IN A RECENT ISSUE OF Government and Opposition AN ATTEMPT WAS made to answer at an abstract level the question, ‘Why Political Systems Change’. The aim of this article is more limited. It is a tentative preliminary attempt to explain why important changes took place in a particular political system – that of Czechoslovakia – in January 1968 and to examine the changes themselves and what remains of them in the wake of the Soviet intervention.

It must be emphasized straight away that the January changes in Czechoslovakia were not so sudden as their treatment by the western mass media perhaps implied. For something close to five years before the January reforms pluralistic developments could be discerned in Czechoslovakia. Limited though they were, they expressed themselves in the form of a less severely censored press, greater scope for interest group activity, a slight relaxation of detailed central party control over the National Assembly and local government, and in more debate within the ranks of the Communist Party.

ANALYSTS OF THE ISRAELI POLITICAL SYSTEM HAVE COMMONLY attributed the stability of the polity to factors closely associated with the role played by the various Israeli parties in the state's economic and social life, and/or to the existence of a dominant, institutionalized state-building party. The consociational approach ought to help to clarify those factors which have maintained the stability of the coalition system which has governed the state of Israel since its establishment in 1948 and whose roots may be traced back as far as 1933 and even earlier.

The consociational model and the theory of elite accommodation have been elaborated in an effort to explain the maintenance of continuing political stability in what at first glance would appear to be societies deeply divided along social, economic, ethnic, religious and ideological lines. Political stability in fragmented societies from this standpoint rests on the overarching commitment of the political elites to the preservation and maintenance of the system and their readiness to cooperate to this end.

TWO QUESTIONS ARISE WHEN CONSIDERING THE CHANGES that might be brought about by direct elections and by developments in the new European Parliament. One concerns institutionalized cooperation between political parties. To what extent can the three existing European party federations – Socialist, Christian Democrat, Liberal – be considered as a step towards the formation of genuine European political parties? Are they anything more than alignments of traditional parties coordinating their action at European level? The other question is related to parties or groups which have not until now created close-knit ad hoc structures. A special case is that of the Communist parties, which have not organized specific links at Communit level. Another problem is raised by non-traditional parties and groups that have in most cases little or no parlia mentary representation at either national or European level. Will some of them take advantage of the European sphere of action to make more impression than they have been able to do at domestic level, in cooperation with similarly oriented partners in other member countries?

THIS ARTICLE DESCRIBES AND ILLUSTRATES HOW JAPAN conceives the political meaning of many kinds of interdependence and uses this concept to advance what it considers to be its national interests and global interests without upsetting the balance of world interdependence. ‘Interdependence’ means the mutual vulnerability and sensitivity of all governing-cum-economic units in the world. ‘The politics of interdependence’ means, then, how actors make strategic use of interdependence with enough self-restraint not to jeopardize the system of interdependence itself. Thus ‘Japan's politics of interdependence’ means how Japan makes strategic use of interd pendence guided by its own standards of conduct. In this sense, this article is an attempt to combine the following two intellectual traditions: the interdependence literature and the economic statecraft literature to define Japan's politics of interdependence. First, I will summarize three principles of Japan's political conceptualization of interdependence. Then I will illustrate them by some recent examples. Thirdly, prospects for Japan's politics of interdependence will be briefly discussed along with some discussion on the lines of research to be further explored.

The international controversy concerning the Hungarian ‘status law’ of 2001 attests to the vital importance of ethnic minority rights in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as within an enlarged European Union. The paper examines the unique challenges raised by the law from its initial adoption in June 2001 to its subsequent amendment in June 2003. It looks at the interaction between four principal kinds of actors: Hungary (a kin state legislating support for ethnic co- nationals in neighbouring countries), Romania and Slovakia (home states to sizeable Hungarian ethnic groups), the Hungarian minorities in Romania and Slovakia, and the European institutions that became involved in the dispute as mediators.

IN RECENT YEARS IT HAS BECOME A COMMONPLACE OF BOTH academic and financial discourse that we are living in a new economic and political world in which financial globalization is destroying the economic autonomy of individual states and hence the foundations of the nation-state as the focus of political authority and the possibilities of politics. Of course, other threats to the nation-state exist — most crucially, the inability to reconcile its virtual monopoly of political authority, and the constraints it imposes on cooperation between states, with ecological causality — but it is the macro-economic crisis of the state which has captured most attention. Undoubtedly, the contemporary international financial environment makes macro-economic management an extremely difficult practical task for many states. With the daily value of foreign exchange transactions amounting to over $1200 billion, governments run the perpetual risk that their choices, or indeed those of other governments, will precipitate an unsustainable rise or fall in the value of their currency. At the same time they must, if they wish to borrow in international capital markets, pursue policies which will secure, and retain, the confidence of international investors. This, of course, creates a very considerable incentive for governments to choose policies which, in both fiscal and monetary terms, prioritize low inflation over growth and employment.

QADDAFI'S THEORY OF POLITICS AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION amounts to the assertion that all forms of representation in fact result in unrepresentative government; that therefore they must be unjust; that therefore they must be replaced by nonrepresentative government. The Green Book describes the institutions of such government but is by no means utterly explicit about the relations between institutions, or about the way personnel are recruited to them. To examine what happens in practice at elections, surely critical events in a nonrepresentative system, suggests that Qaddafi is less a Periclean Legislator than an interpreter, casts some light on the theory, and hints at the nature of the concept of political community underlying both The Green Book and contemporary Libyan society.

TO ANALYSE THE GERMAN QUESTION IN THIS TRANSITORY moment is risky in several respects. The German novelist Martin Walser who underwent a metamorphosis from a fellow traveller of the communists to a German nationalist put it bluntly: ‘He who does not get below his intellectual level when talking about Germany has no intellectual level at all.’ The topic has pitfalls everywhere:

— it is deeply connected with emotions, whatever the view of the writer;

— it is in flux, ‘words are already out of date in your mouth’ as a cynic put it. The increasing number of actors who claim to have a say in the German unification process makes prognosis almost impossible;

— scientific analysis of this unique event lacks concepts. Transition to democracy in a highly penetrated system does not follow the established rules of this branch of knowledge.

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.’

DESPITE YEARS OF POLITICAL STABILITY AND RECENT ECONOMIC growth General Franco's dictatorship has left many of Spain's perennial political dilemmas unresolved. The problems that preci itated the Civil War (1936–39) and destroyed the Second Republic will continue, albeit in modified form, to dog Franco's successors.

One particularly intractable problem is posed by Spain's Basque and Catalan minorities. Local nationalist movements contributed to the Republic's collapse and remain a long-term threat to Spain's political stability. This essay, therefore, tries to identify the root causes of these movements; to examine the regional problem's present state and to scrutinize possible solutions to the problem in the post-Franco era.

How party strategies vary by electoral system remains largely unexplored in election studies. Using qualitative and quantitative data from Spanish national and European elections, we test how party strategies diverge between districted electoral systems and systems using a single national district. We use the number of visits to districts by the party leaders to determine if targeted party strategies are driven by district magnitude, the share of the population entitled to vote in every district, the number of districts or the strength of parties’ local organizations. Our results show that only the frequency of visits to districts by large parties are clearly affected by electoral systems and, more specifically, by the number of districts and district population.

Malaysia's impact on World Politics Exceeds the usual level of inf luence expected of a small state in an international system. It has exercised a leadership role in the Commonwealth, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Non-aligned Movement and South-South Cooperation, and has tried to modify the agenda of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation through the East Asian Economic Caucus. In addition, Malaysia has championed selfdetermination, articulated an ‘Asian’ approach to the issues of human rights and democratization, and has contributed to international peace-keeping operations under the aegis of the United Nations, where it has also served as a non-permanent member of its Security Council and chaired its General Assembly. These achievements in themselves are sufficient to draw scholarly attention to Malaysia although, it must be admitted, that the arena of foreign policy itself is part of domestic politics. In this domain too, Malaysia has long been of interest to political scientists. For an ethnically divided society, Malaysia has maintained a remarkable record of political stability. This in turn had contributed to sustained development, and up till the advent in 1997 of the Asian financial crisis, Malaysia was poised to be the next newly-industrialized country in the Asia-Pacific.

These Words Spoken By President Clinton At His Inauguration on 20 January 1993 can usefully serve as a leitmotif for the present issue of the journal Government and Opposition. The issue is itself the outcome of a conference organized by the journal and the Department of Government of the University of Manchester. The theme was the ‘Influences of Domestic and International Factors on Processes of Policy-Making’. However, this title does not quite catch the interactive quality of the phenomenon which the group was seeking to examine. Increasingly, it has been contended, policies at the domestic level whether in what we once called the first, second or third worlds are being profoundly influenced by international or ‘global’ considerations. But it is also the case that international agreements are being accommodated to the sensitivities of the domestic politics of the partners.

There are at Least Three Possible Types of View about the justifiability of the use of force by states or private individuals on behalf of other private individuals or groups who are the victims of brutal and gratuitous coercion by another state. The first type of view is that no human being, and a fortiori no state, can be justified in using force under any circumstances and for any purpose, because (and only because) force is an intrinsic evil. This unflinchingly deontological view is generous but practically absurd. The second type of view is that states (or even private individuals) can be, and often arc, justified in using force against the brutally coercive actions of another state when, but only when, the latter is acting outside its own territorial jurisdiction. At least in the case of states what grounds that justification is their entitlement to defend themselves against foreign (as against domestic) aggression, and to defend also any other states with whom they have linked themselves either by standing alliances or by solemn common undertakings to secure each other's safety and sovereignty within the bounds of international law. In the case of private individuals, the corresponding justification would lie in their several personal entitlements to defend themselves as best they can against aggression.

Land is a key issue in the aftermath of wars. The return or resettlement of displaced populations accentuates land-related problems, and international support seeks to strengthen the state's administration of land. This article explores ethnographically a land conflict in Guatemala between returning refugees and former members of a civil defence patrol, including the intervention of state and international institutions. In dialogue with Carl Schmitt's idea that land appropriation, first measurements and division are constitutive of the order and orientation of political community, the analysis suggests that bodily presence at the land, potential use of violence and negotiated measurement, continue to be features of post-colonial states despite attempts to solve land problems once and for all.

The Dustjacket of S. E. Finer's Adversary Politics and electoral Reform, published in 1975, reminds us that his older brother Herman Finer was one of the staunchest and best-known opponents of proportional representation (PR), and points out that S. E. Finer long shared his brother's point of view: in fact, ‘until twelve months ago Professor Finer was still adhering to this view. In advocating proportional representation as he does in this book, . . . he has abandoned the intellectual convictions of a lifetime’. In his later essay ‘Adversary Politics and the Eighties,’ published in 1982, he again pinpoints 1974 as the year of his conversion to PR.