The world today, Benjamin Barber points out, is “falling precipitantly apart and coming reluctantly together at the very same moment.” While states from Canada to India are threatened with breakup due to fractious nationalist impulses of their peoples, the power of technology and markets is forcing ever-tighter economic integration worldwide. From a common-sense perspective, these two impulses are among the most important processes in contemporary world politics. Yet, there has been remarkably little attention paid to developing a theory of the international system that examines the effects of both. Hegemonic stability theory considers economic integration but not nationalism; the few studies of nationalism as a systemic force play down the effects of economic integration; and neorealism, the most widely accepted theory of the international system, has no room to address either trend. The field is, partly as a result, a cacaphony of voices largely talking past one another.

For eighteen months between 1978 and 1980, the International Monetary Fund and IMF members attempted to reform the international monetary system by establishing a substitution account. Designed to enhance the stability of the monetary system, the proposed substitution account would have accepted dollar deposits from foreign central banks, in return issuing certificates denominated in special drawing rights. The collapse of negotiations about the account in early 1980 confirms the hypothesis of hegemonic stability theorists that the distribution of systemic costs is problematic in the absence of a hegemonic power. The case thereby qualifies recent assertions that a small group of nations can supply stability to the international economy. However, two factors outside the realm of hegemonic theory also helped produce the outcome of the negotiations: the division of power within the United States between Congress and the Executive, and changes in international market conditions during 1979 and early 1980.

In the period since the publication of the special number of this journal devoted to Africa and international organization, one development of potentially considerable importance in this connection has transpired within Africa. This is the launching of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and its embarcation on the task of forging a measure of peaceful collaboration out of the multitude of mixed aspirations and competing, indeed conflicting, interests of the African states.

Who supports multilateral treaties and who does not? We offer a systematic account of treaty ratification patterns paying particular attention to different states' roles in international legal cooperation in relation to the United States' ratification behavior. States' ability to influence the terms of treaties and their acceptance increases their incentives for treaty ratification. Multilateral powers—states that are powerful and independent from the United States—support multilateral legal cooperation because it offers them an opportunity to shape treaty content. Their engagement in multilateral treaties is strongest when the United States does not lead. States that are weak and/or dependent cannot greatly affect treaties and are therefore less supportive of them but are subject to US pressure. An empirical analysis of states' decisions to ratify prominent postwar multilateral treaties covering a wide range of global issues supports our argument.

Two rounds of stagnation and reform in Russia have occurred: from Nicholas I to Alexander II (1825–81) and from Brezhnev to Gorbachev (1964–90). A comparison between them reveals striking similarities in the sources of stagnation, the approach to reform, and the international and domestic consequences of the reforms. What emerges in particular is a pattern wherein international stability, Russian conservatism, and expanding Russian power in the international system (all of which describe developments during the regimes of Nicholas I and Brezhnev) give way to instability in Europe, liberalization of Russian politics, and Russian downward mobility in the international system (the pattern exhibited during the Alexandrine and Gorbachev eras). These similarities suggest at the very least that we should question the common assumptions about the unique properties of the postwar order, Soviet socialism, and Gorbachev's revolution. The parallels also imply certain revisions in our understanding of the relationship between domestic and international change, the nature of the European order in the nineteenth century, and the determinants of state power in the international system.

Do institutions help explain macroeconomic performance? This article addresses two issues. First, especially given the practical implications of the literature, measurement of institutions should avoid tautologies, and therefore this study uses econometrics to estimate the effect of objectively measurable institutions such as labor market organization, financial development, fiscal federalism, and political regime-type. Second, the growing literature on these promising factors, in turn, is unfortunately incommensurable because previous studies fail to control for other institutional and, in some cases, standard economic variables. Given data on up to ninety-four countries from 1961 through 2000, extreme-bound analysis (EBA), an econometric technique that addresses the sensitivity of previous findings to alternative assumptions about model specification, suggests that some institutions associated with the organization of labor and capital are robust correlates of investment. Few data support the view that variables related to the organization of the state, including fiscal federalism and political regime-type, affect macroeconomic performance.Without implication, the author thanks Richard Nelson, Doug Chalmers, Robert Shapiro, Alessandra Casella, Brendan O'Flaherty, Geoffrey Garrett, Alexander Hicks, Brett Hammond, Mark Kesselman, the editor (Lisa Martin), and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. Also, Ross Levine, Peter Rousseau, Geoffrey Garrett, and Torben Iversen were very helpful in locating data. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System or any member of its staff.

Self-reliance is a logical prescription of Latin American dependency writers and a great many other contemporary critics of the international economic and political order. It is based on assumptions and values shared by contemporary critics, employs the same definitions of central concepts, and most important, identifies specific policies designed to eliminate the bases of dependence and exploitation that critics hold responsible for a distortion of the development process throughout much of the Third World. Despite the significance of self-reliance for dependency and other critical writers, it is rarely defined and even less frequently examined systematically. As a result, self-reliance has too often been dismissed as merely part of the ideological jargon that necessarily accompanies discussions of the new international economic order.

The central focus of economic activity in post-industrial societies is shifting from the manufacturing of objects to the handling of information and knowledge. The power of major transnational firms now rests as much upon their capacities to marshal information and knowledge as upon their traditional role in directly productive activities. There is every indication that the sharpest aspect of competition in the future may be based more on the efficient use of specialized knowledge, information, and new technological capacity for its communication and use than on more traditional factors. Information handling capacity already offers industrialized countries and firms considerable economic and political leverage in North-South interaction. Information vital to developing countries is frequently concentrated in the capitals of the North.

The predominant approach to modeling OPEC behavior depends upon the assumption that economic self-interest provides the best predictor of the cartel's price and production strategy. With rational monopoly behavior, the exogenous characteristics of the oil market determine an optimal price path for the group. But OPEC members have diverse economic as well as political goals. And uncertainty about oil market responses provides substantial leeway to argue about what is optimal. An examination of the five key OPEC price decisions since 1973 shows that an operational code of advancing political priorities on Arab-Israeli issues while deflecting security challenges better explains Saudi Arabia's decision-making than the economic optimizing approach. Moreover, no economic formula alone is consistent with Saudi behavior. The balance of internal and external forces of a political or security character on Saudi leadership suggests more of a tilt toward price hawkishness than pure considerations of economic self-interest would indicate. This tilt is reinforced by a systematic weakness on the part of the U.S. government to exercise a sustained countervailing influence on the Kingdom on behalf of moderation.

Some writing about the UN may suggest that there are those who conceive of the elephant that is the United Nations largely in terms of its human rights programs. The allusion to the fabled task of the blind men is not intended to impugn the vision of those who concentrate on that significant United Nations activity. The United Nations is a multifaceted and incongruous body, and the broadest view would not permit seeing it whole and in detail at the same time. Aware of the inevitable distortion that concentration brings, I would on this occasion look at this particular limb, hoping not to lose sight of the fact that it is part of a living if strange beast in a real world.

The recent revival of the discipline of political economy challenges purely economic explanations of economic growth, technological innovation, and sectoral change. This approach recognizes that political actors, institutions, and strategies to organize the economic process together shape the economic development of industrial societies. Whereas economists have emphasized determinants of growth such as savings and investment rates, degrees of domestic and international competition in an industry, or the supply of labor, the new political economists view the political definition of property rights, the nature of state intervention in the economy, the resources of politically mobilized groups, and political actors' belief systems as critical determinants of economic transformations. Both economists and political economists, however, share the assumption that actors are rational; they pursue their interests in a calculated manner within a given system of institutional constraints.

Gender stereotypes—stylized expectations of individuals’ traits and capabilities based on their gender—may affect the behavior of diplomats and the processes of international negotiations. In a survey experiment in the Council of the European Union, we find that female representatives behaving stereotypically weak and vulnerable may trigger a chivalry reaction among male representatives, increasing the likelihood that the men will agree to support a bargaining proposal from the women. The effect is conditional on the negotiators’ cultural background—the chivalry reaction is displayed mainly by diplomats from countries with relatively low levels of gender equality. Our study contributes to the research on nonstandard behavior in international relations, and in particular the expression and reception of emotions in diplomacy. We argue that gender stereotypes may have a moderating impact on decision making based on such intuitive cognitive processes. We also add to the broader negotiation literature, both by showing the pervasiveness of gender stereotyping, and by testing at the elite level the generalizability of claims regarding gender effects derived from laboratory experiments. Overall, our findings demonstrate the importance of bringing gender into the study of international negotiations, where it has been largely and surprisingly ignored.

Recent interest in cognitive approaches to international interaction in general and international regimes in particular has not been matched by development in theory and methodology. This article details a systematic “subjective” approach that seeks to meet this need. Its claims are developed through its comparison with the accomplishments and shortcomings of more established approaches to the study of international interaction and, in particular, microeconomic formal theory. The subjective alternative can model both individual subjects and the systems in which they are participating. As such, it offers much more in terms of continuities and connections between agents and system structure than do traditional psychological analyses in international relations. The theoretical arguments proceed in the context of a study of cooperation and conflict over Antarctica and its evolving regimes.

The evolution in Romania of a governing system of socialist patrimonialism, as opposed to one of collective rule by counterbalancing elites, accounts for both the country's early and extensive contact with the international capitalist economy and its belated but sharp reaction to international economic disruptions. In the absence of powerful alternative political elites or policies, the socialist nationalist ideology of Nicolae Ceausescu defined the country's “multilateral development” and its deviant foreign policy. Ceausescu's manipulation of the system strengthened his hold during the time of rapid economic development and undermined the country's capacity to react promptly or moderately to economic shocks. Events in Poland, especially the rise of Solidarity, complicated Romanian adjustment; but on balance, the adjustment to external economic forces reinforced rather than eroded Ceausescu's socialist patrimonialism.

The era of American leadership in the multilateral trading regime has ended. This paper argues that this current antipathy to trade is unsurprising: support for US leadership of the regime has always rested on a precarious balance among domestic interests. To overcome a historic bias in favor of home market production, American leaders created incentives for exporters to organize while creating roadblocks for import-competing firms and their employees. The dominance of the exporters’ voice had a significant influence on the policies the US pursued in the design and execution of the global trade regime. Most importantly, the absence of labor's voice undermined the prospect for “embedded liberalism” and instead resulted in an anemic system of adjustment for job loss at home and limited support for worker interests within the regime. While policymakers’ decision to shift power away from potential “veto” groups may have been necessary for US leadership of the Liberal International Order, this institutional design undermined a robust response to the economic dislocation thought to be a result of globalization. The result was a fracturing of the coalition in support of American leadership in the GATT/WTO regime.

In international relations, accounts of medieval political authority are divided between those who see a heteronomous patchwork of overlapping authorities and those who claim that the era of the state started in the twelfth century. How can we overcome this divide? I argue that IR's current difficulties in grasping the nature of medieval political authority stem from shortcomings in how the notion of political authority itself has been conceptualized. Thus, rather than starting from a substantive definition of political authority, I focus on contestation over the categorization and authorization of rule, that is, on how authority is produced in historically specific ways as a result of contemporary contestation over what political authority is, who is authorized, and how rulers stand in relation to one another. This reorientation allows us to appreciate how medieval political authority emerged from the competition between four sets of ordering categories: iurisdictio, potestas, lord/vassal, and magistrate. Each one of these four categories understood authority, rulers, and the relation between rulers in different ways. The problem with existing accounts of medieval authority is that they attempt to find the single ordering principle of medieval international relations. In doing so, they not only fail to capture the features of the time but also reinforce a particular approach to political authority that is unhelpful for understanding medieval and modern politics alike.

Political scientists and economists have long been interested in the role of special interests in the policymaking process. In the past few years, a series of important new books have argued forcefully that the lobbying activities of economic actors have an important influence on the prospects for war and peace. All of these analyses claim that whether economic actors enhance or decrease the likelihood of conflict ultimately depends on the domestic political balance between economic actors who have a strong vested interest in pushing for peace versus those that do not. I advance two contrary arguments. At least among the advanced states, I posit there are no longer any economic actors who will be favorable toward war and who will lobby the government with this preference. All of the identified mechanisms that previously contributed to such lobbying in these states have been swept away with the end of colonialism and the rise of economic globalization. In particular, I show that the current structure of the global economy now makes it feasible for foreign direct investment to serve as an effective substitute for conquest in a way that was not possible in previous eras. My second argument concerns those economic actors in advanced states with a preference for peace. I posit that it has become unnecessary for them to directly lobby the government to avoid war on economic grounds because economic globalization—the accumulation of decisions by economic actors throughout the globe—now has sufficiently clear economic incentives for leaders.

Serious consideration of the role of humanitarian norms and institutions in policymaking does not require the abandonment of an interest-based, rational actor model of policy analysis. However, it does require that scholars focus their attention on international institutional arrangements which are normally overlooked by realists but which may determine the ways in which policymakers match their interests with policy options. The analysis presented here assumes that policies are based on policymakers' calculations of national interests, but it posits that these calculations are affected by incentives and policy options emanating from international norm-promoting institutions. The study attempts to explain how the intervention of an institution of this type led policymakers in two cases to reassess and reinterpret their interests on issues of humanitarian norm compliance.

The imposition of limited sanctions against Italy was given fair prospect of success by members of the League. Sanctions were to have a twofold purpose. One was to uphold the Covenant and encourage collective security. The other was to end the war by putting pressure on the Italian government so as to make it amenable to a negotiated settlement. It was expected that economic and financial measures (as opposed to military means) would be sufficient, over a period of time, to achieve this. The timetable was upset by unexpected political events and by the collapse of Ethiopian military resistance. Policies are explained, events discussed, and to illuminate some dilemmas a distinction (not then well perceived) is made between politically important “consumatory” assumptions and diplomatically operative “instrumentalist” and reconciliationist practices.

Neo-functionalism ascribes a dynamic role to interest groups in the process of integrating pluralist communities. By participating in the policymaking process, interest groups are expected to develop a stake in promoting further integration in order to acquire economic payoffs and additional benefits from maintaining and stimulating the organization through which certain demands can be articulated and goals attained. This implies that in the integration process interest groups have an instrumental role to play in the maintenance of the system; and that by virtue of their participation in the policy-making process of an integrating community they will “learn” about the rewards of such involvement and undergo attitudinal changes inclining them favorably towards the system. Thus, they acquire an interest in seeing the system's perpetuation, and the policy and decision makers acquire an interest in being responsive to interest groups' demands. What is implied overall is that actors' loyalties will shift towards those decision makers in the systems best able to reward them.