With Lal Bahadur Shastri's sudden death in Tashkent in January of this year, India faced for the second time within eighteen months the problem of succession to leadership, The task may have been easier on the second occasion: for one thing, it was not a matter, as it had been in 1964, of finding a successor to a man revered for a full generation as a national leader; for another, there was to hand the experience of the first occasion. On the other hand, while Nehru's end had been for long foreseen and considered, and came as the culmination of a period of declining grip, that of La1 Bahadur occurred without warning. Moreover, for all the respect that Shastri had attracted, the atmosphere in which his replacement had to be sought was not that of the somewhat hushed apprehension in which he had been chosen. But while the second succession was thus accompanied by greater noise and bustle, and while the element of conflict and rivalry was now expressed in the taking of a vote to determine the issue, both operations went with every appearance of smoothness. India felt proud, and most of the world relieved, to find that there was a system that could take the strain. But what is that system ?

My purpose here is only to put forward a number of tentative suggestions in order to provide some common basis and a starting ground for discussion. We are called on to examine the principle and the working of political opposition as one of the specific means of control. That is to say that in our context the notion of opposition is specific, the notion of control general. Accordingly, the issue may be formulated as follows: in the light of the problem of controlling government, that is, of checking absolute power, to what extent and in what ways is the existence of an opposition vital, useful or possible in both ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries ?

Obviously, if one deals with developing countries the very idea of ‘developing’ needs to be dissected. Some countries are purely and simply under-developed; other countries find themselves at different stages of development.

In general discussions about opposition in democratic political systems, such as the thoughtful reflections of Robert A. Dahl, the role which federalism may play in providing an opposition with opportunities to oppose is often forgotten. This is curious, but perhaps in part at least the result of the fact that the institutionalization of opposition has gone farthest in Great Britain – a non-federal state. Yet in a sense to be further developed below, federalism may be looked upon as an alternative method for institutionalizing opposition – alternative that is to the British parliamentary system.

To one who believes in the essential worth of a democratic polity, how much opposition is desirable, and what kinds? What is the best balance between consensus and dissent ? Even among democrats there is not much agreement on the answers to these questions.

It is easy to see why. These questions seem to demand nothing less than a complicated assessment of democracy itself. Or to put the matter more precisely, one can judge the desirability of different patterns of political opposition only by employing a number of different criteria that would be used if one were appraising the extent to which a political system as a whole achieves what are usually considered democratic goals or values.

The religious Orders are, together with the Catholic Church, the oldest political institutions in the West and the only ones to have developed without any break in continuity. St Benedict, the ‘Father of Europe’, founded his first monastery when the Angles, Jutes and Saxons were invading Britain. The Benedictine rule still exacts obedience from thousands today. The Camaldolese and the Vallombrosians existed before the battle of Hastings, the Carthusians date from the same time (1084): both live today by the same rule, according to the same constitutions, clothed in the same habit as their distant predecessors. Exactly one hundred years before Magna Carta, the system of supranational parliamentary assembly was in operation – a system which still governs the monks of citeaux and which, in one form or another, has served as a model for all the religious institutes which have followed.

For some years now Spanish university students have been drawing attention to themselves by their political activity in a regime in which political activity is not legal. The conflict has since 1962 taken the form of a demand by the students to set up an autonomous Students Union in the place of the officially sponsored SEU (Sindicato Espaiiol Universitario). A new wave of student disturbances occurred in the winter of 1965, sparked off by the exclusion of a student who had attended a meeting of students who refused to join in the activities of the official union in January 1965. The students throughout the country began to demand autonomy, both for the rectors of the universities and for the students’ union, and supported demands by workers on 27 January who were also demonstrating in favour of free trade unions. On 6 February demonstrations took place again in Madrid and Barcelona, and a number of arrests were made. Further demonstrations of students against the obligatory SEU took place on 12 February in both cities. A number of students were beaten-up and arrested in Madrid; in Barcelona 1000 students met in the Faculty of Law, with the permission of the dean. Faculties in Bilbao and Madrid were closed for a while by the authorities, but the students continued to hold unofficial assemblies at which they demanded ‘free unions’, and refused to cooperate with representatives of the official union. On 19 February some 2000 students in Madrid demonstrated in favour of university autonomy, and carried on with their protest for three days.

Power is potentiality: for those subjected to it, it offers the potential for good and for ill and therefore each and everyone is directly concerned with the way in which power is used. On this account we give the subject the name of citizen; for to do so implies a right to influence the use of power, which is his at least theoretically. But it is a hollow right, without substance, if he cannot use it. It is a hollow right if its only manifestation is that the citizen from time to time be invited to vote for the person or persons who will then wield absolute power. In such cases, the choice of the citizen is limited and furthermore he who before his accession may seem most desirable may after it reveal himself to be very bad: one has only to remember that no emperor was more fervently greeted than Caligula.

The four elections analysed in this article all took place in the autumn of 1965. In formal terms, there is an important distinction between the election of legislatures (or at most of parliamentary governments) in Norway, Turkey and West Germany and that of a President in France; in terms of results, between the replacement of the Labour government in Norway by a four-party coalition and of the four party coalition government in Turkey by the Justice Party and the confirmation in office of the CDU-FDP coalition and of General de Gaulle.

The new states of Asia and Africa present a variegated picture with respect to the status and mode of action of their opposition parties. In only about a third of the new states are opposition parties regarded as constitutionally legitimate. Israel, Lebanon, Morocco, India, Ceylon, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Nigeria, Malaysia, Philippines, Sudan, and a few others allow opposition to exist in a public and institutional form.

‘There is cause for grave concern that South Africa has thus far been unable to develop any significant party, aggressively committed to a liberal solution of the racial problems.’ These words, written in 1956, by a distinguished South African historian, imply an important truth about South African politics, namely the extent to which the crucial issues of race relations have become, over five decades, interlocked with disputes between the two white language groups and partly submerged in the process.

These disputes have been ventilated in the context of a parliamentary system which since its inception in 1910 has remained the exclusive preserve of a white minority, determined to resist any challenge by the non-white majority for representation in the process of decision-making.

‘The French Empire’, wrote one historian, ‘was doubtless the forerunner of the modern police state.’ The same historian wrote elsewhere: ‘The ancien régime was brought down by violence, and the governments which had followed each other in France, since 1789, had been dictatorships : the dictatorship of the ‘Patriots’ in the Constituent Assembly, of the Girondins in the Legislative Assembly, of the Paris Commune after 10 August; then of the Committee of Public Safety; finally the dictatorship of the Directory, which destroyed, by means of coups d'état the majorities in the Legislative Assembly which displeased them.’

The police-Empire was not unrelated to the dictatorships which preceded it, and in order to understand it, we must first try to grasp the thread which links these successive dictatorships together.

By definition, political opposition by mass parties calling freely for votes against an established government, in parliaments and in regular, open elections, is a comparatively recent phenomenon. It could originate only when governments became effectively accountable to an ever-expanding electorate and is therefore intimately tied to the complex processes of democratization, which even in the more established Western democracies are barely a century old.

On the eve of independence, practically all the new states were committed to full democratic politics, for which careful constitutional arrangements were thought to offer definite guarantees. Yet in most of them competitive politics have not lasted long and have given way to autocratic government in one form or another.

It is of course a commonplace that the defeat of Russia by Japan in the war of 1904–5 ushered in the revolutionary year of 1905. The role of the frankly revolutionary Russian illegal parties has been frequently studied, but the part played by the various groups of more or less moderate public men who are often loosely designated as ‘liberals’ in preparing the climate of revolution has received less detailed treatment in historical writing. The present article therefore proposes to examine the stages by which these groups moved to a progressively more radical position under the impact of an unpopular and unsuccessful war.

The emergence of a student opposition movement in the United States in the past few years has received world-wide attention. During the last year, American students have made headlines for their organized opposition to the Vietnam war, and for the now celebrated Berkeley Student Revolt. For perhaps the fist time in American history, the politics of university students has become a major topic of national political discussion. Many articles have been written in newspapers and magazines discussing the nature and sigmlicance of this movement.

Any analysis of the American student movement must attempt to answer the question why student politics in the mid-1960s should be so much more noteworthy than any preceding set of such activities. Before turning to a discussion of this issue, I would like to summarize briefly some of the earlier radical activities of American university students.

It is now more than thirty-five years since Sir Lewis Namier gave his famous shot in the arm to the study of the parliamentary politics of the 18th century. Under his impact, the great Tory and Whig monoliths have been effectively dethroned and their places taken by ‘connections’ and ‘groups’, by ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ – and among the ‘outs’ the ‘loyal’, or sometimes ‘factious’, opposition. But Namier's preoccupations, and the enthusiasm they inspired, far from stimulating research into the whole field of political action, have rather had the effect of confining its operation to Parliament alone. Hence, the unofficial opposition – that of the ‘political nation’ without-doors – has tended to be neglected. Yet, in this more spontaneous, unofficial opposition from ‘without doors’, it is instructive to see the way in which different actions, starting in different quarters of the community converge for more or less brief periods and exert a common pressure. Anomic and associational movements, social protest and political demands, well-organized and clear-sighted interest groups and ‘directaction’ crowds, leaders and followers come together in a chorus of united opposition, in which, however, the individual parts can still be distinguished and identified.