If the democratic process is to be justified elections must have a definite signrficance within the context of the problems facing the country in which they take place. By this standard the British general election of 1966 is hardly a source of much encouragement. It may have been inevitable in that a government with a majority of three could not be expected to overlook a possibility of getting something more comfortable; and in that sense the decision to have an election has been proved correct, Other things being equal a majority of 97 is obviously a more workable one, and some of the wear and tear of the parliamentary battle as well as of the pre-election atmosphere that has never been absent from the British scene since 1962-3 should now be removed to the benefit of efficient government. As far as one can see this simple factor must also be the one that weighed with the electorate.

Turkey is not in the usual sense a developing country. It is a state, the fabric of which has endured for a number of centuries. Consequently, its political culture embodies elements which go far back into history. It has both an ethos and eidos of service to the state and a bureaucratic apparatus which for centuries has been entrusted with the application of the values embodied in its political culture. The structure of the state has been somewhat looser in Iran, but there too, the situation is appreciably different from what it is in the Arab states or Pakistan where the structure of the state is recent, its mark on the ethos of the people slight and its political traditions embryonic. In the case of Turkey and to a less extent in Iran, some of the crucial problems of developing nations – problems which are acute in many Arab states – such as those of building up an identity as a nation, overcoming particularistic allegiances, launching oneself into the take-off stages of industrialization are well on the way to solution. We are faced then, under the rubric of ‘Middle East’ with a number of countries which are at different stages on the scale of modernization. By itself, this would suffice to make the subsuming of all Middle Eastern countries under a single heading extremely unwise.

The historical development of western civilization has produced several patterns of political opposition deeply rooted and relatively well established in the political systems. This opposition is usually identified with the control of the governed over the government : it is maintained that opposition is at the same time a sufficient and a necessary condition for the existence of such control. Opposition, as the term is commonly used, has the following characteristics : (a) it is political; (b) it is institutionalized in the form of a party or parties; and (c) it is often said that it is also ‘responsible’, i.e., it does not extend to obstruction of the government's actions. In order to define more precisely the relationship between opposition and control, we must ask two questions of a more specific nature: (i) is opposition a sufficient condition for effective control? And (ii) is it a condition sine qua non for any kind of political control? In spite of some ideological assertions, it seems clear that the answers to both questions are negative. Since the problem of opposition in the two- and multiparty systems is discussed elsewhere, we shall focus here on those mechanisms of control which present an alternative to opposition as institutionalized in the party system.

On the morning of 12 February 1951 Kwame Nkrumah was freed from James Fort Prison in Accra. On the 14th he was invited by the Governor of the Gold Coast to form a government. He and his party, the Convention People's Party (CPP), remained in office through the transition to political independence on 6 March 1957, when the Gold Coast changed its name to Ghana, until the military revolution of 24 February 1966. This event formed the fifth of a series of army coups in Negro Africa which had begun on 25 November 1965 in the Congo, and it is probably the most important. Not only had Nkrumah held power for fifteen years, he was, for all the small size of his country, almost certainly the most influential politician south of the Sahara, and for what it was worth the only serious non-Muslim ideologist of the whole continent. Ghana had led the movement to African independence. So far as there was a common political creed its items and aspirations were Nkrumah's and the aspirations, however ineffective, to African unity, were based on his Pan-Africanism and not on the potentially alternative concept of négritude which had spread from the West Indies into French Africa's attitudes and politics.

The object of these notes is to assess how relevant are the main terms of reference of the discussion outlined in Professor Sartori's introductory paper to the group of one-party states known as People's Democracies or Socialist Republics, and in particular to Yugoslavia, Poland, Rumania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and to a lesser degree, Albania. But many of the findings on these states, and I would say those most worthy of our attention, in order to be valid at all, must be valid for all one-party states. Valid for all one-party states is for instance the conclusion that the non-institutional and non-constitutional opposition which is being carried on naturally, inevitably and incessantly against any government in any polity, and by any sui generis means, should be described by other names. I believe that the terms control and contestation can be particularly useful to describe the political process of the People's Democracies, and can be equally applicable to the entire category of one-party states if they are understood in accordance with the definitions I suggest below.

The problems of opposition and control in Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria have lately attracted a good deal of attention. Recent developments have shown either that even an embryonic opposition within the regime can lead to the overthrow of a strong, but isolated leader (Boumedienne's coup d’état against Ben Bella), or that the stubborn refusal of a constitutional opposition to accept repeated offers of national unity can force a ruler to take exceptional measures (the case of King Hassan II who made use of the extraordinary powers of article 35 of the Moroccan constitution). It would seem that Tunisia alone has for some years now enjoyed relative stability, but it must be noted that this is maintained only by means of a constantly re-asserted hold upon the national institutions.