The governments of the five major Western powers—the United States, the United Kingdom, France, West Germany, and Japan—coordinated policy on two key North-South issues from 1974 to 1979: relieving the external debts of developing nations and establishing the Common Fund to help finance international commodity agreements. A prominent feature of the coordination process was the emergence of transgovernmental coalitions among like-minded bureaucrats. Previous studies have suggested that such coalitions may affect national policies by promoting learning and attitude change in their members and by legitimizing the policy changes sought by their members. But these suggestions do not account for the ability of coalitions to translate their policy preferences into national policy commitments, particularly where one or more of their members are relatively weak in their national policy-making systems. On the Common Fund and debt relief, some coalition members held positions in their national systems strong enough to induce their governments as a whole to commit themselves to certain concessions. Weaker members of these coalitions then gained the external support they needed to lead their own governments to make similar commitments, thus preparing the way for agreements with the developing countries and some incremental changes in the international economic order.

The large-scale international migrations of the past decade are of increasing relevance to the formulation of foreign policy. The nature of such migrations has undergone dramatic transformations from those of the quite recent past, and the last five years have seen a series of migration “crises” with powerful foreign-policy implications. Foreign policies have had dramatic effects upon international migration trends. Usually these effects have been unintended and unanticipated, though mass migration has sometimes been employed as a tool of foreign policy. At the same time, international migration has had significant impact upon the formulation and content of foreign policy, especially in the United States. These relationships now present complex policy choices, involving deeply entwined concerns of foreign, domestic, and humanitarian complexion. There are important lessons to be learned from recent experiences, lessons that challenge longstanding perspectives. Indeed, real peril now attends the failure to deal coherently and humanely with international migrations as they relate to foreign policy.

Syria's intervention in the Lebanese civil war in the late spring of 1976 has usually been explained in either structural or perceptual terms. Neither kind of account does a very good job of explaining the character and timing of this military operation. But relating the intervention to changes in Syria's domestic political situation accounts for it much more satisfactorily. Specifically, Syria's ruling social coalition found itself confronted with a substantial threat to its political position in the country from small farmers, craftspeople, and workers in the north-central provinces during the first months of 1976. In response to this threat, each member of the ruling coalition adopted a program that would insure its own dominance, but only at the expense of its domestic political allies. Under these circumstances, these social forces moved into Lebanon in an attempt to secure the capital, manufactured goods, and port facilities that would enable them to suppress their domestic political opponents while maintaining their own alliance. Domestic political struggles thus provide a more plausible explanation for Syria's intervention than either of the other two arguments can.

Many commentators have sounded alarms about the alleged dependence of developed, industrialized countries on assured supplies of raw materials from overseas. Their alarms have disturbing implications for the future of these countries' foreign policies and may, for example, be used to justify political or military interventions in the Third World. These commentators, however, frequently proceed from very primitive conceptual foundations. A careful specification of the dangers involved, and of strategies for measuring various aspects of dependence, points up some of the shortcomings of simplistic analysis. It also suggests that the risks of dependence on foreign sources of most raw materials are easily exaggerated, at least for the United States.

Sectoral growth and change in the postwar West German economy have been affected both by the specialization inherited from prewar times and by the general Western evolution of demand and production along “Neo-Fordist” lines. These two factors have also shaped West Germany's politics, particularly the organization of labor and bourgeoisie, and their alliances with each other and with the state apparatus. The three most important economic crisis situations since 1945 were turning points in the political articulation of socioeconomic interests. The crisis of the immediate postwar period resulted in a politics determined by the conflict of interests between owners of capital and the rest of the population, especially labor from 1947 onward. The Social Democratic party (SPD) was outside the government. A temporary interruption of sustained and highly differentiated sectoral growth in 1966 led to greater political attention to sectoral problems and less attention to class conflict. The SPD entered, indeed led, the government. Since the mid 1970s, the economy's structural crisis, compounded by growing foreign competition, has reaccentuated class conflict in political life. The SPD lost power in 1982.

Third World economies largely dependent on commodity exports other than oil have been the principal victims of the world recession. Attempts at restructuring international commodities regimes through the creation of the Common Fund have met with little success. Accordingly, the possibility of helping commodity exporters through the provision of compensatory finance has attracted increasing attention. One possible model for a new international compensatory facility is the EEC's STABEX scheme, established as part of the Lome Convention. However, rather than operating automatically and without interfering with market mechanisms, as its proponents suggest, the administration of STABEX has depended on discretionary judgments on the part of the EEC Commission, and the scheme has introduced distortions into trade between the EEC and its partners in the Lome Convention. Transfers under the STABEX scheme have had only a minor impact on the economies of recipient countries, especially on the sectors affected by fluctuations in export earnings. STABEX is an unsatisfactory model for a new compensatory facility: additional finance to compensate LDCs for losses in export earnings might most feasibly be made available through further liberalization of the IMF's Compensatory Financing Facility.

The United States insists that the issue of Puerto Rico was removed from the international agenda by a vote of the UN General Assembly in 1953. This insistence has not quieted the international debate. During the last decade, more nations have used more international organizations to pursue the decolonization of Puerto Rico. They have been assisted by moderate Puerto Rican leaders who are looking for a way to induce the United States to change the island's status. As an agenda-taker, the U.S. government has had to expend increasing amounts of energy, prestige, and resources—mostly diplomatic, but occasionally economic and political—each year to try to keep from being condemned as a colonial power. Agenda-setters, particularly Cuba, pay a small price but derive substantial benefits from raising the cost to the United States or increasing the number of turnstiles (actions in other international forums) through which the United States must pass each year. Other countries, whose UN vote is transformed by U.S. concern into hard currency, owe the agenda-setter a debt. Five specific changes in strategy could reduce the costs to the United States of being an agenda-taker in the United Nations