For a long time the intractable nature of the Jerusalem problem ensured that it was persistently swept under the rug in Middle East peace negotiations. Indeed, the widespread belief has been that the dispute over the city’s future political status cannot be settled until most other issues in the Israeli–Arab conflict have been resolved. Under the terms of the Oslo Declaration of Principles signed in September 1993, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) agreed to settle the thorny issue of Jerusalem in the final stage of permanent status negotiations.The Oslo Declaration of Principles, based on the secret Israel–PLO talks in Norway, established a staged approach and a timetable for reaching a permanent settlement. First, the interim negotiations would result in Israeli military withdrawal from Jericho and the Gaza Strip, the transfer of power to a nominated Palestinian National Authority, and the beginning of a five-year transitional period of Palestinian self-government under this Authority. Secondly, the Palestinians would elect a Council and achieve early ‘empowerment’ (self-government) in five spheres in the rest of the West Bank. Thirdly, the permanent status negotiations — to cover Jerusalem, Jewish settlements, refugees, security arrangements and borders, among other issues — would commence by the start of the third year of the interim period, and the resulting final settlement would take effect at the end of the interim phase. The negotiations leading to the signing of the Gaza-Jericho Agreement in May 1994 achieved the first objective. The signing of the Israel-Palestinian Interim Agreement (also termed Oslo II and the Taba Agreement) in September 1995 set the stage for a partial implementation of the second goal: Palestinians gained full control over six main West Bank towns and administrative responsibility for almost the entire Palestinian West Bank population. A Palestinian Council was elected in January 1996.

Raymond Aron is a neglected theorist, at least if we understand by ‘neglected’ a theorist whose theory no longer engenders critical scholarly debate. More often than not, students of international politics either ignore Aron altogether or wrongly subsume him under the rubric of classical Realist. This is not to deny points of agreement between Aron and theorists like Carr and Morgenthau, but merely to indicate that many scholars fail to articulate and to take into consideration the numerous fundamental differences between Aron and other classical Realists. Aron’s Peace and War is probably ‘more quoted than read’ today, and it is doubtful whether more than a handful of students seriously study this monumental work at all.J. Hall, Diagnoses of Our Time: Six Views on Our Social Condition (London, 1981), p. 164.

Territorial secession and dissolution of empire means a challenge to the established system of states. How are the criteria for recognition of new states worked out? How is the gatekeeping to statehood performed? We shall sort out the answers by putting the new post-Cold War challenge into historical perspective. It is not only a question of changing criteria of entry to the system of states, but also one of a change in the state system whereby the quest for ‘criteria of admission’ became meaningful. The question of ‘gatekeeping’ is therefore intrinsically linked up with the modern evolution of the state system as such. The article is structured in a way that will specify this linkage historically.

1. Theory and the application of hegemonic power

The idea of hegemony, in the general sense in which it has been employed by scholars of international relations and historians since the 1970s, has been intended to deepen understanding of the behaviour of states possessing characteristics that qualify the states as hegemons and the effect of that behaviour upon the international system. But the lengthy debate over hegemony has failed to characterize adequately the distinction between hegemonic power and its use by policy-makers in the hegemonic state. Analyses of the role of hegemonic states in the international system that seek to explain the rise and fall of hegemons mechanistically, such as the theory of hegemonic stability in its various permutations,Charles P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939 (Berkeley, CA, 1973; Stephen D. Krasner, ‘State Power and the Structure of International Trade’, World Politics, 28:3 (1976) pp. 317–43; Robert O. Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge, 1981); Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony (Princeton, 1984); Duncan Snidal, ‘The Limits of Hegemonic Stability’, International Organization 39:4 (1985), pp. 579–614. have not explained successfully either the behaviour of policy-makers in the governments of hegemonic states or the variety of resulting effects upon the hegemon and the international system within which it operates.Conybeare’s theory of the tariff-setting behaviour of large and small states, for example, by Conybeare’s own admission fails to explain the behaviour of the two most important trading powers over the period that he considers, Britain and the United States whilst hegemons. See John A. C. Conybeare, Trade Wars: The Theory and Practice of International Commercial Rivalry (New York, 1987), pp. 22–7, 44–5, 272–6. Hegemonic stability theory has paid too little attention to the process of policy-making in the hegemonic state. What makes hegemony a useful characterization for discussion and analysis (separate from the more general analysis of ‘large’ economies or ‘powerful’ states) is that hegemonic states possess a combination of types of power resources that, insofar as that power is used, allows hegemonic states to affect the international system in ways that other, merely large states cannot. This makes the distinction between power and its use, as well as the question of awareness of power by policy-makers, more important with respect to hegemons than to other states.

The Imperfect Is Our Paradise

Wallace Stevens

1. Introduction

One significant consequence of the subsidence of positivism as the dominant methodology of the social sciences has been the strong emergence of an emancipatory conception of international relations. Reisisting pedestrian calls 'to define one's terms', let us rather try to be more useful and characterize the general idea behind it in terms of its aim. The aim of any emancipatory international relations is to reveal to subjects who continue to suffer economically, politically, socially, psychologically, etc., not only that their condition is based on false beliefs but that in learning why such conditions came about, they will acquire the motivation and other instruments to eliminate them. Let us call any such conception, with some considerable trepidation of misunderstanding, 'an emancipatory conception of international relations'. Since we can, under the same rubric, further distinguish classical Marxism, critical theory, post-structuralism and feminist international relations, we evidently must acknowledge that an emancipatory conception of international relations is not all of a piece. The subjects who are picked out by the emancipatory theory may be working class, or women or society's marginal people, but, whomever the subject, the theories addressed to them share the liberatory idea that there is something drastically wrong with the way human life is lived on this planet, and that, more importantly, people live in certain ways because they have an erroneous understanding of what their individual and collective existence ought to consist of which can, and should, be changed.

In the January 1996 issue of the Review, Bill McSweeney argues that our 1993 book, Identity, Migration and the New Security Agenda in Europe (IMNSAE), ‘subverts’ the analysis of Buzan’s People, States and Fear (PSF) ‘without enhancing our understanding of the problem of security’ (p. 93).Bill McSweeney, ‘Identity and Security: Buzan and the Copenhagen School’, Review of International Studies, 22 (1996), pp. 81–93; O. Wæver, B. Buzan, Morten Kelstrup and Pierre Lemaitre with David Carlton et al., Identity, Migration and the New Security Agenda in Europe (London, 1993). Of the many charges that McSweeney brings to bear we will address three. First is that societal security is merely a trendy response to current concerns about nationalism rather than a more theoretically considered move. Second — and this seems to be the core of his complaint — is that the view we take of ‘identities’ is far too objectivist and not (de)constructivist enough, and that our approach makes it impossible to consider the process of identity formation as part of the politics of security. Third, he says that Buzan’s association with IMNSAE contradicts strong positions he developed in PSF and that his analysis has therefore become incoherent.