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1 Toward an analysis of the contemporary Western European radical left
This chapter presents the theoretical and methodological framework that will guide the analysis of this book.
The first section delimits the research object to the development of the partisan radical left in Western Europe from 1989 to 2015.
The second section spells out in detail my holistic approach to the conceptualisation and analysis of the contemporary radical left. First, I propose a slightly modified definition of the boundaries of the radical left, highlighting its internal pluralism and historicity. Secondly, I build on the existing literature on party politics to conceptualise the nature of radical left parties in terms of constituency, political project, organisational mediations, and strategic mediations. Thirdly, I point to the existence of an underlying anti-neoliberal political field produced by the transformations of the social and political system, whose contradictory properties largely overdetermine the dilemmas and behaviour of radical left parties. Finally, I argue for a multi-level, aggregate approach taking into account all three levels (party families, individual parties, and political fields) and putting the discussion of the party family level to the centre stage.
The third section expands on the main research questions and the methodology used to answer them. The former focus on assessing and explaining radical left cohesion, strength, and influence. The latter combine quantitative methods and qualitative observations. The consistent and accurate measurement of radical left strength in its various electoral, parliamentary, governmental, and extra-parliamentary components, in particular, will represent one of the main contributions of the analysis.
The concluding section, finally, summarises and discusses the main features of the framework.
Delimiting the research object
The object of this book is the development of the partisan radical left in Western Europe over the period 1989 to 2015. All three qualifiers â organisational type, geographical scope, and temporal span â must be briefly justified.
The radical left, just like all other political traditions, cannot be reduced to its partisan dimension. In his masterly survey of the long-term evolution of the âclass leftâ, Bartolini (2000) identifies two main components: a âpolitical channelâ (parties) and a âprofessional channelâ (trade unions). March and Mudde (2005), for their part, distinguish within the radical left a political component (parties), a civil society component (non-party organisations such as trade unions, associations, or social movement networks), and a subcultural component.1 Raynaud (2006), similarly, explores the French far left from the point of view of both political parties and their intellectual inspiration.
My analysis will focus on the partisan radical left, looking at other components from the point of view of political parties: their capacity to represent the concerns of their wider subculture at the electoral and institutional levels; their ability to bind sympathisers to their organisations as members or activists; the organisational linkages they establish with civil society and social movement organisations; and their collaboration with non-party actors in extra-parliamentary mobilisations.
The choice is motivated by an interest in the crisis and renewal of partisan forms of participation and representation, and should not be taken as a sanction of a general primacy of party or institutional politics. On the one hand, non-party organisations and movements routinely intervene in the political decision making through privileged links with specific parties, transversal lobbying, referendums, extra-parliamentary mobilisations, public opinion campaigns, and the creation of new parties. On the other hand, political parties themselves straddle the boundary between state and civil society, working within representative institutions but at the same mobilising citizens in electoral campaigns, anti-government demonstrations, and even armed insurrections. Although their primary preoccupation is indeed concerned with influencing state policies, they also often try to directly shape the functioning of civil society institutions (companies, universities, cooperatives, families) and peopleâs ideas and behaviours (identity building, value change, interpersonal relations). Political parties are just one part of a broader subculture made of civil society and social movement organisations, informal groups, physical spaces, media, companies, intellectuals, minority tendencies of non-radical parties or associations, and individual citizens, all of them interacting to various degrees of closeness and coherence.
Contrary to an influential strand of the recent literature (Backes and Moreau 2008; Hudson 2012; March 2012), I will limit the analysis to the radical left of Western Europe â that is, all European countries that belonged to the Western sphere of influence during the Cold War.
There are good arguments in favour of the former option. Until 1989, the relationship between Western communist parties and their Eastern counterparts was tight, despite the progressive drift away from Moscow of Eurocommunist and other tendencies. Relations temporarily collapsed in the nineties but partially resumed with the EU enlargements of the noughties and twenty-tens, with many Eastern parties joining the GUE/NGL and the PEL as full members or observers. Nevertheless, the political cultures and systems of the two sides still remain fundamentally different (HlouĹĄek and KopeÄek 2010). An all-European approach would obscure rather than illuminate the analysis of the nature and behaviour of the radical left, which is shaped by very different forces in Western and Eastern Europe.
The Western European radical left will be approached from two vantage points: a general analysis of the continental landscape, and three detailed national case studies. The continental landscape is defined as the sum of seventeen Western European countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. This covers the whole area with the exclusion of the microstates (Andorra, Monaco, Liechtenstein, San Marino, and the Vatican City) and some small states of late independence (Iceland in 1944, Cyprus in 1960, Malta in 1964).2 The only exception to the Western focus is the case of former East Germany (GDR), which reunified in 1990 with West Germany (FRG) and will therefore be included from that point onwards. The three case studies are Germany, Italy, and France. The rationale for their selection is not the strength and relevance of the radical left, which was high in previous decades but was surpassed by several countries in the post-1989 period (Cyprus, Greece, Portugal, Denmark, and, more recently, Spain). It is instead the central demographic, economic, political, and cultural weight of the countries themselves, which lends to their radical lefts an objectively superior importance for the course of Western European politics. The three countries accounted in 1989â2015 for 50.5 per cent of total registered voters, 56.9 per cent of total radical left voters, 50.8 per cent of the total GDP, and a dominant influence within EU and Eurozone institutions. Not accidentally, their main parties (PRC, PDS/DIE LINKE, PCF, LCR/NPA, and PG) have until recently dominated the transnational discussion, coordination (GUE/NGL, PEL, Transform!), and mobilisation of the Western European radical left. This prominence has receded since the extraordinary electoral successes of SYRIZA in Greece (2012â15) and PODEMOS in Spain (2015), but developments in Germany and France (less in Italy) still remain the key to a shift of the continental social and political balance of forces.
The temporal span of the analysis covers the period from 1989 to 2015. The main characteristics of the contemporary Western European radical left are, to a large extent, the product of processes initiated in the seventies and eighties: the explosion of left-libertarian and green themes; the post-Fordist and post-industrial shift of advanced capitalist economies; the neoliberalisation of economic mechanisms, public policy, culture, and politics; the erosion of working-class identification, militancy, and power; and the multi-faceted crisis of world communism. The fall of the Soviet bloc in 1989â91, however, acted as an accelerator of these processes, precipitated a violent crisis of the radical left, and paved the way for a new beginning of this party family after 1993. The choice of a starting point between 1989 and 1993 is therefore the most natural one. Previous developments (1917â88) will nevertheless be briefly reviewed in chapter two.
Theorising the Western European radical left
The radical left as a party family: boundaries, definition, and implications
Does it make sense to treat radical left parties in Western Europe as a party family? Mair and Mudde (1998) have highlighted both the essential role of this concept for comparative political analysis and the pitfalls of its empirical use. No broad agreement on the most appropriate discriminating criteria currently exists. A number of alternatives, such as party name, transnational links, policy, ideology, origin, sociology, organisation, and position within the matrix of political cleavages, are possible, each leading to different classification results. More specifically, the concept of a Western European radical left party family is well established in the literature (De Waele and Seiler 2012; Hudson 2000, 2012; March 2012; March and Mudde 2005; Tannahill 1978; Waller and Fennema 1988), but opinions somewhat diverge on two critical points: the extent to which the concept applies beyond traditional communist parties to include alternative organisations (of a far-left or left-socialist bent), and the (dis)continuity of the radical left before and after the shock of 1989â91.
Until 1989, scholars of the radical left focused almost exclusively on a specifically communist party family. This was an obvious choice, as official communist parties generally dominated the space to the left of social democracy and, at least initially, represented an ideal-typical case of cohesive party family: a common origin as a split of the socialist workersâ movement in the âcritical junctureâ of 1917 (Lipset and Rokkan 1967: 47â48); a uniform ideology in the Soviet Marxist-Leninist worldview; tight transnational links first in the Comintern, the âworld party of revolutionâ, and later in Moscow-inspired networks; very similar policies, organisational models, constituencies, strategies, and tactics. The categorisation, however, had its problems. Firstly, it ignored the fact that communist parties often closely cooperated with left socialists and other fellow travellers in permanent fronts such as the Finnish SKDL (1945â90) or in temporary electoral alliances such as the Italian FDP (1948) or the French union de la gauche (1972â77). Secondly, it underestimated the progressive loss of ideological and relational cohesion of Western communism, which moved from the monolithism of Stalinâs reign to a tentative âpolycentrismâ after 1956, a marked differentiation between Eurocommunist and orthodox sensibilities after 1968, and an effective disintegration in 1989â91. Thirdly, it ignored alternative leftist traditions such as anarchism, Trotskyism, Maoism, the post-1968 new left, and radicalised minority nationalisms, despite their partial similarity of origin and/or ideology with orthodox communist parties. The reactions of Western European communist parties to the collapse of the Eastern bloc forced a rethinking of the dominant classification, but left observers puzzled with regards to possible alternatives. Bull (1994: 211) claimed that âthe erstwhile fragmentation has become separation and [ ⌠] it will no longer be possible to generalise about these parties as a âfamilyâ, nor fruitful to study them within the same analytical frameworkâ. Other authors concurred, approaching their subsequent diverging choices as a post-communist coda of a history which was in fact over (Botella and Ramiro 2003; Marantzidis 2004). In the noughties, however, several authors began to argue that while the âoldâ communist movement was indeed dead and buried, some form of reconfigured ânewâ radical left party family had been emerging from its ruins (Hudson 2000, 2012; March and Mudde 2005). This insight has since become an accepted premise of the literature on the contemporary radical left, and rightly so, as a composite yet relatively distinct and coherent political space to the left of the socialist and green party families does clearly exist, both in terms of objective commonalities and in terms of subjective relations between parties in fora such as the European United Left/Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL) European Parliament group, the Party of the European Left (PEL) and Nordic Green Left Alliance (NGLA) international party federations, the Transform! think tank, transnational social movements such as the global justice movement, and bilateral contacts.
More problematic are instead the attempts to find an appropriate definition of the distinguishing features of this party family and its relation with its communist predecessor. All authors categorise these parties primarily on the basis of their assumed anti-capitalism, loosely understood as a generic critique of contemporary relations of social and political power (Ducange et al. 2013; March and Mudde 2005; Seiler 2012). The term, however, is too vague to be useful. On the one hand, anti-capitalism is precisely one of those elements which the post-1989 radical left has generally tended to downplay, focusing instead on a medium-term anti-neoliberal programme centred on defending and reviving the welfare state and labour rights against the present onslaught. On the other hand, the application of this criterion to earlier periods would completely blur the distinction with mainstream social democrats, since they as well often upheld a formal commitment to an ultimate overcoming of capitalism and always expounded some form of opposition to the inequalities, insecurity, and power structures produced by capitalism.
In my opinion, the solution to these dilemmas lies in the definition of the radical left as a party family (a) situating itself in the tradition of the âclass leftâ, a historical tradition determined to reform or overcome capitalism from the standpoint of universalistically conceived working-class interests, and (b) identifying and organising itself as a separate tendency from and to the left of mainstream social democracy. The formula is similar to that of Seiler (2012: 13â14), but loosens the anti-capitalist qualification and clarifies that the adjective âradicalâ must be understood not as a substantive but as a predominantly relational qualifier.
What may at first sight appear as a very formalistic definition actually presents a number of key advantages on the existing alternatives. It clearly delimits the boundaries of the radical left, distinguishing it unambiguously both from party families primarily concerned with the representation of other classes and transversal cleavages, and from mainstream social democracy, with which it nevertheless shares a common origin in the nineteenth-century labour movement. It also highlights the constitutive pluralism of the radical left, where different ideological traditions and political currents such as Marxists and non-Marxists, reformists and revolutionaries, moderates and radicals, statists and anti-sta...
