PRESIDENT REAGAN'S STRATEGIC DEFENCE INITIATIVE (usually abbreviated to SDI and more popularly known as ‘star wars’) is generally agreed to have one great merit, whatever its many drawbacks. Concern over the long-term implications of this initiative is said to have convinced the Soviet Union that it should return to the arms control negotiating table that it left so abruptly at the end of 1983.

The difficulty with viewing SDI as a ‘bargaining chip’ is that the President has not shown himself inclined to use it for bargaining purposes. For those who believe that this is all that the SDI is really good for, given the doubts over whether it will ever really lead to a workable defensive system, the risk is that instead of cashing it in for substantial Soviet concessions on offensive arms, President Reagan, by persisting with SDI, will provoke countermeasures of both the defensive and offensive variety by the Soviet Union, and so lead to the ruin rather than the revitalization of the whole arms control process.

THE CONFLICT IN NORTHERN IRELAND HAS LASTED FOR OVER sixteen years, defying all attempts by British and Irish governments to reach a solution. On 15 November 1985 the leaders of both governments, Mrs Margaret Thatcher and Dr Garret FitzGerald, signed, at Hillsborough in Northern Ireland, an Anglo-Irish Agreement which they hoped would establish machinery leading to an eventual diminution of political violence and to an accommodation between the two communities. This Agreement is the result of several years of negotiations between the two governments in the Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Council and is perhaps the most radical attempt at solving the Northern Irish problem since 1921–22. The purposes of this article are to explore what is significantly new in the Agreement as compared with previous attempts at solutions, to examine briefly the different influences which worked to bring it about and, finally, to assess the chances of a successful implementation of the Agreement.

THE CONFERENCE OF THE EUROPEAN COUNCIL AT LUXEMBOURG in December 1985 was a considerable disappointment to advocates of European Union. Instead, as was once hoped, of proposing wide-ranging amendments to the Treaty of Rome, the Council contented itself with a rag-bag of minor changes. For the time being, therefore, the prospect of any fundamental reform in the working of the European Community should probably be ruled out.

Nevertheless, it is unlikely that the pressure for reform – fuelled as it is by a directly elected Parliament which feels itself excluded from the decision-making process in the Community – will disappear. The reformers will, no doubt, pause to regroup their forces so as to apply pressure more effectively when the issue returns once more to the agenda of European politics.

GREEK AND ROMAN ANTIQUITY IS SO EVIDENTLY PRESENT IN French revolutionary and imperial imagery that we are inclined to assign to it the role of a conscious model for a great number of ideas and even of institutions. The Frenchmen of the Republic and of the ‘Grande Nation’ would be, in short, resurrected Greeks and Romans, who would awaken the ‘dead world’ as Saint-Just called Rome. Indeed this received view is not wholly false or arbitrary. Perusal of the political literature – speeches, pamphlets, theoretical works – reveals that the allusions or references to Antiquity were something more than a fashion: from the ideological or cultural point of view, whether it is to identify with or get away from it, we think insistently and continuously of Sparta, Athens and Rome.