WHEREVER ONE TAKES A POSITION IN THE GREAT DEBATE between representative and participatory democrats it is clear that no democracy can function without the involvement of its citizens. What is at issue is the extent and nature of the citizen participation which is thought to be required if a democracy is to be worthy of its name. Whilst this is a fundamentally normative issue, the protagonists on both sides regularly cite evidence as to actual levels of participation and draw inferences from that evidence in support of their contentions.

On the one side are those who assert that in Britain ‘some of the spectators have begun to descend on to the field’; on the other are those who say that ‘the “grass roots” of politics seem shrivelled and starved of the nourishment of participation by the citizens’. For this reason, as Jane Mansbridge has said, ‘field studies of what happens to various ideals when people try to live by them could prove useful in clarifying a wide range of normative questions.

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.

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.

THE RECENT POLITICAL HISTORY OF NORTHERN IRELAND HAS been punctuated by arrivals and departures as successive secretaries of state have attempted to impose their personalities on an intractable problem through a series of (failed) initiatives. The latest exercise has been under way since the beginning of 1990 and is closely identified with the diplomatic skills exerted by the present Secretary of State, Mr Peter Brooke. In what has been described as ‘potentially the most significant political discussions in all of Ireland since the treaty of 1921’, Mr Brooke has embarked on a voyage which could transcend in importance the Anglo-Irish Agreement of November 1985. The purpose of this article is to put that voyage into some sort of context by suggesting that rather than concentrate solely on the ‘high’ politics of political negotiation, attention needs to be paid to the mechanisms which allow negotiations to proceed. For that reason we will look at the relative merits — and the complementarity — of ‘Track One’ and ‘Track Two’ diplomacy.

THIS ARTICLE DESCRIBES AND ILLUSTRATES HOW JAPAN conceives the political meaning of many kinds of interdependence and uses this concept to advance what it considers to be its national interests and global interests without upsetting the balance of world interdependence. ‘Interdependence’ means the mutual vulnerability and sensitivity of all governing-cum-economic units in the world. ‘The politics of interdependence’ means, then, how actors make strategic use of interdependence with enough self-restraint not to jeopardize the system of interdependence itself. Thus ‘Japan's politics of interdependence’ means how Japan makes strategic use of interd pendence guided by its own standards of conduct. In this sense, this article is an attempt to combine the following two intellectual traditions: the interdependence literature and the economic statecraft literature to define Japan's politics of interdependence. First, I will summarize three principles of Japan's political conceptualization of interdependence. Then I will illustrate them by some recent examples. Thirdly, prospects for Japan's politics of interdependence will be briefly discussed along with some discussion on the lines of research to be further explored.

A Major Obstacle to Grasping The Real Problems of perestroika is the underestimation of its contents and of the ensuing constellation of the social forces involved. Usually, perestroika is seen merely as a struggle between the advocates of democratization and sweeping economic reforms on the one hand, and the conservatives, who are deliberately or otherwise seeking to preserve the bureaucratic management practices which have emerged in the country over the last fifty years. All in all, such a characterization does correctly reflect the overall historical perspective. If the administrative system is not drastically restructured within a few decades, the country will suffer economic and political disaster. But when considering, say, the next five to ten years, things are rather more complex. In such a time-span very diverse scenarios are possible.

TO ANALYSE THE GERMAN QUESTION IN THIS TRANSITORY moment is risky in several respects. The German novelist Martin Walser who underwent a metamorphosis from a fellow traveller of the communists to a German nationalist put it bluntly: ‘He who does not get below his intellectual level when talking about Germany has no intellectual level at all.’ The topic has pitfalls everywhere:

— it is deeply connected with emotions, whatever the view of the writer;

— it is in flux, ‘words are already out of date in your mouth’ as a cynic put it. The increasing number of actors who claim to have a say in the German unification process makes prognosis almost impossible;

— scientific analysis of this unique event lacks concepts. Transition to democracy in a highly penetrated system does not follow the established rules of this branch of knowledge.

FOR FORTY YEARS THE COLD WAR, WITH ITS PRESUMED threat to Western Europe, has been used to justify the level of military budgets in NATO countries. The United States, Britain and France, in particular, have sustained high levels of military spending throughout this period. Each has sought to maintain capability across a full range of military options, including nuclear forces and the ability to intervene in Third World conflicts. Each has maintained a large, and quite stable, industrial and technological infrastructure in support of these military goals.

With the ending of the cold war, the basis for that stability has been undermined. Defence spending is set to fall. With it will fall overall spending on defence equipment. But the rate of decline, and its distribution across the different sectors of the defence industry, remain to be determined. Upon the outcome turns the future of investment in defence technologies, with further consequences, complex in nature, for national and industrial technological capabilities. To complicate analysis further, these changes arise at a time of considerable concern on both sides of the Atlantic about industrial competitiveness. This concern had already led to upheaval in industrial structures and strategies within both the defence and the civil high technology industries.

In The Spring of 1989, as Poland's Communist Party was hammering out a new political deal with the non-communist opposition, one Communist official was heard to remark to a Solidarity participant that the only thing really dividing the two sides was the agricultural question: who buries whom? Ironically, neither the Communist Party nor Solidarity could have imagined that within a matter of months Poland would have its first noncommunist prime minister in over forty years, and that the Communist Party would find itself fighting for its political survival, pleading for more posts in a new Solidarity-led Cabinet.

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 SOVIET UNION'S ONCE DOCILE WORKING CLASS IS PASSIVE no longer. Strikes — once said to be an impossibility under socialism — are now commonplace. Unofficial workers' clubs, workers' fronts, and embryonic free trade unions are springing up all over the country. These show a marked polarization: some are oriented toward reform; others are openly conservative; many are ethnically biased. It will be argued in this article that this new worker activism could prove damaging to the progress of economic reform, but that further radical changes in the political framework could reduce this risk.

IT HAS NOW BECOME COMMON FOR OBSERVERS TO NOTE that German reunification, an unthinkable prospect only a year ago, will be realised before anyone, either the East and West Germans themselves or any of their neighbours and allies, is fully prepared for this eventuality. As the conservative Alliance for Germany's stunning successes in the GDR's first free Volkskammer (parliamentary) elections on 18 March demonstrated, a near majority of the country's population was eager to cast its vote for those forces which promised to facilitate East Germany's absorption into the FRG on the fastest possible terms. By the same token, the vote was also a victory of sorts for all of the West German parties who rushed to lend material and financial aid to their GDR counterparts, for their involvement in the East German election campaigns clearly helped to accelerate the momentum behind national reunification.

TECHNOLOGY IS ALMOST AS OLD AS MANKIND BUT THE realisation that useful discoveries could be made systematically came only much more recently. This realisation constitutes one of history's most significant bench-marks, it may even be the most significant one. The organization on a massive scale of research and development was an inevitable result, the fruits of scientific and technological development are now ubiquitous, and the economic, social and political ramifications have been and remain profound. About mankind's political evolution, however, its extent and even more its irreversibility, even in these seemingly favourable times, one must continue to be much more cautious.

‘When I Was Organizing Underground Activities against the Nationalist Party in the 1940s to call for democracy and to attack corruption, I could never have dreamed that forty years later, I would have to demonstrate again for the same causes against my own party.’ Such a comment from a long-term party activist shows how deep the support for the fledgling democratic movement in China went. The massacre of hundreds of Beijing citizens on the night of 3 – 4 June 1989 brought into sharp relief just how out of touch China's top leaders had become with the processes of change which their own reform programmes had set in motion. Many long-term supporters of the party had finally lost faith in the revolution that was being carried out in their name. At the time of writing (July 1989) that goes a long way towards explaining why the old men who now rule Beijing decided to use such crude measures to suppress their own population and China's future leaders.

In previous letters from Paris, which Government and Opposition has been kind enough to publish, I do not believe that I erred on the side of complacency about my country. This is why I have less hesitation in writing today that France is at present the victim of a gale of calumny, the intensity and extent of which leaves one bewildered, incredulous and unhappy.

A particular and aggravating circumstance is that these aspersions are believed in, or at least spread, by the French media and the political elite itself. According to them the moral health of France is threatened. It is in danger of being submerged by a wave of racism, of anti-Semitism and even of neo-Nazism. The most implacable vigilance is necessary. This new official doctrine, it must be said, is quite simply absurd.

The ‘LITTLE TIGERS'’ REPUTATION AMONGST WESTERNERS (and for that matter with the Japanese) is rich in negatives. Exploitative, unprincipled, uncontrolled; minimalist on welfare, maximalist on profit: the unacceptable face of capitalism indeed, to those feeling themselves on the receiving end of the Tigers' determination to compete and get rich quick. Nevertheless the image is misleading. These are no chance miracles of laissez-faire capitalism unbound. On the contrary, the rise ‘from nowhere’ to world trading notoriety has to an extent been contrived in every case.

ON THE SAME WEEKEND AS EAST GERMANS OFFICIALLY exchanged East Marx for real Marks, another kind of exchange took place between East and West German professors at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Bielefeld. The recently established Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Erforschung des politischen Denkens, in the person of Volker Gerhardt (Cologne), had invited some sixty senior philosophers, political theorists and political scientists from both sides of the inner-German border to discuss basic questions in political philosophy. The meeting was not a conference. The organizer, recognising the absence of any shared traditions of inquiry and debate, had issued invitations to a mere meeting. It was the first such meeting since the collapse of the East German Communist regime. In fact, it offered the first opportunity after almost six decades of dictatorships in the East for academics from the former front-lines, as it were, to reflect openly together on their subject, on their academic pasts and on their possible academic futures. Initially, the atmosphere was very tense. But, amazingly, the tensions soon evaporated. A strange sort of civility came to characterize the discussions both inside and outside the conference rooms. Conflicts were largely avoided, to the obvious relief of most participants. From an inner- German perspective, the meeting was a great success. At the end, Ernst Vollrath (Cologne) summed up a general view: ‘We have begun to see that we can learn from one another.’ But this reciprocity was not evident in the academic discussions. Something else was involved apart from the surface issue of Marxism-Leninism versus the rest of the world. It is worth reflecting on the development of the meeting and on what this something else was.

The Evangelical Church Faced Harassment and hostility from the state in the immediate aftermath of the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in October 1949. Indeed, the struggle in which the Evangelical Church is today engaged can be seen as both a consequence and continuation of a struggle which began in 1949. The Soviet Union had gained control in 1945 of that part of Germany which was most staunchly Protestant. Initially there was no central authority for the Evangelical churches in postwar Germany. Instead there were a number of regional churches, eight of which were located in the Soviet Zone. However, in 1948 the Evangelical Church of Germany (EKD) was created as an umbrella organization for the whole country. Indeed the EKD remained intact as an all-German organization until 1969, despite the estrangement and mutual hostility which characterized inter-German relations until that year.

CRITICS ONCE ACCUSED PRESIDENT BUSH OF LACKING VISION. Why anyone would want a visionary's hand twitching over the nuclear button is, however, most unclear. Our recent visionaries — Marxist, Islamic and Nazi — do not inspire confidence in human justice and intellect. Actually, the ‘vision’ that people apparently had in mind is the limited kind that business school professors say chief executives must impart to their companies. More appropriately, ‘vision’ means a clear sense of where one is leading people and also every evidence that the leader believes that the destination is good, and that he and his followers will arrive there. Ronald Reagan had such vision in abundance: from the political perspective, ‘vision’ is the part of statesmanship composed primarily of persuasive charm in the service of a degree of strategic intelligence.

IN TERMS OF THE HISTORICAL CATEGORIES FORMULATED BY S. N. Eisentadt, the origins of the Ottoman-Turkish polity were imperial-bureaucratic rather than imperial-feudal or patrimonial. The regime was not patrimonial because the centre had its own distinctive normative system; the values of the centre were just a pale reflection of those of the periphery. The regime was not imperial-feudal for the centre did not have to face civil societal groups able to challenge it and impinge upon it. The members of the periphery could not develop horizontal loyalties; instead they competed among themselves for a limited number of privileges such as tax-farming rights or quotas for import or export which the centre granted. The Ottoman-Turkish peripheral elements did not develo into an aristocracy or a bourgeoisie with political influence. Consequently, the efforts towards modernization initiated during the nineteenth century took on a particular twist. Modernization meant Westernization, which in turn was perceived from the perspective of Enlightenment tradition. Informed by a ‘cast-iron theory’ of Islam ,the state's salvation was seen to lie in substituting reason for religion as the basis of public policy-making. The military and the bureaucratic elites came to see themselves primarily as the guardians of raison d'état.