Henry R. Nau

From integration to interdependence: gains, losses, and continuing gaps

Approaches to the study of international organizations and politics inevitably reflect the context and preferences of analysts. In the 1950s the dominant characteristic of the international system was conflict. From 1950 to 1954, militarization of the Cold War sharpened the delineation of regional political communities (East versus West), focusing priorities within these communities and narrowing options between them. In the context set by these events, approaches to the study of international organizations and politics were developed to cope with the prospect of violent change in strategic relations between the superpower blocs (the period of seminal theorizing about

The diplomacy of world food: goals, capabilities, issues and arenas

Food is a factor in international diplomacy as a direct instrument of policy and as a condition underlying policy. Grain trade is particularly important. For most of the postwar period, principal grain exporting countries pursued policies designed to support domestic prices, using foreign agricultural policy to dispose of accumulated surpluses and to pursue broader non-food (political and economic) objectives. Grain importing countries came to rely on cheap food supplies in international markets, neglecting incentives to stimulate domestic production. Worldwide food shortages in 1973–74 made clear the need to consider international as well as domestic food requirements. Food considerations acquired a foreign policy dimension, while foreign policy considerations sparked a debate about the use of food for power. A return to surplus conditions in world food markets reduces the opportunities for the exercise of food power, while creating the conditions to meet historically unattainable food goals. To accomplish this, a system of international coordination and review of separate national food policies may be needed. Such a system would ensure greater accountability of private groups to governments and governments to one another without relying excessively on either automatic market forces or a centralized world food authority.

Correspondence: Institutionalized Disagreement

Randall Schweller’s discussion of John Ikenberry’s book After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars is acute, but his criticisms of the role of institutions miss the dynamics that can be involved. Schweller is convincing when he argues that international institutions are too weak to restrain major powers when their leaders decide that their interests call for breaking the rules or disregarding the views of the institution’s other members. He does not discuss, however, the more important if more elusive role of institutions: their ability to shape even a powerful state’s preferences. Thus while at the point of decision a major power will not be bound by the institution, its capabilities, outlook, and even values may have already been affected by how the institution operated previously. What Schweller downplays is how things can change over time—how institutions can strengthen themselves by altering the environment and the views of policymakers. Correspondence

Technological Cooperation and the Nation-State

N K 1 O PROBLEM in the study of international politics has been more persistent or perplexing than the problem of international conflict, or its converse, international cooperation. Many studies in this century have suggested that the nation-state lies at the root of international conflict and that its weakening, circumvention, or transcendence is necessary to strengthen international cooperation. Early proponents of international organization, writing around the turn of the century, advocated the direct transfer of national authority to international institutions, codified in various international legal instruments such as the Conventions of the Hague Conference and the Covenant of the League of Nations (Claude 1971: chs. 2, 3). Functionalists subsequently foresaw the gradual circumvention of the nation-state through the growth of international tasks and organizations which dealt with practical rather than political issues (Mitrany 1966). Neofunctionalists identified an inexorable logic and mechanism (spillover) whereby functionally related activities would eventually alter national attitudes and institutions and create new supranational political authorities (Haas 1958). Most recently, transnational and interdependence theorists have emphasized the role of nonnation state actors and new international circumstances which constrain and limit the authority and options of national governments (Keohane and Nye 1972, 1977). All of these approaches share the view that the nation-state obstructs the growth and development of international cooperation. In an historical sense, this view is not difficult to understand. The nation-state originated in Europe in part as a reaction to centralized international authority. Its establishment, which many writers date from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, constituted a rejection of the universalist pretentions of the Holy Roman Empire and created an international system whose primary purpose (as its name implies) was to defend the sovereignty and independence of separate states. Paradoxically, the purpose of international relationships became to minimize the significance of such relationships. Both conflict (i.e., balance of power) and cooperation served this end; and since the costs of conflict were tolerable and the benefits of