DEEP crises in the life of a nation sometimes lay bare with lightning clarity those basic social ties, loyalties, and commitments which render possible some maintenance of order and control when everything seems about to break down or disappear. In 1945, year of the deepest crisis that the German people have undergone in modern times, groups and organizations like the Junkers or the Nazi Party simply vanished; others, like the military, disappeared at least temporarily or, like the industrialists, were gravely weakened. It was the bureaucracy which became the bedrock, the irreducible minimum of social cohesion upon which, first locally, then in larger units, society was rebuilt. Subsequently, confirmed in its traditional position of control by the occupation powers (certain measures of attempted political purge and technical reorganization notwithstanding), its actual power was enhanced by the innumerable tasks of postwar reconstruction, from the building-up of entire new administrations (in the new Länder as well as on the bi-zonal and then federal levels of government) to the handling of what has been aptly called the “universe of claims” arising out of Nazi, war, and postwar conditions.

The tangled affairs of Indonesia, twice thrust upon the Security Council, have served as an admirable touchstone of the principles, purposes, and effectiveness of the United Nations as well as of the policies of some of its leading members. Fundamental principles of the new postwar order were at stake. The Atlantic Charter had affirmed the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they would live, and the collapse of empires before the Japanese onslaught led to the widespread conclusion that the old colonial system was dead. These doctrines found sober and modified expression not only in Chapter XI of the United Nations Charter, but also in the more general assertion of the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples and of the universal application of human rights and fundamental freedoms. The rights of dependent peoples, the validity of the doctrine of self-determination, and the possibilities for peaceful change all hovered about the Security Council chamber in the course of the debates on the two Indonesian cases.

Though only a few years old, the Russian-American “space race” is in full swing and it is clear, even at this early stage of outer space technology, that it will present both countries with new opportunities and new dangers.

From the American viewpoint we are especially interested in these related questions: First, how will outer space activities affect the external situation within which the United States seeks to promote its security and welfare? Second, how can the United States manipulate space developments in order to improve its security and welfare? And third, how should the United States concert its space policy with other elements of its foreign, defense, and domestic policies

“New thinking” in Soviet foreign policy may change Soviet understanding of the nature of conflict in the third world, Soviet interests in those conflicts, and therefore Soviet conflict behavior. While these shifts are widespread and significant, they are being resisted by military analysts, which indicates that Soviet policy may not be so easily or directly altered. Many military writers accept that escalation risks are extreme and threaten Soviet security, and others discuss local, nonclass, and intractable features of third-world conflicts. However, military analysts do not accept revisionist, class-transcendent definitions of Soviet internationalist duty. It is on this point that new thinking is most likely to founder in Gorbachev's attempts to change Soviet third-world policy and behavior. With the changes in Soviet domestic politics, military participation in security and foreign policy debates may be effective in restraining the more radical innovations implied in civilian analyses.

ON March 7, 1936, German troops entered the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland. Germany thus violated Articles 42 and 43 of the Treaty of Versailles and Articles 1 and 2 of the Treaty of Locarno of 1925. Remilitarization moved forward for about one hundred miles the areas of concentration for any German armed attack in the west and advanced the defensive line that could be held by the German army. It severely weakened France and, in consequence, all the other powers concerned to maintain the Paris peace settlements and to preserve the peace of Europe.

The 38th parallel in Korea marks a critical segment of the ‘international frontier’ between the two worlds into which our one globe seems to be dividing. South of the line is the American-sponsored and U. N.-approved Korean Republic. North of the parallel is the Soviet-backed Korean Peoples” Republic. Both of these governments claim jurisdiction over all of Korea. Both seem to follow the most extreme aspects of the political philosophies of their backers. Thus Korea, a long-unified nation, has, on its liberation from Japan, been split by a purely geodetic line. This line is found on maps but is not evident in the geographic landscape. One may well wonder about the choice of such a line, its geographic character and its present and future function.

If Ambrose Bierce were writing his Devil's Dictionary today, he would probably define psychology as the science that predicts that Russian leaders will behave the same way during a missile crisis that a female sophomore does on a date. If tiiis is a caricature, it is only mildly so, as one would quickly learn by reading die testimony on psychology and international relations during die hearings in 1967 of die Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

This essay reviews six recent books on modern Iranian politics. It suggests that Iranian politics can be analyzed from the perspective of four basic traditions and models: monarchical, liberal nationalist, religious, and leftist. Each model abstracts the essential elements of the political system and demonstrates the dominance of a certain perspective. The first three of these models have been implemented in post—World War II Iran, and even the left has had an impact. The essay concludes by stating that current Iranian domestic politics can be better understood by paying attention to five enduring features: historical continuity of the nation-state, steady increase in state power, persistence of patrimonialism, intense interaction between domestic and foreign policies particularly as it relates to control over oil, and the vitality of civil society even under the Islamic Republic.

America's current nuclear strategy seeks to improve deterrence with a counterforce targeting plan that exceeds the requirements of mutual assured destruction. This “countervailing” nuclear strategy codifies an enlarged spectrum of retaliatory options. The author argues, however, that the countervailing strategy is based upon a number of implausible and contradictory assumptions, and that it actually degrades the overriding objective of genuine security. For many reasons, the Soviet Union is not apt to assign a higher probability of fulfillment to American counterforce threats; under certain conditions, current policy confronts our adversary with a heightened incentive to pre-empt. The conclusion identifies an alternative strategy for the avoidance of nuclear war, a network of doctrines and obligations that calls for a return to minimum deterrence, a comprehensive test ban, and a joint renunciation of the right to the first use of nuclear weapons.

Inspired by a seminal essay of Albert O. Hirschman, as well as by the ongoing debate on the empirical foundations of social science, this article “revisits” (1) the paradigm concept popularized by T. S. Kuhn in the 1960s and (2) the relationship between probabilistic and “possibilistic” modes of theorizing that has acquired renewed relevance in comparative politics mainly with respect to recent theories of democratization and development. It does so by reviewing three major paradigm crises in modern political science: the shift from the Aristotelian polls to the social “system,” the refocusing of political explanations from the social to the global environment, and the contemporary attempts to reevaluate the role of technology in political change. The review takes stock of the record of the discipline of comparative politics, of opportunities provided by paradigm shifts, seized upon or missed by the discipline. It also allows one to seek a more even balance between the potential utility and limitations of the paradigm concept, while at the same time pointing to the perils of divorcing the art of the possible from the laws of probability.

This article seeks to explain when governments are more likely to take an intergovernmental approach to resolving global collective problems rather than step back and encourage (or simply allow) nongovernmental actors to become the main global governors. The authors suggest that an important factor driving this choice is the domestic ideological leanings of powerful states toward greater or lesser government activism. Such ideologies connect domestic preferences to international ones. They also lead to the establishment of domestic institutions that, in turn, facilitate the emergence of international organizations. Using these arguments, the authors develop a set of inferences regarding the likelihood that governments will establish and join intergovernmental organizations. The authors test their hypotheses through a study of global governance in the education realm, and also apply a series of statistical analyses covering developments in all issue-areas over the last century and a half.

A number of options were available to the Reagan Administration for achieving the President's stated objective of deep cuts in nuclear weapons. However, various deep-cut proposals can have dramatically different prospects of being negotiated successfully, as well as varying impacts on strategic and crisis stability. Moreover, some arms reduction proposals may not be compatible with programs to accentuate nuclear war-fighting capabilities, another objective of the Reagan Administration. In rejecting the SALT II framework for reductions, the Administration set aside a relatively quick way to achieve reductions, although not of the kind championed by the President. Instead, a more ambitious approach was chosen-but one that has provided few positive incentives for the Soviets to reach agreement. If the U.S. position is seriously held, the prospect is for lengthy, acrimonious, and inconclusive negotiations.

In any personal dictatorship or tyranny, one thing is certain: some day there will be a succession crisis. That dread day casts a long shadow before, influencing the period of dictatorial rule by anticipation. There is inherent in dictatorship a succession cycle: first, a period of stable dictatorial rule; then, a succession crisis; finally, a resolution of the crisis or a dissolution of the political system. Some dictatorial regimes experience a series of personal dictatorships; the Soviet regime, for example, has twice gone through the cycle, and now has its third dictator. This historical experience affects the general character of the entire succession cycle. Serious inquiry into the succession to Khrushchev requires us to consider the general character of the succession cycle in the Soviet system as well as the particular factors that are likely to influence the course and outcome of the Khrushchev succession crisis.

Political science “area studies,” or what the American Political Science Association calls “foreign and comparative government and politics” in order to insure that they not be confused with the biggest area study of them all, United States government and politics, have always posed difficulties for the Emily Posts of the discipline. Not a year goes by without a guardian of die methodological flame writing an article bemoaning the “ameoretical” quality of area studies or issuing a warning mat “The immersion in local materials may cast the researcher adrift far from any theoretical shore.”

When John Stuart Mill composed his System of Logic, he maintained that valid application of the comparative method to problems in the moral or social sciences is impossible, or, at best, inadmissible, since it must be based on a priori judgments. Mill founded his objection to the use of this method in social science on two essentially interrelated propositions: the uniqueness of each social event, and the multiplicity and variety of causal factors which may be considered as having a determining influence on these events. Although this conception of the special nature of social events has, on the whole, remained unchanged, social scientists have freely applied the comparative method to the analysis of social problems. History has been outstanding among the social sciences in rejecting longest the application of this method. The main argument against its use was derived from the description of history formulated by Ranke and his school, a description which was endowed with a philosophical underpinning by Windelband and Rickert, who classified sciences according to method into a nomothetic and an ideographic group. History was the ideographic science par excellence, and with the strong historical emphasis that was placed in Germany upon other social sciences as well, there was a tendency to return to the viewpoint of Mill and to regard as scientifically suspect generalizations in social science based on the application of the comparative method.

The concept of “people's democracy” has posed a real ideological dilemma for the U.S.S.R. Prior to the spring of 1948 Soviet theory was confronted with the fact that—partly because of Soviet policy itself—eastern Europe was not developing toward socialism by exactly the same pattern of violent revolutionary change which the U.S.S.R. had experienced, but in a manner more closely approximating gradual “reform.” To a very considerable extent it was in the interest of the Soviet Union to emphasize the differences between its own development and that of the “new democracies” in order to quiet national and non-Communist fears in those countries. At the same time, the U.S.S.R. apparently felt obliged to establish its own position of ideological “leadership” in eastern Europe and, simultaneously, to fit the concept of “people's democracy” into the body of orthodox Marxist-Leninist doctrine.

THE new Soviet diplomacy in Asia involves an active effort to extend economic aid to a select group of countries who qualify as non-allied with the United States, or, in some sense of the term, as “neutralists.” To date, the Soviet Bloc has made aid commitments in South and Southeast Asia of over $500 million to India, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Burma. Virtually all the aid has been committed in the past two years; most of it since early 1956. TABLE 1 shows the size and character of the commitments.

The focus of this article is upon the compliance-inducing mechanisms present in any political system. The notion of compliance relationships is central to all conceptualizations of the political system and its functions, as it is related to all political ‘primitives” such as power, influence, authority, etc. Political systems exist above all for the purpose of establishing compliance with some set of norms or values. The primary institutional form reflecting the performance of this function is government. Members of governmental institutions attempt to maintain the compliance system (a) because of the security of habits, and (b) because they share the same set of norms or values. For a number of reasons the efforts of these actors to maintain the compliance system may not be coordinated: they may or may not act ‘rationally” according to the criteria of rationality applied, but the end product of their activity is a stream of demands for compliance that is oriented toward the enhancement of a desired normative system.

In 1899 a little-known, now long-forgotten, Polish revolutionist named Waclaw Machajski published a small book, The Evolution of Social Democracy, which provoked consternation in the nascent Marxist movement in Russia. Its thesis was that the new messianism of socialism masked an ideology of discontented intellectuals, and that the new socialist society would simply replace one ruling class with another, so that the workers would still remain exploited, albeit this time by a new class of professional leaders.