For South Africa 1994 was an Annus Mirabilis. Despite pre-election predictions of violent disruption, the country's first democratic general election took place in an atmosphere of reconciliation and hope for a future in which past injustice would be rectified and the ‘new South Africa’ welcomed back into the international community. For a brief moment — and, of course, it might not last as the inevitable constraints imposed by scarce resources, rising expectations and external pressures complicate decision making — South Africa appeared to have taken a major step towards Nelson Mandela's goal of a ‘nation united in diversity’. Certainly, one striking feature of the four-year transition was the willingness of the elites engaged in the negotiating process to accommodate each other as they sought to reach agreement on a new constitution in a spirit of ‘consensus and compromise’. And the same spirit is meant to inspire the day-to-day working of the Government of National Unity and Reconstruction (GNU) which, in effect, is a grand coalition of all the major talents.

BURKE ISSUED THE CAUTION IN 1767: ‘WHEN ANY COMMUNITY is subordinately connected with another, the great danger of the connection is the extreme pride and self-complacency of the superior which in all matters of controversy will probably decide in its own favour’. He was writing about the American colonies but his remarks are equally pertinent to relations between Britain and Ireland then and now. Given this asymmetrical relationship and a long history of mutual hostility, it may appear curious that an almost audible sigh of relief was heard in London when a coalition government, headed by Dr Garret FitzGerald, was sworn in to lead a new Dail on 14 December 1982.

WHILE ‘REPOSITIONING’ MAY BE AN APPROPRIATE TERM TO DESCRIBE developments in political opposition in many contemporary societies, it falls some way short of capturing the significance of changes in Russia, where in a few years the political landscape has changed out of all recognition. Until little more than a decade ago, political opposition in the Soviet Union was barely visible and, with rare exceptions, of little consequence. In the decades following Stalin's death in 1953, the existence of interest groups and lobbies within the party and state apparatuses was persuasively argued by foreign observers; and occasionally fractional opposition within the ruling elite surfaced. The latter aimed at reversing specific policies and, twice, at replacing the country's leader — Khrushchev on both occasions, unsuccessfully in 1957 and successfully in 1964. From the 1960s onwards, dissent from the regime's values and goals was reflected in the statements and actions of individuals and small groups, often described as the ‘Soviet dissident movement’, though lacking either common objectives and strategy, or impact on the Soviet Union's rulers.

LIKE MANY PEOPLE, I FIND KARL POPPER BOTH FASCINATING and irritating. His vigour and lucidity are irresistible, and no one could complain that he fails to engage with the big questions. The problems begin when we consider his political thought. Some think him one of the great liberal philosophers of the century. I on the other hand, while being fascinated by The Open Society and its Enemies, am repelled by the grossness of its caricaturing of most of the thinkers it touches. The Poverty of Historicism is a marvellous text in the philosophy of the social sciences, but the idea of historicism is a straw man. The paradox seems to be that while there is a lot that refers to the political questions of the day, there is virtually nothing which takes up issues of political philosophy directly. The result is that he seems to me always to be on the wrong foot, and my problem is to discover why.

THE INTELLECTUAL WORLD AS A WHOLE, AND GOVERNMENT and Opposition most particularly, mourn the loss of Ernest Gellner, a major figure who died in Prague on 5 November 1995.

OVER THE LAST DECADE AND A HALF THE PART PLAYED BY THE European Court of Justice (ECJ) in the construction and operation of the European Union has become controversial. Relatively unnoticed beyond specialist legal circles in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, the role of the Court featured prominently in the debates occasioned by the Treaty of Maastricht. In this article I consider the use of heroic and villainous imagery to describe the Court. After arguing that such imagery now conceals more than it reveals, I suggest that if its role is to be understood properly, the Court needs to be placed in strategic context. For convenience, the discussion of strategic context, which makes up the largest part of this article, is divided into five sections. In turn these sections consider member state executives, other European Union institutions, ‘European’ law(s), European Community law and actors in civil society (particularly litigants).

FRANCE IS A COUNTRY IN WHICH PAST POLITICAL BATTLES ARE IN the forefront of the minds of those who are engaged in contemporary conflicts. The March 1977 elections in the 36,383 communes of metropolitan France could evoke memories of 1877 and 1947. The thirtieth anniversary of the Gaullist landslide of 1947 was directly concerned with local elections as such, while 1877 recalled the defeat of President MacMahon's attempt to impose his choice of government a century ago, which finally settled the struggle between Left and Right over the regime of the Third Republic. Anticipation that the regime established by General de Gaulle would be put to the searching test of a clash between the President and a Left-wing Assembly majority converted in some people's minds the March 1977 local clections into a prologue to this decisive national confrontation.

THE PROVISIONAL IRA'S ATTEMPT TO ASSASSINATE THE BRITISH Prime Minister and Cabinet at Brighton on 12 October 1984, represents the most dramatic move to date in a reputedly 20-year strategy of inducing the British to withdraw from Northern Ireland and leave Ireland to the Irish. Where nonviolent Irish nationalists have aimed, most notably through the New Ireland Forum Report published in May 1984, to persuade the British that the 1920 constitutional settlement dividing Ireland is inherently unstable and must be dismantled, the Provisional IRA has no faith in this course of action. The British, they calculate, will be persuaded not by the force of argument but by the argument of force. In this they can claim, with some justification, to be the true heirs of the Easter Rising of 1916. At that time the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, which was to become the basic document of Irish republicanism, declared ‘… the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible’. Since the 1916 Proclamation was ratified by the first subsequent meeting of elected representatives of the Irish people, the first Dáil Eireann, in 1919, representing virtually all but the Ulster unionist minority, and since the right and the aspiration to Irish unity have been reaffirmed by all non-unionist Irish parties ever since, it must be a truth universally acknowledged that the division of Ireland is unjust and undemocratic and that the reunification of the country is the rightful aspiration of the great majority of its people.

AT THE TIME OF WRITING (APRIL I975), THE REFERENDUM ON WHETHER or not Britain should stay in the European Communities is imminent. Originally is seemed as if the Referendum was going to be mainly about whether the terms of membership, renegotiated by the British government in fulfilment of its election pledge, were acceptable or not. However, more and more the actual terms, agreed after prolonged discussions and considerable heart-searching on all sides, seem to be fadin into the background and the central issue is revolving around the question of sovereignty and whether or not British membership of the Communities involves Britain in an unacceptable loss of it.

The article analyses the interplay between agency problems at various stages in the parliamentary chain of delegation and external constraints related to corporatist negotiations in Norwegian agricultural policymaking. The combination of minority government and MPs tending to have more extreme preferences than the voters, and corporatist integration of specialized interests, may lead to an accumulation of agency costs. However, the study shows that we need to specify carefully the conditions under which this will occur. The article is based on official policy documents and a survey of citizens.

This article explains why only some post-neoliberal populists successfully keep themselves in power, thereby dominating political systems over the long term. Based on cross-regional dual paired comparisons of ‘crucial’ cases in the Andes and Central Europe, it advances a theory emphasizing societal reactions rooted in prior neoliberal critical junctures. I argue that where well-established and programmatic social democratic parties engaged in bait-and-switch reforms, subsequent populists mobilized extensive electoral coalitions with core support from former leftist constituents, based on which they built organizational capacities for the provision of national public goods that reinforced their popularity over the long term. By contrast, where personalistic leaders politicized regionally based divides through identity-priming appeals and then disproportionately hurt core supporters through bait-and-switch reforms, subsequent populists mobilized more segmented electoral coalitions, built less cohesive parties and provided limited public goods, which undermined their popularity as incumbents. By underscoring parallels in two different world regions, the article challenges institutionalist accounts of populist domination and offers a novel societally focused perspective.

The endurance and indeed the growing electoral support manifested by the Angolan opposition party UNITA since its defeat as an armed movement in 2002 defies generally gloomy prognoses both for opposition parties in dominant party systems and for defeated rebel movements that recast themselves as political parties. This article examines social service and training projects implemented by UNITA in the Angolan Central Highlands. I argue that the case of UNITA illustrates the need to take into account the importance of resources that accrue outside of the space of formal politics, including historical narratives and social relationships, which UNITA has mobilized and built upon in order to expand its vote share and consolidate its place within electoral politics.

THROUGHOUT THE TWENTIETH CENTURY THE HOUSE OF Lords has been looking for a role. It lost its original power base with the decline in influence of the landed aristocracy and the growth of the party system. At the same time the composition of the House became increasingly difficult to justify; membership based on the accidents of birth no longer seemed an adequate justification for the right to legislate or to overrule the people's elected representatives.

The Parliament Act 1911, which took away the Lords' absolute right to veto legislation, promised reform. But nothing happened. In 1968 the Labour government introduced a reform bill. It failed, the victim of assaults from Left and Right in the House of Commons.

ON 11 MAY 1974 FATHER MUGICA, A LEADING SPOKESMAN OF THE Movement of Priests for the Third World (MPTW) and a pro- Peronist, was machine-gunned to death as he left his church in a working-class neighbourhood after celebrating mass. Once again the Catholic Church in Argentina called for peace and understanding as the proper path for Argentines, and the MPTW issued a long statement condemning the use of violence. Nevertheless, the common pleas by the two factions of the Church in Argentina have had little visible effect in stopping the violence through which Argentina is now suffering. In order to understand how the political and doctrinal differences from within the Church in Argentina have influenced in the past and will continue to influence the political developments in Argentina it is first necessary to look at the background of the problem.

Do democracies and autocracies differ when it comes to whether and how they provide third-party support to warring parties in civil wars? We argue that the political institutions of potential third-party states have important consequences for both questions. We emphasize how three particular institutional characteristics of democratic polities constrain decision-makers. This makes democracies less likely than autocracies to intervene in intra-state conflicts in general, and less likely to provide combat-intensive support specifically. An empirical analysis of incidents of third-party support to actors in civil wars in the period 1975–2009 corroborates the overall argument, although the results regarding support types are less clear. These results have important implications not only for our understanding of civil wars but also for how foreign policy decisions are made across different regime contexts.

THIS ARTICLE EXPLORES THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE CONCEPT of community and the incremental construction of a political ideology for Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party. In explaining the two general applications of community, empirical and evaluative, the article claims that there is an essential vagueness attached to community which limits its value in developing a clear ideological focus for a political party. This incoherence within the concept, coupled with a specific reluctance to analyse and apply community more precisely within the framework of Welsh nationalism, has made it more a hindrance than an asset to Plaid Cymru's political and electoral progress.

Citizens are more trustful of politics if their preferred party is an electoral winner and becomes part of the government. However, there remains the question of whether this positive effect of joining the government also holds for supporters of populist parties. Populists show low levels of political trust, as they strongly criticize the political elite. This study argues that voters of populist parties perceive the political system as more responsive to their concerns when their preferred party becomes part of the government and so they become more trustful of politics. Drawing on the case of Austria, the analyses demonstrate that political trust among populist party voters is higher when their party is in government. In contrast, non-populist voters' level of political trust is more stable, even when their party is not in government.