REALITY IS UNTIDY AND WE SHOULD THANK OUR LUCKY stars for the fact. Liberty thrives on (and in) interstices. The reality of Hayek's world would be no less unbearable than that of Marx's. There is in fact no capitalist society, nor is there a socialist one. All variants of really existing capitalism — and socialism — are mixtures of both, and those which have come closest to the concepts were also the least attractive. The first question to address to any real society is therefore not whether it can be labelled this way or that, but what is the peculiar blend of ingredients which makes it tick.

COMPARED TO OTHER COMMUNIST STATES IN EAST-CENTRAL Europe, Romania offers a fascinating case of neo-Stalinist radicalism cloaked in nationalistic language. A hyper-centralized model of leadership, based on clan instead of party dictatorship, an obedient, corrupt and strikingly incompetent political class, a marked preference for coercive rather than persuasive methods of domination, and stubborn opposition to reforms have contributed to the development of a deep and potentially explosive social, political, and economic crisis. But the price for this unabated commitment to the Stalinist model has been a gradual institutional erosion, the growing deterioration of the social fabric, the heightening of economic tensions, and intellectual asphyxiation. The conflict between state and society has been exacerbated by president Nicolae CeauSescu's wilful and increasingly idiosyncratic behaviour.

THE ELECTIONS TO THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT IN JUNE 1989 will be only the third ever to be held simultaneously in independent nation states. The first two direct elections, however, were marked almost everywhere by disappointment; not only was turnout low −60.7 per cent in 1979 and 57.0 per cent in 1984, but the elections seemed to be more in the nature of plebiscites on the performance of national governments, rather than genuinely transnational, and politicians found it difficult to demonstrate their relevance to a wider public. It is true that small radical new parties, such as the Front National were able to exploit the elections to their own advantage. But this, of course, did not endear the European elections to liberal democrats.

BEFORE THE ISRAELI GENERAL ELECTION OF 1988, IT HAD BEEN confidently forecast that the major determinant of the outcome would be the year-long Palestinian uprising in the Administered Territories — the so-called intifada — and the future of the peace process. It was widely believed that the traumatic events in the West Bank and Gaza would displace from the attention of the electorate the more pressing issues, both domestic and foreign, which had been virtually frozen owing to the inability of the critically-divided ‘national unity government’ to agree on any positive course of action.

THE MAIN PURPOSE OF THIS ARTICLE IS TO CONTRIBUTE TO the continuing debate on the manner in which power is exercised in Western-style democracies from a democratic–elite — or what I prefer to term a demo–elite — perspective. This is to be done through a theoretical exposition placing this perspective in the spectrum of the main theories on the same topic, with special reference to the classical democratic–elite theories of Max Weber, Gaetano Mosca, Joseph Schumpeter, and Raymond Aron, and the contemporary pluralistelitist theories of Robert Dahl and Giovanni Sartori.

‘EUROPESSIMISM’, SAID THE ECONOMIST IN 1984, ‘IS A FASHION that comes and goes’. The newspaper added that ‘The idea of a technology gap, with an uncompetitive Europe on the wrong side of it, deserves a very cold eye’. But it still covered its bets with the view that, despite reservations, ‘few doubt that Europe is in real trouble’. Europe experienced a previous peak of alarm about a ‘technology gap’ in the late 1960s. Concern then focused only on the United States was epitomized by Jean-Jacques Salomon's Le Défi Américain of 1967, and spawned a large literature. This petered out in the early 1970s as the United States experienced its own crises over Vietnam and Watergate, and by the end of the decade and the Carter presidency some Americans were becoming seriously worried about their own technological standing. One now had books with such titles as America's Technology Slip and The European Revenge: How the American Challenge was Rebuffed. However, by 1984 in a chapter entitled ‘“Europeanizing” the US Economy: The Enduring Appeal of the Corporatist State’ Melvyn Krauss was able to be far more sceptical: in his words ‘. . . the call for a new industrial policy in the US amounts to a call to catch up with the losers’. The Chairman of the European Committee for Research and Development had warned even in 1979 that while certain favourable factors guaranteed Europe's ‘survival, and perhaps even relatively comfortable existence’, this would be only ‘for a period that is difficult to predict but is probably no more than a few decades’.