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densely populated country, and the imbalance that this creates would be hard to resolve through a federal system. He is right to say that the real objection lies in the fact that the British mind is set against a rational reorganization of the system. But he might have looked a little more closely at the Northern Ireland example, where home rule was perceived by some as having, by the 1960s, moved in the direction of federalism. There is evidence in the Cabinet papers that, even earlier, British politicians regarded Northern Ireland as at least quasi-federal. Kendle reviews the impact of the debate on the British empire, and here again we have the spectacle of brilliant minds, such as Lionel Curtis's, working in a vacuum. Federalism was resorted to in the case of the Rhodesias; but this was an attempt to preserve the position of the European population, while not surrendering to any kind of South African apartheid. Kendle comes out as definitely in favour of European federalism, and, again, he might have drawn on his Irish interests in exploring this burning issue. The United Kingdom's difficulties in adjusting to the possibility of a federal Europe contrasts with Ireland's easy surrender of sovereignty-a sovereignty that she used violence to achieve and which she once defended so resolutely. The United Kingdom has a special problem, in that Parliament has played a greater role in its history than it has in Ireland's, or even perhaps in the history of any other European state. This points up the central problem in Kendle's book, which is that, while there is, as he demonstrates, an excellent case to be made for federalism (as the story of Italian unification and its consequences reveals), there must be compelling political motiva- tion for states to go down that road. Oddly enough, the fact that few, if any, European states were really nation states reinforced their determination to insist, institutionally, that this is precisely what they were. Kendle's book may well be a tract for the times, as the nation state loses its supreme place on the international stage; or it may be an interesting study in what may yet turn out to be a footnote to the history of the United Kingdom. D. GEORGE BOYCE Swansea THE CONSERVATIVES AND BRITISH SOCIETY, 1880-1990. Edited by Martin Francis and Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1996. Pp. x, 333. £ 35.00. In his popular history of the Conservative Party, We the Nation, published in 1995, A. J. Davies remarks on the paucity of studies of modern