The attitude of the Soviet Union toward the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), among the specialized agencies of the United Nations, is particularly interesting because this organization is distinguished by the wide range of its activities and because the U.S.S.R. unexpectedly decided to join UNESCO after a virtual boycott of nine years. Certain technical aspects of UNESCO also give it an unusual position among international bodies. Like other organizations, it can accomplish little except with the approval of the member states. It is, however, less formal in its procedure than the United Nations, and its decisions are not subject to the veto.

This research note hypothesizes that international agreements including a finite duration provision or with a shorter expected duration should take less time to negotiate. Using a random sample of agreements across different issue areas, it finds statistical support for this hypothesis. Agreements without a finite duration provision experienced a bargaining phase that was twice as long as agreements including a finite duration provision and otherwise short-term agreements. This result not only offers empirical support for the theoretical proposition that a longer shadow of the future leads to increased bargaining delay—it also has important policy implications. International negotiators can include a finite duration provision when they prefer a shorter bargaining phase to a potentially more durable agreement, and they can avoid this feature when they prefer a more durable agreement, although this decision comes with the cost of additional bargaining delay. By treating finite duration provisions as an independent variable, this result also addresses a critique of the research program on the rational design of international institutions that it moves backward by considering only design features as dependent variables.

The United Nations two decades after San Francisco is a very different body from the one which its creators fashioned, and it is a reasonable presumption that there were none or virtually none who presided over its creation who foresaw even dimly what it would become in the short span of twenty years. In particular, few could have believed at that time that the tidal wave of anticolonialism would sweep so drastically over the domains of the imperial powers and leave behind in its wake an organization so largely populated by the new Asian and African states which emerged from the deluge. It is also one of the significant elements in the situation that few could have imagined that the process of decolonization could be carried through with so little needed in the way of violent struggle by the colonial peoples and so much conceded in peaceful acquiescence by their colonial masters. One of the world's great revolutions has been accomplished with a minimum of revolutionary action and sacrifice.

With the increased concern in the post-1960 period over the problem of achieving an equitable geographical distribution in the United Nations Secretariat, renewed attention has been focused on the role of short-term appointments in the recruitment of Secretariat personnel. What in the previous fifteen years of the Organization's history had been viewed largely as a technical facet of personnel policy suddenly became an issue of political contention in both the Fifth (Administrative and Budgetary) Committee and in the General Assembly itself. This article will first briefly detail the various positions in the debate over the role of short-term appointments. Its main focus, however, will be on the institutional dynamics to which secondment relates and on an attempt to gain insight into its operation through the experience of the European Communities with this type of appointment.

The recent growth in the size and number of private business enterprises that operate in many countries has generated a great deal of speculation as to whether a form of international organization has been created which is able to frustrate the policies of the traditional nation-state. The enterprise with subsidiaries scattered around the globe clearly has the potential to evade the influence of many governmental policies. The firm can circumvent a tight monetary policy in one country by having an affiliate borrow in another country and transfer the funds across national borders. If direct transfers of capital from abroad are restricted, transfer prices, royalty payments, or open accounts between affiliates can be adjusted to bring in the needed financial resources. If taxes are high in one jurisdiction, profits that would be subject to tax can be shifted to another tax jurisdiction through manipulation of affiliate transactions. National labor unions and comparatively harsh labor legislation can be frustrated by moving production to facilities in another country when strikes or higher costs threaten a particular market. A governmental program aimed at increasing technical and managerial training to provide a larger domestic supply of skilled personnel may only generate technicians or managers for the multinational enterprise to shift out of the country, back to its head office or to other countries. Technology developed in one country—often through governmental support and often related to defense needs of governments—can be leaked quickly to other countries through the communication network of the multinational enterprise.

Reform of the domestic economic system is the distinctive element of Hungary's foreign economic strategy in the 1980s. The need for systemic economic reform stems from Hungary's status as a small country, heavily dependent on foreign trade, many of whose imports can no longer be met within the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance alone. The many obstacles to economic reform lie in a heritage of policy choices that responded to domestic and CMEA supply constraints rather than to principles of comparative advantage. Such policies undercut the initial economic reform in 1968 and contributed to a major economic crisis in 1979–82. The subsequent changes in policy priorities and institutional mechanisms prompted by this crisis aimed to reduce Hungary's insulation from the larger international economy and make the economy more efficient. Politically, economic reform is possible in Hungary largely because of the impact of the 1956 revolt on both the subsequent composition of the political elite and the norms and features of collective leadership that guided its decision making afterwards. Nevertheless, the political and economic structures on which collective leadership rests weaken reform advocates and obstruct consistent implementation of their policy preferences. Yet Hungary's economic situation in the late 1970s altered the political balance offerees in favor of reformists, permitting them to alter both economic structures and policies.

FAO Preparatory Commission on World Food Proposals

The Second Session of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Conference, held in Copenhagen, Denmark, from September 2 to 13, 1946, created a preparatory commission to consider the proposals of the Conference and any other suggestions relative to the establishment of a World Food Board. The Preparatory Commission, made up of representatives of sixteen member nations of FAO — Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Egypt, France, India, Netherlands, Philippine Republic, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States — and representatives of four United Nations organizations — the Economic and Social Council, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the International Labor Office and the International Monetary Fund — began its sessions at Washington October 28. Siam, although not a member of FAO, participated as a full member in all the discussions concerning rice; the Soviet Union and Argentina, also non-members of FAO, were invited to participate as full members of the Commission but did not designate representatives, although Argentina named two observers. Fifteen FAO members, not members of the Commission, and the International Emergency Food Council (IEFC) also sent observers. The representative of Australia (Bruce) was appointed by the Director-General of FAO (Orr) to serve as chairman of the Commission.

Whereas, recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

If, to misquote Harold Lasswell, one considers the study of politics to be the study of who gets what, when, and why, then this paper is a study of the politics of elections in the United Nations. Who gets what and when are easily discovered, since the results of elections and dates of elections are available in any United Nations Yearbook. The “why” is more difficult to determine. This paper is an attempt to analyze—by the use of empirical, numerical indices exclusively—why nations are elected to UN offices.

The negotiations leading to the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), both in their political and psychological contexts, are an interesting and indeed unique episode in post World War II diplomatic history. The most significant feature of the negotiations was that they succeeded. The Soviet Union and the United States reached a measure of agreement in the vital field of atomic energy. Virtually the entire world joined enthusiastically in this agreement. An international organization came into being with vast potential—even though today in a changed political atmosphere doubts exist that the potential will ever be realized.

The numerous unification efforts now under way in Africa represent one of the most significant developments in the brief post-independence era of that continent. Freedom has brought withit increased recognition in many African quarters of the interdependence of the African statesand the need for unified approaches to common problems. The new countries together with the handful of older independent African states have nearly all become involved in one or more of theintensified drives toward some form of integration. Paradoxically, the issue of how to achieveunity is becoming one of the principal divisions between African states.

There is a distinctively repetitive quality about trade policy problems. Domestic economic growth slows; producers seek protection against foreign competitors; and national decision makers raise barriers to trade while at the same time criticizing their counterparts in other governments for engaging in similar practices. Because trade is one of the more important topics in international and comparative political economy and because this scenario has played itself out more than a few times, it is not surprising that a number of theorists have sought to model the underlying processes thought to produce movements toward and away from protectionism.

I illustrate the accepted, though hardly researched, idea that political institutions play a role in locking in factor specificity across sectors, space, and borders. I use the emergence of modern capital markets in the nineteenth century, a process that threatened to redeploy financial resources away from land and traditional sectors to heavy industry, as a test case to ascertain the degree of domestic financial capital mobility in nine advanced industrialized countries. The main finding is that cross-national variations in financial capital mobility, holding constant the level of economic development, reflect the degree of state centralization.

On October 31, 1956, two days after the armed forces of Israel struck across the Israeli-Egytian Armistice line deep into the Sinai peninsula, and the day following the Anglo-French ultimatum to Egypt, Dag Hammarskjold, the United Nations Secretary-General, asked for the floor in the Security Council meeting. “Yesterday morning”, he said, “on the basis of the information then available— I would have used my right to call for an immediate meeting of the Security Council, had not the United States Government in the course of the night taken the initiative.

In November 1948, the final verdict against 28 accused Japanese war criminals was delivered in Tokyo by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. The Tribunal, established on January 16, 1946, had begun hearings on May 3, 1946, and had been continually in session since that time. The reception of evidence had terminated on February 10, 1948, the tribunal having admitted 4,336 exhibits and 779 depositions in evidence and having heard 419 witnesses testify in court. Hearings had been in English and Japanese, with translation when required into Chinese, Russian, and French; the tribunal noted that language difficulties had materially delayed its work and had even made necessary the establishment of a Language Arbitration Board.

Increasing attention is being paid to the development of international codes of behavior and rules of law to regulate the behavior of transnational enterprise. Notable steps in this direction have been taken by the United Nations, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the European Community, the Andean Common Market and various other organizations. The approaches represented by these efforts can be categorized by the use of four models: the Free Market model; the European Community model; the Multinational Consortium approach; and the Development Community approach. These approaches to the problem of regulation differ in the degree to which they impose prior regulation on multinational firms and in whether they permit the firms to operate as integrated systems or impose arms-length standards on parent-subsidiary relations. Each approach has merits, depending on context and the values of the governments involved.

Recent research on international interdependence has led to increasingly sophisticated conceptualizations of the phenomenon. However, it has not been very successful in measuring interdependence, nor in testing theories about it. Although the theoretical message of most interdependence research is that interdependence is multinational or systemic, empirical operationalization has tended to concentrate on looking for interdependence (or integration, or community) as a relationship between a pair of nation states, rather than as an international pattern of behavior among an entire set of countries. Complicating these empirical analyses is their lack of operationally defined end states. In general, the approach has been to look for changes or differences in behavior, rather than for absolute levels of interdependence or integration. This is, at best, only an indirect test of the validity of a theory, regardless of how well or how badly it enables one to examine and compare one set of nations with another or the same set over time.

How have UN human rights goals and priorities evolved in the 1970s? The moderate compromise represented by the International Bill of Rights, as completed by the Covenants in 1966, has been undone in the seventies. A point-by-point examination of the major principles enunciated in General Assembly resolution 32/130 of 16 December 1977, which codified the trends of the decade and stands as the authoritative statement of the UN's strategic goals and priorities in the field of human rights, shows that the earlier moderation has been replaced by a one-sided, politicized, and often cynical approach. This development in UN doctrine merits polemical criticism.

Because of France's traditional use of culture and language as an instrument of foreign policy, it would be easy to dismiss any movement involving French as serving her national interests. Francophonie, whose purpose is to strengthen the French language and serve the interests of those who use it, depends on nongovernmental organizations and subunits of government in about 26 countries. Its leaders claim it serves the purposes of all French-speaking peoples and that it is transnational or outside the control of governments. In fact, however, some French elites do try to control directly and indirectly the formal organizations of Francophonie, and, thus, it may fail to become a transnational force in world politics. On the other hand, the work done by professionals and language specialists to strengthen French, to extend it to the masses and to build a closed circuit for the communication of vital information responds to needs for protection against so-called “Americanization” and for access to modernization. Therefore, despite its intangible nature, a new cultural force might emerge, and it then could affect the way states interact with each other.

In a recent article, Stephanie Neuman examines several critical factors that separate developing countries into arms producers and arms nonproducers. She ranks countries according to a weighted index of military production capability (derived from length of production, production capacity, and technical capabilities) and also according to the following seven socioeconomic indicators: population, land size, size of military, gross national product (GNP), GNP per capita, number of professional and technical workers, and number of industrial workers. She computes correlation coefficients (Kendall's tau) by region (Latin America, South Asia, and the Far East) and for twenty-six arms producers worldwide.