ABSTRACT
Today’s policymakers, in their understandable preoccupation with Great Power strategies, the rivalries of ideologies and national passions, the problems of nuclear proliferation, and the like—all of which are their more immediate concerns—risk losing sight of changes in underlying contexts. These contexts are today necessarily more sociological than technological, more diffuse and difficult to define. This chapter presents an effort to sketch the broad socioeconomic context which, at its loosest, will constrain policymakers and pose, in direct form, as yet unresolved dilemmas. The existing political structures no longer match the underlying economic and social realities, and just as disparities of status and power may be a cause for revolution, so the mismatch of scales may be the source of disintegration.
