I am better than this. I want a better international system than this. And if we are really honest, we have to admit that we really know a fantastic amount about the international system. What is more, the people who operate the system don't want to know anything about it. They are insulated, even from the knowledge that we now have. This is perfectly clear if you look at our own State Department, which of all departments in government is most completely insulated from the intellectual community, and especially from the social sciences. We have good contact for social sciences contracts from Health, Education and Welfare, the Dopartment of Defense, Agriculture. Any department of government has constant coming and going between the social sciences and itself. Look at the relations between economics and government in this country. Vie deliberately overstaff our department by one-third, because we are pretty sure that one-third of our department will always be in Washington, either in the Council of Economic Advisors or elsewhere. There is constant contact between government and academic life, which is very healthy--everywhere except in the State Department, where there is practically none. The amount of actual research that is done in the international system is almost negligible. Someone asked how many members the International Studies Association would have if everyone active in the international relations area would actually join it. Somebody said one thousand, and I thought that was pessimistic. This is an incredible scandal. Here is the most important area of the sociosphere; this is the thing that is going to make us or break us. We have 12,000 members of the American Economic Association; 15,000 members of the American Psychological Association, and 10,000 sociologists. And there are a miserable 1000 in international relations research. It is so unrecognized that there isn't even a name for it. And yet here is the professional competence that is most desperately needed if we are to move from folk images into sophisticated images in the international system. I like to think of this organization as a beginning of professional, technical skill in the international system. Perhaps we haven't gotten very fer with it yet. If we are honest, a lot of us operate by folk knowledge and club knowledge. A lot of this is all right. I am not saying that folk knowledge is necessarily wrong, but if it is right, you have to build it into the social sciences. We are beginning to get more sophisticated knowledge into the international system, and perhaps in ten years or so, we will have a profession. Then we can have a Council of International Advisers, like the Council of Economic Advisers in the White House. I Let me illustrate this from the current situation in Viet-Nam. have been struck with two things there. One is the fact that we do know something about Viet-Nam, and that this knowledge is apparently completely confined to social scientists themselves. It is not to be found in the State Department itself. We have had a whole succession of lecturers this semester--anthropologists, sociologists, economists, political scientists, many of them people who have done field work in Viet-Nam, etc.--they all tell much the same story. It is a story which makes the State Department White Paper look absolutely preposterous. If they believe it, they are stupid, and if they don't believe it, they are dishonest. It is about as clear as that. On the other hand, when you have said everything, when you have brought all the resources of the social sciences to bear on the Viet-Nam situation, we still know practically nothing about it. We are certainly in no position to stand up and give high advice, because we don't know. I have disbeliefs about whether it is true or not--I believe it is nonsense, but I can't demonstrate this. But I think it is nonsense as a citizen, not as a social scientist. As a social scientist, I don't have more competence here than anybody else. It seems to me that the same goes all down the line. When it comes to larger issues in the international system, we really have precious little more competence than anybody else. Now, how we get this, I don't know. I would be very surprised if we couldn't do better than we do now--we certainly could not do much worse. Every major decision of every major country in international relations is based, as far as I can see, on total illusion. You can do this historically and see the incredible extent to which illusion is the norm in the image of the international system. Go back to Japan--as far as I can see the Japanese suddenly and completely went out of their heads in the 30's. They developed an image of the international system which was so unrealistic and so preposterous that it got them into their serious difficulties. If you think there isn't any law of gravity and you jump off the Empire State Building, you are in for trouble. And this is about where the Japanese The sheer unrealism of their images, looking back on them, is almost incredible. were. As a matter of fact, you can go all the way down the line and look at North's study of the First World War and you see exactly the same thing-that everyone operated in a wholly unreal world. Unreality is the norm here in the international system. And how can you expect it to be anything but disastrous? So, as we can't do any worse than this, it must be possible to do better. And the only way I know is, first of all, to develop more adequate theoretical models of what you might call the total dynamics of the sociosphere. I do not believe you can develop an adequate theory of the international system alone, abstracting it out of the total sociosphere, simply because the things that often we do not regard as parts of the international system are really a crucial part of it. Take something like American agricultural policy: if you look at this in the '30's, you'd say that this couldn't have anything to do with the international system, that it was a domestic issue. But as we all know, American agricultural policy has had an enormous impact on the international system, and this is one of the most important characteristics today. The Great Depression had an enormous impact on the international system. We certainly would not have had Hitler without it. Look at the differential rates of economic development in history and look at the impact of this on the international system. I would say that, over the long run, the differential rates of development are the most significant element of the international system itself, and no one can understand the international system without understanding that. And we just have to face the fact that we have to look at the sociosphere as a whole, and to understand its dynamics as a whole. I think we are beginning to do this. Then we have to develop an information system that will feed into our images all dynamic developments and will also reveal the deficiencies in our knowledge. I think this is a reasonable program for the next twentyfive or fifty years, and I think we can make as spectacular advances in the social science of the international system in the next twenty-five years as we have made in economics in the last twenty-five or thirty years. Unless we do this, the outlook for the human race is a dim one. ARMISTICE AS A THIRD STATUS BETWEEN "WAR" AND "PEACE"* by Metin Tamkoc Introduction The situation in Viet-Nam, where the United States is deeply committed to the defense of the Vietnamese against "indirect aggression" of the Communists, presently occupies the attention of everyone. However, more so than anyone else, the American public seems to be wondering: "What are the United States' soldiers doing in Viet-Nam?" "Are they fighting or playing hide-and-seek?" "If they are fighting, are they fighting the North Vietnamese, or the Communist Chinese, or the Russians?" "If they are involved in a 'war' why don't they finish it quickly?" "If they are not involved in 'war' then why don't they leave the Viet-Namese to fight the issue out among themselves and come home?" "Or is this another Korea?"1 The White Paper on Viet-Nam issued by the Department of State reads: The war in Viet-Nam is a new kind of war, a fact as yet poorly 2 *This concept is originally developed in my book: Political and Legal Aspects of Armistice Status (Ankara: Middle East Technical University, 1963). The ideas expressed here are the result of further research on the subject matter of Chapter IV, "The Global Armistice: A Third Status Between 'War' and 'Peace'" of this book. I am grateful to K. Kurdas, President of the Middle East Technical University for his permission to use the above-mentioned book as a basis of this paper and to quote it freely. 1 This confusion as to the developments in Viet-Nam may also be detected in the words of President Lyndon B. Johnson as quoted in Time magazine: "To retreat, he said, would be 'strategically unwise and morally unthinkable.' To expand the war might get the United States into a fight 'with 700 million Chinese.' On the very eve of the current crisis he reiterated to an associate his determination to go 1 neither north nor south.' "1 Time (February 19, 1965), p. 16. 2U.S. Department of State, White Paper Aggression From the North: The Record of North Viet-Nam's Campaign to Conquer South VietNam, February 27, 1965. Full text is in Washington Post (February 28, 1965), p. 12-A. However, the White Paper fails to explain the fact that the United States, the leader of the Western Bloc, is conducting an armed conflict3 against what the White Paper describes as a "carefully planned program of concealed aggression" of the Communist Bloo, without a formal declaration of "war." In the contemporary jargon of international politics this situation is referred to as the "Cold War." It appears that the situation in Viet-Nam has now become the hottest operation of the "Cold War." In October-November 1962, the hottest spot of the "Cold War" was Cuba. Prior to that, the Bay of Pigs, Indian border region with Communist China, Quemoy and Matsu, Budapest, Suez Canal, Berlin, South Korea, to name only a few, were the hottest spots of the "Cold War" operations. The term "Cold War" reflects a confused state of mind. It is the result of the confusion and the difficulty encountered in identifying the relations of states in the contemporary world. Such confusion is due to efforts in trying to place the contemporary status into one of the two traditional conditions: "war" and "peace.' Furthermore, it is due to the notion that until there is a clear-cut case of "war" in the legalistic sense of the term, states remain in their mutual relations in a status of "peace." The term "Cold War," therefore, presupposes the existence of a general condition of "peace" as far as the relations of super-powers and their allies are concerned, during which "coercive measures falling short of war" are resorted to by the opposing groups. However, if cne reviews the changes that have occurred in the system and structure of international politics and analyzes the nature of present day coercive measures, one could convincingly argue that since 1914 the world has been in a period of crises, a period of continuous fear and violence, a period of transition from "war" to "peace" and vice versa. The characteristic feature of this period of crises is the juxtaposition of "war" and "peace" at the same time and location, i.e., the synthesis of "war" and "peace" which contains the essential characteristics of both conditions. The primary purpose of this paper, therefore, is to analyze the relations of the super powers together with their allies, who seem to hold the Democles' sword over mankind, and try to determine the nature of the condition that prevails in the world, which appears to be neither "war" nor "peace." 3 In view of the difficulty in reaching an agreement as to the meaning of "war" and "peace" on the part of writers and policy makers, and because of the apparent disappearance of the distinction between these two conditions in recent years, these terms are used here in quotation marks and in place of the term "war" the term "armed conflict" is used throughout this paper. 4Gerhard von Glahn writes: "...the presence of methods of selfhelp short of war, in the twentieth century, represents a characteristic reflection of the state of transition in which international law and the community of nations are today." Law Among Nations (New York: The Macmillan Co. 1965), p. 498. |