¹ de Calliè;res, François, On the Manner of Negotiating with Princes, trans, by Whyte, A. F. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press 1963)Google Scholar. Nicolson's, tribute is in The Evolution of Diplomacy (New York: Collier 1954), 85Google Scholar.

² Szulc, Tad, “How Kissinger Did It: Behind the Vietnam Cease-Fire Agreement,” Foreign Policy, No. 15 (Summer 1974), 21–69, esp. 23–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ The material for this essay comes from a case study of the Kennedy Round of trade negotiations, and from the secondary literature on several recent negotiations. Information on the Kennedy Round has been drawn from interviews with participants, as well as repeated runs of a simulation of a multilateral trade negotiation. The simulation was originally designed for graduate students, and has been used in various negotiation training courses at the Department of External Affairs, Ottawa, and at the Department of State, Washington, D.C. The simulation is briefly described in Winham, , “Complexity in International Negotiation,” in Druckman, Daniel, ed., Negotiations: A Social Psychological Perspective (New York: Halsted Press 1977)Google Scholar.

⁴ Nicolson (fn. 1), chap. IV.

⁵ Friedheim, Robert L., “The ‘Satisfied’ and ‘Dissatisfied’ States Negotiate International Law: A Case Study,” World Politics, XVIII (October 1965), 20–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Nyamekye, S. Kwasi, “Environmental Politics in the United Nations: An Analysis of the Role and Influence of the Less-Developed Countries,” Ph.D. diss. (McMaster University 1975)Google Scholar.

⁷ For example, the U.S. delegation to the Kennedy Round numbered nearly 40 individuals. See Preeg, Ernest, Traders and Diplomats (Washington: The Brookings Institution 1970), 92Google Scholar.

⁸ Newhouse, John, Cold Dawn: The Story of SALT (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston 1973), 43Google Scholar.

⁹ Barnett, Robert W., in Observations on International Negotiations (Transcript of an Informal Conference, Greenwich, Conn., June 1971, Academy for Educational Development, Inc., 1971), 112Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Personal interview.

¹¹ Wilson, S. Bruce, Office of the Special Representative for Trade Negotiations, Washington, D.C. (personal communication, April 1, 1976)Google Scholar.

¹² As one interviewee put it, “so few people understood the Kennedy Round, including the top people.”

¹³ The problem in international relations is similar to that which has also been addressed in the literature of organizational adaptation: “A main problem in the study of organizational change is that the environmental contexts in which organizations exist are themselves changing, at an increasing rate, and towards increasing complexity. This point, in itself, scarcely needs labouring.” Emery, F. E. and Trist, E. L., “The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments,” Human Relations, XVIII (February 1965), 21–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; quote from p. 21.

¹⁴ The establishment of bureaucracy reflects in human institutions the principle that variety in the regulator is needed to control variety in the environment (i.e., Law of Requisite Variety). See Ashby, W. Ross, An Introduction to Cybernetics (New York: John Wiley and Sons 1956)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ For further discussion, see March, James G. and Simon, Herbert A., Organizations (New York: John Wiley and Sons 1958), esp. 169–71Google Scholar, “Organization Structure and the Boundaries of Rationality.”

¹⁶ Clearly there are many negotiations in which control of complexity is a lesser problem, such as disputes over fishing quotas or beef imports. However, negotiations on specific issues (for instance, Canadian-Egyptian negotiations on cotton textile imports) often occur within the context of a more general negotiated framework. Thus, the Cotton Textile Agreement of 1964, established to regulate international textile trade, sought the purpose of reducing uncertainty as outlined here.

¹⁷ Negotiations are employed to reduce not only uncertainty, but also variety in the international environment. An example is the attempt at the current multilateral trade negotiation to identify and codify various types of non-tariff restrictions to trade.

¹⁸ Smith, , “SALT after Vladivostok,” Journal of International Affairs, XXIX (Spring 1975), 7–18Google Scholar; quote from p. 8.

¹⁹ Newhouse (fn. 8), 77.

²⁰ Address by Secretary of State Kissinger, “International Law, World Order, and Human Progress,” delivered before the American Bar Association at Montreal, Canada, on August 11, 1975. Department of State Bulletin, Vol. 73 (September 8, 1975), 335–62Google Scholar; quote from p. 359.

²¹ “Our studies, however, lead us to the proposition that firms will devise and negotiate an environment so as to eliminate the uncertainty. Rather than treat the environment as exogenous and to be predicted, they seek ways to make it controllable.” Cyert, Richard M. and March, James G., A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall 1963), 120Google Scholar.

²² Emery and Trist (fn. 13), 28.

²³ Kissinger (fn. 20), 359.

²⁴ Walton, Richard E. and McKersie, Robert B., A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations (New York: McGraw-Hill 1965)Google Scholar; Rapoport, Anatol, Fights, Games and Debates (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1960)Google Scholar. See also Sawyer and Guetzkow: “The process of devising more favorable alternatives and outcomes may be characterized as one of ‘creative problem-solving’ since it involves innovation rather than mere selection among given possibilities. As with creative processes more generally, however, relatively little is understood of its operation.” Sawyer, Jack and Guetzkow, Harold, “Bargaining and Negotiation in International Relations,” in Kelman, Herbert C., International Behavior (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston 1966), 466–520Google Scholar; quote from p. 485.

²⁵ I acknowledge debt to the analysis of Zartman, I. William, “Negotiations: Theory and Reality,” Journal of International Affairs, XXIX (Spring 1975), 69–77Google Scholar.

²⁶ One Kennedy Round negotiator summarized what was a common theme in many interviews: “Disputes are a matter of how they are defined.”

²⁷ Newhouse (fn. 8), 176.

²⁸ Zartman (fn. 25), 73.

²⁹ For example, Evans notes: “When a negotiator invokes his right to reciprocity, he is speaking a language that both he and his fellow bargainers understand.” Evans, John W., The Kennedy Round in American Trade Policy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1971), 23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁰ See Steinbruner, John D., The Cybernetic Theory of Decision: New Dimensions of Political Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1974)Google Scholar.

³¹ For example, see Iklé, Fred Charles and Leites, Nathan, “Political Negotiation as a Process of Modifying Utilities,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, VI (March 1962), 19–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³² Concession making has been a focus of bargaining studies in economics and social psychology. See, for example, Cross, John G., The Economics of Bargaining (New York: Basic Books 1967)Google Scholar; and Bartos, Otomar J., Process and Outcome of Negotiations (New York: Columbia University Press 1974)Google Scholar.

³³ The concept of structural uncertainty is elaborated in Steinbruner (fn. 30).

³⁴ This observation is supported by interviews and by observation of the trade negotiation simulations. For example, one interviewee stated: “Concessions cannot be explained in logical terms.” For further elaboration of this argument, see Winham (fn. 3).

³⁵ See Preeg (fn. 7), 172–77.

³⁶ Newhouse (fn. 8), 95, quotes former Secretary of State Dean Rusk as saying that SALT may have begun for the Soviets at Glassboro.

³⁷ Simon, , “The Architecture of Complexity,” in The Sciences of the Artificial (Cambridge: MIT Press 1969), 87Google Scholar.

³⁸ Ibid., 108. A senior GATT official expressed a similar sentiment when he said one of the most important abilities of a negotiator was to “grasp relationships.”

³⁹ This observation was made by Robert W. Barnett (fn. 9), 150, in the course of explaining the function of trivia in negotiations. Newhouse (fn. 8), 191, has made an analogous point (“tedium has its place in the negotiating process”) in the course of criticizing the fast-paced strategy of the U.S. SALT delegation.

⁴⁰ Cf. Cyert and March (fn. 21).

⁴¹ Cf. Steinbruner (fn. 30), esp. chap. 3.

⁴² “Most men in handling public affairs pay more attention to what they themselves say than to what is said to them.” De Calliè;res (fn. 1), 121. “And yet, we found in our experiments that our subjects were overwhelmingly ‘introverted,’ that their demands were primarily determined by their own past demands, and that they paid little attention to one another's offers.” Bartos, Otomar J., “Concession-Making in Experimental Negotiations,” in Berger, Joseph, Zelditch, Morris Jr., and Anderson, Bo, Sociological Theories in Progress (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1966) 3–28Google Scholar; quote from p. 21.

⁴³ These anxieties often are expressed as principles. For example, one E.E.C. negotiator stated: “It was difficult for our partners to understand our decision-making process … we faced a simultaneous negotiation … it was part of the democratic process.”

⁴⁴ The A.S.P. provides for assessment of duty on foreign products based on the value of a “like or similar” domestic product. It works as follows: an American customs official decides if an imported good is “similar,” values it in comparison to the domestic good, and then applies the existing tariff rate. The system creates uncertainty for exporters (Preeg calls it “irregularity”), and in some cases very high tariffs (Preeg notes that one effective tariff was 172%, and it became known as “Mont Blanc” in the Kennedy Round). Preeg (fn. 7), 171.

⁴⁵ See March and Simon (fn. 15), and Cyert and March (fn. 21).

⁴⁶ One highly placed interviewee commented: “The advantage of tariff negotiations is that you can put phony numbers on things.” For further discussion, see Winham (fn. 3).

⁴⁷ An interviewee summed it up in the following terms: “Negotiation is a subjective affair: at the end you just take the best guess.”

⁴⁸ Dreyer, H. Peter, “Tariff Talks Package Gets Mixed Reaction,” New York Journal of Commerce (May 1967), 1Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Newhouse (fn. 8), 254.

⁵⁰ It is interesting to consider the reverse of this proposition: just as there is more bureaucracy in negotiation, there is also more negotiation in bureaucracy. See the literature on “bureaucratic politics”; see also Strauss, Anselm and others, “The Hospital and Its Negotiated Order,” in Zartman, I. William, ed., The 50% Solution (Garden City: Anchor Books 1976), 98–117Google Scholar.

⁵¹ An analogous observation was made by a State Department official about the adversary process in international relations, and particularly “the structuring effect this procedure has on disputes at the international level.” Herbert J. Spiro, in Observations on International Negotiations (fn. 9).

⁵² See Coser, Lewis A., The Functions of Social Conflict (New York: Free Press 1956)Google Scholar, esp. chap. VII, “Conflict—The Unifier.”

⁵³ Nicolson has sensibly reduced the list to seven virtues: truthfulness, precision, calm, good temper, patience, modesty, and loyalty. However, he “takes for granted”: intelligence, knowledge, discernment, prudence, hospitality, charm, industry, courage, and even tact. Nicolson, , Diplomacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1963), 67Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ The same theme wase eloquently stated about the Law of the Sea Conference by Ambassador Christopher Pinto of Sri Lanka: “The potential of the individual personality at the Conference to construct or destroy, cannot be overstated.” “The Oceans: National Interest and Global Perspective,” speech delivered before the Colloquium sponsored by the Canadian Group of the Trilateral Commission, Halifax, January 21, 1976.