Journal of Peace Research

In recent years the 'traditional' alliance system of the post World War II period has undergone rapid change. Both superpowers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which have dominated the East-West conflict, and similarly the organization of intra-alliance relationships in the Eastern and Western bloc, are today confronted with relatively strong 'second' powers. The superpower conflict U.S.-USSR is complemented by ascending hegemonic conflicts U.S.-Western Europe and USSR-China. The Soviet-Chinese schism started already in the late 1950's. In the early eighties the Western Alliance is strained by severe con flicts, perhaps demonstrating a political process which started much earlier in the Eastern bloc. There are not only different perceptions of the Soviet threat but also different approaches to security policy between Western Europeans and Americans. The 'diversion of power' within the Western and Eastern bloc has initiated a political process in which the 'second' powers like Western Europe or China are trying to define their own security interests.

The article tries to examine the current political situation in NATO and possible forms of cooperation between Western Europe and China.

The focus of this article is upon the costs of high military burdens and militarization. While the primary concern is with the Third World, this analysis also considers costs to advanced capitalist as well as state socialist systems. The work synthesizes findings by more than three dozen researchers, many of whom have published comparative or case studies of substitution effects of military expenditures in socio-economic areas. Particular attention is focused upon damage to the American socio-economic order by high militarization since the early 1960's. In both the North as well as the South, the costs are most obvious in terms of specific tradeoffs when military burdens are high or rapidly increasing. They are occasionally pronounced in such welfare areas as health and particularly education. More frequently, they appear in terms of diminished economic growth rates, unemployment, reduced exports and inflation. In developing nations welfare is less adversely affected in civilian, more industrialized, economically dynamic, heavily aided, state capitalist and especially socialist oriented regimes. Military dominant systems tend to be the most repressive and exhibit the heaviest military burdens. In general, however, systems in both the North and the South vary in how they absorb such tradeoffs as appear. Emphasis is placed upon East-West competitive intervention and commercial gain as a source of both militarization and accelerating militarism in the South.

Despite the fact that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the critical issue in the Arab World, there is a striking lack of sympathy with the specific demands of the Palestinians, both amongst Arab regimes and the Muslim populations in the area. National consciousness has few indigenous roots in the Middle East because of the assumptions of universality within Islam. When it did arise, it was a specific response to European technological dominance and political aggressiveness and to the newly-awakened ethnic con sciousness of the late Ottoman empire. Moreover, it did not express itself as nationalism in the European sense. Instead it turned to the ready-made vehicle of Arabic to define a much wider entity — the Arab Nation. The strong Muslim component involved in this ultimately made the concept acceptable to Arab population at large.

Three different and at times conflicting concepts — Muslim, Arabic and secular identity — confronted European colonialism and Zionism until 1948. These concepts altered only when the Palestinians began to create an effective national community after 1967, leading to an ideological contradiction within the Arab World that explains the ambivalence shown towards the Palestinian issue today. Arabism has been shown to be vacuous and divisive, whereas nation-states, with their claims to secular ethnic nationalism, have led to Camp David in the case of Egypt, and the Iran-Iraq War elsewhere. The only remaining source of ideological relevance for the Muslim World is a return to pure Islamic social organization, and this rejects all question of secular nationalism. In short, although the issue of Israel as an alien intrusion within the Muslim World is relevant, the issue of Palestinian nationalism is not.

The importance of the emigration level as a key control variable for the disarmament process is discussed and confirmed. The mathematical formulation of the optimal control of disarmament leads to the problem of the optimal time control for a system described by the two Richardson linear differential equations. The problem is readily resolved by means of the Pontriagin maximum principle. An illustrative example is presented which clearly shows that arms levels cannot be used as control variables; this explains the permanent failure of talks on the reduction of arms. Moreover, it shows where to look for ways of actual peace strengthening based on disarmament.

While the concept of issue area in foreign policy has received wide theoretical attention, there has been little empirical research on it. This analysis tests five propositions derived from Rosenau's pre-theory in order to assess the role of issues in foreign policy cooperation-conflict. The findings show that the tangibility of issues is a potent variable in analyzing cooperation-conflict when combined with other intervening variables such as the number of actors, the costliness of employed resources, the frequency of contention, persistence, and linkages to other issues. The findings are then used to reformulate Rosenau's analysis into five new propositions which stipulate the conditions under which the tangibility of issues will lead to cooperation-conflict and the kinds of behavior associated with each of Rosenau's four issue areas.

Recent years have seen an upsurge of interest among moral philosophers in questions of international distribution and the relationship between rich and poor countries. Efforts are being made, in the first place, to replace the prevalent image of international relations as a Hobbesian 'state of nature' with a model in which more room is left for moral choice. In the second place, the foundation, content and limits of our obligations to join in the combat of poverty are put under scrutiny. The essay discusses some of the problems raised by this application of normative theory to issues which in many ways are ill-suited for moral theorizing.