There is at present considerable uncertainty as to the purposes which Canada's foreign assistance program is intended to serve. This uncertainty is no doubt influencing our policies. The question of why we are giving and why we should give in the future is fundamental to practically all aspects of our aid policy—including the size, form, terms, and geographical orientation of our assistance, the choice between bilateral and multilateral channels, the administration of our aid, the public support for our assistance program, and the relations between Canada and the recipient countries.

A Casual reading of contemporary news reports suggests that during the past decade economic issues have taken on growing importance in the relations of non-Communist developed countries. The disputes between the United States and Japan over textiles, between the United States and the European Economic Community over agricultural trade, and between France and Germany over currency alignments come readily to mind. It is perhaps symbolic of the enormous success of early postwar foreign policy that issues no graver than these play such a prominent part in relations among countries that, earlier in the century, were sporadically at each other's throats.

In the history of postcolonial Africa, no country has suffered a more tragic experience than Nigeria. After almost twenty years of gradual constitutional evolution by relatively orderly processes of conferences and negotiations, the structure of constitutional agreement collapsed; the army was broken into regional groups; citizens of Eastern Region origin fled much of the rest of the country during a series of massacres which produced a migration of hundreds of thousands of persons; the central government lost its effective authority over the Eastern Region; and when orderly processes of negotiation were suspended, the Eastern Region sought its own security and survival by declaring its independence, shortly after which the central government sought to reestablish its authority in the area by military action. The resulting war, which lasted two and one-half years, produced over a million casualties from military action, disease, and starvation.

Scholars associated with theories of “nation-building” have tended either to ignore the question of ethnic diversity or to treat the matter of ethnic identity superficially as merely one of a number of minor impediments to effective state-integration. To the degree that ethnic identity is given recognition, it is apt to be as a somewhat unimportant and ephemeral nuisance that will unquestionably give way to a common identity uniting all inhabitants of the state, regardless of ethnic heritage, as modern communication and transportation networks link the state's various parts more closely. Both tendencies are at sharp variance with the facts, and have contributed to the undue optimism that has characterized so much of the literature on “nation-building.”

The past decade has witnessed a general advancement in comparative studies of communism. Yet, in comparing the conceptual development of the Soviet-East European and Chinese Communist fields, one is struck by the peculiarly arrested state of the Chinese side. By comparison, the “Kremlinologists” have produced a veritable storehouse of analytical tools with which they have contributed to the explanation of the nature and functioning of the Soviet political process and Soviet-East European interrelationship. Relatively little conceptual development is discernible in the China field. In this brief essay on comparative developments in the study of communism, I will attempt to compare the concepts which Western scholars have evolved to analyze the politics of the Communist world, account for different approaches, and analyze Chinese political history to determine the most meaningful approach. I speak of the nature and functioning of the political process in a restricted sense—the ways in which leaders interact, how political positions are attained and maintained, and, in general, the structure of leadership politics in the Communist world.

The greatest convulsion in Chinese politics since 1949, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, has subsided. The Ninth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), held in April, 1969, seems to have been one of the final steps in consolidating the fruits of the revolution. It involved, above all, an unprecedented scale of upheaval in the party leadership and the party organization.

It is a commonplace observation—certainly among practicing members of the foreign policy community, but also among academic students of world politics—that policy-makers have seldom given much heed to the writings of theorists on international relations. Particularly in recent years, when academic writing on international relations has grown increasingly technical in nature and more impenetrable to a reader without specialized training in one or more social science disciplines, the theorist as theorist has had little communication with the policy-maker. It is also true that many practitioners, and many from the academic side as well, would tend to agree that, by and large, the policymakers have not missed much.

Most of the writing on foreign policy in the less developed countries stresses either the importance of idiosyncratic sources of policy or the identification of a number of relatively long-term factors which influence the formation of policy. These studies are helpful in many ways, but in one important respect they are unsatisfying. They do not give us a clear picture of how foreign policy relates to the political and economic problems that constitute the essence of being a less developed country.

Political science has made valuable contributions to the progressive clarification of the concept of power since World War II. In view of the attention political scientists have traditionally lavished on the concept of power, it seems fitting that they should help clarify it. Thanks to the efforts of such men as Harold Lasswell and Robert Dahl, many political scientists today are keenly aware of the need to define power in relational terms, to distinguish power relations from power resources, to specify scope, weight, domain, and so on. There is, however, one distinction that is rarely considered by political scientists—that between positive and negative sanctions. The purpose of this paper is to clarify this distinction and show how and why it matters.

Since the 1850's there has been intermittent but always renewed interest on the part of politicians, academics, and journalists in the particular aspect of interstate rivalry generally termed an “arms race.” Despite the longevity of concern and the eclecticism of approach, the prime impetus behind the inquiry that has resulted in this article is the sad truth that aside from somewhat banal and highly questionable hypotheses we really know very little about arms race phenomena. This analysis will attempt a systematic investigation of some of the most important aspects of the subject.

Why are people in politics? Behind this deceptively simple question lies a promising realm of research and analysis. A satisfactory understanding of political motivation can provide a powerful analytical tool for explaining why different groups of participants behave as they do; ultimately it can suggest why they adopt and sustain different political institutions. The basic axiom which, in principle, yields such explanations is simple: participants behave in a manner consistent with their incentives.

On March 30, 1971, as the Twenty-fourth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union opened, the prediction was widely voiced in the West that no surprises were in the offing. Basing their judgments on the aura of “business as usual” which had emanated from the Soviet leadership in the months prior to the Congress, Western specialists predicted a dull gathering, keynoted by signs of stability and ostensible unity—a far cry from the lively Congresses, full of unanticipated developments, over which Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev had presided.

In one of the landmark contributions to the strategic literature of the late 1950's, Albert Wohlstetter advanced the disquieting thesis that the vulnerability of our strategic retaliatory force (then consisting largely of overseas-based manned bombers and rather primitive, unhardened IRBM's) to a well-orchestrated Soviet surprise attack had come to suggest worrisome implications for continued U.S. security. The credibility of a deterrent posture, he pointedly emphasized, presupposed the ability of the deterring power to convey to its opponent an absolute certainty that any attack, however massive, would be answered by an unacceptably devastating reprisal.

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:

My argument is that the very existence of international relations poses a serious, and perhaps intractable, problem for Marxism. This is easy enough to see on the level of empirical politics, and even on the level of ideological controversy, but it is a still too little appreciated issue in the context of a thoroughgoing theoretical analysis of Marxian thought. I would like to offer some tentative remarks on this latter plane. My suggestions are not as conclusive as I would like them to be, but they may at least raise some important and topical questions. Briefly, it is my intention to show that since international relations presuppose the horizontal division of mankind into nations or states, and since Marxian thought postulates the absolute unity of mankind as its ideal, problems relating to horizontal group diversity are much more centrally relevant to the Marxian doctrine than it is usually thought. Not only is there a clear moral argument in Marxian thought against group diversity as such, but the very central tenets of Marxism have a direct, though implicit, reference to the relations between horizontal groups such as nations. I believe, further, that these aspects of Marxian thought have been lost sight of and confused or underemphasized over the years, partly by Marx and Engels themselves at the very start, and partly by their political followers, and (later) academic critics.

If the number of publications is an accurate gauge, there was a conspicuous revival of interest in fascism during the past decade. One obvious reason for this was the erosion of the theories of totalitarianism that had dominated discussions of political extremism during the 1950's. By linking German National Socialism and, in some cases, Italian Fascism with Russian Communism, these theories inhibited consideration of fascism as a distinctive generic phenomenon in its own right. But in the wake of the thaw in Khrushchev's Soviet Union and the general relaxation of cold-war tensions during the 1960's, the various theories of totalitarianism became less compelling.1 As a result, many students of twentieth-century politics became aware of the absence of a concept suitable for characterizing those interwar authoritarian movements and regimes in Europe that were neither conservative nor Communist. For some, fascism provided the solution.

During the Tet holiday of 1968, North Vietnamese troops launched massive attacks on a large number of South Vietnamese cities. Why?