Tunisia, of all the countries in the Arab world today, seems to offer the most promising prospects for constitutional democracy. A Tunisian nation already exists, both as a historic political entity and as a people mobilized by a coherent political movement during twenty years of opposition to French domination. President Habib Bourguiba, the creator of the Neo-Destour Party, is not only the Leader needed to incarnate a new nation and decide its direction; he is also the great Educator of the public. The ideas that he communicates in his frequent and readily understood speeches are the Western political concepts and methods that the Neo-Destour assimilated more profoundly during its long struggle than any other successful Arab liberation movement.

Machiavelli begins his Discourses by observing that “the curious nature of men, so prompt to blame and so slow to praise, makes the discovery and introduction of any new principles and systems as dangerous almost as the exploration of unknown seas and continents.” The Political Foundations of International Law runs this hazard, as it is both a splendid pioneering venture and vulnerable to all sorts of criticism. Although it most suggestively studies the theoretical interaction of law and politics, it provides scant doctrinal support. Although it brilliantly applies systems analysis and prudently uses decision-making theory, structural functional approaches, institutional studies, and a subtle form of historicism, it flirts outrageously with the relevance of game theory to the role of law in international affairs. Although it advances its views of international jurisdiction with unprecedented sophistication, it resorts to amateurish simplification when it discusses the United Nations Charter or the major European regional organizations. In sum, Political Foundations is at once profoundly provocative and frustratingly unrealized. However, its achievements are so much greater than its defects that it warrants high praise and mild rebuke.

In any area of scholarly inquiry, there are always several ways in which the phenomena under study may be sorted and arranged for purposes of systemic analysis. Whether in the physical or social sciences, the observer may choose to focus upon the parts or upon the whole, upon the components or upon the system. He may, for example, choose between the flowers or the garden, the rocks or the quarry, the trees or the forest, the houses or the neighborhood, the cars or the traffic jam, the delinquents or the gang, die legislators or the legislative, and so on. Whether he selects the micro- or macro-level of analysis is ostensibly a mere matter of methodological or conceptual convenience. Yet the choice often turns out to be quite difficult, and may well become a central issue within the discipline concerned. The complexity and significance of these level-of-analysis decisions are readily suggested by the long-standing controversies between social psychology and sociology, personality-oriented and culture-oriented anthropology, or micro- and macro-economics, to mention but a few. In the vernacular of general systems theory, the observer is always confronted with a system, its sub-systems, and their respective environments, and while he may choose as his system any cluster of phenomena from the most minute organism to the universe itself, such choice cannot be merely a function of whim or caprice, habit or familiarity. The responsible scholar must be prepared to evaluate the relative utility—conceptual and methodological—of the various alternatives open to him, and to appraise the manifold implications of the level of analysis finally selected. So it is with international relations.

A Wave of rising expectations has engulfed the underdeveloped areas of the world, and in its wake there remains an intense desire for economic advancement and national recognition. Until recent years the relatively luxurious level of living in the West, particularly in the United States, served as a natural focal point in the search for a pattern of economic life that would lead to growth in these areas. Since World War II, and particularly since about 1955, when the USSR adopted a stepped-up “trade and aid” program among the less-developed areas, increasing attention has been directed to the Soviet pattern of growth and the Soviet answer to “imperialism.”

Although the Asian and African peoples have often alleged that the Western nation-state produced untold injustices in the lessadvanced portions of the world, these same peoples are now eagerly using the same organization to order their political and social affairs. Indeed, it is not difficult to find national rivalries in Africa and Asia that exceed the historic rivalries of Europe. The new nations have taken on Western political patterns with a fervor, and sometimes a ruthless purposefulness, that have seldom been equaled. Very few advancing peoples are content with anything less than a nation, and very few new nations have been more successful than their Western counterparts in erecting supranational agencies for political or economic purposes. Professor Emerson has provided us with a remarkable account of the paradoxical simplicity and the unlimited complexity to be found in the spread of the nation-state among the Asian and African peoples.

It is a truism that all action within the international system can be reduced to the action of individuals. It is also true, however, that international relations cannot be adequately understood in terms of individual attitudes and behaviors. Models of the international system usually deal with larger units, nation-states, as prime actors. To what extent can such models give us adequate explanations of international relations without some built-in variables to deal with individual decision-making?

It may be that some processes in international relations can be adequately explained on the level of social structure without explicit consideration of the personality, predispositions, attitudes, and behavior of the individual decision-maker. In that case, the introduction of variables dealing with individual behavior would complicate the model without commensurate payoff in terms of increased understanding and prediction. This would be true if the impact of individual decision-making on the behavior of nations in their relations with other nations were slight, or if the impact varied randomly (because, for instance, of idiosyncratic factors) among the population of international events that one was trying to explain. If, on the other hand, models of the international system that either ignore or make grossly simplifying assumptions about individual decision-making can explain international relations only very imperfectly, it may well be worth the additional effort to build variables about individual decision-making into them.

Ever since the invention of the steam engine in the eighteenth century, men have reflected upon the profound transformations being wrought in their societies by what soon came to be called the Industrial Revolution. In their own fields, historians, economists, sociologists, military specialists, and Marxist philosophers have all traced the effects of industrialization, and some of them—particularly those interested in and aroused by war—have perceived the implications of these changes for international relations. Priority in this respect seems to belong to Auguste Comte, the founder of modern sociology, for devising the first analytical-historical model of the industrial society—one moreover that explicitly, though not always convincingly, pointed to the international repercussions of industrialism. In an essay first published in 1822, Comte drew a distinction betwelen two types (or models) of civilization: the Theological and Military, and the Scientific and Industrial (there also was a third, transitional—as he called it, “mongrel””type, the Metaphysical and Juridical). Comte's first model is notable for the predominance of military activities: “Society makes conquest its one permanent aim.” War makes it possible to found larger societies. In the transitional stage, he observed, “The two aims of activity, conquest and production, advance pari passu. Industry is at first favoured and protected as a military resource. Later its importance augments, and finally war is regarded and systematically pursued as a means of favouring industry.” But, in the last model, “industry has become predominant. All the special relations have gradually established themselves upon industrial bases. Society, taken collectively, tends to organize itself in the same manner,” renounces conquest and war, and makes production “its only and constant aim.”

It was a great shock to the American public to learn that during the Korean War some American prisoners had co-operated with their captors. It was obvious that they had acted under pressure, and it came as a surprise both that helpless prisoners had been subjected to such pressures and that Americans had yielded to them. It had long been taken for granted that prisoners of war would be treated according to the gentleman's code (except, possibly, for isolated outrages). It was overlooked that modern totalitarianism had never recognized the gentleman's code but had denounced it as a fraud, meant to facilitate the exploitation of the masses.

The Council of Economic Mutual Assistance (CEMA) was established by the USSR in 1949 to co-ordinate the economic activities of its newly acquired empire in Eastern Europe. CEMA's true role in intra-Bloc relations has undergone significant changes since the death of Stalin. These changes, and their implications for Soviet foreign and domestic policies, are the subject of speculation in this article.

Conventional theories of international relations assume, implicitly, the model of an “inter-state system.” According to this model, individually states possess a set of characteristics which differ fundamentally from the characteristics of a system of those states interacting with each other. On this basis we can construct theories about the behavior of component states in the system, and more general propositions about the nature of the inter-state system viewed as a whole. Some of the difficulties of this model will be noted here, and an alternative model proposed.

Before pointing to these difficulties, however, we need a clear image of the inter-state model. A classic formulation is contained in a speech given by former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles at a meeting of the American Society for International Law. In it Mr. Dulles identified six characteristics of the nation-state: (1) laws which “reflect the moral judgment of the community”; (2) political machinery to revise these laws as needed; (3) an executive body able to administer the laws; (4) judicial machinery to settle disputes in accord with the laws; (5) superior force to deter violence by enforcing the law upon those who defy it; and (6) sufficient well-being so that people are not driven by desperation to ways of violence. The international system, Mr. Dulles pointed out, in large part lacks these characteristics. He went on to assess the limited success of attempts, ranging from the League of Nations and Kellogg-Briand Pact through the United Nations, to create such a “state system” or “order” at the international level. Mr. Dulles sadly reported that, despite notable progress in the development of international law and judicial machinery, the desired international order does not, as yet, exist.

It is now more than a hundred years since the first shot was fired at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, precipitating four years of terrible conflict. Since then, the question of who was responsible for the opening salvo of the Civil War has continued to occupy the attention of publicists, polemicists, politicians, and scholars.

Perhaps the central dilemma in national security policy is how to A reconcile the obvious potency of nuclear weapons for purposes of deterrence with their dubious utility as instruments of defense—i.e., for fighting a war at tolerable cost in case deterrence should fail. In prenuclear days, deterrence was more or less a function of an efficient capacity for defense, but with the new technology deterrence may be accomplished with capabilities and threats that do not correspond to the capabilities and strategies most suitable for rational military action. This dichotomy forms the leading theme of Deterrent or Defense, by Captain B. H. Liddell Hart, one of Britain's leading military analysts. The book is a collection of articles written mostly during the past three or four years, and concerned chiefly with military problems of NATO. As in many books of this sort, the articles overlap to some extent and are not always consistent. Leaving aside the inconsistencies for the moment, Liddell Hart's basic position can be stated briefly. Strategic nuclear airpower is useful for deterring an all-out nuclear attack on the United States or a full-scale conventional assault on Western Europe. But it has no value whatever for purposes of defense, because the inevitable result of the actual use of such weapons is simply “mutual suicide.” Even though it would be “lunacy” for the United States to initiate thermonuclear war in response to a Soviet attack in Europe, the Russians' fear of such a response probably is still strong enough to deter them from all but limited actions. Hence, the major problem facing NATO is to develop an effective non-suicidal defense against limited aggression. The book's greatest merit lies in its contribution to the solution of this problem.

Accounts of the acute crises of international politics occupy a substantial place in the diplomatic history of the past hundred years. These compounded events have been interpreted as manifestations of international rivalries among the Great Powers. Intermittently, they have drawn intense public attention and have generated heavy anxieties over the possibility that they may lead into general warfare. After the fact, they have become subjects of historical reconstruction, with students and commentators attempting to describe “what really happened.” Thus, both scholarly and popular interest has persisted in the “inside stories” of the several crises belonging to three historical periods: from 1870 to World War I, the interwar period, and the era since World War II.

There is, consequently, a large descriptive literature of the crises, mainly connected with the diplomacy of opposing coalitions and of interstate conflicts during these three periods. The depth and quality of this literature vary greatly, most often according to the recency of the events and the amount of available and relevant historical documentation. The Moroccan crisis of 1905 and the circumstances of the Anschluss of 1936 are, quite naturally, better known and more firmly established factually than the inner details of the Suez crisis of 1956. However, the accumulated knowledge of the series of crises of the post-World War II period, uncertain and impressionistic as it still is, has a great deal to do with our understanding of current international affairs. Take away the facts and meanings commonly associated with the crises of Berlin, Korea, Indochina, Suez, Quemoy, the Congo, and Laos and, obviously, the usual estimates of the scope, intensity, and workings of the Cold War will greatly change. Despite this fact, acute crises have not often been made the focus either of theorizing or of intensive analytic research. Students of international relations have not found it important or necessary to consider these events as if they constituted a significant class of phenomena in the international field. The reasons for passing over the acute international crisis as a focus of explanation are worth consideration.