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.

Writing in 1966, I examined the degree to which changes in research methods in political science are affecting research on international organizations and made some suggestions for extending the use of more rigorous empirical methods in international organization research. This effort stimulated a desire to make a more systematic inquiry. Reported in that paper are the results of a systematic survey of fourteen journals and eleven international relations readers which have been published over the past decade. The survey identified some 300 works on international organizations, 61 of which are based on quantitative analysis and field work. This study reports data obtained from coding these works on nine characteristics and provides examples of major findings. The purpose is to help the community of scholars engaged in this work to see where our collective activity is heading in the hope that this will enable us to make more effective use of the limited skills, time, and money available.

Three momentous events of the 1960's—the war in Vietnam, the steady worsening of the Sino-Soviet dispute, and the Chinese acquisition of nuclear weapons—portend a shift in the political center of gravity from Europe to Asia in the last third of this century. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia only temporarily ruffled Europe's political terrain, and, while it damaged Moscow's international prestige, it never threatened to'escalate into superpower confrontation on the continent. The United States and its North Adantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies, in fact, went out of their way to avoid provoking the Soviet Union; the ritualistic tone of their denunciations of the invasion indicated that, as after Hungary in 1956, the West was resigned to Moscow's freedom of action in its Eastern European “sphere of influence”. Emboldened by the Western response, the Soviet Union reiterated with increased vigor its proposal for a European security conference to freeze the status quo in Europe.

International arrangements for the uses of the ocean have been the subject of long debate within the United Nations since a speech made by Ambassador Arvid Pardo of Malta before the General Assembly in 1967. Issues in question include the method of delimiting the outer edge of the legal continental shelf; the spectrum of ocean arms control possibilities; proposals to create a declaration of principles governing the exploration for, and the exploitation of, seabed mineral resources with the promise that exploitation take place only if it “benefits mankind as a whole,” especially the developing states; and consideration of schemes to create international machinery to regulate, license, or own the resources of the seabed and subsoil. The discussions and debates began in the First (Political and Security) Committee of the 22nd General Assembly and proceeded through an ad hoc committee to the 23rd and 24th assembly plenary sessions. The creation of a permanent committee on the seabed as a part of the General Assembly's machinery attests to the importance members of the United Nations attribute to ocean problems. Having established the committee, they will be faced soon with the necessity of reaching decisions. The 24th General Assembly, for example, passed a resolution requesting the Secretary-General to ascertain members' attitudes on the convening of a new international conference to deal with a wide range of law of the sea problems.

Students of international organization have been increasingly concerned with analyzing and measuring international integration and disintegration. In fact, the emphasis on international integration is the major focus of the contemporary study of international organization. One area of inquiry which has been overlooked until recently, however, is the role of multinational corporations in undermining and/or maintaining the functions of nation-states. The paucity of studies in this area by students of international organization can be explained by I) a preference for analyzing intergovernmental rather than nongovernmental entities and 2) the difficulty of acquiring data concerning worldwide firms.

In the three centuries or so since the modern international system began flo take on its present shape, its component members have come together in a wide variety of organizations, for a wide variety of purposes. Those who act on behalf of the nations have turned to international organizations to oversee peace settlements, to strengthen their collective defense capacity, to mediate conflicts between themselves, to discourage interference from the outside, to harmonize their trade relations, to supervise international waterways, to accelerate the production of food, to codify diplomatic practice, and to formalize legal proceedings. Some organizations are established primarily for the neutral purpose of making coexistence possible, others for the more affirmative purposes of positive cooperation. Some have been directed toward the modification of the system, others toward the preservation of its status quo.

When the United Nations Charter was drafted in 1945 the provisions for keeping the peace had to be drawn up in the abstract. There was no tangible enemy, crises were in the future, and commitments were made in a vacuum. It was only when it became clear what the world was really like that “peacekeeping” was invented. It turned out that in most conflict situations there was no definable aggressor or victim, that the danger was uncontrolled escalation of local conflicts into the nuclear realm, and that the real enemy was a fantastically complex set of instabilities, inequities, and passions to which 1945 international ground rules were inadequately related.

Examination of the literature on the influence of the secretary-general forcefully suggests two conclusions about that literature: It is large and growing rapidly, yet tihere is little in the way of systematic explanation of the behavior of the secretary-general. The scholarly literature is filled with statements that tell us the kindls of things we should be studying (for example, superpower rivalries and the “special right” of the secretary-general), but what they represent are alternative research concerns. They do not constitute conceptual tools for empirical analysis that would help us devise and evaluate propositions setting Ifortti relationships about human action in tihe context of international organizations. No doubt these studies have added to our descriptive knowledge of the secretary-general, and this knowledge possibly alerts us to complex processes at work in and out of the United Nations. Yet two qualifications must be noted. First, the identification of complexity should be the beginning and not the end of empirical inquiry. Second, the actual value of descriptive knowledge remains problematical when it is presented without clarifying the generalizations used as criteria to select facts. Without explicitness we have no way of validating the reliability of criteria used for sorting out “important” information. We are placed in the position of not being certain that the particular study contains all relevant information and not knowing whether the information presented is relevant.