Perhaps the allusions and references contained in the first part of this article might not be readily intelligible to someone whose childhood was not spent listening to stories from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland or to someone not presently involved in the current debates about the finance of United Kingdom universities. Let me therefore offer a few words of explanation.

Alice in Wonderland, and its companion Alice Through the Looking Glass, are children's stories which explore the limits of reason in most creative ways. Their author, the Reverend C. L. Dodgson, a nineteenth-century mathematician at Christchurch, Oxford who wrote under the name of Lewis Carroll, used the stories to discuss the nature of limit processes in mathematics, the phenomenon of relative size and aspects of the absurd. In the stories animals speak, playing cards come to life and the heroine, Alice, undergoes many transformations of bodily size. Since I regard the recent research selectivity exercise of the Universities Funding Council (UFC) as beyond the limits of reason, I have drawn upon the Alice stories by way of satire and I have tried to use some typical Carroll literary devices — plays on words, accounts of physical transformations and the like — to emphasize the relevant points.

FOR FORTY YEARS THE COLD WAR, WITH ITS PRESUMED threat to Western Europe, has been used to justify the level of military budgets in NATO countries. The United States, Britain and France, in particular, have sustained high levels of military spending throughout this period. Each has sought to maintain capability across a full range of military options, including nuclear forces and the ability to intervene in Third World conflicts. Each has maintained a large, and quite stable, industrial and technological infrastructure in support of these military goals.

With the ending of the cold war, the basis for that stability has been undermined. Defence spending is set to fall. With it will fall overall spending on defence equipment. But the rate of decline, and its distribution across the different sectors of the defence industry, remain to be determined. Upon the outcome turns the future of investment in defence technologies, with further consequences, complex in nature, for national and industrial technological capabilities. To complicate analysis further, these changes arise at a time of considerable concern on both sides of the Atlantic about industrial competitiveness. This concern had already led to upheaval in industrial structures and strategies within both the defence and the civil high technology industries.

IT HAS NOW BECOME COMMON FOR OBSERVERS TO NOTE that German reunification, an unthinkable prospect only a year ago, will be realised before anyone, either the East and West Germans themselves or any of their neighbours and allies, is fully prepared for this eventuality. As the conservative Alliance for Germany's stunning successes in the GDR's first free Volkskammer (parliamentary) elections on 18 March demonstrated, a near majority of the country's population was eager to cast its vote for those forces which promised to facilitate East Germany's absorption into the FRG on the fastest possible terms. By the same token, the vote was also a victory of sorts for all of the West German parties who rushed to lend material and financial aid to their GDR counterparts, for their involvement in the East German election campaigns clearly helped to accelerate the momentum behind national reunification.

In previous letters from Paris, which Government and Opposition has been kind enough to publish, I do not believe that I erred on the side of complacency about my country. This is why I have less hesitation in writing today that France is at present the victim of a gale of calumny, the intensity and extent of which leaves one bewildered, incredulous and unhappy.

A particular and aggravating circumstance is that these aspersions are believed in, or at least spread, by the French media and the political elite itself. According to them the moral health of France is threatened. It is in danger of being submerged by a wave of racism, of anti-Semitism and even of neo-Nazism. The most implacable vigilance is necessary. This new official doctrine, it must be said, is quite simply absurd.

IN TERMS OF THE HISTORICAL CATEGORIES FORMULATED BY S. N. Eisentadt, the origins of the Ottoman-Turkish polity were imperial-bureaucratic rather than imperial-feudal or patrimonial. The regime was not patrimonial because the centre had its own distinctive normative system; the values of the centre were just a pale reflection of those of the periphery. The regime was not imperial-feudal for the centre did not have to face civil societal groups able to challenge it and impinge upon it. The members of the periphery could not develop horizontal loyalties; instead they competed among themselves for a limited number of privileges such as tax-farming rights or quotas for import or export which the centre granted. The Ottoman-Turkish peripheral elements did not develo into an aristocracy or a bourgeoisie with political influence. Consequently, the efforts towards modernization initiated during the nineteenth century took on a particular twist. Modernization meant Westernization, which in turn was perceived from the perspective of Enlightenment tradition. Informed by a ‘cast-iron theory’ of Islam ,the state's salvation was seen to lie in substituting reason for religion as the basis of public policy-making. The military and the bureaucratic elites came to see themselves primarily as the guardians of raison d'état.

Revisionist opinion notwithstanding, in my view the Roman empire in the West really did collapse, the European Dark Ages really were dark, and the feudal regna which painfully emerged from them were not ‘states’ in the sense of the term that we use today. A thousand years had to elapse after the fall of Rome for what we nowadays call ‘the modern European state’ to appear. I would like to stress that Europe did not, as some persons have maintained, invent ‘the state’. Europe re-inuented it after that long period of breakdown, followed by near-anarchy and then feudalism; but what it re-invented was in many respects unlike any antecedent — or contemporary — state-form anywhere else in the world. This state-form has now become the world-wide unit of affairs. It was original in three major respects.

FOR US IT IS ENTIRELY NATURAL TO ASSUME THAT THE paramount political question of our time is whether to move in the direction of a socialist or capitalist organization of the economy, or to decide what manner of welfarist compromise between them ought to be struck. But merely to make this assumption is already to be committed to a particular view about what defines politics, the political priorities of our society, the nature of the relationship between state and society, and so on.