Ever since Woodrow Wilson, in the course of his attempts to lay a new and secure basis for peace after the First World War, proclaimed the necessity for “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at,” the methods of diplomacy have been regarded as having had their part in bringing about the outbreak of the First World War, and the demand for a “new diplomacy” has been raised. Although this concept has come into frequent use only in our century, it was soon realized that its history could be raced back into the nineteenth century, but its exact provenance has never been fully established. This article will show that the term can be found even earlier than is generally assumed, namely as early as 1793. As in all such disputes about the origin of a term, it would be ridiculous to maintain that this was definitely the first time this concept made its appearance, but it seems justified to propose that the concept definitely belongs to the second part of the eighteenth century.

In international relations, two opposing schools of thought have fought each other throughout the modern age. Ever since Machiavelli published the Prince, his “realistic” views have shocked “idealist” thinkers. As a battle of the mind, fought by and large outside the political arena, the dispute between the two schools was of great concern to philosophers and moralists; but not until Woodrow Wilson set out to bring Utopia down to earth did it become a political issue of the first magnitude. For the first time, the responsible head of one of the leading powers acted as though the world were on the verge of crossing the thresh-old from sordid “power politics” to a “new era” in which the admonitions of the idealist philosophers would suddenly become the political order of the day.

The French elections of June 1951 and the serious difficulties experienced by the victorious constitutional parties in the formation of a government call attention once more to the problems of a parliamentary system in a multiparty state, and underline the urgency of a redefinition of the roles of parties and government within a constitutional democracy. These developments also draw attention to the basic constitutional problems which affect the political stability of France, and thereby weaken the Western community. With an occasional glance at parallel Italian developments, this article will first analyze the new electoral law and the election returns before proceeding to a discussion of the constitutional issues that contribute to the deepening crisis of the Fourth Republic.

The analysis of any human concept is infinitely and inevitably complicated by the mental processes of the original user and the investigator. Dedication to objectivity by the analyst can usually prevent only the more obvious, and not always the most important, psycho-cultural pressures which condition or determine both the content and the method of the analysis, to say nothing of its purpose and material. In turn, the concept under examination, even though it is necessarily rendered an object isolate for intensive review, remains and must be treated as essentially a living precipitate of the entire environment in which it was born and nourished.

In February 1948 few people in Czechoslovakia could size up the full implications of the Communist coup. The bulk of non-Communist public opinion was, to say the least, bewildered by the rapidity of events and confused about the real issues involved. Its attitude reflected this state of mind. The political parties to which it traditionally owed allegiance collapsed overnight. Their duly elected leaders were immediately muzzled. President Benes, on whom in the final analysis the total burden of stopping the Communist onslaught rested, and from whom the nation would normally expect its cue, gave none, unless his passive acceptance of the fait accompli with which he was presented were to be construed as a sign for the people to do likewise.