THE RECENT POLITICAL HISTORY OF NORTHERN IRELAND HAS been punctuated by arrivals and departures as successive secretaries of state have attempted to impose their personalities on an intractable problem through a series of (failed) initiatives. The latest exercise has been under way since the beginning of 1990 and is closely identified with the diplomatic skills exerted by the present Secretary of State, Mr Peter Brooke. In what has been described as ‘potentially the most significant political discussions in all of Ireland since the treaty of 1921’, Mr Brooke has embarked on a voyage which could transcend in importance the Anglo-Irish Agreement of November 1985. The purpose of this article is to put that voyage into some sort of context by suggesting that rather than concentrate solely on the ‘high’ politics of political negotiation, attention needs to be paid to the mechanisms which allow negotiations to proceed. For that reason we will look at the relative merits — and the complementarity — of ‘Track One’ and ‘Track Two’ diplomacy.

THIS ARTICLE DESCRIBES AND ILLUSTRATES HOW JAPAN conceives the political meaning of many kinds of interdependence and uses this concept to advance what it considers to be its national interests and global interests without upsetting the balance of world interdependence. ‘Interdependence’ means the mutual vulnerability and sensitivity of all governing-cum-economic units in the world. ‘The politics of interdependence’ means, then, how actors make strategic use of interdependence with enough self-restraint not to jeopardize the system of interdependence itself. Thus ‘Japan's politics of interdependence’ means how Japan makes strategic use of interd pendence guided by its own standards of conduct. In this sense, this article is an attempt to combine the following two intellectual traditions: the interdependence literature and the economic statecraft literature to define Japan's politics of interdependence. First, I will summarize three principles of Japan's political conceptualization of interdependence. Then I will illustrate them by some recent examples. Thirdly, prospects for Japan's politics of interdependence will be briefly discussed along with some discussion on the lines of research to be further explored.

READING PROFESSOR INOGUCHI'S SPLENDIDLY COMPREHENSIVE and suggestive account of Japan's external policies as modes of coping with/balancing/sustaining interdependence, I was irresistibly reminded of a phrase I learned in 1950 at the first meeting I attended of our local Tokyo neighbourhood council — the committee of the 300-household precinct where I lodged. I think the issue was the smoke coming out of the chimney of our one and only factory. We did not know then about NOx and SOx, but it ruined the housewives' washing when the wind was in the wrong place, and that was bad enough. In a circumspect speech which reminded us that the factory owner was, also, far and away the largest contributor to the annual shrine festival, a particularly articulate ex-leader of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association preached a little homily on the principle of neighbourliness in a country of densely-packed, cheek-by-jowl communities. Mochitsu motaretsu was his key phrase; the slightly archaic grammar gave it a somewhat venerable weight; support and be supported. And it did not just mean ‘support in order to be supported’. It meant also: ‘don't be deterred from accepting support by a sense of the irksome constraints of dependence. We are all dependent on the community; others too, as much as you. Accept it. It is the community which is your security, not just the indebtedness, or the goodwill, of individual others.’

The ‘LITTLE TIGERS'’ REPUTATION AMONGST WESTERNERS (and for that matter with the Japanese) is rich in negatives. Exploitative, unprincipled, uncontrolled; minimalist on welfare, maximalist on profit: the unacceptable face of capitalism indeed, to those feeling themselves on the receiving end of the Tigers' determination to compete and get rich quick. Nevertheless the image is misleading. These are no chance miracles of laissez-faire capitalism unbound. On the contrary, the rise ‘from nowhere’ to world trading notoriety has to an extent been contrived in every case.

ON THE SAME WEEKEND AS EAST GERMANS OFFICIALLY exchanged East Marx for real Marks, another kind of exchange took place between East and West German professors at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Bielefeld. The recently established Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Erforschung des politischen Denkens, in the person of Volker Gerhardt (Cologne), had invited some sixty senior philosophers, political theorists and political scientists from both sides of the inner-German border to discuss basic questions in political philosophy. The meeting was not a conference. The organizer, recognising the absence of any shared traditions of inquiry and debate, had issued invitations to a mere meeting. It was the first such meeting since the collapse of the East German Communist regime. In fact, it offered the first opportunity after almost six decades of dictatorships in the East for academics from the former front-lines, as it were, to reflect openly together on their subject, on their academic pasts and on their possible academic futures. Initially, the atmosphere was very tense. But, amazingly, the tensions soon evaporated. A strange sort of civility came to characterize the discussions both inside and outside the conference rooms. Conflicts were largely avoided, to the obvious relief of most participants. From an inner- German perspective, the meeting was a great success. At the end, Ernst Vollrath (Cologne) summed up a general view: ‘We have begun to see that we can learn from one another.’ But this reciprocity was not evident in the academic discussions. Something else was involved apart from the surface issue of Marxism-Leninism versus the rest of the world. It is worth reflecting on the development of the meeting and on what this something else was.

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.

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 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.