Suchergebnisse

"Future revolutions will doubtless be directed against the admin- JL istration and not against the political system." Thus states one writer in the opening sentence of his book on l'Administration au pouvoir. There is little doubt that the institution in France that today bears the brunt of attacks coming from the entire range of the political, economic, and social spectrum, is the French administration—the state bureaucracy that, since the early part of the nineteenth century, has been charged with directing most of the state's affairs. Today, the parties of the Left, Right, and Center; big business, small business, and the propertyless; the privileged and the underprivileged; the in-tellectuals, the students, and the unions—all these groups, that is to say, the French people, are agreed on what they regard to be the excessive and nefarious role that the bureaucracy plays in French life. Few Frenchmen would agree with Francois Gazier, former Director of the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, when he writes in his preface to Belorgey's book that "the French administration, thriving under praise and criticism alike, can at least be credited with one success: it has known how to keep in tune with its times" (p. 7). One is tempted to say that were these words not merely the manifestation of hyperbolic tendencies sometimes common in preface-writing, some courage would have been needed to write them. It is hard to conceive in present-day France of an attempt to sustain the thesis that the administration is in tune with its times.

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.

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.

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 purpose of this paper is to make a preliminary evaluation of the pattern of support of research in international studies in the United States by federal agencies, with a view to identifying critical issues in research policy deserving of more detailed study.The security and welfare of the people of the United States depend to a significant degree on the quality of the system of knowledge available to their leaders and to the community of scholars on whose advice regarding the international system in all of its aspects their leaders depend.

There is a sizeable number of separatist movements in contemporary political life. Some of them have attracted widespread support, others have not; some are surrounded by violence, others are not. It is the combination of the size and tactics of separatist movements that we wish to examine. Our purpose is to inquire into the conditions that enable regional separatism to attract widespread support without also eliciting violence. Our conclusions will be based on one separatist movement that managed to accomplish this feat, the Scottish National Party.

In the field of comparative Communist studies theory seems to have lagged behind reality. Until a few years ago we tended to think of Communist polities in terms of uniformities oriented around the concept of a totalitarian model that permeated all Communist systems more or less the same way and to the same degree. Although it was recognized that there were cultural differences and variations in the levels of development, these factors were not assigned great weight in modifying and transforming Communist polities. On the contrary, the very possibility of a transformation was assigned a low probability.

The twentieth anniversary of the assumption of state power by the JL Chinese Communists is a convenient occasion to take stock of the many dramatic events that have taken place since that first day in October of 1949, when Mao Tse-tung proclaimed the new People's Republic of China. The anniversary, however, is more than a fortuitous product of the Western calendar. It lies close to one of those convulsive periods that have jolted China from time to time and have caused major changes in the Chinese state and society. The creation of the People's Republic twenty years ago was one such period. The Great Leap Forward of the late fifties was another, and the recent Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution may have been a third. Each of these events has substantially reshaped the state or society or both. From a historical point of view, the next major event that may well come shortly after the twentieth anniversary is the death of Mao Tse-tung and other co-founders of the Communist state. This anniversary, therefore, offers an opportunity to reassess the record of the Chinese Communists since 1949 with a view toward understanding the setting and the problems that the post-Mao leadership will soon inherit.

In a recent issue of this journal, Oran Young argued forcefully against the 'collection of empirical materials as an end in itself and without sufficient theoretical analysis to determine appropriate criteria of selection." The present paper issues a complementary critique of the opposite failing. Its target is the tendency toward compulsive and mindless theorizing—a disease at least as prevalent and debilitating, so it seems to me, as the one described by Oran Young.

Nordlinger and Zeitlin have each used survey research techniques to make insightful and important contributions to the analysis of political transformation and regime stability. Yet Nord-linger's book on British working-class Tory voters and Zeitlin's study of the revolutionary Cuban working class differ as widely in approach as do the two political systems they study. Zeitlin makes a central assumption "that the social pressures arising out of the work situation are fundamental to the workers' political outlook" (p. 221), and he concentrates on concepts such as alienation and exploitation, which Nordlinger never explicitly considers. But he pays less attention to the distinctive elements of Cuba's political tradition that contributed to the one successful socialist revolution in the Western hemisphere. By contrast, Nordlinger explicitly seeks to connect the exceptional stability of British democracy with such apparently undemocratic, but characteristically English, attitudes as social deference and acquiescence toward authority. Despite the weight of some of his own data, he only briefly considers an interpretation of working-class Labour supporters as acting rationally on the basis of their class interests.