LONDON -- The report commissioned by Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, "The Frontier Within," makes fascinating reading for Western eyes. Parts of it may be specific to the Japanese internal situation, but the key insights are highly relevant to every modern democracy, old and new, and especially to Britain.

The report's 16 authors seem to have grasped, as many politicians and ministers round the world have not, that the entire relationship between government and governed is being transformed. This creates the need for a highly innovative approach to the whole business of government and a redefining of core tasks that people expect the governing administration to perform.

This new approach simply cannot be analyzed or developed in the language of 20th-century ideologies and philosophies. Freedom and democracy must remain the guiding and inspiring principles of an open society, but their interpretation has to start from a quite different angle. The essence of this new pattern of governance, as the report rightly emphasizes, is to recognize that government and officialdom are no longer "on top" and the rest of us underneath. In a network world of all-pervasive and totally accessible information, governance becomes much more of a two-way process, rooted in clear, visible and intelligible rules and principles.