Conceptualizing Politics

I promessi sposi/The Betrothed (the plague in Milan, brought by German mercenaries).
  4  This notion emerged in the so-called English School of International Relations and spread 
around especially after the publication of Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society in 1977.
 5  In today’s international relations lexicon NATO is more exactly dubbed a defence 
community.
 6  Behemoth, written in 1668, is Hobbes’s account of the English Civil War, covering the 
years from 1640–60.
 7  Much on war, but not its definition is contained in the Chinese treatise The Art  of War, 
written in the sixth century BCE and credited to an author called Sun Tzu or Sunzi; its 
first accurate English edition came out in 1910 (Sun Tzu 1910).
 8  In Japan 1945 no nuclear war as a bilateral exchange was fought, and only in the mid 
1950s did the two main nuclear powers attain massive retaliation and second strike 
capability.
 9  This term, a container rather than a category, was introduced by the American political 
scientist Kalevi J. Holsti (1996).
 10  More precisely, Art. 39, Chapter VII of the UN Charter regards ‘the existence of any 
threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression’ as matter of concern for the 
Security Council, which may justify military action (Art. 41).
 11  It is true that colonial genocides or massacres were perpetrated by Germany against the 
Herero and Namaqua in Namibia (then Südwest Deutschland, 1904–1907), the British 
Empire at Amritsar, India (1919) and Italy in Libya and Ethiopia in the 1930s; this hap-
pened however without much religious fanaticism in the background, but rather as an 
outcome of racist arrogance and contempt for the laws of war.
 12  This famous quote is from Part I, Chapter XIII of Leviathan (Hobbes 1651).
 13  ‘Humanitarian intervention’ belongs to the same family of legal terms as ‘responsibility 
to protect’ and in French ‘droit d’ingérence’.

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124  World politics and the future of politics
 14  A radical pacifist alternative, if this wording is adequate, was sketched in 1946 by Gan-
dhi, who famously wrote: ‘Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our 
time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should 
have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. . . . It would have aroused the world and 
the people of Germany. . . . As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.’ (https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi)
 15  This book is only concerned with war as a political phenomenon and must regrettably 
leave aside what ethology, psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology have contributed to 
its knowledge.
 16  The Schengen countries have open borders, but no central intelligence authority; the 
Euroland countries have no common finance minister.
 17  What consequences the withdrawal of the United Kingdom, which can in the process 
become less united, will have on the balance between the two natures of the EU is 
impossible to forecast.
 18  This he said in a speech given at Zurich and available at http://www.churchill-society-
london.org.uk/astonish.html.
 19  The main representatives of neo-institutionalism are Stanley Hoffmann (1928–2015), 
Robert Keohane, Joseph Nye, John Ruggie. Classical realism in the twentieth century 
had Edward Carr (1892–1982), Hans Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) 
among its principal authors, mostly on reformist positions. Waltz’s Man, the State and War 
quoted above still belongs to classical realism, while his later work Theory of International 
Politics (1979) inaugurates neo-realism, which includes its author’s conservative stance. To 
remember is still the research attitude called constructivism (or reflectivism), which tends 
to dissolve the classical unit in IR, the state, into the processes leading to its build-up and 
actorness. Alexander Wendt is one of its relevant representatives.