Response to Professor Gordenker's Comments

Response to Professor Gordenker's CommentsAuthor(s): Robert E. RiggsSource: International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Sep., 1967), pp. 274-277Published by: Wiley on behalf of The International Studies AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3013952 .

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Response to Professor Gordenker's Comments

ROBERT E. RIGGS

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA

The International Studies Quarterly has generously invited me to respond to Professor Gordenker's comments on my essay which appeared in the March issue of the Quarterly. This prompts, first of all, a reaction to the policy which was announced in the March issue of encouraging comment on ideas and developments in the field of international relations. If the policy is carried out as conceived by the editors, it could make a seminal contribution to intellectual cross-fertilization among students of international affairs. The publication of articles in scholarly journals is too often a one-way process in which the writer looses his salvos upon the journal's readership without hearing so much as an echo in return, except perhaps the congratulations of a friend, a request for a re- print, and eventual acknowledgement in someone's footnote. Pub- lication undoubtedly has its personal rewards, and the wider dis- semination of knowledge may be sufficient social justification for it. But scholarly inquiry is advanced more rapidly when interchange, not merely one-way communication, takes place. By lending itself as a forum for comments, the International Studies Quarterly has in this instance initiated a genuine dialogue about prospects for research into UN influence on national policy.

Turning now to some of the specific points raised by Professor Gordenker, I should first make clear that my six categories were not intended to constitute a unified, comprehensive research de- sign. There undoubtedly is some conceptual overlapping among the categories, as well as numerous lacunae. The categories are in fact related more to particular bodies of empirical data that ought to be examined in the search for UN influence on national policy than to any overarching conceptual scheme. Each, of course, is

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COMMENr 275

necessarily underpinned by certain expressed or implied assump- tions about the nature of influence and the relevance of the data to the question of UN influence on policy. But essentially these categories were formulated as points at which, in a practical way, research hooks might be put into the problem. Professor Gor- denker, in his thoughtful discussion, has suggested others. Neither his discussion nor mine is likely to exhaust the possibilities, a fact that both of us recognize.

As a general framework for further research, the concept of a continuous network of communication among individuals repre- senting intergovernmental institutions, member governments, and private groups does hold exciting possibilities. The concept of such a network at least implicitly pervades most of my discussion, as Gordenker suggests. Nevertheless, I would hesitate to reduce the entire question of influence to a matter of communication, im- portant as that may be. At some point the full range of relevant capabilities or "power" of the communicator must be considered, and access to effective means of communication is only one aspect of power. Some messages in a communication network have more urgency or more authority than others, for reasons related to the capabilities of the message sender. What the United States says on the subject of UN financing, for example, will have more weight in the General Assembly than a statement on the same subject in the same forum by a country contributing less than one tenth of one per cent of the regular budget. In the portion of the communication network that extends to domestic groups, spokesmen for large, well-organized, well-financed groups are likely to speak with greater authority on many matters than spokesmen for small, amorphous, ill-financed groups. Government, and indeed any political system, is characterized by muscle as well as nerves.' At the very least, an independent variable of power, capabilities or "potential for influence" could help generate hypotheses to ac- count for the varying impact of messages from different sources as they are fed into the policymaking machine.

1 Amitai Etzioni makes this point in his Political Unification: A Comparative Study of Leaders and Forces (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1965), p. 75. Speaking with reference to political unification movements, he ob- serves: ". . . we wish to emphasize that the action eventually taken depends not only on the qualities of the recipient of the communication, but also on the power of the sender. What is relevant is not only the communicative ability of the sender, how clearly he transmits his message, but also the degree of power with which he supports it." The point seems to me a valid one.



276 COMMENT

Paying explicit attention to the differences in long-term, short- term (and perhaps "middle-term") UN activities, as Gordenker suggests, seems to be another useful handle to the problem. One might also attempt to distinguish long and short-term effects, which is not precisely the same thing. UN efforts to cope with the Suez crisis would probably be characterized as short-term, or at best medium-term, activities, except for the 11-year presence of the United Nations Emergency Force along the Israeli-Egyptian border. But the impact on French attitudes toward the United Nations, and indeed upon other aspects of French foreign policy, appears to have been decidedly long-range. There are obvious difficulties in trying to differentiate short and middle-range reactions to UN activities from long-range adaptations in institutions attitudes and orientations; but conscious attention to the tem- poral dimension certainly should be on the research agenda.

Gordenker's reference to the differing "client groups" and their procedural as well as structural adaptation to participation in the work of international organizations brings to mind some interest- ing observations from Hugh Gibson's book, The Road to Foreign Policy, written more than two decades ago. Discussing the rou- tinized responses that had become the State Department's way of dealing with certain kinds of queries from the field, Gibson speaks of a "standard telegram" often sent to Foreign Service Officers saying "It is not the practice of the department to deal with hypothetical problems." And when the problems arose, the Department typically might respond,

The Department is fully mindful of the difficulties of the situation with which you are faced. It is desired that you keep the Depart- ment fully informed as to developments and that you cooperate closely with your French and British colleagues. We are in close consultation with the interested governments, and, as occasion requires, shall be prepared to send you appropriate instruction for your guidance.2

While Gibson's commentary may be something of a caricature, it tends to confirm Gordenker's suspicion that one could fruitfully look for "patterns of bureaucratic responses" in relation to different classes of issues and differing client groups.

2 Hugh Gibson, The Road to Foreign Policy (New York: Doubleday & Co;, 1944), p. 151, quoted in Richard C. Snyder and Edgar S. Fumiss, Jr., American Foreign Policy (New York: Rinehart & Company, Inc., 1954), p. 281.



COMMENT 277

Obviously, there comes a time when theorizing, hypothesizing, model-building and defining the nature of the problem must be vivified by careful, systematic examination of the data. This dialogue about UN influence on national policy certainly ought not to end here; but as discussion develops, it also ought to be en- lightened by studies that formulate and test specific hypotheses and add the indispensable dimension of concrete detail.



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Response to Professor Gordenker's Comments