Lidija Hristova,
Institute for Sociological and Political Research,
Ss. Cyril and Methodius University,
Skopje
Left and Right in the Post Communist Countries
By giving a short overview of the relevant politicological literature for the ideological positions of political parties in post-communist countries, the purpose of this work is to reveal to which extent these differ from the conditions and processes in established democracies and what these differences owe to. The knowledge gained will serve as a reference framework to analyze the ideological profilation of the parties in the Macedonian post-communist society. Here, we will pay special attention on the position of the political subjects (political parties and citizens/voters) on the two-dimensional specter: left - right and conservatism - liberalism. With the use of the data from the empirical research of the political identities in Republic of Macedonia, the author has come to the conclusion that in the Macedonian case the intriguing Kitschelt’s thesis (of 1992) according to which economic liberalism in post-communist societies is accompanied by political liberalism (double liberalism) has only partially been confirmed.
There’s a really rich politicological literature that gives an analysis of the situation of political parties in post-communist societies, which encompasses either several dimensions of the problem or is concentrated on one aspect of the complex structure of the issues regarding the political and party systems, such as: interparty democracy, party elites, social rifts, ideologies, financing, corruption, party policies, party identities, election behavior etc.
The text that follows is going to give only the most important findings related to the ideological-political profiling of the parties and their positions on the ideological specters in order to present the specifics of the post-communist societies, but to also create a wider framework that would allow to more easily evaluate the processes and political developments in the Republic of Macedonia.
In her comparative analysis of the countries of Eastern and Central Europe, Milada Vaduhova sets forth the following thesis: the moderate right-wing parties are the best promoters of democracy in post-communist countries. The key factor that explains the dominance of these parties in politics is the existence of strong and organized political opposition in communism before 1989. In the first years of the transition process, they promoted themselves as a strong cohesive factor of democratization only in a small number of post-communist countries, whereas in the other countries dominant were the parties that had focused on the defense of the nation and the national culture of the countries that they considered their threat as well as the defense of the status quo situations in the economy, says Vaduhova. The first group of countries included Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic while the second one included Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia and Slovakia; where in the second group dominant were the extreme right/radical wing and/or the national-communist parties. This contributed to making the national issues and the economic populism become dominant transition landmarks of political life of the second group, according to the author. Nevertheless, the end of the nineties was marked by a marginalization process or a transformation of the parties with communist or national orientation while the moderate right wing assumed authority in almost all transition democracies, which influenced their political stabilization and their approach to the liberal democracies.
Vaduhova’s thesis according to which the strength and the coherency of the right wing is in great deal a result of the character of the opposition in communism, is contradictory to the basic thesis of the ones that felt that only the communist party was the only applicable political force at the end of the eighties. This kind of tabula rasa standpoint for the post-communist politics suggests that everyone started from zero in the political transition, i.e. all post-communist countries in the transition period started with the same baggage – a monolithic communist past. The representatives of this hypothesis (Jon Elster, Claus Offe è Ulrich Preuss ) had practically neglected not only the meaning of the differences in the political life of countries of the so-called Eastern block, but also the meaning of the pre-communist period. And there had obviously been many differences.
How does the Left– Right Political Specter Work in the Post-Communist Countries?
Maybe we have to start by finding out the answer to the question: what is “right” in the post-communist countries? The strong support for the market reforms and the nationalistic agenda, which are the two crucial elements that differentiate the right wing from the left, have a specific meaning in post-communist countries. If we took into consideration the economic programs and policies of the parties in these countries, it would be impossible to make a differentiation between the left and right wings. All parties promised higher living standard of the people, slow reforms, more substantial social transfers by the state, and with that a firmer position of the state itself. In this way, the economic liberalism, whose social price as a rule was higher and needed to be mitigated, was found on the agendas of both, the left and the right wing parties, making it harder for analysts to differentiate them according to the customary criteria. The findings from some researchers according to which the painful economic reforms are always preceded by a difficult economic crisis, leads to the conclusion that they are not a result of the ideological concepts of the parties, but a result of the realistic (cruel) demands of the economy.
How do we then differentiate the right from the left wing in post-communist countries? A fair number of authors feel that we should be looking for the answer by analyzing the relation of the parties towards national and socio-cultural issues (Kitschelt 1992, Marcs et al. 2006). Herbert Kitschelt, for example offers triple classification: 1. liberal parties (secularism, tolerance, civil liberties, mild decommunization, pro-market orientations, cosmopolitism, support for the integrations towards the West); 2. christian-national (authority, social order, collective morale, hard decommunization, populist corrections of market legitimacies, national autonomy); 3. post-communist or social-democrat parties (express liberalist concern for the social libertarianism, but also mild support for the economic populism).
The famous researcher of parties and party systems in Yugoslavia and later in Serbia, Vladimir Goati, who refers to Sartori, says that in conditions of multidimensional political space, the dichotomy left wing – right wing is not a sufficiently strong analytical tool to express its complexity. This is why he says that aside from the X-axis we need a Y-axis too and offers the following classification of the political parties in the Republic of Serbia: 1. left - pro-European, 2. right – pro-European, 3. traditional-left, 4. traditional-right. So according to Goati, the role of the Y-axis in the case of Serbia is played by the dichotomy pro-European - traditional.
Klaus von Beyme supports the thesis that the clear structure of the social cleavages is an important factor in the establishment and consolidation of the party system. What happens in a situation when those rift lines are difficult to identify, as is the case in the post-communist countries? According to the author, the political memory related to the pre-totalitarian era, as well as socialistic experience helped the new parties in their profiling only slightly. The traditional lines of division have the same meaning (village - city, church – secular state) since through the intensive process of industrialization and secularization, socialism relativized their meaning substantially. The classic and most important cleavage of the line labor – capital was completely underdeveloped, especially in the first years of democratization when neither capital nor labor were represented in politics. Those conditions emphasized the conflict between the center and the periphery, rationalized through nationalism and regionalism.
The social setting of post-communism which allowed for the development of party systems was quite complex and atypical (from a point of view of western democracies) in order for the four-element Rockan’s typology to be sufficient. Thus, von Beyme considered more appropriate the eight-element division, but emphasizing that the meaning of certain divisions in specific environments is preconditioned by other variables as well. So for example, the dominance of the socio-cultural conflict is to be expected where strong ethnic fragmentation persists and here, he mentions Republic of Macedonia as well as in cases where the process of separation from a bigger state community has not yet been finalized (Slovakia). The author points out that the desirable dominant type of conflict is the social-economic one, which is oriented towards the future and which we come across in conditions of market economy (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Hungary, Latvia).