Rise, decline, fall

Abstract

In the international system of states, wonders are occurring. As the bipolar structure wrought during and after World War II by the Soviet Union, the United States, and their allies has begun to crack, student of international relations have renewed their interest in long-term historical studies of states and state systems. Among other changes, scholars have started defecting from the assumption that the nuclear era is unique, hence not worth comparing with other eras. They (or perhaps I should say we) have begun taking seriously the search for connections and disjunctions between the Europecentered system of states that ruled that world before 1945 and the successive international regimes that have prevailed since then. We have entered a period of fruitful divergence among views of how states change form, how relations among states evolve, and connections between the two. We are, in fact, seeing increasingly that the two processes are one: that the same interactions-centered on war, preparations for war, and threats of wartransform states and systems of states. Michael Doyle's Empires illustrates the renewed will to unite analyses of international and domestic politics. It takes a very different tack from