bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The American Election: Towards Constitutional Democracy?
Authors: Mansfield Harvey C.
Published: April 2007

THE AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION JUST HELD APPEARS to have been a momentous event. It was the greatest repudiation of an incumbent president and party in America since that of Hoover and the Republicans in 1931. Predicted by no one — by neither political scientist, pollster nor politician — this was as much a surprise to joyful Republicans as to luckless Democrats. The voters had not discussed the matter much, except in deprecatory terms borrowed from the media, and on the morning after they too looked around among themselves with wonder and satisfaction.

It could hardly be believed, as Carter's pollster asserted, that everyone turned to Reagan on the last day when the hostages held in Iran failed to appear. Something so considerable must have been meditated, or at least prepared; and this misfortune for Carter does not explain why the Democratic Senators, who were not involved with Iran, were voted out. Perhaps the large number of ‘undecideds’ were Reagan voters, too embarrassed to confess their decision to callers they suspected were unsympathetic. Or perhaps — a wishful fantasy of mine — the voters deliberately did not disclose their intention to the pollsters since they knew that sovereignty stays alive only with an occasional surprise. The voters may have sensed that they can be exploited if they can be predicted.
The Problem of Morality and Power in the Politics of West Germany
Authors: Dyson Kenneth
Published: April 2007

ELECTIONS HAVE ALWAYS CONSTITUTED A PARTICULARLY sharp rupture to the general character of the West German political process, which depends heavily on accommodation by elite negotiation. In the arenas of parliamentary and executive politics a pervasive style of amicable agreement exists at elite levels, and the political value of Sachlichkeit (objectivity) remains important. Hence, in the legislative period 1976–80 over 90 per cent of legislation passed the Bundestag unanimously. An inquisitorial, as opposed to adversary, style of politics plays an important role in the work of the powerful committees of the Bundestag and the Bundesrat, the two legislative chambers in Bonn. Accordingly, and by contrast, elections tend to take on a remarkably dramatic character, even if, as in 1980, there appears to be little polarization of opinion about concrete issues of policy. British politics is, of course, characterized by the influence of the arena of electoral politics, of the ‘cut-and-thrust’ of competitive adversary politics, on other arenas of politics.
Political Development in the German Democratic Republic
Authors: Starrels John
Published: April 2007

HAS ORGANIZED COMMUNISM GONE SOUR IN THE GERMAN Democratic Republic? Various signs suggest that it indeed has. Since late 1975, the regime of Erich Honecker has employed increasingly severe measures to combat internal dissent; and these measures have also been directed against West German media representatives, no less. On the economic front, estimates of national growth for 1979 vary rather widely — from 3 to 5.6 per cent. Yet no matter which figure is accepted, it is increasingly evident that growing international indebtedness to Western financial institutions (calculated to be between $5–6 billion), plus chronic energy shortages and recent agricultural failures have made East Germany's economic prospects gloomier than they have been since the late 1960s. The wave of emigration requests which eeted East Germany's signature of the Helsinki Agreement or1975 at least suggests that average citizens will take action on their own when the occasion allows them to do so. Added to the above consideration, of course, is the 'trade in humans' (Menschenhandel) which has resulted in the 'sale' of approximately 11,000 individuals from East Germany to West Germany between 1964 and 1975, according to one informed Western writer.
Unofficial Education in Czechoslovakia
Authors: Wilkes Kathleen
Published: April 2007

An Alaskan and a Siberian bear were grumbling about the decline in their living conditions – the oil pipes and the bustle in Alaska, the prison camps and the KomsomoI hearties in Siberia – when a Czech bear interrupted: ‘It's worse for me, though. In 1968 I was expelled from the Union of Free Bears; now I'm in Bohemia, training to be a cuckoo’.

AS IS WELL-KNOWN, THE YEARS FOLLOWING THE SOVIET INcursion of 1968 saw drastic purges in Czechoslovakia. The number of those expelled from the Party was put by Vasil Bilak, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, at 461,751; a high proportion of these lost their jobs as well. (Bilak in fact claimed that only 30 per cent of those expelled — about 150,000 — had lost their jobs; but as Zdenek Mlynif and Karel Kaplan were quick to point out, Bilak's statistics took no account of those who were still employed but with lower status: medical consultants demoted to hospital porters, bank managers as office cleaners — in general, professionals redeployed in unskilled labour.) Those expelled suffered in other respects as well; in particular, their children tended to be denied higher or secondary education.
The French Revolution Revisited
Authors: Furet François
Published: April 2007

I SHOULD LIKE TO START WITH AN EXTREMELY SIMPLE STATEment about the French Revolution. This is that there are many historical arguments among historians on many subjects, but that none of these arguments is so intense and so heated as the one which takes place in every generation about the French Revolution. It is as though the historical interpretation of this particular subject and the arguments of specialists directly reflect the political struggles and the gamble for power. It is true that we are all aware today that there are no unbiased historical interpretations: the selection of facts which provide the raw material for the historian's work is already the result of a choice, even although that choice is not an explicit one. To some extent, history is always the result of a relationship between the present and the past and more specifically between the characteristics of an individual and the vast realm of his possible roots in the past. But, nevertheless, even within this relative framework, not all the themes of history are equally relevant to the present interests of the historian and to the passions of his public. The subject of Clovis, for example, and of the Frankish invasions was of burning interest in the eighteenth century, because historians of that era thought that the Frankish invasions were the source of the division between the nobility and the common people: the conquerors having evolved into the nobility and the conquered having become the commoners. Today, the Germanic invasions are no longer considered to contain or reveal any secret about French society: they have become once again a subject for historiography, left to scholars and to the arguments of specialists.
The Change in France
Authors: Wright Vincent
Published: April 2007

THE PRESIDENTIAL AND THE LEGISLATIVE ELECTIONS OF MAY-June 1981 have profoundly altered the political landscape of France. The change may be seen not only in the men who have now acceded to office but also in the measures which they have proposed or have already carried out. The new rulers of France intend to transform political society, economic relations and institutional arrangements. The change will be significant. Nevertheless, it should not be exaggerated. Large elements of continuity may clearly be discerned in both personnel and policies. Moreover, there are important international and domestic pressures which may force the new Socialist leaders singularly to limit their ambitions.
Speaking Notes With Émile Noël on the Administration of Europe
Authors: Ionescu Ghiţa
Published: April 2007

No one, friend or foe, of the European Community could deny that its emergence, growth and consolidation in a very brief time as a ready-made administration, with all the powerful institutions it comprises, has been one of the most impressive achievements of modern political imagination and organizational skill. In Brussels, in Luxembourg, in Strasbourg, institutions appeared almost overnight created by the Treaty of Rome, the names of which inspire such contrary feelings in Europe and in the world at large: the European Court of Justice, the European Council of Ministers, the European Parliament, the European Economic and Social Committee; and last but not least, the European Commission, the most controversial of all these institutions, the most hated or the most admired, precisely because people believe and know that the Commission is the motor of this extraordinary development in European political history.
Trotsky, ‘wie er eigentlich gewesen’
Authors: Schapiro Leonard
Published: April 2007

TROTSKY'S REPEATED FAILURE AS A POLITICAL PROPHET DOES not seem to have damaged his reputation among his devoted followers. The very pivot of Trotsky's faith – that socialism in one country is doomed to failure unless supported by revolution in other countries – has been proved palpably wrong. The only reason why ‘socialist’ countries like the Soviet Union or Poland, for example, survive at all is that they are able to bolster their own inefficient systems by vast loans and imports of food and technology from states where a free economy exists. In The Revolution Betrayed, in 1937, Trotsky foretold that a defeat of Germany by the Soviet Union would result in the crushing not only of Hider, ‘but of the capitalist system’; while in the Soviet Union one of two things would happen. The first possibility was that a revolutionary party would take over which would restore freedom in the trade unions and the Soviets, as well as the liberty of Soviet parties. It would purge the apparatus, abolish all privileges and limit inequality of payment to the minimum. It was a belated conversion to freedom by Trotsky. In 1921 the sailors and garrison of Kronstadt had risen and called for every one of these reforms. They were not only mown down as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ with Trotsky's full support, and under his overall command, but his action was unequivocally justified by him years later in exile, on the grounds that failure to crush Kronstadt in 1921 would have opened the gates to ‘counterrevolution’ – in plain words, would have put an end to communist monopoly of power. The second hypothetical future of a Soviet Union victorious in a war against Germany, according to Trotsky, was the victory of a bourgeois party, which would restore private property. Of course, all political prophets go wrong more often than not. But this particular failure reveals two characteristic weaknesses of Trotsky's power of analysis.
The Industrial Division of Labour and National Cultures
Authors: Gellner Ernest
Published: April 2007

THE ORIGINS OF INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY CONTINUE TO BE AN object of scholarly dispute. It seems to be very probable that this will continue to be so forever. An enormously complex transformation occurred in a very large, diversified and intricate society, and the event was unique: no imitative industrialization can be treated as an event of the same kind as the original industrialization, simply in virtue of the fact that all the others were indeed imitative, were performed in the light of the now established knowledge that the thing could be done and had certain advantages (though the emulated ideal was of course interpreted in all kinds of quite diverse ways). So we can never repeat the original event which is to be understood, which was perpetrated by men who knew not what they did, and this was of its essence: we cannot do this, for quite a number of cogent reasons - the sheer fact of repetition makes it different from the original occasion; one cannot in any case reproduce all the circumstances of early modern Western Europe; and experiments on such a scale, for the sake of establishing a theoretical point, are morally hardly conceivable. In any case, to sort out causal threads in so complex a process, we should need not one, but very, very many re-runs, and these will never be available to us.
The Resolution of Internal Conflicts and External Pressures The Labour Party's Devolution Policy
Authors: Jones J. Barry , Keating Michael
Published: April 2007

THE QUESTION OF DECENTRALIZATION IS ONE WHICH THE British Labour Party has always found difficult to handle because of its inheritance of contradictory traditions in relation to the British state. Labour's roots in anti-authoritarian radicalism and in the British periphery make it sympathetic to decentralist demands and this has been reinforced by the need to compete electorally for support in the periphery. However, to gain power at Westminster it needs more than peripheral support; it needs to capture power at the centre and, in order to benefit the periphery, to strengthen the power of the centre. Ideologically, the party also possesses a socialist tradition which preaches the indivisibility of working-class interests and deplores nationalism and separatism.
The Unforeseen Development of the Kabyle Question in Contemporary Algeria
Authors: Roberts Hugh
Published: April 2007

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE INHABITANTS OF GREATER Kabylia and their Arabic-speaking compatriots constitutes one of the fundamental issues of contemporary Algerian politics. This relationship has been neither accurately conceived nor adequately taken into account in the existing literature on modern Algeria. The growth of popular Berberism in Kabylia, articulating widespread opposition to the government's Arabization policy and the demand for official recognition of the Berber language, went unnoticed by outside observers until 1980. It had been visible since at least 1974, but could not be accommodated by prevailing conceptions either of Berber society in general or of Kabyle history in particular.
Salva sit Universitas Nostra
Authors: Austin Dennis
Published: April 2007

I base this enquiry on the simple proposition that the government of a university ought to be collegiate and that authority within an academic community should be diffuse.

Now it is clear – it became very clear at Manchester in 1981–82 – that the structure of control in most British universities is no longer capable of looking after its members in a rational, intelligent manner. Instead of dispersal there is centralization, and in place of collegiate government there is a persistent drift towards administrative control. Moreover, in relation to the title of this journal, universities are marvellously arranged to oppose but ill-equipped to govern. The words may sound harsh but they were amply illustrated in the crisis that descended on the unversity in July 1981.
Anglo-Irish Relations since 1968: A ‘Fever Chart’ Interpretation
Authors: Arthur Paul
Published: April 2007

BURKE ISSUED THE CAUTION IN 1767: ‘WHEN ANY COMMUNITY is subordinately connected with another, the great danger of the connection is the extreme pride and self-complacency of the superior which in all matters of controversy will probably decide in its own favour’. He was writing about the American colonies but his remarks are equally pertinent to relations between Britain and Ireland then and now. Given this asymmetrical relationship and a long history of mutual hostility, it may appear curious that an almost audible sigh of relief was heard in London when a coalition government, headed by Dr Garret FitzGerald, was sworn in to lead a new Dail on 14 December 1982.
The Competition Policy of the European Community: a Conference Report
Authors: Smellie Rebecca
Published: April 2007

IN A FIERCELY CONTESTED GAME OF FOOTBALL OR RUGBY THE job of the referee is both essential and unenviable. On such occasions, whilst the players will appreciate the importance of the rules of the competition, the incentive to break them can be overwhelming. This is a specific instance of a more general case: the higher the stakes in any competition, the greater the need for a good referee to ensure that the game is played fairly.

Much more significant competition takes place between the industries of the member states of the European Community, and indeed of the rest of the world, for the custom of the Community's markets. It is important to note that the European Community is still far from achieving a truly common market across all the member states, as free from non-tariff barriers as it is already from tariffs. Competition policy in Europe has two referees, national enforcement bodies and the European Commission. This paper is concerned only with the Commission, which has responsibility for matters of competition between the member states.
Hong Kong: a One‐Way Ticket to an Unknown Destination
Authors: Wilkinson Paul
Published: April 2007

THE BASIC ELEMENTS OF THE HONG KONG PROBLEM ARE WELL known and can be briefly stated. Britain acquired the colony of Hong Kong Island as a port of access to the China trade under the 1842 Treaty of Nanking which concluded the Opium War. Followin the Second Anglo-Chinese War a further 3¾ square miles of land, British Kowloon and Stonecutters Island, were ceded to Britain. But under the 1898 convention of Peking a much larger area, formerly part of Guangdong province and now known as the New Territories, amounting to over 360 square miles and including numerous small islands and the surrounding seas, was leased to Britain for 99 years. This lease runs out in July 1997. The Chinese Communist government in Peking has repeatedly declared its intention to reassert its sovereign right to control the whole territory of Hong Kong by 1997 ‘at the latest’. Indeed the People's Republic's leaders have made it clear that they have never accepted the treaties through which land was ceded and leased to Britain as being valid under international law. They regard them as part of the long series of ‘Unequal treaties’ imposed by the imperial owers which the rulers of China in that period were compellecf to accept because of military weakness. Thus there is no question of China being ready to renew the New Territories lease or to come to some agreement recognizing British sovereignty over Hong Kong Island and Kowloon. Peking has never, since 1949, formally accepted the legality of British status in Hong Kong.
Political Participation in Britain: a Research Agenda for a New Study
Authors: Parry Geraint , Moyser George
Published: April 2007

HISTORICALLY SPEAKING, THE THEME OF POLITICAL PARTICIpation and the set of issues connected with it are as old as politics itself, because they touch on some of the most central and perennial questions of political life – who decides, where are the boundaries of community and citizenship to be drawn, who benefits, how will decisions be made? However, beyond this, participation has from time to time become a particularly central and salient issue in British politics. In the seventeenth century the issues revolved around the ‘claims of the gentry and merchant classes to play a larger part in the making of government policy’. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the issue moved on to representation of the nonropertied classes – the town worker, the rural worker and Etterly universal suffrage.
Power and Identity: Politics and Ideology in Latin America
Authors: Merquior J. G.
Published: April 2007

TO THE AVERAGE EUROPEAN CONCERNED WITH, OR SIMPLY curious about, international politics and the Third World predicament, Latin America is a glaring compound of violent Machtpolitik, rampant demography and collective soul-searching. Uneasily torn between Western loyalties and the dismal realities of underdevelopment, the huge continent from Rio Bravo to Patagonia keeps featuring as the unhappy part of America – indeed, of the whole West (for Latin America, unlike Africa, is not just a lost possession of the West – rather, it is a Western projection, for all the obvious significance of its non-Western ethnic and cultural components).
A British Lead to a Federal Europe?
Authors: Ionescu Ghiţa , Pinder John
Published: April 2007

THE ARGUMENT WE ARE ABOUT TO PRESENT UNDER THIS perhaps surprising title is based on a syllogism whose two premises are now visible to all in their sad reality.

The first premise is that because of their political organization in small and medium-sized sovereign states, the countries of Western Europe are losing the chance of adapting themselves independently to the requirements of the third industrial revolution. In this they are falling far behind the United States of America, a welfare state like them and belonging to their political culture – and Japan, whose different political culture makes the comparison less appropriate. Technological dependence brings with it lack of independence in all directions – and especially in military capacity which is now dominated by the two nuclear superpowers. The belated individual efforts of some of the European states to modernize their industries with their own means and with different socio-economic ideologies – conservative monetarism in Britain, socialist Keynesianism in France – have aggravated unemployment in the one and inflation in the other, and provoked much popular dissent against the central governments. The centralized nationalistic system became increasingly inadequate: for the problems are common ones that require common solutions; and as the problems are functional, they abhor ideological approaches.
‘People’, Politicians and Populism
Authors: Canovan Margaret
Published: April 2007

IF THE ZOOLOGISTS ARE TO BE BELIEVED, THIS WORLD appears very different to members of different species of animals. Flowers conceal patterns and markings that are visible only to insects; dogs inhabit a world reeking with enticing scents; the bats' Lebenswelt echoes with highly significant squeaks. Something rather similar is true of political animals as well. The political world that faces the true-blue Tory has contours different from those that present themselves to the militant socialist, while what the liberal sees as the manifest data of politics is different again. Each of them, contemplating the common political world, has his attention caught and held by certain phenomena beside which others fade into insignificance. It is not surprising, therefore, that each has resort to a different key concept to sum up his experience. For the ideal-typical conservative, the basic datum of political experience is the totality of the historic political community, the nation. Like Rousseau's patriot, from the moment he opens his eyes he sees his country, and to the day of his death he never sees anything else. The socialist, by contrast, his attention held by a different range of experiences, wonders how anyone can fad to recognize the importance of social classes and the rift between them, while the liberal in his turn suspects the others of being deliberately obtuse when they refuse to see that distinct and different individuals are the basic components of political reality.
The Question of Ireland: Reflections on Five Books
Authors: Arthur Paul
Published: April 2007

POLITICAL VIOLENCE CREATES ITS OWN MOMENTUM NOT ONLY in the wider security community but also in that refuge for the voyeur, academic research. Before 1968 a mere handful of books looked at the Ulster problem. Since then more than two hundred books and several thousand articles have appreared. But to what avail? In a survey of this vast literature Professor John Whyte concludes that there has been a disproportion between the enormous effort expended and the exiguous results achieved. The purist might maintain that it is not the task of scholars to indulge in political engineering: to those of us who live in the benighted province any port in a storm will do. The merit of these five books is that, wittingly or not, they create some optimism simply because they shift our gaze from the depressing reality of Belfast and examine the problem in a wider context. Of course, that might not be their purpose. Bad Chubb set out with the modest task of explaining the political process of the Irish Republic for the benefit of his own students who had lacked an up-todate general work. Bew and Patterson took as their starting point ‘the irrepressible reality of the class conflict generated by the capitalist structure of the Irish economy’ (p. 187).
Federal Ideas in the European Community: Altiero Spinelli and ‘European Union’, 1981–84
Authors: Burgess Michael
Published: April 2007

DURING THE LAST DECADE ‘EUROPEAN UNION’ HAS BECOME something of a modern catchphrase in the European Community. In its simplest form it is a protean concept which serves as a convenient label for all those who advocate a more regulated and binding Community, though their conception may not necessarily be restricted to the present Community of Ten. ‘European Union’ first emerged at the Paris conference of heads of government in October 1972. There it was agreed that the Community's main objective was to transform, before the end of the decade, ‘the whole complex of the relations of Member States into a European Union’. The communiqué issued after the Paris meeting of the heads of government on 10 December 1974 reaffirmed this commitment and urged the Community of Nine to ‘agree as soon as possible on an overall concept of European Union’.
All Quiet on the German Front? Germany in the Post‐Detente Era
Authors: Moreton Edwina
Published: April 2007

WHEN ALL ABOUT THEM IN EASTERN EUROPE WERE LOSING their heads, the Russians could always count on the East Germans. Now nobody, least of all the Russians, seems so sure. Whether or not East Germany's leader, Erich Honecker, visits West Germany this autumn as planned, the German question is back on the political agenda of both East and West. The sharp battle-by-reprint, during the summer of 1984, in the party newspapers of East Germany and the Soviet Union over the permissible degree of contact between the East German regime and the West German government has revealed in public a remarkable rift within the Warsaw Pact over one of the most sensitive issues in post-war Soviet foreign policy: strategy towards Germany.
The Practice of the Theory of Industrial Adaptation in Britain and West Germany
Authors: Wilks Stephen
Published: April 2007

THE TERM ‘INDUSTRIAL ADAPTATION’ HAS RECENTLY EMERGED as a rallying call in the vocabulary of economic policy-makers in national governments and international organizations. At the same time the political consequences of the adaptation process, such as the reorientation of whole areas of government activity towards industrial priorities, or the escalation of unemployment, have redefined the agenda of economic policy for students of politics. This article, based on a comparison of the systems of industrial adaptation that have operated successfully in West Germany over the post-war period and, far less successfully, in Britain, focuses on the subsidy issue in the two countries and points to the hypocrisy of official economic doctrines and programmes. Insofar as governments must concern themselves with economic activity, issues such as subsidy must be evaluated not in pejorative, polemical fashion but in terms of their goals and of policy frameworks within which they can be controlled.
The European Community: What Kind of Future?
Authors: Noël Émile
Published: April 2007

THAT THERE IS ROOM FOR DOUBT TODAY ABOUT WHAT LIES ahead for the Communities nobody will deny. The Community has been in trouble for at least five years, and despite the succession of summits the trouble has not been fully disposed of. The enlargement negotiations are the demonstration - or one more demonstration - of the difficulty the Community is having in coming to terms with itself. And, worse, a further process of what I might call ‘institutional drift’ is making its operation yet more intergovernmental.

I should like first to review the position as it now stands and how it is likely to develop in the short term. I will then go on to try to establish what can be done to rectify, or even reverse, the present trends. For unless they do change in the months ahead the prospects for progress in the longer term will be in jeopardy.
Authority and Benevolence: the Confucian Recipe for Industrial Success
Authors: Dore Ronald
Published: April 2007

I ONCE PERSUADED MYSELF THAT I COULD DISTINGUISH AT least seven different meanings of the term ‘individualism’ but I shall mention here only two. The fust is individualism in contradistinction to spiritual and emotional identification with a group. The second is individualism in contradistinction to dependence on some individual other, or others, who are in some sense deemed superior. One of my themes today is the interaction between the two: between self-assertion vis-à-vis the group, and self-assertion vis-à-vis established authority, and what this tells us about the way industrial concerns can be or ought to be organized in modern societies.
Welfare State and Welfare Society
Authors: Parry Geraint
Published: April 2007

‘CRISIS? WHAT CRISIS?’, THE CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER was reported to have replied to a question concerning the alleged crisis in sterling. In the case of the welfare state it might seem that the appropriate response would be ‘Which crisis? ’ since there are several on the menu - fiscal crisis, legitimacy crisis, crisis of ungovernability . Left, Right and Centre have become convinced that there is a crisis. This is after a period of history which had seen an unprecedented rise in the standard of living of the vast majority of the population living in what are normally regarded as welfare states.
Welfare and the Value of Liberty
Authors: Plant Raymond
Published: April 2007

THE IDEA OF THE WELFARE STATE IS CURRENTLY TREATED with more scepticism across the political spectrum than at any time during its development. Insofar as the institutions of the welfare state were consolidated during the period of Butskellite consensus which lasted until the late 1960s, in the more polarized political climate of today it is now seen on both the Right and the Left to embody many of the failures implicit in that consensus. It was assumed, so it was argued, that the fiscal dividends of growth could be used to increase welfare in a relatively painless way by maintaining the absolute position of the better off and using the dividends of growth via public expenditure on health, education and welfare to improve the relative standing of the worst-off members of society. In this way it was thought that the social and economic rights of citizenship could be extended within a market economy without putting excessive strain on that economy.
Pleasing Any of the People, Some of the Time: Perceptions of Redistribution and Attitudes to Welfare
Authors: Taylor‐Gooby Peter
Published: April 2007

HOW DO PEOPLE'S IDEAS ABOUT REDISTRIBUTION AND STATE welfare affect their political judgments? The issue is of interest for practical and theoretical reasons. A party which presents egalitarian redistribution as a central social-policy objective has been replaced in government by one which does not. Various writers suggest that a lack of popular support for redistribution contributed to this change, whether because the experience of economic decline undermines altruism; because there is an anti-welfare backlash at the level of ideology; or because the least redistributive welfare services benefit the better-off groups who are also more influential .Thus free sixth-form and university education, mortgage interest relief and occupational pension subsidy are favoured, whereas rent subsidy, low wage supplementation and unemployment benefit are not. Underlying these arguments is the suggestion that welfare programmes, to the extent that they are seen to contradict popular desires, will contribute to a generalized decline in support for government.
Pragmatikos and Federalis: Reflections on a Conference
Authors: Pinder John
Published: April 2007

THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT DID NOT SKIMP ITS PREPARATIONS for the European Council meeting in Milan on 28–29 June, when proposals for moves towards European Union were on the agenda for the European Community's heads of state and government. Much effort went into the ‘Howe plan’, which was seen as a model of British pragmatism: strictly practical proposals and no truck with the proposed intergovernmental conference to consider Treaty amendments or other high-faluting federalist notions. A success proportionate to the effort was certainly expected. But Mrs Thatcher left Milan without decisions on the British proposals, outvoted on the intergovernmental conference and angry with the partners who pushed her into a corner with the Dane and the Greek. It is too soon to unravel what was certainly a tangled tale, doubtless with errors all round and a generous application of Murphy's Law. But behind the tactical and political confusion, one element in the failure may have been the divergent approaches of the British and the majority of their partners to discussing the Community's future development.
The Impact of the German Federal Constitutional Court on Politics and Policy Output
Authors: Landfried Christine
Published: April 2007

THE HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE OF THE SURRENDER OF LEGAL positivism to the prevalence of injustice under the nazi regime and the concern to create a real federation led the founding fathers of the Federal Republic of Germany to create the most powerful Constitutional Court in the world for the control of the formal and material constitutionality of laws.

This Court, a supreme constitutional organ like the Bundestag and the Bundesrat, is organized in two chambers, called Senates. The First Senate has jurisdiction over basic rights, the Second Senate decides all questions of political disputes. Though the Court only acts on request, it does nevertheless play an active role in shaping politics and policy output. The jurisdiction of this Court is the ‘authentic interpretation of the Constitution’ and it cannot be qualified as normal jurisdiction, because many provisions of the Basic Law are open to different interpretations and call for a reference to sources and premises beyond the document itself.
Political Implications of US‐EC Economic Conflicts (I) Euro‐American Turbulence—The Trade Issue
Authors: Wellenstein Edmund
Published: April 2007

TRADE QUARRELS BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND EUROPE have featured as a daily item in newspapers for some time, often even on the front page. Thus the New York Times in June 1986 carried a headline: ‘Reagan's tougher trade stand – policy shift angers Allies’. At the same time, the EC Council of ministers meeting in Luxembourg rejected American criticism of EC trade practices; in particular, the ministers underlined that EC support for exports of agricultural products could only be discussed in the framework of GATT, and only if other direct and indirect support schemes were also submitted to that forum. That same day, the Uruguayan leader Mr Sanguinetti complained bitterly that he did not manage to sell meat on his traditional markets, as the Americans and the Europeans undercut prices by more than 50 per cent. . . One could go on and on like this.
Political Realignment in Advanced Industrial Society: From Class‐Based Politics to Quality‐of‐Life Politics
Authors: Inglehart Ronald , Rabier Jacques‐René
Published: April 2007

Throughout this century, the Marxist Left in Europe has emphasized an economic interpretation of history, with state ownership of the means of production as the key element in their prescription for society. Political polarization is depicted as a direct reflection of social class conflict, with the working class the natural base of support for the Left. This diagnosis has become increasingly out of touch with reality in recent years, which have seen the decline of orthodox Marxist parties in Western Europe and the diminishing credibility of the ideology on which they are based. For as advanced industrial society emerges, economic determinism provides a progressively less adequate analysis of society, and class-based parties and the policies they advocate become less central to politics. Economic development reduces the impact of economic determinism. Though economic factors tend to play a dominant role in the early stages of industrial society, in advanced industrial society their relative importance diminishes; and self-expression, ‘belonging’ and the quality of the physical and social environment become increasingly important.
Science and the Public Purse
Authors: Kingman John
Published: April 2007

IN HIS PROFOUND ANALYSIS OF THE MICROCOSMOGRAPHIA Acadernica of his time, F.M. Cornford identified among the parties the Adullamites, who ‘are dangerous, because they know what they want; and that is, all the money there is going’. He goes on to say that they ‘are not refined, like classical men. That is why they succeed in getting all the money there is going’.

Of Cambridge scientists in the 1920s, the era of sealing wax and string, this was an unduly harsh judgment, but it may be thought prophetic of today's academic world, in which scientists spend millions of pounds on research projects whose only apparent justification is peer judgment; this research is worth support because other scientists in the same field say it is.
Tibet from Buddhism to Communism
Authors: Stoddard Heather
Published: April 2007

The conflict between Mohammed and Marx has received a fair amount of scholarly attention; so have the occasional attempts at syncretism, fusing the two visions. The confrontation of Buddha and Marx is just as interesting, and has been explored rather less. There are certain parallels between Buddhism and Islam. Both contain a High Tradition of great, scholarly sophistication which lends itself to purification, and can constitute the banner of political and spiritual ‘Reform’ and revival. This has in fact happened within both Islam and Buddhism. But within the two most thoroughly Buddhism‐dominated societies, Mongolia and Tibet, the process was not allowed to run its course. Each of these countries has a small population, and in each case what might have been the natural internal development was distorted by the overwhelming might of a great communist power. In neither case, however, has the victory of Marx over Buddha been complete or uncontested. The crucial events did not happen simultaneously in the two countries, but happened about three decades later in Tibet than they had in Mongolia. The present article contains insights into and information about the last years of the ancien régime in Tibet, based on unique understanding and research opportunities.
Reflections on the Anglo‐Irish Agreement
Authors: Connolly Michael , Loughlin John
Published: April 2007

THE CONFLICT IN NORTHERN IRELAND HAS LASTED FOR OVER sixteen years, defying all attempts by British and Irish governments to reach a solution. On 15 November 1985 the leaders of both governments, Mrs Margaret Thatcher and Dr Garret FitzGerald, signed, at Hillsborough in Northern Ireland, an Anglo-Irish Agreement which they hoped would establish machinery leading to an eventual diminution of political violence and to an accommodation between the two communities. This Agreement is the result of several years of negotiations between the two governments in the Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Council and is perhaps the most radical attempt at solving the Northern Irish problem since 1921–22. The purposes of this article are to explore what is significantly new in the Agreement as compared with previous attempts at solutions, to examine briefly the different influences which worked to bring it about and, finally, to assess the chances of a successful implementation of the Agreement.
The European Community Today
Authors: Noël Émile
Published: April 2007

THE DISTINGUISHING FEATURE OF THE COMMUNITY IS ITS institutional system. The establishment of that system and the changes and distortions it has undergone have very much moulded its development. But the Community is also a complex ongoing process: the institutional side alone does not give the full picture. The economic, the financial and the institutional aspects are closely interwoven, and together determine the course of its affairs. I propose to consider the state of the Community today, its current crisis and the outlook for the years ahead from both these angles.
States, Revolutionary Conflict and Democracy: El Salvador and Nicaragua in Comparative Perspective
Authors: Shugart Matthew Soberg
Published: April 2007

EL SALVADOR AND NICARAGUA, TWO SOCIETIES WHICH HAVE recently experienced revolutionary conflict, have also embarked upon electoral processes. The US government cdls El Salvador's regime ‘democratic’ and aids its fight against leftist revolutionaries, while calling Nicaragua's regime ‘totalitarian’ and its elections a sham. What would democracy in these countries require and what are democracy's prospects?

One criterion of democracy, opposition or competitiveness, is insufficient because it says nothing about the social bases of competing elites. In order to provide some guarantee that a regime will be responsive to politicized social needs, we must stress the criterion of participation or inclusiveness as a necessary condition for democracy. In a context of intense conflict a democratic regime must allow all sectors – or rather their representatives chosen in competitive elections – to participate in decisions which will affect them. Such a regime's prospects for success are further enhanced by pacts of mutual guarantees of security among the contending actors, as in the consociational democracies.
Honecker’s Germany
Authors: Childs David
Published: April 2007

AS HE SALUTED THE GRIM FORMATIONS OF 10,000 ‘FIGHTING groups of the working class’ and thousands of other soldiers and paramilitary police in Berlin's Karl-Marx-Allee on 13 August, Erich Honecker looked quite relaxed. He knew that his colleagues Egon Krenz (crown prince and security overlord) and Erich Mielke (Minister for State Security) had taken every precaution to ensure that there would be no counter-demonstrations to mar this celebration of 25 years of the ‘anti-fascist defensive (Berlin) wall’. In this, his fifteenth year as leader of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), the 74-year-old Honecker could compliment himself on a successful party congress followed by successfully staged elections. He could also look back to a number of successful initiatives in the GDR's external relations.
The Scientific Ethos of Reagan’s America
Authors: Williams Roger
Published: April 2007

While States Have Always Been in Competition, modern states are in competition in an historically unique way. Only since the Second World War has it become generally appreciated that the mastery of technical change is vital to economic success, to such military security as is available, and, in short, to political achievement in a world in which expectations are un-precedentedly high. Since the political system of a state is inescapably a major factor in that state’s overall performance, it follows that the efficiency and effectiveness of the world’s various political systems are now, in an important sense, under long-term test. Whether over time most systems will tend to an asymptotic common performance, or whether some will reveal themselves as objectively ‘better’ than others is thus, really for the first time, a meaningful issue, and one which each succeeding generation can be expected to do a little more to resolve. In this context particular interest attaches in the immediate future to the relative performances of the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan, and Western Europe, the latter considered both as separate states and collectively. This article is concerned only with the United States, but a reference frame of permanent international competition, in accommodating to and capitalizing upon technical change, needs to be borne in mind throughout.
An Outpost of Corporatism: the Franchise State on Wall Street
Authors: Moran Michael
Published: April 2007

Writers on Corporatism Agree about Little but are nevertheless strikingly united in one belief, that America has failed to develop strong corporatist institutions. The two most important collections published in recent years, for instance, both contain papers explaining this supposed American uniqueness. Yet the notion that corporatism is conspicious by its absence is odd. It is indeed true that the United States has failed to develop one particularly ambitious form of corporatism — the organization of capital and labour into central institutions designed to achieve agreed national aims. The essence of corporatism consists, however, of something less than this grand social scheme. It resides in what Offe calls ‘the attribution of public status to interest groups’. Endowing private bodies with public duties and public powers involves crossing a constitutional Rubicon. Behind lie the landscapes of liberal polities, with their open political struggle and comparatively clear separation of government from civil society. Beyond the Rubicon lie the features in Schmitter’s famous description of corporatism — compulsion, hierarchy, monopoly. But these are contingent, not necessary, features. The quintessence of corporatism consists in the effort to endow private interests with sovereign authority. In so doing it challenges the great aim of a liberal polity — the separation of economic from political power — imposing in its place the ‘devolution of public policymaking and enforcement on organised private interests’.
‘Understanding America’: Impressions of a Departing Ambassador
Authors: Wright Oliver
Published: April 2007

HAVING JUST RETURNED TO THIS COUNTRY AFTER SERVING as British Ambassador to Washington, I have a distinct impression that modern America is not properly understood by many sectors of public opinion in the United Kingdom. An example of this misunderstanding is given by a recent public opinion poll which rated the USSR and the United States as equal threats to peace. Obviously, this is not the case.

We should really try to understand the United States. Some of us at least, certainly enough of us to make a difference to the general perception of the United States in Britain as reflected in the bizarre verdict of that public opinion poll, should acquire some measure of understanding, since American commitment in NATO to the defence of Europe has kept us at peace for the last 40 years. The American commitment in the GATT to the free world's open trading system is the best guarantee we have of prosperity in the future. That the Free world exists, that we have a Free World to talk about, is largely thanks to the existence of the United States.
The Odyssey of Jon Elster
Authors: O'Leary Brendan
Published: April 2007

Jon Elster has made the story of Ulysses and the Sirens a central motif in his philosophical odyssey. In Elster's philosophy a paradigm of imperfectly rational behaviour is to bind yourself against the mast, as a precaution against the predictable weakness of your will which would otherwise leave you ensnared by the sirens. The use of literary analogies is frequent in Elster's work, whether he is Explaining Technical Change or Making Sense of Marx. Consequently it is not inappropriate to describe Elster's own intellectual wanderings as an odyssey. Unlike Joyce's Ulysses there is no trace in Elster of a predilection for scatological subjects, nor any danger of unreadability. But there is a similar technical and stylistic range, and a comparable breadth in intellectual debts, acquired from journeying through Western culture with several languages. Elster, like Joyce, is also crowned with the ability to make an artistic whole out of apparently disparate materials.
The End of Ideology Revisited (Part I)
Authors: Bell Daniel
Published: April 2007

THERE ARE SOME BOOKS THAT ARE BETTER KNOWN FOR their titles than their contents. Mine is one of them. Various critics, usually from the Left, pointed to the upsurge of radicalism in the 1960s as disproof of the book's thesis. Others saw the work as an ‘ideological’ defence of ‘technocratic’ thinking, or of the ‘status quo’. A few, even more ludicrously, believed that the book attacked the role of ideals in politics. It was none of these.

The frame of the book was set by its sub-title, On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. Yet the last section looked ahead. After observing young left-wing intellectuals express repeated yearnings for ideology, I said that new inspirations, new ideologies, and new identifications would come from the Third World.