Unlike the theory of international trade and payments, theorizing on international relations or the international “system” is of fairly recent origin, has attracted relatively few scholars, and—in terms of achievement—is still in a rather underdeveloped stage. But there has in fact been important progress during the last twenty-five years, much of it along tentative, experimental, and not necessarily congruent lines. Nowadays there seems to be new interest in such theorizing and the Center of International Studies at Princeton University thought it useful to collect a reasonably representative sample of recent thinking and, toward this end, to call upon younger scholars in the field rather than on the established leaders, such as Harold Lasswell, Hans Morgenthau, Richard Snyder, Arnold Wolfers, and Quincy Wright.

Of the several public dialogues currently being carried on in the United States, the controversy over military strength and disarmament may be both the most important and the most confusing. Its importance is obvious; it is an interesting commentary on the vital nature of armament-disarmament policy that the literature in the field is burgeoning almost as fast as the literature about the Civil War on its 100th anniversary. But, if the importance is obvious, the confusion is becoming equally so.

The concept of a profession as a social institution is a rather nebulous one. It is sometimes used to refer to any clearly defined vocational group. More traditionally it refers to a “learned profession,” the classic examples of which are divinity, medicine, and the law. The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (Vol. XII, p. 478) defines a profession, in this sense, as “a vocation founded upon prolonged and specialized intellectual training which enables a particular service to be rendered.” It is this meaning of the term that is here intended.

The following reflections have been occasioned by the Twenty-second Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR. Their purpose is to try to grasp the nature and to gauge the extent of the change between the Russia of today and that of Stalin's time. Naturally, no more can be done within the scope of a brief paper than to indicate some of the areas that may be relevant in this connection and to arrive at some provisional conclusions. In looking for those areas, various curiosities and incongruities of the Moscow Congress may serve as guiding beacons.

There is a great demand for theories in international relations. The term “theory” has become so honorific that hypotheses, statements of fact, and intuitive guesses are often dressed up as theories. In part this longing for theory can be ascribed to a desire for the status of a “hard science” like physics, since the “hard sciences” are often viewed by laymen as the theoretical sciences par excellence. They have displayed their power in revealing the secrets of nature and, when applied to the affairs of men, have achieved notable practical successes like the construction of the atomic bomb.

On the whole this demand for theory is probably good. We cannot reason without generalization and, where matters are complex, the web of reasoning logically takes the form of a theory. Most historical investigations and case studies employ theories inexplicitly—often in the belief that the generalizations follow from the straightforward presentation of “purely factual” material. There is usually no recognition that interpretations of factual material can always be presented in a form isomorphic with theories from the sciences of economics, psychology, sociology, and so forth.

The intelligentsia in Poland, as in all rapidly changing societies, is regarded as a leading social force and is observed with interest by sociologists, political scientists, and journalists. However, both in Poland and elsewhere the term “intelligentsia” has several connotations and refers to a variety of social groups and occupations, as does the term “intellectuals,” which is sometimes used as an equivalent. In Webster's International Dictionary we find the following definition: “Intelligentsia.—Informed intellectual people; the educated or professional group, class, or party;—often derisive.” The Oxford Dictionary defines the term as “That part of a nation that aspires to independent thinking.” It seems to me that these two definitions represent the main trends in the use of this word.

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.

Discussion of troop requirements and weaponry for NATO is much concerned with the battlefield consequences of different troop strengths and nuclear doctrines. But the battlefield criterion is only one criterion, and when nuclears are introduced it is secondary. The idea that European armament should be designed for resisting Soviet invasion, and is to be judged by its ability to contain an attack, is based on the notion that limited war is a tactical operation. It is not.

The USSR placed on the agenda of the Big Three wartime conference at Yalta in February 1945 the question of the Turkish Straits. Of this 200-mile natural channel, less than 60 miles—the Bosphorus coming from the Black Sea and the Dardanelles going to the Aegean—are true straits, joined by the inland sea of Marmara. Ever since 1841 the transit of naval vessels through the Straits has been regulated by international agreement. The latest regime was established by a convention signed at Montreux in July 1936, authorizing Turkey to remilitarize the strategic waterway and, if it were “threatened with imminent danger of war” or actually engaged in war (Articles 20 and 21), to permit or disallow at its discretion the passage of warships through the narrows.

How far may we hope to go in theorizing about international affairs? That question is at the center of this article, which consists of several more or less eclectic stabs at the problem.

I shall be writing as though some theory of power politics were the only possible candidate for being the theory of international relations. Let that be regarded as an act of methodological faith—certainly I can think of no scientific demonstration of it, and I would rather leave the philosophy of the matter for another occasion. There are a number of stock objections against any general theory of international relations oriented towards power politics, and these I shall try to rebut, chiefly by extending and correcting my own previous efforts in the genre. I shall then introduce objections of a rather more abstract sort, and, again from my own previous work, I shall try to show that the difficulties which these latter present are indeed formidable. But I hope it will be understood that neither kind of objection need be relevant to meories of international relations other than those built around the concepts of force, power, and security.

On October 5, 1937, in the heart of America's isolationist belt, President Franklin D. Roosevelt denounced the dictators and called for a concerted international effort to quarantine the aggressors. His words drew the excited attention of the world and raised high the expectations for an immediate revision of America's neutrality policy. An opportunity was quickly provided Roosevelt to implement his new policy when the signators of the Nine Power Treaty were invited to Brussels to confer over Japan's undeclared war against China. These developments roused the ire of the American isolationists but brought fresh hope to those who believed a policy of resistance would restrain the dictators. For the next several weeks in this year of decision the balance swung away from the appeasers towards the resisters. For a time, because of American participation, the Brussels conference seemed to hold high promise for the success of the latter group. Then, as the United States backed away, the appeasers returned to lead Europe along the road to Munich.

POOR old Trotsky,” Prime Minister S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike once remarked, “his unhappy ghost seems to have found its only refuge in this country.” While Ceylon is not the only refuge of Trotsky, it is certainly the most hospitable, for nowhere else has his image inspired so successful a following. On two occasions since Ceylon has become independent, one or another of the Trotskyite parties has acted as the principal opposition to the government, and in one instance one of them governed Ceylon in coalition with a party of the Center. Ambitious, dedicated, expressive of the needs of the people, and possessing perhaps the most astute and distinguished leadership of any of the parties in Ceylon now that Bandaranaike has unfortunately been assassinated, the Trotskyite movement seems to have installed itself as a permanent part of Ceylonese politics.

Games have been used in the study of international politics; if they were not so demanding of time and energy, they would probably be used more. A Berlin crisis, or a busy day in the life of the United Nations, lends itself to this procedure. Participants usually represent “countries” and they may be encouraged to play the “role” of the country, acting as they believe the country would act, or they may be encouraged to behave in the game as they believe the country ought to behave in its own interest. The game may be organized for research, the participants being scholars and policy analysts; or it may be organized as training, to give students vicarious experience in the complexities of international politics.

A Characteristic of warfare is that it has changed with the arrival of new weapons and concepts to produce a series of distinct pasts, each of which in its time proved surprising in terms of the past once removed. Although critics have generally been able to observe that the generals were prepared for the last war, they might with greater insight have noted that the generals were prepared not just for the last war, but for all the past wars, and hence were seldom at a loss except on encountering foes better equipped than themselves. Cortez was prepared for Montezuma; Montezuma, up against new notions and gadgets, was not prepared for him.

Among all the social sciences, the art of model building is perhaps best developed in economics.Models or theories are conceptualizations of and abstractions from reality; they rely intrinsically on ldquo;if-thenrdquo;statements and should lead to testable propositions if they are to be of any use at all.

It would be difficult to give a brief description of all the important characteristics of economic models, for there are numerous types, designed to describe or explain completely different aspects of economic reality. Most of them contain as essential ingredients some statements about the technical environment (e.g., marginal cost curves rise after a certain point) and some statements about human motivation (e.g., the entrepreneur desires to maximize profits; the consumer maximizes utility).The models themselves can have either descriptive or normative use. The Keynesian model or theory “explains” the factors diat cause the level of national income to be what it is and allows one to deduce the direction of change in national income resulting from changes in the parameters. The usefulness of such a descriptive model is determined by whether or not its conclusions are testable propositions. Normative models, most frequently encountered in economics in welfare economics and in operations research, also utilize statements about environment and motivations but do not pretend to predict; infact they merely prescribe. The test of the usefulness of such normative models is whether ornot their prescriptions are at least in principle imple—mentable.

It is not surprising that Western statesmen and students of politics everywhere have recently begun to give major attention to what are variously termed guerrilla warfare, irregular warfare, paramilitary operations, la guerre révolutionnaire, insurrectional warfare, resistance movements, and other, allegedly military, doctrines. Of course, irregular armed struggles are not a unique feature of mid-twentieth-century politics; however, they have occurred with great frequency in our time and, more important, they have resulted in baffling victories over vastly better armed, better trained, and more numerous forces. President Kennedy, in response to the apparent superiority in military doctrine possessed by Communist forces in Asia, has ordered the rapid expansion of United States “guerrilla and counter-guerrilla forces.” On a more prosaic level, the publication in a national Sunday-morning newspaper of excerpts from a celebrated pamphlet on guerrilla warfare by Mao Tse-tung suggests that “guerrilla warfare,” along with “massive retaliation,” has entered the popular Cold War vocabulary.

During the Indian Independence struggle, Mahatma Gandhi devised a shrewd ideological version of the concept of social trusteeship, rooted firmly in the strong religio-social traditions of India. Gandhian trusteeship was criticized, but for the most part it functioned effectively to gain and hold for the Independence movement the support of several sectors of India's highly segmented society. Significantly, moreover, many of those who most vehemently criticized Gandhian trusteeship have expressed their acceptance of this idea since Independence.