IN JUNE 1971, FRANÇOIS MITTERRAND WAS NARROWLY ELECTED, after a bitter contest, to the leadership of the French Socialist Party. By the end of 1973 he was in command of the party. There is nothing new about an ambitious politician taking over and attempting to transform an existing party. Mendts France in the 1950s and Servan-Schreiber, more recently, tried to reshape a weak and divided Radical Party. They failed as a result of their own tactlessness and because of the perverse obduracy of the party's opportunistic notables who saw little virtue in ideological purity and disciplined organization. Nor is there anything new about a party of the left being dominated by a strong personality. No study of the French Communist Party would be complete without an analysis of the commanding roles played by the tight-lipped Thorez, the jovial Waldeck-Rochet or the circumspect Marchais. The Socialist Party has been no less immune to the cult of personality; it would be impossible to write the history of the party without constant reference to the dynamism of Jaures, the moral persuasiveness of Blum and the organizational genius of Mollet, three men who dominated long periods of the party's history.

SIX MONTHS AGO THE EFFECT OF THE ENLARGEMENT OF THE Community after one year seemed to be a purely academic subject. But soon afterwards, a chain of events and of setbacks led to the state of weariness and of profound uncertainty in which the Community finds itself today.

To restrict oneself, in these circumstances, to a purely institutional balance-sheet would be an empty exercise. How convincing or even useful is it to say that, in general, the institutions functioned almost normally in 1973 when through lack of political will or spontaneity they neither obtained the wished-for results nor supplied the answers expected by European public opinion? When there is no agreement on a minimum of common orientations or on the background of a common strategy, the institutional content of the Community loses its meaning. Not seldom national constitutions, when deprived of popular support, have seemed to be at the mercy of the slightest upheaval. The same thing could happen to a European constitution.

WHEN KARL DEUTSCH STARTED TO PREPARE THE ‘SECOND THEME’ OF the IXth World Congress of the International Political Science Association held in Montreal in August 1973, entitled ‘Key Issues in International Conflict and Peace Research’ he asked me to organize the Commission which was to deal with the problem: Pathways to Peace: National Sovereignty or Supranational Integration.

The task of trying to disentangle all the questions linked in this rather formidable subject seemed to me to require first of all a working defhition of its various aspects, then a great number of papers* to examine at least those aspects which I considered essential in the light of the working definition; and a good discussion to wrap them together again.

THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF NATIONAL ECONOMIC PLANNING WAS fashionable in the 1960s at a time when the French model had become extremely popular in Western Europe. However, analyses of planning experience were then generally inhibited by a preoccupation with descriptions of the formal planning procedures rather than with any serious attempt to assess anything but the economic consequences of planning. (Andrew Shonfield's classic study of Modern Capitalism was a conspicuous exception to this criticism.) Attention was focused on plans as official documents rather than upon a set of planning practices that might be only remotely related to any formal statement of public policy. Planning was viewed too much from the forecasting end rather than the implementation end and the rationality of objectives became more of a preoccupation than the practical problems of translating them into reality. A normative model of efficient decision-making was all too often assumed to be readily transposable because of a wholly unrealistic notion of the ways in which organizations work.

THE QUESTION OF THE SIZE AND ESSENTIAL NATURE OF POLITICAL communities, that is to say of areas in which political power is exercised, has often been neglected by writers on politics in favour of an examination of power itself, or of the institutions through which it is exercised. In recent years interest in the topic has been revived by the discussions about ‘integration’ sparked off by the advent of the European Economic Community and other attempts at the creation of supra-national institutions. In the period before the second world war the issue had arisen in a different context, namely in relation to the strains encountered by imperial systems faced with the growing forces of nationalism.

WHEN DISCUSSING COMMUNIST IDEOLOGY IT IS NECESSARY TO DIFferentiate between two varying - indeed opposite views. Firstly there are the parties, organizations and institutions in countries within the Soviet sphere of influence (including parties in the West which are identified politically and ideologically with the USSR). Secondly the large number of parties and groups, which claim to be communist, and derive their ideology from Marx, Engels and Lenin, but which are highly critical of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its ideology. Although these fundamentalist groups are numerous and splintered they can be categorized into two mainstreams of thought: Maoist and Trotskyite. The Maoist ideology is not only the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party but also that of smaller, so called Maostic groups in the West.

A FEW YEARS AGO, GALL1 AND PRANDI WROTE THAT THE UNIFICATION of the socialists represented a phase of rationalization of the Italian political system. Not only did the re-unification of the PSI (Socialist Party of Italy) and the PSDI (Social Democratic Party of Italy) lead to a simplification of the party subsystem (by reducing its excessive numbers), thus rendering the choice between alternatives easier for the electorate. But at last a single voice seemed to emerge which could undertake the task of opposing the twenty years of Christian Democrat predominance, which had been responsible for so many aspects of political ‘immobilism’. Moreover it was possible to discern a strategic design in the socialist plans — an optimistic design perhaps, but entailing possible innovations. The formation of a strong Socialist Party might have led to the overcoming of one of the principal - if not the greatest - defects of the Italian party system: the absence of a mechanism of rewards and punishments.

THE CRISIS OF THE EUROPEAN NATION-STATE IS OBVIOUSLY A subjective notion. Objectively it would mean a complete breakdown in the capacity of the state to provide the minimum assurances for individual and collective endeavour and a situation in which the choice was between total anarchy and external intervention. Such situations have been known in some states outside Europe; it was at the origin of the Congo crisis of 1960–61. No Western European state has been in this situation since the re-establishment of selfgovernment in West Germany. Even when there has been a challenge to a regime verging on the revolutionary as in France in 1958, the only question was what alternative force of order would emerge to enable the life of the French state to continue.

MODERN ALGERIA BEARS VARIOUS STIGMATA OF RADICALISM. ITS struggle for national liberation was one of exceptional severity, involving untold and incalculable suffering and sacrifices. Only Vietnam can surpass it; no other ex-colonial country can equal it. After independence, the commanding heights of the economy, and even a very significant part of the rural sector, passed into one form or another of socialist ownership, including the important experiments in auto-gestion (workers' self-administration), in both industrial and agricultural enterprises. In foreign policy, the hostility of its government to what it holds to be remaining forms of colonialism has been serious and sustained. Internally, the regime is relatively egalitarian and rather puritanical and earnest, by any standards. The Algerians look to their own efforts for the betterment of their condition. All these traits - a heroic struggle for liberation, followed by a good deal of socialism and a general earnest radicalism, ought to have made Algeria a place of pilgrimage for the international Left. It is well known that the promised land must be somewhere. Algeria had as good a claim as Russia, China, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Vietnam, to be at least considered for such a role. In fact, Algeria found in Frantz Fanon the thinker or poet of this vision. Though not a native of Algeria, he identified with the Algerian national cause and died whilst serving it, and became its internationally renowned theoretician.

AMONG ACADEMICS, ESPECIALLY IN AMERICAA, PSEUDO-THEORY OF stable democracies has recently been developed and there is keen competition to invent indices which grade countries according to a scale which runs from the highest possible degree of stability to the greatest instability. And yet our stable democracies are only a hundred to a hundred and fifty years old – a mere moment in the long history of mankind.

The title-deeds upon which the claims to greatness of contemporary liberal democracies are based are many and genuine; they are advanced industrial economies, which promise, if mankind so desires, opportunities for productivity which will give a completely new meaning to the ideas of ‘scarcity’, of the distribution of economic wealth and services and to the idea of work itself; allegiance to lofty, humanist values founded on the affirmation of the primacy of the individual as a citizen; pride of place given to individual rights as contrasted with the corporatist rights of anciens régimes, which oppressed the individual and paralysed social and economic growth; toleration of non-conformist ideas and movements; flexibility in dealing with conflicts between individuals and groups.

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.

THE SUBJECT OF PARLIAMENTARY CONTROL OVER FOREIGN POLICY IN the Netherlands has increased in importance in recent months following the latest Arab-Israeli war and the ensuing reduction in Arab oil production. In addition to their general cutback of oil production, the Arab states singled out the United States and the Netherlands as ‘friends of Israel’ to whom oil supplies were to be limited even further. While the United States seemed an obvious target for such an embargo because of its open political and military support of Israel, opinions still differ as to why the Netherlands received this dubious distinction. The most obvious explanation - the traditional political and moral support for Israel by all Dutch governments, whatever their political composition - has not been universally accepted. Some commentators, including Foreign Minister Van der Stoel, have assumed that the Arab states wanted to put pressure on the entire Western European economy by hitting the important oil retining capacity of Rotterdam. This it was hoped would lead to a demand from economic circles to support the Arab cause. Whatever the underlying reasons, the oil embargo has had important consequences for the economic life of the Netherlands.

EXISTINGTH EORIES AND METHODS OF GOVERNMENTAL PLANNING are incomplete. They neglect very often, for instance, the full range of factors which shape the behaviour and effectiveness of central government planners in liberal democratic regimes. It is essential, therefore, to refine the basic paradigm upon which analysis and evaluation of the activities of central planners is typically based if the major problems of their work are to be clearly understood.

Central planners are concerned with the improvement of the intellectual dimension of public policy-making at both national and increasingly supranational levels in Western Europe by longer-term perspectives, forward co-ordination and more sophisticated discussion of alternatives. They seek to guide or control the activities of a group of agencies, a particular governmental system or even of society as a whole.

‘POWER’ AND ‘CONFLICT’ ARE BOTH TERMS WE DO NOT SEEM TO BE able to do without, however much we may be worried by what methodological purists say. We tend to feel that if we could understand the distribution of power and the lines and amounts of conflict we would have the key to the explanation of political events in the world as a whole, a particular society, or some group - some association or organization - within a society.

This feeling is in my view quite justified, but only in this sense: that if we had an analysis of the state of a society (etc.) that was sufficient to enable us to talk confidently about the distribution of power and the lines and amounts of conflict, we would already be in a position to be able to explain political events. In other words, as a means to being able to describe the situation in terms of power and conflict, we would have to build up information and ways of analysing that information, so good, that we would indeed be able to explain political events. But the logical relationship among the elements would be, not that because we could talk about power and conflict we could explain political events but rather that because we could explain political events, we could talk about power and conflict.

IN RECENT YEARS THERE HAS BEEN A FORMIDABLE GROWTH OF literature on the political and other implications of business corporations. Much of the writing on the corporations has been of an alarmist nature. We are usually referred to the growth of an impressive economic (and, by implication, political) power of the corporations, the lack of effective democratic control on their activities, and the consequent need to establish a more effective set of constraints. It is suggested that internally the corporations are tending to by-pass the legislatures and other representative institutions, while externally the multinationals are integrating sectors of economies across states, and employing a management which may owe primary loyalty to the corporation and not the state in which managers are based. The emergence of the multinationals therefore not only seriously challenges many of our cherished political institutions and procedures, it also confronts our patterns of thinking about the sovereign state which have been inherited from the 16th century. In that they escape from the constraints of national boundaries and representative institutions it is alleged that the corporations are rendering obsolescent our traditional concepts of both state and sovereignty. Much of this argument is neatly encapsulated in the evocative titles of such scholarly works as Beyond the Nation State and Sovereignty at Bay.

BERNHARD SCHÄFERS HAS DEMONSTRATED THAT PLANNING CAN BE analysed theoretically with regard to three central features : first, from the standpoint of human nature and the history of human development; planning thus refers to how people conceive of their future activity; secondly, from the standpoint of ‘modern science’, in which planning is seen as an attempt to develop the prognostic and plan-oriented capacity of science; and thirdly from the standpoint of the conditions for the existence of industrial-technical societies, in the context of which planning is conceived of as an endeavour to effect the comprehensive direction of these societies as well as the co-ordination of its subsystems.

‘EXTERNAL SOVEREIGNTY’ IS THE CONCERN OF THIS PAPER, AND THE extent to which it has been eroded, in substance if not in form, by the pressures of the modern world. The formal distinction between external sovereignty and internal sovereignty needs to be emphasized at the outset. Externally, sovereignty connotes equality of status between the states – the distinct and separate entities – which make up our international society. Internally, it connotes the exercise of supreme authority by those states within their individual territorial boundaries. From Bodin who, in De La République (1577), saw souveraineté as the exclusive right ‘to give lawes unto all and everie one of its . . . subjects and to receive none from them’ to the Permanent Court of International Justice which, in the Wimbledon Case (1922), held that the sovereign state ‘is subject to no other state and has full and exclusive powers within its jurisdiction without prejudice to the limits set by applicable law’, the concept of the sovereign state has implied both supremacy within and equality of status without.