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).

IT IS OFTEN SAID THAT INDIA'S POLITICS ARE NEVER QUITE WHAT THEY seem. If ever there were a banal statement about the collective life of a people this would have to qualify. The politics of any country, almost by definition, fails to represent the daily lives and struggles of ordinary people, and in most cases even the strivings of politicians themselves. Democratic politics is at least as much about distortion as representation – the projection of images to appeal to electorates, for instance, or the softening of policy stances to accommodate seemingly incompatible coalition partners. But ‘national’ politics in India, by which I mean the competition among political elites for control or inf luence over the institutions of the central state, is currently less representative than in any other non-authoritarian country one could imagine. Paradoxically, this is the result of a deepening, rather than a withering, of India's democracy – in particular, the tendency for marginalized groups to seek power on their own terms, through parties explicitly established to represent them, and for elections to be fought not as massive national referendums, but at levels much closer to people's own experience.

THE OCTOBER 1999 ELECTIONS HAVE RESULTED IN THE SECOND CHANGE ever from one political party to another since the inception of mass politics in Argentina in 1916. The first such change came in 1989 when the Peronist Carlos Menem took over from Radical Raúl Alfonsín.

COUNTRIES RIVEN BY INTERNAL CONFLICT HAVE INCREASINGLY SOUGHT to resolve their conf licts and establish stable government by conducting elections, which outside observers can verify as ‘free and fair’. The first highly successful such venture, in Nicaragua 1990, was followed by election operations by the UN in Ethiopia 1992, Angola 1992, El Salvador 1994, Mozambique 1994, South Africa 1994, Haiti 1995, Liberia 1997 and Cambodia 1993 and 1998. The degree of stability and reconciliation achieved by these operations has varied, but the recent election observer effort, in Cambodia (26 July 1998), had a disputed outcome, which raised fundamental questions concerning the efficacy of post-conf lict election monitoring.

THE PURPOSE OF THIS ARTICLE IS TO ESTABLISH THE RELEVANCE OF the question that forms its title for contemporary political theory. It is not an obvious question, both because it is not obvious what the answer is, but also because it is not obvious what it means in contemporary terms. In order to establish its significance, it is necessary first of all to establish what the question does mean, and what the term ‘corporation’ means within it. It is, ultimately, a philosophical question, and the idea of the ‘corporation’ has therefore to be understood in a more abstract sense than is usual in contemporary political discourse. Because of this, the question has a tendency to sound archaic, if not obscure, when set out in philosophical terms. Nevertheless, I hope to demonstrate its continuing relevance by looking at one particular attempt to answer it, undertaken by a political thinker who was self-professedly not a philosopher, writing in a setting that was recognizably modern. The thinker was the legal historian F.W. Maitland, who produced in the early years of this century a series of essays in which he set out the contemporary significance of a problem which he believed went to the heart of the identity of the modern state. Of course, the question of the state's corporate identity is a perennial theme of European, and more particularly German, political philosophy, but Maitland wanted to demonstrate that it was also a question of practical significance, even for those who are traditionally unmoved by grand philosophical themes. That it is still of practical significance I hope to illustrate by applying some of Maitland's conclusions to one of the fundamental questions of contemporary politics: the question of the nature of the welfare state.