The prospect of a European federation has aroused great enthusiasm in the United States, but at the same time the difficulties encountered in its realization have generated a host of frustrations. It is not unusual, after five years of costly effort, to hear that the moment of crisis has arrived; that we must either push ruthlessly toward the goal, or abandon not only integration but possibly assistance to Europe as well. Perhaps these are the only alternatives that confront the United States. But before we fasten on to them irrevocably, it may be well to ask once more: What is the nature of the area that we are attempting to integrate, and how has our thought on the subject developed? Some appreciation of the recent history and problems of Europe, and of the circumstances that inspired postwar American policy, may help to determine whether or not the range of choice is as narrow as it looks at present to the United States.

TRaditional China was characterized by a remarkable homogeneity of mores, institutions, and values. In this it resembled the simpler societies in which, as Maclver has pointed out, the institutions are in broad accord with the mores, and one system of values prevails, being reaffirmed in every aspect of life. During the past hundred years, China's perdurable synthesis of doctrines and institutions has been slowly but certainly undermined. While the impact of the Western powers and Western technology forced the modification of Chinese institutions, the subtle penetration of Western ideas altered or destroyed every long-accepted value. The past century of China's history can be seen as a continuous struggle to regain its ancient homogeneity. That century is marked by repeated attempts to create groups of modified institutions to meet the challenge of Western power, together with groups of modified values which, it was hoped, would support the new institutions and check the spread of divisive Western ideas. These efforts failed, and with each failure more and more traditional institutions and values were abandoned as incapable of existing in amalgam with Western elements. In this process, different social groups reacted differently to the persisting appeal of the old and the attraction of the new and, in so reacting, further undermined the old synthesis of values and institutions.

During Stalin's lifetime Soviet writing, with his encouragement, presented him as a master theoretician, without a living peer. The more recent tendency on the part of his successors to reduce reference to this and others of his roles has not amounted to a denial of the earlier theme of intellectual greatness. It may therefore be of some importance, even after his death, to investigate Stalin's theoretical writings, not only to clarify his function and accomplishments as an intellectual, but also to gain further insight into Bolshevik and Soviet patterns of thought. A particularly interesting subject for such an investigation is Stalin's last and most widely heralded theoretical writing, the article, “Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R.”

In Central and Eastern Europe, roughly ninety million people live in a political setting labeled as “People's Democracy.” The area constitutes a bloc which stretches from the Elbe and the Baltic to the Black Sea and includes six countries: Poland, Eastern Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria. According to official Communist interpretation, these countries are in a phase of transition toward socialism; they have not yet attained the “summit” of development as represented by the Soviet Union. While the People's Democracies are traveling along the road to the form of organization of society established by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the period of time within which complete adoption of the Soviet system is to be achieved has not been defined.