Suchergebnisse

Foreign policy has been radically transformed by the revolutionary processes of modernization not only in the societies composing the Atlantic region, but wherever high levels of modernization exist. There is a quality about modernization that dissolves the effects of what have generally been considered the major determinants of foreign policy, whether these determinants are based on ideology and type of political system (democratic versus totalitarian foreign policies, for example), or power and capability (great-power versus smallpower policies). Wherever modernized societies exist, their foreign policies are more similar to each other than they are to the foreign policies of nonmodernized societies, regardless of the scale of the society or its type of government.

For nearly forty years, with great regularity, the late Vera Aleksandrova contributed articles on current Soviet literature to the Socialist Courier–the émigré organ of the Menshevik party. Now her husband, S. M. Schwarz, has selected from the large number of those contributions about 120 pieces and has published them in the original Russian under the sponsorship of the Russian Institute of Columbia University.The result is a long, very significant, and in some ways unique book. One has every reason to be grateful to the editor and the sponsoring institution, and the only reproach that could be raised against them concerns their failure to include in the selection articles written between 1945 and the middle sixties. But this failure could still be remedied by issuing a second volume.

The charge to examine old problems with new eyes, and so obtain a firmer understanding of the structure of the modernization process, came from Karl Deutsch in 1953. And now, sixteen years later, other social and behavioral scientists urge us to focus upon the process, the very dynamics of modernization, noting that with this more powerful view of change the sequential structures themselves will be clarified. But in examining the modernization process in Africa, we feel almost helpless in trying to reply to such a call—a call that essentially requires us to link Space and Time and Man in such a way that a general system is created to postdict the course of a modernizing society.

In a broadcast from Havana on October 15, 1967, Cuba's líder máximo told his audience, "Who could deny the significance to the revolutionary movement of the blow of Che's death? It is a fierce blow, a very hard one." One week earlier the near-legendary ideologue of the Cuban Revolution had been captured and shot by Bolivian authorities in a tiny Andean village named Higueras. Troops had also taken into custody the French Marxist Régis Debray, who had gained attention with his interpretation of the Cuban revolution before joining the Guevara-led band of rebels in Bolivia.

The field of modern civil-military relations is not a totally fresh one, still unexplored. Kurt Lang's 1969 bibliography on military sociology lists over one thousand items—books, articles, and unpublished material—and this catalogue includes only the material available in English. His section on civil-military relations lists some 250 items,1an impressive accumulation in a supposedly new field.

It is important, in the light of the continuing debate concerning the interpretation of agreements, to clarify the underlying assumptions of contextual methodology and to determine its theory of meaning. The issues have recently been probed in some detail in Gidon Gottlieb's critique1 of the philosophic underpinning of the framework for the interpretation of agreements adopted by Myres S. McDougal, Harold D. Lasswell, and James C. Miller. It is the thesis of this paper that in significant respects Gottlieb's alternative solution and the framework of McDougal and Lasswell admit a similar need for analyzing extra-textual data to facilitate nonarbitrary decision-making.

The seizure of the Pueblo, the downing of the American EC-121 reconnaissance plane, the attempted assassination of South Korea's President Chung Hee Park by a North Korean commando unit, and the recent revelation of North Korea's plans for unification of the Korean peninsula in the 1970s, raise numerous questions about the nature of the political system that has emerged from the Soviet occupation of Northern Korea in 1945-1948, during Stalin's last decade of rule.

These three volumes form a curious mind-full. Two concentrate on whence we come. The third concentrates on whither we are going. Mr. Ardrey and Professor Lorenz dwell on the implications for our present and our future of the earlier other animal forms that we continue. Mr. Kahn and Mr. Wiener are concerned almost exclusively with the kind of animals we are going to be. Even the first two volumes make less of the constancy of man as an animal than we might expect.

The distribution of ethnic groups throughout South Asia constitutes the region's single most significant strategic factor. Other factors, varying in importance according to specific location and time, do, of course, interact with the ethnic factor. Thus, the topographic, political, economic, and transportation maps all contribute essential elements to our knowledge of the region. Nevertheless, the settlement pattern of distinct culture-groups, as defined by the language and dialect maps, is clearly the most critical of all tangible phenomena.

Recalling the abrupt changes in American national security policy in 1953 and 1961, we may well ask: What New Look should we expect now? What should we want? Changes will probably emerge more temperately and slowly than they did in those years. To our friends abroad, over-sensitized as they have become to policy modifications, this prospect should be reassuring. Much as they tend to sympathize with dissent within the United States over Vietnam, they realize that our domestic furor over this tragic war threatens to induce a generalized neo-isolationism. Arguments for neo-isolationism have a powerful appeal, but tend to cloud debate about the real issues for long-term security policy choice: what doctrine, military force structure, budgets, and plans?

Increasingly, the present society is coming to be viewed not as a condition but as an alternative, as one possible arrangement of a much larger set. The social sciences help provide an understanding of the factors and mechanisms that allow us to review such a society, propose alternative plans, and transform it in line with these new designs.

After a virtual neglect for several decades, in the last twenty years renewed interest has been shown in a general theory of social behavior. Most of this theoretical work has depended on two main postulates. One is the functionalist (sometimes called structural-functional) approach to the explanation of social institutions, based on the assumption that the social institutions of a given society can best be understood in terms of their social functions, that is, in terms of the contributions they make to the maintenance of social systems as a whole. For lack of an established technical term, we shall call the other postulate the conformist approach to the explanation of individual behavior: it is based on the assumption that uniformities of individual behavior in a given society can best be understood in terms of certain commonly accepted social values, which most members of the society tend to internalize during their socialization process.