Every schoolboy knows that ‘England does not love Coalitions’; yet the briefest acquaintance with the history of British politics in the present century would reveal that Britain has been governed by self-styled coalitions for more than a third of the period, although the ministries which can be regarded as coalitions for the purposes of this essay cover a much shorter span: the Asquith coalition (May 1915-December 1916); the Lloyd George coalitions of December 1916-December 1918, and December 1918-October 1922; the MacDonald national government (August 1931-September 1932), and the Churchill coalition (May 1940-May 1945). It is also the case that, on the fifteen occasions since 1943 when Gallup Polls have questioned the electorate about their views on coalition government, the proportion of those regarding such ministries as desirable has never fallen below 22 per cent. If these magnitudes are not evidence of love, at least it is clear that the electorate is on some occasions prepared to engage in mild flirtation, and their politicians in not too-infrequent marriages of convenience.

‘When the market is buying, sell, and when the market is selling, buy.’ This Stock Exchange maxim might be equally productive applied to academic fashions; and that it has been fashionable to extol the ‘single or single-dominant party system’ in Africa is undeniable.

One way of questioning this fashion – and a fruitful one – is to examine the very concept of a ‘single or single-dominant party’. Its very clumsiness discloses the difficulties of conceptualization, when states in which only one party is legal are classed together with others where one party has succeeded in winning an overwhelming preponderance of seats, or where states whose governments have seized every chance to harass opposition elements are lumped together with others where little or no such pressure has been applied. Not only that. The word ‘party’ itself requires further definition. In what sense was the (now defunct) PDD of Dahomey a ‘party’? Or the FLN of Algeria? The party in Mali or in Guinea is quite clearly a very different animal from the party in Malawi. And so is the style of politics.

Even before the end of the first world war, during the inter-war years and right up to the outbreak of the second world war, a vein of political thought ran through Europe, which condemned national sovereignties and set up against them the idea of a European federation.

In reality, the federalist trend of thought in the inter-war years remained marginal to the main political currents, and partook more of the nature of prophecy than of politics. In the 1920s and 1930s politics in Europe were both tense and varied, culminating in the emergence of many political-ideological tyrannies. But in spite of the violent divergences over political problems in those years, politics itself, of the right and of the left, of moderates and radicals, of conservatives and revolutionaries, was based on the profound experience which the peoples had lived through during the first world war, namely of the solidity of the nation state. This experience led to the conviction that only on this rock could anything be built.

When Walter Bagehot first published his English Constitution in 1865, it was already possible to regard ‘Her Majesty’s Opposition’ as an established part of the constitution. Indeed, Bagehot regarded it as an essential concomitant of cabinet government, and remarked that a ‘critical opposition is the consequence of cabinet government’. Already the folklore of politics was full of apposite quotations from statesmen of the old school about the virtues of an opposition, although perhaps only Disraeli and Derby were prepared to accept the doctrine, attributed to George Tierney (1761-1830) that ‘the duty of an Opposition was very simple – it was to oppose everything and propose nothing’.

Just as the revolution of 1848 was preceded by a ‘campaign of banquets’, so, a hundred years later, the European revolution was announced by a ‘campaign of congresses’ spread over the years 1947–1949. These congresses expressed the state of mind, and stimulated the major trends, of a heterogenous and many-sided movement – a movement curiously inefficient in its tactics, and direct in its strategy, but to which the Council of Europe owes its existence, and because of which the Community of the Six has been able to take shape and to win the acceptance of public opinion, and hence of the parliaments and governments responsible to public opinion in those days.

It will soon be forty years since Lenin decided, to ‘put the lid on opposition’, as he expressed it himself at the dramatic Tenth Congress of his party in March 1921. Much has happened since then, both in the Soviet Union and in the countries which have by imitation adopted the same pattern of one-party government. It is therefore worth reflecting on the reasons which led Lenin to adopt this drastic policy; and to pause to enquire into the results which have flowed from his action—whether he intended them or not.

The bolsheviks took power in 1917 without having (as on so many other vital questions) formulated any precise theory about their future policy towards those who disagreed with them. There was a general acceptance of the need to deal sternly with ‘enemies’ – indeed no revolutionary government could hope to survive for long if it did not do something of the kind.

In the debate on the Native Authority (Amendment) Law of 1955, the late Premier of the North, Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto, replying to the demand that ‘it is high time in the development of local government systems in this Region that obsolete and undemocratic ways of appointing Emirs’ Councils should close’, commented that ‘the right traditions that we have gone away from are the cutting off of the hands of thieves, and that has caused a lot of thieving in this country. Why should we not be cutting (off) the hands of thieves in order to reduce thieving? That is logical and it is lawful in our tradition and custom here.’ This could be read as a defence against social change, a recrudescence of ‘barbarism’ after the inroads of pax Britannica, and a plea for the retention of the status quo and the entrenched privilege of the political elite.

There is no need, perhaps, to repeat that as in other European countries, and especially France, but not in Great Britain and the United States, the most characteristic feature of Italy’s contemporary political life is the fact that within its liberal-democratic political system the main opposition is carried on by a party or parties which deny in principle the structure and purposes of the liberal-democratic state, and the values of electoral representation and its institutions. The interchange between government and opposition in countries like Great Britain and the United States is centred around the agreement between the parties to play fair and to acknowledge the rules of the parliamentary process as the permanent basis of the country’s political life. But the communist parties, and in the countries where they still exist the fascist or neo-fascist parties, reject these principles and proclaim that when they come to power they will replace them by forms of ‘direct’ or ‘all people’s’ democracies. This ideological argument about the respective merits of the purely political or parliamentary and the social-economic centralized forms of democracy is at the core of the doctrinal discussion between the communists and the neo-fascist parties, and the other Italian parties.

The elections which were held on 23 May 1965 will doubtless prove to be a watershed in Belgian politics, as were those of 14 October 1894, in which universal suffrage, tempered by the use of the plural vote, was first put into practice, and those of 16 November 1919 in which universal suffrage, with the exception of most women, was first fully introduced.

The institutional process is essentially an outcome and a reflection of political action. It is therefore understandable that political institutions have always interested not only political thinkers and politicians, but also those nations and groups which are struggling to set up, reorganize or abolish any given political institutions.

Their importance lies, too, in the fact that they reflect fundamental political aspirations and relationships. They are more or less the true image of a political system and of the structure of a society at a given epoch. But when seen in a more general perspective, institutions are merely the framework of power, The complexity of and problems inherent in society, its permanent need for further material, cultural and political development have led to an expansion of the institutional structure of political society. This expansion is brought about by political organizations, especially by political parties, as well as by other organizations, such as trade unions, citizens’ associations, pressure groups, etc.

The future historian of European integration is likely to suffer from a surplus of documentation and a shortage of facts. If a certain kind of ignorance, as Lytton Strachey once remarked, is essential to the writing of intelligible history, it has little hope of survival amid the vast accumulation of newspaper cuttings, official statistics, policy speeches, annual reports and statesmen's memoirs with which the present-day scholar must contend. One expert has calculated that ‘the volume of official documents produced by the United Kingdom Government and its agencies during the six war years 1939–45 equalled, in cubic content, the volume of all previous archives of the United Kingdom and of its constituent kingdoms England and Scotland that had survived down to the date of the outbreak of war.’

On 15 January 1966, a crisis-bound Nigerian government was overthrown by a swift military coup d'état. The Prime Minister of the Federal Republic and his powerful associate, the Federal Minister of Finance, were seized by soldiers in Lagos. Neither survived, although the death of the Prime Minister, who was not personally unpopular, may not have been premeditated. His political chief, the premier of the vast Northern Region, was killed in Kaduna, and the latter's ally, the premier of the Western Region, died violently in Ibadan. Their major opponents among Nigerian office holders, namely the President of the Republic and the premiers of the Eastern and Midwestern Regions, escaped death. The President was on leave outside the country; it is not clear whether the two surviving premiers were spared by design or mistake. In any case, the tendency in Nigerian politics with which the survivors had been identified did appear to have triumphed despite their personal losses of power.

In 1965 and 1966 Africa and India shared once again the adversity of widespread famine in their respective areas. A Commonwealth initiative by Britain, Canada, and Australia – designed to cope with aspects of the famine problem – was announced early in January 1966. And the United States launched a programme of food aid for the areas. Such rescue operations were crucial under the pressure of an emergency. What persisted after the worst was over was the basic vulnerability of such areas as India and Africa to the whims of their climates.

The Common Market as an issue in domestic British politics under the Macmillan government – and distinct from the negotiations, as such, with the European Economic Community – can be considered under three broad heads. First, there is the question how the decision to seek entry for Britain was taken. How far was it a political decision; how far was it motivated by the views of civil servants; how far was it prompted by interest groups in industry and finance ? Secondly, how did the Conservative Party become converted to the idea of British membership of the European Economic Community and how significant was the opposition to the idea that developed in the party ? The third question is what effect, if any, did domestic political opposition to the Common Market have on the French President's eventual veto of the project ?

Except by implication, the third question is excluded from consideration here. Only a close student of French domestic politics is competent to evaluate how far, if at all, the hostility to the European idea in a section of the Conservative Party and the official objections of the Labour Party to British membership of EEC on any terms that then seemed negotiable, made it easier for the French President to impose his final veto. Conceivably, the possibility that a successor labour government might disown any treaty that the conservatives had signed may have played a marginal part in assisting the President's attitude in the final stages.

How simple the Ghana picture now seems! First, the opposition of nationalist demands to colonial rule; later, the opposition of local movements to the national government, then the internal opposition of sectional groups within the single party until the military intervened to turn everything awry. The story has a familiar ring to it. Anti-colonialism, one can argue, was mistaken for nationalism; but as soon as it became clear that the British were preparing to withdraw, politics became a destructive conflict between the would-be nationalist movement and tribal interests. In terms of this argument the overthrow of the Nkrumah regime has to be seen as simply one more example of the weakness of the structure of control in the newly independent states. Frailty, thy name is African nationalism ! The African colonies became self-governing before it was clear that a single ‘self’ existed; they are states before they are nations, and lack that ‘self-aware unity’ which is needed as the basis for a stable political system. Ghanaian history under Nkrumah (one concludes) is the history of every African ex-colony, the only difference being that the rise and fall of first the opposition and then the Convention People's Party in Accra occurred a little earlier in time than comparable events in other capitals.

It was Mencius who taught that the people are justified in rebelling against a decadent dynasty. Since the Chou dynasty replaced the Shang at the dawn of China's history, successful rebellion has been the proof that the dynasty was decadent and the rebels not rebels but the new possessors of T'ien Ming, Heaven's mandate. For ‘Heaven sees as the people see and hears as they hear’.