With the seating of the representatives of the People's Republic of China, membership in the United Nations system has now become almost universal. The major exception to the general rule of universality is the exclusion of the divided nations: Germany (combined population: 68,000,000), Korea (combined population: 47,000,000), and Vietnam (combined population: 35,000,000).

None of the divided nations hold membership in die United Nations proper, although all three of the Western-affiliated sectors have been given observer status at the UN.

The debate over the “tyranny of the weak” has been revived by recent developments in Vietnam and die continuing confrontation in the Middle East. Although some observers conclude that improved understanding among the large powers has weakened the power of the smaller allies, others maintain that the weaker states continue to show amazing intractability. A clarification of these questions should start with an examination of some of the concepts that can fruitfully be applied to a case study witit some potential for comparative analysis.

Corruption may be defined in a legal or normative sense, and in some societies the two definitions may be coincident. In the legal sense, corruption is self-regarding behavior on the part of public functionaries that directly violates legal restrictions on such behavior. Normatively, a public functionary may be considered corrupt whedier or not a law is being violated in the process. A legally corrupt person may arouse no normative reprobation; a person judged corrupt by normative standards may be legally clean. What is common to both definitions is the notion of the abuse of public power and influence for private ends. It can safely be assumed that any society or political system manifests some level of one or the other, or both of these forms of corruption.

The categorization of states according to size has long been a part of world politics. Rothstein notes, for example, that the formalization of the categories of great and small powers occurred as a result of the signing of the Treaty of Chaumont in 1817. Recently, the concept of size has received an increasing amount of attention as a factor affecting foreign policy. One manifestation of this is the renewed interest in die foreign policy behavior of small states. In his pre-theory of foreign policy, Rosenau includes size as one of three “genotypic” variables assumed to exert a major influence on foreign policy. In addition, empirical studies have shown size to be an important factor underlying variations in the international behavior of nation-states.

In an earlier issue of this journal, we presented our findings on the composition of the interstate system, along with the diplomatic importance or “status” attributed to each member by die others in the system. Covering the period between the Napoleonic Wars and the onset of World War II, we set out both to calculate the ranking of the states every five years during those 125 years, and to make explicit the criteria by which system membership and status ranks were established. Our major motivation was to identify the empirical domain within which our own research would go forth and to develop certain indicators which were relevant to me Correlates of War project; it also seemed likely that these data might be of use to others in tiie scholarly community.

The growing role of governmental bureaucracy has been one of the most noted and discussed characteristics of developing political systems. The phenomenon of bureaucratic intervention in politics, already discernible in the 1950's in many of these states, has, so it seems, become the rule rather than the exception in the years that have followed. Despite the prevalence of the politicized bureaucracy, however, and the amount of discussion engendered by the phenomenon, die sources of bureaucratic growth and dominance in the developing states remain obscure. Most analysts emphasize the superior organization of the bureaucracy and argue that this organization, reinforced by die transfer of techniques from abroad and uncontested because of weak indigenous political institutions, provides much of the explanation for the aggrandizement of the bureaucracy in die policy-making process.

The postwar period has been an unusual era in the annals of political science. Numerous practitioners of the discipline have ventured into areas previously unexplored, formulating new concepts, constructing new conceptual frameworks and models, putting forth new hypotheses and theories previously unstated, borrowing and importing ideas and methodological tools from sister disciplines, and improving upon old and innovating new research techniques (particularly quantitative techniques)—all in the interest of pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge. It seems no exaggeration to say that this is one of the most creative, if not necessarily the most fruitful, episodes in the development of the discipline.