Global Rivalries From the Cold War to Iraq

This book, a major and groundbreaking new work of IR, deals with an aspect of the globalisation debate that has been thrown into relief by the Iraq War: the question of rivalry versus unity in the 'international community'.

It argues that this question goes back to the maritime-commercial primacy and liberal state structure established by the English-speaking West (Britain and its North American settler colonies) in the three centuries following the Glorious Revolution.

In the process, this Western constellation, or 'Lockean heartland', had to meet the challenge of successive contender states, beginning with France, then unified Germany, and so on.

With each round of expansion, new contenders had to be confronted, old ones integrated - without ever completely overcoming the faultlines left by past rivalries.

The book introduces the general argument and the overall historical picture, and then takes the reader through a detailed analysis of the post-WWII historical process in terms of the evolving heartland/contender state divide and its legacies.It throws new light on European integration, from the early days of the 'American Plan for Europe' to the Lisbon challenge to the United States.

Likewise it pays detailed attention to rivalries in the Middle East, from US wartime association with the Arabs to the wars in Iraq.

A separate chapter deals with the Soviet Union as a contender state and how it activated rifts within the West, and on the new quality of the rivalries engendered by the turn to neoliberal globalisation taken by the West in the 1980s and '90s.

Further chapters give detailed accounts of the evolution of the heartland/contender divide in Latin America, the rise of China against the backdrop of the 'Asian Crisis', and the struggles over Central Asia and the resurgence of a strong state in Russia.

A final chapter raises the question whether the liberal globalising project and its human rights ideology have not collapsed back to authoritarianism hiding behind the War on Terror.