ABSTRACT
In reflecting upon the prospects for world order, in the concluding chapter of The Twenty YeaIS Crisis, E. H. Carr advised that 'few things are permanent in history; and it would be rash to assume that the territorial unit of power is one of them'.l Based upon his observation that world order was being reshaped by the contradictory imperatives of progressive economic integration and a 'recrudescence of disintegrating tendencies', Carr concluded with a confident prediction that 'the concept of sovereignty is likely to become in the future even more blurred and indistinct than it is at present'. 2 Yet his devastating critique of inter-war idealism delivers a powerful rebuff to the hubris of those who seek to construct a new world order on the foundations of nineteenth-century liberal thought. Whilst Carr celebrated the importance of normative and utopian thinking in international relations, he grounded this in a sophisticated appreciation of the routines of power politics and the historical possibilities for international political change. Although a convinced sceptic of the Enlightenment vision of a universal human community and the inevitability of a 'harmony of interests', Carr nevertheless believed that 'it is unlikely that the future units of power will take much account of formal sovereignty'.J Indeed, he even went so far as to argue that 'any project of international order which takes these formal units [sovereign states] as its basis seems likely to prove unreal'.4 In surveying the prospects for world order at the end of the twentieth century, such observations appear remarkably prescient, especially in relation to the contemporary debate concerning globalization and the condition of the modern nation-state.
