International Relations after the Cold War

This article, based on Adam Roberts's valedictory lecture as Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at Oxford University, reconsiders the causes and consequences of the end of the Cold War. It argues that a key to understanding these developments is acceptance of pluralism—of theories, of political systems, of cultures, of methods of analysis, and of academic disciplines. Pluralism in at least some of these senses is a recognized strength of International Relations studies in the UK. The long tradition of acceptance of a plural international system, and a plural approach to understanding it, includes figures as varied as John Stuart Mill, Maxim Litvinoff, Alastair Buchan and Hedley Bull. The end of the Cold War was the result of a plural mix of factors: both force and diplomacy; both pressure and détente; both belief and disbelief in the reformability of communism; both civil resistance in some countries and guerrilla resistance in others; both elite action and street politics; both nuclear deterrence and the ideas of some of its critics; both threat and reassurance; both nationalism in the disparate parts of the Soviet empire and supranationalism in the European Community. Paradoxically, the specialists in politics and International Relations who came closest to foreseeing the end of the Cold War were those who made few if any claims to a ‘scientific’ approach, and whose idea of forecasting was based, at the very most, on Mill's modest concept of ‘a certain order of possible progress’. Since the end of the Cold War, simplistic interpretations of how it ended have contributed to narrow understandings of international order. The spirit of imposed universalism having fed from Moscow, has flourished as never before in its other favourite haunt, Washington DC. There is a need to recognize the plurality of perspectives that endure in the post‐Cold War world.