This article updates earlier work by Haas, Butterworth, and Nye on conflict management by international organizations. In addition, it seeks to answer the question of whether one can fruitfully interpret conflict management as a case of regime growth and regime decay. For this purpose I develop indicators of regime coherence and regime effectiveness, and illustrate them by subjecting the management of disputes to time-series analysis. The discussion identifies when and under what global conditions the regime began to decay. Finally, I explain that decay in terms of four mutually supportive hypotheses. In this article I thus offer a statistical history of the conflict management functions of the United Nations and the major regional organizations, and use it to probe the limits of the utility of the regime literature.

Much of the confusion in the current literature on regimes is due to the fact that two very different metaphors about nature, science, and culture inform the discussion. The two metaphors—the organic and the mechanical—imply six different approaches to world order studies, and hence to the analysis and advocacy of regimes. Each of the six—eco-environmentalism, eco-reformism, egalitarianism, liberalism, mercantilism, and mainstream views—advances different arguments about the origin of regimes, the structural principles that explain their growth and decay, their functioning, and the values they serve. Yet each approach uses the same basic vocabulary: system, structure, process, costs-and-benefits, public goods, management, learning, organization, hegemony, and collaboration. Clarity about each argument, and a possible synthesis of views, can be achieved only if we understand the semantic and philosophical contexts in which the terminology is embedded. This article attempts the task of terminological and contextual explication in the setting of evolutionary epistemology and of contending theories of international relations. It opts for a synthesis of the analyses of regimes offered by mainstream views and by a normative view of world order represented by the eco-reformist approach. The discussion is illustrated with references to the Law of the Sea negotiations.

Making technology autonomous from the influence of investors and proprietors in developed countries has emerged as one of the core themes in the doctrine of dependence. Technology is not only machinery; it is “a major resource for creating new wealth; it is an instrument allowing its owners to exercise social control in various forms; it decisively affects modes of decision making.…” It is seen as the key to achieving “integral development,” free from the abuses associated with the past patterns of technology transfer which were largely mediated by multinational corportions: excessive foreign exchange costs, rise in unnecessary imports, production of luxury goods, neglect of employment objectives, stagnation of the agricultural sector, excessive urbanization, insufficient use of local professionals, environmental degradation, and lack of sensitivity to local cultures. In Marxist versions of dependence-thinking the older pattern of technology transfer strengthened the enclave economy and its comprador bourgeoisie, rather than aiding the development of a national bourgeoisie and of a modern working class.

Why do nations create institutionalized modes of multilateral collaboration? How can common interests develop in the face of inequalities in power and asymmetries in interdependence? The author explores the role of knowledge in the definition of political objectives and interests. The systematic interplay of changing knowledge and changing objectives results in the redefinition of “issues” and the practice of “issue linkage.” The dynamics of issue-linkage, in turn, tell us something about international regimes for the management of progressively more complex issue areas. An ideal-typical “regime” is described, theoretically applicable to all types of issues. Since the cognitive attributes of the actors who set up such a regime cannot be expected to remain stable, this concept of a “regime” can illuminate cliscussion and analysis, but cannot be expected to provide a clear model for desirable policy. However, it can illustrate the options open to policy makers wishing to choose a mode of collaboration. Regimes dealing with money, the oceans, and technology transfer are used for illustrative purposes.

Theories of regional integration are becoming obsolescent because three core assumptions on which these theories have been based are becoming less and less relevant to the behavior patterns actually displayed by governments active in regional organizations. These three assumptions are (1) that a definable institutional pattern must mark the outcome of the process of integration, (2) that conflicts of interests involving trade-offs between ties with regional partners and ties with nonmembers should be resolved in favor of regional partners, and (3) that decisions be made on the basis of disjointed incrementalism. The history of the European Communities since 1968 shows that most governments no longer behave in accordance with these assumptions, although they did earlier. The explanation for the new trend is to be found in awareness of the various novel kinds and dimensions of interdependence between countries, issues, and objectives, particularly with reference to policies involving those aspects of highly industrial societies which do not respond readily to the incentives of a customs union. A new decision-making rationality–labelled “fragmented issue linkage”–seems to be competing with incremental habits, suggesting that efforts are being made to cope with “turbulence” in the industrial environment so as to avoid piecemeal solutions. The effort to cope with turbulence, in turn, is unlikely to lead to any “final” set of regional institutions.

This essay seeks to make the following points: (1) The search for holistic intellectual constructs to legitimate the construction of international regulatory regimes is fruitless if it is based on some notion of naturalness suggested by science itself. The purposes to be served by the use and regulation of science and technologies cannot be subordinated to the scientific attributes of the activities to be regulated. (2) Darwinian evolutionary propositions concerning survival imperatives are not adequate guides for the definition of political purposes governing the international regulation of science and technology. (3) If holistic constructs are not fruitful as organizing devices entirely disaggregated and fragmented solutions to technological problems are self-defeating in terms of achieving political purposes. What kind of knowledge do we have to suggest the creation of cognitive links among parts which add up to wholes consistent with political purposes as units-to-be-regulated? The identification of links demands a closer type of cooperation among technical experts and political decision makers than practiced hitherto. Hence a notion of the public interest is advanced to suggest the identification of links through new types of institutions and procedures for combining scientific with political knowledge. (4) Wholes to be identified through such processes can be analyzed in terms of the language of complexity and decomposability, leading to various notions of interdependence. Political purposes and technological developments are discussed jointly to show how a given concern can be characterized by different kinds of interdependencies at different times. “Interdependence” then emerges as a multi-dimensional and dynamic device for identifying wholes. (5) Various types of interdependence are matched to various forms of international organizational cooperation and the evolution of organizations is examined in terms of learning to manage interdependence. (6) By combining organizational forms with changing political purposes we arrive at provisional wholes called “technology-task-environments” which permit the scientist and the politician to contribute jointly to the management of interdependence issues triggered by changing technologies and scientific ideas until the evolving mix of knowledge and purpose leads them to construction of alternative (but equally temporary) wholes.

As the consequences of science and technology impinge more and more on international relations, states attempt to deal with the promise and dangers implicit in these consequences by the creation of international regimes. The nature and scope of such regimes are justified, in part, by the scientific and technological givens with which they are to deal. Increasingly, however, the process of justification is dominated by constructs and arguments taken from systems theory, thus mixing the epistemological styles of the natural and the social sciences. It is often not clear whether justification in terms of systems theory is rhetoric or based on demonstrated isomorphisms. The article seeks to answer this question by presenting a four-fold typology of systems theories together with their assumptions and relevance to the creation of international regimes. The article then examines three specific proposals for international action on science and technology, prepared under OECD auspices, in order to demonstrate the extent to which they rely on systems theory and to determine how persuasive the systemic justification is. The conclusion: there is an inverse relationship between the elaborateness of the systemic justification and the acceptability of the regime on logical, empirical, and moral grounds.

Why have we been studying something we call “regional integration” for about fifteen years ? We were stimulated by two otherwise unrelated trends: the flowering in the United States of systematic social science and the blooming in Europe of political efforts to build a united continent, to “integrate” Western Europe at least. But the story of integration encompassed a mixed bag of heroes ranging from such regional “integrators”as Napoleon Bonaparte and Simón Bolívar to nation-building statesmen such as Otto von Bismarck and Camillo Cavour. Some saw even in Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tojo certain characteristics of the political actor who seeks to integrate nations into a regional unit. Are we then studying any kind of political unification ?

As common markets, free trade associations, and limited-purpose regional arrangements continue to proliferate in many corners of the globe, the basic question of the relevance of these efforts to the process of building political communities also continues to be posed for theorist and practitioner alike. One approach for linking these two phenomena is the intensive and comparative study of common markets and free trade associations in terms of their capacity to transform member states into a political union. In principle, at least, the careful and comparative study of key variables in the process of achieving and perfecting economic unity at the regional level could yield propositions which might have predictive value for assessing the chances of success of various discrete efforts at regional unification. In methodological terms such an approach would combine case studies with the use of aggregate data.

In the world of Isaac Asimov the computer programmer is God: he selects the facts and relationships between facts from which as yet unknown correlations flow; thus he rules the world by predicting and manipulating change, and thus he maintains stability.