After the Interregnum - David Chandler

formalised political and legal equality out from the sphere of informal political
relations between states.
Just as the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ were mutually constituted, so the decline of that
distinction has to be understood through a consideration of both sides of the
‘political’. The intellectual appropriation of one side of the divide - the ‘outside’ - has
been transformed because the understanding of the other side - the ‘inside’ - has
radically changed. I want to forward the suggestion that the framework for analysing
International Relations has changed because, today, much less importance is attached
to the ‘inside’ - to the formally institutionalised framework of legal and political
equality.
Let’s go back to the beginning. In old ‘political’ International Relations the sphere of
sovereignty was the sphere of progress and political transformation, of debate and
struggle over ‘the good life’. In contrast, the international sphere of anarchy was one
of strategic interaction without a shared collective framework of the political beyond a
mutual interest in co-existence. In today’s post-positivist and post-political
International Relations it appears that the sovereign sphere is one of exclusion and
conflict where the state dominates or ‘colonises’ the political, preventing political
progress and marginalizing critical voices (Lipschutz 1992:392). William Connolly,
for example, writes that Western mass politics are a form of ‘imprisonment’ because
progressive demands can be derailed by national chauvinist sentiments (1991:476).
From today’s vantage point it seems to be apparent that the state-level focus of old
political movements limited their progressive potential. For Kaldor: ‘it was through
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