according to factors such as class and education, even within the countries that
most nearly approached the ideal ofliberal democracy. More to the point,
Gabriel Almond (b. 1911) and Sidney Verba (b. 1932), the authors ofThe Civic
Culture, found that it varied greatly according to the efficacy and stability of the
democratic regimes surveyed. It was high in the USA and the United King-
dom, relatively low in Italy, and marginal in Mexico (which was not, at the
time, a democracy, but rather a fairly liberal one-party state). However, as
actualpolitical participation rates are everywhere extremely low, it is
unclear that citizens’ perceptions of their political competence mean very
much.
Civil Defence
Civil defence refers to any systematic attempts or plans by governments to limit
civilian casualties and damage to civil property during a war. The first major
civil defence programmes were instituted during the late 1930s, when the
danger of aerial bombardment of European cities became clear. One important
early precaution, in the United Kingdom for example, was the issuing of gas
masks to the entire population at the beginning of the Second World War.
Although no gas attacks were ever made, the idea that civilian populations
could and should be protected against weapons specifically designed for
indiscriminate mass killing was established. A parallel development was the
extensive building of air-raid shelters in the towns, and it is fairly clear that
effective air raid precautions reduced deaths in both Britain and Germany, and
the absence of such a programme resulted in a more severe impact in Japan,
which was heavily bombed by the USA.
Civil defence, however, is not just a humanitarian activity. It can itself be
regarded as a weapon, and certainly has major implications for the military
capacity of the country being attacked. Most theorists of air warfare, including
those most influential in the Second World War, supported ‘strategic’ bombing
campaigns on the grounds that the direct attacks on the civilian population
would destroy morale throughout the enemy’s society, and swiftly bring it to
capitulate. The more one can protect one’s civilians, therefore, the longer one
can fight, thus allowing time for direct military or economic superiority to pay
off. In fact it is now known from post-war surveys that the Allied bombing
offensive did far less damage to German war efforts than had been anticipated,
and the morale factor, while perhaps over-emphasized, was the major one.
With the advent of the nuclear age civil defence became a matter of
considerable debate, and the Western and Eastern powers acted very differently
on the issue. In Britain the official Civil Defence organization was wound
down in the 1960s as government expenditure cuts reduced all forms of
defence expenditure. Although the USA had originally commissioned an
Civil Defence