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.

BOTH GERMAN STATES HAVE IN THE PAST BEEN ECONOMIC systems in search of political legitimation. The legitimation of the West German state was gradually established by the acceptance of democratic principles by the huge majority of the population and by a welfare system which was deliberately devised to protect it against contamination from the socialist camp. East Germany lost its legitimation at the moment when it abandoned its economic system. Consequently the battle-cry turned from ‘we are the people’ to ‘we are one people’.

JAPAN'S INCREASING AFFLUENCE AND ITS INFLUENCE IN world affairs have led many to inquire about the functioning of Japanese politics and how one should deal with the Japanese in government or business negotiations. With the steady rise of such interest in Japan, the study of Japanese politics has started to flourish at home and abroad. It was impossible to predict one or two decades ago that one would find so many students, many of whom have a good command of the Japanese language, enrolled in a graduate course on Japanese politics in major US universities. Writings on Japanese politics have started to attract many more general readers, not just a small group of specialists in Japanese politics whose number would not reach, by any method of calculation, one thousand in the whole world. In this article I shall summarize and discuss some major debates on the nature and functioning of Japanese politics with some recent illustrations. The following three subjects have been chosen: decision-making and policy implementation, power structure and the nature of democracy.

THE INTERGOVERNMENTAL CONFERENCES ON ECONOMIC and monetary union and on political union will have consequences for economic efficiency and for political power within the European Community. Both will be important for the future of Europe. But the focus of this article is somewhat different: the implications for the rule of law and representative government. Only somewhat different, because the rule of law and representative government provide the most secure framework for economic efficiency and political power. But more significant, because they not only provide that framework but also embody fundamental political values.

WE STARTED WRITING THIS LETTER ON 22 DECEMBER 1990, the day that Lech Walesa was sworn in before the Polish Sejm as the first President of Poland ever elected in national elections. Even during this memorable ceremony, some MPs could not hide their deep dissatisfaction. They shared with a large portion of intellectuals of the world the conviction that Mazowiecki, a journalist, would be a far better president for Poland than Walesa the shipyard - worker.

Having followed with some curiosity the Western coverage of the Polish elections, and of the political struggles that preceded it, we have the impression that the coverage was biased, and often misleading. Commentators repeated misleading stereotypes, identifying themselves with one side in the political conflict in Poland. They presented a black-and-white picture of the conflict. Tadeusz Mazoweicki symbolized stability, democracy, tolerance, open-mindedness, ‘true’ pluralism, etc.; while the ‘terrible Lech Walesa’ represented dictatorship, obscurantism, anti-Semitism, populism, and chaos. Subtle references were made to Walesa's working-class background, to his lack of poise and education. We find such journalistic bad manners outrageous.

WHILE GORBACHEV'S REFORMS HAVE HAD A BROAD IMPACT ON Soviet society, one key element in the communist system of rule has been particularly affected: the nomenklatura. The word refers to lists of positions for which party committees traditionally held responsibility in recruitment, and lists of persons deemed suitable to fill them. In general, appointments to such posts could not be made without the sanction of the relevant party committee. In some cases, it directly selected the appointee; in others it simply endorsed nominations made elsewhere. The crucial point, however, is that appointments could not be made without the party committee's permission, and that committee's Department of Organizational and Party Work supervised this procedure for staffing the various bureaucratic apparatuses. It has been the essential element in the staffing procedures, and the term covered party involvement in staffing non-party positions, both elective and appointive, the staffing by the party apparatus of positions at lower levels in its own apparatus, and the filling by non-party institutions (such as ministries) of lower-level appointments in their own structures.

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.