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International responses to technology: Concepts and trends

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

John Gerard Ruggie
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With increasing frequency and growing vehemence, we are being told that on our “only one earth” we are, for the first time, living a single history. By this is meant that technological, ecological, political, economic, and social environments are becoming so globally enmeshed that changes taking place in one segment of international society will have consequential repercussions in all others. An equally frequent and no less vehement remonstration attending this observation is that the scope and complexity of new scientific and technological developments are outpacing the capacities of our systems of international organization to manage them. The necessity has emerged, this line of reasoning continues, to restructure our international institutional frameworks in keeping with the unhitching of nature's constants which science and technology have effected. But on what basis? According to what principles? Toward what ends?

Type
Research Article
Information
International Organization , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , Summer 1975 , pp. 557 - 583
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1975

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References

1 Note, in this connection, the preparations for a proposed UN Conference on Science and Technology; the UNA Report, Science and Technology in an Era of Interdependence (1975)Google Scholar; the report commissioned by the Secretary General of the United Nations Environment Conference, edited by Ward, Barbara and Dubos, Rene, and entitled Only One Earth (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972)Google Scholar; and Falk, Richard A., This Endangered Planet (New York: Random House, 1971)Google Scholar; among many similar sources.

2 In his essay, below.

3 James, Alan, “Law and Order in International Society,” in James, A. (ed.), The Bases of International Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 65Google Scholar.

4 Berger, Peter L. and Luckman, Thomas, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1967), p. 57Google Scholar, emphases added.

5 In the parlance of the day, “politicization” usually means making things more controversial in society or pushing decisions to higher levels of decision making in government. Several of our authors subscribe to this meaning. I am here using the term in its broader and more classical sense of “making things political,” that is, as denoting the process whereby phenomena are brought into the public domain “and their future course shaped according to ‘public‘ considerations” (Wolin, Sheldon, Politics and Vision [Boston: Little, Brown, 1960], p. 7)Google Scholar. Under this definition, the popular usage would be subsumed as referring to two instruments of a broader process.

6 In her paper, below.

7 A more elaborate typology and its more extensive application to a single case, together with specific references to the literature on interdependence, may be found in Haas' paper, below.

8 See the papers by Heck and Johnson in this volume.

9 Cf. Nau's paper, below.

10 These are explored by Brenner in his contribution to this volume.

11 Cf. Levy's paper, below.

12 France's decision was part of a more complex package deal, under which the Germans assumed the largest share of the cost of the European-NASA Spacelab program, Great Britain of the maritime satellite, France and Germany for the ‘Symphonie’ program and France for launchers (ESRO/ELDO Bulletin, 22 [08 1973], pp. 2–4)Google Scholar.

13 Consult Pendley and Scheinman, below.

14 See Lφvald's demonstration in his paper, below.

15 These are discussed at some length by Heck.

16 Ibid.

17 Cf. Weiss, below.

18 The consequences for Euratom are explored by Nau.

19 Cf. Levy, below.

20 McNemar, Donald W., “The Future Role of International Institutions,” in Black, Cyril E. and Falk, Richard A. (eds), The Future of the International Legal Order, 4, The Structure of the International Environment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 454Google Scholar.

21 Skolnikoff, Eugene B., The International Imperatives of Technology (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, 1972), p. 97Google Scholar; I should add that Skolnikoff focuses on the functions of organizations rather than on institutions themselves.

22 Two important exceptions are,Lindberg, Leon N., “Political Integration as a Multidimensional Phenomenon Requiring Multivariate Measurement,” International Organization, 24 (Autumn 1970)Google Scholar, and Keohane, Robert O. and Nye, Joseph S., “Transgovernmental Relations and International Organizations,” World Politics, 27 (10 1974)Google Scholar.

23 In borrowing Vernon's depiction I do not mean to imply that he succumbs to the syndrome. See his Sovereignty at Bay (New York: Basic Books, 1971)Google Scholar.

24 Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1973)Google Scholar.

25 Cf. Holzner, Burkhait, Reality Construction in Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1972)Google Scholar. I owe this reference to Cheryl Christensen.

26 Those by Johnson and Brenner.

27 Cox, Robert W. and Jacobson, Harold K. (eds), The Anatomy of Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), Ch. 1 and 2Google Scholar.

28 Thus, my only quarrel with the otherwise exceedingly suggestive paper by Keohane and Nye, on “Transgovernmental Relations and International Organizations,” is that insufficient attention is given to the many vectors that systematically bound the policy spaces within which transgovernmental relations and international organizations exist, and within which organizational tasks and consequences assume their meaning as well as significance.

29 Cf. Allison, Graham, Essence of Decision (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971)Google Scholar.

30 See, in particular, the papers by Johnson and Brenner in this volume.

31 This brief description does not adequately portray the full complexity of the case. Cf. Nau's paper, below, for an in-depth analysis. On Crest, cf., Walsh, John, “In a Hard Year in Brussels, Things Look Up for Science,” Science, 184 (05 31, 1974): pp. 962–67Google Scholar.

32 In her paper, below.

33 Below.

34 “Authority Patterns: A Structural Basis for Political Inquiry,” American Political Science Review, 67 (1973): pp. 1142–62Google Scholar.

35 Weber, Max, “Bureaucracy,” in Gerth, H. and Mills, C. Wright, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946)Google Scholar.

36 Blau, Peter, “Critical Remarks on Weber's Theory of Authority,” American Political Science Review, 57 (1963): pp. 305–16Google Scholar; the citation is from p. 306.

37 Ibid. pp. 306–7.

38 Ibid. p. 312, emphases added.

39 Ibid.

40 Barnard, Chester I., The Functions of the Executive (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938), p. 172Google Scholar.

41 Ibid., p. 166.

42 Ibid., pp. 182–3.

43 A related discussion has preoccupied students of international law for some time. The resolution of their debate to which I hold has been ably argued by Falk, Richard A., “International Jurisdiction: Horizontal and Vertical Conceptions of Legal Order,” in Falk, (ed), The Role of Domestic Law in the International Legal Order (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press 1964)Google Scholar, and Gidon Gittlieb, “The Nature of International Law: Toward a Second Concept of Law,” in Cyril Black and Richard Falk (eds). For an earlier discussion of the structure of international organization, depicted along the above lines, see my paper “The Structure of International Organization: Contingency, Complexity and Post-Modern Form,” Papers, Peace Research Society (International), 18 (1971), pp. 73–91Google Scholar.

44 Barnard, 184.

45 Below. See, especially, his table 1, which demonstrates the virtually infinite number of political interpretations and inferences one can derive from the same physical or technological fact.

46 See, in this connection, “The Cocoyoc Declaration,” in the Appendix of this volume.

47 This strategy is applied to international governance of selected scientific and technological fields by Ruggie and Haas, in “Environmental and Resource Independencies: Organizing for the Evolution of Regimes,” prepared for the Commission on the Organization of the Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy, to be published in its compendium of papers.

48 For a report on the Lomé Convention, see The Economist, 8–14 February 1975.

49 de Jouvenel, Bertrarid, The Art of Conjecture (New York: Basic Books, 1967)Google Scholar.

50 I take these terms from Moynihan, Daniel P., “The United States in Opposition,” Commentary, 03 1975Google Scholar.