War is ... an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will

—Clausewitz, On WarCarl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and tr. Michael Howard and Peter Paret, rev. edn (Princeton, NJ 1984), p. 75.

All politicians and national leaders are instinctive adherents of the formulation by Clausewitz cited above, even if few of them have actually read On War. Uninterested in — and often impatient with — military detail, fearful of casualties and expense, they are primarily concerned with the political result which a successful military action will bring, and often find professional realism about the efficacy of military power tiresome. In particular, the concept of military force exercised or threatened to bring about the political collapse of a state, or the destruction of the morale of its people, or even a modification in the policies of its government, is a habitual policy of national leaders, and has been for many years a commonplace in that grey area where the concerns of politicians and military men overlap. In this article, I show by historical example how difficult the use of military power in this way has been, and how unclear it is whether there is any straightforward way in which military force can be calibrated and employed, or threatened, for political ends.

All history is tendentious, and if it were not tendentious nobody would write it.R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, rev. edn, ed. Jan Van Der Dussen (Oxford, 1994), p. 398.

History is therefore never history, but history-for.C. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (La Pensée sauvage) (London, 1972), p. 257. This is reminiscent of Robert Cox's much-quoted statement that '[t]heory is always for someone and for some purpose'. See his 'Social Forces, States and World Order: Beyond International Relations Theory', Millennium, 10 (1981), pp. 126-55, at p. 128.

Introduction

War is a multi-causal phenomenon, not only in the oft-noted sense that a variety of factors contribute to the making of a war, but also in the perhaps less obvious sense that there are multifarious casual paths to war. Some of the more idiographically minded are adamant, therefore, that 'the only investigation of the causes of war that is intellectually respectable is that of the unique origins ... of the particular past wars'.A. Seabury and A. Codevilla, War: Ends and Means (New York, 1989), p. 50; emphasis in original. And even one of the more nomothetically minded has conceded, some dissentign voices notwithstanding, that 'the hope that there are a few necessary conditions that must always be present in order for war to occur is probably not going to be fulfilled'.J. A. Vasquez, The War Puzzle (Cambridge, 1993), p. 48. For a dissenting voice, see B. Bueno de Mesquita, The War Trap (New Haven, CT, 1981). Vasquez, however, goes on to suggest three necessary conditions of 'world wars'. For a brief, critical discussion of Bueno de Mesquita and Vasquez, see my On the Causes of War, pp. 74-9.

International Relations scholars have drawn on history ever since the field first formed in the early twentieth century. They have trawled the beds of the past, far and near, to probe, substantiate, and analogize in the pursuit of theories about what have been taken to be the main pillars of contemporary international life: states and the institutions and systems that form around their interaction. Even if states as we now know them did not exist in a given period, one could still mine insights from the interaction of any relatively autonomous political units, from city-states to tribal bands.See, e.g., Marcus Fischer, ‘Feudal Europe, 800–1300: Communal Discourse and Conflictual Practices’, International Organization, 46 (1992), pp. 427–66; and Adam Watson, The Evolution of International Society (London, 1992).

In the past, the key question about humanitarian intervention has been: if governments violate the basic human rights of their citizens, should other governments intervene forcibly to remedy the situation? Since the end of the Cold War the key question has been: if internal conflicts cause unacceptable human suffering, should the international community develop collective mechanisms for preventing or alleviating it?

Research output on European integration was once likened by Puchala to the story of the blind men and the elephant. Explanations tend to be similar to a ‘blind man’s account’ of the colossal creature, i.e., fragmentary and impressionistic.For the original analogy, see D. Puchala, ‘Of Blind Men, Elephants and International Integration’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 3 (1972), pp. 267–84. We agree with arguments that this analogy is still valid today.In a recent paper, Haaland-Matlary suggests that the current state of research on European integration can still be described with reference to Puchala’s metaphor. See J. Haaland-Matlary, ‘Integration Theory and International Relations Theory: What Does the Elephant Look Like Today and How Should It Be Studied?’, paper submitted to the 2nd ECSA World Conference on ‘Federalism, Subsidiarity and Democracy in the European Union’, Brussels, 5–6 May 1994. In this context, not only have conventional state-centric approaches failed to come to terms with the dynamics and policy-making of a regional integration scheme that has proved dynamic and cumulative; but society-centric approaches such as functionalism/neofunctionalism have also been frustrated by the resilience of the European state within an ongoing process of integration. A recent attempt to transcend these shortcomings, the policy networks approach, has attracted significant interest.For a discussion on the origins and relevance of the policy networks approach, see R. A. W. Rhodes and D. Marsh, ‘Policy Networks in British Politics: A Critique of Existing Approaches’, in D. Marsh and R. A. W. Rhodes (eds.), Policy Networks in British Government (Oxford, 1992), pp. 1–26. For the application of the model to EU policy-making, see J. Peterson, ‘The European Technology Community: Policy Networks in a Supranational Setting’, in Marsh and Rhodes (eds.), Policy Networks, pp. 226–48; and V. Schneider et al., ‘Corporate Actor Networks in European Policy Making: Harmonising Telecommunications Policy’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 4 (1994), pp. 473–98. Although it attempts to examine the integration process and EU policy-making on the basis of a proxy to state–society relations (i.e., policy networks consisting of public and private agents), this strength is overshadowed by two weaknesses. First, its findings are inevitably partial/sectoral and therefore sacrifice the wood for the trees. Second, it tends to provide an essentially descriptive account of how societal actors influence the dynamics of integration and EU policy-making.

It will hardly have escaped even the most myopic observer of international relations that we all have to become familiar with the East Asian region. This new engine of growth in the global economy is transforming the patterns of economic, military and even cultural dimensions of global power. Long gone are the days when a specialist on British foreign policy was considered an international relations authority, while someone who studied Chinese foreign policy was a mere area studies expert.

In his 1996 review essay William Wallace, ‘Truth and Power, Monks and Technocrats: Theory and Practice in International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 22:3 (July 1996), pp. 301-21. William Wallace makes a powerful case for the discipline of International Relations adopting a ‘semi-detached’ relationship to the policy arena. Although Ken Booth has already written a response to that article,Ken Booth, ‘Discussion: A Reply to Wallace’, Review of International Studies, 23:3 (July 1997), pp. 371-7. I want to add my voice to the debate about the appropriate relationship between theory and practice.