It will cause little controversy in the spring of 1975 to observe that the world is in a profound political and economic crisis, or that interdependence is a palpable and often unpalatable fact. Conflict over formerly latent issues is increasingly evident, as governments try desperately to cope with the effects of other governments' policies, as in the case of oil, or with resource shortages, as in the case of food. Many of the problems from which such issues arise–including also environmental degradation, inflation, and recession–have immediate impacts on people's daily lives. Unlike traditional foreign policy issues, they are not separate from domestic politics, and experienced largely through the mass media, but rather encountered daily on the job and at the market. Domestic and foreign policies are closely intertwined, and important domestic interests are threatened by events abroad. It is becoming clear that ties between national economies can transmit economic evils as well as economic goods.

We argue that mercantilism is not an anachronism, but a pattern of interaction between economies functioning analytically as subsystems both of nations and societies. The relation between theory and policy in France's post-war monetary history suggests two concepts of mercantilist rationalization of external economic policy. Although verbalized in terms of liberal economic theory, French monetary policy served nationalist diplomacy (diplomatic mercantilism) and/or the specific societal politics of the domestic economy (political mercantilism). Diplomatic and political mercantilism are indices of indeterminacy of international economics. Societal politics and international economics are thresholds of feasibility for diplomatic mercantilism. But cumulative rationalization of feasible external economic policy in terms of both political and diplomatic mercantilism is not excluded. As a function both of national system maintenance and societal integration, mercantilism is more easily explained in terms of sociological functionalism than in terms of either international functionalism or Realism alone.

The Conference of the Committee on Disarmament (CCD), a 26-member committee chaired by the US and the USSR and reporting annually to the UN General Assembly, has been stalled for three years over two issues which neither super power wishes to agree on: chemical weapons and a comprehensive nuclear testing ban. As a result, the future viability of the world's only multilateral forum for negotiating arms control is in jeopardy. In recent years a movement has been initiated by certain non-aligned states—mostly notably Mexico, Sweden, and Yugoslavia—to shake up the procedural foundations of the CCD so as to bring about substantive changes in its agenda, its manner of operation, its composition, and its results. The immediate diplomatic vehicle for this procedural revolution is the convening of a new deliberative forum, the World Disarmament Conference (WDC). The WDC has been debated in the last three General Assemblies where it has evolved in substance and built a constituency of support so that there is a distinct possibility such a body may be convened in the next few years. Its most significant achievement would be to bring France and China into world disarmament forums, and to legitimize on-going bilateral and regional arms control structures which have been created in the absence of movement at the CCD.

The Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America (Treaty of Tlatelolco) was signed in 1967 and is now in force for eighteen Latin American nations (the important exceptions being Argentina and Brazil). Under the terms of the treaty the Organization for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America (OPANAL) was established in 1969. With headquarters in Mexico City, OPANAL is a sophisticated control mechanism composed of three principal organs: a General Conference, Council and Secretariat. This article examines the effort to establish regional nuclear weapons free zone in Latin America and analyzes the ability of the Tlatelolco Treaty to provide the legal and political framework for containment of the growing military potential of Latin American nuclear energy programs. Particular attention is given to the positions of key Latin American nations within the region, nuclear weapons states, and those nations retaining territorial interest within the nuclear weapons free zone. In addition several policy options are advanced which could facilitate the more complete implementation of regional nuclear arms control in Latin America.

Based on interviews with 82 national legislators in all nine member states of the European Community, this article examines and analyzes the attitudes and anticipated behavior of the respondents with respect to political integration. In the analysis we pursued four paths: personal motivations, constituency concerns, views of the European Parliament, and a sketch of the history of efforts for direct elections. According to our findings, political integration offers these legislators neither personal-material, electoral-partisan, nor institutional-prestige rewards that are unambiguous. Nevertheless, the interviews also show considerable expression of support for an expanded level and scope of decision making by the Community institutions and for political union. This might be explained by the attractiveness of a United Europe as a forum in which small and medium powers are able to act as a great power. However, the nation state provides things even more basic to political classes: an identity, immediate access to available power, and opportunities for more power.

Available data on the activities of the multinationals and other aspects of international economic relations have rendered traditional approaches to the study of international politics, international organizations and the international system obsolete. The political and economic facts of international life are so intertwined that it has become compulsory to resort to the findings of political economy to discuss the international system and its functions and to assess properly the role and functions of the United Nations within it.

Evidence on the extent of individual demand for international security programs is presented and analyzed. Factors affecting the extent of demand and the circumstances under which individuals might be willing to pay for peacekeeping are discussed. Eliminating the outright prohibition of contributions by individuals would be an effective way to stimulate disclosure of monetary evaluations of international security programs and to learn more about the extent of demand for them.

Information from four audits, or audit-like reviews, of international relief programs in the Nigerian-Biafran war sheds considerable light on the financial sources, scope, timing of flows, and cost-efficiency associated with that complex operation. Beyond their intrinsic interest, which is heightened by two of the documents remaining unpublished, such economic data bear heavily on many political aspects of the relief effort. For example, they permit examination of the relationship, and partial disjunction, between dominance in contributions (which was mainly governmental and particularly American) and leadership in administration (which was chiefly continental European and private). They also facilitate an assessment of the massive or token proportions of these endeavors, their capacity to anticipate rather than just respond tardily to predictable catastrophes, and the extent of their entanglement in the domestic and international power fields that characterized the Nigerian conflict. For all their rather divergent modi operandi, the leading role in the relief process of the two private umbrella organizations is clearly apparent; but so too is the limited ambit of even such comparatively massive relief work within the context of an on-going civil war.