Communist election turnout shows society’ s “temperature”
The Day continues to discuss the prospects of the Ukrainian Left parties. This time the subject is approached from a geo-historical angle, summing up the key trends in the transformation and evolution of the “Left veterans” faced with the need to meet current challenges.
The Ukrainian Left have nothing to complain about in terms of media attention. Their leaders are often interviewed and prestigious editions carry their articles. Add here countless diversified commentaries trying to explain the electorate’s support of those championing Socialist and Communist ideas and the prospects of the Left movement in Ukraine. The Day has repeatedly broached the subject, as well.
The imminent fiasco of the Ukrainian Left has been predicted quite often, yet they remain influential political operators. Moreover, they regard progress made by their comrades in arms in certain neighboring countries as harbingers of their own political renascence, even though the election turnover indices betray a gradual decline.
Be it as it may, the Ukrainian Left prospects should be considered in a broader context, international as well as historical. Most sociopolitical institutions in a modern society (the national state, constitutions, parties, political ideologies, etc.) are products of the new times, the modern epoch, according to some philosophers. Postmodern theoreticians claim that the modern epoch is drawing to a close. A new world is taking shape, driven by the globalization process, accompanied by dramatic hardships. What will it be like? An answer is anyone’s guess at this stage. One thing is certain: all the basic institutions of a modern society will face serious challenges and the need to be essentially transformed.
The key latter-day political ideologies — Liberalism, conservatism, Socialism, nationalism, even feminism — emerged in an epoch marked by transition from agrarian to industrial civilization, from a feudal to bourgeois society. The main axis of the ideological conflict in the modern epoch was the political confrontation of the Left and the Right. The very symbolic notions emerged during the French Revolution in the late 18th century when the radical MPs sat to the left of the speaker and their conservative opponents to the right.
The gist of the ideological conflict between the Left and the Right has remained basically the same over the past two centuries. Since the French Revolution, the Left have been associated with the ideas of social equality and justice, claiming solutions to social conflicts through the redistribution functions of the state. The Right have insisted that trying to establish social justice is inevitably contrary to the idea of freedom. The Left movement has been heterogeneous from the outset. Both in the later 18th century and at the start of the third millennium there have been people championing radical methods. It is also true, however, that similar trends have been registered in the Right camp. Political radicalism will most likely forever exist. The problem is its scope and the kind of impact it produces on the social situation.
In various forms the Left movement has transformed as society evolved, at the same time serving as a catalyst and motive force of cardinal social changes. The development of a mass labor movement helped institute universal suffrage. Labor and Social Democratic parties appearing in most European countries at the turn of the 20th century became the cornerstone in the institution of mass political parties. The ideas of social democracy, translated into life, served as a basis of the welfare state policy, meaning a polity where each and everyone prospers, although “capitalism with a human visage” would seem a better description. This brief, far from exhaustive listing of the historical merits of the left movement and Socialist ideology is meant only to show that they were not an offshoot of social evolution, as maintained by some critics attacking the Left. Rather to the contrary, the assertion of modern Liberal democracies, their impressive socioeconomic gains were facilitated precisely by the Left-Right competition. Here special credit is due the Social Democratic branch of the Left movement.
Pragmatic revision of the Marxist sociopolitical doctrine, formulation of the concept of “democratic socialism” and later the Keynesian economic model helped modernize the moderate Left wing. This benefited both the Social Democrats that turned into an influential political force in Europe and the democratic political system as a whole. After World War II, the development of political systems in most liberal democracies became centripetal; there was a noticeable rapprochement between the Left centrist (Social Democratic) and Right centrist (primarily Liberal) parties. The political pendulum law took effect, with Left and Right centrist political forces taking turns at the helm. This secured political stability and the required level of competition in terms of power play.
History, however, is capricious. In the 1980s, the Social Democratic and Communist branches of the Left movement found themselves crisis-stricken.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and of the entire Socialist camp resulted in a deep-going crisis gripping the leading Communist parties of Western Europe, although in the 1970s they attempted to formulate a more liberal, so-called European Communist doctrine. The Communist parties of Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Finland split up.
The Communist Party of Italy, one of the largest in Western Europe, self-dissolved in February 1991, replaced by the Democratic Party of the Left, taking a Social Democratic stand. The orthodox Communists formed two parties: the Party of Communists of Italy and the Communist Refoundation.
The Communist Party of Spain, with a membership of some 200,000 in 1978, ranking with the strongest political forces at the time, had lost more than half its members by the later 1990s. At the 1979 parliamentary elections it collected 10% of votes and in 2000 the United Left Coalition, including the Communist Party of Spain, showed a mere 5.5% turnout.
Other Communist parties also suffered essential electorate reductions. That of France (winning 20% at the 1978 parliamentary elections) registered a 9.9% turnout in the first round of the 1997 parliamentary campaign and only 3.6% in the second round. The Communist Party of Portugal received 17% of votes in the 1979 elections. In 1999, the United Democratic Coalition, including the Communist Party, won 8.9%. The Greek Communists (some 10% in the 1980s) collected 5.5% in the 2000 parliamentary elections.
Pessimistic moods prevailed in the Left centrist camp in the 1980s. With reason, considering the triumphant march of neoliberalism manifest in Thatcherism and Reaganomics, election defeats, the unprecedentedly long opposition status of Europe’s two leading Social Democratic Parties (Labor and SDPG). The Left centrists (including the Left liberals) overcame the crisis in the 1990s. Democratic nominee Bill Clinton became US President, Left centrist Social Democrats received key government posts in Holland, Great Britain, France, Italy, and FRG. European Socialist parties (EU Social Democratic Coalition) formed the largest faction in the European Parliament after 1989 and 1994 elections. However, at the turn of the third millennium the political pendulum swung further right again, so the Left centrists had to retreat somewhat in a number of countries (US, France, Italy, Holland), as well as in the European Parliament.
Although nothing terrible had happened, the European Left centrist movement is faced with the acute problem of ideological upgrading. The proposed solutions to modern problems are different in many respects and are often hardly compatible. Interestingly, the main vector of the European Social Democratic ideological quest has of late been referred to as the third option. Obviously, the notion is popular not only in the former Soviet republics.
Whereas previously the third option was understood as steering a middle course between Soviet “real Socialism” and “orthodox American capitalism” (this being the gist of the program of the Social International revived in 1951), after the fall of the USSR, with the globalization process gaining momentum, the key Socialist idea is linked to the market paradigm. The third option has become an alternative to the obsolete postwar Social Democratic model, on the one hand, and neoliberalism, on the other.
The third option ideology boils down to a quest for the golden mean between (a) the attractive aspects of the North American market economy and low unemployment rate, albeit with a high level of social stratification, and (b) the European continental model with its characteristically advanced social infrastructure and chronic unemployment.
Searching for the third option is strongly influenced by the globalization process. The 21st Social International Convention, held in Paris, November 8-11, 1999, was sharply critical of the globalization model relying on the principles of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. Those addressing the subject voiced serious concern over the side effects of the globalization process, leading to a sharp aggravation of inequality among the states, a threat of forced cultural homogeneity, with whole nations being endangered by speculative financial capital. The declaration proposed deep-going reforms in the world economic and financial systems, based on the principles of transparency, accountability, controllability, and democracy.
The globalization process, sharpening intercivilization conflicts are increasingly challenging both the Left and other leading political camps. In fact, globalization spurs fresh ideological rifts, undermining that structure of political differentiation that took shape in the second half of the 20th century. Mounting nationalistic moods in EU countries, the attitude to immigration and immigrants, the ways and forms of further integration of the Union, aggravating crises in the world economy, the attitude to progressive technologies and their social consequences, new ecological crises — these are only few of the items making up the new agenda for Europe, to which the traditional political parties have no unequivocal answers.
The antiglobalist movement is a special challenge to the traditional Leftists. Its ideology is clearly anticapitalist, thus forming a potential rival. The eclectic linkage between Left radical, libertarian, Left liberal, and anarchist ideas constitutes a highly explosive ideological mix. Antiglobalist protests remind one of yet another enigmatic political phenomenon: the new Left and student revolutionary movements of the 1960s, with new social (ecological, feminist, humanistic, etc.) movements as their sequel. Their social basis was the appearance of a new generation on the public arena of the developed Western countries. Those young people were not prosperity-and social-and-physical-security-oriented. Rather, they were materialistic, seeking self-expression, a new lifestyle, and so on. Similar phenomena are underway within the antiglobalist movement.
How will all this affect the Left movement? There is no answer, not at this stage anyway. One thing is clear. The Left-Right confrontation will not disappear in the epoch of globalization; it will transform.
The globalization process will have an impact on the Left parties in the postcommunist part of the world (even if to a lesser degree than in the West). The key role in this region is still played by domestic political factors. Summing up political experience in various postcommunist countries allows us to single out four basic Left evolutionary trends:
1. Transformation of Communist parties as Social Democratic or Left centrist ones. This trend is peculiar to a number of Left parties in Central and Eastern European countries where most of the population supported liberal political and economic reforms; also, aiming to integrate into NATO and EU, as evidenced by Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Characteristically, a political pendulum model is also taking shape within the centripetal political systems of these countries. The Left-centrist parties are either in power (sometimes as part of a coalition) or have had this status.
2. Communist parties retain their orthodox ideologies, albeit with amendments allowing for new political realities. In most such cases the party does not change its traditional name and this trend is manifest in most post-Soviet countries (Ukraine and Russia included), with separate cases in Central Europe (e.g., the Czech Republic). Moldova is the only postcommunist country where the orthodox Communist party succeeded in coming to power and this resulted in mounting domestic political tensions.
3. Establishment of Social Democratic (Left centrist) parties on a new organizational basis. This trend is widespread in both post- Soviet and postcommunist Central European countries.
4. Transformation of Communist parties as parties in power under authoritarian and neototalitarian regimes. This trend is especially manifest in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Thus, the ruling Democratic Party of Turkmenistan, led by President Saparmurad Niyazov, was set up in December 1991, immediately after disbanding the local Communist Party.
The dominance of some or other trends is determined by sociopolitical conditions and cultural tradition underlying the party system in a given country. Incidentally, this situation is characteristic of not only postcommunist or post-Soviet countries. Historical tradition and cultural-political context have a crucial impact on the political and ideological specifics in various countries in various regions. Thus, Latin American, Arab, Asian, and African countries offer unique such conditions. They are essentially different from the European model. Precisely the Left-Right ideological differentiation scale is the specific feature of European political culture. In this sense the post-Soviet countries (barring the Central Asian republics) tend to the European political ideological differentiation model, all such specifics notwithstanding.
Comparing the trends and specifics in the development of Left parties, in various postcommunist countries, allows us to arrive at an important conclusion: the ideological visage acquired by a former Communist party, the degree of its influence in a given society best characterize the vector and degree of postcommunist transformations in a given country. The degree to which the electorate supports the orthodox Communists reflects the political temperature of a given postcommunist society. The lower that degree, the further that society has moved from its communist past. The Communist temperature of Ukrainian society is gradually lowering, meaning that we are on the way to recovery, even if this convalescence is not as quick as we would prefer.
