the influence of the explanatory factors on the emergence or non-emergence of concerts. The only historical case of a great power concert to date is the nineteenth-century European Concert. Comparisons will be made between this period and the Cold War, when a great power concert manifestly did not take place.

Like every other part of the world, the Caribbean is having to come to terms with the deep-seated changes in the nature of the world order manifest at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. These changes have set in train a process which is beginning to constitute a reconfiguration of what is meant by and included within the concept of the Caribbean. Conventionally, the Caribbean has been defined by a blend of its geography and history. From a simple geographical viewpoint, it consists of all the islands in the Caribbean Sea, making up a huge archipelago which runs some 2,500 miles from the southern tip of Florida in the north to the coast of Venezuela in the south, facing Central America to the west and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. From a more complex historical viewpoint which emphasizes the common, searing impact of slave-based European imperialism, it also includes Belize on the Central American isthmus and the three ‘Guianas’ on the South American coast: Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. Conceived in this way, the region has widely been said to possess an intellectual coherence that makes it possible to analyse its modern politics and economics within a single framework.

This is according to Protocol. More briefly ‘Dear Anthony meet me at Geneva. Yrs. Cleopatra’

Very few of the figures who held responsibility for the making and direction of British foreign policy in the 1930s did so with much benefit to their subsequent historical reputations. Three of the four men who occupied the post of Foreign Secretary after the General Election of 1931 appeared in the cast list of the ‘Guilty Men’, vilified by the triumvirate of left-wing journalists who wrote under the pseudonym of ‘Cato’ in the dramatic summer of 1940. That vilification has been only partially redeemed by the efforts of later revisionist biographers. Certainly, Sir John Simon, Sir Samuel Hoare and Lord Halifax all left the Foreign Office with their political reputations lower in the public mind than at the time of taking office. The exception to this experience was, of course, the case of Anthony Eden who, at the time of his resignation in February 1938 after more than six years as a member of the National Government, stood, in Churchill's famous words, as the ‘one strong young figure standing up against long, dismal, drawling tides of drift and surrender’. The making of his reputation had begun in the early 1930s when Eden occupied only subordinate office within the administration. Yet an examination of the making of British foreign policy in the years 1931–5 will show that popular perceptions of Eden's position and of an apparently serious rift between him and his departmental superior were somewhat misleading.

So stark and swift was the collapse of the Cold War structure of international relations that few yet pretend to have been expecting it. The magnitude of the changes involved has forced practitioners and theorists alike into radical rethinking. For practitioners, the old certainties have gone and it is unclear what political and security structures will replace those of the Cold War: whether it will be a New World Order or a New World Disorder is still very much open to debate. But for international relations theorists the events have focused attention on the nature of international political structures. What kind of structures can international systems represent if they can be changed so fundamentally and so easily? Neo-realists especially have to rethink a dominant discourse which relies heavily on established regularities and on the stability of the bipolar system. What does it say for Waltz's conception of international structure if it can be so easily transcended by unit factors? If structural theories of international relations can say nothing about an event as momentous as the collapse of the Cold War system, what can they say anything about? Neo-realists could ignore the fact that their theories could not account for transformations of international structure precisely because these theories did explain the regularity and stability of bipolarity. Now that is gone, theorists have to look again at what they mean by a structure. Moreover, the nature of agency has to be reexamined; for neo-realists human agency was essentially irrelevant at the structural level of explanation, yet the collapse of the Cold War system seemed to depend very largely on active and calculating agents. Questions concerning the nature of agency and the meaning of structure and the relationship between them are now more relevant than ever in international relations theory.

The majority of political theories have arisen in opposition to existing theories and the interests they represent. Dependency theory was no different in this regard. It arose as a reaction to ‘modernization’ theory, which linked industrialization to political development and to those theories of political development which themselves represented American interests during the period of the Cold War.1 It arose also in reaction to the economic theory of ‘trickle down’ which characterized the post-war social democratic concern with economic growth and Keynesian economics in industrialized countries and which linked the poor in the industrialized West with the poor in the non-industrialized South. In both, Keynesian based, state led policies of capital investment were expected to provide the locomotive for indigenous development.

This article argues the case for a new approach to the analysis of regions. It highlights how a region is constantly being denned and redefined by its members in a permanent discourse with each member attempting to identify itself at the core of the region. The core is defined in both territorial and functional terms and this definition necessarily involves a manipulation of knowledge and power. This region building approach utilizes the literature on nation-building and the genealogical writings of anti-foundationalists. It does not, however, attempt to place the study of regions in international relations on a new footing or replace what are arguably the two dominant approaches in the existing literature: an ‘inside-out’ approach focusing on cultural integration and an ‘outside-in’ approach focusing on geopolitics. Rather, it aims to extend the ongoing debate by asking questions about how and why the existence of a given region was postulated in the first place, who perpetuates its existence and with what intentions, and how students of regions, by including or excluding certain areas and peoples, help to perpetuate or transform a given region. After sketching the divergent approaches used to analyze regions, the second part of the article identifies how the two dominant approaches have comprehended Northern Europe, and it then uses the region-building approach to criticize and supplement their findings.

Throughout the 1980s and continuing into the 1990s the academic discipline of international relations has witnessed a prolonged period of intense intellectual ferment about the contemporary identity of the field. The significance of this academic controversy is evidenced by the designation that it most fundamentally represents the discipline's third ‘Great Debate’. The importance of the third debate to a field characteristically immune from meta-theoretical self-reflection has been aptly acknowledged by those who recognize the changed nature of philosophical and theoretical inquiry in the post-positivist age. The variety of contending classifications that have been put forth to elucidate the overall character of the third debate is but another indication of the considerable importance that scholars have attached to the outcome of this dispute as we approach the next millennium.

The spread of nuclear weapons outside the Western world has become the most important nuclear issue since the end of the Cold War. By contrast, the debate about Europe's nuclear strategy has subsided. Nuclear collaboration in Western Europe now seems an unlikely prospect and so too does proliferation, despite instability in the former Soviet Union, and occasional speculation about Germany's nuclear appetite. A very different atmosphere prevailed during the Cold War, when the need for a European nuclear force was endlessly debated, without any prospect of this political demand being fulfilled, and, in the late 1950s and 1960s, several European countries appeared to be at the threshold of obtaining nuclear power.