Conventional wisdom holds that the success of Gorbachev's domestic reforms would probably enhance Western security, but that there is nothing the West can do to make this outcome more likely. This conventional wisdom is right on the first count, but wrong on the second. The author supports his conclusion by three bodies of evidence: the effect of the international environment on the domestic politics of great powers in general over the past century; the history of the Soviet Union in particular; and the current constellation of political forces in Gorbachev's Russia.

“New thinking” in Soviet foreign policy may change Soviet understanding of the nature of conflict in the third world, Soviet interests in those conflicts, and therefore Soviet conflict behavior. While these shifts are widespread and significant, they are being resisted by military analysts, which indicates that Soviet policy may not be so easily or directly altered. Many military writers accept that escalation risks are extreme and threaten Soviet security, and others discuss local, nonclass, and intractable features of third-world conflicts. However, military analysts do not accept revisionist, class-transcendent definitions of Soviet internationalist duty. It is on this point that new thinking is most likely to founder in Gorbachev's attempts to change Soviet third-world policy and behavior. With the changes in Soviet domestic politics, military participation in security and foreign policy debates may be effective in restraining the more radical innovations implied in civilian analyses.

This essay discusses the social background and career experiences of a previously unstudied group of Chinese elites: the mayors of Chinese cities. The data are compared with available information on basic-level leaders and higher-ranking cadres. China's mayors are relatively young, have not been in their posts very long, are college graduates (usually majoring in engineering), and quite often are mayors in cities in their native provinces. This last finding is counter to all Chinese bureaucratic practice dating back to the early empires. The authors relate these characteristics to broader developments in the Chinese political system. In particular, localism and elitism are reinforced by China's new mayoral elite; furthermore, the patterns identified appear to contribute to growing political immobilism in China.

Under the banner of “1992,” the European Communities aim to remove all barriers to the movement of persons, capital, and goods among the member countries. The 1992 movement comprises a set of bargains among European elites. Structural change (relative U.S. decline and Japanese ascent) provoked a rethinking of European roles and interests. The 1992 project emerged as a response because of: (1) the policy leadership exercised by the Commission of the European Communities, with support from a transnational business coalition; and (2) a changed domestic political context in several key countries—specifically, the failure of previous national economic strategies and the transformation of the left. The changes under way will alter regional business competition and politics and will affect the world economic system.

The party-state apparatus's structure, which makes it incapable of implementing systemic reforms, is a principal source of resistance to Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of radical reconstruction (perestroika) in the USSR. This apparatus took form in the struggle to subdue the peasantry in the 1930s. Its basic means for managing agricultural production (and, to some extent, industrial production as well), is the mobilizational campaign. But campaigns are by nature intermittent and thus ineffective at eliciting subtle, long-term changes in organizational or individual behavior. For perestroika to succeed, alternative instruments for policy implementation which offer effective political and economic incentives for increased production must be developed. Despite its pervasiveness and intrusiveness, the Soviet state is incapable of effectively implementing many kinds of change in society. In that sense, it is a “weak state.”