During the excitement of expansion, members of the European Economic Community may be forgiven if their comments on Community policy are often more rhetorical than rational. In sober moments European leaders display an awareness of the dilemmas they face in achieving that ambiguous state of grace known as unity. What is less fully recognized is the dilemma the Community presents to outsiders, particularly those who are and wish to remain its friends.

How are we to deal with, how are we to accommodate, how are we to make provisions for this creation which, because it is in the process of shaping itself, does not know what it is going to be? Do we accept it for what it seems to be at this moment, a loose association of sovereign powers which already can exercise some authority in internal matters but is not acting in external matters like the unit it seems to want to be? Or do we make our calculations on the basis of the rhetoric?

EEC spokesmen at times stress the freedom of its sovereign parts.

The colonels’ coup in Greece on April 21, 1967, caught everyone by ṡurprise - the Right, the Center and the Left. Mikis Theodorakis, Greece's most gifted popular composer and maverick political “revolutionary,” was tipped off by a right-wing journalist who telephoned him in the early morning hours of the coup. He went immediately into hiding and started organizing the Patriotic Front, a left-wing resistance movement based on the Lambrakis Youth Movement, of which he was the founder and president.

Journalists, historians, sociologists and religious leaders are all agreed that the American churches are badly split. The division is partly theological, but it recognizes no traditional bounds of denomination, afflicting Roman Catholics as much as the various Protestants. The thesis of Dean Kelley's Why Conservative Churches Are Crowing, (New York, 1972) is suggested by the title he himself had chosen for the book: “Why Strict Churches Are Strong.” Churches that are ecumenical in spirit and open to the wider world do not prosper like those that are highly authoritarian and exclusivistic. Strict authoritarianism responds to the desire for secure foundations in a badly shaken culture.

small Alpine village in the shadow of mountains that have watched impassively the coming of industrial society. A remarkable study in contrasts. A massive peasant house built in the sixteenth century across the street from a completely automated milk-processing center. Smooth machines now handle a host of functions that were once the work of the peasant family across the way. A swaying cable car carries foreign tourists up over common land that the village is no longer populous enough to cultivate. A young girl can be seen haying on the side of an Alpine meadow worked by her ancestors, but she is wearing a miniskirt and rib sweater, and she is soon on her way to a big-city salesgirl apprenticeship.

After twenty-five years of a nuclear-military arms race, it is possible to define significant limits of military power for national security. These limits apply with special force to the nuclear superpowers. These same limits of military power also define new requirements for a disarmament process.

Underlying the long discussion of disarmament among nations has been the understanding that lowered levels of armaments produce mutual advantage: the prospect of physical destruction is reduced; and the cost of armaments can be applied to constructive uses. The arms race from 1946 to 1971 between the United States and the Soviet Union has not improved the military security of either nation, and the economic cost to these two countries has exceeded $1,500 billion.

Those who do Christian ethics are obliged in the seventies to renew their search for an understanding of the conditions that would justify revolutionary resorts to violence (jus ad belum), of the moral limits upon the conduct of insurgency war and, yes, of the permissible limits of counterinsurgency (jus in bello).But, you may object, that is to ignore a chief cause of American involvement in the Vietnam war: President Kennedy was tempted to begin the escalation of U.S. involvement because he had an available “weapons system“ (the Green Berets) and because he trusted a doctrine of counterinsurgency. What's more, you further object, regardless of what we may think about the morality of insurgency or counterinsurgency as such, a chief lesson to be drawn from Vietnam is that, when an industrial power like the United States gets involved in counterinsurgency in a traditional and preindustrial society, disproportionate violence is bound to be done.

Russians are now one of the national minorities of the USSR. In 1969 or 1970 the non-Russian birthrate, together with a fillip of immigration of Muslims across the Sinkiang border, finally tipped the balance, and the Great Russians became, not the majority nationality, but the plurality nationality with less than 50 per cent of the population. In statistical terms, at least, the problem of nationalities within the USSR, far from being solved, has become more acute. To, be sure, the Russians are still the leaders in the population statistics and, of greater importance, they seem to maintain absolute command of the economy, all the while their culture is growing more and more dominant.

Yugoslavia's history has been shaped by paradox. Twenty million people share a land area of approximately 96,000 square miles, which includes the mountainous south, with a largely nomadic population, and the flat river plains of the north, the agricultural heartland. Through its long history the people have been divided by unending confrontations between Eastern and Western Europe, between the Byzantine Empire and the Empire of the Francs, between the Moslem and the Christian worlds. Yugoslavia has been everyone's battleground. The imperial ambitions of Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany and Italy have all ravaged Yugoslavia.

All this has created a people possessing many important differences and many equally important similarities.

Growing tensions in the Persian Gulf area threaten to plunge this oil-rich region into violent conflict. The conflict could well become a full-fledged Middle East war involving the U.S. and the USSR as these superpowers go in turn to the aid of their clients. The recent clashes between Iraqi and Kuwaiti troops, Iran's decision to buy $2 billion worth of U.S. arms and political disputes in Pakistan between Baluchi tribesmen and the government are all signs of the tensions.

Who are the antagonists? On the one side, the radical Army-Ba'ath regime in Iraq, with its predominantly Arab population of over nine million, makes no bones of its conviction that the Iranian monarchy is doomed, that the Persian Gulf area (which it terms the Arab Gulf) should be dominated by Arabs, and that Iraq is the natural leader of the Arabs of the Gulf area.