DRAMATIC CHANGE IS HARDLY A FEATURE OF WEST GERMAN politics. The signals are usually visible well in advance — but gradual change also means that the wider significance of particular developments may be overlooked. A cursory examination of the political scene in the wake of the election held in January 1987 may fail to reveal much that is new since the success of the Christian Democrats in 1983. Thus, despite the sharp fall in the CDU vote, the coalition with the Free Democrats was comfortably confirmed in office. At the same time, the haemorrhage of SPD support—although partially staunched — still continued, with the inability to make a recovery in the intervening years the haunting question for the party. Chiefly at the expense of the SPD, the Greens have now anchored themselves in the party system. Their presence on the federal stage since 1983, and earlier in the Länder, has gingered up political debate and forced issues on to the agenda that otherwise would have been neglected. There are signs of change, but how are they to be interpreted?

ONE OF THE MOST REMARKABLE DEVELOPMENTS ON THE French political scene since the Left's historic victories in the presidential and parliamentary elections of 1981 has been the spectacular emergence of former Prime Minister Raymond Barre as both a powerful contender for the ‘leadership’ of the Right and for the French presidency. His emergence raises a number of interrelated issues which are likely to have a profound impact in France over the next few years.

First, it has brought to the fore questions about the nature and perhaps even the very future of the Fifth Republic. The insistent refusal by Barre and his supporters to countenance cohabitation has elevated to the top of the political agenda the perennial issue of constitutional interpretation. What happens when the President of the Republic and the majority in the National Assembly are of opposed political persuasions? This has ceased to be a question of interest only to constitutional scholars but has become a reality after the March 1986 legislative elections resulted in a narrow victory for the RPR-UDF alliance. How Barre and his supporters behave in such a delicate situation is of crucial importance.

HAVING JUST RETURNED TO THIS COUNTRY AFTER SERVING as British Ambassador to Washington, I have a distinct impression that modern America is not properly understood by many sectors of public opinion in the United Kingdom. An example of this misunderstanding is given by a recent public opinion poll which rated the USSR and the United States as equal threats to peace. Obviously, this is not the case.

We should really try to understand the United States. Some of us at least, certainly enough of us to make a difference to the general perception of the United States in Britain as reflected in the bizarre verdict of that public opinion poll, should acquire some measure of understanding, since American commitment in NATO to the defence of Europe has kept us at peace for the last 40 years. The American commitment in the GATT to the free world's open trading system is the best guarantee we have of prosperity in the future. That the Free world exists, that we have a Free World to talk about, is largely thanks to the existence of the United States.

WHILE STATES HAVE ALWAYS BEEN IN COMPETITION, modern states are in competition in an historically unique way. Only since the Second world War has it become generally appreciated that the mastery of technical change is vital to economic success, to such military security as is available, and, in short, to political achievement in a world in which expectations are unprecedentedly high. Since the political system of a state is inescapably a major factor in that state's overall performance, it follows that the efficiency and effectiveness of the world's various political systems are now, in an important sense, under long-term test. Whether over time most systems will tend to an asymptotic common performance, or whether some will reveal themselves as objectively ‘better’ than others is thus, really for the first time, a meaningful issue, and one which each succeeding generation can be expected to do a little more to resolve. In this context particular interest attaches in the immediate future to the relative performances of the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan, and Western Europe, the latter considered both as separate states and collectively. This article is concerned only with the United States, but a reference frame of permanent international competition, in accommodating to and capitalizing upon technical change, needs to be borne in mind throughout.

THE FOLLOWING IS NOT INTENDED AS A VALUE-FREE SURVEY of American conservatism today. Less clear, perhaps, will be my general approval of this revolt, although that will emerge soon enough. It remains to announce that I want to offer some friendly advice to American conservatism regarding pride and interest and to recommend to its attention the American Constitution, which so beautifully combines them. American conservatives, perhaps because of the manipulations of American liberals, have lost some of their attachment to the Constitution, and much of their understanding of it.

Recently I overheard someone say that Harvard University was wrong to have invited Ronald Reagan to its 350th anniversary in 1986, because of Reagan's ‘anti-intellectualism’. What could this have meant? Reagan has reduced student loan programmes and university research programmes, and wants to cut them further. He invites many actors and very few professors to his White House dinners. He himself should have been, and probably was, a C student in college, like the Democratic president he frequently praises — the one who began the practice of using ghost-writers for his speeches — Franklin D. Roosevelt. In sum, Reagan doesn't sufficiently respect the intellect.

WRITERS ON CORPORATISM AGREE ABOUT LITTLE BUT ARE nevertheless strikingly united in one belief, that America has failed to develop strong corporatist institutions. The two most important collections published in recent years, for instance, both contain papers explaining this supposed American uniqueness. Yet the notion that corporatism is conspicious by its absence is odd. It is indeed true that the United States has failed to develop one particularly ambitious form of corporatism — the organization of capital and labour into central institutions designed to achieve agreed national aims. The essence of corporatism consists, however, of something less than this grand social scheme. It resides in what Offe calls ‘the attribution of public status to interest groups’. Endowing private bodies with public duties and public powers involves crossing a constitutional Rubicon. Behind fie the landscapes of liberal polities, with their open political struggle and comparatively clear separation of government from civil society. Beyond the Rubicon lie the features in Schmitter's famous description of corporatism — compulsion, hierarchy, monopoly. But these are contingent, not necessary, features. The quintessence of corporatism consists in the effort to endow private interests with sovereign authority. In so doing it challenges the great aim of a liberal polity — the separation of economic from political power — imposing in its place the ‘devolution of public policy making and enforcement on organised private interest’.