THE NON-ELECTORAL COMPROMISE ACHIEVED IN MARCH 1978 IN Italy, and the French elections of the same month will be followed in the course of next year - coinciding with four issues of our journal - by the British general elections, the Italian presidential election and, in June 1979, by the first elections to the European Parliament. These five major European political events will no doubt be accompanied by many other unforeseeable developments. All of them will be pored over by political scientists, experts in the politics of France, Britain or Italy, and in the politics of European integration. Analysis of the facts and of their respective historical or sociological backgrounds will underscore the national significance of these events - as for instance the article by J. R. Frears on the French elections which appears in the present issue. But in the next four issues, leading up to our special issue of October 1979, which will be devoted to the direct elections to the European Parliament itself, we shall concentrate on the more profound and less obvious trends and prospects of Western Europe as a whole, for the study of which the European Parliament will eventually provide a new vantage point.