Abstract
In spite of close to twenty years of theoretical elaboration and empirical research, the international regime concept still lacks a critical edge. The concept, introduced into the international relations literature in the 1975 Special Edition of International Organization, was initially defined as a set of mutual expectations, rules and regulations, plans, organizational energies and financial commitments, which have been accepted by a group of states.1 This definition contained many of the elements of Krasner’s widely accepted definition agreed to by a group of scholars seven years later. Krasner defined a regime as a set of ’principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area of international relations.’2
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Notes
John Gerard Ruggie, ‘International Responses to Technology: Concepts and Trends’, International Organization 29, 3 (Summer 1995) 557–583.
Stephen Krasner, ‘Structural Causes and Regime Consequences: Regimes as Intervening Variables’, in International Regimes, edited by Stephen Krasner (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983) 2.
Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
For a useful review of the hegemonic stability hypothesis, see Robert Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) 31–46; and Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987) 72–92.
The origin of the hegemonic stability hypothesis is usually attributed to Charles Kindleberger. However, the perspective has been elaborated by other authors working in rather different theoretical perspectives. See Charles Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations; and Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974).
Susan Strange, ‘The Persistent Myth of Lost Hegemony’, International Organization 41, 4 (Autumn 1987) 571–572.
For a review of functionalist and neofunctionalist theory, see Michael Hodges, ‘Integration Theory’, in Trevor Taylor (ed.), Approaches and Theory in International Relations (London: Longman, 1978) 237–256.
Susan Strange, States and Markets (London: Pinter 1988), 161.
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© 1998 Fred P. Gale
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Gale, F.P. (1998). International Regimes: A Conceptual History. In: The Tropical Timber Trade Regime. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371521_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371521_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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