The British general strike of May, 1926, was a strange event. Over two and a half million men left their work and for nine days closed down the British economy. It was the greatest strike ever to take place in Western Europe and it evoked much class bitterness. And yet many middle- and upper-class Englishmen who had been bitter and angry during the strike came eventually to look back on it as a gay adventure which showed how peaceful and sensible Englishmen were. They were proud that they had fought so great an industrial battle to a conclusion without a single death or even the firing of a single shot. Alfred Duff Cooper (Lord Norwich) who was a young back-bencher at the time of the strike (he later became Secretary of State for War and First Lord of the Admiralty) wrote in 1953 in his autobiography: “… it [the strike] threatened the survival of parliamentary government, and it brought the country nearer to revolution than it has ever been.” But despite this, English good sense triumphed: “Happily, no grave errors of judgment were made by either side and the remarkable result was achieved of complete victory without vindictiveness on the one side or rancour on the other. The air was cleared and from that day to this relations between capital and labour have been happier in Great Britain.”.

In a majority of Latin-American countries the coup d'etat rather than the ballot is still the institutionalized mechanism for transferring political power. Some states, like Haiti and Paraguay, are clearly in the “prehistory” of modern political parties. Nevertheless, in the twentieth century the political party with a developed ideology has become a major feature of Latin-American political life.

Almost thirty years ago Nicholas Mansergh concluded that the political parties in Northern Ireland did not fulfill the needs of the political system: that (to put his statement in more contemporary terms) the input functions, particularly that of political socialization, were enfeebled to the extent that one party constituted a permanent government while the other became an equally permanent opposition. What is more, underlying the party system and within the political society itself there existed no consensus on fundamentals: “There is no residue of political beliefs—as in Great Britain and the Free State—acceptable to both parties.”

Involvement in the Congo crisis of 1960 illustrates dramatically an American dilemma in foreign policy: the apparent incompatibility between the nation's emotional rejection of colonialism and the burdens of world leadership which include the consequences of anticolonialism. In 1960 the United States joined the Soviet Union in expediting the removal of the NATO partner, Belgium, from the Congo, helped to increase the power of the United Nations in the Congo at the expense of Belgian interests, and used its influence to destroy the Western-oriented regime of Moise Tshombe of secessionist Katanga. But in 1964 the United States was largely responsible for replacing the United Nations' forces in the Congo with Belgian troops; in 1965 the United States supported Tshombe's government in Leopoldville; and in 1966 and 1967 the United States joined Belgium in an uneasy vigil over the government of General Joseph Mobutu. It is not surprising that its efforts should have been interpreted by communists as American imperialism, by Africans as neocolonialism, and by many allies either as incorrigible naiveté or as hypocrisy.

Adenauer's role during the Rhineland occupation after the First World War has been the subject of bitter controversy. His critics, whether Nazi, Communist, or Socialist, have depicted him as a “Rhenish separatist” devoid of German patriotism and willing — perhaps even eager to — collaborate with France at the expense of national unity; parallels were often drawn between his alleged eagerness to create an independent West German Republic allied to France in 1919 and 1923, and his alleged indifference to the cause of German reunification after 1949. His foes depicted him steadily in the 1950's as a Prussophobe-Rhenish provincialist who preferred alliance with the Western Powers to any unification of Germany which might require the loosening of NATO ties.

The involvement of peasants in the rebellions and revolutions of the distant past has been impressive in certain respects, but never acquired quite the importance attributed to it in our own time. In terms of the sheer weight of their numbers, the vastness of the peasants involvement in some internal wars of the past may perhaps never be duplicated. Over twenty million Chinese peasants' were killed in the terrible T'ai-p'ing (1850–1864). Nor was the significance of these colossal figures limited to sheer mass, as the Mexican Revolution illustrates. But never before has so much reliance been put on the peasants for so ambitiously revolutionary plans as in our time. Particularly since the Chinese Communist Revolution, the peasantry has displaced the industrial proletariat as the crucial revolutionary class in the dogma of the most militant Marxists. We have been told repeatedly that Mao, Guevara, Giap, and their disciples have put their hopes in the peasantry and the countryside not merely for radical upheavals through revolutionary wars in underdeveloped countries, but also for global revolution. The role the peasants actually play in such revolutionary wars is among the crucial problems of our time.