THE NEW REGIONALISM, MANIFESTED IN EUROPE BY THE SINGLE European Act and the Maastricht Treaty (1992) and in North America by the signature of the North-American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA 1993), is centred on strategic policies and new institutions, the aims of which are to achieve a more effective role in global competition. In Europe, the shift is marked by the impending process of monetary union and the creation of its related institutions. The new approach agreed in the Maastricht Treaty sets out four requirements for eligibility to membership of monetary union. Convergence criteria embodying the judgment of financial markets about future inflation, exchange rate and fiscal policy appeared to be the second best choice for governments seeking to institutionalize their commitment to inflation-avoiding policies. The whole mechanism is meant first to provide the region with a credible monetary institution able to win over the financial markets and secondly to set up bulwarks to the inflation-prone pressures of domestic sheltered interests. Thirdly, the aim is to commit member countries, through a so-called targeting exercise (in Keohane's words) to accomplishing the agreed objectives with monetary discipline and macroeconomic adjustment.

Social Democratic Parties Across Europe Face adjustment problems. Given the electoral decline of almost every social democratic party, it is tempting for social scientists to pronounce such political parties as either in decay or even a thing of the past. There is little doubt that social democratic parties are searching for new concepts, ideas and policies. At the heart of the attempt to regain the political initiative is the debate over how to react not only to the challenges from the new social movements but also to the re-invigorated attack by liberals and conservatives on central social democratic policies: the welfare state and socioeconomicequality.

ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS THAT STUDENTS OF POLITICS IN THE USA learn is that the central organizing principle of the Constitution and of the political system is the separation of powers. Yet most students begin with – and few are encouraged to go beyond – a very one-sided view of that principle. For the most part, they are taught about the protective, controlling purposes rather than about the constructive, empowering purposes of the practice of separating governmental powers. They are always taught to appreciate power separation as a means of avoiding certain evils, but they are rarely taught to appreciate it as a means of attaining certain goods.

The Impact of Domestic Policy on International relations and vice versa has seldom been more clearly demonstrated than in late autumn 1992, with the near collapse in November of the Uruguay Round and the series of events in the European Community surrounding the Danish and French referenda and Britian's forced withdrawal from the ERM being only the two most glaring examples.

IN TRYING TO ACHIEVE THE SIMPLICITY OF, IN SOME SENSE, scientific statements one must either, in the counsels of the wise, be very laboured or very brief. I want to be very brief and to use an essay as an essay, an attempt to try something out or on before a learned audience, or a timely speculation (that is, in time to be stopped) about whether a possible future voyage is worth undertaking, not an account of actual discovery.

THE SIXTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION PROVIDES AN opportunity to draw up a balance-sheet. It is even more appropriate as the Soviet leaders have used the occasion to adopt a new constitution, and have thus implied that a new stage is about to begin for Soviet society and for the system of government which emanates from it and embodies it. This stage, called advanced socialism, has several characteristics: ‘the formation of a new historic community - the Soviet people, the development of the dictatorship of the proletariat into the state of the whole people, the transformation of the CPSU from a revolutionary party of the workers into the party of all the people, the strengthening of the homogeneity of Soviet society’. The phrases ‘homogeneity and cohesion of society’ are probably those which recur most frequently in the presentation of the new constitution, especially when its national implications are described. ‘The constitution of the USSR is at the same time a constitution of a state of the whole people — the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — and of the fifteen sovereign republics which compose it and finally of the thirtyeight national-state formations with differing forms of autonomy. The new historic community — the Soviet people — numbers 250 million citizens, representing more than one hundred nations and nationalities of the USSR. But it is also a single social monolith, a single historical phenomenon with a single economy, a single culture, a single Soviet way of life, a single ideology’

THE MOMENT EUROPEAN POLICY BECAME AN ESSENTIAL ELEMENT IN the external and internal policies of our countries, it could not ignore the use of the ‘Summit’, which in itself was an outcome of technological advance and of the personalization of power. The first meeting between the heads of government of the Six took place in 1957, in order to speed up the conclusion of the Treaty of Rome. Later, it was France which was most insistent that these meetings should be repeated. The reason behind this insistence was, broadly speaking, the nature of the French constitutional system and the osition of the President of the Republic, whose task it is to take t e main res onsibility for foreign affairs.

It is of course a commonplace that the defeat of Russia by Japan in the war of 1904–5 ushered in the revolutionary year of 1905. The role of the frankly revolutionary Russian illegal parties has been frequently studied, but the part played by the various groups of more or less moderate public men who are often loosely designated as ‘liberals’ in preparing the climate of revolution has received less detailed treatment in historical writing. The present article therefore proposes to examine the stages by which these groups moved to a progressively more radical position under the impact of an unpopular and unsuccessful war.

By The Standards of The Solar System, Where are found the only comparable bodies of whose existence we have certain knowledge, the earth is not a large planet. For most of recorded history, on the other hand, it has certainly seemed so to its inhabitants, and only in recent decades has a different perception come to prevail, as instanced, for example, by the much-remarked Ward-Dubos book of 1972, Only One Earth — The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet. In 1872 Phileas Fogg needed almost eighty days to go around the world, in 1961 Yuri Gagarin managed the feat in little more than eighty minutes, and nowadays less intrepid travellers than these think nothing of accomplishing the task using commercial aircraft in comfortably less than eighty hours. Photographic images and, in general, data of unlimited complexity meanwhile circle the globe virtually instantaneously. The technologies here are those of transport and communications but in most other areas of human activity too the twentieth century has seen similar technological strides.

THE EXPERIENCE OF ‘COHABITATION’ BETWEEN MITTERRAND and Chirac - an enforced coalition between the effective heads of yesterday's government and yesterday's opposition - is a fascinating case-study in constitutional politics. How on earth will the constitution of 1958, which functioned in a reasonably consistent way from 1958 (or at least from 1962) to 1986, perform in the unprecendented situation created by the parliamentary victory of the Right?

As with all case-studies, there are some features specific to the situation. For instance, despite the general consensus that the prime ministership carries greater power, and that M. Chirac's newly-elected government is entitled to carry out its programme (‘the government governs, the president presides’, etc.), it is clear to everyone that the decisive contest for power will be the presidential election of 1988. The 1986 parliamentary election was in a sense a first ballot, or a primary, for the presidential stakes, and all of those principally concerned - Chirac, Barre, Giscard, Mitterrand and Rocard - have for some time calculated their actions in relation to the rendezvous of 1988.

WRITERS ON CORPORATISM AGREE ABOUT LITTLE BUT ARE nevertheless strikingly united in one belief, that America has failed to develop strong corporatist institutions. The two most important collections published in recent years, for instance, both contain papers explaining this supposed American uniqueness. Yet the notion that corporatism is conspicious by its absence is odd. It is indeed true that the United States has failed to develop one particularly ambitious form of corporatism — the organization of capital and labour into central institutions designed to achieve agreed national aims. The essence of corporatism consists, however, of something less than this grand social scheme. It resides in what Offe calls ‘the attribution of public status to interest groups’. Endowing private bodies with public duties and public powers involves crossing a constitutional Rubicon. Behind fie the landscapes of liberal polities, with their open political struggle and comparatively clear separation of government from civil society. Beyond the Rubicon lie the features in Schmitter's famous description of corporatism — compulsion, hierarchy, monopoly. But these are contingent, not necessary, features. The quintessence of corporatism consists in the effort to endow private interests with sovereign authority. In so doing it challenges the great aim of a liberal polity — the separation of economic from political power — imposing in its place the ‘devolution of public policy making and enforcement on organised private interest’.

THE WEATHERMEN EMERGED AS A DISTINCT POLITICAL ENTITY IN June 1969 in the United States of America. They had their roots directly within the political (civil rights and anti-Vietnam war campaigns) and cultural (emergence of the so-called counter-culture) activities of the New Left movement of the 1960s. Their interest lies not only in this new linkage of politics and culture but more substantially in their attempt to become a guerrilla band and instigate revolution in the most advanced nation in the world.

PARTIES ARE THE LINK BETWEEN EXISTING POLITICAL STRUCtures and the rocesses which lead to new political institutions. No wonder, therefore, that parties play an important role at the centre of many revolutionary theories. Nevertheless the theory of parties is not as decisive to Marx's social and political theory as one might imagine. Some introductions to Marx's thought do not even mention the catchwords ‘party’ or ‘parties’ though they concentrate on the sphere of his political ideas. In most books hints at a theory of parties are hidden away in remarks of marginal importance under the topics ‘praxis’ or ‘revolution’. Only those comprehensive studies which emphasize the continuity between Marxism and Leninism, because they defend the Marxist position, deal explicitly with the theory of parties. The same is true for those authors who overemphasize the continuity of Marxist thought, to a degree which almost identifies the theoretical positions of Marx, Engels and Lenin, for the purposes of anti-Marxist polemi.

I DECIDED TO ENTITLE THIS ESSAY ‘TERRA INCOGNITA Australis’ — a rubric appropriate for more than one reason, as will become apparent later — since, the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that what we profess to know concerning the determinants of public policy outcomes has much the same epistemological status as the shapes that appeared in the Southern Hemisphere of sixteenth-century cartographers. The objective of the essay is to substantiate this charge in respect of the prevailing explanatory parad’ ms which inform as to the best way to proceed to give some more definition to the map in future. The charge is a serious one insofar as comparative public policy analysis is currently a boom area in political science. I could be accused of attempting to create a ghost town before the shafts are driven deep enough to hit ‘pay dirt’, but I can only claim that this is not my intention. I have been working in the area which is currently described as comparative public policy for more than a decade now and the explanatory paradigms I criticize are ones to which I have variously subscribed over the years. Since I believe that there is valuable ore to be found, and found in roughly the area in which we are looking for it, I would argue that criticism and redefinition of paradigms are useful tasks, since they improve our eventual chances of hitting a lode-bearing seam.

AN ANONYMOUS COMMENTATOR ON THE GREEK POLITICAL SCENE predicted in 1970 that it was unlikely that the Greeks, even if resentful of the Colonels' 'unta, would ‘respond widely to their presently exiled (self- or otherwise) erstwhile political leaders’ and concluded that 'the self-exiled Karamanlis, with his protracted silences, had lost much of his credit with his followers’. He was by no means alone in writing off the old politicians in general, and Constantine Karamanlis in particular, as a serious factor in the Greek political equation. But when the Greek military regime collapsed in July 1974 in the wake of President Makarios's overthrow in Cyprus and the subsequent Turkish invasion, President Phaidon Gizikis had no other choice than to summon the 67-year-old Constantine Karamanlis to clear up the mess created by seven years of military government. Karamanlis, far from being a spent force, returned to a welcome verging on delirium and looks set fair for another long term as Prime Minister and most likely, once the new constitution has been enacted, as President of Greece.

COSTA RICA SHAKES TWO HUNDRED MILES OF underpopulated border with Nicaragua. It has only the most limited capacity to regulate the flow of either weapons into, or refugees out of, the adjacent territory. The absence of a professional army is noteworthy (although it should not be overstated — there are some well armed, but unprofessionally led, defence forces, and the police are quite militarized). What requires emphasis is less the scarcity of soldiers than the abundance of lawyers, and the power of their profession. Last year, for example, tension built up between Managua and San José, because it was revealed that an airstrip in northern Costa Rica had been used to resupply the 'contras' in violation of Costa Rica's proclaimed policy of neutrality. The Sandinistas interpreted this as yet another proof of Costa Rican duplicity and of San José's subordination to the will of the paymasters in Washington. Nicaraguans (of all ideological persuasions) find it almost impossible to accept the Costa Rican version of this episode, which points out that the government has no power to interfere with the use of private property unless a prima facie case exists of illegal activity.