Since the end of the Cold War, policy makers and scholars alike have struggled to characterize an international system in transition. Their challenge is to describe the nature of the driving forces that have changed world affairs—on both state and interstate levels--since 1989. Much of the focus has been on structural approaches that stress the role of broad global forces--such as Samuel Huntington's "third wave" of democratization, or the recurring (and often obsessive) turn to the concept of globalization as a catch-all explanation.
In these explanations of the new global order, the concept of individual or state leadership plays a relatively minor role. Sociologist Max Weber foreshadowed this analytical trend as early as the turn of the 20th century. The primary thread through Weber’s work on leadership dynamics, politics, and social theory is the concept of rationalization and bureaucratization. In Weber’s approach, personal political forms of traditional and charismatic domination are replaced by systemic, impersonal institutions, and bureaucracies—a change arising from the demands of modern mass society and the rationalization of capitalist economic systems. Even cases of “charismatic domination,” as Weber terms movements based on cults of the individual, represent temporary deviations from this trend; eventually, the logistical and economic requirements of mass society demand a return to the primacy of institutions and systemic forces over individual freedom.
Whether or not they acknowledge their intellectual debt, many commentators on globalization and democratization employ a similar framework in which the impact of individual leaders is dwarfed by the importance of capital investment, financial systems, and diffuse political movements. Scholars like Susan Strange have argued that even individual states are constrained by the same transnational forces of economic globalization. Unfortunately, in order to elucidate the nature of social transformation, these structuralist approaches typically rule out the possibility of individual or state agency within the flow of history.
Our symposium strives to establish a conception of leadership that appreciates broad structuralist themes active at the state and interstate levels while also recognizing the different types of leadership—individual, institutional, state, and interstate—that drive these broad trends. Such a multi-dimensional conception of leadership offers commentators and analysts a way to reinsert the notion of agency—both as a means of assigning responsibility and as a way of seeing solutions to crises—into the otherwise impersonal and seemingly uncontrollable structural narratives that dominate modern international relations. The symposium opens with a set of interviews with prominent international leaders. Next, Eliot Cohen examines the leadership dynamics that drive wartime policy. Niall Ferguson then discusses the nature of US imperialism. In his article, Robert Rotberg details the case of Cyprus to highlight the role and art of leadership in conflict resolution. Jeremy Leeds enters the debate over corporate governance and the role of leadership on corporate, governmental, and individual levels. The symposium ends with an article by Adel Safty, who stresses the moral component of true leadership. To understand the driving forces behind global trends, one must both return to and revise traditional concepts of leadership. Whether they be individual politicians like US President George Bush, or institutional entities like the United Nations, leaders matter as more than mere deviations from the predestined path of history—and have the potential to alter the course of international affairs.
