IT WAS ASSUMED BY AMERY THAT THE BRITISH CONSTITUTION WAS AN important topic for study and something which might require further reform, because with the rest of his generation he took it for granted that the Constitution was itself wholly under the control of the British people through their indigenous institutions. Parliamentary sovereignty could only be understood in the light of sovereignty in the sense of political independence. At the time he was writing the importance of this basic concept had been reinforced by recent experience. Many European countries had lost their sovereignty through the imposition of German rule and had only had it restored to them by a massive military effort in which Britain had played no mean part. In their turn, the victorious allies had deprived Germany of its sovereignty and were through the occupation regimes starting on a path which it was hoped would lead, as indeed it did, to a Germany purged of the Nazi virus.

AS EUROPEAN INTEGRATION BECOMES AN INCREASINGLY IMPORTANT public policy issue facing both the country and its political leaders, the degree to which Britain can or should harmonize its welfare, employment and taxation policies with those of other EU members will receive progressively more attention. In this context and with the evident importance of opinion poll popularity for the main political parties’ pursuit of electoral success, public opinion on issues concerning welfare, taxation and redistribution is likely to have considerable bearing on the viability of Britain's incorporation of the legislation and practices endorsed in other EU member states. Nonetheless, even a cursory examination of evidence on the public's attitude on questions relating to these changes suggests integration is unlikely to follow a smoothly negotiated path. Responses to a recent British Social Attitudes survey, for example, show that, while holding mixed attitudes towards the idea of European integration and only mildly negative attitudes to EU inf hence over policies concerning pollution, immigration and defence, the British public are strongly opposed to EU influence over taxation and, to some degree, employment policy. Even among those people who endorsed the general aim of European integration, only a minority – in the case of taxation, a very small minority – found the idea of Europeanlevel decision-making acceptable.

LIKE MANY OF HIS APHORISMS, MARX'S DESIGNATION OF THE FRENCH as the model political nation (leaving the economy to the English and philosophy for the Germans) contained enough of a grain of truth to remain relevant for over a century. Since 1989, the idea of politics based on the revolutionary experience begun in 1789 and pursued by a unified and international working-class subject has lost its utility for understanding the political choices facing modern industrial democracies. Nowhere is the need for a new understanding of the political more clear than in France itself, as illustrated by the strikes that paralysed the country for more than three weeks in November and December of 1995 and forced the government to retreat. While some saw the birth of a ‘social movement’, cheered the victory of society against the state, or imagined that class struggle had begun anew, the more pessimistic argued that the French had once again proven themselves incapable of political reform. The former presuppose a model of politics from the nineteenth century, the latter look forward to a globalized twenty-first century. For those of us still living in the twentieth, analysis of the French strikes can help us to understand how politics can make the shape of the twentyfirst century less inevitable.