To regard Socialism and Communism as Siamese twins is an error, wilful or genuine, which rarely troubles American thinking on foreign politics now. It cannot be said, however, that the shadow of the confusion has been entirely dispelled. Some groups, influential in the making and execution of American foreign policy, appear to be gravely disturbed by what they term the development of the welfare state in western Europe. At a time—they argue—when the United States requires strong partners in the common attempt to defend large parts of the non-Soviet world against Communist expansion, the spread of welfare-state practices weakens western Europe economically as well as politically. The development of the welfare state is said to lessen the capacity of countries for raising productivity and hence for standing on their own feet in their economic dealings with the outside world and also for mounting substantial defense efforts. Since a less progressive and adaptable economy will frustrate expectations of income and economic security, political stability and morale are alleged to suffer. This effect, as well as the abridgment of democratic freedoms perceived to follow from abandoning the liberal economy, is believed to make such countries more susceptible to Communist subversion. These misgivings are not aroused by the behavior of all the western European nations. It is rather the United Kingdom, the three Scandinavian countries, and the Netherlands which are identified with the evolution of the welfare state, while economic liberalism is perceived to have a more abiding hold in Belgium, France, Italy, and western Germany.

Probably the most consistent feature of the policy of the three Western powers—the United States, Great Britain, and France—towards the defeated Germany, from the time of Potsdam until a few months ago, was the emphasis on the need for the disarmament and demilitarization of the Germany of the future; and when it was decided, in 1949, to establish the Federal Republic of Western Germany, this policy was endorsed once more.

In June 1949, the Foreign Ministers of the three powers met in Paris, and on the twentieth of that month the High Commission charter was signed. At a second meeting held early in November of the same year, also in Paris, it was agreed that certain wider powers should be granted to the Federal Republic through the High Commissioners. Nevertheless when, on November 22, the definitive Occupation Statute, sometimes known as the Petersberg agreement, came to be signed by Konrad Adenauer, Chancellor of the new Republic, and by the three High Commissioners at the Petersberg Hotel in Bonn, the headquarters of the High Commission, it contained the following significant clause:

In the Soviet Union, views on all intellectual subjects—the social sciences, philosophy, and even the biological and physical sciences—are frequently regarded as expressions of political views. As a consequence, all intellectual fields are considered appropriate arenas for the struggle against “reaction” and other supposed manifestations of “bourgeois” ideology. To consider science a-political and supra-national, or to speak approvingly of “world science” or “world culture,” is to subscribe to the “bourgeois” ideology of “cosmopolitism”—an ideology which is assumed by virtue of its universalist emphasis to deprecate the contributions to culture made by individual nations.

The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), created in November 1943 and dissolved in September 1948, was in some respects unique in the history of international organization. Unlike traditional functional organizations it was not established to deal with some technical problem of common interest but of limited significance. Nor was its creation motivated as was the institution of the League and the United Nations by the hope that it might solve the vast problems of war and peace. Its scope, the management of postwar relief and the caring for displaced persons, was limited but significant. Its decision-making powers within the field of relief operations were broad when compared with the authority of both prior and subsequent functional organizations. Since national influence within the organization had operational, not simply technical orpropaganda, significance, it was not surprising that the structure of the organization should be a matter of considerable concern to its member states. Both in its creation and in its subsequent development thestructure of UNRRA reflected the conflicting interests of the constituent governments in international relief.

For the political scientist in America there can scarcely be a more fascinating or more elusive study than the Soviet Union. The first enticement is the menacing importance of Soviet power. Then there is the miracle which in a single generation has changed a defeated and disintegrating agrarian society into one of the two greatest industrial and military States of our day. But these are claims to everybody's attention. The peculiar challenge to the professional student of social phenomena is another matter. For him Russia now is an enormous but dimly lighted laboratory in which doctrine is tested by experience, where the strain between ideology and reality is carried to a pitch never previously attempted, where techniques are developed by which a small elite secures a steady ninety-nine per cent of formal acquiescence from a population of two hundred millions, where political and economic strength is accumulated by processes in which what we consider normal human reactions are choked off by fear or concealed in the trite responses of an authorized litany.

Organized efforts to deal with the problem of war through channels other than those of traditional diplomacy seem peculiarly subject to frustration. Perhaps this is inevitable. Certainly it is common. The current disappointment with the achievements of UNESCO, which Professor Dunn examines in the opening pages of his book, is only the most recent and most obvious instance of the dismay which sometimes follows upon the discovery that the star to which the wagon supposedly has been hitched is, after all, a decidedly earth-bound horse. The fervor that often accompanies a desire to “do something” about international understanding seems to invite a kind of oversimplification that leads inevitably to disillusionment and despair. Social scientists are by no means immune from this affliction, although it is not peculiar to them. The myopias of academic specialization, confronted with the tremendous complexities of such a task in applied social science, may encourage a neglect of the limitations of particular specialties and produce oversimplifications at their peripheries.