THE NEW EDITOR HAS ASKED ME ‘TO WRITE THE KEY ARTICLE ON THE foundation and achievements of Government and Opposition itself’, others to write on aspects of Ghiţa Ionescu's life and work, just as John Pinder has already written such an excellent comprehensive account. I said that that was too tall an order, to sit down and read again, or look over, thirty-one years of it and all those associated books and pamphlets. But Geraint Parry twisted my arm, much as Ionescu used to do, most flatteringly, telling me that ‘the Board felt unanimously that you would be the ideal [sic] person since you were one of the journal's founders’. Even so, all I said I could do would be an essay, mostly from memory, an essai to catch the motives, atmosphere and context of that time, half a life-time ago at the height of the cold war. And as an erstwhile biographer, I know the unreliability of memory.

THE ELECTIONS IN ROMANIA IN NOVEMBER 1996 WERE A TURNINGpoint in the political life of the country. They resulted in the victory of the Democratic Convention (DCR) and its presidential candidate, Emil Constantinescu, over the party dominated by reformedcommunists (the Party of Social Democracy of Romania, PSDR) and its candidate, the former president, Ion Iliescu.

Professor Ghiţa Ionescu would have rejoiced in this long-awaited victory for the DCR. During his visit to Romania in 1993 he met many leading figures of the Democratic Convention, including Mr Constantinescu himself who, as Rector of the University of Bucharest, conferred upon him the doctorate honoris causa. He was also pleased to discover that one of his major books, Communism in Romania, had already been translated into Romanian (in 1992). Professor Ionescu was warmly welcomed and was particularly impressed by the enthusiasm of the young people, some of them academics, who were very actively engaged in the political struggle against the Iliescu regime.

GHIŢA IONESCU'S HOMELAND IS ONE OF THE MOST TROUBLED NATIONS in Europe. Its wounded national feeling has produced the strangest ideological combinations, mixing freely a fascist past with nostalgia for Ceausescu, as is the case with the Vatra Romaneasca (Romanian Homeland) movement, or the editors of the influential journal Romania Mare, adept at denouncing the ‘international Judaeo- Zionist-capitalist’ plot. One of the main theoreticians of corporatism, as is well known, was Mihail Manoilescu, while another Romanian intellectual, Ilie Badescu, created the ‘protocronist’ school of sociology, bent on documenting cultural and scientific findings in Romania which had anticipated later Western European developments. This approach was adopted officially during the Ceausescu regime, and now inspires some extreme right-wing groups which espouse a radical nationalist ideology. One of them, the Party of the National Right, admits to not being democratic, but compensates for this by proclaiming its ‘demophilia’, that is, its love for the people, a concept created by Petre Tutea, an admirer of the Iron Guard interwar fascist movement.

GHIŢA IONESCU'S MAIN WORKS ON COMPARATIVE COMMUNIST POLITICS were The Politics of the European Communist States which appeared in 1967 and Comparatiue Communist Politics which appeared in 1972. They generalized upon the more historical and empirical studies which had appeared earlier in the 1960s: Communism in Romania, The Reluctant Ally: A Study of Communist Neo-Colonialism and The Break-up of the Soviet Empire. They established his reputation as one of the foremost scholars of communist states in Central and Eastern Europe. This article will consider the main ideas of the two key works and relate them to broader trends in the evolution of his thinking. Chiefly, though, it will concentrate upon his 1967 work, since the 1972 one was much shorter and it also largely recapitulated the same ideas.

EUROPEAN INTEGRATION — THE PHRASE WAS USED SO EASILY TO connote a process that might, over a period, incorporate most of the continent. But in the four decades when the cold war segmented Europe the notion of extensive integration seemed irrelevant; in practice integration has been consolidated as an essentially West European phenomenon. The policy scope, the economic application, the security implications and the institutional frameworks of integration became concentrated around the core countries of Western Europe. Similarly the underpinning understandings about solidarity and mutual commitment were formulated on the assumption that a hard boundary separated those Europeans capable of being engaged from those who were prevented from so doing. There were few among those who studied this West European process who kept the wider Europe in mind. Ghiţa Ionescu was unusual in always keeping an eye open to developments in both parts of the continent, a legacy that all of us who worked with him cherish. The burden that he leaves us is of trying to figure out whether integration can be given substance as a process for pan-Europe.

AMONG THE FOIBLES BY WHICH HUMANS ENHANCE THEIR PEACE OF mind, few are as persistent as the habit of endowing transitory practices and institutions with permanence. We tend to assume that things known since childhood, particularly if they are important to us, are timeless and immutable. The modern nation state, for instance, is seen as a perpetual fixture on the landscape when, in fact, it is a relatively new, and probably passing phenomenon, at least as we now know it. The state emerged only in the modern era, when governments succeeded in freeing themselves of feudal and ecclesiastical constraints; the period from then to the present is a mere thimbleful of time in the history of governance.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE NATION-STATE INTO A ‘COMPETITION state’ lies at the heart of political globalization. In seeking to adapt to a range of complex changes in cultural, institutional and market structures, both state and market actors are attempting to reinvent the state as a quasi-‘enterprise association’ in a wider world context, a process which involves three central paradoxes. The first paradox is that this process does not lead to a simple decline of the state but may be seen to necessitate the actual expansion of de facto state intervention and regulation in the name of competitiveness and marketization.

ALL GOVERNMENTS WHETHER OR NOT PARTICIPATIVE NEED TO KEEP an eye on public opinion if they are to maintain their legitimacy. Even autocratic governments have to provide some bread and circuses for their citizens if they are to stay in power. Autocratic governments throughout history have relied on achieving the acquiescence of their citizens first by convincing most of them that the status quo is the best available, given the constraints under which the government is operating at the time. Alternatively they have had to externalize their problems by convincing the citizens that there is external pressure which can be resisted only by the exercise of restraint and patriotic support for the government.

HAVING BEEN THE OBJECT OF GHIŢA IONESCU'S GENEROSITY TOO many times to count — it was every time I saw him or spoke to him or even thought of him — I find it hopeless to try to even the score. But I will do my best to honour his memory with the following thoughts, as I believe they might have piqued his interest or provoked his disagreement. He was always interested in something new, but he himself belonged to neither of human nature's two great political parties, radical and conservative. He neither welcomed nor rejected the new merely because it was new. So here is a salute to a man strongly political, widely attentive, and wonderfully well-bred in taste and learning.