Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-c47g7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T16:53:44.661Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Regimes, power, and international aviation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Get access

Extract

Measured against institutionalism and modified structural realism, realism provides the most coherent explanation of the international arrangements pertaining to the issue-area of civil aviation. Although institutionalized international organizations govern technical and safety issues, no single regime has emerged to govern the important commercial matters that bear on states' relative gains and losses. Instead, since World War I states have entered into a multiplicity of denounceable bilateral agreements that in turn reflect the balance of bargaining power between them. States that have attempted to reorganize the system have been driven by their own interests and capabilities, with the stronger aviation powers professing a preference for liberalism.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1995

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

I thank my colleagues, T. V. Paul and Mark Brawley in political science and Jagdish Handa in economics, and the journal's three anonymous reviewers for their sharp but most constructive criticisms on an earlier version of the paper, as well as the journal's editor who, with his comprehensive and penetrating comments, has been my toughest critic. I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its generous financial assistance for research on this and other subjects over the years.

1. For a contemporary manifestation of this debate, see the controversy between Joseph Grieco on the one hand and Snidal, Duncan and Powell, Robert on the other, in “Relative-Gains Problem for International Cooperation,” American Political Science Review 87 (09 1993), pp. 729–43.Google Scholar For a more recent assessment, see Powell, Robert, “Anarchy in International Relations Theory: The Neorealist-Neoliberal Debate,” International Organization 48 (Spring 1994), pp. 313–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Grieco, Joseph M., Cooperation Among Nations: Europe, America, and Non-tariff Barriers to Trade (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990)Google Scholar, chaps. 1 and 2.

3. Krasner, Stephen D., “Structural Causes and Regime Consequences: Regimes as Intervening Variables,” in Krasner, Stephen D., ed., International Regimes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 121Google Scholar at p. 2.

4. Susan Strange, “Cave! Hic Dragones: A Critique of Regime Analysis,” in Ibid., pp. 337–54 at p. 342.

5. Kratochwil, Friedrich, “The Force of Prescriptions,” International Organization 38 (Autumn 1984), pp. 685708CrossRefGoogle Scholar, cited in Young, Oran R., International Cooperation: Building Regimes for Natural Resources and the Environment (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 195.Google Scholar

6. Young, , International Cooperation, p. 195.Google Scholar

7. Haggard, Stephan and Simmons, Beth A., “Theories of International Regimes,” International Organization 41 (Summer 1984), pp. 491–517 at p. 493.Google Scholar

8. Among book-length inquiries, see Krasner, International Regimes; Keohane, Robert O., After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Oran Young, International Cooperation; Lang, Laszlo, International Regimes and the Political Economy of East-West Relations (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Rittberger, Volker, ed., International Regimes in East-West Politics (London: Pinter Publishers, 1990)Google Scholar; and Cutler, A. Claire and Zacher, Mark W., eds., Canadian Foreign Policy and International Economic Regimes (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1992).Google Scholar

9. The typology of negotiated, spontaneous, and imposed regimes is from Young, International Cooperation, pp. 84–89.

10. Strange, “Cave! Hic Dragones,” p. 345.

11. Krasner, Stephen D., “Global Communications and National Power: Life on the Pareto Frontier,” World Politics 45 (04 1991), pp. 336–67 at p. 337.Google Scholar

12. On this institutionalist view, see Grieco, Cooperation Among Nations, chaps. 1 and 2; Ruggie, John Gerard, “Multilateralism: The Anatomy of an Institution,” International Organization 46 (Summer 1992), pp. 561–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Caporaso, James A., “International Relations and Multilateralism: The Search for Foundations,” International Organization 46 (Summer 1992), pp. 599632CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Keohane, Robert O., “International Institutions: Two Approaches,” International Studies Quarterly 32 (12 1988), pp. 379–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Buzan, Barry, “From International System to International Society: Structural Realism and Regime Theory Meet the English School,” International Organization 47 (Summer 1993), pp. 327–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. Donald J. Puchala and Raymond F. Hopkins, “International Regimes: Lessons from Inductive Analysis,” in Krasner, , International Regimes, pp. 6191.Google Scholar The quotations are drawn from pages 86, 61, and 63, respectively.

14. Young, , International Cooperation, p. 64.Google Scholar

15. Keohane, After Hegemony.

16. On the distinction between benevolent and coercive hegemonic models, see Snidai, Duncan, “The Limits of Hegemonic Stability Theory,” International Organization 39 (Autumn 1985), pp. 579614.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. Stephen D. Krasner, “Regimes and the Limits of Realism: Regimes as Autonomous Variables,” in Krasner, , International Regimes, pp. 355–68 at p. 357.Google Scholar

18. The quotation is from Arthur A. Stein, “Coordination and Collaboration: Regimes in an Anarchic World,” in Ibid., pp. 115–40 at p. 115.

19. Robert Jervis, “Security Regimes,” in Ibid., pp. 173–94 at p. 187.

20. Jock A. Finlayson and Mark W. Zacher, “The GATT and the Regulation of Trade Barriers: Regime Dynamics and Functions,” in Ibid., pp. 273–314 at p. 277.

21. Ibid., p. 276 n.

22. Jonsson, Christer, International Aviation and the Politics of Regime Change (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987).Google Scholar

23. Krasner, Stephen D., Structural Conflict: The Third World Against Global Liberalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 196226.Google Scholar

24. Martin Dresner and Michael Tretheway, “Canada and the Changing Regime in Air Transport,” in Cutler, and Zacher, , Canadian Foreign Policy and International Economic Regimes, pp. 184214.Google Scholar

25. International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), Civil Aviation Statistics of the World: 1992 (Montreal: ICAO, 1993), p. 19.Google Scholar

26. On the terms, see Gilpin, Robert, U.S. Power and the Multinational Corporation: The Political Economy of Foreign Direct Investment (New York: Basic Books, 1975), pp. 2633.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In a later classification, Gilpin employed the term “economic nationalism” in place of mercantilism, but in the text he used the two terms as alternatives for each other; see his The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 3134.Google Scholar The term “mercantilism” also is employed, largely in the sense intended here, by some of the contributors to Krasner, International Regimes, see, for example, Ernst B. Haas “Words Can Hurt You; or, Who Said What to Whom About Regimes,” pp. 23–59 at pp. 50–52, and John Gerard Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order,” pp. 195–231 at p. 197.

27. Cited in Jonsson, Christer, Intemational Aviation and the Politics of Regime Change, p. 29Google Scholar, and Sochor, Eugene, The Politics of International Aviation (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), p. 2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For the text, see League of Nations, Treaty Series, vol. 11, nos. 1–3, 1922, pp. 174–98.Google Scholar

28. Dobson, Alan P., Peaceful Air Warfare: The United States, Britain, and the Politics of Intemational Aviation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 86.Google Scholar

29. Dierikx, Marc L. J., “Shaping World Aviation: Anglo-American Civil Aviation Relations, 1944–1946,” Journal of Air Law and Commerce (hereafter referred to as JALC) 57 (Summer 1992), pp. 795840.Google Scholar

30. “Cabotage” refers to the privilege of conducting transport between any two points within a single state, which is normally denied to foreign states.

31. Dobson, , Peaceful Air Warfare, p. 87.Google Scholar

32. Ibid., pp. 22–26 and 47–48.

33. Ibid., pp. 46–48.

34. See Jonsson, , IntemationalAviation and the Politics of Regime Change, pp. 4748Google Scholar; and Dobson, , Peaceful Air Warfare, p. 129.Google Scholar

35. See Dobson, , Peaceful Air Warfare, p. 157Google Scholar; MacKenzie, David, Canada and International Civil Aviation, 1932–1948 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), pp. 167–70Google Scholar; and Miller, John Andrew, Air Diplomacy: The Chicago Civil Aviation Conference of 1944 in Anglo-American Wartime Relations and Post-war Planning, Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1971, p. 183.Google Scholar

36. Dobson, , Peaceful Air Warfare, p. 142.Google Scholar

37. MacKenzie, , Canada and International Civil Aviation 19321948, p. 145.Google Scholar

38. Lord Finlay, cited in Dobson, , Peaceful Air Warfare, p. 133.Google Scholar

a only countries holding a 2.5-percent or greater share of the world's international traffic in 1990 were selected.

b Figures for 1946 are for passenger-kilometers (number of passengers multiplied by number of kilometers flown). All other figures are for scheduled passengers.

c Figures in parentheses are millions of passengers.

Sources. Based on International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), Scheduled Airline Opera tions: General Traffic Statistics up to June 1949, Statistical Summary No. 8 (Montreal: ICAO, 1950)Google Scholar, table 1; ICAO, Traffic 1960–1970 (Montreal: ICAO, 1971), pp. 118–19 and 140–41Google Scholar; and ICAO, CivilAviation Statistics of the World (Montreal: ICAO, various years).Google Scholar

39. MacKenzie, , Canada and International Civil Aviation, 19321948, pp. 145 and 167–69.Google Scholar

40. See Jonsson, International Aviation and the Politics of Regime Change, chap. 2; Taneja, Nawal K., U.S. IntemationalAviation Policy (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1980)Google Scholar, chap. 1; Gidwitz, Betsy, The Politics of International Air Transport (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1980)Google Scholar, chap. 3; and Dempsey, Paul Stephen, Law and Foreign Policy in IntemationalAviation (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Transnational Publishers, 1987), pp. 49 and 53.Google Scholar

41. For a concise treatment of the various proposals at the conference, see Gidwitz, The Politics of International Air Transport, chap. 3. The proposal by Australia and New Zealand for a single global airline run by an international public authority did not find acceptance. Canada's proposal, combining competition with international regulation, was found unacceptable by the United States.

42. Thornton, Robert, International Airlines and Politics: A Study in Adaptation to Change (Ann Arbor: Program in International Business, University of Michigan, 1970), p. 25.Google Scholar

43. The quotations are from Dobson, , Peaceful Air Warfare, pp. 166–67.Google Scholar

44. Ibid., pp. 164–65.

45. United Nations, Treaty Series, vol. 15, 1948, pp. 295–375 at p. 296.Google Scholar

46. The quotations are from Ruggie, “Multilateralism,” pp. 567 and 571, respectively.

47. On the concept of “embedded liberalism,” see Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change,” pp. 209–14.

48. MacKenzie, , Canada and International Civil Aviation, 1932–1948, pp. 239–41.Google Scholar See also the observations of an American delegate to Geneva, in Robert McClurkin, J. G., “The Geneva Commission on a Multilateral Air Transport Agreement,” JALC 15 (Winter 1948), pp. 3946.Google Scholar

49. MacKenzie, , Canada and International Civil Aviation, 1932–1948, p. 206.Google Scholar

50. Dobson, , Peaceful Air Warfare, pp. 142–45.Google Scholar

51. Ibid., p. 175.

52. Roosevelt is quoted in Sampson, Anthony, Empires of the Sky: The Politics, Contests, and Cartels of World Airlines (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1984), p. 72.Google Scholar

53. All quotations are from MacKenzie, , Canada and International Civil Aviation, 1932–1948, p. 213.Google Scholar

54. Ibid., p. 218.

55. Bevin and Atlee both are cited in Ibid., pp. 219–20.

56. Dobson, , Peaceful Air Warfare, p. 208.Google Scholar

57. Ibid., p. 209.

58. International Air Transport Association (IATA), Air Transport in a Changing World: Facing the Challenges of Tomorrow (Montreal: IATA, 1992), p. 20.Google Scholar

59. ICAO, “List of Bilateral Air Transport Agreements Which Were Denounced and Ceased to Have Effect, During the Period 1980– 1991” (Montreal: ICAO, 1991, typescript) plus additional typed sheets supplied by ICAO's Legal Bureau, 18 April 1994. Among denunciations of bilateral agreements with the United States during the 1980s was Greece (1984); earlier denunciations of such agreements were those of Italy (1966) and Britain (1976). See Dempsey, , Law and Foreign Policy, in Intemational Aviation, p. 176.Google Scholar

60. Peter van Fenema, H., ed., International Air Transport in the Eighties (Deventer, Netherlands: Kluwer, 1980), pp. 5354.Google Scholar

61. Goodwin, Ray Allen, “The Role of the United States in the 1963 Transatlantic Air Fare Crisis,” JALC 30 (Winter 1964), pp. 8293.Google Scholar

62. The quotations are from Sochor, , The Politics of International Aviation, pp. 75–76 and 8485Google Scholar, respectively. See also Gidwitz, , The Politics of International Air Transport, pp. 86–87 and 9597.Google Scholar

63. The calculation of traffic generation is based on the proportion of U.S. citizens in the U.S. international traffic in 1975. Some estimates place the U.S. share in the traffic generated on the transatlantic routes at 60 to 70 percent; see Dobson, , Peaceful Air Warfare, p. 258.Google Scholar

64. See Diamond, Barry R., “The Bermuda Agreement Revisited: A Look at the Past, Present and Future of Bilateral Air Transport Agreements,” JALC 41 (Summer 1975), pp. 419–96Google Scholar; and Dobson, Peaceful Air Warfare, chap. 8.

65. Wassenbergh, H. A., Public International Air Transportation Law in a New Era (Deventer, Netherlands: Kluwer, 1976), pp. 12–13 and 2327.Google Scholar

66. Jonsson, , Intemational Aviation and the Politics of Regime Change, p. 54.Google Scholar

67. Dempsey, , Law and Foreign Policy in International Aviation, p. 27.Google Scholar

68. Kasper, Daniel M., Deregulation and Globalization: Liberalizing International Trade in Air Services (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1988), p. 37.Google Scholar

69. Ibid., p. 87.

70. Thornton, , International Airlines and Politics, p. 105.Google Scholar

71. Jonsson, , International Aviation and the Politics of Regime Change, p. 147.Google Scholar

72. Patrick Shovelton is quoted in Sampson, , Empires of the Sky, p. 145.Google Scholar

73. Wassenbergh, H. A., “Parallels and Differences in the Development of Air, Sea, and Space Law in the Light of Grotius' Heritage,” Annals of Air and Space Law (hereafter referred to as AASL) 9 (1989), pp. 163–75.Google Scholar

74. Jonsson, , International Aviation and the Politics of Regime Change, p. 37.Google Scholar

75. Kahn is quoted in Sampson, , Empires of the Sky, p. 145.Google Scholar

76. The quotations are both from Jonsson, , International Aviation and the Politics of Regime Change, pp. 124 and 125Google Scholar, respectively.

77. Ibid.

78. Ibid., pp. 158–59.

79. Ibid., pp. 38–39 and 146.

a only countries holding a 2.5-percent or greater share of the world's international traffic in 1990 were selected.

bOverall U.S. share relative to all countries except Canada.

Sources. U.S. Department of Transportation, U.S. InternationalAir Travel Statistics (Cambridge, Mass.: Center for Transportation Information, various years).Google Scholar

80. On Britain's dominant position in European aviation, see United Kingdom, House of Lords, Select Committee on the European Communities, Civil Aviation: A Free Market By 1992? (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1990), p. 53.Google Scholar

81. Both representatives are quoted in ICAO, World-wide Air Transport Colloquium, Montreal, 6–10 April 1992: Exploring the Future of International Air Transport Regulation-Proceedings (Montreal: ICAO, 1992).Google Scholar

82. On these trends, see Dempsey, Paul Stephen, “Airline Deregulation in the United States: Competition, Concentration, and Market Darwinism,” AASL, vol. 17, part 1, 1992, pp. 199243.Google Scholar See also Dresner, Martin E. and Tretheway, Michael W., “Canada and the Changing Regime in International Air Transport,” in Cutler, and Zacher, , eds., Canadian Foreign Policy and International Economic Regimes, chap. 8Google Scholar.

83. Personal communication from Terry Denny, of IATA, Montreal, 1994. See also Dresner, Martin and Tretheway, Michael W., “The Changing Role of IATA: Prospects for the Future,” AASL 13 (1988), pp. 323Google Scholar, and ICAO and the Economic Regulation of International Air Transport,” AASL, vol. 17, part 2, 1992, pp. 195211.Google Scholar

84. Martin, Lisa L., Coercive Cooperation: Explaining Multilateral Economic Sanctions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 251.Google Scholar See also Finnemore, Martha, “International Organizations as Teachers of Norms: The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization and Science Policy,” International Organization 47 (Autumn 1993), pp. 565–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which “reveals a relationship between the international system and states that is not easily accommodated within traditional state–centric neorealist analysis.”

85. On the disruptive potential of issues of distribution for regime formation and persistence, see Krasner, “Global Communications and National Power.”

86. Relevent studies include Grieco, Cooperation Among Nations; Cafruny, Alan W., Ruling the Waves: The Political Economy of International Shipping (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)Google Scholar; and Krasner, “Global Communications and National Power.”