In this paper, I shall dispute the widely held belief that all effective sanctions would greatly hurt poor South African blacks. Rather, it is likely that bans on exports of high technology to South Africa and imports of South African gold and diamonds would cause labor-intensive sectors to expand, thereby limiting the impact of a general recession on unskilled nonwhites. Still, several types of sanctions, such as those on oil, would have a severe impact on poor nonwhites. In addition, forced divestment would result in windfall capital gains for white South Africans; such gains would not be realized, however, if the ban were on new investments only. Finally, I shall discuss the need for infrastructural aid to help South Africa's neighbors weather the storm. Judicious aid to these countries is also important in inducing both Western and South Africanowned investments away from South Africa.

Conventional accounts of the 19th-century international system describe it as a conservative restoration of the 18th-century system and account for the general stability of the 19th century primarily on the basis of the actors' peaceful dispositions. They fail to recognize or explain the profound structural changes in 19th-century politics. Problems that could not be successfully dealt with in the 18th century were solved or managed by 19th-century statesmen by means of three new systemic arrangements: a system of intertwined guarantees and duties for the great powers; arrangements for shielding European politics from extra-European quarrels; and a network of intermediary bodies, separating and linking the great powers, to serve as buffers and spheres of influence.

Four types of regimes of historic importance appeared in Europe between the two world wars: pluralist democracy, social or corporatist democracy, traditional dictatorship, and fascism. The vast body of literature that has grown up around them has rarely cast these political orders as historical alternatives to each other, however. When it has done so, it. has normally cast pluralist democracy as the alternative to fascism. Most commonly, this has taken the form of contrasts between Germany and Britain, and has been accompanied by the question, why was Germany not like Britain? Yet, pluralist democracy such as appeared in Britain was actually the least relevant alternative between the wars, for the possibility of stabilizing it where it did not already exist had been foreclosed by World War I. Where liberal parties had failed to establish responsible parliamentary institutions before the war, it would prove impossible to stabilize a pluralist democracy afterward. Henceforth, stabilization would require corporatism—in either its fascist or social democratic variant—rather than pluralism.

Astate bargains tacitly with another state when it attempts to manipulate the latter's policy choices through its behavior rather than by relying on formal or informal diplomatic exchanges. The process is tacit because actions rather than rhetoric constitute the critical medium of communication; it is bargaining and not coercion because the actions are aimed at influencing an outcome that can only be achieved through some measure of joint, voluntary behavior. Obviously, states rarely rely on either purely tacit or purely formal negotiation. However, the theory of tacit bargaining does not become totally inapplicable when there is verbal or written communication between the principals. It simply becomes increasingly relevant as states rely more on actions than on conventional negotiation. Examples of tacit bargaining are plentiful in international relations: a retaliatory tariff is announced in response to trade barriers; a state at war refrains from using chemical weapons or from bombing nonmilitary targets in the hope that its opponent will behave similarly; an austerity program is implemented by a financially troubled government in order to convince foreign banks that they should continue to extend credit.

This essay starts from two premises: that, as far as the articulation and mobilization of popular interest in the countryside are concerned, the “best teams won” in the Chinese and the Vietnamese revolutions; but that, after the success of the revolution, the popularity and responsiveness of the regimes to the people became more problematic. Together, these premises imply a shift in the relationship of party to people between the revolutionary and postrevolutionary stages. That such a shift occurred in China and Vietnam is not obvious; there were significant continuities of personnel, policies, and ideology across the revolutionary divide. I shall argue that, despite the continuities, the rational basis of party-mass relations was deeply affected by victory. Indeed, the very continuities helped mask a structural flaw in the new regimes that has induced current political and economic reforms.

The crisis of food production in Africa demands that social scientists devote attention to the agricultural policies of African governments. Hunger and famine derive not only from natural catastrophe but also from policy decisions that shape the opportunities faced by farmers. The prevailing view among economists is that the administrative determination of agricultural prices in Africa creates disincentives to production. It is now widely accepted that the overvaluation of national currencies encourages food imports, and that the provision of subsidies to urban consumers prevents the payment of attractive prices to rural producers. This pattern of policy choice results, according to some political scientists, from the exertion of influence by prominent social groups, usually an alliance among bureaucratic and industrial elites and urban consumers. The resultant regime of agricultural policies serves to undermine the basic interests of agricultural producers, largely because their voices are only weakly articulated into the policy process.

WHEN leaders extend deterrence, they attempt to prevent a military attack against an ally by threatening retaliation should force be used against their protégé. At present, most analysts locate extended deterrence at the intersection of nuclear and conventional force in Europe; the United States relies heavily on this strategy to protect its allies. The extension of deterrence to Europe, however, is only one among several possible applications of the strategy. It has been widely used by the United States, for example, to manage conflict in the Middle East. We propose to examine this wider extension of deterrence.

The author explores the changing functions of boundaries in territorially and nonterritorially based social organizations. By focusing on the exchanges that boundaries mediate, a fuller account can be given of the systems characteristics in which the units interact than is afforded by traditional systems theory. Two case studies demonstrate that imperial boundaries differ significantly from those in the state system. Boundaries are shown to be the major means for conflict management in the international system. The author also investigates shifts in the location of the boundary, characteristics of balance-of-power systems, and the restriction and expansion of the exchanges that boundaries allow through the bundling or unbundling of territorial rights. Most of the latter devices that gave rise to spheres of influence, buffer states, suzerainties, and so forth have been overtaken by events, but functional regimes and spheres of influence based upon tacit rather than explicit rules remain important.

Corruption—like the weather—is a phenomenon people in the third world talk about a great deal, and, it would seem, do little about. Scholars of political change in the third world share this interest, but—although they are usually not expected to deal with corruption itself —they should move beyond the recounting of vivid anecdotes to a more systematic analysis of the problem. Steps in this direction were made in the 1960s and 1970s, but surprisingly little more work has been done since.

International relations scholars do not agree on the connection between the balance of power and war. They question whether or not an equal distribution of power among states or alliances leads to stability, whether the preponderance of power in favor of one actor or alliance leads to peace, or whether the key lies in the transition of preponderance from one power to another. Everyone is familiar with these questions; yet, more than twenty years of rigorous elaboration and sophisticated quantitative testing have done little to produce the answers.1 Do these inconclusive results suggest that there is no relation between the distribution of power and war?

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, scholars in the fields of Soviet politics and comparative communism began to reexamine the political and social character of the Soviet Union and Soviet-type regimes in the wake of more than a decade of de-Stalinization. They questioned the validity of the totalitarian model (at least in its more rigid forms) that suggested a static image of politics and society in communist systems, and proposed concepts more cognizant of the dynamic nature of these systems. A prominent theme in much of this literature was that social differentiation resulting from economic development and the emergence of modern industrial society would prove incompatible with continued dictatorial rule by a “vanguard party” following a militant, Utopian ideology. In particular, the rise of a large elite stratum of skilled technical and professional personnel was expected to militate against the long-term viability of a revolutionary regime. Analysts proposed that, under pressure from this group, whose contributions are indispensable to economic growth and development, the party leadership would eventually be compelled to abandon radical social and economic restructuring through revolutions from above in favor of more legal-rational modes of operation, and see its own role as the balancer of the various interests typical of a modern society.

All states are continuously in the process of adjusting to change in the political economy of international and national systems. Problems inherent in this adjustment process are a basic source of national behavior and international conflict. The heuristic model presented in this paper provides systematic explanations for the strategic choices that states make in the adjustment process. Through the specification of the range of strategic options and of the formal interests of states, new insights are gained concerning the articulation between national and international political economy. Empirical cases are drawn from the politics of energy adjustment in the 1970s.

Implicit in most recent social science explanations of human behavior is a conception of man as universal homo economicus. Although such a conception is capable of giving a powerful account of a great deal of human action, its account of the nature and variety of human values is inadequate. Cultural assumptions about the meaning of “self” and “others,” and about relations between human beings, are likely to vary from one society to another. These assumptions affect the collective decision processes of political elites under conditions of complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity. The author first addresses the question of how to construct a compelling cultural explanation, and then offers evidence which suggests that, because Chinese, Japanese, and Russians tend to hold somewhat different conceptions of “self” and “others” than do Americans (the former tending to be more collectivist than the latter), these different conceptions have implications for collective decision making.

In this paper, I investigate why a bureaucratic-authoritarian (hereafter BA) regime emerged in South Korea during the early 1970s. The regime transition was the outcome of conflict among key political actors who were constrained, although not in a deterministic way, by the change in the Korean economic structure. It can be understood as the outcome of strategic choices made by key political actors among alternatives that satisfied structural constraints.

The post-World War II world has seen the transformation of the international system from a configuration with several rival great powers into one with two superpowers and a set of lesser but still substantial powers—second-tier states with democratic politics and mixed economies. One of the recurrent concerns of the latter has been to secure supplies of natural resources. We argue that postwar conditions point to eight elements of prudent resource policy for middle-level powers. Such states should: (i) avoid military means; (2) choose trade partners whose political interests overlap with their own and who enjoy political stability; (3) seek to create in supplier and transit countries a structure of economic interests that will make supply agreements self-enforcing; (4) diversify with respect to commodity dependence, supplier share, and transit bottlenecks; (5) tailor stockpiles to the urgency of demand; (6) exploit technology to reduce dependence and enhance bargaining advantages; (7) encourage the private sector and public enterprises to become intermediaries in the international resource trade; and (8) pursue strategic interdependence among consumer nations by creating multilateral stakes in the maintenance of normal commerce in resources.

Experience shows that framing of a future, in some indeterminate time, may, when it is done in a certain way, be very effective, and have few inconveniences; this happens when the anticipations of the future take the form of those myths … which give an aspect of complete reality to the hopes of immediate action by which more easily than by any other method, men can reform their desires, passions, and mental activity. … The myth must be judged as a means of acting on the present; any attempt to discuss how far it can be taken literally as future history is devoid of sense. It is the myth in its entirety which is alone important.

The current burst of work on regimes or, more broadly, on international institutions, reflects an emerging sense—especially among Americans—that the international order engineered by the United States and its allies in the aftermath of World War II is eroding rapidly and may even be on the verge of collapse. But is the resultant surge of scholarly work on international regimes any more likely to yield lasting contributions to knowledge than have other recent fashions in the field of international relations? The jury will remain out until a sustained effort is made to evaluate the significance of regimes or institutions more broadly, as determinants of collective behavior at the international level.