What are the prospects for conflict and cooperation (and ultimately for war and peace) now that the Cold War has ended? The various theoretical perspectives come up with rather different answers. Waltzian Neorealism diagnoses business as usual: anarchy prevails; states will continue to have to fend for themselves. With the current transition from bipolarity toward multipolarity we must even expect more, not less, international conflict. Liberals are much more optimistic: international institutions and liberal democracy can pave the way for significant progress toward a peaceful world. Constructivists are also optimistic: states can develop cooperative relationships; anarchy is not a given systemic constraint. Cooperative anarchies are thus a possibility. In this article, I argue that there is an important element missing from the current debate about prospects for international conflict and cooperation. That element concerns the nature of contemporary statehood. Internation relations theory has tended to treat states as fixed, ‘like units’.This is the well-known formulation by Kenneth Waltz: ‘so long as anarchy endures, states remain like units’. ‘To call states “like units” is to say that each state is like all other states in being an autonomous political unit’. ‘We abstract from every attribute of states except their capabilities.’ Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA, 1979), pp. 93, 95, 99. They are not, of course, and the difference between the main types of statehood amounts to much more than the variation in capabilities noted by Realists and the absence or presence of liberal democracy as analyzed by liberals. There are three different main types of state in the present international system, and an identification of them is necessary in order to appreciate current and future patterns of cooperation and conflict.

While the euphoric predictions of a ‘New World Order’ and the ‘End of History’ have been buried in the alleys of Sarajevo and the killing fields of Rwanda and Chechnya, the end of the Cold War still constitutes the primary prism through which world affairs in general, and Middle Eastern events in particular, are observed. When in 1991 an American-led international coalition under the auspices of the United Nations expelled Iraq from the emirate of Kuwait, invaded and annexed six months earlier, this move was at once lauded as a confirmation of the New World Order, based on respect for and enforcement of international law, and castigated as an imperialist ploy by the United States, now ‘the only remaining superpower’, to impose its hegemony over the Persian Gulf and the Arab world as a whole. Likewise, the first-ever agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, signed on the White House lawn on 13 September 1993, was widely interpreted as a corollary of the end of the Cold War. To its proponents the accord represented the immeasurable potential for coexistence and cooperation generated by the end of superpower global rivalry; to its detractors, a humiliating pax Americana imposed on two disorientated and subservient clients.

The boat was leaky, the sea heavy, and the shore a long way off. It took all the efforts of the one man to row, and of the other to bail. If either had ceased both would have drowned. At one point the rower threatened the bailer that if he did not bail with more energy he would throw him overboard; to which the bailer made the obvious reply that, if he did, he (the rower) would certainly drown also.

Sir Norman Angell (1914)

Introduction

While most European Union (EU)I use the term EU when referring to events after November 1993 and when discussing the general history of the Union, but I reserve the usage 'European Community' (EC) for specific occurrences before the enactment of the Treaty on European Union in November 1993. scholars agree that international economic interdependence is a key variable in understanding politics between states, only a small number of studies have recognized the impact of interdependence on politics within states. Traditionally, scholars have been concerned with the effects of interdependence on states' external autonomy and have focused on the limitations that increased levels of interdependence impose on states' foreign policies.The classic piece being Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr, Power and Interdependence (Boston, MA, 1977). More recent scholarship, however, has suggested that the effects of rising interdependence also manifest themselves domestically.See, e.g., Peter Gourevitch, Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International Economic Crisis (Ithaca, NY, 1986); and Helen V. Milner, Resisting Protectionism: Global Industries and the Politics of International Trade (Princeton, 1988). In scholarship on international organizations, for example, it has been argued that international organizations increasingly shape the domestic policy choices of states and have lasting implications for executives' autonomy.Andrew P. Cortell and James W. Davis, Jr, 'International Institutions and Domestic Politics: Structure, Interest and Agency', unpublished ms., University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University, 1995; and Vivien A. Schmidt, 'Upscaling Business and Downsizing Government: France in the New European Community', paper presented at American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, 2-5 September 1993. More specifically, it has been suggested in the context of the EU that membership has 'strengthened' the domestic autonomy of governments.Andrew Moravcsik, 'Why the European Community Strengthens the State: Domestic Politics and International Cooperation', Center for European Studies, Harvard University, Working Paper Series No. 52 (1994).

The obsolescence of war in the relations between the leading industrial powers, and the declining significance of national sovereignty in the context of globalization are frequently cited as key indicators of the steady decline of the Westphalian era.For an insightful overview, see J. Richardson, ‘The End of Geopolitics?’, in R. Leaver and J. Richardson (eds.), Charting the Post-Cold War (Boulder, CO, 1993). The transformation of world politics has encouraged the formations of new linkages between the study of change in international relations and the normative consideration of alternative principles of world politics. Imagining new forms of political community has emerged as a major enterprise in the contemporary theory of the state and international relations.W. Connolly, ‘Democracy and Territoriality’, in M. Ringrose and A. J. Lerner (eds.), Reimagining the Nation (Buckingham, 1993); D. Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Global Governance(Cambridge, 1995); W. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and the Culture (Oxford, 1989); A. Linklater, ‘Community’, in A. Danchev (ed.), Fin de Siècle: The Meaning of the Twentieth Century (London, 1995); and R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge, 1993). In this context, E. H. Carr’s writings on the crisis of world politics in the first part of the twentieth century acquire a relevance for contemporary debates which his reputation for Realism has served to distort. His writings contain a striking analysis of the changing nature of the modern state and the possibility of new forms of political association. Carr’s observations about these subjects are as profound as they are inspiring, and they are rich in their significance for the contemporary theory and practice of international relations. They make significant contributions in three areas: the empirical analysis of the transformation of the modern state, especially but not only in Europe; the embryonic but increasingly sophisticated normative analysis of how the nation-state ought to evolve, and what it ought to become; and the evolving discussion of how the study of internation relations might be reformed to tackle the dominant moral and political questions of the epoch. These questions are concerned above all else with the metamorphosis of political community.

Theory and morality

All history is the history of human consciousness.

To say such a thing is not merely to take a certain view of the metaphysics of history or of the epistemology of historiography - aligning oneself, perhaps, with R. G. Collingwood.R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946), p. 305. In An Autobiography (London, 1939), Collingwood said: 'My life's work ... has been in the main an attempt to bring about a rapprochement between philosophy and history' (p. 77). May greater success attend our efforts to reconcile philosophy and international studies! To say such a thing is itself a significant event within the history of human consciousness, an event whose ironical power is centred in the word 'is'. And that is really all I want to talk about this evening. The word 'is' - and the awful moral responsibility which rests on the shoulders of those of us who are masters of the word Is. Let us call ourselves isarchs, the ruling-class of Istopia. Let us call ourselves the Wizards of Is.

Three principal schools of political economy — economic liberalism, economic socialism and economic nationalism — are offered to students of international political economy by the professional literature. Since the end of World War II and in the context of the rivalry between the ‘liberal West’ and the ‘Socialist East’, economic nationalism has been a neglected field of study.Notwithstanding, some excellent studies of economic nationalism have been published. In the field of international relations, see R. Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton, 1987), and J. Mayall, Nationalism and International Society (Cambridge, 1990). In the field of economic development, see D. Seers, The Political Economy of Nationalism (Oxford, 1983), and P. Burnell, Economic Nationalism in the Third World (Brighton, 1986). For a study of the interaction between Communism and nationalism, see R. Szporluk, Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx versus Friedrich List (Oxford, 1988); for the economist's point of view, see H. Johnson (ed.), Economic Nationalism in Old and New States (Chicago, 1967), and A. Breton, ‘The Economics of Nationalism’, Journal of Political Economy, 72 (1964), pp. 376–86. For an excellent review of the origins of the concept, see J. Kofman, ‘How to Define Economic Nationalism?: A Critical Review of some Old and New Standpoints’, in H. Szlajfer (ed.), Economic Nationalism in East-Central Europe and South America, 1918–1939 (Geneva, 1990), pp. 17–54. During the Cold War period and up until after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, economic nationalism attracted more attention among scholars of Africa, Latin America and Asia than among those of us who studied the political economy of the ‘centre’ (e.g., Mayall, Burnell and Seers, to mention just three, are all scholars of economic nationalism who were initially concerned with the study of developing countries). Economic liberalism and economic socialism have vied for scholarly attention, resulting in greater theoretical and analytical sophistication. During the interwar period the situation was different: economic nationalism was well represented in widely read textbooks on international relations and enjoyed attention from both its proponents and its opponents.F. H. Simonds, The Great Powers in World Politics: International Relations and Economic Nationalism (New York, 1939); J. M. Keynes, ‘National Self Sufficiency’, The Yale Review, 22 (1933), pp. 755–69; J. Viner, ‘International Relations between State Controlled National Economies’, American Economic Review, supp., 34 (1944), p. 328; L. Robbins, Economic Planning and International Order (London, 1937), pp. 326–7; T. E. Gregory, ‘Economic Nationalism’, International Affairs, 10 (1931), pp. 289–306; W. E. Rappard, ‘Economic Nationalism’, in Harvard Tercentenary publications, Authority and the Individual (Cambridge, MA, 1937), pp. 74–112. Now, with the collapse of the Communist regimes, the consequent change in world politics, the current economic problems in North America and in Europe and, last but not least, the lessons derived from the miraculous economic success of the mercantilist states of East Asia,On Japan and East Asian states as mercantilist, see Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle (Stanford, CA, 1982), and Japan: Who Governs? The Rise of the Developmental State (New York and London, 1995); James A. Gregor (with Maria Hsia Chang and Andrew B. Zimmerman), Ideology and Development: Sun Yat-sen and the Economic History of Taiwan (Berkeley, CA, 1981). the time seems to have come to re-examine our perceptions of the discourse of political economy, and redirect scholarly attention toward the theory of economic nationalism.

In his review article in the July 1996 issue of this journal (‘Truth and power, monks and technocrats: theory and practice in international relations’) William Wallace wasted the opportunity to say some interesting things about an important issue. Because he has been seen by some to be making some necessary points about the state of International Relations in Britain in recent years, I wish to point out seven major problems in his argument. If I am correct about this then readers might wonder about the validity of his conclusions about the relationship between truth and power and theory and practice, but I will leave it to others to comment upon these.