People who are seriously concerned with international relations—whether as scholars, officials, or interested citizens—generally purport to prefer that states should act in accordance with principle in their dealings with each other. This preference is usually stated wistfully, or even plaintively, as an ideal that is unfortunately far from any prospect of realization. The proposition is that states do not, but certainly should, consistently engage in principled behaviour in the international setting.

To speak of the ‘future’ of strategy is to reveal a deep tension in the way we commonly think about the subject. On the one hand we are confronted by revolutionary changes in the geo-political landscape. The transformation of Europe, the fragmentation of the Soviet Union, and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, for example, encourage the belief that the Cold War—a term which has been almost synonymous with-strategy for nearly half a century—is now an historical artifact. These events, analyzed so intensively by leaders and commentators, open up significant questions about the future of strategy.

The relationship between militarization and state formation in the West has been the subject of considerable scholarship,1 and there is thus some temptation to simply transfer concepts and arguments from that domain to the study of Third World militarization. Yet state formation dynamics in the two contexts were and are quite different, with important implications for the nature of national security threats. In the West threats tended to be external, rooted in anarchical competition between relatively equal states possessing domestic legitimacy, which meant that militarization could be understood primarily in terms of the political realist focus on security dilemmas and action-reaction dynamics. In contrast, Third World state formation has occurred in a largely dependent context in which relative external security contrasts with domestic insecurity.2 In this case the external environment, rather than being a source of threat, becomes a source of opportunities for elites lacking domestic legitimacy to gain support against internal security threats. In short, national security problems look very different in the First and Third Worlds because of different trajectories and contexts of state formation. Very different mechanisms may therefore account for militarization, suggesting the need for concepts and theories different than those that dominate security studies in the West.

Our social circumstance is fundamentally changing, so we are told on this historical morning after the Cold War. What was formerly called the ‘Second World' has suddenly disappeared; apartheid appears to be in final retreat; class structures and gender relations are said to be undergoing substantial shifts; there are increased hopes for disarmament and a wider demilitarization of international life; existing state boundaries and to some extent also the nature of the state itself are deeply in question. At the same time, we of the late twentieth century are allegedly experiencing a world-wide upsurge in religious revivalism, an unprecedented global ecological awareness, a shift from states to markets and from globalism towards regionalism in the organization of the world economy, cascading democratization across the continents and so on. There is widespread talk of ‘a new world order’, of the emergence of what is variously called ‘post-industrial’, ‘post-capitalist’ or ‘post-modern’ society, and of ‘the end of history’. Symptomatic, too, of the pervasively felt sense of transition are insistent calls for new theories, new language, new politics, new institutions and new norms that will be equal to the challenges posed by this purportedly revolutionary world situation. True, sceptics might well argue that dynamism and upheaval of the kind that we are witnessing today constitute defining features of modern social life, and that our generation is but the latest in a long string t o succumb to a secular millenarian delusion that it has been granted the historical privilege of living through the dawn of a new epoch. However, whether they adopt a prophetic or an agnostic stance on the matter, most commentators would agree that the question of social change sits high on the agenda of current world affairs.

The implosion of the Soviet idea over the course of 1989 to 1991, culminating in the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, promises to reshape the region along lines of historic ethnic, and even religious division. That development requires those interested in American-Russian relations to take a more historical approach to analysis than might have been the case hitherto. The past is, of course, not necessarily a guide to events in the present or future. None the less, current debates about how deeply the United States should be involved in Russian affairs should benefit from better familiarity with the historical record, in particular of that period before the relationship between the two countries suffered from mutual ideological and geopolitical animus. It is sometimes forgotten, or else too briefly remembered, that relations between the United States and Russia extend back to the dawn of an independent American diplomacy. Similarly, it is not always recalled that for much of the nineteenth century, especially prior to the Civil War, those relations were relatively amicable, although also distant and detached. An overview of the period may therefore be useful today, for the degree to which the United States can afford o t detach itself from Russia is again of main concern. A related area of interest and debate is the role of public opinion in possibly forcing confrontation on issues where national elites might prefer to maintain cordial relations. This essay seeks to cast light on these areas of current interest, by focusing on the interplay between public enthusiasms in the United States for diplomatic intervention in Russia, and official political calculations in American diplomacy prior to 1865. It argues that the resulting policy had mostly to do with a detachment from Russian despotism, born of the physical isolation of the United States, its lack of truly significant contacts with Russia, but also its own deeply flawed republicanism.

This essay examines John Quincy Adams' diplomatic and ethical thinking and explores the implications of this legacy for the exercise of American power in contemporary world affairs. Both as America's most accomplished Secretary of State i n the nineteenth century, and through his voluminous public and private papers, Adams helped to identify the normative foundations of the national interest. In particular, he defined the limits of America's obligations to defend human rights and t o intervene on behalf of revolutionary principles in the quarrels of distant nations. Attention focuses here upon Adams' contribution to historic debates concerning: (1) individual and national rights which must be defended if freedom is to be maintained; (2) the basis for American neutrality in the 1790s; and (3) the claims upon American diplomacy generated by the independence movements of South American and Greek patriots.

The name of Alexis de Tocqueville is not generally associated with the study of international relations. Social analyst, political thinker, and informed commentator on the fundamental intellectual currents of his age, he left to others the illumination for posterity of the states-system in the first half of the nineteenth century. Yet, while he was not primarily concerned with foreign affairs, he did not ignore them. Some of the most famous passages in Democracy in America point to the capacities, or incapacities, of democracies in conducting foreign policy. His service in the Chamber of Deputies under the Orleanist Monarchy and in the Legislative Assembly under the Second Republic from 1839 to 1851 brought him into contact with the foreign and colonial questions of the day; it was he who largely wrote the reports of two committees on which he served during those years, dealing with the abolition of slavery in France's West Indian possessions and French military and colonial policy in Algeria. The highest post—and sole Cabinet responsibility—he attained in this world of practical politics was that of Foreign Minister in 1849.

The creation of the Baghdad Pact, a regional defence organization linking Britain to Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan, in 1955, has been surrounded by historiographical confusion. Much of this is explicable in terms of the impact of rapid international changes on long-term strategy, the importance of which has tended to be neglected by historians of the pact. So, one school of thought focuses on the American promotion of the ‘Northern Tier’ concept during the period 1953–4, and on the British preference for an organization based on her Suez Canal Zone Base in Egypt.1 Applyingthis concept to the year 1955, the Baghdad Pact can become ‘the United States’ final victory over Great Britain during the Cold War, a victory which the Suez Crisis of 1956 served to confirm.

For NATO's first four decades the overwhelming threat to its members' security arose from the enormous military strength of the Soviet Union … the allies were unable to match the numerical levels of the Warsaw Pact's conventional armaments and manpower. This … underlined the key role of nuclear weapons in deterrence, ensuring that the cost of aggression was plainly too high for any attacker to contemplate.

The issue of ‘interpretive’ approaches to the study of international relations has achieved prominence in recent meta-theoretical discussions of the discipline. It has been suggested, for example, that the work of interpretive theorists, such as Hayward Alker, Richard Ashley, Friedrich Kratochwil, John Ruggie and Robert Cox, represents an approach which is qualitatively different and distinct from the traditional, positivist-inspired approach to the study of international politics.

New political thinking on international relations during the Gorbachev era of Soviet politics received considerable attention in the West from government agencies and academics. Much of the analysis was concerned with matters of immediate policy relevance, and the relatively few attempts to assess new thinking in more theoretical terms tended to assume that one state-directed ideology (or official belief system) was now giving way to another in order to justify the radical shifts in policy being dictated by domestic economic factors.

In 1977 at the instigation of the Carter Administration, the United States and the Soviet Union opened negotiations aimed at concluding an agreement to control conventional arms transfers. Four rounds of talks were held over a period of twelve months and expectations were raised in both countries that the negotiations would be successful. However, at the fourth round of talks these expectations were dashed by the abrupt termination of negotiations. It is the contention of this article that the immediate fate of the talks and the timing of their collapse can be understood only in the context of the bureaucratic battles within the Carter Administration over the issue of arms transfer control and the wider question of relations with the Soviet Union and China.

This article offers a sociological perspective on a major conceptual issue in international relations, the question of ‘security’, and it raises major issues to do with the role of sociological concepts in international studies. For some years now, the work of sociological writers such as Skocpol, Giddens and Mann1 has attracted some interest in international studies. International theorists such as Linklater and Halliday have seen their work as offering a theoretical advance both on realism and on Marxist alternatives. At the same time, these developments have involved the paradox that, as one critic puts it, ‘current sociological theories of the state are increasingly approaching a more traditional view of the state—the state as actor model—precisely at a time when the theory of international relations is getting away from this idea and taking a more sociological form.

The fundamental change occasioned by perestroika, the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc, the reunification of Germany, and the end of the ‘Cold War’ has become a crucial test for the explanation of change provided by the established paradigm of international politics, neo-realism. In at least three respects, this approach was embarrassed by the chain of events.

The choice of name given to or adopted by a collectivity is often immaterial. It probably does not matter much whether a new football team, for example, is called the Braves or the Valiants. All that is needed is some distinctive terminology, by whch the group in question can easily be identified. Sometimes, however, a name may be meant to reflect some substantive qualities, aspirations, or associations which are already connected with or claimed by the collectivity. The names adopted in 1947 by the two successor states to Britain's empire on the Indian sub-continent, for instance, were seen to be significant. Both India and Pakistan had their own reasons for wishing to be so called. Burma's 1989 translation into Myanmar was perhaps indicative of the same kind of consideration.

A theory, writes Anthony Wilden, like any other adaptive system, must have a survival value. It is impossible, he continues, ‘for a theory not to have a referent or a goal outside itself, since “pure truth” not only does not exist, it has no survival value whatsoever.’ Wilden's reference to the ‘external’ goal of a theory suggests that theories carry subliminal messages which exceed the strict boundary of their textual content. An effective technique for identifying the political and normative undertones communicated by theories is an inquiry into those areas which supposedly of peripheral significance to them.