Dramatic Change is Hardly a Feature of West German politics. The signals are usually visible well in advance — but gradual change also means that the wider significance of particular developments may be overlooked. A cursory examination of the political scene in the wake of the election held in January 1987 may fail to reveal much that is new since the success of the Christian Democrats in 1983. Thus, despite the sharp fall in the CDU vote, the coalition with the Free Democrats was comfortably confirmed in office. At the same time, the haemorrhage of SPD support — although partially staunched — still continued, with the inability to .make a recovery in the intervening years the haunting question for the party.’ Chiefly at the expense of the SPD, the Greens have now anchored themselves in the party system. Their presence on the federal stage since 1983, and earlier in the Länder, has gingered up political debate and forced issues on to the agenda that otherwise would have been neglected. There are signs of change, but how are they to be interpreted?

One of the Most Remarkable Developments on the French political scene since the Left’s historic victories in the presidential and parliamentary elections of 1981 has been the spectacular emergence of former Prime Minister Raymond Barre as both a powerful contender for the ‘leadership’ of the Right and for the French presidency. His emergence raises a number of interrelated issues which are likely to have a profound impact in France over the next few years.

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.

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.

The Following is not Intended as a Value-Free Survey of American conservatism today. Less clear, perhaps, will be my general approval of this revolt, although that will emerge soon enough. It remains to announce that I want to offer some friendly advice to American conservatism regarding pride and interest and to recommend to its attention the American Constitution, which so beautifully combines them. American conservatives, perhaps because of the manipulations of American liberals, have lost some of their attachment to the Constitution, and much of their understanding of it.

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’.

Susan’s ‘Faites Vos Jeux, Messieurs. Rien Ne Va Plus’ Professor Susan Strange is widely recognised as the foremost British exponent of the meta-discipline of International Political Economy, better known under its nickname IPE. I define it as a meta-discipline because, as is well known, its purpose it to fuse into one the three previously disparate disciplines of economics, politics (notably comparative politics, political sociology and public policy) and international relations which can make sense now only when they are related to each other. The nineteenth-century founders of the social sciences had simply used the name of Political Economy. But then the unforeseeable agglomeration of empirical material led to an objective need for specialization and to a subjective professional interest which in turn led not only to a growing differentiation in the subject-matter, but also to an unnatural incompatibility of perspectives. Like many other artificial barriers which have fallen under the sweep of twentieth-century interdependence, the disciplinary barriers, and even the inadequate ‘interdisciplinary collaborations’ between the major social sciences, should now return to the initial common matrix. Whether the end result will indeed be a new, unique, science, or whether the social sciences will learn how to ‘see’ trifocally is another matter.

The eve of a major multilateral trade negotiation is a time to meditate. This is not because the atmosphere is beauteous, calm and free. Nor is it about to become so because major governments, after years of haggling, are ready — more or less — to enter the round. Indeed, the Conventions of trade negotiation are antithetical to a calm and clear understanding of what combination of aspiration and realism will do most to improve the conditions of international trade. In such negotiations, the general objective — the reduction of trade barriers — is referred to as a concession to others. ‘Standing firm’ and other forms of negativism are praised. Brinkmanship is encouraged— at least among those strong enough to do damage.

As Joan Robinson put it so well, marxism is the opium of the Marxists — and the opium often works its effect on the Marxist mind by means of convoluted conceptual loops, many of them associated with stubborn exercises in essentialist labelling: what is Marxism? Who are the true Marxists? Who are the (self-appointed) Marxists unworthy of such a tag in the eyes of the custodians of the doctrine?

The purpose of this article is to draw attention to a fact about the situation in Northern Ireland which has been almost universally overlooked or misunderstood where, that is, it has not been deliberately concealed, and to draw out its principal implications. This is that the people of Northern Ireland are excluded from the party political System which determines the government of the United Kingdom (the State of which Northern Ireland nominally forms part), that they have not chosen to exelude themselves but have been excluded by the actions of the major British political parties and that their continuing exclusion is today sustained by deliberate decision of the leaders of those parties.

This article brings together a number of opinion surveys conducted in Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in the aftermath of the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement at Hillsborough on 15 November 1985. In addition the fifteen by-elections of 23 January 1986 in Northern Ireland are treated as the referendum they were claimed to be by Unionists, and a brief assessment is given of the role played by the Agreement in the Irish Republic's general election of February 1987.