In corridor and dining-room conversations during the past eight years among national representatives and Secretariat officials in the handsome Chateau de la Muette on the western edge of Paris, it has often been boasted that the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) is the most successful of the many postwar experiments in international organization. The boast is supported with a variety of comparisons, some inevitably invidious.

In its efforts to penalize Portugal and the Republic of South Africa for their colonial and apartheid policies the General Assembly has called upon the specialized agencies to deny to those states the benefits of membership in their respective organizations. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) has refused to do so on the ground that it is a nonpolitical, functional organization without authority to impose sanctions upon members for conduct unrelated to its purposes. The pointed exchange of views between the United Nations and die World Bank on this question illustrates the serious problem of the proper relationship between the United Nations and the specialized agencies and exposes one of the difficulties of the functionalist strategy for world order. An appreciation of the significance of this dispute requires an examination of its history, the legal context in which it arises, and its relationship to the theory of functionalism.

The 46th session of the International Labor Conference took place in Geneva from June 6 through June 29, 1962, under the presidency of Mr. John Lynch (Minister for Industry and Commerce and government delegate of Ireland). According to Mr. David A. Morse, the Director-General, despite disputes, restlessness, impatience, and criticism, disagreement had been contained within the Organization's rules and procedures; and the Conference had reached a wide measure of agreement on important and controversial issues.

Members of most organizations are involved at different levels of intensity: Some participants pay more attention to the organization than others. Thus the question “Who cares about the organization?” can lead to significant findings about differential levels of involvement. These findings, in turn, suggest members’ policy priorities as well as illuminating Behavioral patterns within the organization.

Conventional discussions of state power have tended to list a state's resources or capabilities for power in a straightforward and unambiguousway. True, the caveat is offered that there is a difference between potential and actual power, but the difference is usually spelled out in terms either of problems of modernization (seen itself as a technique of transforming capabilities) or in terms of the will and skill of the state under discussion.1 But in a world of highly interdependent political economies, this utilization gapdepends not only on the conditions that create and sustain the state's ability tocontrol its own resources, but also on the conditions that determine 1) theaccess of others to these capabilities, and 2) the access of the state to theresources of other states. For what purposes and in what situations are astate's resources usable by it? In what situations can the state be a gatekeeper with respect to the access by others to its resources? The answers to thesequestions determine, in part, whether potential becomes actual (relative)power in present or future state-to-state relations. It is to this neglecteddimension of power that this paper is devoted.

In 1954, just twenty years after first becoming a member, the Soviet Union rejoined the International Labor Organization (ILO). This step was a sharp reversal of the USSR's past policy. The Soviet Union had boycotted ILO since 1937, three years before its initial membership was terminated as a consequence of its expulsion from the League of Nations, and during much of this time it conducted a bitter attack against the agency. The Soviet Union's re-entry may also have marked a turning point for the International Labor Organization. One of the oldest specialized agencies, ILO had developed a tradition of technical work for which it had won wide renown. Some feared that the Soviet Union's re-entry was likely to upset this tradition; others felt that the Organization's wider and more nearly universal membership would provide new strength and vitality. Although the full implications of the USSR's resumed membership in ILO cannot yet be seen, sufficient time has elapsed to warrant a critical examination of Soviet policy in this specialized agency and of the reactions of other states. Perhaps clues can be seen to the motivations for the shift in the USSR's attitude, preliminary estimates made of the success of Soviet policies, and tentative judgments offered about the over-all effects on ILO.

Since January 1963, General de Gaulle's foreign policy has been subject to many contradictory or erroneous interpretations in the United States. It is necessary, therefore, to indicate its foundations, its main lines, some of the expectations and techniques peculiar to the General, and some of the obstacles it encounters. I will concentrate here on his views and policies toward France's Atlantic and European partners.

Faced with a formidable competitiveness problem, the American government chief executive appeared to offer a series of ad hoc responses in the 1980s. Contrarily, this article suggests that executive responses to foreign economic challenges follow a predictable pattern. Pointing to the interactive effects of ideology and interest, this article argues that both the degree and type of executive response, be it in the form of market-opening strategies, of temporary or permanent forms of protectionism, or of adopting a laissez-faire approach, can be predicted based on two factors: whether a sector is characterized as “high tech” and whether it is considered to be competitive. A major implication of this argument is that the U.S. chief executive has used trade policy as a surrogate for industrial policy; but in so doing, the strategic considerations associated with industrial policies have been bypassed. The major effect is that the executive fails to intervene only in the realm of an “infant industry” policy—the area most likely to generate a dynamic economy. The product of this combiantion of protectionist policies is a stagnant economy that we term “compromise protectionism.”

It is possible to distinguish roughly two periods in the history of the United Nations. During the first, which lasted until the middle nineteen fifties, the Western powers had a fairly secure majority in the General Assembly, and Cold War issues tended to dominate. The supreme test of that first phase was the Korean War. It showed both that the new International Organization refused to practice appeasement and that in a bipolar world whose main antagonists were engaged in an ideological struggle and endowed with nuclear weapons, UN intervention in the conflicts between the blocs would either expose the Organization to a demonstration of impotence or submit the world to the risks of escalation. A second phase began when membership of the UN increased, and the newly-independent nations became the biggest group within the Assembly. Now, as Dag Hammarskjöld put it in his report to the fifteenth General Assembly, the main task in the area of peace and security shifted to “preventive diplomacy”—rushing to the scene of fires which break out “outside the sphere of bloc differences” before the arrival of the major contenders. The biggest challenge has been the Congo crisis. It has tested all the assumptions which had been made—by scholars as well as by the late Secretary-General—about the role of the UN, its possibilities and its limits, and about the relations between its principal organs and its main groups of members.

Food is a factor in international diplomacy as a direct instrument of policy and as a condition underlying policy. Grain trade is particularly important. For most of the postwar period, principal grain exporting countries pursued policies designed to support domestic prices, using foreign agricultural policy to dispose of accumulated surpluses and to pursue broader non-food (political and economic) objectives. Grain importing countries came to rely on cheap food supplies in international markets, neglecting incentives to stimulate domestic production. Worldwide food shortages in 1973–74 made clear the need to consider international as well as domestic food requirements. Food considerations acquired a foreign policy dimension, while foreign policy considerations sparked a debate about the use of food for power. A return to surplus conditions in world food markets reduces the opportunities for the exercise of food power, while creating the conditions to meet historically unattainable food goals. To accomplish this, a system of international coordination and review of separate national food policies may be needed. Such a system would ensure greater accountability of private groups to governments and governments to one another without relying excessively on either automatic market forces or a centralized world food authority.

The new international nuclear regime requires accession to fullscope safeguards and an acceptance of the formal restraints imposed by the London Nuclear Suppliers Group on the worldwide availability of sensitive nuclear technology, materials, and equipment. The underside of the nuclear market, however, consists of surreptitious transfers by suppliers to special recipient states. Pakistan has capitalized on the existence of such a market to acquire the means to make nuclear weapons. Though South Asia is likely to be the first region outside of the central strategic system to harbor nuclear-armed national rivals, the situation is manageable through the imposition of innovative institutionalized constraints on the region. Neutrally conceived, these constraints can be adapted for other regions facing nuclearization. In the long run, the imbalance of capabilities between India and Pakistan will manifest itself in the nuclear field as it has in others.

Most debate about the efficacy of orthodox stabilization programs, such as those of the International Monetary Fund, has been fruitless. First, rarely are these programs fully implemented or sustained for long periods. Second, defenders and critics of the programs hold differing premises about the nature of capitalist economies. The debate is therefore not about the appropriate balance of supply-and demand-side measures but, rather, about what sort of supply- and demand-side measures will address the supply- and demand-side problems that each group perceives. The results of an orthodox stabilization program which incorporated demand- and supply-side elements and which was fully implemented and sustained by the New Zealand government from 1984 to 1990 reveal the limits to orthodox programs. New Zealand, a primary product exporter, suffers from a structural imbalance of payments and from an external debt burden equal in scale to that of the Latin American and other highly indebted less developed countries (LDCs), but it does not have the serious supplyside constraints on growth that critics claim typify underdeveloped economies. This makes New Zealand an appropriate test of the typical orthodox stabilization program. Despite the fact that its administrative capacity, political will, domestic support, and access to external resources were far in excess of those of the typical would-be LDC stabilizer, New Zealand achieved only a precarious macroeconomic and international payments stability. Moreover, as the case of New Zealand demonstrates, inflation control and financial liberalization policy components of orthodox plans have contradictory consequences for payments balance. This suggests that long-term stabilization, in New Zealand and elsewhere, cannot be achieved solely by internal reforms.

We present a model of political networks that integrates both the choice of trade partners (the extensive margin) and trade volumes (the intensive margin). Our model predicts that regimes secure in their survival, including democracies as well as some consolidated authoritarian regimes, will trade more on the extensive margin than vulnerable autocracies, which will block trade in products that would expand interpersonal contact among their citizens. We apply a two-stage Bayesian LASSO estimator to detailed measures of institutional features and highly disaggregated product-level trade data encompassing 131 countries over a half century. Consistent with our model, we find that (a) political institutions matter for the extensive margin of trade but not for the intensive margin and (b) the effects of political institutions on the extensive margin of trade vary across products, falling most heavily on those goods that involve extensive interpersonal contact.

The similarity of state structures throughout Eastern Europe helps to explain why the reactions of states in that area to the international economic disturbances of the past decade resemble each other and why they differ from those of states outside the socialist bloc. Similar state structures, however, do not explain why the economic strategies of the East European states themselves in response to international economic shocks in the 1970s and 1980s diverged so noticeably. The role of state structure is to define “kto/kovo” (who can do what to whom) relationships in the state and economy. In this way state structures define problems that political leaders must solve, possibilities among which they may choose, and political resources and allies upon which they may draw in the course of their decision making. In contrast, strategy choices–“what is to be done”–are the outcomes of political processes in which leaders mobilize resources and allies to capture positions of power from which they can pursue the purposes they advocate. Thus differences in foreign economic strategies among member states in the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance reflected differences in the dynamic interaction of the form and content of political processes that occurred within common state structures.

Continued dependence on expensive imported liquid fuels puts stress on the relations among and the domestic performance of the members of OECD. Coordinated energy R&D could in principle lessen those stresses and also benefit other liquid fuel consumers. A political economy approach can help explain the tepid pursuit of this possibility in two ways. First, it can clarify the reasons for the weak collective action energy R&D record of the members of the OECD both before and after the oil events of 1973. Second, it can demonstrate and identify the nature of the undersupply of the public good of energy knowledge. The history of this area illustrates several general obstacles to the provision of public goods in realistically complex political situations. These include the uncertain and distant nature of commitments to actually deliver collective goods in the absense of self-enforcing agreements, unwillingness to jeopardize possible future private advantages, and the tendencies to link provision of particular public goods to cooperation by other parties with the provider on a host of other matters. In effect, the attempts of particular statesmen to tie energy R&D cooperation to other issues reinforce tendencies to view the choices not as ones about the level of provision of public goods, but rather as ones about national shares of private goods—economic, military, and political.

Italy's political economy is characterized by international weakness and internal fragmentation and polarization. Since 1947, Italy's foreign economic policies have been defined by a broadly-based political and social coalition dominated by the Christian Democratic party (DC). This coalition has incorporated or maintained close links with ministerial bureaucracies, the Bank of Italy, state-controlled industrial and commercial enterprises, large corporations, and Catholic trade unions. It has attempted to foster a postwar climate receptive to business interests and to foreign investment; one which would facilitate the maintenance of a stable domestic political and social order. At the same time, the DC coalition is so fragmented by factionalism and personal competition that economic policy making has lacked direction and has been marked by personalism and by improvisation. Italian policy makers operate in a precarious environment in that they must use political and economic weaknessin order to mobilize the international assistance needed to maintain the internal social order as well as external economic survival.

As an explanation of organizational growth at the international level, functionalism postulates that people who become personally involved in the activities of international agencies will develop attitudes more favorable to international cooperation. Analysis of speeches by United States Congressmen and Senators before and after serving as delegates to the UN General Assembly indicates that significant attitudinal change may occur. At the cognitive level, Congressmen tend to pay more attention to the UN than before. The majority also experience positive change in affect toward the UN. In addition, the data provide evidence of convergence toward a mean value as participants initially holding the more extreme views (positive or negative) generally express more moderate opinions as a result of the UN experience. The fact that such a leveling of expectations occurs at a significantly higher level of favorability gives modest support to the functionalist thesis.