In the history of postcolonial Africa, no country has suffered a more tragic experience than Nigeria. After almost twenty years of gradual constitutional evolution by relatively orderly processes of conferences and negotiations, the structure of constitutional agreement collapsed; the army was broken into regional groups; citizens of Eastern Region origin fled much of the rest of the country during a series of massacres which produced a migration of hundreds of thousands of persons; the central government lost its effective authority over the Eastern Region; and when orderly processes of negotiation were suspended, the Eastern Region sought its own security and survival by declaring its independence, shortly after which the central government sought to reestablish its authority in the area by military action. The resulting war, which lasted two and one-half years, produced over a million casualties from military action, disease, and starvation.

The past decade has witnessed a general advancement in comparative studies of communism. Yet, in comparing the conceptual development of the Soviet-East European and Chinese Communist fields, one is struck by the peculiarly arrested state of the Chinese side. By comparison, the “Kremlinologists” have produced a veritable storehouse of analytical tools with which they have contributed to the explanation of the nature and functioning of the Soviet political process and Soviet-East European interrelationship. Relatively little conceptual development is discernible in the China field. In this brief essay on comparative developments in the study of communism, I will attempt to compare the concepts which Western scholars have evolved to analyze the politics of the Communist world, account for different approaches, and analyze Chinese political history to determine the most meaningful approach. I speak of the nature and functioning of the political process in a restricted sense—the ways in which leaders interact, how political positions are attained and maintained, and, in general, the structure of leadership politics in the Communist world.

Why are people in politics? Behind this deceptively simple question lies a promising realm of research and analysis. A satisfactory understanding of political motivation can provide a powerful analytical tool for explaining why different groups of participants behave as they do; ultimately it can suggest why they adopt and sustain different political institutions. The basic axiom which, in principle, yields such explanations is simple: participants behave in a manner consistent with their incentives.

If the number of publications is an accurate gauge, there was a conspicuous revival of interest in fascism during the past decade. One obvious reason for this was the erosion of the theories of totalitarianism that had dominated discussions of political extremism during the 1950's. By linking German National Socialism and, in some cases, Italian Fascism with Russian Communism, these theories inhibited consideration of fascism as a distinctive generic phenomenon in its own right. But in the wake of the thaw in Khrushchev's Soviet Union and the general relaxation of cold-war tensions during the 1960's, the various theories of totalitarianism became less compelling.1 As a result, many students of twentieth-century politics became aware of the absence of a concept suitable for characterizing those interwar authoritarian movements and regimes in Europe that were neither conservative nor Communist. For some, fascism provided the solution.

In an examination of the ecological correlates of the Vietnamese insurgency, Edward Mitchell suggests the existence of some disquieting relationships between certain indicators of land tenure arrangements and insurgent activities. Briefly, he finds that the degree of control that the Government of the Republic of Vietnam exercises at the provincial level is positively associated with inequality. Areas that appear to have the most unequal land tenure arrangements are precisely those over which government control is greatest.

The writings of the so-called Cold-War revisionists have had a powerful impact in recent years. In the case of the new generation coming to political awareness, analogies drawn or suggested between Vietnam and the period of the origins of the Cold War carry immediate conviction: many others have had their image of contemporary history challenged or even shattered, and those not persuaded by the revisionist case would acknowledge that important questions have been raised. Undoubtedly circumstances have favored the revisionist critique.

A great deal has been written about the political system of the Republic of South Africa. The ethnic, linguistic and racial differences of its population, the complex and convoluted history of its political antecedents, the strength and productivity of its economy, its strategic location (both in terms of geography and transaction flows), the inequities of its social and political system, and above all, the seeming uncertainty of its future have fascinated observers of its past and present. The volume of material is impressive; however, because many of the works dealing with South Africa are highly personal or partisan in character or essentially descriptive in nature, they are generally of only marginal or transitory importance to any fundamental understanding of its political system. Moreover, there remain substantial blank spots on our cognitive map of South Africa, and many of the more critical aspects of its situation have been ignored or given the most superficial of treatments.