British politics are more fun today, at least for the political scientist, than at any time since the Second World War. The British two-party system, that seemingly immutable product of the “first past the post” electoral system, Britain's social structure and the enduring party identifications of Britain's voters, shows every sign of breaking up–not slowly and gradually, but with something approaching Mount St. Helen's force. A political party that did not exist a year ago, the Social Democrats, is now, in alliance with the liberals, sweeping all before it electorally. This short article tries to give some account of what is going on–and why.

The present upheaval is taking place both down below, among voters, and up above, among members of Parliament and other prominent politicians. Let us begin with the voters.

Ostensibly, “The Man of Iron” is a film about a successful strike, the culmination of ten years of hope and struggle, an act of solidarity among workers who have understood that the only guarantee of their material well-being and their freedom is the union, an autonomous power of their own. It is a film about a strike and, midway, director Andrzej Wajda turns it into a classical flick, a banal love story seen so many times before, with scenes of a train station, wrapped in blue mist, where a mother takes her child, wrapped in red blankets, away from the intruding repression. One enters the climate of Gorky's Mother, of “Adelein 31,” of “Norma Jean.”

Several Polish and French reviewers did not like this sentimental injection of private life, accusing the film of formal inconsistency, but I find the formalism of the strike film as profoundly ironic as the event itself: the strike of workers against the society where the working class was supposed to hold power, the strike against a party which claimed to represent them turned out to be just a strike like other strikes of workers against the power of capital and the state.

And the ending–one of the endings–is equally romantic: the hero and his woman reunited after she is freed from prison by the victory of strikers, the protagonist in the closing monologue turning to the generation of his father to report the accomplishment of the task.

In the aftermath of the invasion of Afghanistan and the advent of the Reagan Administration, cooperation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union seems to have diminished, particularly in the area of arms control. Nuclear non-proliferation is the oldest area of Soviet-American cooperation in arms control, dating back to the establishment of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in the 1950s. But the fact that the two countries have a common interest does not mean that there is necessarily an equal interest or that it can survive the current tension.

Some analysts argue that the Soviet Union has more at risk from proliferation than does the United States. For example, many of the potential new entrants to nuclear weapons status–India, Pakistan, Korea, Taiwan, Iraq–are countries geographically close to the Soviet Union and distant from the United States. Thus, it could be argued that the Soviet Union has more to fear than we do, and from the zero-sum perspective of U.S.-Soviet hostility, further proliferation may hurt the Soviet Union more than the United States. To judge whether this is a sensible basis for policy, or whether cooperative action is a better basis requires a closer look at the skeptical arguments.

The meetings of heads of state and foreign ministers of the eight already industrialized and the fourteen developing nations held at Mexico's lush island resort of Cancun raised high hopes and expectations among some, consternation and frustration among others. The real meaning and substance of the meeting were often obscured by the media's forced reliance on the official press briefings and, in the absence of other information, the emphasis on the food eaten, the elaborate security precautions, and the luxury of the surroundings. By now Cancún has faded from the headlines, but the issues and agendas raised are likely to be with us for a long time.

The Cancún meeting may have been a watershed. It is not that the place is so important or even that this particular gathering was so crucial. The issues have been building for years. But what Cancún did was to provide a prestigious forum and sounding board for the Third World ideas, and to bring some of these home to the American public for the first time.