European Integration and the Communist Dilemma

Communist Party Responses to Europe in Greece, Cyprus and Italy

Giorgos Charalambous

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317139508
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Essays in Politics & International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

European Integration and the Communist Dilemma assesses the response of communist parties to European integration using three contrasting and comparatively significant case studies from Greece, Cyprus and Italy. These parties, in common with other radical parties in Europe, face a continuing strategic dilemma with regard to Europe through which larger questions about communist ideology and identity can be illuminated. Exploring the tendency of communist parties to face a trade-off between domestic legitimacy and electoral concerns, and their nature as parties professing opposition to the systemic currents of capitalism and European integration, the author provides a fascinating study of the nuances in deciding whether to adopt ideological consistency or undergo moderation. Blending advances in party politics, communist history and Europeanization research, the book devises a framework that overcomes the deficiencies of uni-dimensional approaches to the study of parties and Europe. In this manner, wider insights on the national party politics of European integration are drawn.

Chapter 1
Introduction

The Book’s Domain

During the 1980s and before, scholars studying political parties used to acknowledge that much more work exists in the party politics literature on the left than on the right. After the 1980s this claim was no longer made. It was evident by then that communist parties had entered a path of electoral demise or stagnation and ideological confusion, whereas the radical right was becoming an increasingly relevant electoral actor in European politics. Between that time and the turn of the millennium, very few books and articles were published on contemporary European communist parties1 and, more widely, on the European radical left, among which communist parties can be situated. Most dealt with either these parties’ reactions to the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, like the seminal volumes by Bull and Heywood (1994) and Bell (1993a), or their trajectories of transformation in Central and Eastern Europe (for example, Bozóki and Ishiyama 2002; Grzymala-Busse 2002; Ishiyama 1999).

Since then, the trend has changed again. While interest in the radical right has not faltered, more and more scholars began to explore the European radical left after the turn of the 1990s. Focus was placed on these parties’ internal disputes with regard to government coalition participation (Hudson 2000); on their role in the consolidation of South European democracies and on the similarities and differences of their organizational and ideological trajectories (Bosco 2001, 2000); on their European policies (Holmes and Roder 2012; Charalambous 2011a; Benedetto and Quaglia 2007; Dunphy 2004; Hough and Handl 2004); on the challenges and threats these parties pose to democracy (Backes and Moreau 2008); on their organizational impediments/catalysts to programmatic reform and adaptation (Keith 2011; Botella and Ramiro 2003; Ramiro 2004); on their experience with government office (Olsen et al. 2010a; Bale and Dunphy 2011; Dunphy and Bale 2011); and on the variability among them (March 2008; March and Mudde 2005). Very recently, March (2011) produced a wide-ranging and detailed overview of radical left parties, covering both Western and Eastern Europe.

We have thus reached a point where radical left politics is a burgeoning but still underdeveloped field of academic study. In this book I attempt to contribute to this field by closing various gaps in the study of communist (and, arguably, also radical left) parties’ relations to European integration during the past two and a half decades. The main idea is to uncover communist party mechanisms of response to Europe and assess their underpinning logic. By extension, issues arising from the broader study of national political parties’ relations to European integration and the latter’s significance for the former are also put in perspective and addressed.

At the same time, my analysis in this book is situated within the broad perspective that is currently and, in my opinion, rightly dominating the field. While I differ from others on a number of parameters, I view communist parties foremost as ‘real political actors’ engaged with, and aware of, the pressures of political competition. To paraphrase Bale and Dunphy (2007; see also 2011) I focus not only on their ‘leftness’, but also on their ‘party-ness’. This two -pronged viewpoint derives from the distinction between what parties are and what parties do (Mair and Mudde 1998: 220) – that is, between their traditional identities on the one hand and their contemporary appeals on the other, which may or may not be consonant with each other (see also Mair 1999: 20–21). In this way, the book can be said to be in tune with the relevant literature’s theoretical points of convergence, effectively carrying them further.

Conversely, as already mentioned, from the early 2000s most comparative studies have not focused exclusively on communist parties, but rather studied the radical (or far) left. There is a good case to be made that the ideology of communist parties is part of a broader spectrum of radical left world-views. The radical left has been categorized as a party family with good reason. Many scholars have examined it under the (mostly implicit) assumption that its common denominator is at least as clear as that of other commonly perceived party families (see March 2011; 2008; Olsen et al. 2010a; Backes and Moraeu 2008; Dunphy 2004; Botella and Ramiro 2003). Most theorists of political ideologies have evoked the value of social, political and economic equality in society as the chief differentiating characteristic of these parties’ ideologies (see, for example, Heywood 2003; Vincent 1995: 86). March and Mudde have argued that, first, the radical left shares a (radical) rejection of the underlying socio-economic structure of contemporary capitalism and its values and practices, as well as the advocating ‘of alternative economic and power structures (involving a major redistribution of resources from existing political elites)’. Second, it shares a (left) pursuit of social justice ‘in political and social arrangements’, while espousing ‘collective economic and social rights as their principal agenda’, being more consistently anti-capitalist than anti-democratic and promoting internationalism, both as an instrument of networking and as a necessary form of struggle in the face of the global nature of national and regional problems (March and Mudde 2005: 25).2

However, communist parties can be distinguished as a group on their own, within the broader radical left, on various grounds. They seem to have enough in common between them, and enough differences with other non-communists, to allow us to pursue their study independently. Taking Mair and Mudde’s (1998) discussion of party families as a classification tool, these parties share: (1) a communist label; (2) similar origins; (3) and an ideology whose teleological element speaks about a higher, more qualitative stage of society – communism (see Chapter 2). More specifically, they further share a vehement criticism of imperialism and, even if not dominated by them, host a coherent current of Leninists who occupy central and municipal leadership positions. More importantly, most communists officially name capitalism, and not simply neoliberalism, as the main malaise of society, although, as we will see, electoral rhetoric may add different colourations to this matter. Even those who embrace a certain degree of the free market do so within the context of a participatory grassroots democracy, in which capital will not be the privileged good of only part of a population and decisions will not be taken through bureaucratic and elitist procedures and processes. An alternative, though at times vague, vision of a society which has rid itself of the spirit of capitalism is communists’ declared and long-term objective.

Nevertheless, communists are a broad group (March 2008: 3): Leninism is more important in some communist parties than others; organizational structure varies from a strict application of democratic centralism to the allowance of tendencies within the party; international affiliations span the whole spectrum of radical left party cooperation across Europe and the world; and teleology involves a broad gamut of officially declared master plans, which range from multi-party socialism, in which market and planning are combined, to a statist conception of a classless communism in which ‘the party’ will be the one and only, at least during the transition phase. It is this broadness that makes the communists a fruitful sub-group for generating conclusions for the wider radical left. Subsequently, this book focuses on the communists but remains open to problematizing the notion of the ‘communist party family’. It should thus be stated explicitly that the communist parties under examination here are not considered a priori as markedly different or inherently similar to the rest of the radical left. There are good reasons for both differentiating them from the rest of the radical left and acknowledging their historical and ideological place in this group as a whole. Only in the conclusion of this book, and on the basis of the empirical evidence, will a final assessment of the communist party species, its diversity and its evolution be attempted.

The Research Questions and the Conceptual Lens

Through three relevant and contrasting case studies – the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), the Cypriot Progressive Party of the Working People (AKEL) and the Italian Party of Communist Refoundation (Rifondazione) – I explore in detail the responses of communist parties to European integration and place them within the context of radical left politics and ideology. I seek to answer two main research questions:

1. How have European communist parties responded to European integration and the challenges brought by it to their domestic arenas? In other words, in what manner and with what result?

2. Why have they responded in the way they have? Put differently, what has conditioned their responses?

These questions are pursued within the contours of a conceptual lens which, as argued, has heuristic soundness and historical relevance for communist parties and which places their ‘party-ness’ on an equal footing with their ‘leftness’: the strategic dilemma between ideological consistency and moderation. As with all parties whose identity incorporates a weighty challenge to the existing order, communist parties have had, and still continue, to face an intriguing and theoretically labyrinthine choice between ideological consistency and moderation as an act of compromise in exchange of a more utilitarian benefit.

An attempt to show whether and how exactly this dilemma informs communist party responses to European integration, also leads to the analysis of some wider issues relating to communist party politics:

• What do the responses to European integration of the three parties under examination – and, more generally, their trajectories – tell us about the study of European communism?

• To what extent has communist ideology incorporated, or given, theoretically informed answers to emerging EU-rooted questions and problems?

• Given the evidence that a strong form of communist ideology (and perhaps strong ideology more broadly) has been diminishing in recent decades, how are we to consider communist political options for the future?

The connection between the domains of communist party politics and political party responses to European integration has not attracted much scholarly attention. So far there are only two published books that are thematically oriented towards radical left party relations to European integration. Dunphy’s (2004) seminal account covered ten cases of European radical left parties, undertook a detailed historical review of communist party divisions on the issue of Europe, connected with academic debates on the left and drew comparisons with the greens and the social democrats. Yet, it considered each party very briefly, focused only on the policy dimension of these parties’ responses to European integration and, in view of crucial developments since 2003, is now slightly outdated. Although the study’s insights are of crucial value to scholars of the left, and party politics, much remains to be said about the similarities between radical left and other radical parties, the significance, and the evolution of the significance, of national contexts and the lines demarcating the communists from the non-communist radical left. These are themes that are pursued in this book.

Holmes’s and Roder’s (2012) edited volume deals with the wider issue of radical left, green and centre-left parties’ reactions to the developments surrounding the efforts for a European constitution. It is quite generous in its case study selection and includes various cases that do not allow for a systematic and framed examination of the significance and precise causal effect of various domestic and partisan specificities. Further, while its methodological choices give it potential for rich generalization, because its central theme concerns the nature and causes of disagreements within the broader left in regard to the pathway towards the European Constitutional Treaty and the Lisbon Treaty, many of its case-study chapters give us a mostly static account.

This book’s research questions have both topicality and wider theoretical significance. Their topicality derives from developments at the EU and national level since the early 1990s, which have reconfirmed that radical left and communist parties are integral actors in EU and European politics and have spurred questions that are relevant to the future of both communist ideology and broader radical opposition to the nature and character of European integration. One relatively cohesive group in the European Parliament (EP) – the European United Left/Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL) – and one European Party Federation (EPF) – the European Left Party (ELP) – now exist after decades of very loose cooperation among these parties. At the national level, many of them have entered local and even central government, and most have recovered from their earlier electoral demises (March 2011: ch. 1). Despite electoral trajectories that are much poorer than those they achieved before the 1990s, their appeal remains as steady as, or stronger than, that of the greens and the radical right (see March 2011: ch. 1) and in some areas, notably in Southern Europe and Germany, of the liberals, too.3

Currently, however, we are at a time when public and political opposition to European integration is gaining momentum whereas the communists’ and radical left’s electoral share among the voting public is not. Most centrist parties remain comparatively strong and in charge of government, and many radical right parties are making or sustaining their inroads into the lower classes (for example, Oesch 2008; Kitschelt and McGann 1995: 155). Thereafter, a discussion on communist opposition to European integration additionally contributes to the existing puzzle concerning the challenges that political ideologies with inherent anti-EU morphologies, and especially radical left ideology, have to cope with in the face of European integration and its increasing effects on EU member states.

The theoretical significance of the book’s research questions to communist and radical left party politics in their broad sense can be understood if we consider that the challenges brought by the EU as an overarching and increasingly salient reality for member states resemble, in many ways, those of capitalist liberal democracies. European integration is a system. Especially for those who are dissatisfied with either most of its operational principles and policies or with its logic of existence and underlying values, the EU is a ‘systemic problem’. In many ways, it resembles the capitalist system itself, which can be summarized as the combination of a free market and the arrangement of electoral democratic politics, designed in such a way that consensus and gradualism are the main modi operandi, hence making it difficult for radical actors to achieve any transformational change.

In fact, it has been suggested that the EU is more difficult to transform than a non-regionalized capitalism. The overall structure of the EU is characterized by ‘the segmentation of competences’, ‘the multiplicity of power centres in the European system of multi-level governance’ and the ‘structural inability of parties to find a central guiding role in the overall institutional set-up’ (Moschonas 2009: 12). This is a problem of collective action and coordination, which is common to all political parties, but it particularly affects left-wing parties, since these ‘aim to correct – or change – the dominant economic paradigm and are more in need of strong institutional (and societal) resources’ (Moschonas 2009: 12–13). On another level, the EU system has no government–opposition nexus, since it has never developed ‘the third great milestone identified by Dahl in his analysis of the path to democratic institutions … the capacity to organize opposition …’ (Mair 2007: 7). To an extent, as Mair reminds us, the EU system, though differing from the domestic arenas of member states where the capacity to organize opposition exists, resembles the pattern of Western capitalist democracies since the 1950s in that it is characterized by ‘a surplus of consensus’ (Dahl 1965, cited in Mair 2007: 6) and the ‘waning of opposition’ (Kirchheimer 1957, cited in Mair 2007: 5).

On the socio-economic axis, European integration reinforces the currents that communist ideology wants to transform, through a model that is effectively neoliberal and whose emergence and consolidation represents a hugely beneficial arrangement for the Western bourgeoisie (see, for example, Hermann 2007; Anderson 2007; Grahl and Teague 1989). Trade unions have been disempowered, especially with the advent of European Monetary Union (EMU), the Lisbon Strategy (Beiler 2006) and now Europe 2020. Social dialogue rarely establishes minimum standards, and European competencies exclude fundamental labour rights, such as the right to strike and wage-bargaining (Beiler and Schulten 2008; Greenwood 2003). Unemployment has increased to very high levels (Hermann 2007), and employment remains only a secondary target, as subsumed in the neoclassical view that price stability and inflation prevention are the main conditions for prosperity (see Jones 2002). The emphasis on competitiveness, privatization and the role of the private sector in regard to education and health has been growing (Van Apeldoorn 2003: Rosamond 2002; Hay and Rosamond 2002), while the many mentions of the European social model have been mainly used as ‘rhetorical resources intended to legitimize the political construction and identity-building process of the EU institutions’ (Jespen and Pascual 2005: 231, cited in Beiler and Schulten 2008: 232; see also Hermann and Hofbauer 2007).

Perhaps this is so in the same way that liberal democracies, financial networks and other institutional configurations at the national level did not just come into being, but were designed in such a way as to guarantee the stability and resilience of capitalist structures, while at the same time satisfying the economic interests of elites. Significant empirical evidence exists to support the claim that in both economic and foreign policy issues there exists a transnational European capitalist class, which not only has ideologically and territorially bounded interests, but also pursues a strategy that is autonomous of the broader popular dynamics within the community, as well as self-perpetuating in nature (for example, Carroll and Fennema 2002; Van Apeldoorn 2000).

Beyond issues of topicality, therefore, my contention in this book is that the importance of the relationship between communist parties and European integration can also be ascribed to the theoretical connection between European integration and capitalist organization, as well as to the EU’s nature as an ‘aggressive’ (viz. neoliberal) and overtly consensual capitalism. The supposition is that as long as communist parties find it challenging to try to change nationa...