The significance of the European Communities (EC) remains obscure. The reason is that orthodox integration literature is fundamentally ahistorical: it fails to give an adequate account of the roots of modern European integration. And however admirable the project might be in itself, we cannot rectify the failure simply by chronicling the admittedly much ignored origins of the EC in the 1950s. For the EC is systematically connected to earlier cases of integration in Europe. Only by understanding the evolution of these integrational forms—from early modern Britain, to nineteenth century Germany, to contemporary Europe—can one begin to make sense of the EC. In brief, one must seek to understand the “present as history,” a task that few writers on regional integration have yet attempted, and none with any success.

Recent efforts by North American social scientists to devise systematic empirical tests for a series of propositions purportedly drawn from structural theories of dependency have focused largely on the consequences of foreign economic linkages for the economies of developing countries. Although the results of these tests have been received with considerable skepticism by dependentistas and neo-positivists alike, cross-national, quantitative studies of the dependence-development relationship are not without value: they have focused research on a central problem, namely the effects of various forms of economic linkages on rates and types of economic development. This concentration of research activities, in particular the current spate of replications, has yielded new empirical knowledge concerning these relationships, plus some intriguing conflicting evidence. This is now sufficient to support further inquiry in itself, independent of the confines of dependencia theories which gave rise to the research originally.

The local subsidiary of a multinational corporation is both a national firm incorporated under host country law and a sub-unit of a centrally optimizing global system. This duality, which is inherent in the structure of foreign direct investment, produces potential benefits—such as resource transfers and access to markets—as well as costs—in terms of constraints on national economic control. Host governments utilize a variety of policies to “…increase the likelihood that the subsidiary will respond positively to the national policies of the host country rather than to the global strategy of the corporate family”— including expropriation or forced divestment of ownership.

Conventional discussions of state power have tended to list a state's resources or capabilities for power in a straightforward and unambiguousway. True, the caveat is offered that there is a difference between potential and actual power, but the difference is usually spelled out in terms either of problems of modernization (seen itself as a technique of transforming capabilities) or in terms of the will and skill of the state under discussion.1 But in a world of highly interdependent political economies, this utilization gapdepends not only on the conditions that create and sustain the state's ability tocontrol its own resources, but also on the conditions that determine 1) theaccess of others to these capabilities, and 2) the access of the state to theresources of other states. For what purposes and in what situations are astate's resources usable by it? In what situations can the state be a gatekeeper with respect to the access by others to its resources? The answers to thesequestions determine, in part, whether potential becomes actual (relative)power in present or future state-to-state relations. It is to this neglecteddimension of power that this paper is devoted.

While debate continues on whether the foreign policies of small states are1 or are or not generically different from those of large states, little has been written explicitly about the association of size of donors with the quality of their foreign aid. This essay hypothesizes that the aid policies of small states will differ from those of large states in ways that may be measured empirically, just as Plischke, East, Sawyer, and Hermann have demonstrated with quantitative data that the general foreign policy behavior of small states varies significantly from that of large ones. More particularly, it is hypothesized that small states give higher quality aid, and give it relatively more generously, than large states. This hypothesis is grounded on general impressions—Sweden is widely acknowledged as a “good” donor and the United States an indifferent one—and on extrapolations from small state theory that will be sketched below.

Professor Robert Cox's “Labor and hegemony” in the Summer 1977 issue of International Organization includes one of the most sophisticated versions of the corporate unionist or “revisionist” description and explanation of American labor's foreign policy that has appeared to date. Nevertheless, it is inaccurate both as description and explanation, and like other attempts to use the corporate unionist approach, it is a misleading paradigm impeding research into the nature of labor's transnational involvements.

When I wrote “Labor and hegemony,” I anticipated two kinds of critical reaction: one on the ground that the method and approach was at variance with mainstream political science; the other in defense of two institutional establishments whose ideological foundations were challenged in the article— those of the ILO and the AFL-CIO. Both these organizational establishments place great stock in the idea of tripartism, representing it as a form of pluralism or a bargaining relationship of independent actors—unions, employers, and government. In “Labor and hegemony,” I argued that this appearance of independence has to be understood as the ideological expression of a particular structure of social power, a particular form of hegemony that is found in advanced capitalist societies with the emergence of a corporative form of state. This blocco storico is the proper object of study, and since it has international as well as national dimensions its study can be a fruitful approach to international affairs and international organization.