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In the last ten years, employment in the textile and clothing industry in the European Community has decreased by roughly one million workers. In the face of falling employment, profits, and investment, and of surplus capacity, business and labor have increasingly pressured state and European authorities for adjustment assistance and import protection. Although most industrialized countries face similar pressures, policy making in the member states of the European Economic Community is made difficult by the uneven development of the EEC, which regulates trade policy and state aids to industry and restricts business practices but which is not able to construct interventionist or structural policies. Further complicating the situation is the split between two groups of states that differ profoundly on whether the EEC should adopt a liberal trading, noninterventionist position or a protectionist trade policy combined with state aids to mitigate the economic and social effects of restructuring. Tracing these developments over the last ten years, I argue that contradictions in the European political economy in textiles have led to a protectionist bias in Community policies, notwithstanding important developments in outward processing as a means of restructuring.

The article by Chase-Dunn, Pallas, and Kentor (1982) presents a critique of previously used research designs and two "new" multilevel designs for testing propositions about the world-system. Recognizing that world-system analysis presents researchers with methodological conundrums such as the degrees of freedom problem, we welcome attempts to adapt designs or create new ones that can enable tests of research hypotheses derived from theories of the world-system. Because the research design, with its many potential ramifications, has a vital place in the research process, discussions of the subject are important and require critical reading.

The European Community (EC) has been in existence for over twenty years and its permanence is no longer seriously questioned. This recognition of the EC as a permanent component of the global system is partially acknowledged by the shift of scholarly research from the internal problems of Community development to its external relations. Here a number of important questions are unre solved : Is the EC a coherent global actor or only an arena where representatives of nation states carry out their foreign policies? Does the EC operate effectively in the political arena or is its power limited to economic matters? The authors address these questions by dividing their subject matter up into EC relations with the advanced industrial societies, and relations with the developing countries. In the former category they examine EC external policy in agriculture and energy. In the latter category the EC's attempt to formulate a development policy is examined from six different per spectives. Regardless of the degree of common purpose and cohesion evident in the EC's activities, it clearly is an important actor for both the industrial and nonindustrial countries.

The European Community (EC) has been in existence for over twenty years & its permanance is no longer seriously questioned. This recognition of the EC as a durable component of the global system is partially acknowledged by the shift of scholarly research from the internal problems of Community development to its external relations. Here a number of important questions are unresolved: Is the EC a coherent global actor or only an arena where representatives of nation-states carry out their foreign policies? Does the EC operate effectively in the political arena or is its power limited to economic matters? To address these questions, EC relations with the advanced industrial societies & with the developing countries are examined. In the former category EC external policy in agriculture & energy is scrutinized. In the latter category, EC's attempt to formulate a development policy is viewed from six different perspectives. Regardless of the degree of common puropse & cohesion evident in the EC's activities, it clearly is an importnat actor for both the industrial & nonindustrial countries. Modified HA.