AS RECENT EXPERIENCE IN THE GULF WAR HAS AGAIN confirmed, dependence on foreign supply of military equipment and munitions can lead to an alarming vulnerability. At risk are the national armed forces and their effective prosecution of combat, and since in any military engagement, the place, dimensions, duration, and intensity of battle are not necessarily of their choosing, a second level of salience is added to this risk. A key lesson of the Falklands and Gulf wars, arguably the two most technologically intensive wars to date, is that modern weapons depend crucially on a comprehensive array of logistic support and its timely delivery and reliability.

READING PROFESSOR INOGUCHI'S SPLENDIDLY COMPREHENSIVE and suggestive account of Japan's external policies as modes of coping with/balancing/sustaining interdependence, I was irresistibly reminded of a phrase I learned in 1950 at the first meeting I attended of our local Tokyo neighbourhood council — the committee of the 300-household precinct where I lodged. I think the issue was the smoke coming out of the chimney of our one and only factory. We did not know then about NOx and SOx, but it ruined the housewives' washing when the wind was in the wrong place, and that was bad enough. In a circumspect speech which reminded us that the factory owner was, also, far and away the largest contributor to the annual shrine festival, a particularly articulate ex-leader of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association preached a little homily on the principle of neighbourliness in a country of densely-packed, cheek-by-jowl communities. Mochitsu motaretsu was his key phrase; the slightly archaic grammar gave it a somewhat venerable weight; support and be supported. And it did not just mean ‘support in order to be supported’. It meant also: ‘don't be deterred from accepting support by a sense of the irksome constraints of dependence. We are all dependent on the community; others too, as much as you. Accept it. It is the community which is your security, not just the indebtedness, or the goodwill, of individual others.’

THE CANADIAN POLICE SYSTEM IS VERY MUCH A LAW UNTO ITSELF. It does not have the authoritarian traditions of European countries and their successors in Communist regimes. It does not have the same societal involvement of the Japanese and Chinese arrangements. Since Canadians, unlike their southern neighbours, believe it is possible to be whole without being powerful, it does not have the American style cop. It shares many of the attitudes and disciplines of the British, but in institutional terms they are vastly different from each other.

To some extent these institutional peculiarities are matters of history, although not all of them are. Before Confederation each area had its own specific policing characteristics depending upon the time of settlement, the racial origin of the settlers and the characteristics of the country. In the cast the Maritime provinces (as they were to become) largely relicd upon military and naval patrols with provost marshals in the garrison towns, with some nightwatchmen on the civilian side. The countryside was little policed, although some local militias existed who could be called out if neccssary.

AS THE TWENTIETH CENTURY DRAWS TO ITS END, TWO MEN, Hitler and Stalin, appear to stand out even in its violent history for the scale of the suffering and destruction which they inflicted on millions of innocent people. But at once, the question arises: how far have the roles of Hitler and Stalin been exaggerated? Is it any longer possible, in the twentieth century, to hold individuals responsible for events on this scale? Should the responsibility rest not with these men but with the movements and regimes with which they are identified? This is the question which I want to discuss.

ECONOMIC HISTORY IS FAR REMOVED FROM PRECISE SCIENCE and cannot offer an unambiguous explanation of the initiation, pace and causes of rapid industrial growth. Nevertheless, few economic historians would disagree that the pattern of growth is not random; and that in evaluating it, technological innovation must be a central element.

The landmarks of industrial development are conventionally thought of in terms of science and technology. From the adoption of the stirrup and the plough, which heralded the feudal age in Europe; to the spread of the silicon chip and the microprocessor, which lie at the core of the emergent IT economy, the development of society can be charted in terms of technological change. And just as the analysis of technological change has become one of the dominant tools of the economic historian, so ‘futurology’ is centred around trajectories of innovation. Over the next century changes are projected which are just as profound as those experienced since 1890. The world of 2090 will be different, and while the fundamental political differences may be unpredictable, there is a presumption that it will be technologically very different from the present. It is appropriate that popular speculation about future society is termed not ‘future fiction’ but ‘science fiction’.

It is an attempt at moral regeneration, at expiation, at the purging of guilt;
a would-be effort at performing a Wirtschaftswunder (so far without visible success);
a political reorganization, the establishment of democracy, from above;
an intellectual liberalization; a partial abandonment of pretensions at a monopoly of truth;
the withering away, or at least conspicuous routinization of a secular faith;
a reincorporation of the Soviet Union in a wider civilization, an international idiom;
a recovery of traditional Russian culture (and of others), including ‘spiritual’ values, a much used phrase;
the establishment of the rule of law;
the re-creation of civil society;
a re-orientation in foreign relations and policy.

The legitimacy and the appeal of the perestroika regime has a curious double basis. It says, in effect: we claim your support because we are changing everything; and we also claim your support because we are preserving our established order, our Soviet, revolutionary, Leninist heritage and tradition. This may or may not be contradictory; but it is unquestionably the case and this is the manner in which the great restructuring is presented, advocated and defended.

This Rather Cumbersome Title Might Be Easier to understand if it was first explained in which sense the two concepts which it contains are taken here. Thus ‘information revolution’ is taken to mean not only the scientific and technological revolution, which has culminated in the microelectronic revolution, but also the two major geopolitical consequences of the information revolution: ‘interdependence’ and ‘globalization’. The question posed here is how this vast complex influences and changes the functioning, some would say, even the existence of parliamentary sovereignties.

BRITISH READERS MAY RECOLLECT MARTIN'S POIGNANT expression of regret, in Voltaire's Candide, that the French and English had felt it necessary to go to war in North America over ‘quelques arpents de neige vers le Canada’. Martin captures the sense of an enduring European perception of Canada — an indeterminate expanse of ice and snow held firmly in winter's Arctic grip throughout much of the year. His sardonic utterance reminds us of the overseas rivalries of Canada's European parents out of which were born its historic ‘two solitudes’, its distinct linguistic and cultural communities, one proudly French, the other British in descent, their entwined affairs remaining persistently refractory long after the eventual emergence from its colonial past of present-day Canada.

Perhaps the allusions and references contained in the first part of this article might not be readily intelligible to someone whose childhood was not spent listening to stories from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland or to someone not presently involved in the current debates about the finance of United Kingdom universities. Let me therefore offer a few words of explanation.

Alice in Wonderland, and its companion Alice Through the Looking Glass, are children's stories which explore the limits of reason in most creative ways. Their author, the Reverend C. L. Dodgson, a nineteenth-century mathematician at Christchurch, Oxford who wrote under the name of Lewis Carroll, used the stories to discuss the nature of limit processes in mathematics, the phenomenon of relative size and aspects of the absurd. In the stories animals speak, playing cards come to life and the heroine, Alice, undergoes many transformations of bodily size. Since I regard the recent research selectivity exercise of the Universities Funding Council (UFC) as beyond the limits of reason, I have drawn upon the Alice stories by way of satire and I have tried to use some typical Carroll literary devices — plays on words, accounts of physical transformations and the like — to emphasize the relevant points.

IN NOVEMBER 1979 THE GOVERNMENT ABANDONED ITS PROtection of Official Information Bill within a fortnight of its second reading in the Lords. That it should have failed to survive its first encounter outside the departmental world in which it was conceived, came as no surprise to those familiar with what Dick Crossman, in reference to excessive secrecy, once described as the real English disease.

WHEN A SLEEPER AWAKES FROM A BAD DREAM HE FINDS THE BEDCLOTHES a little rumpled but nothing else changed. The dream itself quickly fades. However the recurring dream is a phenomenon well-known to psychology. The French electorate of the Fifth Republic goes in for the insubstantial dream as an important form of experience. The most famous example was the ‘Events of May 1968’. Like a sleepwalker the whole country acted out the myth of revolution with all its romantic folklore. Comfortable, even wealthy, people manned the strike committees at their children's schools. However nobody turned the power or the water off and nobody did any shooting. People only began to get killed when petrol distribution was resumed for the Whitsun holiday weekend and there were 120 deaths in road accidents. Nonetheless the government tottered and the world trembled. No one noticed that in an affluent industrial democracy with a standard of living among the highest in the world the kind of discontent that leads to violent cataclysm did not exist.

The Story is Told That Following The 1916 Rising a journalist contacted a nationalist politician for some background information. He was told that hostilities had begun when Cromwell invaded Ireland. When would it end?: ‘When hell freezes over.’ No doubt it is apocryphal but it conveys the sense of fatalism and of time-scales necessary to understand the present tense of the peace process. As a result of the IRA bombing of Canary Wharf on 9 February 1996 sobriety and long memories have replaced the euphoria of mid-1994. No one had pretended that it was going to be easy; indeed some of the major actors had been thinking in generational terms. The SDLP leader, John Hume, spoke of ‘the real healing process [which] will take place and in a generation or two a new Ireland will evolve’ (italics added) at his party's annual conference in November 1995. Even the influential Sinn Fein insider, Jim Gibney, inserted a note of realism as early as June 1992 when he said that a British ‘departure must be preceded by asustuined period of peace and will arise out of negotiation’ (emphasis added).

THE AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION JUST HELD APPEARS to have been a momentous event. It was the greatest repudiation of an incumbent president and party in America since that of Hoover and the Republicans in 1931. Predicted by no one — by neither political scientist, pollster nor politician — this was as much a surprise to joyful Republicans as to luckless Democrats. The voters had not discussed the matter much, except in deprecatory terms borrowed from the media, and on the morning after they too looked around among themselves with wonder and satisfaction.

It could hardly be believed, as Carter's pollster asserted, that everyone turned to Reagan on the last day when the hostages held in Iran failed to appear. Something so considerable must have been meditated, or at least prepared; and this misfortune for Carter does not explain why the Democratic Senators, who were not involved with Iran, were voted out. Perhaps the large number of ‘undecideds’ were Reagan voters, too embarrassed to confess their decision to callers they suspected were unsympathetic. Or perhaps — a wishful fantasy of mine — the voters deliberately did not disclose their intention to the pollsters since they knew that sovereignty stays alive only with an occasional surprise. The voters may have sensed that they can be exploited if they can be predicted.

MY DOMINANT INTELLECTUAL CONCERNS HAVE BEEN WORLD politics and history, with strong but subsidiary passions – engaging the mind not less than the body – for watching wild creatures, looking at paintings and buildings and walking and (in my younger days) climbing on mountains. These are not gregarious pursuits; and though I have been a fiercely, and perhaps parochially, loyal member of various small groups at various times I have mostly been a lone magpie, picking up small things from many places.

I used to think the word ‘scholar’ pompous and pretentious, but now I would accept it as a description, using it in the sense prevalent in the Middle Ages, when scholars travelled, in space and time, in pursuit of learning. A learner at least I have been and am. I once believed that I was learning in order to prepare myself for some special service to society: I long ago discovered that I could best serve, inadequately of course but still serve, by going on trying to learn. I have much of which to be ashamed in my life, but of this discovery I am not ashamed.

It Was An Honour To Be Invited To contribute to this special issue, yet I hesitated to take up the invitation. A learned journal is no place for expressions of wifely tribute, had such ever been my style, and I am not a political scientist. In the end, however, it was precisely the lack of specialist qualification which persuaded me. Sam's influence and appeal, as both scholar and teacher, were after all never confined to the realms of political science per se – any more than were his sources of reference and inspiration.