Radioactive Waste Disposal at Sea: Public Ideas ... - IMO

Explaining Regime Formation 115
Times, November 22, 1972; “Policing the Dumpers,” Newsweek,
November 27, 1972). Train further said that the conference had met the
goal set by the Stockholm conference, and that the agreement provided
“practical evidence of the increasing priority the nations of the world are
giving to environmental problems” (Arbose 1972). 7
In chapters 4 and 5 I noted that realists would have to include the
domestic level in order to understand how the initiative to establish the
global ocean dumping regime grew out of U.S. domestic regulation. But
realist theory has not developed a theory of domestic politics that can be
examined in this case study. Moreover, little is said in realism about the
roles of ideas, policy entrepreneurs, and nonstate actors, or about international
organizations. A further complicating factor is that, while preserving
territorial and political integrity are core objectives of a hegemonic
state, and, for realists, serve the national interest, protection of the oceans
against dumping can hardly be seen as closely associated with such objectives.
This complicates the realist analysis, although scholars sympathetic
to realism have suggested using an inductive approach to analyze policies
that are not closely associated with preserving territorial and political
integrity as examples of protection of the national interest. 8 But, as I noted
in chapters 4 and 5, realists following an inductive approach would still
need to acknowledge that the hegemon perceived ocean dumping as an
essentially global problem, and that dealing effectively with ocean dumping
demanded cooperation among states. Similar to the knowledge-based
approach, the power-based approach cannot account for why the United
States and a number of other Western countries saw ocean dumping as an
international problem of some significance and urgency in the early 1970s.
More generally, this case cannot be explained by pointing to states’ interests;
the way states defined their interests was changing. To fully comprehend
this process of regime formation, it should be taken into account that
the view of the health of the oceans changed significantly in the beginning
of the 1970s, especially in the West.
Evidence of the changing view of the oceans abounds. A British scientist
who was at the time the editor of the highly respected journal Nature wrote
in 1972 that incidents such as the recent discovery of large amounts of mercury
in Pacific tuna had helped to create “the impression that the oceans of
the world are in some general sense polluted and that the pollution stems
from industrial activity of a kind which is characteristic of the twentieth