Political Parties in Post-Communist Eastern Europe

Paul Lewis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134634378
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Political Parties in Post-Communist Eastern Europe is the first textbook to survey the course of party developments in eastern Europe as a whole in the post-Communist period. This book relates the specifics of the post-communist situation to the broader picture of the early stages of party development in western Europe and also to contemporary models of party organisation in established democracies.
The book includes:
· a brief historical introduction to the context of post-communist change
· the process of competitive party formation and democratic elections
· the development of independent parties; their ideologies, and electoral volatility
· the structure and level of organisation developed by new parties
· an analysis of stable party systems which have emerged in eastern Europe and the contribution they make to emerging democracies in the region
Party Politics in Post-Communist Eastern Europe will be a comprehensive and invaluable resource, accessible to undergraduates of politics and European studies, as well as the non-specialist reader.

1 Political change in eastern Europe

Introduction

The emergence of independent, competitive parties and the development of party government has been one of the most significant aspects of recent political change in eastern Europe. Political parties appear as one of the most prominent institutions of modern liberal democracy. It is hardly possible, in practice if not in theory, to conceive of a functioning representative democracy without some kind of competitive party system. The development of a range of reasonably effective parties is a prime indicator of the democratization of the former communist countries and the progress they have made towards joining the broad European community of established democratic nations. Parties help anchor the recently established democratic regimes in a broader society and contribute to their stability amidst multiple processes of rapid social and economic change. Effective constitutions and the diverse processes involved in the rule of law are strengthened by the possibilities parties offer for the development of a more active citizenry and the emergence of a robustly democratic political culture. There are also strong reasons to believe that such conditions are conducive to stable processes of economic development and the formation of effective market economies. This book is designed to provide an overview of the critical process of party development in eastern Europe both for those with a special interest in contemporary processes of change in the region and others concerned with the nature of modern political parties more generally.

Firstly, though, it is necessary to define the terms of the survey. Most people have a good idea of what a political party is, although experts find it difficult to agree on a definition that sums up its basic characteristics. As social institutions parties can carry different implications and their attributes vary in significance according to social context. Some influential definitions direct attention to a party’s primary activity of contesting elections and seeking to place its candidates in public office.¹ Other analysts point out that parties can exist under regimes that do not hold elections, and that otherwise normally constituted parties sometimes choose not to contest a particular election or elections in general.² A further criticism of the office-seeking approach is that it provides insufficient grounds for distinguishing between parties and interest groups.³ Such writers then tend to elaborate on other characteristics and the range of functions parties can perform.

The focus on electoral activity and the ambitions of parties to achieve government office are, nevertheless, of particular importance. In the context of post-communist eastern Europe it can be argued that participation in competitive elections is a major feature of party identity formation and the evolution of such organizations. Party competition is a prominent feature of the contemporary regimes that distinguishes them from the single-party dictatorships of the communist period and provides at the present juncture a natural focus of attention. Consideration of parties that are non-competitive is hardly of great interest here. At the present stage of east European party development, too, the distinction between party and interest group is a difficult one to draw and should not be over-emphasized.

Ranging beyond the question of definition, it must also be recognized that the very concept of party and its global scope is problematic. Surveys of parties on a general basis or within a particular region have not been common, and attempts to generalize about them on a comprehensive basis have encountered major conceptual problems. Reasonably stable, well-developed parties tend, quite simply, to be found in established liberal democracies and it is not clear that the parties identified in other contexts are quite the same kind of political institution. Some of the difficulties involved in such comparative exercises could be left to one side in the early stages. The first prominent modern, post-war overview by Maurice Duverger did not pay any attention to the countries that later came to be recognized as the Third World.⁴ Leon Epstein was more aware of the problem of scope but acknowledged in his work that discussion of democratic party activity essentially concerned those nations that have participated actively in the ‘special Euro-American development’ of the last few centuries.⁵

Giovanni Sartori did pay attention to the largely unstructured party activity in Africa and some Latin American countries, although this largely served to emphasize the singularity of the European pluralist model. Von Beyme once more preferred to restrict his focus to parties in western democracies. More recently, Alan Ware has, quite reasonably, been unapologetic in continuing to direct close attention to parties in liberal democratic regimes – although in the context of the 1990s one of the five cases he considers is that of Japan. Discussion of political parties on a general basis has, then, tended to reinforce the focus on established democracies in Europe and associated countries in North America and Australasia. One important work shifted attention to the Third World and dealt with Political Parties and Political Development. It tended in this context, however, to emphasize the advantages of one-party regimes – a view that was very much of its time and of limited relevance to the study of parties in contemporary eastern Europe.⁶

In truth, the description and analysis of modern political parties remains rooted in the context of the established democratic regimes of the western world and is by no means necessarily the worse for that. It is certainly the prime reference point for party development in eastern Europe. The one-party regime that evolved within the Soviet dictatorship, and subsequently spread to other parts of Europe and the world, had little in common with the experience of liberal-democratic, competitive party politics. It does not now have a great deal to contribute to the general study of modern party politics.

But that does not mean that the west European and American origins of the party experience, as well as specific implications of the liberal-democratic context, should be ignored in a broader study. In a useful survey of activities outside the liberal-democratic heartland Vicky Randall deplores the prevalence of Euro-centrism and rigid concepts of what a political party should be.⁷ The importance of the experience of established liberal democracies for party development and modern party practice overall cannot be ignored – but neither should the specific nature of some of the implications derived from that analysis. Established western practices might well provide the benchmark for modern party activity but, in the context of this study, it would be a mistake to expect the new democracies of eastern Europe either to replicate western models in any detail or to reproduce their party systems within a few years of the ending of dictatorship. Expectations of new democracies often reflect an idealized understanding of western experience and a faulty grasp of the important changes that many established democratic parties are undergoing.

A second major question of definition concerns the region itself. If the idea of the political party itself needs to be examined before being applied to the context of post-communist democracy, so that of eastern Europe also requires some elucidation. Any definition of eastern Europe is firstly, of course, a matter of geography – but also far more than that. The notion of eastern Europe, like that of Europe itself, carries a range of normative overtones and is often associated with particular values. For most of the post-1945 period the definition of the region was quite straightforward. The communist eastern Europe that emerged with the construction of the Iron Curtain was easily defined. From the late 1940s to 1989 it referred to the countries located to the east of the Federal Republic of Germany, Austria and Italy that did not form part of the Soviet Union.

With the removal of the Iron Curtain it now makes sense to revert to an earlier and broader view of eastern Europe – although one that still excludes European Russia, which merits separate treatment by virtue of the Eurasian status of the Russian whole, lingering remnants of its superpower status and special features that mark it off from the smaller countries closer to the democratic European mainstream. The eastern Europe at issue here is, therefore, quite simply defined. It consists of that part of Europe that cannot be described as western – a term with connotations not just geographical but also political (involving an established democratic order and in most cases membership of the European Union and NATO) and economic (capitalist countries with established market economies).

Contemporary eastern Europe thus includes most of post-communist Europe and major portions of the former Soviet Union. The coverage of this book extends to include the Baltic republics, characterized in any case by a firm identification with the countries of central Europe, as well as Moldova with its strong links with Romania. Although more distant from the European heartland, too, Ukraine and Belarus are also broadly European and their status remains reasonably distinct from that of Russia. But such definitions are also contentious and can be highly divisive in political terms. While few would argue with the borders of contemporary eastern Europe being extended to include parts of the former Soviet Union, many citizens of the pre-1989 eastern Europe, particularly in Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic, now wish to be known as inhabitants of central Europe, or at least east-central Europe. They have no wish to be identified with the population of any part of the former Soviet Union and assert a distinct cultural, political and economic identity closer to that of western Europe than the regions ruled directly from Moscow until the very end of 1991. Some of them may even feel downright insulted that their rapidly democratizing countries and developing party systems are covered in a book on eastern Europe. It is not the intention here to evoke any such response. My view is just that it is more useful to have a broad view of eastern Europe that encompasses all nineteen post-communist countries of Europe (with the exception of the more ambiguous case of Russia) and, for purposes of comparison and analysis, to direct attention to the marked political, social and cultural differences within that broad category. This survey of the new parties will in any case tend to be more strongly focused on the countries of central (or east-central) Europe that are closer to the west and where party development has generally been more advanced – and which are also countries where the process has been better documented.

It is not just the classification of the different sub-regions that is contentious but also their composition in terms of particular countries. My preferred grouping, and that which will be used throughout this book, distinguishes between the countries of:

• east-central Europe: Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and the Czech Republic;
• the Baltic states: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania;
• the Balkans: Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and most of the countries of the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia);⁸ and
• former Soviet republics: Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine.

Some political science texts have a slightly different focus. The central Europe examined by Attila Ágh in his recent text, for example, includes not just the countries I describe as east-central European but also Croatia.⁹ In a further variant, Keith Crawford includes as constituent parts of east-central Europe all the countries of the former Soviet empire, and includes within it Albania, Bulgaria and Romania.¹⁰ There is no general agreement on what constitutes contemporary eastern Europe or on how the countries that make it up should be grouped.

The classification proposed above is, in my view, somewhat more coherent than the other variants not just in geographical but also in political and economic terms. In line with most east-central European colleagues, indeed, it is difficult not to acknowledge also that these essentially geographical groupings also carry broader social significance. As listed in Table 1.1, the countries of east-central Europe are both further along the democratic path (Freedom Ranking) and richer (GDP per capita). After 1990, Slovenia, for example, rapidly left the ‘Balkan’ location of the former Yugoslavia to form part of a richer and more democratic east-central Europe. In political terms, on the other hand, Slovakia moved away from the more advanced category. Following the break-up of Czechoslovakia it diverged from the broadly democratic path taken by other east-central European countries and continued to show (at least until the elections of 1998) some of the authoritarian characteristics of several of the Balkan and post-Soviet countries. Although former Soviet republics too, the Baltic states entered into fast-track democratization and maintained an economic lead over other former Soviet republics. It is reasonable, therefore, to place them in a separate category.

Table 1.1 The countries of contemporary eastern Europe

Contemporary international decisions reinforce the principles underlying this classification. In a further variant of sub-regional fine-tuning, the European Union expressed its own judgement on the pattern of political and economic development in eastern Europe in 1997 by identifying Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic as the countries best suited for early entry to an enlarged community. The fourfold subdivision of eastern Europe is therefore primarily geographical, but also political and economic in some of its broad implications – although these can only be regarded as loose and suggestive in a general sense.

A third, and final, point of definition needs to be added about the term ‘post-communism’. This is used to refer to the period after 1989 (in the former eastern Europe) or after 1991 (in the former Soviet Union) when, in the first case, the exercise of Soviet power ceased to be effective and, in the second, the rule of Moscow or the Soviet communist party came to an end and the USSR disintegrated. There is, notes Leslie Holmes, ‘no readily identifiable and reasonably specific ideology or even theory of post-communism’.¹¹ But then there is no particular reason why there should be. Post-communism is simply a condition that exists in countries that have sloughed off communist rule. This common history is indeed likely to leave the countries with important similarities in the immediate post-communist period, but they can be expected to diminish over time rather than forming a distinctive pattern of post-communist evolution. This is precisely what seems to happening in contemporary eastern Europe in terms of levels of democratization and diverging paths of economic development. Nevertheless, for many people the term does carry significant political overtones. The idea of the ‘post-communist party’ is often used to refer to organizations formed on the basis of former ruling parties not just in a descriptive or historical sense, but also with the distinct implication that they carry over some authoritarian baggage from the former period. In this book any judgements will be based on empirical analysis of the particular party, and the term ‘post-communist’ will be used in a straightforward descriptive and historical sense rather than in any evaluative way.

Historical background

1989 was a momentous year both for the countries of eastern Europe and the development of a democratic Europe as a whole. Its most striking image might well have been the opening wide of the heavily guarded gates set in the Berlin Wall and the eagerness with which Berliners set about its demolition with pickaxes and crowbars, but in the longer run it was a process of construction that would do most to determine how long and in what form this newly gained freedom would survive. It was not bricks and mortar that were primarily at issue. Central to the process was the building of new political institutions and the establishment of a diversity of parties capable of expressing the interests and aspirations of a modern population. A range of influences bore on the prospects for party development and the capacity of the countries of eastern Europe to produce stable party systems capable of sustaining new democratic systems. One important factor was the region’s limited experience of liberal democracy and the relative weakness of party development before the onset of communist rule.

In distinction to the longer established democracies of the west, the newly independent countries of post-communist eastern Europe had little experience of multi-party democracy or the practice of pluralist politics. Even before World War II, when the major portion of contemporary Belarus and the Ukraine already formed part of the Soviet Union, most of the other countries of eastern Europe had little success in preserving or implementing the principles embodied in the democratic constitutions most of them had adopted after the end of the previous war in 1918. Czechoslovakia was the only exception in maintaining a fully democratic regime through to its demise with the Nazi invasion of the already weakened republic in March 1939. Democratic experience elsewhere was very limited, and the different kinds of constitutional order introduced throughout the region were rarely fully implemented.¹² The development of parliamentary democracy was abruptly curtailed in Bulgaria with the overthrow of the Stamboliiski government in 1923, in Poland after a coup d’état in 1926, and in Yugoslavia with the proclamation of a royal dictatorship in 1929. In Hungary there was little in the way of democratic development at all, the brief Soviet Republic of Béla Kun in 1919 being followed by a series of administrations under the overall supervision of Admiral Horthy until his removal in 1944. Apart from a brief extension of the franchise in 1920, the Hungarian electorate also remained restricted to 27.5 per cent of the adult population, so the limited degree of party competition was further restricted in its democratic reach in terms of popular representation.

Although early democratic aspirations – let alone practices – generally gave way to authoritarianism and varying degrees of dictatorship, the east European regimes were still distinct from the totalitarian system created in the Soviet Union. Political rule might well have been dictatorial and repressive in many cases, but it was by no means as tyrannical or monolithic as that established in Stalin’s Russia. Unlike the situation within the resolutely one-party system installed in the Soviet Union, parties and elections did make some input to eastern Europe’s public life and democratic processes retained some political significance. Thus, within the strongly monarchical system of rule that persisted in Romania, the National Peasant Party won a major electoral victory in 1928 and embarked on a series of reforms; Bulgaria, too, saw a People’s Bloc of diverse party forces voted into power in reasonably free elections in 1931 to cope with the effects of the Depression. The Polish election of 1928 offered a fair degree of political choice and it was only after the passage of a new constitution and the death of Marshal Piłsudski in 1935 that dictatorial currents gained real strength. While the limits placed on party activity and the maintenance of a restricted franchise might mean that inter-war east European political life bore little resemblanc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables
• Preface
• 1. Political Change In Eastern Europe
• 2. Party Origins and Party Development
• 3. Parties, Elections and Parliaments
• 4. Party Organization and Institutional Development
• 5. Party Systems and Structures of Representation
• 6. Conclusion: Political Parties In Contemporary Eastern Europe
• Annex: Party Profiles (Major Parties In East-Central European Parliaments)
• Notes
• Bibliography