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Prospecting the Future

Creating the paradigms for the next millennium isn't something you can just order up! It's a process-it can take days or months or years! -Garry Trudeau (1997) What are the long-run prospects for international relations? The essays in this volume address that question based on broad conceptions of its extended past and its present, and limits on our foresight. They emphasize fundamental features of polarity, governance, prevailing identities, the role of state and nonstate actors, and aggregation and disaggregation as they bear on security and political-economy prospects for the relatively long run. They more or less take explicit positions on the future concentration and dispersion of power, wealth, and legitimacy and of their opposites-weakness, poverty, and regimes lacking in consent. The contributors have the intellectual conviction, some might say arrogance or innocence, to provide us with conjectures (de Jouvenal 1967), visions of possible futures and the paths to them, intended to open up thinking about the future rather than to close it off. They do not by and large offer forecasts of states of affairs and their time of occurrence in the customarily specific terms of the world of international affairs practice. That self-restraint does not in itself deprive their views of practical relevance. The acts and words of international affairs practitioners do not comprehensively and continuously monopolize relevance to social consequences. Policy salons have not earned a special claim to realism in its common-language sense. As Max Weber observed, "Very frequently, the