Political Orders and Political Eras

Introduction

The transition from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown as Prime Minister of Britain produced a vast amount of stock-taking. For journalists, this involved the question of differences—realized, incipient, or imaginary—between Blair and Brown. For political scientists, however, this is the wrong question. Instead, their job is to ask whether any given transition represents a truly new political order. If it does not, the question becomes when the current political era really did emerge. What remains is then the question of whether current politics gives any serious indication of some new, latent, emergent era.

In this issue of The Forum, Graham Wilson and Donley Studlar revisit these questions in Britain. Graham concentrates more on the structure and distinction of a putative Blair era, while Donley carves British political history into the longer framework. Byron Shafer then asks where we are in history, that is, where we are in the same sort of evolution in the United States. For Germany, Clay Clemens asks whether a grand coalition can ever represent real political change, or whether it is only a device for forestalling same. And for France, Andrew Appleton uses this same set of notions to ask whether there can indeed be a ‘Sarkozy era’.