The ‘Reflections’ which follow were written in October 1979. The months in between have been rich in developments within the Community and in the world. This brief introduction is an attempt, not to take stock of them completely – space for this is lacking – but simply to tie them in with the analyses and orientations worked out some months ago.

The two significant events for the Community were the setback at the European Council in Dublin (29–30 November 1979) and the European Parliament's rejection of the 1980 budget (December 1979). I shall try to assess how the Community and its member-states reacted to two events which tested its cohesion: the new ‘oil shock’ after the OPEC meeting in Caracas and, politically, the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BUSINESS INTERESTS AND THE British Conservative Party is a matter of crucial importance which is relatively neglected in the existing literature. The basic theme of this article is that this relationship is more problematic and tenuous than is often assumed to be the case. Relations between business interests and the Conservative Government elected in 1979 are likely to be characterized by recurrent tensions on questions of economic and industrial policy.

ULTIMATELY, POLITICAL PARTIES ARE FOR GOVERNING; BUT who shall govern? In some countries the decision rests by broad agreement on the normal waxing and waning of electoral sympathies. Not so in Southern Europe today. Hopes or fears of continuismo, have combined since the mid-1970s to raise divisive issues about the governing credibility of many parties, as Portugal and Spain inaugurated a party system after decades of no-party politics, Greece reinstated party competition after a briefer military rule, and Italy's parties underwent the most complicated electoral and coalitional test in thirty years of democracy.

Otherwise said, the complexity of coalitional preferences does not reflect a generic situation of competitive multi-party politics. It reflects a specific situation of crisis of founding coalitions, and therefore points to a lingering issue of legitimation. Who then, shall govern in Southern Europe, and with what legitimacy? The question admits no easy answer.

SINCE 1976 ITALY HAS BEEN EXPERIENCING A POLITICAL STALEmate which should not be confused with the periodical difficulties of the system. What is at stake is the capacity of Italian democracy to ensure change in a peaceful manner – which I take to be one of the main functions of democracy. The political essence of the crisis lies in the Christian Democrats' (DC) growing incapacity to assure the governability of the country and in the problem of providing an alternative governmental leadership which would include the main opposition party, the Communist Party (PCI).

The resulting impasse is what explained both Moro's insistence on the need for a ‘great national solidarity’ and the PCI's strategy of the ‘historic compromise’. Convergence found political expression in the grand coalition governments which ruled Italy between 1976 and 1979, the first majority in thirty years which included the PCI.

On the analytical level, convergence in polarized systems like Italy's can be fruitfully analysed, as I have suggested elsewhere, from the viewpoint of the consociational model. I shall first briefly review the model before turning to a discussion of the prospects for cooperation after the 1979 general elections.

SCANDAL AND CORRUPTION ARE CUSTOMARILY THOUGHT OF in much the same ways as pigs and whistles; they go together. Strangely, however, academic studies of corruption seem to pay little attention to scandal. It is strange if only because in societies like this corruption tends to be obscure, a condition in which its participants wish it to remain, and it is to the occasional scandal that we are indebted for what knowledge is generally accessible. This is particularly true in Britain where the major scandals have usually been followed (sometimes illuminated) by official inquiries; certainly that has been the practice in this century from the Marconi shares scandal in 1913 to the Poulson scandal sixty years later which spawned both a committee and a Royal Commission. A closer look at the incidence of political scandal, this article will suggest, is an additional tool for the study of corruption and perhaps particularly so for comparative studies. A more fundamental (and more widely canvassed) problem, however, is so to define corruption as to facilitate reliable comparisons across temporal and cultural boundaries. We will first discuss that problem.