Sovereignty and human rights are generally considered separate, mutually contradictory regimes in international society. This article takes issue with this conventional assumption, and argues that only by treating sovereignty and human rights as two normative elements of a single, inherently contradictory modern discourse about legitimate statehood and rightful state action can we explain key moments in the expansion of the international system during the twentieth century. After developing a constructivist argument about communicative action, norm formation and sovereignty, the article focuses on post-1945 decolonization, showing how ‘first wave’ post-colonial states played a crucial role in constructing the ‘international bill of rights’, how they invoked those rights to justify the norm of self-determination, and how this norm in turn licensed the proliferation of new sovereign states in Asia and elsewhere.

Machiavelli believed that diplomacy, unlike military service, was of no significance for civic virtue, and that in foreign policy it was no substitute for arms and money. Nevertheless, it enhanced the virtù of even the strongest prince. It was for this and other reasons that Machiavelli also believed that the good faith on which negotiation depends was generally observed. His view that promises need not outlast the conditions that produce them is an escape clause that is equally necessary. Machiavelli does not deserve the charge, laid at his door by Harold Nicolson, of corrupting the art of diplomacy.

In this article I intend to give more attention to Pufendorf's ideas than has been the custom among international relations theorists. The main focus will be upon Pufendorf's distillation and conceptualization of the implications of Westphalia in terms of sovereignty and the integrity of states. Furthermore, his extension of the Aristotelian classification of types of state, and his attempts to go beyond Bodin's and Hobbes's theories of sovereignty, provide the vocabulary and concepts in terms of which the different international actors of the late seventeenth century could be understood. In this respect the focus is altogether different from Linklater. My emphasis upon the historical and emblematic character of the Peace of Westphalia, the personification of the state and its animation by sovereignty, which serves to facilitate Pufendorf's exploration of the idea of a system of states, and my suggestion that his ideas are not wholly redundant and may be used to explore some facets of a modern states system, serve considerably to extend Forsyth's brief analysis.

In 1987, Paul Kennedy predicted in his best-selling book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, that the Pacific region, especially Japan and China, would rise in power, while the then Soviet Union, the United States and Europe would decline in power. Except for Russia, his predictions have not fared well. Why? His realist model of international politics ignored the role of national identities. National identities involve domestic institutions and policies that motivate citizens to create and use wealth and power. Nations compete through domestic reforms as well as international military and economic rivalries. Domestic changes in the United States and Europe revitalized American and European power, while delays in domestic reforms doomed Soviet/Russian power and dramatically slowed Japanese and Asian growth.

Fifth century Greeks distinguished between hegemonia (legitimated leadership) and arkhe (control). Thucydides employed this distinction to track the changing nature of the Athenian Empire during the Peloponnesian War, and the ways in which a diminishing concern for balancing self-interest against justice corroded Athenian authority, made survival of the empire increasingly problematic and encouraged the disastrous expedition to Sicily. The Melian Dialogue—often cited by realists to justify a power-based approach to foreign policy—is intended to symbolize this decay. Building on our analysis of Thucydides, we examine the British, Soviet and American experiences with hegemony. A striking feature of the contemporary American situation is the extent to which American leaders claim hegemonia but deny any interest in arkhe. Rightly or wrongly, much of the rest of the world has the reverse perception. This seeming contradiction has important implications for US foreign policy and world politics more generally.

This article challenges the idea that IR theory is in the midst of a ‘third debate’ between ‘positivistic’ and ‘post-positivistic’ approaches, by showing that neither the ‘first’ nor the ‘second’ debates have lost any of their relevance, and by arguing that the ‘third debate’ and the allegedly new paradigms it generated do not constitute a challenging innovation. While the ‘first debate’ is a debate between two visions of human nature, the ‘second debate’ is a debate between two visions of knowledge. A critical stance vis-à-vis rationalism does not imply a rejection of political realism, nor an endorsement of postmodernism or constructivism.

More than a decade after the revolutions of 1989, we can see these as a high point of a new, worldwide and increasingly global wave of democratic revolution and counter-revolution. Violent struggles between the political forces unleashed have produced genocidal wars and stimulated global state formation. These developments present concerned citizens and students of international relations and politics with new challenges. This article criticizes two trends in the responses of political intellectuals in the West: the ‘new anarchism’ of some critical thinkers in the academic discipline of international relations, and ‘yesterday's radicalism’ which has led some left-wing critics to revive the defence of sovereignty for repressive and genocidal non-Western states. The lecture concludes by outlining an alternative ‘new politics’ of international relations

RIS.Can we begin with one of your own favourite questions? What in our field has most surprised you recently?

CE. Perhaps it's how much is going on with feminist informed scholarship in lots of different parts of the world. For instance, I hadn't been aware of how much work was being done by Turkish feminist scholars, Japanese feminist scholars, and Korean feminist scholars. We all like to think this kind of feminist scholarly work is going on, but I don't think I fully understood how much there now is. That's very exciting and hopeful, but very surprising.

Fred Halliday, Revolution and World Politics: The Rise and Fall of the Sixth Great Power (London: Macmillan 1999).

In an age which seems anything but revolutionary it is essential to recall how much the international politics of the last two centuries has been shaped by the fear - real and imagined - of the revolutionary overthrow of the existing order. It all began of course in France, continued with the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, and then persisted in one form or another for the entire duration of the two post-war periods.

The fascination of revolutions is one shared by the worlds of scholarship and art and literature alike. For the latter, revolutions appear to hold out hope that a new order will sweep aside the decay, oppression and corruption they perceive as omnipresent in society. For the former, revolutions come tantalizingly close to the holy grail sought by social scientists for two hundred years, offering sequences of events and patterns of interaction that share sufficient similarities across continents and centuries to suggest the possibility of a true science of human affairs, including predictive hypotheses.

Fred Halliday has been impertinent enough to write this book at a time when the collapse of the European socialist bloc and the undiluted hegemony of a trans-nationalized capitalism, encourages the beatific neo-liberal confidence in the ‘end of history’. For this book brilliantly emphasizes the meaning and the importance of revolutions both as an historical phenomenon and in terms of its relevance for the twenty-first century, especially for those countries of the South. Probably few academics in Western countries are as well positioned as Halliday to write about the subject: his early links with the New Left in the 1960s, his interest in the study of Third World conflicts and revolutions, and of course his role as a theoretician of international relations, have equipped him well. His study analyses revolutions in all of their complexity and range, from the British to the Iranian, the French to the Bolshevik, the Chinese to the Cuban. The result is a substantial, profound, richly analytical book, that almost requires writing another book to discuss its various qualities. I will however restrict myself here to making a few comments about the issues I deem particularly significant.

This is a rich, impressive and timely book. At a time when American and neoliberal triumphalism deny the significance of any revolution later than 1776, and when almost no-one in the social sciences is still studying either revolution or class, Fred Halliday has demonstrated that we have been living in a revolutionary age, dominated by the conjoined effects of war and class revolution. In case you find his sub-title mysterious, Karl Marx noted that the Europe of his time was dominated by five Great Powers, but Revolution, ‘the sixth Great Power’, would soon overcome them all. Halliday would suggest that Marx was only half-right. Revolution did not overcome all five Powers, but it did transform them all—and their successors. Hannah Arendt and Martin Wight also emphasized that couplings of war and revolution have dominated much of modernity. But Halliday adds that these are not to be seen as ‘disruptions’ of International Relations, they are International Relations, since they have set the overall parameters of the modern international system. They did so, he says, in three distinct revolutionary phases from the sixteenth century to the present-day: sixteenth-seventeenth century religious wars/revolutions, late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Atlanticist wars/revolutions, and twentieth century wars/revolutions which became increasingly dominated by communism.

Over the past quarter-century, Fred Halliday has distinguished himself as a prolific and insightful scholar of international affairs. He has imbibed a generous dose of Marxist theory without being intoxicated by it, and one might say the same for his consumption of other types of theory as well. Not content to be an armchair academic, Halliday is personally acquainted with a number of revolutionary movements and his writings combine an obvious sympathy for their aspirations with a clear-eyed sense of their shortcomings. The result is a combination of intellectual range and personal experience that is nearly unique among contemporary scholars of world politics.

No author of a study such as mine could fail to be grateful, to editors and contributors alike, for a discussion as wide-ranging and pertinent as that which the Review has accorded my book on revolutions. The main purpose of Revolution and World Politics was to place the study of revolutions, as historical process and as theoretical challenge, at the centre of International Relations. The responses printed here seem, in large measure, to reinforce that endeavour.