The United States' notice of withdrawal from the ILO is to be understood in terms of hegemonic power relations. “Tripartism” is an ideology based upon a dominant historical tendency, namely the emergence of a corporative form of state in both developed and underdeveloped countries. The AFL-CIO has participated in the construction of the corporative state in the US and has supported its hegemonic role in the world in concert with American business interests and the CIA. Neither the ILO nor international trade union organizations (especially the ICFTU) has enjoyed a stable relationship with the center of hegemonic power in the labor field, since the AFL-CIO has conducted a unilateral foreign policy. The functionalist strategy of executive leadership asserting the autonomy of an international organization through task expansion in technical fields has been almost totally irrelevant to the issue. Nor has the ILO found an alternative counter-hegemonic base of support, e.g., in the Third World. The existing hegemony has reasserted itself through the ILO program and ideology even as the US has withdrawn material support. Hegemony, which no longer operates through majority votes in international organizations, works instead through bureaucratic controls. This structure of power has prevented the ILO from confronting effectively the real social issues of employment-creation, land reform, marginality, and poverty in general. Initiatives that have been taken to deal with such issues have all ultimately been diverted into programs consistent with the hegemonic ideology and power relations.

The definition and direction of interdependence remain unclear. As a corrective, interdependence can be defined as the direct and positive linkage of the interests of states where a change in the position of one state affects the position of others and in the same direction. Interdependence, then, is measured both by the flow of goods between states—horizontal interdependence, and the equalization of factor prices among states-vertical interdependence. Horizontal and vertical interdependence measured across six industrialized states from 1890–1975 reveal some important changes in the interdependence among these states. Fairly significant before World War I, interdependence declined markedly in the interwar period. Following World War II, interdependence seemed to increase once again, but since 1958 the measures appear much more mixed. The data seem to support a detachment of individual national policies from the general trend toward interdependence. This detachment may alter the trend, reducing the positive and direct relationship among industrial economies.

In January 1974 the Council of Ministers of the European Community issued a resolution calling for the coordination of the science and technology policies of the member countries. This initiative came after several years of largely unrewarded efforts by the European institutions to bring a measure of Community-wide coherence in national R&D programs and objectives. Despite the development of alternative decision-making and implementation procedures, the Community's impact on national activities was on the whole limited in scope, confined to programs of marginal importance and more concerned with the joint execution of specific research tasks than with the political motives and intentions of the member governments. A review of the 1974 resolution's effects, principally through the work of the CREST committee, demonstrates that the multiple obstacles to policy coordination have yet to be overcome. These obstacles stem from a) varying conceptions of the policy coordination task, b) the discrepancies and inadequacies in national science policy formulation, c) deficiencies in the perspectives and procedures of Commission officials and national delegations, and d) a variety of constraints which restrict the domain of possible Community intervention.

The major hypothesis of this article is that attendance at interparliamentary group meetings by members of Congress between 1949 and 1970 modified their attitudes toward foreign policy. Interviews with a sample of congressional delegates, analysis of roll call data, and documentary records were used to test this hypothesis. Changes after attendance at an initial meeting were small. However, when party, ideology, and degree of previous isolationism or internationalism were controlled the changes were much more significant. Predictions formulated on the basis of cognitive dissonance theory were remarkably accurate, thus suggesting that cognitive consistency explanations may help to account for the behavior observed.

As an explanation of organizational growth at the international level, functionalism postulates that people who become personally involved in the activities of international agencies will develop attitudes more favorable to international cooperation. Analysis of speeches by United States Congressmen and Senators before and after serving as delegates to the UN General Assembly indicates that significant attitudinal change may occur. At the cognitive level, Congressmen tend to pay more attention to the UN than before. The majority also experience positive change in affect toward the UN. In addition, the data provide evidence of convergence toward a mean value as participants initially holding the more extreme views (positive or negative) generally express more moderate opinions as a result of the UN experience. The fact that such a leveling of expectations occurs at a significantly higher level of favorability gives modest support to the functionalist thesis.

Evaluation research involves the use of the scientific method to evaluate the impact of public programs. The cross-disciplinary evaluation research literature provides a useful orientation for the examination of activities of international organizations. The primary advantage of this approach is that more dependable cause and effect statements are possible. The major limitations relate to its applicability, vary from case to case, and should not be underestimated. Yet they do not preclude its beneficial use by international organization scholars and policy makers. The smallpox eradication program of the World Health Organization serves as the basis for an illustration of the evaluation research methodology.

The relationship between students of international organization and students of international politics has been an erratic one, marked by appreciable shifts in both salience and sympathy. At some points, we may have been close but hostile, at others close and friendly, and more often than not, distant and mildly skeptical of one another's work. As I see it, the extraordinary gap of the 1960s is beginning to close, and I take it as one of my missions here to help accelerate this process, while enhancing the probability that, as our intellectual paths converge again, we will like what we see.

Weighted voting at the UN has been suggested for various reasons: (1) to overcome the problems of the mini-states now being admitted, with one vote just as the very large states have; (2) to prevent voting in the General Assembly from swinging any further in the anti-West, anti-Israel direction; (3) to satisfy the requirements of democratic justice: i.e., “one person-one vote,” not “one nation-one vote”; and, (4) to reflect more realistically the distribution of power among nations.