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Shapes of a World to Come
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2011
Extract
No theory of world politics yet created is able to guide us into a new age, but scholars and statesmen persist in conceiving global designs that claim our attention. Many writers are tempted by a formidable problem: What is the “real” shape—or alternatively the preferred shape—of the world to come? The fruits they offer are varied in taste but often so appealing in appearance that students of international relations cannot refuse to try them.
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- Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1974
References
1 As Kuhn, Thomas S. argues, consequential research can hardly begin until “a scientific community thinks it has acquired firm answers to questions like the following: What are the fundamental entities of which the universe is composed?” The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago 1970), 4–5.Google Scholar
2 To become more fundamental would imply that surrogate units assume leading roles in significant international problems across a wide range of substantive matters.
3 “One of the factors which one cannot discount is that for over twenty-five years Soviet military power has been potential rather than employed, except for brief and decisive interventions in Budapest and Prague; whereas American military power, to say nothing of British and French, has been frequendy deployed in action, with all the shortcomings that the conduct of real war shows up. One has only to travel around the developing world, to the Arab countries, to Soudieast Asia, even to Subsaharan Africa, to find mat there is a mystique—a credibility, if you like—about Soviet military power, armies as well as navies, and in places about Chinese military power as well, a mystique which American military power does not have… This situation need not, however, persist” Buchan, 81s–82.
4 Cf. Weidenbaum, Murray L., The Modern Public Sector (New York and London 1969)Google Scholar, passim. For a Canadian view of the “new mercantilism,” see Levitt, Kari, Silent Surrender: The Multinational Corporation in Canada (Toronto 1970), 99–103.Google Scholar
5 Vernon does cite public-private relations in Japanese trade and banking to show what might be called an arm-in-arm pattern. He distinguishes another characteristic of Japan's political economy which could pertinently be investigated more closely in the United States and elsewhere: the circulation of individuals between governmental agencies and industry. See pp. 225–30.
6 Vernon takes note of such exceptions on pp. 213–14. To the sources he cites en passant, one might add Kurth's, James R. “Why We Buy the Weapons We Do,” Foreign Policy, No. 11 (Summer 1973), 33–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Andelman, David A., “Pentagon Spends Millions To Save Ailing Companies,” New York Times, April 30, 1973, p. 1.Google Scholar On the governmental-nongovernmental nexus in arms transactions with the Third World, see Stanley, John and Pearton, Maurice, The International Trade in Arms (London and New York 1972), 7–8, 24ff.Google Scholar
7 However, Samuel P. Huntington contends that world politics may be approaching a global structure “far less conducive to the emergence and operation of transnational organizations than one in which one center predominated. Clearly it favors a dispersion of control over transnational organizations. It may also favor a slowdown in their numerical growdi and some restriction in the geographical scope of their activities.” “Transnational Organizations in World Politics,” World Politics, xxv (April 1973), 333–68; quote from 362. Insofar as large corporations have acted as “mutually rein forcing” agents (to invoke Vernon's broad description) of a preponderant governmental power, this threat might be expected to diminish in the future.
8 This exhortation to restraint seems to allow a double standard, for Buchán welcomes a regenerated United Nations offering arenas within which the governments of low-income nations might “drag as many resources as possible out of the developed world” (p. 107).