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In the 21 years since the conclusion of the Second World War, a complicated, piecemeal framework of trading arrangements under various international organizations has been created. Now there is concern, internationally and domestically, as to whether this framework is a durable basis for expanded world trade.

Specialists in the field of international organization have noted with some alarm a decline of interest among students and foundations in the study of the United Nations system. There has been a shift toward the study of regionalism and the theory of integration. The former shift reflects one reality of postwar world politics—the division of a huge and heterogeneous international system into subsystems in which patterns of cooperation and ways of controlling conflicts are either more intense or less elusive than in the global system. The interest in integration reflects both the persistence and the transformation of the kind of idealism that originally pervaded, guided, and at times distorted the study of international organization. We have come to understand that integration, in the sense of a process that devalues sovereignty, gradually brings about the demise of the nation-state, and leads to the emergence of new foci of loyalty and authority, is only one, and by no means the most important, of the many functions performed by global international organizations. This has led only in part to a more sober and searching assessment of these functions. It has resulted primarily in a displacement of interest toward those geographically more restricted institutions (like the European Communities) whose main task seems to be to promote integration.

From earliest times, hostile propaganda has been in wide use among men and between nations; it has also been deeply resented and even violently resisted. But only re cently has the world developed a system of principles and norms designed to curb and even to outlaw its use. Similar to the evo lution of international rules intended to proscribe aggressive war, the culmination of the movement to curb international commu nication considered dangerous to peace has come only in the twentieth century. Attention has focused not only on propa ganda leading to acts of subversion and to outright aggression and war, but also on propaganda that is defamatory of a sov ereign state and of its leaders and representatives. So exten sive is this body of norms that today, as the hostile propaganda between nations continues unabated, especially in times of stress, the real need is not so much for more rules to be drafted or new treaties to be signed and ratified. What we require is the establishment of authoritative and acceptable means for the interpretation of the existing norms and their effective enforce ment.