The debate between realists and liberals has reemerged as an axis of contention in international relations theory. Revolving in the past around competing theories of human nature, the debate is more concerned today with the extent to which state action is influenced by “structure” (anarchy and the distribution of power) versus “process” (interaction and learning) and institutions. Does the absence of centralized political authority force states to play competitive power politics? Can international regimes overcome this logic, and under what conditions? What in anarchy is given and immutable, and what is amenable to change?

Multilateralism characterizes, to varying degrees, patterns of interaction among states and the formal organizations they construct. The utility of multilateral norms or organizations varies with the type of cooperation problem states confront. Thus, the functional logic of international cooperation leads to hypotheses about the conditions under which the institution of multilateralism may be a feasible and efficient solution, as in coordination problems, and those under which it will not, as in collaboration problems. Within these constraints, powerful states choose institutions that will serve their interests, with multilateral arrangements becoming more attractive as the future is valued more highly. Multilateral institutions should be stable in circumstances of changing distributions of power, relative to more hierarchical institutions. The vulnerability of patterns of international cooperation to various exogenous changes depends on the type of strategic interaction underlying state behavior.

In 1989, peaceful change, which a leading realist theorist had declared a very low-probability event in international politics less than a decade before, accommodated the most fundamental geopolitical shift of the postwar era and perhaps of the entire twentieth century: the collapse of the Soviet East European empire and the attendant end of the cold war. Many factors were responsible for that shift. But there seems little doubt that multilateral norms and institutions have helped stabilize their international consequences. Indeed, such norms and institutions appear to be playing a significant role in the management of a broad array of regional and global changes in the world system today.

How decision makers define state interests and formulate policies to deal with complex and technical issues can be a function of the manner in which the issues are represented by specialists to whom they turn for advice in the face of uncertainty. The contributors to this issue examine the role that networks of knowledge-based experts—epistemic communities—play in articulating the cause-and-effect relationships of complex problems, helping states identify their interests, framing the issues for collective debate, proposing specific policies, and identifying salient points for negotiation. Their analyses demonstrate that control over knowledge and information is an important dimension of power and that the diffusion of new ideas and data can lead to new patterns of behavior and prove to be an important determinant of international policy coordination.

The discipline of international relations faces a new debate of fundamental significance. After the realist challenge to the pervasive idealism of the interwar years and the social scientific argument against realism in the late 1950s, it is now the turn of critical theorists to dispute the established paradigms of international politics, having been remarkably successful in several other fields of social inquiry. In essence, critical theorists claim that all social reality is subject to historical change, that a normative discourse of understandings and values entails corresponding practices, and that social theory must include interpretation and dialectical critique. In international relations, this approach particularly critiques the ahistorical, scientific, and materialist conceptions offered by neorealists. Traditional realists, by contrast, find a little more sympathy in the eyes of critical theorists because they join them in their rejection of social science and structural theory. With regard to liberal institutionalism, critical theorists are naturally sympathetic to its communitarian component while castigating its utilitarian strand as the accomplice of neorealism. Overall, the advent of critical theory will thus focus the field of international relations on its “interparadigm debate” with neorealism.

After much deliberation, member governments of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) agreed to pursue a new regime for international trade in services as part of the Uruguay Round negotiations begun in 1986. The talks have produced a draft agreement—the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS)—which, if ratified, could have important implications for the world economy. But when the question of trade in services first arose, most governments did not understand the issues or know whether a multilateral agreement would be to their advantage. If anything, their existing national interests and institutions seemed contrary to the goal of liberalizing trade in services. This article argues that an epistemic community of services experts played a crucial role in clarifying and framing the complex issue of trade in services and placing it on the global agenda. Through their analyses of the services issues and their interactions with policymakers, the epistemic community members were able to convince governments that international services transactions had common trade properties and that the liberalization of services through removal of nontariff barriers was potentially advantageous to developing as well as developed countries. In addition to fostering international negotiations within the GATT forum and helping states redefine their interests, the community members were instrumental in specifying a range of policy options to be considered. However, once governments understood their interests and domestic constituencies were mobilized, their policy choices were influenced more by power and bargaining dynamics than by continuing, direct epistemic community influence.

Why has the concept of multilateralism not played a more prominent role in theories of international relations? The prima facie case for the importance of multilateral activity in the international realm would seem great. The world, we constantly tell ourselves, is increasingly drawn together. The Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck argues that most external effects of production and consumption are external not only to the household but also to the country in which they occur. According to many different indicators, interdependence is on the increase in nearly all parts of the world. International political economists talk about global indivisibilities, ranging from peace to pollution. Most important international problems-including pollution, energy, managing airline traffic, and maintaining rules for trade and investment-intrinsically involve many countries simultaneously. What makes a problem international is that often it cannot be dealt with effectively within the national arena. Costs and benefits spill into the external arena. These external effects are frequently so great that domestic goals cannot be accomplished without coordinated multilateral action.

When nations negotiate, often the toughest bargaining is not between nations but within them. The reason is simple: proposed international agreements, no matter how much in the “national interest,” inevitably have differential effects on factional concerns, threatening to make winners of some and losers of others. Potential losers often have the power to prevent agreements not to their liking, thereby limiting what is possible in international negotiations. This article uses a negotiation analytic framework to analyze the consequences of such limits. It argues that limits need not be a liability for a divided country—under some circumstances they may provide a bargaining advantage—and demonstrates circumstances under which intracountry differences are desirable and undesirable from a national perspective. More specifically, the article shows that the effect of domestic differences on international negotiations depends on the configuration of domestic interests, on the nature of domestic political processes, and on characteristics of the international bargain. It then explores a particular dimension of the domestic process: the ability to link issues which allow factions to make internal side-payments. It demonstrates that internal issue linkage can have profound effects on the external bargain and explores the strategic implications of side-payments for those who would manage domestic differences in international negotiations.

As the world moves away from the familiar bipolar cold war era, many international relations theorists have renewed an old debate about which is more stable: a world with two great powers or a world with many great powers. Based on the chief assumptions of structural realism—namely, that the international system is characterized by anarchy and that states are unitary actors seeking to survive in this anarchic system—some security analysts are predicting that a world of several great powers will lead to a return to the shifting alliances and instabilities of the multipolar era that existed prior to World War II. For instance, John Mearsheimer argues that “prediction[s] of peace in a multipolar Europe [are] flawed.” Thomas Christensen and Jack Snyder argue that states in a multipolar world can follow either the pre-World War I or the pre-World War II alliance pattern, thus implying that a third course is improbable. They further assert that “the fundamental, invariant structural feature, international anarchy, generally selects and socializes states to form balancing alignments in order to survive in the face of threats from aggressive competitors.” The realist argument predicts that great powers in a self-help international system will balance one another through arms races and alliance formations.

An American epistemic community played a key role in creating the international shared understanding and practice of nuclear arms control. In the absence of nuclear war, leaders' expectations of nuclear war and of its control were affected by causal theories and abstract propositions and models which, given their “scientific” and technical nature, were developed by an epistemic community. This study, which emphasizes the roles played by epistemic communities in policy innovation and in the diffusion of understandings across nations and communities, analyzes how the theoretical and practical ideas of the arms control epistemic community became political expectations, were diffused to the Soviet Union, and were ultimately embodied in the 1972 antiballistic missile (ABM) arms control treaty. In contrast to those studies that have concentrated primarily on the workings of international epistemic communities, this study stresses the notion that domestically developed theoretical expectations, which were worked out by a national group of experts and selected by the American government as the basis for negotiations with the Soviets, became the seed of the ABM regime. Moreover, by suggesting that the arms control epistemic community was really an aggregation of several factions that shared common ground against various intellectual and policy rivals, this study sheds light on the question of how much coherence an epistemic community requires. The political selection of new conceptual understandings, followed by their retention and diffusion at national and international levels, suggests an evolutionary approach at odds with explanations of international change advanced by structural realism and approaches based on it.

With the end of the cold war, the military posture of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has entered a period of profound change. Prior to the recent dramatic political events in Europe, however, NATO conventional force levels in the Central Region had been remarkably stable for some three decades. This article seeks to explain this record of stability in terms of three widely used theories of international relations. It argues that balance-of-power theory and public goods theory cannot alone provide a satisfactory account. Rather, these traditional approaches for understanding alliance behavior must be supplemented by regime theory, which emphasizes the constraining effects of enduring institutional factors even in the face of structural change. Specifically, it shows how an international regime has influenced the provision of conventional forces in the Central Region by alliance members. More generally, this analysis seeks to contribute to the literature on international regimes in three ways. First, it demonstrates that regimes do matter by providing an example of their importance for explaining state behavior and international outcomes. Second, it extends regime theory to relations among military allies. Third, it elaborates a comprehensive model for understanding why states actually comply with regime injunctions. The model stresses both the ways in which regimes effectively modify the international environment within which states operate, altering the costs and benefits associated with different courses of action, and the ways in which participating states may internalize regime norms and rules, thereby making compliance increasingly automatic.

At the end of the 1940s, the United States and several West European states allied to defend themselves against invasion by the Soviet Union. Balance-ofpower theory predicts the recurrent formation of such balances among states. But it says little about the precise nature of the balance, the principles on which it will be constructed, or its institutional manifestations. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has been a peculiar mix. As a formal institution, NATO has through most of its history been distinctly nonmultilateral, with the United States commanding most decision-making power and responsibility. At the same time, NATO provided security to its member states in a way that strongly reflected multilateral principles. Within NATO, security was indivisible. It was based on a general organizing principle, the principle that the external boundaries of alliance territory were completely inviolable and that an attack on any border was an attack on all. Diffuse reciprocity was the norm. In the terms set out by John Ruggie, NATO has generally scored low as a multilateral organization but high as an institution of multilateralism.

Multilateralism, international governance of the “many,” was defined by the United States after 1945 in terms of certain principles, particularly opposition to bilateral and discriminatory arrangements that were believed to enhance the leverage of the powerful over the weak and to increase international conflict. Postwar multilateralism also expressed an impulse to universality (John Ruggie's “generalized organizing principles”) that implied relatively low barriers to participation in these arrangements. A ticket of admission was always required, whether acceding to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) or joining the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Nevertheless, the price of that ticket was not set so high that less powerful or less wealthy states could not hope to participate.

Postwar management of whaling was marked by two major policy changes: the 1974 adoption of a more restrictive set of management procedures and the 1982 adoption of a moratorium on commercial whaling. In both cases, U.S. government efforts to ensure compliance with the International Whaling Commission (IWC) decisions were central to the outcome. Yet no government's choices can be understood without examining how decision makers were influenced by three nongovernmental groups—an economic interest group of whaling industry managers, an expert epistemic community of cetologists, and an issue-oriented lobbying coalition of environmentalists—which vied for influence nationally and transnationally. The epistemic community of cetologists shaped particular policy choices only in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Earlier, it was eclipsed by the industry managers and, later, by the environmentalists. However, it had sufficient continuing influence to limit the range of policy options and thereby prevent the adoption of the most consumptionist alternatives in the 1940s and 1950s and of the most preservationist ones in recent years.

Faced with a formidable competitiveness problem, the American government chief executive appeared to offer a series of ad hoc responses in the 1980s. Contrarily, this article suggests that executive responses to foreign economic challenges follow a predictable pattern. Pointing to the interactive effects of ideology and interest, this article argues that both the degree and type of executive response, be it in the form of market-opening strategies, of temporary or permanent forms of protectionism, or of adopting a laissez-faire approach, can be predicted based on two factors: whether a sector is characterized as “high tech” and whether it is considered to be competitive. A major implication of this argument is that the U.S. chief executive has used trade policy as a surrogate for industrial policy; but in so doing, the strategic considerations associated with industrial policies have been bypassed. The major effect is that the executive fails to intervene only in the realm of an “infant industry” policy—the area most likely to generate a dynamic economy. The product of this combiantion of protectionist policies is a stagnant economy that we term “compromise protectionism.”

There is a distinctively repetitive quality about trade policy problems. Domestic economic growth slows; producers seek protection against foreign competitors; and national decision makers raise barriers to trade while at the same time criticizing their counterparts in other governments for engaging in similar practices. Because trade is one of the more important topics in international and comparative political economy and because this scenario has played itself out more than a few times, it is not surprising that a number of theorists have sought to model the underlying processes thought to produce movements toward and away from protectionism.

Sectoral analyses reveal an emerging tension between a global market and an anarchic political system and oblige scholars to examine the dynamic and reciprocal relationship between states and markets. This analysis of commercial-class aircraft manufacturing, a strategic industry, demonstrates how corporate behavior affects political choices and vice versa. It suggests that corporate and political policymaking is a messy process: first, policymakers must respond to multiple and often conflicting demands, from both domestic and international constituencies; second, they are influenced by a number of variables, including ideology, interest group activity, consequences of previous policies, perceptions about their state's position in the international system, and available knowledge about how to realize specific goals. Sets of competing variables which act as centripetal and centrifugal forces are identified and analyzed in terms of how they have impelled corporations to seek transnational production arrangements. Three prototypical structures of international production are delineated, and the potential consequences for states and corporations participating in each model are discussed. The key objectives of the article are to encourage the use of multivariate analyses to explain change in the international system and to provoke further debate about the appropriate policies to pursue to achieve global economic competitiveness across a number of industry sectors.

Serious consideration of the role of humanitarian norms and institutions in policymaking does not require the abandonment of an interest-based, rational actor model of policy analysis. However, it does require that scholars focus their attention on international institutional arrangements which are normally overlooked by realists but which may determine the ways in which policymakers match their interests with policy options. The analysis presented here assumes that policies are based on policymakers' calculations of national interests, but it posits that these calculations are affected by incentives and policy options emanating from international norm-promoting institutions. The study attempts to explain how the intervention of an institution of this type led policymakers in two cases to reassess and reinterpret their interests on issues of humanitarian norm compliance.

The decision of the European Community (EC) members to complete their “internal market” by the end of 1992, as embodied in the 1987 Single European Act (SEA), may represent the most ambitious instance of multilateral cooperation since the construction of the post-World War II international order. The economic objective of internal market completion is the removal of a wide array of nontariff barriers to trade that elsewhere have proved politically intractable, including border controls, national standards, preferential procurement policies, and industrial subsidies. The institutional structures underpinning the internal market are more constraining on the behavior of sovereign states than has been the case for other international regimes. The SEA replaced unanimity voting (national vetoes) in the primary decision-making body of the EC, the Council of Ministers, with a system of majority voting over matters pertaining to the internal market. In addition, the internal market is buttressed by an elaborate and powerful legal system. EC law is considered to have supremacy over national laws and to have “direct effect” in domestic jurisdictions, regardless of whether it is explicitly incorporated through legislation.

The emergence of scientific evidence that emissions of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were depleting the stratospheric ozone layer prompted an epistemic community of atmospheric scientists and concerned policymakers to push for regulations regarding CFC use. Members of the transnational epistemic community played a primary role in gathering information, disseminating it to governments and CFC manufacturers, and helping them formulate international, domestic, and industry policies regarding CFC consumption and production. Community members contributed to the timing and stringency of CFC regulations through a combination of strategies ranging from the persuasion of individuals to the capture of various decision-making channels. Most important, by influencing the actions of the United States and DuPont, the largest producer of CFCs, the epistemic community changed the external environment in which policy decisions were made by other governments and firms.