This article reviews three recent books critical of America's new “imperial” foreign policy, examines whether the United States can properly be compared to empires of the past, and identifies three aspects of contemporary American policy that may well be called imperialist. It also addresses some of the main objections to recent U.S. foreign policy made by American realist scholars and argues that traditional interstate realism can no longer readily apply to the problem ofAmerican unipolar preponderance over an anarchical, nuclear-armed world.

Despite a vast literature on nationalism, theoretical investigations on the subject are rare. Historians generally are not interested in theory, although they use typologies. The most thoroughgoing typology has been produced by the sociologist Anthony D. Smith, who has constructed a matrix with 55 locations that allows categorization of both ancient and modern types of nationalism. Smith divides nationalist ideology into a core doctrine and its accretions, but he may underestimate the importance of language. Kedourie has produced a theory of the intellectual development of nationalism, but only Gellner has a theory of modernity in which nationalism plays a key role. Interest in ethnicity has given a new direction to studies of nationalism by stressing the function of group allegiance in achieving political ends. Finally, despite the sharpness of Smith's definitional insights, his theory itself is too narrow to establish the link he seeks between modernization and nationalism.

In a world in which popular democracy sometimes seems on the defensive, the rise of the Justice party has a significance that goes beyond the borders of Turkey. That nation's continuing social and political revolution, obscured as it has been in the eyes of most foreigners by the cruel impasse of Cyprus and the revival of Greek-Turkish antagonisms in the eastern end of the Mediterranean, is worth trying to understand. Not only does multiparty rivalry exist, but political power in this important American ally is held by the Near East's only genuine grass-roots political party. This party has its roots deep in the country's social structure and is currently headed by an energetic and intelligent young leader of relatively humble origins.

Throughout the 1950's, students of communism almost invariably emphasized the “totalitarian” characteristics of Communist states, a conceptual orientation that coincided with and reinforced the foreign policy of the cold war. T h e doctrines of containment and massive retaliation could be justified most easily if the targeted enemy was considered the embodiment of the unremitting evil suggested by the totalitarian label.

Utilizing two editions of a Soviet textbook that was awarded a state prize and termed “the correct orientation” by a Central Committee official, the author analyzes the evolution of the Soviet view of the outside world in the first half of the 1970s. The movement away from ideological rigidity that began in the 1960s continued in the 1970s on a wide range of subjects. In addition, the analysis of the capitalist countries became intertwined with the debate on the future development of Soviet society; a number of features are said to have resulted from the imperatives of industrialization rather than the inner dynamics of capitalism, and hence are in need of adoption by the Soviet Union. The article closes with a brief survey of the issues subsequently raised in the published Soviet debates that continue on either side of the approved, centrist position.

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.

Although some scholars claim that the empirical evidence for the very low instance of interstate war between democracies is well established, others have raised new challenges. But even if democratic peace is observed, its theoretical explanation remains unresolved. Consensus has not emerged among competing approaches, some of which are criticized for offering monadic logic for a dyadic phenomenon. This article synthesizes recent literature to advance a simple, but distinct, explicitly dyadic theory about institutionalized political competition, leading to expectations that it is the most important source of democratic peace. While the authors are far from the first to consider political competition, their approach stands out in according it the central role in a dyadic theory focused on the regime type of initiators and target states. They argue that potential vulnerability to opposition criticism on target-regime-specific normative and costs-of-war bases is more fundamental than mechanisms such as audience costs, informational effects, or public goods logic. Incumbents in high-competition states will be reluctant to initiate conflict with a democracy due to anticipated inability to defend the conflict as right, necessary, and winnable. The authors present new and highly robust evidence that democratic peace is neither spurious nor a methodological artifact, and that it can be attributed to high-competition states’ aversion to initiating fights with democracies.

Do individuals previously targeted by genocide become more supportive of other victimized groups? How are these political lessons internalized and passed down across generations? To answer these questions, the authors leverage original survey data collected among Holocaust survivors in the United States and their descendants, Jews with no immediate family connection to the Holocaust, and non-Jewish Americans. They find that historical victimization is associated with increased support for vulnerable out-groups, generating stable political attitudes that endure across generations. Holocaust survivors are most supportive of aiding refugees, followed by descendants, especially those who grew up discussing the Holocaust with their survivor relatives. An embedded experiment demonstrates the steadfastness of these attitudes: unlike non-Jews or Jews without survivor relatives, survivors’ and descendants’ views toward refugees do not change after reading an in-group versus out-group–protective interpretation of the “never again” imperative. Histories of victimization can play an ameliorative role in intergroup relations.

Many scholars believe that intense warfare propelled state formation in early modern Europe because rulers built tax institutions to pay for wars. Scholars likewise cite milder geopolitical pressures to explain the lackluster state building in the developing world. The authors analyze episodes of ferocious warfare in and beyond Europe and find that despite similar fiscal strains, not all governments built strong tax institutions to service wartime debt. When net creditors in a country's credit market were part of the ruling political coalition, they pressed governments to diversify taxes and strengthen fiscal institutions to ensure debt service. But when net debtors held political sway, governments were indifferent to debt servicing and fiscal invigoration. Coalitional politics can help to explain why mounting debt-service obligations led to fiscal institution building in some cases, but not others. The analysis highlights how the private economic interests of ruling coalition members can affect state building.

The long-time neglect of the military establishment by the economics profession at large is now in the process of being rectified. It hardly seems necessary to justify this awakening interest. Since resource allocation is fundamental in military problems, the economist, whose primary interest is the logic of the allocative process, is particularly well-qualified to make a contribution. To be sure, this contribution is purely formal. Economics helps to select and frame the questions that should be asked, but the data necessary for the decision-maker to make a choice must be supplied from elsewhere. Though economics may be lacking in substantive content, in that it tells how to choose rather than what to choose, nevertheless such clarification of the logic of choice is not useless to the decision-maker.

The water is safe to drink in Alexandria and Cairo, Egypt, thanks to a water filter station established by Czechoslovak engineers. A shoe factory in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, is being built by Czech technicians. Across the frontier, in Somalia, Czechs are building a technical institute to teach some young Somalis the techniques necessary to staff modern factories. Across the continent in Conakry, Guinea, airport inscriptions are in Czech as well as in French and English to accommodate the many Czechs arriving on the direct Prague-to-Conakry airline. In the smaller villages of Ghana special trucks are delivering Czech beer to the local inhabitants. In Mali journalists are being trained by Czechs in the establishment of their own press agency. And in Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia, there are numerous Africans among the more than 2,000 students from Africa, Asia, and Latin America enrolled at Czech state expense in institutions of higher learning. To say that Africa has assumed a role of real importance for the Czechs is an understatement.

INDIA is six years old. Its reactions to the world are still largely a matter not of deliberate policy, but of a set of sometimes in consistent attitudes toward foreigners, attitudes which are only now, under Prime Minister Nehru's constant prodding, crystallizing into a foreign policy. A policy, whether foreign or domestic, is the pursuit by word and deed of a calculated line of action based on the interest, real or mistaken, of a country, or sometimes of its ruling classes. There is still no such calculation of risks and rewards in India's relations with the world, although a certain continuity of planning and thinking is beginning to emerge. Mr. Nehru's proclaimed “judgment of issues as they arise, on their own merits, with an open and independent approach” is by definition the negation of policy, since it precludes the pursuit of a pattern, or even the calculation of India's interests. To those accustomed to the history-rooted calculations of Europe, such an approach to policy-making seems odd.

Inflation has long been a fact of economic and political life in Argentina. The Peronist government which assumed office in mid-1973 attempted to control inflation through the so-called Social Pact, a wage-price agreement of two years’ duration involving the leading labor union organization, a leading businessmen's organization, and the Argentine state. An awareness of the principal issues of the economic situation is essential to an understanding of the crisis of contemporary Argentina, and a description of the evolution of the Social Pact reveals some of the essential contours of the economic debate. But the importance of the Social Pact extends beyond mere economic considerations. The study of the latest Argentine experience with anti-inflationary policy suggests some generalizations about the nature of populist political movements, the symbolic functions of economic policy initiatives, and the functions of such policies in co-opting private economic actors and legitimating governmental interference with free market forces. It also reveals some important characteristics of Argentine politics, especially concerning relations between the state and private economic groups. With economic and political implications of comparative significance, the Argentine Social Pact is an important case study in political economy.

A decade ago Roy Macridis waved a red flag in the face of the politicel science fraternity by proclaiming that the collection of data on foreign political systems had become a sterile preoccupation because of its parochial and “monographic” concern with a limited number of Western great powers, and its theoretical shallowness.1 During the intervening years considerable money and time have been spent in a frontal attack on these deficiencies. Spearheading this attack has been a band of younger scholars brought together under the leadership of Gabriel Almond in the Committee on Comparative Politics of the Social Science Research Council.

Hypotheses regarding differences (or lack of differences) in policy-orientation or in degrees of influence between the various members of the Soviet Politburo have always been of great interest to students of politics. Thus there have been frequent speculations regarding alleged differences in foreign policy lines and on the problem of succession. The absence of confirming or disconfirming data for any of these hypotheses is striking, and obvious in view of the secrecy that enshrouds the internal operations of the Politburo. Published statements of any kind by members of the Politburo have become infrequent in recent years. Such statements as are available for analysis have usually dealt with different subjects and have been made at different dates, so that they were difficult to compare from the point of view of testing hypotheses regarding differences in policy of influence. Through Stalin's seventieth birthday, December 21,1949, however, a rare opportunity for comparative analysis did occur.

Since 1959 Congress has tried to protect U.S. direct foreign investments from expropriation by quite explicit amendments to various foreign assistance acts. Probably the most important of these legislative efforts, the Hickenlooper amendment, the Gonzales amendments, and the effective repeal of the Hickenlooper amendment, are contradictory and have been applied only sporadically. By developing testable hypotheses that can accurately and parsimoniously predict these varied legislative and diplomatic policies, this article attempts to demonstrate the value of a radical analysis of American foreign policy. After those hypotheses are evaluated, they are compared with propositions derived from pluralist and bureaucratic analysis. Finally, the policy history is reconsidered to show that changes in the external environment, particularly the rise of economically powerful nationalist regimes, have let to a significant evolution in the policy preferences of large multinational firms.

It is generally recognized that there are enormous difficulties, bureaucratic as well as political, that attend attempts to ameliorate human problems which arise from the growing interdependence of states. The policy challenge therefore is how to create—or alternatively, how to understand and then to reform—the existing machinery of international administration to enable it to cope with interdependence. The World Food Conference, held in Rome on November 5–16, 1974, was not only an exercise in ad hoc multilateral diplomacy designed to meet the immediate threats of the food crisis; it was also an attempt to rebuild the international food bureaucracy, either by replacing the Food and Agriculture Organization or by reforming it. The Conference largely succeeded in this task; it created a World Food Council, organizationally linked to the FAO in Rome, but separately responsible to the UN General Assembly through the Economic and Social Council. Thus, an examination of the leadership of the Secretariat of the World Food Conference provides a classic case for the study of bureaucratic politics: an international secretariat not merely indirectly influenced the shape of policy; it actually made policy.

“Realism” and “idealism” are both terms which have been used in differing, sometimes opposite, senses in the history of philosophy. They must therefore be employed with great caution. Dr. John H. Herz, in his recent study of the application of these terms to politics, seeks to define the sense in which he uses them. He writes in his preface that the book was in the main finished when the last war was ended and that little which had happened since required modification of his conclusions. To the reviewer it seems that further thought on the concepts employed in a perspective more removed from the disturbing influences of the war period would have been desirable.