In western democracies different patterns of cooperation among working class organizations have developed. The three ‘pillars’ of the working class movement in Britain, the trade unions, the party and the cooperative movement, have no equivalent in the history of Germany, for two reasons.

ISRAEL IS MORE SUI GENERIS THAN OTHER POLITICAL SOCIETIES not so much in virtue of the nature of its political arrangements and postures as in virtue of what underlies them. To highlight some basic issues of Israeli politics from this point of view is to take one's cue from the most fundamental question of Jewish existence: To be like or unlike, any other nation? If Zionism prevents Israelis from distinguishing themselves in the manner in which other nations distinguish themselves from each other, a major reason is that Israel's neighbours deny her the right to realize within sovereign boundaries the resurgence of a Jewish state and nation.

AS HE SALUTED THE GRIM FORMATIONS OF 10,000 ‘FIGHTING groups of the working class’ and thousands of other soldiers and paramilitary police in Berlin's Karl-Marx-Allee on 13 August, Erich Honecker looked quite relaxed. He knew that his colleagues Egon Krenz (crown prince and security overlord) and Erich Mielke (Minister for State Security) had taken every precaution to ensure that there would be no counter-demonstrations to mar this celebration of 25 years of the ‘anti-fascist defensive (Berlin) wall’. In this, his fifteenth year as leader of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), the 74-year-old Honecker could compliment himself on a successful party congress followed by successfully staged elections. He could also look back to a number of successful initiatives in the GDR's external relations.

SINCE THE 1950s, THERE HAS BEEN A GROWTH OF REGIONAL integration, not only in Europe, but in other continents too. It is based on a deep foundation: the ‘real socialization’ of production. This means that production is transformed from a process confined within narrow groups to an ever-widening social process, whereby the production or consumption of each individual depends to a growing extent on the production and consumption of all membersof the society, the limits of which are continuously expanding to mankind as a whole.

THE ISSUES OF DEFENCE AND EUROPE DID NOT PLAY A prominent part in the UK general election campaign of March-April 1992. One of the reasons was that public opinion polls throughout the campaign indicated consistently that domestic issues came first with the electorate. Secondly, with the disappearance of the Soviet threat and the restoration of consensus between the parties on nuclear weapons, defence was not a sufficiently contentious subject for it to be a central topic in the campaign. It was no surprise, however, that the Conservative Manifesto claimed that defence would not be safe in the hands of the opposition parties and that their policies would result in huge job losses in the defence sector.

ONE OF THE INNOVATIONS OF THE 1981 ELECTIONS IN ISRAEL which caught the eye, was the frequent use of ‘this time’ in campaign slogans. ‘This time only the Labour Alignment!’ ‘This time the Likud!’ shouted the slogans from all the billboards. This is an appeal to political support based on a short-term time perspective. This appeal differs greatly from that which characterized the Israeli ideological, mass-membership parties in previous periods.

The change in party slogans is a response to changes in the electorate. These changes in the electorate are most clearly reflected in the magnitude of the ‘undecided‘ vote and of its oscillation between different parties. The ‘undecided’ vote which used to be very low, amounted to about 40 per cent according to polls made in 1977 in the preelection period, and to about 30 per cent in the period preceding the 1981 elections. Moreover, the polls pointed to a particularly great oscillation of the electorate in the pre-1981 election period: the political forecast in December 1980 was around 60 Labour seats and around 28 Likud seats. In the beginnin of June 1981, the pendulum swung. The forecast for Labour fell to 30-33 seats while of Likud rose to 47 or even 49 seats. In the elections the race between Likud and Labour was very close. The results were 47 to Labour and 48 to Likud (as against 32 Labour and 43 Likud in 1977).

‘EVERY ELECTION GENERATES ITS OWN MYTHS, MYTHS ABOUT WHAT the politicians were saying, about what the electorate thought they were saying, and about what the electorate meant by its votes.’ Butler's and Kavanagh's comment on the 1979 election applies with even more force to the outcome in 1997. For when an opposition party secures an unexpectedly large victory, there is a seemingly insatiable demand for explanations which stress the positive appeal of the winners — and a corresponding tendency to understate the significance of disenchantment with the outgoing administration. Such myths become entrenched when, as in 1979 certainly and in 1997 probably, the election does turn out to represent a political turning-point. This article therefore applies a degree of deconstruction to the 1997 election. In the afterglow of Labour's famous victory, it is as well to remember that the campaign was rather humdrum. The outcome was predictable, the lengthy campaign had little impact on Labour's lead and turnout fell significantly. Even if the election does transpire to have initiated major change, there is precious little evidence to suggest that in 1997 (any more than in 1979) a large body of electors was voting with that end in mind. What voters intend, and what elections achieve, are two different things. If there is a lesson to be drawn from the 1997 election, it seems to be rather limited and obvious. When governments are divided and directionless, the pendulum swings.

WHEN IN OCTOBER 1982 LE MONDE COMMEMORATED THE centenary of Arthur de Gobineau's death, it borrowed as headline Jean Mistler's description of him as ‘le plus grand méconnu du dix-neuvième siècle’. Despite its hyperbole, that judgment is useful in alerting us to an absorbing case partly of neglect and partly of misrepresentation, and to the circumstances under which this pioneer of Aryan racist ideology was posthumously rescued from the first of these fates only at the price of condemnation to the second. There are both personal and public reasons why Gobineau has proved so difficult for his own contemporaries and for posterity to assess. Much of the problem arises from the enigmatic complexity of the man himself: a figure (in Jean Gaulmier's phrase) ‘tantôt fascinant, tantôt insupportable’, a self-styled aristocrat, a charming yet fiercely pessimistic autodidact, an energetic novelist, poet and dramatist as well as diplomat, journalist, historian and orientalist, and someone who bore the stamp both of polymath and of charlatan. But the image has been blurred also because of the impact of wider historical experience, concerning above all the record of Franco-German mutual hostility. From whichever side of the Rhine they came, the attempts at viewing Gobineau through the gunsmoke of 1870–1 were already confusing enough even before the turmoil of 1914–18 further obscured the scene. Further misperception thrived once Nazism started to implement across France and Europe at large a vision of Teutonic racial destiny which was widely, yet wrongly, taken to reflect directly Gobineau's own ideas. The points of disjunction between those beliefs and what actually became known as ‘gobinism’ need to be recognized. Even so, that awareness is enhanced by acknowledging also that Gobineau's whole mode of thinking about race made him singularly liable to such distortion. In short, he himself had quite gratuitously created his very own hostages to intellectual fortune.

THIS ARTICLE ATTEMPTS TO DISCUSS A NUMBER OF QUESTIONS RELATED to the development of a working-class movement of dissent under non-democratic conditions. In this discussion particular attention will be given to the consequences of economic development. It is not that economic development will be considered as a cross-culturally invariant factor in the explanation of social and political conflict and dissent, but that given i) a non-democratic political context and ii) social and economic conditions allowing for working-class movements whose open manifestation is hence restricted by the political set of constraints, the effects of economic development upon such contradictory conditions, and the way they influence the pattern of development of the working-class movement will be especially considered.

CENTRAL TO THE STUDY OF DEMOCRATIC POLITICS IS THE IDEA of popular control over the activities of elites. More specifically, how can the preferences of citizens be aggregated into a political choice for a government policy or government personnel? Popular control, the effects of citizen participation in political life, is the basis of a major value orientation in the discipline: the notion of participant democracy. The degree of citizen participation becomes the key to the nature of democracry in a society : the more participation, the more democratic the political life of a country becomes. Political participation may take a variety of forms, e.g., running for office, holding office,voting, soliciting votes, and campaigning for, or contributing funds to, I the party of one's choice. However, voting is the most emphasized aspect of citizen participation, since it is the only form of active participation many engage in. The limitations placed on voting as a mechanism for popular control over political choices are well documented. Voters do not choose when to vote, nor the agenda. They have minimal input into the selection of candidates and the choice of issues which divide the parties at elections. Public participation in the selection and resolution of important policy issues between elections is severely restricted.

THE JUNE 1979 EUROPEAN ELECTIONS MARK A VERY IMPORTant date, not only for the members of the European Community, but also for all the European countries, since for the first time, almost simultaneously, the representatives to the parliamentary Assembly of the Community were chosen democratically in the nine countries.

There is no need, perhaps, to repeat that as in other European countries, and especially France, but not in Great Britain and the United States, the most characteristic feature of Italy’s contemporary political life is the fact that within its liberal-democratic political system the main opposition is carried on by a party or parties which deny in principle the structure and purposes of the liberal-democratic state, and the values of electoral representation and its institutions. The interchange between government and opposition in countries like Great Britain and the United States is centred around the agreement between the parties to play fair and to acknowledge the rules of the parliamentary process as the permanent basis of the country’s political life. But the communist parties, and in the countries where they still exist the fascist or neo-fascist parties, reject these principles and proclaim that when they come to power they will replace them by forms of ‘direct’ or ‘all people’s’ democracies. This ideological argument about the respective merits of the purely political or parliamentary and the social-economic centralized forms of democracy is at the core of the doctrinal discussion between the communists and the neo-fascist parties, and the other Italian parties.