TAKE AWAY ITS EXOTIC AND ITS MAGIC, THE MARVELLOUS despair of Cien Años de Soledad, the Latino troubadours like Atahualpa Yupanqui who sing of peasant rebellions, love of land and patrimony, and sudden death; take away as well the tourists, the scenery, the churches, the romantic rebels and the outrageous caudillos, and indeed the whole vast mad throng of images which foreigners hold about Latin America, and we come to the heart of the matter, one unique theme, one common denominator, or perhaps better, one refrain, or one implicit major premise about the hemisphere. It is that everything has been tried and nothing works. Or, nothing works as it should. Even that which starts well won't last. Enterprises fail unless foreign owned and operated.

THE ISSUE OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT HAS PERHAPS BEEN MORE widely and publicly debated in this country than in any other. It has been a live political issue for well over a century, and the range of views represented by participants is as broad today as at any time in the past. Given the vast amount of literature – philosophical, legal, political and statistical – devoted to the subject, it is difficult to contribute to the debate in some more substantial way then merely by rehearsing well-known opposed positions. What I shall attempt to do in this paper is briefly to set out the positions of principle which might be taken up in arguments about the reintroduction of the death penalty, in the hope of clarifying the exact points of disagreement. Having done this, I shall argue for a particular moral position, before going on to consider some of the more specialized legal issues and the implications for constitutional theory which any form of reintroduction would raise. In the light of all these arguments, I shall finally draw some conclusions for both the debate of principle and the problem of practical politics with which the members of both Houses of Parliament are likely to be faced in the near future.

ONCE IRAN HAD CALLED FOR AN ISLAMIC REVOLUTION, THERE was speculation that the message might elicit a similar response elsewhere in the Islamic world. In fact, soon after the events in Iran, a group of foreign journalists arrived in Turkey and rumour had it that they had come to report on the Islamic revolt expected in Turkey as well. The expected, however, did not take place: instead, had the journalists stayed on, what they would have witnessed was the breakdown of democraci, and the installation of authoritarian rule by the staunchest de enders of secularism, the Turkish military. Islamic politics had been instrumental in exacerbating the democratic crisis, and hence the military takeover was partially directed against the Islamic politics of the National Salvation Party (NSP) and the street politics of radical Islamic groups. Islamic politics was strong enough to figure in the equation of democratic breakdown, but far too weak to detonate an Islamic revolution.

The purpose of this essay is to look into the nature of Islamic politics in Turkey in terms of its past ventures in society, its recent involvement in party politics and its prospects for the future. Our fundamental assumption is that the specific characteristics of Islamic politics in Turkey are closely bound up with the state-dominant nature of Turkish political culture and society. More specifically, we attempt to show that changes in the nature of Islamic politics and movements, their organization, aims and strategies, have been in large part shaped by the changing structure and ideology of the state and the centralist elites.

THE BASIC ELEMENTS OF THE HONG KONG PROBLEM ARE WELL known and can be briefly stated. Britain acquired the colony of Hong Kong Island as a port of access to the China trade under the 1842 Treaty of Nanking which concluded the Opium War. Followin the Second Anglo-Chinese War a further 3¾ square miles of land, British Kowloon and Stonecutters Island, were ceded to Britain. But under the 1898 convention of Peking a much larger area, formerly part of Guangdong province and now known as the New Territories, amounting to over 360 square miles and including numerous small islands and the surrounding seas, was leased to Britain for 99 years. This lease runs out in July 1997. The Chinese Communist government in Peking has repeatedly declared its intention to reassert its sovereign right to control the whole territory of Hong Kong by 1997 ‘at the latest’. Indeed the People's Republic's leaders have made it clear that they have never accepted the treaties through which land was ceded and leased to Britain as being valid under international law. They regard them as part of the long series of ‘Unequal treaties’ imposed by the imperial owers which the rulers of China in that period were compellecf to accept because of military weakness. Thus there is no question of China being ready to renew the New Territories lease or to come to some agreement recognizing British sovereignty over Hong Kong Island and Kowloon. Peking has never, since 1949, formally accepted the legality of British status in Hong Kong.

IN THE STRICTEST MEANING OF THE TERM, JACOB Burckhardt , the eminent historian and widely acclaimed expert on European art, cannot be considered a neglected author. Yet nor does he belong to the mainstream of European political thinking; he is to be found on the sidelines as a remarkable, but somewhat erratic, figure, representing a unique sort of extreme cultural criticism directed against modernity.

THE DÉBÂCLE OF THE 1848 REVOLUTION WAS A SEVERE SHOCK to most European radicals of that period. The resilience of the anciens regimes proved that, contrary to the revolutionary prophecies, the millennium was not around the corner. If the powers-that-be withstood such a powerful revolutionary wave, how were they ever going to be toppled?

The disillusion was strongest among German radical revolutionaries. Many emigrated to the United States; some, like Arnold Ruge and Bruno Bauer, slowly slid into co-operation with conservative circles, and re-emerged, decades later, as spokesmen for Bismarckian politics; many just dropped out, quietly slipping into obscure and respectable bourgeois existence; Karl Marx, in his London exile, abandoned his hopes for an imminent social upheaval, stayed away from the more radical, Jacobin elements of the League of Communists and immersed himself in his journalistic and scholarly work, expecting the long-range internal contradictions of capitalist society to bring about the dissolution of the bourgeois order. Only in the 1860s did he return to some sort of political activity in connection with the First International: even there he was a moderating influence against the more extreme Blanqukts and Bakuninkts.