THE MUNICH AGREEMENT HAS BEEN THE SUBJECT OF A VAST literature. There are only a few points which I should like briefly to make. The first is that for the Czechs the main horror of Munich was not that it deprived them of valuable territories, but that it was imposed on them by their allies. The Anglo-French ultimatum of September 1938 profoundly wounded President Beneš and the whole Czech nation. If they had had no friends at all, the Czechs might have fought alone and perished, or they might have surrendered, the tragedy would have been simple. But their false friends told them that if they resisted they would be in the wrong, they deprived them even of the chance of defending themselves. This was to have lasting effects on their national morale.

‘WHEN WE HAVE SAID THAT THE EDITOR IS IN FULL CONTROL OF editorial policy, we have really said everything, and all the answers are only slight variations on that theme. Naturally, he has his assistant editors; naturally there is full discussion; naturally the circulation departments are usually informed in advance of big editorial developments; but the Editor is in charge of policy.’

WHATH AS HAPPENED TO THE FRENCH SOCIALIST PARTY? ONCE ONE of the largest and most influential political parties in France, heir to a tradition dating back to the French Revolution, a party with deep roots in local and national politics, the SFIO decided to dissolve itselfin 1969 and to reconstitute a new socialist party. This new party is to be built on the foundations of the old SFIO in co-operation with a number of clubs, most notably the Convention des Institutions Républicaines (CIR), a federation of clubs recently emerged from the now defunct Federation of the Left (Fédération de la gaucbe démocrate et socialiste, FGDS).

THE POLITICAL SCIENTIST WHOSE MAIN INTEREST LIES IN ASIA OR Africa has to avoid impaling himself upon the twin horns of an analytical dilemma. If he seeks to place his subject within the general framework of political theory he finds that it is difficult to avoid accepting Asian politics as a sub-species of Western politics. But if he insists upon the uniqueness of his own subject then he can expect to achieve an explanation of a ‘rose is a rose is a rose’ variety. Almond and Coleman in The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton, 1960) set us off in pursuit of ‘political development’ and ‘modernization’. Many of us rejected a view of politics as a continuum in which the Asian world was presented as entering the mainstream of political development insofar as its members were assimilating to the model of ‘competitive politics’ – which, on closer examination, turned out to be the Anglo-American model – though Almond and Coleman did not go quite so far as to insist that the goal, the promised land of political development, was a two-party system.

GEORGES SOREL FORMS AN APPROPRIATE SUBJECT FOR THIS JOURNAL, in that his writing can be seen as providing a justification for permanent opposition to the work of government. His name has been associated with the recent revival of anarcho-syndicalism, and at first sight he has much in common with the contemporary Left. Sorel was an outspoken critic of consensus politics, in which socialist leaders appeared to betray their principles and adjust themselves comfortably to the existing order. He believed real opposition could only find expression outside the political system, untainted by its shabby compromises. He was an opponent of ‘bourgeois culture’, and regarded it as his main achievement to have exposed its superficiality, particularly the utilitarian social science taught in the universities. He attacked materialist values, and looked for a revival of idealism and integrity in public life. He regarded proletarian violence as morally superior to the force which the democratic state attempted to conceal by fraud. Finally, he disliked bureaucracy, and hoped to see a society of producers’ workshops under the workers’ control.

IN A RECENT ISSUE OF Government and Opposition AN ATTEMPT WAS made to answer at an abstract level the question, ‘Why Political Systems Change’. The aim of this article is more limited. It is a tentative preliminary attempt to explain why important changes took place in a particular political system – that of Czechoslovakia – in January 1968 and to examine the changes themselves and what remains of them in the wake of the Soviet intervention.

It must be emphasized straight away that the January changes in Czechoslovakia were not so sudden as their treatment by the western mass media perhaps implied. For something close to five years before the January reforms pluralistic developments could be discerned in Czechoslovakia. Limited though they were, they expressed themselves in the form of a less severely censored press, greater scope for interest group activity, a slight relaxation of detailed central party control over the National Assembly and local government, and in more debate within the ranks of the Communist Party.

THE PHRASE ‘SOCIOLOGY OF POLITICS’ UNMISTAKABLY INDICATES A sub-field, a subdivision of the overall field of sociology – like sociology of religion, sociology of leisure and the like. By saying sociology of politics we make clear that the framework, the approach or the focus of the inquiry is sociological.

The phrase ‘political sociology’ is, on the other hand, unclear. It may be used as a synonym for ‘sociology of politics’, but it may not. When saying political sociology the focus or the approach of the inquiry generally remains unspecified. Since political phenomena are a concern for many disciplines, this ambiguity turns out to be a serious drawback. This is particularly apparent in Europe, where many scholars share Maurice Duverger's view that ‘in a general way the two labels (political sociology and political science) are synonymous’. This view is very convenient, is particularly successful among European sociologists eager to expand to the detriment of political scientists, and for this very reason goes a long way towards explaining the persistent lag of political science in Europe.

CAN PARLIAMENTARY INSTITUTIONS THRIVE IN COUNTRIES WITH little or no tradition in the habits of self-government? Is multiparty competition viable in states where compromise is not accepted as a political virtue? The questions are familiar and are asked whenever the advisability of exporting the Westminster model (or the Capitol Hill or Palais Bourbon model) is raised.

The proposition to be examined is that a parliamentary and party system was transplanted into an initially unfavourable environment and eventually acclimatized itself. The ecological difficulties are familiar; indeed, they form the substance of the debate about the export of systems. In the Third World, at the point of decolonization it involves the former colonial power bequeathing liberal-democratic institutions as a device for legitimizing the new native regime.

TWENTY YEARS OF BREAKDOWNS IN PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENTS; the replacement of competitive political systems by military-bureaucratic regimes throughout Asia and Africa; civil war in Vietnam; the disintegration of Nigeria and the perpetration of genocide in that country, have inspired pessimism among most observers about the future of democratic politics in the new states. It has been suggested that political scientists now turn their attentions to the question of ‘political decay’ as well as to the question of ‘political development’ and that political leaders in the new states concentrate upon building the instruments of political control before engaging in serious economic development and social mobilization, and before permitting political competition and political participation: for, it is argued, rapid increases in economic development, social mobilization, and political participation work against the building and maintenance of strong and stable political institutions in a developing society.

THAT POLITICAL PARTIES DID NOT HOLD A RESPECTABLE PLACE IN 18th-century American political theory was a reflection of the low place they were believed to hold in practice. Wherever the Americans looked, whether to the politics of Georgian England, their own provincial capitals or the republics of the historical past, they thought they saw in parties only a distracting and divisive force representing the claims of unbridled, seKsh, special interests. I do not intend here to try to penetrate the thickets of 18th-century politics either in England or in the American provinces. We long ago learned not to identify the Whigs and Tories of the 18th century with the highly developed British political parties of modern times, and not to imagine that England had a well-developed two-party system at the close of the 18th century or even during the first two decades of the 19th. Modern parties have grown up in response to (and in turn have helped to stimulate) the development of large electorates, and their institutional structures are in good measure an outgrowth of the efforts necessary to connect the parliamentary party and the mass party. The modern party is, in this respect, the disciplined product of regular party competition in the forum of public opinion. It also deals with legislative issues, over which the established parties differ.

MY STARTING POINT IS THE RATHER PLATITUDINOUS PROPOSITION that political science is a branch of scholarship which can be defined in terms of the activity studied but not in terms of the method adopted, which is to say that it is not a discipline like history or physics. To say that these subjects are disciplines is to indicate that historians and physicists are committed both to a certain method of acquiring data and to a certain mode of explanation. Because political scientists are not so committed they are inevitably involved in controversies about method and explanation, and the view I propose to discuss here is the view that, although several modes of explanation are open to students of politics, only the historical mode, and on a different level the philosophical mode, are appropriate. Those who hold this view lean heavily on the writings of Professor Michael Oakeshott and I shall begin with a very brief reference to Oakeshott's account of the main modes of experience and explanation. Subsequent sections will discuss the relevance of this account to students of politics, the nature of historical explanation, and the possibility of alternatives such as sociological explanation.

INTER-PARTY RIVALRY BASED LARGELY ON SOCIO-ECONOMIC LINES took institutional shape in Ceylon, for the first time, with the approach of general elections in August–September 1947, under the newly inaugurated Soulbury Constitution. The issues at the general election of 1947 were simple and straightforward. It was accepted that the United National Party (UNP) would form the government with its leader, D. S. Senanayake, as the man who would lead the country to independence. The party had the backing of almost the entire press. It enjoyed ample financial resources and commanded the support of the ‘big families’, the landed interests, the mudalalis (shop-owners), and government officials, particularly the village headmean. The choice posed to the electors was between a policy of progressive social reforms and stable government advocated by the UNP as against the revolutionary changes that the three left wing parties envisaged – the Trotskyist Lank Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) and its splinter, the Bolshevik Leninist Party which later changed its name to the Bolshevik Samasamaja Party (BSP), and the Moscoworiented Communist Party (CP). These left-wing groups were ideologically in conflict with each other.

FOR THIRTY-TWO YEARS GENERAL FRANCO HAS REMAINED HEAD OF the Spanish State and has retained control over the political system which he fashioned during the Civil War. But once Franco is removed from the stage what will happen to the system?

The system depends upon the support of a number of groups in Spanish society which coalesced during the Civil War in support of the nationalist cause. These groups were united by a desire for victory over the Republic, but had long term conflicts of interest. Franco's own authority has been due to his skill in arbitrating between these competing elements and in welding them into a durable form of coalition government. Each group has been granted a stake in the regime; for example, conventions have grown up regulating the distribution of government offices between them. But Franco has never permitted any one of them to obtain a monopolistic position. By remaining relatively independent of all factions he has always been free to manoeuvre between the competing interests and to retain the initiative. At the same time, his system has benefited from the reluctance of all groups in the society to press their differences to the point where violence might be renewed.

1968 will remain in political history a memorable year, for at least two reasons. The first is of particular relevance to this chronicle of Government and Opposition. Not only was 1968 what could be called a highly politicized year, in the sense that the number and the pace of political events in most countries and continents were above average. But domestic political problems came to the fore (the French crisis, May 1968-April 1969, the crushing of the Czechoslovak revolution by the Soviet intervention) or ran parallel to some permanent international crisis (the possible impact on the Vietnam war of the change of American president, the transformation of the conflict between the Chinese and Soviet Communist Parties into an outright conflict between the two states). Moreover all these domestic political events had everywhere a common cause. They derived everywhere from the need for political modernization, with the special accent on participation, which has eluded both pluralistic-constitutional and communist states. The modern industrial or even post-industria1 society, seeking to adapt its politics to the rapid technological, economic and social changes, is in labour everywhere.

NEITHER A SINGLE NOR A DOMINANT POLITICAL PARIY EMERGED FROM the Indonesian nationalist struggle. Rather, before the declaration of independence in August 1945, during the physical revolution against the Dutch which terminated in December 1949, and in the subsequent years the nationalist movement has been fragmented into a diversity of political groupings. Even today, after many small parties have disappeared, there remain eight legally active parties; a ninth, the PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia), is striving to put together an underground apparatus from the ruins of 1965. As each party is the centre of a network of mass organizations, the peasants, youth, women, students and workers are also organizationally fragmented.

The multiplicity of political parties is rooted in the division of Indonesian society into several distinct self-conscious, socio-cultural groupings, the alirans (lit: ‘streams’), whose distribution has changed little since 1945. They are cross-ethnic in nature and mostly encompass a broad range of socio-economic classes. The broad outlines of the aliran pattern become apparent through an examination of two fundamental cleavages that cut across society: one religious, the other between holders of traditionalist and modernist world views.