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An analysis is presented of the creation and development of rules governing the organizational form and the policy content of the European Central Bank (ECB). The establishment of the ECB and the launching of the Euro constitute an extraordinary innovation, one that opens and organizes a new institutional space in Europe. The ECB system is assessed in the light of three broad theoretical approaches emphasizing, respectively, power politics, institutions as rational solutions to collective problems, and pre-existing normative (social) structures. Power politics and functional rationality approaches are found to fail to account for important aspects of the ECB’s rules and policy mandates, while, in contrast, a sociological emphasis on institutional context is useful in explaining the continuities linking the ECB to the normative structure that had previously developed – largely within the network of central-bank governors – and diffused throughout the organizational field in which monetary policy-making was embedded. It was the need to legitimize the new ECB in terms of these broader norms that shaped the ECB’s organizational structure and governing rules: in particular, pre-existing norms influenced three key aspects of the ECB – its political independence, its criteria for membership, and its rules for price stability.

Sir Harold Nicolson’s international thought, more specifically, his thinking on international order, diplomacy, a united Europe, world government, and global peace, was shaped by his upbringing in a diplomatic household, an Oxford classical education, and two decades as a diplomat in Europe and Asia Minor. Especially significant were his Foreign Office service in London during the First World War and his involvement in peacemaking at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, which culminated in the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Nicolson also made important contributions at the Lausanne Conference (1922–23), en poste in Germany between 1927 and 1929, and as an anti-appeasement MP prior to the Second World War. His fifty-year career, from the time of the Balkan Wars to Suez, represented an attempt to resolve the question of how best to secure international stability: through power politics, idealism, or an amalgam of realist and idealist approaches.

This chapter explores the forty-five-year period after the Crimean War when great powers of all stripes fell into an intense competition for formal political control over third-party territories. The competition greatly increased the level of tension in the system, even if most of the struggles stopped short of a direct great power war. Most significantly, of course, France, Britain, and Germany dove into a scramble for colonial territory after 1880 that drew most of Africa and large parts of Asia into the European orbit. On two particular occasions—the Austro-Prussian “Seven Weeks' War” of 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870—large-scale war between two great powers did break out. The purpose of the chapter is to uncover to what extent and in what manner economic interdependence shaped the struggles and wars of this almost-half-century period.

No theory gives state power a more central place than realism. Indeed, the term “power politics” is often synonymous with realism and realpolitik foreign policy, but making the concept of power tractable has been a challenge even for realists. No scholar better exemplifies the intellectual challenges of making realism a robust social scientific theory than Stephen Krasner. Throughout his career he has wrestled with realism’s promises and limitations. He reinvigorated concepts of relative state power in his analysis of foreign policy and international institutions in the 1970s and 1980s, but in the 1990s came to question realism’s assumptions about unitary states and the fundamentals of state sovereignty. At the turn of the century, he was abandoning his neorealist colleagues and pointing out fundamental contradictions between realism’s ontology of fully sovereign autonomous states and realism’s assumption of anarchy in which states can further their interests by altering the domestic authority structures of other states. Yet, since leaving government, Krasner has returned to his realist roots, exploring new roles for state power. Krasner’s intellectual journey highlights not only the tensions in realist thinking but also the enduring utility and importance of a power-politics approach.

From its rise around 1300, and continuing from the mid‐fifteenth century until its demise during World War I, the Ottoman Empire was a crucial player in European and Asian power politics: first as a major Islamic threat to Christian Europe and later as a weakening military power over whose territories and resources the European Great Powers competed. In Chapter 5, Gábor Ágoston examines the grand strategy of the early Ottomans, focusing on how a small Turkic principality evolved into an empire with the conquest of Byzantine Constantinople (1453). Ágoston suggests that until the late sixteenth century, the Ottoman rulers sought ‘the gradual expansion of earlier Ottoman frontiers into a world empire by defeating Christian and Muslim neighbours and rivals and incorporating their territories’. Changes in the geopolitical setting during the mid‐sixteenth century caused the Ottoman strategy to shift towards defending earlier gains, using fortresses, garrisons, and provisional forces.

The Politics and Power Approach to understanding social policy creation is described and applied to the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Law. This approach focuses on who wins and who loses based on their relative power resources at different points in the policy process. Introducing a policy process model combined with differential power analysis, this chapter provides readers a way of understanding policy through looking at how influence, persuasion and decision-making are conducted by system insiders and those who want to be on the inside. A discussion of elitist and pluralistic approaches to understanding policy decisions is included as background to the analysis of TANF. These theories are important in that they describe the relative weight of “the people” in the thinking of decision-makers.

Negotiating the nuclear pact between India and the United States proved problematic because of the two competing imperatives of the latter's foreign policy: great power politics versus nuclear weapons non-proliferation. President George W. Bush's administration considered the agreement primarily as an instrument to develop a strategic alliance with India, but many members of Congress would support it only if it contributed to the objectives of non-proliferation. In India, political critics viewed the agreement as a ploy by the US to stifle India's nuclear options. Aside from nuclear technicalities, the US-India civilian nuclear energy cooperation agreement is also about the emergence of a new configuration in global balance of power. This chapter discusses the long-standing debate in the international relations literature about the effectiveness of international institutions in global politics, as well as the civilian nuclear energy pacts signed by India with other nations following that with the US.

Georg Schwarzenberger described himself as ‘European; born and bred in Germany, with British nationality and British loyalties’. His life was indeed characterised by the crossing of borders: he distanced himself from his Jewish religion and bourgeois family, emigrated from Germany to England, and, finally, changed his scholarly area from international law to international relations. Schwarzenberger was born in Heilbronn, Württemberg, in 1908. For his legal studies, Schwarzenberger chose the University of Heidelberg, considered the most liberal university in Germany. This chapter chronicles the life of Schwarzenberger as an émigré legal scholar in England, his settlement in London, his approach to international law, his promotion of international law, his work on international law and power politics, and his influence on English law.

This chapter examines the difference between Thucydides and Hobbes on the issue of justice. The difference between what should be and what is reverberates in Thucydides' moral dramas. All the characters recognize the tension between justice and the demands of power politics. Thucydides equates justice with the avoidance of needless and excessive bloodshed and with adherence to basic war conventions, such as not killing women and children. In his treatment of Plataea, Thucydides recognizes the value of traditional notions of virtue and justice. However, he laments that men are always willing to violate these principles because of envy and need for revenge. Indeed, Thucydides holds out little hope that mankind will at any time recognize the Melian claim that its interests lie in adherence to a common code of justice. Hobbes thinks that a common code of justice is in the common interest of mankind but that the only way it can be consistently upheld is if there is an absolute sovereign to maintain it. This means that at the international level, one cannot expect all laws of nature to be observed consistently. States need only obey these laws if their unilateral obedience will cause them no harm. In this way, Hobbes makes justice and expediency coincide.

The task of this chapter is to clarify what we see as Agamben's understanding of politics, a question which is otherwise very opaque in his work. It is argued here that seeing Agamben as a political thinker – which we do — relies on being able to make a coherent distinction between politics and power. Here this distinction is explored through, first, a critical engagement with Chantal Mouffe's category of the political, and then with Antonio Negri's distinction between constituting and constituted power, neither of which, we argue, adequately accounts for Agamben's understanding of politics. We then turn to Walter Benjamin's ‘Critique of Violence’, in which the project of transcending legal violence through the enigmatic notion of ‘divine violence’ takes us closer to Agamben's messianic and ‘anarchic’ way of thinking about politics beyond the clasps of law and sovereignty.

This chapter examines the gradual decomposition of the idea of sovereignty in the thought of Charles Merriam, particularly as it related to his emerging conception of democratic power. As a leading political theorist in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, the dean of the Chicago School of political science, one of the most active builders of policy-facing social science research, and leading apostle of planning for the New Deal state, Merriam’s idea of democratic sovereignty was consequential. The democratic definition of the political that he developed offered a viable if flawed counterweight to Schmitt’s decisionism, the iron cage of Weberian bureaucratic rationality, and the atomic liberty of liberal individualism. Alas, Merriam failed to reckon with the recrudescence of older forms of sovereignty, whose obsolescence he overstated. Worse still, he did not consider how the new democratic energies unleashed by the pragmatist conception of the political might be simplified and brutalized by militarism and total war.

This chapter argues that, rather than seeing realist constructivisms as a combination of two explanatory theories, they should be viewed as combinations of different types of theorising. They combines a political theory informed by realism (based on power politics) that, in turn, informs a realist foreign policy strategy and morality based on a prudential check on power, with an explanatory theory largely informed by constructivism. In this way, combining realism and constructivism can be seen as an attempt to think the different layers of IR theorising in parallel, and yet to explore new combinations not within but across types of theorising.

This chapter is structured around four questions: Why did the Europeans not achieve economic integration in the late 1940s and early 1950s? Why did the Federal Republic of Germany welcome the Benelux proposal in 1955 and make substantial concessions to France in order to establish the European Economic Community (EEC)? Why did the French agree to create a supranational common market so soon after rejecting the defense community and then carry through on their commitment? And why did the British initially join the discussions, quickly pull out, and then propose a competing European industrial free trade area (FTA) in October 1956, before finally seeking to associate their own economic grouping with the common market? It argues that these events are best understood as the product of balance of power politics. Specifically, the global distribution of power made European cooperation possible, and the major protagonists endorsed or refused integration based on balance of power calculations.

The classical criteria for statehood (the so-called Montevideo criteria) were essentially based on the principle of effectiveness. The proposition that statehood is a question of fact derives strong support from the equation of effectiveness with statehood. It is necessary to distinguish two possible positions: that there cannot a priori be any criteria for statehood independent of effectiveness, and that no such criteria yet exist as a matter of international law. Fundamentally, the argument that international law cannot regulate or control effective territorial entities is an expression of the view that international law cannot regulate power politics at all; that it is in the end non-peremptory. But on its own terms and with whatever results, international law is in a stage of development towards greater coherence and cogency. An important development here has been the acceptance of the notion of peremptory norms of general international law.

This chapter addresses the following questions: Why did the French agree to create a military community in 1952? Having signed the European Defense Community (EDC) treaty, why did they subsequently refuse to ratify it and instead seek German membership in the Western European Union (WEU) and NATO in 1954? Why did West Germany welcome the French proposal for a Europe an army and sign and ratify the EDC treaty? And why did Britain refuse to become involved in the EDC negotiations? It argues that these events were the consequence of balance of power politics: the power configuration that made European cooperation in heavy industry possible remained in force, and each state chose to engage in or forego integration based on balance of power calculations.

This chapter explores the role of Memphis Sound as a both a symbol and an instrument of the Black Power Movement. It highlights Stax Records, who, under the leadership of Al Bell, amplified the musical “blackness” of its recordings. The studio used nationalist rhetoric in its advertisements and public statements, and allied with African American political organizations in order to force the issue of racial disparity. This unfortunately angered some of the label's white staff members and challenged Stax's image as a site of integration. However, the studio never abandoned the integrationist discourse of the Memphis Sound, nor did they stop using white musicians. The chapter mentions the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, an all-white band, whose career serves as an illustration of how the story of Stax records in these years reveals the multifaceted role of Black Power politics in soul music, the country-soul triangle, and the U.S. recording industry.

This chapter identifies three drivers of hegemonic unraveling and transformation in international orders: great-power contestation and alternative order building; how the dominant power’s loss of its “patronage monopoly” enhances the bargaining leverage of weaker states; and the rise of counter-order movements, especially transnational ones, that weaken support for existing international arrangements—sometimes within the leading power itself. Because analysts tend to focus their attention on the relationship between power transitions and great-power wars, they have only recently begun to appreciate the significance of these three processes. This chapter shows that these challenges—from above, below, and within—played a key role in past power transitions and transformations in international order, including the decline of Spanish hegemony, challenges to British hegemony before World War I, the rise of fascism and Bolshevism during the interwar period, decolonization, and the collapse of the Soviet system.

The concluding chapter of the book begins by reviewing the argument and the evidence presented throughout the book. It then turns to a discussion of the theoretical and policy implications of the argument. Theoretically, the book draws new attention to the importance of temporality in international politics while also reframing how the effect of uncertainty in international politics is understood. In terms of policy implications, the conclusion examines the likely direction of Sino-American relations in the coming years, including those factors that might lead to a further deterioration of that relationship. The book concludes with a discussion of avenues for future research on time horizons, uncertainty, and beliefs about state intentions.