THE THIRD MINISTERIAL MEETING OF THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION (WTO), held in Seattle from 30 November to 3 December 1999, was a resounding failure. It was intended to launch a new round of multilateral trade negotiations, in succession to the Uruguay Round which had ended seven years before. But even before it could begin, the proceedings were disrupted by massive demonstrations. Central Seattle became a war zone, with tear gas and rubber bullets, and then a ghost town, with empty streets and boarded-up windows. Inside the conference hall the atmosphere was little better. The conference chair (Charlene Barshefsky, US Special Trade Representative) and the WTO Director-General (Mike Moore, new in office) were booed in open session. In the end, the ministerial meeting was suspended with nothing agreed, only an exhortation from the chair ‘to take time out’ in the hope of resolving disagreements and reconvening later.

This article looks at what went wrong and why and what will be needed in future. It contrasts the failure at Seattle with the undoubted achievements of the international trade system in the 1990s. It examines three possible causes of failure: disruption by NGOs; organizational weakness in the WTO; and errors of government. Of these three, it finds governments most to blame. Governments generally, but especially the United States and the European Union, have not grasped the full extent of the demands placed on them by the advance of globalization. Seattle was a setback but need not be a disaster – provided governments correct the errors that allowed it to happen.

THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES THE PATTERN OF SIMILARITIES AND differences in Britain and France with regard to public service charterism: that strand of recent public service reform designed to reconstruct relations between the state and the citizen on the basis of new or revitalized principles of public service, epitomized by the Citizen's Charter (1991) in Britain and the Charte des Services Publics (1992) in France. Despite the appearance of increasing convergence in the rhetoric of public management reform in the two countries during the 1990s, especially during the incumbency of centre-left governments in the latter part of the decade, there is evidence of continuing divergence in the philosophy and practice of public service charterism. This article argues that variation is a function of the existence of country-specific public service regimes, embodying different ideals of citizenship, which have shaped the emergence and implementation of charter policy in Britain and France.

FIFTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER THE FALL OF FASCISM AND THE END OF THE Second World War, right-wing radical movements and parties are part of the political normalcy in many Western democracies. In the face of the twentieth-century experiences of fascism and state socialism, and their failures, this stubborn persistence seems at the same time anachronistic and frightening. While there is no shortage of explanations and interpretations of this phenomenon in an evergrowing body of literature, most studies focus on national trends and derive their criteria from country-specific histories and discourses. Serious comparative scholarship on the radical right is still in its infancy.

This article is a plea for more comparative research on rightwing radicalism at the turn of the century. It begins by highlighting the three central dimensions of the problem. First, one must state that contemporary right-wing radicalism is an international phenomenon. Thus, more than before, comparative studies are needed both to analyse the international quality and to specify the nation-specific characteristics of the radical right in each country. Secondly, it must be borne in mind that contemporary right-wing radicalism is a modern phenomenon. It has undergone a phase of renewal, as a result of social and cultural modernization shifts in post-war Europe. Thus it is only vaguely connected with previous versions. Terms like ‘fascism’ or ‘neo-fascism’ which suggest a historical continuity from Munich to Mölln and Magdeburg in Germany, or from Vichy to Vitrolles in France, become increasingly obsolete. The third factor to bear in mind is that contemporary right-wing radicalism is a complex phenomenon. The ongoing specialization and compartmentalization in the social sciences, such as discourse analysis, party and electoral research, and youth sociology – to name but a few of the approaches applied to the radical right – fail to do justice to the complexity of the subject. Clearly, the many faces of right-wing radicalism require clear analytical distinctions, but ultimately they need to be approached in a truly interdisciplinary way.

THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES AUSTRALIAN REFERENDUM PRACTICE WITH the aim of contributing to the growing international debate over concepts of deliberative democracy, defined in terms of democratic regimes structured to maximize community deliberation in public decision-making. Theories of deliberative democracy go beyond earlier approaches to participatory democracy by specifying in greater detail the nature of the deliberative process in which citizens should be able to participate and of the importance of institutions of civil society to an effective deliberative process. The focus on ideals of public deliberation ref lects the ambition of deliberative democrats (the ‘deliberati’ if you will) to ground political decision-making in norms of shared public reason. Where earlier approaches to participatory democracy investigated rights to political participation, current approaches to deliberative democracy also investigate responsibilities of political participants – particularly responsibilities to comply with norms of rational political deliberation.

HAVE PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS IN NORTH AFRICA IN THE 1990S bolstered prospects for democratization and greater pluralism? This study argues that, with the possible exception of Algeria's 1991 elections, they have not been harbingers of democracy in Egypt, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. The elections can be viewed as public displays by the state or limited political barometers, rather than processes which create obligations for the government. They have been means through which regimes have sought to dampen reactions to political immobilism, structural adjustment and the death of a social contract. Some elections have been manipulative, exclusionary exercises of elites trying to roll back the liberalizations of the 1980s, while others have been pseudo-competitive instruments of regime maintenance. Most of the elections can be seen as mechanisms for a top-down ‘artificializing’ of pluralism in order to preserve the core of regime control. In Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria, there seems to be no contradiction between fostering a selectively pluralistic atmosphere and simultaneously undermining the transition to democracy. In Morocco, pluralism and alternance seem to remain quite compatible with continued political domination by the Makhzen. Mona Makram-Ebeid's characterization of Egypt's 1995 elections could equally be applied to others in the region: ‘What has occurred is a pluralization of the political sphere, yet it has been liberal neither in intent nor outcome.’