Are the military coups that have shaken Africa recently simply a working-out of personal animosities, are they due to chance, or are they the result of something inherent in the very nature of present-day African political systems? It is to questions such as these that this article is addressed, and to which it seeks to provide tentative answers. Further, if, as will be argued here, the African coups result from something inherently systemic, what conclusions can be drawn at present about Africa's future political development?

The concrete lessons of recent history have helped us to appreciate the paramount importance of the political preconditions of social and economic development in the new states. The basic problem of political stability must be solved before all others—or everything else may be in vain. For this reason, some of the scholarly attention that used to be focused on social and economic development has shifted to political organization and has given prominence to terms such as “nation-building,” “political culture,” and “democratization.”

Hans Morgenthau's political realism has led him to the conclusion that there can be no permanent peace without a world state. But, he says, there can be no world government until there is world community, and a sense of world community cannot form unless national decision-makers resolve or ameliorate world tensions through a return to a wise diplomacy.

The expectation that a customs union in Europe will ultimately lead to political unification is based on the so-called spillover effect. This effect operates whenever any step toward integration creates new needs and fresh demands to proceed further in the same direction. Thus a customs union may create pressures to integrate not only commodity markets but capital markets as well. An integration of capital markets in turn may necessitate currency unification for its effective functioning, and a unified currency finally may imply a pooling of sovereignties sufficiently complete to destroy the separate identities of the participating nation-states. The process could also work in the opposite direction: from an insistence on the integrity of the nation-state to an ultimate rejection of the customs union itself.

Until recently many political scientists tended to regard violent civil conflict as a disfigurement of the body politic, neither a significant nor a proper topic for their empirical inquiries. The attitude was in part our legacy from Thomas Hobbes's contention that violence is the negation of political order, a subject fit less for study than for admonition. Moreover, neither the legalistic nor the institutional approaches that dominated traditional political science could provide much insight into group action that was regarded by definition as illegal and the antithesis of institutionalized political life.

Schwarz's study Vom Reich zur Bundesrepublik is, in the opinion of this reviewer, the single most important book on the occupation studyperiod in Germany after World War II that has yet appeared. It is not an ordinary narrative history—indeed, it presupposes a good deal of prior knowledge—but is rather a topical analysis of the following problems: the various possible solutions to the German question in the years after 1945; the policies toward Germany of the four victorious powers—Russia, France, Britain, and the United States; the development of German attitudes on the future political orientation of one or two Germanies; and finally, the factors that led to the voluntary acceptance of Western integration by most West Germans even though this integration meant the partition of Germany.

The case study method, which despite the behavioral revolution is still the most popular method for studying political phenomena, continually confronts its practitioners with the necessity of solving the micro-macro, or levels-of-analysis problem. On the one hand, one can literally study a “case” in the most narrowly delimited way, risking no incautious generalizations but courting triviality.

Western observers of Soviet life have been apt to construe Soviet historiography as a political barometer. The character of statements rather than the events purportedly described by them has been the object of study. The tendentiousness of Soviet historical writing —its distortions and its employment of such elusive concepts as “relations of production”—have been not so much obstacles to investigation as they have been its subject matter.

In reading the two books under review, I was reminded of Senator Fulbright's book The Arrogance of Power—or at least of the title. Each of these two works, also dealing with the relationships of the United States to the less developed world, but each making a different point, can be summed up in a similar substantive phrase: Geiger's thesis would be “The Humility of Ignorance”; Kaplan's, “Commitment to Responsibility.”