A specter haunts the world's bureaucrats: the specter of small government. Skepticism about the expanding role of government in most industrial nations has encouraged political economists to go back to some fundamental questions about what we really need government to do for us, whether it be for reasons of efficiency or equity. The aim of this paper is to suggest that some of the theories attacking “big” government are equally applicable in the realm of international organization (IO).

“Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and the end of political education,” wrote Henry Adams. But human beings have never been able to agree on what constitutes “knowledge” of human nature and what excessively negative or naively wishful thinking about it. Because we differ in our conceptions of who we are, difficulties exist in agreeing upon what is a fit society and the methods appropriate and necessary for bringing it into being. Conflicting conceptions of human nature play a role in shaping and energizing all levels of political competition and conflict, from the interpersonal through the global.

In a recent article for this journal, Susan Strange analyzed the political consequences of surplus capacity in three industrial sectors: steel, textiles, and shipbuilding. As she has shown, the emergence of serious problems of surplus capacity has accelerated protectionist trends in governmental policy in Europe and North America. The rhetoric of liberalism now is frequently accompanied by the reality of quotas, cartel agreements, subsidies for domestic firms, and discrimination against particularly dynamic producers.

Sometime between now and 1991, the international community will have to consider creating a new legal regime for Antarctica. Until recently, the “cold continent” and its legal regime were the concerns of a few scientists, fishermen, and legal specialists. Now, with new information on the extent of Antarctic resources, concern that present supplies of raw materials, fuels, and food are limited, and improvement of cold weather extraction technology, a broader group of policymakers, entrepreneurs, scientists, and environ-mentalists are paying attention to Antarctica. Experts now believe that exploratory drilling for offshore oil and natural gas is only a decade away. Though commercial extraction is farther in the future, and commercial exploitation of land-based minerals is unlikely in the next thirty years, speculation about Antarctica's natural wealth has aroused wide interest. There remain formidible obstacles to all these activities, but recent work in the oceans suggests that these plans might materialize earlier than now expected, and that a legal regime capable of dealing with resource activities should be in place before they begin.

The past decade has witnessed the investment of considerable energy and ingenuity in the refinement of the categories of foreign policy determinants proposed in James Rosenau's famous essay, “Pre-theories and Theories of Foreign Policy.” A sizable literature on foreign policy behavior is now developing, based upon empirical tests of the explanatory power of such variables as size, wealth, degree of political accountability, decision-maker attributes, environmental stimuli, etc. Surprisingly little attention in the field of comparative foreignpolicy, however, has been directed at specifying more precisely and in operational form the concept of issue area—an important component of Rosenau's “pre-theory” and an analytic concept that has received much attention in the public policy field. Moreover, among those scholars who do employ the concept there is little consensus as to the merits of a content based as opposed to a process oriented treatment of issue area or to the implications for empirical research of selecting one approach over the other. This essay seeks: 1) to review the foreign policy literature that attaches major importance to issue area; 2) to assess the merits of alternative treatments of the concept in terms of their contribution to the development of a theory of comparative foreign policy; and 3) to specify the conditions under which different issue area approaches can be used most profitably in comparative foreign policy research.

Recent research on international interdependence has led to increasingly sophisticated conceptualizations of the phenomenon. However, it has not been very successful in measuring interdependence, nor in testing theories about it. Although the theoretical message of most interdependence research is that interdependence is multinational or systemic, empirical operationalization has tended to concentrate on looking for interdependence (or integration, or community) as a relationship between a pair of nation states, rather than as an international pattern of behavior among an entire set of countries. Complicating these empirical analyses is their lack of operationally defined end states. In general, the approach has been to look for changes or differences in behavior, rather than for absolute levels of interdependence or integration. This is, at best, only an indirect test of the validity of a theory, regardless of how well or how badly it enables one to examine and compare one set of nations with another or the same set over time.