Letter: Foreign policy games

IS IT not time to close down foreign ministries?

Their primary functions seem to be to play elaborate games which may end in war, to turn sensible ideas about new forms of European cohabitation into a folly of technocratic infighting, and to conduct so-called "relations" with their opposite numbers in other countries, relations which warm and cool like adolescent friendships.

There is no longer any need for "foreign policy". There are transnational economic systems and transnational social problems which need to be dealt with as rationally and fairly as we try to deal with national economies and problems.

Dr PHILIP ALLOTT

Trinity College, Cambridge