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.

TODAY, GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS OFTEN SEEM TO BE IN THE position of the legendary caliph Harun al Raschid, who went about in disguise among his people in order to find out what they really thought, since he could not trust his servants to tell him the truth. This story puts in a nutshell some systematic questions:

What kind of political information is circulating in society?

What are the information ‘needs’ of government and how can they be satisified?

How is information transformed or shaped in the political process, in society, in parliament, in government?

To what degree is political information dependant on the respective structure and distribution of legitimate power Herrschuftsorganisation?

What informal and organizational networks exist?

What is the impact of the mass media? How far, if at all, do our present theories on information processes explain reality?

How far is political information dependent on individual perception?

What processes of feedback exist and what influence do these feedback processes exercise on the content of information and decision-making?

‘VERY DEEP IS THE WELL OF THE PAST’, WRITES THOMAS MANN, as he begins his Tales of Jacob, ‘Might one not even call it bottomless?’ And indeed so it is if we search out the origins of government down, down, through its many levels in time until we reach only a misty shadow of what might have been some primitive society whose very existence we can but infer from artifacts, from myth and legend – and from an interpolation, unhistorical to be sure for it is mere hypothesis – from what we know of stateless societies still extant in this, our own day.

IN A FIERCELY CONTESTED GAME OF FOOTBALL OR RUGBY THE job of the referee is both essential and unenviable. On such occasions, whilst the players will appreciate the importance of the rules of the competition, the incentive to break them can be overwhelming. This is a specific instance of a more general case: the higher the stakes in any competition, the greater the need for a good referee to ensure that the game is played fairly.

Much more significant competition takes place between the industries of the member states of the European Community, and indeed of the rest of the world, for the custom of the Community's markets. It is important to note that the European Community is still far from achieving a truly common market across all the member states, as free from non-tariff barriers as it is already from tariffs. Competition policy in Europe has two referees, national enforcement bodies and the European Commission. This paper is concerned only with the Commission, which has responsibility for matters of competition between the member states.

‘WHEN THE SWEDES BEAT A RETREAT FROM KEYNES THAT surely signals a climacteric.’ Thus Andrew Shonfield clinched his argument that the unwillingness of the industrialized countries to offset the deflationary consequences of the 1979 oil shock reflected a general crisis of confidence in the principles of the mixed economy. The loss of Keynesian innocence in the 1970s came to different countries in different ways. In Sweden it came comparatively late and abruptly when, in 1980, after six years in which public expenditure had grown from 46 per cent to 64 per cent of GDP, the coalition non-socialist government acknowledged that the budget deficit, amounting to 10 per cent of GDP, had reached crisis proportions. From 1980 the problem of curbing the recalcitrant deficit became a corner-stone of the non-socialists’ economic policy. Eschewing any increase in the tax-burden, which it was committed to reduce, the government launched a comprehensive attack on public spending. Its persistence on this course in the face of protests that it was eroding the welfare state and tolerating rising unemployment was a major factor in its defeat in the general election of September 1982.

HARDLY TEN MONTHS AFTER THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC'S ELECtorate had renewed Helmut Schmidt's mandate for another four-year term in office on 5 October 1980, Time offered its readers a scenario that saw Schmidt stepping down as Chancellor by 1 September 1983: an SPD Convention had reneged on his government's commitment to deploy Pershing II and Cruise missiles on West German soil, should the Geneva arms-control talks fail. In a surprise return to the chancellorship, Willy Brandt succeeded in forming a new coalition government with the FDP. When Brandt, however, accepted a Soviet offer to negotiate a nuclear-free zone in Central Europe, Hans Dietrich Genscher's Free Democrats left the cabinet. With its economy deteriorating and the scope of its welfare system another volatile issue, the FRG was pictured as preparing for early, extraordinary elections.

IN THE CONGRESSIONAL ELECTION OF 1982 RONALD REAGAN asked the American people to ‘stay the course’, and they have just responded with a definite negative that is nonethless difficult to interpret. The results were bad for the Republicans: a 26-seat loss in the House of Representatives, creating a 99-seat Democratic majority and ending the de facto Reagan majority there; and a loss of seven state governors together with many state representatives. The Republicans held their margin of eight in the Senate.

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 1982 WAR IN THE LEBANON AND ITS BLOODY AFTERMATH were not accidents of history. They resulted from the takeover of the Israel government and the world Zionist movement by Menachem Begin's Revisionists. This group of Zionist extremists (Dr Chaim Weizmann's description) had been derided and excluded from power for over 50 years. In 1977, they won their first Israeli general election and set about realizing their radical programme.

This article will discuss the roots of Begin's War and the challenge of the Begin revolution to world Jewry. First, it will review some of the available evidence about the fighting and the extent of civilian casualties. This review will throw light on Mr Begin's motives for launching ‘Operation Peace for Galilee’.

BURKE ISSUED THE CAUTION IN 1767: ‘WHEN ANY COMMUNITY is subordinately connected with another, the great danger of the connection is the extreme pride and self-complacency of the superior which in all matters of controversy will probably decide in its own favour’. He was writing about the American colonies but his remarks are equally pertinent to relations between Britain and Ireland then and now. Given this asymmetrical relationship and a long history of mutual hostility, it may appear curious that an almost audible sigh of relief was heard in London when a coalition government, headed by Dr Garret FitzGerald, was sworn in to lead a new Dail on 14 December 1982.

LITTLE NOVELTY IS NOW ATTACHED TO THE PHENOMENON OF Britain's relative industrial decline inasmuch as this had been the subject of interminable debate since well before the First World War. However, compelling reasons can be found now for examining one particular dimension of British performance, namely, industrial innovation. First, it is not too long since the ACARD reports appeared on Britain's capacity to embrace new technology. Secondly, NEDO has only recently published what constitutes the most comprehensive strategy yet devised for the UK electronics industry and, since electronics represents the core technology of the late twentieth century, the British position in this industry needs to be more widely appreciated in any appraisal of industrial innovation. Thirdly, the official level of UK unemployment (3.34 million in September 1982) suggests that without some prospect of reduction, organized labour is unlikely to endorse new technology where this leads to the widespread displacement of employment.

PETER ALEKSEYEVICH KROPOTKIN WAS BORN IN MOSCOW IN 1842, the youngest son of a noble Russian family whose origins could be traced back to the Middle Ages. He died in 1921 in a small village some forty miles to the north of that city, a radical critic of the Bolshevik regime and a symbol for all those who believed that the Bolsheviks had perverted the original aims of the Russian Revolution. In the course of his life he had spent a long period of exile in Western Europe, had been imprisoned both in Russia and in France and had achieved international celebrity in two separate fields. The first was geography, where in particular his research on the structure of the mountain ranges of Northern Asia radically changed the received views of the scientific community. The second was the European anarchist movement, in which Kropotkin played a prominent role both as a revolutionary activist and a theoretician. Indeed these two careers were not as mutually irrelevant as they might at first appear, since the most distinctive feature of Qopotkin's anarchism was the attempt he made to place anarchist ideas on a scientific foundation, borrowing especially from the then-fashionable theory of organic evolution. In the assessment that follows I shall look first at his exposition and defence of anarchist principles, then at his efforts to place those principles in a framework borrowed from the natural sciences and finally offer a critical verdict both on the principles themselves and on the attempt to use evolutionary theory to back them up.

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.

IF MARCEL PROUST'S CENTRAL PREOCCUPATION WAS THE unsettling instability of human character, an important minor consideration was the equally marked instability of intellectual and cultural life. À la recherche du temps perdu offers a series of brilliant sketches demonstrating the impact of fashion upon intellectual reputation, and these are usually scathing because of an implicit sociology condemning the frivolity and philistinism of ‘arbiters of taste’. Now whilst the sociology of the matter is, as we shall see, different, there can be no doubt that fashion has not exempted political theory from its attentions. This is obviously unsettling, but does it really matter? Is not fashion trivial, even harmless?

AN IDENTITY CRISIS HAS FOLLOWED ON THE GRADUAL Succession of the generations in the second German state. The feeling that previous ideals have lost their meaning, and the abandonment of the hope of a unified German nation have led to discontent even amongst socialists. In addition to the numerous demands for more human rights and cultural freedom, which led in the mid-1970s to an emigration movement, harassed by the police, a movement which is still taking place, the end of the 1970s gave birth to the autonomous peace movement. This movement articulates the basic opposition of the younger generation in one theme, that of peace, and unites it with another, the search for the nation believed lost.

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.

IT IS A TRUISM TO STATE THAT ALL AGES ARE AGES OF TRANsition, and that the clash of tradition and experiment never ceases. Nevertheless, there are periods when history seems to collapse in on itself, and the time-span of change so contracts that revolution, not only political, becomes almost a norm. Since the Industrial Revolution many writers have dealt with the ideological reaction to the predicaments of rapid social change. J. S. Mill described the English public of his day as caught between two warring camps of the ‘Men of the Past’ and the ‘Men of the Present’, those who wish to return to the certainties of an earlier age, and those who wish to hasten change in the hope of a better future. Such a division is clearly simplistic, but it expresses the sense of bifurcation in society. ‘Past’ and ‘Present’ serve in this context as omnibus terms for multi-dimensional complexities which allow ample scope for individual selection, organization and evaluation.

WRITINGS ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE FREquently deal with either the discipline or the profession. There is also a tendency not to relate political science to national and international political, intellectual and educational developments. In this article political science is treated as a discipline and a profession and viewed to a more significant degree than is usually the case as the dependent variable rather than as an independent one. Although political science in the United States is being dealt with, and the emphasis is upon the post- 1945 period, it is worth remembering that the ‘content and style of political science in any country is no less international in character than it is national. At the very least differences in national styles (as well as content) are a function of international styles as the latter are mediated by national factors’. There is in the United States neither a single school of political science nor a unitary style or content.