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.

One of the important developments in world politics during the cold-war era was the relationship between the superpowers and small nation-states. In contrast to the period before the cold war, small nation-states had considerable latitude for maneuvering in pursuit of their own interests. This phenomenon was largely rooted in the imperatives of the cold war. The relationship between the United States and the Republic of Korea during the period of the Korean War is critically analyzed in light of the new reality in international relations. South Korea tried to influence the conduct of the United States in Korea by employing five techniques: (1) a public call for assistance; (2) a public call for mutual cooperation against the common enemy; (3) a calculated policy proposal for bargaining advantage; (4) refusal to cooperate; and (5) moral suasion. These techniques are examined, with the conclusion that of the five, (1) and (2) were effective; (3) and (4) were least effective; and (5) was most effective.

Conventional wisdom holds that great power patrons prop up client dictatorships. But this is generally assumed rather than systematically analyzed. This article provides the first comprehensive analysis of the relationship between foreign sponsorship and authoritarian regime survival, using an original data set of all autocratic client regimes in the postwar period. The results demonstrate that patronage from Western powers—the United States, France, and the United Kingdom—is not associated with client regime survival. Rather, it’s only Soviet sponsorship that reduced the risk of regime collapse. The author explains this variation by considering the effects of foreign sponsorship on the likelihood of military coups d’état. He argues that the Soviet Union directly aided its clients by imposing a series of highly effective coup prevention strategies. By contrast, the US and its allies didn’t provide such aid, leaving regimes vulnerable to military overthrow.

The emergence of the United States as a world power at the opening of the twentieth century found the nation ill-prepared to assume the burdens imposed by its new status. For American military and naval leaders, possession of an island empire stretching across 7,000 miles of ocean from San Francisco to the Philippines and almost to the mainland of Asia created new and serious problems. Slowly, during the first years of the century, the Army and Navy evolved a military strategy which would ensure the defense of these islands while supporting the foreign policy shaped by the nation's civilian leaders.

The emergence or reemergence of academic disciplines in the Soviet Union has frequently been signalled or accompanied by the publication of comprehensive critical studies of their “bourgeois” counterparts in the West. Thus, for example, Soviet empirical research in sociology and the subsequent tentative and limited official recognition of sociology as an academic discipline were preceded by the appearance of a number of monographs devoted to a critique of Western sociology. Perhaps it is against this background and from this perspective that one must interpret the publication, in 1969, of the first major Soviet study and critique of American political science.

Confusion and misconceptions about the state and nature of “theory” have reached monumental proportions in the field of international relations. This situation is debilitating both because it misleads academics and policymakers alike about the contributions that can be made by theorists of international relations and because it operates to set back serious efforts to pursue theory in the field. Accordingly, I write in an effort to cut through some of this confusion and to set the problems of constructing theories about international phenomena in perspective. Specifically, I wish to explicate the following theses in these pages:1

What is the relationship between political instability and economic growth? This article examines this question using insights from the new institutional economics applied to a canonical case: revolutionary Mexico. The authors argue that investment and growth during and after the revolution were less affected by political instability than one might predict based on the extant theoretical and empirical literature. They find that while investor expectations, output, and productivity were sensitive to the interdiction of factor and product markets during the years of intense revolutionary violence (1914–17), the periods of political instability before (1910–13) and afterward (1918–34) had relatively minor effects on investor confidence, investments in new plant and equipment, rates of entry and exit by firms, industrial structure, and productivity growth.

A FAMILIAR sight in the newspapers and weekly magazines is a world map (often, I regret to say, on the Mercator projection) on which population, oil production, or similar information is shown by rows of small men, barrels, or other appropriate symbols. These maps are often interpreted in caption or accompanying text as indices of national power. No one denies that such information is relevant to power, but no reader of this journal needs to be cautioned that such information is only a first step toward an evaluation. The present paper spells out that caution and tries to take another step or two. Its thesis is: An estimate of national power has two aspects which are related, in a figurative way, like the two rays of a triangulation. Either ray gives direction, but it takes the two to give distance. A better analogy, perhaps, is that of two searchlight beams groping through the dark until they intersect on the target. One ray or beam is the conventional inventory of the elements or factors of power. It gives the power resources of a nation, using “resource” in a broad sense. The other ray is here called “national strategy.”

This study examines the role of technological variables in the decisions by Egypt, the World Bank, and the United States regarding the selection and financing of the Aswan High Dam project. Three major decision-making models-rational choice, incremental, and organizational process-are assessed according to their appropriateness for and applicability to the “technological dimension.” This dimension is defined in terms of three major components-design, impact, and management issues. Despite a tendency of the literature to associate the rational-choice model with highly technical decisions, this study illustrates the dominance of “satisficing,” “muddling through,” and “bounded rationality” behavior for each of the major participants. The technological dimension is found to be important, but clearly secondary to the primacy of politics.

Contemporary Soviet doctrine on international relations emphasizes changes in the relationships of both domestic and world political structures; all the processes of restructuring are said to be “organically” interconnected. An extensive reconceptualization of domestic processes of social change has provided ideological legitimation for elites in the highly bureaucratized Soviet system. Meanwhile, according to Soviet spokesmen, the world correlation of forces has shifted decisively in favor of the U.S.S.R. Because of this change in the world balance, the Soviets claim the power to set the rules in international relations. The new Brezhnev Doctrine projects the U.S.S.R. as the center of the world, largely determining the direction and pace of political change. The Soviet leaders view detente in terms of rational acceptance by the “imperialist camp” of unavoidable processes of restructuring favorable to the “socialist camp.”

Territory is important to people; the manner in which it is divided up is often critical. The European approach to territorial problems developed mainly in response to European historical experience; the traditional literature in the fields of geography and history makes scant reference to non-Western boundary concepts and practices. European and Southeast Asian approaches to territorial issues differ significantly. In the aggregate, the differences are imposing, if somewhat abstract; in detail, the continuing disparities in outlook and administrative practice are of considerable relevance to current policy decisions.

Functionalism has assumed an important role in the behavioral sciences in recent years, but the employment of this method of analysis is fraught with difficulties. Some of the logical problems of functionalism are reviewed in this article in the form of a critique of Gabriel A. Almond's introduction to The Politics of the Developing Areas, entitled “A Functional Approach to Comparative Politics.” This article focuses attention upon the weaknesses of the approach. In doing so, it is exclusively negative and critical, and is not an attempt at a rounded characterization.

Two radical models of economic foreign policy making are summarized: instrumentalist and structuralist. By means of an issue-based policy paradigm, the views of several leading conventional scholars are described. The contrasting radical and conventional models are shown to be related—radicals providing useful insights into the setting of policy and conventional scholars being strongest regarding the policy process. Cautious synthesis is recommended to students of U.S. foreign economic policy making.

The Korean War represented the first American experience with the problem of meeting local Communist aggression by means of limited, if costly, warfare. But despite the revulsion with that experience, and the “new look” at military strategy and foreign policy, it may not be the last. The character of recent weapons developments and the passing of our thermonuclear monopoly make it probable that in the future, as in the past, American policy-makers will be forced to consider the alternative of local conflict, with all its problems and risks, in determining how to respond to the threat or actuality of Communist moves in the peripheral areas.

In these circumstances, analyses of American policy-making immediately before and during the Korean War may well illuminate the perspectives and considerations relevant to this difficult and dangerous type of operation. Here, no more can be done than toexamine the effect of strategic planning and estimates of Communist intentions and behavior on the decision to commit American forces to the defense of South Korea. This decision, and even the crucial decision to commit ground forces to eventual offensive operations against the aggressor, was made within afew days of the North Korean attack. Attention, accordingly, is focused on American policy reactions to the war in the first week or ten days following June 25, 1950.

After a decade of play, the score in the match pitting men in uniform against politicians is nearly even. About half of the new states of Black Africa have remained uninterruptedly under civilian rule while in the other half each has experienced at least one coup in which armed forces—military and police—have played a prominent role. Most of the coups were followed by the establishment of some form of military government. Sometimes the original coup leaders were overthrown by others; sometimes they returned to their barracks, hovering about the seats of power; sometimes they or others abruptly interrupted “civilianization.”

Most Western observers have concluded that in the conflicts between the U.S.S.R. and the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, the Soviets resorted to military intervention only when certain ideological or strategic issues were at stake. This study suggests that in the conflicts between the leaders of the CPSU and the leaders of the Communist Parties of Yugoslavia, Poland, Albania, Rumania, and Czechoslovakia there was only one real issue at stake: control over the local East European party. The adversaries in these struggles have been Muscovite factions dependent on Soviet support and ultimately loyal to Moscow, and domestic factions seeking to base their rule on genuine popular support. What determined whether the Soviets intervened militarily was not the ideological or strategic issue publicly raised by the Soviets, but whether the domestic faction had demonstrated to Moscow the capacity and will to mobilize its country for armed resistance against the Soviets.

If the United Nations is ever to assume the greater powers needed for effective peace-keeping and peace-making, the General Assembly and/or the Security Council will need an improved system of representation and voting. The present system of giving each country one vote in the General Assembly, regardless of the country's size, and of giving a veto in the Security Council to five big powers, is unrealistic and imperfect for many reasons, which need not be detailed here.

When violent political uprisings are anticipated by potential participants, politically responsible decision-makers, and scholarly observers, and do not occur, and when violent revolutionary uprisings suddenly erupt that no one, including most of the participants, expected, serious questions are raised as to the adequacy with which the conditions of spontaneous political violence are understood and analyzed by scholar and policy-maker alike—at least in particular cases. The problem is compounded when other cases are correctly predicted, as sometimes happens.

We are looking for an explanation of the German miracle. Only yesterday an outcast among the nations, eternal troublemaker, never to be trusted, Germany is today the eagerly sought ally of the Western world, next to Great Britain apparently the most stable of the European states. How has this transformation occurred?