James N. Rosenau

Governance in the Twenty-First Century

To anticipate the prospects for global governance in the decades ahead is to discern powerful tensions, profound contradictions, and perplexing paradoxes. It is to search for order in disorder, for coherence in contradiction, and for continuity in change. It is to confront processes that mask both growth and decay. It is to look for authorities that are obscure, boundaries that are in flux, and systems of rule that are emergent. And it is to experience hope embedded in despair.

Transnational Competence in an Emergent Epoch

The article elaborates a framework for understanding the relevance of transnational competence to the dynamics that mark the transformations of our time. Nongovernmental stakeholders interacting through dense civil-society networks that permeate domestic-foreign frontiers bear increasing responsibility for the course of events. Based on linked interests, interorganizational knowledge generation and aggregation, partnerships, and interpersonal/intercultural interactions, they are deeply involved in addressing the many challenges posed by an ever more interdependent world. Transnational competence lubricates transterritorial networks and projects. Here, the authors extend earlier work that posited a worldwide skill revolution both by developing explicit dimensions of transnational competence and by introducing a behavioral component. The new framework provides analytical groundwork for explaining why some people, groups, and networks are more effective than others in forging meaningful transnational solidarities, negotiating and benefiting from the intensifying experience of globalization, and waging successful transnational campaigns. The article also probes how the spread of transnational competence is being facilitated by global migration and transmigration trends. The final section explores the governance implications of expanding transnational competency for the emergent epoch.

Intervention as a scientific concept

The deeper one delves into the literature on intervention, the more incredulous one becomes. The discrepancy between the importance attached to the problem of intervention and the bases on which solutions to it are founded is so striking that at first one wonders whether an adequate sample of the literature has been examined. Enlargement of the sample, however, only makes the discrepancy more glaring, and after pursuing every footnote that suggests a different approach and ruminating in a wide variety of documents, one is compelled to conclude that the literature is indeed incredible. The spirit of scientific explanation appears to have had no impact on it whatsoever. In an age when it is second nature to assume that the solution of problems requires comprehension of their sources, scholarly writings on the problem of intervention are singularly devoid of efforts to develop systematic knowledge on the conditions under which interventionary

The Structure of Foreign Policy Attitudes among American Leaders

The recent renaissance of interest in public opinion and foreign policy has generated a vigorous debate about the dimensions that characterize foreign policy attitudes. This paper assesses a scheme that emerged from Wittkopfs analyses of the Chicago Council on Foreign Policy surveys. Two dimensions (militant internationalism and cooperative internationalism) are crossed to create four types: hard-liners (support MI, oppose CI), internationalists (support both MI and CI), isolationists (oppose both MI and CI), and accommodationists (oppose MI, support CI). After developing scales for MI and CI, the scheme is tested with data from nationwide surveys of opinion leaders undertaken in 1976 (N = 2,282), 1980 (N = 2,502), and 1984 (N = 2,515). The MI/CI scheme is tested--and strongly supported--by examining the pattern of responses by hard-liners, internationalists, isolationists, and accommodationists to a broad range of questions from the three surveys of opinion leaders. The background attributes and other political attitudes associated with the four types are then examined. Correlations are strong for ideology and party; moderate for occupation; and weak for gender, age, education, travel, and military service. The conclusion raises some questions about the isolationist category and speculates about the broader implications of the findings.

A Pre-Theory Revisited: World Politics in an Era of Cascading Interdependence

On the presumption that the structures of global affairs are undergoing a profound crisis of authority and other changes of a comparable magnitude, the analysis seeks to build a comprehensive theory of world politics that synthesizes these developments at micro as well as macro levels. The synthesis is accomplished by focusing on the simultaneity and expansivity of patterns promoting both the coherence and the breakdown of systems at all levels, patterns that are given the label of ‘cascading interdependence’ and that are explored through the concepts of action scripts, analytic aptitudes, subgroupism, aggregation, and adaptation. In this context governments are posited as increasingly ineffective as international actors and individuals as increasingly skilled in their public roles. In addition, analysts of world politics are seen as inevitably shaping the course of events, so that it is important for them to remain ever sensitive to the ways in which they interact with the world they seek to study.

Vietnam, Consensus, and the Belief Systems of American Leaders

Based on a sample of 2,282 leaders in all walks of American life, this study probes the impact of U.S. involvement in Vietnam on the perceptions, convictions, and belief systems of those who occupy high positions of leadership. The findings clearly indicate that the post-World War II consensus on U.S. foreign policy has been shattered; that the Vietnam experience was a critical sequence of events in this respect; and that differing, largely mutually exclusive belief systems have emerged among the nations leaders. The competing conceptions of international politics were found to be so coherent and integrated that they are unlikely to change soon or casually. Barring another traumatic event on the order of Pearl Harbor or Vietnam, the prospects for an early emergence of a new foreign policy consensus in the United States thus seem slim, and beyond the capacity of any political figure or group to fashion.

Consensus Lost. Consensus Regained?: Foreign Policy Beliefs of American Leaders, 1976–1980

To what extent there was a foreign policy consensus in the United States during the two decades following World War II continues to be debated. But most students of American foreign policy agree that the war in Vietnam fostered a situation reminiscent of the 1930s when there was little agreement on such basic issues as the nature of the international system, Americas national interests and the most likely threats to them, and the appropriate strategies to promote those interests. Many of the ‘axioms’ that guided policy through the initial decades of the postwar era were, after Vietnam, the subject of often intense debate. However, data on the persistence of cleavages, beyond the period immediately following the conquest of South Vietnam, are much scantier. The underlying issue in this paper is that of persistence versus change. Did the patterns of American leadership beliefs a year after the end of Vietnam persist through 1980?; and did the ideological, occupational, and other correlates of foreign policy beliefs change during these four years? Answers to these questions are sought in data from two nationwide surveys of American leaders in 1976 (N = 2,282) and 1980 (N = 2,502). The years 1976–1980 were marked by turbulence at home and abroad. Expectations that the end of the Vietnam and Watergate episodes would provide a period of healing proved to be overly optimistic. It was thus a period during which one might well have expected substantial changes in the content and structure of foreign policy beliefs. Indeed, claims of a convergence of beliefs were in ample supply as leaders in both political parties proclaimed the existence of a post-Vietnam foreign policy consensus. The data presented here, however, offer little evidence of change during the four years ending in 1980, much less of a new consensus.

A New Dynamism in World Politics: Increasingly Skillful Individuals?

Our inquiry is the first phase of a project designed to explore systematically whether individuals are becoming more equipped to play a central role in world affairs. It hypothesizes that individuals have undergone a skill revolution, leading them to be more analytically competent, emotionally capable, and politically effective in assessing events, developing alternatives, and executing effective political action. The first phase is confined to the skills of elites: we tested the predicted generational changes by analyzing the skills of three types of individuals—elected officials in the U.S. Congress, witnesses at congressional hearings, and contributors to the daily press in three countries—in two widely separated epochs as they evaluated events across three issue areas—foreign affairs, international trade, and human rights. In doing so we randomly selected nearly one thousand paragraph-sized statements and coded them according to the methodology prescribed by the Integrative Complexity Coding Manual. All in all, our findings supported the hypothesis: the skill level of the sampled individuals was found to have increased over several generations by a statistically significant (P < .001) average greater than 10 percent. Each issue area also showed gains in the same direction between the two epochs and across all types of elites; and all of these results also met the 95 percent confidence level for statistical significance. Inasmuch as this finding does not negate the possibility of a long-term trend toward more capable publics, it points to the need for further research into the dynamics whereby world politics may become increasingly sensitive to demands at the micro level.

Liberals, Populists, Libertarians, and Conservatives: The Link between Domestic and International Affairs

This paper examines the relationship between the domestic and foreign policy beliefs of American opinion leaders, using data drawn from nationwide surveys in 1984, 1988 and 1992. Responses to fourteen items appearing in each of the surveys are used to identify four domestic policy types: liberals, populists, conservatives, and libertarians. An additional 14 items are used to classify respondents into four foreign policy types: hardliners, internationalists, isolationists and accommodationists. There is a high correlation between the domestic and foreign policy types. Further analyses examine the responses of the four domestic policy types to several international issues: future threats, US interests and roles, foreign policy goals, and approaches to peace. Background variables associated with the domestic and foreign policy beliefs indicate that the cross-cutting cleavages created by domestic and international issues during the two decades after World War II are giving way to overlapping divisions that have powerful partisan and ideological foundations.

The future of politics

Abstract Humankind is undergoing subtle but vast transformations, from the impact of globalization to the pull of local comforts, from the movement toward regional organizations to the demands of transnational groups, from the ever more powerful consequences of microelectronic technologies to the ever deepening bonds of interdependence. These changes can fairly be described as the emergence of a new epoch marked by altered global structures and driven by a skill revolution, an organizational explosion, and a continuous flow of ideas, money, goods, and people that is rendering long-standing territorial boundaries increasingly obsolete and fostering an extensive decentralization of authority. The future of politics is thus conceived to be pervaded by contradictions, ambiguities, and uncertainties.