Michael C. Williams

Why Ideas Matter in International Relations: Hans Morgenthau, Classical Realism, and the Moral Construction of Power Politics

Debates over how ideas matter in international relations have come to occupy a key place in the field. Through a reexamination of the thinking of Hans Morgenthau, this article seeks to recover a tradition of classical realism that stressed the role of ideas in both the construction of action and in political and ethical judgment. Locating Morgenthaus understanding of politics against the background of the oppositional “concept of the political†developed by the controversial jurist Carl Schmitt shows how Morgenthaus realism attempts to recognize the centrality of power in politics without reducing politics to violence, and to preserve an open and critical sphere of public political debate. This understanding of Morgenthaus realism challenges many portrayals of his place in the evolution of international relations, and of the foundations of realist thought. However, it is also of direct relevance to current analyses of collective identity formation, linking to—and yet providing fundamental challenges for—both realist and constructivist theories.For helpful and insightful comments on this article in its wide variety of previous incarnations, I would like to thank Michael Barnett, James Der Derian, Randall Germain, Alexandra Gheciu, Stefano Guzzini, Jef Huysmans, Oliver JutersA¶nke, Jennifer Mitzen, Vibeke Schou Pedersen, and especially Rita Abrahamsen and Richard Wyn Jones. Previous drafts were presented at the 2002 meetings of the British International Studies Association, and at the Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. My thanks also to the participants at those sessions.

The Discipline of the Democratic Peace: Kant, Liberalism and the Social Construction of Security Communities

The theory that democratic states do not go to war with one another depends upon the claim that such states can recognize each other as democracies and act pacifically in accordance with this recognition. This article argues that analyses of the democratic peace and security communities can benefit from a fuller and more critical engagement with the thinking of Immanuel Kant. Kantian liberalism involves subtle yet powerful processes of identity construction, and the processes of mutual recognition with which these identities are intertwined play essential constitutive and disciplining roles in the development of political relations. These processes of recognition are not merely sociological puzzles, but rather overtly political practices that both entail and enable the exercise of considerable power. The social construction of democratic security communities builds upon these liberal structures of identity and discipline, a situation demonstrated in the case of NATO.

What is the National Interest? The Neoconservative Challenge in IR Theory

Despite its controversial influence in American foreign policy and international politics, neoconservatism has received comparatively little attention in IR theory. This article seeks to contribute to a critical engagement between IR theory and neoconservatism by providing an account of the theoretical foundations of neoconservatism and its distinctive approach to the national interest. Examining these foundations reveals a series of areas in which IR can engage substantively with neoconservatism. Perhaps most surprisingly, it also demonstrates the renewed relevance of classical Realists such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans Morgenthau, whose thinking not only addressed themes at the heart of contemporary neoconservatism, but who also provided prescient warnings of the dangerous directions in which neoconservative understandings of the national interest could lead.

The Myths of Europe: Legitimacy, Community and the 'Crisis' of the EU

The current debate over the ‘crisis’ of the EU has often been linked with criticisms of functionalism. From both a liberal-political and a romantic position, functionalism has been charged with paying inadequate attention to questions of legitimacy and identity - and particularly to the importance of myth - in political community. For the romantic position, the functionalist project could succeed so long it did not enter the realm of national myths. For liberals, it can succeed only if supplemented by a European myth. Each holds in common, however, the belief that myth was missing from the integration process so far and that the key question involves myth’s relation to functionalism. This article argues that, rather than eliding mythic elements, functionalism actually draws powerfully upon modernist myths of rationalization, and that coming to terms more fully with this mythic structure is essential in assessing questions of the EU’s legitimacy and its ‘crisis’.

Securing the City: Private Security Companies and Non-State Authority in Global Governance

The past decade has witnessed a remarkable expansion and globalisation of the private security sector. These developments mark the emergence of public—private, global—local security networks that play increasingly important roles in global governance. Rather than representing a simple retreat of the state, security privatisation is a part of broad processes in which the role of the state — and the nature and locus of authority — is being transformed and rearticulated. Often presented as apolitical, as the mere effect of market forces and moves towards greater efficiency in service delivery, the authority conferred on private actors can alter the political landscape and in the case of private security has clear implications for who is secured and how. The operation and impact of public/private, global/local security networks is explored in the context of security provision in Cape Town, South Africa.

Public/private, global/local: the changing contours of Africa's security governance

From conflict zones to shopping malls, from resource extraction sites to luxury tourist enclaves, private security has become a ubiquitous feature of modern life. While the ‘monopoly of legitimate violence’ continues to be one of the defining features of state sovereignty, and one of the most powerful elements of the modern political imagination, the realities of security today increasingly transcend its confines, and include a wide range of private actors. At its most controversial, private security is represented by the combat active soldier, heavily armed and actively involved in warfare. At its most mundane, it involves the unarmed guard at a hotel entrance, or a neighbourhood watch of concerned citizens mobilising local energies in the pursuit of safety and security.

Selling security: Assessing the impact of military privatization

ABSTRACT The rise of the private military industry has become an important and controversial issue in international politics. This article reviews the contributions of four books that analyse the rise and consequences of the privatization of force. Placing military privatization in a broader political context shows how a fuller understanding of these developments requires a global focus and an emphasis on their relationship both to global capital and to shifting state forms where the public and the private, the domestic and the international, are being rearticulated.