IN JUNE 1971, FRANÇOIS MITTERRAND WAS NARROWLY ELECTED, after a bitter contest, to the leadership of the French Socialist Party. By the end of 1973 he was in command of the party. There is nothing new about an ambitious politician taking over and attempting to transform an existing party. Mendts France in the 1950s and Servan-Schreiber, more recently, tried to reshape a weak and divided Radical Party. They failed as a result of their own tactlessness and because of the perverse obduracy of the party's opportunistic notables who saw little virtue in ideological purity and disciplined organization. Nor is there anything new about a party of the left being dominated by a strong personality. No study of the French Communist Party would be complete without an analysis of the commanding roles played by the tight-lipped Thorez, the jovial Waldeck-Rochet or the circumspect Marchais. The Socialist Party has been no less immune to the cult of personality; it would be impossible to write the history of the party without constant reference to the dynamism of Jaures, the moral persuasiveness of Blum and the organizational genius of Mollet, three men who dominated long periods of the party's history.

A FEW YEARS AGO, GALL1 AND PRANDI WROTE THAT THE UNIFICATION of the socialists represented a phase of rationalization of the Italian political system. Not only did the re-unification of the PSI (Socialist Party of Italy) and the PSDI (Social Democratic Party of Italy) lead to a simplification of the party subsystem (by reducing its excessive numbers), thus rendering the choice between alternatives easier for the electorate. But at last a single voice seemed to emerge which could undertake the task of opposing the twenty years of Christian Democrat predominance, which had been responsible for so many aspects of political ‘immobilism’. Moreover it was possible to discern a strategic design in the socialist plans — an optimistic design perhaps, but entailing possible innovations. The formation of a strong Socialist Party might have led to the overcoming of one of the principal - if not the greatest - defects of the Italian party system: the absence of a mechanism of rewards and punishments.

THE SUBJECT OF PARLIAMENTARY CONTROL OVER FOREIGN POLICY IN the Netherlands has increased in importance in recent months following the latest Arab-Israeli war and the ensuing reduction in Arab oil production. In addition to their general cutback of oil production, the Arab states singled out the United States and the Netherlands as ‘friends of Israel’ to whom oil supplies were to be limited even further. While the United States seemed an obvious target for such an embargo because of its open political and military support of Israel, opinions still differ as to why the Netherlands received this dubious distinction. The most obvious explanation - the traditional political and moral support for Israel by all Dutch governments, whatever their political composition - has not been universally accepted. Some commentators, including Foreign Minister Van der Stoel, have assumed that the Arab states wanted to put pressure on the entire Western European economy by hitting the important oil retining capacity of Rotterdam. This it was hoped would lead to a demand from economic circles to support the Arab cause. Whatever the underlying reasons, the oil embargo has had important consequences for the economic life of the Netherlands.

‘POWER’ AND ‘CONFLICT’ ARE BOTH TERMS WE DO NOT SEEM TO BE able to do without, however much we may be worried by what methodological purists say. We tend to feel that if we could understand the distribution of power and the lines and amounts of conflict we would have the key to the explanation of political events in the world as a whole, a particular society, or some group - some association or organization - within a society.

This feeling is in my view quite justified, but only in this sense: that if we had an analysis of the state of a society (etc.) that was sufficient to enable us to talk confidently about the distribution of power and the lines and amounts of conflict, we would already be in a position to be able to explain political events. In other words, as a means to being able to describe the situation in terms of power and conflict, we would have to build up information and ways of analysing that information, so good, that we would indeed be able to explain political events. But the logical relationship among the elements would be, not that because we could talk about power and conflict we could explain political events but rather that because we could explain political events, we could talk about power and conflict.