For several centuries the game has been played according to the rules of the state system, juridical rules about the equality of states and geopolitical practices that focus on the inequalities of states. The framework and deeper implications of this type of world order have been best articulated by political philosophers, perhaps most persuasively by Machiavelli and Hobbes, but there are many versions of these "realist" themes, including in the thought of non-Western traditions. The state with its ability to mobilize resources, impose order within its borders, and most of all, by its capacity to wage war, sustain diplomacy, and establish temporary conditions of stability, has remained central to these analyses. In recent years, Hedley Bull in The Anarchical Society and Robert Gilpin, War and Change in International Society, have been the most successful international relations specialists when it comes to theorizing this contemporary condition of the state system. Kenneth Waltz has been influential in emphasizing the structural side of statist geopolitics, especially by calling systematic attention to the behavioral implications of bipolarity during the cold war era. The gatekeepers of this Westphalian mind-game were very effective at marginalizing counter-traditions of political thought: that is, variants of non-violent or warless worlds, visions of peaceful global governance. Such images of alternatives to statism, have, perhaps, most vividly been associated with Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace and the diplomacy of Woodrow Wilson after World War I that half-heartedly led to the problematic establishment of the League of Nations. These alternative images have been marginalized by being labeled as "utopian," "salvationist," and even "apocalyptic."

In this regard, the statist paradigm has dominated thought and practice throughout this century:

• The bitter ideological and geopolitical rivalries between liberal democracies and fascism, and then communism, have been predominantly understood as struggles for ascendancy between states and groups of states.

• The great upheaval in the South associated with the process of decolonization have proceeded on the basis of legitimating the imposed boundaries of the colonial era, even if artificial and ethnically non-sustainable, given the identities that persisted in these societies and their relationship to uneven distributions of public and private goods.

• Even the experiments in global institutions were carried out in a manner that limited membership to sovereign states and adopted a constitutional language that was reassuring about the retention of sovereign rights and the avoidance of supranationality.

But despite this apparent domination of the conceptual landscape, states have seemed cumulatively and increasingly to be losing their grip over the dynamics of "community" and "identity," and even of "security." New mind-games are taking shape around the ideas of globalization, global civil society, and the cyberworld. Will these claimants on the future also be marginalized as "utopian" or "exotic"?