De gustibus non est disputandum. That also applies to the new, less severe format in which INTERNATIONAL POLITICS AND SOCIETY is appearing for the first time at the beginning of its ninth year. There was enough contentious debate about the changes amongst the editors, and the result is by no means a consensus product. Away from any subjective preferences for colors, formats, typefaces and page designs, which played a major role in our journal's new packaging, we have also tried to introduce a few objective improvements. We believe that the pages are now easier on the eye, the insertions in the text facilitate access to the articles, the key words on the spine help even the fleeting glance to ascertain the contents.

The price of the innovations was a loss of space. We want to keep this price as small as possible by dispensing with the French and German summaries at the end of the edition. However, our homepage (www.fes.de/ipg) will still have German summaries of most of the essays.

There are other reasons to visit the IPG homepage as well. It includes much which does not fit into the journal itself, or for which the quarterly appearance of the journal is too slow. And the German page has the continually updated topics "world politics / war and peace", "globalization and justice", and "European integration". The IPG homepage also currently offers a summary of analyses, comments and background information on the causes and repercussions of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. 

"The day that changed the world": these words were more than just journalistic posturing. They corresponded to the spontaneous feelings of very many people in those days. The gigantic cloud of dust sent up by the attack on the World Trade Center has now settled down in the metaphorical sense as well. Gradually, it is becoming possible to see more clearly again and to distinguish between what will have been but a – traumatic – episode, and what will stay different. One realizes that the events of September 11 stand for developments which have been coming for a long time but which one would not care to see. It may be that the events of September 11 have accelerated these developments by making them so suddenly visible. INTERNATIONAL POLITICS AND SOCIETY presents a number of attempts to place the events in longer-term contexts. The focus is on the secular modern age and its fundamentalist opponents, the policies of the U:S:, the wounded – and suddenly vulnerable – hegemonic power, on the renewed importance of the nation state in the globalized world, and on the outlook for that region in which the Islamic and the Western worlds have always collided most directly.

The impressions of September 11 also heighten the significance of the shift in the relationship between war and the rule of law. Robert C. van Ooyen shows how the changing nature of international conflict threatens to sever the restrictions imposed on government by the rule of law.

Even after September 11, 2001, the world will continue to be driven by problems totally unrelated to international terrorism or the conflict between Western and other cultures. One of them, "global ageing", forms the second main theme of this edition. Until fairly recently, people feared overpopulation in the world. Today, concern is increasing about the prospects deriving from the reversal of this trend which has long since begun: the coming simultaneous decline in the populations of all industrial countries and of many major developing countries.

The editors of INTERNATIONALE POLITIK UND GESELLSCHAFT are interested in the views of their readers. Write or email (ipg@fes.de) us about, for example, what you think of our new look.