Moscow, International Relations Publishing House, 1976, 287 p. Circulation 8000. Price 1 rub. 22 kopecks.

Imaginology (from the English "image" - image, stereotype) is a new direction in Western historiography, sociology, political science, the science of international relations and economics. However, if attempts at imaginological approaches-especially to international problems-are only a few years old, the phenomena that serve as the subject of research are as old as the ancient art of diplomacy itself. Indeed, any form of foreign policy activity, in particular actions taken in response to the actions of another state, is always mediated by the prevailing ideas about this counterparty, about its potential capabilities - resources, intentions and plans, the value and reliability of its friendship or the danger that can be exposed because of its hostile position.

The real international situation must first pass through the minds of those on whom foreign policy decisions depend, before the decisions themselves can be made and implemented. The question of the adequacy of the reflection of the realities of international life in the minds of the ruling circles of a particular country is much more complicated. Class subjectivism often minimizes even the ability of generally astute bourgeois politicians to acquire sound ideas and to make sober judgments about certain aspects of international reality. For a researcher of international relations, it is extremely important to understand the operation of a "mechanism" that has class roots and often unconscious distortions in the consciousness of real reality. Very significant in this mechanism are foreign policy stereotypes, i.e. stable ideas about another country, its economic and military potential, socio-political system, the goals that its government sets for itself in the international arena, the diplomatic strategies and tactics it uses, etc. Stereotypes, if they correctly reflect reality, can serve as useful guidelines for assessing the course and individual diplomatic steps of a particular state, otherwise they become the basis for incorrect assessments and can lead away from the path of realism.

Why is there a growing interest in stereotypes in the West these days? As is well known, a characteristic feature of modern world development is the rapid expansion of political, foreign economic, scientific and cultural ties, the strengthening of the influence of interstate contacts on the internal socio-political development of countries, and at the same time the increasing influence of the masses on the sphere of international relations. All this taken together makes us pay special attention to the ideas that the ruling classes affirm about other states and which directly or indirectly affect the formation of their foreign policy attitudes and specific decisions taken by governments and diplomatic departments. The appeal to the problem of foreign policy stereotypes is no less caused by the consequences of the changing balance of power on the world stage. The growing power of world socialism and the strengthening of the positions of developing countries limit the possibility of using "traditional" methods of economic and military pressure by imperialism, and reduce the effectiveness of the usual forms of diplomatic maneuvering. Western powers have to carefully weigh the socio-psychological and ideological consequences of their actions. Comprehensive accounting and the ability to manipulate such "weightless" factors are becoming an increasingly important part of modern diplomatic art.

Along with these main reasons for increasing attention in the West to the role of foreign policy stereotypes, the subjectivist methodological foundations of bourgeois social studies also lead to an undue inflating of the role of stereotypes. The ideological vices of the works of bourgeois imaginologists are convincingly shown in the book by L. A. Zak, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Chief researcher of the IMEMO of the USSR Academy of Sciences, who has done a great deal of critical study, comparison and summation of what has been done by Western political science in the field of foreign policy research.-

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political stereotypes. His monograph contains a concise but very" capacious " essay on the emergence and evolution of the imaginological direction in various social disciplines. However. the task set by the author is by no means limited to identifying what has been achieved by Western science in this area, It is only one aspect of the book, and it is far from the main one.. Following the Marxist tradition, L. A. Zak seeks to combine criticism of the untenable constructions of bourgeois theorists, convincing polemics with them, and scrupulous identification of what is in their works that can be critically used in the research practice of our international scientists. And although the rational grain turns out to be perhaps not so large, it is still far from useless, and, most importantly, its value increases dramatically taking into account the important observations and conclusions that L. A. comes to. A. Zak, turning to the direct analysis of the foreign policy stereotypes themselves, and which make up the most significant part of the monograph in scientific terms. It pays considerable attention to methodological issues related to the study of foreign policy stereotypes from Marxist-Leninist positions, identifying those aspects of these stereotypes that are of the greatest interest and should first attract the attention of our scientists.

The author's attempt to define the main scientific concepts that a researcher of foreign policy stereotypes should use is very fruitful. Among them, of course, the diplomatic stereotype is of particular importance as the main category of imaginology and international relations. L. A. Zak convincingly reveals the content of this category and its relationship with other scientific concepts of the imaginological series. "The diplomatic stereotype," he notes, " is formed on the basis of many different, sometimes contradictory data and is itself a set of ideas about various aspects of the activities of a particular state. At the same time, it is sometimes perceived and even hypertrophied far from its most essential features. A stereotype can lag behind reality or outstrip it " (p. 81). L. A. Zak traces objective class reasons that cause a significant deformation of diplomatic stereotypes, which in turn often lead to far-reaching consequences for foreign policy. The book highlights the class character of stereotypes ignored by bourgeois sociology and political science. Identifying the class roots of stereotypes allows the author to raise the question of the existence of class variants of the diplomatic stereotype, especially the diplomatic stereotypes of countries with a different socio-political system.

Analyzing various aspects of the category of diplomatic stereotype, L. A. Zak proves the expediency of distinguishing between " stereotypes of representations "(for which the concept of" image "is acceptable as a synonym) and" stereotypes of action", as well as establishing the relationship between these two types of stereotypes.

The author enters yet another new and unexplored area when he sets out to investigate the" impact on the stereotype", in other words, the efforts that a given state makes to maintain a certain (beneficial)image of the state. the stereotype of this state in other countries. Of course, in practice, these efforts are closely intertwined. with actions aimed at solving other tasks. However, the theoretical analysis is intended to isolate among the various goals pursued by diplomacy, often eluding the attention of researchers concerns about maintaining the" necessary " stereotype. In the history of international relations, it has happened that imperialist powers (for example, fascist states) sought to take advantage of the benefits that the perception of them as aggressive countries created (for blackmail, intimidation of counterparties, etc.). Drawing on the material of the diplomatic history of recent years, L. A. Zak also shows the efforts that various imperialist powers made to influence the situation in the world. on the stereotype of another state in third countries (in particular, to distort the image of the Soviet Union). It is of undoubted scientific and practical interest to study what actions and under what conditions have the most effective impact on the stereotype.

The author presents a comprehensive analysis of the problem of correlation between the worldview of various social classes and diplomatic stereotypes. In this regard, another very important and unexplored problem in the literature is highlighted - the correspondence and inconsistency of stereotypes with each other.-

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principles of diplomacy and propaganda. The reader will also find in the book a question about the influence of diplomatic stereotypes on the process of making foreign policy decisions, about the role of stereotypes in the development and outcome of international conflicts. The final chapter highlights the complex and controversial process of changing Western diplomatic stereotypes under the influence of international detente.

L. A. Zak managed to avoid the temptation, which is often subject to researchers who go through the scientific "virgin land", to absolutize the meaning of those issues that serve as the subject of their research. He is not inclined to exaggerate the significance of the socio-psychological factor to the detriment of analyzing the role of the decisive objective conditions of international life. Soberly assessing the possibilities inherent in the imaginological approach, L. A. Zak emphasizes that it is necessary to accurately determine its important, but nevertheless undoubtedly subordinate place within the whole complex of research techniques used by Marxist science, based on the methodology of historical materialism (p.261).

It is indisputable that when studying the history of international relations, researchers could not avoid the problem of the influence of the diplomatic stereotype on the foreign policy of a particular country, since the consideration of this problem was strongly dictated by the very logic of the study. It is enough to refer here to the fundamental works of major Soviet scientists, whose research experience is connected with the main stages in the development of our historiography of international relations. Anyone who has read the major study of Academician E. V. Tarle "The Crimean War", of course, remembers the brilliant pages that reveal the impact of the feudal - monarchical worldview of Nicholas I on the formation of distorted ideas about the internal springs of politics and intentions of the bourgeois governments of England and France, ideas that the tsar also consciously tried to support Napoleon III and Palmerston. In the "History of Diplomacy" and other scientific collective works, in works on the diplomatic history of the XIX-XX centuries, in a number of studies of Soviet scientists on the prehistory of the first and Second World Wars, the analysis of specific factual material demonstrates the influence of well-established foreign policy ideas on the behavior of governments and diplomatic departments of various countries in various international situations. It was in the works of Soviet researchers, for example, that it was revealed how much the distorted diplomatic stereotype of England that developed in Wilhelm II and in the ruling circles of Germany as a whole on the eve of the July crisis of 1914 influenced the acceleration of the military explosion.

The study of this aspect of diplomatic history was and still is of great scientific and practical importance. Thus, the First World War was "generated by half a century of development of world capital, its billions of threads" 1 . Among these "threads", diplomatic stereotypes also took their place, which created an extremely inadequate idea of the international reality of that time for a number of statesmen. The "theory of miscalculation", based on a false diplomatic stereotype, appears in many Western works on the prehistory of the Second World War, the emergence of which is sometimes attributed to the misconceptions and miscalculations of Hitler and Chamberlain regarding the intentions of the counterparty in the last days of August 1939. Exaggerating the role of the diplomatic stereotype can also lead away from understanding the deep socio-economic class roots of international conflicts, just as underestimating this role inevitably leads away from understanding some of the "threads" that directly lead to the emergence of crisis situations and determine the specifics of their development. "Excessive exaggeration of the significance of the psychological factor," L. A. Zak rightly notes, " to the detriment of the analysis of the role of the decisive objective conditions of international life, class interests and the ideology of the ruling classes left a clear imprint on bourgeois imaginology. The sphere of diplomacy often appears in imaginological studies almost as an independent closed area, detached from the objective socio-economic and class relations that gave rise to it and functioning only according to its own laws" (p.260).

It is quite obvious that the absence of the category of the diplomatic stereotype itself and other related concepts in the research tools of international scientists, as well as a reasonable definition of their borders, did not allow for a sufficient assessment of the situation.

1 V. I. Lenin. PSS. Vol. 31, p. 161.

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as much as possible, use the opportunities inherent in the study of the imaginological aspect of international relations. Therefore, the theoretical understanding of this range of issues carried out in the monograph is of both scientific and practical interest, and meets the urgent needs of the development of Marxist historiography of international relations.

In the final section of the book, the author addresses the issue of shifts in Western stereotypes under the influence of defusing international tensions. The decades of the "cold war" were a time of creating many artificial stereotypes, which even when they appeared distorted the actual state of affairs, far from the real reality. At the same time, it was a period of maximum unification of stereotypes based on the extreme distortion and simplification of diplomatic stereotypes of socialist countries that have developed in various Western states. This unification was largely a consequence of the post-war hegemony of the United States in the capitalist world and the consistent imposition by Washington, with all the means at its disposal, of a perverse view of socialist countries that was advantageous to it. Unfortunately, many of these false stereotypes still apply today.

The author notes that the melting of the ice of the "cold war" caused some adjustment of diplomatic stereotypes in the direction of a relatively more objective reflection of certain aspects of the process of modern world development. This partial elimination of the deformations of diplomatic stereotypes of the Cold War period under the influence of objective processes that took place in the world was accompanied by a certain differentiation of the stereotypes themselves. L. A. Zak quite correctly emphasizes that one of the reasons for this is the conclusions that the peoples themselves draw from the experience of world development in recent years, from the peace-loving foreign policy of socialism. The ever-increasing influence of the broad masses of the people on foreign policy affects, albeit indirectly, the change in diplomatic stereotypes. However, the process of ousting distortions and layers of the Cold War period from Western stereotypes under the influence of detente, as the author notes, is not straightforward, as is the development of the detente of international tension itself. Positive changes in Western stereotypes, which make them a relatively more realistic reflection of modern world development, are difficult to intertwine with the changes that are being made to these stereotypes under the pressure of the most reactionary circles of imperialism and the military-industrial complex. Such changes, the author writes, are reduced to attempts to superficially update old stereotypes, adapt them to changing reality, while preserving everything essential in the same content. Such "modernization" can be reduced to a complete distortion of the actual processes of development, which is presented "upside down" (p. 249). Unfortunately, it is stated in the monograph, sometimes we have to observe cases of "backsliding" - the expulsion from Western stereotypes of more realistic ideas and sober assessments of reality that have already been embedded in them, and the restoration of dilapidated stereotypes that contributed to clinging to a bankrupt policy "from a position of strength". We can only hope that it is not these zigzags that are decisive, and that the gradual reduction of distortions in stereotypes that contradict the obvious realities of our time will continue. After all, the changes that are taking place in the direction of foreign policy realism are ultimately a reflection of the objective processes of modern world development. The peer-reviewed monograph is the first Marxist study on an important and unexplored aspect of diplomatic history and the art of diplomacy prepared at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the USSR Academy of Sciences. It is organically connected with the work of a large team of scientists of this research center. In the work of L. A. Zak, a number of problems are posed. Naturally, some of them could be solved only in general, basic terms, while others may become a topic for special research. Of course, but everything in such a multi-faceted work, which touches on new and complex problems, seems indisputable. The author himself admits that some of his proposed solutions are controversial. But on the whole, his book is a valuable contribution to our literature on the theory of international relations.

Corresponding Member of the AI of the USSR V. G. Trukhanovsky

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