Sovereignty has become controversial. The idea and practice of sovereignty are said to be increasingly undermined by the simultaneous transnationalization and localization of political, economic, and cultural space. Not only is the ability of states to control their boundaries gradually erased, but given political boundaries seem unable to account for or define the dynamics of social life. At the same time, sovereignty is indicted as supportive of inequality, internal oppression, external imperialism, racism, and ecological destruction, among other unsavoury features of international social life. In this view, sovereignty is condemned as an ethically deficient way of organizing the international community. This is a confusing and contradictory picture. On the one hand, the boundaries defined by sovereignty appear increasingly irrelevant to international society, and on the other, the very power of sovereignty to demarcate boundaries is decried.

With the precipitate and well-deserved demise of positivism as the only theory of knowledge backstopping international relations, a large number of ethical issues, emasculated by positivism's non-cognitivist views of morality, are emerging for philosophical reflection and analysis. One of the most important of these is relativism. Despite its obvious (and increasing) significance, however, few international theorists have specifically addressed the issues it raises. One of the main reasons for this neglect, this article argues, lies in the conspicuous failure on the part of the newer normative approaches to international relations even to acknowledge that a relativist interpretation is a plausible construal of their position. In the next section, three examples of such failure will be described. It is no accident that these examples derive from anti-realist positions. A perspicuous feature of anti-realism has been its evident incapacity to give sufficient weight to the fact that the world is divided into antagonistic groups which have serious, perhaps even irreconcilable, moral and political conflicts with one another. But whatever may be the case for anti-realists, revisionary political realism is in no position to obscure its relation to relativism. The possibility of relativism, for the revisionary political realist, arises from simple reflection on the realist tradition.

A major problem in managing and ultimately resolving many environmental issues, transboundary and global in particular, is how to tackle the fundamental questions of distributive justice and fairness involved. Little systematic reflection and research have been devoted to these issues. The problem of acid rain is a prime example. Strategies to abate acid rain must, among other requirements, be viewed as fair and just if they are to be politically accepted, implemented and honoured in the long term. Research and actual negotiations in this area to date have, by contrast, focused almost exclusively on the generation and analysis of emission reduction strategies which are effective in economic and, more recently, environmental terms.

The British Way in Warfare was the title of a book by Basil Liddell Hart published in 1932. It was an elaboration of ideas first propounded a year earlier in a celebrated lecture on ‘Economic Pressure or Continental Victories’ to the Royal United Services Institute. Like many of his generation, the more Liddell Hart reflected on his own encounter with war (he had been gassed and wounded at the Somme), the more he became convinced that such folly must not be repeated. This required transforming the very conduct of war. With equal conviction he believed that he had hit upon some answers. These appeared as general principles of strategy—the ‘indirect approach’—and a particular policy for his own country— ‘limited liability’. He claimed that he was doing little more than distilling the essence of a long–standing national approach. This was ‘the British Way in Warfare’.

A group of writers have taken up Nietzsche's hammer against the constructions of contemporary international theory. Postmodern approaches problematize the dominant understanding of international relations as a world of sovereign states which demarcate inside from outside, order from anarchy, identity from difference. More generally, they challenge the notion of sovereignty as an ahistorical, universal, transcendent concept, be it applied to the sovereign state, the sovereign individual or a sovereign truth. Sovereignty and the dichotomies regulated by its power are mechanisms of domination and closure which limit the play of political practice. It is the aim of these writers to hammer away at these limitations, opening space for plural and diverse practices in world politics.

With the Treaty on European Union, or the Maastricht Treaty, into force in November 1993, the member-states of the European Community (EC) appeared to be embarking on a far-reaching enterprise to enhance the authority of Community institutions. Continuing a process that had begun with the Single European Act (SEA), into force in 1987, Maastricht increased the powers of the European Parliament. It established mechanisms whereby EC countries were to seek to improve policy coordination in such diverse areas as social affairs, high technology, border controls, immigration, and anti-crime efforts. It committed the EC members to work toward the establishment of a common foreign and security policy. Most importantly, it laid out a path and timetable for qualified EC members to achieve Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) by the end of the 1990s.

The emergence of transnational markets in securities issuance and trading is a dramatic development in the contemporary financial services sector with larger consequences for national policy-making. The liberalization of access to domestic securities exchanges, the progressive reduction of regulatory restrictions leading to product innovation such as derivatives trading, the growing involvement of transnational banks in securities dealing, and the elimination of capital controls have all combined to yield rapid change over the past fifteen years. The process is, however, relatively poorly researched. Folklore about the global markets abounds but much remains to be done to put the global integration of the markets into perspective and understand its complexity. Specifically, there has been a failure to analyse the consequences of the liberalization and transnationalization of financial markets for democratic political systems in an increasingly global market economy.

Israel is situated in the Middle East, which is not a zone of peace but rather of turmoil. In contrast to the West where peace has become the norm, the Middle East exists in a different socio-political time zone. It is war-prone and the use of force still evokes remarkable popular support. The Middle East, similar to other Third World regions, displays a greater propensity for intra- and inter-state conflict as compared to the environments of the developed states. Therefore, the Middle East is not about to be transformed into what Karl Deutsch called a ‘security community’, where recourse to arms is not acceptable for the resolution of inter-state conflict.

The past decade has witnessed a resurgence of regionalism in world politics. Old regionalist organizations have been revived, new organizations formed, and regionalism and the call for strengthened regionalist arrangements have been central to many of the debates about the nature of the post-Cold War international order. The number, scope and diversity of regionalist schemes have grown significantly since the last major ‘regionalist wave’ in the 1960s. Writing towards the end of this earlier regionalist wave, Joseph Nye could point to two major classes of regionalist activity: on the one hand, micro-economic organizations involving formal economic integration and characterized by formal institutional structures; and on the other, macro-regional political organizations concerned with controlling conflict. Today, in the political field, regional dinosaurs such as the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and the Organization of American States (OAS) have re-emerged. They have been joined both by a large number of aspiring micro-regional bodies (such as the Visegrad Pact and the Pentagonale in central Europe; the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU) and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in the Middle East; ECOWAS and possibly a revived Southern African Development Community (SADC, formerly SADCC) led by post-apartheid South Africa in Africa), and by loosely institutionalized meso-regional security groupings such as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE, now OSCE) and more recently the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). In the economic field, micro-regional schemes for economic cooperation or integration (such as the Southern Cone Common Market, Mercosur, the Andean Pact, the Central American Common Market (CACM) and CARICOM in the Americas; the attempts to expand economic integration within ASEAN; and the proliferation of free trade areas throughout the developing world) stand together with arguments for macro-economic or ‘bloc regionalism’ built around the triad of an expanded European Union (EU), the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) and some further development of Asia-Pacific regionalism. The relationship between these regional schemes and between regional and broader global initiatives is central to the politics of contemporary regionalism.

As the Cold War has receded, it has left behind a world system characterized by two divergent trends. On the one hand, as the two superpowers have withdrawn their security umbrellas, a host of ethnic and territorial conflicts have sprouted around the globe. On the other hand, as former rival blocs now create alliances, international mechanisms for the peaceful resolution of contentious issues have proliferated. A central concern of our times, then, is whether, and under what circumstances, these new mechanisms will be successful in dealing with the disorderly aspects of the new world ‘order’.

‘What one can say in an original way about foreign policy is extremely limited. You can apply the basic principles to new situations, but essentially one says the same thing all over again in a different geographic, political, and military context.’ These are the words of Hans J. Morgenthau, spoken towards the end of a life devoted to the study of international politics. Yet was it that simple? And did Morgenthau really say the same things all over again in different geographic, political, and military contexts?

From the perspective of a particular kind of international theorizing, foundational questions about the nature of international society are a central concern. ‘Does the collectivity of sovereign states constitute a political society or system, or does it not? ’ is, according to Hedley Bull, the first of a series of questions that, taken together, constitute ‘Classical’ international relations theory and distinguish it from the ‘Scientific’ approach to the subject. Similar sentiments could be drawn readily from the work of the other authors whose writings collectively make up the International Theory, or International Society, or ‘English School’ approach to international relations theory. I have argued elsewhere that there are reasons why this emphasis on international society is mistaken. To cut a long story short, the burden of the argument is that an approach that places primary emphasis on the nature of international society is likely to isolate itself from the wider discourses of political and social philosophy in ways that cannot be defended in terms of any alleged sui generis features of international relations. Rather, international relations theory is best understood as an aspect of political theory and not as a discourse with its own rules and subject matter. However, this argument has been cast in ‘meta-theoretical’ terms and does not directly address the actual issue of the nature of international society; critics are entitled to point to the absence here of a clearly articulated, positive point of view. The purpose of this article is to begin to remedy this omission, by sketching the outlines of an examination of international society that would be less tied to traditional categories and in closer contact with broader movements in social thought.

Regionalism, and more generally multilateralism, is commanding considerable attention in the policy and intellectual communities. In the security domain, this interest can be traced to a number of developments. One is the regionalization of international security brought about by the dramatic change in the dynamics of the international political system. In the absence of a new overarching and overriding global-level security dynamic, domestic, bilateral and regional dynamics have become more salient and have to be addressed in their own terms. It is now much more necessary and possible, for example, to discuss security in Asia, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East in regional and sub-regional contexts, quite independent of a global dynamic or developments in other regions. While the interests and linkages arising from the involvement of external powers must still be taken into account, the context is qualitatively different from the Cold War era, when the dynamics of the superpower conflict permeated and in many cases subsumed the local dynamics of conflicts.

Defence is a policy sector central to international relations. If war and conflict lie at the heart of traditional, Realist analyses of interstate relations, this derives in no small part from the claim that states are continually putting themselves in a position of readiness to wage such wars and triumph in conflict. If, as some commentators maintain, the nature of military doctrine, and national defence policies—offensive or defensive—can condition the nature of interstate relations, an explanation of the nature of national defence policies is vital in order to fully comprehend the nature of international relations.