ABSTRACT
United Nations Law of the Sea Conference (UNCLOS) represents the largest continuous and most technically demanding set of large-scale negotiations ever attempted. Its participants spanned the entire membership of the United Nations, and the issues covered nearly the entire range of ocean use topics. The United States (US) did not hesitate or reserve anything; its representatives opposed the treaty and voted against it. The US government indicated not only that it would not support efforts to reopen the negotiations even after the vote but that it would do its best to persuade others not to sign the treaty. The literature describing behavior in multilateral organizations is voluminous, but remarkably few works deal explicitly with multilateral negotiations within large organizations. Formal equal representation of nation-states created two other characteristics of UNCLOS as a bargaining arena: formal debate and formal decision making. Formal debate gave states and groups the opportunity to put their positions on record.
