WHILE GORBACHEV'S REFORMS HAVE HAD A BROAD IMPACT ON Soviet society, one key element in the communist system of rule has been particularly affected: the nomenklatura. The word refers to lists of positions for which party committees traditionally held responsibility in recruitment, and lists of persons deemed suitable to fill them. In general, appointments to such posts could not be made without the sanction of the relevant party committee. In some cases, it directly selected the appointee; in others it simply endorsed nominations made elsewhere. The crucial point, however, is that appointments could not be made without the party committee's permission, and that committee's Department of Organizational and Party Work supervised this procedure for staffing the various bureaucratic apparatuses. It has been the essential element in the staffing procedures, and the term covered party involvement in staffing non-party positions, both elective and appointive, the staffing by the party apparatus of positions at lower levels in its own apparatus, and the filling by non-party institutions (such as ministries) of lower-level appointments in their own structures.

RECENT EVENTS IN EASTERN EUROPE HAVE GENERATED A large degree of uncritical triumphalism amongst certain Western commentators. The collapse of the communist regimes in these countries as the result of their failure to manage their economies and the consequent demand on the part of their citizens for more accountable government, has led many to link the struggle for democracy with a desire for capitalism. Some writers have gone so far as to portray the demise of ‘actually existing socialism’ as the culmination of ‘a universal human evolution in the direction of free societies’ grounded in ‘the empirically undeniable correlation between advancing industrialisation and liberal democracy’.

THE QUESTION ‘WHO WON THE COLD WAR?’ IS STILL BEING debated. In a way it is certainly right to say that communism is collapsing and that Western capitalism has won the cold war. The Soviet Union (I shall not analyse here the situation in other socialist countries) has in fact recognised the complete failure of its economic system. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) has lost ground during the relatively free elections in various Soviet republics, etc.

Yet we have to take into account that the cold war was largely a war of words, a war of ideas, and in some respects the Soviet Union has done well in the global ideological contest. For a country with a scarcity of food and most elementary consumer goods and with an extensive past record of repression and direct terror it has been extremely successful in establishing its image as a stable and peace-loving partner in the international arena, as a society which is capable of producing more humane, caring, intellectual and trustworthy leaders than most other countries. It is a remarkable achievement and it is even more remarkable that this ideological success has emerged from the ruins of the dull and rigid Brezhnevist ideological machinery.

Morocco has a number of islamic movements that demand the establishment of a truly Islamic society. Most of them sprouted up in the 1970s and caused considerable anxiety in the immediate aftermath of the Iranian revolution. But these movements have proven to be less powerful than was once feared — or hoped. After describing the main tendencies represented by these groups, I shall suggest some possible reasons for their political inefficacy.

THE 1990 MAY DAY PARADE IN MOSCOW'S RED SQUARE provided an extraordinary spectacle of the growing dilemma faced by the Soviet leadership. Mikhail Gorbachev, flanked by members of the Politburo, stood atop the Lenin Mausoleum while below an angry crowd of demonstrators booed, jeered and defiantly waved placards and portraits of opposition politicians. It was an historic occasion, reminiscent of the last days of the CeauSescu regime in Romania. Not since Lenin's day had there been a public demonstration of this kind in Red Square. This was the first time since the Bolshevik Party appropriated the International Labour holiday to celebrate its own power that the May Day parade had been disrupted. The symbolic significance was all too apparent: the key event in the calendar of Soviet political ritual had been visibly wrecked, the communist leadership had appeared weak and isolated, and even at the sacred heartland of Lenin's shrine Gorbachev's authority was being challenged and undermined by an angry Soviet public. From being a symbol of workers’ solidarity and Soviet military might, May Day had become further testimony to the crisis of legitimacy in the Soviet regime.

THROUGHOUT THIS CENTURY, THE STRUGGLE FOR AND consolidation of Jewish territorial sovereignty in the ancient Land of Israel has been characterized by two complementary processes: waves of Jewish immigration from throughout the diaspora, and a succession of violent conflicts with Israel's Arab neighbours. Both of those processes were at work during 1990 — 91 when Israel became reluctantly involved in the Gulf war while also having to cope with an influx of hundreds of thousands of Jews seeking escape from the crumbling Soviet empire, as well as a few thousand emigrants from Ethiopia and from South America. For many Israelis, the surrealistic spectacle of immigrants being greeted at Ben-Gurion Airport with gas-masks designed to protect them from the Iraqi Scud missiles raining down on major Israeli cities, represented highly dramatic evidence of the fulfilment of Zionism's aspirations.

MOST OF WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE ROLE OF POLITICAL pacts and pact-making in developing democracy is based on transitions from exclusionary authoritarian regimes in Europe and Latin American. This is not surprising; most political pacts have been concluded in Europe and Latin America, as political and economic elites have attempted to extricate themselves from the ruins of war or the reigns of tyrants. Increasingly, however, pacts have been used elsewhere as devices to mark political transitions of other kinds. In the Arab world, for example, the ultimately unhappy fate of Lebanon's 1943 National Pact, which provided the framework of a transition to independence, did not deter pact-makers in Tunisia in 1988 from using the device in what they hoped would be a transition from a single-party regime to a more pluralist democracy.

This article compares the patterns of breakdown of communist rule and the processes by which power was transferred to new ruling groups in four countries: Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the GDR. In the countries covered in this paper, two paths to systemic crisis and breakdown are identified: the path of failed reform in Hungary and Poland, and the path of intransigent resistance to reform in Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic. The lesson of the Czechoslovak and East German experience was clearly that those regimes which totally rejected reform, because they saw it as incompatible with communist power, faced total and rapid collapse when confronted with the challenge of Gorbachev's perestroika and when deprived of the support of the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’; but the experience of Poland and Hungary suggests that those regimes which embarked on reform were no more successful in preserving communist power — half-way reform turned out in many ways to be even worse than no reform at all, while radical reform, that is, reform which would bring about the intended economic results, in the end could not be achieved without sweeping away communist power. Gorbachev himself now seems to be impaled on the horns of this same dilemma in the Soviet Union.