In the three centuries or so since the modern international system began flo take on its present shape, its component members have come together in a wide variety of organizations, for a wide variety of purposes. Those who act on behalf of the nations have turned to international organizations to oversee peace settlements, to strengthen their collective defense capacity, to mediate conflicts between themselves, to discourage interference from the outside, to harmonize their trade relations, to supervise international waterways, to accelerate the production of food, to codify diplomatic practice, and to formalize legal proceedings. Some organizations are established primarily for the neutral purpose of making coexistence possible, others for the more affirmative purposes of positive cooperation. Some have been directed toward the modification of the system, others toward the preservation of its status quo.

There are several approaches to regional integration, both in actor's strategies and in academic analysis. One of the pioneering political science efforts at providing a causal model of regional integration was developed under the stimulus of events in Western Europe in the late 1950's and not surprisingly it reflects these origins. We will refer to it as academic neo-functionalism.

The study of regional integration, of how national units come to share part or all of their decisional authority with an emerging international organization, is one of the areas of political inquiry in which a cumulative research tradition has developed. Previous paradigms are scrutinized critically in new settings; replications are made and even encouraged; new concepts, hypotheses, and measures are suggested and incorporated without obliterating past work. Under these conditions theoretical formalization may play a particularly fruitful role.

The literature reviewed in this article focuses on the question of interstate conflict in Africa. There may be some doubt as to the particular interest that such a body of work might hold for those not initiated in the “mysterious” ways of Africa. Certainly Africanists have all too frequently assumed as much, and students of international relations have often readily concurred in this judgment. In no area of the world is William T. R. Fox's assessment that regional studies have tended to be “written in a comparative politics rather than an international relations context” more accurate. In contrast to this widely held view it is the contention of the present writer that the study of interstate conflict in Africa should be and, in fact, is of immense interest both to the scholar and the practitioner of international relations.

When the United Nations Charter was drafted in 1945 the provisions for keeping the peace had to be drawn up in the abstract. There was no tangible enemy, crises were in the future, and commitments were made in a vacuum. It was only when it became clear what the world was really like that “peacekeeping” was invented. It turned out that in most conflict situations there was no definable aggressor or victim, that the danger was uncontrolled escalation of local conflicts into the nuclear realm, and that the real enemy was a fantastically complex set of instabilities, inequities, and passions to which 1945 international ground rules were inadequately related.

This note is intended primarily for graduate students and other researchers without previous field experience in studying international organizations. I do not propose either to summarize or to repeat the many expositions on survey research, interviewing, and the like; radier the focus here will be primarily on a number of the “nuts and bolts” problems not usually treated in the literature that the researcher is likely to face. If the individual is aware of these beforehand he can save himself time and a few mistakes.

Compelling as mathematical representations may seem to some interested in the “automaticity” of integration processes, to other empirical theorists they seem anything but obviously relevant. Yet there is a clear trend toward greater use of formal reasoning in both measurement and modeling work on integration processes. Juxtaposing a variety of such integration logics—the mathematical formulae and conceptual abstractions incorporated in assessments of integration progress and regress—should help achieve the major purpose of this article: to introduce students to a variety of possible integration logics, some of their possible interrelationships, and the limitations of some of the simpler ones vis-à-vis current verbal theories of the integration process.

The Soviet bloc is an international subsystem which has undergone substantial change since its inception, partly as a result of factors external to it and partly because of internal change. The actors in the subsystem are the Communist parties, which are the effective powerholders in the bloc countries. The party-regimes together constitute the subsystem. Within the subsystem there is one Great Power, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which desires 'that other members recognize Soviet ideological and political primacy and emulate Soviet policies. Until Stalin's death this objective was mainly realized, thereafter there was increasing disharmony within the subsystem.

The literature on integration has expanded tremendously during the last decade. This growing interest in the problems and processes of integration is particularly marked in two areas, studies of international regional integration and studies of national integration. On the whole, these efforts have been carried out with very little reference to each other. What is striking, nonetheless, is the similarity of much of the material and the relevance of work in one area for conceptualization and theory building in the other. As one who has been concerned primarily with national political integration I would like to delineate some of the major similarities and differences between the foci of national and regional integration studies, to suggest the utility of thinking in terms of a common conceptualization of political integration, and to discuss the relevance of some aspects of the work on national integration for regional theory and research.

It is generally recognized that the last decade or so witnessed a proliferation of studies dealing with different aspects of regional integration. While most of them discussed the origin and history of various international organizations, some, especially those of a more recent vintage, ventured into the thicket of theory building in an effort to engage eventually in some kind of comparative analysis.

Examination of the literature on the influence of the secretary-general forcefully suggests two conclusions about that literature: It is large and growing rapidly, yet tihere is little in the way of systematic explanation of the behavior of the secretary-general. The scholarly literature is filled with statements that tell us the kindls of things we should be studying (for example, superpower rivalries and the “special right” of the secretary-general), but what they represent are alternative research concerns. They do not constitute conceptual tools for empirical analysis that would help us devise and evaluate propositions setting Ifortti relationships about human action in tihe context of international organizations. No doubt these studies have added to our descriptive knowledge of the secretary-general, and this knowledge possibly alerts us to complex processes at work in and out of the United Nations. Yet two qualifications must be noted. First, the identification of complexity should be the beginning and not the end of empirical inquiry. Second, the actual value of descriptive knowledge remains problematical when it is presented without clarifying the generalizations used as criteria to select facts. Without explicitness we have no way of validating the reliability of criteria used for sorting out “important” information. We are placed in the position of not being certain that the particular study contains all relevant information and not knowing whether the information presented is relevant.