Territory is important to people; the manner in which it is divided up is often critical. The European approach to territorial problems developed mainly in response to European historical experience; the traditional literature in the fields of geography and history makes scant reference to non-Western boundary concepts and practices. European and Southeast Asian approaches to territorial issues differ significantly. In the aggregate, the differences are imposing, if somewhat abstract; in detail, the continuing disparities in outlook and administrative practice are of considerable relevance to current policy decisions.

Although the Department of State continues to attribute the war in Vietnam to “aggression from the North,” there has always been a suspicion among more enlightened public officials and most academic critics of the war that economic discontent rooted in the inequitable tenure arrangements of the Vietnamese countryside might have some connection with the vigorous opposition of the Viet Cong to numerous Saigon governments. Thus it is surprising to learn that, on the contrary, support for the Saigon regime is most pronounced in provinces in which few peasants farm their own land, large estates were formerly owned by French or Vietnamese landlords, tenancy is widespread, and the distribution of land is unequal. This finding is particularly striking since it is contrary to data from the rest of Southeast Asia. In Burma, for example dacoity and other forms of social disorder were most frequent in the deltaic area of lower Burma, a region of extensive tenancy, unstable tenure, massive agricultural debt, and large-scale absentee ownership by Indian financial houses. In Thailand most social tension is concentrated in the northeast, a region of poor soil and shifting subsistence agriculture, and in the Menam delta immediately adjacent to Bangkok, where absentee holdings are farmed by tenants. Most commercial agricultural land in Thailand is cultivated by owner-proprietors and it is this fact that explains much of the country's political stability. In the Philippines the Hukbalahap movement was concentrated in central Luzon, again a region of extensive tenancy.

Undoubtedly David Floyd is correct in his statement that “by far the most important and original of the sections [within the Romanian Workers' Party April, 1964, Statement] for the communist world as a whole was the one dealing with political relations between the communist countries, though it was the statement on Comecon which attracted most attention at the time.” Among the major points the Romanians made in this Statement was that the formal basis of relations enunciated by Khrushchev in 1955 was to become the real basis of relations among socialist nations. Relations were to be based on “the principles of national independence and sovereignty, equal rights, mutual advantage, comradely assistance, noninterference in internal affairs, observance of territorial integrity, [and] the principles of socialist internationalism.” The Romanians spelled this out in underscored print and followed it with the statement that “the strict observance of the basic principles of the new type relations among the socialist countries is the primary prerequisite of the unity and cohesion of these countries and of the world socialist system performing its decisive role in the development of mankind.”

Since Stalin's death in 1953, Russia's leaders have every four or five years convened the nominally supreme body of the Soviet Communist Party, its Congress, to ratify policy guidelines and power shifts. Khrushchev lent excitement to the Congresses he presided over, launching surprise attacks on domestic and foreign Communists who were critical of his unorthodox traits. At the 20th Congress in 1956, the Party First Secretary went beyond the text of an anti-Stalin report that had earlier been agreed upon in the Kremlin and he implicated rival associates in cases of Stalinist misrule. The same foes, eliminated from high places in 1957, were just as suddenly brought under heavy criticism by Khrushchev's group at the extraordinary 21st Congress in 1959 and the 22nd Congress in 1961. A delegation of observers from Communist China headed by Premier Chou En-lai walked out of the 22nd Congress after their Albanian clients were unexpectedly assailed for heretical beliefs close to those held in Peking. In contrast, dramatic challenges and disclosures were missing from the 23rd Congress, which the successors of Khrushchev organized in 1966. The flat nature of the proceedings underlined the fact that a cycle of renewal in post-Stalin politics had been superseded by what was essentially a cycle of consolidation.

One of the sorest needs in the social sciences is for clear and concise conceptual equipment to give structure to disciplines and order to the range of hypotheses these disciplines purport to explore. Perhaps nowhere is this need for conceptual equipment more pressing, however, than in that amorphous area of study that examines the broad range of social processes gathered under the rubric of “modernization.” Depending on one's perspective, the process of modernization is either primarily economic, or political, or psychological, or social, or technological, or all of the above. Like the elephant in the old tale, the beast is different depending on who touches it and where.

Ending the war in Vietnam, preventing similar conflicts elsewhere, solving the problems associated with the pollution of our environment, and securing a just domestic social order are among the most important political issues of our time. These issues have one characteristic in common: the securing (or non-securing) of these objectives will be shared by all citizens of the United States. Consequently, these and similar phenomena can be analyzed in terms of collective goods: goods that, if consumed by one member of a specified group, cannot be withheld from the other members. Indeed, much of politics can be seen to be concerned with the securing (or non-securing) of collective goods. The reason for this is well expressed by Mancur Olson:

“Future revolutions will doubtless be directed against the admin- JL istration and not against the political system.” Thus states one writer in the opening sentence of his book on l'Administration au pouvoir. There is little doubt that the institution in France that today bears the brunt of attacks coming from the entire range of the political, economic, and social spectrum, is the French administration—the state bureaucracy that, since the early part of the nineteenth century, has been charged with directing most of the state's affairs. Today, the parties of the Left, Right, and Center; big business, small business, and the propertyless; the privileged and the underprivileged; the in-tellectuals, the students, and the unions—all these groups, that is to say, the French people, are agreed on what they regard to be the excessive and nefarious role that the bureaucracy plays in French life. Few Frenchmen would agree with Francois Gazier, former Director of the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, when he writes in his preface to Belorgey's book that “the French administration, thriving under praise and criticism alike, can at least be credited with one success: it has known how to keep in tune with its times” (p. 7). One is tempted to say that were these words not merely the manifestation of hyperbolic tendencies sometimes common in preface-writing, some courage would have been needed to write them. It is hard to conceive in present-day France of an attempt to sustain the thesis that the administration is in tune with its times.