This essay examines the Concert of Europe as an international system and offers some general reflections and tentative conclusions about the meaning, the nature, and the operation of concert diplomacy between 1815 and 1854. It focuses upon the assumptions and procedures engendered by the Concert which restrained and moderated the policies of the European great powers by peaceful means. It concludes that the European Concert was a conscious and reasonably successful attempt to devise a stable and peaceful system of interstate relations.

Three types of thought approach the question of future world order: the naturalrational, positivist-evolutionary, and historicist-dialectical. The normative criterion in the natural-rational approach has, in recent times, most commonly been bound up with the view that liberal pluralism in polities is the condition for a just world order. This view has, however, succumbed both under the critique of positivist-evolutionary political science which argues that authoritarianism is characteristic of early stages of political development, and to the manipulation of “pluralism” in poor countries by powerful external forces (investment, trade union, and intelligence). The positivist-evolutionary approach has two main currents. One is functionalism, of which the transnational and transgovernmental relations versions are currently fashionable. The other is the notion of a global ecological system. Both versions take existing structures of power and social relations as implicit givens from which future trends are extrapolated; they provide no basis for considering the possibility of changes in these structures. The historicist-dialectical approach offers the possibility of understanding change in these basic structures of power and social relations by searching out points of emerging conflict and the alternative conceptions of order which the forces in conflict express.

What leverage does international organization offer on problems of interdependence? At what system level can actors cooperate to what effect? And is their cooperation more the product of the “objective facts” of interdependence or of “subjective” political considerations? Insights into these problems are obtained by examining the operational network of relationships that developed between the UN and selected regional organizations in the field of collective security. The organizations' operational jurisdictions and capabilities are examined in light of 146 cases of interstate security conflicts that were submitted to them. The operational network that developed is found to be in accordance with the prescriptions of Chapter VIII of the UN Charter, suggesting that short-term bargaining considerations are the primary determinants of the effectiveness of international organization. But although such considerations have made these organizations quite useful, they have also produced a movement away from organizational conflict management during the past decade.

Throughout the nuclear era, United States strategic defense policy has been conceptualized in terms of the rational theory of decision. Though this has been on balance a happy arrangement for the primary policy of deterrence, there are anomalies in the theory which make its extension to problems of arms control problematic and which lead to well-known doubts about crisis stability. Given the seriousness of the latter issues, it is well to consider the implications of alternative theories of the decision process.

A competitive theory of the decision process can be found; that theory, labeled here the cybernetic theory, leads to distinctly different conclusions concerning major matters of defense policy such as force sizing, force targeting, and arms-negotiation strategy. It is very unlikely that such an unfamiliar and underdeveloped theory could either quickly or completely replace established rational conceptions of defense policy, but some plausible marginal adjustments are suggested.

On the basis of evidence mainly from West Africa, many scholars in the 1960's made predictions about likely trends in Africa as a whole on such issues as one-party states. On the basis of data from Eastern Africa, can we now risk predictions about likely performance of military regimes in Africa as a whole?

There is evidence from Eastern Africa that African soldiers may be agents of retradi-tionalization. The bulk of the army in most countries is recruited from some of the most rural and least acculturated sectors of society. Contemporary African soldiers may be traditionalists in charge of modern armies with modern technology. What happens when a modern organization is manned mainly by rural recruits?

It may be that both modernization and retraditionalization are taking place under military leadership in Africa. The cultural revivalist role of sub-westernized or non-westernized African soldiers is beginning to manifest itself in places like Uganda under Idi Amin and Zaire under Mobutu Sese Seko. The political decline of westernized intellectuals and the rise of soldiers may herald a partial re-Africanization of Africa, but with some painful costs.

The phenomenal growth of the Japanese Communist Party's electoral strength during a period of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity (1961–1974) clearly deviates from Benjamin's and Kautsky's “curvilinear theory” of the economic development and strength of Communist parties. Nor does it conform to Lipset's hypothesis that there exists an inverse correlation between the economic growth and the strength of Communist parties. It is my basic contention that the recent growth in the JCP's organizational strength and electoral successes should be ascribed to the overall deradicalization of the party which has taken place since 1961. The findings of this study as a whole substantiate theories en deradicalization of the Marxist movement advanced earlier by Robert Michels and more recently by Robert C. Tucker, who hypothesized that there exists an inverse correlation between the deradicalization of a revolutionary party and its “worldly success.” His findings also confirm Triska's and Finley's hypothesis that deradicalized Communist parties in the developed countries would become not significantly different from other non-Communist parties either in structure or functions.

Few people in any NATO country are satisfied with the existing theater nuclear posture and doctrine—yet radical revision is politically impossible. There is a marked absence of consensus within NATO on the proper functions of theater nuclear weapons: to Europeans they are, above all, a near-guarantee of a wider war and symbolic of American commitment (thereby enhancing deterrence), while to Americans they are, essentially, a means for reversing a deteriorating battlefield situation. A guide to the debate of recent years is organized around the systematic discussion of four alternative theater nuclear postures: Current NATO, Revised NATO, The Covering Force, and Battlefield Use. The ideas inherent in, and the means for the accomplishment of each, are presented, as are the claimed advantages and disadvantages. The debate occasioned by the Nunn Amendment has focused attention on the question of the relationship between defensive utility and deterrent value.

In a recent article in this journal, I reported a failure to replicate the positive correlations Bruce Russett found between inequality of land tenure and political instability.2 Unfortunately, two of the instability indicators I used were untransformed counts (Deaths from domestic political violence, 1948–67 and 1961–65), whereas Russett had employed the logarithm of a similar measure. Taking logarithms is advisable when using counts in order to reduce skewness.3 Correlations between inequality and the logarithms (to the base ten) of the Deaths variables (plus one, as the log of zero is undefined) are greater than those I reported, though not so strong as Russett found. For 1961–65, the correlation is .29; for 1948–67, .20. The former is significant at the .05 level; the latter is not. When the Gini coefficients are weighted by the percentage of each nation's labor force in agriculture in i960,4 the correlations with the logged Deaths variables were .63 and .61—both highly significant. These figures especially support Russett's conclusions.