bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Democracy and Amateurism—the Informed Citizen
Authors: Parry Geraint
Published: April 2007

ALTHOUGH THE PROBLEM OF POLITICAL KNOWLEDGE WAS AT the centre of classical political thought it has been only intermittently addressed in more recent theoretical writings. To the degree that modern political writing has concerned itself with the question of the kind of knowledge appropriate and possible in politics, it has focused on the capacity of core decision-makers to absorb and assess the information presented to them by experts.
Too Much or Too Little Knowledge?
Authors: Gould Julius
Published: April 2007

I HAD THE PRIVILEGElTASK OF ‘CONCLUDING’ THE CONFERENCE at which the articles in this issue of Government and Opposition were originally presented. Now, as then, I can take up only a few of the central issues within the presentations and discussions. My comments seek to underscore the great range of ‘classical’ and ‘contemporary’ questions which the authors address. These include, obviously enough, the nature of knowledge in the social sciences, with the word ‘sciences’ being broadly interpreted -not in any narrow, behavioural sense: the way periods of confidence in such knowledge fostered, and have been fostered by, the perspectives of social democracy: how such confidence has waxed and waned in recent years: how political actors act, even have to act, in advance of data: how modern politics is aided or hindered by the pressures that come from sectional interests — which must now be taken to include the ‘media’ and those who work in or near the ‘think-tanks’ that have proliferated in the last two decades. I do not attempt the impossible — namely any detailed exegesis of all the rich and varied topics that emerged.
Negotiating the Northern Ireland Problem: Track One or Track Two Diplomacy?
Authors: Arthur Paul
Published: April 2007

THE RECENT POLITICAL HISTORY OF NORTHERN IRELAND HAS been punctuated by arrivals and departures as successive secretaries of state have attempted to impose their personalities on an intractable problem through a series of (failed) initiatives. The latest exercise has been under way since the beginning of 1990 and is closely identified with the diplomatic skills exerted by the present Secretary of State, Mr Peter Brooke. In what has been described as ‘potentially the most significant political discussions in all of Ireland since the treaty of 1921’, Mr Brooke has embarked on a voyage which could transcend in importance the Anglo-Irish Agreement of November 1985. The purpose of this article is to put that voyage into some sort of context by suggesting that rather than concentrate solely on the ‘high’ politics of political negotiation, attention needs to be paid to the mechanisms which allow negotiations to proceed. For that reason we will look at the relative merits — and the complementarity — of ‘Track One’ and ‘Track Two’ diplomacy.
Support and Be Supported: Japan’s Strategies of Interdependence
Authors: Dore Ronald
Published: April 2007

READING PROFESSOR INOGUCHI'S SPLENDIDLY COMPREHENSIVE and suggestive account of Japan's external policies as modes of coping with/balancing/sustaining interdependence, I was irresistibly reminded of a phrase I learned in 1950 at the first meeting I attended of our local Tokyo neighbourhood council — the committee of the 300-household precinct where I lodged. I think the issue was the smoke coming out of the chimney of our one and only factory. We did not know then about NOx and SOx, but it ruined the housewives' washing when the wind was in the wrong place, and that was bad enough. In a circumspect speech which reminded us that the factory owner was, also, far and away the largest contributor to the annual shrine festival, a particularly articulate ex-leader of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association preached a little homily on the principle of neighbourliness in a country of densely-packed, cheek-by-jowl communities. Mochitsu motaretsu was his key phrase; the slightly archaic grammar gave it a somewhat venerable weight; support and be supported. And it did not just mean ‘support in order to be supported’. It meant also: ‘don't be deterred from accepting support by a sense of the irksome constraints of dependence. We are all dependent on the community; others too, as much as you. Accept it. It is the community which is your security, not just the indebtedness, or the goodwill, of individual others.’
Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan: Oikonomic Welfare States
Authors: Jones Catherine
Published: April 2007

The ‘LITTLE TIGERS'’ REPUTATION AMONGST WESTERNERS (and for that matter with the Japanese) is rich in negatives. Exploitative, unprincipled, uncontrolled; minimalist on welfare, maximalist on profit: the unacceptable face of capitalism indeed, to those feeling themselves on the receiving end of the Tigers' determination to compete and get rich quick. Nevertheless the image is misleading. These are no chance miracles of laissez-faire capitalism unbound. On the contrary, the rise ‘from nowhere’ to world trading notoriety has to an extent been contrived in every case.
Letter from Germany: Reflections Occasioned by the First East-West German Political Philosophy Meeting
Authors: Thompson Martyn P.
Published: April 2007

ON THE SAME WEEKEND AS EAST GERMANS OFFICIALLY exchanged East Marx for real Marks, another kind of exchange took place between East and West German professors at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Bielefeld. The recently established Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Erforschung des politischen Denkens, in the person of Volker Gerhardt (Cologne), had invited some sixty senior philosophers, political theorists and political scientists from both sides of the inner-German border to discuss basic questions in political philosophy. The meeting was not a conference. The organizer, recognising the absence of any shared traditions of inquiry and debate, had issued invitations to a mere meeting. It was the first such meeting since the collapse of the East German Communist regime. In fact, it offered the first opportunity after almost six decades of dictatorships in the East for academics from the former front-lines, as it were, to reflect openly together on their subject, on their academic pasts and on their possible academic futures. Initially, the atmosphere was very tense. But, amazingly, the tensions soon evaporated. A strange sort of civility came to characterize the discussions both inside and outside the conference rooms. Conflicts were largely avoided, to the obvious relief of most participants. From an inner- German perspective, the meeting was a great success. At the end, Ernst Vollrath (Cologne) summed up a general view: ‘We have begun to see that we can learn from one another.’ But this reciprocity was not evident in the academic discussions. Something else was involved apart from the surface issue of Marxism-Leninism versus the rest of the world. It is worth reflecting on the development of the meeting and on what this something else was.
The International Political Economy of the Communications Revolution: The Case for a Neo‐pluralist Approach
Authors: Humphreys Peter J.
Published: April 2007

THE LAST TWO DECADES HAVE SEEN AN UNPRECEDENTED ‘convergence’ of technological developments in computing, telecommunications and the mass media, an event now referred to collectively as ‘the communications revolution’. At the heart of this revolution lies a Kondratievian cluster of technologies: specifically, the silicon microchip, which has facilitated an increase of several orders of magnitude in information storage and processing capabilities; and advanced telephonic, cable and satellite technologies, which have, again by orders of magnitude, expanded the capacity to transmit information instantaneously. A particular result of the economics of satellite communication is that the costs of accessing data bases and information services have become increasingly unaffected by distance and independent of location. The communications revolution has facilitated development of a world-wide system of computerized financial transactions and has also greatly accelerated globalization of the operations of transnational enterprises engaged in manufacturing, resource exploitation and business service.
Letter from Paris
Authors: Manent Pierre
Published: April 2007

In previous letters from Paris, which Government and Opposition has been kind enough to publish, I do not believe that I erred on the side of complacency about my country. This is why I have less hesitation in writing today that France is at present the victim of a gale of calumny, the intensity and extent of which leaves one bewildered, incredulous and unhappy.

A particular and aggravating circumstance is that these aspersions are believed in, or at least spread, by the French media and the political elite itself. According to them the moral health of France is threatened. It is in danger of being submerged by a wave of racism, of anti-Semitism and even of neo-Nazism. The most implacable vigilance is necessary. This new official doctrine, it must be said, is quite simply absurd.
What Czechoslovakia Expects from Gorbachev
Authors: Šik Ota
Published: April 2007

The People of Czechoslovakia Have Now Risen and are determined — as are the people of other socialist countries — to overthrow the hated party leadership. People like Husak, Jakes, Indra, Fojtik, Hofman and others, came to power with the help of Soviet tanks and have been able to maintain themselves at the top until just recently. Only by means of repressions in the style of Brezhnev have they been able to hold on to power for twenty years. They have built up a system of spying and terror which enabled them to uncover and suppress any development of the opposition in the country. They have systematically distorted the facts of the Prague spring and the erstwhile reform movement with lies and unproven assertions.
Social Change and Party System Stability in Colombia
Authors: Dix Robert H.
Published: April 2007

In August 1989 a Declaration of War On The State by Colombian drug traffickers and the attendant murder of a leading presidential candidate, Liberal Luis Carlos Galgn, seemed to threaten the foundations of democracy itself. Yet as the campaign leading up to the 1990 elections went forward under conditions of extraordinarily tight security, it also appeared that Colombia's two traditional parties would enter the next decade paradoxically still secure in the virtually monopolistic position within the domain of electoral politics that they had held for more than a century.
A Map of Political Participation in Britain
Authors: Parry Geraint , Moyser George
Published: April 2007

WHEREVER ONE TAKES A POSITION IN THE GREAT DEBATE between representative and participatory democrats it is clear that no democracy can function without the involvement of its citizens. What is at issue is the extent and nature of the citizen participation which is thought to be required if a democracy is to be worthy of its name. Whilst this is a fundamentally normative issue, the protagonists on both sides regularly cite evidence as to actual levels of participation and draw inferences from that evidence in support of their contentions.

On the one side are those who assert that in Britain ‘some of the spectators have begun to descend on to the field’; on the other are those who say that ‘the “grass roots” of politics seem shrivelled and starved of the nourishment of participation by the citizens’. For this reason, as Jane Mansbridge has said, ‘field studies of what happens to various ideals when people try to live by them could prove useful in clarifying a wide range of normative questions.
Transition to Democracy—or Anschluss? The Two Germanies and Europe
Authors: von Beyme Klaus
Published: April 2007

TO ANALYSE THE GERMAN QUESTION IN THIS TRANSITORY moment is risky in several respects. The German novelist Martin Walser who underwent a metamorphosis from a fellow traveller of the communists to a German nationalist put it bluntly: ‘He who does not get below his intellectual level when talking about Germany has no intellectual level at all.’ The topic has pitfalls everywhere:

— it is deeply connected with emotions, whatever the view of the writer;

— it is in flux, ‘words are already out of date in your mouth’ as a cynic put it. The increasing number of actors who claim to have a say in the German unification process makes prognosis almost impossible;

— scientific analysis of this unique event lacks concepts. Transition to democracy in a highly penetrated system does not follow the established rules of this branch of knowledge.
Introduction to the series: Science and Politics
Authors: Williams Roger
Published: April 2007

TECHNOLOGY IS ALMOST AS OLD AS MANKIND BUT THE realisation that useful discoveries could be made systematically came only much more recently. This realisation constitutes one of history's most significant bench-marks, it may even be the most significant one. The organization on a massive scale of research and development was an inevitable result, the fruits of scientific and technological development are now ubiquitous, and the economic, social and political ramifications have been and remain profound. About mankind's political evolution, however, its extent and even more its irreversibility, even in these seemingly favourable times, one must continue to be much more cautious.
Letter from the Other Canada
Authors: Laforest Guy
Published: April 2007

LESS THAN TWO YEARS AGO, THE READERS OFGovernment and Oppositionhad reasons to be moderately optimistic concerning the future of our country. If their judgment was based on George Feaver's ‘Letter from Canada’, it appeared prudent to conclude that it was no small achievement for Canada to have persisted as a state in the face of tremendous adversity. These readers may have also trusted some distinguished experts on Canadian history and politics. Donald Smiley recently wrote that he had ’very much over-estimated the strength of Québec nationalism and provincialist influences elsewhere in the country and very much under-estimated the capacity of the system to respond effectively to such divisive pressures’. Smiley's judgment was supported by Kenneth McRoberts: ‘Canada's most serious political crisis, which originated in the political modernization of the Quiet Revolution and saw the election of a Québec government formally committed to Québec sovereignty, appears to have run its course.’
United Kingdom National Security and Defence Dependence: The Technological Dimension
Authors: Edmonds Martin
Published: April 2007

AS RECENT EXPERIENCE IN THE GULF WAR HAS AGAIN confirmed, dependence on foreign supply of military equipment and munitions can lead to an alarming vulnerability. At risk are the national armed forces and their effective prosecution of combat, and since in any military engagement, the place, dimensions, duration, and intensity of battle are not necessarily of their choosing, a second level of salience is added to this risk. A key lesson of the Falklands and Gulf wars, arguably the two most technologically intensive wars to date, is that modern weapons depend crucially on a comprehensive array of logistic support and its timely delivery and reliability.
Letter from America
Authors: Barber Benjamin
Published: April 2007

A favourite American cliché insists that everybody and everything has a price. For the purposes of this letter, that turns out to be rather too true. During the summer and into the autumn of 1990, the United States was consumed with three kinds of prices: the price of art, the Pryce of art and the price of oil which may also be the price of war.
North Korea—Will it be the ‘Great Leader’s’ Turn Next?
Authors: Phipps John
Published: April 2007

OF ALL THE REMAINING COMMUNIST PARTY STATES THE Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) would appear to have the most to fear from the 1989 democratic revolutions that swept Eastern Europe. The regime of Kim I1 Sung remains unmoved and unreformed, but is certainly not unconcerned about the events that have taken place among its former socialist bloc allies. To an outside observer the Pyongyang regime gives the impression of being almost frozen in time, with no real progress having taken place in either the economic or political spheres over the last twenty years. When the Ceauaescu regime in Romania crumbled amid bloodshed in the closing days of the 1980s, many analysts’ attention turned in great expectation to the autocratic regime of the world's longest-serving political leader. The epitaph of the Kim regime was being prepared in earnest. Although the last twelve months have hardly been reassuring for the Kim Regime, communist party rule has been maintained and Kim's personal standing inside North Korea remains intact.
Lenin and the Crisis of Communism: The View from Inside
Authors: Shore Cris
Published: April 2007

THE 1990 MAY DAY PARADE IN MOSCOW'S RED SQUARE provided an extraordinary spectacle of the growing dilemma faced by the Soviet leadership. Mikhail Gorbachev, flanked by members of the Politburo, stood atop the Lenin Mausoleum while below an angry crowd of demonstrators booed, jeered and defiantly waved placards and portraits of opposition politicians. It was an historic occasion, reminiscent of the last days of the CeauSescu regime in Romania. Not since Lenin's day had there been a public demonstration of this kind in Red Square. This was the first time since the Bolshevik Party appropriated the International Labour holiday to celebrate its own power that the May Day parade had been disrupted. The symbolic significance was all too apparent: the key event in the calendar of Soviet political ritual had been visibly wrecked, the communist leadership had appeared weak and isolated, and even at the sacred heartland of Lenin's shrine Gorbachev's authority was being challenged and undermined by an angry Soviet public. From being a symbol of workers’ solidarity and Soviet military might, May Day had become further testimony to the crisis of legitimacy in the Soviet regime.
The Parliamentary Monitoring of Science and Technology in Britain
Authors: Hayter P. D. G.
Published: April 2007

THROUGHOUT THE TWENTIETH CENTURY THE HOUSE OF Lords has been looking for a role. It lost its original power base with the decline in influence of the landed aristocracy and the growth of the party system. At the same time the composition of the House became increasingly difficult to justify; membership based on the accidents of birth no longer seemed an adequate justification for the right to legislate or to overrule the people's elected representatives.

The Parliament Act 1911, which took away the Lords' absolute right to veto legislation, promised reform. But nothing happened. In 1968 the Labour government introduced a reform bill. It failed, the victim of assaults from Left and Right in the House of Commons.
Political Pacts, Liberalism, and Democracy: The Tunisian National Pact of 1988
Authors: Anderson Lisa
Published: April 2007

MOST OF WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE ROLE OF POLITICAL pacts and pact-making in developing democracy is based on transitions from exclusionary authoritarian regimes in Europe and Latin American. This is not surprising; most political pacts have been concluded in Europe and Latin America, as political and economic elites have attempted to extricate themselves from the ruins of war or the reigns of tyrants. Increasingly, however, pacts have been used elsewhere as devices to mark political transitions of other kinds. In the Arab world, for example, the ultimately unhappy fate of Lebanon's 1943 National Pact, which provided the framework of a transition to independence, did not deter pact-makers in Tunisia in 1988 from using the device in what they hoped would be a transition from a single-party regime to a more pluralist democracy.
Studies on North Africa–Introduction to A New Series
Authors: Gellner Ernest
Published: April 2007

The shadow of islamic fundamentalism hovers over all of North Africa, notwithstanding the profound differences between the historic fates of the various Maghrebin countries.

Algeria suffered by far the longest and most disruptive colonial period, In fact, Algeria had been colonized by the Ottoman empire before it had begun its French colonial period in 1830. A prolonged and brutal war of conquest was eventually followed by the establishment of a large European population, which acquired effective local political control under the Third Republic. Result: pre-colonial social institutions were largely destroyed, and Algerian society consisted mainly of a pulverized and oppressed rural proletariat. There were exceptions: a Muslim bourgeoisie survived in some centres such as Tlemsen, Constantine and even Algiers itself vigorous local institutions survived in the Berber hills and a few other places. But all in all, one could say that there were neither traditional institutions nor any Algerian nation.
Morocco’s Fundamentalists
Authors: Munson Henry
Published: April 2007

Morocco has a number of islamic movements that demand the establishment of a truly Islamic society. Most of them sprouted up in the 1970s and caused considerable anxiety in the immediate aftermath of the Iranian revolution. But these movements have proven to be less powerful than was once feared — or hoped. After describing the main tendencies represented by these groups, I shall suggest some possible reasons for their political inefficacy.
Israeli Democracy at the Crossroads: A Crisis of Non-governability
Authors: Barzilai Gad , Shain Yossi
Published: April 2007

THROUGHOUT THIS CENTURY, THE STRUGGLE FOR AND consolidation of Jewish territorial sovereignty in the ancient Land of Israel has been characterized by two complementary processes: waves of Jewish immigration from throughout the diaspora, and a succession of violent conflicts with Israel's Arab neighbours. Both of those processes were at work during 1990 — 91 when Israel became reluctantly involved in the Gulf war while also having to cope with an influx of hundreds of thousands of Jews seeking escape from the crumbling Soviet empire, as well as a few thousand emigrants from Ethiopia and from South America. For many Israelis, the surrealistic spectacle of immigrants being greeted at Ben-Gurion Airport with gas-masks designed to protect them from the Iraqi Scud missiles raining down on major Israeli cities, represented highly dramatic evidence of the fulfilment of Zionism's aspirations.
The End of Communist Rule in East-Central Europe: A Four-Country Comparison
Authors: Batt Judy
Published: April 2007

This article compares the patterns of breakdown of communist rule and the processes by which power was transferred to new ruling groups in four countries: Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the GDR. In the countries covered in this paper, two paths to systemic crisis and breakdown are identified: the path of failed reform in Hungary and Poland, and the path of intransigent resistance to reform in Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic. The lesson of the Czechoslovak and East German experience was clearly that those regimes which totally rejected reform, because they saw it as incompatible with communist power, faced total and rapid collapse when confronted with the challenge of Gorbachev's perestroika and when deprived of the support of the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’; but the experience of Poland and Hungary suggests that those regimes which embarked on reform were no more successful in preserving communist power — half-way reform turned out in many ways to be even worse than no reform at all, while radical reform, that is, reform which would bring about the intended economic results, in the end could not be achieved without sweeping away communist power. Gorbachev himself now seems to be impaled on the horns of this same dilemma in the Soviet Union.
The Approach of British Political Parties to a Defence Role for the European Community
Authors: Keohane Dan
Published: April 2007

THE ISSUES OF DEFENCE AND EUROPE DID NOT PLAY A prominent part in the UK general election campaign of March-April 1992. One of the reasons was that public opinion polls throughout the campaign indicated consistently that domestic issues came first with the electorate. Secondly, with the disappearance of the Soviet threat and the restoration of consensus between the parties on nuclear weapons, defence was not a sufficiently contentious subject for it to be a central topic in the campaign. It was no surprise, however, that the Conservative Manifesto claimed that defence would not be safe in the hands of the opposition parties and that their policies would result in huge job losses in the defence sector.
Sliding Towards EC Membership: Norway in Scandinavian Perspective
Authors: Svåsand Lars , Lindström Ulf
Published: April 2007

THIS ARTICLE ADDRESSES THE PROBLEM OF NORWEGIAN membership in the EC. Why is it so difficult for Norway to follow in the tracks of Sweden and Finland, and for that matter the rest of Western Europe?

The changes on the European continent since the collapse of the East-West divide have also altered the political agenda in the Scandinavian countries. The ambitions of the EC-internal market as well as the Single European Act speeded up a discussion of how Finland, Norway and Sweden should position themselves in order not to lose out economically and become marginalized politically. In Norway, the traumatic EC debate in 1972 had split the country, and the parties, into two camps, resulting in the rejection of EC membership by 53 per cent of the electorate. Since then, the issue has been absent from political debate. In Finland and Sweden the official rationale for not discussing the issue disappeared simultaneously with the regimes in Eastern Europe, suddenly pushing the topic onto the political agenda, causing an abrupt change in Swedish EC policy.
Crisis, Choice, and Changein Retrospect
Authors: Almond Gabriel A. , Flanagan Scott C. , Mundt Robert J.
Published: April 2007

THE ‘NEW INSTITUTIONALISM’ HAS BEEN THE MOST VISIBLE movement in American political science during the last decade. It is a recoil from reductionism that is said to have dominated the political science of the previous decades. During the American Political Science Association presidency of Charles E. Lindblom in 1981, with Theodore Lowi and Sidney Tarrow as co-chairs of the Program Committee, it was decided that all titles of panels and round tables at the annual meeting were to have ‘and the state’ tacked on. The implication was that the behavioural revolution had resulted in the neglect of the power and autonomy of the state. But this adding on ‘and the state’ had very little effect on the content of the papers, and seemed primarily to have ‘buzzword’ significance. A second manifestation of this discomfort was an article in theAmerican Political Science Reviewof 1984 by James March and Johan Olsen, entitled ‘The New Institutionalism; The Organizational Factor in Political Life’, followed by a book by the same two authors calledRediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics.
The Algerian State and the Challenge of Democracy
Authors: Roberts Hugh
Published: April 2007

THE PUBLIC REACTION OF WESTERN GOVERNMENTS AND commentators to the suspension of the electoral process in Algeria following President Chadli's resignation on 11 January was profoundly mixed. Relief at the fact that Algeria was not about to become ‘a second Iran’ very quickly gave way to disapproval of the manner in which this prospect had been conjured away at the last moment, as numerous leader writers in London and Paris and no doubt elsewhere indulged themselves in vigorous criticism of what they had not hesitated to call a ‘military coup’.
Reflections on the Maastricht Treaty
Authors: Noël Emile
Published: April 2007

The Conclusions Reached at the meeting of the European Council in Maastricht, on 9 — 10 December 1991, on economic and monetary union and also on political union, form an impressive and complex whole, in which undertakings of major importance coexist with other more timid ones. A detailed analysis would overstep the limits of an article. Moreover, there are still some problems to be cleared up before the final drafts are agreed, even if the principal political decisions have already been taken. The remarks which I would like to submit here will therefore deal more with general questions, and I will limit myself to the more significant provisions of the Maastricht agreements.
Science, Technology and the Large Corporation
Authors: Wilks Stephen
Published: April 2007

ECONOMIC HISTORY IS FAR REMOVED FROM PRECISE SCIENCE and cannot offer an unambiguous explanation of the initiation, pace and causes of rapid industrial growth. Nevertheless, few economic historians would disagree that the pattern of growth is not random; and that in evaluating it, technological innovation must be a central element.

The landmarks of industrial development are conventionally thought of in terms of science and technology. From the adoption of the stirrup and the plough, which heralded the feudal age in Europe; to the spread of the silicon chip and the microprocessor, which lie at the core of the emergent IT economy, the development of society can be charted in terms of technological change. And just as the analysis of technological change has become one of the dominant tools of the economic historian, so ‘futurology’ is centred around trajectories of innovation. Over the next century changes are projected which are just as profound as those experienced since 1890. The world of 2090 will be different, and while the fundamental political differences may be unpredictable, there is a presumption that it will be technologically very different from the present. It is appropriate that popular speculation about future society is termed not ‘future fiction’ but ‘science fiction’.
Letter from Argentina
Authors: Di Tella Torcuato S.
Published: April 2007

STRANGE AS IT MAY SEEM, ARGENTINIANS ARE SLOWLY getting accustomed to stability, both economic and political, and to a guarded optimism about their future. Not that optimism is difficult to come by in these shores. On the contrary, despite melancholy tango lyrics, national spirits are quite ready to rocket to the skies, only to fall with greater momentum from those heights at the next difficulty. What is new is not optimism, but its guarded, and I would say for once justified nature.
Perspectives for Transnational Social Policy
Authors: de Swaan Abram
Published: April 2007

WELFARE STATES ARE NATIONAL STATES, AND IN EVERY country welfare is a national concern, circumscribed by the nation's borders and reserved for its residents alone. In the course of centuries, these states have emerged from and against one another, in mutual competition, and in the past century this process of state formation in the West went in tandem with the collectivization of care. The welfare state is the national state in its latest phase. It may be succeeded by another stage which we may eventually see.
Equality versus Solidarity
Authors: Spicker Paul
Published: April 2007

THE PRINCIPLE OF ‘SOLIDARITY’ IN FRANCE HAS COME TO stand for a justification of social policy in terms of the protection of mutual interests. In the literature of social policy, ‘solidarity’ refers to the establishment of collective action and recognition of mutual responsibility. The principle is often related to egalitarian policies; but the prescriptions of ‘solidarity’ may tend in a very different direction to policies which pursue equality. Equality and solidarity are not necessarily incompatible objectives, but as commonly understood, there is a tension between them which means that each might undermine the other.
Letter From America: The 1994 Elections—Herbert Hoover Redux?
Authors: Barber Benjamin R.
Published: April 2007

READERS OF GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION WILL NOT BE strangers to the events of November that led to a crushing defeat for the Democrats and the first all-Republican Congress in a very long time, if for no other reason than that they have read my colleague Harvey Mansfield's account in the winter issue. There was quite a lot of conservative gloating in November and December (and why not?). There is a little less now that the Gingrich revolution has begun to face up to the two dauntingly unalterable realities of American politics: the reality of the centre and the reality of divided government.
Canadian Political Arithmetic: Quebec, and Canada, after Charlottetown
Authors: Feaver George
Published: April 2007

CANADIAN POLITICAL ARITHMETIC IS A TRICKY BUSINESS. IN Canadian politics, as in Alice's Wonderland, things become ‘curiouser and curiouser’. In suggesting, on the eve of the October, 1993 Canadian federal election, that it looked like ‘the Liberals’ election to lose’, I thought I had gone out on a limb. Brian Mulroney, who by the date of his departure was regarded throughout English Canada with almost universal antipathy, had retired. With their new leader, Prime Minister Kim Campbell, at the helm, polls published at the time the election was called indicated that the ruling Conservatives were favoured by 36 per cent of leaning and decided voters, as compare to 33 per cent for the Liberals. The Tories could win, or at least deny the liberals a clear majority.
Social Justice in Europe: An Evaluation of European Regional Policy
Authors: Bufacchi Vittorio , Garmise Shari
Published: April 2007

WHEN RAWLS FORMULATED HIS VIEWS ON SOCIAL JUSTICE IN the 1950s and 1960s, leading to the publication of ATheory of Justicein 1971, he based his theory on a simple but unconditional assumption, namely, that justice is the first virtue of social institutions. This assumption Rawls considers to be beyond doubt, so much so that in the very first page of his treatise he claims that ‘laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust’.

Largely as a result of Rawls's ATheory of Justice, over the last 25 years questions of social justice have dominated most debates on political theory. And while vast quantities of ink were expended over philosophical discussions on significant but detailed aspects of Rawls's theory, principally on the plausibility of his meta h sical assumptions on individuals and human psychology, it is unfortunate that not enough attention has been paid to Rawls's initial recommendation of adopting normative criteria as a tool for evaluating political institutions.
La France pour tous?—The French Presidential Elections of 23 April and 7 May 1995
Authors: Cole Alistair
Published: April 2007

JACQUES CHIRAC WAS ELECTED FIFTH PRESIDENT OF THE FRENCH Fifth Republic on 7 May 1995. After 21 years, a politician claiming the Gaullist mantle is once again the occupant of the Elysée Palace. The spontaneous demonstration of countless thousands of Chirac supporters in the Place de la Concorde on the evening of the 7 May was sweet revenge for a candidate who had previously failed on two occasions to secure election, in 1981 and 1988 against the Socialist François Mitterrand. Like the former President, Chirac was elected on his third attempt. Like Mitterrand, President Chirac possesses the necessary presidential attributes of perseverance in adversity, a willingness to learn from past mistakes, and the support of a powerful political party.
Pareto's Concept of Demagogic Plutocracy
Authors: Femia Joseph
Published: April 2007

DESPITE HIS STATUS AS A FOUNDER OF MODERN SOCIAL SCIENCE, Pareto receives little scholarly attention. In particular, his penetrating discussion of ‘demagogic plutocracy’ (his term for the liberal state) has been strangely ignored by analysts of Western, or ‘bourgeois’, democracy. While Marx's scattered and inconsistent remarks on ‘the capitalist state’ have spawned a vast literature, Pareto is lucky to be acknowledged in a footnote. Consider the exemplary case of David Held, a theorist of great repute, who managed to write a 321 page textbook calledModels of Democracywithout once mentioning Pareto's name. Why has Pareto been ‘put in quarantine’? One reason is surely the irritating nature of his master-work,Treatise of General Sociology(published in 1916). Even his admirers describe this work as ‘monstrous’ – disorganized, unnecessarily long, full of pedantic distinctions, and continually interrupted by digressions, and by digressions within digression. He never missed an opportunity to break the thread of exposition in order to pursue some bright idea or display his arcane erudition. But a fuller explanation of Pareto's ‘quarantine’ requires us to look at the social psychology of intellectuals.
Future Prospects for Europe
Authors: Noël Emile
Published: April 2007

BEFORE WE CAN BEGIN TO EXAMINE THE PROSPECTS FOR Europe's future, we must acknowledge that, for three years now, the European Community (or rather, the European Union) has been in a state of latent, but nonetheless profound, crisis. The problems surrounding the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty revealed this crisis but its roots go much deeper. We have all experienced its manifestations: 1) an economic and social crisis, in the form of the currency upheavals of 1992–93 and the rise in unemployment; 2) a political crisis, following the failures of the European Union in the former Yugoslavia and its complete absence from the scene in Rwanda; 3) an institutional crisis, given the uncertainties posed by the prospect of an enlarged (‘wider’) Europe for the present effective working of the Community, and even for its future in the absence of a clear political will.
The G7 Summit and the Reform of Global Institutions
Authors: Bayne Nicholas
Published: April 2007

IN MY GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION/LEONARD SCHAPIRO lecture in 1993 I attempted an incomplete analysis of international economic relations after the end of the cold war, in particular the unexpected tensions and difficulties. The end of superpower confrontation had not only removed one incentive for Western countries to settle their economic disputes. It had also lowered the priority given to security issues, where national governments were in control, and had exposed their dwindling ability to take economic decisions, because of the extent of the interdependence which was the price paid for their prosperity. I could not think of a single area of domestic policy immune from international influence. Professor Susan Strange has developed a more trenchant analysis of this trend in her Government and Opposition/Leonard Schapiro lecture this year.
Arms Control and Nuclear Safety: The National and International Politics of Russia's Nuclear Arsenal
Authors: Bluth Christoph
Published: April 2007

RUSSIAN FOREIGN POLICY IS STILL IN A STATE OF FLUX. LIKE the other former republics of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation seeks to come to terms with being an independent state needing to define its national interests and foreign and security policy objectives.

The principal element in the new frame of reference for Moscow is the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union itself. For forty years, most of the territories controlled by Moscow were adjacent to territories protected by the United States, or else to China. The Russian Federation is now virtually surrounded by former Soviet republics, all with deep political, social and economic problems, and some of which are highly unstable and subject to violent civil conflicts. The territory of the Russian Federation itself, about 75 per cent of the territory of the former USSR with about 60 per cent of its population, is still not properly defined, given that significant sections of the borders are purely notional, and the degree of control that Moscow can exercise over the entire Federation is uncertain.
Russia at the Crossroads
Authors: Gordon Leonid
Published: April 2007

THE CURRENT CRISIS IN RUSSIAN SOCIETY HAS BEEN THE SUBJECT of all manner of scholarly investigations, essays and editorials. But the clear economic reverses, distinctly felt by all, have caused analysis to focus almost exclusively on this aspect of the crisis. A more constructive approach to the problem might be to examine it as a process, as an objective result of all aspects of the country's development and contemporary civilization as a whole.

This approach presupposes that the rejection of socialism in Russia and Eastern Europe, the major reforms in China and Vietnam, and the dead-end situation in Cuba are not chance, but form a pattern. In each case, the crisis is a function of the transition from one social system to another. This transitional crisis is all-encompassing; its economic component is no more important than the political, social, ethical, cultural, or that of daily life. A transitional crisis is the harbinger of a Time of Troubles when all of society — not just isolated elements — is thrown into turmoil.
Early Elections in Slovakia: A State of Deadlock
Authors: Abrahám Samuel
Published: April 2007

THE EARLY GENERAL ELECTIONS IN SLOVAKIA HELD ON 30 September–1 October 1994 and resulting in the victory of populists and nationalists caught many observers by surprise, both in and outside Slovakia. Unlike in Poland and Hungary, the leftist party in Slovakia suffered decisive setbacks, receiving 10.4 per cent of the poll instead of around 20 per cent as indicated in the pre-election surveys. The Democratic Party, the latest successors to the intellectuals who took power from the communists after November 1989, did not even receive the 5 per cent necessary to enter the National Council (see Table 1). The reaction to the overall results has been one of resignation, and pessimism about the fate of democracy in this post-communist country, which, with the Czech Republic constituted Czechoslovakia until 1993.
The Judicial Review Debate: From Partnership to Friction
Authors: Le Sueur Andrew
Published: April 2007

DURING AUTUMN 1995 JUDICIAL REVIEW BECAME NEWS IN THE United Kingdom. Tabloid and broadsheet newspapers, radio, television and Parliament provided fora for ministers, Conservative backbench MPs and journalists to debate the apparent growing willingness of the judiciary to intervene in politically contentious government decisions. The tone of the debate was often hostile; sometimes vitriolic. We were told that there was a crisis. According to an editorial in The Times, ‘it is tempting to observe a pattern emerging, a potentially alarming hostility between an overmighty executive and an ambitious judiciary’. Radio and television journalists described a situation of ‘mutual resentment and suspicion’ and ‘unprecedented conflict between a Conservative government and the judiciary’. The Daily Express denounced ‘the sickness sweeping through the senior judiciary – galloping arrogance’ and the Daily Mail accused judges of giving ‘the impression – perhaps a false impression, but nevertheless a real one – of acting on a political agenda of their own’.
Understanding Late-Twentieth-Century Capitalism: Reassessing the Globalization Theme
Authors: Marshall Don D.
Published: April 2007

There are Many Ambiguities Within The Literature on globalization. Some scholars speak of a world that is chunging others use the framework as part of a new univocal discourse to describe late twentieth-century capitalism. Apart from ‘globalization’, many other cartographic and navigational metaphors have been employed to describe the present world order. There is the loss of the ‘magnetic North’; an ‘emerging global civilization’; and a curious notion of an evolving ‘global civil society’. Master concepts like ‘sustainable development’ and ‘world politics’ have consequently become popular and are creeping into international relations discourse. In extreme cases the literature seems to suggest or imply that history is coming to an end on convenient Western socio-cultural terms only. Indeed it seems that proponents of globalization have come to proclaim universality afresh in similar vein to that of those who indulge in and perpetuate the notion of a post-Columbus 500-year capitalist historicism. I do not share the triumphalism of the liberal globalization discourse. It is certainly important to ask whether the wave of technological change, interdependent policy-making, international socialization of production, and time-space compression have or have not come to transcend or replace the complex web of centre-periphery relations. There remains generally a familiar interstate world system, albeit with the spatial and temporal limits to state, market and human interactions experientially compressed. Questions about who rules, who benefits or suffers, and whether prospects for social survival are better or worse remain as important as ever.
The Framework Document on Northern Ireland and the Theory of Power‐Sharing
Authors: Lijphart Arend
Published: April 2007

The Purpose of This Article is To Analyse The Document ‘A Framework for Accountable Government in Northern Ireland’, published by the British government in early 1995, and to assess its significance in terms of the theory of powersharing (consociational democracy). The Framework Document, as it is usually called, received a hostile reception from many Unionist politicians in Northern Ireland. The ideas that it contains, however, resonate with many previous blueprints for the future of Northern Ireland. In some form they are very likely to re-emerge in the proposed solutions that will follow the ‘all-party’ talks set for June 1996. I shall show that the Framework plan for democratic government in Northern Ireland is completely and thoroughly consociational in its orientation. It confirms the proposition that power-sharing is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for viable democracy in deeply divided societies.
‘Bitter Victory, Sweet Defeat.’ The March 1996 General Elections and the New Government in Spain
Authors: Balfour Sebastian
Published: April 2007

As The Results of The General Elections In Spain of 3 March were being announced, the leaders of the two main parties came out of their respective headquarters to greet the crowds of well-wishers. To judge by the expression on their faces, one could be forgiven for thinking that the victors had lost and the losers had won. A jubilant Felipe González, the outgoing Premier, uttered the phrase which serves as the main title of this article. The paradoxical outcome of the election was that in order to form a government, the victors were forced to seek the kind of parliamentary support which they had bitterly decried in the outgoing government and a pact with parties that they had mercilessly attacked during the previous legislature.
Motility in Scenedesmus dimorphus, Scenedesmus obliquus, and Coelastrum microporum
Authors: TRAINOR FRANCIS R. , BURG CAROL ANN
Published: April 2007

Motility was observed in Scenedesmus dimorphus, S. obliquus, and Coelastrum microporum incubated at IS C in a medium lacking a nitrogen source. Flagellated cells of the WH 50 strain of S. obliquus could not be cultured in a variety of organic media. From this and the occasional occurrence of quadriflagellated cells in C. microporum, if appears possible that the motile cells are gametes.
COMPOSITION AND SUCCESSION OF CYANOPHYCEAN WATER BLOOMS1
Authors: Vance B. Dwain
Published: April 2007

To elucidate cause and effect relationships operating within cyanophycean water blooms, preliminary laboratory and field studies were made to discern physiologically active metabolites affecting the growth of various algal species in 3 ponds of different nutritional types.

Blue‐green algal blooms in Missouri ponds were composed of relatively few species. Microcystis aeruginosa, the most prevalent species, was a major constituent of most of the blooms in which it occurred.

Dense cyanophycean blooms occurred only in ponds having a high organic content. Growth inhibitors apparently were produced by blue‐green algae in nature as well as in the laboratory. The results suggest that these active metabolites may be important in controlling species succession and species dominance within a given phytoplankton population.
THREE CLOSELY ALLIED DINOFLAGELLATES1
Authors: Hulburt Edward M.
Published: April 2007

It is recommended that Exuviella minima, E. mariae‐lebouriae, and Procentrum triangulatum be considered as varieties of Prorocentrum minimum.