WHEN ONE COMES TO LOOK AT THE LITERATURE ON CIVIL-MILITARY relations one is struck by the enormous proliferation of ad hoc generalizations on the subject, particularly where the military in new nations is concerned. Many of these contradict each other. Often the theories are not adequate to the facts. And frequently they depend on so many other things being equal that by the time one has made all the necessary qualifications there is not much explanatory force left in the original hypothesis.

The colonial legacy has on the one hand been said to create political armies in the image of those of the colonial power, which are less likely to interfere in politics.

THE STUDENT OF POLITICS AND THE PRACTITIONER OF POLITICS approach the same problem from different ends. The student is concerned with searching for the underlying realities which can explain the surface shifts of political ephemera; or perhaps with disentangling the different levels of reality which he discerns from his dispassionate observation of the political scene. The practitioner is concerned above all with the intricacies of day-to-day politics. He is interested in long-term patterns of political behaviour only insofar as they affect his political chances, or insofar as foreknowledge will enable him to change and shape the developing pattern. At the opposite ends of this division of interest in the phenomena of politics one may imagine, as ideal types, the ‘pure’ political scientist, the neutral observer of the political battle whose attitude to the contestants and their fluctuating fortunes is one of scholarly detachment, and the dedicated politician, glorying in the clash and chaos of the battlefield, with little more than contempt for those who stand aside and watch. For those who stand towards either end of this division, there are now two separate worlds of politics.

ON THE MORNING OF 19 MARCH 1969, A CONTINGENT OF BRITISH paratroopers and police landed on the tiny Caribbean island of Anguilla and installed Mr Anthony Lee as Her Majesty's Commissioner. According to the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary, the reasons for taking this course of action were: there was a small group of disreputable characters from outside the state who not only possessed arms but were influencing those who purported to be the island's government. Further, this armed minority was frustrating the wishes of the great majority of Anguillans, and if, as a result of the absence of any lawful government or good order on the island, there was any damage done to the person or property of any foreign national, then Britain would be held responsible in virtue of her responsibility for the island's defence and external relations. It was therefore necessary to ensure that Britain would be in a position to discharge her responsibility fully.

THERE ARE FEW COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD IN WHICH THERE IS NO constitutional machinery for changing the head of the government. Certainly there are a number of heads of government in Latin America who are effectively irremoveable by constitutional means (and Mr Burnham would seem recently to have joined their ranks); constitutionally, however, they are bound to go through the motions of an election.