The majority as minority: women and contemporary politics in Scotland,New Zealand and Finland,c. 1960–96

SUMMARY

In this article, Catriona Burness seeks to establish the current potential for increasing significantly the level of women's participation in politics in Scotland and the United Kingdom in the light of the experience of their representation in Scotland, New Zealand and Finland since 1960. The comparator countries have been selected because they are small countries of comparable size, with advanced political cultures, in which women have been eligible to vote and be elected to parliaments for a considerable period of time. The article reviews the history of women's representation in each of these countries and seeks to identify patterns in the developments that have taken place. It then discusses the prospects for further advances on the current position, in particular in the light of the probable introduction of a devolved assembly in Scotland.     

Recent books on the East

The following paper was discovered by Laurence Evans, Professor of History at the State University of New York at Binghamton, during the course of research in the files of the Department of State (to which Department the paper had been made available in 1918 for use as background information by the American Delegation at the Peace Conference), and Professor Evans has kindly communicated it to the Society. Its contents are not included in the book on Mecca which Snouk published in German, and it is not among the scattered articles in Verspreide Geschriften (1923–27). That collection does, however, include another essay about Ahmad Dahlan, in Dutch, entitled “Een rector der Mekkaansche universiteit”, originally contributed to a learned journal and reprinted in vol. 111, pp. 65–122. [We are printing this paper in good faith believing it to be previously unpublished. Ed.]     

Détente and conventional arms control: West German policy priorities and the origins of MBFR

The standard view of the negotiations on mutual and balanced force reductions 1973–86 is that no progress was made because the Warsaw Pact sought to protect its existing advantage in conventional forces in Europe, while the western side was against any reductions. Moreover, the political objectives of the talks (for the eastern side the conclusion of CSCE, for the western side the maintenance of domestic support for troop commitments to Europe) were achieved without any progress in the negotiations. Research in German archives shows that for a time there was strong support in the west German government for far more ambitious goals seeing the talks as a mechanism to affect fundamentally the structure of European security on the basis of more radical force reductions. This paper analyses the results of this research, its influence on the official west German position on MBFR and the interaction with the decision‐making process in the NATO alliance.     

Tools for co‐operation with the international community

Looking at processes of engagement between international actors in the Industrialised North, notably the G8 and Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).