Suchergebnisse

A rising protectionist tide is threatening to undermine the domestic political foundation necessary to sustain America's liberal trade posture through the 1980s. U.S. trade officials and recent administrations remain committed to a liberal trade order, but severe crises in key economic sectors of the economy, regionally concentrated in the traditional industrial region of the country, are cutting the ground from beneath them internationally and domestically.At the recent GATT ministerial meeting in Geneva, for example, the United States pressed hard for expanding international trade liberalization in agriculture, services, and high technology industries—all areas of economic activity in which the United States enjoys a strong competitiye position and trade surpluses. American trade officials in Geneva had the burden of advancing their arguments for further trade liberalization against the backdrop of recent U.S. actions, taken in response to domestic pressures, which imposed import quotas on European steel and Japanese automobiles and which adopted a more restrictive trade regime for textiles and apparel in the renewal of the Multi-Fiber Agreement. While the GATT meeting was in progress, the U.S. Congress was considering a domestic content bill that would require auto-makers selling over 900,000 vehicles in the American market to use 90 percent U.S. labor and parts by 1985. U.S. trade representative William Brock III called this "the worst piece of economic legislation since the 1930s." The House passed the bill with 215 votes, but it died in the Senate. The bill will certainly be re-introduced in the more protectionist 98th Congress.

Multinational corporations can be viewed either as independent actors operating in the interstices of state-to-state relations or as an instrument of foreign policy of states within which the parent companies are located. In either case these enterprises pose a threat to the sovereignty of states, and international organizations have been employed to deal with these challenges. The advanced industrial states of the West have found international organizations useful in attempts to harmonize national policies to avoid potential trade and investment disequilibria, to deal with problems of overlapping jurisdiction, and to encourage the development of multinational corporations. Labor unions in the West have found functionally specific nongovernmental organizations valuable in enhancing their bargaining position vis-à-vis enterprises organized multinationally. In general, these activities reflect a view of the multinational corporation as an independent actor very sensitive to global opportunities. Less developed countries are typically very wary of multinational corporations and tend to view them as instruments through which they could be subjugated to the West. These states have shown an interest in using universal and regional organizations to coordinate and buttress their position in negotiations with the multinational firms. Most international organizations are only beginning to deal explicitly with the multinational corporation phenomenon, but while these activities should increase, it is doubtful that we will soon see the emergence of a new global international organization to focus states' attempts to oversee the behavior of these enterprises as they affect international relations.

Ten years ago Chadwick F. Alger identified a major problem in international organizations research. He decried the tendency to study international organizations primarily in terms of "their accomplishment of their explicit goals through the explicit mechanisms established for this purpose." In most cases this meant concentration on the passage or defeat of resolutions in public meetings and on the extent to which the problems addressed in these resolutions have been dealt with efficaciously through United Nations bodies. Alger suggested that "this type of inquiry does not produce the only, nor necessarily the most important, impact that the organization has on relations among members." Instead, we should devote more attention to an examination of how international organizations "affect the broader international system in which they operate even when problems are not resolved within their walls."