The outsider who presumes to instruct specialists in the needs of a field which is theirs and not his is very like the bachelor who dares to lecture parents on the requirements of child-rearing: having learned everything secondhand, he is in frightful danger of talking nonsense and, what is worse, of thinking it sagacity.

Two things encourage me to undertake the risk: (1) The difficulties which beset the study of international politics do not seem to me peculiar to that field alone, but are encountered firsthand and in substantially the same form in other fields of which I have direct knowledge. (2) It is apparent from even a casual exposure to the field that its own practitioners are currently in a stock-taking mood in which they seem eager to scrutinize their own product and to have its value assessed. This mood of disquiet has also begun to express itself in proposals for new general approaches to the field, new areas of inquiry, new schemes for collating and analyzing data, explorations into questions once thought remote from the concerns of international politics, and other such developments signifying vitality and a lively spirit of inquiry. The two works which provide the occasion for this essay are items in point, but many others could be cited.

The totalitarian model remained the best analytic concept for studying Soviet politics because it offered clear empirical referents, provided a yardstick for measuring change, and could be adapted to explain the nature of change. Alternative models emphasizing pluralism encouraged the impression that “political development” was occurring rather than the ”political decay” that led to the Soviet Union's collapse. The study of the successor states must now be brought within a more general approach to comparative political analysis. Yet the totalitarian model retains utility for understanding the legacies those states still confront.

This paper tests the objective (professionalization) and subjective (party penetration) models of Soviet civil-military relations. The objective model is found to provide the best fit and is used to investigate further the factors leading to military participation in, and withdrawal from, the coup of August 1991. The objective model points to the importance of threats to professional autonomy and national unity, the politicization of the military, and declining regime legitimacy as the primary causal factors in the participation of the military in the coup. It also stresses the importance of military professionalism as a barrier to intervention and as a cause of military paralysis during the coup. Furthermore, the model points to the importance of democratic legitimacy in future civilian control and to the need for increased military professionalism to forestall threats to the post-Soviet regime.

Ever since Woodrow Wilson, in the course of his attempts to lay a new and secure basis for peace after the First World War, proclaimed the necessity for “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at,” the methods of diplomacy have been regarded as having had their part in bringing about the outbreak of the First World War, and the demand for a “new diplomacy” has been raised. Although this concept has come into frequent use only in our century, it was soon realized that its history could be raced back into the nineteenth century, but its exact provenance has never been fully established. This article will show that the term can be found even earlier than is generally assumed, namely as early as 1793. As in all such disputes about the origin of a term, it would be ridiculous to maintain that this was definitely the first time this concept made its appearance, but it seems justified to propose that the concept definitely belongs to the second part of the eighteenth century.

While much is known about the impact of bombing on an economy's material ability to produce—in terms of the physical survival of resources—comparatively little thought has been devoted to the broader social consequences of truly major bombing. The social and political consequences, however, may well dominate the material or more narrowly economic ones; resources potentially of value may either remain unutilized or may be improperly or anti-socially employed, as a result of the impairment or collapse of our accepted processes of social decision. Our purpose here is to attempt to explore the social consequences of a major bombing disaster by an examination of the effects of bombing upon the organization of society, upon the distribution of political and economic power, and upon institutions relevant to the effective functioning of society. Needless to say, we can only make preliminary or tentative conjectures (or, rather, speculations), in view of the complexity of the subject and the limited degree of historical knowledge of the functioning of human societies under conditions of extreme stress. Nevertheless, it seems desirable to explore these questions—since the answers may have important implications for prewar planning designed to promote the ability of our society to cope with such disasters.

Democratization in Latin America took place throughout the 1980s within a context of acute economic crisis, thus posing a sharp challenge to established theory. This essay examines alternative explanations-economic, political, institutional, international-for this paradoxical outcome. It is argued that the political impact of the debt crisis differs for the short, medium, and long terms. The analysis also devotes considerable attention to the concept of “democratization” and to the quality of Latin American democracies, which tend to contain pervasive authoritarian features. Careful reading of these phenomena can lay the foundation for new and enduring theoretical frameworks about the relationship between macroeco-nomic transformation and political change.

The concept of “social contract” is useful in understanding the process of reform currently under way in the Soviet Union. The social contract “concluded” by Khrushchev and Brezhnev provided the population with economic guarantees but deprived it of any political power. Their contract was geared primarily toward less educated, blue-collar workers. During the past seventy years Soviet society has become industrialized, urbanized, and educated. Gorbachev has understood that the well-being of the Soviet economy will in the future rest on the labor and know-how of skilled and educated professionals. He must therefore conclude a new contract that will be advantageous to this sector of society in order to ensure its participation in his efforts to reform the economy.

The problem of whether the rational, self-interested individual will voluntarily subscribe to a large group providing collective benefits is examined, using the perspectives of Hardin's application of game theory and Olson's application of economic theory. The arguments in each case are held to be unsatisfactory, and the same analysis cannot automatically be applied to all problems involving collective action. The subscription to large groups normally represents a distinct sub-class of problems, the solution to which, contrary to the established wisdom, is that the rational, self-interested individual with a net benefit (together, perhaps, with the irrational one with a net loss) will voluntarily subscribe to a group providing a collective good.

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.

This essay starts from two premises: that, as far as the articulation and mobilization of popular interest in the countryside are concerned, the “best teams won” in the Chinese and the Vietnamese revolutions; but that, after the success of the revolution, the popularity and responsiveness of the regimes to the people became more problematic. Together, these premises imply a shift in the relationship of party to people between the revolutionary and postrevolutionary stages. That such a shift occurred in China and Vietnam is not obvious; there were significant continuities of personnel, policies, and ideology across the revolutionary divide. I shall argue that, despite the continuities, the rational basis of party-mass relations was deeply affected by victory. Indeed, the very continuities helped mask a structural flaw in the new regimes that has induced current political and economic reforms.

This article investigates the structures of civic networks and their roles in steering the political choices of party and union elites regarding the retrenchment or expansion of welfare states in four recently democratized developing countries. Utilizing coaffiliation networks built upon two waves of World Values Surveys and evidence from comparative case studies for Argentina, Brazil, South Korea, and Taiwan, the study develops two explanatory factors that account for variations in welfare politics: cohesiveness and embeddedness. In Argentina and, to a lesser degree, in Taiwan, party and union leaders' cohesive relationships, being disarticulated from the informal civic sphere, allowed them to conduct elite-driven social policy reforms from above, by launching radical neoliberal reforms (Argentina) or by developing a generous transfer-centered welfare state (Taiwan). In Brazil and South Korea, however, party and union leaders' durable solidarity embedded in wider civic communities enabled them to resist the retrenchment of welfare states (Brazil) or implement universal social policies (South Korea) based on bottom-up mobilization of welfare demands. This article demonstrates that elites in the formal sector make markedly different political choices when confronting economic crisis and democratic competition depending upon their organizational connections in formal and informal civic networks.

“Whereas in post-war Britain youth has often channelled its energies into violent self-expression, destructive or creative, in France the dominant impression left by all the varying tendencies is of a kind of docile listiessness.” A competent British commentator on French politics and society had the misfortune of appearing in print with this assertion about French youth in June of 1968—that is, at precisely the time when many members of France's younger generation were participating in that violent form of self-expression that has come to be called “the Events.”

This article evaluates one means—political gaming—for coping with the distorted processes and perceptions that are present in foreign policy making during crises. Political games are exercises in which teams representing national governments meet and discuss crisis situations presented in scenarios. American foreign policy makers have engaged in this activity since the late logo's at the RAND Corporation, M.I.T., the Pentagon, and the C.I.A. Several hypotheses are developed on the changes in decisionmaking processes generated through political gaming, and on the nature of international perceptions during crises, as reflected through political gaming. These hypotheses are evaluated by means of data from the only unclassified professional-level games on international crises (those at RAND and M.I.T.), from a series of student games conducted at Yale, and from insights gained by the author's direction of two C.I.A. games. The results show that political gaming is indeed effective in improving decision making during crises, and they introduce some new aspects into accepted wisdom about international perceptions during crises.

We have entered a new phase in the apparently endless debate method. Argument once centered on the possibility of quantifying important political variables, and of establishing empirically based generalizations about international behavior. With accumulating evidence that measurement and generalization are possible, the grounds have shifted. Sometimes only specific applications are attacked. Though it is curious how few of the extant applications of scientific method come up to the high standards of some of their critics, the critics’ targets cannot complain too much. After all, the methods and applications are new, most studies do suffer from significant flaws of one sort or another, and constructive criticism is essential to their improvement.

Attempts at economic reform in the late Gorbachev years suffered from a critical lack of consensus among top leaders on the desired direction of change. As the crisis worsened, top leaders did not band together but instead fell back upon their underlying organizational interests, adopting new economic programs largely to promote their own political constituencies. This article critiques the “collective learning” literature that has been applied widely to explain the Gorbachev reforms, and it suggests a typology to account for its strengths and weaknesses in both foreign and domestic policy settings.

In examining the politics of the late Soviet economic crisis, it proposes a model of divergent (rather than collective) learning and suggests the new concept of “borrowing” to explain the instrumental use of foreign economic models by rival Soviet politicians.

This article examines how the institutional design of borders affects international trade. The authors explore variation in the effects of borders by comparing new international borders that follow precedent and thus have a prior institutional history with new international borders that lack such an institutional history. The former minimally disrupt—or restore—previous economic networks, while the latter fundamentally disrupt existing economic networks. A variety of empirical tests show that, consistent with this institutional perspective on borders, new international boundaries that follow precedent are associated with significantly faster recovery and greater increase in subsequent trade flows. By contrast, when new international borders are truly new, they disrupt local economic networks, introduce new transaction costs, and impose higher adjustment costs on states, which the authors show to have long-term deleterious effects on trade.

The study of elites, or “who's who, when, and how,” as Professor Rustow has described this field, has long been a topic of concern to scholars in a wide variety of disciplines. Social and political philosophers dating back to Aristotle and including such diverse figures as Marx, Pareto, and Mosca have written about the relationships between elites and the social order, and a host of social scientists and historians have carried out detailed analyses of the social background of highlevel decision-makers in various societies

Given the increasing importance of constitutional modification in Eastern Europe, Latin America, South Africa, Europe, and Australia, it is imperative to study systemically the conditions under which formal constitutional amendments are likely to fail. In this paper, the authors isolate conditions whereby the instrumental objectives of participants in the politics of constitutional modification threaten to overload the institutional capacity of the amending process. The proximate cause of amendment process overload is indeterminacy regarding the redistributive impact of the proposed change. Redistributive indeterminacy is a function of a rigid amending process, an institutional structure that encourages a large number of constitutional players and amendments which provide broad scope for judicial interpretation. The authors isolate two critical factors: the intensity of mass and elite preferences surrounding constitutional proposals and die structure of the amending process itself. They next trace mese factors back to institutional variables to create a model to explain and predict constitutional failure in a range of contexts. Finally, they apply the model to highly visible recent constitutional failures in the United States and Canada.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the concept of “normalcy” has occupied a prominent place in the pronouncements of Germany's most powerful politicians and policy makers. In addition, it has also suffused much of the emerging literature on the domestic and international implications of German unification. Some observers argue that unification embodies the call to normalcy, offering Germany's leaders the opportunity to put their nation's past behind them. Others treat the events of 1989–90 as part of an ongoing challenge to German identity. Finally, a third group of scholars regards the invocation of German unity as an excuse for papering over the crimes of the Nazi past. Although there is no a priori basis for considering any one of these approaches the most appropriate for assessing contemporary German affairs, this does not mean one's choice of terms is totally arbitrary. If German normalcy is to mean anything analytically, it must minimally represent an attainable and worthy goal to which the leaders of the Federal Republic can aspire in their efforts to make Germany more like other European states.

After World War II, the US-led international security order exhibited substantial regional variation. Explaining this variation has been central to the debate over why is there no nato in Asia. But this debate overlooks the emergence of multilateral security arrangements between the United States and Latin American countries during the same critical juncture. These inter-American institutions are puzzling considering the three factors most commonly used to explain divergence between nato and Asia: burden-sharing, external threats, and collective identity. These conditions fail to explain contemporaneous emergence of inter-American security multilateralism. Although the postwar inter-American system has been characterized as the solidification of US dominance, at the time of its framing, Latin American leaders judged the inter-American system as their best bet for maintaining beneficial US involvement in the Western Hemisphere while reinforcing voice opportunities for weaker states and imposing institutional constraints on US unilateralism. Drawing on multinational archival research, the author advances a historical institutionalist account. Shared historical antecedents of regionalism shaped the range of choices for Latin American and US leaders regarding the desirability and nature of new regional institutions while facilitating institutional change through mechanisms of layering and conversion during this critical juncture.