The United States' notice of withdrawal from the ILO is to be understood in terms of hegemonic power relations. “Tripartism” is an ideology based upon a dominant historical tendency, namely the emergence of a corporative form of state in both developed and underdeveloped countries. The AFL-CIO has participated in the construction of the corporative state in the US and has supported its hegemonic role in the world in concert with American business interests and the CIA. Neither the ILO nor international trade union organizations (especially the ICFTU) has enjoyed a stable relationship with the center of hegemonic power in the labor field, since the AFL-CIO has conducted a unilateral foreign policy. The functionalist strategy of executive leadership asserting the autonomy of an international organization through task expansion in technical fields has been almost totally irrelevant to the issue. Nor has the ILO found an alternative counter-hegemonic base of support, e.g., in the Third World. The existing hegemony has reasserted itself through the ILO program and ideology even as the US has withdrawn material support. Hegemony, which no longer operates through majority votes in international organizations, works instead through bureaucratic controls. This structure of power has prevented the ILO from confronting effectively the real social issues of employment-creation, land reform, marginality, and poverty in general. Initiatives that have been taken to deal with such issues have all ultimately been diverted into programs consistent with the hegemonic ideology and power relations.

The demand by Third World countries for a “new international economic order” also has its political dimension. Do the threats of commodity cartels, debt defaults, and investment expropriation reflect a fundamental shift in the balance of power between North and South? This paper argues, to the contrary, that the power of the South is quite limited. An analysis of trade, financing, and investment relations between North and South reveals the latter's clearly subordinate position, which is all the more weakened by the fragile political-administrative structures of many Third World regimes. Nevertheless, the demands being made should in some form be accommodated since they serve Northern interests in two important respects: they potentially allow the North new means of leverage in relations with the South; and they offer the North the opportunity to coordinate its various policies and interests in regard to the Third World. Had the South not called for a new international economic order, the North should have pressed for one.

A common “interdependence problematique” can be found in recent literature on security interdependence, regional integration processes, ecological limits to growth, and global political economy. Six problematical aspects of interdependence relationships should therefore be given definitional significance: existing or proposed transnational or intergovernmental relationships in the post-Cold War era typically raise issues concerning the degree of public consumption interdependence, the extent to which situational interests are non-zero sum, the need for coordinated production relationships, the extent of cross-sector or inter-functional interdependence and the vulnerabilities involved in breaking with or doing without any such institutionalized relationships. Twenty methodological maxims are useful for appraising the design relevance of empirical research on partial, regime-like world order alternatives. Much but not all previous research has been severely deficient in addressing the efficiency, equity, conservation, and feasibility implications of contending interdependence alternatives.

Why does a common challenge, such as the oil crisis, elicit different national responses in the international political economy? The domestic structure of the nation-state is a critical intervening variable without which the interrelation between international interdependence and political strategies cannot be understood. The essay justifies this volume's concentration on a few advanced industrial states of the North; from a broader historical perspective it looks briefly at the interaction of international and domestic forces in the shaping of the international political economy; it examines two theories of foreign policy (international approaches and bureaucratic politics) in order to highlight the gap which this volume intends to fill; and it details the theoretical orientation informing the essays which follow.

Eight years of work on the Law of the Sea, conducted in various United Nations bodies and three rounds of a United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, have produced a high probability of official failure. The complex, cumbersome, and inefficient decision system of the Law of the Sea Conference is largely to blame for this result. It was a major error to attempt to negotiate the entire Law of the Sea simultaneously. During the first two sessions, in 1974 and 1975, difficult decisions were postponed repeatedly, thus multiplying the problems in an already very difficult situation. The Group of 77 was effectively captured by coastal states, leading to a Revised Single Negotiating Text that fails to meet the interests of landlocked and geographically disadvantaged states as well as those of the most advanced maritime states on scientific research, and distant-water fishing states. A number of these states are unlikely to sign a convention in the near future; and even if some agreement is reached at a future session of the Law of the Sea Conference, the new regime will be difficult to apply universally in the way that the old one was. A variety of conflicts is likely to proliferate, and detailed regional or sub-regional negotiations will continue. No universal solution to Law of the Sea issues is likely to emerge.

The definition and direction of interdependence remain unclear. As a corrective, interdependence can be defined as the direct and positive linkage of the interests of states where a change in the position of one state affects the position of others and in the same direction. Interdependence, then, is measured both by the flow of goods between states—horizontal interdependence, and the equalization of factor prices among states-vertical interdependence. Horizontal and vertical interdependence measured across six industrialized states from 1890–1975 reveal some important changes in the interdependence among these states. Fairly significant before World War I, interdependence declined markedly in the interwar period. Following World War II, interdependence seemed to increase once again, but since 1958 the measures appear much more mixed. The data seem to support a detachment of individual national policies from the general trend toward interdependence. This detachment may alter the trend, reducing the positive and direct relationship among industrial economies.

In January 1974 the Council of Ministers of the European Community issued a resolution calling for the coordination of the science and technology policies of the member countries. This initiative came after several years of largely unrewarded efforts by the European institutions to bring a measure of Community-wide coherence in national R&D programs and objectives. Despite the development of alternative decision-making and implementation procedures, the Community's impact on national activities was on the whole limited in scope, confined to programs of marginal importance and more concerned with the joint execution of specific research tasks than with the political motives and intentions of the member governments. A review of the 1974 resolution's effects, principally through the work of the CREST committee, demonstrates that the multiple obstacles to policy coordination have yet to be overcome. These obstacles stem from a) varying conceptions of the policy coordination task, b) the discrepancies and inadequacies in national science policy formulation, c) deficiencies in the perspectives and procedures of Commission officials and national delegations, and d) a variety of constraints which restrict the domain of possible Community intervention.

Eight journals were surveyed for articles reporting empirical research on international organizations, under the assumption that periodic self-assessment is a necessary component of any program of scientific inquiry. Forty-five article published between 1970 and 1975 are compared to articles from the 1960s on a variety of dimensions. In the recent period more authors view international organizations comparatively while fewer concentrate their efforts on the UN. The types of organizations and organizational process being studied have become more diversified, as have the research methods being utilized. Several questions receiving the sustained attention of researchers, such as studies of UN voting groups, the attributes of UN member states, the effects of economic assistance on influence in the UN, and the role of IO's in conflict resolution, all reflect a growing accumulation of knowledge about international organizations.

The United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea marks the threshold of a major transition in regimes governing the use of ocean fisheries. After 200 years of operation, the principle of the freedom of the seas for fishing is being abruptly dismantled and replaced by extended zones of national jurisdiction. The new acquisition of authority by coastal states will, in many situations, greatly facilitate the adoption of improved management techniques. But in most regions throughout the world, the authority over numerous stocks of fish will continue to be diffused among neighboring countries because of the migratory patterns of the stocks. Arrangements for the distribution of yields from these shared stocks, for the provision of information, the adoption of regulations, and enforcement will be extremely difficult to achieve and may become significant sources of conflict and waste for many years into the future.

The years immediately after World War II provided American policy makers with a unique opportunity to help shape the international economic order for a generation to come. United States objectives are usually described in terms of enlightened idealism or capitalist expansionism. But much of the way policy makers envisaged international economic reconstruction derived from the ambivalent way in which domestic economic conflict had been resolved before and during the New Deal. In the inconclusive struggle between business champions and the spokesmen for reform, Americans achieved consensus by celebrating a supposedly impartial efficiency and productivity and by condemning allegedly wasteful monopoly. Looking outward during and after World War II, United States representatives condemned Fascism as a form of monopoly power, then later sought to isolate Communist parties and labor unions as adversaries of their priorities of production. American blueprints for international monetary order, policy toward trade unions, and the intervention of occupation authorities in West Germany and Japan sought to transform political issues into problems of output, to adjourn class conflict for a consensus on growth. The American approach was successful because for almost two decades high rates of growth made the politics of productivity apparently pay off. Whether an alternative approach could have achieved more equality remains an important but separate inquiry.

Major LOS controversies over navigation concern access to the waters of archipelagoes, the scope of coastal authority over passage through the territorial sea and straits, and navigation through ocean areas adjacent to the territorial sea. Proposals at the LOS Conference pertaining to access to archipelagic waters focus on new rights for island nations and on safeguards for navigation interests. The specific issues at stake in the territorial sea and in straits concern innocent passage for warships, coastal authority to deny innocent passage, clarification of the concept of innocent passage, and the scope and content of a claimed special right of transit for straits. Beyond the territorial sea the most important navigation issues relate to the extent of coastal authority other than control of resources. Controls over vessel source pollution are at issue as well as the relationship of navigation to resource measures. Assessment of the various interests at stake and of the trends in consideration of proposed treaty arrangements on the above issues suggests that, in general, navigation uses of the ocean will not suffer unduly in the LOS treaty expected to emerge in 1977. However, proposals to create a new zone, called the economic zone, which would be subtracted from the high seas, pose a possible long-term threat to navigation interests.

Most cases of regional economic integration are among Third World countries, yet research in this field has been dominated by theory based on the European experience. The politics of integration among underdeveloped countries can be better understood within the framework of a theory designed to fit conditions in those regions. Contemporary economic theory provides a basis for such a theory. A successful integration scheme requires a high degree of political cooperation. The problem is that the type of integration scheme most likely to contribute to development is the most difficult to achieve. On the basis of the distribution of the costs and benefits of integration, the policy positions of national and sub-national actors can be predicted on a broad range of integrative measures. The ultimate success of integration depends on the ability of relevant actors to negotiate coalitions in support of policies which will contribute to the development of the region as a whole and which will assure an acceptable distribution of these benefits within the region.

The major hypothesis of this article is that attendance at interparliamentary group meetings by members of Congress between 1949 and 1970 modified their attitudes toward foreign policy. Interviews with a sample of congressional delegates, analysis of roll call data, and documentary records were used to test this hypothesis. Changes after attendance at an initial meeting were small. However, when party, ideology, and degree of previous isolationism or internationalism were controlled the changes were much more significant. Predictions formulated on the basis of cognitive dissonance theory were remarkably accurate, thus suggesting that cognitive consistency explanations may help to account for the behavior observed.

The fundamental objective of American foreign economic policy after the Second World War was to establish a regime in which impediments to the movement of capital and goods were minimized. In this quest American central decision makers were largely successful because of America's external power. However, because of the weakness of the US political system, that is, the ability of private groups to check state initiatives, public officials were constantly faced with domestic political constraints. These constraints were more apparent in the area of commercial policy, where decisions involved Congress and executive agencies susceptible to societal influences, than in monetary policy, where decisions were made in a more insulated environment. The decline of America's external power, which became evident in the mid-1960s, was accompanied by growing demands for protection as more sectors of the American economy were adversely affected by foreign trade. This has led to increasing incoherence in US policy and greater instability in the international economic regime.

Shipping is characterized by a high degree of mobility and flexibility based on free access to the world's oceans and multilateral participation in carriage of sea-borne trade. Recently, technological and institutional developments have tended to create conditions in which bilateral shipping agreements may become dominant. A major step in this direction was the 1974 UNCTAD Convention on a code of conduct for liner conferences. Efforts to protect the marine environment from ship-originated oil pollution may work in the same direction depending on how they are implemented. Under any circumstances, implementation of pollution control standards under the 1973 IMCO convention will be costly and freight rates arc certain to rise. Unless international pollution control standards are rigidly fixed and binding, discriminatory treatment and bilateral agreements are likely. But such standards would be futile unless there is also freedom of innocent passage–a matter for the Law of the Sea Conference.

Economic policies in Britain after World War II, both domestic and international, were dominated by foreign policy goals. This provides the primary explanation for Britain's poor economic performance in the postwar years. Commitments made in the late 1940s and 1950s, particularly with regard to Britain's international position and responsibilities, and domestic economic policies devised to support these commitments, locked Britain into a low-growth situation. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the widespread consensus supporting these commitments began to disintegrate and efforts were made to develop new policies directed toward stimulating domestic economic growth. These efforts were unsuccessful–largely because of the unwillingness of government leaders to shift national priorities away from traditional international commitments. This failure made it impossible for the British economy to meet the rising expectations of the British population and contributed, after 1967, to a widespread increase in social conflict. Compared to other advanced industrial nations, Britain's economic performance since 1945 has been poor. Britain's poor economic performance is due, however, not to the weakness of British governments or to their inability to resist demands made by interests groups, but rather to a series of policy choices, especially in the international area, that were inappropriate for Britain's resources but to which successive governments adhered with remarkable stubbornness and rigidity.

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.