THE NON-ELECTORAL COMPROMISE ACHIEVED IN MARCH 1978 IN Italy, and the French elections of the same month will be followed in the course of next year - coinciding with four issues of our journal - by the British general elections, the Italian presidential election and, in June 1979, by the first elections to the European Parliament. These five major European political events will no doubt be accompanied by many other unforeseeable developments. All of them will be pored over by political scientists, experts in the politics of France, Britain or Italy, and in the politics of European integration. Analysis of the facts and of their respective historical or sociological backgrounds will underscore the national significance of these events - as for instance the article by J. R. Frears on the French elections which appears in the present issue. But in the next four issues, leading up to our special issue of October 1979, which will be devoted to the direct elections to the European Parliament itself, we shall concentrate on the more profound and less obvious trends and prospects of Western Europe as a whole, for the study of which the European Parliament will eventually provide a new vantage point.

THERE IS NO OTHER WEST EUROPEAN DEMOCRACY AS HIGHLY SUSPECT throughout the world so far as the extent of its tolerance towards deviant marginal groups is concerned. This is one of the reasons why West Germany is a good case for testing certain propositions about the theory of pluralism in general. In political science terminology pluralism has mostly been used in the restricted way of a certain stage of public philosophy, i.e. in the sense of ‘interest group liberalism’ propagating and perpetuating the faith that a system built primarily upon group bargaining must be perfectly selfcorrective and must have confidence in the balancing impacts of ‘overlapping memberships’ and contervailing powers. The ‘bias of pluralism’ in political science2 included a restriction of the notion ‘pluralism’ to interest groups. It was the highly disputable attempt to sum up all the forms of emancipation movements and their counterforces in the concept of ‘group’, thus equalizing them, and to line up all the cleavage lines which developed at different times of modern history (movements for religious autonomy, nationalism, conflicts between cities and countryside, class struggles etc.) and which had some impact on the formation of party systems, to compete in one arena.

ELECTIONS FOR A CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY ARE SCHEDULED TO TAKE place in Peru in 1978. In view of this event and of the changes which it might bring about, it would be useful to examine the tenyear record of the military revolutionary government in that country.

If the road to hell truly is paved with good intentions, it is of little solace to those who must walk it. So it is that after nearly a decade of revolution in Peru we can no longer concern ourselves with ferreting out the motives of the military officers who have led it, but must turn instead to an assessment of the damage that has been done. Peru's Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces has attracted considerable attention and even admiration within and without Latin America since its inception through a bloodless coup on 3 October 1968. In subsequent years the military junta, in which the Army dominates over the Air Force and Navy, has passed through three perceptible stages. The first corresponded to the presidency of General Juan Velasco Alvarado, architect of the coup and leader of the revolution until he was ousted in August 1975. His tenure, now referred to officially as the ‘First Phase’ of the revolution, was responsible for dramatic and far-reaching reforms which eventually over-taxed the financial and political resources of his government and forced him from office. The so-called ‘Second Phase’ of the revolution began with Velasco's replacement by his more conservative Prime Minister, General Francisco Morales Bermddez. Attention turned to consolidating the gains of the revolution during this period but the inability of the government to shore up the economy and rationalize the programmes of the Velasco era resulted in the imposition ofa severe austerity programme in July 1976. Violent political upheavals within the popular classes in July, and the backlash of the conservative factions within the military, caused a purge of most of the remaining liberal officers in the government. It is fair to speak of a ‘Third Phase’ of the revolution since the latter part of 1976 in which President Morales has been pressured into systematically dismantling many of the popular reforms of the Velasco era. Official announcements in 1977 clarified the military's intention to withdraw from direct management of the state over the next two to three years. Thus, it is appropriate now to begin assessment of the Institutional Revolution of the Armed Forces and its legacy for Peru.

IT WAS ONE OF THE MAJOR ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE WEST TO SECURE the inclusion of the issue of human rights within the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) and its Final Act. Among the Principles contained in the latter which purport to guide relations between the participating states, Principle VII refers to respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief. Basket III of the Final Act contains an extensive number of detailed practical measures allowing for the freer movement of peoples, information and ideas. These results were achieved only after protracted negotiations in drawing up of a mutually acceptable package of measures covering the whole range of issues involved in detente: the military and the economic as well as the humanitarian. The practical manner in which the Final Act brought these aspects of detente together provides a solid basis from which to assess implementation by the participating states and therefore their commitment to continuing the process of detente.

WHEN A SLEEPER AWAKES FROM A BAD DREAM HE FINDS THE BEDCLOTHES a little rumpled but nothing else changed. The dream itself quickly fades. However the recurring dream is a phenomenon well-known to psychology. The French electorate of the Fifth Republic goes in for the insubstantial dream as an important form of experience. The most famous example was the ‘Events of May 1968’. Like a sleepwalker the whole country acted out the myth of revolution with all its romantic folklore. Comfortable, even wealthy, people manned the strike committees at their children's schools. However nobody turned the power or the water off and nobody did any shooting. People only began to get killed when petrol distribution was resumed for the Whitsun holiday weekend and there were 120 deaths in road accidents. Nonetheless the government tottered and the world trembled. No one noticed that in an affluent industrial democracy with a standard of living among the highest in the world the kind of discontent that leads to violent cataclysm did not exist.

NO OTHER MIDDLE EASTERN COUNTRY COULD MATCH THE TURBULENT post-independence history that Syria has experienced. Gaining its independence from France in April 1946, Syria moved uncertainly through the bewildering web of inter-Arab politics until the first military coup in March 1949 propelled it towards the long period of instability that was to follow. Indeed, the coup of November 1970, popularly known as the ‘Corrective Movement’, which installed the Asad regime in power constituted the twenty-first change of government in the twenty-four years of the country's independence. This persistent political turmoil, particularly during the fifties and sixties, contrasts sharply with the stability that Syria enjoyed in the first eight years of this decade.

WHAT KINDS OF RATIONALE ARE NECESSARY OR APPROPRIATE FOR explanation in comparative politics? A rationale is essential for explanation, underlying any attempt to construct a theory, since it is the only means by which one can indicate why the event to be explained should follow from the precedent events held to explain it - something which a simple succession of events in itself, no matter how regular, can supply. In this article, I shall outline an answer to this question, and then indicate a framework of investigation inside which the basic requirements of political explanation can be met, and at the same time made relevant to strategies for research. There are, I suggest, only three rationales from which explanatory statements need to be derived, and these can be combined with one another in ways which are easily enough put into practice, but which also have important implications for the kinds of explanation which it is possible to achieve. I hope to come out, therefore, with a general framework into which any valid explanation can be put, and to suggest that by putting our explanations into such a framework, we will be better able to compare them with one another, and thus to ‘cumulate’ our ability to understand political phenomena drawn from different areas. I do not pretend to overcome the well-known problems in the way of a ‘science of politics’, and will indeed argue that within the pattern of explanation which I suggest such problems are insoluble.