Between The European Elections of June 1989 and those of June 1994, the voters had to digest an extraordinary diet of change. The cold war ended, leading to the unification of Germany and replacing one monolithic security problem by a diversity of problems, including, most agonizingly, Bosnia. The Soviet Union disintegrated. Recession brought unemployment above 10 per cent for the European Union as a whole. Many were bemused by the complexity of the Maastricht Treaty and the political conflicts engendered by some of its major elements. Foremost among these was the project for the single currency, promoted by France in order to anchor Germany yet more firmly in the Union. The idea of a ‘common defence’ as a backbone for the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) also had this motivation.

Spanish America Has Moved From The Status of Debt crisis region to that of emerging market in the past few years, and has done so without great political upheaval. So can economic liberalism and democratic institutions work together in the region? Neither phenomenon is really new in Spanish America. However they have often been regarded as potentially antagonistic or even mutual exclusive. Indeed there have been times when the two concepts seemed to be competitors rather than allies. If they are now (mostly) allies, this is not primarily because old-fashioned modernization theory has been proved right all along, but because of changes in both the internationalenvironment (political as well as economic) and in the character of democratic politics in much of Spanish America.

Conditions In The Market For Votes Have Changed throughout Europe in recent years. Markets which for much of the post-war period were characterized chiefly by voter loyalty to governing parties and plausible challengers to them, have latterly been subject to significant elements of uncertainty and fragmentation. Not only have votes been switched with increasing rapidity, they have also been cast increasingly for parties which lie outside hitherto established frameworks of electoral politics. Perceived governing incompetence has dearly been a major factor in this transformation, but broader social change has also played a part. The consequence is that European electoral markets present increasingly open terrain for party political competition. Not for many years have possibilities for market entrance been as good.

‘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’.

It Was In 1962 In The Man on horseback, A Book which has long since become a classic, that S. E. Finer drew attention to a class of country in which the government was repeatedly subject to the interference of its armed forces: the military, he noted ‘as an independent political force, constitutes a distinct and peculiar political phenomenon’. Beginning from the political strengths and weaknesses of the military, his analysis addressed the disposition of the military to intervene in politics and its opportunities for doing so, and he brought out the different forms such intervention could take and the different levels to which it could be pressed. In effect, he also turned on its head a prevailing if tacit assumption. Given their ‘vastly superior organization’ and their arms, it seemed to him that ‘Instead of asking why the military engage in politics, we Ought surely ask why they ever do otherwise’.

After a Period of Stability of More Than Five Years, the European Monetary System (EMS) was forced into a series of realignments of the participating currencies' central rates in the months after September 1992. Following renewed turmoil on the currency markets in July 1993, on 2 August 1993 the ministers and central bank governors of the Community decided ‘to widen temporarily the obligatory marginal intervention thresholds of the participants in the exchange rate mechanism of the European Monetary System to ± 15 per cent around the bilateral central rates’. Although this measure was repeatedly emphasized as being ‘of limited duration’, as was the determination of some ministers to reach Monetary Union, these events have been designated as the ‘death’ of the EMS or its ‘breakdown’, and the Bank of International Settlements in its latest Annual Report called it ‘the most significant and far-reaching currency market crisis since the breakdown of the Bretton-Woods-system’.

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.

It is a Recurrent Theme of Comments on Sammy Finer's writing that, like his talk, it dazzled. Perhaps, as he himself said of his Compurutiue Government text compared to his own lectures, the written version might be ‘less picturesque and Mediterranean’ but it could still enliven the most apparently dull topics within political science. Thus it may seem curious to draw attention to a work of his which betrays fewer of these qualities. The work is Five constitutions published in 1979.

The First Chapter of Book xx of L'esprzt Des Lois, entitled simply Du Commerce, begins by contrasting the Old and the New, that is virtue and moral purity on the one hand and commerce on the other:

The Success of The Movement For Multi-Party Democracy (MMD) is too recent an event to permit any firm assessment of changes taking place in the Zambian political system. These are, however, probably weighted in favour of a more democratic regime. A situation has arisen in which the powers of the President and those of a parliamentary opposition hang in the balance. In Africa presidents have tended to gain the upper hand but this may prove not to be the case in Zambia.

Sammy Finer Contributed To so Many Areas of political science – comparative government, international relations, sociological theory, electoral studies – that it is often forgotten that his first love was public administration, the subject of his first two books, his Primer of public Administration, published in 1950 and his biography of Sir Edwin Chadwick published in 1952. In addition, Sammy published a seminal article on ‘The Individual Responsibiity of Ministers’ in the journal Public Administration in 1956.

In that article, written in the aftermath of the Crichel Down controversy, Sammy refuted what he called the ‘folklore’ that surrounded the principle of individual responsibility, showing that there was no convention of resignation for administrative fault, and that, in any case, resignation was an ineffective remedy for departmental mismanagement.

There are at Least Three Possible Types of View about the justifiability of the use of force by states or private individuals on behalf of other private individuals or groups who are the victims of brutal and gratuitous coercion by another state. The first type of view is that no human being, and a fortiori no state, can be justified in using force under any circumstances and for any purpose, because (and only because) force is an intrinsic evil. This unflinchingly deontological view is generous but practically absurd. The second type of view is that states (or even private individuals) can be, and often arc, justified in using force against the brutally coercive actions of another state when, but only when, the latter is acting outside its own territorial jurisdiction. At least in the case of states what grounds that justification is their entitlement to defend themselves against foreign (as against domestic) aggression, and to defend also any other states with whom they have linked themselves either by standing alliances or by solemn common undertakings to secure each other's safety and sovereignty within the bounds of international law. In the case of private individuals, the corresponding justification would lie in their several personal entitlements to defend themselves as best they can against aggression.

It is no Accident That Almost Every Major British political leader in the post-war period has been troubled by the question of consistency. As Harold Macmillan recognized when he identified his greatest fear as ‘events’, politicians are liable to be driven off their chosen courses when they least expect problems. Macmillan seems to have been referring to events outside his control, and in the increasingly interdependent world since 1945 the number of these events has greatly increased. Technological advances bring crises in far off places promptly into the cabinet room; instant responses from Downing Street are now possible, and the media expects them. If this were not enough, cabinet ministers are faced with the potential events which might be brought into existence by their policy decisions. Ministers can scarcely plan several moves ahead when their next action might cause a major upheaval, yet such foresight is demanded by commentators, supporters and opponents. In an atmosphere of economic difficulty the margin of error becomes tighter; initiatives are more likely to fail, and the cost of persevering with dubious policies becomes greater. Nowadays, if a politician wishes to hold to a unwavering line on every important issue his career is likely to be spectacular — and short. Perhaps only a highly-skilled follower of Machiavelli could escape from this predicament, by gaining a reputation for consistency without deserving it.