WHEN ITS ARTICLES OF AGREEMENT WERE DRAWN UP IN 1944, the International Monetary Fund was seen as having two main functions: to oversee the operation of a system of fixed, but adjustable, exchange rates; and to promote the removal of payments restrictions on international trade. Over the years since then, despite the demise of the fixed exchange rate system and a steady decline in payments restrictions, the scope of the Fund's influence has grown. Why should this be?

In broad terms, the answer is to be found in the increasing integration of the world economy. As trade and investment flows have grown, so too have the concerns of the international community for good economic management in individual national economies. ‘Spill-over’ effects have grown in size and importance, and with them the need for a framework to regulate their consequences.

THIS ARTICLE DESCRIBES AND ILLUSTRATES HOW JAPAN conceives the political meaning of many kinds of interdependence and uses this concept to advance what it considers to be its national interests and global interests without upsetting the balance of world interdependence. ‘Interdependence’ means the mutual vulnerability and sensitivity of all governing-cum-economic units in the world. ‘The politics of interdependence’ means, then, how actors make strategic use of interdependence with enough self-restraint not to jeopardize the system of interdependence itself. Thus ‘Japan's politics of interdependence’ means how Japan makes strategic use of interd pendence guided by its own standards of conduct. In this sense, this article is an attempt to combine the following two intellectual traditions: the interdependence literature and the economic statecraft literature to define Japan's politics of interdependence. First, I will summarize three principles of Japan's political conceptualization of interdependence. Then I will illustrate them by some recent examples. Thirdly, prospects for Japan's politics of interdependence will be briefly discussed along with some discussion on the lines of research to be further explored.

IN A RECENT ISSUE OF Government and Opposition AN ATTEMPT WAS made to answer at an abstract level the question, ‘Why Political Systems Change’. The aim of this article is more limited. It is a tentative preliminary attempt to explain why important changes took place in a particular political system – that of Czechoslovakia – in January 1968 and to examine the changes themselves and what remains of them in the wake of the Soviet intervention.

It must be emphasized straight away that the January changes in Czechoslovakia were not so sudden as their treatment by the western mass media perhaps implied. For something close to five years before the January reforms pluralistic developments could be discerned in Czechoslovakia. Limited though they were, they expressed themselves in the form of a less severely censored press, greater scope for interest group activity, a slight relaxation of detailed central party control over the National Assembly and local government, and in more debate within the ranks of the Communist Party.

Maastricht Has Put Subsidiarity in The Forefront OF European Community (EC) guidelines. This new principle will allow the EC to take action wherever competences are shared in those areas where the member states cannot sufficiently achieve its objectives, but not beyond. The new Article 3b reads:

TO ANALYSE THE GERMAN QUESTION IN THIS TRANSITORY moment is risky in several respects. The German novelist Martin Walser who underwent a metamorphosis from a fellow traveller of the communists to a German nationalist put it bluntly: ‘He who does not get below his intellectual level when talking about Germany has no intellectual level at all.’ The topic has pitfalls everywhere:

— it is deeply connected with emotions, whatever the view of the writer;

— it is in flux, ‘words are already out of date in your mouth’ as a cynic put it. The increasing number of actors who claim to have a say in the German unification process makes prognosis almost impossible;

— scientific analysis of this unique event lacks concepts. Transition to democracy in a highly penetrated system does not follow the established rules of this branch of knowledge.

The European Parliament is The First Directly Elected international parliament in history. June 1994 marks the beginning of its fourth term of five years. The Treaty on European Union, which came into force on 1 November 1993, strengthens the powers of the Parliament in a number of significant ways. Now is a good time, therefore, to reflect on the development of the European Parliament, and to speculate on its potential.

HAVE PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS IN NORTH AFRICA IN THE 1990S bolstered prospects for democratization and greater pluralism? This study argues that, with the possible exception of Algeria's 1991 elections, they have not been harbingers of democracy in Egypt, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. The elections can be viewed as public displays by the state or limited political barometers, rather than processes which create obligations for the government. They have been means through which regimes have sought to dampen reactions to political immobilism, structural adjustment and the death of a social contract. Some elections have been manipulative, exclusionary exercises of elites trying to roll back the liberalizations of the 1980s, while others have been pseudo-competitive instruments of regime maintenance. Most of the elections can be seen as mechanisms for a top-down ‘artificializing’ of pluralism in order to preserve the core of regime control. In Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria, there seems to be no contradiction between fostering a selectively pluralistic atmosphere and simultaneously undermining the transition to democracy. In Morocco, pluralism and alternance seem to remain quite compatible with continued political domination by the Makhzen. Mona Makram-Ebeid's characterization of Egypt's 1995 elections could equally be applied to others in the region: ‘What has occurred is a pluralization of the political sphere, yet it has been liberal neither in intent nor outcome.’

IN RECENT YEARS IT HAS BECOME A COMMONPLACE OF BOTH academic and financial discourse that we are living in a new economic and political world in which financial globalization is destroying the economic autonomy of individual states and hence the foundations of the nation-state as the focus of political authority and the possibilities of politics. Of course, other threats to the nation-state exist — most crucially, the inability to reconcile its virtual monopoly of political authority, and the constraints it imposes on cooperation between states, with ecological causality — but it is the macro-economic crisis of the state which has captured most attention. Undoubtedly, the contemporary international financial environment makes macro-economic management an extremely difficult practical task for many states. With the daily value of foreign exchange transactions amounting to over $1200 billion, governments run the perpetual risk that their choices, or indeed those of other governments, will precipitate an unsustainable rise or fall in the value of their currency. At the same time they must, if they wish to borrow in international capital markets, pursue policies which will secure, and retain, the confidence of international investors. This, of course, creates a very considerable incentive for governments to choose policies which, in both fiscal and monetary terms, prioritize low inflation over growth and employment.

This introduction to the special issue provides an exploration of the scholarly analysis of Jim Bulpitt's Territory and Power in the United Kingdom: An Interpretation. It first addresses the principal theoretical concerns and the historical interpretation that Bulpitt pursued in Territory and Power. It discusses the main lines of criticism that have been laid against the book and how in turn these have been rebutted. The article then assesses how the contributions made in this special issue provide fresh reflection on the book's contribution to the study of UK and comparative politics before suggesting how Territory and Power could shape the agenda of future research.

QADDAFI'S THEORY OF POLITICS AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION amounts to the assertion that all forms of representation in fact result in unrepresentative government; that therefore they must be unjust; that therefore they must be replaced by nonrepresentative government. The Green Book describes the institutions of such government but is by no means utterly explicit about the relations between institutions, or about the way personnel are recruited to them. To examine what happens in practice at elections, surely critical events in a nonrepresentative system, suggests that Qaddafi is less a Periclean Legislator than an interpreter, casts some light on the theory, and hints at the nature of the concept of political community underlying both The Green Book and contemporary Libyan society.

DESPITE YEARS OF POLITICAL STABILITY AND RECENT ECONOMIC growth General Franco's dictatorship has left many of Spain's perennial political dilemmas unresolved. The problems that preci itated the Civil War (1936–39) and destroyed the Second Republic will continue, albeit in modified form, to dog Franco's successors.

One particularly intractable problem is posed by Spain's Basque and Catalan minorities. Local nationalist movements contributed to the Republic's collapse and remain a long-term threat to Spain's political stability. This essay, therefore, tries to identify the root causes of these movements; to examine the regional problem's present state and to scrutinize possible solutions to the problem in the post-Franco era.

CONSTITUTIONS, CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM AND CONSTITUTIONAL conflict are once again commanding attention. The celebrations of the bicentennial of the American constitution, the implementation of constitutional reform in Canada, the Labour government's programme for constitutional change in the United Kingdom, the seemingly intractable conflict in Northern Ireland, and transfers of sovereignty to the European Union from its constituent states, testify to this. Equally, if not more challenging, have been the upheavals in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union and its reconstituted states, the ‘third’ wave of democratization across the developing world, the experiment in participatory constitutionalism in South Africa and the return of Hong Kong to China. Of the 179 countries that elect their governments out of a total of 192 countries in the world, 176 have codified constitutions. Constitutions, however, that are not fully mature or operative and are not based on the principles or drafted with the advice of those nations that have developed and entrenched their constitutions tend to be disregarded, or even dismissed. Moreover, writing a constitution is one exercise, implementing, and interpreting it is a far more complex and delicate undertaking. So how are social scientists to evaluate the process?

ANALYSTS OF THE ISRAELI POLITICAL SYSTEM HAVE COMMONLY attributed the stability of the polity to factors closely associated with the role played by the various Israeli parties in the state's economic and social life, and/or to the existence of a dominant, institutionalized state-building party. The consociational approach ought to help to clarify those factors which have maintained the stability of the coalition system which has governed the state of Israel since its establishment in 1948 and whose roots may be traced back as far as 1933 and even earlier.

The consociational model and the theory of elite accommodation have been elaborated in an effort to explain the maintenance of continuing political stability in what at first glance would appear to be societies deeply divided along social, economic, ethnic, religious and ideological lines. Political stability in fragmented societies from this standpoint rests on the overarching commitment of the political elites to the preservation and maintenance of the system and their readiness to cooperate to this end.

How party strategies vary by electoral system remains largely unexplored in election studies. Using qualitative and quantitative data from Spanish national and European elections, we test how party strategies diverge between districted electoral systems and systems using a single national district. We use the number of visits to districts by the party leaders to determine if targeted party strategies are driven by district magnitude, the share of the population entitled to vote in every district, the number of districts or the strength of parties’ local organizations. Our results show that only the frequency of visits to districts by large parties are clearly affected by electoral systems and, more specifically, by the number of districts and district population.

A Change Of Government In Britain Does Not Necessarily Imply a change in foreign policy, but when Robin Cook entered the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in May 1997 it was with the ambition of bringing about a break with the past. The FCO was endowed for the first time with a ‘Mission Statement’, in which spreading the values of human rights, civil liberties and democracy (‘mutual respect’) was described as a benefit to be secured through foreign policy; the new Foreign Secretary elaborated this ambition at the launch of the Mission Statement, asserting: The Labour Government does not accept that political values can be left behind when we check in our passports to travel on diplomatic business. Our foreign policy must have an ethical dimension and must support the demands of other peoples for the democratic rights on which we insist for ourselves. We will put human rights at the heart of our foreign policy.

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.

THERE ARE SOME BOOKS THAT ARE BETTER KNOWN FOR their titles than their contents. Mine is one of them. Various critics, usually from the Left, pointed to the upsurge of radicalism in the 1960s as disproof of the book's thesis. Others saw the work as an ‘ideological’ defence of ‘technocratic’ thinking, or of the ‘status quo’. A few, even more ludicrously, believed that the book attacked the role of ideals in politics. It was none of these.

The frame of the book was set by its sub-title, On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. Yet the last section looked ahead. After observing young left-wing intellectuals express repeated yearnings for ideology, I said that new inspirations, new ideologies, and new identifications would come from the Third World.