There is a great demand for theories in international relations. The term “theory” has become so honorific that hypotheses, statements of fact, and intuitive guesses are often dressed up as theories. In part this longing for theory can be ascribed to a desire for the status of a “hard science” like physics, since the “hard sciences” are often viewed by laymen as the theoretical sciences par excellence. They have displayed their power in revealing the secrets of nature and, when applied to the affairs of men, have achieved notable practical successes like the construction of the atomic bomb.

On the whole this demand for theory is probably good. We cannot reason without generalization and, where matters are complex, the web of reasoning logically takes the form of a theory. Most historical investigations and case studies employ theories inexplicitly—often in the belief that the generalizations follow from the straightforward presentation of “purely factual” material. There is usually no recognition that interpretations of factual material can always be presented in a form isomorphic with theories from the sciences of economics, psychology, sociology, and so forth.

The internal political life of Turkey since the revolution of 1960 JL has been beset by military coups and conflicts between political parties and social groups far more frequent and intensive than might normally be expected in a post-revolutionary period. This unrest contrasts sharply with the political stability which prevailed before 1960, and comes after a series of constitutional changes intended to establish a better system for orderly change and control of government.

This study systematically identifies the Soviet lessons of Vietnam as presented in eleven Soviet newspapers (specialized and regional as well as the central papers) and eight journals. Altogether, 1,585 citations were coded, representing more than 70 different lessons. A predominant finding is that the most common lessons the Soviet Union learned from Vietnam differed from their American counterparts: the Soviet lessons would not have warned the leadership about the dangers of military intervention in Afghanistan. A left/right scale was constructed, based on such issue clusters as why the communists won in Vietnam, the nature of imperialism, and the implications of Soviet policy in the Third World. Substantial variation was found among the media examined, many of which are linked to specific Soviet institutions. The implication is that Soviet foreign policy is contingent upon individual choices, institutional interplay, and changing contexts. This, in turn, suggests that Western policy makers should not lose sight of their capacity to influence the Soviet policy dialogue, and hence Soviet policy choices.

The virtually simultaneous appearance of new editions of Hannah A Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism and Carl Friedrich's and Zbigniew Brzezinski's Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy affords an opportunity to reopen the question of the utility of the classical theory of totalitarianism in systematic comparative political analysis. The original editions of these two volumes went far toward shaping lay and academic understandings of totalitarianism in the 1950's; in addition, most subsequent general scholarship on totalitarianism has been written implicitly or explicitly in the light of—if not in reaction to—these two earlier works.

Before the U.S. invasion of December 1989, Panama experienced one of the longest periods of military rule in the modern-day history of Latin America. While numerous authoritarian military regimes emerged in the region during the 1960s and established for themselves a relatively high degree of autonomy from both domestic and international actors, only those in Panama, Paraguay, and Chile survived until the late 1980s. And of these three surviving military regimes, only Panama's was ended through the application of external military force. For the past several years, there has been considerable discussion of the factors that seem best to account for General Manuel Antonio Noriega's personal ability to resist U.S. pressure from 1987 until 1989 and to largely insulate himself from the political and economic constraints of Panamanian domestic politics. However, much less attention has been devoted to discussion of the factors that explain the long-term maintenance of the military authoritarian regime in existence for fifteen years prior to his assumption of power. This analysis suggests that the long-term maintenance of Panama's military authoritarian regime was due in large part to its ability to acquire substantial amounts of foreign capital. During the 1970s, such capital was preferentially obtained from the international banking community. During the 1980s, it was obtained through illicit activities of various kinds, including participation in the growing international drug trade.

Although the Department of State continues to attribute the war in Vietnam to “aggression from the North,” there has always been a suspicion among more enlightened public officials and most academic critics of the war that economic discontent rooted in the inequitable tenure arrangements of the Vietnamese countryside might have some connection with the vigorous opposition of the Viet Cong to numerous Saigon governments. Thus it is surprising to learn that, on the contrary, support for the Saigon regime is most pronounced in provinces in which few peasants farm their own land, large estates were formerly owned by French or Vietnamese landlords, tenancy is widespread, and the distribution of land is unequal. This finding is particularly striking since it is contrary to data from the rest of Southeast Asia. In Burma, for example dacoity and other forms of social disorder were most frequent in the deltaic area of lower Burma, a region of extensive tenancy, unstable tenure, massive agricultural debt, and large-scale absentee ownership by Indian financial houses. In Thailand most social tension is concentrated in the northeast, a region of poor soil and shifting subsistence agriculture, and in the Menam delta immediately adjacent to Bangkok, where absentee holdings are farmed by tenants. Most commercial agricultural land in Thailand is cultivated by owner-proprietors and it is this fact that explains much of the country's political stability. In the Philippines the Hukbalahap movement was concentrated in central Luzon, again a region of extensive tenancy.

Can transitional justice enhance democratic representation in countries recovering from authoritarian rule? The authors argue that lustration, a policy that reveals secret collaboration with the authoritarian regime, can prevent former authoritarian elites from extorting policy concessions from past collaborators who have been elected as politicians in the new regime. Absent lustration, former elites can threaten to reveal information about past collaboration unless the politicians implement policies these elites desire. In this way, lustration policies enable politicians to avoid blackmail and to be responsive to their constituents, improving the quality of representation. The authors show that whether lustration enhances representation depends on its severity and the extent to which dissidents-turned-politicians would suffer if the skeletons in their closets were revealed. The authors also find that the potential to blackmail politicians increases as the ideological distance between authoritarian elites and politicians decreases. They test this theory with original data from the Global Transitional Justice Dataset, which spans eighty-four countries that transitioned to democracy since 1946.

Foreign aid can be “related” to intervention in many ways. Some argue, with Senator J. W. Fulbright, that aid tends to precede intervention and to increase the probability of intervention.1 Others would say that aid follows intervention, contending, for example, that American aid to Vietnam was evidence of a prior diplomatic commitment. Still others see aid as an alternative to intervention—if we give aid now we are less likely to have to intervene in the future. Another group would contend that the aid-giving process may constitute intervention. It is with the views of this last group that most of this article deals. In examining them, we shall focus on three topics: (i) the links between foreign aid and influence; (2) the links between particular types of aid and what is often called intervention; and (3) the possibility of functional equivalents for aid that do not involve intervention. There are some conceptual problems, however, that we must address first.

Reliable disarmament, particularly of nuclear weapons, requires inspection and control, which in turn require much mutual trust. None of this is yet in sight. Disarmament of nuclear weapons is therefore still a long way off, although a measure of conventional disarmament may be nearer.

The relationship between economic system and political regime has recently reemerged as a central issue in social science. An examination of the political perceptions and actions of individual firms and of sectors during the uncertainties of decolonization permits a new approach to this question, using the concept of political exposure. The firm or sector characteristics that are associated with greater political exposure are assessed. Political preferences cannot be equated with either political action or outcomes, however. The links between capitalism and political regime require further refinement and qualification.

This article inquires into changes in the distribution of power and the extent of ideologically based conflict in the international system as they affect one aspect of international law, the recognition of new governments. These effects are assessed by analyzing instances in which recognition is used as a device for expressing opinions about or securing specific commitments from a new government. An examination of such instances since 1815 leads to the conclusions that (a) the distribution of power makes a difference only when the international system, or the new government's regional subsystem, is dominated by one strong power; (b) the extent of ideological conflict has a significant effect on expressions of opinion; and (c) a number of addictional factors also affect all political uses of recognition.

This article examines the importance of the internal structural dynamics of the military in the analysis of transitions from nondemocratic rule and in democratic consolidation. The authors argues that factors endogenous to the military—including variations in the size of the officer corps, solidarity among graduating classes from the military academy, and promotional prospects—are important determinants of the political behavior of militaries. As a case study, military structure and politics during Indonesia's recent transition from nondemocratic rule and current consolidation of democracy are explored in detail. While the ongoing interaction between civilians and the military is acknowledged, systematic structural features are identified as being important for understanding the behavior of the Indonesian military between 1998 and 2001. The authors compare and contrast the study of Indonesia with other cases in the literature on transitions—including Ghana, Nigeria, Portugal, and Thailand—and discuss resulting implications for the study of transitions and consolidations.

Bertrand de Jouvenel is one of a very small group of writers in our own time who make a serious effort to develop political theory in the grand style. In the English-speaking world, where so many of the interesting political problems have been solved (at least superficially), political theory is dead. In the Communist countries it is imprisoned. Elsewhere it is moribund. In the West, this is the age of textual criticism and historical analysis, when the student of political theory makes his way by rediscovering some deservedly obscure text or reinterpreting a familiar one. Political theory (like literary criticism) is reduced to living off capital—other people's capital at that.

The Hungarian transition from socialism stands out from other examples of political change in the region, in that the ruling Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (MSZMP) suffered an erosion of political power generated largely from within the party itself. The study shows how the Communist Party, after its destruction in the revolution of 1956, sought to institutionalize its rule through a course of limited liberalization and the broad co-optation of the populace. This policy helped create a tacit social compact with society, particularly in co-opting younger intellectuals who identified with the goals of reform socialism. However, the party eventually marginalized this group, creating an internal party opposition that supported socialism but opposed the MSZMP. Consequently, when the limits of Hungarian reform socialism became evident in the mid-1980s, rank-and-file intellectuals within the party began to mobilize against the party hierarchy, seeking to transform the MSZMP into a democratic socialist party. These “reform circles,” drawing their strength primarily from the countryside, spread to all parts of the party and helped undermine central party power and expand the political space for opposition groups to organize. Eventually, the reform circles were able to force an early party congress in which the MSZMP was transformed into a Western-style socialist party prior to open elections in 1990.

The case is significant in that it indicates that the forms of transition in Eastern Europe were not simply the specific outcome of elite interaction. Rather, they were shaped in large part by the patterns of socialist institutionalization found in each country. Therefore, studies of political transition can be enriched with an explicit focus on the institutional characteristics of each case, linking the forms of transitions and their posttransition legacies to the institutional matrix from which they emerged. In short, the study argues that the way in which an autocratic order perpetuates itself affects the manner in which that system declines and the shape of the new system that takes its place.

It is only natural that a period anxiously seeking to wrest peace from the threat of nuclear extinction should look nostalgically to the last great successful effort to settle international disputes by means of a diplomatic conference, the Congress of Vienna. Nothing is more tempting than to ascribe its achievements to the very process of negotiation, to diplomatic skill, and to “willingness to come to an agreement”—and nothing is more dangerous. For the effectiveness of diplomacy depends on elements transcending it; in part on the domestic structure of the states comprising the international order, in part on their power relationship.

The issue of Japanese foreign direct investment (FDI) has attracted scant attention because of its relative insignificance to the Japanese economy before the 1980s. In the 1970s only a few analysts explained the Japanese FDI behavior from a macroeconomic perspective. This paper argues that there has been a noticeable change in the nature of Japanese FDI in the 1980s, a position that supports the traditional microeconomic explanation based on the oligopolistic market theory. This convergence toward the “Western” style of FDI reflects a fundamental shift of the Japanese economy from a trade-oriented economy to one that is foreign investment—oriented. However, as the experiences of two hegemonic states (Great Britain and the United States) have shown, foreign investment is not the best economic strategy from a long-term perspective. Preliminary evidence in recent years indicates that increasing FDI affects Japan's productivity growth negatively by weakening both the production base and the various sources of Japanese competitiveness.

In a recent article in this journal, I reported a failure to replicate the positive correlations Bruce Russett found between inequality of land tenure and political instability.2 Unfortunately, two of the instability indicators I used were untransformed counts (Deaths from domestic political violence, 1948–67 and 1961–65), whereas Russett had employed the logarithm of a similar measure. Taking logarithms is advisable when using counts in order to reduce skewness.3 Correlations between inequality and the logarithms (to the base ten) of the Deaths variables (plus one, as the log of zero is undefined) are greater than those I reported, though not so strong as Russett found. For 1961–65, the correlation is .29; for 1948–67, .20. The former is significant at the .05 level; the latter is not. When the Gini coefficients are weighted by the percentage of each nation's labor force in agriculture in i960,4 the correlations with the logged Deaths variables were .63 and .61—both highly significant. These figures especially support Russett's conclusions.

Variation in the need for military and political support from military allies affects the degree to which foreign economic policies will discriminate in favor of military allies and against adversaries and other countries. Powers in need of such support will pursue discriminatory foreign economic policies in order to change the configuration of domestic interests to favor not only closer economic relations but also closer political relations. By strengthening domestic support for an alliance, policymakers make it more difficult for their allies to renege on alliance commitments. Stronger political relations in turn reinforce the deterrent effect of the alliance. Because the net strategic benefits from closer relations in their case are lower, powers that can go it alone without support from allies will refrain from discriminatory policies. Shifts in strategic need make it possible to explain variation in the links between security considerations and foreign economic policies within alliances over time and also across alliances. British grand strategy in the 1930s illustrates how shifts in strategic need influence the degree to which foreign economic policies discriminate in favor of potential military allies.

A longstanding thesis on the Chinese revolution is that the peasants embraced the Communist movement because the brutalization by the invading Japanese Army aroused the village people, making it possible for the Communist Party to organize them and to appeal to their nationalist aspirations. A theoretical exploration of peasant mobilization and revolutionary war in the T'aihang Mountain-North China Plain revolutionary base suggests different reasons. The peasants there embraced the Communist movement mainly because the Communist Party 8th Route Army helped them regain their basic rights to subsistence in their struggles with landlords and local governments before the Japanese invasion. The armies of the Japanese and the Kuomintang exerted tremendous pressures on the peasant movements in the base area, and there was a negative correlation between the presence of these intruding forces and the emergence of a viable Communist political order. The revolutionary army won the War of Resistance and the War of Liberation largely by averting and ameliorating the burdens the peasants were encountering. In all of the revolutionary processes, the peasants placed greater value on the performance of the party in enhancing their livelihood than on the nationalist propaganda of the revolutionary movement.