Showing papers in "Foreign Affairs in 1970"

Brain drain or overflow

Abstract: drain" in recent years, no firm consensus has emerged as to whether or not one exists. Today we know much more about the international migration of professional manpower than we did five, four or even three years ago. But the "more" we know is mainly facts, and not all that many; men still have difficulty saying what the facts mean and deciding whether or not the brain drain constitutes a problem of "disturbing dimen sions"?as the Pearson Commission called it. Instead of mass movements of relatively unskilled and un tutored peoples into the world's empty spaces, international migration has increasingly become the movement of people with education seeking opportunities in more developed coun tries to use skills that education has given them. The dramatic increases in foreign study since World War II, the explosion of international communications and the decline in the cost of travel have combined to internationalize the market for edu cated manpower to a degree previously unknown. This widening of the market, combined with full employment in the West, has greatly increased competition for professional manpower, espe cially the competition for exceptional talent. For some em? ployers, this international competition has brought trouble; for many individuals it has brought opportunity. There can be no quarrel with the statement in the United Na tions Report1 that "highly trained personnel from many devel oping countries are emigrating to a few major developed coun tries, that the size of this flow is large and that it is increasing at a rapid rate." But there is great question whether this migration is seriously hurting the countries that are the net exporters of trained manpower. The surprising fact is that in most develop? ing countries the number of professionally trained people who are becoming available for home employment is rising, not fall ing, and in country after country the numbers are rising faster than their economies can absorb them. One certainly cannot make this statement about all countries, or even all underdevel

Overcoming Insularity in Jamaica

Abstract: IN the long run it may yet transpire that the differences be tween stages of economic development as between various nations and regions of the world are a more important de terminant of history than differences in ideology or systems of government. Religious wars are contested with fervor at the time; so are wars to make the world safe for democracy. But sooner or later, the economic historian presents an alternative analysis which seems to put the hysteria of yesteryear in a more realistic frame. And so today, press, pulpit and politician would have us be lieve that a new ideological focus is at the heart of the uncer tainties, tensions and conflicts of the second half of the twentieth century. Once again, I suggest that tomorrow's historians will point out that behind the hysteria lay economics and that the real battleground was in that largely tropical territory which was first the object of colonial exploitation, second, the focus of non-Caucasian nationalism and more latterly known as the underdeveloped and the developing world as it sought euphe misms for its condition. It has now proclaimed itself the third world to mark its transition from an age of apology to one of assertiveness.

Greece under the Colonels

Abstract: THERE have been three widely separated political Greeces : the ancient city-states, the Byzantine empire and modern Greece, which won its independence from the Turks less than a century and a half ago. In essence, there is little relation ship between the governance of these three Greeces but, because of classical influence on contemporary education and because the early Athenians were so gifted in defining and elaborating systems of thought, there is a persistent tendency to regard con temporary Greece in terms of its antique glory. Nowadays above all, when the country is governed by a stolid group of Colonels, it is fashionable to decry dictatorship in the birthplace of de mocracy. "Democracy" is, of course, a Greek word and a Greek inven tion although the democracy made famous in the Athens of the fifth century BC was economically founded on slavery, and Plato's "Republic" is in fact a treatise on elementary fascism. Moreover, one should not forget that "anarchy," "tyranny," "despotism" and, above all, "chaos" are also Greek words, to say nothing of "demagogue." Actually, as Aristotle pointed out: "The forms of government are four?democracy, oligarchy, aristocracy and monarchy; and hence the powrer that governs and decides in them is always some part or the whole of each." None of the three stages of Greece?classical, medieval or modern?has been famed for good government, very possibly because the Greeks are too intelligent, too unruly and too self seeking to submit easily to the dictates of others. FewT recent Greek statesmen have qualified as able to produce sustained stability in an inherently unstable nation. It can be argued that Constantine Caramanlis, Prime Minister from 1955 to 1963, headed the most successful modern administration but was too vain to accept political defeat, and instead of leading a parlia mentary opposition?as Churchill had done in England?he departed in a huff for voluntary exile. II

The Peace Corps: Making it in the Seventies

Abstract: TEN years ago this fall John Kennedy first spoke about sending Americans overseas in voluntary service. By the following summer the idea had a name?the Peace Corps ?several hundred Volunteers were in training, and even as Con gress debated the program it became clear that the idea was catching on. The Silent Generation was ready to be heard from and young Americans were flooding the Corps' makeshift head quarters with thousands of applications. The public saw in it an opportunity to "show what Americans are really like" and redeem the image portrayed in Eugene Burdick's best-seller, "The Ugly American." Surveys revealed thousands of jobs to be done abroad. It seemed obvious that the most modern nation in the world could provide the needed manpower. Despite mis givings, Congress baptized the experiment by overwhelming votes.

America and Europe

Abstract: TWENTY-FIVE years have passed since the collapse of Europe. Vienna-Versailles-Potsdam: these historic mile stones mark the calamitous decline of the European world order during the last hundred and fifty years. At Vienna, European statesmen sought to restore a European balance of power, having defeated?with the critical assistance of maritime Britain and Eurasian Russia?the Napoleonic effort to establish a unified continental system. In 1815, it was still European statesmanship that resolved Europe's imperial prob lems and thereby ordered the structure of world power. At Versailles, with Russia excluded, European statesmen grappled with the new force of national self-determination and strove to limit the power of the single most dynamic European national entity, Germany; but they did so in a political and idealistic context created largely by a transatlantic statesman, who represented the entry of American power into the European arena. Europe alone no longer could fight its wars nor build its peace. At Potsdam, 25 years ago last July, Europe was absent. In the prostrate capital of the most mighty European nation the future of the former center of the world was shaped in a confrontation between an Atlantic-Pacific continental power, the offspring of Europe's liberal tradition, and a Eurasian ideological empire, likewise a transplanted product of the European intellectual diffusion. Though some of the most lively debates at Potsdam were the personal contribution of the British war leader, the British presence?representing primarily an overseas empire? was already becoming an extension of American power. A new post-European world order thereby emerged, with Europe itself powerless and divided. This was a shift of historic proportions, the disappearance of what for several centuries in fact had been the center of world power, the partition of hith erto the world's most dynamic continent, the emergence instead of two competitive, ideologically distinct, non-European centers of power. To this day Europe is effectively absent from world politics. Its decline has been halted on the social-economic plane and in

The Arab-Israeli Conflict: An American Policy

Abstract: THE purpose of recent American diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East is simply stated. It is to stop the fighting and bring the peace effort back to the point, now nearly three years ago, when Ambassador Gunnar Jarring was setting out on his mission to help bring about an agreed Arab-Israeli settlement on the basis of a unanimous U.N. resolution. It is a measure of the deterioration since that time that these mod

The People, the Army, the Commander, A Soviet View,

Abstract: : The characteristic features of modern warfare are examined, and the decisive role of the general populace in the course and outcome of a war is demonstrated An important place is accorded to the problems of leadership in modern warfare and to the role of the commander in armed struggle While elucidating on all these questions, cognizance is taken of taken of the current radical transformation in military affairs The book will undoubtedly be of interest to officers It may also be recommended to students attending officer- commissioning schools and to those attending university extension courses in Marxism-Leninism (Author)

Vietnamization: can it work?

Abstract: THE uneasy public quiet on Vietnam which the President achieved with his speech last November 3 was shattered by the large-scale U.S. military intervention in eastern Cambodia. Once more U.S. policy in Southeast Asia became the subject of major controversy. In this situation there is some danger that we shall become so caught up in the immediate issues that we neglect more fundamental questions with respect to current American strategy. The new actions are a product of a basic fault in the structure of U.S. policy but do not, by them selves, define that fault. In his November 3 speech the President offered a strategy based upon the twin approach of negotiations and Vietnamiza tion of the war, accompanied by withdrawals of American forces. He was pessimistic about the outlook for negotiations but told us that Vietnamization would permit the United States to disengage from the war even if negotiations failed. In the period since, the United States has further downgraded negotiations as an essential part of any solution. The only subsequent hint that the government might not consider the Vietnamization strategy sufficient by itself was provided by the President's speech on April 20 announcing future troop withdrawals, in which both the volume and tone of his discussion of negotiations implied a recognition that they were important. He stated explicitly that negotiations at least provide "a better, shorter path to peace." But there was no evidence following that speech of a change in the U.S. position in the Paris negotiations, and the President's action in Cambodia 10 days later clearly gave priority to Vietnamiza tion. This priority was reflected in the renewed emphasis upon the use of military means to end the war and in the justification of the Cambodian intervention on the grounds that it was needed to protect American lives and to "guarantee the continued suc cess of our withdrawal and Vietnamization program." The basic question therefore remains: Has the President been right in de-coupling Vietnamization and American troop with drawals from negotiations or are the two strategies essential com plements to each other? The search for an answer to this question must begin with an