SIX MONTHS AGO THE EFFECT OF THE ENLARGEMENT OF THE Community after one year seemed to be a purely academic subject. But soon afterwards, a chain of events and of setbacks led to the state of weariness and of profound uncertainty in which the Community finds itself today.

To restrict oneself, in these circumstances, to a purely institutional balance-sheet would be an empty exercise. How convincing or even useful is it to say that, in general, the institutions functioned almost normally in 1973 when through lack of political will or spontaneity they neither obtained the wished-for results nor supplied the answers expected by European public opinion? When there is no agreement on a minimum of common orientations or on the background of a common strategy, the institutional content of the Community loses its meaning. Not seldom national constitutions, when deprived of popular support, have seemed to be at the mercy of the slightest upheaval. The same thing could happen to a European constitution.

WHEN DISCUSSING COMMUNIST IDEOLOGY IT IS NECESSARY TO DIFferentiate between two varying - indeed opposite views. Firstly there are the parties, organizations and institutions in countries within the Soviet sphere of influence (including parties in the West which are identified politically and ideologically with the USSR). Secondly the large number of parties and groups, which claim to be communist, and derive their ideology from Marx, Engels and Lenin, but which are highly critical of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its ideology. Although these fundamentalist groups are numerous and splintered they can be categorized into two mainstreams of thought: Maoist and Trotskyite. The Maoist ideology is not only the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party but also that of smaller, so called Maostic groups in the West.

MODERN ALGERIA BEARS VARIOUS STIGMATA OF RADICALISM. ITS struggle for national liberation was one of exceptional severity, involving untold and incalculable suffering and sacrifices. Only Vietnam can surpass it; no other ex-colonial country can equal it. After independence, the commanding heights of the economy, and even a very significant part of the rural sector, passed into one form or another of socialist ownership, including the important experiments in auto-gestion (workers' self-administration), in both industrial and agricultural enterprises. In foreign policy, the hostility of its government to what it holds to be remaining forms of colonialism has been serious and sustained. Internally, the regime is relatively egalitarian and rather puritanical and earnest, by any standards. The Algerians look to their own efforts for the betterment of their condition. All these traits - a heroic struggle for liberation, followed by a good deal of socialism and a general earnest radicalism, ought to have made Algeria a place of pilgrimage for the international Left. It is well known that the promised land must be somewhere. Algeria had as good a claim as Russia, China, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Vietnam, to be at least considered for such a role. In fact, Algeria found in Frantz Fanon the thinker or poet of this vision. Though not a native of Algeria, he identified with the Algerian national cause and died whilst serving it, and became its internationally renowned theoretician.

EXISTINGTH EORIES AND METHODS OF GOVERNMENTAL PLANNING are incomplete. They neglect very often, for instance, the full range of factors which shape the behaviour and effectiveness of central government planners in liberal democratic regimes. It is essential, therefore, to refine the basic paradigm upon which analysis and evaluation of the activities of central planners is typically based if the major problems of their work are to be clearly understood.

Central planners are concerned with the improvement of the intellectual dimension of public policy-making at both national and increasingly supranational levels in Western Europe by longer-term perspectives, forward co-ordination and more sophisticated discussion of alternatives. They seek to guide or control the activities of a group of agencies, a particular governmental system or even of society as a whole.

BERNHARD SCHÄFERS HAS DEMONSTRATED THAT PLANNING CAN BE analysed theoretically with regard to three central features : first, from the standpoint of human nature and the history of human development; planning thus refers to how people conceive of their future activity; secondly, from the standpoint of ‘modern science’, in which planning is seen as an attempt to develop the prognostic and plan-oriented capacity of science; and thirdly from the standpoint of the conditions for the existence of industrial-technical societies, in the context of which planning is conceived of as an endeavour to effect the comprehensive direction of these societies as well as the co-ordination of its subsystems.