THE NEWS FROM AMERICA IS (WHAT ELSE COULD IT BE?) BILL Clinton – America's first first-name-only-please President, informality and accessibility being hallmarks of democratic populism in the 1990s. It might seem as if this is the roller-coaster presidency: if you do not like Clinton's bad (good) reputation today, just wait a month and you can be sure that things will have turned upside down. When I started this piece in the spring, he was way, way down; today just a few months later, following a successful Japanese trip (his weak rivals in the G-7 group made him look good), his two successful judicial appointments (Ruth Bader Ginsberg to the Supreme Court and Louis J. Freeh to the FBI), his paper-thin but indispensable budget victory in the Congress, and his shepherding of the historic Israeli-Palestinian peace protocol, he's looking good. By the time you read this, however, he's likely to be down again, or perhaps down but once again up. His political career has been on a rollercoaster from the start and the media seem determined to keep him and the country rocking — and rolling.

THE END OF ONE-PARTY DOMINANCE BY THE LIBERAL Democratic Party of Japan came as abruptly as the fall of the Berlin wall four years before. It started with the debate on electoral system change, ostensibly as an attempt to curb corruption. The LDP has been plagued by a series of large-scale corruption scandals since the Recruit scandal of 1989. The latest concerned former vice-president Shin Kanemaru's alleged violation of the political money regulation law and the income tax law in 1992–93. The Prime Minister, Kiichi Miyazawa, accepting a fair degree of compromise with opposition parties, wanted to pass a bill to change the current electoral system. The LDP initially wanted to change from the system of choosing a few persons in each district by one vote to the Anglo-American type system of selecting one person in each district by one vote. The opposition wanted to change to the continental European system of proportional representation. A compromise was made by the LDP's proposal to combine the latter two systems. Then two dissenting groups emerged suddenly in the LDP. One took the exit option by forming new political parties. The other took the voice option by backing away from the Miyazawa compromise plan. Miyazawa was humiliated by his failure to have the bill enacted and a motion of no confidence was passed. He then called for a general election, which took place on 18 July 1993. The outcome did not give a majority to the LDP and subsequently a non-LDP coalition was formed to produce a non-LDP government for the first time since the foundation of the LDP in 1955

I HAVE A STRONG RESISTANCE TO LOOKING BACK ON THINGS which I have written in the past: sometimes they may not seem too bad, but more often I notice inadequacies which are embarrassing if not painful. In any case, life and one's interests move on, and one leaves past writings for others to make what they will of them. But on reflection I thought that I would like to take a look at the question which I was addressing in Function, Purpose, and Powers, and see how it might appear more than a generation later.

‘IF THE STATE DID NOT EXIST, WE WOULD HAVE TO INVENT IT. Comment.’ Few of the responses to this examination question qualified its suggestion that the state might be amenable to instantaneous contrivance or conscious design. The oversight on the part of my undergraduate charges pointed to the still potent legacy of a generation of Canadian political artificers whose projects of inventing the Canadian state had abetted the rise of a species of ‘constitutional politics’ given to the ever more elaborate concoction of comprehensive solutions to Canada's vexing constitutional shortcomings. These projects tended to politicize historically embedded elements in the constitutional order, serviceable if imperfect, which had been conventionally regarded as resistant beyond redemption to improved reformulation. This new-style politics was at centre stage in the long and eventful prime ministerial years of the Liberal Party's Pierre Trudeau, the great Cartesian inventor par excellence of the contemporary Canadian state. It would remain a central feature of the nine-year incumbency of Trudeau's Conservative Party successor, Brian Mulroney. Trudeau's vision of a reinvented Canada had proceeded from his background preparation for public life as an academic constitutional lawyer. Mulroney, aiming to finesse what the more cerebral Trudeau could not, would bring to bear on the affairs of the Canadian state the skills of a labour lawyer with the know-how to get Canada's perennially fractious provinces and interest groups to the political bargaining table, there to resolve once and for all any constitutional differences still outstanding.

THIS STUDY IS ONE OF COMPARATIVE STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS deliberately avoiding a sociological definition of the situation. It is assumed that two societies had existed in Czechoslovakia for some time and the difference between them, and possible analogies, are examined. There is also an assumption that the division of Czechoslovakia occurred especially because ‘Czechoslovak society’ as such had not yet been established; this was in spite of the fact that the two societies, at the time of the split, had substantially more in common than they had had at the time of Czechoslovakia's formation. There exists the view, which we want to verify, that during the decline of the federation the following factors were significant:

• 1. The differences in economic, social, cultural and dispositional structures;

• 2. The asynchronous and differing processes of modernization in both societies;

• 3. The different consequences of the formation of societies of Soviet type in the Czech Lands in Slovakia;

• 4. The differing processes for rectification of political, economic and cultural institutions in both republics after November 1989.

THE STAKES IN THE COMPETITION TO DEVELOP HIGH Definition Television (HDTV) are high. In the face of intense competition from Japan, the European effort has had the earmarks of a mission-oriented, Japanese-style industrial policy. But political support for a politically-derived European HDTV standard is matched by market demand. This case study reveals that the nature of government-industry relations in the EC has changed very little when large, politically powerful firms are involved, despite the increasingly prominent policy role of the European Community and the creation of the internal market.

IN ITS MOST ELABORATELY ARTICULATED FORM RACISM IS AN array of theoretical views about the epistemic clarity and human import of the practice of individuating human populations in terms of their presumed biological descent. In this form the term can refer with some precision, and largely independently of context, to a quite specific body of beliefs. In far more diffuse and far less theoretical forms, however, and in forms which are also far more widely distributed in human history, it can and does refer just as readily to the highlighting of distinctions which are certainly at least as much cultural as they are genetic, and which are inextricably located in a context of more or less intimate and painful confrontation between human groups. In this second form there cannot in principle be anything comparably determinate for the term racism to refer to.