The claim is advanced for recognizing evolutionary learning as the generative principle of world politics. Immanuel Kant was the first to specify a “natural” process leading toward “perpetual peace.” The long cycle, seen as the process of structural change. is explained with the help of a Parsonian learning model and a social evolutionary model and is argued to be coupled with the Kantian process. The long cycle defines the agenda for change in the major institutional complexes of world politics and deepens our understanding of the conditions for the control of global war.

Compared with Japan, no other industrialized country has so adamantly denied foreign investors direct access to its domestic markets. Japan continued to deny such market access until domestic constituencies finally championed foreign demands and successfully pressured a reluctant state for concessions. The initiative for these concessions came neither from Japan's principal government negotiators in the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) nor from public policymakers in America. Rather, it came from American and other multinational corporations (MNCs) seeking to exploit imperfect markets for the technology and related assets which they alone controlled and which a few Japanese oligopolists demanded. These local oligopolists served as manipulative intermediaries between MNCs and the nationstate and in that position determined both the timing and the substance of their country's long march toward capital liberalization. Between the legislation of capital controls in 1950 and the de jure elimination of those controls in 1980, what began as an extension of limited concessions to individual MNCs, eventually aided by small regulatory loopholes, gradually encompassed all foreigners supplying broad product groups. During the intervening thirty years, the MNCs examined in this article— including Coca-Cola, IBM, Texas Instruments, and the “big three” U.S. automakers —finally gained limited access to the Japanese market. For them, the formal liberalizations of the late 1960s and early 1970s proved significant, but not always decisive, as Japanese oligopolists moved both to replace public regulations with private restrictions and to mesh their ongoing political influence domestically with their emerging economic power internationally. Thus, de facto liberalization proceeded slowly and unevenly, at least through 1980, and foreign direct investment in Japan continued to languish. What capital liberalization did occur had little to do with the pressures exerted on MITI and the Japanese state by the U.S. government and the international organizations that America then controlled. Rather, American diplomacy proved successful in forcing concessions from Japan only when it was backed up both by the economic power of American MNCs and by the active support of Japanese business.

Recent developments in U.S.-Soviet relations have prompted reassessments of the effects that nuclear weapons may have had on world politics. If there has been a “nuclear revolution,” both the meaning of that term and its precise implications for the behavior of states remain unclear. This article agrees with the realist argument that the discovery of nuclear weapons did not by itself fundamentally change the structure of the international system. However, it argues that the subsequent condition of nuclear deterrence, resulting from the widespread deployment of nuclear weapons and sophisticated delivery systems during the 1960s, does constitute a source of structural change. Under nuclear deterrence, the superpowers have acquired a new function—“joint custodianship” of the system—which differentiates their role from that of other states. This suggests that the international system has a new organizing principle that varies from the standard realist conception of anarchy. Structural change led to the rise of detente in the 1970s; but because the processes by which leaders in Washington and Moscow adjusted to structural change were not always parallel, this detente was limited in scope and could not be sustained. As processes of adjustment begin to converge, the modified structural approach proposed in this article predicts that superpower cooperation in a new detente of the 1990s will go beyond what was achieved in the 1970s and also beyond what would be consistent with standard realist arguments.

The liberal approach to international regimes is attractive in the development of that concept because it deploys a well-developed and rigorous set of analytic devices in the form of rational actor models. However, it also assumes that regimes are benevolent, voluntary, cooperative, and legitimate associations of actors, which unnecessarily limits theregime concept and encourages an ideological and apologetic position with respect to regimes. Following a critique of the liberal approach, this article suggests an alternative based on a fundamental assumption of contestability in regimes. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault which culminates in the concept of “power/knowledge,” it regards international regimes as attempts to define, order, and act within international public spaces. It also regards international regimes as loci and foci of struggle. Some aspects of this conceptualization are sketched in preliminary form, and a brief illustration in the area of nuclear nonproliferation is provided.