International Relations
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Abstract
This is an important book on an important subject. The past 10 years have seen a flood of theories that purport to explain the behavior of governments in issues of foreign economic policy, theories based on the simple calculus of organized group interests, on the role of the hegemon, and on the conditioning power of economic culture. It is refreshing to look closely at the complex processes of a major economic negotiation, constantly looking for evidence of the utility of the various theories. Predictably, nothing seems to work in quite the way the theories project. Those who prefer to think that national positions in international economic negotiations are the simple sum of organized group interests may take comfort in the fact that pressure groups indeed played a substantial role in the Tokyo Round. But both the context and the weight of that role varied from one country to the next, depending in considerable part on the nature of the processes available to pressure groups to express themselves. In some cases, the pressure-group representatives came to identify themselves with the larger purposes of the negotiation; in others, they accepted their lack of influence with resignation; in still others, they reacted with intransigence.