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.

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.

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.

The fact that most Arab countries recently celebrated the centenary of Lenin's birth with varying degree of fanfare only underlines their relative impermeability to his teachings. The fanfare was not in all cases inversely proportional to the country's implementation of practical ideology, but the latter is in scarce evidence. Few of the leadership groups have assimilated the Leninist prescription to unite practice with theory, much less devised or adapted an ideology which is “practical” in the sense of legitimating particular political strategies or tactics in a logical and systematic way. Nor have they, except possibly in Tunisia, developed the necessary concomitant of practical ideology, namely a durable political organization which articulates and implements it.

The national malaise over Vietnam has had many spillovers. Among them can be counted a shelf of works on the militaryindustrial complex and the role of the military establishment in American policy-making. Much of this material should never have been written; it is uninformed, naive, biased, and even nonsensical. Several recent contributions to the debate have attempted to raise the level of discussion by considering the defense problem as a matter of allocative theory and decision. Each of these books will be widely regarded as an authoritative pronouncement on the causes and cures of America's defense dilemmas. They have been written by distinguished scholars or former policy-makers whose reputations in their fields are excellent.