Comments for a Symposium on the Comparative Study of Communist Foreign Policies.

摘要

The 1971 regional AAASS symposium for which the papers presented here were originally prepared asked the authors to address themselves to three questions with regard to the comparative study of Communist foreign policies: (1) why should we compare; (2) what should we compare; and (3) how should we compare. The papers before us are long on why arguments, short on 'what' recommendations, and tell us almost nothing about 'how' to do it. That is perfectly consistent with the difficulty of the respective questions asked. Unfortunately, the future of the comparative Communist foreign policy enterprise depends on the soundness of an integrated, rather than a sequential, answer to those questions.