Long considered as an economic giant and a political dwarf, Japan begins to solve this paradox by acquiring a political weight on the international scene. Its diplomacy remains non-assertive and its military role limited. But it has an increasing influence on the structure of the world economy by the size of its GNP, the composition and spread of its external economy and its capital ftows, and by the impact of its industrial policy on the international division of labour. The growing macroeconomic and financial interdependence between the US and Japan has an incidence on defence high technology and on the transfert of resources to the Third World. Japan's new status as a world power is acknowledged even by Gorbachov's « Eastern » policy. Japan's case weakens the assumption of the realist paradigm of international relations theory that power and interdependence are incompatible.

Although relatively much has been said and written already on civilian based defence, one hardly can deny that there has been not much of an increase in our understanding of this particular alternative security concept. Hence, in the present article an attempt is made to trace the factors, which are to be held responsible for this rather striking case of theoretical stagnation. The main argument boils down to the assertion that, up till now, to much energy has been invested in normative analysis and polemics. Together with the reality of a very restricted research capacity, this has led to an almost complete neglect of scientific research proper. Indeed, in the existing litterature it is hard to find any serious effort at theoretical articulation. One will search in vain for explicit stated modeis, testable hypotheses as well as elaborated research strategies. Little wonder then, that hitherto scientific progress has been wanting. Accordingly, it is argued that to bring about any positive change in this respect in the future, a mere upgrading of the actual research capicity - as is so often advocated - will not suffice. Real progress is only to be expected, if more work is made of basic research.

The British Union of Fascists dealt with the contradictions between its fascist ideology and certain institutions and values dominant in Britain in the 1930s. The economic and social conditions in Britain provided the back-cloth from which the BUF's ideology and policies emerged. While critical of Parliament as inadequate for coping with a modern economy, the BUF had to take account of the depth of public attachment to elections and democracy. Corporate state proposals were presented as expressing the British habit of teamwork, and popular control over fascist governments was envisaged via plebiscites. Unusually for fascists, the BUF distinguished between public obligations and private rights and this because of the dominance of individual liberty in the collective conscience. Finally, the specific co-existence of the modern and the archaic in the BUF's discours in terms of British social and historical factors has to be stressed.

The purge of Second World War collaborators in Belgium has not been the subject of many serious scientific research sofar. However, progress in theorizing and in data handling make it now possible to clear away the major impediments to such scientific research. After the war, extracts of the judgements of the military courts, which were responsible for the trial of collaborators, were published in the government gazette, « Het Belgisch Staatsblad ». These extracts provide the empirical basis of the project, which is put in the theoretical context known as « the ambivalence theory ». A brief look at the military judiciary system sheds some light on the processes behind the judging of collaborators. The article unveils some first results of the analysis of 5,000 court cases. The most important finding sofar is the absence of consistency - in time as well as in space - in the judging of collaborators in Belgium.

Democracy is intimately linked with the institution of parliament. If there are problems with the functioning of the parliament, democracy is considered as being in danger. Three kinds of problems are aften raised in this respect: technical problems, political problems and personnel problems. The technical problems refer to the technicity and complexity of the subjects to be dealt with in parliament. The political problems refer mainly to the loss of political power of the parliament, to the benefit of political parties and pressure groups. The personnel problems refer to the job of MP itself, which has become a full-time job, but which is still a very unstable position. Two hundred and fifty Belgian MP's were asked for their opinion about all this. The results show that they are primarily concerned with the technical problems, and that they suggest technical remedies for a better functioning of the parliament. The Belgian MP's do recognize the importance of the political problems, especially the domination of the political scene by the political parties, but they are not very eager to propose measures with a direct impact on this.

Using post-war election results for the Belgian House of Representatives, the power relations among political parties are analysed by calculating power- and satisfaction indices. Also, a participation index has been constructed to calculate the probability that a party will join a government coalition. Since the election of 1981 the traditional parties (christian-democrats, socialists and liberals) join the same Banzhof power and participation probability. The other parties represent no power and participation valueat all.