Suchergebnisse

A series of recently declassified documents in the National Archives provide striking evidence of the shift of United States military strategic thinking away from the nineteenth and early twentieth century unilateral interventionist approaches to the bilateral approaches taken in World War II under the multilateral framework of the Good Neighbor Policy.It is also significant to note that, despite the multilateral thrust of this Good Neighbor Policy promulgated by President Roosevelt and the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Military Departments— War and Navy—made no provisions for multilateral strategic plans in World War II.But even as U.S. military planners prepared for bilateral cooperation with Latin American allies in the war, they continued to draft and update unilateral plans for intervention and invasion of key Latin American countries if cooperative approaches should fail.

Geopolitics as an approach to politico-military matters was of considerable significance up to the end of World War II, when it declined in respectability and prestige due to its association with Nazi theories of world conquest. As a result, very few strategic or military writings in the United States or Western Europe since World War II have been called "geopolitical," even though they might include many of the concepts subsumed under the pre-1945 term. But, interestingly enough, the concept is alive and well in Latin America, especially in those Southern Cone countries (Brazil, Argentina, and Chile) where the most prolific thinking and writing on geopolitics has taken place in the last thirty years.

There is a demand for the extension of participation in organizational decision-making. If realized, this should strengthen the stability of a democratic society through providing more people with a meaningful experience of democratic processes. At the same time, however, organizations are continuing to become bigger and their control more centralized. This trend is illustrated for Britain. It leads to an increasing remoteness of decision making on policy issues away from employees and members of the public. The effects of bureaucratization, which accompanies growth, exacerbate the remoteness. So far as participation is concerned, a growing contradiction is therefore emerging between social ideology and social reality, and this is not being given adequate recognition. The likely result is a weakening commitment to collective social objectives and a declining perceived legitimacy of social institutions. It is concluded that a resolution of this problem would be assisted by recognizing how the economic advantages of large-scale organization have been exaggerated and how there are organizational design possibilities for avoiding the socially less desirable aspects of bureaucracy.