When he set out to form a secret intelligence agency for President Roosevelt in 1941, “Wild Bill” Donovan made little effort to curb his own characteristic receptivity to the new, the different, and even the unorthodox. Completely in character, he took up with quick enthusiasm the novel idea that scholars—those dreamy inhabitants of ivory towers—would be ideal for the job. He believed that by searching through the Library of Congress and through the files of the many government agencies these men could uncover much of the information for which secret agents risked their lives. In a sense, he dedicated the Research and Analysis Branch of the wartime Office of Strategic Services to the task of making the romantic secret agent obsolete. Since then, more and more people have come to believe that research—and the social sciences—have at last found a home within the formal structure of government.

The advent of a new administration in the United States and the passage of seven years since the end of World War II make it appropriate to review the political situation which has developed in Europe during that period and to ask what choices now are open to the West in its relations with the Soviet Union.

The end of World War II found Europe torn between conflicting conceptions of international politics and of the goals that its members should seek. The democratic powers, led by the United States, viewed the world in traditional, Western, terms. The major problem, as they saw it, was one of working out a moral and legal order to which all powers could subscribe, and in which they would live. Quite independently of the environment, they assumed that one political order was both more practicable and more desirable than some other, and that their policies should be directed toward its attainment.

Military demonstrations could conveniently be classified according to objective under two major headings: (a) those intended primarily to convey purpose or intention, and (b) those intended primarily to convey capability. The latter type is generally free of the political risks which often attend the former. Both types, but especially the former, may be effected without necessarily disclosing new advances in the use, design, or performance of weapons. In the latter type, however, there may be a strong temptation—or a strong justification even in the absence of temptation—to parade a new or improved weapon or weapons system which reflects both technological achievement and enhanced capability.

Within the last year or so there have been signs of another attempt to halt the drift toward anarchic restrictionism in international trade. Its origins may be discerned in the conference of British Commonwealth Finance Ministers summoned to London in January 1952 to consider the third of the sterling area's postwar crises. This conference, after branding as “palliatives” the measures taken to remedy recurring balance of payments deficits, concluded that a lasting solution of the sterling area's problems was possible only“when the world-wide trade of the sterling area is on a substantially higher level than at present, when sterling is freely convertible into all the main currencies of the world, and its position need no longer be supported by import restrictions.” A year later, another Commonwealth conference reaffirmed these objections in more striking language: “The Commonwealth countries look outward to…co-operation with other countries, not inward to a closed association. It is their common purpose, by their own efforts and together with others, to increase world trade for the benefit of all peoples.” The first formal step toward widening the basis of this initiative took place in March of this year, when Mr. Anthony Eden and Mr. R. A. Butler, acting in this matter for the British Commonwealth as a whole, discussed the economic prospect with Mr. John Foster Dulles, and found “reason to hope for continued progress towards a better-balanced, growing world trade and the restoration of a multilateral system of trade and payments.” From Washington, Mr. Eden and Mr. Butler went to Paris in fulfillment of a promise to “keep in step with the Organization for European Economic Co-operation.”

The purpose of this article is to outline a fresh approach to America's economic relations with the non-Communist world. These proposals envisage a direct attack by the United States and its allies on the structural distortions which have persisted since 1945 in the non-Communist world economy. The chronic dollar shortage of our major allies is taken to be, essentially, a symptom of these more basic structural distortions. The proposals would end, after a transition period, the system of annual Congressional grants to our allies and would substitute for it the combined operation of investment and financial pools. These pools might be built up from the present International Bank and the International Monetary Fund, although they would require operations different in scale and purpose from those now conducted by these institutions. The proposals would apply a common approach to the problems of both the industrialized portions of the non-Communist world and the underdeveloped regions, and would thus combine or coordinate U.S. economic efforts in Europe, Japan, and in underdeveloped areas. It is believed, also, that they would mitigate some of the more serious political friction between the United States and other non-Communist countries and strengthen the non-Communist world as against the Soviet bloc.

American foreign policy has recently become a favorite target-area for attacks upon an alleged moralizing and legalistic habit which ignores or condemns national interest. The criticism runs the whole gamut of our relations with the world outside, focusing with final virulence upon our effort to find peace in the United Nations. It covers most of the nation's history, tracing the decline from “realism” to moralistic fantasy back to the moment when the genius of the Federalists began to be corrupted by Jeffersonian sentimentalism. The vast complex of today's foreign relations furnishes innumerable points of assault. A folly of self-righteousness has led us—so the indictment reads—into tragic error in China, in Korea, in the Near and Middle East, even (though here some of the accusers desert) in Europe. We give quixotically where we should sell; but our purse-strings are tied with moral scruples where we should be lavish. Shrinking from the open use of power, we enter into wasteful and entangling alliances where we should keep a free hand. Crusading in the name of democracy and disregarding the limits of our resources, we undertake to assist peoples anywhere to establish free governments in the face of intervention from Moscow. We take up arms for the utopian aims of an international organization set up in postwar zeal for a new era and maintained at our expense. A course in this literature of calamity leaves us wondering how the nation has survived. It sounds like the dirge for a fallen empire.

At many places and times, tribes have merged to form peoples; and peoples have grown into nations. Some nations founded empires; and empires have broken up again into fragments whose populations later attempted again to form larger units. In certain respects, this sequence appears to describe a general process found in much of history. This process shows a number of patterns which seem to recur, and which to a limited extent seem to be comparable among different regions, periods, and cultures.

“The Soviet Union is now engaged in an audacious attempt JL to upset the established balance of power prevailing in Europe.” This statement was used by C. L. Sulzberger, writing in the New York Times for March 23, 1952, to open a discussion of the Soviet offer to establish a unified and neutral Germany. It symbolizes the startling renaissance of the balance of power concept in recent years not only in the pages of learned journals, but in the daily press and in radio as well. This rebirth is probably attributable to the effort to reconsider the notions concerning international relations generally held during the League of Nations period, notions which emphasized open diplomacy, collective security, and the use of arbitration instead of unilateral force. The apparent futility of these methods seemed to call for the reintroduction of more meaningful concepts into the analysis of international affairs, and the balance of power thus reappeared as part of the general trend to re-establish the primacy of power as the key to the understanding of interstate relations. There would be no difficulty in this development if the term “balance of power” were free from philological, semantic, and theoretical confusion. Unfortunately, it is not. The term is defined differently by different writers; it is used in varying senses, even if not defined exactly at all; and, finally, it is the focal concept in several quite distinct theories of international relations. The purpose of this article is the clarification, not only of the verbal differences in meaning, but also of the applied meanings of the “balance of power” phrase as they vary in accordance with the intentions of the users. The necessity for such an attempt may be demonstrated by an introductory discussion of the variety of thought on this topic, in terms of substantive meanings no less than in terms of systems of classification.

The events leading to the rise of Stalin to sole prominence in the Soviet Union and the general political picture of the totalitarian Stalinist regime are now familiar, but specific forms of the evolution of “Stalinism” are often not adequately understood. Evolving Soviet historiography is an unusually informative mirror of these developments, since it not only attempts to describe them, but implicitly embodies them as well. The present article is an analysis of one theme from early Soviet history, treatment of which in Soviet historiography exemplifies both the trend of Soviet historiography as a whole, and the trend of Stalinism as an emergent totalitarian ideology based on Bolshevism.

The relations between art and politics have rarely been discussed either in contemporary aesthetics or in political science. Since Hegel's Philosophy of Fine Arts, the analysis of art styles as the sensuous objectifications of cultural attitudes has been worked out in detail. But the same method has not been applied to the sensuous objectifications of political action. The removal of art from social life to the museum has also removed it from among the integral concerns of political science. Accepting the popular dichotomy between art and politics, modern political science has long lost its senseof art as techne, as a practical instrument of communication and coercion. An older political science did indeed consider “art” an instrument of coercion, curbing what Freud liked to call “the rebelliousness and destructive passions” of the masses and binding them to their rulers. Indeed, perhaps Freud alone among modern masters of social science comprehended art as one of the weapons of coercion in the arsenal of culture. “Works of art,” Freud writes, “promote the feelings of identification” and identification is, in the Freudian theory, the modality of authority.

The postwar drive to liberalize trade, increase competition, and thereby improve productivity within Western Europe has met with determined opposition, as have similar attempts at reducing trade barriers in the United States. This resistance has come from a variety of groups which fear that their interests will be jeopardized as a result of keener competition, and its magnitude can hardly be overestimated. Indeed, it probably constitutes the major single barrier to European economic unification. Certainly, it can no longer be passed off with lectures on the virtues of competition, mobility of the factors of production, and international division of labor.

When the United States stumbled into possession of the Philippine Islands in 1898, Americans had not operated a military government since Reconstruction, and the task of ruling a populous alien colony was an unprecedented one for them. Because of the insurrection waged by Filipino guerrillas after February 1899, martial law could give way to civil control but gradually. The long transition provoked a civil-military conflict which, because the chief antagonists were famous fathers of now famous sons, has recently acquired a new interest. But the rivals of 1900–1901 should be judged for their own deeds. How and why did Major General Arthur MacArthur and Commissioner William Howard Taft fall out?

The comparative ease with which authoritarian groups have come to power in nations where large parties stood pledged to defend the democratic order to the bitter end has become one of the most disturbing elements in modern world politics. Such developments have brought into question the validity of accepted liberal-democratic norms governing the behavior of responsible leaders, both in the domestic opposition to the authoritarian regime and in foreign governments whose security arrangements are adversely affected by the suppression of free institutions. Basically, these traditional norms have implied non-interference with constitutional political processes and acceptance of their consequences. On June 23, 1933, Hitler outlawed the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), which for over four decades, until 1932, had been the largest German party and, since the founding of the Weimar Republic iri 1918, the principal advocate and defender of the democratic system and a peaceful foreign policy. In considering the actions of its leadership from the accession of Hitler to the outlawing of the party, this article seeks to contribute to a re-examination of these accepted norms, particularly insofar as they concern the behavior of a liberal-democratic mass party faced with a government seeking total power.

The first general strike in the history of England, with its mass labor action, was bound to attract strong interest from the workers' state which proclaimed as its rallying cry: “Workers of All Countries, Unite!” Soviet concern for the British working class followed logically from the active participation of Marx and Engels in the movement, and the continued attention shown by Lenin to this important “section” of the “world proletariat.”

Colonialism has been a sore spot in the handling of American foreign policy in the post-World War II period largely because of ambivalent forces, domestic and foreign, which have been tugging at the United States. At the heart of the colonial problem which has faced this country is the central issue of eventual political status for colonial territories. On this question United States policy has traditionally been and continues to be one of condemnation of colonialism and in favor of independence for colonial peoples, with certain reservations added in small print—the grant of independence should not be too hurried and it should be given only to peoples who desire it and are capable of assuming the responsibilities involved.

Over a period of many months, both before and since the abdication of King Farouk, responsible heads of government in Egypt have been voicing a claim to the entire Nile Basin, although practical measures to convert the claim into control have been pointed chiefly toward that part of the Basin included in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.

It is the fashion nowadays, especially in the United States, to assume that river basins are coherent, nature-given units of the earth's surface, without questioning their fitness for unified political administration or sovereignty. According to that fashion, even the extreme Egyptian claim seems cogent. The Nile Basin is a drainage unit and clearly appears so on the map (Fig. 1)

The history of international relations has lent itself to many uses. Its narrators have employed the tangled web of intention, maneuver, alliance, and war to vindicate or besmirch men's reputations, prove the guilt or innocence of nations in conflict, enrich traditions, furnish precepts for the present, and provide guides to the future. Their activity has gone on for a very long time and the product of their research has grown enormous. Presumably such a vast and varied output reflects a number of needs and interests. But is its perusal a useful way of gaining insight into the varied problems of international politics? More, as diplomatic history customarily is written, does it constitute an effective training ground for statesmen?

There are fads in scholarship as well as in fashion. Just JL now, the current fad, with respect to American diplomatic history, is to belabor what is called “Wilsonianism” with all the sarcasm and dignified invective at the writer's disposal. It is almost de rigueur to expatiate upon the prescient wisdom of the Founding Fathers, to pass over most of the period between John Quincy Adams and William McKinley as relatively unimportant, and to concentrate the heaviest guns of criticism upon the “Utopianism” of the first half of the twentieth century. Only now, and belatedly, we are told, is the United States beginning to come down from the clouds of illusion and to survey realistically the true nature of the world with which its diplomatists and policymakers must cope. Only now are we beginning once again to measure possible policy decisions by the yardsticks of power and “the national interest.”

This book is a highly professional effort to move toward a unification of concept in the fields of cultural anthropology, sociology, and psychology. The reviewer is an economic historian who, at the limit of generosity, can be described as an interested observer of these fields.

The reviewing procedure raises some difficulties. Although the obscurity of the contributions to the volume varies, it is only with sustained effort that the amateur can come to believe that he has conquered the barrier of private vocabulary which the behavioral scientists have erected, no doubt for good and sufficient reasons. But one trained in modern economics least of all has a right to complain.

Five years ago the Comintern loomed once again as a spectre on the European horizon with the founding in Poland, September 1947, of the Information Bureau of the Communist Parties of the USSR, Bulgaria, Hungary, Rumania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia (expelled June 1948), France, and Italy. It has since become both fashionable and convenient to identify the “Cominform” with all aspects of international Communist activity, ranging from the most general of policy directives to an isolated Communist-led strike. The indiscriminate identification of “Cominform” with international Communist activity provides the layman with a convenient stereotype which spares him the trouble of further inquiry. For the student of Communism, however, this lack of precision merely results in obscuring the actual role of the Cominform, as it is known to us, and more particularly, its function within the configuration of various covert and overt instrumentalities of the international Communist movement. To speak, for example, of a “Cominform” policy of collectivization or of a “Cominform” purge trial in the Balkans, or to suggest by “Cominform” the whole web of controls of national Communist parties maintained by the USSR is to ascribe a role and importance to the Cominform that it simply does not have. For without minimizing the importance of the function the Cominform has come to discharge, it may be said that its role is essentially that of a central, but by no means the most important, propaganda instrument of the international Communist movement, designed primarily to provide public guidance and information to the leadership of various national Communist parties. Thus Pravda and the USSR radio broadcasts furnish daily guidance to the international Communist movement, and the World Federation of Trade Unions is continuously engaged in attempting to bring trade union activity in line with Communist policy.