The theory that a liberal international economic structure is associated positively, and a mercantilist structure negatively, with international security is widespread. But the case in favor of liberalism, and the case against mercantilism, are both one-sided, and the whole attempt to link economic structure to international security anyway overestimates the influence that economic structure has on the use of force. Political and military factors provide explanations more convincing than economic ones for the propensity of states to resort to, or refrain from, the use of force. Liberal and mercantilist structures each have both positive and negative impacts on the use of force, but these impacts become important only when they are complemented by noneconomic factors governing the use of force. Hence security grounds cannot be used convincingly either as a reason for maintaining the current liberal system or as a reason for opposing a shift toward a more mercantilist structure of international economic relations.

The governments of the five major Western powers—the United States, the United Kingdom, France, West Germany, and Japan—coordinated policy on two key North-South issues from 1974 to 1979: relieving the external debts of developing nations and establishing the Common Fund to help finance international commodity agreements. A prominent feature of the coordination process was the emergence of transgovernmental coalitions among like-minded bureaucrats. Previous studies have suggested that such coalitions may affect national policies by promoting learning and attitude change in their members and by legitimizing the policy changes sought by their members. But these suggestions do not account for the ability of coalitions to translate their policy preferences into national policy commitments, particularly where one or more of their members are relatively weak in their national policy-making systems. On the Common Fund and debt relief, some coalition members held positions in their national systems strong enough to induce their governments as a whole to commit themselves to certain concessions. Weaker members of these coalitions then gained the external support they needed to lead their own governments to make similar commitments, thus preparing the way for agreements with the developing countries and some incremental changes in the international economic order.

Theories of the product cycle, hegemony, and the world system are used to analyze the creation and development of the Northeast Asian political economy in this century. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have each developed in a particular relationship with the others; the three taken together form a hierarchical, constantly interacting political-economic unit. During the period of colonial rule Japan was unique in building an imperial economic unit marked by a strong role for the state (whether in Tokyo or Taipei), by a tight, integral Unking of all three nations into a communications and transport network running toward the metropole, and by a strategy of both using the colonies for agricultural surpluses and then locating industries there. After 1945 a diffuse American hegemony replaced Japan's unilateral system, but elements of the prewar model have survived: strong states direct economic development in South Korea and Taiwan (here termed “bureaucratic-authoritarian industrializing regimes”); both countries are receptacles for Japan's declining industries; and both countries develop in tandem, if in competition, with each other. The most recent export-led competition has seen Taiwan succeed where South Korea has (temporarily?) failed, leaving Seoul in an export-led “trap,” burdened with rapidly increasing external debt. Taiwan, furthermore, has industrialized relatively free of social disruption, whereas Korean society resisted its transformation at Japanese hands and remains more rebellious today. There can be one Japan and one Taiwan, but not two or many of either, in the world economy.

Industrial partisan preference may be formally modeled as the joint consequence of pressures from labor and the differential impact of the world economy on particular businesses. This “basic” and static model, when extended to cover the money market, can be used to examine questions of political development, including the effects of fluctuations in national income on political coalitions. American institutions and public policy during the New Deal are used to test the theory against empirical evidence, much of it from new primary sources. The rise of the New Deal coalition is traced to changes in the American industrial structure deriving from the boom of the 1920s and the reversal of the U.S. financial position that resulted from World War I, in addition to the well-known labor militancy of the 1930s. The effect of these changes was the rise of a (Democratic) political coalition dominated by capital-intensive, multinationally dominant firms and industries with a strong interest in free trade and a historically unprecedented ability to cope with major industrial upheavals without resort to force. The major public policy initiatives of the New Deal are reexamined from this standpoint.

Changes in the domestic politics of East-West energy trade policy indicate a more general transformation of the domestic politics of American foreign policy. In the postwar period the basic, consensual pattern of congressional bipartisanship, executivebranch unity, interest-group collaboration, and a supportive public has been replaced by the conflictual pattern of an assertive Congress, a fragmented executive branch, antagonistic interest groups, and a divided public. These contrasting patterns are manifestations of structural changes in the domestic political economy. Along both political and economic dimensions, and differentiated according to whether the locus of pressure was group-specific or more general, what had been basic foundations of consensus became by the early 1970s fissures of conflict. Of particular significance were the weakening of the macropolitical foundations (the basic accord on foreignpolicy objectives and strategies) in the wake of both Vietnam and detente and the increased marginal value of the economic costs, both diffuse (macroeconomic) and particularistic (microeconomic), to be paid for economic coercion. In this transformed context, the state's support-building instruments of ideology and economic compensation were insufficient to build consensus. As a result, in this issue area and perhaps more generally, high levels of domestic constraints on the conduct of American foreign policy have become the rule rather than the exception.

The large-scale international migrations of the past decade are of increasing relevance to the formulation of foreign policy. The nature of such migrations has undergone dramatic transformations from those of the quite recent past, and the last five years have seen a series of migration “crises” with powerful foreign-policy implications. Foreign policies have had dramatic effects upon international migration trends. Usually these effects have been unintended and unanticipated, though mass migration has sometimes been employed as a tool of foreign policy. At the same time, international migration has had significant impact upon the formulation and content of foreign policy, especially in the United States. These relationships now present complex policy choices, involving deeply entwined concerns of foreign, domestic, and humanitarian complexion. There are important lessons to be learned from recent experiences, lessons that challenge longstanding perspectives. Indeed, real peril now attends the failure to deal coherently and humanely with international migrations as they relate to foreign policy.

Syria's intervention in the Lebanese civil war in the late spring of 1976 has usually been explained in either structural or perceptual terms. Neither kind of account does a very good job of explaining the character and timing of this military operation. But relating the intervention to changes in Syria's domestic political situation accounts for it much more satisfactorily. Specifically, Syria's ruling social coalition found itself confronted with a substantial threat to its political position in the country from small farmers, craftspeople, and workers in the north-central provinces during the first months of 1976. In response to this threat, each member of the ruling coalition adopted a program that would insure its own dominance, but only at the expense of its domestic political allies. Under these circumstances, these social forces moved into Lebanon in an attempt to secure the capital, manufactured goods, and port facilities that would enable them to suppress their domestic political opponents while maintaining their own alliance. Domestic political struggles thus provide a more plausible explanation for Syria's intervention than either of the other two arguments can.

Under the same systemic shock, the collapse of the international economy in 1929, different countries formulated different policy responses. Britain, Germany, the United States, France, and Sweden all began by attempting the orthodoxy of deflation. Soon after, they abandoned deflation, devalued their currencies, erected tariff barriers, and set up corporatistic production and marketing arrangements. A few countries went further, and began experimenting with demand-stimulus fiscal policy. The most successful was Nazi Germany; the Swedish and U.S. efforts were much more limited and less effective, the French attempt crumbled in less than a year, and Britain never tried demand stimulus. Why this divergence in policy? The politics of policy response, the societal basis of different policy coalitions and the way in which they were expressed through different political formulations, suggests an answer. In all countries, labor, agriculture, and certain elements of business became available for revolts against policy orthodoxy. What differed across countries was the specific balance of forces among these interest groups, and the political factors that shaped their combinations. The effect of political leadership, institutions, and other variables on outcomes depended critically on the way specific social forces in each society used and worked through them.

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 1979 and 1980 the U.S. government attempted to regulate the Eurocurrency system in order to stabilize the international monetary and financial systems, and for U.S. domestic monetary purposes. The conflict between the U.S. government (especially the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Board) and U.S.-based transnational banks (TNBs) illustrates TNBs' contradictory interests, which are neither self-evident nor easily discernible, even to TNBs themselves. The state comes to play a mediating role vis-a-vis TNBs in an only partially successful attempt to transform contradictory interests into coherent policy, resulting in conflict between the state and TNBs. The origins of U.S. regulatory initiatives are rooted in multilateral attempts to supervise banks between 1974 and 1978, and the failure of such coordination during the 1978 dollar crisis. From the conflict between U.S. officials and U.S. TNBs emerge varying concepts of TNBs' interests. After examining the reasons for the failure of the U.S. proposals, I conclude by suggesting some implications of TNBs' contradictory interests for statist and social conflict theories of the advanced capitalist state. Few theories of the state have adequately taken into account the complexity and contradictory interests of transnational capital.

Many commentators have sounded alarms about the alleged dependence of developed, industrialized countries on assured supplies of raw materials from overseas. Their alarms have disturbing implications for the future of these countries' foreign policies and may, for example, be used to justify political or military interventions in the Third World. These commentators, however, frequently proceed from very primitive conceptual foundations. A careful specification of the dangers involved, and of strategies for measuring various aspects of dependence, points up some of the shortcomings of simplistic analysis. It also suggests that the risks of dependence on foreign sources of most raw materials are easily exaggerated, at least for the United States.

How do norms influence choices in social life? Conceptual distinctions among types of norms and suggestions in the work of Hobbes, Hume, and Durkheim help us investigate in greater detail the “woolly” concept of regimes in international relations. When we disaggregate the “set of explicit and implicit norms, rules, and decisionmaking procedures” in a given issue area and focus on the conceptual links between rules, principles (norms), and actions, we gain an understanding of the role of norms in social life that is more comprehensive than the understanding provided by traditional accounts. Furthermore, placing the present regime discussion within wider philosophical traditions enables us to develop a more critical approach to the building of theory in the social sciences, since the use of norms as explanatory devices challenges the predominant positivist outlook in several important respects.

Weapons production is increasing in the Third World, affecting the structure of the world arms transfer system. The quantitative and qualitative capabilities of Third World industries imply that the number of less developed countries (LDCs) producing major weapons will not increase dramatically in the future; that LDC defense production will remain a small fraction of the world's arms trade; and that military industries in the Third World will concentrate on defense items that are older and less complicated than technologies manufactured in the developed world. Various socioeconomic factors might explain the reasons for the disparities among arms producers. Factors of scale, particularly the existence of a large military to provide an adequate internal market, combined with financial resources and technically trained personnel to support the necessary industrial infrastructure, determine a state's comparative military-industrial capabilities. The inherent constraints of size and infrastructure will create a hierarchically stru tured world arms trade and production system as the military industries of states grow.

It is widely agreed that the work of Thomas Hobbes established and continues to nourish the tradition of “realism” in international political theory. But this association is in many ways paradoxical, and above all because Hobbes's avowed purpose was to “show us the highway to peace.” It is usually assumed that he aimed exclusively at internal peace while resigning himself to permanent rivalry among states, but there are a good many indications that this may not be an adequate interpretation. Hobbes devoted substantial effort to explicating several modifications of the inherited intellectual tradition, in both politics and education, that seem to have been intended to promote beneficial effects in interstate relations. When these substantive aims are taken into account, rather different lessons seem to emerge. One, in particular, is that it may be misleading to think of the Hobbesian tradition as one of realism.

The historically unstable world trade in sugar has long stimulated multilateral efforts to stabilize sugar prices. In the negotiations leading to the International Sugar Agreement (ISA) of 1977, both producers and consumers were willing to make short-term concessions in the interest of reaching an accord that would benefit all in the long run–a pattern that has hardly been typical of North-South bargaining in general. But the ISA has failed to achieve its goal of more stable sugar prices in the years since its enactment. This failure is primarily due not to shortcomings in the agreement itself but rather to a major expansion of production in the only important sugar exporter that failed to ratify the ISA, the European Community. The ISA is important not only in its own right but also because it offers a good example of the promise–and the problems–of international commodity agreements in bringing about more stable and equitable relations between North and South.

Sectoral growth and change in the postwar West German economy have been affected both by the specialization inherited from prewar times and by the general Western evolution of demand and production along “Neo-Fordist” lines. These two factors have also shaped West Germany's politics, particularly the organization of labor and bourgeoisie, and their alliances with each other and with the state apparatus. The three most important economic crisis situations since 1945 were turning points in the political articulation of socioeconomic interests. The crisis of the immediate postwar period resulted in a politics determined by the conflict of interests between owners of capital and the rest of the population, especially labor from 1947 onward. The Social Democratic party (SPD) was outside the government. A temporary interruption of sustained and highly differentiated sectoral growth in 1966 led to greater political attention to sectoral problems and less attention to class conflict. The SPD entered, indeed led, the government. Since the mid 1970s, the economy's structural crisis, compounded by growing foreign competition, has reaccentuated class conflict in political life. The SPD lost power in 1982.