From the international to the global?

Having long adhered to the claim that, for all the encompassing societal transformations, the international system has essentially remained the same over the millennia, theorists of International Relations today find it hard to shut themselves off against a widespread sense of rupture that concerns the very nature of ‘the international’. Some of the responses to this perception have sought to elucidate changes in the international system in geopolitical terms, diagnosing, for instance, a turn from interstate rivalry to a ‘clash of civilizations’. The dominant thread over the past 15 years or so, however, posited a more profound transformation that, according to many analysts, threw into question the assumption of an independent realm of international politics itself. ‘Globalization’, on this view, was fundamentally transforming the world’s social and geographical parameters.