The world we live in happens to be a diversified, highly partitioned space. The surface of the earth is partitioned in a great many ways: politically and physically, economically and culturally. The political divisions are the raison d'être of international relations; the variety of thedifferent parts of the earth's surface is the raison d'être of geography. If the earth were uniform—well polished, like a billiard ball—there probably would not be any such science as geography, and international relations would be much simpler. Because the general principles of geology, geophysics, botany, or economics do not apply in the same way throughout the different compartments existing on the earth, geographical studies appeared and were useful, cutting across the abstraction of the topical disciplines and attempting a scientific analysis of regions and their interrelations.

Before our entry into the First World War American policy was labeled as one of neutrality, which implied that the proper measure of relations with the belligerents was to be found in international law and, more particularly, in the rules of maritimewarfare. The content of that policy failed to correspond with its label, for actually it was sharply inclined to the side of Great Britain. However, the Administration refrained from acknowledging the fact that British naval actions were not being scrupulouslysubjected to the test of the rules of maritime warfare. Freedom of the seas and support of Great Britainwere quite different points from which to proceed.Each might have been used as the basis of separate phases of a changing policy. In fact, however, they were employed simultaneously. Since they not only failed to complement each other but were actually contradictory, the result was to subject American policy toa terrific internal tension.

Among the constitutional devices sometimes recommended as remedies for the ills of present society, federalism has come to play a consistent, if not a major, role. A rapid glance at the balance sheet of Western European intrastate federalism over the last three decades might therefore be of some usefulness.

The uncertainty over the continued existence of federal states is shown by the difficulty in defining their distinguishing features. Assertions in constitutional documents do not help much, as they are political assertions rather than guiding principles of interpretation. Some constitutions have even tried to square the circle. Thus, the Spanish Constitution of 1931 in the same breath called Spain an “integral state” and defined it as consisting of provinces as well as regions formed according to the “principle of autonomy.” The Bonn Basic Law of 1949 dodges the issue elegantly by affirming in its preamble that it is the German people in the eleven states who have enacted the basic law.

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.

The scale and intensity of the fighting in Korea have been such as Americans have, before 1950, associated only with full-fledged war. How such a conflict could fail to develop into World War III they only dimly understand. They had assumed that in the twentieth century war, or at least wars involving great powers, had to be total.

To the extent that this assumption is incorporated in the expectations of the ruling elite of either of two or more contending powers, it is likely to be true; to the extent that war is made an end in itself, is conceptually divorced from the political ends it in fact seeks to achieve, the organized violence of warring great powers must be not only totally organized, but totally applied, while the consequences go hang. The weapons and techniques of the last war when handled non-politically produced, therefore, as might have been anticipated, conditions singularly unpropitious to the realization of what were professed to have been the aims for which the war was fought.

In the general picture of Eastern European developments the Hungarian scene has some peculiar features. Hungary did not succeed in changing sides effectively during the recent war and at the close of hostilities was probably in the worst political position among the former Axis satellites. She did not enjoy much sympathy in the West, and was positively disliked by the Russians. In point of time Hungary was the last of the Axis satellites to conclude an armistice treaty with the three major Allies (January 20, 1945).

In the 1950's, as in the 1930's, there are Congressional efforts to limit executive discretion in the conduct of foreign affairs. Senators Taft and Wherry have generated a debate over the President's authority to send armed forces abroad, which is reminiscent of the debate over the neutrality legislation of the earlier decade. The time has therefore come when a more just appreciation of President Roosevelt's leadership in foreign affairs may be possible and when such an evaluation may be useful.

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.

For the past five or six years American foreign economic policy has constantly been forced to scramble to keep pace with rapidly changing reality. On March 30, 1950, the President entrusted the retiring Secretary of the Army, Gordon Gray, with responsibility for “a careful analysis of the various factors bearing on the present disparity between imports and exports.” Mr. Gray scarcely had time to assemble a staff and begin an intensive investigation when the attack on South Korea introduced significant alterations into the factual setting of the world's economy.

Hypotheses regarding differences (or lack of differences) in policy-orientation or in degrees of influence between the various members of the Soviet Politburo have always been of great interest to students of politics. Thus there have been frequent speculations regarding alleged differences in foreign policy lines and on the problem of succession. The absence of confirming or disconfirming data for any of these hypotheses is striking, and obvious in view of the secrecy that enshrouds the internal operations of the Politburo. Published statements of any kind by members of the Politburo have become infrequent in recent years. Such statements as are available for analysis have usually dealt with different subjects and have been made at different dates, so that they were difficult to compare from the point of view of testing hypotheses regarding differences in policy of influence. Through Stalin's seventieth birthday, December 21,1949, however, a rare opportunity for comparative analysis did occur.

The creation of the Cominform in the summer of 1947 marked an important stage in the development of communism in Europe. The precise reasons that led the leaders of Soviet Communism to revive a public form of co-operation between several Communist parties remain to this day uncertain. What is obvious is the use to which the Cominform has been put during its brief existence up to now. It has acted as an added catalyst of social and political change in the satellite countries. Its resolutions, like the one on the occasion of the expulsion of Yugoslavia from that body, have laid down the broad lines of policy to be pursued by the People's Democracies on such vital issues as the question of collectivization of agriculture, the “nationalist deviation,” etc. The original concept of the Com-inform included, undoubtedly, creation of the appearance of complete autonomy of the Communist parties in Eastern Europe. The language of the speeches at the founding meeting and the choice of the seat for the new organization, outside of the Soviet Union, testify as to the serious attempt to present the collaboration between the Soviet Union and her Communist allies under a veneer of equality. If the picture thus presented seemed to lack realism to the Communist leaders from Poland or Yugoslavia, it is unreasonable to assume that the propaganda effect of the establishment of the Cominform was entirely lost upon the masses who had, since the end of the war, joined the ranks of the ruling parties in the satellite states.

The contrast between brave American words in support of colonial aspirations and United States military aid in support of colonial powers putting down native insurrection is painfully sharp. Checking the spread of Soviet imperialism and liquidating the remnants of old-style European imperialism are objectives which seem to stand in the way of each other. Military security can apparently be purchased only at the price of popular hostility in the colonial world. And friendship may prove unpurchasable at any price.

Foreign policy making always involves a reconciliation of not wholly compatible goals, but the dilemma which United States colonial policy poses in Asia is peculiarly distasteful. What we face there today we might tomorrow face in Africa or the Pacific islands. Some action has to be improvised in the Far East at once. But this crisis also requires the United States to remove the conditions which will present similar predicaments elsewhere in the future.

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.

Opinion differs about the role of syndicated columnists in the forming of national opinion and in the decision-making process in the United States. Our columnists have been the subject of pioneering studies, but we have a long way to go before the picture can be called historically complete, scientifically precise, or fully satisfactory for policy-making purposes. What the columnists say is an important chapter in the history of the American public, and history is most useful for critical purposes when written close to the event. The general theory of communication and politics can be refined as the details of the opinion process are more fully known.

It is possible to contend that in political science today, and particularly with regard to international politics, there is a significant trend towards interpreting events in termsof “power.” This trend has stimulated controversy between those who assert that the study of politics is that of the struggle for power and those who hold that such a study must incorporate other and contradictory values. This paper is not an attempt, directly, to resolve these differences. Rather, it is based squarely on the supposition that power does constitute the generalized end of politics, an end which is basic as a means to other innumerable and variegated ultimate ends. Granted this supposition, however, it is contended that there does not yet exist a structure of analysis dealing with the processes involved in the attainment of this generalized end—a conceptual structure comparable to that of economics, which deals with the attainment of the generalized end of wealth. The purpose of this paper, then, is to propose a skeleton upon which a formal body of political theory might be constructed. For until such a body of ideas about the processes of coercion exists, little progress is likely to be made in resolving the wider controversy mentioned above.

Both of these books deal with foreign policy and they are alike in their common concern with the organizational rather than the substantive aspect of that policy. Both authors believe in democracy and in our own particular American brand of democracy. Although both feel that existing arrangements need modification, neither desires a complete scrapping of our basic governmental structure. But while Professor McCamy puts his faith in the executive branch and feels that the answer lies in an energizing and streamlining of the administrative process which will better equip the President and his subordinates for (a) determining sound policy and (b) persuading Congress to accept—or not reject—that policy, Professor Dahl argues that the more basic need is to equip Congress so that its wisdom and judgment can be added to that of the executive in the attainment of a mutually determined policy.

The departure of the French Socialists from the government early in 1950, even though they returned in a few months, marked the end of a stage of postwar history in Europe. For the first time since liberation France was governed by a coalition in which the Socialists were no longer represented. At the same time the Socialists were in the opposition in Belgiumand Western Germany as well and limited to little influence upon the Italian and Swiss governments. Austria, Great Britain, and Scandinavia were the only countries in which the Socialists are strongly represented in their governments. Roughly speaking then, Europe is divided into three zones according to the degree of power of democratic socialism: Eastern Europe—bordered on the West by a line running from Trieste to Lübeck—where the democratic Socialist parties have been absorbed by the Communist parties; Northwestern Europe—Great Britain and the Scandinavian countries (Norway, Sweden, Denmark)—under predominant Socialist influence; and the rest of Continental Europe where the the Socialists are a more or less powerful opposition group. Spain and Portugal in the South and Greece and Turkey in the Southeast are left outside ofthe scope of our study owing to the peculiar and non-democratic structure of these countries.

Among the increasing number of publications on the Indonesian Revolution the survey of J. W. Meyer Ranneft and the larger studies of H. J. van Mook occupy something of a unique position. It is rather seldom that high-ranking Dutch colonial civil servants are willing and able to put down their recollections and criticisms in fairly extensive form. If one browses through the volumes of such journals as Koloniale Studien, Koloniaal Tijdschrift, De Indische Gids, or Tijdschrift voor Ambtenaren bij het Binnenlandsch Bestuur, one is indeed struck by the number of authors who are members of various government services. But their work in this connection is primarily of a specific and localized nature; their articles may range from vaccination to irrigation problems in the Indies, but they rarely strike the broad, interpretive note that characterizes the studies now under discussion. This fact gives the present publications of Meyer Ranneft and van Mook a special cachet: both by what is said and what (admittedly purposely in the case of Meyer Ranneft) remains unsaid, their work not only illuminates many aspects of the Indonesian Revolution, but, more significantly, also the mentality of two of the highest ranking officials in the colonial civil service, who helped materially in shaping the course of events in Indonesia since the 1930's. It should also be noted that Meyer Ranneft and van Mook are representative of the chief two opposing factions and schools of thought in the Dutch administration, and their present publications are nothing short of a credo of each of these respective schools. This is particularly evident when their earlier work is examined; both men have a rather extensive bibliography, which throws added light on their present studies.

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.