‘CRISIS? WHAT CRISIS?’, THE CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER was reported to have replied to a question concerning the alleged crisis in sterling. In the case of the welfare state it might seem that the appropriate response would be ‘Which crisis? ’ since there are several on the menu - fiscal crisis, legitimacy crisis, crisis of ungovernability . Left, Right and Centre have become convinced that there is a crisis. This is after a period of history which had seen an unprecedented rise in the standard of living of the vast majority of the population living in what are normally regarded as welfare states.

A FEW YEARS AGO, THE PRESENCE OF A CENTRAL AMERICAN Head of State here was an unknown event. It was also uncommon to make any reference to the countries of Central America in the area of international politics.

The Central American countries have been characterized during their century and a half of independence by their relative isolation, and by a slow process of development which forced upon us the stereotyped label of 'banana republics'. In the meantime nations emerged in our region, sometimes with problems, some with more vigour than others, but all with their traditions, their demands, their contradictions and their truths.

ON THE MORNING OF 19 MARCH 1969, A CONTINGENT OF BRITISH paratroopers and police landed on the tiny Caribbean island of Anguilla and installed Mr Anthony Lee as Her Majesty's Commissioner. According to the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary, the reasons for taking this course of action were: there was a small group of disreputable characters from outside the state who not only possessed arms but were influencing those who purported to be the island's government. Further, this armed minority was frustrating the wishes of the great majority of Anguillans, and if, as a result of the absence of any lawful government or good order on the island, there was any damage done to the person or property of any foreign national, then Britain would be held responsible in virtue of her responsibility for the island's defence and external relations. It was therefore necessary to ensure that Britain would be in a position to discharge her responsibility fully.

The intellectual structures which can easily be applied to the political and social realities of Northern Europe are largely irrelevant to those of Southern Europe, and certainly, to those of France.

Three postulates are implicit in considering the problem of the changing relations between the trade unions and the working-class parties.

One is that in every European industrial country there are working-class parties. In addition there are parties which are not working class, but bourgeois middle class, conservateurs, popolare or volksparteien (and the logic of this postulate even implies that there is, in fact, only one working-class party of any real political significance).

‘VERY DEEP IS THE WELL OF THE PAST’, WRITES THOMAS MANN, as he begins his Tales of Jacob, ‘Might one not even call it bottomless?’ And indeed so it is if we search out the origins of government down, down, through its many levels in time until we reach only a misty shadow of what might have been some primitive society whose very existence we can but infer from artifacts, from myth and legend – and from an interpolation, unhistorical to be sure for it is mere hypothesis – from what we know of stateless societies still extant in this, our own day.

THE QUESTION OF DECENTRALIZATION IS ONE WHICH THE British Labour Party has always found difficult to handle because of its inheritance of contradictory traditions in relation to the British state. Labour's roots in anti-authoritarian radicalism and in the British periphery make it sympathetic to decentralist demands and this has been reinforced by the need to compete electorally for support in the periphery. However, to gain power at Westminster it needs more than peripheral support; it needs to capture power at the centre and, in order to benefit the periphery, to strengthen the power of the centre. Ideologically, the party also possesses a socialist tradition which preaches the indivisibility of working-class interests and deplores nationalism and separatism.

‘EUROPESSIMISM’, SAID THE ECONOMIST IN 1984, ‘IS A FASHION that comes and goes’. The newspaper added that ‘The idea of a technology gap, with an uncompetitive Europe on the wrong side of it, deserves a very cold eye’. But it still covered its bets with the view that, despite reservations, ‘few doubt that Europe is in real trouble’. Europe experienced a previous peak of alarm about a ‘technology gap’ in the late 1960s. Concern then focused only on the United States was epitomized by Jean-Jacques Salomon's Le Défi Américain of 1967, and spawned a large literature. This petered out in the early 1970s as the United States experienced its own crises over Vietnam and Watergate, and by the end of the decade and the Carter presidency some Americans were becoming seriously worried about their own technological standing. One now had books with such titles as America's Technology Slip and The European Revenge: How the American Challenge was Rebuffed. However, by 1984 in a chapter entitled ‘“Europeanizing” the US Economy: The Enduring Appeal of the Corporatist State’ Melvyn Krauss was able to be far more sceptical: in his words ‘. . . the call for a new industrial policy in the US amounts to a call to catch up with the losers’. The Chairman of the European Committee for Research and Development had warned even in 1979 that while certain favourable factors guaranteed Europe's ‘survival, and perhaps even relatively comfortable existence’, this would be only ‘for a period that is difficult to predict but is probably no more than a few decades’.

This paper examines the impact of constitutional rules on parliamentary dissolution, government termination and duration with a particular focus on the likely effects of UK’s Fixed-term Parliament’s Act (2011). In the UK debate, expectations about the Act diverge. This article evaluates the plausibility of these contrasting views by combining evidence from a comparative analysis of European cabinets with a counterfactual analysis of the Act’s effect on the strategies of UK politicians. The evidence from both analyses indicates that fixing the term of parliament is likely to render parliaments more stable, but may also have the unanticipated effect of making governments more vulnerable to failure and replacement.

While far-right parties tend to receive a small minority of votes in national elections, their presence in ruling coalitions is becoming much more common. In this article, I ask under what conditions mainstream parties are willing and interested in forming a coalition with a far-right party, given the potentially high costs associated with having such a partner in government. I characterize such moves as the co-optation of a growing political rival in an effort to minimize electoral threat. That is, as far-right parties become more threatening to the electoral success of a mainstream party, they will invite the party into their government, in an effort to stave off said threat. This characterization borrows from the literature of authoritarian co-optation to build on our current understanding of parliamentary coalition-building. Quantitative analysis utilizing cross-national, survey and spatial data is employed to support this theory.

PROFESSOR LAZARSFELD ONCE REFERRED TO SOCIOLOGY AS BEING IN A sense a residuary legatee, the surviving part of a very general study, out of which specializations have successively been shaped.

The same might be said of political science. In the West the first deliberate and reflective studies of political life were made in Greece at the end of the th century BC, and in the succeeding century. The histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, some of the pamphlets attributed to Xenophon, above all the normative and empirical studies of Plato and Aristotle were among the direct ancestors of contemporary political science. Parallel examples are to be found in the intellectual history of China, India and Islam. It seems that at certain stages in the development of great societies questions of legitimacy, power and leadership assume supreme importance; and intense intellectual effort, using the best analytical tools available, is devoted to the study of man as brought to a focus in the study of politics.

In the debate on the Native Authority (Amendment) Law of 1955, the late Premier of the North, Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto, replying to the demand that ‘it is high time in the development of local government systems in this Region that obsolete and undemocratic ways of appointing Emirs’ Councils should close’, commented that ‘the right traditions that we have gone away from are the cutting off of the hands of thieves, and that has caused a lot of thieving in this country. Why should we not be cutting (off) the hands of thieves in order to reduce thieving? That is logical and it is lawful in our tradition and custom here.’ This could be read as a defence against social change, a recrudescence of ‘barbarism’ after the inroads of pax Britannica, and a plea for the retention of the status quo and the entrenched privilege of the political elite.

‘SEEK, AND YE SHALL FIND’. YET IT IS NOT IMMEDIATELY obvious that the last decade has seen a remarkable revival of a specifically English tradition of democratic socialist thought. Most political writing in England, of course, has a bad press. I use ‘political writing’ in an obvious but also a special sense. By ‘political writing’ I mean serious writing about politics which is neither academic nor purely polemical. Sometimes it may be by academics, but then not academics writing for academics in a manner only comprehensible to academics; rather those books or articles which are written for a general public who take a serious interest in politics, whether directly or indirectly involved — say ‘literate citizens’.

SITUATIONS IN WHICH VIOLENCE IS THE RESULT OF THE USE OF massive force in international conflicts is not the primary concern of what follows. It should be kept in mind, however, that war constitutes the outer limit, quantitatively, of political violence. However, internal war, that is organized, large scale armed conflicts between groups within a political system or order, manifesting the breakdown of such an order, is part of our concern. Violence is related to the maintenance of political power, although this sort of violence is more usually spoken of as ‘force.’

‘Cometh The Hour, Cometh The Man’ . . . in This Case two men, in the unlikely figures of the British Prime Minister, John Major, and the Irish Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds. Neither is a charismatic personality and each presides over a government with more than its fair share of problems. Yet with one leap they have agreed on an issue which removes them from the mundane realities of domestic politics and offers them a place in the sun. Already the Irish Council of the European Movement has awarded Mr Reynolds (alongside the SDLP leader, John Hume ) its ‘Man of the Year’ award. Can a Nobel Peace Prize be far behind? The Prime Minister has not been slow to exploit the huge potential in the peace process. He informed the Commons on the day that the Joint Declaration was signed, 15 December 1993, that when he met the Taoiseach at Downing Street ‘two years ago, we both agreed on the need to work together to try to bring about peace in Northern Ireland and in the Republic . . . we both knew that, after 25 years of killing, we had to make it a personal priority both to seek a permanent end to violence and to establish the basis for a comprehensive and lasting political settlement’.

In this article attention is focused on the features of the emerging Romanian banking system, its failures, and their determinants. These failures were either politically driven or simply a result of the weak regulatory capacity of the state (as the owner of the banks) and lax monitoring from the central bank, as the central authority entrusted with the responsibility to maintain a well-functioning banking system. The reluctance of various governments, regardless of their political orientation, to apply sanctions against banks that are in trouble until the last possible moment encourage excessive risk-taking when banks first encounter financial difficultics, and asset-stripping when the insiders realize that a bank's continued viability is in jeopardy. Based on a number of case studies, the article argues that, in post-1989 Romania, insider trading, self-loans and blunt theft appeared more as systemic features rather than isolated incidents.

THROUGHOUT THIS CENTURY, THE STRUGGLE FOR AND consolidation of Jewish territorial sovereignty in the ancient Land of Israel has been characterized by two complementary processes: waves of Jewish immigration from throughout the diaspora, and a succession of violent conflicts with Israel's Arab neighbours. Both of those processes were at work during 1990 — 91 when Israel became reluctantly involved in the Gulf war while also having to cope with an influx of hundreds of thousands of Jews seeking escape from the crumbling Soviet empire, as well as a few thousand emigrants from Ethiopia and from South America. For many Israelis, the surrealistic spectacle of immigrants being greeted at Ben-Gurion Airport with gas-masks designed to protect them from the Iraqi Scud missiles raining down on major Israeli cities, represented highly dramatic evidence of the fulfilment of Zionism's aspirations.