Transnational relations and world politics/ edited by Robert O.Keohane and Joseph S.Nye

The idea for this volume began over dinner in Boston in June 1968. With several other new members of the Board of Editors of International Organi zation we were trying to articulate our sense of dissatisfaction with the study of international organization. We felt that an "Everest syndrome" prevailed. Scholars studied organizations simply because "they are there." We agreed that new approaches were needed. But we also agreed that calls for "new approaches" had often been interpreted as calls for ever more esoteric method ology that contributed to an overemphasis on easy to study yet frequently trivial aspects of international organization like roll-call voting in public international assemblies. We decided to edit a special volume that would, in our view, put the horse back in front of the wagon by first describing pat terns of interaction in world politics and then asking what role international institutions do or should play.

Our reaction against the overemphasis on intergovernmental organization and our desire to start from the patterns of interaction in the world led us to theorize in terms of transnational relations. We make no claim to having "discovered" transnational relations. Others, like Raymond Aron, Philip Jessup, Karl Kaiser, Horst Menderhausen, and James Rosenau, used the con cept long before we did. As students of Stanley Hoffmann (and thus of Aron) we started our theorizing in terms of Aron's conception of "transnational society." We found this unsatisfactory, however, because it did not direct attention to governmental manipulation of transnational relations. During our work on this volume we have grown progressively more interested in the interaction between governments and transnational society and in transna tional coalitions among subunits of governments. Thus, this volume gradually shifted its emphasis from different international organizations to a broader paradigm for approaching world politics.