On November 17, 1969, after a three-year delay, the United States and the Soviet Union initiated Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). Involving strategic systems and policies vital to the security of both superpowers, their allies, and the world, these talks have the potential of becoming the most important series of United States-Soviet negotiations since World War II. They can affect not only the military-technical aspects of the strategic balance but United States-Soviet political relations and the future role of nuclear weapons. Given the complexity and sensitivity of the subject, it is not surprising that negotiations are still continuing. Even if an early, limited agreement is reached, SALT meetings can be expected to span a period of many years.

Territory is important to people; the manner in which it is divided up is often critical. The European approach to territorial problems developed mainly in response to European historical experience; the traditional literature in the fields of geography and history makes scant reference to non-Western boundary concepts and practices. European and Southeast Asian approaches to territorial issues differ significantly. In the aggregate, the differences are imposing, if somewhat abstract; in detail, the continuing disparities in outlook and administrative practice are of considerable relevance to current policy decisions.

A Familiar and yet notable feature of socialism is the nature of the countries where that form of social organization prevails. With few exceptions, all are economically among the less advanced countries of the world. At least, they were so at the time socialism emerged in them.

In those countries, then, socialism rather than its great rival, capitalism, has been the instrument for further economic development. How have they fared in consequence ? What in particular of the claim often made by proponents that socialism is a superior system for such development?

In what must surely rank as one of the strangest episodes in the entirehistory of science, two generations of our immediate forebears in the social sciences managed virtually to ignore the “Darwinian” theory of biological evolution and to exclude from their purview any sustained consideration of the role of biological factors in the shaping of human behavior.

Although the Department of State continues to attribute the war in Vietnam to “aggression from the North,” there has always been a suspicion among more enlightened public officials and most academic critics of the war that economic discontent rooted in the inequitable tenure arrangements of the Vietnamese countryside might have some connection with the vigorous opposition of the Viet Cong to numerous Saigon governments. Thus it is surprising to learn that, on the contrary, support for the Saigon regime is most pronounced in provinces in which few peasants farm their own land, large estates were formerly owned by French or Vietnamese landlords, tenancy is widespread, and the distribution of land is unequal. This finding is particularly striking since it is contrary to data from the rest of Southeast Asia. In Burma, for example dacoity and other forms of social disorder were most frequent in the deltaic area of lower Burma, a region of extensive tenancy, unstable tenure, massive agricultural debt, and large-scale absentee ownership by Indian financial houses. In Thailand most social tension is concentrated in the northeast, a region of poor soil and shifting subsistence agriculture, and in the Menam delta immediately adjacent to Bangkok, where absentee holdings are farmed by tenants. Most commercial agricultural land in Thailand is cultivated by owner-proprietors and it is this fact that explains much of the country's political stability. In the Philippines the Hukbalahap movement was concentrated in central Luzon, again a region of extensive tenancy.

The study of elites, or “who's who, when, and how,” as Professor Rustow has described this field, has long been a topic of concern to scholars in a wide variety of disciplines. Social and political philosophers dating back to Aristotle and including such diverse figures as Marx, Pareto, and Mosca have written about the relationships between elites and the social order, and a host of social scientists and historians have carried out detailed analyses of the social background of highlevel decision-makers in various societies

Virtually all of the existing literature on modernization is concerned with the virtues of modernity. It focuses on the gains to be derived from modernization—industrialization, material progress, social welfare, political rationality, etc. But experience suggests that gains are usually achieved at some cost: the drive toward modernity seems invariably to produce new social and personal problems. In the USSR—perhaps the world's most developed underdeveloped country—the modernization process has been accompanied by massive social costs.

Military professionalism is a large and complicated subject that has been hitherto unconsidered by defense specialists and political scientists in Canada and about which the statistics necessary for proximate sociological conclusions are not readily available. Since 1945, discussion of defense problems in Canada has centered largely upon the effect of developments in military technology and international politics on Canada's military policies and organization, and not upon the nature and form of the professionalism that sustains and subordinates itself to them. The aim of this paper is primarily to discuss the place and role of the military profession in Canadian political society between 1945 and 1970 and to show how it might be affected by present trends in Canadian defense policy.

A Striking characteristic of the literature on military rule in developing countries is the gap between theoretical expectations and political, social, and economic reality. On the one hand, practitioners of comparative social and political theory have tended to view the military, at least in the non-Latin American area, as an organization capable of playing an important modernizing role. On the other hand, empirical researchers, often the very same individuals who at a different time wear the hat of the “theoretical practitioner,” have found the performance of the military as political agents of modernization to have been rather dismal.

Undoubtedly David Floyd is correct in his statement that “by far the most important and original of the sections [within the Romanian Workers' Party April, 1964, Statement] for the communist world as a whole was the one dealing with political relations between the communist countries, though it was the statement on Comecon which attracted most attention at the time.” Among the major points the Romanians made in this Statement was that the formal basis of relations enunciated by Khrushchev in 1955 was to become the real basis of relations among socialist nations. Relations were to be based on “the principles of national independence and sovereignty, equal rights, mutual advantage, comradely assistance, noninterference in internal affairs, observance of territorial integrity, [and] the principles of socialist internationalism.” The Romanians spelled this out in underscored print and followed it with the statement that “the strict observance of the basic principles of the new type relations among the socialist countries is the primary prerequisite of the unity and cohesion of these countries and of the world socialist system performing its decisive role in the development of mankind.”

As a direct result of growing economic interdependence and of the accelerating expansion of the international economy and its increasing impact on national economic life, it seems highly probable that diplomacy and international relations among governments will be more and more concerned in the future with financial and monetary matters.

At a time when proposals for a European strategic force centering on Anglo-French nuclear cooperation are once again the subject of serious official discussions, it would seem appropriate to raise a number of more general issues about the making of defense policy in Western Europe today.

The strategic relations between the two superpowers have for a long time been influenced by the strategically superior position of the United States. This strategic imbalance has recently been rectified through a massive Soviet program of developing weapons systems that in effect created superpower parity. However, the concepts of strategic superiority and parity in the nuclear context are rather ambiguous. It is the purpose of this study to examine the influence of strategic parity as well as several related factors that have in the past shaped Soviet strategic doctrine and policy, and that are likely to continue to do so in the future.

This study was undertaken in an effort to use data from European history to develop a model that might prove useful for describing, explaining, and predicting the patterns of political development and international behavior of some of the newly independent states of Asia and Africa. My interest in exploring the experiences of several European states grew out of dissatisfaction with efforts to build development theories exclusively upon knowledge of the contemporary developing areas in which the outcomes are unknown, where the periods of time with which we can work are often too short for testing any long-term development theories, and where we are often unable to distinguish between short-term, momentary changes and long-term, persistent patterns of growth or decay.

The growing recognition of the importance of ethnic, racial, and religious groups in the politics of the new states has given rise to an urgent need for theory. Although this need extends to all aspects of group relations, the first priority is for systematic classification to reduce the bewildering array of descent-groups in the developing world to manageable proportions and comparable cases. With a view to facilitating comparative analysis, the aim of this paper is to make a modest beginning in the formulation of meaningful categories.

Since Stalin's death in 1953, Russia's leaders have every four or five years convened the nominally supreme body of the Soviet Communist Party, its Congress, to ratify policy guidelines and power shifts. Khrushchev lent excitement to the Congresses he presided over, launching surprise attacks on domestic and foreign Communists who were critical of his unorthodox traits. At the 20th Congress in 1956, the Party First Secretary went beyond the text of an anti-Stalin report that had earlier been agreed upon in the Kremlin and he implicated rival associates in cases of Stalinist misrule. The same foes, eliminated from high places in 1957, were just as suddenly brought under heavy criticism by Khrushchev's group at the extraordinary 21st Congress in 1959 and the 22nd Congress in 1961. A delegation of observers from Communist China headed by Premier Chou En-lai walked out of the 22nd Congress after their Albanian clients were unexpectedly assailed for heretical beliefs close to those held in Peking. In contrast, dramatic challenges and disclosures were missing from the 23rd Congress, which the successors of Khrushchev organized in 1966. The flat nature of the proceedings underlined the fact that a cycle of renewal in post-Stalin politics had been superseded by what was essentially a cycle of consolidation.

The emergence or reemergence of academic disciplines in the Soviet Union has frequently been signalled or accompanied by the publication of comprehensive critical studies of their “bourgeois” counterparts in the West. Thus, for example, Soviet empirical research in sociology and the subsequent tentative and limited official recognition of sociology as an academic discipline were preceded by the appearance of a number of monographs devoted to a critique of Western sociology. Perhaps it is against this background and from this perspective that one must interpret the publication, in 1969, of the first major Soviet study and critique of American political science.

One of the sorest needs in the social sciences is for clear and concise conceptual equipment to give structure to disciplines and order to the range of hypotheses these disciplines purport to explore. Perhaps nowhere is this need for conceptual equipment more pressing, however, than in that amorphous area of study that examines the broad range of social processes gathered under the rubric of “modernization.” Depending on one's perspective, the process of modernization is either primarily economic, or political, or psychological, or social, or technological, or all of the above. Like the elephant in the old tale, the beast is different depending on who touches it and where.

If the United Nations is ever to assume the greater powers needed for effective peace-keeping and peace-making, the General Assembly and/or the Security Council will need an improved system of representation and voting. The present system of giving each country one vote in the General Assembly, regardless of the country's size, and of giving a veto in the Security Council to five big powers, is unrealistic and imperfect for many reasons, which need not be detailed here.

Some economists argue that high population density and rapid population growth are not in themselves impediments to economic development. On the basis of a quantitative analysis of historical data, Simon Kuznets, for instance, concludes that, historically, rates of economic development have not significantly correlated, either positively or negatively, with rates of population growth. Similarly, E. E. Hagen observes that “nowhere in the world has population growth induced by rising income been sufficient to halt the rise in income. … The historical record indicates that rise in income in these societies has failed to occur not because something thwarted it, but because no force has been present to cause income to rise.