WHEREVER ONE TAKES A POSITION IN THE GREAT DEBATE between representative and participatory democrats it is clear that no democracy can function without the involvement of its citizens. What is at issue is the extent and nature of the citizen participation which is thought to be required if a democracy is to be worthy of its name. Whilst this is a fundamentally normative issue, the protagonists on both sides regularly cite evidence as to actual levels of participation and draw inferences from that evidence in support of their contentions.

On the one side are those who assert that in Britain ‘some of the spectators have begun to descend on to the field’; on the other are those who say that ‘the “grass roots” of politics seem shrivelled and starved of the nourishment of participation by the citizens’. For this reason, as Jane Mansbridge has said, ‘field studies of what happens to various ideals when people try to live by them could prove useful in clarifying a wide range of normative questions.

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— it is in flux, ‘words are already out of date in your mouth’ as a cynic put it.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.

THE SOVIET UNION'S ONCE DOCILE WORKING CLASS IS PASSIVE no longer. Strikes — once said to be an impossibility under socialism — are now commonplace. Unofficial workers' clubs, workers' fronts, and embryonic free trade unions are springing up all over the country. These show a marked polarization: some are oriented toward reform; others are openly conservative; many are ethnically biased. It will be argued in this article that this new worker activism could prove damaging to the progress of economic reform, but that further radical changes in the political framework could reduce this risk.

TECHNOLOGY IS ALMOST AS OLD AS MANKIND BUT THE realisation that useful discoveries could be made systematically came only much more recently. This realisation constitutes one of history's most significant bench-marks, it may even be the most significant one. The organization on a massive scale of research and development was an inevitable result, the fruits of scientific and technological development are now ubiquitous, and the economic, social and political ramifications have been and remain profound. About mankind's political evolution, however, its extent and even more its irreversibility, even in these seemingly favourable times, one must continue to be much more cautious.

CRITICS ONCE ACCUSED PRESIDENT BUSH OF LACKING VISION. Why anyone would want a visionary's hand twitching over the nuclear button is, however, most unclear. Our recent visionaries — Marxist, Islamic and Nazi — do not inspire confidence in human justice and intellect. Actually, the ‘vision’ that people apparently had in mind is the limited kind that business school professors say chief executives must impart to their companies. More appropriately, ‘vision’ means a clear sense of where one is leading people and also every evidence that the leader believes that the destination is good, and that he and his followers will arrive there. Ronald Reagan had such vision in abundance: from the political perspective, ‘vision’ is the part of statesmanship composed primarily of persuasive charm in the service of a degree of strategic intelligence.

LESS THAN TWO YEARS AGO, THE READERS OF Government and Opposition had reasons to be moderately optimistic concerning the future of our country. If their judgment was based on George Feaver's ‘Letter from Canada’, it appeared prudent to conclude that it was no small achievement for Canada to have persisted as a state in the face of tremendous adversity. These readers may have also trusted some distinguished experts on Canadian history and politics. Donald Smiley recently wrote that he had ’very much over-estimated the strength of Québec nationalism and provincialist influences elsewhere in the country and very much under-estimated the capacity of the system to respond effectively to such divisive pressures’. Smiley's judgment was supported by Kenneth McRoberts: ‘Canada's most serious political crisis, which originated in the political modernization of the Quiet Revolution and saw the election of a Québec government formally committed to Québec sovereignty, appears to have run its course.’