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In early and prehistoric times, human groups cooperated among themselves and competed viciously with other groups. Concepts of international relations, notably universal hegemony and exclusive nationalism, go back to the earliest recorded history. Only the ancient Greeks experienced inter-state relations somewhat analogous to those of modern Europe; and the first reflections on these may be found in Thucydides. The Greeks, and later the Romans, above all Cicero, developed a notion of cosmopolitanism. During the Latin Middle Ages, the papacy perpetuated the idea of universal hegemony. The principle of state sovereignty was also formulated. The pre-modern Chinese empire was held to rule 'all-under-Heaven'; Confucian ethics contributes the notion of humanity (ren) as the fundamental category. Muslims deepened the us-them distinction by claiming sole legitimacy for their religious community under the Caliph (Deputy of Muhammad). Today, Muslims veer between this and a more Western approach to international relations. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

Early Christianity viewed religion and politics as largely separate; early Islam viewed them as largely concurrent. But from the eighth to the eleventh centuries each modified their original position, so that they almost converged. However, they subsequently diverged again. This was because, in the West, political thought became secularised following the eleventh‐century papal reform movement and then the Protestant Reformation. Muslim thinkers, on the other hand, beginning with al‐Mawardi (974–1058), sought to restore the subsumption of politics into religion, notably during the sixteenth‐century Shi'ite revolution in Iran. While today the West views religion and politics as largely separate categories, Muslims see them as necessarily intertwined; attempts to separate them have so far largely failed. Hence Muslim political thought is based primarily on revelation (interpreted in various ways), while Western political thought is based on philosophy.