Thank you for asking me to join this discussion. Your invitation has charm and just the touch of beleaguered optimism I always loved. After all the blood your century has spilled, at least a few of you believe that reasonable men might yet persuade the world that war must never come again. It warms and heartens me that the plight of Peace still touches some minds. You really seem to believe that some argument, even one called up from the past, might yet move the warrior heart. Do I believe that this might happen? Of course I will try again. The native good sense of men might yet listen. I never despaired of mankind, no matter how much evidence might have overwhelmed my faith in it.

At least this discussion can be carried on safely in public. There was a time when speaking out against war was dangerous, and I constantly spoke against it.

There is in this land a certain restlessness, a questioning,” said President Lyndon Johnson when he delivered his State of the Union message at the beginning of 1968. How right he was. And to his own question of “why, why this restlessness?” he responded: “Because when a great ship cuts through the seas, the waters are stirred and troubled. And our ship is moving….“

What Lyndon Johnson overlooked in his neat metaphor was that a lot of passengers on that ship were stirred and troubled, fearing that they were on a new Titanic setting due course for a large iceberg that was highly visible to them but apparently not to Captain Johnson and his crew.

Tens of thousands of books have been written about the Soviet Union–about its industry, agriculture, the political system, and its history. Even about prisons, concentration camps, and insane asylums there is a lot of literature. And yet, in talking with various persons in the West, I have realized how little is known here about Soviet life.

There are those of us whose job seems always to be immediate problem-solving. We are like people frantically busy piling up rocks with the fleeting notion that perhaps they are building something. To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy by Peter Berger and Richard Neuhaus (American Enterprise Institute, 1977) offers a portrait in which resemblances can be seen between the haphazard rock pile and the city of good “mediating structures” there portrayed.

Approaching the subject as a lawyer, the question at once comes to mind: Do we need mediating structures (family, church, voluntary association, neighborhood, racial and ethnic subgroups) in a society governed by the American Constitution? If the “mediating structures“ are thought to be necessary to protect the individual from the state, is that not precisely the function of the Constitution?

A woman traveling alone all the way from Holland to Bulgaria! And sleeping in a monastery! Villagers, visitors, and monks marveled, for although the small mountain cloister had held its doors open for decades, most lodgers were native families.

The Orthodox monastery near the village of Bachkovo, Bulgaria, founded by Georgian monks in 1083, had been plundered in the name of Allah, liberated in the name of the czar and was now very much in order under the Soviet state, both as monastery and hostelry.

Sacred and secular mingled within the same walls that had secluded seventeenth-century monks from worldly things. Four long, white stucco buildings with wooden galleries and grated windows enclosed the courtyard with chapel and fountains. Over the broken cobblestones chickens, geese, lambs, and pigs wandered about among the tourists, monks, and priests.

Last month I described eleven “successes” of Soviet foreign policy since the October, 1917. Revolution. Now it is time to turn to Soviet ““failures” and to the underlying factors that have shaped Soviet policy in the past and that should be weighed by Western policymakers in the years ahead. Partially by coincidence and partially with un eye to symmetry, I again come up with the number eleven.

These assessments of success and failure are based on my own research, stimulated and refined by a survey (both written and oral) that tapped the views of other Soviet specialists visiting the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The “balance sheet.“” of course, represents my own judgment. Readers will no doubt make their own distinctions, thus reducing or expanding the list; some may quarrel about whether a certain.event ought to be rated a failure or a “ success given Moscow's apparent objectives; but I think the following represents a fair account in accord with the facts as we know them.

The most serious analyst of the danger of technical determinism is still Jacques Ellul. As far back as 1965 this French philosopher, lawyer, and social prophet argued that “The technical phenomenon has assumed an independent character quite apart from economic considerations, and that it develops according to its own intrinsic laws…, following its own intrinsic causal processes, independent of external forces or human aims.“

Frequent accusations to the contrary notwithstanding, Ellul replied that he “never intended to describe any inexorable process of inevitable doom.” In fact he insists “that if we can be sufficiently awakened to the real gravity of the situation, man has within himself the necessary resources to discover, by some means unforeseeable at present, the path to a new freedom.“

Those aspects of today's China I consider basic to a proper understanding of that country now, and which I also believe will persist into the foreseeable future–possibly -to the end of the century–are the following:

• China is now more "China" than at any time since 1949, but by no means less socialist for that.

  It is embarked on a path that will probably make it the most significant economic and politico-cultural power in the Asia/Pacific Region by the turn of the century.

  In its handling of its foreigjn relations China is moving away from some recognizable patterns of the past and developing a character tjiat will make it both easier and tougher to deal with as times goes on.