The relationship between international organization and developing countries is one of interdependence: developing countries place hope in disinterested help through international agencies; and the needs of the developing world provide stimulus to the expansion of international organization. Yet these two contemporaneous processes of political development—the growth of international organization and nation building in developing areas—may not always be in step. Education is a convenient viewpoint from which to examine this relationship, with its element of discord and of convergence of interest. Education is a prominent aspiration of governments and people in developing countries and is widely considered to be a most efficacious instrument for modernization. This subject-matter limitation also makes it possible to focus on two international organizations: the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as the agency primarily responsible for educational systems; and the International Labor Organization (ILO) because of its recent emphasis both on training in occupational skills and on the relevancy of the manpower factor for educational policy.

Nine predictions are advanced on the impact on the international system of a successful effort to contain nuclear proliferation.

The world will see a modest dilution of the prerogatives of sovereignty, very much tailored to the halting of nuclear weapons spread. Some breakthroughs will be achieved in the multinational management of nuclear industry. Current “pariah states” may escape such status, simply through the latent possibility of nuclear proliferation. Nuclear weapons will continue to go unused in combat, just as they have since 1945. Soviet-American cooperation on the nuclear proliferation front will continue. The traffic in conventional arms may by contrast go relatively unchecked, as most countries conclude that this kind of weapons spread is less bad than nuclear proliferation. All of this will be carried through by statements distorted by the normal deceptions of diplomacy. The world will nonetheless generally become more sophisticated in discounting any glamor or political clout in nuclear weapons programs. Most of the barrier to proliferation will come through normal political and economic exchange, rather than through any violent or military interventions.

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 diverse interests of donors and the desires of recipients to shop for the best deals mean that coordination of projects in international assistance causes problems along with promises of greater efficiency. Evidence from East Africa indicates that political competition and lack of candor and comparability in donors' reports limit the effectiveness of efforts at donor coordination. On the other hand, the policies of Kenya and the East African Community permitting virtual autonomy to profitable public corporations in their dealings with foreign governments and businessmen compromise the opportunity to optimize the use of assistance available in a multi-donor situation.

Almost all technology is dual use to some degree: it has both civilian and military applications. This feature creates a dilemma for cooperation. States can design arms control institutions to curtail costly competition over some military technology. But they also do not want to limit valuable civilian uses. How does the dual use nature of technology shape the prospects for cooperation? We argue that the duality of technology presents a challenge not by its very existence but rather through the ways it alters information constraints on the design of arms control institutions. We characterize variation in technology along two dual use dimensions: (1) the ease of distinguishing military from civilian uses; and (2) the degree of integration within military enterprises and the civilian economy. Distinguishability drives the level of monitoring needed to detect violations. When a weapon is indistinguishable from its civilian counterpart, states must improve detection though intelligence collection or intrusive inspections. Integration sharpens the costs of disclosing information to another state. For highly integrated technology, demonstrating compliance could expose information about other capabilities, increasing the security risks from espionage. Together, these dimensions generate expectations about the specific information problems states face as they try to devise agreements over various technologies. We introduce a new qualitative data set to assess both variables and their impact on cooperation across all modern armament technologies. The findings lend strong support for the theory. Efforts to control emerging technologies should consider how variation in the dual use attributes shapes this tension between detection and disclosure.

Amidst their other differences, the defeats suffered by the United States in Vietnam, Iran, and Lebanon have a common explanation. In all three cases American strategy was based on “global commitments theory.” Interests were to be defended and global credibility strengthened by the making, maintaining, reinforcing, and sustaining of American commitments to Third World allies. However, the core assumptions on which the logic of global commitments theory rests are plagued with inherent fallacies. These fallacies can be identified analytically as patterns of dysfunction along four dimensions of foreign policy: decision-making, diplomacy, military strategy, and domestic politics. They also can be shown empirically to have recurred across the Vietnam, Iran, and Lebanon cases. The central theoretical conclusion questions the fundamental validity of global commitments theory as it applies to the exercise of power and influence in the Third World. Important prescriptive implications for future American foreign policy are also discussed.

The Conference of the Committee on Disarmament (CCD), a 26-member committee chaired by the US and the USSR and reporting annually to the UN General Assembly, has been stalled for three years over two issues which neither super power wishes to agree on: chemical weapons and a comprehensive nuclear testing ban. As a result, the future viability of the world's only multilateral forum for negotiating arms control is in jeopardy. In recent years a movement has been initiated by certain non-aligned states—mostly notably Mexico, Sweden, and Yugoslavia—to shake up the procedural foundations of the CCD so as to bring about substantive changes in its agenda, its manner of operation, its composition, and its results. The immediate diplomatic vehicle for this procedural revolution is the convening of a new deliberative forum, the World Disarmament Conference (WDC). The WDC has been debated in the last three General Assemblies where it has evolved in substance and built a constituency of support so that there is a distinct possibility such a body may be convened in the next few years. Its most significant achievement would be to bring France and China into world disarmament forums, and to legitimize on-going bilateral and regional arms control structures which have been created in the absence of movement at the CCD.

A cursory glance at a map, a university curriculum, or a government organization chart will confirm that man has a remarkable capacity for establishing arbitrary boundaries. Moreover, he has usually claimed a degree of sovereignty within those boundaries which he would energetically defend and, if possible, extend. We would continue to believe that we could reasonably afford our independent behavior except for the recent “discovery” that the human environment is not only a complex but also a finite system. Environmental problems, or, more particularly, the harmful effects of man's activities on his environment, challenge our exclusiveness and affect our existing territorial, disciplinary, and institutional boundaries simply because they transcend them. Of the many factors to be taken into account in dealing with environmental problems two have particular importance: the identification of the geographical level at which action can effectively be taken and the choice of the appropriate legal and institutional instruments to be employed.

The article focuses on two problems in the measurement of integration with transaction data. The first is the analysis procedure by which the transaction data are summarized. Different procedures affect the data in such different ways that they can actually lead to contradictory conclusions about the progress of integration. This article spells out some of the major differences in the models of analysis. The second problem is validity of transaction data as measures of integration. There are numerous different conceptualizations of integration, some centering on the development of central institutions, others on the existence of favorable attitudes among people, and still others on the existence of a highly co-operative relationship among states. It is not clear that transaction data are the most appropriate measure of any of these concepts.

Western European Union (WEU) is unique in the family of European organizations. Its membership comprises Great Britain in addition to the inner circle of the six nations of Little Europe. As such it was hailed as a big step forward from the continental limitations of European integration. Its special task, besides residuary powers in the cultural, social, and economic field, has been defense and the control of armaments. Western European Union was erected on the ruins of the European Defense Community (EDC) by the Paris Agreements of October 1954. Its legal basis was the Brussels Treaty Organization of 1948, a defensive alliance against future German aggression which over the years had left its military functions to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and had concentrated on its cultural and social role.

In one of his first declarations as Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld said that no part of his task was “more challenging than the one which consists in trying to develop all the potentialities of that unique diplomatic instrument which the Charter has created in the institution called the Secretary-General of the U.N.”

Conceived modestly, the idea of East-West interdependence offers a convenient framework for exploring the intersection of politics with economics, of national economic goals with international economic relations, and, ultimately, of East-West efforts to increase economic cooperation with Western efforts to restructure international economic institutions. By interdependence we do not mean to imply a decisive set of arrangements, capable of impinging on the most fundamental economic and political choices of the other party. Rather, we have in mind a lesser level of mutual dependence in which both or all parties view cooperation as a useful but not a decisive means for pursuing some or all of their essential economic goals. More simply, we use the term because, better than any other, it underscores the difference between an economic relationship imposed by political confrontation, and reflected in economic warfare and autarky, and an economic relationship benefiting from the easing of political tension, evident in a common recognition of gains, political as well as economic, to be had from cooperation.

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to push a rock up the top of a mountain, from which the rock kept rolling down. International organization seems to be a modern illustration of an old myth. After each crisis, new attempts are made to push the rock of peace up again, and no crisis has revealed the frustrating task of international organization more sharply than the recent shock of the Middle Eastern and Hungarian explosions.

In everyday speech, the word “refugee” means any person who has to leave his home because of a general catastrophe — natural or social. People whose dislocation was caused, in one way or another, by the second world war came to be called “displaced persons” or “DP's.” The largest remaining group of such displaced persons is in China, where there are perhaps 25,000,000 people who are still living away from their former homes; but the problem which they present, though it is almost unimaginably vast and tragic, comes within the jurisdiction of a single nation. The same is true of the second largest remaining group, the perhaps 10,000,000 Soviet citizens who have not returned to their pre-war places of residence. The perhaps 8,000,000 Germans recently transferred from East Prussia, Silesia, the Sudetenland and other areas into the four zones of diminished Germany and Austria pose an international problem; but it is being handled by the occupying authorities — jointly or separately. Apart from several hundred thousand persons of Chinese nationality driven by the war from their homes in non-Chinese portions of Southeast Asia and some tens of thousands of Indian nationality, similarly displaced, who do not raise vexing political questions, the persons with whom a general international organization for uprooted people must deal are almost exclusively the perhaps 2,000,000 European refugees — refugees in the narrower technical meaning of the term, bristling with political complications.

Within the space of less than six years, the African membership in the United Nations has increased from three to twenty-eight Members constituting the largest geographical group in the Organization. Furthermore, as many as seven other territories may become independent and seek membership before the end of 1965.

International arrangements for the uses of the ocean have been the subject of long debate within the United Nations since a speech made by Ambassador Arvid Pardo of Malta before the General Assembly in 1967. Issues in question include the method of delimiting the outer edge of the legal continental shelf; the spectrum of ocean arms control possibilities; proposals to create a declaration of principles governing the exploration for, and the exploitation of, seabed mineral resources with the promise that exploitation take place only if it “benefits mankind as a whole,” especially the developing states; and consideration of schemes to create international machinery to regulate, license, or own the resources of the seabed and subsoil. The discussions and debates began in the First (Political and Security) Committee of the 22nd General Assembly and proceeded through an ad hoc committee to the 23rd and 24th assembly plenary sessions. The creation of a permanent committee on the seabed as a part of the General Assembly's machinery attests to the importance members of the United Nations attribute to ocean problems. Having established the committee, they will be faced soon with the necessity of reaching decisions. The 24th General Assembly, for example, passed a resolution requesting the Secretary-General to ascertain members' attitudes on the convening of a new international conference to deal with a wide range of law of the sea problems.