The removal of barriers to international trade has been a powerful stimulus to economic growth in the post-war period. World trade has grown on average 2 per cent faster than GNP throughout this period. Countries which deliberately sought to make themselves competitive externally have grown much faster than countries which relied on their domestic market. By contrast, communist countries, where the system discouraged external trade, have fallen steadily behind. The consequence for most countries has been a steadily growing share of their economy which is exposed to international competition.

Over a quarter of a century ago i was privileged to receive an invitation to contribute an article on South African politics to the first number of this journal. I recall dismissing the thesis that ‘economic forces, together with the emergence of an African middle class, will provide a long term solution to the country's problems…’ I argued that

The shadow of islamic fundamentalism hovers over all of North Africa, notwithstanding the profound differences between the historic fates of the various Maghrebin countries.

Algeria suffered by far the longest and most disruptive colonial period, In fact, Algeria had been colonized by the Ottoman empire before it had begun its French colonial period in 1830. A prolonged and brutal war of conquest was eventually followed by the establishment of a large European population, which acquired effective local political control under the Third Republic. Result: pre-colonial social institutions were largely destroyed, and Algerian society consisted mainly of a pulverized and oppressed rural proletariat. There were exceptions: a Muslim bourgeoisie survived in some centres such as Tlemsen, Constantine and even Algiers itself vigorous local institutions survived in the Berber hills and a few other places. But all in all, one could say that there were neither traditional institutions nor any Algerian nation.

Morocco has a number of islamic movements that demand the establishment of a truly Islamic society. Most of them sprouted up in the 1970s and caused considerable anxiety in the immediate aftermath of the Iranian revolution. But these movements have proven to be less powerful than was once feared — or hoped. After describing the main tendencies represented by these groups, I shall suggest some possible reasons for their political inefficacy.

THROUGHOUT THIS CENTURY, THE STRUGGLE FOR AND consolidation of Jewish territorial sovereignty in the ancient Land of Israel has been characterized by two complementary processes: waves of Jewish immigration from throughout the diaspora, and a succession of violent conflicts with Israel's Arab neighbours. Both of those processes were at work during 1990 — 91 when Israel became reluctantly involved in the Gulf war while also having to cope with an influx of hundreds of thousands of Jews seeking escape from the crumbling Soviet empire, as well as a few thousand emigrants from Ethiopia and from South America. For many Israelis, the surrealistic spectacle of immigrants being greeted at Ben-Gurion Airport with gas-masks designed to protect them from the Iraqi Scud missiles raining down on major Israeli cities, represented highly dramatic evidence of the fulfilment of Zionism's aspirations.

This article compares the patterns of breakdown of communist rule and the processes by which power was transferred to new ruling groups in four countries: Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the GDR. In the countries covered in this paper, two paths to systemic crisis and breakdown are identified: the path of failed reform in Hungary and Poland, and the path of intransigent resistance to reform in Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic. The lesson of the Czechoslovak and East German experience was clearly that those regimes which totally rejected reform, because they saw it as incompatible with communist power, faced total and rapid collapse when confronted with the challenge of Gorbachev's perestroika and when deprived of the support of the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’; but the experience of Poland and Hungary suggests that those regimes which embarked on reform were no more successful in preserving communist power — half-way reform turned out in many ways to be even worse than no reform at all, while radical reform, that is, reform which would bring about the intended economic results, in the end could not be achieved without sweeping away communist power. Gorbachev himself now seems to be impaled on the horns of this same dilemma in the Soviet Union.