Interest in the study of international relations has considerably increased in American universities since the close of World War II. A School of World Affairs has been established by Columbia University which is also planning institutes for special areas, the first of which, the Russian Institute, will open soon. To promote research and teaching, grants have been given to universities, such as that by the Rockefeller Foundation to Yale University. It is reported that in almost all educational institutions the students, particularly veterans, show an especially great interest in international affairs. The Council on Foreign Relations, keenly aware of this situation, has organized conferences in various parts of the country to investigate problems of teaching and research in international relations.

The latter half of the eighteenth century was a period of tremendous social, political, and economic fermentation. Much of our contemporary civilization was shaped by the forces released during those five decades. Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Germans of great ability and deserved renown had written and were writing of the rights of man and of the citizen. More than ever before in the history of the modern world thought was being given to the lot of the common people. In America, and later in France, Thomas Paine epitomized this liberal intellectual trend in words that have been adopted as classic expressions of the inherent value of the human personality.

Unfortunately, the phenomenal growth of industrial capitalism during he nineteenth and twentieth centuries caused the new bourgeois ruling classes to lose sight of the basic human values stressed so emphatically by the eighteenth-century intellectuals.

The first requisite for a clear grasp of the tragic situation in India today is the need of distinguishing between two trends, the political one of conflict between autocracy and democracy, and the nationalistic one of conflict between White and Brown. Failure to distinguish can lead to such astonishing ideas as that Gandhi fights for Democracy or that “British” is synonymous with “imperialist.”

The three years of struggle and attempted negotiations between Poland and the Soviet Union over the readjustment of their frontiers were concluded by a two-fold decision. Thanks to Moscow, Poland was given a government which readily consented to give up both the Western Ukraine and White Ruthenia, territories occupied by Poland after the First World War; now they become parts of the Soviet Union. On the motion of Viacheslav Molotov, the Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Ukraine was accepted as a member of the world organization, the United Nations.

The first event means that after six hundred years, Poland has withdrawn her claim to an extensive tract of land which she ruled at times as far east as the River Dnieper and beyond. Polish ambitions to control the Ukrainian and White Ruthenian lands and to assimilate these two peoples culturally in order to make them an ethnographic Polish entity, with some exceptions of course, failed.

This paper will treat only a small part of the subject promised by its title. A really correct evaluation of present-day Germany would demand, above all, a thorough economic and sociological analysis for which sufficient data are not available. Even establishing and naming events and facts is, in the present state of affairs, a matter of interpretation.

Further, it would be necessary especially to describe the forces engaged in reconstruction, in church work and administration, in governmental agencies and in the press, in parties and in trade unions, in universities and in public colleges. What is being accomplished by these elements cannot be judged until later, when they have reached a stage of crystallization. Here we shall discuss only the circumstances under which reconstruction is taking place.

When the Potsdam declarations were made public, Anne O'Hare McCormick (in her column in the New York Times of August 4, 1945) commented: “The scale and novelty of the great experiment is breathtaking. Stalin, Truman and Attlee may be remembered longer than the original Big Three, the war-leaders, because their names are affixed to this document.”

The general public, on this side of the Atlantic, is as yet hardly aware of the full implications of the Potsdam declarations. The economic consequences of Potsdam have been widely debated in Britain, but they have received little attention in this country. Yet, the plan decided upon in the former city of the Prussian kings is due almost entirely to American initiative. In the words of Raymond Daniell: