The explanation of the rise and fall of the world system's leading powers in terms of uneven economic development tends to overlook the role of the creation and management of public credit and national debts. Prior to 1815, the Netherlands and Great Britain owed a significant proportion of their respective victories over the larger and wealthier states of Spain and France to the development of competitive financial capabilities. Winning, however, leads to higher absolute debt burdens which, prior to 1945, encouraged postwar reductions in governmental expenditures. In this fashion, world leaders have contributed to the erosion of their preponderant capability positions before the emergence of international rivals. These ideas are elaborated within the context of George Modelski's long cycle of world leadership theory and through a brief review of war-related financial problems between 1500 and 1815 and the consequent development of national debts. The longitudinal analysis of British and American public debt data provides collaborating empirical support.

American foreign economic policy between 1887 and 1934 was shaped in important ways by the international economic structure and the position of the United States as a “supporter” within it. As Britain's hegemony declined, and particularly after it joined the United States as a supporter just prior to World War I, American foreign economic policy became more liberal and active. Once Britain was transformed from a supporter into a spoiler in the late 1920s, leaving the United States as the sole supporter within the IES, both the international economy and American policy became more unstable and protectionist. During the 1970s, the United States, West Germany, and France all emerged as supporters within the IES, indicating that a moderately stable and liberal international economy may continue to exist in the future.

Hong Kong's postwar economic “miracle” has been sustained by a minimally integrated social-political system, the two constituent parts of which are a laissez-faire bureaucracy and a “self-sufficient,” atomistic Chinese society. Until recently, this system has operated to keep politically salient issues to a manageable minimum. Secular, asymmetrical changes, however, have opened up cracks in the system; their disruptive effects have become increasingly visible. Because of its overly rapid economic growth, the organizational fabric of the Chinese society has worn away, making it more dependent on the government for need satisfaction. Together with the administrative imperatives befitting a complex industrial society, this dependence furthers the emergence of a professionalized and expanded bureaucracy. The problem of linkage between the government and the Chinese society is aggravated by the inadequacy of existing intermediary devices. As a result, a new style of politics is emerging in Hong Kong, reflecting its troubled structural conditions.

Soviet policies with regard to neutrality in postwar Western Europe have developed from largely unsuccessful influence attempts into more realistic and acquiescent lines seeking to find a balance between operative aims and actual leverage. There has been a change from ideologically motivated opposition toward conditional support and flexible search for areas of common interests, and from basically unrealistic grand designs to recognition of the status quo. The Soviet posture toward potentially neutral blocs and disparate neutralist trends in Western Europe has primarily been characterized by a wait-and-see attitude. In order to make Soviet policies and postures understandable, it is necessary to combine the concept of the U.S.S.R. as a rational bloc leader interested above all in weakening the opposite bloc with that of a world power interested mainly in international stability and prevention of war. The popular Western hypothesis that the Soviet union is acting on a design that would incrementally neutralize the whole of Western Europe is difficult to test; even if there were such a design in reserve or in the experimental stage, its degree of crystallization and internal integration would have to be low.

Four issues must be articulated and related in order to create a general theory of revolution: revolutionary leadership and organization, mass participation, the nature of revolutionary action, and system response. Recent studies of the Iranian revolution provide abundant descriptive materials relevant to the last three issues, but little to illuminate the nature of the leadership of the revolution or its organization. Few of the studies attempt to analyze their materials in a theoretically useful way. A psychoanalytical interpretation of revolutionary action and of the Shah's response is one way of moving toward a general theory. His leadership failure, explained in terms of his personal history and character structure, is a powerful way to account for the revolution itself as well as for its outcome.

The major cause of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 was the government's inability to satisfy the rising expectations of the Iranian people—especially following the sudden enormous increase in the price of oil in 1973. This cause fits in with the theoretical discussions of revolution by, among others, James Davies, Crane Brinton, Samuel Huntington, and David Apter. Among other contributing factors was the human rights policy of President Carter, which promoted a good deal of confusion and disharmony in U.S. policy toward Iran, encouraged the opposition, and helped to disorient the Shah. The Shah's confusion was aggravated by the shock he suffered when he first realized the extent of the opposition to his regime, and by the state of his health. The outcome of the revolution was also influenced by the Western media.

Despite increased interest in the political role of the state, attention is currently shifting away from the state's contribution to political development in Wilhelmine Germany. There are, however, a number of unresolved questions concerning the Wilhelmine state bureaucracy's role in German politics that make the abandonment of political analyses of the state premature. Earlier approaches to the Wilhelmine administration have argued that it was either insulated from society or subordinate to dominant social classes. Such monolithic analyses are unable to account for bureaucratic commitments to competing, substantive interests and goals as well as for administrative conflict over such commitments. This problem can be avoided through hypotheses that explain bureaucratic political behavior in terms of class, administrative structure, or ideology. These hypotheses may be of general use for future research on administrative politics in other societies as well as in Wilhelmine Germany.

In this review essay, recent significant works on the subject of comparative ethnicity are situated in the broader context of cultural pluralism as an emergent interdisciplinary field. The reasons for the crystallization of cultural pluralism as a distinctive field of inquiry are explored. The rise of ethnic studies was obviously triggered by the growing saliency of communal conflict in all regions of the world. The low visibility of such cleavages in the early postwar years may be attributed to conjunctural factors. Important long-term trends include the broadening and deepening of patterns of social communication and competition through urbanization, expanding literacy, mass media, and population movements; these processes are apt to produce heightened communal consciousness and politicization of ethnic cleavages. The great expansion in the scope of state actions raises the stakes in issues of division of the national product and domination of the state apparatus. A large consensus has emerged in the literature as to the situational, contextual, and circumstantial nature of ethnicity. Within the comparative ethnicity literature, an important division has appeared between “instrumentalists,” who stress the pursuit of collective advantage, and “primordialists,” who focus upon the assumed givens of shared culture and the psychological properties of ethnic consciousness.