The rise of capitalism in Western Europe was based on rising mass incomes and a political power relationship favorable to the lower classes, which created opportunities for profitable investment. Nowhere in today's underdeveloped world did such conditions exist before the European expansion; nowhere were they created by the mere fact of integration into the capitalist world system. Thus the periphery has been ever more disadvantaged by its connection with the capitalist center. But the center could and can dispense withthe contribution of the periphery and, indeed, on occasion has done so. A planned restructuring of the productive apparatus and social reform in the Third World are both complex and contradictory processes. The working class in the North has to realize its interest in defending the masses of the Third World. It can do so by linking economic concessions in the North-South dialogue (raw material prices or access to markets) to social reform and the creation of a productive apparatus that permits the rise of mass incomes in the Third World.

Parallels between the demands of the developing countries for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) and earlier demands of American agrarian populists suggest that the NIEO reflects the characteristic grievances of commodity-producing societies (agraria) vis-a-vis their industrial counterparts (industria). Such grievances arise when modernization produces growing interaction and interdependence that threaten the autonomy of agraria. Conflict between agraria's ideal of independence and the reality of interdependence raises political consciousness, enhances group identity, leads to protests and proposals for reform, and stimulates efforts to withdraw from the dependency relationship. Both American agrarian populism and the NIEO movement protested the existing distribution of wealth and power, adverse terms of trade, an “excessive” middleman's share, a monetary system dominated by industria, limited access to credit, and the burden of debt. Proposed solutions were also parallel, partly because they responded to similar grievances, partly because they have arisen in a similar political context. A central problem of late 19th century American politics and contemporary world politics has been the restoration of political order under circumstances where the scope of political and social interaction has vastly expanded but where power within the political system is still widely dispersed. The proposals of both populist movements sought to deal with this problem by restoring local control and weakening supralocal forces.

Although the theory of hegemonic stability has attracted an impressive array of adherents, current formulations leave many conceptual issues unresolved. Existing formulations also fail to draw from the theory any implications concerning the process by which a hegemonic state creates and maintains a regime. As an example, Great Britain is generally agreed to have been hegemonic in the nineteenth century, but Britain's behavior was generally inconsistent with that implied by a theory of hegemonic stability. I advance an alternative set of explanations for changes in international tariff levels based on the notion of a “political business cycle.”

Nationalization of the Zairian and Zambian copper industries failed to deliver the hoped for benefits and pushed some still further beyond reach. It did so because nationalization entailed the loss of insulation, that is, the wide range of unperceived risk management and custodial functions fulfilled by the multinational mining corporations. Without this insulation these two governments, their copper industries, and their citizens' welfare all suffered. Looking beyond Zaire and Zambia, it appears that the loss of insulation has negative effects in all cases of mining industry nationalization. The size of the costs are mitigated by the strength of the nationalizer's political system.

UNCTAD provides a unique focus for studying the response of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) to the New International Economic Order. Not only has UNCTAD played a role in stimulating East-South trade links since its foundation in 1964 but the East European members of the CMEA, collectively incarnated at UNCTAD as Group D, have there transformed their behavior with respect to the less developed countries. This transformation is evident in the evolution of Group D's position across four sets of negotiations: those on commodities trade and the Common Fund, on the Generalized System of Preferences, on the Code of Conduct for Liner Conferences, and on the Code of Conduct for Transfer of Technology. Contrasts between the conduct of the CMEA and that of the EEC at UNCTAD highlight the significance of Group D's use of international law to remake the world trade system. Implicit in this strategy is the question of domestic state trading structures, which appears to be a principal factor motivating issue-specific coalitions at UNCTAD between the CMEA countries and the Group of 77. The CMEA countries use UNCTAD to reinforce their sovereign prerogatives as states in a transnational world, refashioning at the same time the transnational environment in which states conduct mutual relations, in order to reconstruct in their own favor the international regimes governing various aspects of trade and development.

In late November 1978, Nicolae Ceausescu, general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party, returned to Bucharest from a Moscow meeting of the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO). In a series of speeches from 25 November through 1 December, he began to denounce efforts by the Soviet Union to integrate more fully the armies of the WTO members and to get the East European members to increase their defense expenditures. Ceausescu was making a dramatic (and apparently successful) appeal for domestic support for his resistance to Soviet pressure. Other WTO member-states, although less publicly, have also resisted this Soviet pressure. Romania is not the only East European state ignoring Soviet calls for higher defense spending. Poland, for example, has also shown a significant decline during the 1970s in the amount of its gross national product (GNP) spent on defense (D/GNP). East Germany, on the other hand, increased its expenditures dramatically over the same decade.