The Structure of Foreign Policy and Trade Relationships within North Africa. A Limited Empirical Test of the Cantori and Spiegel Model.

摘要

Surveys clearly show there is lack of agreement among North African authorities concerning the boundaries and structure of the region. Indeed, there is a lack of consensus today within the whole field of regional studies with regard to definitions as well as general characteristics and attributes of regional subsystems. In their book, The International Politics of Regions, Louis J. Cantori and Steven L. Spiegel employed a deductive and speculative research approach to identify fifteen regions which they believed existed in 1970, when their book was published. They identified North Africa as one of their postulated regions and presented a description of what they believed to be its boundaries and basic structure. It is the purpose of this paper: (1) to conduct a partial empirical test of the postulated Cantori/Spiegel North African regional model by examining foreign policy relationships and trade patterns, and (2) to compare the results with the Cantori and Spiegel model in terms of regional boundaries, subsystem structure and intra-systemic interactions.