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Political Forces In Asia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Extract

THE POLITICAL SCIENTIST WHOSE MAIN INTEREST LIES IN ASIA OR Africa has to avoid impaling himself upon the twin horns of an analytical dilemma. If he seeks to place his subject within the general framework of political theory he finds that it is difficult to avoid accepting Asian politics as a sub-species of Western politics. But if he insists upon the uniqueness of his own subject then he can expect to achieve an explanation of a ‘rose is a rose is a rose’ variety. Almond and Coleman in The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton, 1960) set us off in pursuit of ‘political development’ and ‘modernization’. Many of us rejected a view of politics as a continuum in which the Asian world was presented as entering the mainstream of political development insofar as its members were assimilating to the model of ‘competitive politics’ – which, on closer examination, turned out to be the Anglo-American model – though Almond and Coleman did not go quite so far as to insist that the goal, the promised land of political development, was a two-party system.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1969

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References

1 Finance and World Power; a Political Commentary, by Young, George K., London, 1968, pp. 146, 169.Google Scholar

2 Ibid, pp. 169–70.

3 But see Clinard, M. B., Slums and Community Development, New York, 1966 Google Scholar; McGee, T. G., The South East Asian City, London, 1967 Google Scholar; and Tinker, H., ‘The City in Asia’, Reorientations, London, 1965.Google Scholar

4 Segal, Ronald., The Crisis of India, London, 1965, p. 135.Google Scholar

5 Quoted in Blake, Robert., Disraeli, London, 1966, p. 482.Google Scholar

6 The ‘extended’ Indian attitude to citizenship does not include emigrants from India (i. e. the present Republic of India) who have settled in East Africa and acquired or inherited the status of British subjects, or British protected persons.

7 In addition, Japan has territorial claims to the Ryukyus, actively pursued with the United States, and residual claims in Sakhalin which might be activated if ever circumstances became propitious.