Külpolitika - A Magyar Külügyi Intézet elméleti-politikai folyóirata - 1979 (6. évfolyam)

1979 / 4. szám - KÖNYVEKRŐL - Green, Stephen: Nemzetközi segítség katasztrófák esetén

Miklós Kolos: Polish foreign policy and the West in the 1970s

In its major principles the foreign policy of Poland agrees with the foreign policy line of the socialist countries. Developments at home and abroad opened up new options and created new tasks in the 1970s. Poland endeavoured to improve its participation in the international division of labour, intensively enlisting foreign trade and credit policy in the service of development. All this naturally implied considerably more attention to western markets. Foreign policy became more dynamic, making the furthering of socialist construction its permanent task.

Polish-West German contacts were successfully normalized over a number of stages. Poland took an active part in the preparation and work of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Linking up the security of Poland with European security is an important principle of Polish foreign policy. Accordingly the country systematically works for disarmament and the slowing down of the arms race. The country’s broadly based cultural policy also effectively backs foreign policy endeavours.

After describing the major foreign policy line the article demonstrates its implementation at the hand of relations between Poland and four major capitalist countries: France, the United States of America, the Federal Republic of Germany and Great Britain.

Ferenc Gazdag: The French Socialist Party and Western European integration (1971— 1979)

The 1971 new strategy of the French Socialists produced essential changes in their foreign policy ideas as well. Three new aspects can be discerned: a reinterpretation of socialist internationalism, an examination of contemporary imperialism, and of the role of France within the Western European system. The Western European integration has a stressed importance within the Socialist foreign policy. The Party argues that all the opportunities offered by the Common Market should be exploited in the interests of working people. A new Europe-policy thus permits development in the direction of the original model of socialism. French Socialists look to a united Western Europe as essentially occupying the same place between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, as a third power, which socialist ideology wishes to play wedged between communist and bourgeois ways of thinking. Such a Western European integration would, in their view, assure the right wider background for the progress of the French Left.

Within the period under consideration the Socialist Party formulated its position on Western European integration in three separate stages:

between 1971 and 1973, in 1976, and in the second half of 1978, while holding on to the early 1970s slogan: „For a Europe moving towards socialism!” They support direct elections to the European Parliament, as well as the admission of new members to the Common Market.

Though 1979 has been described as the Year of Europe, it has not produced the desired breakthrough for the French Socialist Party, either on the European, or on the domestic front.

János I Szirtes: Foreign policy planning in capitalist countries

Foreign policy planning became general in capitalist countries following the Second World War, the new international conditions having made such a methodological change necessary.

The Foreign Policy Planning Section Department of the State Department was established in 1947, and the most important capitalist countries, such as the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Japan &c. soon followed suit. Smaller capitalist countries, such as Austria and Switzerland, also engaged in foreign policy planning. Such activity also takes place within various international organizations in the Western world. The/relevant section of NATO is called APAG. .—

The purpose of planning is the optimization of decision making. Planners have access to information on the ministerial level, and since they are not concerned with day to day affairs, they have time enough for processing and analysis. Planners everywhere deal with questions of strategy and with working out alternative ways of reaching the designed objectives. Early on planners worked in terms of ten to fifteen year long periods, which diminished to from two to five years in the course of the sixties. Efficiency causes concern. Demands were made which the planners could not possibly satisfy, planners being asked to determine likely future problems and ways of avoiding them with a high degree of certainty. The major cause of difficulties is the absence of a uniform, generally accepted theoretical basis for capitalist foreign policy planning.

Capitalist foreign policy planning is at a low point at present, though the analysis of its general and concrete characteristics is a subject which demands ongoing continuous attention.

Tamás Lovassy: Apartheid within the present system of international relations

Apartheid is rightly reckoned the crime of the century, an obvious anachronism in the present system of international relations. The article presents the process which gave birth to apartheid and racial discrimination; its legal mechanism in the Republic of South Africa and in Rhodesia, at the hand of a number of particularly

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