In Continental Europe a New Debate Has Emerged Over the interpretation of the major changes that have taken place in political parties during the 1990s. A ‘fourth wave’ of democratic party-building originating in Eastern Europe has highlighted a number of new developments. Parties have emerged which are built around leaders, which have few members, are subsidized by the state and which direct their activities towards the media and the electorate rather than towards partyidentifiers. Recent contributions to this debate have sought to transform a picture of the decline of political parties by offering a new image of the party. The future of the party is to be found in what have been variously dubbed ‘professional framework parties‘, ‘media parties’ or ‘cartel parties’.

The Purpose of This Article is To Analyse The Document ‘A Framework for Accountable Government in Northern Ireland’, published by the British government in early 1995, and to assess its significance in terms of the theory of powersharing (consociational democracy). The Framework Document, as it is usually called, received a hostile reception from many Unionist politicians in Northern Ireland. The ideas that it contains, however, resonate with many previous blueprints for the future of Northern Ireland. In some form they are very likely to re-emerge in the proposed solutions that will follow the ‘all-party’ talks set for June 1996. I shall show that the Framework plan for democratic government in Northern Ireland is completely and thoroughly consociational in its orientation. It confirms the proposition that power-sharing is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for viable democracy in deeply divided societies.

THE INTELLECTUAL WORLD AS A WHOLE, AND GOVERNMENT and Opposition most particularly, mourn the loss of Ernest Gellner, a major figure who died in Prague on 5 November 1995.

DURING AUTUMN 1995 JUDICIAL REVIEW BECAME NEWS IN THE United Kingdom. Tabloid and broadsheet newspapers, radio, television and Parliament provided fora for ministers, Conservative backbench MPs and journalists to debate the apparent growing willingness of the judiciary to intervene in politically contentious government decisions. The tone of the debate was often hostile; sometimes vitriolic. We were told that there was a crisis. According to an editorial in The Times, ‘it is tempting to observe a pattern emerging, a potentially alarming hostility between an overmighty executive and an ambitious judiciary’. Radio and television journalists described a situation of ‘mutual resentment and suspicion’ and ‘unprecedented conflict between a Conservative government and the judiciary’. The Daily Express denounced ‘the sickness sweeping through the senior judiciary – galloping arrogance’ and the Daily Mail accused judges of giving ‘the impression – perhaps a false impression, but nevertheless a real one – of acting on a political agenda of their own’.

In December 1995 General Elections Took Place in Russia for the lower house of parliament, the Duma. In constitutional terms the Duma is a relatively weak body, comparable with the French National Assembly. It initiates and enacts legislation, but must find a two-thirds majority if it is to override a presidential veto. The December elections were, however, of a disproportionate significance. The fact that they were taking place was important in itself. The Duma elected in December 1995 was only the second Duma to be elected in post-Soviet Russia, and the first to be elected in relatively normal circumstances. (The preceding Duma had been elected in 1993 only after President Boris Yeltsin had used tanks against the old Supreme Soviet, created a new parliament almost literally out of its ashes, and legitimized his actions by means of a new constitution approved by a national referendum.)

As The Results of The General Elections In Spain of 3 March were being announced, the leaders of the two main parties came out of their respective headquarters to greet the crowds of well-wishers. To judge by the expression on their faces, one could be forgiven for thinking that the victors had lost and the losers had won. A jubilant Felipe González, the outgoing Premier, uttered the phrase which serves as the main title of this article. The paradoxical outcome of the election was that in order to form a government, the victors were forced to seek the kind of parliamentary support which they had bitterly decried in the outgoing government and a pact with parties that they had mercilessly attacked during the previous legislature.

Ghiţa Ionescu's Formal Academic Career Began When He reached the London School of Economics in 1963, at the age of fifty. Within three years he had published three books and become the founder-editor of Government and Opposition. He went on to edit the journal for the next thirty-one years and to bring the total number of his books to fourteen, five of them comprising a brilliant series on the East European communist states and the rest mainly on the challenges, both internal and external, facing the liberal democracies in advanced industrial society. He became Professor of Government at the University of Manchester and chairman, for over two decades, of the Research Committee on European Unification of the International Political Science Association. He inspired and energized countless students and colleagues. The main purpose of this article is to explore the significance of these achievements. But first, a word about the motive forces behind them.

The March 1996 Australian Federal Election Was The most important Australian election for more than a decade. It resulted in the return of the Liberal-National coalition to office after thirteen years in opposition, ending a period of unprecedented Labor-initiated change, first under the leader-ship of Bob Hawke and since 1991, Paul Keating.

The election was also important because the new government will in all probability lead Australia into the new millennium and guide the country through a period of intense change in the Asia Pacific region; how the Liberal-Nationals approach the whole question of Australia's changing relationship with the world will shape Australia's future and wellbeing for decades to come. And finally, the election was notable for making John Howard prime minister during his second period as Liberal leader, a prospect that Howard himself had once ridiculed as akin to ‘Lazarus with a triple bypass’.

The Analysis of Opposition in Asian Political Systems raises acute problems of definition. At one end of a continuum lie those polities in which an ‘opposition’ is either inconceivable (North Korea is perhaps the best example) or inevitably in a state of war or confrontation with the regime (as is the case in Burma/Myanmar). In cases at this end of the continuum opposition cannot be democratic in the systemic sense, unless the opposition realizes its programme and becomes a democratic government. At the other end of the continuum, however, the character, standing and potential of ‘opposition’ is very much a matter of debate. In these systems a multiplicity of non-governing political parties exist, and these parties contest elections and send members to legislatures, though they often operate under rules (informal as well as formal) and conditions which tend to prevent them from gaining power. The focus of this article will be upon these systems, which are here labelled – whether parliamentary or presidential – ‘constitutional’. ‘Constitutional’ is understood as entailing the existence of an embedded and more or less regularly operating set of electoral mechanisms which plays an essential part in the selection of the government.

The Story is Told That Following The 1916 Rising a journalist contacted a nationalist politician for some background information. He was told that hostilities had begun when Cromwell invaded Ireland. When would it end?: ‘When hell freezes over.’ No doubt it is apocryphal but it conveys the sense of fatalism and of time-scales necessary to understand the present tense of the peace process. As a result of the IRA bombing of Canary Wharf on 9 February 1996 sobriety and long memories have replaced the euphoria of mid-1994. No one had pretended that it was going to be easy; indeed some of the major actors had been thinking in generational terms. The SDLP leader, John Hume, spoke of ‘the real healing process [which] will take place and in a generation or two a new Ireland will evolve’ (italics added) at his party's annual conference in November 1995. Even the influential Sinn Fein insider, Jim Gibney, inserted a note of realism as early as June 1992 when he said that a British ‘departure must be preceded by asustuined period of peace and will arise out of negotiation’ (emphasis added).

THERE ARE CERTAIN PREDICTABLE HIGH POINTS IN THE political calendar. Local elections, the Queen's speech and the Budget are pencilled in at each party's headquarters and the media devote acres of newsprint and hours of broadcasting time to each. Yet none of these compare in duration to the season of party conferences, which last for the best part of a month. For political commentators and activists they are the political equivalent of an Olympic games for sports fans and competitors.

The Nolan Committee Has Put Parliament on Trial. Many believe that standards of public life have fallen into disrepute in recent years. The press has seized upon a series of sleaze issues: cash for parliamentary questions, the Scott inquiry into government contracts, undisclosed gifts from lobbyists, the hidden patronage of quango appointments, and the revolving door between public office and newly privatized company boards. Most believe this succession of stories has eroded public trust and confidence. Ivor Crewe's submission to the committee pointed out that agreement with the statement ‘Most MPs make a lot of money by using public office improperly’ has risen from 46 to 64 per cent in the last nine years. Lord Nolan, reflecting on evidence before his committee, noted: ‘One of the things we have been struck by is the depth of public cynicism about standards of conduct in public life, coupled with damaging cynicism about the motives of those who go into it.’ Some of the disquiet is produced by the succession of sexual imbroglios causing a series of ministerial resignations. Yet this has been of lesser concern to the Nolan Committee than standards of financial propriety at Westminster. The recommendations which emerged so far have focused on the need to avoid potential conflicts of interest, and the need for the transparent disclosure of financial dealings.

There are Many Ambiguities Within The Literature on globalization. Some scholars speak of a world that is chunging others use the framework as part of a new univocal discourse to describe late twentieth-century capitalism. Apart from ‘globalization’, many other cartographic and navigational metaphors have been employed to describe the present world order. There is the loss of the ‘magnetic North’; an ‘emerging global civilization’; and a curious notion of an evolving ‘global civil society’. Master concepts like ‘sustainable development’ and ‘world politics’ have consequently become popular and are creeping into international relations discourse. In extreme cases the literature seems to suggest or imply that history is coming to an end on convenient Western socio-cultural terms only. Indeed it seems that proponents of globalization have come to proclaim universality afresh in similar vein to that of those who indulge in and perpetuate the notion of a post-Columbus 500-year capitalist historicism. I do not share the triumphalism of the liberal globalization discourse. It is certainly important to ask whether the wave of technological change, interdependent policy-making, international socialization of production, and time-space compression have or have not come to transcend or replace the complex web of centre-periphery relations. There remains generally a familiar interstate world system, albeit with the spatial and temporal limits to state, market and human interactions experientially compressed. Questions about who rules, who benefits or suffers, and whether prospects for social survival are better or worse remain as important as ever.

Largely Implemented During The Tumultuous Years between 1923 and 1937, Turkey's laws, education system, civil service, economy, military, international outlook and trade are all founded on the premise of a Western-oriented separation between religion and state. This system has survived seventy years of economic, political and social transformation with remarkable resilience: Islamic brotherhoods, most recently a particularly vehement tarikat called the Aczmendi, are still prosecuted for calling openly for return to Islamic rule.

‘IT LOOKS TO ME DISTINCTLY LIKE CANADIAN FEDERALISM'S referendum to lose’, I wrote late last winter, anticipating the call from Jacques Parizeau's provincial Parti Québécois for the second referendum on Quebec ‘sovereignty’ in fifteen years, expected sometime in 1995. Thank goodness I took the precaution to add: ‘bearing in mind, of course, that from the sovereignists’ angle of vision, it appears to be their referendum to lose, too.’ But I confess I meant the qualification to be taken as tongue-in-cheek rather than as a serious guess about what then seemed likely to lie ahead. Certainly the auguries, had the PQ decided to go ahead with its referendum in early 1995, suggested that the federalists in Quebec would probably have carried the day as decisively as they had in 1980, when almost 60 per cent of Quebeckers rejected René Lévesque's first PQ referendum on ‘sovereignty-association’.

THE SINGLE EUROPEAN ACT AND THE MAASTRICHT TREATY attempted to balance two principles of representation in their redesign of the institutional structures of the European Union: the one, based on the indirect representation of publics through nationally elected governments in the European Council and Council of Ministers; the other, based on the direct representation of publics through a more powerful European Parliament. There is much to be said for this balance, for neither of the two principles can, on its own, be an adequate solution at this stage in the development of the EU. The Council suffers from a non-transparent style of decision-making and is, in the view of many, closer to oligarchic than to democratic politics. On the other hand, the claims of the European Parliament to represent public sentiments on European integration are limited by low voter participation, the second-order nature of European elections and the still Protean nature of what we might call a transnational European demos. The EU lacks a single public arena of political debate, communications and shared meanings; of partisan aggregation and political entrepreneurship; and of high and even acceptance, across issues and member states, that it is European and not national majority views which should count in collective rule-making.

The Israeli General Election of 1996 Has Been Described as a ‘referendum’ on the Middle East peace process, the central issue in the campaign. However, important as it was, the outcome of the election was determined not so much by the issue of peace, as by a change in the electoral law providing for the direct election of the prime minister. On 29 May, for the first time, Israelis went to the polls to elect a prime minister as well as a new Knesset and the result was yet another upheaval in Israeli political life.

For The Last Fifty Years, Italian Politics Have Been remarkably static and predictable: one party (the Christian Democrats) always came out on top, while the Left was always in opposition. Yet in the most unexpected fashion all this changed in April 1996: for the first time in the history of the Italian Republic, a left-wing government has been returned. While the historial significance of the 1996 elections cannot be disputed, it is much more difficult to explain the causes of such radical political change. Compared to the results of the 1996 elections, the elections of 1992 now seem little more than a minor tremor, yet one could argue that the tremors felt in 1992 were part of the same process that delivered the real earthquake four years later. Therefore in searching for an explanation of the recent unexpected political changes in Italy, one should start from the 1992 elections.

Why Do People Disagree About Politics? Like All Naive questions, this one rapidly launches us into fundamentals. Without disagreement, there would be no politics.

Some of the answers are obvious, and all the common ones line up with popular political projects. If disagreement were attributed to error, for example, to know the truth would transform our condition. Let us review the commonest answers in turn and look at the sources of political disagreement.