France is perhaps today the one European country about which it is most difficult to speak with any degree of accuracy. A phrase used by General de Gaulle during the events of May 1968 applies perfectly to France today, different as it is from France as it was then: ‘La situation est insaisissable’. (‘The situation is beyond our grasp.’) Let us recall the principal facts.

GREENLEAF'S THE BRITISH POLITICAL TRADITION IS ONE OF the most impressive intellectual and physical endeavours of modern British political studies. And yet even with these two recent books of over five hundred pages each, to match the first equally wellloaded and well-balanced double-barrelled pair which appeared in 1983, The Rise of Collectivism and The Ideological Heritage, the enterprise is still not complete. A fifth book is to follow on ‘The World Outside’ —which must dampen down for the moment an obvious criticism that the British political tradition would seem, on Professor Greenleaf s account, to be uniquely unaffected, like ancient China or Japan, by the outside world; or the outside world by it.

In the twenty-five years since The End of Ideology was published, the concept of ideology has unravelled completely. What is not considered an ideology today? Ideas, ideals, beliefs, creeds, passions, values, Weltanschauungen, religions, political philosophies, moral systems, linguistic discourses — all have been pressed into service. One hears about ‘communism and capitalism as competing ideologies’, and ‘the failure of the United States [before Reagan] to develop an ideology’. In an essay in the Partisan Review, ideology is defined as ‘fantasy cast in the form of assertion’, a loose and associative form of thought, ‘sharing qualities with pornography …’. A front-page essay in the Times Literary Supplement on pre-Christian religious thought talks of the effects of ‘hostile ideologies (i.e. early Epicureanism) on Christian apologists’. And a book on military strategy is entitled The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disaster of 1914.

WHEN SWISS CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS SPECIAL ISSUE LIMIT themselves to the presentation of a picture of modern Switzerland and leave it to the public to decide whether they want to learn something from the Swiss experience, two problems remain unsolved. First, in Switzerland we have neglected to some extent the analysis of the structures and the processes of the political system. We know more about the history of our political institutions than we do about their actual functioning. Normative theory is better developed than empirical research. This leads to the second problem: as many questions concerning the mechanics of the system are not answered in a sufficiently clear way, interpretations of the Confederatia Helvetica differ considerably between various analysts.

VIEWED FROM THE OUTSIDE WEST GERMANY SEEMS TO BE AN oasis of stability. The dullness of such a political system has been alleviated, however, by the rise of the Green and alternative movements. Why should Germany become a Mecca for the alternative movements, when so many scholars have testified over the years that its political culture tends to be legalistic, not conflict-oriented or tolerant of unconventional behaviour? Most observers from abroad have attempted to answer this question in terms of value change, motivational or economic crisis theories.

THROUGHOUT THE TWO-DAY DEBATE OF OUR SYMPOSIUM we did our best to answer a challenging and I would say tricky question: can the Confederado Helvetica be imitated? I do not think that the Swiss who were present considered their country as a model at all. They tried to establish and to maintain a certain distance from the object of their study and to refrain from the reference — too often used — to a so-called special Swiss case. They were no apologists but honest witnesses.

Personally, I would make an evaluation of my country from a slightly different angle. My enquiry, therefore, would be focused on the functioning of the Swiss democratic system, on our capacity to face the challenge of our times and to maintain a national cohesion which is indispensable to our existence as a nation. Is this small country still viable? Is it not condemned to be swallowed by one of those continental empires which, in the decades following 1945, were supposed to structure the international system in one, two, three, four or five sub-systems?

It appears that the outlook in this fin de siècle is a little different: small countries are still alive; they have proliferated. There are today more than 160 states on the planet and there are more to come. Everywhere there appears a frantic search for a cultural identity on which to base a nation.

THIS LETTER FROM AMERICA WILL OFFER A RANDOM account of American trends that at best are marginally political: of interest to readers of Government and Opposition because they take an interest in political culture in the broadest (most nominal) sense. In choosing material, I have employed criteria of selection that are consistently arbitrary but only occasionally indefensible. For example, this letter is tied together by the letter B— for Barber, who is writing it, and Bloom, Bork, Biden and Gorbachev (forced to choose, I prefer arbitrariness to consistency) who are its principal subjects. If this seems a rather too cavalier approach, bear in mind that deadlines on a quarterly publication will make much of what was timely and clever when written seem stale and irrelevant when read months later.

BRITISH READERS MAY RECOLLECT MARTIN'S POIGNANT expression of regret, in Voltaire's Candide, that the French and English had felt it necessary to go to war in North America over ‘quelques arpents de neige vers le Canada’. Martin captures the sense of an enduring European perception of Canada — an indeterminate expanse of ice and snow held firmly in winter's Arctic grip throughout much of the year. His sardonic utterance reminds us of the overseas rivalries of Canada's European parents out of which were born its historic ‘two solitudes’, its distinct linguistic and cultural communities, one proudly French, the other British in descent, their entwined affairs remaining persistently refractory long after the eventual emergence from its colonial past of present-day Canada.

JUST AS THE REVOLUTION OF 1848 WAS PRECEDED BY A ‘campaign of banquets’, so, a hundred years later, the European revolution was announced by a ‘campaign of congresses’ spread over the years 1947–49. These congresses expressed the state of mind, and stimulated the major trends, of a heterogeneous and many-sided movement — a movement curiously inefficient in its tactics, and direct in its strategy, but to which the Council of Europe owes its existence, and because of which the Community of the Six has been able to take shape and to win the acceptance of public opinion, and hence of the parliaments and governments responsible to public opinion in those days.

Historians may argue that the congresses achieved nothing — and indeed we do not normally expect congresses to achieve much. Members of the same profession meet together to sit through tedious sessions and enjoy themselves all the better afterwards. But in those days, a strange driving passion, unknown to this generation, inspired the militants of Europeanism, and induced them to prefer the nightly labours of commissions and operas. It is the sense of this driving passion which must be communicated, if we are to convey the psychological and historical reality of the campaign of congresses, and pay due tribute to the influence it exerted. Their action should not be considered as that of a general seizing a military position, a law-giver imposing a legal structure, or even a medicine effecting a cure. Rather should it be regarded as a concerted concentration of psychic and psychological factors which prepare the ground and enable the organism to resorb certain poisons, overcome certain inhibitions and liberate new energies. It is such profound metamorphoses which really deserve the name of revolution.