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Regimes, power, and international aviation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

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Measured against institutionalism and modified structural realism, realism provides the most coherent explanation of the international arrangements pertaining to the issue-area of civil aviation. Although institutionalized international organizations govern technical and safety issues, no single regime has emerged to govern the important commercial matters that bear on states' relative gains and losses. Instead, since World War I states have entered into a multiplicity of denounceable bilateral agreements that in turn reflect the balance of bargaining power between them. States that have attempted to reorganize the system have been driven by their own interests and capabilities, with the stronger aviation powers professing a preference for liberalism.

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Copyright © The IO Foundation 1995

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References

I thank my colleagues, T. V. Paul and Mark Brawley in political science and Jagdish Handa in economics, and the journal's three anonymous reviewers for their sharp but most constructive criticisms on an earlier version of the paper, as well as the journal's editor who, with his comprehensive and penetrating comments, has been my toughest critic. I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its generous financial assistance for research on this and other subjects over the years.

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c Figures in parentheses are millions of passengers.

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78. Ibid., pp. 158–59.

79. Ibid., pp. 38–39 and 146.

a only countries holding a 2.5-percent or greater share of the world's international traffic in 1990 were selected.

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84. Martin, Lisa L., Coercive Cooperation: Explaining Multilateral Economic Sanctions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 251.Google Scholar See also Finnemore, Martha, “International Organizations as Teachers of Norms: The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization and Science Policy,” International Organization 47 (Autumn 1993), pp. 565–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which “reveals a relationship between the international system and states that is not easily accommodated within traditional state–centric neorealist analysis.”

85. On the disruptive potential of issues of distribution for regime formation and persistence, see Krasner, “Global Communications and National Power.”

86. Relevent studies include Grieco, Cooperation Among Nations; Cafruny, Alan W., Ruling the Waves: The Political Economy of International Shipping (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)Google Scholar; and Krasner, “Global Communications and National Power.”