AT THE TIME OF INDEPENDENCE FIFTY YEARS AGO MAHATAMA Gandhi suggested that the Indian National Congress, which he successfully led to independence, should be disbanded. As its function was to produce a coalition which could achieve independence from British rule, its historical role was over. This was an entirely logical, yet an entirely unpractical suggestion. Politicians active inside the Congress wished, not unnaturally, to turn their sacrifices into potential investments in an independent state. Independence was accompanied by partition of the country which degenerated into riots and massacre of civilians. There was no other political organization except the Congress to establish effective government. In any case, Congress was too successful a political organization to be dissolved purely by the power of argument. The Congress, therefore, turned from an independence movement into a governing party, a difficult transformation under all circumstances, and flourished. The historical significance of the recent general elections in India, the eleventh after independence, seems to be the actual realization of Gandhi's suggestion. India must now find a political structure which can function without the overwhelming presence of the Congress, a party universally reviled but, ironically, treated as indispensable.

‘ONE OF THE PECULIARITIES OF THE SUBJECT OF OPPOSITION IS THAT, although the problem of opposition is one of the oldest, very few works have ever dealt with it specifically and exclusively.’ These introductory remarks to their 1968 volume by Ghiţa Ionescu and Isabel de Madariaga still hold remarkably true, despite a number of subsequent works and collections devoted to the subject. Their explanation was that although opposition is the altera pars of government it is a concept which is necessarily relative to that of power upon which political action centres and around which political science moulds itself.

‘EVERY ELECTION GENERATES ITS OWN MYTHS, MYTHS ABOUT WHAT the politicians were saying, about what the electorate thought they were saying, and about what the electorate meant by its votes.’ Butler's and Kavanagh's comment on the 1979 election applies with even more force to the outcome in 1997. For when an opposition party secures an unexpectedly large victory, there is a seemingly insatiable demand for explanations which stress the positive appeal of the winners — and a corresponding tendency to understate the significance of disenchantment with the outgoing administration. Such myths become entrenched when, as in 1979 certainly and in 1997 probably, the election does turn out to represent a political turning-point. This article therefore applies a degree of deconstruction to the 1997 election. In the afterglow of Labour's famous victory, it is as well to remember that the campaign was rather humdrum. The outcome was predictable, the lengthy campaign had little impact on Labour's lead and turnout fell significantly. Even if the election does transpire to have initiated major change, there is precious little evidence to suggest that in 1997 (any more than in 1979) a large body of electors was voting with that end in mind. What voters intend, and what elections achieve, are two different things. If there is a lesson to be drawn from the 1997 election, it seems to be rather limited and obvious. When governments are divided and directionless, the pendulum swings.

ALTHOUGH THE CLASSICAL WORK ON POLITICAL OPPOSITION IN Western Democracies, edited by Robert Dahl, was published decades ago, in 1966, the analysis of the characteristics of opposition, in democracies or elsewhere, has advanced rather less than other aspects of comparative politics. The word ‘opposition’ is used daily to account for a variety of developments; but its many meanings have not been systematically related to the differences among the political systems of the world. A number of comparative studies did appear after the 1966 seminal work, admittedly, including one by Dahl himself in 1973, as well as those by Ionescu and Madariaga in 1968, by Schapiro in 1972, by Tokes in 1979, by Kolinsky in 1988 and by Rodan in 1996; these volumes explore aspects of the concept which could not have been even referred to in the original study, since that study was confined to Western democracies and to the part played by political parties in the context of opposition. Yet the problem has still not been tackled truly comprehensively, as, with the exception of the 1973 Dahl volume, the works on the subject are comparative only in the sense that they deal with more than one country; but their scope remains limited to a region or to a particular type of political system. Meanwhile, many country analyses examine the nature of political opposition in each particular case, but the information which they provide has to be brought within a common framework before we can hope to obtain a general picture of the characteristics of opposition across the world.

THE NEW EDITOR HAS ASKED ME ‘TO WRITE THE KEY ARTICLE ON THE foundation and achievements of Government and Opposition itself’, others to write on aspects of Ghiţa Ionescu's life and work, just as John Pinder has already written such an excellent comprehensive account. I said that that was too tall an order, to sit down and read again, or look over, thirty-one years of it and all those associated books and pamphlets. But Geraint Parry twisted my arm, much as Ionescu used to do, most flatteringly, telling me that ‘the Board felt unanimously that you would be the ideal [sic] person since you were one of the journal's founders’. Even so, all I said I could do would be an essay, mostly from memory, an essai to catch the motives, atmosphere and context of that time, half a life-time ago at the height of the cold war. And as an erstwhile biographer, I know the unreliability of memory.

ON TUESDAY, 5 NOVEMBER 1996 BILL CLINTON WAS REelected President of the United States by a comfortable margin. In addition, the Republicans retained control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Although these results were generally unsurprising, the election was an important one for students of American electoral behaviour. In particular, the results were widely expected to cast new light on two distinctive strands of thought in the literature: claims that we are in the midst of a realignment of the electorate towards the Republicans; and claims that American voters now consciously choose divided government so as to limit the scope of government and avoid the extremes in both parties. The second part of this article will address these questions and will discuss their implications for President Clinton's second term. First, however, it will be useful to examine the results in more detail.

OWING TO THE GROWTH OF THE GREEN MOVEMENT IN THE 1980S MANY feel that Britain has experienced a cultural revolution on environmental issues. According to conventional wisdom, public opinion has come to reflect a deep-rooted and widespread sense of environmental awareness, with long-term consequences for British politics. Yearley suggests that there has been a significant ‘greening’ of British public opinion in recent years.’ In a series of articles reviewing attitudes towards environmental values, Young concludes that evidence for a culture shift ‘is almost beyond dispute’. Environmentalists commonly make three distinct claims, namely: there has been a growth of public concern about environmental issues; as a result public support for green policies and ideas has increased; in turn this has led to greater environmental activism, including support for the Green Party, involvement in environmental groups and green consumerism.

ONE OF THE MORE INTERESTING ASPECTS OF THE 1996 US presidential election was the evident inverse relationship between the results that year and those of the election contested exactly one hundred years earlier. Most of the states won by Bill Clinton were carried by the Republican William McKinley in 1896, while nearly all the states won by Bob Dole were those carried by William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic candidate. In 1896 there were 45 states, and of them 28 were won by the Democrats and 17 by the Republicans in the 1996 presidential election. Twenty-one of the 28 Democratic states in 1996 (or 75 per cent of the total) had been Republican a hundred years earlier; 15 of the 17 Republican states in 1996 (or 88 per cent of the total) went for the Democrats in 1896. This impression of the two election years being mirror images of each other, at least so far as the pattern of presidential results is concerned, is even more evident when looking at the distribution of Electoral College (EC) votes. (The five states created since 1896 are omitted from the entire discussion.) Of the 358 EC votes the 282 that went to the Democrats were from ‘McKinley states’, and they constitute 78 per cent of the Democrat total. In the case of the Republicans, 133 out of 148 EC votes were from ‘Bryanite states’ - that is 90 per cent of the 1996 Republican EC vote.

WE TAKE IT FOR GRANTED THAT THE SURVIVAL OF THE STATE DEPENDS on democratic consent. With the demise of Marxism and fascism, Diamond suggests that, apart from Islamic fundamentalism, democracy is the only model with ideological legitimacy. And Fukuyama asserts that ‘the democratic transitions of the past generation could not have occurred had not populations around the world finally become conscious of the fact that liberal democracy alone provides the possibility of fully rational recognition of human dignity’.

BY 1997 THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY HAD BEEN IN POWER FOR EIGHTEEN years, the longest period of uninterrupted rule by a single party this century. To many it looked as if the alternation of two parties in government had stopped. And if that really had been the case, it would have meant that the British conception of opposition as the institutionalization within the workings of everyday politics of a standing alternative to the government of the day had broken down or been abandoned. But this is not what happened. The official opposition, the Labour Party, had re-established itself as a viable alternative government and was then able to gain not just an effective, but an overwhelming majority in Parliament in the general election of 1 May 1997. This outcome testified to more than the triumph of one party over another, marking the revival of the victor and the exhaustion of the loser: it also reasserted a crucial element in the constitutional practices of modern Britain.

THE ELECTIONS IN ROMANIA IN NOVEMBER 1996 WERE A TURNINGpoint in the political life of the country. They resulted in the victory of the Democratic Convention (DCR) and its presidential candidate, Emil Constantinescu, over the party dominated by reformedcommunists (the Party of Social Democracy of Romania, PSDR) and its candidate, the former president, Ion Iliescu.

Professor Ghiţa Ionescu would have rejoiced in this long-awaited victory for the DCR. During his visit to Romania in 1993 he met many leading figures of the Democratic Convention, including Mr Constantinescu himself who, as Rector of the University of Bucharest, conferred upon him the doctorate honoris causa. He was also pleased to discover that one of his major books, Communism in Romania, had already been translated into Romanian (in 1992). Professor Ionescu was warmly welcomed and was particularly impressed by the enthusiasm of the young people, some of them academics, who were very actively engaged in the political struggle against the Iliescu regime.

GHIŢA IONESCU'S HOMELAND IS ONE OF THE MOST TROUBLED NATIONS in Europe. Its wounded national feeling has produced the strangest ideological combinations, mixing freely a fascist past with nostalgia for Ceausescu, as is the case with the Vatra Romaneasca (Romanian Homeland) movement, or the editors of the influential journal Romania Mare, adept at denouncing the ‘international Judaeo- Zionist-capitalist’ plot. One of the main theoreticians of corporatism, as is well known, was Mihail Manoilescu, while another Romanian intellectual, Ilie Badescu, created the ‘protocronist’ school of sociology, bent on documenting cultural and scientific findings in Romania which had anticipated later Western European developments. This approach was adopted officially during the Ceausescu regime, and now inspires some extreme right-wing groups which espouse a radical nationalist ideology. One of them, the Party of the National Right, admits to not being democratic, but compensates for this by proclaiming its ‘demophilia’, that is, its love for the people, a concept created by Petre Tutea, an admirer of the Iron Guard interwar fascist movement.

MANY INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS, FOUNDED DURING OR JUST AFTER the Second World War, are passing their fiftieth anniversaries, which have become the occasions for reviewing their past performance and looking into the future. This has already happened for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, launched at Bretton Woods in 1944; and for the United Nations (UN), inaugurated in 1945. The fiftieth anniversary of the Marshall Plan, the origin (at one remove) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), falls in the summer of 1997. The anniversary of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) is not till 1998. But the end of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations and the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) have already prompted some backward looks.

SURELY IN THE MANUFACTURE OF VARIETIES OF PEACEABLE AND legitimate political opposition the American political system leads the world, and from a comparative perspective the United States is therefore extremely atypical. This essay will review briefly some of the more familiar ways in which political opposition in the United States is expressed and encouraged, will consider some of the consequences for a political system so rich in opportunities for opposition, and in conclusion will discuss changes in patterns of opposition over the last 30 years.

THE GENERAL ELECTION IN JAPAN OF OCTOBER 1996 brought back the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to a position of predominance, if not preponderance, in the House of Representatives. Out of 500 seats, the LDP acquired 239, while the second largest New Frontier Party (FNP) won 156, the newly-formed Democratic Party 52, the Communist Party 26, the Social Democratic Party of Japan (SDPJ) 15, and the Sakigake New Party two seats. Prior to the general election, the LDP, the SDPJ and the Sakigake had cooperated in a coalition government with 211, 30 and 9 seats, respectively. After the election, the LDP formed a minority government without making a formal coalition arrangement with the much enfeebled SDPJ and Sakigake. Why was the LDP able to make this sort of comeback? Why have ‘reformist parties’, starting with the New Japan Party, the Renewal Party, the New Frontier Party and most recently the Democratic Party, experienced such a brief period of increased power before their fall (or stagnation)? These are the questions that this article addresses in describing and explaining Japanese politics today.

AS THE TWENTIETH CENTURY DRAWS TO ITS END, TWO MEN, Hitler and Stalin, appear to stand out even in its violent history for the scale of the suffering and destruction which they inflicted on millions of innocent people. But at once, the question arises: how far have the roles of Hitler and Stalin been exaggerated? Is it any longer possible, in the twentieth century, to hold individuals responsible for events on this scale? Should the responsibility rest not with these men but with the movements and regimes with which they are identified? This is the question which I want to discuss.

A STRIKING FEATURE OF THE EMERGENCE OF THE ‘NEW’ SOUTH Africa following the first democratic election in April 1994 was the widespread expectation that both the mechanism of transition and the electoral outcome in coalition government (the Government of National Unity: GNU) might serve as a model to other African regimes similarly placed. This may well be true with respect, for example, to the relevance of power-sharing arrangements of the kind that were built into South Africa's interim constitution in 1993, but as I shall explain, South Africa's experience of constitutional change and its outcome is best understood as sui generis. I am inclined to be sceptical about this assumption on the grounds that ‘models’ imported from elsewhere have not served Africa well; that the establishment of Westminster-style democratic structures in newly independent states in the 1950s and 1960s based on winner-take-all electoral systems failed to take into account historical and cultural differences — in particular the absence of anything resembling a Western-style tradition of democratic participation. Whether it could have served as a model, given the constraints of the time — loss of imperial will, insistent claims of indigenous nationalist elites etc. — is another matter. As Michael Oakeshott remarks: ‘[democracy] has been homegrown in Western society and to seek to transfer its beliefs and habits to an exotic soil will always be difficult.’

SIX YEARS AFTER THE ELECTIONS OF 1990 FOLLOWING THE DEFEAT OF the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) which had ruled Nicaragua since it led the popular insurrection to overthrow the corrupt and dictatorial Somoza regime in 1979, the Sandinistas experienced their second bruising encounter with electoral democracy. Daniel Ortega, who as outgoing president of the republic was defeated by Violeta Chamorro of the National Opposition Union (UNO) in 1990, was once again defeated. This time the defeat was much less of a shock. Chamorro's victory in 1990 had surprised many observers despite the fact that a number of opinion polls had predicted the result. These had been dismissed by the Sandinistas as politically suspect as they had been carried out by Costa Rican organizations. Up until the opening of the FSLN's campaign in June 1996, polls had shown Ortega as the clear underdog with a gap of up to 20 per cent between him and Arnoldo Alemán, the candidate of the rightist Liberal Alliance. However, an unexpectedly cohesive and effective FSLN campaign had narrrowed the gap and by September polls were showing the two with between 38 and 46 per cent each. But, as in 1990, the ‘don't knows’ would vote decisively against the FSLN on polling day.

GHIŢA IONESCU'S MAIN WORKS ON COMPARATIVE COMMUNIST POLITICS were The Politics of the European Communist States which appeared in 1967 and Comparatiue Communist Politics which appeared in 1972. They generalized upon the more historical and empirical studies which had appeared earlier in the 1960s: Communism in Romania, The Reluctant Ally: A Study of Communist Neo-Colonialism and The Break-up of the Soviet Empire. They established his reputation as one of the foremost scholars of communist states in Central and Eastern Europe. This article will consider the main ideas of the two key works and relate them to broader trends in the evolution of his thinking. Chiefly, though, it will concentrate upon his 1967 work, since the 1972 one was much shorter and it also largely recapitulated the same ideas.