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International regimes: lessons from inductive analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Donald J. Puchala  and
Raymond F. Hopkins
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Extract

International regimes are attitudinal phenomena. They are thus subjective and exist primarily as participants' understandings, expectations or convictions about legitimate, appropriate or moral behavior. Regimes are identified and their tenets described by studying records of participants' perceptions gleaned either from interview transcripts or from appropriate documents. Theorizing concerning international regimes currently focuses upon identifying analytic characteristics that might become bases for comparative empirical studies and foundations for generalization. Particularly promising are comparisons of international regimes with regard to specificity, formality, modes of change, and distributive bias. The regime that buttressed late 19th century European colonialism is compared to the international food regime of the present day with respect to these analytic features. Observations on the two cases suggest reasons why some international regimes are durable and others fragile, why some invite wide compliance and others provoke deviation, and why some change while the international structure of power remains constant but others change only after the weak become strong.

Type
Grotain Perspectives
Information
International Organization , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , Spring 1982 , pp. 245 - 275
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1982

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References

1 See Young, Oran R., “International Regimes: Problems of Conception Formation,” World Politics (04 1980): 331–56Google Scholar; Haas, Ernst, “Why Collaborate? Issue-Linkage and International Regimes,” World Politics (04 1980): 357–405Google Scholar; Keohane, Robert O. and Nye, Joseph S., Power and Interdependence (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977)Google Scholar; Brown, S. et al. , Regimes for the Ocean, Outer Space, and Weather (Washington, D. C.: Brookings, 1977)Google Scholar; Morse, Edward L., “The Global Commons,” Journal of International Affairs (Spring/Summer 1977): 1–21Google Scholar; Hopkins, Raymond F. and Puchala, Donald J., Global Food Interdependence: Challenge to American Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Hopkins, and Puchala, , eds., The Global Political Economy of Food (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979)Google Scholar; and Hopkins, Raymond F., “Global Management Networks: The Internationalization of Domestic Bureaucracies,” International Social Science Journal (01 1978): 31–46Google Scholar. The major focus of the Council on Foreign Relations' 1980's Project on the construction of regimes is a good indicator of the importance the concept has achieved in both academic and practitioner circles.

2 This definition draws upon a point made by Easton, David, “An Approach to the Analysis of Political Systems,” World Politics (04 1957): 383–400Google Scholar.

3 For example, Lucy Mair finds that regimes exist to prescribe and proscribe behavior even in states with no formal government. See Primitive Government (Baltimore: Penguin, 1960)Google Scholar.

4 Young, , “International Regimes,” p. 340Google Scholar. In our sense, then, a regime is more specific than structure, such as the power relationship of the North to the South or the distribution of power in a particular issue-area, but is more enduring than mere historical case analysis of ongoing issues. The reality of a regime exists in the subjectivity of individuals who hold, communicate, reinforce or change the norms and authoritative expectations related to the set of activities and conduct in question.

5 Greenwood, Ted and Haffa, Robert Jr, “Supply-Side Non Proliferation,” Foreign Policy no. 42 (Spring 1981): 125–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 See Haas, , “Why Collaborate,” p. 397Google Scholar.

7 See, for example, Langer, William L., The Diplomacy of Imperialism, 2d ed. (New York: Knopf, 1972)Google Scholar; Palmer, R. R., A History of the Modem World (New York: Knopf, 1957), pp. 613–59Google Scholar.

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10 Albrecht-Carrie, René, A Diplomatic History of Europe since the Congress of Vienna (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), pp. 207–226Google Scholar.

11 The events surrounding the Fashoda Crisis well illustrate this point. Cf. Langer, , Diplomacy of Imperialism, pp. 551 ff.Google Scholar; Albrecht-Carrie, , Diplomatic History, pp. 223–25Google Scholar.

12 Snyder, Louis L., ed., The Imperialism Reader (Princeton, N. J.: Van Nostrand, 1962), pp. 206 & passimGoogle Scholar.

13 The Germans, for example, with their policy of Schrecklichkeit killed over 100, 000 Hehe and Herreros in German East and West Africa.

14 The Buganda, for example, expanded their territorial sphere within Uganda with British support, thanks to their collaboration. See Apter, David, The Political Kingdom in Uganda (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1962)Google Scholar.

15 Pratt, Expansionists of 1898; see also Pratt, J.W., Expansionists of 1812 (New York: Peter Smith, 1949)Google Scholar; and Langer, , Diplomacy of Imperialism, pp. 67–96Google Scholar.

16 Ibid.; Salmon, Edward, “The Literature of Empire,” in The British Empire vol. 11 (London, 1924)Google Scholar.

17 Even as late as 1939 Robert Delavignette could write a book, Freedom and Authority in French West Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950 [original French version, 1939]) based on this paternalistic view. The book gives advice to colonial officers on how to deal with subject tribes and chiefsGoogle Scholar.

18 For a discussion of the principle of self-determination see Emerson, Robert, From Empire to Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), pp. 295–362CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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20 Rosecrance, Richard, Action and Reaction in World Politics (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), pp. 220–73Google Scholar.

21 Snyder, , Imperialism Reader, pp. 209, 304–324Google Scholar.

22 Moon, Parker T., Imperialism and World Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1928)Google Scholar.

23 Albrecht-Carrie, , Diplomatic History, pp. 243–44Google Scholar.

24 Kay, David A., “The Politics of Decolonization: The New Nations and the United Nations Political Process,” International Organization 21, 4 (Autumn 1967): 786–811CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Hopkins, and Puchala, , Global Political Economy of Food, pp. 18–27Google Scholar.

26 For an elaboration of this point historically, see Malenbaum, Wilfred, The World Wheat Economy: 1885–1939 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 See the figures in Hopkins, and Puchala, , Global Food Interdependence, p. 36Google Scholar. The U. S. share in this was about 80% and the Canadian about 12%.

28 See Mc Calla, Alex F., “A Duopoly Model of World Wheat Pricing,” Journal of Farm Economics 48, 3 (1968), pp. 711–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Hopkins and Puchala, Global Food Interdependence, chap. 2.

29 Morgan, Dan, Merchants of Grain (New York: Viking Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

30 Sanderson, Fred H., Japan's Food Prospects and Policies (Washington, D. C.: Brookings, 1978), pp. 1–2Google Scholar.

31 Christensen, Cheryl, “World Hunger: A Structural Approach,” in Hopkins, and Puchala, , Global Political Economy of Food, pp. 171–200Google Scholar.

32 The one exception was Brennon Jones of Bread for the World. Key talks at the negotiations involved American Agriculture Department negotiators who worked out their positions in consultation with Canadians and with representatives of American wheat farmers (the latter served on the United States delegation) and representatives of the EEC (where French officials played a leading role). Soviet Union trade officials also played an important contextual role through clarifying their intentions but declining to participate in reserve obligations.

33 For some of this information we are indebted to Daniel Morrow. In 1978–79 he was Special Assistant to the Under Secretary for International Affairs and Commodity Programs, United States Department of Agriculture, and one of the principal negotiators working on the food aid convention.

34 Other challenges to this norm may be found in the works of revisionists such as Lappe, Frances Moore and Collins, Joseph, Food First (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977)Google Scholar.

35 See Shephard, Jack, The Politics of Starvation (New York: Carnegie Endowment, 1975)Google Scholar.

36 Talcot Parsons, for example, argues that anomie is the absence of norms while its opposite, institutionalization, is marked by structured complementarity of norms. See The Social System (New York: Free Press, 1964), p. 39Google ScholarPubMed.

37 Michael Mandelbaum, for example, believes that important but informal principles and norms exist with respect to nuclear weapons. Our thanks for his comments at the Palm Springs Conference, 27 February 1981.