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.’

TO PARAPHRASE ALEXANDER YAKOVLEV, THE ONLY predictable thing about the 28th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) would be its utter unpredictability.

Twice brought forward from its original planned date (February 1991), it began its deliberations in Moscow's Palace of Congresses on 2 July 1990. Little optimism attended the opening. Instead, the mood was nervous and jittery, angry and spiteful. Gone were the self-congratulation, unanimity and routinized ovations of previous congresses. Society at large was stubbornly indifferent to what was happening in the Kremlin; the Party was riven with dissent, while the Congress delegates themselves were in a fractious, belligerent mood.

Revisionist opinion notwithstanding, in my view the Roman empire in the West really did collapse, the European Dark Ages really were dark, and the feudal regna which painfully emerged from them were not ‘states’ in the sense of the term that we use today. A thousand years had to elapse after the fall of Rome for what we nowadays call ‘the modern European state’ to appear. I would like to stress that Europe did not, as some persons have maintained, invent ‘the state’. Europe re-inuented it after that long period of breakdown, followed by near-anarchy and then feudalism; but what it re-invented was in many respects unlike any antecedent — or contemporary — state-form anywhere else in the world. This state-form has now become the world-wide unit of affairs. It was original in three major respects.

The People of Czechoslovakia Have Now Risen and are determined — as are the people of other socialist countries — to overthrow the hated party leadership. People like Husak, Jakes, Indra, Fojtik, Hofman and others, came to power with the help of Soviet tanks and have been able to maintain themselves at the top until just recently. Only by means of repressions in the style of Brezhnev have they been able to hold on to power for twenty years. They have built up a system of spying and terror which enabled them to uncover and suppress any development of the opposition in the country. They have systematically distorted the facts of the Prague spring and the erstwhile reform movement with lies and unproven assertions.

FOR US IT IS ENTIRELY NATURAL TO ASSUME THAT THE paramount political question of our time is whether to move in the direction of a socialist or capitalist organization of the economy, or to decide what manner of welfarist compromise between them ought to be struck. But merely to make this assumption is already to be committed to a particular view about what defines politics, the political priorities of our society, the nature of the relationship between state and society, and so on.

THE VIOLENCE WHICH MARKED THE OVERTHROW OF Nicolae Ceaugescu's regime at Christmas 1989, and the recurrent disorders, especially in Bucharest, which have punctuated developments over the last nine months, have made Romania's experience of anti-Communist revolution strikingly different from that of its neighbours to the north and to the west. Whatever the political and social tensions emerging in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland (and whatever may be the GDR's legacy to a reunified Germany), it is unlikely that the charge of neo-communism will be central to their political debate. It is precisely that charge levelled against the government party (National Salvation Front/FSN) and against the person of Ion Ilescu by various opposition groups, and former prominent dissidents under Ceaugescu, which remains the most emotive issue in Romanian politics. The question of whether the revolution which overthrew Nicolae Ceauyescu and led to the dissolution of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) was the result of a popular uprising or a coup d'état planned by Party members has haunted Romanian politics through the first nine months of the post-Ceauqescu period.

The Return to Democracy of Spain, Portugal, and Greece in the 1970s is an encouraging and inspiring example to democrats everywhere — but especially to Latin American demccrats because of their region's close historical and cultural ties with two of the Southern European countries. However, apart from the general feeling of optimism that the Southern European experience legitimately engenders, are there any specific lessons and lessons specifically relevant to Latin America that can be learned from it? In this article, I shall suggest six such lessons. Some of these are positive lessons — examples to be followed, such as choosing a form of democracy that is suitable to a country's size and to its political and social divisions; others are negative ' examples to be avoided, such as Portugal's and Greece's experimentation with a presidential form of government. Some lessons are based on common characteristics of the new Southern European democracies; others concern traits on which they differ.

THE LAST TWO DECADES HAVE SEEN AN UNPRECEDENTED ‘convergence’ of technological developments in computing, telecommunications and the mass media, an event now referred to collectively as ‘the communications revolution’. At the heart of this revolution lies a Kondratievian cluster of technologies: specifically, the silicon microchip, which has facilitated an increase of several orders of magnitude in information storage and processing capabilities; and advanced telephonic, cable and satellite technologies, which have, again by orders of magnitude, expanded the capacity to transmit information instantaneously. A particular result of the economics of satellite communication is that the costs of accessing data bases and information services have become increasingly unaffected by distance and independent of location. The communications revolution has facilitated development of a world-wide system of computerized financial transactions and has also greatly accelerated globalization of the operations of transnational enterprises engaged in manufacturing, resource exploitation and business service.

On 14 May, 1989, Argentinians Elected The Peronist Carlos Menem as president, causing the first constitutional transfer of power to the opposition since 1916. The situation is so unfamiliar that quite a few Peronists are behaving in their newly acquired positions, particularly in some cultural and mass communication spheres, as though the change had been the result of a violent takeover. After all, the first Peronism was heralded by the nationalist military coup of 1943, and its second coming, in 1973, was the result of a combined strategy of electioneering and guerrilla tactics. Those were the days when many Peronists repeated Mao Tse-tung's dictum that ‘power comes from the barrel of a gun’, and such intellectual habits die hard. Culturally the authoritarian components are still strong in Peronism, partly because most of the progressive, liberal or left-of-centre intelligentsia have flocked to the Radicales or to small leftist parties, renouncing their sympathies of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when they thought Peronism was the harbinger of revolution, owing to its working-class composition. This, of course, creates a cultural vacuum in Peronism, which has to be filled by whoever comes or remains from the old days. However, many things have changed in the Argentine political climate, and despite the many stragglers the country is becoming accustomed to a pluralist institutional structure.

In August 1989 a Declaration of War On The State by Colombian drug traffickers and the attendant murder of a leading presidential candidate, Liberal Luis Carlos Galgn, seemed to threaten the foundations of democracy itself. Yet as the campaign leading up to the 1990 elections went forward under conditions of extraordinarily tight security, it also appeared that Colombia's two traditional parties would enter the next decade paradoxically still secure in the virtually monopolistic position within the domain of electoral politics that they had held for more than a century.