Clear-air turbulence: incessant regulation of deregulation in international civil aviation

Abstract

International civil aviation consists of an intricate web of private and public parties. The national sovereignty on air space puts constraints on market forces. Particularly between the end of World War II and the late seventies, considerable regulations on international commercial air services were in force. These regulations resided at the core of the multilateral framework that had deliberately left loopholes from which mushrooming bilateral interactions escaped and undermined its main tenets. International civil aviation remains as an understudied issue for international relations discipline. This study unravels the conflictual coexistence of regulatory and deregulatory currents from a theoretical outlook developed from within international relations theory. Accordingly, focal points of this study, within the time scope of the Chicago Conference of 1944 to the Bermuda II Agreement of 1977 are the U.K-U.S. aviation rivalry, to be traced on the axis of regulation and deregulation and ICAO's role within and engagement with this axis. Merits of an eclecticist insight were evaluated in analyzing these cases via critical theoretical appropriations of variants of realist thinking, regime theory and security studies. The main results of the analyses are that the shifts in level of regulation could be explained with reference to differing public and private power structures of U.K. and U.S. and that ICAO as a regime rests on contrastingly ambiguous genetic roots that paved the way for its lagging behind as concretized in its interference with issues of regulation and deregulation.