ABSTRACT
State power comes in many forms. Since the end of the Cold War the tendency of the Western liberal democracies to see ‘power’ in terms of institutions, rules and a normative view of international relations has accelerated. Indeed, now almost a century old, the idea of power as the restraint of power via institutions and regimes, allied to the multiplication and identification of power and influence with legitimacy, was a justifiable response to the catastrophic use of society-busting military power in pursuit of extreme state interests during both the First and Second World Wars.
