International stratification and underdeveloped countries

For many years the international relations field in political science was devoted to legal and other studies predicated on the sover eign equality of states. But stud ies oriented in this manner be came increasingly characterized by lack of realism and by naïveté. Hans Morgenthau, in Politics among Nations, attempted a ma jor breakthrough, shortly after World War II, in the develop ment of the concept of power as the explanatory principle under lying the inequalities in the actual relations between the sov ereign members of the interna tional community.

Now Professor Lagos offers another important breakthrough in a provocative, new analytical framework for the study of inter national relations. International Stratification and Underdevel oped Countries goes beyond the concept of power and studies the structure of relations among na tions as a stratified system in terms of economic, prestige, and power variables that determine relative superiority and inferior ity. Underdeveloped nations have suffered a loss of status as a con sequence of their comparison with the developed countries, and this position of inferiority is in open contradiction to the equali tarian ideology that assumes all nations to have equal rights, ea pacities, and duties. The inter national stratification approach regards the international rela tions of underdeveloped coun tries as systems of action aimed toward improving the real status of the nation. Professor Lagos identifies some of the fundamen tal typologies of international actions in the three basic strati fication variables. He employs data classified according to the typologies as an empirical refer ence upon which to build a model of an international grand strat egy of the underdeveloped nation attempting to react against its low international status.

If the international stratifica tion approach supersedes the power approach, as well it may, the reasons will be that Profes sor Lagos has developed a more viable theory than Morgenthau and that he offers us a system atic method of examining in ternational problems that are peculiar to the 1960's.