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Recent scholarship has witnessed 'the return of the grand narrative'. The establishment of 'world history' and the emergence of 'big history' and 'new global history' are examples of that trend. Similar tendencies are evident in the study of international relations. In the main, those writings have developed independently of each other, and it is unclear whether they add up to a coherent narrative. But they share an interest in understanding what has been identified as the central theme in recent studies of world history, namely the development of human interconnectedness over the last few centuries and millennia. They represent a growing recognition of the need for a broadening of the historical imagination to reveal how 'encounters between strangers' have influenced the evolution of societies and civilizations, and indeed the social and political development of the species as a whole. The study of international relations is clearly central to a study of long-term processes that foregrounds such encounters. Precisely what it contributes, and what it can profit from engaging with the larger literature on the evolution of interconnectedness, is the subject of this article.

Comments on John J. Mearsheimer's "Why is There Peace in Europe?" (2009). Adapted from the source document.

Increased social power over the millennia has led to remarkable achievements in varied spheres of endeavour while introducing new possibilities for more destructive forms of harm over greater distances. Efforts to create moral frameworks to protect persons from senseless harm have been critical replies to the ambiguities of human interconnectedness. Over the millennia, societies have become entangled in global 'civilizing processes' such as the systems of communication that now encompass humanity as a whole, enabling different peoples to become better attuned to each other. Societies of states have immense significance for that long-term development. They have been arenas in which independent communities have discovered the prospects for, as well as the constraints on, agreements on norms that can be anchored in the most readily available points of solidarity between strangers — those vulnerabilities to mental and physical suffering that are shared by human beings everywhere. The recovery of 'universal history from a cosmopolitan point of view' can examine the contribution that international societies have made to global civilizing processes that harness such solidarities to restrain the human capacity to cause violent and non-violent harm to distant peoples. It can support the normative project of promoting global civilizing processes that employ unprecedented levels of collective power to reduce the tragic effects of the ambiguities that have accompanied long-term trends towards higher levels of human interconnectedness.

Kenneth Waltz's structural realism abstracts the international political domain from other spheres of social interaction to explain recurrent patterns of competition and conflict across the millennia. There are similarities between the structural realist 'grand narrative' and the process-sociological approach developed by Norbert Elias. But the latter supported 'high-level synthesis' in the social sciences in order to understand how relations between material, ideational and emotional forces have contributed to the growth of human interconnectedness. The analysis contended that one of the purposes of the social sciences is to increase knowledge of how humans can gain control of the processes that bind them together in global networks of interdependence. Elias was opposed to partisan inquiry such as Kant's notion of a universal history with a cosmopolitan intent. But a shared emphasis on how humans have developed the capacity to cause distant harm reveals how future grand narratives can combine the analysis of the growth of interconnectedness with the ethical argument for greater transnational solidarity.