For over three decades the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has based its deterrent on the principle that the United States would retaliate with nuclear weapons if a Soviet conventional attack against Western Europe succeeded. This notion has long troubled most strategic analysts. It remained generally acceptable to political elites, however, when U.S. nuclear superiority appeared massive enough to make the doctrine credible (as in the 1950s); when the conventional military balance in Europe improved markedly (as in the 1960s); or when détente appeared to be making the credibility of deterrence a less pressing concern (as in the 1970s). None of these conditions exists in the 1980s, and anxiety over the danger of nuclear war has prompted renewed attention to the possibility of replacing NATO's Flexible Response doctrine (a mixture of nuclear and conventional deterrence) with a reliable conventional deterrence posture that might justify a nuclear no-first-use (NFU) doctrine.1

Disagreements between East and West on questions of regional security in Africa, South West Asia, and South East Asia have, since the mid-1970s, contributed considerably to the deterioration of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. Moreover, in the current period of poor relations, one of the most plausible avenues to the outbreak of nuclear war is that of escalation from crisis and confrontation in the Third World—specifically in the Middle East, where the interests of the two blocs most clearly intersect.

The study of international political economy is distinguished not only by its substantive focus but also by its continuing attention to cooperative, or at least rule-guided, arrangements. These cooperative arrangements are defined variously: as an open world economy by Robert Gilpin and Stephen Krasner, and as strong international regimes by Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye. But in either case, the problems of cooperation and order are not approached simply as tactical alliances or as limiting cases of international anarchy. Instead, close attention is paid to the possibilities for rule making and institution building, however fragile and circumscribed they may be. By this view, the absence of a Hobbesian “common power to keep them all in awe” does not preclude the establishment of some effective joint controls over the international environment. Elaborating on this perspective, Brian Barry argues that “international affairs are not a pure anarchy in which nobody has any reason for expecting reciprocal relations to hold up. In economic matters, particularly, there is a good deal of room for stable expectations.”

What are Chinese scholars writing about internal developments in the Soviet Union? Are they positive or negative in their assessments of each stage of Soviet history, from the early leadership of Lenin to the recent accession of Gorbachev? What are the consequences that changing Chinese attitudes are likely to have for Sino-Soviet relations? After a quarter-century of the Sino-Soviet split, foreign observers no longer need to grasp at tiny straws of information, or to rely solely on a small number of official documents and authoritative articles. The study of new, published sources can add substantially to our understanding of international perceptions in the socialist world, and can bring us nearer to the elusive goal of learning about debates on foreign policy in communist-led countries. Academic journals and books from the late 1960s in the Soviet Union, and from 1979 in China, present an impressively detailed and intriguingly lively literature on the problems of socialism in the other country. Having previously examined Soviet writings on China, I will introduce Chinese publications on the Soviet Union in this article.

Central Asia confronts the Soviet leadership in Moscow with a number of important policy problems. The difficult issues raised by economic and demographic trends in the region and the potential rise of Muslim nationalism among the masses there have received careful and increasing attention from Western analysts in recent years, as have some of the current and potential responses of the Soviet leadership to them. Far less attention, however, has been directed toward a more directly political problem raised by developments in Central Asia; a problem the resolution of which appears to be of far more pressing urgency, and which has potentially far more profound implications for the future of the Soviet political order itself: the rise of a modern, secular Muslim, communist elite.

In the mid-1950s, the Eisenhower administration proposed that the U.S. government subsidize the expansion of American corporate interests abroad. In 1954 and again in 1955, the Republican administration recommended that Congress ease the provisions of the Internal Revenue Code applicable to income earned abroad in order to encourage American multinational corporations (MNCs) to increase their investments overseas. The MNCs and exporters opposed specific components of the administration's tax package, however; Congress therefore refused to endorse it. By the end of its tenure in office, the administration itself retreated from its attempts to subsidize private capital exports and began to advocate a crackdown on tax abuse by American multinational firms.

There is a widespread view in the West that Soviet strategic doctrine has not changed much since the early 1960s, and still concentrates on fighting and winning an all-out nuclear war. The Soviets are said to be reluctant to recognize thresholds, and therefore have no limited nuclear options, much less a true conventional war-fighting option. To the extent they do have a conventional option, it is contingent on surprise and a two-week blitzkrieg; if the war is not won quickly, they will have to escalate.

In the 1970s, discussion of the international economy frequently turned to the emergence of a “new protectionism” among the industrial countries after the accomplishments of trade liberalization in the 1960s. International organizations such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the International Monetary Fund (I.M.F.) documented an increase in trade barriers erected against imports of manufactures. The protectionism was “new” in two respects: (1) it was directed against dynamic exporters of manufactured goods (especially Japan and the newly industrializing countries) that had recently become important elements in world trade; (2) the means of protection were nontariff barriers —quotas, voluntary export restraints, and a host of governmental impediments to competitive trading practices.1

Our knowledge of the operations of the centrally planned East European economies has become increasingly detailed; unfortunately, this accumulating scholarship has led to a certain disregard for some of the larger issues, especially concerning long-term developmental trends. The adverse results of this loss of focus have become quite apparent from the discussions about Soviet and East European economic problems—occasioned by the deaths of Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov—in the popular and semi-popular press. Most of the sweeping generalizations presented to the public were at considerable variance with scholarly assessments tucked away in publications for specialists. Further, many of the important empirical lessons in earlier comparative studies of long-term growth in East and West (for example, the remarkable survey by Bergson)1 appear to have been forgotten; and U.S. governmental policy statements often appear to be based on false assumptions about what actually happened.

The phenomenon of general or hegemonic war has long been viewed as a distinctive kind of conflict, and one that has played a unique Robert Gilpin states: role in world history.

In this article I shall examine the origins of a major rural revolutionary movement, Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path). An extremist Maoist organization, Sendero has gained considerable peasant support in Peru's southern highlands, especially in the Ayacucho area. Although peasant unrest has been endemic in Peru, the scope and intensity of the current movement are unprecedented. Never before has a Peruvian guerrilla group ranged over such a wide part of the country, and never before has such a group threatened the order of daily life in the capital.

If a consensus exists in the literature on international economic sanctions, it is that attempts to use economic instruments to achieve political objectives are likely to fail.1 This widely shared conclusion has been based on the analysis of a number of highly visible but unsuccessful attempts, including the League of Nations' sanctions against Italy in 1935–1936, the Arab boycott of Israel, U.S. sanctions against the Castro regime, United Nations sanctions against Rhodesia, and most recently, U.S. sanctions against the Soviet Union following the invasion of Afghanistan and the imposition of martial law in Poland.

Communism traces deviance, disaffection, and dissent alike to alienation and presocialist forms of consciousness. Insofar as the building of communism brings about an end to exploitation and alienation, deviance, disaffection, and dissent should disappear with them. The persistence of disaffection and articulate dissent, or of crime, delinquency, and social deviance generally, represents a failure of socialization—a failure, thus, of the system. Communist regimes are anxious, therefore, to deny the existence of crime, to expel dissenters, and to curb social deviance. Dissent and deviance are troubling in yet another respect. Insofar as Marxism aspires to eliminate social conflict and traces it to differences in social or class interest, dissent and deviance may be taken to reflect the persistence of differences in perceived interest, whether “objectively” rooted in class differences or not.

Is consent a sure foundation upon which to build a stable world order? Under what conditions is it achieved? The burgeoning literature on international regimes and regime change is beginning to address the issue E. H. Carr raised over forty years ago. Hegemonic stability theory argues that a preponderance of power provides the basis for international order. Recent observers, however, have noted that order can break down even when the hegemon exercises dominance. Furthermore, stable collaboration can be achieved in the face of declining hegemony. The exercise of power alone cannot lead to a stable international order.

Despite its widespread currency in political science, the concept of clientelism has rarely found its way into the literature on communist systems. Students of communist politics regularly note the importance of personal ties, and many recognize the significance of informal bonds in economic and political spheres at all levels of society. Some even apply the term “clientelism” to the political behavior they describe. Yet these studies are generally limited to elite-level politics, to factionalism, career mobility, recruitment patterns, and attainment of office at the top- to middle-level echelons of the bureaucracy.2 Few have considered clientelism as a type of elite-mass linkage through which the state and the party exercise control at the local level, and through which individuals participate in the political system.

Thanks to the vigor of the dependency school's attack on the established “developmentalist” framework for studying change in the Third World, debates going on today in development studies are perhaps the most interesting and important in the field of comparative politics. The debates are interesting because, both methodologically and substantively, a wide range of new issues has been raised in a field that by around 1970 had become relatively moribund. They are important because, in the Third World especially, the mainstream developmentalist models earlier formulated in the United States—such as those sponsored by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC)—have been angrily discarded by many in favor of politically explosive explanations of underdevelopment that lay the manifold problems of these areas squarely at the feet of Western imperialism (and, in the case of the Latin Americanists heading this school, at the doorstep of Washington in particular). Thus, there are acutely perceived moral and political dimensions to this clash of paradigms for the study of Third World development, beyond the intellectual, or academic, interest that such controversy is sure to excite.

Engels once remarked in a letter to Marx, that it really looks as if old Hegel is directing History as World Spirit from his grave, and with the greatest conscientiousness lets everything spin out twice, once as great tragedy, and the second time as running farce, Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, Barthelemn for Saint-Just, Flocon for Carnot, and Mondkalb with the top dozen most debt-ridden lieutenants for the little corporal and his roundtable of marshals. Thus, as for the 18th Brumaire—we've been there before.1

In this paper, I examine two key relationships relevant to the comparative study of policy implementation. The first is the linkage between the structure of elites, techniques of mobilization, and local policy implementation. Although many studies of elites have emphasized the effects of integration on political stability, they have only recently addressed the question of how elite integration affects policy implementation. More specifically, how does the existence of elites that are deeply divided over policy issues affect the power capabilities and opportunities of those elites and, therefore, the methods they employ to mobilize support for their policies? And how do these techniques affect the pattern

In 1983 two events focused international attention on East and West Germany. One was the collapse of talks on intermediate range missiles in Geneva and the consequent deployment of the missiles by NATO. The other was the 500th anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther. The Luther anniversary cast the spotlight particularly on communist East Germany, which revised its previously negative interpretation of Luther and not only marked his birth with elaborate festivities but also extended unprecedented assistance to the Lutheran church for its celebration. Yet, just as many wondered if inter-German detente would survive the I.N.F. deployment, so, too, many wondered at the nature of the church-state cooperation in the G.D.R., and if it would survive the Luther Year. The present analysis examines the character and direction of this churchstate relationship, using the Luther Year experience as evidence.

For anyone whose job is to study the United States, the memoirs of its statesmen provide more than merely entertaining reading. They not only give you a closer insight into the “kitchen” of statesmanship and political decision making; they also provide an opportunity to check the assumptions and paradigms that were constructed earlier to analyze the policy of any particular administration. The memoirs confirm that in spite of hundreds of books and thousands of articles in the U.S. press that discuss specific policies, as well as daily debates in Congress and its committees, press conferences, and official statements, the policy process is not as open as it might seem at first glance. Rather, American foreign policy is made within a very restricted circle of the “initiated”—official and unofficial presidential advisers, including selected members of the Cabinet.