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Bringing the State Back into International Relations

In the decade or so following the end of the cold war the academic study of International Relations (IR) took a turn, or rather a combination of turns, which downgraded the significance attached to states and their foreign policies. Some scholars stressed the way in which, now that the Warsaw Pact had collapsed and NATO found itself groping towards ‘cooperative security’ rather than collective defence, the political and security orientations of individual states had become less important. From a different angle, specialists in International Political Economy explored what one of their pioneers, the late Professor Susan Strange, characterized as The Retreat of the State in the face of the powerful new forces represented by international flows of trade, money and know-how. The phenomenon of globalization, now intensely analysed, appeared to go even further than its predecessor, interdependence, in eroding the importance of states and their foreign policies. The significant ‘actors’ in the international system, it seemed, might no longer be states (even big ones), but rather ‘non-state actors’ such as multinational companies, international organizations, transnational political movements concerned with ecology or peace, and the other components of what came to be called ‘global civil society’. In Western Europe this latter-day withering-away of the state seemed to many to be accentuated by the way the member states of the European