Studies of international regimes have sought to describe international collaborative arrangements in more systematic terms than in the past, and to analyze their development in terms of major schools of international relations theory. This article refines the commonly used definition of regimes and elucidates the major hypotheses of one theoretical school, structural realism. The strength and nature of the international commodity trade regime are systematically described, and their development is analyzed in terms of the major hypotheses of structural realism. In large part, these hypotheses are supported by the analysis of what is a relatively weak international regime.

Students of comparative politics have long acknowledged the importance of such institutional factors as electoral systems, parliamentary versus presidential rule, and the strength of parties; but they have either regarded the institutions as given or have explained them entirely in domestic terms (associating proportional representation, for example, with the intensity of social cleavages). In economically advanced democracies, however, these institutional aspects can be plausibly linked to dependence on trade: proportional representation, the parliamentary system, strong parties, and large electoral districts have “survival value” for developed democracies exposed to trade. That the recently revived agitation for proportional representation in the United Kingdom has been cast explicitly in terms of economic necessity and dependence on trade adds force to this argument, and suggests the need for further historical research on other cases of institutional adaptation and change.

The concept of a “regime” is frequently used to describe and explain behavior in international political economy. Peter Cowhey and Edward Long, attempting to test theories of surplus capacity and hegemonic decline, advanced a version of a regime governing international trade in automobiles which was fundamentally liberal from 1966 to 1975, but then collapsed into protectionism. Their diagnosis is mistaken, however, because the trade regime for autos was neither as liberal as they assert during the 1950s and 1960s, nor as protectionist as they believe it has become in the 1980s. The discussion focuses on a new definition of the auto trade regime based on four fundamental rules that have persisted since the 1950s. By examining data on auto imports since 1955 on a region-by-region basis, it becomes clear that the trade expansion of the postwar years was not based on a global liberalization of the trade regime, but on carefully managed regional arrangements that favored imports within the region, or extra-regional imports that did not threaten domestic producers. The flurry of restraints on Japanese imports in recent years is not a collapse into protectionism, but a reinforcement of the fundamental regime rules. The auto industry case illustrates the tendency of analysts to underestimate protectionist elements in industry trade regimes and to overestimate the amount of changes that take place in their fundamental rules.

This article reconciles common policy usage with scholarly definition. The system of cooperation on non-proliferation has often been termed an international “regime,” but there has not been any systematic effort to determine if this is actually true. The discussion also attempts to reconcile the formation and maintenance of this system of cooperation with contemporary international relations theory. The central argument is that the system of international cooperation on non-proliferation does constitute a regime, but that such a regime presents a serious anomaly for contemporary theory. The article concludes that power and egoistic self-interest are inadequate to account for the regime's formation and maintenance. The inadequacies of both the hegemonic stability and functional theories point towards another independent variable that needs central consideration in regime analysis: knowledge and learning.