Intertextual Relations (2009)

The editors of a modest Danish journal (no longer published) commissioned essays for a project imaginatively called ‘The Nines’. They had noticed that major statements of international theory appeared in the ninth year of most decades in the last century. 1989 was the year Friedrich Kratochwil published Rule, Norms and Decisions, and the author published World of Our Making—books largely responsible for launching constructivism in the field of International Relations. That same year saw publication of a symposium volume, called International/Intertextual Relations, staking out a poststructuralist stance for the field. For poststructuralists, the world is a text subject to as many readings as there are readers; there is no grand narrative. For the author, every text is embedded in a story; modernity is a grand narrative; the volume gets a sympathetic if critical reading.