Volume 11, Number 4, 1980

EN:

It is a well-established principle of international law that the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State is forbidden. It is also recognized that every State has the sovereign and inalienable right to choose its economic System as well as its political social and cultural Systems in accordance with the will of its people, without outside interference, coercion or threat in any form whatsoever. But international law does not prohibit the use of force in the exercice of the right of self-defence if an armed attack occurs and some writers state that there is no rule of international law which forbids the government of one state from rendering assistance to the government of another state.

This article is primarily concerned with legal issues related to soviet invasion of Afghanistan; its purpose is to examine official statements put forward in Moscow in order to justify the legality of this armed intervention. As will be seen, there is a perfect similarity between legal arguments used in 1956, 1968 and 1980; this is being done in order to give the domestic crisis an international colouring and to justify a demand for foreign intervention. It must be noted that Soviet troops are "not interfering" in the international affairs of Afghanistan: on the contrary, they are "fighting for" the principle of socialist self-determination of the people of Afghanistan... By definition a war conducted by the USSR is a just and defensive war...

EN:

The author seeks to determine in what way marketing may be considered as a development catalyst by examining the case of agricultural products in developing countries. He first observes that the marketing System both reflects the level of development and constitutes a subsystem of the socio-economic System. Marketing is thus in a symbiotic relationship with the development process.

Market complexity conditions the nature of public and private sector initiatives. In fact, the structure of domestic agricultural markets is disjointed and the imperatives of world markets impose an almost dialectical choice between exports and import substitution. After having analyzed contextual and empirical data, the author considers such marketing actors as government marketing boards and producer cooperatives by attempting an assessment of their developmental impact. Marketing, he concludes, may be seen as a necessary but not sufficient condition for the development process.

EN:

It is generally accepted that a power relation is at the base of every negotiation and that, to the extent possible, each State attempts to negotiate when that relation is the most weighted in its favour, especially if the subject matter of negotiation is perceived by it as being of vital importance.

Over several years all of Israel's neighbours, Egypt among them, obstinately refused to negotiate (at least openly) with the Zionist State apparently counting on an improvement in the power relation in their favour. An improvement moreover that eventually seemed possible with the relative yet nonetheless important successes of the October 1973 war.

The enigma that Sadat's policy constitutes from this vantage point resides precisely in the fact that that policy appears to upset the power relation that made the October War possible and that led to Israel's first setback. The economic difficulties and reorientation of the Egyptian regime (both towards the West and towards private enterprise) do not, by themselves, explain what is referred to as Egypt’s « defeatist » diplomacy. This diplomacy also reflects a strategic coherency that can only be understood within the historical perspective of the Arab-Israeli conflict and by undertaking a rigourous analysis of Zionism and its principal sources of political support. Sadat, by a paradoxical exploitation of a position of weakness, attempts to transform politically that relative weakness into a position of strength in order to wrest from Israel that which the Arabs have not succeeded in obtaining by armed force. He pursues the war, but by the other means. Nevertheless, the success of these means depends to a great extent on the attitudes of the other countries of the battlefield.

EN:

This study covers the one-year period since the first election of the European Assembly by universal suffrage, the results of which were rather misleading. The authors attempt to elaborate a conceptual framework capable of analyzing empirically the programs and ideological stands of the parties in the Strasbourg Chamber as they have evolved since the election. As a point of reference, the analysis has recourse to three socio-political cleavages which were observable throughout late European history or tend to appear in the modem context of political life; these include the divisions between 1) "bourgeois" and working class parties; 2) europeanist versus nationalist parties, and 3) industralist (or productivist) as opposed to "ecological" party formations. A detailed examination of both the interventions of euro-deputies in Assembly debates, and data recorded in several interviews with some deputies during this first year of their mandate, reflects not only the existing constellations of power and party alliances within the Assembly that reaffirm themselves on specific issues, but also the potential coalitions which may arise due to the rapidly changing political scene. These new coalitions, which tend to form more easily among members of different parties who share common interests with regard to social and economic issues, may eventually serve to overcome the traditional ideological divisions among parties. In terms of the near future, it doesn't matter so much whether the Euro-right or the Euro-left will succeed in imposing its majority in the Assembly, but whether the European Parliament itself, as an institution, will be able to demonstrate that it can have an effective and more representative voice in the formulation of EEC policies.