With Lal Bahadur Shastri's sudden death in Tashkent in January of this year, India faced for the second time within eighteen months the problem of succession to leadership, The task may have been easier on the second occasion: for one thing, it was not a matter, as it had been in 1964, of finding a successor to a man revered for a full generation as a national leader; for another, there was to hand the experience of the first occasion. On the other hand, while Nehru's end had been for long foreseen and considered, and came as the culmination of a period of declining grip, that of La1 Bahadur occurred without warning. Moreover, for all the respect that Shastri had attracted, the atmosphere in which his replacement had to be sought was not that of the somewhat hushed apprehension in which he had been chosen. But while the second succession was thus accompanied by greater noise and bustle, and while the element of conflict and rivalry was now expressed in the taking of a vote to determine the issue, both operations went with every appearance of smoothness. India felt proud, and most of the world relieved, to find that there was a system that could take the strain. But what is that system ?

For some years now Spanish university students have been drawing attention to themselves by their political activity in a regime in which political activity is not legal. The conflict has since 1962 taken the form of a demand by the students to set up an autonomous Students Union in the place of the officially sponsored SEU (Sindicato Espaiiol Universitario). A new wave of student disturbances occurred in the winter of 1965, sparked off by the exclusion of a student who had attended a meeting of students who refused to join in the activities of the official union in January 1965. The students throughout the country began to demand autonomy, both for the rectors of the universities and for the students’ union, and supported demands by workers on 27 January who were also demonstrating in favour of free trade unions. On 6 February demonstrations took place again in Madrid and Barcelona, and a number of arrests were made. Further demonstrations of students against the obligatory SEU took place on 12 February in both cities. A number of students were beaten-up and arrested in Madrid; in Barcelona 1000 students met in the Faculty of Law, with the permission of the dean. Faculties in Bilbao and Madrid were closed for a while by the authorities, but the students continued to hold unofficial assemblies at which they demanded ‘free unions’, and refused to cooperate with representatives of the official union. On 19 February some 2000 students in Madrid demonstrated in favour of university autonomy, and carried on with their protest for three days.

‘The French Empire’, wrote one historian, ‘was doubtless the forerunner of the modern police state.’ The same historian wrote elsewhere: ‘The ancien régime was brought down by violence, and the governments which had followed each other in France, since 1789, had been dictatorships : the dictatorship of the ‘Patriots’ in the Constituent Assembly, of the Girondins in the Legislative Assembly, of the Paris Commune after 10 August; then of the Committee of Public Safety; finally the dictatorship of the Directory, which destroyed, by means of coups d'état the majorities in the Legislative Assembly which displeased them.’

The police-Empire was not unrelated to the dictatorships which preceded it, and in order to understand it, we must first try to grasp the thread which links these successive dictatorships together.

It is now more than thirty-five years since Sir Lewis Namier gave his famous shot in the arm to the study of the parliamentary politics of the 18th century. Under his impact, the great Tory and Whig monoliths have been effectively dethroned and their places taken by ‘connections’ and ‘groups’, by ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ – and among the ‘outs’ the ‘loyal’, or sometimes ‘factious’, opposition. But Namier's preoccupations, and the enthusiasm they inspired, far from stimulating research into the whole field of political action, have rather had the effect of confining its operation to Parliament alone. Hence, the unofficial opposition – that of the ‘political nation’ without-doors – has tended to be neglected. Yet, in this more spontaneous, unofficial opposition from ‘without doors’, it is instructive to see the way in which different actions, starting in different quarters of the community converge for more or less brief periods and exert a common pressure. Anomic and associational movements, social protest and political demands, well-organized and clear-sighted interest groups and ‘directaction’ crowds, leaders and followers come together in a chorus of united opposition, in which, however, the individual parts can still be distinguished and identified.

If the democratic process is to be justified elections must have a definite signrficance within the context of the problems facing the country in which they take place. By this standard the British general election of 1966 is hardly a source of much encouragement. It may have been inevitable in that a government with a majority of three could not be expected to overlook a possibility of getting something more comfortable; and in that sense the decision to have an election has been proved correct, Other things being equal a majority of 97 is obviously a more workable one, and some of the wear and tear of the parliamentary battle as well as of the pre-election atmosphere that has never been absent from the British scene since 1962-3 should now be removed to the benefit of efficient government. As far as one can see this simple factor must also be the one that weighed with the electorate.

On the morning of 12 February 1951 Kwame Nkrumah was freed from James Fort Prison in Accra. On the 14th he was invited by the Governor of the Gold Coast to form a government. He and his party, the Convention People's Party (CPP), remained in office through the transition to political independence on 6 March 1957, when the Gold Coast changed its name to Ghana, until the military revolution of 24 February 1966. This event formed the fifth of a series of army coups in Negro Africa which had begun on 25 November 1965 in the Congo, and it is probably the most important. Not only had Nkrumah held power for fifteen years, he was, for all the small size of his country, almost certainly the most influential politician south of the Sahara, and for what it was worth the only serious non-Muslim ideologist of the whole continent. Ghana had led the movement to African independence. So far as there was a common political creed its items and aspirations were Nkrumah's and the aspirations, however ineffective, to African unity, were based on his Pan-Africanism and not on the potentially alternative concept of négritude which had spread from the West Indies into French Africa's attitudes and politics.