We live in a world of several intersecting crises: the technological crisis, the psychological crisis of “national liberation”, the bipolar clash of monolithic and pluralist ideals, and the bitter paradoxical crisis in which the availability of military force far outweighs the political goals that might command its use. In combination, we have a crisis of the unknown, where science, soldiery, diplomacy, education, and many other agencies struggle fruitlessly to deal with the inexorable situation. And in this crisis military groups of the affected nations are subjected to a series of novel pressures.

Unu, in 1947, became the Prime Minister of the Provisional Government of Burma. He retained that post after independence in 1948 and, except for seven months in 1956–1957, he had been the duly elected Prime Minister until he gave up office in September, 1958, after the serious split in the ruling party, the Anti-Fascist Peoples' Freedom League (AFPFL). From then until the third national elections of February, 1960, General Ne Win, Chief of the Burma Defense Forces, held the reins of what was called a “caretaker government”, in which he proceeded strictly according to the constitution adopted in 1947. U Nu's Party won an overwhelming victory at the polls in 1960 and once again, with almost 80 per cent parliamentary backing in the 250-man Chamber of Deputies, the more powerful chamber in the bicameral parliament, he set about to govern Burma. On March 2, 1962, General Ne Win staged a coup. He took over the government in the name of a military Revolutionary Council, arrested the previous cabinet members, and set aside Burma's constitution.

The contemporary modus operandi of the Soviets in Ethiopia seems in many ways to be a refined and ideologically refurbished version of that of pre-Revolutionary days.

Russia's interest in Ethiopia is centuries old. An offer to join forces with Ethiopia and the Protestant West in the struggle against the Mohammedan Turks reached Moscow before the time of Peter the Great. Hiob Ludolf's pioneer work, Historia Aethiopica, was translated into Russian in the seventeenth century, and, nearly 150 years ago, the teaching of the Amharic language became a part of the Khar'kov University curriculum.

South Africa's policy of “separate development” of the races is an enduring feature in that Republic's predicament but the theory and practice of Apartheid have been changing. During the last fifteen years the policy has undergone a fundamental transformation.

On any list of the most penetrating and least deceived political theorists of the nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville must be ranked high. Few others perceived the dangers both of egalitarianism and of racial thinking; of secular religions as well as of state churches; of historical determinism, as well as of those other explanations which equally well undermine responsibility by attributing everything to mere chance or to the appearance of exceptional individuals. Tocqueville insisted upon the obligation of free men to determine by empirical investigation just what are the genuine alternatives confronting them. By his own effort to perform this task, he made a classic contribution to the study of the relationships between social organization and political institutions.