tional political forces which are likely to influence a SPS program at the latter stages of its development and demonstration and in the early years of system operation. The point of such an admittedly speculative discussion is to place current technical, socioeconomic, and legal analyses of the SPS concept in a more realistic political context. SPS development will take place in the full glare of international political scrutiny. A SPS is not likely to come into being through the nonpolitical activities of technical agencies. The scope of the SPS enterprise, with investments of up to one trillion dollars required, makes this impossible. If one adds the fact that the SPS is a source of adequate energy, the most fundamental basis of industrial civilization, then it is inevitable that SPS policy will be a matter of “high politics.” Decisions about SPS at the international level will be made, not by international civil servants, international lawyers, or international economists, nor even by international bankers; they will be made by the political leaders of major nation-states in the context of international political debate. RELEVANT GLOBAL TRENDS There are a number of fundamental trends in global relationships which are likely to influence the context within which negotiations about SPS will take place. These trends include the following (1): a. The unquestioned economic leadership of the United States among Western countries has disappeared as Europe and Japan have recovered their economic vitality in the thirty years following World War II. Economic and political relationships among the countries of Western Europe, Japan, and the United States have become exceedingly complex, and are marked as much by competition for economic and political advantage, both vis-a-vis each other and with respect to other countries, as they are by collaboration among the industrial democracies to achieve some common purpose. There is no perceived threat or unifying problem which now overrides the historical tendency towards rivalry and fragmentation among major nation-states. The increasing economic power of newly industrializing countries will further complicate this picture in coming decades. b. A central issue in global politics has become bargaining about the prudent use of resources, the production and distribution of wealth, and the management of global technologies, with a central issue being a more equitable distribution of the wealth and social benefits resulting from technological capabilities. The legitimacy of the existing rules of international law and norms of international behavior is being questioned; to the nonindustrial world, these laws and norms appear to reflect the former political superiority of Western countries and to “rig” the international system in order to confer advantages on those countries. c. There is increasing use of multilateral, as opposed to bilateral, diplomacy as a means for negotiating on pressing issues and there is a parallel development of new and adaptive functions for multilateral institutions as global bargains on specific issues are reached. d. Issues and considerations which have always been dealt with in international frameworks are being combined with those issues which have been traditionally treated as the internal affairs of a particular country; this means that much of the substance of multilateral diplomacy is in fact related to the decisions and actions internal to a particular country. As countries develop new technological
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