It is not simply because an inter-disciplinary journal is such a rarity that a retiring editor of the Review looks back on an unusual experience. In the variety of responses to the challenge of studying international relations two opposing general tendencies constantly assert themselves. One is the tendency to see international problems wholly in terms familiar to long established disciplines; the other is to define international relations so particularly as to exclude contributions from traditional modes of understanding. The existence of the Review suggests that its own correct and humane function is to moderate both these tendencies, without thereby depleting the ambition to create new styles of discourse or the determination to maintain the vigour of the old. Among its more demanding readership the Review may even stimulate efforts to transcend them. Selecting, commissioning and preparing material for publication with such aims in mind certainly tests the categories of the editor's own thinking to an unusual degree. For this experience he ought to be, and in the present case certainly is, duly grateful.

In the summer of 1920 Arnold Toynbee's old friend and contemporary at Balliol, L. B. Namier, a historian of a very different school, brought him a book which had been published 18 months earlier, the first volume of Oswald Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes, The Decline of the West. ‘As read these pages teeming with firefly flashes of historical insight,’ Toynbee recalled some years later, ‘I wondered at first whether my whole enquiry had been disposed of by Spengler before even the questions, not to speak of the answers, had fully taken shape in my own mind.’ He decided nevertheless to go on with his own equally ambitious account of the rise and fall of civilizations. From the start, therefore, Toynbee's vast life-work, the 12 volumes, over three million words, of A Study of History, has been coupled with and compared to the two volumes, a mere 400 thousand words, of Spengler's Decline of the West. Both were best-sellers: the original German edition of The Decline of the West sold 100,000 copies in its first eight years; the abridged edition of A Study of History sold over 300,000 and even the ten volume edition (the two subsequent volumes were an atlas and a volume of second thoughts entitled Reconsiderations) sold 7,000 complete sets within a year of the publication of the final volume. Both are, if not forgotten (Spengler at least turns up in unlikely places, such as President Nixon's desk, placed there by Dr Kissinger) certainly largely unread. Yet each is interesting because of the great gifts of their very different authors and because of what they tell us not just about the past but about the twentieth century and the sense of crisis with which we have lived for the last 70 years.

Most commentators on the 1949 sterling crisis have viewed it as an episode with implications merely for the management of the British economy. This paper, based on the public records now available, discusses the impact of the crisis on British economic foreign policy. In particular it suggests that the crisis revealed deep Anglo-American differences, centring on the nature of the Marshall Plan, on the international value of the sterling area, and on the proper relationship between the United Kingdom and Western Europe, Ultimately the British succeeded in resolving these disagreements: but this triumph ironically implied both the defeat of British aims in post-war European reconstruction and a long term delusion that great power status could be maintained on the basis of a special relationship-with the United States.

With undue and perhaps false modesty, E. H. Carr described his brilliant contribution to what he called ‘the infant science of international polities’, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations, as ‘already a period piece’ in 1946 when a second edition appeared.1 Teachers of the subject have not accepted Carr's ‘period piece’ characterization. For more than forty years it has been prescribed reading for many of their students and has had to be reprinted many times.

This paper offers an analysis of some of the problems arising in those international disputes concerning issues of public international law which do not present any proximate threat to international peace or security. It does so in the context of an examination of procedures for settling disputes over jurisdiction in public international law, disputes of the kind which arose in 1982 when the United States’ right to control—that is, its jurisdiction over—exports from Western Europe to the Soviet Union was challenged by the EEC and its member states. The analysis is also intended to have general relevance to all international legal disputes in which individuals are directly involved as disputants with or alongside states.

This paper is an effort to overcome a major obstacle to a creative system orientation in international relations—a dearth of knowledge about system-level change. To accomplish this goal two tasks are necessary. First, building upon earlier contributions, a new definition of international system is offered and its essential properties—structure, process, equilibrium, stability—are discussed. The second requirement is to create a new approach to crisis and to forge links between its unit and system levels, the focus of the rest of the paper. This, in turn, will facilitate the analysis of crises as catalysts to system change, that is, as international earthquakes.

The West is now less dependent on Persian Gulf oil than at any time in the last decade. However, the area remains economically and strategically vital. The fact that the recent escalation of hostilities in the desultory Iran-Iraq war has attracted world-wide attention bears disturbing witness to the West's continuing vulnerability in this region. This vulnerability stems, in part, from three crucial decisions—two made in London and one in Washington—during the years 1968 to 1973, Until then, the Persian Gulf was viewed, when it was considered at all, as something of an international anachronism—a sleepy outpost of the fast-dwindling British Empire where Britannia still ruled the waves and the ‘Pax Britannica’ applied as it had since the 1820s. In that six-year period the Labour government of Harold Wilson announced that Britain would end its historic role in the Gulf; the Conservative government of Edward Heath chose not to alter the Labour policy, despite indications that it would do so; and the Nixon administration decided not to ‘fill the vacuum’. This paper assesses these three cases in terms of decision making theory, testing the utility of various theoretical decision making paradigms. Developments in the Gulf itself are treated only in so far as they had an effect on the making of policy in London and Washington.

In recent years the collapse of détente and the general deterioration in East-West relations have heightened fears that human evolution will terminate abruptly in a nuclear catastrophe. This foreboding is manifested in many facets of Western life: in the speeches of politicians; in popular culture; in mass movements; and in the working practices and consciousness of academics. At such times I believe that those of us who are specialists in areas outside strategic studies become inclined to take an interest in ‘the great debate’. In some respects this may be in order to seek reassurance. After all, if the ‘experts’ seem calm in these inauspicious times perhaps we can all relax again and put the ‘nuclear genie back in the bottle’. Unfortunately, even if we discovered the psychological solace we had been seeking it would not be satisfactory to hand the nuclear debate back to the ‘experts’. There are solid academic, as well as practical reasons why strategic studies should not remain the exclusive concern of the specialist strategic studies community.

How to conceptualize the relationship between domestic political conflict and foreign policy has been a perennial problem of international relations. Quantitative studies of the internal and external conflict behaviors of nations have proposed and rejected correlations between these two phenomena on a regular basis. But the theoretical linkages that are presented in these studies between the domestic and external political arenas are generally made in such a rudimentary fashion that they appear fuzzy if not actually contradictory when subjected to close analysis. At the same time, most historical treatments of domestic conflict and foreign policy are too impressionistic to provide clear concepts for comparative research. As Michael Fry and Arthur Gilbert have demonstrated with regard to the writings of one especially prolific and influential contemporary historian—Arno Mayer—a substantial amount of pruning and interpolation is required to put such notions as ‘the Forces of Order and the Forces of Movement’ or ‘organic’ and ‘inorganic’ societal crises into usable form.

The Cold War remains, despite the proliferation of studies of the subject, one of the most enigmatic and elusive international conflicts of modern times. Like all complex international conflicts, it does not have a single cause. Rather, it is the end result of a concatenation of a number of problems which, by their interaction, made it so intractable. Of these problems, none was more central or pervasive than the German problem. This was central to the outbreak of the Cold War, central to its continuation and central to its decline. So close, in fact, is the inter-connection between the German problem and the Cold War that it becomes difficult to distinguish cause and effect. Clearly, the problems of what to do with Germany contributed to the breakdown of relations between the wartime allies, just as the growing conflict between those allies affected the course of German history. By drawing on the documents relating to United States policy towards Germany during the early post-war period, the present article seeks to shed some new light on the process by which Germany came to be divided and to place the developments in Germany in the broader context of the struggle between East and West. In a nutshell, the argument to be advanced here is that there was never any real possibility of avoiding the partition of Germany given the bipolarity which characterized the international system after 1945, If this was indeed the case, then it follows that the arguments of the traditionalist historians who view the Soviet Union as exclusively responsible for the partition of Germany and the arguments of the revisionist historians who lay the blame entirely at America's door, must be rejected as equally unconvincing. To put it another way, the search for a solution to the problem of Germany which would safeguard the security of Europe and satisfy the basic security needs of both superpowers, represented an attempt to square the circle. The failure to do so contributed in a crucial and decisive way to the emergence of a global conflict between East and West which we call the Cold War.

‘Northern Ireland Is free to determine its own future. It is a fundamental part of the United Kingdom, If the majority of the people in Northern Ireland wish not to be obviously we would honor their wish, whether it was to be independent or to join up elsewhere. Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom because of the wish of the majority of its people.’

Surprisingly little systematic research has been completed on evaluating the impact of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) at a time when participation in their activities has come under close scrutiny. Both theoretical weaknesses and methodological inadequacies plague researchers who are interested in the effects of outcomes on affected parties, be they intergovernmental organizations, governments or, ultimately, individuals. In this paper, we examine the problems confronting this type of research and assess the strategies so far employed to overcome some of these shortcomings. We shall also examine some approaches appropriate to generating hypotheses concerning IGO impact and propose a comprehensive framework suitable for further research.

In the April 1984 issue of this journal, Mark Imber resurrected Mitranian functionalism. His well-reasoned elucidation of David Mitrany's writings and of the writings of Mitrany's major critics ended in five propositions for further research. Unfortunately, one cannot be sure that these five propositions represent Mitranian functionalism or a new species of functionalism, Imberian functionalism. In any case, the five propositions hardly advance our knowledge of functionalism, even if they are only intended to show the possibility of functionalism's existence.

A decade after publication of a major work on world politics suggests an appropriate period for reassessment. Looking back, two obvious questions emerge. How original is Franz Schurmann's analysis? And how has it stood the test of time? The last question, depending on the first, will be discussed in my conclusion. The answer to the first question, however, is still clouded in controversy, as it was from the start. (I am considering only Schumann's interpretation-of American ‘welfare imperialism’ and how it is derived; not his informative but conventional depiction of American-Soviet-Chinese policies in relation to the Vietnam war.)

June 1985 marked the fortieth anniversary of the opening of the San Francisco conference on international organization that adopted the UN charter. This period, distinguished by the absence of war between the superpowers, is double the period that elapsed between 1918 and 1939. It was the hope and intention of those gathered at San Francisco that their labours would produce an institutional framework of collective security in which a recurrence of the conditions and behaviour that characterized the inter-war period could be avoided.

Duff Cooper fell in love with France during his first visit to Paris in 1900 and he remained faithful to her for the rest of his life. The fact that Paris in 1900 was deeply Anglophobic, because of the Boer war, had no effect upon Cooper's feelings for the city. His affection for France was no fair-weather plant. It was deepened by the experience of nine months in the trenches in the Great War and was, thereafter, proof against all discouragements. As a young Foreign Office clerk in 1923 he did not join in the fashionable disparagement of France inspired by the French occupation of the Ruhr. As Minister of War from 1935 to 1937 he fought for the creation of a British army which would be large enough to play a continental role and later, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he was a leading advocate of Anglo-French co-operation. After his resignation in protest against the Munich agreement, Cooper spent his time fostering the idea of an Anglo-French alliance as the corner-stone of a European combination against Hitler's Germany. His love for France even survived the fall of France in June 1940 and, at a time when many francophiles were repenting of their former faith. Cooper renewed his pledges of devotion. Speaking on the wireless as Minister of Information on the eve of the Franco-German armistice, he declared his faith that France would rise again: ‘This is not the first time that a great nation has been defeated and has recovered from defeat. They have fought with heroism against superior numbers and superior weapons; their losses have been terrible.’ At the Ministry of Information Cooper was one of the earliest patrons of General de Gaulle and his Free French Movement. Given such a long history of Francophilia what could have been more natural than that he should have been appointed as Britain's first post-war ambassador to France. It was not, however, quite so simple as that.