The end of the Cold War has seen Western internationalism migrate from the margins to the centre of International Relations theory and practice. As a consequence the modest ambitions of what we might now call ‘classical internationalism’ have come under challenge from more thoroughly cosmopolitan varieties from both the right and left of the mainstream Western political spectrum whose commonalities, moreover, are arguably becoming as prominent as their differences. This article attempts to recover the classical internationalist project and, more specifically, the understanding of statehood that underpins it. Some observations on the distinctions and tensions between varieties of contemporary internationalist and cosmopolitan thinking about international politics are followed by a critique of a pervasive scholarly disinterest in the varieties of Western internationalist states. These two exercises form the backdrop to advocacy of the idea of ‘the Good State’ as a response to dominant forms of contemporary Western cosmopolitanism and their critics.

Ironically, since 11 September 2001, world politics seems to have taken a turn towards certainty. This article is an intervention that demonstrates how the illusion of the sovereign state in an insecure and anarchic international system is sustained and how it might be challenged. It does so through a Derridean analysis of Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society. The article examines how International Relations (IR) thinking works; it teases out the implications of our reading of Bull's work and proposes that what we call generalising the international could lead to an alternative analysis of world politics, one that retains an openness to the future and to politics.

This article is an attempt to rescue revolution, both as concept and practice, from the triumphalism of the contemporary world. To that end, the article uses three transformations from authoritarian rule – the end of apartheid in South Africa, the collapse of communism in the Czech Republic and the transition from military dictatorship to market democracy in post-Pinochet Chile – in order to test the ways in which these contemporary manifestations of radical change compare and contrast with past examples of revolution. Although these cases share some core similarities with revolutions of the modern era, they also differ from them in five crucial ways: the particular role played by the ‘international’ and the state, the nature of violence, the use of ideology, and the process of negotiation itself. As such, they signify a novel process in world politics, that of negotiated revolution.

Understanding the origins of capitalism in terms of feudal crisis, agrarian class structures and economic development in Europe has been an enduring concern of a growing body of scholarship focusing on changes in social property relations. This work has been distinctive in highlighting long-term patterns of social property relations central to shaping late medieval and early modern Europe, variegated patterns of serfdom within feudalism, class conflicts intrinsic to the emergence of agrarian capitalism, and thus capitalist ‘transition’ through different paths of development. Most recently, the implications of a focus on social property relations have been drawn out in its relevance for International Relations (IR), expressly in terms of tracing specificities within the age of absolutism that shaped the expansion of the states-system and its relation to modernity. This article outlines and engages with past and present debates linked to the social property relations approach. It raises several problematics through an engagement with the theorising of political modernity by Antonio Gramsci and on this basis offers pointers towards future lines of enquiry from which further reflection on the conditions of historical and contemporary state formation and restructuring may proceed.

Why did Great Britain remain neutral during the American Civil War? Although several historical arguments have been put forth, few studies have explicitly used International Relations (IR) theories to understand this decision. Synthesising a discursive approach with an ontological security interpretation, I propose an alternative framework for understanding security-seeking behaviour and threats to identity. I assess the impact Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had upon the interventionist debates in Great Britain. I argue that the Proclamation reframed interventionist debates, thus (re)engendering the British anxiety over slavery and removing intervention as a viable policy. I conclude by proposing several issues relevant to using an ontological security interpretation in future IR studies.

As is often the case when a concept gets a new lease of life in the newspapers there has been a resurrection of interest in recent times in the concept of ‘reconstruction’. The current American administration has now undertaken not one but two major wars that have resulted in the need for reconstruction since 2001 when George W. Bush took up office in the White House. In the previous few years there were major reconstruction efforts undertaken in Bosnia (after the 1995 Dayton Accords) and in Kosovo (after the war of 1999), to name but the most obvious. Historians have to some extent taken up this cue and have been producing edited books and even full length monographs on the ‘lessons’ that we might learn from historical reconstruction efforts. There has also been a great use of conscious historical analogy by President George W. Bush. One classic example of the recent past by President Bush in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute elicited an indignant response from a number of historians in the Financial Times on the dangers of historical analogy.

This article explores the international political thought of one of the most prominent late Victorian public intellectuals, John Robert Seeley (1834–95), the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, and author of the best-selling The Expansion of England (1883). Challenging conventional readings of Seeley, I argue that his vision of global politics must be located within the wider frame of his views on the sacred, and that he is seen best as articulating an intriguing political theology of international relations. In particular, I argue that instead of interpreting him as a realist, as has traditionally been the case, his position is classified most accurately as ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’. Only by situating him in the intellectual context(s) of his time is it possible to provide an adequate account of the identity of his political thought.

This article illustrates the continuing salience of Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation (1944) by employing two of its central concepts, fictitious commodities and the double movement to interpret the globalisation countermovement and one of its most important figures, José Bové. I explain the transformation of José Bové from rural sheep farmer to French folk hero and global activist and analyse the extent to which his rhetoric and political actions are congruent with Polanyi's key insights. Arguing against the media characterisation of Bové as protectionist, I show that this misrepresentation conceals the larger ideological threat his movement poses to institutionalised politics and neoliberal hegemony. The political vision underlying Bové's symbolic media tactics and articulated in his book, Le Monde n'est pas une Marchandise, reveals significant manifestations of Polanyi's chief intellectual legacy – an unparalleled critique of economism and market society. An often neglected question in Polanyian scholarship is whether or not it is possible to have a market economy without becoming a market society. A more careful analysis of Polanyi's thought sheds light on this key issue while the empirical analysis of Bové's movement reveals its implications for French society and the broader globalisation countermovement.

Mill's political and his international theory rest on a philosophy of history drawn in turn from the experience of nineteenth century imperialism. And yet, this philosophy of history remains unexamined in Political Theory and International Relations (IR) alike, largely because of the peculiar division of labour between the two disciplines. In this article I will argue that this omission results not just in a misconception of those aspects of Mill's thought with which Political Theory and IR directly engage; in addition, and more seriously, it has led in both disciplines to an unreflected perpetuation of Mill's justification of imperialism.