Canadian-American relations have tended to bore statesmen and scholars who long to be where the action is. According to one scholar, "study of Canadian-American relations tells one almost nothing about the big problems facing the world," while in a classic essay Arnold Wolfers used the unguarded border as an example of "indifference to power." If we view world politics with "realist" assumptions that unified states are the only actors, force is the major source of power, and solving the military security dilemma is their overwhelming objective, then Canadian-American relations are indeed dull.
This article presents both a history and an administrative analysis of the United Nations Volunteers, an international organization established by a General Assembly resolution in December 1970. The hope that the new organization would presage a new era of multinational volunteerism has proven groundless. In seeking to explain the ineffectiveness of the UN Volunteers, I look inside the organization and find that it has little or no control over its six principal functions. This extreme decentralization of responsibility is then explained not by a static description of the institutional but by focusing on the dynamic process by which state and transnational actors exercised influence during the different stages of the organization's establishment and development. Those actors whose autonomy was most jeopardized by a new volunteer organization were most active in defining and limiting the scope of its operations. The relative lobbying advantages of state and transnational actors meshed with bureaucratic and budgetary constraints to ensure an enfeebled organization.
In their work on a series of monographs, the themes of which follow, a group from the Section for International Politics of the German Political Science Association posits the following assump tions : (a) that international relations and the foreign policies of individual states can be suffi ciently explained only when considered within the hierarchical structure of world society; and (b) that this structure, carried by the interests and mechanism of capitalism, represents a system of dominance ('Herrschaft'). 1) Empirical analysis of penetration processes and dependency structures in various strata of world society. This includes the global as well as respective national historical conditions, and also the socio-economic changes in and between the center nations which generated waves of penetra tion. 2) Analysis of the core area of the more or less integrated international center, including multi national corporations and bank systems; of the effects of the international division of labor with regard to desintegration and retardation of devel opment in the international and intranational peripheries of world society. 3) Analysis of the role of the state apparatuses as agents of the national centers as well as of transnational actors. 4) Analysis of the nature of the competition between the capitalist and the socialist systems and its function in stabilizing or destabilizing the international system of dominance. 5) Examination of the relations between socialist societies as to the extent to which they represent reactions to the capitalist environment or autonomous transition forms, and as to the con clusion to be drawn for emancipating non- socialist peripheries. 6) Estimation of the possibilities for emancipa tory strategies of dissociation in the peripheries aiming at nonviolent capital accumulation, divi sion of labor, and cultural development, all these free of dominance.
This article examines the United States-Canadian defense issue area from a transnational and transgovernmental perspective, and attempts to develop conceptually the transgovernmental dimension through empirical application. The first part delineates those factors that encourage transnational and transgovernmental activity in the defense issue area. The second part considers pure intergovernmental transactions, referring to United States-Canadian dealings in which there is no transnational or transgovernmental activity. Because we know so little about how these dealings occur, this section examines pure intergovernmental transactions as a three-stage issue flow: preprocess, process, and postprocess. The third section identifies and examines the dynamics of mixed transactions, referring to intergovernmental flows having transnational or transgovernmental activity that does not essentially alter the outcomes of the flows. The fourth part identifies transformative transactions, referring to intergovernmental flows that become transnational or transgovernmental flows (or the reverse) through the involvement of new actors that significantly alter the outcomes of the flows. In summation, the fifth section considers those factors militating against transnational and transgovernmental activity in the defense area.
As events since October 1973 have again underscored, security of supply and price of energy resources have enormous strategic and economic implications for any industrialized country. Nevertheless, trade in energy resources between Canada and the United States has not always been closely managed by the central governments that are responsible for national security and economic development. In fact, the energy trade involves a wide variety of actors that continually seek transnational contacts and alliances of opportunity to further their own self-interest almost as if the national border did not exist.
The purpose of this research note is to suggest a potential general paradigm for the study of foreign policy processes. It is explicitly synthetic in that it combines Arnold Wolfers's notion of a continuum, the extremities of which he labels the pole of power and pole of indifference, with Theodore Lowi's efforts to affirm the nexus between issue and policy process. Two questions prove crucial in the determination of issue area: Is or is not the domestic impact of the issue symmetrical? And are the political goods at stake exclusively tangible or not? With the answers to these questions it becomes possible to specify the issue area (distribution, regulation, "interaction-protection," redistribution) in which an event may be classified and to hypothesize the nature of the policy process (the identity of the major actors, the intensity of conflict) to be observed. Particular attention is paid to limited war as a redistributive issue area in order to make the case that redistribution, contrary to Lowi's view, is an important foreign policy process. Finally an effort is made to suggest how issue-based propositions could be utilized in the transnational comparison of foreign policy processes. It is suggested that differences in the policy process across issue areas within a given state may be as great as differences in process within a particular arena of power for two states as different in political system as the United States and the USSR.
