TROTSKY'S REPEATED FAILURE AS A POLITICAL PROPHET DOES not seem to have damaged his reputation among his devoted followers. The very pivot of Trotsky's faith – that socialism in one country is doomed to failure unless supported by revolution in other countries – has been proved palpably wrong. The only reason why ‘socialist’ countries like the Soviet Union or Poland, for example, survive at all is that they are able to bolster their own inefficient systems by vast loans and imports of food and technology from states where a free economy exists. In The Revolution Betrayed, in 1937, Trotsky foretold that a defeat of Germany by the Soviet Union would result in the crushing not only of Hider, ‘but of the capitalist system’; while in the Soviet Union one of two things would happen. The first possibility was that a revolutionary party would take over which would restore freedom in the trade unions and the Soviets, as well as the liberty of Soviet parties. It would purge the apparatus, abolish all privileges and limit inequality of payment to the minimum. It was a belated conversion to freedom by Trotsky. In 1921 the sailors and garrison of Kronstadt had risen and called for every one of these reforms. They were not only mown down as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ with Trotsky's full support, and under his overall command, but his action was unequivocally justified by him years later in exile, on the grounds that failure to crush Kronstadt in 1921 would have opened the gates to ‘counterrevolution’ – in plain words, would have put an end to communist monopoly of power. The second hypothetical future of a Soviet Union victorious in a war against Germany, according to Trotsky, was the victory of a bourgeois party, which would restore private property. Of course, all political prophets go wrong more often than not. But this particular failure reveals two characteristic weaknesses of Trotsky's power of analysis.

I MUST CONFESS THAT I DID NOT CHOOSE THE SUBJECT OF this article out of theoretical or scientific interest. My dreams have not been peopled by the merits of replacing one team by another in government. It was FranGois Mitterrand's election to the Presidency of the French Republic to which I reacted in a way that I shall not conceal from you: alternation in government is not in itself a blessing. Let us admit that it is desirable in general and in the abstract that, where a country is divided between two blocs, each of them should some day come to power, one of them should not be condemned to the ungrateful role of a perpetual opposition. But having said that, we should not change government unless the new oneholds out more hope than the old.

THE MALVINAS WAR HAS BEEN FOR ARGENTINA WHAT CYPRUS was for the Greek colonels. Unfortunately we lack a Karamanlis, and the Junta regime has lost the six years it has been in office without developing a political project of its own. In this sense, our situation is very different from that of Brazil, where the ruling military have had time to ‘open up’ the political system gradually.

To understand the mind of the Argentine armed forces one has to realize that they felt disappointed by the Martinez de Hoz administration (1976–81). Actually, this is putting it mildly. They felt betrayed: it is as though the Argentine economy had been bombed for the past six years. A familiar experience? Possibly, but unlike some European countries, we lack the institutional mechanisms. Besides, the Argentine military felt that while they did their part in stopping the guerrillas, the specialists they put in charge of economic matters did not do their job. The team of economists, headed by José Martínez de Hoz, was a local version of ‘Chicago boys’, backed by international finance and its world economic pundits. A contorted version of ‘liberalism’ invaded our beaches, giving us nineternth-century laissez faire plus a foolish overvaluation of the peso which made Buenos Aires the costliest city in the world, and rendered competition against imports impossible. Quite a few people thought this was necessary because, as the widely displayed sticker on our cars has it, ‘to reduce the state is to strengthen the nation’. The idea is that Argentina would finally be a real part of the Western Christian world and, inspired by European and North American examples, would throw away protectionism and all its trappings, never to look at it again.

DEVELOPMENTS IN BRITISH POLITICS BETWEEN JULY AND NOVember 1981 - Roy Jenkins's near-win in the Warrington byelection, the capture of Croydon North-West by the Liberal/SDP Alliance and Shirley Williams's triumph in Crosby - strongly suggest that the British party-system may never be the same again. Although it was possible to argue that the Warrington result reflected no more than the impact of a famous candidate on a situation of public hostility towards the two major parties in a working-class constituency, the Croydon result, which gave victory to a Liberal candidate with a long record of earlier failures, and which gave the Alliance 40 per cent of the votes in a seat where the Liberal Party's organization had been almost as non-existent as the SDP's, cannot be dismissed so easily. These by-election results, together with an impressive run of local election successes for the Alliance, and continuing evidence from the opinion polls, strongly suggest that British politics, as the SDP's leaders have proclaimed, must be entering a new phase.

THE ORIGINS OF INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY CONTINUE TO BE AN object of scholarly dispute. It seems to be very probable that this will continue to be so forever. An enormously complex transformation occurred in a very large, diversified and intricate society, and the event was unique: no imitative industrialization can be treated as an event of the same kind as the original industrialization, simply in virtue of the fact that all the others were indeed imitative, were performed in the light of the now established knowledge that the thing could be done and had certain advantages (though the emulated ideal was of course interpreted in all kinds of quite diverse ways). So we can never repeat the original event which is to be understood, which was perpetrated by men who knew not what they did, and this was of its essence: we cannot do this, for quite a number of cogent reasons - the sheer fact of repetition makes it different from the original occasion; one cannot in any case reproduce all the circumstances of early modern Western Europe; and experiments on such a scale, for the sake of establishing a theoretical point, are morally hardly conceivable. In any case, to sort out causal threads in so complex a process, we should need not one, but very, very many re-runs, and these will never be available to us.

THE PROVISIONAL IRA (PIRA) IS THE OFFSPRING OF THE IRISH Republican Army which played such a leading part in the war for Irish independence, 1919–21. Its leaders claim to be the true inheritors of the Irish Republican tradition of struggle against the British, determined to complete the task by expelling the British presence once and for all and thus to ‘liberate’ the whole of Ireland by reunifying north and south and establishing a PIRA socialist state.

IN NOVEMBER 1979 THE GOVERNMENT ABANDONED ITS PROtection of Official Information Bill within a fortnight of its second reading in the Lords. That it should have failed to survive its first encounter outside the departmental world in which it was conceived, came as no surprise to those familiar with what Dick Crossman, in reference to excessive secrecy, once described as the real English disease.

BRITAIN HAS BEEN ACTIVELY TRYING TO ALTER THE BUDGETary arrangements of the European Communities in order to reduce the size of its net contributions since the Labour government of Harold Wilson succeeded Edward Heath's Conservative government in February 1974. This effort has been based upon the perception that Britain's net contribution to the budget – the balance of gross contributions and receipts – was excessive compared with that of its partners. Britain has been the largest net contributor, yet has a per capita gross national product which places it with the less prosperous member states.

THE QUESTION OF DECENTRALIZATION IS ONE WHICH THE British Labour Party has always found difficult to handle because of its inheritance of contradictory traditions in relation to the British state. Labour's roots in anti-authoritarian radicalism and in the British periphery make it sympathetic to decentralist demands and this has been reinforced by the need to compete electorally for support in the periphery. However, to gain power at Westminster it needs more than peripheral support; it needs to capture power at the centre and, in order to benefit the periphery, to strengthen the power of the centre. Ideologically, the party also possesses a socialist tradition which preaches the indivisibility of working-class interests and deplores nationalism and separatism.

No one, friend or foe, of the European Community could deny that its emergence, growth and consolidation in a very brief time as a ready-made administration, with all the powerful institutions it comprises, has been one of the most impressive achievements of modern political imagination and organizational skill. In Brussels, in Luxembourg, in Strasbourg, institutions appeared almost overnight created by the Treaty of Rome, the names of which inspire such contrary feelings in Europe and in the world at large: the European Court of Justice, the European Council of Ministers, the European Parliament, the European Economic and Social Committee; and last but not least, the European Commission, the most controversial of all these institutions, the most hated or the most admired, precisely because people believe and know that the Commission is the motor of this extraordinary development in European political history.

THE DENIAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN SOCIALIST STATES CAN BE seen as the natural outcome of Marxist praxis: Marxist teaching about the nature of the class struggle and the conditions necessary for the emancipation of the proletariat from bourgeois values is not only theoretically alien to the concept of universal human rights, but its implementation by Marxist revolutionaries in the circumstances expected to prevail is likely to require the denial of such rights to ever-widening sections of the society if political power is to be secured and retained.

IN ONE OF MY BOOKS I HAVE ARGUED THAT ‘MODERNIZATION’ is a process whereby a society becomes increasingly aware of itself, its identity and aspirations, and seeks to make concrete its awareness in terms of seeking equivalence with other nations. The argument of this essay is that while the process of change in India has general characteristics common to other societies, it can never be the same in totality because the initial conditions are so different.

THE NEW CAMBRIDGE OR CAMBRIDGE ECONOMIC POLICY GROUP, (CEPG) School led by Professor Wynne Godley has received considerable attention in this country. Its policy prescriptions however are international as well as national. It is well known that it calls at regular intervals for comprehensive long-term import controls and reflation in the UK. It is less well known, and indeed a more recent occurrence, that it calls for ‘co-ordinated’ international trade - i.e. import controls for each country administered centrally by some body such as the OECD - and reflation. As protectionist pressures continue to grow throughout Europe and in the USA, the appeal of New Cambridge analysis may grow with it. We should therefore be aware of the nature of the arguments which it deploys in the attempt to make protection respectable.

RECENT DEBATES IN BRITAIN ABOUT SECRECY IN CENTRAL government have become immersed in the traditional tension between espionage and secrecy. Espionage concerns spies and others who intend to help an enemy and who deliberately harm the security of the nation. Secrecy means ‘the compulsory withholding of knowledge reinforced by the prospect of sanctions for disclosure’. Leakage of official information may involve persons having no intention of damaging the nation. However, harm to the country may ensue from information getting into the wrong hands, whether by espionage or leakage. Experience of this tension in practice was a major factor leading to the enactment of the Official Secrets Act 1911, with section 1 covering espionage and section 2 unauthorized disclosure of information, with the risk of prosecution for either offence. Journalists in particular are aggrieved that they may be subject to prosecution under the Act used to charge spies and traitors. Jonathan Aitken, one of the journalists prosecuted in 1970 under section 2 of the 1911 Act over extracts from a British diplomat's report leaked to the Sunday Telegraph about the Nigerian civil war, was acquitted and published his own version of the Nigerian case in his book Officially Secret (1971), which heavily criticized the Official Secrets Act.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE INHABITANTS OF GREATER Kabylia and their Arabic-speaking compatriots constitutes one of the fundamental issues of contemporary Algerian politics. This relationship has been neither accurately conceived nor adequately taken into account in the existing literature on modern Algeria. The growth of popular Berberism in Kabylia, articulating widespread opposition to the government's Arabization policy and the demand for official recognition of the Berber language, went unnoticed by outside observers until 1980. It had been visible since at least 1974, but could not be accommodated by prevailing conceptions either of Berber society in general or of Kabyle history in particular.

QADDAFI'S THEORY OF POLITICS AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION amounts to the assertion that all forms of representation in fact result in unrepresentative government; that therefore they must be unjust; that therefore they must be replaced by nonrepresentative government. The Green Book describes the institutions of such government but is by no means utterly explicit about the relations between institutions, or about the way personnel are recruited to them. To examine what happens in practice at elections, surely critical events in a nonrepresentative system, suggests that Qaddafi is less a Periclean Legislator than an interpreter, casts some light on the theory, and hints at the nature of the concept of political community underlying both The Green Book and contemporary Libyan society.

IN THE SEVEN YEARS SINCE THE FALL OF THE COLONELS' dictatorship in Greece, a new Greek party has established firm political roots. With the accession of Greece to the European Community on 1 January 1981, the new parties have been brought into the Western European political orbit, a development which marks the rehabilitation of a political system ostracized by virtue of its period of dictatorship. Unlike Portugal and Spain, however, which also seek membership of the European Community, the Greek period of dictatorship – lasting seven years post-war – represents much more an historical aberration, for Greece not only has an ancient history which saw the birth of democratic government, it also has enjoyed far more democratic than dictatorial governments in its modern period.

AT FIRST SIGHT ONE MIGHT BELIEVE THAT THE REPORT ON THE teaching of social sciences in the world prepared in 1951 by William Robson, at the invitation of UNESCO for the International Political Science Association, is still valid today in what it says about the situation in France. In fact, because of the strong traditions in the French universities, the teaching of and research in political science in France have not made the progress which had been hoped for, in spite of the continuing efforts of successive governments. Nevertheless, since the mid-1960s a major effort has been made. Some 40 chairs and nearly three times as many lectureships and assistant lectureships have been created and several large research centres have been set up, particularly in Paris where, alongside the venerable Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, many teams have been established, notably at Paris I, Paris II and Paris X, comprising lawyears, sociologists and historians.