In recent years tremendous concern has been expressed about the problems of what had first been identified as “backward,” then euphemistically “underdeveloped” or “undeveloped,” and now more positively “developing” or “emerging” areas. A wealth of factual and theoretical studies has been produced, attempting to view the problems of underdevelopment broadly and to construct a conceptual framework by which we might comprehend the apparently complex phenomena occurring in those regions. In spite of this growing scholarly interest, and without attempting to minimize the contribution of those who are laboring in this as yet untapped field, it is this writer's contention that too few studies have been undertaken which examine and analyze the views of those individuals most influential in shaping the future of the emerging states—the national political leaders.

An evaluation of British foreign policy towards Nazi Germany is still overlaid in England by political controversy. The two main political parties cannot deny their descent from the parties that confronted each other in the 1930's. The question of responsibility for that tragically unsuccessful foreign policy and for the ensuing war still produces heated reproaches in the political arena and equally heated debates among historians. The belief that, had Britain taken the “right line,” the war could have been prevented is still very strong. In the words of the Oxford historian, A. L. Rowse: “There was a hope then, and it did matter what line we took; during that last decade this country exercised a leading influence in Europe and still held a position of leadership in the English-speaking world. All that has changed: the real decisions are made elsewhere” (p. 4). Had Hitler been checked and the exhaustive blood-letting avoided, would the “real decisions” still be made in England? These nagging questions arise again and again on the rostrum, in the newspapers, in Senior Common Rooms. They have produced two sets of legends, of which various versions circulate. The Right asserts in Quintin Hogg's words that “the Left was never right,” and that by demagogically exploiting the public's pacifist temper it kept Britain from rearming so that the Conservative governments had no alternative to appeasement. The Left, on the other hand, developed the legend that Tories feared Soviet Russian communism more than Nazism and saw in Hitler the man who stemmed the Red tide from spreading westward. The Communist version of this goes further; it asserts that Neville Chamberlain, in true Machiavellian fashion, encouraged Hitler to expand towards the East in order to involve him in a serious conflict with Stalin.

Politics cannot tolerate indulgence, it must be logical and consistent.” This was a lesson in Soviet foreign policy which N. S. Khrushchev administered in July 1957, or just after the organizational finale to his bitter struggle with V. M. Molotov, whom the victorious leader accused of favoring “the policy of ‘tightening all the screws’” in relations with the West. However, in the past two and a half years, erraticism has often marked the Kremlin's foreign political behavior. Does this vacillation originate entirely in “objective” pressures on the party First Secretary and premier, or in his own allegedly impulsive nature, or may it sometimes be due in part to a recurrence of factional clashes in the Soviet hierarchy?

A new mood of criticism is abroad in modern India. The mood can be characterized as one of dismayed re-evaluation of the entire direction of development efforts since Independence. Its character was presaged by the withdrawal from politics of J. P. Narayan as long ago as 1953, but it has only been in the last two years that the mood has begun to produce tangible political effects as well as to liven markedly public debate. To be sure, the efforts of the government of India have, for many years, come under sustained attack by leftists—notably, the Communist Party and the Socialist Party of India—the force of their argument being that those efforts have fallen far short of what is necessary for the certain amelioration of the lot of the mass of Indians. The singularity of the new wave of criticism is that it is producing a genuine conservatism, in the sense that its thrust is directed against the headlong pace, as well as the novelty, of Prime Minister Nehru's “socialist” program. The Swatantra Party, founded in 1961, is the organizational manifestation of this mood in active politics. It is being led by the redoubtable C. Rajagopalachari, former Vice-President of India and veteran of the Independence struggle. The central tenet of the new conservatism is that India's ills can be traced to overrapid innovation and too sweeping a departure from Indian ways. India's economic and social predicament is not amenable to Western social engineering, based primarily upon socialistic components within a democratic political frame; it can be bettered only by a return to the methods of spiritual appeal, individualistic effort, and tutelage in the fundamentals of political democracy that are associated with the revered name of Mahatma Gandhi.

Three recent texts on international relations, chosen out of the welter of new books and revisions that have appeared in the last few years, are the subject of this review. They have been picked because in some ways each is an excellent and important work. They are also books which in their strengths and weaknesses complement each other. Each author or set of authors has a distinct emphasis in outlook and in method, but at the same time the books exhibit a core of agreement about certain fundamental aspects of world politics today that indicates a growing consensus among contemporary analysts and scholars. A comparative review of this type can thus be used not only to evaluate the suitability of these books as texts and their contributions to international relations theory, but also to assess this consensus and to indicate its main outlines.

I don't know how many economists, teaching business fluctuations or the corn-hog cycle, have devoted an hour to the household thermostat; I know several. Cybernetics, I am told, drew attention to similarities between vacuum tubes and animal nerve cells, and made predictions about the human nervous system that were verified by surgery. An article on feedback related artillery fire-control and automatic oil-pipeline systems to the ecological complementarity of the lynx and the rabbit. Economists compare the closeness of election campaigns to the market forces that make two brands of cider taste much alike. Analysts of rumor, best sellers, and epidemic diseases have been led independently to the equation for the logistic curve; and the collapse of Batista has been compared to the collapse of a stock market. Individuals with conflicting internal values have been likened to a two-person committee with a complicated voting system; and recently the paradigm of the “prisoners' dilemma” has been used to characterize preemptive attack, cheating on a test ban, and Rousseau's illustration (five men cooperating in a stag hunt when one spies a hare) of the value of enforceable contract.

Professor Lucian W. Pye succeeds brilliantly in Politics, Personality, and Nation Building in explaining why at least one country, Burma, has encountered some of the difficulties it has in creating an effective, modern state system. Proclaiming at the start of his study the need for a doctrine of democratic development, Pye deals primarily with the related search for individual and collective identity by a people unprepared in many of their sentiments and attitudes for the tasks that now weigh so heavily upon their shoulders. The most revealing section of his book, that dealing with the attitudes of various members of Burma's political elite on such matters as power and action and the nature of Burmese politics, is based mainly on 79 interviews (34 with administrative officials, 27 with politicians, and 18 with “observers and critics of the political scene such as journalists, educators and businessmen”). Disguised sketches of some of the persons interviewed follow Pye's analysis of the views of these Burmese.

The necessity for books dealing with Congress and foreign policy is not immediately apparent. The authors of both volumes under review remind us that Congress is not central to foreign policy-making, and that foreign policy-making is not central to the business of Congress. The fact that this is so poses indirectly a question important to both books. Given the increasing impact of foreign affairs on America's future, is it enough for Congress merely to lobby, to warn, to complain, to snip at budgets and attempt to modify policies set by a burgeoning, technically specialized executive? Must not Congress change its ways, or shrink into an unequivocally subordinate place in our Constitutional system, as foreign affairs occupy more and more of the landscape?

On March 27,1938, just two days before signing the Munich agreement, by which Czechoslovakia was dismembered, Neville Chamberlain referred to the Czech-German dispute in the Sudetenland as “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.” The insularity and outright ignorance displayed in this remark, while surprising in a national leader, were not untypical of the views prevailing before World War II among the English-speaking public regarding not only the Sudeten problem, but much else in Eastern Europe. The accounts of journalists, travelers, and writers in search of sensation did little to counteract, and frequently merely reflected, the shallow and often disdainful opinions held by many Westerners regarding the quarrelsome nationalities of Eastern Europe.