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This chapter explores the institutions and institutional changes needed to meet human rights demands, focusing on international executive power. It first discusses the functions of the domestic executive, and how the power of that executive is both facilitated and controlled by the governmental structure within which the executive operates. The chapter then turns to the differences between the international executive and the domestic executive, and to the appropriate methods to facilitate and control the international executive. Next, it considers the implications of this analysis in the context of functional organization, of the United Nations, of the international financial institutions (IFIs), and of the G-7/G-8. The chapter concludes with integrated recommendations.

This chapter begins with a brief sketch of the events that unfolded during the Cuban missile crisis. It describes the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or the ExComm, consisting of Kennedy's cabinet, their immediate subordinates, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a number of other top-level advisers. It then turns to Kennedy's secret recordings of many White House meetings and telephone conversations, which capture more than twenty hours of ExComm deliberations. Next, it sets out the book's purpose, namely is to undertake the first sustained analysis of the ExComm recordings. The goal is to mine the details of these discussions from a sociological perspective that views conversation as an achievement unto itself, and anything achieved through conversation as indelibly shaped by its rules, constraints, procedures, and vicissitudes.

This chapter focuses on discussions about the initial U.S. response to the discovery of Soviet missiles. It argues that the choice of the blockade was only possible once a particular objection to that very plan was suppressed, namely that it would give the Soviets a chance to complete work on at least some of the missiles, as a result of which the United States might subsequently find itself attacking operational missiles that could be launched (perhaps without authorization) against U.S. cities. This suppression took time, however, time that the ExComm had because it was able to postpone a decision so long as its deliberations were kept secret.

This chapter begins with some historical background, situating the ExComm, as a deliberative body, against the backdrop of the Bay of Pigs, where genuine deliberation was lacking. Then, it describes how the ExComm's meetings were organized and conducted. It starts with some remarks about the composition of the group, and then describes, in general terms, how the meetings were structured. Next, it describe Kennedy's singular role in the meetings, as sometimes-chair, sometimes-decider, and addressee of choice. Finally, it looks at the conversational data through an entirely different methodological lens, presenting some simple quantitative findings about who spoke, how they obtained the floor, and who was addressed—patterns that offer further evidence for the qualitative observations about authority and expertise while providing additional insight into the interactional styles of the different ExComm members.

This chapter examines talk about how to enforce the blockade, in terms of which ships to stop and which to allow through. Because the blockade was, from the start, ill suited for the purpose of forcing the Soviets to withdraw their missiles, storytelling about the consequences of stopping various ships rarely connected those actions to the larger objective. Furthermore, stories about the future were largely supplanted by elaborate justifications for not acting, one peculiarity of which was that the ExComm sometimes seemed to lose sight of whom it primarily had to convince. Moreover, the ExComm did not so much decide not to intercept the Bucharest, a tanker which was Kennedy's best chance to set an early example, as it failed to decide anything at all, but this indecision was transformed into a decision by the course of events.

Reflecting on the decision-making process after the Cuban missile crisis was over, President Kennedy famously observed that “the essence of ultimate decision remains impenetrable to the observer—often, indeed, to the decider himself ... There will always be the dark and tangled stretches in the decision-making process—mysterious even to those who may be most intimately involved.” This chapter summarizes theoretical and empirical arguments with an eye toward making sense of this striking claim, wherein Kennedy appears to admit that even he felt baffled by what happened in the White House during his presidency. It then discusses the peculiar fact that, at a conference of former ExComm members and academics held twenty-five years after the crisis, the former were forced to admit that their deliberative process was far from systematic. The academics were baffled, but the findings of this book provide an explanation, involving the strange twists and turns that the deliberative process undergoes when it is conducted aloud, subject to the whims of other people and the demands and sensitivities of the conversational machinery that makes the whole thing work.

Chapter 6 investigates the EU’s impact upon the power dynamics within Labour, the PS and SPD in central office. It first analyses each party’s executive committee(s)’s role in the formulation of European policies. This is followed by an investigation into the parties’ international departments, which form part of the central party bureaucracy. Finally, each section also examines the party in central office’s relationship with the Party of European Socialists. The focus of the analysis lies on the party in central office’s role in the formulation of European policies and, to a much smaller extent, the selection of EU specialists. In doing so, the chapter reveals a complex picture of power dynamics between the different faces of the party. It demonstrates that the parties in central office were not ‘lions’ in the sense that they did not hold the power to formulate policies about and through the EU. At the same time they were not entirely powerless in EU matters, as the label ‘toothless tigers’ would imply. Rather, Labour, the PS and SPD in central office were ‘toothless tigers with claws’ that complemented the work of the party in public office.

This book adopts a methodology that attempts to disaggregate conventional interpretations of a monolithic and homogeneous Labour right or revisionist leadership tendency. It concentrates on the Labour right at the parliamentary level in the 1970s. The Labour government had encountered serious difficulties of both economic management and wider manifesto commitments, and relations with the party and National Executive Committee (NEC) deteriorated significantly. Labour's post-war social democracy experienced significant challenges to its governing and institutional norms. The empirical basis of the study consists of a number of case studies of key ideological and policy themes, which explore the dimensions of the complexity and divisions of the parliamentary Labour right in the 1970s. A key moment and factors in the evolution of social democratic politics and the making of the contemporary Labour Party is addressed. Finally, an overview of the chapters included in this book is given.

This chapter addresses the (limitations) of group and factional organisation and activity on the parliamentary Labour right in the 1970s. It also describes the standard conceptual frameworks of factionalism and Labour Party factionalism. Tony Crosland's priorities were now clearly different to those of Roy Jenkins. The Jenkinsites represented the re-emergence of Campaign for Democratic Socialism (CDS) in truncated form. Jenkins' disinclination to compete with his factional opponents from within the Shadow Cabinet and the National Executive Committee (NEC) was to have important implications for political alignments and the balance of power in the Labour Party. The Manifesto Group ‘was formed to deal with a purely Parliamentary situation’. The limitations of Manifesto Group organisation are presented. The experience of the Manifesto Group confirmed the emerging constraints, divisions and limitations of Labour's centre-right coalition and the seemingly inalienable trajectory of the Labour Party further to the left.