The appeal to globalization as a non-negotiable external economic constraint plays an increasingly significant role in the linked politics of expectation suppression and welfare reform in contemporary Europe. Yet, although it threatens to become something of a self- fulfilling prophecy, the thesis that globalization entails welfare retrenchment and convergence is empirically suspect. In this paper it is argued that there is little evidence of convergence amongst European social models and that, although common trajectories can be identified, these have tended to be implemented more or less enthusiastically and at different paces to produce, to date, divergent outcomes. Second, I suggest that it is difficult to see globalization as the principal agent determining the path on which European social models are embarked since the empirical evidence points if anything to de-globalization rather than globalization. The implications of this for the future of the welfare state in Europe and for the USA as a model welfare state regime are explored.

The modern state would be a crisis if consent to long-established sites of authoritative rule were breaking down, previously capable states were unable to command coercive power, and if the demands of international and supra-national institutions had enforceable claims against historically sovereign states. There is no general crisis of the modern state. The states of most developed countries are secure as sites of authoritative rule, and the military power commanded by the American state is unprecedented. However, the external sovereignty of many poor and small states is diminishing. The cause is not ‘globalization’ but the policies of the world's dominant state.

In the first of two articles the authors show what consociational theory may learn from the case of Northern Ireland, namely, the importance of external agencies in making and implementing consociational settlements, the relations between consociational and self-determination settlements, the ‘complexity’ of internal settlements, the merits of STV (PR) in electoral arrangements, innovations in using proportional representation decision rules to allocate ministerial portfolios, and conceptual modifications. A second article addresses what anti-consociationalists may learn from the same case.

This article examines the role played by national history in generating and sustaining the popularity of British Eurosceptic arguments. The core argument advanced is that the modernist approach to history prevalent among British historians and the society in which they work has to be considered the key reason for Euroscepticism retaining such a popular appeal in Britain. The overly reverential attitude to recent martial history on the part of the British, and an almost total neglect of the peacetime dimensions of modern European history since 1945, both serve to exaggerate the tendency in the country to fall back on glib images of Britain as a great power with a ‘special relationship’ across the Atlantic and Europe as a hostile ‘other’ to be confronted rather than engaged with constructively.

It is well known that in developed democracies the opposition tends to cooperate with the government. Spain is no exception: around 70 per cent of all ‘organic laws’ (constitutionally significant bills that require a parliamentary majority to be passed) are approved with the support of the main opposition party. We try to explain the variation in the level of consensus in the first seven legislative terms of the current Spanish democracy. We show that there are three key variables: the balance of power between government and opposition, the nature of the institutional actor that first proposes the bill, and the ideological significance of the bill.

A growing number of Chinese environmental groups constitute not only an effective force in tackling environmental issues, but also a genuine civil society that is transforming state-society relations in China. This paper will consider how the environmental movement now taking shape among south-western China's environmental NGOs creates new civic freedoms and deals with existing constraints under the current Chinese political system. While this empowerment of local citizens will have a broadly positive influence on the protection of China's environment, precedent from other transitioning countries shows that environmental movements can be inextricably linked to important new freedoms for the public as well as jarring political change.