THAT THERE IS ROOM FOR DOUBT TODAY ABOUT WHAT LIES ahead for the Communities nobody will deny. The Community has been in trouble for at least five years, and despite the succession of summits the trouble has not been fully disposed of. The enlargement negotiations are the demonstration - or one more demonstration - of the difficulty the Community is having in coming to terms with itself. And, worse, a further process of what I might call ‘institutional drift’ is making its operation yet more intergovernmental.

I should like first to review the position as it now stands and how it is likely to develop in the short term. I will then go on to try to establish what can be done to rectify, or even reverse, the present trends. For unless they do change in the months ahead the prospects for progress in the longer term will be in jeopardy.

EUROPE AT FIRST SIGHT SEEMS A WORD WITH A CLEAR MEANing; but a further look shows it to be most ambiguous.

The most obvious meaning is geographical: Europe is the north-west peninsula of the Asian land mass. But even this is not correct: there are three western peninsulas: Finland, Scandinavia and the main European. Usually the three are lumped together; but even at its narrowest point the sea which divides these is much wider than that which separates the Balkans from Anatolia - which is always reckoned to be Asia, and indeed one portion of which constituted the whole of Asia when that word was first used. I know this because I once swam across the Bosphorus, but would certainly never have tried the sound between Elsinore and Helsingborg.

IT IS NOT EASY TO EXPLAIN THE REASONS THAT LED TO THE appointment of Bettino Craxi as Prime Minister. First of all, there was certainly the political fatigue of the Christian Democratic Party which had held the premiership for 35 years. AIdo Moro, a great man and leader, had tried to mediate between the various currents within the party, as well as between the party and other allied parties (the Republicans, the Social Democrats, the Socialists). But what Moro really dreamt of was a possible alliance with the Communist Party to solve at least the most serious issues, such as terrorism and economic decline. He thought of repeating with the Communists the experience the DC had had in the early 1960s with the Socialists: widening the democratic area with the view of transforming the PCI into a social democratic trend. In order to obtain this he even considered letting the PCI take part in the majority at least if not in the government itself. His disappearance had serious repercussions, especially in the Christian Democratic Party where internal friction grew even stronger than in the past. This resulted in a great drop in the party's power and ability to manage the country politically even if, at least in part, it regained in the 1979 and 1983 elections the votes lost in the 1976 elections.

IT IS PERHAPS A SIGN OF THE GREATER MATURITY OF THE discipline of political science today that the ‘great debate’ of the immediate postwar period on the essential nature of the subject has now died down. The vast quantities of ink that were spilled (and not a little blood) did not result in a victory for either of the two great camps - the traditonalists or the behaviourists - but in a recognition, however reluctant, that the subject of the study of politics was too great, and too complex, to be approached only from this angle or that, but required the application of many different methods, and of many different kinds of minds, if progress was to be made towards the better understanding of the ways in which man provided for his own overnance. However, if the students of political thought, of constitutions and institutions, now work alongside the practitioners of ‘empirical’, and indeed of quantititive, techniques for the study of politics, it is in large part due to the efforts of Carl Friedrich, who saw the need to maintain the intellectual unity of a subject which, since the time of Aristotle, had progressed, as indeed all subjects can only progress, by the continual interaction between those who contemplate its theoretical underpinnings and those who are knowledgeable about the data by which, in the end, the theories must be tested. The normative dimension of the study of man and his political activities, is an additional complication, but it does not absolve the theorist from the need to relate his theory to perceived reality, nor the empiricist from the necessity of placing his observations within a context which alone will give them significance.

IN TOLSTOY'S STORY OF THE THREE HERMITS, A BISHOP (TRAvelling by ship) passes by chance the island on which they live and asks to be set ashore. He discovers that they know only the simple prayer: ‘Three in One, One in Three, Praise be His Name’. ‘It is not sufficient,’ he says, and teaches them the catechism. After some difficulty, they memorize the words, whereupon he returns to his ship. Later, in the moonlight, he sees the three old men running towards him across the waves. ‘My lord, my lord, we have forgotten’. ‘Go back,’ says the bishop, ‘go back: faith that enables you to walk on the water does not need any catechism’. Mr P. W. Botha has his tricameral constitution, three in one, one in three, but can he truly walk upon the water?

I ONCE PERSUADED MYSELF THAT I COULD DISTINGUISH AT least seven different meanings of the term ‘individualism’ but I shall mention here only two. The fust is individualism in contradistinction to spiritual and emotional identification with a group. The second is individualism in contradistinction to dependence on some individual other, or others, who are in some sense deemed superior. One of my themes today is the interaction between the two: between self-assertion vis-à-vis the group, and self-assertion vis-à-vis established authority, and what this tells us about the way industrial concerns can be or ought to be organized in modern societies.

‘MORALITY’, LENIN TOLD THE 529 APPRENTICE APPARATCHIKI gathered at the Third Congress of the Communist Youth League in October 1920, ‘is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building a new, a communist society… We do not believe in an eternal moralit and we expose the falseness of all fables about morality.’ Lenin's rapt young listeners learned the lesson well: for some it paved the way to high office in Stalin's party, state and police machines, across the corpses of Lenin's own comrades ‘objectively’ become ‘enemies of the people’; many were to perish as they lived by it. The goal was sublime: the ‘true‘ freedom and unity natural to Man, but thwarted till now by class division and exploitation. For such a goal all expedient instruments and methods were fitting. To spurn vile means where these advanced ‘communism’ was the true immorality.