This article argues against a recent development within anglo-phone political philosophy which treats almost all group conflicts as deriving from cultural differences, thus downplaying the notion that conflicts may simply be over the distribution of things to which all the participants attach value: power, money, land and so on. Normative political philosophy, it is claimed by those who take this view, should be primarily concerned with issues of identity, recognition and culture at the expense of issues concerning distribution. There is however, little basis for these claims, whose implications are sketched in here and form the foundation for a defence of a liberalism ‘that has confidence in its own insights, a liberalism possessed of clarity as well as compassion.’

Almost no historian of the Second World War nowadays fails to acknowledge the important role of signals intelligence (SIGINT). By contrast, most histories of postwar international relations omit – without explanation – all reference to SIGINT. Neglect of this and other aspects of intelligence has significantly distorted the study of the Cold War. A new generation of scholars, however, has begun to challenge this neglect. The article seeks to show how recent research on intelligence is changing our understanding of the early Cold War.

Our present understanding of British intelligence and its relationship to Anglo-American cooperation in the postwar period leaves much to be desired. Indeed while it has often been remarked that the twin pillars of Anglo-American security cooperation were atomic weapons and intelligence exchange, there remains an alarming disparity in our understanding of these two areas. The importance of intelligence is often commented on, but rarely subjected to sustained analysis. This article seeks to fill that gap by looking in turn at the nature of the Western ‘intelligence community’, the impact of alliance politics upon intelligence common to national estimates and the significance of strategic intelligence cooperation.

The recent release of previously classified Foreign Office files has helped illuminate the early history of the secret propaganda unit, the Information Research Department (IRD). Although launched in 1948 by the Attlee government with the avowed intention of promoting Britain as a socialist ‘Third Force’ in world politics, IRD tended in practice to devote its earliest efforts to attacking the Soviet Union and Communism, not only abroad but also at home, where leaders of the Labour movement deployed its materials against the far left. By 1950 the Third Force mission had been abandoned altogether as British foreign policy shifted decisively towards support for an American-led coalition of Atlantic powers.

1. Personal and academic background

F.H. It would be very interesting if you could say something about your own personal and academic background. What were the experiences that led you to write Man, the State and War?

A.Mc. A common preoccupation of much contemporary writing about world politics concerns the dynamic interrelation between continuity and change. The end of the Cold War, the intensification of globalization and the 'postmodern turn' have delivered powerful challenges to the orthodoxy of realism. Among the most significant of these challenges is the cosmopolitan approach advocated by David Held, Andrew Linklater and others. In contradistinction to realism, which assumes a strict analytical separation between politics within and amongst states, the cosmopolitan approach proffers a more unified conception of political life. In this discussion Barry Buzan, a prominent advocate of realism, and David Held debate the merits of their respective positions and assess the strengths and limits of both realism and cosmopolitanism as frameworks for understanding contemporary global politics and its potential for transformation. I began by asking Barry to explain the fundamentals of contemporary realism. What are its constituent elements?

Benjamin Frankel (ed.), Realism: Restatements and Renewal, Ilford, Frank Cass & Co. Ltd, 1996

Benjamin Frankel (ed.), Roots of Realism, Ilford, Frank Cass & Co. Ltd, 1996

Ken Booth and Russell Trood (eds.), Strategic Cultures in the Asia-Pacific Region, Basingstoke, Macmillan, forthcoming

Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1995

Peter J. Katzenstein, Cultural Norms and National Security: Police and Military in Postwar Japan, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1996

Peter J. Katzenstein (ed.), The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, Columbia, NY, Columbia University Press, 1996

Elizabeth Kier, Imagining War: French and British Military Doctrine between the Wars, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1997

Randall D. Germain and Michael Kenny's valuable 'Engaging Gramsci: International Theory and the New Gramscians'Review of International Studies, 24:1 (1998), pp. 3-21. alerts Anglophone IR scholars to broader debates about Gramsci's theories that are rarely highlighted by scholars in the (somewhat misnamed) 'Italian School'. Just as Germain and Kenny have offered one way to contextualize Gramsci's contributions within the intellectual and social world that was the immediate object of his analysis, it is equally important to put the work of Anglophone 'Gramscian' scholars in its own immediate context in order to clarify why the 'Gramsci' that so many of us have found helpful was the historicist and 'idealist' who, as Germain and Kenny's article suggests, is only one of the many Gramscis that can be identified through historically grounded close readings of the Sardinian's words and deeds.

In a recent issue of the Review, Randall Germain and Michael Kenny issued a serious challenge to neo-Gramscian scholarship in international studies,Randall D. Germain and Michael Kenny, 'Engaging Gramsci: International Relations Theory and the New Gramscians', Review of International Studies, 24:1 (1998), pp. 3-21. claiming that 'the Italian school's appropriation of Gramsci is far more conceptually problematic than they [neo-Gramscians] acknowledge, and that their use of his framework is difficult to sustain with respect to the scholarship devoted to his ideas'.Ibid., p. 3. In their critical probing of the neo-Gramscian IR literature, Germain and Kenny focus most closely upon two issues: Gramsci's ambiguous and contested legacy and the difficulty of establishing any 'definitive interpretation' of his work; and the appropriateness of attempting to understand transnational social relations in terms of a broadly Gramscian concept of 'civil society'. I will discuss each in turn.

The attempts by Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and other members of the 'Copenhagen School' to provide a theoretical foundation for a broader understanding of security and security studies involves a sustained effort to rethink the processes through which issues become 'security' issues. Security is no longer viewed as referring naturally or unproblematically to the military security of the state. Rather, the goal becomes to understand how different 'referent objects' - from the economy, to the environment, to military relations - can become subject to the processes of 'securitization' in which the socially and politically successful 'speech act' of labelling an issue a 'security issue' removes it from the realm of normal day-to-day politics, casting it as an 'existential threat' calling for and justifying extreme measures.Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO, 1998); Ole Wæver, 'Securitization and Desecuritization', in Ronnie D. Lipschutz (ed.), On Security (New York, 1995), pp. 46-86.

This is a much-delayed and partial reply in what might ordinarily seem a small, even local, quarrel. However, it has become a more and more plausible view that international relations theory can only make progress if it grapples with embedded and assumed notions of objectivity, and makes room for more subtle and complex views of subjectivity. There is agreement, therefore, with Hollis and Smith that an engagement with the question how epistemology and ontology are related is important for International Relations.Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, 'A Response: Why Epistemology Matters in International Theory', Review of International Studies, 22:1 (1996), pp. 111-16. This reply to their position is, however, partial in that Vivienne Jabri would seek to establish a more complex view of Giddens than a discussion piece would allow. She has already begun to do this in her recent book, Vivienne Jabri, Discourses on Violence (Manchester, 1996). but for now she would say that Hollis and Smith have deformed Giddens in their reading of him. Leaving that largely but not totally aside, this reply is to do with other deformations. There is, firstly, a deformation of our view of cultural argument, labelling it an argument for relativism. Secondly, Hollis and Smith risk misplacing International Relations not only by a restricted reading of philosophy, but in relation to developments in other internationally concerned disciplines. We hope that Smith's self-images of a disciplineSteve Smith, 'The Self-images of a Discipline', in Ken Booth and Steve Smith (eds.), International Relations Theory Today (Cambridge, 1995). do not imply it is hermetically sealed, although I have noted elsewhere how 'Western' all these self-images seem to be,Stephen Chan, 'Seven Types of Ambiguity in Western IR Theory and Painful Steps towards Right Ethics', Theoria, 89 (1997). and that is precisely part of the point I am trying to make here.