Although the first recorded permanent diplomatic mission was established by the Duke of Milan at Genoa over five hundred years ago, knowledge of the structure and functioning of the global diplomatic enterprise is still extremely limited. The often-cited work of Nicolson provides a historical overview of diplomacy, describes some of the norms of recent practice, and enumerates traits of “the ideal diplomatist.” Morgenthau has analyzed the importance of diplomatic style to international peace, and others have offered valuable descriptions of the diplomatic practice of single nations. Yet there exist no systematic studies of the diplomatic behavior of nations, nor even comparative statistics on bilateral and multilateral forms of international representation.

These notes are part of a study on the problem of political integration. My hypothesis is that the political system driving for integration maximizes its chances for achieving a high degree of integration and remaining stable, in spite of the short-run destabilizing effects of the drive for integration, if it is authoritarian, consensual, “identific,” and paternal. If any of these four characteristics is absent, and to the extent that functionally compensating factors are also absent, the destabilizing effects of the drive for integration are increased.

China has been such a big unit during most of the last two thousand years that it has habitually been thought of in terms of models, whether Legalist, Confucian, Neo-Confucian, or Communist. To put it another way, the remarkable early success of Chinese administrators in setting up and maintaining a centralized bureaucracy was part and parcel of their inveterate penchant for blueprinting the social order. Today "China" is one of the largest concrete referents commonly used in discussions of world politics. Generalizing about China is a particularly daring venture, but it is a game we continue to play because the Chinese have always played it. Before appraising the most interesting recent treatment of China in this customary fashion—Franz Schur-mann's book Ideology and Organization in Communist China—I should like to look briefly at the fashion itself.

At Least one element of consistency has continued to characterize the course of political events in Indonesia—its capacity to confound the expectations and defy the predictions of most Western observers and scholars. The fate of the Communist movement provides the most recent example. Donald Hindley concluded, in his 1964 study of the policies and development of the Indonesian Communist party since national independence, that a “Communist rebellion is out of the question in the foreseeable future” (p. 301). Guy Pauker's analyses in 1964 and early 1965 of political developments stressed the probability that Indonesia would imminently become a Communist state, either by acclamation or in default of opposing forces.

SEALE and Kerr, the authors of the two books under review, have covered between them a series of events from 1945 until 1964, but they have done so from quite different points of view. Seale's book, entitled The Struggle for Syria, covers the period from 1945 until 1958, while Kerr's, The Arab Cold War, covers the period from 1958 until 1964. The struggle for Syria that Seale describes is supposed to be a struggle between Egypt and Iraq, but the cold war that Kerr describes is a war of ideology, and perhaps one of wills, between Egypt's President Nasser and the leaders of the Syrian Ba'th party. Although both authors include a reference to dates in the titles of their books, the chronological element is not equally important in both. Seale's work is a review of the high points of Syrian politics through the period indicated, whereas Kerr is primarily concerned with a summary and analysis of the unity talks that took place between Nasser and the Ba'th leaders in 1963.

What tempts an army to move into politics and ultimately to pass beyond the threshold of legality into the realm of civil disobedience and insurrection? In Latin America and the underdeveloped world, where such occurrences have been common, the phenomenon of military “praetorianism” poses relatively few analytical problems for the historian or social scientist. But the forces in modern democratic societies which lead an army into rebellion are far more complex, just as, fortunately, they arise with far less frequency. In contemporary France the problem of military insurrection is especially complicated, all the more so since the French army, until the era of the Second World War, had always regarded itself as “la grande muette,” suffering but obedient, and the French officer corps had prided itself on its apoliti-cism and devotion to strict professional duty.

In a great many wars—perhaps in most wars since the Middle Ages—one or both of the belligerents could have done significantly more to fight his enemy but chose not to do so. Whether we want to call all these wars “limited,” or only those in which both sides hobbled their military effort, is perhaps a minor matter of terminology.

We may argue about the wisdom of announcing ‘unconditional surrender’ as an aim in the last major war,” observes Schelling in his recent book, Arms and Influence—as one might expect, a brilliant and important study—“but seem to expect ‘unconditional destruction’ as a matter of course in another one” (p. 23). Secretary McNamara does in fact require “adequacy of our forces from the standpoint of convincing others that the initiation of general nuclear war would inevitably bring about” not their facing the choice between capitulation and devastation, but exclusively “their own destruction.” Suppose the enemy underestimates our force and its defenses or exaggerates the obstacles he can put in our path—suppose, that is, we have failed to be “clear and convincing” about our capabilities. Assume that the enemy then attempts to disarm us, disarming himself in the act.