News Flow in the North African International Sybsystem

Abstract

The recent emphasis on the study of international regions as an intermediate level of analysis between the nation-state and the global international system appears to reflect in part an increasing problem in the discipline of isolating relatively stable units of analysis during periods of rapid social change. While it may be premature to sound the death knell for the nation-state as an effective social unit for processing what Almond and Powell call the regulative, extractive, distributive, and responsive tasks of a political system,' it is also clear that the technological revolution in communication, transportation, and modes of production does not respect the territorial boundaries recognized in international diplomatic practice. Structural-functional models of an integrated and largely self-contained social system have perhaps not proved more productive in guiding research to date because of the difficulties in defining the boundaries of a sociocultural system which not necessarily coextensive with the territorial boundaries of the separate states upon which much of our aggregate statistical data is based. Cultural areas, as Shibutani reminds us, are set neither by territory nor by formal group membership but by the limits of effective communication.2 Because the effectiveness of communica-