The world today, Benjamin Barber points out, is “falling precipitantly apart and coming reluctantly together at the very same moment.” While states from Canada to India are threatened with breakup due to fractious nationalist impulses of their peoples, the power of technology and markets is forcing ever-tighter economic integration worldwide. From a common-sense perspective, these two impulses are among the most important processes in contemporary world politics. Yet, there has been remarkably little attention paid to developing a theory of the international system that examines the effects of both. Hegemonic stability theory considers economic integration but not nationalism; the few studies of nationalism as a systemic force play down the effects of economic integration; and neorealism, the most widely accepted theory of the international system, has no room to address either trend. The field is, partly as a result, a cacaphony of voices largely talking past one another.

Liberal and critical theorists alike claim that the world political economy is becoming globalized. If they are right, leading corporations should gradually be losing their national characters and converging in their fundamental strategies and operations. Multinational corporations (MNCs) should be the harbingers of deep global integration. In fact, recent evidence shows little blurring or convergence at the cores of firms based in Germany, Japan, or the United States.

Unlike interstate wars, civil wars rarely end in negotiated settlements. Between 1940 and 1990 55 percent of interstate wars were resolved at the bargaining table, whereas only 20 percent of civil wars reached similar solutions. Instead, most internal wars ended with the extermination, expulsion, or capitulation of the losing side. In fact, groups fighting civil wars almost always chose to fight to the finish unless an outside power stepped in to guarantee a peace agreement. If a third party agreed to enforce the terms of a peace treaty, negotiations always succeeded regardless of the initial goals, ideology, or ethnicity of the participants. If a third party did not intervene, these talks usually failed.

This article reformulates liberal international relations (IR) theory in a nonideological and nonutopian form appropriate to empirical social science. Liberal IR theory elaborates the insight that state-society relations—the relationship of states to the domestic and transnational social context in which they are embedded—have a fundamental impact on state behavior in world politics. Societal ideas, interests, and institutions influence state behavior by shaping state preferences, that is, the fundamental social purposes underlying the strategic calculations of governments. For liberals, the configuration of state preferences matters most in world politics—not, as realists argue, the configuration of capabilities and not, as institutionalists (that is, functional regime theorists)maintain, the configuration of information and institutions. This article codifies this basic liberal insight in the form of three core theoretical assumptions, derives from them three variants of liberal theory, and demonstrates that the existence of a coherent liberal theory has significant theoretical, methodological, and empirical implications. Restated in this way, liberal theory deserves to be treated as a paradigmatic alternative empirically coequal with and analytically more fundamental than the two dominant theories in contemporary IR scholarship: realism and institutionalism.

Modern states have constructed a multiplicity of issue-specific regimes to facilitate collective action. The majority of these institutions are specific instances of the deeper institutional practices that structure modern international society, notably the fundamental institutions of contractual international law and multilateralism. Two observations can be made about fundamental institutions. First, they are “generic” structural elements of international societies. That is, their practice transcends changes in the balance of power and the configuration of interests, even if their density and efficacy vary. The modern practices of contractual international law and multilateralism intensified after 1945, but postwar developments built on institutional principles that were first endorsed by states during the nineteenth century and structured international relations long before the advent of American hegemony. Second, fundamental institutions differ from one society of states to another. While the governance of modern international society rests on the institutions of contractual international law and multilateralism, no such institutions evolved in ancient Greece. Instead, the city-states developed a sophisticated and successful system of third-party arbitration to facilitate ordered interstate relations. This institution, which operated in the absence of a body of codified interstate law, is best characterized as “authoritative trilateralism.”

Trade barriers, though usually considered welfare-reducing, are globally ubiquitous. In light of the enormous clash between what is and what ought to be, researchers have begun addressing the question of why countries so consistently pursue such apparently counterproductive policies.

International relations theorists have in recent years shown an interest in international norms and rules not equaled since the interwar period. This contemporary literature is, of course, quite different—i.e., better—than that of the 1920s and 1930s: it has greater intellectual depth, empirical backing, and explanatory power. The promise of this research, bolstered by the opportunities of the post–cold war era, is that norms encouraging free trade, protecting the environment, enhancing human rights, and controlling the spread and use of heinous weapons may have a substantial impact on the conduct and structure of international relations. But pessimists also exist. Some have taken up the stick E. H. Carr skillfully shook at idealists in an earlier period, arguing that the anarchic power-shaped international arena is not so malleable and that international norms and institutions have relatively little influence. On the one hand, we are pointed to the centrality of international norms; on the other, we are cautioned that norms are inconsequential. How do we make sense of these divergent claims? Which is right?

In recent international relations theory debates, constructivists have argued that explanations based primarily on interests and the material distribution of power cannot fully account for important international phenomena and that analysis of the social construction of state identities ought to precede, and may even explain, the genesis of state interests. This claim has proved difficult to operationalize empirically, though some persuasive results are now emerging. This article analyzes the relationship between state identity and state interest in the development of American neutral rights policy from U.S. independence to the War of 1812.

Japan's level of defense expenditure relative to the size of its economy has long been uniquely low among the major industrialized countries. As of 1995, Japan's expenditures stood at 0.96 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Even adding to this the approximately 0.3 percent of GDP devoted to pensions for retired personnel, the level of spending is considerably less than that of major Western states such as the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany, as well as industrialized Asian states such as South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore. Furthermore, these relative magnitudes have remained reasonably stable over the past few decades.

Nearly half a century has passed since Harold D. Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan generated a treatise on political theory that advocated analysis of power as a framework for analysis of political process. Fully half a century has passed since Hans J. Morgenthau confidently assured us of the universality, in politics as in nature, of the principle of the balance of power and defined the interests of states in terms of power. More than half a century has passed since Edward Hallett Carr set out to disabuse institutionalists and “idealists” of what he regarded as their utopian illusions and asserted a fundamental precept of the realist critique of prewar institutionalism, that politics is “in one sense always power politics.”3 The central role of power as an analytic construct in classical realist, structural realist, and structural neorealist scholarship has been so pervasive that the assertion requires no further elaboration. Still, the notion of “power” in the discipline and its usefulness as an analytic construct remain “essentially contested.”

While some structural realists and their liberal and institutionalist critics continue to fight a high-profile battle about the fundamental nature of international politics, a quieter discussion is progressing about how to integrate various aspects of realist thinking into a more coherent approach to security politics. The goal of this discussion is to marry the two major strands of contemporary realist thought: balance-of-power theory and security dilemma theory. Recent works advocate combining structural variables, such as the number of great actors in the system and the distribution of capabilities among them, with security dilemma variables, such as the comparative efficacy of offensive versus defensive doctrines given available weaponry and military training.

Scholars focusing on international relations generally or foreign policy decision making are now paying increasing attention to the ways in which mental constructs—ideas, beliefs, ideologies, or worldviews—affect political actors' perceptions and behavior. The influence of mental constructs in political interaction is particularly visible when actors are trying to extend interaction into new areas or to establish new modes of cooperation. This study will illuminate the impact of mental constructs in these situations by examining the development of outer space law. The Soviets' successful launch of Sputnik in October 1957 shifted outer space from the realm of science fiction and speculation to the realm of real international concerns. Governments were faced with the problem of determining not only what they wanted to do in space but also what sorts of rules for unilateral activity and mutual interaction should prevail there.

In recent decades a great expansion has occurred in world environmental organization, both governmental and nongovernmental, along with an explosion of worldwide discourse and communication about environmental problems. All of this constitutes a world environmental regime. Using the term regime a little more broadly than usual, we define world environmental regime as a partially integrated collection of world-level organizations, understandings, and assumptions that specify the relationship of human society to nature. The rise of an environmental regime has accompanied greatly expanded organization and activity in many sectors of global society. Explaining the growth of the environmental regime, however, poses some problems. The interests and powers of the dominant actors in world society—nation-states and economic interests—came late to the environmental scene. Thus these forces cannot easily be used to explain the rise of world mobilization around the environment, in contrast with other sectors of global society (for example, the international economic and national security regimes).

Do supranational institutions matter—do they deserve the status of an independent causal variable—in the politics of the European Community (EC)? Does the Commission of the European Communities matter? Does the European Court of Justice (ECJ) or the European Parliament? Is the EC characterized by continued member state dominance or by a runaway Commission and an activist Court progressively chipping away at this dominance? These are some of the more important questions for our understanding of the EC and of European integration. They have divided the two traditional schools of thought in regional integration, with neofunctionalists generally asserting, and intergovernmentalists generally denying, any important causal role for supranational institutions in the integration process. By and large, however, neither neofunctionalism nor intergovernmentalism has generated testable hypotheses regarding the conditions under which, and the ways in which, supranational institutions exert an independent causal influence on either EC governance or the process of European integration.

At some point during 1991–92, something substantial changed in the way Israel's security agencies interrogated Palestinian detainees. The change was not in the number of detainees interrogated; on any given day in 1993, some four hundred to six hundred Palestinians continued to be interrogated by either the General Security Services (GSS) or the military (Israel Defense Forces; IDF). Overall, Israel interrogated some five thousand Palestinians every year from 1988 to 1994. Nor was the change one of interrogation results: the conviction rate of Palestinians in the military courts remained above 96 percent, with most convictions based on confessions obtained during interrogation. According to official statistics, of the 83,321 Palestinians tried in military courts in the West Bank and Gaza Strip between 1988 and 1993, only 2,731, or 3.2 percent, were acquitted. The security forces were still questioning a remarkable proportion of the adult male population, obtaining vast amounts of information on Palestinian social, political, and military activities.

Domestic agricultural subsidy policies in the United States and in the European Union (EU) underwent substantial liberal reforms between 1990 and 1996. In the United States in 1990, Congress reduced acreage on which farmers could receive income-support payments (deficiency payments) by 15 percent under a budget reconciliation act. In the EU in 1991–92, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was dramatically modified under a set of reforms (the MacSharry reforms) that reduced internal cereal price guarantees by 29 percent over three years and obliged larger EU farmers to leave 15 percent of their arable land idle as a further check on excess production. Then in 1995–96, the U.S. Congress passed the Federal Agricultural Improvement and Reform (FAIR) Act, a sweeping measure that eliminated for at least seven years all deficiency payments to farmers as well as all annual land-idling programs. U.S. Senator Richard Lugar, chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, asserted that this new law would “change agricultural policy [in the United States] more fundamentally than any law in sixty years.”

An analyst of U.S. foreign economic policy observes that each wave of antiforeign sentiment associated with the surge of foreign direct investment (FDI) coming into the United States washes ashore a flotsam of restrictive and exclusionary laws that recedes slightly or becomes buried and forgotten in the sand only to advance again with a new wave. During the late 1980s, the controversy generated by the sharp rise of Japanese acquisitions in the United States washed ashore the latest flotsam of regulatory measures and further advanced the tangle of rules and regulations targeting inward foreign direct investment (IFDI). Of the various types of FDI, the present study is concerned mainly with the policy change toward foreign investment in an already established domestic business. This type of investment often involves merger or acquisition and is distinct from a “greenfield” investment where the foreign investor establishes “from scratch” a new business in the host economy.

Propelled by the oil boom of the mid-1970s the Middle East emerged as the world's fastest growing region. Hopes and expectations were high for Arab political consolidation, economic advancement, and cultural efflorescence. With falling oil prices and a devastating war between Iran and Iraq, these hopes had dimmed somewhat by the early 1980s. In 1985, however, the spectacular image of an Arab great power was still tantalizing. A Pan-Arab state, wrote two experts on the region, would include a total area of 13.7 million square kilometers,

International relations scholars have tended to focus on realism's common features rather than exploring potential differences. Realists do share certain assumptions and are often treated as a group, but such a broad grouping obscures systematic divisions within realist theory. Recently, some analysts have argued that it is necessary to differentiate within realism. This article builds on this line of argument. The potential, and need, to divide realism on the basis of divergent assumptions has so far been overlooked. In this article I argue that realism can be split into two competing branches by revealing latent divisions regarding a series of assumptions about state behavior. The first branch is Kenneth Waltz's well-known neorealist theory; a second branch, termed here “postclassical realism,” has yet to be delineated as a major alternative but corresponds with a number of realist analyses that cohere with one another and are incompatible with Waltzian neorealism.

Since the beginning of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) Uruguay Round the European Community (EC) has twice attempted to reform the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), resulting in the February 1988 stabilizers reform package and the May 1992 MacSharry reform package. Curiously, these two attempts at reform resulted in vastly different outcomes. The 1988 reform was incremental in nature and functioned mainly as a stopgap measure. The 1992 reform, however, called for a shift from nontransparent consumer subsidies to transparent taxpayer subsidies. This shift represented a fundamental change in the philosophy underlying the CAP and laid the groundwork for an agreement in the Uruguay Round. This article examines the conditions under which this important policy shift occurred. It employs an interpretative case study method that demonstrates the empirical value of Robert Putnam's two-level game model when it is expanded to consider the simultaneous interaction of negotiations at three levels: the domestic level, the EC level, and the international level. The study concludes that the power and heterogeneity of interest groups at various levels of the game matter, that the real and perceived costs of no agreement affect the degree of substantive reform, and, finally, that a three-level interactive strategy is important in achieving an acceptable agreement at each level of the game.