DOES THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS NECESSARILY ENTAIL CERtain rights, and if so, what are they? Do democratic assumptions exclude the possibility of rights that are superior to the democratic theory and practice?

These are the two sets of questions that I propose to explore in this essay.

The ‘Reflections’ which follow were written in October 1979. The months in between have been rich in developments within the Community and in the world. This brief introduction is an attempt, not to take stock of them completely – space for this is lacking – but simply to tie them in with the analyses and orientations worked out some months ago.

The two significant events for the Community were the setback at the European Council in Dublin (29–30 November 1979) and the European Parliament's rejection of the 1980 budget (December 1979). I shall try to assess how the Community and its member-states reacted to two events which tested its cohesion: the new ‘oil shock’ after the OPEC meeting in Caracas and, politically, the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan.

FOR A POLITICAL SCIENTIST THE LAST TWENTY-FIVE YEARS represented a unique historical period. There were opportunities for research in new fields requiring new techniques. Indeed, the sense of newness combined subject, technique and moral direction in a singular synthesis. Words like nationalism, growth, independence, freedom, not to speak of the staged figures who personified them, Ghandi and Nehru, Nkrumah and Zik, Touré and Keita, Sukarno and particularly Mao and Castro, gave a peopled tension to what constituted not only new frontiers of independence but also moral events as new nations and new political forms made their appearance.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BUSINESS INTERESTS AND THE British Conservative Party is a matter of crucial importance which is relatively neglected in the existing literature. The basic theme of this article is that this relationship is more problematic and tenuous than is often assumed to be the case. Relations between business interests and the Conservative Government elected in 1979 are likely to be characterized by recurrent tensions on questions of economic and industrial policy.

ON 2 MAY 1979, THE COMMISSION OF THE EUROPEAN COMMUNIties adopted a Memorandum on the accession of the European Communities to the ‘Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms’ signed in Rome on 4 November 1950 by the Member States of the Council of Europe and which entered into force on 3 September 1953. This memorandum which constitutes a document aimed at stimulating thought on the problems posed by the accession of the EEC and which concludes in favour of such a step, has been sent to the other institutions and organs of the European Communities. It is intended to start a debate within these institutions and organs and in all interested circles within the Member States.

ULTIMATELY, POLITICAL PARTIES ARE FOR GOVERNING; BUT who shall govern? In some countries the decision rests by broad agreement on the normal waxing and waning of electoral sympathies. Not so in Southern Europe today. Hopes or fears of continuismo, have combined since the mid-1970s to raise divisive issues about the governing credibility of many parties, as Portugal and Spain inaugurated a party system after decades of no-party politics, Greece reinstated party competition after a briefer military rule, and Italy's parties underwent the most complicated electoral and coalitional test in thirty years of democracy.

Otherwise said, the complexity of coalitional preferences does not reflect a generic situation of competitive multi-party politics. It reflects a specific situation of crisis of founding coalitions, and therefore points to a lingering issue of legitimation. Who then, shall govern in Southern Europe, and with what legitimacy? The question admits no easy answer.

ALL INVITATIONS TO WRITE SOMETHING THAT COME WITH FAR distant deadlines are a subtle exercise in entrapment (and I speak here from experience as both hunter and quarry) resting on the usual tendency to discount the future. How could anyone resist the temptation to talk about everybody's favourite subject – themselves – when it is enhanced by the flattery implicit in the suggestion that other people might be interested? So easy too: just a few thousand words about changes in the discipline in the last twenty-five years and the way in which one sees it.

HAVING NOW BEEN IN POWER FOR FIFTEEN YEARS, THE PRESENT Brazilian political regime sees the coming year as the end of a successfully completed experiment. Its goal is the normalization of the ‘development state’ established in 1964 – a goal that encompassed a clear economic model and a willingness to accept the risks that the impact of the development state would have on other sub-systems of society.

Over a period of a decade and a half, the regime has sought to provide an increasingly coherent response to the impasses in social change that were characteristic of the period of so-called spontaneous development of the fifties. This response was based on the assumption of a natural convergence of increased productivity, social mobility and democracy.

BEFORE THE FIRST WORLD WAR HENRI BERGSON HAD PUBlished three major works, but nothing exclusively or even primarily concerned with social and political issues. Nevertheless, Bergson's philosophy was thought to have a political meaning that could be deduced from its principles. Despite their different, even contradictory, conclusions about it, Bergson's philosophy influenced several leading figures in France – Georges Sorel, Charles Péguy, Charles Maurras and Charles de Gaulle – and through them the course of French history. Significantly, Bergson's philosophical arguments interested them more than his relatively minor, but concrete, statements about contemporary politics. Bergson's mature thought on moral and political life was shaped principally by the First world War: Les Deux sources de la moral et de la religion appeared after Sorel and Péguy were dead and when Maurras and the Action Franqaise no longer figured so prominently in French politics. Even de Gaulle, who came to prominence much later than the others and who really belongs more to the second half of the century than they do, appears to have taken no interest in Les Deux sources. Rather, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience and L'Évolution créatrice in which Bergson states his critique of ‘conceptual thinking’ and his theories of consciousness and biological evolution, comprise ‘Bergsonism’ in politics – not Bergson's own politics. These ironically find no consistent representation in the movements or political theories discussed below. The difference between what Bergson stood for and favoured in politics and what others thought his philosophy implied for politics is most striking and points to the difficulties inherent in taking practical advice from metaphysical arguments. There are, then, two problems surrounding Bergson's influence in France, one of which has already been alluded to and will be discussed at some length. The other is much more diffuse, but defines Bergson's political reputation today.

SINCE 1976 ITALY HAS BEEN EXPERIENCING A POLITICAL STALEmate which should not be confused with the periodical difficulties of the system. What is at stake is the capacity of Italian democracy to ensure change in a peaceful manner – which I take to be one of the main functions of democracy. The political essence of the crisis lies in the Christian Democrats' (DC) growing incapacity to assure the governability of the country and in the problem of providing an alternative governmental leadership which would include the main opposition party, the Communist Party (PCI).

The resulting impasse is what explained both Moro's insistence on the need for a ‘great national solidarity’ and the PCI's strategy of the ‘historic compromise’. Convergence found political expression in the grand coalition governments which ruled Italy between 1976 and 1979, the first majority in thirty years which included the PCI.

On the analytical level, convergence in polarized systems like Italy's can be fruitfully analysed, as I have suggested elsewhere, from the viewpoint of the consociational model. I shall first briefly review the model before turning to a discussion of the prospects for cooperation after the 1979 general elections.

IN THE FIELDS OF CONTEMPORARY HISTORY AND POLITICAL science, the German discussion during the past thirty years has taken many unexpected turns. On the one hand, the expansion of political and social studies has led to often very exaggerated forms of specialization and theorization; the quantity of books and articles either on methodology or on fragmented details can hardly be mastered even by dedicated professionals. On the other hand, symptomatic of profound changes on the institutional and political level of German society is a marked polarization among social and political scientists, which has taken place mainly during the past ten to fifteen years; the historians are following the trend by confronting the ‘progressive’ methods of social and structural analysis with the ‘traditional’ history of persons, events and institutions. At the same time, an increasing demand for more personnel and more funds in the field of the social sciences, initially justified by the scarcity of public support, has now been followed by critical doubts about the expanding number of students and academic people pressing for positions.

SCANDAL AND CORRUPTION ARE CUSTOMARILY THOUGHT OF in much the same ways as pigs and whistles; they go together. Strangely, however, academic studies of corruption seem to pay little attention to scandal. It is strange if only because in societies like this corruption tends to be obscure, a condition in which its participants wish it to remain, and it is to the occasional scandal that we are indebted for what knowledge is generally accessible. This is particularly true in Britain where the major scandals have usually been followed (sometimes illuminated) by official inquiries; certainly that has been the practice in this century from the Marconi shares scandal in 1913 to the Poulson scandal sixty years later which spawned both a committee and a Royal Commission. A closer look at the incidence of political scandal, this article will suggest, is an additional tool for the study of corruption and perhaps particularly so for comparative studies. A more fundamental (and more widely canvassed) problem, however, is so to define corruption as to facilitate reliable comparisons across temporal and cultural boundaries. We will first discuss that problem.

ONE HAS TO BE CAREFUL ON THESE OCCASIONS. THERE IS SO much accident about it. Personally, as a latedeveloper at school, I did not have matriculation Latin but if I had I would have read History at Oxford. Instead I began in Economics at London University, at University College, by the way, not LSE – I had not heard of either, but LSE looked like the office blocks of Croydon in which my father worked in insurance and UCL looked like a university, as I had seen them in the cinema. But I moved out of Economics when my tutor at the beginning of the third year gave me a very high mark on an essay on ‘Value Theory’, but said: ‘Get out. I advise you to get out. You plainly don't believe in the subject. You will be a brilliant critic of it if you go on. But you don't believe that economic theory is an thing else but an analytical card-castle. If you go on, youdend up by hating your subject, hating yourself, and feeling like I do that you've wasted your life.’ I said that as I was taking Finals that summer, it was a little late to switch. ‘Nonsense’, Alfred Stonier replied, ‘not if you really want to get out of Economics. You are going dong to LSE for Laski's lectures for subsidiary. Government's easy, just reading books. Switch to that till you're clear what to do.’

SOCIO-POLITICAL ANALYSIS – SIT VENIA VERBO! – HAS TO DO with our experience of political development and its social foundations. Needless to say, our experience influences the way in which we see such development. It is not arrogant to add that this was never more true than in the changing circumstances of Europe in the last half-century.

A personal note may be regarded as generational, social, national as well. Before my eighteenth birthday I experienced both 20 July 1944 and the forced merger of Social Democrats and Communists in East Germany in the spring of 1946. In both cases, my father was in opposition, though in very different kinds of opposition. In the first instance, opposition from outside; being an insider, a member of the Reichstag, was a distant memory, though one to be revived at any moment, if the coup d'état succeeded. In the second instance, opposition from inside; a clear sense, as Deputy Chairman of the East German Social Democrats, that a new totalitarianism was just around the corner, after the brief euphoria of 1945. In both cases, moral victory and practical defeat, prison, exile. Such experiences need no interpretation.

POLITICS WAS A CONCERN OF MINE SINCE I WAS SIX YEARS OLD. It did not start in the library. It began a decade before 1930 in the campaign meetings of my mother who was one of the first women Members of Parliament in the Czechoslovak Republic, for the Social Democratic Party in a Sudeten German workingclass constituency. By 1930 I was 18 years old and an active member of the youth organization of that party. In that year I saw Nazi parades in Berlin, prior to the Nazis’ first big success in the German elections of that year. Soon there were Nazi meetings – later thinly disguised as Henlein party meetings – in the Sudetenland and in Prague where I became a student at the German University and where my family and I belonged to the German minority. Problems of the labour movement, depression, unemployment, nationalism and Fascism were real events unrolling before my eyes.