As a legal officer in the Department of State in the 1920's, Frederick S. Dunn developed a curiosity about the decision-making process of which he was a part. The dissatisfaction which he felt with prevailing explanations of state behavior, and particularly with single-factor explanations, was the spur to a lifetime of scholarly activity. His quest for greater knowledge relevant to the ordering and control of foreign affairs was to lead him successively to Johns Hopkins, Yale, and Princeton Universities and far afield from the methods and subjects of interest to his colleagues in international law; but there was a forty-year continuity of interest in a set of questions whose answers would lead to improved decision-making.

This article attempts to set forth, in as nearly comprehensive and organized a manner as possible, a range of problems referring to the political development of Communist China whose investigation would not only advance our understanding of contemporary Chinese politics but would also produce results of value for the general study of politics. Our focus is particularly, but not exclusively, on events since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Our procedure is to move from the general to the specific: that is, to inquire, first, what are the most general classes of political phenomena with which the Chinese political system has affinities; second, what are the most general developmental trends which can be observed in the Chinese revolution; and third, what are the particular aspects of the dynamics of the Chinese political system which offer rewarding opportunities for research.

Great wars, the rise and decline of empires, observed differences in the power and influence of nations, and in general the uneven levels of national achievement in international politics have inspired much speculation and hypothesis-building. Men have felt the need for satisfying explanations of past events and patterns, and even greater need for plausible hypotheses with which to approach the future. The last seventy-five years or so have witnessed a bumper crop of hypotheses designed to account for or to anticipate the ordering of political relationships in the society of nations. One characteristic of most of these activities has been a persistent search for the “master variable” that would provide a simple yet plausible and satisfying basis for explaining or predicting the ordering of political relationships among nations.

The financial difficulties of the United Nations have become one of the pressing issues of contemporary international affairs. They have roots that extend to the heart of the politics of the Organization and its procedure. Beyond this they raise serious questions about the ability of the institution to function effectively in the future. To grasp the complex problems associated with the UN financial situation it is necessary to view the matter in some perspective.

At the international Communist conclave that assembled in Mos-Cow in November 1960, the Soviet delegation introduced a new formula, designed to serve as an ideological blueprint for Communist policy in the less-developed areas of the world. The formula consisted of two parts: a statement of immediate objectives and a tactical plan to achieve them. Of these, the objectives were set forth in the form of a theoretical governmental model, described as a transitional state structure appropriate for less-developed societies. It was christened the “national democratic state,” and the tactical plan chosen as the proper means for its establishment was correspondingly designated the “national democratic front.”

Asian studies have long since ventured beyond the traditional limits of Orientalia to embrace history and the social sciences; they have not as yet, however, applied the insights of international relations to an area framework. Similarly, international relations specialists have all but ignored the relevance of their discipline to Asia. The purpose of this article is to help bridge the serious gap between these two fields.

The term “political modernization” is of late encountered with increasing frequency in the literature of political science. Its antecedents are somewhat diffuse. In the most general sense, it seems to represent a specialized adaptation of scholars' long-standing concern with the question of whether the process of social change is determinate or variable, random or patterned, continuous or episodic, cyclic or evolutionary. Within this tradition “political modernization” is a concept opposed in tendency to the relativistic character of much modern scholarship in the field of politics. It would seem to be oriented more in the direction of a patterned and evolutionary—although not necessarily determinate or value-laden—interpretation of social change.

It came as no surprise that First Secretary and Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the 22nd Party Congress predicted the next historical period will witness “the further increase in the role of the Party as the higher form of public and political organization, the strengthening of its directing influence in all sections of communist building….” What is the nature of this projected party role and how does it differ from past practice? What problems have been encountered by the Khrushchev regime in directing the state through the party apparatus and how has it attempted to cope with these difficulties? By focusing on the Party's changing role since 1953, what light can be shed on modifications in the composition, procedures, and structure of the Party during the Khrushchev era?

A Paradigm is more than a perspective but less than a theory. It provides a set of interrelated questions, but no hypothetical answers or account of validated propositions. It provides a “language,” a net of variables, but it does not specify the relationships among the parameters of these variables. It is less vague than a mere perspective, providing an ordered, specific, and often logically exhaustive and tightly ordered focus for research and speculation. A paradigm is often a stage on the way from an old perspective to a new theory.

The two industrial nuclear-power blocs in Western Europe, EURATOM (European Atomic Community—the Common Market) and ENEA (European Nuclear Energy Agency, organized under the auspices of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation), represent a significant political cleavage in Europe. Both supranational groups are consortiums for the generation of industrial nuclear power, including fuel production, reprocessing, and isotope separation. EURATOM represents the Continental Six under French-West German leadership; ENEA, a more loosely organized bloc under British sponsorship.

Defense policy and civil-military relations are now well established fields for political science. They raise problems that are important and exciting in their own right and as dramatic instances of general institutional problems of policy-making and control. Comparative and particular aspects of this field should be appreciated. What are the special characteristics of the Australian type of situation?

Although tactical nuclear weapons have been extensively integrated into NATO, there appears to be no clear doctrine for using them to control a battlefield or hold a defense perimeter. Even the possibility of a limited tactical nuclear war has been questioned. Disenchantment with tactical nuclear defense has stimulated an increased interest in the controlled use of strategic weapons and a demand for stronger conventional forces. But these alternatives also present problems.

It is all too often assumed that African nationalism is a product of very recent manufacture. One supposes that World War II and its aftermath brought about new forces of change, loosely called “nationalism,” which in a few short years swept African prison graduates into undreamed of positions of power and world importance. To some extent, of course, this presumption is correct: those elements of change unleashed by the war and by the subsequent estrangement of two of the victors did indeed accelerate the emergence of popular movements in Africa south of the Sahara. More rapidly than even the aspirants themselves could have hoped, colonial powers made it evident that freedom could be obtained for the agitation.

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.

With the exception of Libya, Egypt, the Sudanese Republic, and Ethiopia, where no political parties exist, some variation of the single-party political system or a distinctive tendency in that direction may be found in nearly all of the independent African states. That this should have come to pass within the relatively short period of the rise of African states has been a surprise to some observers of African nationalist movements and parties during the colonial period—who were rather sanguine about the prospects of Western-type democracy and party systems in Africa—as well as to the colonial powers themselves (especially Britain and France)—who presumably assumed that their policies of decolonization in Africa were providing the institutional framework within which Western-type party systems and politics would prevail.

If one thinks seriously about any of the major international trouble spots in the world today, one soon confronts the problem of what really is the “value” of, for example, Cuba, Berlin, or Laos to the United States. The view put forward in this article is that, while the question is unanswerable in a rigorous and precise sense, some useful things can be said in approaching it, and in trying to distinguish between more and less unsatisfactory answers to it. In principle, of course, the value of other countries to the United States includes that of the advanced countries, and, most significantly, of Western Europe. The present article, however, will be primarily concerned with the value of less-developed countries to the United States, and with their value in certain extreme contingencies over a time period that is relatively short from the standpoint of history, though somewhat longer from the standpoint of economics.

The Second World War is often regarded as a virtually total conflict, with few mutual restraints to bind the belligerents to less than maximum use of their destructive capabilities. While it is generally remembered that poison gas and bacteriological weapons were not used, these limits are usually cited as great exceptions to the rule. Relatively little notice has been taken of the restraints in Europe on the use of conventional high-explosive and incendiary bombs in aerial bombardment, restraints which remained in effect for an unexpectedly long time after the start of the war.

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 importance and political implications of the subject of unconventional warfare are well known and need not be elaborated upon here. At the present time, the three branches of the American military services are expanding their “special” forces, preparing for the eventuality of conflicts of smaller scope than conventional warfare. On the Soviet side, the theory of peaceful coexistence—i.e., the thesis that capitalism should be eliminated by popular movements rather than by foreign armies—was reasserted at the January conference of the S.E.D. in Berlin, by no lesser authority than Nikita Khrushchev himself.

There are many means employed by the United States to maintain and advance its position throughout the world during the current period of bipolar conflict. The most conspicuous of these are subsumed under what is known as the Mutual Security Program. Nearly half of the approximately $4 billion budgeted during fiscal year 1962 for mutual security went into military assistance. Of this, about $125 million was devoted to the training of foreign military personnel. This Military Assistance Training Program, including the training of foreigners in the United States and that administered overseas by Military Assistance Advisory Groups (MAAG's), missions, overseas commands, and third countries, constitutes by far the largest effort the world has known on the part of one country to educate and train citizens of others. The number of foreigners given military assistance training in the United States each year—about 16,500 in 1960—exceeds the number trained here under the Fulbright, Smith-Mundt, and Agency for International Development (AID) programs combined.