The Five Worlds of Detente

As the East-West bipolarity of the cold war has blurred in the “age of detente,” we have been searching for a new conceptual image for world politics. Men have always devised conceptual images to help them arrange and manage the complex data and forces of the world; being suddenly without one is unnerving.

Recently a new, simplified concept was offered to replace East (Communist)-West (non-Communist). Rotating their lens ninety degrees, men found a North (rich)-South (poor) syndrome (hardly a polarity). Unfortunately, the new North-South syndrome is afflicted with the same weakness as the old East-West ideological bipolarism: it is too narrow. Just as “Communist-non-Communist” takes no account of wide variations in culture and development, so does “rich North-poor South” omit the cleavage between Communist and non-Communist nations, which has not been dissolved, either by detente or by Helsinki or by the discovery and proclamation of the North-South syndrome. However, when dovetailed together, the usefulness of these two concepts increases geometrically.

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Norman B. Hannah

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As the East-West bipolarity of the cold war has blurred in the “age of detente,” we have been searching for a new conceptual image for world politics. Men have always devised conceptual images to help them arrange and manage the complex data and forces of the world; being suddenly without one is unnerving.

Recently a new, simplified concept was offered to replace East (Communist)-West (non-Communist). Rotating their lens ninety degrees, men found a North (rich)-South (poor) syndrome (hardly a polarity). Unfortunately, the new North-South syndrome is afflicted with the same weakness as the old East-West ideological bipolarism: it is too narrow. Just as “Communist-non-Communist” takes no account of wide variations in culture and development, so does “rich North-poor South” omit the cleavage between Communist and non-Communist nations, which has not been dissolved, either by detente or by Helsinki or by the discovery and proclamation of the North-South syndrome. However, when dovetailed together, the usefulness of these two concepts increases geometrically.