This thesis problematizes the disciplinary gap between the related fields of International Relations (IR) and Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA). It claims that this gap is generated as a consequence of the deeper ontological and epistemological assumptions of these disciplines. While IR theories are more concerned with macrolevel phenomena and reduce foreign policies of states to structural imperatives, FPA theories are inclined to focus on micro-level determinations and reduce relational phenomena to non-relational and singular behaviours of states and policy makers. This meta-theoretical gap, the thesis argues, can be bridged by a dialectical ontoepistemology that reconstitutes IR and FPA as the aspects of the same disciplinary undertaking by offering an inter-subjective and praxis-oriented view of international politics. Through this onto-epistemology, the thesis contributes to wider debates in social scientific discourse on the so-called agent-structure problem in favour of an agent-based approach by conceptualising macro-level social phenomena not as structures, but as inter-subjective consequences of diverse and contradictory praxes of a multiplicity of diachronically-situated individual and collective agents. The more specific contribution of this thesis to the fields of FPA and IR is that it establishes international relations as the cumulative and contradictory results of the intersubjective praxes of states in making foreign policies and devising foreign policy strategies. To illustrate these onto-epistemological arguments empirically, the thesis demonstrates that the 2003 Iraq War as a major international relations development was the long-term result of the dialectical interplay of the reproductive strategies of a series of states and other agents. Similarly, how the individual states discussed in the empirical chapters contributed to the transformation of the so-called international system through their foreign policy strategies also illustrate the practical bridging of FPA and IR by individual and collective agents.

European intellectual production on international relations is central to the renovation of Western hegemony in the post-Cold War, ‘post-American' world. This includes both policy and academic discourses and a focus of this work is an account of the fields in which these discourses are generated that relates them at a deep level. Working within ‘Amsterdam School' accounts of European integration, I develop the focus on class formation and the internal relation between class and the international for the post-Cold War era. The ‘shift to Europe' within the previously Anglo-centric Atlantic transnational capitalist class alongside developments in the EU's ability to cohesively project power means that a developing bi-polar West must be considered within any understanding of attempts to maintain and reformulate Western hegemony. I consider the EU policy field in this context, focusing on the EU think tank field, as it relates to the ‘global power Europe' discourse; this discourse concerned with harnessing the international legitimacy of the concept of ‘civilian power Europe' for military interventions. I map the ‘global power Europe' think tank network, and assess its position within the formation of a hegemonic bloc. Turning to the field of IR I give a novel reading of the principal salient features of the field's development, as well as allowing an exploration of the field's limitations and possibilities through tracing the trajectories of European approaches to security, seen as the operationalization of European difference within IR. This methodology, focusing on trajectories rather than paradigms, allows an understanding of the effects of IR theories, as well as the limits and possibilities inherent from their conditions of production, beyond that which can be gleaned from the surface of theoretical debates and configurations. Approached from these two different directions – through policy institutes as a capital-policy nexus, and academic discourse as related to its social conditions of production – and exploring the homologies across them gives a non-reductive grasp on the interaction of the ideational and material in the renovation of Western hegemony.

This study examines how decolonization, both as a political problem and as a historical periodization, figured in the postwar thought of a group of liberal American thinkers who considered the decline of European empires to be a more significant historical phenomenon than the Cold War. These figures — in policy-suggesting venues such as the Council on Foreign Relations as well as in the departments of universities — entertained a variety of approaches for how to handle the “colonial problem.” After examining the late 1940s and 1950s, when decolonization was still considered manageable by these US elites, the study moves inside Cold War-era universities to show how hinge-thinkers in several disciplines and subfields came to view decolonization less as a process that could be governed than a crisis that required new thinking. The figures examined include Rupert Emerson, Samuel Huntington, Clifford Geertz, and others who negotiated European colonial knowledge and transformed the focus of their disciplines, as well as the relationship of their disciplines to the US state. The Conclusion examines the way these American thinkers accounted for what was widely perceived as the tragedy of the Third World liberation, and how they theorized about the period in retrospect. The study ends by arguing that the emergence of “globalization” as a concept in the early 1980s was significantly conditioned by the withdrawal of liberal political hopes for the future of the Global South, where they were substituted with market-based imaginaries and panaceas.

A number of influential early International Relations (IR) theorists explicitly theorised politics in terms of ‘tragedy’ and their discourse was revived at the beginning of the 21st century. This thesis engages with this ‘tragic’ tradition of international political theory and pushes the debate in directions that have previously been hinted at but which have nonetheless remained largely unexplored. It is argued here that from the late archaic to the end of the classical period in ancient Athens, eros (‘sexual love’, ‘passionate yearning’) and its cognates came to form the conceptual basis of a political discourse that fused elements of sex, power, and gender into what we might call a kind of ‘erotic politics’. This discourse is clearly reflected in tragedy; many dramas take eros as a central theme and explore the role that the emotion could (and should) play in the community. Although it is usually transgressive and destructive, tragic eros is nevertheless redeemable in terms of the benefits it can bestow on the city when handled wisely. Using this contextualised reading of tragedy as a reference point, the dissertation critically analyses the texts of two influential commentators on international politics, namely, Thucydides and Hans Morgenthau. It is argued that both of these authors were heavily influenced by the Athenian discourse of erotic politics, especially as it appears in tragedy; love, power, and tragedy were central to both men’s understanding of international politics. This analysis will provide an original perspective on Thucydides’ and Morgenthau’s political philosophies and will open up new ways at looking at some of the ‘tragic’ situations that recent scholars have identified in contemporary politics.

The thesis seeks to explain the emergence of the EU’s international investment policy since the 1980s. Building on theories of European Integration, it tests two ex ante hypotheses. Hypothesis H1 builds on supranational thinking and stipulates that the Commission acted as policy entrepreneur and pushed for the communitarisation of international investment policy-making. Hypothesis H2 builds on liberal intergovernmental thinking and stipulates that European business successfully lobbied the Member States for a communitarisation of international investment policy-making in order to ensure access to competitive state-of-the-art international investment agreements. To assess the validity of these hypotheses, the thesis traces throughout history and examines policy-making instances, which decisively shaped the EU’s de facto and legal competences in international investment policy since the 1980s. It examines the EU’s involvement in investment-related negotiations during the Uruguay Round, on the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT), on the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) and on Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) with Mexico and Chile. It, moreover, analyses EU-internal debates on the EU’s legal competences in international investment regulation in the context of intergovernmental conferences on Treaty revisions and legal proceedings before the European Court of Justice. The joined analysis of international and EU-internal negotiations suggests that supranational thinking and Commission entrepreneurship best describe the integration process leading to the emergence of the EU’s international investment policy. The Commission acted as resourceful policy entrepreneur and used agenda setting, invoked the evolving trade agenda, fringe, implied and de facto competences, strategically used different international negotiating fora and legal review in order to consolidate the EU’s role in international investment policy. Functional and power considerations fuelled the Commission’s policy entrepreneurship. European business, on the other hand, was hardly informed, organised and interested in international investment policy-making. It did not seek to influence European or national policy-makers. The Member States, finally, occasionally favoured cooperating in certain international negotiating fora in order to maximise their bargaining power and to reach for the best possible deals with third countries. More often, however, they sought to contain the EU’s involvement and competences in international investment policy. The thesis makes an important empirical contribution to our knowledge of EU foreign economic policy. It is the first study to comprehensively document and to explain the EU’s role in the global investment regime. It, moreover, contributes to the long-standing debate between supranational and intergovernmental accounts of European Integration. It challenges mainstream assumptions on the role of business in the international investment regime and global political economy and finally contributes to historical institutionalist research on endogenous agency-driven institutional change.

This thesis explores the discrepancies and apparent contradictions between Scientific Man Versus Power Politics and Politics Among Nations, two of Hans Morgenthau’s seminal works, published in 1946 and 1948 respectively. Despite the large amount of material published on Morgenthau this discrepancy has been overlooked. Analysing these two works is achieved through the use of the Skinnerian method. To understand the purpose of the books the thesis compares each book with similar books that Morgenthau read during this period, as well as utilizing his personal correspondence to understand his motivation. The thesis argues that the tension between the works is a result of their contrasting purposes and the shift in Morgenthau’s thinking wrought by changes in the external context. This external context is Morgenthau’s acclimatization to US academia, the growth of the discipline of International Relations (IR) within it, and the onset of the Cold War. As well as throwing light on the cogency of Morgenthau’s IR contribution, the thesis illuminates the general IR literature of this period, much of which has languished under the shade of Politics Among Nations in particular.

This thesis proposes to remedy some of the theoretical lacunae surrounding the topic of strategic culture by reconceptualising it in a way that is compatible with existing expected utility models of executive choice. Current theorising regarding strategic culture has been paralysed by an ongoing debate between the first and third generations of strategic culture theorists and by the persistent inability of scholars to provide a predictive framework based on the concept - meaning that it is unable to operate as anything other than a residual variable. The hypothesis of this thesis is that conceptualising strategic culture using Thomas Schelling's concept of a focal point permits us to sidestep some of the theoretical debates that have divided rationalists and theorists of strategic culture by allowing culture to be grafted on to a rational actor model of executive choice in a way that is progressive rather than degenerative. In order to test this theory, the thesis develops and subsequently tests the idea of a liberal strategic culture, utilising both the congruence method and within case process tracing to demonstrate the external validity of the theory being developed. The cases chosen span American administrations from the Cold War to the contemporary era and demonstrate the utility of a re conceptualised model of strategic culture across a range of geopolitical and domestic contexts.

This thesis interrogates the absence of questions of race, colonialism, and their contemporary legacies in the philosophical literature on global justice and cosmopolitan ethics. What are the ethical, political, and material consequences of these "unspeakable things unspoken", and what would it mean for cosmopolitanism to take seriously the problem of the global colour line? The thesis provides a tentative answer to these questions through a close engagement with contemporary debates about the meaning and purpose of international solidarity. It demonstrates that critical and liberal approaches often help reproduce and legitimise, rather than challenge and transcend, the current unjust and unequal racialized global order. Drawing on Cedric Robinson and the literature on racial capitalism, it interrogates how solidarity can be decolonised and reconceived so as to better attend to the materiality of the global colour line. Through a close reading of the European migrant crisis, recent forms of Black-Palestinian solidarity, and the ongoing struggle for decolonisation in South Africa, it identifies an alternative internationalist imaginary that grows out of the solidarities forged in the struggle against imperialism, patriarchy, and racial capitalism. This is a radicalised and decolonised emancipatory project which retrieves the idea of universal history and total critique, but does so without invoking Eurocentric ideas of progress and teleology. In an era of Trump, Brexit, and global fascist resurgence-where the "white working class" frequently is juxtaposed with "immigrants", and identity politics blamed for the demise of the organised Left-such an internationalist vision is urgently needed.

How do ideologies and cities shape each other? This work offers a theoretical strategy for explaining how urban forms and political projects have afforded each other's development historically, while avoiding a deterministic account of how political aims are realised in particular urban forms. To do this it focuses on the emergence of nationalism in the context of the modernisation of European cities in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. As background, the development of the concept of citizenship in the context of the medieval city is explored and an understanding of the exceptional political space of the city in political philosophy is outlined. The political philosophy of nationalism is seen to engender an urban-rural tension and the works of Rousseau and Herder are read to understand further the relationship between nationalist thought and the modern city. Then in order to structure an investigation of how urban form and ideology interact, an analytical framework is developed using JJ Gibson's theory of affordances. The framework is applied to European urban forms which developed during the rise of nationalism, specifically in three historical city cases: Budapest, Vienna and Venice. The cases share in common an experience of Habsburg administration and the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century but have quite different formal contexts. Urban forms and affordances are discussed more generally using the phenomenon and concept of Haussmannisation and the usefulness of that concept is discussed. More general conclusions are drawn in which political ideas, ideologies and urban forms are understood to afford each other ranges of such possibilities without determining them.

This thesis examines the role of ideas in relation to institutional change. It develops a critical constructivist analysis, drawing on neo-Gramscian political economy perspectives in IR, in order to understand how ideational factors such as beliefs, values and interests intertwine with material factors in order to understand processes of institutional transformation. It argues that ideology and hegemony, concepts sometimes associated with a structuralist position, can be usefully re-invigorated by introducing them into a socio-cultural constructivist analysis. The critical elements of the Marxist/Gramscian legacy and its strong credentials in analysing the development of capitalist social forms and modes of production provide its key contribution. Constructivism on the other hand can act as a corrective to the structuralist tendencies of some historical materialism as well as offering new methods of analysis which emphasize the importance of ideational and cultural factors. Following a discussion of the idealism/materialism and structure/agency dichotomies, the thesis argues that a discourse-historical approach presents a fruitful methodology to interrogate the transformation from Keynesian social democracy to neoliberal deregulation, privatisation and monetarism during the closing decades of the twentieth century. In addition, analysis of how neoliberal discourse represents those agents who oppose or question its fundamental principles and policy prescriptions gives an insight into the way in which a dominant discourse remains dominant in the face of growing evidence to counter its claims.