The detonation of Peking's first atomic devices in recent months has X provoked renewed widespread discussion of the dangers of the further spread of nuclear weaponry. Speculation has flourished about who would be next—Sweden? Japan? Israel? Or perhaps India, which has become the first nonnuclear country to build a chemical separation plant? Cost estimates put nuclear weapons within reach of the poorest nations within a few years. Governments have issued solemn pronouncements about the need to design further international agreements to prevent nuclear proliferation. The President of the United States made use of a high-level committee to advise him how to deal with the problem.

Peace will be achieved, virtually all Western leaders say upon issuing a general statement on foreign policy, when all men learn to obey a common law. The achievement of world peace through world law is a popular solution to the problems of world politics of our times. However, creating a viable international law that all or even most states are willing to obey has proved difficult.

Arecent commentator has suggested that the value to political science of looking at new states is that “one is forced to deal with the most basic questions of politics—the entire set of questions involved in the creation and maintenance of political societies.” Certainly this appears to be true time and again. One is forced to look at the largest questions to the smallest, both because they are vivid and apparent, and because they are also urgent. The basic problem of obligation—why we do things we do not want to do, and allow unpleasant things to be done to us by political leaders, or why we accept the authority of power—is for us either a matter of analysis or of sociological inquiry. Clearly it is more than that in a new state. There the question is a living one, sometimes for a large minority, sometimes for many small sections or groups. The state and the nation are not, as yet, one. Rousseau or Hobbes have come to life.

Although the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development has been in existence for nearly two decades, the political aspects of its activities have received scant attention. Most of the literature on IBRD operations has been written by economists, who quite naturally emphasize the economic aspects. Political scientists, to the extent that they have discussed it at all, have described most of its operations as removed “from the sphere of international or domestic politics.” The purpose of the following analysis is to determine in what respects the activities of the International Bank may be described as “political.” Such a determination would be useful in three ways. First, it would, it is hoped, stimulate research on international organizations as actors in international politics; second, it would require revision of the standard explanations of the evolution of international development aid programs; and third, it would aid in evaluating the argument for more multilateral aid which assumes that such aid is “nonpolitical.”

The political scientist and the politician of our day both tend to be skeptical of international law. The political scientist, who is interested in studying the distribution of power, sees in the classic rules of international law neither an adequate description of the conduct of states nor an effective prescription for ordering national conduct. The politician, who is interested in the exercise of power, finds it difficult to realize what he considers vital national interests within the traditional legal framework. Both scholars and practitioners apparently feel that the older rhetoric of international law—nonintervention, peaceful settlement of disputes, the law of war—is to a great extent irrelevant to a world in turmoil. Bombings without declaration of war, illegal reprisals, campaigns of political assassination, and military intervention to crush internal revolt are accepted as part of the backdrop of world conflict. It seems increasingly clear that the classic rules of international law and the basic political and moral principles on which they rest are now used less and less by the great powers even as points of reference. Nothing sounds more old-fashioned than Secretary Stimson's remarks of less than forty years ago, in advising against the establishment of a national intelligence service, that “gentlemen don't read each other's mail.”

International bargaining and negotiation are subjects about which there has long been much speculation and the offering of much advice. Accounts of bargaining experiences, as well as the assembly and ordering of real-world data and inferences drawn therefrom (particularly when they lead to the maxims of a Callières, a Nicolson, or a Lippmann) raise questions that require investigation by all available means, including experimentation in laboratories when feasible. Laboratory investigation can be confined to overt behavior—proposals, arguments, threats, outcomes, and so on—or the laboratory can be employed to seek data on attitudes, intentions, expectations, and perceptions, and thereby to probe where historical data seldom penetrate. Computer technology adds flexibility, control, and efficiency to laboratory data collection. It permits, during the course of an experiment, questions that probe the subjective aspects of a negotiation without the distortion that results from the presence of an interrogator.

On November 1, 1963, the Ordinary Professor for Physical Chemistry at the Humboldt University in East Berlin, Robert Havemann, included the following remarks in his lecture on conceptual thinking: “The vital source of our cultural development … is the many-sided, increasingly comprehensive information of all members of society concerning all knowledge, all problems and questions of our time. Every impediment to and limitation of information paralyzes the activity of the members of society and thereby the development of social conditions, and only puts a brake on development. At all times reactionary regimes have attempted to keep the people in ignorance. … A government can only succeed in its so very important tasks if it can rely on the active and energetic cooperation of all members of society.… Whoever is afraid of the consequences of general unlimited information and, on account of this fear, impedes it, creates thereby precisely the conditions for fateful development” (p. 52).

The impulse to question the conventional wisdom about world problems has in recent years reflected the perfectly normal dissatisfaction with the way things were going. The temptation has been great to question the rationality of a system preserved against disastrous collapse only, it seemed, by shared knowledge of how disastrous the consequences of collapse would be. (One is reminded of the young lady at the ball who was asked by her escort what it was that held up her strapless evening gown. When she replied that it was “gravity”, he queried the principle. “Gravity”, he said, “should make it fall down.” Her response perhaps describes the contemporary dilemma: “sOh, I don't mean Newton's gravity, but the gravity of my situation if the darned thing doesn't work.”) The phenomenon is, perhaps, described as “self-preventing prophecy.” The fact that the phenomenon has seemed to work thus far is hardly an adequate response to those who are uneasy about its reliability, as no one can fail to be.

The outstanding characteristic of the French political system is its historical instability. Constitutional monarchy was overthrown by a revolution, replaced by a republic, which in turn quickly evolved into a dictatorship, and when it too was dismissed by an armed uprising, the interminable squabbles among the monarchist factions allowed another republic to come into existence by default. But for an “accident” of history this republic too would have given way to a dictatorship through the bloodless medium of the coup d'état, but while the republic tottered on in the interwar period the life-span of its governments was calculated in terms of months rather than years, and with its “collapse” under the coup de grâce of military defeat a new dictatorship immediately sprang up to take its place, to be succeeded by another republic lasting for thirteen years amid constantly recurring cabinet crises, then falling in the wake of an eminently successful revolution, out of which emerged the present regime. Here we have what sociologists might label the “institutionalization of instability”, interpreted by a number of leading writers on French politics as the product of a deep-seated conflict between the “two Frances”, whether these two political subcultures are viewed as the parties of mouvement and of I'ordre établi, or as the “administrative and representative traditions.”