Preface
This book has been in print for nearly twenty years; this is the third edition. After
that time there is, perhaps, only one thing of which I am sure—prefaces get
harder to write. Whether this is merely a reflection of the uncertainties and
intellectual modesty of middle age or also a reflection of the developments in
politics over that time is unclear. Certainly nothing seems as clear about
‘modern’ politics now as it did in 1984, or even in 1992. Yet politics, perhaps
no more than any aspect of social change, is a curious mixture of continuity,
change, and repetition. In the 1992 preface I commented on the fact that the first
preface had been written when ‘Ronald Reagan... was [still] the world’s fore-
most hawk, a true believer in Star Wars, rather than the man who signed the
Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty’. The current US President is the son of
Reagan’s successor, and has re-energized Star Wars—and replaced Reagan’s old
‘Evil Empire’ with ‘The Axis of Evil’. Plus c ̧ a change?
British politics has changed, has it not? In 1992 the Conservative party was
still in power, though without Margaret Thatcher. Since then the Labour party
has won an unprecedented secure second term. But, as the entries for ‘New
Labour’ and ‘Third Way’ suggest, the degree of substantive change in British
politics may be less well indicated by that fact than by comparing what the
Labour Party defeated in 1992 has in common with its victorious descendant of
1997 and 2001. Plus c ̧ a change?
But of course things do change, often irreversibly. This third edition reflects
change, even if it has to be written with a stronger sense of the unpredictability
of politics than its predecessor volumes. It reflects change in the large number of
new entries and the much smaller number of entries dropped. It reflects change
in the way that most continuing entries have been re-written at least slightly,
and a good number significantly. The changes may be more in the way of
continuation of the picture of 1992 rather than the sharp discontinuities
between 1984 and 1992, but they are real. The whole geo-political story of
Central Europe is to point, as is the huge transformation of the old European
Community, or the further development of a consensus on economic policy in
most advanced economies.
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