Abstract
Britain in the 1990s is part of a world that is immensely different from that of the 1970s, let alone from what we casually refer to as the ‘post-1945’ world. The contemporary world, of course, always appears uniquely confusing and intractable: only when it becomes the past do we perceive in it strong elements of continuity. Indeed, current affairs would simply be incomprehensible were it not for the many consistent strands interwoven with the politics of the past. So many of those strands have been cut or ruptured by the events of recent years, however, that it may now seem commonplace to assert that the 1990s will be a time of great change for British foreign policy.
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Notes
Good modern expressions of realist thinking can be found in Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society, (London: Macmillan, 1977);
Martin Wight, Power Politics, 2nd edn, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986);
Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics, (Cambridge, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979);
John Garnett, Commonsense and the Theory of International Politics, (London: Macmillan, 1984).
There are a wealth of behaviouralist and process approaches to contemporary world politics. Some of the more explicitly theoretical such works of recent years are, Robert O. Keohane and J.S. Nye, Power and Interdependence: The International Sources of Domestic Politics (Boston: Little Brown, 1977);
Richard W. Mansbach and J.A. Vasquez, In Search of Theory: A New Paradigm for Global Politics, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981);
Gavin Boyd and G.W. Hopple, (eds), Political Change and Foreign Policies (London: Frances Pinter, 1987).
The most recent formal behaviouralist expression is that by Michael Nicholson, Formal Theories in International Relations, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
See, Alan James, Sovereign Statehood: The Basis of International Society, (London, Allen & Unwin, 1986).
Wolfram Hanreider, ‘Dissolving International Politics: Reflections on the Nation State’, American Political Science Review 72(4), (1978), pp. 1276–87.
Basil Williams, The Whig Supremacy 1714–1760, 2nd edn, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 8.
For a distinctively more modern view of the same phenomenon see Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 700–25.
For a good discussion of the development of sovereignty in British political philosophy see Ellen Kennedy, ‘The State and Sovereignty’ in Lawrence Freedman and Michael Clarke (eds), Britain in the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Enoch Powell, ‘Towards a Europe of Sovereign Nations’, The Independent, 6 September 1989, p.12.;
Richard Ritchie (ed.), Enoch Powell on 1992, (London: Anaya, 1989).
Dahrendorf, Ralf, On Britain, London, BBC Publications, 1982, p. 133.
Paulo Cecchini, The European Challenge, (Brussels: European Community, 1988).
On the historical development of sovereignty see F.H. Hinsley, Sovereignty, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Also Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America, (London: Chatto, 1989).
On the relationship between Britain’s present conditions and the concept of sovereignty see, William Wallace, ‘What Price Independence? Sovereignty and Interdependence in British Politics’, International Affairs, 62(3), (1986), pp. 367–89.
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© 1992 Royal Institute of International Affairs
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Clarke, M. (1992). Introduction. In: British External Policy-making in the 1990s. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22122-6_1
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