Nicholas Onuf

Everyday Ethics in International Relations

Ethical conduct reflects what we feel we should or must do, given available standards. Ethics begins with the reasons that we give for our conduct. This paper begins where people do: with the way that we justify our everyday conduct by invoking standards that are immediately and abundantly available. When pressed, we look for more acceptable reasons and more general standards. While philosophers look for universal standards and seek to justify them, all of us live in a world of everyday ethics.

Book Review: David Campbell and Michael J. Shapiro (eds.), Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, 268 pp., £16,50 pbk.)

146 because of domestic pressures, in the United States it was pressure from the masses, and in the Soviet Union it was pressure from within the government’ (p. 235). And although the political consequences were profound within each country, the fundamental outcomes were different. Despite Presidents Johnson and, in particular, Nixon (with Watergate) being driven from office, and ‘despite being shaken to its core, the American constitutional system remained intact and mostly legitimate in the view of the American people’ (p. 256). On the other hand, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and of communism throughout Eastern Europe, ‘stands in sharp contrast to the final fall-out of Vietnam on American society’ (p. 237). In other words, ‘The United States survived Vietnam, and the Soviet Union did not survive Afghanistan’ (p. 239). Superpowers Defeated provides an informative and insightful comparison of the Vietnam War and the Afghan War that many, as Borer argues, assume to be automatically analogous. Although Borer would agree up to a point, he demonstrates the complexities and, hence, also the differences between the two wars. Furthermore, most students of world politics probably have greater familiarity with just one of the cases. In this respect, for most students of international studies there is new information and analyses about the other war. Overall, Borer provides a thoughtful and informative comparison, leading to a stronger understanding, of the Vietnam and Afghan Wars.

World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations

Introduction PART I: Rules 1. Constructivism 2. Law and Language 3. Cognition, Judgement, Culture 4. The Problem of Order PART II: Rule 5. The Presumption of Anarchy 6. Political Society 7. World Politics 8. Rationality and Resources