At a time when the debate is about the form that our allegiance to democracy should take, liberal or communitarian, republican or constitutional, it may be useful to go back to basics, to ask why we cherish democracy as it is. Our reasons could differ.

We need to start with Schumpeter. His innovation in contemporary Democratic Theory represented a breakthrough on two counts, both in theory construction, and in the nature of political explanation. I shall deal first with his contribution to theory, then with his implicit principles about how we should work as political scientists.

Schumpeter, as is well known, applied to the study of the political system the same paradigm that was used in the analysis of the market. The intuitive idea was that both systems were deemed to satisfy the interests (or preferences) of a given population. In the political system, preferences for programmes, or policies, corresponded to preferences for merchandise, and one could purchase them through the vote. On the other side, for those seeking election, offering programmes in exchange for votes brought profits in the form of political power.

Prime Minister Tony Blair's decision to send Royal Marine Commandos to Afghanistan in the spring of 2002 resulted in the deployment of the largest military force assembled by Britain since the Gulf War of 1991. In 1991, Britain took a leading role among European nations in the United States-led coalition responsible for driving Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. Just as then, Britain once again stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the US, although this time in a hunt for Osama bin Laden and the destruction of the al-Qaida network, recognised as having been responsible for the terrorist attacks that took place in the US on 11 September 2001.

In the immediate aftermath of those attacks, the British government unreservedly offered its support to the US: Prime Minister Tony Blair was present in the gallery when President Bush addressed a joint session of Congress on 20 September 2001, and Britain was initially the only other nation that was involved when attacks subsequently commenced against the Taliban and alQaida.

Do you have somebody to Support you while you're looking for a job?’ This is a question I sometimes heard during the three-year period in which I was applying for academic positions in political science. I was asked it by various members of the profession, men and women alike, who appeared to be showing genuine interest and concern. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, however, and that very question highlights the sad reality of women's integration into French academia, especially in political science. Despite its progressive agenda, this discipline continues to promote the reproduction of traditional social behaviour at all levels of the profession. Though women saw some improvements in the early 1980s, they remain stuck at the margins of contemporary French political science.

Indeed, gender discrimination in France is not considered a serious concern. The egalitarian discourse currently en vogue in French academia has a different focus: class discrimination. The most important issue on the agenda is eliminating bias against applicants from lower social classes.

Over recent years, UK universities have undergone a government-driven expansion of their student intake, with a target of fifty per cent of each age cohort graduating with a degree. The aim was to increase the average educational standard of the UK educational system as a whole - albeit at the cost of reducing the average academic standard within the university sector (Smith and Webster, 1997; Charlton, 2002).

The combination of necessarily reduced student selectivity (both in admissions and examinations) and substantially reduced funding per student created the problem of how to manage the decline in academic standards and inflation of the degree qualification. After some years of trying more informal methods (Williams, 1997), the government set-up the QAA (Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education; QAA, 1998), which would use the managerial tool of quality assurance auditing.

Yet the QAA is now regarded as a failed experiment - expensive, damaging to efficiency, and probably ineffective (THES, 2001; Baty, 2001).

Extensive empirical work shows conclusively that the great majority of political scientists in the western world are owl-simplifier or lark-knotter types. The deviant categories of owl-knotters and lark-simplifiers are populated almost entirely by post-modern discourse analysts and rational-choice theorists who have either discursively misconstructed themselves or irrationally analysed the choices of their own life-game. Both discourse analysis and rational-choice are, therefore, products of mistaken identity. If specialists in these fields were to reconceptualise themselves as owl-simplifiers or lark-knotters we would all be saved a lot of trouble. Alternative explanations based upon neo-postdistanciationalist and post-neodistanciationalist theory are considered, and dismissed as lacking any credibility.

The workshop formula of the ECPR joint sessions usually forces researchers to reshape their intellectual interests to fit a particular workshop theme. Only authors who can convince a workshop director that their stories are pertinent to his or her theme are allowed to participate. At the ECPR meetings in Canterbury in 2001 this strict format was abandoned for the first time, which probably contributed to the merrier-than-usual atmosphere. Many non-mainstream interests that had long been suppressed and maybe even oppressed by ECPR executives were allowed free expression. In the panels organised by the Standing Group on Women and Politics, political theorists blossomed as abundantly as the fuchsias on the campus grounds. This was extraordinary because, as one of them explained to me, it usually took a clever distortion of their real intellectual interests to get a workshop director to accept their papers. In any case, that year's conference schedule offered an enormous range of interesting subjects, leading to tremendous inner conflicts about which workshops to attend. I was particularly torn between gender and the arts.

Discourse Analysis has become increasingly influential within political science. Its growing conceptual and methodological importance for political research has already been reflected in a number of ECPR activities. Various highly successful and at times heavily oversubscribed Joint Sessions workshops related to Discourse Analysis have taken place over the past decade or so. International collaboration in the area was developed in workshops such as Olof Ruin's ‘Political Biography’ (Bochum, 1990), Terrell Carver and Matti Hyvärinen's ‘New Interpretative Methodologies' (Limerick, 1992), Terrell Carver and Veronique Mottier's ‘Politics of Sexuality’ (Oslo, 1996), Maureen Whitebrook and Fabrice Larat's ‘The Political Uses of Narrative’ (Mannheim, 1999), Matti Hyvärinen's ‘The History of Political Concepts’ (Copenhagen, 2000), Herbert Gottweis and Hendrik Wagenaar's ‘Policy, Discourse and Institutional Reform', and Veronique Mottier and Moya Lloyd's ‘Identity Politics’ (Grenoble, 2001). The ECPR General Conference 2001 in Canterbury also had a very successful section of panels on ‘Discourse Theory and Political Analysis’, organised by David Howarth, which brought together researchers from many different countries.

Discourse Analysis derives from a paradigm shift in philosophy, Twentieth-century philosophy moved from taking a view about the world and its properties expressed through language, to a focus on language and its properties as such, and how the world is made for us from the meanings that language expresses, This represents an Inversion of the scientific and commonsensical world- view inherited from the scientific revolution and empiricist philosophies of the last few hundred years, In that perspective language is simply a neutral medium through which facts and meanings can in principle be transparently conveyed (Shapiro, 1985-86).

Perhaps the clearest expression of this outlook in philosophical terms is in the first chapter of Richard Rorty's (1989) Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, where he explains that - with the death of God - we can no longer assume that the universe contains meanings that are just ‘there’ to be construed by us in language. That is, we have no reason to believe that the world ‘has a human face’ which it turns to us, and which we can interpret through language as a neutral medium, Rather we use language to inscribe meanings into the world - whether into or onto objects, or experiences - and then we read those meanings back to ourselves as if they had always resided in the objects or experiences as such.

During the 1970s and the early 1980s structural Marxism, associated with French theorists such as Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar and Nicos Poulantzas, was very influential amongst leftist political scientists in both Britain and Denmark. Later, many followers of these schools of thought, inspired by the open and undogmatic Marxism of Antonio Gramsci, formed a neo-Gramscian wave in theory that criticised the economic determinism and class reductionism of structural Marxism. Some aimed to combine neo-Gramscian theory with post structuralist insights from the works of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan. The result was the gradual elaboration of a post structuralist strand of Discourse Analysis. The UK-based scholars Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) developed a version of this that became highly influential not only in the UK, but also in Denmark, where a large number of students and researchers draw upon their work.

The central tenet of Laclau and Mouffe's strand of Discourse Analysis uses the hermeneutic interpretation of meaning to shift the analytical focus from a positivist concern with objective facts to the discourse-theoretical concern with the conditions of meaning and identity.

The increasing prominence of Discourse Analysis within political science owes much to theoretical as well as empirical developments. Firstly, conceptual innovations within political theory have led to an increasing awareness of the importance of issues of language and meaning, readership and interpretation for political analysis. Secondly, political practice itself has significantly changed over the past few decades. Identity politics has become increasingly important to our understanding of European and international politics, as traditional class loyalties have weakened. The breakdown and redesign of the Cold-War political regimes, infranational and supranational pressures resulting from European Unionisation and, more generally, from current processes of economic and political globalisation, have all contributed to the shake-up of old political identities and to the emergence of new ones. The politicisation of ethnic, regional, gender and sexual identities has come to occupy much of the political scene, thereby challenging and transforming traditional understandings of the boundaries of the political.

Since the late 1980s, Discourse Analysis has become an increasingly important force within the policy sciences. The core concern of policy studies has been captured as ‘understanding the world and trying to change it at the same time’ (Nelson, 1996). Rooted in the work of Harold D. Lasswell, who called for a ‘policy orientation’ in social science research, policy studies has constantly sought to develop knowledge in order to facilitate policy interventions, and thus to help resolve pressing social problems (Lasswell, 1951). Yet Lasswell's ‘policy science of democracy’ - in which academics were to fulfil an independent role as public intellectuals addressing public problems, not necessarily in alignment with the state - has been far less influential than the more instrumental sorts of policy analysis aiming to facilitate efficient and effective state action.

The growing dissatisfaction with the limitations of the rationalist mainstream of instrumental policy analysis led several authors to appreciate the central importance of language for policy analysis.

Discourse analysts are often accused of two things, namely, that Discourse Analysis leads to a vicious relativism, and that it lapses into philosophical idealism.

The charge of relativism contends that since, according to Discourse Analysis, there are no ultimate foundations and so everything is discursive, discourse analysts end up in a situation where everything is equally true, right and good. This supposedly makes it impossible to defend any particular set of claims or values.

The premise of the argument is correct. Discourse Analysis claims that there is no extra-discursive truth, morals or ethics. However, the conclusion is wrong, since discourse analysts never arrive at a situation where everything is equally valid. Discourse analysts always find themselves located within a particular discourse, which necessarily provides a set of historically contingent criteria for determining what is true, right and good. Only God is capable of transcending all discursivity. We mortals are always placed within discursive frameworks that define our criteria of validity. These frameworks are constantly renegotiated through processes of disintegration, mutual exchange, or antagonistic conflict.

‘Pantha rhei,’ was one of the tenets of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. This observation on life in Greece in the sixth century BC is certainly relevant to the World Wide Web some 2,500 years later. On the Web everything is in a state of flux and is subject to continuous change. The Web is expanding at an enormous pace; millions of new pages appear every month. The number of sites - the building blocks of the Web - is increasing by millions each year and may have amounted to 162 million in July 2002 (Internet Software Consortium, www.isc.org/ds/WWW-200207/index.html). This incredible expansion is taking place despite the fact that at the same time as new sites are created, many disappear: the aveage life span of a site is estimated at seventy-five days. Sites are often provided at only one location. If, for whatever reason, a supplier decides to discontinue a site, it is lost forever. In this dynamic process of rise and fall most existing sites are not static either.