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This article argues that exceptionalism is a type of foreign policy not exclusive to the United States. It examines other historical cases, including post-Revolutionary France and the Soviet Union. The three cases are comparable in terms of their main characteristics, which include claims of exemptions from the ordinary rules of international relations, messianic missions to 'liberate' others, and perceptions of universalized threats. The article also explores the historical and normative foundations of exceptionalist foreign policy claims and practices. All three cases demonstrate the assumptions of social and political superiority that underlie these normative bases. The article concludes with some observations about the incompatibility of exceptionalist foreign policies with the Westphalian foundations of the international order. [Reprinted by permission; copyright Sage Publications Ltd. & ECPR-European Consortium for Political Research.]

This article argues that exceptionalism is a type of foreign policy not exclusive to the United States. It examines other historical cases, including post-Revolutionary France and the Soviet Union. The three cases are comparable in terms of their main characteristics, which include claims of exemptions from the ordinary rules of international relations, messianic missions to 'liberate' others, and perceptions of universalized threats. The article also explores the historical and normative foundations of exceptionalist foreign policy claims and practices. All three cases demonstrate the assumptions of social and political superiority that underlie these normative bases. The article concludes with some observations about the incompatibility of exceptionalist foreign policies with the Westphalian foundations of the international order.

Contemporary theorists of international politics do not see the world in the same ways nor do they agree on what is important to know, or how to know it. Disagreements are partly due to the increasing complexity of the world, but also derive from the development of many different viewing points. Some are geographic and cultural (Americans often view the world differently than, say, Japanese), but other perspectives come from different epistemological starting points and from different assumptions as to what constitutes reliable or useful knowledge, and how to create it. Debates in the 1960s revolved around problems of methodology. Today, we see in addition arguments over metaphysics, the purposes of theoretical activity (understanding versus praxis, for example), and a whole host of other divisive questions.