McNair Paper Number 49 Chapter 2, March 1996
CRISIS OF
THE POLITICAL SYSTEM
The solidity of postwar European democracies was based on two major factors: their success in achieving consensus on a new and successful model for economic prosperity and social welfare, and the requirements of maintaining solidarity during the Cold War. Neither of these factors is still fully relevant. European political leaders have been unable to find solutions to the problems of the economy and the crisis of the welfare state. There is no real programmatic difference between governments and opposition, between mainstream left and right. Politics reduces itself to the battle of ins versus outs, and alternation of power does not necessarily change policy or improve the situation.
DECLINE OF IDEOLOGY
One apparently great success of postwar European politics was the end of the harsh clash of ideologically based adversarial parties that characterized the interwar world. Agreement on the basic contours of the welfare state and mixed economy led to the appeasement of rancorous and sometimes violent conflicts over first principles; liberals, conservatives, and socialists differed only over nuance and tried to work the system to maximize the benefits to their constituent groups (which in any case had become broader as catch-all parties replaced class-based parties). "Acceptance of the mixed economy cum welfare state thus represented an ill-founded act of faith that . . . [they] represented an end to history; that the economic system would continue to deliver the goods, which could then be redistributed to promote 'equality.'"(Note 1) By the 1980s, communism had either become Euro-Communist or had been discredited. The end of the USSR and the collapse of its Communist party was the culmination, not the cause of this phenomenon. Socialists in most of Western Europe had long since made their peace with the new economic order (witness the Bad Godesberg platform of the SPD in 1959). In the 1980s, some of the socialist parties found themselves in an "identity crisis." They attempted to find a raison d'être in their foreign policy, by criticizing American conduct of the Cold War and occasionally glorifying Third World radicals, but this was not very meaningful then and would be even less so now. The French socialists, who had been out of government since the onset of the Fifth Republic in 1958, cherished the belief that they constituted a genuine alternative to the right and could make a "break with capitalism". It took only a few years of power (from 1981 to 1984) to dispel this illusion. Thus, socialism and communism, which had once constituted a kind of religious faith for their adherents lost their special identity. Socialist parties became simply parties of government and perhaps for this reason, no more immune to corruption than other parties.
So long as the new sociopolitical framework of Europe guaranteed unlimited prosperity, the end of ideology seemed a blessing. Unlike the 1930s, the crisis of the last decades has been a slow, incremental process. The rub was that once the system began to sputter, there was no real policy alternative presented by mainstream parties. The resulting crisis of political systems was a slow one, and this slowness and the tenacity of existing political institutions are as noteworthy as the existence of the crisis. Popular discontent with governments in a democratic regime usually leads to alternation of power, but alternation of power will not produce relief if the new government follows policies similar to those of the old. When that happens, citizens increasingly tend to abstain from the political process, look to extremist parties or support new or nonestablishment political parties and movements, and may even go to the street. Ideology, which appeared to depart from politics through the front door, returns through the back door. In the last analysis, established parties can founder and the system can even collapse.
There is a widespread unhappiness with governments and politics throughout Europe, with political crises at varying stages of development in different countries:
One consequence of this process was the rise of non-mainstream political movements and leaders. Le Pen, Villiers, and Tapie owe their success to the unpopularity of traditional politics and politicians and to their own effective use of television to support an antisystem, populist and personalist message, of either the left or right. Legislative elections in April 1993 may have prevented a reenactment of May 1968; they provided catharsis by virtually annihilating the governing Socialists. The fact that the referendum on the Maastricht Treaty barely passed despite support from virtually all major leaders constituted a vote of no confidence in the political class (though even more so of Mitterrand). The Maastricht vote also indicated a reinforced tendency for much of much of the population to blame Europe for France's economic problems. For many French people, Europe has become equated both with the future and unemployment. Euroscepticism has become a tempting electoral ploy for ambitious French politicians looking for a way to break into the big time, not just for demagogues like Le Pen. As a result, especially in the year preceding presidential elections, France's mainstream politicians became far more reticent about European integration, so that the French presidency of the EU seemed like a caretaker operation.
The election of Jacques Chirac as president was a result of the public's unhappiness with the status quo. Candidate Chirac succeeded in painting both the socialists and his RPR rival, Balladur, as part of the problem and ran a brilliant campaign which stressed voluntarism and the determination to deal with unemployment and the forgotten man. He marginalized Villiers; both he and Jospin benefited from Tapie's legal troubles and temporary exclusion from political life.
The problem is that President Chirac could not fulfill the promises of candidate Chirac. Bringing French unemployment below 10 percent would have been difficult even if Chirac had a free hand to follow a purely French economic policy. But he did not have a free hand; he was committed to achieving EMU in 1999, which requires halving, rather than increasing, France's 5.7 percent public sector deficit by that time. Chirac could abandon the strong franc policy and call on the Seguin team, which is waiting in the wings to replace Juppé. But the consequences of breaking with France's long-term goal of EMU on domestic politics and on the Franco-German relationship are daunting.
Pursuing the policy of the strong franc and EMU, however, is extremely risky, since it requires immediate and drastic cuts in the deficit of the French social security system. After a government reshuffling in fall 1995, Prime Minister Juppé presented a program for social security reform, accompanied by reforms of public service pensions, which raised the years of service required for retirement by some favored groups, like railroad workers, to match the rest of the public sector. The reforms were announced in a highly technocratic way; those affected were not consulted, not even Juppé's political and trade union allies were included in prior discussion. The result was a wave of strikes in November-December 1995, spearheaded by railroad and Paris Metro workers, which paralyzed the capital and eventually the country. Although the strikes were "led" by antigovernment unions, with their own agendas, the great majority of the general public supported the strikes, feeling that the strikers represented their cause as well. These strikes demonstrated the opposition of the French people to giving up the social benefits they had acquired in the course of the last 50 years without a convincing case having been made by the government. Unlike May 1968, this was a revolt by middle- class France anxious to protect its acquis sociaux, not by radicals. It demonstrated that the gap between the French elite, aware of the paramount necessity of succeeding in EMU, and the French public, concerned by unemployment and uncertain about the future, was even greater than at the time of Maastricht. The end of the strikes did not resolve underlying issues and the road to EMU remains full of obstacles. Yet without France, EMU would be meaningless and if EMU is postponed it may never take place. In short, Chirac may be caught in a box. He can only hope that movement in the right direction and the appearance of activism will suffice to avert a social crisis.
The country most affected by the combined impact of long term economic problems and the end of the Cold War is Italy. The end of the Cold War had a special impact there. Whereas for most of Europe containment involved an external foe, in Italy it was also internal. The raison d'être of Christian Democracy and its coalition partners was to keep the powerful Italian Communist Party out of government. "Hold your nose and vote Christian Democrat!" The lack of alternation of power led to the corruption of the DCI as well as the other "democratic" parties which joined the governing coalition and shared the spoils. The main non-Communist opposition party, the Socialists, lost their ideology and integrity in the process. With the end of the Cold War, the justification for the government coalition disappeared. Italian magistrates began an unprecedented exposure of the corruption of the political system which led to the disintegration of all the major government parties and the discrediting of their leaders.
Italian communism was not the inheritor, for although the threat it represented to the right declined so did its own appeal. The initial beneficiary was television magnate Silvio Berlusconi, who filled the vacuum in the center by creating the Forza Italia political movement out of nowhere, until he was undermined by magistrates raising uncomfortable questions about his own business.
Italy had been famous for its partitocrazia and the dominance of its political class. It is now a country with undefined political structures, between elections and perhaps constitutions, with at best a temporary government of technocrats. During the "First Republic," governments survived only by not challenging the forces of organized crime and the underground economy. They subordinated foreign policy to their allies, economic policy to Brussels and defense policy to NATO. The old regime survived and then failed because Italians had few expectations concerning their government and politicians. Now that the Italian state has virtually withered away, how can government act and reform take place?
Japan constitutes an interesting analogue to the collapse of the Italian party system. The Liberal Democrats held onto office for just as long as the Chrisitan Democrats and for much the same reason--to keep the left out of power. The end of the Cold War led to a "revolution of contempt" directed against the LDP--as well as against its fossilized Socialist opposition. Perhaps the most telling testimony of public disgust at the entire political class was the April 1995 selection of a movie scriptwriter and a comedian as governors of Tokyo and Osaka respectively. Both ran against a single candidate backed by all five major political parties. The growth of fanatic religious cults also indicates disaffection with establishment politics.
The fragility of long-established political systems and parties at a time of popular discontent was nowhere better illustrated than in the 1993 Canadian general elections. Although Canada is not on the European continent, its level of economic development is comparable to Europe; its party system and its brand of welfare state are also more similar to Western Europe than to the United States. Canada is suffering from a level of national and provincial debt higher than that of most of Western Europe, which limits its financial options. In 1993, Brian Mulroney's Conservatives, who had been in office since 1984, were expected to lose and the Liberals were expected to return to power. What was stunning was the magnitude of the loss. The Conservatives won only 16 percent of the popular vote and lost all but two seats in the House of Commons. Thus one-and-one-half of Canada's two-and-one-half party system were demolished. But the Liberals, although the winners, were not the only beneficiaries of the Tory defeat. In fact, they won only 41 percent of the vote. The "loyal opposition" in Ottawa was a new party, the Bloc Quebecois, the federal counterpart of the Parti Quebecois, and thus committed to Quebec independence. In the West, the Reform Party came out of nowhere to win 19 percent of the total national vote and only two fewer seats than the Bloq Quebecois. Thus, the governing Liberals were left--at least for the time being--as the only national party in a Parliament otherwise composed of regionalist parties. The life of both the Reform Party, a highly personalized grouping dominated by Preston Manning, and the Bloq Quebecois, whose raison d'être is tied to Quebec independence, is precarious.
In summary, the decline of ideology in Europe led a growing consensus on basic policy issues between the mainstream parties of left and right. The fact that consensus thinking has proven inadequate to resolve basic economic problems is at the root of the vulnerability of these parties and of political institutions in general to growing public frustration. This has been all the more true because with the end of the Cold War, many long time governing parties are no longer indispensable as bulwarks against communism. The cases of Japan and Canada (to say nothing of the United States) suggest that the crisis of political parties and systems is not restricted to Europe but is a problem of advanced societies in general.
The decline of the post-World War II European political system has been accentuated by the influence of the media. At the beginning of the postwar era, the typical West European government was essentially a representative government in which the autonomy of government was protected from the immediate pressure of the public. Between the citizen and the highest magistrates lay powerful institutions and organizations, including, naturally, the parliament and the institutions of the state, but also political parties and trade unions, all of which played a mediating role. These bodies had a sense of their corporate identity and responsibility and in no sense saw themselves as mere transmission belts of popular will. Even in the democratic era (one person one vote was attained in almost all West European states by 1945), government leaders also benefited from such attitudes and values, notably the deference accorded to public authorities.
In traditional parliamentary democracies, national leaders were elected indirectly. The prime minister was chosen by parliament, not the voters. The member of parliament himself was often chosen to stand for a particular distict either by the national party or by the local party organization and had no personal relationship to the district. In many countries, conservative parliamentarians were members of local elites elected by virtue of their family standing. Where electoral lists were employed, national party leaders were especially powerful, since they rank ordered the list, in effect, deciding who would be elected. The prime minister was likely to be a politician's politician, chosen by virtue of his performance in Parliament or record in the party apparatus, rather than a people's politician. The physical distance between MP and constituent during parliamentary sessions prevented much direct contact. The voter was informed about public events through the printed media, mostly the newspaper, but only the well educated or politically involved tended to read a serious newspaper. Left wing voters often showed the same kind of deference to their party leaders (who rarely came from the working class) that they had shown previously, if reluctantly, to their "betters."
The development of radio, the first instantaneous form of mass communication, coincided with the rise of fascism, and Fascist leaders were quick to grasp the potential of radio to gain power and to continue to mobilize the population afterwards. Once they came to power, they destroyed the existing parliamentary structures and ruled as charismatic dictators. World War II ended their careers, but the rise of television after the war and the more democratic spirit that pervaded most European societies led to a slow transformation of political life.
Political leaders appealed increasingly to the public directly. They were chosen (or maintained) in part on the basis of their ability to reach a national audience. Their personality (above all, the trust they inspired or failed to inspire) became a significant factor as to whether their party won elections. Many voters were voting for Margaret Thatcher as a person and not just as the Conservative candidate, and the same thing could be said of Felipe Gonzalez or Willy Brandt. Nonetheless, the existence of the parliamentary system and powerful national parties slowed down the process towards the kind of populist appeal found in American politics at that time. In multiparty systems where governments changed often, the development of leaders oriented to the public was slowest.
France developed in a somewhat different way. De Gaulle created a political system that favored the direct relationship between president and people (direct election of the President of the Republic after 1962, use of referenda by the President to go over the head of Parliament, etc.). France also had a heritage of weaker political parties than most other European countries. De Gaulle was quick to recognize the importance of television and retained firm control over it. Generally, however, especially after de Gaulle, the French president acted more like an elected monarch than a charismatic leader. The French public seemed to prefer presidents it could respect. The French State remained relatively effective, and the political class, despite a fair number of scandals, generally competent. The debate between Chirac and Jospin was conducted in a serious, almost technocratic way and avoided either ad hominem speech or discussion of sensitive areas of national security. On the other hand, the volatility of public opinion during the French presidential elections of 1995 (the rise and fall of Balladur, the rise of Chirac and his decline before the first round, and the rise of Jospin) cannot be explained without taking into account the role of the media.
The political system of the United States differs from that of all European nations. Nonetheless, it is instructive to note the impact of media on American politics. The primacy exercised by television in the relationship of citizen to government is evident in the United States, with enormous implications as to why and how candidates are chosen, the simplification and personalization of the political debate, the demand for quick action and quick solutions, the aversion to long-term planning, the tendency to replace the institutional power of parties with the power of an individual's fortune. Ross Perot showed that someone with money and a telegenic personality (in this case, telegenic in an antihero kind of way), could score 17 percent of the vote in presidential elections. His very lack of political experience was translated into a special qualification for the highest office in the land. Bill Clinton's victory in the 1992 election was due largely to his effective use of the media during the campaign.
By personalizing politics, television has made the issue of "character" central. Distance and cynicism or irony are antithetic to the perspective of television. By providing constant close ups of political life, TV magnifies the importance of personal blemishes. The separation of political and private life disappears. Candidates and officials are held most accountable for personal behavior everyone understands (especially anything touching on the seven deadly sins) or issues on which everyone feels an equal right to an opinion (like abortion). Their positions on complex issues, understood by few but affecting many, become almost irrelevant.
By simulating the direct contact of leaders and the people (for the first time since early forms of social organization, where direct contact was possible because of the smallness of polity) television creates conditions for something approximating charismatic leadership as described by Max Weber. But unlike the days of yesteryear, there are no established patriarchal hierarchies to resist it. "The charismatic hero does not deduce his authority from codes and statutes. . . . The charismatic leader gains and maintains authority solely by proving his strength in life . . . his divine mission must 'prove' itself in that those who faithfully surrender to him must fare well. If they do not fare well, he is obviously not the master sent by the gods." (Note 2)
Will Europe resist "americanization" in this domain? Clearly the weight of traditions and culture and the power of existing institutions should present--and in many countries has presented--powerful obstacles to this trend. Yet Italy, where old and entrenched institutions have collapsed, has gone even further than the United States towards "mediatization" of politics.
Italy provides an instructive lesson about the inherent weakness of the old model in a time of rapid change. Within a short time, Italy went from being a partitocrazia to a state in which a charismatic media personality, Silvio Berlusconi literally created out of thin air a "political party" simply to provide him with enough seats in parliament to govern. To be sure, Berlusconi was familiar with television, owning three of Italy's major networks (of which he was very loathe to divest himself when named Prime Minister). In the past, Italian leaders were creatures of a party; now at least one party is the creature of an individual. A referendum in June 1995 aiming to divest Berlusconi's company, Fininvest, of two of its three national television channels was defeated. Fininvest, which gained its powerful place through 1991 legislation that ended the state monopoly, even today controls about half of Italy's TV programming. Berlusconi pushed hard for June 1995 parliamentary elections because "fresh elections would postpone the referendum, and he has hedged his bet with frequent commercials on his channels telling Italians how to vote if the referendum goes forward." (Note 3) The referendum resulted in a victory for Berlusconi, perhaps because some voters took seriously the threat that they might lose some of their favorite television programs.
The importance of the telegenic personality is made apparent also by the rise of Gianfranco Fini. Fini's winning telepersonality has eclipsed the fascist past of the National Alliance and has made it acceptable to a larger number of voters even as a party of government. Forza Italia's weakness is that it is based almost entirely on one man's charisma (and wealth) but lacks organizational strength. Fini clearly believes that he and the National Alliance have the organizational base needed to expand and can inherit the Forza Italia constituency when and if Berlusconi falters. The key to success is to appear to be Berlusconi's loyal supporter. With Italian politics divided between coalitions of the left and right, Fini will be well placed to become Prime Minister.
It is not clear what Italian "postfascism" means today. Traditional fascism was nationalist and militarist; despite a few comments about Istria irredenta by National Alliance extremists, the movement does not talk about expansionism or the renationalization of defense. If anything, it shares the wider public fear of immigration (but unlike similar parties in other countries, Italian fascism and neofascism has never been especially racist). Fascism was strongly anti-Marxist but replicated many of the techniques of communism; today it is hard to be anti-Marxist when there is virtually no more Marxism. The National Alliance wants to keep the left out of power, but has not elevated that desire to the level of a crusade. Above all, neofascism generally reflects a loss of moorings of many strata of society, a desire to preserve the nation state and national culture against the encroachment of supranational Europe and regional loyalties. But what does that mean in practice? What policies would a Fini-led government follow? Italy could refuse to proceed further toward European integration, but such a position, although it might gladden some members of Fini's old party, would not please most of the center right. Already Italy runs the risk of being relegated to the second circle of a multispeed Europe; to leave the EU entirely seems an economic impossibility for Italy. Increasing acceptance of the National Alliance as a party of govenment and of Fini as a minister and potential head of government have consequences outside of Italy, by providing an aura of respectability to similar parties in other countries, like the Freedom Party in Austria. It leader, Georg Haider, must be taken seriously as a potential chancellor; the party received over a fifth of the vote in l995.
It is clear how politicians can use television to gain power. What is less clear is what it means for the process of governing. At a time when the public is irascible and volatile, opposition figures find it an ideal instrument for taking on the existing leadership, but they, too, are quickly used up by the media when they in turn come to power. The same accessibility to the talk shows that helped elect Clinton seems to have undermined his stature; Newt Gingrich has become old very quickly. If radio contributed to the rule of Fascist strong men, television may contribute to the weakening of all political leaders and leadership.
Thus, television has greatly altered the nature of political life. It has eroded traditional institutions of representative government and the values that supported them and has personalized politics. It has made the pursuit of long term policies more difficult. The best guide to the relationship of leader and public may be mutatis mutandi, Thucydides' depiction of Athenian democracy after the death of Pericles. In that case, popular willfulness may replace political will, and continuity and rationality are at risk.