The Purpose of This Article is To Analyse The Document ‘A Framework for Accountable Government in Northern Ireland’, published by the British government in early 1995, and to assess its significance in terms of the theory of powersharing (consociational democracy). The Framework Document, as it is usually called, received a hostile reception from many Unionist politicians in Northern Ireland. The ideas that it contains, however, resonate with many previous blueprints for the future of Northern Ireland. In some form they are very likely to re-emerge in the proposed solutions that will follow the ‘all-party’ talks set for June 1996. I shall show that the Framework plan for democratic government in Northern Ireland is completely and thoroughly consociational in its orientation. It confirms the proposition that power-sharing is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for viable democracy in deeply divided societies.

As The Results of The General Elections In Spain of 3 March were being announced, the leaders of the two main parties came out of their respective headquarters to greet the crowds of well-wishers. To judge by the expression on their faces, one could be forgiven for thinking that the victors had lost and the losers had won. A jubilant Felipe González, the outgoing Premier, uttered the phrase which serves as the main title of this article. The paradoxical outcome of the election was that in order to form a government, the victors were forced to seek the kind of parliamentary support which they had bitterly decried in the outgoing government and a pact with parties that they had mercilessly attacked during the previous legislature.

The March 1996 Australian Federal Election Was The most important Australian election for more than a decade. It resulted in the return of the Liberal-National coalition to office after thirteen years in opposition, ending a period of unprecedented Labor-initiated change, first under the leader-ship of Bob Hawke and since 1991, Paul Keating.

The election was also important because the new government will in all probability lead Australia into the new millennium and guide the country through a period of intense change in the Asia Pacific region; how the Liberal-Nationals approach the whole question of Australia's changing relationship with the world will shape Australia's future and wellbeing for decades to come. And finally, the election was notable for making John Howard prime minister during his second period as Liberal leader, a prospect that Howard himself had once ridiculed as akin to ‘Lazarus with a triple bypass’.

Largely Implemented During The Tumultuous Years between 1923 and 1937, Turkey's laws, education system, civil service, economy, military, international outlook and trade are all founded on the premise of a Western-oriented separation between religion and state. This system has survived seventy years of economic, political and social transformation with remarkable resilience: Islamic brotherhoods, most recently a particularly vehement tarikat called the Aczmendi, are still prosecuted for calling openly for return to Islamic rule.

For The Last Fifty Years, Italian Politics Have Been remarkably static and predictable: one party (the Christian Democrats) always came out on top, while the Left was always in opposition. Yet in the most unexpected fashion all this changed in April 1996: for the first time in the history of the Italian Republic, a left-wing government has been returned. While the historial significance of the 1996 elections cannot be disputed, it is much more difficult to explain the causes of such radical political change. Compared to the results of the 1996 elections, the elections of 1992 now seem little more than a minor tremor, yet one could argue that the tremors felt in 1992 were part of the same process that delivered the real earthquake four years later. Therefore in searching for an explanation of the recent unexpected political changes in Italy, one should start from the 1992 elections.

Joseph Raz Has Long Been Well Known as a Legal philosopher and theorist of practical reason. But it is only in the last decade that he has come to be widely identified as the most prominent defender of a distinctive interpretation of the liberal tradition. Raz wholeheartedly endorses the communitarian view that the individual is a social being, who needs society to establish his/her self-identity and to gain objective knowledge of the good, rather than a self-contained subject abstracted from any specific social experience. Unlike neutralist liberals, such as Rawls and Dworkin, he rejects ‘the priority of right over the good’, stressing the interdependent relationship between right and the good. Yet he remains very much a liberal in his commitment to the value of autonomy (or freedom) and argues powerfully for the desirability (or necessity) of incommensurable plural conceptions of the good life for the well-being of people, as well as for the liberal virtue of toleration, and for their attendant liberal democratic political institutions.