WHEN ITS ARTICLES OF AGREEMENT WERE DRAWN UP IN 1944, the International Monetary Fund was seen as having two main functions: to oversee the operation of a system of fixed, but adjustable, exchange rates; and to promote the removal of payments restrictions on international trade. Over the years since then, despite the demise of the fixed exchange rate system and a steady decline in payments restrictions, the scope of the Fund's influence has grown. Why should this be?

In broad terms, the answer is to be found in the increasing integration of the world economy. As trade and investment flows have grown, so too have the concerns of the international community for good economic management in individual national economies. ‘Spill-over’ effects have grown in size and importance, and with them the need for a framework to regulate their consequences.

THE BRITISH GENERAL ELECTION, HELD ON 9 APRIL 1992, resulted in a victory for the Conservatives, their fourth successive victory. This was the first occasion in Britain on which a single party had won four successive general elections since the Napoleonic era. At first sight, admittedly, this victory may not seem particularly striking. The Conservatives gained an overall majority of only 21 seats, the lowest Conservative overall majority this century, except for 1951, and the Conservative share of the vote in the United Kingdom — 41.9 per cent — is the lowest gained by any Conservative government this century, with the exception of 1922.

THE ISSUES OF DEFENCE AND EUROPE DID NOT PLAY A prominent part in the UK general election campaign of March-April 1992. One of the reasons was that public opinion polls throughout the campaign indicated consistently that domestic issues came first with the electorate. Secondly, with the disappearance of the Soviet threat and the restoration of consensus between the parties on nuclear weapons, defence was not a sufficiently contentious subject for it to be a central topic in the campaign. It was no surprise, however, that the Conservative Manifesto claimed that defence would not be safe in the hands of the opposition parties and that their policies would result in huge job losses in the defence sector.

THESE NOTES TRY TO ASSESS THE DEEPER CAUSES OF Mr Major's electoral victory in the light of the Silent Revolution which is rapidly changing statecraft now all over the world. It is a lucky coincidence that the coming to power of Mr Major's own government takes place at the same time as the beginning of a new era in the organization of human affairs — the ‘no-more-world-wars’ era and its pragmatic spirit. Thus the readjustments and the innovations which the new British government may set in motion for the recovery of Britain will fit into the global changes already taking place. This, of course, assuming that the world policy-makers take up and strengthen the positive tendencies open now to the world, and the British policy-makers actively coordinate their national efforts with the overall transnational transformation in course, and indeed synchronically make Britain's impact on them. For every little bell tolls now for the world's thee, and the British bell sounds loudly enough.

THIS ARTICLE ADDRESSES THE PROBLEM OF NORWEGIAN membership in the EC. Why is it so difficult for Norway to follow in the tracks of Sweden and Finland, and for that matter the rest of Western Europe?

The changes on the European continent since the collapse of the East-West divide have also altered the political agenda in the Scandinavian countries. The ambitions of the EC-internal market as well as the Single European Act speeded up a discussion of how Finland, Norway and Sweden should position themselves in order not to lose out economically and become marginalized politically. In Norway, the traumatic EC debate in 1972 had split the country, and the parties, into two camps, resulting in the rejection of EC membership by 53 per cent of the electorate. Since then, the issue has been absent from political debate. In Finland and Sweden the official rationale for not discussing the issue disappeared simultaneously with the regimes in Eastern Europe, suddenly pushing the topic onto the political agenda, causing an abrupt change in Swedish EC policy.

THE ‘NEW INSTITUTIONALISM’ HAS BEEN THE MOST VISIBLE movement in American political science during the last decade. It is a recoil from reductionism that is said to have dominated the political science of the previous decades. During the American Political Science Association presidency of Charles E. Lindblom in 1981, with Theodore Lowi and Sidney Tarrow as co-chairs of the Program Committee, it was decided that all titles of panels and round tables at the annual meeting were to have ‘and the state’ tacked on. The implication was that the behavioural revolution had resulted in the neglect of the power and autonomy of the state. But this adding on ‘and the state’ had very little effect on the content of the papers, and seemed primarily to have ‘buzzword’ significance. A second manifestation of this discomfort was an article in the American Political Science Review of 1984 by James March and Johan Olsen, entitled ‘The New Institutionalism; The Organizational Factor in Political Life’, followed by a book by the same two authors called Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics.