ABSTRACT
International relations theorists do not appear to have been able to add anything fundamental to the ideas about international cooperation developed by the seventeenth-century Dutch legal philosopher Hugo Grotius. In many circumstances international cooperation proceeds not so much out of a need to organize common defense against political enemies or economic rivals, although such competitive motives may be partly involved, as from mutual calculation of benefits to be gained through multilateral collaboration. The perception that the amount of cooperation the world needs is unattainable as long as the world polity operates largely as an anarchic nation-state system has stimulated two different types of transformative projects. They are efforts to establish directly a centralized authoritative system of governance for world society as a whole, and efforts to overcome global anarchy in bits and pieces, sector by sector, wherever trans-country "functional" interdependencies are sufficiently matured to allow for the institutionalization of international, possibly even supranational, cooperation.
