THE ARGUMENT WE ARE ABOUT TO PRESENT UNDER THIS perhaps surprising title is based on a syllogism whose two premises are now visible to all in their sad reality.

The first premise is that because of their political organization in small and medium-sized sovereign states, the countries of Western Europe are losing the chance of adapting themselves independently to the requirements of the third industrial revolution. In this they are falling far behind the United States of America, a welfare state like them and belonging to their political culture – and Japan, whose different political culture makes the comparison less appropriate. Technological dependence brings with it lack of independence in all directions – and especially in military capacity which is now dominated by the two nuclear superpowers. The belated individual efforts of some of the European states to modernize their industries with their own means and with different socio-economic ideologies – conservative monetarism in Britain, socialist Keynesianism in France – have aggravated unemployment in the one and inflation in the other, and provoked much popular dissent against the central governments. The centralized nationalistic system became increasingly inadequate: for the problems are common ones that require common solutions; and as the problems are functional, they abhor ideological approaches.

IN MAY-JUNE 1981 THE LEFT CAME TO POWER IN FRANCE WITH an ambitious, if not altogether coherent or consistent, programme of economic expansion, redistribution, industrial relations reform, liberalization and decentralization. Unlike previous Left-wing governments which had proved to be unstable and transient, the newly formed government in 1981 was built on solid electoral and governmental foundations: the Socialists had captured the Presidency, enjoyed alone a majority in the National Assembly and provided the bulk of the Government. That government could look forward to at least five years of uninterrupted rule. So long-term structural reforms could be envisaged.

MANCUR OLSON HAS WRITTEN A BOOK IN THE GRAND tradition, trying to explain how societies are undermined by their own success. In his own words, there is an ‘internal contradiction’ (p. 145) in the development of stable societies. I want to discuss Olson's views in the light of other works in the same tradition, works that also set out to explain how success tends to be self-defeating in various ways. Among the classics of social theory, I have singled out the writings of Marx, Veblen and Schumpeter. A contemporary work that suggests itself for the same kind of comparison is the recent book by Douglass North, Structure and Change in Economic History. Before I go on to compare Olson'stheory with these competing explanations, I must briefly set out the main elements of the theory itself. This must of necessity be a very simplified statement, but the later discussion will allow me to add some nuances.

IF THE ZOOLOGISTS ARE TO BE BELIEVED, THIS WORLD appears very different to members of different species of animals. Flowers conceal patterns and markings that are visible only to insects; dogs inhabit a world reeking with enticing scents; the bats' Lebenswelt echoes with highly significant squeaks. Something rather similar is true of political animals as well. The political world that faces the true-blue Tory has contours different from those that present themselves to the militant socialist, while what the liberal sees as the manifest data of politics is different again. Each of them, contemplating the common political world, has his attention caught and held by certain phenomena beside which others fade into insignificance. It is not surprising, therefore, that each has resort to a different key concept to sum up his experience. For the ideal-typical conservative, the basic datum of political experience is the totality of the historic political community, the nation. Like Rousseau's patriot, from the moment he opens his eyes he sees his country, and to the day of his death he never sees anything else. The socialist, by contrast, his attention held by a different range of experiences, wonders how anyone can fad to recognize the importance of social classes and the rift between them, while the liberal in his turn suspects the others of being deliberately obtuse when they refuse to see that distinct and different individuals are the basic components of political reality.

POLITICAL VIOLENCE CREATES ITS OWN MOMENTUM NOT ONLY in the wider security community but also in that refuge for the voyeur, academic research. Before 1968 a mere handful of books looked at the Ulster problem. Since then more than two hundred books and several thousand articles have appreared. But to what avail? In a survey of this vast literature Professor John Whyte concludes that there has been a disproportion between the enormous effort expended and the exiguous results achieved. The purist might maintain that it is not the task of scholars to indulge in political engineering: to those of us who live in the benighted province any port in a storm will do. The merit of these five books is that, wittingly or not, they create some optimism simply because they shift our gaze from the depressing reality of Belfast and examine the problem in a wider context. Of course, that might not be their purpose. Bad Chubb set out with the modest task of explaining the political process of the Irish Republic for the benefit of his own students who had lacked an up-todate general work. Bew and Patterson took as their starting point ‘the irrepressible reality of the class conflict generated by the capitalist structure of the Irish economy’ (p. 187).

DURING THE LAST DECADE ‘EUROPEAN UNION’ HAS BECOME something of a modern catchphrase in the European Community. In its simplest form it is a protean concept which serves as a convenient label for all those who advocate a more regulated and binding Community, though their conception may not necessarily be restricted to the present Community of Ten. ‘European Union’ first emerged at the Paris conference of heads of government in October 1972. There it was agreed that the Community's main objective was to transform, before the end of the decade, ‘the whole complex of the relations of Member States into a European Union’. The communiqué issued after the Paris meeting of the heads of government on 10 December 1974 reaffirmed this commitment and urged the Community of Nine to ‘agree as soon as possible on an overall concept of European Union’.

WHEN IN OCTOBER 1982 LE MONDE COMMEMORATED THE centenary of Arthur de Gobineau's death, it borrowed as headline Jean Mistler's description of him as ‘le plus grand méconnu du dix-neuvième siècle’. Despite its hyperbole, that judgment is useful in alerting us to an absorbing case partly of neglect and partly of misrepresentation, and to the circumstances under which this pioneer of Aryan racist ideology was posthumously rescued from the first of these fates only at the price of condemnation to the second. There are both personal and public reasons why Gobineau has proved so difficult for his own contemporaries and for posterity to assess. Much of the problem arises from the enigmatic complexity of the man himself: a figure (in Jean Gaulmier's phrase) ‘tantôt fascinant, tantôt insupportable’, a self-styled aristocrat, a charming yet fiercely pessimistic autodidact, an energetic novelist, poet and dramatist as well as diplomat, journalist, historian and orientalist, and someone who bore the stamp both of polymath and of charlatan. But the image has been blurred also because of the impact of wider historical experience, concerning above all the record of Franco-German mutual hostility. From whichever side of the Rhine they came, the attempts at viewing Gobineau through the gunsmoke of 1870–1 were already confusing enough even before the turmoil of 1914–18 further obscured the scene. Further misperception thrived once Nazism started to implement across France and Europe at large a vision of Teutonic racial destiny which was widely, yet wrongly, taken to reflect directly Gobineau's own ideas. The points of disjunction between those beliefs and what actually became known as ‘gobinism’ need to be recognized. Even so, that awareness is enhanced by acknowledging also that Gobineau's whole mode of thinking about race made him singularly liable to such distortion. In short, he himself had quite gratuitously created his very own hostages to intellectual fortune.