THE SIXTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION PROVIDES AN opportunity to draw up a balance-sheet. It is even more appropriate as the Soviet leaders have used the occasion to adopt a new constitution, and have thus implied that a new stage is about to begin for Soviet society and for the system of government which emanates from it and embodies it. This stage, called advanced socialism, has several characteristics: ‘the formation of a new historic community - the Soviet people, the development of the dictatorship of the proletariat into the state of the whole people, the transformation of the CPSU from a revolutionary party of the workers into the party of all the people, the strengthening of the homogeneity of Soviet society’. The phrases ‘homogeneity and cohesion of society’ are probably those which recur most frequently in the presentation of the new constitution, especially when its national implications are described. ‘The constitution of the USSR is at the same time a constitution of a state of the whole people — the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — and of the fifteen sovereign republics which compose it and finally of the thirtyeight national-state formations with differing forms of autonomy. The new historic community — the Soviet people — numbers 250 million citizens, representing more than one hundred nations and nationalities of the USSR. But it is also a single social monolith, a single historical phenomenon with a single economy, a single culture, a single Soviet way of life, a single ideology’

The present issue is devoted to a comparative investigation of the relations between political parties and trade unions in four countries of the European Community: France, Germany, Italy and Great Britain. It is the result of a conference jointly organized by the Policy Studies Institute and our journal, held on 23 June 1978 in London. In turn, the conference was the first in a series of similar comparative investigations of the relations between political parties and functional interests, employers, farmers, intellectuals etc., in the countries of the European community to be organized in the near future. These investigations will contribute to the search for the ‘more profound and less obvious trends and prospects as a whole’ in the 1978 and 1979 elections in Europe which we announced in our last issue. We then went on to state that: ‘The premisses of these comparative investigations are rooted in the common problems facing all Western European states because they all belong to one, specific region of modern industrial society — a region which presents the characteristic problems of mixed economies and welfare states, and which is marked by its specific geo-political position. The variations in the democratic politics of each of these Western European countries are closely linked, if in different ways, to these two major problems. These democratic policies can be new and passionate in Italy, traditional and calm in Britain - but they are still variations on the same themes.’

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.

HOW IS THE EEC TO REACT TO THE UNCTAD DEMAND FOR AN INTEGRATED commodity programme? In this paper we attempt to sketch the background to this question and to identify some of the major options available to the Community. At the outset, however, one point deserves emphasis: over the past fifty years there have been many attempts to manage international commodity trade. Their success or failure has invariably depended more on political than purely technical considerations. Where national security or alliance needs ‘demanded’ coordination, as with the combined Raw Materials Board during the Second World War, any technical difficulties were overcome; on the other hand the inter-war rubber, wheat and coffee agreements were unable to withstand the onslaught of the depression, the retreat to economic nationalism, and the readiness of many members to put short-term domestic considerations before long-term international commitments. In the current debate the political context has, of course, changed, but the relevance of these political considerations has not.

THERE IS NO OTHER WEST EUROPEAN DEMOCRACY AS HIGHLY SUSPECT throughout the world so far as the extent of its tolerance towards deviant marginal groups is concerned. This is one of the reasons why West Germany is a good case for testing certain propositions about the theory of pluralism in general. In political science terminology pluralism has mostly been used in the restricted way of a certain stage of public philosophy, i.e. in the sense of ‘interest group liberalism’ propagating and perpetuating the faith that a system built primarily upon group bargaining must be perfectly selfcorrective and must have confidence in the balancing impacts of ‘overlapping memberships’ and contervailing powers. The ‘bias of pluralism’ in political science2 included a restriction of the notion ‘pluralism’ to interest groups. It was the highly disputable attempt to sum up all the forms of emancipation movements and their counterforces in the concept of ‘group’, thus equalizing them, and to line up all the cleavage lines which developed at different times of modern history (movements for religious autonomy, nationalism, conflicts between cities and countryside, class struggles etc.) and which had some impact on the formation of party systems, to compete in one arena.

CONTEMPORARY WEST GERMAN FEDERALISM IS FACING A DILEMMA generated by the transformation of the party system after the second world war. Since the late nineteenth century highly complex political and administrative structures have developed in Germany and for most of the time federalism has been one of their important elements. Because of their complexity effective policy-making depended largely upon strategies of accommodation, bargaining and repartition of influence between rival groups and organizations. This has been the rationale of federalism as well as of multi-party coalition government.

THAT SOUTH AFRICA HAS WITHIN ITS STATE AND SOCIETY THE POTENTIAL for revolution is rarely doubted. It is a very strange and wicked country — anachronistic and atavistic, as if left over from the past to trouble the present. Africans are not worse treated today in South Africa than black men and women were in the United States 150 years ago. They are not bought and sold as property. Their survival, too, is assured unlike, say, the American Indians or the Aborigines of Australia at the turn of the century. They are more free, or less 'unfree', than the serfs in Russia before emancipation. But the extraordinary feature of South Africa is that it is still bound to a rigidly divided society which, if it is not slavery, is certainly close to serfdom. To behave in the twentieth century in a modern industrial state as if it were still the nineteenth or eighteenth century is very unusual, so unusual in fact that many people simply refuse to believe that it can be done: the whites deny that the parallel is just, the non-white populations refuse to believe it can last. It is this conflict of belief as well as the opposition of interests which seem to presage tragedy, for, if revolution comes, it will certainly be tragic not only for those who fear its consequences but for many who now want to hasten its arrival. Very often in such terrible situations, it seems to me that there is also an element of fatalism. It comes to be believed that what must be, will be, although whether that point has yet been reached in South Africa I do not know. It is something we have to consider.

In western democracies different patterns of cooperation among working class organizations have developed. The three ‘pillars’ of the working class movement in Britain, the trade unions, the party and the cooperative movement, have no equivalent in the history of Germany, for two reasons.

CONTINUITY RATHER THAN CHANGE WAS CHARACTERISTIC OF THE Turkish party system during its formative years in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Now, however, party competition in Turkey appears to be approaching a new phase of development. While some political analysts have described the emerging trends in the 1970s with reference to a ‘critical realignment’ in mass electoral behaviour, others have characterized the party system as going through a period of ‘flux and transition’. Indeed, the recent course of electoral politics in Turkey displays some significant changes. First, with the termination of the Justice Party's UP) dominant position in party competition, there has been a transition from a predominant party system to one of moderate pluralism in which the likelihood of coalition government has significantly increased. Secondly, the trend toward greater fragmentation in the party system which partially accounted for the JP's loss of dominance in 1973, appears to have been reversed in the 1977 parliamentary election as the two major parties made substantial gains at the expense of the minor parties. Thirdly, these changes have been accompanied by the increase of ideological polarization in the party system and the intensification of ideological cleavages among the party elites.

The problem of ‘tutelage’ of trade unions by political parties in italy must be seen against a background of: the structural conditions of the labour market (where trade unions are active) and those of the ‘political market’ (where parties are active) as masses for manoeuvre used to attain certain aims; the characteristics of the leadership of the trade unions and those of the political parties; the ‘styles of leadership’ (including the conduct of conflict) by trade union and party leaders.

ELECTIONS FOR A CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY ARE SCHEDULED TO TAKE place in Peru in 1978. In view of this event and of the changes which it might bring about, it would be useful to examine the tenyear record of the military revolutionary government in that country.

If the road to hell truly is paved with good intentions, it is of little solace to those who must walk it. So it is that after nearly a decade of revolution in Peru we can no longer concern ourselves with ferreting out the motives of the military officers who have led it, but must turn instead to an assessment of the damage that has been done. Peru's Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces has attracted considerable attention and even admiration within and without Latin America since its inception through a bloodless coup on 3 October 1968. In subsequent years the military junta, in which the Army dominates over the Air Force and Navy, has passed through three perceptible stages. The first corresponded to the presidency of General Juan Velasco Alvarado, architect of the coup and leader of the revolution until he was ousted in August 1975. His tenure, now referred to officially as the ‘First Phase’ of the revolution, was responsible for dramatic and far-reaching reforms which eventually over-taxed the financial and political resources of his government and forced him from office. The so-called ‘Second Phase’ of the revolution began with Velasco's replacement by his more conservative Prime Minister, General Francisco Morales Bermddez. Attention turned to consolidating the gains of the revolution during this period but the inability of the government to shore up the economy and rationalize the programmes of the Velasco era resulted in the imposition ofa severe austerity programme in July 1976. Violent political upheavals within the popular classes in July, and the backlash of the conservative factions within the military, caused a purge of most of the remaining liberal officers in the government. It is fair to speak of a ‘Third Phase’ of the revolution since the latter part of 1976 in which President Morales has been pressured into systematically dismantling many of the popular reforms of the Velasco era. Official announcements in 1977 clarified the military's intention to withdraw from direct management of the state over the next two to three years. Thus, it is appropriate now to begin assessment of the Institutional Revolution of the Armed Forces and its legacy for Peru.

THERE HAS RECENTLY BEEN A SPATE OF WRITING ON THE CONCEPT OF corporatism as part of the interpretation of contemporary British politics, and a series of articles by J. T. Winkler has provided a comprehensive and detailed frameword for the analysis of certain features of political practice. One of the purposes of this writing is to rescue the term ‘corporatism’ from its Italian and fascist connotations to permit a dispassionate examination of the central features of corporatist thought and practice.

ARE ELITES AND LEADING MINORITIES A NECESSARY EVIL, A LIABILITY, or are they a vital and beneficial asset? Ultimately, the question is: should we downgrade or uplift leadership?

The list of authors who speak in favour of the latter view is impressive, both in time and in eminence. For the ancients, it is the major Greek historian, Thucydides, who reminds us that the greatness of Athens reached its height with Pericles precisely because ‘by his rank, ability, and known integrity he was enabled to exercise an independent control over the multitude’. After we had begun again, Bryce reviewed the most advanced experience of his time in this concise sentence: ‘Perhaps no form of government needs great leaders so much as democracy does’. Fifty years later, in 1937, after the downfall of democracy in Italy, Germany and Spain, de Madariaga wrote : ‘Despite appearances, liberal democracies are dependent on leadership even more so perhaps than other, more authoritarian forms of government; for . . . their natural tendency to weaken the springs of political authority must be counterbalanced by a higher level of. . . authority on the part of their leaders’.

IT WAS ONE OF THE MAJOR ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE WEST TO SECURE the inclusion of the issue of human rights within the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) and its Final Act. Among the Principles contained in the latter which purport to guide relations between the participating states, Principle VII refers to respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief. Basket III of the Final Act contains an extensive number of detailed practical measures allowing for the freer movement of peoples, information and ideas. These results were achieved only after protracted negotiations in drawing up of a mutually acceptable package of measures covering the whole range of issues involved in detente: the military and the economic as well as the humanitarian. The practical manner in which the Final Act brought these aspects of detente together provides a solid basis from which to assess implementation by the participating states and therefore their commitment to continuing the process of detente.

OVER THE LAST TEN YEARS, ECOLOGY HAS MADE ITS ENTRANCE INTO politics. At first the main concern was with pollution; but soon it broadened, and today the watchword is energy. In both cases the underlying phenomenon is that of economic growth. Not that all growth is incompatible with ecological balance; but over the last few decades normally there was a conflict, and industrial and urban growth in particular have led to a significant deterioration of the environment. Hence the importance of the controversy surrounding industrialization and economic growth, which has taken on an increasing importance in the politics of several Western European countries.

The intellectual structures which can easily be applied to the political and social realities of Northern Europe are largely irrelevant to those of Southern Europe, and certainly, to those of France.

Three postulates are implicit in considering the problem of the changing relations between the trade unions and the working-class parties.

One is that in every European industrial country there are working-class parties. In addition there are parties which are not working class, but bourgeois middle class, conservateurs, popolare or volksparteien (and the logic of this postulate even implies that there is, in fact, only one working-class party of any real political significance).

WHEN A SLEEPER AWAKES FROM A BAD DREAM HE FINDS THE BEDCLOTHES a little rumpled but nothing else changed. The dream itself quickly fades. However the recurring dream is a phenomenon well-known to psychology. The French electorate of the Fifth Republic goes in for the insubstantial dream as an important form of experience. The most famous example was the ‘Events of May 1968’. Like a sleepwalker the whole country acted out the myth of revolution with all its romantic folklore. Comfortable, even wealthy, people manned the strike committees at their children's schools. However nobody turned the power or the water off and nobody did any shooting. People only began to get killed when petrol distribution was resumed for the Whitsun holiday weekend and there were 120 deaths in road accidents. Nonetheless the government tottered and the world trembled. No one noticed that in an affluent industrial democracy with a standard of living among the highest in the world the kind of discontent that leads to violent cataclysm did not exist.

In the past two decades the relationship between the unions and the labour party — the central feature of labour politics in Britain — has undergone some remarkable changes. It has passed through severe crisis: reinforcing tensions which built up in the 1960s became so great at the end of the decade that the alliance appeared ‘threatened as never before’. One scholar of labour movement politics suggested at the time that there might be a life-span to ‘Labour’ parties. To the Left of the Labour Party some revolutionary critics looked to a militant union break with ‘the immense contradiction’. To the Right of the Labour Party some social democratic critics looked to a realignment which would facilitate the emergence of a new radical centre party.

THERE ARE THREE REASONS WHY THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN WRITTEN. FIRST, the Centre Parties, with their origins in rural interests, have provided a natural channel for the articulation of issues difficult to accomodate within the framework of a two-party system. These issues include decentralization, environmental protection and a questioning attitude to growth. Secondly, these parties provide an interesting study of attempts to adapt from a traditionalist base to the modern world. In the process they have come to play an important part in coalition formation in their respective countries. The Norwegian Centre Party, for example, provided the Prime Minister for a coalition from 1965 to 1971 in the person of Per Borten, while the Centre Party of Sweden achieved power in 1976 at the head of a three-party coalition under the premiership of Thorbjörn Fälldin. Finally, they have been little explored academically either in their own countries or in English-language source literature.

It seems to be part of the conventional wisdom of British political science that English religious institutions and values do not demand much attention from the discipline's practitioners. It appears to be tacitly assumed that the process of secularization, and the relative absence of serious religious cleavages, have left such phenomena with minimal political significance. Nevertheless, Churches, and above all the Church of England, have traditionally occupied a position in English society that must leave some question marks against such assumptions. Mass politics, in an age of widespread indifference to institutional religion, no doubt has left Churches with considerably diminished scope for the exercize of political influence. On the other hand, these bodies still dispose of resources that, potentially at least, make them pressure groups of some weight. The politicization of moral issues, of particular interest to the Churches, may add credence to such a view.