THROUGHOUT THE WORLD, NEW TECHNOLOGIES ARE bringing greater specialization and scale of production, and hence more need for interdependence among the economies of nation states. Nowhere is this need more keenly felt than in Europe, both East and West.

THE SERIOUS ILLNESS DURING THE LATE SUMMER OF THE PRIME Minister, Andreas Papandreou, who is rising seventy, brought Greece to the start of an unusually long pre-electoral period which, if the government holds to its word, will end on 18 June 1989. Meanwhile, the affairs of state were being overshadowed by affairs of the heart, as detailed press coverage of his progress at Harefield showed him walking hand-in-hand with Dimitra Liani, a buxom former Olympic Airways hostess half his age, who had flown with him to London and with whom he has had a far from discreet liaison for the past year.

THE ELECTIONS TO THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT IN JUNE 1989 will be only the third ever to be held simultaneously in independent nation states. The first two direct elections, however, were marked almost everywhere by disappointment; not only was turnout low −60.7 per cent in 1979 and 57.0 per cent in 1984, but the elections seemed to be more in the nature of plebiscites on the performance of national governments, rather than genuinely transnational, and politicians found it difficult to demonstrate their relevance to a wider public. It is true that small radical new parties, such as the Front National were able to exploit the elections to their own advantage. But this, of course, did not endear the European elections to liberal democrats.

WHEN THE ARGUMENT FOR THE UTILIZATION OF THE RESULTS of scientific knowledge for the improvement of human life was first laid out, it was thought that the state would be a major promoter or patron of such research by encouragement, financial assistance and institutional aid. It was not anticipated that the state needed the advancement of scientific knowledge for the enhancement of its own powers, apart from that enhancement which resulted from the increased wealth furthered by scientific knowledge and its enhanced military power. At the end of nearly four centuries of development of opinion on this subject, government has come to be not only the major patron but also one of the major users of scientific knowledge for its own activities.

IT IS THE BURDEN OF CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE AND technology to produce change at a rate, and of a scale and character, which is genuinely without precedent. Science and technology have between them made the world a smaller and inescapably interdependent place, and as catalysts and instruments of change they are far from finished yet. In fact, the introduction into industrial societies of systematic research, development and innovation, as contrasted with the more or less serendipitous activity of invention, bids fair to being one of the few major benchmarks of history. It is also a benchmark to which political systems, and above all the international system (if one may so dignify what is still in many respects a rag-bag) have still fully to accommodate themselves.

BEFORE THE ISRAELI GENERAL ELECTION OF 1988, IT HAD BEEN confidently forecast that the major determinant of the outcome would be the year-long Palestinian uprising in the Administered Territories — the so-called intifada — and the future of the peace process. It was widely believed that the traumatic events in the West Bank and Gaza would displace from the attention of the electorate the more pressing issues, both domestic and foreign, which had been virtually frozen owing to the inability of the critically-divided ‘national unity government’ to agree on any positive course of action.

THIS LECTURE IS DESIGNED AS AN EXPERIMENT IN resynthesis rather than deconstruction. It is conventional for both the modern and the post-modern to assume that the dead weight of some tradition or paradigm is controlling our minds and that its burden has as our first move to be cast aside. This assumption is often justified, and we do often find ourselves under just such a necessity. But the assumption may itself become a convention, and when it does we are obliged to begin every intellectual exercise with the construction of a straw man; if there is no Old Man of the Sea we are called on to invent him. This can be tiresome and time-wasting; I have myself been cast as Old Man because someone was needed to play the part, often enough to know that it can be a nuisance. But a more important consideration is that if we regard every complex pattern of interpretation, established because it has necessarily taken time to build it up, as no more than an encumbrance to be demolished, we may end by impoverishing ourselves rather than enriching our resources of speech and written language.

SINCE THE 1950s, THERE HAS BEEN A GROWTH OF REGIONAL integration, not only in Europe, but in other continents too. It is based on a deep foundation: the ‘real socialization’ of production. This means that production is transformed from a process confined within narrow groups to an ever-widening social process, whereby the production or consumption of each individual depends to a growing extent on the production and consumption of all membersof the society, the limits of which are continuously expanding to mankind as a whole.

IT WAS MACHIAVELLI, THE FIRST MODERN POLITICAL THINKER, who distinguished between two kinds of problem a prince might have to face. The first sort was easy to cure but difficult to recognise, the second easy to recognise but very hard to cure. The key to successful management of a state was thus the prescience to recognise problems early on, and the will to take the necessary action.

Five centuries later, the basic situation remains the same, but the terms have changed. First, whereas a prince merely took advice from a few counsellors, the contemporary ruler is at the centre of a complex network of committees which act, so to speak, as his channel of cognition. Such channels can get blocked. The effectiveness of governments thus depends on how successful experts are in translating their reports on new developments into terms which can serve the cause of wise political action.

ALTHOUGH THE PROBLEM OF POLITICAL KNOWLEDGE WAS AT the centre of classical political thought it has been only intermittently addressed in more recent theoretical writings. To the degree that modern political writing has concerned itself with the question of the kind of knowledge appropriate and possible in politics, it has focused on the capacity of core decision-makers to absorb and assess the information presented to them by experts.

I HAD THE PRIVILEGElTASK OF ‘CONCLUDING’ THE CONFERENCE at which the articles in this issue of Government and Opposition were originally presented. Now, as then, I can take up only a few of the central issues within the presentations and discussions. My comments seek to underscore the great range of ‘classical’ and ‘contemporary’ questions which the authors address. These include, obviously enough, the nature of knowledge in the social sciences, with the word ‘sciences’ being broadly interpreted -not in any narrow, behavioural sense: the way periods of confidence in such knowledge fostered, and have been fostered by, the perspectives of social democracy: how such confidence has waxed and waned in recent years: how political actors act, even have to act, in advance of data: how modern politics is aided or hindered by the pressures that come from sectional interests — which must now be taken to include the ‘media’ and those who work in or near the ‘think-tanks’ that have proliferated in the last two decades. I do not attempt the impossible — namely any detailed exegesis of all the rich and varied topics that emerged.