Theoria

The contributions to this issue of Theoria both revisit some of the themes that have come to shape the journal as an editorial project and invitingly open up new areas of enquiry and debate. Thus the challenges posed by poverty on a global scale, the problems of inequality and distributive justice, the legacy of the failure of socialism in Eastern Europe and aspects of the ‘postmodern moment’ in late twentieth century thought are, once again, challengingly engaged with. At the same time new agendas for research and theoretical reflection are identified.

The definition of what precisely we mean by poverty is controversial. Yet empirical evidence establishes firmly that both the gap between the richest and the poorest countries in the world has been widening (as measured in terms of per capita GDP) since 1960, and that since independence a number of the very poorest countries in the world have experienced negative growth in per capita GDP. Regardless of whether one is concerned with relative or absolute conceptions of poverty, therefore, it is difficult to argue that poverty has not become a problem of greater urgency.

As temporary custodians of the planet, those who are alive at any given time can do a better or worse job of handing it on to their successors. I take that simple thought to animate concerns about what we ought to be doing to preserve conditions that will make life worth living (or indeed liveable at all) in the future, and especially in the time after those currently alive will have died (‘future generations’). There are widespread suspicions that we are not doing enough for future generations, but how do we determine what is enough? Putting the question in that way leads us, I suggest, towards a formulation of it in terms of intergenerational justice.

In 1956 communists North of the Limpopo discovered, to their horror, that ‘he who had been the leader of progressive humanity, the inspiration of the world, the father of the Soviet people, the master of science and learning, the supreme military genius, and altogether the greatest genius in history was in reality a paranoiac torturer, a mass murderer, and a military ignoramus who had brought the Soviet state to the verge of disaster’ (Kol˜akowski 1978:450). The decade which followed was to witness an important although inconclusive challenge to the orthodoxy and authority of the once omniscient Soviet Union; a development characterised by increasingly heterogenous relations within Comecon, and by a series of bold but ultimately unsuccessful attempts at economic reform (Swain & Swain 1993:127).

Since its inception, the discipline of International Relations has struggled to establish the rigour of its methodological base in the academy, and it has struggled to establish whether and how it might have any moral place in the world. At the end of the millennium both struggles have reached a high point. Methodologically, the discipline has begun a trans-Atlantic separation. On the one hand there has been a U.S. emphasis on neo-realism and neo-liberalism, which in both its categorisations and its positivistic tendencies is not a considerable departure from the inter-war debate between realists and idealists. On the other hand there has been a British concern not only for a ‘historicised’ discipline, but for the intellectual history of the discipline itself. Steve Smith has written on ten self-images that International Relations has held.

There can be no doubt that Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition has more than lived up to its title insofar as it has been taken up as the signal explication, if not example, of the condition that the ‘globalised’ world finds itself in today.1 This paper attempts to demonstrate the incoherence of at least one of its arguments, namely that the postmodern marks the relegation of the social bond not only to the past but also to what is passé.

Notes on Contributors