REPRESENTATIVES ARE RARELY REPRESENTATIVE OF THOSE THEY represent. The most widely bruited cause of this paradox is the difference in social class; almost every study of legislators in Western democracies shows that they come from more well-todo backgrounds, are drawn from more prestigious and intellectually satisfying occupations, and are much better educated than their electors. Such contrasts alone would make for a formidable divide between representatives and the represented; but more significant than these external signs is the psychological gulf between politicians and ordinary citizens. For a few, politics consumes the greater part of their lives; for the many, politics is a matter taking up little time and absorbing little emotional energy. The belief systems of the politically active few will usually be complex and highly articulated; of the passive many, shallow and indistinct.

READERS OF GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION WILL NOT BE strangers to the events of November that led to a crushing defeat for the Democrats and the first all-Republican Congress in a very long time, if for no other reason than that they have read my colleague Harvey Mansfield's account in the winter issue. There was quite a lot of conservative gloating in November and December (and why not?). There is a little less now that the Gingrich revolution has begun to face up to the two dauntingly unalterable realities of American politics: the reality of the centre and the reality of divided government.

THE CURRENT CRISIS IN RUSSIAN SOCIETY HAS BEEN THE SUBJECT of all manner of scholarly investigations, essays and editorials. But the clear economic reverses, distinctly felt by all, have caused analysis to focus almost exclusively on this aspect of the crisis. A more constructive approach to the problem might be to examine it as a process, as an objective result of all aspects of the country's development and contemporary civilization as a whole.

This approach presupposes that the rejection of socialism in Russia and Eastern Europe, the major reforms in China and Vietnam, and the dead-end situation in Cuba are not chance, but form a pattern. In each case, the crisis is a function of the transition from one social system to another. This transitional crisis is all-encompassing; its economic component is no more important than the political, social, ethical, cultural, or that of daily life. A transitional crisis is the harbinger of a Time of Troubles when all of society — not just isolated elements — is thrown into turmoil.

MY POINT OF DEPARTURE IS ONE THAT HAPPENS TO BE RATHER appropriate for a lecture sponsored by the journal Government and Opposition. It is that the political choices open to governments these days have been so constricted by those forces of structural change often referred to as ‘globalization’ that the differences that used to distinguish government policies from opposition policies are in process of disappearing.

DURING THE FIRST HALF OF THE 1990s ABOUT ONE THIRD OF the countries which had been governed continuously by liberal democratic regimes since the mid-1950s experienced major electoral upheavals at a general election. In the case of eight countries an argument could be made that electoral politics was not as it had been, and that the party systems were now experiencing problems that were quite different in scale from those with which they had contended during the previous forty years. The countries concerned were:

– Sweden, where the 1991 general election produced a major decline in the share of the vote (5.5 per cent of the total) for the governing Social Democrats; this was the largest change in its vote share between consecutive elections since 1944.

WHAT FOLLOW ARE LESS ‘THESES’ THAN ‘CONJECTURES’, speculations both tentative and disjointed. Like a mathematician's conjectures, however, they admit of being systematically ordered into a larger theory as well as being elaborated more fully, one-by-one. Here I shall, without elaboration, at least sketch the outlines of that larger theory.

The general tenor of all these conjectures is to query an ethos, prevailing for the past two centuries or more, effectively encapsulated in the slogan, ‘Every state a nation, every nation a state’. Starting with the American and Latin American revolutions and continuing through the twentieth century's own wars of national liberation, the continuing motif has been one of freeing ‘a People’ from ‘alien rule’. Champions of ‘political unification’, from Mazzini's Italy to Kohl's Germany, have likewise taken as their rallying cry the uniting of a single people under a single government. That is the ‘every nation a state’ side of the story.

BEFORE WE CAN BEGIN TO EXAMINE THE PROSPECTS FOR Europe's future, we must acknowledge that, for three years now, the European Community (or rather, the European Union) has been in a state of latent, but nonetheless profound, crisis. The problems surrounding the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty revealed this crisis but its roots go much deeper. We have all experienced its manifestations: 1) an economic and social crisis, in the form of the currency upheavals of 1992–93 and the rise in unemployment; 2) a political crisis, following the failures of the European Union in the former Yugoslavia and its complete absence from the scene in Rwanda; 3) an institutional crisis, given the uncertainties posed by the prospect of an enlarged (‘wider’) Europe for the present effective working of the Community, and even for its future in the absence of a clear political will.

CANADIAN POLITICAL ARITHMETIC IS A TRICKY BUSINESS. IN Canadian politics, as in Alice's Wonderland, things become ‘curiouser and curiouser’. In suggesting, on the eve of the October, 1993 Canadian federal election, that it looked like ‘the Liberals’ election to lose’, I thought I had gone out on a limb. Brian Mulroney, who by the date of his departure was regarded throughout English Canada with almost universal antipathy, had retired. With their new leader, Prime Minister Kim Campbell, at the helm, polls published at the time the election was called indicated that the ruling Conservatives were favoured by 36 per cent of leaning and decided voters, as compare to 33 per cent for the Liberals. The Tories could win, or at least deny the liberals a clear majority.

WHEN RAWLS FORMULATED HIS VIEWS ON SOCIAL JUSTICE IN the 1950s and 1960s, leading to the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971, he based his theory on a simple but unconditional assumption, namely, that justice is the first virtue of social institutions. This assumption Rawls considers to be beyond doubt, so much so that in the very first page of his treatise he claims that ‘laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust’.

Largely as a result of Rawls's A Theory of Justice, over the last 25 years questions of social justice have dominated most debates on political theory. And while vast quantities of ink were expended over philosophical discussions on significant but detailed aspects of Rawls's theory, principally on the plausibility of his meta h sical assumptions on individuals and human psychology, it is unfortunate that not enough attention has been paid to Rawls's initial recommendation of adopting normative criteria as a tool for evaluating political institutions.

THE AMERICAN ELECTION OF 1994, A SMASHING NATIONAL victory for the Republican Party, was both unusual and momentous. It produced a result of startling clarity, which is unusual in the American constitutional scheme, especially for a non-presidential election; and it promises enduring dominance for the Republicans, which is momentous. The change that President Bill Clinton said he would bring in 1992, and did not bring, has been imposed on him.

Not since 1946, when Harry Truman was presented with a Republican Congress, has an incumbent president been treated so roughly by the voters. But Truman lived in the era of New Deal dominance and was able to recover and be re-elected in 1948. The better analogy for the 1994 election, unfortunately for the Democrats, is probably 1930, when Herbert Hoover was repudiated by the voters and a new Democratic Congress become the prelude to the New Deal dominance that began in 1932 and now seems to have come to an end.

MANY COMMENTATORS HAVE VIEWED THE CITIZEN'S CHARTER programme as a cynical exercise, having little to do with either the political participation one associates with citizenship or the establishment of a general bill of rights in the manner of the great Charters of the past. Although these criticisms possess some force, they fail to recognize that a distinctive conception of citizenship and rights underlies the initiative. In section one, we give an outline of this view of the citizen and trace its origins in the New Right critique of the social-democratic theory that predominated during the post-war period. This exercise forms a necessary preliminary both for understanding the objectives of the policy, the task of section two, and for assessing its coherence and plausibility, the aim of section three. We shall conclude that the scheme fails because it either substitutes the market for the state where it is inappropriate or omits to do so where it might provejustified. In these respects, the combination of politics and markets from the mixed-economy perspective of the social democratic conception of citizenship may well be superior.

JACQUES CHIRAC WAS ELECTED FIFTH PRESIDENT OF THE FRENCH Fifth Republic on 7 May 1995. After 21 years, a politician claiming the Gaullist mantle is once again the occupant of the Elysée Palace. The spontaneous demonstration of countless thousands of Chirac supporters in the Place de la Concorde on the evening of the 7 May was sweet revenge for a candidate who had previously failed on two occasions to secure election, in 1981 and 1988 against the Socialist François Mitterrand. Like the former President, Chirac was elected on his third attempt. Like Mitterrand, President Chirac possesses the necessary presidential attributes of perseverance in adversity, a willingness to learn from past mistakes, and the support of a powerful political party.

IN MY GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION/LEONARD SCHAPIRO lecture in 1993 I attempted an incomplete analysis of international economic relations after the end of the cold war, in particular the unexpected tensions and difficulties. The end of superpower confrontation had not only removed one incentive for Western countries to settle their economic disputes. It had also lowered the priority given to security issues, where national governments were in control, and had exposed their dwindling ability to take economic decisions, because of the extent of the interdependence which was the price paid for their prosperity. I could not think of a single area of domestic policy immune from international influence. Professor Susan Strange has developed a more trenchant analysis of this trend in her Government and Opposition/Leonard Schapiro lecture this year.

‘PEACE PROCESS’ IS A NEW AND FASHIONABLE CONCEPT. THERE are of course great local differences between the Middle Eastern, the South African and the Irish-British peace processes. But there are some remarkable characteristic similarities between them which form a pattern and especially when, as at present, they are seen in their phases of transition. What I present here are a few remarks on the differences and similarities in the phase of transition of the ongoing peace processes in South Africa and in Northern Ireland — differences which geopolitically, demographically, culturally and economically might seem at first sight in some respects rather difficult to compare.

THE NEW REGIONALISM, MANIFESTED IN EUROPE BY THE SINGLE European Act and the Maastricht Treaty (1992) and in North America by the signature of the North-American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA 1993), is centred on strategic policies and new institutions, the aims of which are to achieve a more effective role in global competition. In Europe, the shift is marked by the impending process of monetary union and the creation of its related institutions. The new approach agreed in the Maastricht Treaty sets out four requirements for eligibility to membership of monetary union. Convergence criteria embodying the judgment of financial markets about future inflation, exchange rate and fiscal policy appeared to be the second best choice for governments seeking to institutionalize their commitment to inflation-avoiding policies. The whole mechanism is meant first to provide the region with a credible monetary institution able to win over the financial markets and secondly to set up bulwarks to the inflation-prone pressures of domestic sheltered interests. Thirdly, the aim is to commit member countries, through a so-called targeting exercise (in Keohane's words) to accomplishing the agreed objectives with monetary discipline and macroeconomic adjustment.

DESPITE HIS STATUS AS A FOUNDER OF MODERN SOCIAL SCIENCE, Pareto receives little scholarly attention. In particular, his penetrating discussion of ‘demagogic plutocracy’ (his term for the liberal state) has been strangely ignored by analysts of Western, or ‘bourgeois’, democracy. While Marx's scattered and inconsistent remarks on ‘the capitalist state’ have spawned a vast literature, Pareto is lucky to be acknowledged in a footnote. Consider the exemplary case of David Held, a theorist of great repute, who managed to write a 321 page textbook called Models of Democracy without once mentioning Pareto's name. Why has Pareto been ‘put in quarantine’? One reason is surely the irritating nature of his master-work, Treatise of General Sociology (published in 1916). Even his admirers describe this work as ‘monstrous’ – disorganized, unnecessarily long, full of pedantic distinctions, and continually interrupted by digressions, and by digressions within digression. He never missed an opportunity to break the thread of exposition in order to pursue some bright idea or display his arcane erudition. But a fuller explanation of Pareto's ‘quarantine’ requires us to look at the social psychology of intellectuals.

RUSSIAN FOREIGN POLICY IS STILL IN A STATE OF FLUX. LIKE the other former republics of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation seeks to come to terms with being an independent state needing to define its national interests and foreign and security policy objectives.

The principal element in the new frame of reference for Moscow is the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union itself. For forty years, most of the territories controlled by Moscow were adjacent to territories protected by the United States, or else to China. The Russian Federation is now virtually surrounded by former Soviet republics, all with deep political, social and economic problems, and some of which are highly unstable and subject to violent civil conflicts. The territory of the Russian Federation itself, about 75 per cent of the territory of the former USSR with about 60 per cent of its population, is still not properly defined, given that significant sections of the borders are purely notional, and the degree of control that Moscow can exercise over the entire Federation is uncertain.

HERE I WILL SHOW THE STRANGENESS OF ALEXIS DE Tocqueville's account of the doctrine of interest rightly understood. He affirms that doctrine, but not for the sake of interest. He wishes to preserve the greatness and the misery of the Americans’ very intense self-consciousness, and to keep open the possibility of spiritual responses to that experience.

THE MEXICAN POLITICAL SYSTEM IS CURRENTLY GOING through the most turbulent, disconcerting and complex end of a sexenio, or six-year presidential term, in memory. This is not the usual internal turmoil which has traditionally accompanied every change of administration, but a political crisis so great that it portends a process of political change destined to transform the very nature of the Mexican political regime itself.

It may not be altogether new for this political regime to face the ‘democratic demands’ of important sectors of civil society; these demands have been made in the past in a variety of ways and with various consequences. However, this time the call for democracy constitutes an authentic challenge to the continuity and autonomy of the regime, and this is an extraordinary, highly significant development.