Machiavelli begins his Discourses by observing that “the curious nature of men, so prompt to blame and so slow to praise, makes the discovery and introduction of any new principles and systems as dangerous almost as the exploration of unknown seas and continents.” The Political Foundations of International Law runs this hazard, as it is both a splendid pioneering venture and vulnerable to all sorts of criticism. Although it most suggestively studies the theoretical interaction of law and politics, it provides scant doctrinal support. Although it brilliantly applies systems analysis and prudently uses decision-making theory, structural functional approaches, institutional studies, and a subtle form of historicism, it flirts outrageously with the relevance of game theory to the role of law in international affairs. Although it advances its views of international jurisdiction with unprecedented sophistication, it resorts to amateurish simplification when it discusses the United Nations Charter or the major European regional organizations. In sum, Political Foundations is at once profoundly provocative and frustratingly unrealized. However, its achievements are so much greater than its defects that it warrants high praise and mild rebuke.

An epigram coined under the Third Republic presents the political Frenchman as torn between the claims of his heart on the Left and of his pocketbook on the Right. At a time when a nationalistic policy in Algeria draws heavily on all pocketbooks this idea seems out of date: today a good section of the French public is trying to reconcile accepted attitudes with a new policy, and the old phraseology of the Left conceals less and less successfully an ideology of the Right. The trend is strengthened by transfusions of new blood from a colonial domain lost or endangered in the last few years; that is, by the arrival in metropolitan France of tens of thousands of politically active and actively resentful citizens from Indo-China, Morocco, Tunisia, impenitently expressing their disrespect for democratic values, their wartime sympathies for Pétain and Vichy, and their contempt for the traditional language of political conformity.

Between the mid-1990s and the mid-2010s, the Chinese government was distinctly open to the Western offer of democracy-assistance programs. It cooperated with a number of Western organizations to improve the rule of law, village elections, administrative capacity, and civil society in China. Why did the Chinese government engage with democracy promoters who tried to develop these democratic attributes within China? The author argues that the government intended to use Western aid to its advantage. The Chinese Communist Party had launched governance reforms to strengthen its regime legitimacy, and Chinese officials found that Western democracy assistance could be used to facilitate their own governance-reform programs. The article traces the process of how the government’s strategic intention translated into policies of selective openness, and includes evidence from firsthand interviews, propaganda materials, and research by Chinese experts. The findings show how democracy promoters and authoritarian leaders have different expectations of the effects of limited democratic reform within nondemocratic systems. Empirically, reflecting on the so-called golden years of China’s engagement with the West sheds new light on the Chinese Communist Party’s survival strategy through authoritarian legitimation.

The trend toward economic rationality in the USSR has not beenconfined to domestic issues alone. It is also manifest in the search for more advantageous and efficient procedures in foreign economic relations, specifically aid and trade with the third world. In this search for ways to secure tangible gains, Soviet relations with the developing countries are entering a new phase, in which economic considerations of profit are challenging the hitherto dominant political motivations.

The proliferation of new sovereign states, well over sixty since World War II, has created language problems on a scale unknown in the past. In many of the emergent lands there is a great diversity of tongues, with none of them predominant. Ethnic and tribal rivalries quite often are so acute that the choice of any one language over the others would evoke stubborn opposition and fan already existing resentments. For example, Nigeria with some two hundred distinct languages simply saw fit to adopt English as the over-all official medium, although several important vernaculars are employed for primary education and local administration.

Between 1944 and 1948, six European countries experienced Communist seizures of power. Three were enemies and three friends and allies of Soviet Russia during the war; four were Slav countries; five were predominantly peasant with some remnants of feudalism; with the exception of industrial Czechoslovakia, their prewar record in democratic government was far from exemplary. In all of them, however, the Communists were successful.

What were the components of Communist success and democratic defeat? The case of Czechoslovakia shows clearly that the active interest and impressive display of Soviet power in contrast to the West's hesitant policy not only formed the background but were the chief bases for Communist successes in Eastern Europe. Careful, professional infiltration of democratic institutions and the wishful thinking of the democrats did the rest.

The broad question posed here is how authority is distributed in the world and what shifts may be occurring in its pattern of distribution. Mainly, of course, authority is today allocated according to the Western State System, characterized in its legal mechanics by territorial rule among equals and in its political philosophy by consent of the governed. Conveniently dated from the Treaty of Westphalia and the French Revolution, the system is now more widespread than ever before.

The view of critics like Myrdal that a solution to problems of mass poverty requires sweeping changes in established cultural attitudes and institutions which cannot be carried out through democratic methods remains influential in India among intellectuals and radical political parties. Yet, a frontal assault on the existing social order would delay or abort basic economic reforms by fragmenting large numbers of the poorer classes along more potent allegiances to religion, language, and caste. An alternative solution can be devised based on the distinction between direct and indirect obstacles to economic development which are part of the social setting. Direct constraints are found in patterns of land ownership and land tenure. By contrast, the cultural attitudes, caste structures, and power relations are indirect obstacles in the sense that they strengthen ideological and political patterns that stand in the way of agrarian reform. Under Indian conditions democratic rather than authoritarian institutions offer the best prospect over the long term for carrying out basic economic changes. They strengthen egalitarian values and provide an opportunity for direct organization of the more numerous lower castes to weaken both the legitimacy and power of the dominant landed castes—without risking the social disorder of a direct confrontation.

The quotations from Charles A. McClelland and Graham T. Allison represent two distinct approaches to the study of international relations: (i) international system analysis; and (2) foreign policy analysis. Essentially, international system analysts seek to explain interactions between nations by phenomena such as their prior interactions and the structure of the system. Foreign policy analysts, on the other hand, seek to explain foreign policy behavior as the output of subnational organizations following standard operating procedures or engaging in a problem-solving search. Given the international system and foreign policy approaches as contrasting points of departure, the goals of the present study are:

The oil crises of the 1970s ended a distinct historical period in the control of oil. While the demise of the first oil regime is clear to all, the nature of that regime itself is less well understood. What, in particular, was the distribution of power among the actors in the regime? What were the structures and goals of this system during the long period (approximately the first seventy years of the twentieth century) during which petroleum became vital to industrial society and emerged as the most important commodity in world commerce?

Military strategy is of all the human sciences at once the most ancient and the least developed. It could hardly be otherwise. Its votaries must be men of decision and action rather than of theory. Victory is the payoff, and is regarded as the most telling confirmation of correct judgment. There is no other science where judgments are tested in blood and answered in the servitude of the defeated, where the supreme authority is the leader who has won or can instill confidence that he will win.

Some modicum of theory there always had to be. But like much other military equipment, it had to be light in weight and easily packaged to be carried into the field. Thus, the strategic ideas which have from time to time evolved have no sooner gained acceptance than they have been stripped to their barest essentials and converted into maxims. Because the baggage that was stripped normally contained the justifications, the qualifications, and the instances of historical application or misapplication, the surviving maxim had to be accorded a substitute dignity and authority by treating it as an axiom, or, in latter-day parlance, a “principle.”

How large is the Soviet gross national product (GNP) relative to our own? A third as large? Half? Two-thirds? Which of the estimates is correct? As the unique solution, none of them, unfortunately. Nor need we search for other numbers: these are probably the best of the lot, and in any case, the reply would be the same. The problem is not one of data, or of definitions, or of estimating methods. Such problems do exist and present difficulties of their own, but the inescapable and immovable barrier to the unique solution in US-USSR national output comparisons is the crucial fact of differences in the structures of the American and Soviet economies. In general, in comparisons of different economies or of the same economy at different times, diverse structures create what the economist calls an “index-number problem.” The worst of it is, the “problem” is insoluble.

At a time when proposals for a European strategic force centering on Anglo-French nuclear cooperation are once again the subject of serious official discussions, it would seem appropriate to raise a number of more general issues about the making of defense policy in Western Europe today.

Renzo De Felice's most recent publications, Mussolini il duce and Fascism: An Informal Introduction to Its Theory and Practice, have caused considerable consternation among both the lay and academic public. De Felice has suggested that generic fascism, and particularly Italian Fascism, may have displayed some progressive and revolutionary features. He goes on to suggest that Italian Fascism shared some affinities with the traditional “left.” Most of these contentions are well supported in the specialized literature; while they may cause some political discomfort, they should generate little intellectual resistance. The discussion concerning sensitive political issues has caused scholars to neglect some important methodological theses which De Felice is prepared to defend. The most critical issue turns on the role and legitimacy of generalizing over an ill-defined generic fascism. De Felice has attempted to restrict the characterization “fascist” to one or two strictly European regimes. The article concludes that there are no methodological grounds for such a restriction.

The historical role of the working class has recently been subject to reassessment. Frequently repudiated are the Marxist views that the proletariat constitutes either, as Marx's and Engels' classic scheme would have it, the revolutionary social force in capitalist societies, or, as Lenin believed, the pre-eminent element in a revolutionary alliance with the poorest strata of the peasantry, or, finally, as Mao holds, the leadership cadres needed to mobilize the downtrodden peasant masses into conscious, revolutionary action. Consider, for instance, the meager role attributed to the working class in Barrington Moore's brilliant effort, in Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, to delineate three historical routes to modernity.

THE idea that peaceful adjustment of the relations of states may result from contention among them Claude believes to be hopelessly outmoded. The presence of nuclear weapons means that any equilibrium of states, however stable it may seem, is not nearly stable enough. The task of the theorist and the statesman alike is to introduce order from above, to replace the “invisible hand” by which adjustments are contrived in systems of self-regulation with something a little more substantial. Here the juxaposition of our two authors enlivens the subject. F. H. Hinsley considers the notion of spontaneous equilibrium to be a liberating idea. He applies the eighteenth century's beautiful system of natural harmony to the world of the present and is delighted with the result. Though large-scale war would now be devastating, we need not worry. Nuclear power is absolute and nuclear states, competent to control the instruments of power at their disposal, deter each other absolutely.

The creation of the Cominform in the summer of 1947 marked an important stage in the development of communism in Europe. The precise reasons that led the leaders of Soviet Communism to revive a public form of co-operation between several Communist parties remain to this day uncertain. What is obvious is the use to which the Cominform has been put during its brief existence up to now. It has acted as an added catalyst of social and political change in the satellite countries. Its resolutions, like the one on the occasion of the expulsion of Yugoslavia from that body, have laid down the broad lines of policy to be pursued by the People's Democracies on such vital issues as the question of collectivization of agriculture, the “nationalist deviation,” etc. The original concept of the Com-inform included, undoubtedly, creation of the appearance of complete autonomy of the Communist parties in Eastern Europe. The language of the speeches at the founding meeting and the choice of the seat for the new organization, outside of the Soviet Union, testify as to the serious attempt to present the collaboration between the Soviet Union and her Communist allies under a veneer of equality. If the picture thus presented seemed to lack realism to the Communist leaders from Poland or Yugoslavia, it is unreasonable to assume that the propaganda effect of the establishment of the Cominform was entirely lost upon the masses who had, since the end of the war, joined the ranks of the ruling parties in the satellite states.