The significance of the European Communities (EC) remains obscure. The reason is that orthodox integration literature is fundamentally ahistorical: it fails to give an adequate account of the roots of modern European integration. And however admirable the project might be in itself, we cannot rectify the failure simply by chronicling the admittedly much ignored origins of the EC in the 1950s. For the EC is systematically connected to earlier cases of integration in Europe. Only by understanding the evolution of these integrational forms—from early modern Britain, to nineteenth century Germany, to contemporary Europe—can one begin to make sense of the EC. In brief, one must seek to understand the “present as history,” a task that few writers on regional integration have yet attempted, and none with any success.

The central focus of economic activity in post-industrial societies is shifting from the manufacturing of objects to the handling of information and knowledge. The power of major transnational firms now rests as much upon their capacities to marshal information and knowledge as upon their traditional role in directly productive activities. There is every indication that the sharpest aspect of competition in the future may be based more on the efficient use of specialized knowledge, information, and new technological capacity for its communication and use than on more traditional factors. Information handling capacity already offers industrialized countries and firms considerable economic and political leverage in North-South interaction. Information vital to developing countries is frequently concentrated in the capitals of the North.

Many developing countries have become increasingly activist toward multinational corporations in recent years. A number of governments have significantly altered the national regime for foreign direct investment (FDI) in order to shift ownership and control toward the host country. The national regime for FDI is the set of rules, regulations, and behavioral norms under which foreign enterprises are expected to operate. Foreign investment regime change can occur in a number of ways (formal expropriation, cancellation of contracts or concessions, alteration of taxation and royalty formulae, limitations on profit repatriation, requirements of local equity participation, etc.) that affect the operational autonomy and financial returns of the foreign firm. This paper will present a theory to explain one aspect of foreign investment regime change: the formal nationalization or expropriation of foreign-owned subsidiaries operating in natural resource extraction.

A specter haunts the world's bureaucrats: the specter of small government. Skepticism about the expanding role of government in most industrial nations has encouraged political economists to go back to some fundamental questions about what we really need government to do for us, whether it be for reasons of efficiency or equity. The aim of this paper is to suggest that some of the theories attacking “big” government are equally applicable in the realm of international organization (IO).

“Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and the end of political education,” wrote Henry Adams. But human beings have never been able to agree on what constitutes “knowledge” of human nature and what excessively negative or naively wishful thinking about it. Because we differ in our conceptions of who we are, difficulties exist in agreeing upon what is a fit society and the methods appropriate and necessary for bringing it into being. Conflicting conceptions of human nature play a role in shaping and energizing all levels of political competition and conflict, from the interpersonal through the global.

Recent efforts by North American social scientists to devise systematic empirical tests for a series of propositions purportedly drawn from structural theories of dependency have focused largely on the consequences of foreign economic linkages for the economies of developing countries. Although the results of these tests have been received with considerable skepticism by dependentistas and neo-positivists alike, cross-national, quantitative studies of the dependence-development relationship are not without value: they have focused research on a central problem, namely the effects of various forms of economic linkages on rates and types of economic development. This concentration of research activities, in particular the current spate of replications, has yielded new empirical knowledge concerning these relationships, plus some intriguing conflicting evidence. This is now sufficient to support further inquiry in itself, independent of the confines of dependencia theories which gave rise to the research originally.

The traditional relation between richer and poorer countries, whereby the former exported manufactures and the latter exported primary products, has been undergoing an accelerating transformation in recent years. Developing countries are emerging as serious competitors in the world economy in a widening range of manufactured products, and increasing industrial exports is one of the highest foreign-policy priorities of their governments. At the same time, demands for import restrictions have been increasingly heard in the older industrial countries. The result is that bilateral bargaining to regulate trade and market shares has become a common but understudied element of the North-South diplomatic agenda. Despite all our recent discussion of the international economic order, our knowledge of this type of bilateral conflict is quite sketchy. Industrial trade issues touch several often-conflicting policy objectives of the country involved, including employment and growth, price stability, debt servicing, domestic political power and stability, and the strength of bilateral political ties. Latin American countries and the United States have historically been mutually important as trade partners, and some

Priority in the use of a novel meaning of a term is no cause for pride; in fact it betrays a lack of “terminological discipline” and a want of linguistic inventiveness–for when a writer creates or modifies a concept he ought also to coin a new word to denote it, rather than corrupt the language and spread confusion.

Recent experience confirms an old truth: Switzerland offers a view of the past that works. In 1978 Switzerland was one of the richest countries in the world with a Gross National Product (GNP) of $13,853 per capita. Between 1975 and 1978 it raised the proportion of exports of goods and services in its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) from 36 to 44 percent. In 1977 its current account surplus surpassed that of West Germany and was second only to Japan's. Between 1970 and the end of 1979 the Swiss Franc appreciated by about 90 percent on a trade-weighted basis; against the dollar the appreciation was about 120 percent. From a rate of more than 10 percent in 1974 its inflation rate dropped to 1 percent in 1978. Switzerland's official unemployment figures (which do not record the loss of more than 300,000 jobs among foreign workers and women since 1973) are lower than those of all other advanced industrial states. And even though since 1970 government expenditures have increased faster than in any other OECD country, Switzerland's budget deficit was cut by one-third in the midst of a general recession in 1976–1977. Real GDP dropped by more than 7 percent in 1975, which represented one of the largest declines in the OECD and was a much greater drop than had been recorded in any one year in the 1930s; yet, only two years later, in 1977 Switzerland's real GNP increased by 4.3 percent, which exceeded the growth rate of any other OECD member state.

Self-reliance is a logical prescription of Latin American dependency writers and a great many other contemporary critics of the international economic and political order. It is based on assumptions and values shared by contemporary critics, employs the same definitions of central concepts, and most important, identifies specific policies designed to eliminate the bases of dependence and exploitation that critics hold responsible for a distortion of the development process throughout much of the Third World. Despite the significance of self-reliance for dependency and other critical writers, it is rarely defined and even less frequently examined systematically. As a result, self-reliance has too often been dismissed as merely part of the ideological jargon that necessarily accompanies discussions of the new international economic order.

The local subsidiary of a multinational corporation is both a national firm incorporated under host country law and a sub-unit of a centrally optimizing global system. This duality, which is inherent in the structure of foreign direct investment, produces potential benefits—such as resource transfers and access to markets—as well as costs—in terms of constraints on national economic control. Host governments utilize a variety of policies to “…increase the likelihood that the subsidiary will respond positively to the national policies of the host country rather than to the global strategy of the corporate family”— including expropriation or forced divestment of ownership.

In a recent article for this journal, Susan Strange analyzed the political consequences of surplus capacity in three industrial sectors: steel, textiles, and shipbuilding. As she has shown, the emergence of serious problems of surplus capacity has accelerated protectionist trends in governmental policy in Europe and North America. The rhetoric of liberalism now is frequently accompanied by the reality of quotas, cartel agreements, subsidies for domestic firms, and discrimination against particularly dynamic producers.

Neo-functionalism ascribes a dynamic role to interest groups in the process of integrating pluralist communities. By participating in the policymaking process, interest groups are expected to develop a stake in promoting further integration in order to acquire economic payoffs and additional benefits from maintaining and stimulating the organization through which certain demands can be articulated and goals attained. This implies that in the integration process interest groups have an instrumental role to play in the maintenance of the system; and that by virtue of their participation in the policy-making process of an integrating community they will “learn” about the rewards of such involvement and undergo attitudinal changes inclining them favorably towards the system. Thus, they acquire an interest in seeing the system's perpetuation, and the policy and decision makers acquire an interest in being responsive to interest groups' demands. What is implied overall is that actors' loyalties will shift towards those decision makers in the systems best able to reward them.

Making technology autonomous from the influence of investors and proprietors in developed countries has emerged as one of the core themes in the doctrine of dependence. Technology is not only machinery; it is “a major resource for creating new wealth; it is an instrument allowing its owners to exercise social control in various forms; it decisively affects modes of decision making.…” It is seen as the key to achieving “integral development,” free from the abuses associated with the past patterns of technology transfer which were largely mediated by multinational corportions: excessive foreign exchange costs, rise in unnecessary imports, production of luxury goods, neglect of employment objectives, stagnation of the agricultural sector, excessive urbanization, insufficient use of local professionals, environmental degradation, and lack of sensitivity to local cultures. In Marxist versions of dependence-thinking the older pattern of technology transfer strengthened the enclave economy and its comprador bourgeoisie, rather than aiding the development of a national bourgeoisie and of a modern working class.

Conventional discussions of state power have tended to list a state's resources or capabilities for power in a straightforward and unambiguousway. True, the caveat is offered that there is a difference between potential and actual power, but the difference is usually spelled out in terms either of problems of modernization (seen itself as a technique of transforming capabilities) or in terms of the will and skill of the state under discussion.1 But in a world of highly interdependent political economies, this utilization gapdepends not only on the conditions that create and sustain the state's ability tocontrol its own resources, but also on the conditions that determine 1) theaccess of others to these capabilities, and 2) the access of the state to theresources of other states. For what purposes and in what situations are astate's resources usable by it? In what situations can the state be a gatekeeper with respect to the access by others to its resources? The answers to thesequestions determine, in part, whether potential becomes actual (relative)power in present or future state-to-state relations. It is to this neglecteddimension of power that this paper is devoted.

Sometime between now and 1991, the international community will have to consider creating a new legal regime for Antarctica. Until recently, the “cold continent” and its legal regime were the concerns of a few scientists, fishermen, and legal specialists. Now, with new information on the extent of Antarctic resources, concern that present supplies of raw materials, fuels, and food are limited, and improvement of cold weather extraction technology, a broader group of policymakers, entrepreneurs, scientists, and environ-mentalists are paying attention to Antarctica. Experts now believe that exploratory drilling for offshore oil and natural gas is only a decade away. Though commercial extraction is farther in the future, and commercial exploitation of land-based minerals is unlikely in the next thirty years, speculation about Antarctica's natural wealth has aroused wide interest. There remain formidible obstacles to all these activities, but recent work in the oceans suggests that these plans might materialize earlier than now expected, and that a legal regime capable of dealing with resource activities should be in place before they begin.

The past decade has witnessed the investment of considerable energy and ingenuity in the refinement of the categories of foreign policy determinants proposed in James Rosenau's famous essay, “Pre-theories and Theories of Foreign Policy.” A sizable literature on foreign policy behavior is now developing, based upon empirical tests of the explanatory power of such variables as size, wealth, degree of political accountability, decision-maker attributes, environmental stimuli, etc. Surprisingly little attention in the field of comparative foreignpolicy, however, has been directed at specifying more precisely and in operational form the concept of issue area—an important component of Rosenau's “pre-theory” and an analytic concept that has received much attention in the public policy field. Moreover, among those scholars who do employ the concept there is little consensus as to the merits of a content based as opposed to a process oriented treatment of issue area or to the implications for empirical research of selecting one approach over the other. This essay seeks: 1) to review the foreign policy literature that attaches major importance to issue area; 2) to assess the merits of alternative treatments of the concept in terms of their contribution to the development of a theory of comparative foreign policy; and 3) to specify the conditions under which different issue area approaches can be used most profitably in comparative foreign policy research.

The inauguration of ECOWAS in Lagos on 28 May 1975 has been hailed as a breakthrough in the long series of efforts to institute some form of economic cooperation and integration embracing the entire West African subregion. While Nigeria's role as leader in the process of forming ECOWAS is generally acknowledged, no systematic analysis exists of the nature of Nigeria's role nor of its impact on and probable consequences for the organization.

While debate continues on whether the foreign policies of small states are1 or are or not generically different from those of large states, little has been written explicitly about the association of size of donors with the quality of their foreign aid. This essay hypothesizes that the aid policies of small states will differ from those of large states in ways that may be measured empirically, just as Plischke, East, Sawyer, and Hermann have demonstrated with quantitative data that the general foreign policy behavior of small states varies significantly from that of large ones. More particularly, it is hypothesized that small states give higher quality aid, and give it relatively more generously, than large states. This hypothesis is grounded on general impressions—Sweden is widely acknowledged as a “good” donor and the United States an indifferent one—and on extrapolations from small state theory that will be sketched below.