Through the Eastern Alps runs one of the great cultural frontiers of Europe, the zone of contact between the cultural sphere of the Mediterranean and the transalpine cultures to the north. This frontier has shifted back and forth over time, as have the boundaries of language and of various dominant political units. One of the present foci of culture contact in a zone of dispute and discord is the present-day Italian region of Alto Adige or Tiroler Etschland (still called the South Tirol by unreconstructed defenders of the traditional unity of the Tyrol) and the Trentino. Unified in the first part of the 13th century under the Counts of the Tyrol, the region passed into the hands of the Habsburgs in 1363, where it remained until 1918 but for a brief interlude during the Napoleonic period. The Napoleonic occupation divided the region, yielding to Bavaria the largely German-speaking province of Bozen (Bolzano), together with the North Tyrol, while grouping the Romancespeaking portions with Italy. This division became the prototype of later efforts to divorce the Romance Tyrol from the German Tyrol, a division effected again in the provincial separation between Province Bozen and Province Trento after the entire region was yielded by Austria to Italy at the end of World War I. Except for a brief period near the end of World War II (1943 to 1945), when both provinces were grouped as Operationszone Alpenvorland with Gau Tyrol of the Greater German Reich, the region has remained politically part of Italy. It remains also, however, an area of conflict in which Italian political hegemony and cultural influence has been combatted by the German-speaking population, impelled by a desire for greater autonomy or complete separation from the Italian state.

The question of whether Japan can rightly be said to “have had feudalism” is by no means settled. Although Westerners have been writing about “Japanese feudalism” for well over a hundred years, the acceptability of this practice is still a matter of controversy among professional historians, notably among those who make the study of medieval Europe their specialty. To a long line of Western historians ending with Herbert Norman, however, there was no question about the appropriateness of placing the feudal label on Japan. Nor does the contemporary Japanese historian question a term which has become so important a part of his professional as well as everyday vocabulary. In a Japan in which the reading public is daily reminded that the “struggle against feudalism” is still being waged, feudalism seems a present reality which by its very nature cannot be denied to have existed in Japan's past.

Dès qu'il aborde les textes, le médiéviste rencontre des nobiles. Ouvre-t-il Grégoire de Tours, il y voit bientôt cités des nobiles, un nobile genus, un nobilissimus in genre sua. Parcourt-il les Capitulaires francs, il y trouve rapidement un article applicable aux omnes homines laïci, tam nobiles quam ignobiles. Sources narratives ou sources diplomatiques, partout il butte d'emblée sur le problème des “nobles”.

One of the most impressive testimonies to the unity of mankind lies in the fact that certain basic features of social structure have been determined in different areas by the existence of similar conditions. Thus in ancient Egypt, in Japan, in early American cultures and among Indo-European peoples sociological analysis shows the rise of aristocracy to have been due to the coincidence of certain irrational, deepseated, retrospective convictions with certain economic conditions. Repeatedly the evolution of a ruling class runs back into that prehistoric darkness when related tribes first united to form a primordial political community; in the earliest historic age of such a community we find the members of this regarded as descendants of the gods or even as their earthly embodiments. It is on this belief in their divine origins that the great base their claim to a monopoly of political and economic power, the latter including disposal of the labor of the unfree. The same belief leads them to perpetuate themselves as a caste; their family lines must not be contaminated by the blood of the low-born. The mass of the free-born accepts this social order as divinely ordained. There is no sign of any consciousness of oppression nor thought of revolt against the privileges of the aristocracy. The latter for its part carefully heeds the rights of common mortals. There is either no tradition of a golden age of equality, or if there is some legend of a lost paradise, it fails to incite revolt against an order sanctified by immemorial existence. A society based on respect for an hereditary aristocracy that monopolized the best land could not be subverted by any forces generated solely within the lower classes. Discontent could become revolutionary only through the cultural developments that made it possible to ask the question, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”

The economic, social, and political development of newly independent nations depends upon the prior or concurrent strengthening of public administration. To be sure, the path of national development is a circular one as it traces a spiral ascent in which a step forward in one kind of development makes possible the next step in another. The administrative arc of this circle is here emphasized not because it is more basic than the others, but because it has often been slighted. New governments, often on the recommendation of technical-assistance advisors, adopt excellent programs in health, agriculture, education, and industry, but then fail to translate these programs from paper to action. The fault is not lack of earnest intent but the burden of an unresponsive and weak administrative system.