Meech Lake Research Articles

Beyond the Crystal Ball: Modelling Predictions about Quebec and Canada

Within the field of Canadian politics, intense debate over the constitution is a central and abiding concern. Given the failure of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords, it is suitable to reflect on Canada--and especially Quebec--as a political entity in the greater setting of North America. The passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which creates economic alternatives for Quebec, (1) makes this an especially appropriate time to examine the prospects for significant (or macro) constitutional change. (2) Neither executive federalism nor popular referenda have succeeded in producing lasting agreement on basic principles of government between Quebec and the Rest of Canada (ROC). After the intense conflict over the Charlottetown referendum, while much of Canada retreated into constitutional hibernation, Quebeckers, possibly buoyed by anticipated passage of the NAFTA, boldly elected fifty-four members of the independantiste Bloc Quebecois (BQ) in the federal election of 1993, and a separatist Parti Quebecois (PQ) government in the provincial election of the following year. Given the passage of the NAFTA and the political uncertainty that still exists in post-referendum Quebec and Canada, constitutional issues promise to attain even greater centrality. Thus, the time is right for appraisal of constitutional problems and prospects within a new theoretical frame of reference. After all, one of the few apparent points of agreement about previous rounds of bargaining is that time pressure and lack of foresight are enemies of constructive change. (3) This research note introduces to the study of Canadian politics a new technique for predicting the outcome of bargaining over key issues. Although the paper's aim is modest--to describe the technique--it also outlines a more substantial research project that is currently underway and should provide insights into the outcomes of two fundamental issues facing Quebec-Canada relations in the aftermath of the 1995 referendum on sovereignty in Quebec. More specifically, the project seeks to predict the outcome of Quebec-Canada constitutional bargaining and the outcome of bargaining over a sovereign Quebec's attempt to join the NAFTA. The investigation unfolds in three stages. The first presents the Decisions Insights expected utility forecasting model. The second describes the current political and economic setting of the ROC and Quebec, and offers some predictions based upon the model as a means of presenting the outlines of a promising research program. The third and final stage encourages extension of the research project on both intellectual and practical grounds. Toward an Expected Utility Model Constitutional bargaining and negotiations among governments and interest groups can be studied in any number of ways. Conventional approaches combine (in varying degrees) empirical theory from political science and historical analysis. The result is a set of informative case studies that collectively trace the evolution of bargaining over distribution of power between the federal and provincial governments, most notably Quebec. (4) Models based on rational choice, or the application of microeconomic theory to the study of politics, are well suited to the analysis of the kind of bargaining that can be expected between Quebec, the ROC, and a range of others. These models begin with the assumption of self-interest and focus directly on how and why policies are made. The specific characteristics that link economic thought to political processes may be summarized as follows: first, methodological individualism as a point of departure; second, the assumption that individuals strive after their own interests in a rational way and try to maximize utility--this assumption may be called the fundamental behavioral hypothesis; and, third, use of methods and techniques of economic analysis. Thus, rational choice is a theoretical perspective with well-developed methods that can be applied to the integration of horizontal and vertical elite bargaining. …

The Recline of Party: Armchair Democracy and the Reform Party of Canada

If one were asked to go spelunking around the dim caverns of neology to come up with a satisfactory label for the type of political energy currently driving modern liberal democracies, one could do worse than to settle for centrifugalism. Instead of imploding due to the objective contradictions of their economic systems, these states have had to contend with an explosion of subjectivity--a fecund ecology of highly politicized identity-bearers has developed, and they appear bent on asserting their diversity in the face of outmoded centripetal institutions designed to falsely homogenize or assimilate their experiences, needs, and priorities. For the most part, the owners of these newly invigorated consciousnesses see the political infrastructure of liberal democracy as a barrier to their fulfillment that is every bit as formidable as the economic relations of liberal capitalism. This impression has manifested itself in escalating challenges to the legitimacy of traditional practices of representative democracy which, depending on the ideological concerns of the observer, are either decried as symptomatic of society's ungovernability, or celebrated as a blossoming of healthy pluralism. Canada has not been immune to these developments. The explicit recognition in the 1982 of Rights and Freedoms of aboriginal, multicultural, female, and disabled citizens helped to congeal these as distinct and legitimate political identities in Canada. (1) Additionally, recent years have witnessed the increasing activism of various religious, environmental, and gay rights groups who, together with the aforementioned Charter Canadians, have grown increasingly frustrated with the limitations of a political discourse constructed exclusively upon the brokerage of regional and linguistic interests. This debate crystallized around the popular rejection of the Meech Lake Accord in 1990, and was evident in subsequent critical public commentary on the deficiencies of Canadian representative and parliamentary democracy. (2) It quickly became evident that the traditional party system was an insufficient collector or conduit for the burgeoning democratic aspirations of a heterogeneous citizenry not content to see their diverse brokered away to the margins of political consideration. This recent flurry of identity-based group politics, with its implicit rejection of traditional representative institutions, would appear to vindicate the observation made by John Meisel over a decade ago that an increase in the role of organized groups in the processes of interest articulation was leading to a decline in the aggregative capacity of traditional brokerage parties in Canada. (3) Indeed, the idea that organized interest groups are a democratic threat of one sort or another has since appeared as a common focus of two otherwise divergent offspring of the malaise afflicting the Canadian party system: the recent Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing (RCERPF) and the Reform Party of Canada. While the RCERPF's concern appears to be that democracy in Canada suffers as organized interest groups assume, but ultimately fail to fulfill, the role and functions of traditional political parties, Reform's approach to the problem of special interests is quite different. In this paper, I will use the example of its recent forays into the world of electronic plebiscitarianism to argue that the Reform party's brand of populism is designed specifically to combat the threat organized pose to the unfettered free market distribution of political and economic values, rather than as a democratic corrective to the rise of pluralism and the decline of parties. By contrasting it with the RCERPF in the context of the decline of party thesis, I intend to show that Reform's use of these techniques represents neither a serious desire to alleviate public alienation from the representative system, nor a sincere response to citizens demanding increased opportunities for meaningful democratic participation. …

Review Essay: A Reluctant Nation Finds Its Voice: English Canada Considers the Alternatives

Philip Resnick. Thinking English Canada. Toronto: Stoddart, 1994. xii + 129 pp. $19.95 cloth. David Bercuson and Barry Cooper. Deconfederation: Canada Without Quebec. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1991. xi + 180 pp. $14.95 paper. Robert Young. The Secession of Quebec and the Future of Canada. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995. xiv + 376 pp. $17.95 paper. Gordon Gibson. Plan B: The Future of the Rest of Canada. Vancouver: The Fraser Institute, 1994. x + 217 pp. $19.95 paper. Alan Freeman and Patrick Grady. Dividing the House: Planning for a Canada Without Quebec. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1995. xii + 257 pp. A recent letter to the editor of the Toronto Globe and Mail reflected a deep-seated confusion currently besetting Canadians. (1) Under the heading Search of National Meaning, the writer questioned a recent article covering St.-Jean-Baptiste Day, referred to as Quebec's national holiday. How can this usage of the term `national' relate to the Globe's reference to itself as `Canada's National Newspaper,' the writer asked. Does this mean the Globe and Mail implicitly accepts the idea of Canada as two nations, or is Canada a nation which includes a province with a National Assembly and related national institutions which in turn includes Indian nations? A confusion of terminologies to be sure. Yet, more significantly, this simple letter hints at the broader and more complicated political and sociological confusion at the root of the country's past thirty years of constitutional wreckage. For, at the heart of Canada's unresolved and seemingly intractable unity debate lie profound disagreements over how to reconcile the concepts of state and nation. If the books reviewed here in some ways reflect this confusion, they also challenge the model of Canada as a single nation-state. In fact, if these books can be assumed to represent an emergent, yet quite divided opinion of the unity impasse from an English-Canadian perspective, then one's hopes for Canadian constitutional closure in the near future grow only dimmer. These volumes make a frank and, at times, bold attempt to delineate a new agenda for English Canada within the unity debate. Written amid the fulminations which have characterized the years since the Meech Lake and Charlottetown debacles, these volumes attest to a new and greater willingness on the part of English Canadians to carve out a constitutional agenda that perhaps, for the first time, genuinely reflects the concerns of what might be called a reluctant nation, English Canada. (2) This willingness to speak out represents a significant shock to the conventional political wisdom that necessarily included Quebec within all conceptions of the Canadian nation. For decades, any discussion in Canadian federal political circles about the issue of English Canada has clashed with this increasingly frayed federalist paradigm. Thus, as Reg Whitaker has written, the gospel of national unity, as it has been played out on the Canadian political stage over the past thirty years, has stifled the emergence of an authentic English-Canadian voice. (3) Yet, the period in Canada between the failed Charlottetown Accord and the recent referendum in Quebec has seen a thorough breakdown in the pan-Canadian federal model. A conflict has emerged from the context that Peter Russell calls mega-constitutional politics, in which agreement on the very essence of the Canadian political community has all but vanished. It is at this mega level, as Russell suggests, that disagreements over formal constitutional principles have become overshadowed by powerful, emotional divisions between different groups' perceptions of identity and of belonging in the Canadian polity. (4) Jane Jenson has similarly described this divisive period as one marked by the attempts of various groups to assert their collective identities--to name nations--wherein much more was involved than the division of powers in federalism, self-government for Aboriginal peoples, recognition of the distinctiveness of Quebec society, the composition and role of the Senate, or even the economic and social consequences of embedding a neo-liberal agenda in the Constitution. …

Trudeau and the end of a Canadian dream

In 1982 Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau realized his life's ambition: the patriation of the Canadian constitution and the enshrinement of a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. At the same time he dealt a severe blow to his arch-enemies, the nationalists in Quebec who believed that a significant and rewarding partnership with Canada was possible without renouncing their identity as Quebecers. Laforest reveals that Trudeau betrayed the trust of the people of Quebec during the 1980 referendum on sovereignty-association and contends that the whole patriation exercise, completed without the consent of Quebec, is not legitimate in that province. He also holds Trudeau responsible for the ultimate rejection of the distinct society clause in the Meech Lake Accord, which had given a glimmer of hope to Quebec federalists. Trudeau and the End of a Canadian Dream shows how constitutional reform, and the political culture it fostered, shattered the hopes of those who believed that being both a Canadian and a Quebecer was possible.

Turmoil in the peaceable kingdom: the Quebec sovereignty movement and its implications for Canada and the United States

Analyzes the development and implications of the Quebec sovereignty movement, and discusses financial considerations such as interest rates, the right to use the Canadian dollar, and defense spending. Details Quebec's economic and political development since 1976, and the Meech Lake and Charlottetow

Canadian and U.S. Constitutions: Evolutionary and Revolutionary Nationbuilding and Nationmaintaining

Canadian and U.S. Constitutions: Evolutionary and Revolutionary Nationbuilding and Nationmaintaining Willi Paul Adams (bio) Marian C. McKenna, ed. The Canadian and American Constitutions in Comparative Perspective. Calgary, Alberta: University of Calgary Press, 1993. xlvi 219 pp. Bibliography and index. $18.95. One way to examine the extent of American uniqueness is to compare the organizational histories of the United States and Canada as reflected in their constitutions. The comparison shows almost instant nationhood fought for and confirmed in two wars in one case and evolutionary nationhood — still without definite closure — in the other. Search for the underlying causes reminds us that the North American frontier environment did not predetermine the American type of democratic government pace Frederick Jackson Turner. The New World of cheap land, scarce labor, faraway imperial government, and militarily inferior aboriginal inhabitants left room for the European migrants to decide how to govern themselves — and to become Americans, Canadians, and Canadiens in the process. Some opted for military resistance to colonial rule, for unilateral proclamation of independence and a revolutionary change of regime; others felt compelled to move by small steps toward “responsible government” within the British Empire. The same English political and legal culture spawned both the Constitution of the United States of 1787/91 and the British North America Act of 1867 with its recent substantial amendment by the Constitution Act of 1982 that includes a Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Since a constitution is an agreement to distribute power, comparing the Canadian and American constitutional orders should be a standard practice to analyze both systems of government. But because of the nation-centered mindset of most lawyers and constitutional historians such investigations remain rare. 1 It is certainly not a crowded field to which University of Calgary historian Marian C. McKenna adds her substantial anthology; it can actually well serve as an introduction to the field. Her own article-length introduction sets the stage for the newcomer with an analytical outline of the issues that are dealt with in greater detail by the following nine articles, six of which are [End Page 545] published here for the first time. Most of them are written by political scientists in Canada, two by Canadian judges, two by political scientists in the United States. The conference at Calgary with which this fruitful scholarly enterprise began was inspired by the self-congratulatory bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution on one side of the border and by the ongoing struggle on the other side over recognizing Quebec as a “distinct society” in order to ward off the Parti Québécois’ push for more or complete independence of the largely Frenchspeaking province. 2 Hence Peter H. Russell of the University of Toronto’s political science department and former president of the Canadian Political Science Association aptly concludes the volume with the somber question “Can the Canadians Be a Sovereign People?” 3 His answer at the end of a trenchant outline of the neglected role of the people as a source of legitimate government in Canadian constitutional politics since the 1860s is unmitigated skepticism; “So deep are their current differences on fundamental questions of political justice and collective identity that Canadians may now be incapable of acting together as a sovereign people” (p. 186). When in 1980 the voters of Quebec were given a chance to express themselves directly on the supreme constitutional question — it was the first time since their intensely remembered conquest in 1759 — they clearly rejected the Parti Québécois’ requested mandate to negotiate some combination of political independence and economic cooperation. But two years later, Quebec’s Assemblée nationale rejected Prime Minister Trudeau’s historic achievement, the Constitution Act of 1982, because it did not sufficiently recognize the special status the legislature’s majority aspired to. Enacted by the British Parliament, signed into law by Queen Elizabeth, and agreed to by the nine remaining provincial legislatures, it became the law of the land nevertheless. When five years later Quebec’s demands had been largely recognized in the Meech Lake Accord of 1987, hammered out behind closed doors by the ten provincial premiers and the prime minister the legislatures of Manitoba and Newfoundland...

The lessons of Meech Lake and Charlottetown

The lessons of Meech Lake and Charlottetown

Constitutional predicament: Canada after the referendum of 1992

Canada's fifth effort at mega-constitutional was a period of popular discussion and leadership negotiation, that ran from the defeat in 1990 of the Meech Lake Accord through the Charlottetown Accord and the referendum of 26 October 1992. Constitutional Predicament explores the referendum in relation to the democratic process; nationalism (Canadian, Aboriginal, Quebecois) and pluralism; principles of constitutionalism, constitution-making, and popular participation in constitution-making; the role of the Charter and Supreme Court; future constitutional efforts; and worldwide trends. The contributors agree that Canadian voters rejected the Charlottetown proposals because they disapproved of both their content and the procedure by which they were drawn up. They conclude that, while Quebec remains the chief problem for the Canadian constitution, Quebec was not the sole constitutional issue or the sole issue which determined how Canadians voted. The constitutional process did help make it apparent that Canada is multinational and that each of the three major nations has valid claims on the political system. The contributors offer contrasting views on how the Charlottetown Accord came to read as it does, why negotiators at Charlottetown so misjudged public opinion, and the prognosis for further constitution-making. Readers may also see the referendum vote as a preview of the vote in the general election of October 1993, which unseated the Tories one year later, almost to the day. Taken together with the accompanying provocative commentaries, the essays will be of specific interest to students of Canadian politics and constitutional affairs. The complete text of the Charlottetown Accord is included in an appendix. The contributors and commentators are Janet Ajzenstat, Alan C. Cairns, Curtis Cook, Barry Cooper, Peter Emberley, David Hendrickson, Robert J. Jackson, Juan Lindau, F.L. Morton, Alain Noel, and James Tully.

The Effect of the Charter of Rights on Canadian Federalism

Canadian experience under the 1982 of Rights contradicts the orthodox understanding ofjudicial review as a decentralizing institution that performs a checking or blockingfunction. politics in Canada suggest that in a federal system, judicial review can also enhance values and policies favored by the national government at the expense of the constituent units. Rather than weakening the policy capabilities of the federal government, the Canadian has enhanced its influence. The has undermined the policy autonomy of the provinces by giving a policy veto to the Supreme Court, an institution that is more receptive to the policy preferences of national elites, especially in the area of language policy. This has aggravated French-English relations, because of the high incidence of judicial nullifications of Quebec's restrictive language policies. Elite attempts to compensate Quebec by way of new constitutional amendments (e.g., the Meech Lake Accord) have been thwarted by the emergence of an influential coalition of postmaterialist social interests, which use litigation to promote their nonterritorial policy objectives. These Charter Canadians have opposed constitutional amendments that would weaken the or the Court. This coalition has broken Canadian governments' historical monopoly on the constitutional amending process. By stimulating the democratization of constitutional politics, the has weakened the institutions of consociational democracy and elite accommodation. This has diminished the influence of all the provinces, but especially Quebec, thereby contributing to the recent rise in secessionist tendencies within Quebec.

In Search of Manitoba's Constitutional Position, 1950-1990

Despites relatively small population and “have not” status, Manitoba has been a major player on the stage of constitutional politics. This paper traces the province’s position as articulated at more than 20 First Ministers’ Conferences. It demonstrates how a vague and airy constitutional consciousness evolved into a fixation with the high polities of constitutional reform, and it contrasts the positions of seven premiers and three governing parties. The issues include entrenching francophone and aboriginal rights and the Meech Lake Accord. Manitoba's malleable position reveals doses of non-partisanship, philosophical principles, contradiction, and consistency.

Democracy and Its Discontents

How should one make sense of the malaise that currently sours public opinion in the countries of Europe, in Japan and North Amer ica? It reveals itself most saliently in tremendous electoral volatility as political parties are deserted for new formations and leaders. Con sider the disintegration of Japan's Liberal Democrats; the obliteration of Canada's Progressive Conservatives; the populist appeal of Ross Perot; the attrition of the mainstream German parties for Greens on the left and x?nophobes on the right; the willingness of voters in Poland and former East Bloc countries to vote for recycled commu nists; the Zhirinovsky phenomenon in Russia. Most recently Italian voters turned sharply toward the unconventional electoral formations of the Italian Freedom Alliance: the refurbished neo-fascists, the plebiscitary fan clubs of television magnate Silvio Berlusconi, and the pugnacious regionalists of the Northern Leagues. Elections provide only the most spectacular index of public impa tience. Political leaders have found it difficult to follow through on laboriously negotiated national pledges such as Meech Lake, Maas tricht or the North American Free Trade Agreement. Great break throughs become mired in complexity: How many outside Brussels still retain the 1992 vision of the European Community as a trans forming venture? And social cohesion apparently frays at a level even

After Meech Lake: Lessons for the FutureDavid E. Smith, Peter MacKinnon and John C. Courtney, eds. Saskatoon: Fifth House Publishers, 1991, pp. 261

After Meech Lake: Lessons for the FutureDavid E. Smith, Peter MacKinnon and John C. Courtney, eds. Saskatoon: Fifth House Publishers, 1991, pp. 261

An Inverted Logroll: The Charlottetown Accord and the Referendum

In the constitutional referendum held on October 26, 1992, Canadian voters said “No” to a constitutional package, the “Charlottetown Accord,” contrived explicitly to win pan-regional support. Instead, it evoked pan-regional opposition.The package Canadians rejected was formidably complex. It became so by a decade's accretion of elements, each calculated to appeal to, or to offset concessions to, groups excluded at an earlier stage—Quebec, the western provinces, and aboriginal peoples. Negotiators hoped that by 1992 they had finally found an equilibrium, a logroll sufficiently inclusive to survive referral to the people. Instead they seem to have gotten the logic of the logroll upside down: they may have overestimated both how much each group wanted what it got and how intensely some groups opposed key concessions to others.Quebec. At the heart of the package were proposals contrived to induce the political class of Quebec to acquiesce in the political settlement embodied in the Constitution Act, 1982. Although the government and legislature of Quebec had rejected the 1982 settlement, no one contested that it applied to the province. But many agreed, on grounds of either justice or expediency, that the pill had to be made less bitter. The first attempt to bring Quebec on side was the Meech Lake Accord, struck in 1987 and buried in 1990. The failure of this attempt was the immediate background to the 1992 events.

An Inverted Logroll: The Charlottetown Accord and the Referendum

In the constitutional referendum held on October 26, 1992, Canadian voters said “No” to a constitutional package, the “Charlottetown Accord,” contrived explicitly to win pan-regional support. Instead, it evoked pan-regional opposition.The package Canadians rejected was formidably complex. It became so by a decade's accretion of elements, each calculated to appeal to, or to offset concessions to, groups excluded at an earlier stage—Quebec, the western provinces, and aboriginal peoples. Negotiators hoped that by 1992 they had finally found an equilibrium, a logroll sufficiently inclusive to survive referral to the people. Instead they seem to have gotten the logic of the logroll upside down: they may have overestimated both how much each group wanted what it got and how intensely some groups opposed key concessions to others.Quebec. At the heart of the package were proposals contrived to induce the political class of Quebec to acquiesce in the political settlement embodied in the Constitution Act, 1982. Although the government and legislature of Quebec had rejected the 1982 settlement, no one contested that it applied to the province. But many agreed, on grounds of either justice or expediency, that the pill had to be made less bitter. The first attempt to bring Quebec on side was the Meech Lake Accord, struck in 1987 and buried in 1990. The failure of this attempt was the immediate background to the 1992 events.

The Mass Media and Political Crisis: Reporting Canada’s Constitutional Struggles

This article examines media coverage of the Meech Lake and Canada rounds of the constitutional crisis. How media reporting may have influenced the negotiation process, the controversies that erupted over alleged political bias in the CBC’s reporting and over the wide differences that seemed to separate anglophone and francophone journalists and the difficulties that television seemed to have in conveying complex issues are the central themes that are explored. It uses Joshua Meyrowitz’s work to examine the extent to which television may have created a “shared arena” that intruded on and transformed the constitution-making process.

A Sovereign Idea: Essays on Canada as a Democratic Community

In these essays, written during the last fifteen years, Whitaker analyses the paradoxes of federalism and democracy in a society which is deeply divided by region, language, and class. He examines the thought and action of such diverse figures as Mackenzie King, Harold Innis, William Irvine, and Pierre Trudeau and evaluates their impact on Canadian society both then and now. With an astute critical eye he surveys constitutional reform and the question of sovereignty as it has developed from 1981 through Meech Lake and beyond, and explores federalism, democratic theory, and the practice of politics in the real world. In the final essay, Quebec and the Canadian Question, written especially for this volume, he evaluates the major changes which have occurred in Canadian politics during the last fifteen years and assesses their resounding impact on the future possibilities for Canadian democracy. The dominant political discourse, Whitaker argues, is increasingly based on human rights. This, in combination with the ascendance of free-market conservatism, the turn to continentalism under free trade, and the resurgence, since the failure of Meech Lake, of serious tensions between and the rest of Canada, has led to a compounded crisis that requires an examination not only of what wants, with or without Canada, but what Canada wants -- with or without Quebec. The Canadian idea of democracy is still evolving. Together in one volume for the first time, Whitaker's essays describe the process of that evolution and show what lies beneath the constitutional debate on the future of Canada.

Ritualizing Ritual's Rituals

With a gesture of an eagle feather, Elijah Harper, an Ojibway-Cree and a New Democrat member of the Manitoba legislature, indicated his “No” to the constitutional changes proposed in the Meech Lake Accord, on the grounds that First Nations had been excluded.1 During the much-publicized confrontation at Oka between Mohawk warriors and the Securité de Quebec, in the same summer of 1990, the Long House, the spiritual and political focus of this Iroquoian community, the False Face masks, and the grove of pines at Kahnewake were revealed to television audiences. Even while specific meanings remained inaccessible, it was evident that a range of places, actions, and objects had roles to play in the major sociopolitical changes that First Nations people in Canada were instigating for themselves. Ovide Mercredi, the newly elected leader of the Assembly of First Nations, encouraged Joe Clark, Canada's minister for constitutional affairs, to participate in a pipe ceremony and listen to passages from the Bible, read by a Christian elder, before they began their discussions. Mercredi observed, “I am trying to use traditional values within our organization, but also in our dealings with the rest of Canadian society.”2

Meech Lake: the inside story

Meech Lake: the inside story

Canada: From Bennett's ‘New Deal’ to the Meech Lake Accord

Canada: From Bennett's ‘New Deal’ to the Meech Lake Accord

Book reviews

Democracy and Discontent: India's Growing Crisis of Governability by Atul Kohli (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp.420, £35.00 hardback, £13.95 paperback). The Child And The State In India by Myron Weiner (Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1991, pp.213, US$45.00 hb, US$14.95 pb). India and the Soviet Union: Trade and Technology Transfer by Santosh Mehrotra (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp.xvi+242, £30.00). Social Action and the Labouring Poor: An Experience by Primila Lewis (New Delhi, Vistaal Publications, 1991, pp.267, Rs. 95). India. Rebellion to Republic. Selected Writings, 1857–1990 edited by R. Jeffrey, L. Brennan, J. Masselos, P. Mayer and P. Reeves (South Asian Publications Series, No. 5. Sterling, New Delhi and Bangalore, 1990, AUD $40.00). India's Foreign Policy since 1971, by Robert W. Bradnock (Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1990, pp.128). A Democratic South Africa? Constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society by Donald L. Horowitz (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1991, pp.293, $24.95). Mauritius: Democracy and Development in the Indian Ocean by Larry W. Bowman (Aldershot, Dartmouth Publishing, 1991, pp.208, £22.50). Mandela, Tambo and the African National Congress by Sheridan Johns and R. Hunt Davies (New York, Oxford University Press, 1991, pp.353, £10.95). The Unbreakable Thread: Non‐Racialism in South Africa by Julie Frederikse (London, Zed Books, 1990, pp.294, £9.95). Transforming Settler States: Communal Conflict and Internal Security in Northern Ireland and Zimbabwe by Ronald Weitzer (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990, pp.278, $29.95 hb). Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya. The Dialectic of Domination by Bruce Berman (London, James Currey; Nairobi, Heinemann Kenya; Ohio, Ohio University Press, 1990, pp.479, £11.95 pb). Mau Mau. An African Crucible by Robert B. Edgerton (London, I.B. Tauris, pp.310, £14.95 hb). Food Insecurity and the Social Division of Labour in Tanzania, 1919–85 by Deborah Fahy Bryceson (London, St Antony's/Macmillan series, £40). Colonialism and Development in the Contemporary World edited by C. Dixon and M. Heffernan (London, Mansell, 1991, pp. 232, £35). Charity Politics and the Third World, by Peter J. Burnell (Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991, pp. 314, £37.50). Radical Mandarin: The Memoirs of Escott Reid (University of Toronto Press, 1990, pp. 392, £24). Liberty and Community: Canadian Federalism and the Failure of the Constitution by Robert C. Vipond (State University of New York Press, Albany, N.Y., 1991, pp.249, $14.95). Images of a Constitution by William E. Conklin (Toronto, Buffalo, London, University of Toronto Press, 1989, pp.365, $Cdn 45.00). A Meech Lake Post-Mortem, by Pierre Fournier (Montreal, McGill‐Queen's University Press, 1991, pp.154). Toward a Canada-Quebec Union, by Philip Resnick (Montreal, McGill‐Queen's University Press, 1991, pp.119). Political Crossroads: the 1989 Queensland Election edited by Rosemary Whip and Colin A. Hughes (St Lucia, Queensland, University of Queensland Press, 1991, pp. xv + 280, $Aust 29.95). Global Regimes and Nation‐States: Environmental Issues in Australian Politics, by Robert Boardman (Carleton University Press, Ottawa, 1990, pp. 222, $Can 29.95 hb, $19.95 pb).