THE CURRENT CRISIS IN RUSSIAN SOCIETY HAS BEEN THE SUBJECT of all manner of scholarly investigations, essays and editorials. But the clear economic reverses, distinctly felt by all, have caused analysis to focus almost exclusively on this aspect of the crisis. A more constructive approach to the problem might be to examine it as a process, as an objective result of all aspects of the country's development and contemporary civilization as a whole.

This approach presupposes that the rejection of socialism in Russia and Eastern Europe, the major reforms in China and Vietnam, and the dead-end situation in Cuba are not chance, but form a pattern. In each case, the crisis is a function of the transition from one social system to another. This transitional crisis is all-encompassing; its economic component is no more important than the political, social, ethical, cultural, or that of daily life. A transitional crisis is the harbinger of a Time of Troubles when all of society — not just isolated elements — is thrown into turmoil.

WHAT FOLLOW ARE LESS ‘THESES’ THAN ‘CONJECTURES’, speculations both tentative and disjointed. Like a mathematician's conjectures, however, they admit of being systematically ordered into a larger theory as well as being elaborated more fully, one-by-one. Here I shall, without elaboration, at least sketch the outlines of that larger theory.

The general tenor of all these conjectures is to query an ethos, prevailing for the past two centuries or more, effectively encapsulated in the slogan, ‘Every state a nation, every nation a state’. Starting with the American and Latin American revolutions and continuing through the twentieth century's own wars of national liberation, the continuing motif has been one of freeing ‘a People’ from ‘alien rule’. Champions of ‘political unification’, from Mazzini's Italy to Kohl's Germany, have likewise taken as their rallying cry the uniting of a single people under a single government. That is the ‘every nation a state’ side of the story.

THE AMERICAN ELECTION OF 1994, A SMASHING NATIONAL victory for the Republican Party, was both unusual and momentous. It produced a result of startling clarity, which is unusual in the American constitutional scheme, especially for a non-presidential election; and it promises enduring dominance for the Republicans, which is momentous. The change that President Bill Clinton said he would bring in 1992, and did not bring, has been imposed on him.

Not since 1946, when Harry Truman was presented with a Republican Congress, has an incumbent president been treated so roughly by the voters. But Truman lived in the era of New Deal dominance and was able to recover and be re-elected in 1948. The better analogy for the 1994 election, unfortunately for the Democrats, is probably 1930, when Herbert Hoover was repudiated by the voters and a new Democratic Congress become the prelude to the New Deal dominance that began in 1932 and now seems to have come to an end.

‘PEACE PROCESS’ IS A NEW AND FASHIONABLE CONCEPT. THERE are of course great local differences between the Middle Eastern, the South African and the Irish-British peace processes. But there are some remarkable characteristic similarities between them which form a pattern and especially when, as at present, they are seen in their phases of transition. What I present here are a few remarks on the differences and similarities in the phase of transition of the ongoing peace processes in South Africa and in Northern Ireland — differences which geopolitically, demographically, culturally and economically might seem at first sight in some respects rather difficult to compare.

THE MEXICAN POLITICAL SYSTEM IS CURRENTLY GOING through the most turbulent, disconcerting and complex end of a sexenio, or six-year presidential term, in memory. This is not the usual internal turmoil which has traditionally accompanied every change of administration, but a political crisis so great that it portends a process of political change destined to transform the very nature of the Mexican political regime itself.

It may not be altogether new for this political regime to face the ‘democratic demands’ of important sectors of civil society; these demands have been made in the past in a variety of ways and with various consequences. However, this time the call for democracy constitutes an authentic challenge to the continuity and autonomy of the regime, and this is an extraordinary, highly significant development.

LIKE MANY PEOPLE, I FIND KARL POPPER BOTH FASCINATING and irritating. His vigour and lucidity are irresistible, and no one could complain that he fails to engage with the big questions. The problems begin when we consider his political thought. Some think him one of the great liberal philosophers of the century. I on the other hand, while being fascinated by The Open Society and its Enemies, am repelled by the grossness of its caricaturing of most of the thinkers it touches. The Poverty of Historicism is a marvellous text in the philosophy of the social sciences, but the idea of historicism is a straw man. The paradox seems to be that while there is a lot that refers to the political questions of the day, there is virtually nothing which takes up issues of political philosophy directly. The result is that he seems to me always to be on the wrong foot, and my problem is to discover why.

THE EARLY GENERAL ELECTIONS IN SLOVAKIA HELD ON 30 September–1 October 1994 and resulting in the victory of populists and nationalists caught many observers by surprise, both in and outside Slovakia. Unlike in Poland and Hungary, the leftist party in Slovakia suffered decisive setbacks, receiving 10.4 per cent of the poll instead of around 20 per cent as indicated in the pre-election surveys. The Democratic Party, the latest successors to the intellectuals who took power from the communists after November 1989, did not even receive the 5 per cent necessary to enter the National Council (see Table 1). The reaction to the overall results has been one of resignation, and pessimism about the fate of democracy in this post-communist country, which, with the Czech Republic constituted Czechoslovakia until 1993.