THIS IS A SPECIAL ISSUE OF OUR JOURNAL AND IT IS THE outcome of a conference held at the Centre Européen de la Culture in Geneva. The Centre was founded in 1947 by Denis de Rougemont, the great Swiss writer, philosopher and European federalist, and directed by him until his death in 1985. Now it has been revived under the presidency of Professor Jacques Freymond, the best-known Swiss political scientist in the world of academia, and himself the author of many classic works on international politics. We want once more to thank the Centre, its present physically and intellectually indefatigable President and its expert staff.

THERE ARE SOME BOOKS THAT ARE BETTER KNOWN FOR their titles than their contents. Mine is one of them. Various critics, usually from the Left, pointed to the upsurge of radicalism in the 1960s as disproof of the book's thesis. Others saw the work as an ‘ideological’ defence of ‘technocratic’ thinking, or of the ‘status quo’. A few, even more ludicrously, believed that the book attacked the role of ideals in politics. It was none of these.

The frame of the book was set by its sub-title, On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. Yet the last section looked ahead. After observing young left-wing intellectuals express repeated yearnings for ideology, I said that new inspirations, new ideologies, and new identifications would come from the Third World.

TRIADS ARE IN FASHION. IN POLITICS AND MARKETS, Charles Lindblom distinguishes between three kinds of social relationships — the exchange relations characteristic of markets; the authority relations characteristic of states; and what he calls ‘preceptoral’ relations, the relations of teachers to pupils, of advertisers to consumers, of indoctrinators to the indoctrinated. In the epilogue to The Liberal Theory of Justice, Brian Barry proposes a different, but in some respects complementary, triad. There are, he suggests, three ‘models’ of social collaboration.

CAN THE SWISS CONFEDERATION BE IMITATED? THAT DEPENDS, says the historian, on what you mean by imitation. Switzerland has certainly served as a model for others, sometimes a model distinctly not to be imitated. When the American Founding Fathers gathered in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 to write a new constitution and ‘to form a more perfect Union’, they had Switzerland in mind. Alexander Hamilton, a chief actor in that enterprise, devoted part of an issue of The Federalist Papers, written the following year as a defence of what the framers had drafted, to a close analysis of the Swiss Confederation. Switzerland did not impress him:

He recognised that they were held together ‘by their joint interest’ but saw the confederacy as a poor guarantor of internal and external coherence. ‘Whatever efficacy the union may have had in ordinary cases, it appears that the moment a cause of difference sprang up capable of trying its strength it failed.’

EDMUND BURKE, REVIEWING IN 1790 THE EVENTS OF 102-101 years previously, saw no objection to penning and printing the following remarkable words: ‘The Revolution of 1688 was obtained by a just war, in the only case in which any war, and much more a civil war, can be just. Justa bella quibus necessaria’. He cannot have meant that the revolution was ‘obtained’, in the sense of ‘secured’, by the wars in Europe which followed from 1688 to 1697, for he speaks of ‘civil war’; nor is it likely that he intended his words to refer to the war in Ireland which ended with the Treaty of Limerick. Burke's Irish perspectives might indeed lead to his viewing this as a civil war rather than a war of conquest, but the context which surrounds the words quoted makes it clear that he is thinking of the ‘Revolution of 1688’ as an English political process and an English civil war. The ‘cashiering’ or dethroning of a king, he is instructing readers of Richard Price's sermon to the Revolution Society, is not a legal or a constitutional process, which can form one of the normal procedures of an established civil society.

THE STEADY EXPANSION OF THE FUNCTIONS OF GOVERNMENT and its increasingly interventionist role in the economy has for much of the twentieth century seemed an inexorable and irreversible trend. The jurist, Dicey, already saw it as such at the beginning of the century. In a famous series of lectures, he traced the retreat of Benthamite individualist liberalism in the face of what he called ‘collectivism’. The common theme in all the developments he considered — the protection given to trade unions on the one hand, compulsory education and municipal trading on the other — was their limitation of the freedom of contract, the limitation of — the buzz-word of British politics in the late 1980s — ‘choice’.

SINCE GORBACHEV'S COMING TO POWER THE RELATIONSHIP between economics and politics in the Soviet Union has been changing rapidly. But even from the outset one could see that there would be limits to change. The primacy of politics which characterizes the relationship between economics and politics under the conditions of socialism in power will be fully maintained in the future, too. All proposals for more decentralization meet with obstacles when they seem to call into question the leading role of the party. The party is only advised to observe a kind of ‘economic restraint’: it should stop mingling every aspect of public administration with the economy. The idea is to free the party from its responsibility for detail in order to allow it to concentrate more on its central political tasks. In this respect socialism has problems similar to those which Western governments face in the welfare state. After the end of the hegemony of social democracy it is, above all, the conservative parties in Western Europe who are ready to reduce the responsibility of the governments of the day for many economic and social tasks: this is why we find deregulation efforts, privatization of public enterprises and the transfer of political functions to non-state social organizations everywhere.

THE 1986 ELECTION WAS THE BEGINNING OF ‘COHABITATION’ and 1988 was the end of it — at least of the Fifth Republic's first experience of it. Cohabitation between the President and a Prime Minister who was his chief political adversary was to be the last great test of the stability and adaptability of the Fifth Republic's political institutions. It had been the dominant theme in 1986 just as the fearsome prospect of cohabitation between left-wing parliamentary majorities and previous presidents had been to the forefront in the parliamentary elections of 1978 and even 1973. It was as the President of cohabitation that FranGois Mitterrand won his extraordinary 1988 victory. The survival of presidential legitimacy against the onslaught of prime ministerial power is what the 1988 presidential election will be remembered for. This is the principal theme of this article.

AS THE GREAT HISTORIAN LOUIS HARTZ TAUGHT US IN HIS remarkable study The Liberal Tradition in America, anyone wishing to focus on the special character of a regime would do well to begin by taking the measure of what is absent rather than what is present. Like America, Switzerland has long been regarded as an exception to many of the conventional rules of historical and democratic development — Sonderfall Schweiz is how the Swiss portray and perhaps boast a little about their national exceptionalism. Switzerland possesses a unique form of democratic government the hallmarks of which are participatory democracy, neutrality and radical federalism (decentrahsm or localism, what the Swiss sometimes call Kantönligeist). These hallmarks give to it a character which stands in stark contrast to traditional Anglo-American democracy. The student of comparative politics will observe at once that a great many of Switzerland's leading political features seem to have no analogue in either the English common law or the American Constitution. Swiss democracy is English democracy minus most of English democracy's salient features: which is to say, it is scarcely English democracy at all.

The powerful idea of natural rights as the armour of the individual against illegitimate authority (originally against the illegitimacy of absolute monarchy, later against the hyper-legitimacy of majoritarian tyranny) is largely missing, for example. Missing too is the tradition of an independent judiciary devoted to the protection of wholly private rights against an alien, power-mongering state. When Alexis de Tocqueville, whose liberal premises suited America so well, went looking in the Alps for something like the English liberties, he went astray. Not finding English liberties, he quite misunderstood Switzerland's regime.

AT THE END OF HIS REVIEW OF LABOUR MARKET RIGIDITIES in advanced capitalist societies, Ronald Dore presents us with the classical and highly uncomfortable dilemma between equity and efficiency. There are two kinds of rigidities, he suggests: those that improve economic performance while giving rise to social inequality and societal dualism, and those that promote equity while detracting from efficiency. Unlike neo-classical economics, Dore recognises that to be efficient, advanced production systems require institutions above and beyond the market — such as long-term employment, internal labour markets, and ‘sticky’ mechanisms of wage determination. But these institutions, he insists, are not, or no longer, defensible in terms of the Marshallian tradition of industrial and social citizenship. Social justice and equality, according to Dore, are vested today in a second type of ‘ridigities’ — the redistributive apparatus of the welfare state — which, unlike the first, extracts an ‘efficiency price’ from the economy.

The French presidential election will be held after the publication of this issue. Our summer issue will contain an analysis in depth of the results and the foreseeable consequences. But our readers will find here two contrasting interpretations of the significance of the Mitterrand presidency of 1981–88, the first in the history of the French Fifth Republic which produced an exercise in ‘cohabitation’.

IT IS NOT SO EASY TO DETECT THE SPECIFIC FEATURES OF THE Helvetian model in the Switzerland of today. They should rather be sought in what has made Switzerland what it is in seven centuries of the association of different communities, often disunited, fiercely determined to maintain their own sovereignty and independence. Switzerland was born from the conviction that only a system of collective security would in the long term assure to each community the liberty to which all aspired. It was a double liberty: that which was threatened by external aggression, and that which had to be preserved against interference from those which one was committed to succour. For, in binding themselves, from the second half of the thirteenth century, by successive treaties of alliance, the first confederated cantons in no way surrendered their own liberties.

The system of collective security thus set up in the thirteenth century was the cornerstone on which Switzerland was built, its spinal column. The engagements formed in the pact of 1291 were set out in a few lines, and are still valid seven centuries later. They have certainly enabled the Confederation to stand up to external danger almost until the end of the Ancien Régime in 1798. It is these secular experiences in matters of collective security which have inspired and, after many changes, fashioned modern Swiss security policy.

‘SEEK, AND YE SHALL FIND’. YET IT IS NOT IMMEDIATELY obvious that the last decade has seen a remarkable revival of a specifically English tradition of democratic socialist thought. Most political writing in England, of course, has a bad press. I use ‘political writing’ in an obvious but also a special sense. By ‘political writing’ I mean serious writing about politics which is neither academic nor purely polemical. Sometimes it may be by academics, but then not academics writing for academics in a manner only comprehensible to academics; rather those books or articles which are written for a general public who take a serious interest in politics, whether directly or indirectly involved — say ‘literate citizens’.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY ORIGINALLY FOUND THEIR more immediate inspiration in an evolutionary or Jacob's Ladder vision of human societies, the idea of Progress. Social forms were seen as located along some great Chain of Being, which eventually leads to this-worldly salvation by this-worldly means. But there the resemblance ends. Sociology was rooted in a primarily historical evolutionism, in the perception, by the generation of Condorcet and Hegel, that human history is a story of cumulative change, and in the hope that the pattern of this change was the key to the meaning of life. History was to reveal the inner potential and destiny of human society. By contrast, the evolutionism which somewhat later, around the middle of the nineteenth century, gave birth to anthropology, was markedly biological, and came to be much influenced by Darwin.

IN THE EARY 1970s, AT THE HEIGHT OF BRAZIL'S ‘ECONOMIC miracle’, the possibility was mooted by some within the regime of an evolution towards a stable authoritarian system based upon a permanent ruling party capable of governing by consent. The most immediate model in the Latin American context was the ruling Mexican Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutionalized Revolutionary Party); hence the term ‘Mexicanization’ to express this concept. However, objective assessments of the prospects were somewhat sceptical. In 1974 President Geisel launched a process of ‘liberalization’, hoping to gain enough popular support through the ruling party, ARENA, to allow a measured relaxation of the repressive controls established after 1964. The process of change thus inaugurated led in little over a decade to the collapse of the regime, and the installation of a civilian, José Sarney, as president in March 1985. As I shall argue below, every move the regime made in its attempt to build a majority party backfired, and, ironically, it was the opposition MDB, whose development was blocked and harassed at every turn, which came nearest to emulating the PRI as a genuinely popular party with cross-class support, a broad national base, and a fund of legitimacy, deriving from its opposition role.

THE POLITICAL CRISIS WHICH ERUPTED IN POLAND IN 1980 WAS widely attributed to the economic problems which beset the country then and subsequently. Economic conditions undoubtedly contributed to the crisis — but survey evidence suggests that gradual cultural changes were a less obvious but at least equally important factor. Historically, the Polish people have characteristically placed relatively great emphasis on self-determination and political freedoms. This traditional heritage has not grown weaker in recent years. Quite the contrary, it seems to have been reinforced by a gradual shift toward postmaterialist values among the Polish public.

An intergenerational shift from materialist toward postmaterialist priorities, already shown to be taking place in more than a score of Western countries, also seems to be occurring in Poland.

THE AIM OF THIS ARTICLE ON MITTERRAND IS NEITHER TO ‘bury’ him nor to praise him, but rather to assess the impact of his presidency on French politics and French socialism. Any such assessment is inevitably a partial and interim report. The full impact of several socialist reforms (notably those concerning decentralization and workers' rights) might only become apparent after several years of implementation. But in January 1988 Mitterrand is still in the Elyste Palace. Despite his loss of a parliamentary majority in the 1986 elections and his subsequent ‘cohabitation’ with Chirac's RPR-UDF government, Mitterrand has won back, since 1986, considerable popularity and respect.

‘FEDERALISM’, CLAIMED THE SWISS PHILOSOPHER, DENIS DE Rougemont, ‘rests upon the love of complexity, by contrast with the brutal simplicity which characterises the totalitarian spirit’. It would be hard to deny that complexity is the most striking feature of federal government in Switzerland. To comprehend it fully, one would have to analyse the history, politics and atmosphere of each of the twenty-six cantons, for each is a political system in itself; and there is no such animal as a ‘typical’ canton. Political scientists have studied one or two cantons in some depth, and there are also impressionistic accounts of cantonal life, but there is no really satisfactory comparative analysis of the cantons as a whole. Further, many Swiss cantons are ‘closed' societies, difficult for the foreigner to penetrate and not easily accessible to the academic inquirer. The political scientist needs to acquire the skills of the anthropologist in addition to those of the analyst of political institutions if he is to make headway. It is difficult, therefore, to give anything more than a very general impression of the principles lying behind federal government in Switzerland, an impression which is bound to be, to some degree at least, misleading. For of no country more than Switzerland is it more correct to say that the truth lies in the minute particulars and not in generalities.

The complexity of Swiss federalism is a consequence of the fact that the Swiss have embraced more completely than any other democracy that essential principle, the leitmotiv, of federalism — the sharing of power. Switzerland is indeed an extreme example of federalism, just as it is an extreme example of the application of the principles of democracy and of neutrality in foreign affairs.