THE THIRD MINISTERIAL MEETING OF THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION (WTO), held in Seattle from 30 November to 3 December 1999, was a resounding failure. It was intended to launch a new round of multilateral trade negotiations, in succession to the Uruguay Round which had ended seven years before. But even before it could begin, the proceedings were disrupted by massive demonstrations. Central Seattle became a war zone, with tear gas and rubber bullets, and then a ghost town, with empty streets and boarded-up windows. Inside the conference hall the atmosphere was little better. The conference chair (Charlene Barshefsky, US Special Trade Representative) and the WTO Director-General (Mike Moore, new in office) were booed in open session. In the end, the ministerial meeting was suspended with nothing agreed, only an exhortation from the chair ‘to take time out’ in the hope of resolving disagreements and reconvening later.

This article looks at what went wrong and why and what will be needed in future. It contrasts the failure at Seattle with the undoubted achievements of the international trade system in the 1990s. It examines three possible causes of failure: disruption by NGOs; organizational weakness in the WTO; and errors of government. Of these three, it finds governments most to blame. Governments generally, but especially the United States and the European Union, have not grasped the full extent of the demands placed on them by the advance of globalization. Seattle was a setback but need not be a disaster – provided governments correct the errors that allowed it to happen.

Democracy is far less fragile than we sometimes imagine. Although hard to establish, it is remarkably robust and is corrupted only by dint of persistent effort. Yet, as Rousseau wrote of freedom, once lost, democracy is nearly impossible to regain. Today, the forces of democracy face a new source of corruption all the more sinister because it appears so innocuous, often even identifying itself with the liberty it undermines. Having survived the nation-state and in time subordinated it to its own liberal purposes, can democracy now survive globalization? Only if democracy is globalized.

At present, the encompassing practices of globalization have created an ironic and radical asymmetry: we have managed to globalize markets in goods, labour, currencies and information without globalizing the civic and democratic institutions that have historically comprised the free market's indispensable context. Put simply, we have removed capitalism from the institutional ‘box’ that has (quite literally) domesticated it and given its sometimes harsh practices a human face.

There are few Chapters of the Federal Republic'S History that could be written without a prominent reference to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Since 1949 Christian Democratic chancellors have led German governments for no less than 37 years. Even when in opposition, the Christian Democrats - composed at the national level of the CDU and the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU)1 - constituted more often than not the strongest parliamentary party group (Fraktion) in the Bundestag, such as after the federal elections of 1969, 1976 and 1980. Also at state level and in the Bundesrat, which represents the individual states (L-nder) in the national decision-making process, the Christian Democrats quite often held a dominant position justifying occasional remarks of a ‘CDU/CSU bias’ within the German party system.

OVER THE LAST DECADE AND A HALF THE PART PLAYED BY THE European Court of Justice (ECJ) in the construction and operation of the European Union has become controversial. Relatively unnoticed beyond specialist legal circles in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, the role of the Court featured prominently in the debates occasioned by the Treaty of Maastricht. In this article I consider the use of heroic and villainous imagery to describe the Court. After arguing that such imagery now conceals more than it reveals, I suggest that if its role is to be understood properly, the Court needs to be placed in strategic context. For convenience, the discussion of strategic context, which makes up the largest part of this article, is divided into five sections. In turn these sections consider member state executives, other European Union institutions, ‘European’ law(s), European Community law and actors in civil society (particularly litigants).

THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES THE PATTERN OF SIMILARITIES AND differences in Britain and France with regard to public service charterism: that strand of recent public service reform designed to reconstruct relations between the state and the citizen on the basis of new or revitalized principles of public service, epitomized by the Citizen's Charter (1991) in Britain and the Charte des Services Publics (1992) in France. Despite the appearance of increasing convergence in the rhetoric of public management reform in the two countries during the 1990s, especially during the incumbency of centre-left governments in the latter part of the decade, there is evidence of continuing divergence in the philosophy and practice of public service charterism. This article argues that variation is a function of the existence of country-specific public service regimes, embodying different ideals of citizenship, which have shaped the emergence and implementation of charter policy in Britain and France.

It was one of the defining features of the soviet system that it allowed no legal challenge to party dominance. Elections took place at regular intervals; but from an early stage they were based upon a single slate of candidates, the ‘bloc of Communists and nonparty people’. Voting was not compulsory, but it was difficult to avoid – canvassers went from house to house, ballot boxes were set up in hospitals, long-distance trains and polar observatories, and constituency officials competed with each other for the highest turnout. In theory it was possible to vote against, but this meant using the screened-off booth in the polling station, since a vote in favour, with a single candidate system, could be cast without marking the ballot paper or even looking at it. Some called these ‘Elections Paradise-style: as God said to Adam, “Here is Eve, the woman of your choice”’. Bertolt Brecht, commenting on the leaf lets that had been distributed in East Berlin after the rising of 1953 which announced that the people had forfeited the government's confidence and could ‘only win it back by redoubled labour’, put it more directly. ‘Wouldn't it be simpler,’ he asked, ‘if the government dissolved the people and elected another?’

In France the Last Decade has Witnessed a Notable Attempt at renewing the theory and practice of representative democracy. This has taken the form of a campaign, first launched in 1992, to tackle the significant under-representation of women in all of France's main arenas of elective representation by according constitutional status to the principle of parite. The campaign focused on the claim that, as one half of humankind, women in democratic polities should have the right to hold half of all elective offices:‘Femmes: moitie de la terre, moitie du pouvoire. Its supporters contended that the requirement that elective positions be held by equal numbers of men and women would revitalize French democracy, ushering in a new form of democratic polity: une democratie paritaire.

The publication of the report of the royal commission on the Reform of the House of Lords, A House for the Future, provides an occasion to look at second chambers and bicameralism in Anglo- American democracies. This limited focus is not for want of subject matter: the Inter-Parliamentary Union reports that of 178 parliamentary democracies in 1996, 58 were bicameral. Nor is the subject of second chambers, while never popular, a neglected area of inquiry at present. In fact, more has been published on the topic in the past four years than at any time in recent memory. The reason for focusing on Anglo-American countries is that they are the democracies where upper chambers are being transformed today. In response to events unique to themselves, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom have of late looked beyond responsible government as traditionally defined and begun to examine the role of their second chambers. The United States warrants inclusion because it is the founder of the theory of modern bicameralism.

FIFTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER THE FALL OF FASCISM AND THE END OF THE Second World War, right-wing radical movements and parties are part of the political normalcy in many Western democracies. In the face of the twentieth-century experiences of fascism and state socialism, and their failures, this stubborn persistence seems at the same time anachronistic and frightening. While there is no shortage of explanations and interpretations of this phenomenon in an evergrowing body of literature, most studies focus on national trends and derive their criteria from country-specific histories and discourses. Serious comparative scholarship on the radical right is still in its infancy.

This article is a plea for more comparative research on rightwing radicalism at the turn of the century. It begins by highlighting the three central dimensions of the problem. First, one must state that contemporary right-wing radicalism is an international phenomenon. Thus, more than before, comparative studies are needed both to analyse the international quality and to specify the nation-specific characteristics of the radical right in each country. Secondly, it must be borne in mind that contemporary right-wing radicalism is a modern phenomenon. It has undergone a phase of renewal, as a result of social and cultural modernization shifts in post-war Europe. Thus it is only vaguely connected with previous versions. Terms like ‘fascism’ or ‘neo-fascism’ which suggest a historical continuity from Munich to Mölln and Magdeburg in Germany, or from Vichy to Vitrolles in France, become increasingly obsolete. The third factor to bear in mind is that contemporary right-wing radicalism is a complex phenomenon. The ongoing specialization and compartmentalization in the social sciences, such as discourse analysis, party and electoral research, and youth sociology – to name but a few of the approaches applied to the radical right – fail to do justice to the complexity of the subject. Clearly, the many faces of right-wing radicalism require clear analytical distinctions, but ultimately they need to be approached in a truly interdisciplinary way.

IT IS OFTEN SAID THAT INDIA'S POLITICS ARE NEVER QUITE WHAT THEY seem. If ever there were a banal statement about the collective life of a people this would have to qualify. The politics of any country, almost by definition, fails to represent the daily lives and struggles of ordinary people, and in most cases even the strivings of politicians themselves. Democratic politics is at least as much about distortion as representation – the projection of images to appeal to electorates, for instance, or the softening of policy stances to accommodate seemingly incompatible coalition partners. But ‘national’ politics in India, by which I mean the competition among political elites for control or inf luence over the institutions of the central state, is currently less representative than in any other non-authoritarian country one could imagine. Paradoxically, this is the result of a deepening, rather than a withering, of India's democracy – in particular, the tendency for marginalized groups to seek power on their own terms, through parties explicitly established to represent them, and for elections to be fought not as massive national referendums, but at levels much closer to people's own experience.

The European Union has undergone four successive rounds of enlargement since its inception in 1957. Currently, the EU finds itself in the midst of a new wave of enlargement, in the context of a simultaneous process of ‘deepening’ and ‘widening’. The enlargement process in progress, aims to incorporate the former communist countries on the eastern periphery of the Community. It is rather ironic, however, that Turkey, one of the earliest applicants for membership of the Community, is not included among the group of states, notably the four Visegrad countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia) which enjoy a serious prospect of being admitted into the Community in the near future. This constitutes a paradoxical development in the sense that the claims of these countries for full EU membership are very recent, dating back to their liberation from communist rule in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1989.

The transition to democracy in bangladesh after the overthrow of the authoritarian regime in 1990 began with the formation of a non-political caretaker administration (NCA) to prepare the ground for the transfer of power to a popularly mandated government. Its other important purpose was to manage the affairs of the state during the interlude that separated the dissolution of the authoritarian regime (December 1990) and the complete installation of the democratically-elected government (September 1991) to rule the country in its own right.

The need for this NCA was imperative in the wake of the dismantling of authoritarian rule. The attempts of the ousted regime to conduct a third election, while still in power, were not acceptable to its political adversaries, given the former's proven tendency to unduly inf luence the electoral process in the past.

THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES AUSTRALIAN REFERENDUM PRACTICE WITH the aim of contributing to the growing international debate over concepts of deliberative democracy, defined in terms of democratic regimes structured to maximize community deliberation in public decision-making. Theories of deliberative democracy go beyond earlier approaches to participatory democracy by specifying in greater detail the nature of the deliberative process in which citizens should be able to participate and of the importance of institutions of civil society to an effective deliberative process. The focus on ideals of public deliberation ref lects the ambition of deliberative democrats (the ‘deliberati’ if you will) to ground political decision-making in norms of shared public reason. Where earlier approaches to participatory democracy investigated rights to political participation, current approaches to deliberative democracy also investigate responsibilities of political participants – particularly responsibilities to comply with norms of rational political deliberation.

The twentieth-fourth general election in Japan took Place on 25 June 2000, shortly after Yoshiro Mori had succeeded his predecessor, Keizo Obuchi, as interim prime minister. (Obuchi had died after being in a coma following a stroke.) He, in his turn, had succeeded Ryutaro Hashimoto to the prime ministership when Hashimoto had resigned after the government lost a considerable number of seats in the election for the upper house in 1998. Keizo Obuchi had managed to increase support for the government by passing two substantial sets of legislative measures to stimulate the economy in 1998 and 1999.

THE OCTOBER 1999 ELECTIONS HAVE RESULTED IN THE SECOND CHANGE ever from one political party to another since the inception of mass politics in Argentina in 1916. The first such change came in 1989 when the Peronist Carlos Menem took over from Radical Raúl Alfonsín.

Recent theoretical discussion and Empirical Evidence have shown that national identity is important at both collective and individual levels. The issue of national identity is particularly relevant to the community of Hong Kong, which was reunited with the People's Republic of China (PRC) on 1 July 1997. The fact that 97 per cent of Hong Kong's population is Chinese does not guarantee the automatic development of a sense of national identity. Mutual understanding between the people of the two places is not as easy and natural as one might expect, for objective differences, such as those found in the political, legal and economic systems, make the ‘other’ more stranger than kin. Such difficulties were compounded by the phenomenon that, unlike in many former colonies, the people of Hong Kong did not abhor their outgoing British rulers; in fact many were quite nostalgic about the colonial period.

Despite the dramatic final breakthrough in summer 1987, the democratization of South Korea (hereinafter Korea) displayed the hallmarks of a gradual or continuous transition from authoritarianism. These included: liberalization emanating from within the regime; continuity of personnel from the authoritarian ruling elite; continuity in economic and foreign policy; and the exclusion from power of the representatives of the economically disadvantaged groups. Such features of democratic deficit have been observed for Korea and for Brazil, two countries whose experiences of authoritarian developmentalism are commonly compared.

Events in recent years suggest the possibility of more fundamental reform of Korea's economic and political institutions. The financial crisis of late-1997 led to the most serious economic recession for 40 years. Held in the middle of the financial meltdown, the presidential election of December 1997 resulted in a victory for Kim Dae-Jung (or DJ as he is commonly known), a veteran dissident associated with the excluded constituencies (not only his own underdeveloped home region but also labour and progressivelyminded intellectuals and activists).

HAVE PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS IN NORTH AFRICA IN THE 1990S bolstered prospects for democratization and greater pluralism? This study argues that, with the possible exception of Algeria's 1991 elections, they have not been harbingers of democracy in Egypt, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. The elections can be viewed as public displays by the state or limited political barometers, rather than processes which create obligations for the government. They have been means through which regimes have sought to dampen reactions to political immobilism, structural adjustment and the death of a social contract. Some elections have been manipulative, exclusionary exercises of elites trying to roll back the liberalizations of the 1980s, while others have been pseudo-competitive instruments of regime maintenance. Most of the elections can be seen as mechanisms for a top-down ‘artificializing’ of pluralism in order to preserve the core of regime control. In Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria, there seems to be no contradiction between fostering a selectively pluralistic atmosphere and simultaneously undermining the transition to democracy. In Morocco, pluralism and alternance seem to remain quite compatible with continued political domination by the Makhzen. Mona Makram-Ebeid's characterization of Egypt's 1995 elections could equally be applied to others in the region: ‘What has occurred is a pluralization of the political sphere, yet it has been liberal neither in intent nor outcome.’

COUNTRIES RIVEN BY INTERNAL CONFLICT HAVE INCREASINGLY SOUGHT to resolve their conf licts and establish stable government by conducting elections, which outside observers can verify as ‘free and fair’. The first highly successful such venture, in Nicaragua 1990, was followed by election operations by the UN in Ethiopia 1992, Angola 1992, El Salvador 1994, Mozambique 1994, South Africa 1994, Haiti 1995, Liberia 1997 and Cambodia 1993 and 1998. The degree of stability and reconciliation achieved by these operations has varied, but the recent election observer effort, in Cambodia (26 July 1998), had a disputed outcome, which raised fundamental questions concerning the efficacy of post-conf lict election monitoring.