Politics in Europe: An Introduction to the Politics of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Russia, and the European Union

Politics in Europe

Politics in Europe An Introduction to the Politics of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Russia, and the European Union THIRD EDITION M. Donald Hancock Vanderbilt University

David P. Conradt East Carolina University

B. Guy Peters University of Pittsburgh

William Safran University of Colorado, Boulder

Stephen White University of Glasgow

Raphael Zariski University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Seven Bridges Press  Fifth Avenue New York, NY - Copyright ©  by Chatham House Publishers of Seven Bridges Press, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher. Publisher: Ted Bolen Managing Editor: Katharine Miller Production Services: Bytheway Publishing Services Cover design: Stefan Killen Design Cover photo: PhotoDisc, Inc. Printing and Binding: Phoenix Color Corp.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Politics in Europe : an introduction to the politics of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Russia, and the European Union / M. Donald Hancock . . . [et al.].— rd ed. p. cm. Rev. ed. of: Politics in Western Europe. nd ed. ©. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN --- (pbk.) . Europe—Politics and government—– . I. Hancock, M. Donald. II. Politics in Western Europe. JN.A P  .—dc  Manufactured in the United States of America          

Contents

List of Tables List of Comparative Figures Preface Introduction

vii x xi xiii

Part I. The United Kingdom B. Guy Peters

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

The Context of British Politics Where Is the Power? Who Has the Power? How Is Power Used? What Is the Future of British Politics? For Further Reading

1 17 42 63 78 84

Part II. France William Safran

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

The Context of French Politics Where Is the Power? Who Has the Power? How Is Power Used? What Is the Future of French Politics? For Further Reading

87 99 119 148 157 164

Part III. Germany David P. Conradt

11. 12. 13. 14.

The Context of German Politics Where Is the Power? Who Has the Power? How Is Power Used?

167 191 205 227

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15. What Is the Future of German Politics? For Further Reading

239 250

Part IV. Italy Raphael Zariski

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

The Context of Italian Politics Where Is the Power? Who Has the Power? How Is Power Used? What Is the Future of Italian Politics? For Further Reading

253 270 292 326 334 344

Part V. Sweden M. Donald Hancock

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

The Context of Swedish Politics Where Is the Power? Who Has the Power? How Is Power Used? What Is the Future of Swedish Politics? For Further Reading

347 357 367 381 395 399

Part VI. Russia Stephen White

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

The Context of Russian Politics Where Is the Power? Who Has the Power? How Is Power Used? What Is the Future of Russian Politics? For Further Reading

403 416 431 445 456 464

Part VII. The European Union M. Donald Hancock and B. Guy Peters

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

The Context of European Union Politics Where Is the Power? Who Has the Power? How Is Power Used? What Is the Future of EU Politics? For Further Reading

467 480 498 509 525 542

Appendix Index

545 563

List of Tables Part I. The United Kingdom

1.1 Unemployment Levels by Region, 1996 3.1 Citizens per Parliamentary Seat 3.2 Class Voting, 1979 and 1997

5 46 54

Part II. France

6.1 France: Some Changes in Fifty-four Years 6.2 Political Cycles and Regimes 7.1 Political Composition of Selected Fifth Republic Governments before 1981 7.2 Political Composition of Selected Fifth Republic Governments, 1981–88 7.3 Political Composition of Selected Fifth Republic Governments since 1991 8.1 Parliamentary and Presidential Elections, 1958–97 8.2 Composition of the National Assembly since 1956 8.3 Recent Cantonal Elections: Number of General Councilors Elected 8.4 Composition of the Senate, 1959–99

91 93 105 106 107 124 126 140 141

Part III. Germany

11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5

German Unity, 1989–90: A Chronology The States of the Federal Republic Income by Occupation, 1988 The Ten Largest Firms in the Federal Republic Satisfaction with Democracy: Germany, Britain, France, Italy, European Union 13.1 Seat Distribution in the 1998 Election 15.1 What Has Become Better, What Has Become Worse since Unification? East Germany, 2000 15.2 Catching Up: East vs. West, Economic Indicators, 1991–99

175 177 182 183 188 220 240 243

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Part IV. Italy

18.1 Percentages of Total Vote Polled by Italian Parties in Elections for the Chamber of Deputies, 1948–96 18.2 Seats Won by Various Italian Parties in Elections for the Chamber of Deputies, 1948–96

294 295

Part V. Sweden

21.1 23.1 23.2 23.3 24.1 24.2

Comparative Tax Payments, 1998 Election Results, 1932–98 Bloc Alignments, 1958–98 Government Formation, 1932–2002 Per Capita Gross Domestic Product, 1997 Measures of Commitment to Public Welfare

355 369 378 379 382 385

Part VI. Russia

26.1 26.2 27.1 27.2 28.1 28.2 28.3 29.1

Some Characteristics of Russia’s Population Russians’ Main Concerns in the Late 1990s The 1996 Russian Presidential Election The Russian Presidential Election of 26 March 2000 Elections to the Russian State Duma, December 1995 Elections to the Russian State Duma, December 1999 Some Characteristics of Party Support, December 1999 Russian Economic Performance, 1992–98

405 412 422 423 433 438 439 449

Part VII. The European Union

31.1 31.2 32.1 32.2 32.3 32.4 33.1 33.2 34.1 34.2 35.1 35.2

Area and Population of EU Member States Indicators of Economic Development Number of Votes in Qualified Majority Voting The Prodi Commission, 2000–2005 Distribution of Seats in the European Parliament Elections to the European Parliament, June 1999: Number of Seats by Party Group, 1999–2003 Consultations and Cooperations and Co-Decision Procedures in the European Parliament, 1998 Decisions and Resolutions Adopted by the European Parliament, 1998 European Union Budget: Sources of Revenue, 1999–2000 European Union Expenditures, 2000 Treaty of Nice: Qualified Majority Voting Treaty of Nice: Number of Members of the European Parliament

468 468 485 488 490 491 503 504 515 517 538 539

list of tables

ix

Appendix A.1 A.2 A.3 A.4 A.5 A.6 A.7 A.8 A.9 A.10 A.11 A.12 A.13 A.14 A.15

National Election Outcomes: Percentage of Popular Support Distribution of Seats in National Legislatures Postwar Executive Leadership Per Capita Gross National Product (GNP), 1975–97 Growth of Real Gross Domestic Product (GDP), 1970–2001 Consumer Prices, 1970–99 Average Unemployment Rates, 1960–99 Annual Unemployment Rates, 1985–99 Central Government Total Outlays as Percentage of Nominal GDP, 1986–2002 General Government Total Tax and Nontax Receipts as Percentage of Nominal GDP, 1986–2002 Days Lost through Strikes and Lockouts per 1,000 Employees, 1960–2000 Infant Mortality Rate, 1960–90s Life Expectancy at Birth, 1960–90s Student Enrollment Rates Religious Adherents by Major Denominations, mid–2000

547 550 553 556 557 558 559 559 560 560 561 561 562 562 562

List of Comparative Figures Population Population Density Annual Immigration Percentage of Population Aged 65 and Older Gross Domestic Product per Capita Average Annual Growth Rate of Gross Domestic Product Average Unemployment Rates Percentage of Females in Workforce Average Balance of Trade Voter Turnout Vote for Radical Left Parties Vote for Social Democratic/Labor Parties Vote for Centrist Parties Vote for Conservative Parties Number of Postwar Cabinets Comparative Tax Payments Total Government Expenditures as a Percentage of Nominal Gross Domestic Product Trade Union Density Infant Mortality Rate Days Lost Annually through Strikes and Lockouts per 1,000 Employees Defense Expenditures as a Percentage of Gross Domestic Product Inequality Index European Parliamentary Election, June 1999 Contribution of Own Resources by EU Member States to the 1999 Budget Disbursements Made in Each EU Member State as a Percentage of the 1999 Budget

10 31 67 80 88 103 120 158 159 196 206 246 277 329 336 356 396 397 413 457 461 475 507 518 520

Preface THIS THIRD EDITION of Politics in Europe constitutes a major departure from previous versions. A principal innovation is the inclusion of Russia alongside the established West European democracies of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden. Russia’s transition since the early s from an authoritarian communist regime to a pluralist democracy and market economy is one of the most profound transformations in recent political history, equivalent in scope and depth to the Bolshevik revolution of  (albeit in a diametrically opposed direction). The Russian experience offers compelling counterpoints to historical patterns of democratization, discontinuity, and regime stabilization in Western Europe. Another change in this edition is a fundamental revision of the chapters on the European Union to correspond with the analytical framework applied throughout the country sections in the remainder of the volume. An especially daunting challenge was exploring the question “Who Has the Power?” with respect to multiple national, institutional, and organizational actors, all of whom play important roles in EU policymaking and implementation. Increasingly, the European Union has come to dominate domestic policy agendas among its member states, particularly with respect to Economic and Monetary Union (and, with it, the implementation of a common currency, the euro). This prospect has galvanized the domestic political debate in Britain, Denmark and Sweden, all of which have yet to choose to adopt the euro. Moreover, the prospective expansion of the EU to include a number of Central European nations will inevitably transform the fabric of European politics in the years ahead. In addition, each of the country sections has been substantially updated to reflect recent election results and political developments, including the April–June  presidential and parliamentary elections in France. Chatham House has established a web page to accompany this volume that will contain future election outcomes, analyses of current political and economic trends in Europe and important activities of the European Union (including highlevel aspirations to craft a constitution), and links to websites dealing with European government and politics (see www.sevenbridgespress.com/chathamhouse/hancock). In a rapidly changing political and economic world, Europe continues to command the attention of students, informed citizens, scholars, and other professionals. Democratic principles and the postwar economic performance of the West European nations helped inspire the dramatic events during the late s and early s that led to the transformation of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet

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Union into fledgling market economies and democratic political systems. Domestically, national politics have assumed new and, in some cases, unsettling dimensions in response to globalization, increased electoral volatility, the increased salience of the European Union, and an ever-evolving political agenda. An emergent “New Europe” encompasses both continuity and change. Democratic constitutional principles and institutional arrangements—well established on the basis of historical experience in the United Kingdom, France, and Sweden and the product of postwar consensus in Germany and Italy and the demise of Communism in Russia—remain firmly entrenched throughout Europe. Traditional political parties and organized interest groups continue to occupy center stage, with the exception of Italy and Russia. At the same time, resurgent social-political movements—ranging from Communists in Russia to right-wing nationalist parties in France, Italy, and Germany—continue to challenge the established political order. While familiar conflicts over economic management and social welfare continue to animate national electoral campaigns, new issues have arisen concerning immigrants, crime, globalization, and international terrorism. An important consequence is increased electoral volatility. Contributors to this volume address these disparate themes of contemporary European politics with an empirical focus on the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Russia, and the European Union. The volume is organized to facilitate both single-country analysis and cross-national comparison. Figures dispersed throughout the text display cross-national comparisons at recent points in time. Their purpose is to present visually useful “snapshots” of salient demographic, political, economic, and social characteristics of each country. In addition, detailed statistical tables on postwar elections, executive leadership, and socioeconomic performance are included in the appendix to make possible systematic comparisons among the various countries over time. For the benefit of students of comparative politics, the data in these tables also serve as a basis for generating hypotheses and conducting preliminary research. This volume is dedicated to students of comparative politics who seek enhanced knowledge of the new Europe at a time when all European democracies confront the challenge of adaptive economic, social, and political response to domestic, regional, and global changes. We would like to thank our students, colleagues, and others who have contributed to our own understanding of European affairs, among them Norman Furniss and Timothy Tilton, both at Indiana University, and the late Arnold Heidenheimer. For their research and editorial assistance, we are grateful to Larry Romans and Gretchen Dodge at the Heard Library at Vanderbilt University, John Logue at Kent State University, Victor Supyan at the Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada of the Russian Academy of Science in Moscow, Erwin Hargrove at Vanderbilt University, and Francesco Giordano at the University of Chicago. Special thanks for their timely insights into European politics in general and British politics in particular are due Andrew Hughes Hallett, formerly of Glasgow University and now a colleague at Vanderbilt University, and David Coates at Wake Forest University. —M. Donald Hancock Vanderbilt University

Introduction THE STUDY OF comparative politics serves multiple purposes. They include acquiring

greater knowledge about similarities and differences among nations and their subsystems, testing various scientific propositions, and deriving political lessons from the experience of others that might usefully be applied or studiously avoided in one’s own place and time. Throughout the evolution of comparative politics as a core field within political science, this endeavor has involved varying degrees of empirical, normative, and theoretical analysis.2 Traditionally, Western scholars concentrated on constitutional norms and institutional arrangements in the established democratic systems of the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and, for a time, Weimar Germany. After World War II, many of the most creative comparative scholars turned their attention to problems of modernization, leadership, and revolution in the Third World countries of Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa in an effort to devise more rigorous concepts and methods of comparative political analysis.3 More recently, scholars have reincorporated European politics into the mainstream of comparative politics as they have sought to extend and refine basic concepts of the field.4 This volume of country surveys is testimony to the renewed relevance of the European political experience for comparative purposes. A key example is the attainment of democracy under vastly different historical and political conditions in Western Europe and Russia. Their similarities and contrasts offer important insights into processes of democratization elsewhere in the contemporary world of nations. A compelling justification for the comparative analysis of European politics lies in the historical contributions of nations such as Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden to basic philosophical, cultural, and institutional tenets of Western civilization. Immigrants from throughout Europe (including Russia and Central Europe) have helped create new nations in the United States, Canada, Israel, and elsewhere. Many of their descendants understandably look to Europe to comprehend the significance of their national origins and the European roots of their own countries’ constitutional and political development. From a historical perspective, Europe also offers important insights for the comparative study of different “paths to modernity.” The striking contrast between the success of Britain and Scandinavia in sustaining an evolutionary pattern of political change and the far more tumultuous experiences of France, Germany, Italy, and Russia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries provides crucial knowledge about underlying factors of

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system stability and political effectiveness.5 In the contemporary world of nations, Europe’s postwar political and economic achievements—including its democratic convergence and unprecedented material growth—constitute a series of “most similar cases” broadly comparable to other advanced industrial democracies in North America, Japan, and parts of the British Commonwealth. As such, Europe provides a rich laboratory for the comparative study of political parties and organized interest groups, political culture, institutional arrangements, economic management, social services, and public policy.6 A Common Analytical Framework Consistent with these multiple purposes of comparative political inquiry, this volume addresses fundamental features of modern European politics on the basis of a common analytical framework designed to facilitate both single-country and crossnational analysis. Various country specialists address six important European nations according to the following criteria: () the context of national politics (including basic geographic and demographic factors, history, and political culture); () formal decision-making and implementation structures; () political parties, organized interest groups, and electoral behavior; () the uses of political power; and () the future of politics under changing domestic and international conditions.7 Accompanying the country sections are photographs as well as tables, graphs, and statistical appendixes containing empirical comparative data. The choice of country studies is based on a variety of considerations. One is the traditional inclusion of the United Kingdom and France in most comparative courses on European politics. Both countries have provided major contributions to the emergence of Western democracy and continue to play important political and economic roles in regional and world affairs. A second consideration is the significance of Germany as a compelling instance of fundamental system transformation over time. Theoretically and empirically, the German case offers crucial insights into processes of socioeconomic and political development under successive historical conditions of regime discontinuity, postwar stability in the West, the failure of communism in the former German Democratic Republic, and unification in . Third, the inclusion of Italy and Sweden provides important systemic contrasts to more familiar case studies with respect to their distinctive patterns of postwar political dominance—Christian Democratic (until the early s) versus Social Democratic, respectively—and the central role of civil servants and organized interest groups in the policymaking process. Finally, Russia’s simultaneous transitions to democracy and a market economy pose fundamental questions concerning system transformation and performance. Russian experiments, first with communism and now with a distinctive form of democracy, are of a sweeping scale daunting to comparative analysis. The seventh section of this volume deals with the European Union (EU). Since the early s, institutionalized economic cooperation among principal European nations has resulted in the emergence of the EU as an increasingly important regional political system. The completion of an integrated regional market by the early s and the more recent attainment of economic and monetary union among a majority of the EU member states underscore the Union’s importance as a key economic and political actor in its own right.8

introduction

xv

Contrasting System Types While each of the contributors concentrates on single countries, their analysis illuminates contrasting features of three basic types of democratic polities that transcend national boundaries: () pluralist (the United Kingdom, Italy, and the EU), () étatist (France and Russia), and () democratic corporatist (Sweden and, to a lesser extent, Germany).9 The first of these types—pluralist democracies—is characterized by dispersed political authority and a multiplicity of autonomous organized interest groups representing employers, farmers, labor, and other special interests vis-à-vis the state. In such systems competitive economic and electoral relations dominate intergroup relations, with most groups oriented more toward short-term material and social gains than intermediate or long-term goals of system transformation. A dominant feature of pluralist systems is group reliance on coalition formation, often with respect to specific policy issues, as a means to maximize a group’s economic and/or political influence. The structure and dynamics of pluralist democracies vary according to the distribution of political power among key policy actors. Majoritarian pluralism characterizes political systems dominated by a majority party in parliament, as has been the case during alternative peroids of Conservative and Labour governance in the United Kingdom. Fragmented pluralism, in contrast, characterizes systems in which power is dispersed among a multiplicity of parties (none of which is able to command a sustained legislative majority in its own right). Policymaking in majoritarian pluralist systems can yield decisive policy outcomes (witness Thatcherism and recent constitutional reforms under “New Labour” in Britain), whereas political outcomes tend to be incremental and oftentimes tentative in fragmented pluralist regimes, with successful outcomes dependent on the strength (or fragility) of winning coalitions. Fragmented pluralism characterizes both Italy and the European Union as well as non-Europeans polities such as the United States and Canada. In contrast, étatist systems are political regimes that embody more centralized authority structures and policymaking processes. A chief feature of étatist regimes is the concentration of bureaucratic power at the apex of the political system, as is the case in Italy despite its postwar record of successive changes of government. If accompanied by a parallel concentration of executive power (as in the Fifth Republic of France and in Russia under President Putin), the likely result is a high degree of institutional efficacy in the political process. Thus, forceful policies can be more efficiently decided and implemented in étatist regimes than is typically the case in pluralist systems, but for that very reason they can also be more readily reversed by an incumbent or a successor government (as proved the case with successive phases of nationalization and privatization during the s and s in France). Such policies may also be subject to less legislative control than in pluralist systems. Democratic corporatist systems, finally, encompass institutionalized arrangements whereby government officials, business groups, and organized labor jointly participate in making (and in some cases implementing) economic and social policies. Such decisions are subsequently enacted through executive decrees, legislative endorsement, or both.10 Democratic corporatism is more highly developed in Sweden, the other Scandinavian countries, and Austria than in other European countries; yet, primarily in the sphere of

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national economic policymaking, corporatist linkages exist in the Federal Republic of Germany as well.11 By facilitating institutionalized participation by organized interest groups in the political process, democratic corporatism encourages a “partnership” approach to problem solving in specified policy areas (such as economic reconstruction in eastern Germany). Critics, however, fault corporatist arrangements because they tend to bypass legislative channels of representation, impede leadership accountability, and discourage democratic participation on the part of rank-and-file members of trade unions and other mass organizations.12 These different system types are relevant for explaining contrasting patterns of socioeconomic and political performance on the part of modern democracies. Without question, many aspects of system performance—including those measured by basic indicators such as annual rates of economic growth, inflation, and unemployment levels—are influenced by external economic and other factors beyond the direct control of national policy actors. Nonetheless, national policymaking institutions and processes mediate the domestic economic and social consequences of exogenous trends and events. As Hugh Heclo has observed in commenting on different national responses to the international crisis of stagflation during the s and early s, “Each nation has embarked on a search for innovations in economic policymaking, although each has done so in its own way. This recent agitation for economic policy innovation in the midst of constraints provides a good example of what [has been] termed ‘structured variation’ in public policy.”13 As contemporary European politics demonstrates, ‘structured variations’ among nations with respect to policy choices and their effects on socioeconomic performance are products of contrasting patterns of institutionalized power, different ideological preferences on the part of governing political parties, and varying degrees of access by the principal organized interest groups to national policy councils. The central questions of comparative political analysis remain, in short, who governs, on behalf of what values, with the collaboration of what groups, and with what socioeconomic and political consequences. The experience of the six European democracies included in this volume and the European Union reveals illuminating answers. Notes . This definition of comparative politics is based on Robert Dahl, Modern Political Analysis, th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, ); and Lawrence C. Mayer, Comparative Political Inquiry: A Methodological Survey (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey, ). . Dahl, Modern Political Analysis. . For a summary overview of innovation in postwar approaches to comparative political analysis, see Ronald H. Chilcote, Theories of Comparative Politics: The Search for a Paradigm (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, ). A critical assessment of the failure of the behavioral revolution to live up to many of its promises can be found in Lawrence C. Mayer, Redefining Comparative Politics: Promise Versus Performance (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Library of Social Research, ). Standard sources on the methodology of comparative research include Mattei Dogan and Dominique Pelassy, How to Compare Nations: Strategies in Comparative Politics, d ed. (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, ); Adam Przeworski and Henry Teune, The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry (New York: Wiley-Interscience, ); and Robert Holt and John Turner, eds., The Methodology of Comparative Research (New York: Free Press, ). . Note, in particular, the increased relevance of European politics for the comparative study of public policy. See Arnold J. Heidenheimer, Hugh Heclo, and Carolyn Teich Adams, Comparative Public Policy: The

introduction

. .

. .

.

.

.

.

.

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Politics of Social Choice in America, Europe, and Japan, 3d ed. (New York: St. Martin’s, ). See also Francis Castles, Comparative Public Policy: Patterns of Post-War Transformation (Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar, ). See Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, ); and Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ). Important examples of comparative studies of groups, institutions, democracy, and culture incorporating European data include Francis G. Castles, The Impact of Parties: Politics and Policies in Democratic Capitalist Society (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, ); Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press, ); Russell Dalton et al., Electoral Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies: Alignment or Realignment? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ); Peter H. Merkl, ed., West European Party Systems (New York: Free Press, ); Kay Lawson, Comparative Study of Political Parties (New York: St. Martin’s, ); Suzanne Berger, ed., Organizing Interests in Western Europe: Pluralism, Corporatism, and the Transformation of Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, ); Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Boston: Little, Brown, , ) and Almond and Verba, eds., The Civic Culture Revisited (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, ); Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ) and Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ; Robert Dahl, Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy: Autonomy vs. Control (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ); Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ); Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ); Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (New York: Cambridge University Press, ); Peter Hall, Governing the Economy: The Politics of State Intervention in Britain and France (New York: Oxford University Press, ); Douglas A. Hibbs Jr., The Political Economy of Industrial Democracies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ); Gösta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ); and Adam Przeworski et al., Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, – (Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, ). The same conceptual framework was utilized in the original edition of this book. The original signatories of treaties establishing the European Coal and Steel Community in  and the European Economic Community in  included France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. The United Kingdom, Denmark, and Ireland joined the Community in  and were followed by Greece in  and Spain and Portugal in . Austria, Finland, and Sweden became members in January . The distinction between étatist, pluralist, and democratic corporatist regimes is utilized to help explain contrasting patterns of economic policy management in M. Donald Hancock, John Logue, and Bernt Schiller, eds., Managing Modern Capitalism: Industrial Renewal and Workplace Democracy in the United States and Western Europe (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood-Praeger, ). Excellent compilations of reprinted articles and original research on varieties of democratic corporatism can be found in Philippe Schmitter and Gerhard Lehmbruch, eds., Trends toward Corporatist Intermediation (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, ); and in Gerhard Lehmbruch and Philippe Schmitter, eds., Patterns of Corporatist Policy-Making (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, ). Also see Reginald J. Harrison, Pluralism and Corporatism: The Political Evolution of Modern Democracies (Boston: Allen and Unwin, ). Democratic corporatism was most fully institutionalized in former West Germany in the form of “concerted action,” which involved high-level consultations focusing on economic policy among government officials and representatives of employer associations and trade unions from  to . Since then, formal trilateral policy sessions have been replaced by much more informal policy discussions among key economic actors that are periodically convened at the behest of the federal chancellor. See M. Donald Hancock, West Germany: The Politics of Democratic Corporatism (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, ). From a critical ideological perspective, Leo Panitch argues that corporatism in liberal democracies promotes the “co-optation” of workers into the capitalist economic order and thus impedes efforts to achieve greater industrial and economic democracy. Panitch, “The Development of Corporatism in Liberal Democracies,” Comparative Political Studies  (): –. Heidenheimer, Heclo, and Adams, Comparative Public Policy, .

Chapter 1

The Context of British Politics BRITISH SOCIETY AND British politics often have been discussed in terms of tradition, homogeneity, and integration. Authors have written of the absence of significant social cleavages other than social class and of the presence of a uniform set of political and social values. Consensus also has been argued to exist on the nature of the political system and about the general policies of government. The impression commonly given is one of homogeneity, stability, and indeed of a rather boring locale in which to study politics. The impression of stability was reinforced by the ability of one political leader—Margaret Thatcher—to remain in power for over a decade and for her party to win the subsequent general election. Even after the election of the Labour government in , enough of the Conservative policies remain in effect to make traditional supporters of Labour argue that there has been too much continuity in British politics. In reality, the social and political systems of the United Kingdom are substantially more diverse than they are frequently portrayed, and many of the factors that divide other democracies politically also divide the citizens of the United Kingdom. There are differences in religion, language, regions, and perceptions of issues that both mitigate and reinforce the traditionally dominant class divisions in British politics. Those divisive factors have become even more important as immigration, Europeanization, and continuing economic change have tended to increase the salience of existing social divisions and to create new divisions. Not only is there diversity, but also the setting of British politics has a number of seemingly contradictory elements that make the management of government much more of a balancing act than might be thought at first glance. In fact, the genius of British politics in maintaining a stable political system over several centuries is not the good fortune of operating in a homogeneous society but the development of a set of institutions, values, and customs that permit the pragmatic acceptance of diversity and an effective accommodation to change. Historically these changes have been rather gradual, but the pace of transformation accelerated during the last part of the twentieth century. This chapter explores several contradictory elements within the environment of British politics and their relationship to the functioning of the political system.

A United Kingdom of Four Countries Perhaps the fundamental point of diversity in British politics is that the United Kingdom is a multinational state composed of four parts. To begin, therefore, let us introduce some

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nomenclature with real political importance. The proper name of the nation usually referred to as Great Britain is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Great Britain, in turn, is composed of England, Wales, and Scotland. All are constituent parts of the United Kingdom, albeit rather unequal partners in terms of population and economic productivity. Over  percent of the total population of the United Kingdom lives in England,  percent in Scotland,  percent in Wales, and the remainder in Northern Ireland. Over  percent of total wages and salaries in the economy are paid in England, with only  percent going to residents of Northern Ireland. The three non-English components of the United Kingdom, sometimes called the Celtic Fringe, joined with England at a number of times and in a number of ways.1 Wales was added first, by conquest, in the early fourteenth century. The English and Scottish crowns were united in  when the Scottish king James I became the first Stuart king of England, and the parliaments of the two countries were joined by the Act of Union in . This unification did not, however, terminate the conflict between the northern and southern portions of Great Britain. Scottish uprisings in  and again in  resulted in English (or British) occupation of Scotland and the outlawing of a number of Scottish customs, such as the kilt and bagpipes. These restrictions were removed, at least informally, by , and manifestations of Scottish nationalism have been substantially less violent since that time. The desire of some Scots (and substantially fewer Welsh) for greater autonomy or even independence has not, however, disappeared entirely. A nationalist party began to run some candidates in Scottish elections during the s and gained one seat in a byelection in . Since  the Scottish National Party (SNP) has been able to gain representation in Parliament at every election. During the s, pressure for independence was sufficiently strong to force a referendum on the issue of nationalism. That referendum failed, but the issues of self-determination and autonomy did not go away.2 Another referendum in  approved the devolution of a number of powers to a Scottish Parliament, which formally took office in July . The interest in Scottish devolution has to some extent been connected with the European Union and its interest in regionalism and the rights of subnational territories in all European countries. Wales received its own assembly at the same time, although that body has substantially fewer powers than the Scottish Parliament. The involvement of the British government in Ireland has had a long and tortuous history. English armies began invading Ireland in ; the island was finally conquered in  and was formally joined with Great Britain to form the United Kingdom in . The unity created was more legal than actual, and Irish Home Rule was a persistent political issue during the second half of the nineteenth century. Political arguments were accompanied by increasing violence and then by armed uprisings against British rule. The most famous of these was the Easter Uprising in , which constituted the beginning of years of serious violence. Following a long period of negotiation, the twenty-six southern counties of Ireland were granted independence in  as the Irish Free State (later the Republic of Ireland), while six northern counties in Ulster remained a part of the United Kingdom.

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This partition did not solve the “Irish Question.” Continuing tensions and outbreaks of violence between Catholics seeking to join with the rest of Ireland and Protestants desiring to maintain their unity with the United Kingdom has been a persistent problem for any British government. The “troubles,” beginning in , were a period of continuing violence between the two communities. The London government tried a number of ways of creating a political settlement, all in the general context of Ulster remaining within the United Kingdom. For a short time, substantial rule was devolved to Belfast, and arrangements for power sharing between the Catholic groups and the British government were attempted. None of the plans were successful, and they were followed by a return to direct rule and the large-scale use of British troops in Ulster. After years of mutual distrust, the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic entered into negotiations over the future of Ulster. The Anglo-Irish Agreement was signed in  by the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic and was meant to foster a spirit of compromise, but by itself could not put an end to the troubles in Northern Ireland. Most of the violence was not officially sanctioned, and hence formal agreements among governments were unlikely to produce real results. What put the violence on hold, if not ending it permanently as was hoped, was the voluntary suspension of violence, first by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and then by the Protestant paramilitary organizations, during . These agreements established the conditions for initial negotiations for an enduring settlement. A statement of a possible workable settlement was negotiated between Prime Minister John Major and the Taoiseach (prime minister) of Ireland, John Bruton, in February .3 This agreement included a number of points, the most important being that there be some democratic means of negotiating a more enduring solution to the question involving all parties to the continuing dispute. Further, some form of executive for all of Ireland was envisaged, with its powers including dealing with the European Union. More immediately, the agreement meant that, after several decades of doing so, British soldiers stopped patrolling the streets of Belfast. If nothing else, this removed a symbol of the troubles and a continuing irritant for the Roman Catholic population. Moving beyond the initial cease-fire agreement to more meaningful negotiations proved to be more difficult. Progress toward talks was repeatedly stalled by the British government’s insistence that the IRA must decommission all its weapons before talks began, as a necessary demonstration of its commitment to peace and a political settlement; to the IRA, decommissioning would be the equivalent of surrender because there was no reciprocal demand for decommissioning weapons held by the Protestant paramilitary forces.4 A highly significant step toward resolving the question of Northern Ireland was the “Good Friday” agreement of . It was signed by Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Irish prime minister, and the leaders of Sinn Fein (the political arm of the IRA) and the Ulster Unionists. It called for electing a new assembly for Northern Ireland, establishing an executive formed from both communities, and forming a joint consultative body between Dublin and Belfast to address issues that affect all of the island of Ireland. The most fundamental point was that a much greater measure of self-government was to be returned to

4

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the province. A referendum on the agreement passed overwhelmingly in Northern Ireland and even more so in a simultaneous vote in the Republic of Ireland. Peace seemed to be returning to Northern Ireland. Elections were held for the Assembly in spring , and the executive assumed office, with David Trimble (an Ulster Unionist) as First Minister, in July. The executive also included members of several important parties in the Province, including Sinn Fein. Initial optimism over the government proved short-lived, however, when the peace process stalled over the question of decommissioning weapons held by the IRA and the Protestant paramilitaries. In response London restored direct rule over the province. The political impasse was tentatively resolved when Sinn Fein, in an unprecedented move, called on the IRA in October  to begin decommissioning its weapons. Trimble, who had resigned in July, was reelected First Minister in November. Preserving the unity of the United Kingdom does not prevent the expression of a number of differences among its constituent parts, and to some degree those differences are enshrined in law and the political structure. Before devolution, each of the three non-English components of the United Kingdom had a cabinet department responsible for its affairs. Most laws have been passed in Parliament with separate acts for England and Wales, for Scotland, and for Northern Ireland. This differentiation is in part because both the Scottish and Ulster legal systems are substantially different from the English (and Welsh), and legislation must be tailored to conform to those differences. In addition, Scottish and Welsh legislation has been treated somewhat differently in Parliament, with committees composed of the MPs of each of the two regions reviewing the legislation at the same time as it is considered by other parliamentary committees.5 The devolution of many issues to the new legislative bodies in Wales and Scotland, and perhaps Northern Ireland, means that this system will have to be amended, although the details will take months or years to implement.6 Prior to the imposition of direct rule in Northern Ireland in , Stormont, which was the parliament of Northern Ireland, had a major role in policymaking for that province, and there is still a separate Northern Ireland civil service, which is responsible for implementing the policies of the government in London. After direct rule, the role of Stormont was virtually eliminated, but one part of the proposed settlement with the Roman Catholic groups will be a restoration of some powers to a legislature in Northern Ireland. Law, language, and religion also differ in the four parts of the United Kingdom. Scottish law is derived in part from French and Roman law, as well as from common law, and various legal procedures and offices differ between English and Scottish practice. Language is also different in various parts of the United Kingdom. Welsh is accepted as a second language for Wales, although only about  percent of the population can speak it and only about  percent speak it as their only language. Some people in Scotland and Northern Ireland speak forms of Gaelic, but it has not been accorded formal legal status, perhaps because only just over  percent of the population speak Gaelic. Finally, the established religions of the parts of the nation are different: The Church of England (Anglican)

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5

is established in England, the Church of Scotland (Presbyterian) in Scotland; Wales and Northern Ireland do not have established churches because of their religious diversity. The diversity in Wales between Anglicans and various “chapel religions” (Methodism in particular) has not had the dire consequences of the differences between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, but it has been a source of political diversity and somewhat different patterns of voting in the principality than in England.7 These traditional religious divisions are becoming less important as church membership declines, but they are being replaced by differences with non-Christian religions, especially Islam. Finally, the four components of the United Kingdom differ economically. This is less true of their economic structures than of their economic success. Differences in the proportion of the working population employed in manual jobs, or even in the proportion employed in agriculture, are relatively slight between England and the Celtic Fringe. The major differences in employment patterns are the substantially higher rates of public employment in the Celtic Fringe, especially in Northern Ireland. Measures of economic success do differ, with levels of unemployment on average higher in the non-English parts of the United Kingdom (especially Northern Ireland) than in England. In economic terms, however, the divide in the United Kingdom is as much between the south of England and the rest of the country as it is between England and the non-English nations. Unemployment rates in some parts of northern England are as high or even higher than in Scotland or Wales, while London and the southeast have at times in the recent past had shortages of workers (see table .). Average personal income in all three parts of the Celtic Fringe is also lower than in England, and by a large margin in the case of Northern Ireland. These economic differences have political importance, for they create a sense of deprivation among non-English groups within the United Kingdom, as well as among some residents of northern England. Not surprisingly, these areas vote heavily for the Labour Party. The differences among the four nations within the United Kingdom are manifested politically, although fortunately infrequently with the violence of Ulster politics. Scottish nationalism did not die entirely following the Act of Union, but it has experienced a number of cyclical declines. Votes for the Scottish National Party (SNP) had an upsurge Table 1.1 Unemployment Levels by Region, 1996 (in percentages) England North Northwest Yorkshire and Humberside West Midlands Southeast East Midlands South West East Anglia Source: Department of Employment.

10.1 8.5 8.4 8.0 7.5 7.4 6.9 6.1

Northern Ireland Scotland Wales

11.0 8.1 7.9

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from  to . The SNP at least doubled its vote in every election from  to  and received more than  percent of the Scottish vote in the October  election but only  percent in . Welsh nationalism has been less successful as a political force than has Scottish nationalism, but Plaid Cymru, the Welsh National party, won over  percent of the Welsh vote in the October  election. Nationalist voting declined after , but remained a significant factor in these Celtic portions of the United Kingdom. In the  election Plaid Cymru won  percent of the vote and continued to push for the referendum that eventually approved setting up the Welsh Assembly. The party received . percent in . Party politics in Northern Ireland, which has been based on cleavages of the seventeenth century as much as the twentieth century, bears little resemblance to politics in the rest of the United Kingdom. There are two parties that represent the Roman Catholic population, with one allied with the IRA. There are also two parties for the Protestant majority, varying primarily in the intensity with which they express allegiance to the United Kingdom and distrust of Roman Catholics, especially the IRA. Finally, there is one party that attempts to be a catchall for the two confessional groups. There are some elements of economics and class in the equation—one of the Roman Catholic parties also has a moderate socialist agenda—but the fundamental basis of politics has been religion. The first thing, therefore, that we must understand about the United Kingdom is that it is a single state composed of separate parts. Unlike the states of the United States, these elements of the union possess no reserved powers, but only the powers delegated to them by the central government. The political system remains unitary while allowing an increasing degree of latitude for the Scottish and Welsh governments, and the potential for a greater role for an executive in Northern Ireland. Only rarely has the unity of the United Kingdom been questioned by its constituent parts, at least since the Scottish uprising of . One challenge of that sort was at least partially successful, however, and most of Ireland did receive its independence. The  referendums on devolution of additional powers to governments in Scotland and Wales appear to make the unity of the United Kingdom even less problematic, given that these two regions have achieved an important political goal. These elections were but two more events in a long history of regional and national politics within the United Kingdom. The contemporary political Zeitgeist of participation and self-determination makes devolution and regional autonomy all the more important. The institutional structure of the United Kingdom continues to evolve, and governance issues that relate the different components will continue on the political agenda. Stability and Change A second feature of the context of contemporary politics in the United Kingdom is the continuity of social and political institutions, combined with a significant degree of change. If a subject of Queen Victoria were to return during the reign of Elizabeth II, he or she would find very little changed, at least on the surface. Most of the same political institutions would be operational, including the monarchy, which has vanished in a num-

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ber of other European nations. Laws would still be made by the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and there would still be a prime minister linking Crown and Parliament. Most of the procedures and the vestigial offices involved in making law are also almost entirely unchanged, including the anachronistic outfit of the Speaker of the House of Commons (although recently worn by a woman). There would be a new political party commanding one of the more important positions in partisan politics—the Labour Party—but party politics would still be primarily two-party politics. Finally, the majority of the subjects of the Queen would be loyal and supportive of the basic structures and policies of the government. At the same time that there has been this great continuity, there has also been great change. The political system has been greatly democratized since Victorian times. When Queen Victoria came to the throne, only about  percent of the adult population was eligible to vote; that despite the Great Reform Act of . In the reign of Elizabeth II, almost all adults are entitled to vote. Before , the House of Lords was almost an equal partner in making legislation; since that date, the House of Lords has exercised only minor influence over policy. A Victorian prime minister was definitely primus inter pares (first among equals), while in the twentieth century collegial patterns of decision making changed to create something approaching a presidential role for the prime minister. The monarchy, which in Victoria’s day still had substantial influence over policy, has today been constitutionally reduced to virtual impotence. Finally, but not least important, the United Kingdom has changed from being perhaps the strongest nation on earth and the imperial master of a far-flung empire to a second-class power—economically and militarily—in a nuclear age. Social and economic trends have paralleled political trends. Just as the monarchy has been preserved, so too has a relatively stratified social system that includes hereditary (as well as life) peerages. In contrast, working-class organizations such as trade unions have tended to lessen the domination of the upper classes and to generate some democratization of the society as well as the political system. The economic structure of the United Kingdom is still primarily based on free enterprise, but government ownership and regulation have had a significant, if declining, impact. The decade and a half of Tory domination of politics until  weakened the unions and enhanced the power of business interests, and “New Labour” under Tony Blair has done little to strengthen the role of the unions. One strategy of the Conservatives in their conscious attempts to reinforce capitalism was the spread of wealth in the society through selling off public housing and privatizing public corporations. The Labour government first elected in  has been following many of the same policies, albeit for different ideological reasons. Compared with other industrialized nations, the British economy is no longer the great engine of production it once was. The relative poverty of the United Kingdom, when compared to many of its European and North American counterparts (see table A, p. ), has severely restricted the policy options that are available to British government, but those reduced opportunities for spending have not significantly affected governmental stability. Despite high levels of unemployment among minority populations (especially the young in those groups) and high levels of income inequality, governmental sta-

8

the united kingdom

bility appears almost certain to continue, with the major question being Northern Ireland. The evolutionary change so characteristic of British political life has been facilitated by the absence of a written constitution. It would be more accurate to say the absence of a single written document serving as a constitution, for a number of documents (Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Petition of Right, the  Parliament Act, the Statute of Westminster) have constitutional status. In addition, the Parliament of the day, expressing the political will of the British people, is competent to do virtually anything it deems necessary, without the limitations of judicial review that exist in the United States. For example, the Scotland Bill and the Wales Bill create a quasi-constitutional form of intergovernmental relations in a way that would have been alien to a centralized regime. Such constitutionally unlimited powers have the potential for great tyranny, inasmuch as only other politicians, the threat of elections, and their own good sense restrain governments. The Blair government has undertaken to make major changes in the constitution through acts of Parliament. These include the devolved powers to Scotland and to Wales and attempts to do the same for Northern Ireland. There also have been further reductions in the powers of the House of Lords, or at least the reduction of the number and powers of hereditary peers sitting in that body. A limited freedom of information bill is being introduced to end decades of secrecy in the government. Although many aspects of the monarchy and Parliament have changed little, the executive branch of government underwent a revolution during the Thatcher government, and the pace of change lessened little during the Major government. Among other changes, large cabinet departments were broken up into a number of “executive agencies” headed by chief executives who may be recruited from outside the civil service or other government organizations. In addition, in major policy areas such as the National Health Service market-based instruments were introduced to attempt to increase the efficiency of those services. A number of procedural changes were introduced, also designed to improve efficiency and economy in the public sector. The Blair government has embraced many of these changes, with some retreat from the internal markets in health, but a continuing interest in corporatization and privatization. For example, in mid- the Blair government converted the Post Office into a corporation, a move not dared even by Margaret Thatcher. Traditional and Modern: The Political Culture of the United Kingdom Much of the ability to accommodate to political change while maintaining older political institutions in Britain may be explained by the political culture of the United Kingdom. That is to say, it may be explained by the values and beliefs that political elites and ordinary citizens have about politics and government. One way of describing this culture has been “traditionally modern.”8 A number of traditional views are combined with a number of modern elements to produce a blend that, if apparently internally contradictory, appears to function well and produce effective government. This culture has not been static but has permitted relatively gradual change based on pragmatic acceptance of chang-

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ing national needs and changing social values. The traditional elements of the political culture are best known, with deference, trust, and pragmatism still important for an understanding of how the British political system functions. As with any statement about national cultures or patterns of values, these statements run the risk of being a stereotype. Taken with a grain of salt, however, these observations about political culture can help us understand not only how British politicians and citizens function in their political roles but also how they tend to think about politics. In the first place, the British population is generally said to be deferential to authority, both generally and particularly to the “authority” of the governing classes. Authority implies the lack of opposition by citizens to the actions of their government, or perhaps even the positive acceptance of those actions. The British government has, by all accounts, a large reservoir of authority, for few citizens question the correctness of the current political arrangements or the right of the government to make and enforce laws. The diffuse support the populace gives the political system and its willingness to obey laws and accept the authoritative decrees of government make the United Kingdom a much easier nation to govern than most. There have been only a few major challenges to the authority of elected governments in the United Kingdom, aside from the peculiar politics of Ulster. One is the trade unions’ attempt to bring down Conservative governments and their economic and industrial policies. This succeeded against the Heath government in  but not against Thatcher in the mid-s. In both cases the miners were the central union involved. The miners were able to bring about the changes they desired with the fall of Heath, but a year-long strike against mine closings and certain conditions of work under Thatcher resulted merely in a reassertion of the power of government to make law. Another major challenge to the authority of government—riots in the inner cities— occurred during the Thatcher government. Although the authority of government was again asserted, such disturbances produced some policy responses to aid these severely depressed areas. Finally, during the early s, the Thatcher government’s attempt to change the system of local government finance from property taxes (rates) to a per capita community charge (poll tax) provoked political violence and significant tax evasion. The Major government quickly reversed the decision and implemented a complex mixture of property and household taxes to pay for local government. The tradition of deference to the upper social classes is a special case of trust in the United Kingdom. Even in a modern, secularized political system, a number of citizens still feel obliged to defer to their “betters” and accept the upper classes as the only appropriate rulers of the society. In political terms, this has provided the Conservative Party an immense advantage and prevents it from being the permanent minority that it would be if people voted strictly on class lines. This traditional attitude is being transformed, however, as many working-class Tories have adopted a more pragmatic concept of the upper classes as being better educated and trained to govern, as opposed to merely accepting their position from deference. In addition, a number of working-class voters have started voting for the Tory Party because it has benefited them through lower taxes, opportunities to buy cheap council houses, and other changes brought in by the Thatcher government.

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Population (in millions) .

France

.

Germany .

Italy

.

Russia Sweden

. .

United Kingdom

.

United States Canada

.

Source: OECD, Economic Surveys, ; Department of Economic and Social Affairs,  Democratic Yearbook (New York: United Nations, ).

For the working-class people who had jobs, the Conservative era from  onward was one of growing prosperity and increasing acceptance of the Conservative Party. Also, an increasing number of Tory politicians (including John Major) have come from modest backgrounds, have worked their way up socially and economically, and believe that others should be able to do the same. There are, however, a number of factors eroding that deference—if indeed it was ever as strong a force as it was characterized.9 First, the very fact that the Conservative politicians tend increasingly to come from modest means and often lack the educational advantages of their predecessors is making deference a less rational option for voters. Further, the nouveau riche nature of many new Conservatives is tending to accentuate the class and economic element of their own party and to drive away other people. Finally, the general secularization of society and the increased media coverage of scandal and suspect behavior among officeholders is making the idea of the “betters” running the country difficult for many citizens to accept any longer.10 Associated with deference toward authority and political leaders is a high degree of trust in the political system as a whole and in its leadership. Survey evidence for the United Kingdom indicates an extremely high level of trust, higher than in almost any other political system, in the fairness and general benevolence of government.11 This high level of trust, although declining in the face of more abrasive political campaigns and some equally abrasive policy decisions, permits a form of political democracy to flourish in the United Kingdom that would be out of place in almost any other industrial society. In this form of democracy the central decision-making process is closed to scrutiny or participation by citizens, or even by politicians who are not members of the cabinet. The United Kingdom is a democracy, but it “is a system of democracy by consent and not by delegation, of government of the people, for the people, with, but not by, the people.”12 The number of cases of

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“sleaze” that have been exposed by the media, and by parliamentary processes, have also tended to erode the trust that the public has had in its government. British citizens expect to participate in politics at election times; most have been content to settle back, watch the government work, and pass judgment at the next election.13 Breaks in official secrecy have given citizens and academics a better view of the internal workings of government, but much of this activity still remains hidden to outsiders. To run a government on such a closed basis requires an extraordinary level of trust on the part of citizens. The increasingly participative nature of British citizens, however, is making them more resentful of their lack of genuine involvement in government, and there is now a perceived need to reexamine the traditions of secrecy and limited democracy that have characterized British government. The need for participation must, however, be weighed against the capacity of governments to make decisions without having to expose their internal decision making. The obverse of the public’s trust is the responsible behavior of elected leaders. Government has generally conducted itself responsibly, even benevolently, and has not violated existing political norms. When those norms have been violated, as when elections were suspended during the two world wars, it has been by broad agreement among the political parties. Responsibility has also meant that parties and governments are expected to deliver more of what they promised in election campaigns than would be expected of American parties. Although there is continuing agitation for increased openness in government, the steadfastness of the great majority of British politicians has helped prevent these demands from gaining wide popular acceptance. The credulity of the population was strained by a number of scandals during the Thatcher decade, but even those did not have so great an impact as they might have had in other democratic nations.14 The acceptance of a rather secretive government in exchange for responsible performance—assuming these two traits are connected—points up another feature of the political culture of the United Kingdom: its pragmatism. Although ideologies are frequently spouted during campaigns or in speeches delivered for mass consumption, British politics is extremely practical. An empirical, pragmatic mode of political thought has so dominated British political life that the preservation of traditional political institutions such as the monarchy is justified not on grounds that they are right and just but on grounds only that they have worked. Even in the more ideological Thatcher government, there were enough turnarounds and changes in policy that illustrate the pragmatic mode of thinking about government at work. Obviously such a political epistemology will be associated with gradual change and a continuous adjustment to changing conditions, a factor that has assisted the system in altering in all but its essential features to accommodate a modern world. It could be argued, in fact, that it was rigidity over several issues (the poll tax and Europe) that led to Thatcher’s replacement by John Major in November . The traditional values of deference, trust, and pragmatism exist in the context of a modern, or even postindustrial, political system. Prime Minister Tony Blair has, for example, attempted to create the image of “Cool Britannia” to counteract the traditional and stodgy image he feels the country has abroad and as a spur to modernize the political culture. The policies pursued, the presence of mass democracy and mass political parties,

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a very large level of public revenues and expenditures, and some increasingly close linkages between state and society are evidence of the modernity of the political system. Yet with all that, political leaders are allowed the latitude to discuss and decide political issues without directly involving the public or press. This is a modern democracy, but a democracy permitting an elite to govern and exercising latent democratic power only at agreed upon times. Class Politics, but . . . The characteristic most commonly identified with politics and political conflicts in the United Kingdom is social class. The principal basis of social differentiation and political mobilization is social class, meaning primarily levels and sources of income. The major partisan alignments in politics are along class lines, with the Labour Party representing the interests of the working classes and the Conservative Party (and to a lesser extent the Liberals and Democrats) reflecting the interests of the middle and upper classes. We have already seen that the correspondence between class and party is less than perfect, but the generalization remains a useful one. Social class is both an objective and a subjective phenomenon. Objectively, the United Kingdom has significant inequalities of income, even after the effects of redistribution of taxes and governmental expenditures are taken into account. But despite the prominence given to class politics in Britain, the inequalities are in general no greater than in many other industrialized democracies. The bottom one-tenth of income earners in the United Kingdom earns . percent of the total income in the nation, while in the United States the same proportion of income earners receive only . percent of total income. The highest decile in the United Kingdom earns . percent of total income, compared with . percent in the United States and . percent in Germany.15 Britain is more class based, however, in that a larger proportion of income earners in Britain is still employed in industrial working-class occupations, meaning primarily manual labor, whereas the largest single category of employment in most other European and North American nations is now service jobs. Access to other goods and services is also affected by class considerations, although again perhaps not to the extent of other European nations. In particular, education is class related, both in the small elite private sector and in the larger state sector that until very recently tracked or streamed all children at an early age. Access to secondary and postsecondary education retains a pronounced upper-class bias, although again less so than in many European nations. With the expansion of university enrollments during the late s and s, that bias may be reduced further. And, in part because of the class basis of education, social mobility is rather low in Britain, although it is still apparently higher than in much of continental Europe. Subjectively, people in the United Kingdom are generally more willing to identify themselves as members of a particular social class than are Americans, who overwhelmingly identify themselves as members of the economic middle class. Issues of all kinds may become polarized on a class basis. Any policy that preserves or extends the privileges and power of the more affluent is immediately held suspect by the Labour Party and the

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trade unions, even when (as with selling council houses to their current tenants) the policy may have a number of benefits for working-class families as well as the government. Several caveats must be raised about a simple class model of British politics. The first is that recently there has been some change, and the embourgeoisement of the working classes, so obvious in many European nations, is occurring to some degree in Britain also. Manual labor is a declining share of the labor force, even though it remains a larger share in the United Kingdom than in most other European countries. Also, the wages paid to manual workers now often approach or even surpass wages and salaries paid to many non-manual workers, and manual workers find some of their economic interests served by the Conservatives. Changes are occurring within the occupational and economic structure, then, that may mitigate the impact of class on politics. Numerous other issues also lessen the dominance of class. We have already mentioned the existence of ethnic and regional cleavages based on the national constituent elements of the United Kingdom. Scottish and Welsh nationalism have tended to cut broadly across class lines and to be concerned with national rather than class consciousness. A new ethnicity entered British politics with the formation of the anti-immigrant National Front party in . Such groups have declined in size in the past few years, but they are still active in many places. In  an estimated . million people of New Commonwealth and Pakistani origin lived in Great Britain, comprising almost  percent of the population. These ethnic minorities now dominate many older industrial towns, and in some inner-city schools English is taught as a second language. As these groups are also multiplying more rapidly than white Britons, the specter of nonwhite domination and the loss of jobs by whites are powerful weapons for some political groups. Pressure by the minorities for representation has already begun to affect the local and national political systems. Religion also plays a role in British politics. The monarch is required to be a Protestant, which in practice has meant a member of the Church of England. This Anglican monarch (Presbyterian while in Scotland) rules a population that is only approximately three-quarters Anglican and that contains a significant Roman Catholic minority. This characteristic has been most visible in Northern Ireland, but cities such as Liverpool and Glasgow also have large and politically relevant Roman Catholic populations. Christianity in Britain is, with the exception of Northern Ireland, of decreasing relevance as a small and declining proportion of the population actually practice their nominal religion. Perhaps even more important, the fastest-growing religions in Britain are not Christian of any denomination but rather are Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist. As well as affecting political behavior, these new religions raise questions about civil liberties and tolerance in a country without a formal bill of rights. The tensions created by the growing ethnic diversity are not as great as in France or Germany, but they are present nonetheless and racial tensions are becoming of increasing concern to the police and civil libertarians alike. Politics in Britain is not entirely about class, but it is very much about class. The importance of other cleavages varies with the region of the nation (with the Celtic Fringe being the most influenced by non-class cleavages) and by the time and circumstances of the

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controversy. Nevertheless, if one attempts to understand British politics through only class divisions, one can miss a good deal of the complexity of politics and the political system. Finally, politics in Britain may also be about substantive issues. For example, the Green movement has not been as powerful in Britain as in most of the rest of Europe, but it is increasingly influential. The Green Party received . percent of the votes in the  European election and has had some success at the local level, although it has not fared as well since then. The nature of the electoral system prevents new parties or social movements from gaining representation in Parliament rapidly, but there does appear to be a real interest in issues that go beyond simple class politics. Conservatively Liberal Policy Ideas Another apparent paradox about British political life is the “conservatively liberal” nature of many of the policies and policy ideas of the nation. For most of the postwar period members of the Labour Party regularly spoke about the virtues of socialism, and they often would sing the “Red Flag” at their party congresses. Members of the Conservative Party regularly spoke about the restoration of laissez-faire economics and dismantling a good deal of the welfare state and the return of a more significant role for Britain in the world. In practice, however, most of the policies adopted by most governments bore a remarkable resemblance during the postwar period. The Labour Party accepted that most of the British economy would be privately owned and at the same time pressed nationalization of certain large industries and the extension of social services to the disadvantaged. The Conservative Party while in office generally accepted the virtual entirety of the welfare state, as well as government ownership of such industries as coal, steel, and the railways. The major deviation from this pattern in recent memory was Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. This government began to sell off government stock in nationalized industries such as British Gas, British Telecom, British Steel, and British Airways, as well as to encourage local authorities to sell off their council (public) housing to sitting tenants. There was talk of ending the Post Office monopoly over the delivery of mail. Also, a number of social programs were cut or more stringent requirements for recipients were introduced. These Thatcherite policies, largely continued by the Major government that followed, represented a significantly more ideological approach to policymaking than has been true for most postwar governments in the United Kingdom. The public water supply system now has been sold off to the private sector, and a number of local government services (garbage collection, for example) have been contracted out to the private sector under a system of “compulsory competitive tendering.”16 In something of a return to the consensual style, the Blair government has continued many of the programs of the previous governments. “New Labour” is much less interested in even talking seriously about socialism than was old Labour. Instead, there is a good deal of discussion of how to use the private sector to provide many public services and the need to make government more like the private sector. The “third way” between the market and the state is argued by this government and its supporters to be the way forward to making Britain a better place in which to live and work.17

the context of british politics

15

Despite the intrusions of ideology, there does appear to be broad support for a mixed-economy welfare state. All major political parties favor the major programs of the welfare state such as pensions, other social insurance programs such as unemployment protection, and the National Health Service. At the same time, the majority of the population accepts private ownership and management as the major form of economic organization, despite the presence of a (declining) number of nationalized industries. What the parties and politicians appear to disagree about is just what is the proper mix of the mixed economy and just how much welfare there should be in the welfare state. Isolated but European One of the standard points made about Britain’s history is that its insular position relative to the European continent has isolated Britain from a number of influences and has allowed it to develop its own particular political institutions and political culture. The mental separation from Europe was to some degree greater than the geographical separation, so Britain may have looked European from North America; but Britons did not always feel European on their islands. The separation of Britain from the Continent and from the world can be overstated; John Major said, “We are only an island geographically.” Britain has not been successfully invaded since , but it has been deeply involved in European politics and warfare. Also, Britain was by no means insular when dealing with the rest of the world, managing a far-flung empire and even more far-flung trade routes, from its little islands. And, unlike that other great island nation, Japan, Britain was never really isolationist but was always involved in world politics and trade. One of the major changes in the political environment of the United Kingdom has been its entry into the European Union (EU) three decades ago. After two denials of admittance, largely at the instigation of France and Charles de Gaulle, Britain joined the EU in , followed by the first advisory referendum in its history. Joining the EU obviously has brought Britain closer to its continental counterparts, and it has had important domestic consequences as well. Joining the EU introduced a whole new level of government to the United Kingdom; some of the previous exclusive rights of Parliament to legislate for British subjects now actually reside in Brussels. The importance of Europe for Britain has been increasing, and pressures toward closer integration of the European market place even more economic decision-making power in Brussels. The move toward greater political integration arising from the Maastricht Treaty of , and the adoption of the euro as a common currency by most EU member states has placed even more pressures on British government to bring its policies in line with those of the continental countries. The Blair government is pressing toward greater involvement but faces stiff opposition from the Conservatives and from a largely “Euro-skeptic” population. The British people, more than those of any other nation in Europe, express reluctance about any greater economic and political unification by the EU. Britain may be a part of Europe, but it maintains some distance (psychological as well as geographic) from its partners on the Continent. The issue of Britain’s involvement with Europe has become important in domestic politics. Thatcher lost office in no small part due to her European policies, but she con-

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tinued to oppose deeper involvement from the back benches. Prime Minister Major sought to follow the more moderate path of a greater political role for European institutions, although without supporting more complete political union. Further, divisions within his party over Europe hastened the downfall of the government. The issue of European unification remains divisive in Britain, as well as within the Conservative Party, but Britain does not appear able to accept isolation from Europe any longer and may have to accept an ever increasing involvement with the European Union. Joining the EU has required something of a retreat from longstanding British commitment to its Commonwealth countries, whose special economic privileges are gradually being phased out as Britain expands trade with continental Europe. The political commitment to the former colonies remains, and the queen and prime minister both make a point of attending Commonwealth meetings and dealing with Commonwealth business. Head of the Commonwealth is by now largely a symbolic function for the monarchy, although it can have some real political impact, especially when dealing with questions such as apartheid in South Africa and ethnic conflicts in other former colonies. Notes . See, for example, Richard Rose, The Territorial Dimension of Government: Understanding the United Kingdom (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, ). . In some ways the referendum was designed to fail. It required that there be a majority of all eligible voters, not just those actually voting, in order to pass. . “A Knock at Number Ten,” The Economist,  February . . “Peace Comes Dropping Slow,” The Economist,  March . . For example, the Scottish Grand Committee deals with the second reading of all Scottish bills. It is composed of all  Scottish MPs along with enough other members to preserve the partisan balance found in the entire House. There is a similar structure for Welsh legislation. . Although there are agreements about which policy areas are devolved, the separation between United Kingdom law and Scottish law will at times be difficult to make cleanly. For example, education has been devolved, but research and science support have not. . Kenneth Wald, Crosses on Ballots (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). . Richard Rose, “England: A Traditionally Modern Political Culture,” in Political Culture and Political Development, ed. Lucian Pye and Sidney Verba (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ). . Denis Kavanagh, “The Deferential English: A Comparative Critique,” Government and Opposition  (): –. . The numerous ministers who resigned during the Major government over sex or financial scandals have deflated the notion of a natural ruling class rather thoroughly in the eyes of many, if not most, citizens. . This evidence goes back to Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ), –. . L.S. Amery, Thoughts on the Constitution (London: Oxford University Press, ), . . See Geraint Parry, George Moser, and Neil Day, Political Participation and Democracy in Britain (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, ). . These include disinformation about the sinking of the General Belgrano during the Falklands War and suspect dealings about the purchase of helicopters from the Westland Corporation. See Magnus Linklater and David Leigh, Not With Honour (London: Sphere, ). 15. World Bank, World Development Report,  (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –. Country data span the years – and hence are not wholly comparable. . Kieron Walsh, Public Services and Market Mechanisms: Competition, Contracting and the New Public Management (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ). . See Anthony Giddens, The Third Way and its Critics (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, ).

Chapter 2

Where Is the Power? THE GOVERNMENT OF the United Kingdom is parliamentary. Parliamentary govern-

ment links executive powers directly to legislative powers. The executive of a parliamentary government such as that of the United Kingdom is elected not directly and independently of the legislature but rather by the legislature. With modern political parties, voters know that when they vote for a certain political party, if that party becomes the majority in the legislature, they will have a certain person as the next executive (prime minister in the case of the United Kingdom). Becoming prime minister still requires action by Parliament. The British people did not elect Tony Blair as prime minister in  and ; instead, citizens voted for a majority of Labour Party members of Parliament, which enabled Blair as party chair to become prime minister. The government of the United Kingdom is also a parliamentary government of a particular type, described by Arend Lijphart as “majoritarian.”1 The operative tradition is that there must always be at least a majority of members of the lower house supporting the government. Failing that, a government can nonetheless remain in power if a majority of MPs do not disavow it in a vote of no confidence. There is little or no acceptance of minority governments, which have been successful in many other European countries. Further, the effectively two-party nature of politics for most of the modern era has meant that a British government generally has been composed of members of a single political party. The popular support for the Liberal Democratic Party during the s and s threatened to produce a “hung Parliament,” and with that the need to create a true coalition government. There have been tacit coalitions in the past (e.g., the “Lib-Lab” agreement during the late s) but no true coalition since the wartime government of –.2 If at any time a majority of the members of Parliament decide they no longer want the current government to continue in office, they can remove that government by a vote of no confidence, or by defeating a major government legislative proposal. As there are now a majority of Labour deputies in Parliament, removing the prime minister would require the defection of members of Blair’s own party, an uncommon but not unheard-of occurrence. For example, the Conservative government almost fell in spring  when a number of Tory MPs were prepared to defect over European Union policy. Also, as the Conservatives did when they elected Major as party leader in November , a majority party can change its leader and thereby change prime ministers. Remaining the “queen’s first minister” requires the continual support of Parliament;

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if that support is lost, the prime minister and the other ministers must, by convention, either reorganize themselves or go to the people for a new election.3 And not only the prime minister must go in a change of government. The doctrine of collective responsibility makes the government as a whole responsible for its actions and in consequence requires that the government as a whole resign.4 Individual ministers may be forced out of office for their own particular failures—whether policy, administrative, or personal—but when a government falls, all ministers will leave, although if a new government of the same party were formed, many would soon be back in office. Another implication of collective responsibility is that decisions also will be collective and must be supported by the entire cabinet. Ministers are expected to argue for their positions in cabinet, but once the collectivity has made its decision they must all support that decision publicly. If a member of the government cannot support the decision, then he or she must resign. Further, ministers are expected to respect the secrecy of the Cabinet Room and not reveal who was on which side in the discussion (although a significant amount of leaking and briefing occurs in practice); the government is expected to present a united front to Parliament and to the public.5 Although still the norm, collective responsibility appears to be anachronistic because policymaking in British government has become dominated increasingly by the prime minister. One virtue of a parliamentary government, especially a majoritarian one, is that it allows an executive, once elected to office, to govern. While presidential governments— even “semipresidential” regimes such as France—frequently have conflicts between the legislative and executive branches over which body should control a policy issue, this rarely occurs so overtly in a parliamentary regime.6 A political executive that cannot command the acquiescence of the legislature will soon cease to be the executive. This unity of the two institutional forces enables a strong prime minister such as Margaret Thatcher to push through policies (e.g., the poll tax) that are unpopular even within her own party in Parliament.7 Even less powerful British prime ministers (e.g., John Major) have the capacity to exert much stronger policy leadership than would be possible in more consensual parliamentary regimes, much less in presidential regimes.8 And when a prime minister such as Tony Blair has a substantial majority of his or her party in Parliament ( of  seats in the House of Commons elected in ), there is an almost unlimited capacity to implement a desired program of legislation. British Parliamentary Government While a number of political systems practice parliamentary government, each practices it differently. Several features of parliamentary government as practiced in the United Kingdom should be described before we discuss each of the major institutions. The first is the principle of government and opposition. With rare exceptions (such as policy affecting Northern Ireland), bipartisanship has little place in this form of parliamentary government; instead, it is the role of the Opposition to oppose the government. Even if the Opposition should agree with the basic tenets of the government’s policy, it still must present constructive alternatives to that policy if it is to do its job appropriately. It is assumed that through this adversarial process better policies will emerge, and that the voters will be given alterna-

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tive conceptions of the common good from which to choose at the next election. The major exception to this principle is in times of war or crisis, but even then the Opposition is expected to question the means by which goals are pursued.9 British parliamentary government is also party government. Although there are certainly barriers to the effective implementation of party government, the idea that political parties are extremely important for governing pervades the system. Parliament is now conceived of, to some degree, as an institution in itself but also as an arena in which the political parties clash. Parties are expected to be responsible, to stand for certain policies and programs, and to attempt to carry out those programs if elected. There are always necessary compromises once elected to office, but parties are expected to attempt to implement their programs or to have a reasonable justification for failure to do so. Finally, British parliamentary government is sovereign. There are, strictly speaking, no legal limitations on the powers of Parliament. There is virtually no means by which a citizen can challenge an act of Parliament as unconstitutional, although some actions may be found to go beyond the powers of a particular minister. Other limitations on the discretion of Parliament increasingly have come into play through Britain’s membership in the European Union and the Council of Europe (e.g., the European Convention on Human Rights), but these are appeals to external standards rather than strictly British constitutional rules.10 There are, of course, very real political limitations on the activities of Parliament, but its actions, once taken, are law until Parliament acts again. With the above considerations about parliamentary government in mind, we now proceed to a brief description and discussion of the six major institutions of British national government: the monarch, the prime minister, the cabinet and government, Parliament, the courts, and the civil service. We describe the features most salient for an understanding of the manner in which the British system converts proposals into law. Also, as the style of government has changed in the United Kingdom, as well as in other European governments, there are a number of important actors that do not fit conveniently into those six major structures. The Monarch The United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy, with the powers of the monarch constrained by both law and convention. Further, there is grumbling about the cost of maintaining the royal household and about the wealth of the queen and the royal family, with some agitation to terminate the role of the monarchy in favor of a republic. The role of the royal family became more contentious when Diana, Princess of Wales, was killed in an automobile accident in . Her divorce from Prince Charles and other widely publicized family problems brought the monarchy into disrepute, and the tabloid press has made it common practice to expose any perceived failings in the royal family.11 There is now more sentiment in favor of reducing the power and influence of the monarchy, although this sentiment waxes and wanes with specific events.12 The powers of the monarchy are very closely circumscribed; although many acts are performed by the queen or in her name, the prime minister or the cabinet makes the actual decisions. Declarations of war, making treaties, granting peerages, and granting

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clemency to prisoners are all royal prerogatives, but all are exercised only on the advice of the prime minister and other ministers, or even by those ministers alone in the case of Orders in Council (see below). Similarly, the royal assent is necessary for legislation to become law, but this has not been refused since Queen Anne in . One major point at which the monarch could possibly influence policy and politics substantively is in the selection of the prime minister. There is little or no possibility for the exercise of independent judgment by the monarch if one major party wins a clear majority, as Labour did in the  and  elections. If there were no clear winner, however, the monarch might be able to exercise some independent judgment, albeit with the advice of the outgoing prime minister. The conventions governing such an eventuality only began to be clearly articulated in the early s, and the monarch would have to be extremely careful not to overstep the tacit boundaries in a society increasingly less certain about the efficacy of continuing the monarchy.13 The monarch also is empowered to dissolve a sitting Parliament, and the decision to do so could (in theory at least) be made independently if the government did not resign and call for elections after a vote of no confidence or if it lost on a major issue. As governments since the s have appeared unwilling to resign in the face of policy defeats, this potential power of the monarch to force a government to go to the people may become important in making policy choices. Likewise, a monarch could refuse to dissolve a Parliament when asked by the prime minister, if she believed that it was not in the national interest to do so. These powers would, however, be exercised at some peril for the monarch, as any such direct intervention into the political life of the country might threaten the legitimacy of the institution of the monarchy. The great commentator on British politics, Walter Bagehot, described the monarch as a real part of the policymaking system in Britain, concealed in a cloak of dignity and ceremony.14 Much of the impact of a monarch on policy and politics remains hidden and is very subtle. The monarch’s influence is exercised through frequent meetings and consultations with the prime minister and requires her to be as well briefed as her ministers. The power of the monarch, then, may be as personal as the power of any other political actor, even more so. It would be easy for a monarch not to have influence, given the dominant partisan mold of the British policymaking system. For the monarch to be effective, she must not only perform the extensive ceremonial functions of the office but also be an effective politician in her own right. The most important function of the monarch, however, remains to be a symbol of the nation as a whole and to rise above the partisan strife. She must be a unifying force when much else in the political system tends to be centrifugal, divisive, and adversarial. The Prime Minister The monarch is head of state—that is, the representative of the nation as a whole and the symbolic head of the entire governing system. The prime minister is head of government of the day and its chief executive officer. Of course, in the United States, the two roles are merged in the president, who is at once head of state and head of government. Separating the two roles in Britain means that a citizen or a politician can more readily criticize the

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prime minister without being seen to attack the legitimacy of the entire system of government. The office of prime minister has evolved slowly since the beginning of the eighteenth century. The prime minister is at once just another minister of the Crown and above the other ministers. There is increasing discussion of the role of the prime minister becoming presidential, as more power appears to flow into  Downing Street.15 This alleged “presidentialization” of the prime minister is a function of several factors. The first is that parliamentary campaigns have become increasingly directed toward electing a particular prime minister rather than toward the selection of a political party to govern. The personalization of British politics increased substantially while Thatcher was prime minister, but even before that time campaigns were oriented toward the appeal and personality of individuals. The Labour government of Tony Blair has produced an even greater emphasis on personal loyalty than the Thatcher government.16 Party remains important in the voting decision, but so too do the prospective leaders of the nation. Additional aspects of the presidentialization of the office of prime minister include the staffing and organization of the office. Thatcher’s placement of several special assistants in departments, especially in the Treasury, constituted an early move to extend the authority of the prime minister substantially beyond its traditional role of primus inter pares (“first among equals”). Tony Blair has intensified this process through a number of administrative and organizational innovations. Among them has been the appointment of special assistants to the prime minister’s Private Office for presentation and planning, the expansion of the prime minister’s Policy Unit to include thirteen officers, and the creation of a new Strategic Communications Office with a staff of six. “Its job is to generate a coherent and unified presentation of government policy by co-ordinating departmental announcements and ensuring that they are ‘on message.’ ”17 Following the American precedent, Blair has also appointed a chief of staff “to pull together the work of the Prime Minister’s Office and to co-ordinate it with that of the Cabinet Office.”18 The first incumbent, Jonathan Powell, was recruited from Labour parliamentary party ranks and is employed as a temporary civil servant. Another key innovation under Blair has been the integration of the formerly separate Cabinet Secretariat and Office of Public Service into a single cabinet office under the management of a cabinet secretary. This move was accompanied by the creation of a Constitution secretariat in , whose chief purpose is to oversee Labour’s constitutional reform program, and a Central secretariat () charged with advising on ministerial responsibilities and accountability.19 A separate unit was established in the prime minister’s office in  to facilitate intradepartmental cooperation in addressing problems arising from social exclusion of individuals and groups from intended policy benefits. The cumulative effect of these moves, dating from the Thatcher years onward, has been the evolution of the office of the prime minister in the direction of the Executive Office of the American president and the Bundeskanzlersamt in Germany, although on a much smaller scale.20 Certain characteristics, powers, and limitations on the prime minister are important for understanding the office. First, the prime minister is the leader of the majority party

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in the House of Commons. Until , prime ministers frequently came from the House of Lords, but by convention, the prime minister now is a member of Commons. For example, Sir Alec Douglas-Home renounced his hereditary title in order to sit in the House of Commons and eventually become prime minister in . The political party first makes the selection of a potential prime minister; whoever would be prime minister must first win an election within the party. Even sitting prime ministers may have to be reelected by their party; sometimes they lose the confidence of their party, as Thatcher did in , and with it their office. This is but one of many ways in which the customs and conventions of the British political system reinforce the cohesiveness and integration of political parties. The prime minister, therefore, must be able to command the apparatus both of a political party and of government. In addition to being the leader of a political party, the prime minister must be a political leader within the House of Commons. Becoming prime minister indeed may say more about an individual’s abilities in Parliament than about the skills necessary to run a government. The prime minister is expected to lead parliamentary debates, and the ability to win in verbal jousts in the House of Commons frequently appears more important to success as prime minister than winning less visible policy and administrative battles. Prime Minister’s Question Time, now occurring only once a week, is watched widely and is a test of the skills of the prime minister. Although technically he or she is only primus inter pares, the powers of the prime minister are actually substantial. First, the prime minister is the formal link between the Crown and the rest of government. The queen invites a prospective prime minister to form a new government, and relationships between the monarch and Parliament are channeled through the prime minister. In like manner, the prime minister serves as chief political adviser to the queen, especially on major issues such as the dissolution of Parliament. The monarch and the prime minister routinely meet on a weekly basis, especially if there are important political issues on the agenda. The prime minister also dispenses office. Once the queen has invited a prospective prime minister to form a government, it is the prime minister who assembles the government team. Certainly members of that team will have political followings of their own, and others may have to be included to placate certain segments of the party, but the office held by each cabinet member will be the decision of the prime minister. The power to dispense office also extends to a number of other offices, including an increasing number of lucrative positions in the “quangos.”21 The prime minister can also decide on life peerages, which are nominally appointed by the Crown but, in actuality, are in the gift of the prime minister. Opposition parties can also nominate life peers. In all cases the nominees are subject to a scrutiny process to ensure their eligibility. Once in office, the prime minister has considerable personal power over policy and the activities of the cabinet. We have already mentioned the growth of the prime minister’s staff and the alleged presidentialization of the office. As the organizer, leader, and summarizer of the business of the cabinet, the prime minister is also in a position to enforce views over his or her nominal equals. As the head of the government, the prime minister has substantial public visibility and influence over society. This public influence

where is the power?

23

has increased with the growing power of the media, and the Blair government has been particularly conscious of the ability to influence the public.22 For example, the prime minister used that power to influence the public through the media as one strategy to push forward the peace process in Northern Ireland. Finally, in time of emergency, the powers of a prime minister are not limited by a constitution, as are those of an American president. We should also mention the role of the leader of the Opposition, who, as leader of the largest minority party in the House of Commons, would probably be prime minister if the sitting government were defeated in an election. Although lacking the official powers of office, the role of the leader of the Opposition is not dissimilar to that of the prime minister. He or she is expected to be the leader of a political party, a leader in Parliament, and the leader of a cabinet, albeit one out of office (the “shadow cabinet”). The adversarial style of British politics obliges the leader of the Opposition to oppose the program of the government and to propose searching for alternatives to all government programs, in preparation for the day when the Opposition becomes the government and must introduce its own policy proposals. As the alternative prime minister, the leader of the Opposition is paid a salary in addition to that of an MP and is kept briefed on important policy issues because he or she must be ready to become prime minister on very short notice. Cabinet and Government Working beneath—or with—the prime minister are the cabinet and the government. Although these terms are often used interchangeably, they actually designate somewhat different entities. The cabinet is composed of the individuals—in the  Blair government the sixteen men and seven women—who meet with the prime minister as a collectivity called the cabinet and who make collective policy decisions. The term government is more embracing, including all ministers regardless of their seniority or degree of responsibility; in  there were almost  ministers, junior ministers, and parliamentary private secretaries. The cabinet is technically a committee of the government selected by the prime minister to provide advice in private meetings and to share in the responsibility for policy. Although the prime minister is certainly primarily responsible for government policies, the cabinet is also collectively responsible to Parliament, and cabinet members generally will rise and fall as a unit rather than as individuals. There are several varieties of ministers: secretaries of state, ministers, and junior ministers; to some degree, parliamentary private secretaries have some ministerial functions. The distinction between secretaries of state and ministers is rather vague. Each tends to head a department of government (e.g., the Department of Health, Department for Work and Pensions, or the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), although all major departments are now headed by secretaries of state. Some members of cabinet may carry titles other than minister (e.g., chancellor of the exchequer, the chief Treasury minister). The government, and in some instances the cabinet, also includes a number of posts without departmental responsibilities, either ministers without portfolio or holders of such titles as Lord Privy Seal. These officials are included in the government

24

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as general or political advisers, or as the leadership of the House of Commons or the House of Lords. In those positions they manage government business in the house. Junior ministers are attached to a department minister to provide political and policy assistance in the management of the department, and these positions serve as steppingstones for persons on the way up in government.23 Ministers of state are junior ministers, placed between parliamentary undersecretaries of state (colloquially called “pussies”) and parliamentary private secretaries. Each department has one minister to deal with Lords business, who may be of any rank (but is often a “pussy”). Finally, parliamentary private secretaries are unpaid (aside from their normal salaries as members of Parliament) assistants to ministers and are responsible primarily for liaison between the government and the rest of Parliament. There are, then, in any government, some eighty to ninety positions to be filled in the political executive, most coming from the House of Commons. The job of a minister is a demanding one. Unlike American political executives, a British minister remains a member of the legislature and an active representative for a constituency; consequently, he or she must fulfill a number of positions and responsibilities simultaneously. The first of these multiple tasks is to run the department. The minister must be able to run the department in two ways. First, the minister is responsible for the day-to-day management of the large, bureaucratic organization of which he or she is the head. Few politicians have experience with the management of such large organizations, so they are at some disadvantage in making the department run effectively. The minister must also manage the policies of the department. That is, he or she must develop policies appropriate to the department’s responsibilities, policies that will be in keeping with the overall priorities of the government. In this task, ministers are generally hindered by their lack of expertise. Ministers are seldom chosen for their expertise in a policy area; more often, they are appointed for their general political skill and voter support. For example, it is estimated that only five of fifty-one ministerial appointments in the Wilson government of – had any prior experience in the area of their department’s responsibilities.24 There is evidence that the knowledge base of ministers has not improved substantially.25 The consequences of their lack of expertise are exacerbated by the tendency to shift ministers from one department to another, even during the lifetime of a government. For example, the Labour government reshuffled its ministers in the summer of , at the halfway point in its five-year (maximum) term of office, and there were a number of instances of ministers who had gained substantial expertise in an area being moved, even in the important economics area.26 Furthermore, in their departments ministers are faced with experienced and relatively expert civil servants, who tend to have views of their own about proper departmental policies (see pp. –). An inexperienced and inexpert minister must then fight very hard just to manage his own department. If the minister is also a member of the cabinet, there will be additional demands on his or her time. Traditionally, the cabinet has met five to six hours per week (although the practice under Blair has been only one hour a week), but preparation for those meetings requires even more time. Membership in the cabinet also requires that each minister be at least briefed on all current political issues. And there are the cabinet committees necessary to coordinate policies and deal with issues requiring consideration prior to their determi-

where is the power?

25

nation by the cabinet.27 A minister cannot afford to take cabinet work lightly, even though he may be only a part of a collectivity often dominated by the prime minister. In cabinet, as in Commons, political reputations are made, and in both the interests of the minister’s department must be protected and advanced. The minister remains an active member of Parliament and as such is required to appear in Parliament for a substantial amount of time each day, especially when the government has only a small majority. The minister must also be prepared to speak in Parliament on the policies of his department or for the government as a whole. A minister must also be prepared to respond to questions during Question Time, and may have to spend hours being briefed and coached on the answers to anticipated questions. The constitutional responsibility of the executive to the legislature places a great burden on ministers in a parliamentary government. As a member of Parliament, the minister also retains constituents in the district from which he was elected, and these citizens must be served. This service involves spending weekends in the “surgery” (i.e., the constituency office or other locations in the district) and receiving delegations from local organizations when in London. Unlike politicians in other countries, a British member of Parliament often does not come from the constituency from which he or she is elected and therefore may have to learn about the local issues. And, since there is no fixed term for a Parliament (other than that an election must occur within five years), British politicians, even more than American politicians, must always be preparing for the next election. The cabinet does not work entirely alone, and one of the important developments in British politics has been the development and expansion of the Cabinet Office. The Cabinet Office, or secretariat, grew out of the Committee of Imperial Defense in World War I. Currently, a very senior civil servant, along with a small number of associates, serves the cabinet. The secretary to the cabinet is himself influential in shaping cabinet decisions, although not by obvious means. The secretary creates the cabinet agenda, and he distributes cabinet papers to the appropriate individuals. By so doing, he determines which ministers will be heard quickly and which will have to wait for their day in cabinet. Although the prime minister summarizes cabinet meetings orally, it is the secretary to the cabinet who as a result of the meetings drafts written communications to the departments for action and prepares the formal written records of the meetings. These records are not subject to change, even by the prime minister. While there is little or no evidence of these powers being abused, the position of secretary to the cabinet is extremely influential. In recent years the Cabinet Office has undertaken a number of other important policy functions, including managing British policy toward the European Union.28 Responsibility for the management of EU relations is shared with the Foreign Office, which runs the Permanent Representation in Brussels. There is also a small, but growing, prime minister’s staff of political and personal advisers. This is far from approaching the magnitude of the White House staff in the United States or even the Bundeskanzlersamt in Germany, but it has been growing and is seen as one more bit of evidence of the concentration of policymaking powers in the cabinet rather than in Parliament as a whole. Each minister also is increasingly likely to have

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some personal policy advisers, whether paid for by public money or by party funds. The difficulties that cabinet ministers encounter in trying to make policy have also produced suggestions that each should be given a group of advisers, similar to the cabinet du ministre in France. The Thatcher government, more than previous governments, sought more partisan and ideological policy advice than it was likely to receive from civil servants, and it may be difficult to return to the policy dominance of permanent officials. The Blair government has continued that practice and to some extent has actually extended their use. This practice has to some extent devalued the civil service. Parliament The government of the United Kingdom has already been described as parliamentary, implying a significant role for Parliament in government. Despite the nominally strong position of Parliament in the constitutional arrangements of the United Kingdom, there are serious questions as to the real, effective powers of Parliament. With the growing strength of the political executive and the increased discipline of political parties, Parliament as an institution is less capable of exercising control over policies than it once was. Parliament has been attempting to create a more powerful position in the political process, especially in the oversight of the executive, but the evidence is that it has had little success in these efforts. The huge majority enjoyed by the Blair government since  will make the job of Parliament all the more difficult. Members of Parliament The first thing that must be understood about a legislative body such as Parliament is the nature of the individuals involved and the incentives offered to them to participate. The Parliament elected in  has  members, elected from a like number of constituencies, meaning that the average member of Parliament (MP) represents fewer than , people (compared to approximately , represented by members of the U.S. House of Representatives). Compared with members of most other legislative bodies, MPs have few advantages. Their pay, even with continuing raises, is a modest £, (roughly $, at  rates of exchange), compared to over $, for U.S. representatives. MPs receive approximately the same amount for personal expenses, including weekend travel to their districts when Parliament is in session and rent for a second residence in London. Some members of Parliament may have sponsoring organizations that will either help with their expenses in office or even provide some direct remuneration for the MP. For Labour politicians, these are commonly trade unions; for Conservatives and a few Liberal Democrats, they are industrial groups or large corporations, or perhaps other types of interest groups. The appearance of corruption is leading to a rethinking of the place of sponsorship. The Labour Party, for example, is beginning to restrict the role of unions as sponsors for its members,29 and the numerous scandals over Conservative Party finance have tended to make that party more circumspect in its financial relationships. In return for these modest rewards, MPs work long hours and receive relatively little staff support. While American legislators are accustomed to having several dozen staff members working for them, the average MP has funding only for a part-time assistant or

where is the power?

27

secretary unless the member is paying personally for the assistance or is receiving assistance from a sponsor. Historically many MPs lacked private offices, unless they were in the government or shadow government, and so they were forced to share small offices with other MPs. Most of them now have offices of their own in a new building near the House of Parliament, but even there accommodations remain cramped. The job of member of Parliament was designed for a gentleman of independent means, and the rewards of office still have not changed sufficiently to match the apparent demands of modern legislative bodies. Organization Parliament is composed of the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Both houses are involved in making policy, but Commons is crucial for forming governments as well as for setting the public budget. As the House of Lords has become relatively less important in the policymaking process, let us first describe it briefly and then proceed to a more extended discussion of the House of Commons. The House of Lords is composed of the lords spiritual (representing the hierarchy of the Church of England) and the lords temporal. The lords temporal comprise hereditary and life peers, along with the Law Lords appointed because the House of Lords also serves as the final court of appeal in the United Kingdom. Hereditary peers (who once made up an overwhelming majority of members in the House of Lords) claim their seats based on inherited titles, whereas the queen appoints life peers (on the advice of the government) only for their lifetime. Dating from , the concept of life peers was designed in part to rectify the partisan and ideological bias of the hereditary peers against the Labour Party. In , the Labour majority in the House of Commons voted to abolish the privileged status of the hereditary peers in the House of Lords in favor of a chamber dominated by life peers. As a result of the  constitutional reform, all but ninety-two hereditary peers were removed from the House of Lords. Early in , the House of Lords consisted of some  members, of whom  were life peers.30 Conservatives still comprised the largest group in the chamber (, compared to  Labour peers and  Liberal Democrats). Approximately a quarter of the members were nonparty, “cross-bench” peers. This change in the composition of the House of Lords significantly facilitates Labour-sponsored legislation. Until the enactment of the reform, even the Blair government with its solid majority in Commons faced recurrent problems with the House of Lords. The major impetus for limiting the powers of the House of Lords was David Lloyd George’s “people’s budget” of . This budget introduced a progressive income tax (the first since the Napoleonic wars) and a rudimentary public health insurance program. The Conservative Lords balked at this Liberal proposal and refused to pass the budget. Parliament was then dissolved; but when the Liberals were returned with a (reduced) majority, the House of Lords accepted the budget. Further, after a second election in , in which the Liberals were again returned with a majority, the House of Lords accepted the Parliament Bill of , which greatly limited its powers. The House of Lords now cannot delay money bills longer than one month—and

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cannot vote them down and prevent their implementation—and any legislation passed by the House of Commons in two successive sessions of Parliament, provided one calendar year has passed, goes into effect without approval by Lords. Lords does still occasionally delay or even vote down legislation (as it did recently on an Animal Health bill). Mainly, however, it serves as a debating society and as a locus at which the government can accept amendments to its proposals that it would be less willing to accept in the more politicized House of Commons. The House of Lords actually serves a useful function in British policymaking despite its diminished role, as many useful modifications to legislation result from the attention of the Lords. Further, Lords has chosen to become specialized in some areas of policy (e.g., science and technology), and its committee reports in this area must be considered carefully. Further, the Blair government has used the House of Lords to initiate legislation when its legislative calendar became clogged in its first year. The structure and functions of the House of Commons have evolved over centuries and to some degree still reflect their medieval roots. Much of the ceremony and procedure derive from the past, but despite complaints about the vestigial aspects of the procedures, these do not appear to inhibit in any significant way the functioning of a modern legislative body. To the extent that other institutions of British government seriously overshadow the House, the fault resides more with other structural and cultural characteristics of British government than with the quaint trappings of power within the House of Commons. British politics is conducted in an adversarial style, and even the design of the House of Commons emphasizes that fact. Most legislatures sit in semicircles, and the individual members sit at desks and go to a central rostrum to address the body. The House of Commons is arranged as two opposing ranks of benches, placed very close together in a small chamber. Speakers generally face their political opponents, and although the form of address is to the Speaker, the words are clearly intended for the opponents. The proceedings of the House of Commons are now broadcast, and statements by members therefore are also directed at the voting public and the media. The cabinet and other members of the government populate the front benches on one side of the aisle, while their Opposition counterparts are arrayed on the other side. From these two front-row trenches, the two major belligerents conduct the verbal warfare that is parliamentary debate. Behind the front benches are the foot soldiers of the back benches, ready to vote to their party’s call, and perhaps to do little else. The style of debate in the House of Commons, as well as being contentious and rather witty, is very informal, and for the MP addressing the House there are few protections against heckling. As well as being a partisan body, the House of Commons is a national institution. Ideas of cabinet government and collective responsibility are closely allied to ideas of party government, and there is a strong sense that political parties should present clear and consistent positions on policy issues either in or out of government. The electorate at the next election on the basis of those policies can then judge them. In addition to responsibility for policy, the dependence of the executive on the ability to command a majority of the House requires that parties vote together. Political parties in the House of Commons are organized in order to deliver votes when required. Members know that

where is the power?

29

voting against their party on an important issue can be tantamount to political suicide (although it sometimes serves as a springboard to future political success), and each party has a whip whose job it is to ensure that the needed votes are present. The British system of government does not allow much latitude for individual MPs to have policy ideas of their own, although the parties generally do allow their members free votes on issues of a moral nature, such as abortion or capital punishment. From the partisan organization and behavior of the House it follows that it is a national institution. The U.S. House of Representatives is usually conceptualized as a group of ambassadors from their constituencies, while European legislatures are perhaps even more national because of proportional representation and the absence of any real connection to geography. The House of Commons is somewhere between those two extremes, although the British generally acknowledge that MPs are more responsible to the party and its national goals and priorities than to the individual interests of their constituencies. This is signaled by the fact that MPs are not required to live in their constituencies, and many do not. Of course, the MP tries to satisfy the constituency whenever possible, but it is generally assumed that the member owes the office to the party and the national policies advanced in the election campaign rather than to any geographically narrow interests of the constituency. Nevertheless, as with free votes on moral issues, MPs are often allowed to abstain from voting for, and in rare cases to vote against, party proposals when they would clearly be inimical to the interests of the MP’s constituency. Amid this sea of adversarial and partisan politics, the Speaker of the House is an impartial figure, seated on a throne between the two front benches. Traditionally the Speaker dressed in the style of the eighteenth century, although the current incumbent (a Labour MP from Scotland) wears a business suit for normal meetings of the House.31 Although an MP and elected from the House, the Speaker is selected for not having been a vociferous partisan; the aim is to find someone who can be elected unanimously rather than as a result of a partisan confrontation. Competitve elections have occurred only four times since the beginning of the twentieth century, most recently in October , when twelve MPs were nominated for the office. Once elected, the conventions are that a Speaker may remain in the office as long as he wishes, with the Speaker’s parliamentary seat rarely contested. Although he is still an MP, another member discharges his constituency duties, and the Speaker will vote only in case of a tie. Then, by convention, the Speaker’s vote is cast to preserve the status quo. As an impartial figure, the Speaker can discharge his role as a moderator and, to some degree, be the embodiment of the dignity of the House. The Speaker is not without real influence over decisions, however; for example, his use of the “kangaroo” determines which amendments to legislation will be debated and which will not, and his acceptance of a motion of closure ends debate but only after he believes all relevant positions has been heard. Likewise, the Speaker enforces the rules of the House, not only in debate but also with respect to issues such as suspending members who have violated financial disclosure rules.32 One important question a student of national legislatures would ask concerning the House of Commons would be, What is the nature of its committee system? While the House of Commons does have committees, they are by no means as central to the legisla-

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tive process as the committees in the U.S. Congress or the German Bundestag. Eight standing committees in the House of Commons are composed of from sixteen to fifty members. Unlike American committees, only the core of the committee is permanent; other members are added to the committee depending on the nature of the bill being considered. Any one committee may consider a variety of bills during a session of Parliament, with the composition of the committee changing to match the nature of the bills. The composition of the committees, as well as reflecting the expertise of its members, reflects the partisan composition of the House as a whole, and a small majority in the House may result in a more substantial majority in committee. Also unlike American committees, the standing committees of the House of Commons are not really independent of the whole House but tend to reflect the whole House. Their role is not expert and transformative, as is that of U.S. committees; instead, they are miniature legislatures where bills may be discussed and improved and before which the government can accept amendments without jeopardizing its political stature in Commons. As an indication of this more limited capacity, the committee stage for legislation in the United Kingdom is after the principal political debate on the bill rather than before its primary consideration. As such, the major battles over the legislation have already transpired before the committee sees the legislation. The committee’s task is to refine the legislation rather than significantly to influence its basic nature and purpose. Special committee provisions governed legislation affecting Scotland until the creation of a Scottish Parliament and a Welsh Assembly following referendums in both regions in . Because most legislation until then was passed with a separate Scottish bill, in part a result of special features of Scots law, a separate committee system existed for Scottish bills. The recent devolution of legislative power from London to Edinburgh means that the Scottish Parliament now exercises autonomous authority over Scottish affairs except for economic policy and foreign affairs. The Scottish Parliament exercises limited rights of taxation and receives an annual block grant of around  billion pounds (approximately $. billion), which it can allocate as it wishes. Recent skirmishes over road tolls and student fees between England and Scotland, however, reveal that lawmakers have yet to agree on important details of the constitutional division of power between the national and regional capitals. Persisting political conflicts also raise what has come to be called the “West Lothian Question”—whether Scottish MPs in Westminster should be barred from taking part in votes on legislation that affects only England, while English MPs no longer have a vote on most Scottish matters.33 In contrast, Wales remains much more subordinate to London. Separate Welsh committees in the national parliament never exercised as much influence as the previous Scottish committees, historically because there had never been a separate Welsh Assembly or body of Welsh law before union with England. Consequently, much Welsh legislation is joined with English. The newly established Welsh Assembly exercises only “persuasive powers” in relation to London and the right of secondary rule-making within Wales itself. In addition to the standing committees, there are several select committees in the House of Commons. The most important of these are the Statutory Instruments Committee and the Public Accounts Committee. The first of these committees monitors the

where is the power?

31

Population Density (per square kilometer) 

France



Germany 

Italy 

Russia



Sweden



United Kingdom 

United States Canada



Source: OECD, Economic Surveys, ; Department of Economic and Social Affairs,  Democratic Yearbook (New York: United Nations, ).

issuing of statutory instruments, or delegated legislation, by government departments. As in all governments of industrialized societies, the workload of British government has increased to the point that Parliament cannot make all the needed laws. Instead, it delegates the authority to decide many legislative matters to the relevant executive departments, with the provision that this delegated legislation be subject to review by the Statutory Instruments Committee and potentially (if rarely) by the entire House of Commons. The Public Accounts Committee is a modern manifestation of the traditional parliamentary function of oversight of expenditures; it monitors the government’s expenditure plans, especially through the postaudit of the final expenditures. It has also at times become engaged in more analytic exercises, such as value-for-money audits, and has gained the reputation as an authoritative body whose reports require some sort of government response. By tradition, this committee is chaired by an MP from the Opposition. Its work is now greatly aided by the National Audit Office, which, like most other government accounting offices, has become increasingly concerned with value for money in addition to judging the probity of public expenditures. One of the most interesting developments in the committee structure of Parliament has been the creation of twelve (now fourteen) select committees to follow the activities of government departments. This has been an attempt to establish the legislative oversight by committee so familiar to American political executives, although a similar suggestion was made by Richard Crossman in , and even earlier by the Haldane Commission on the structure of government ().34 Each of the select committees monitors a functional area of government policy and holds hearings on and independent investigations into policy. Although their success has varied, they have provided Parliament with more institutionalized mechanisms for investigation; some of them, such as the Treasury and Civil Service Select Committee, have had a substantial impact on the direction of policy. This Select Committee, for example, was active in monitoring and

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evaluating the major administrative reforms of the Conservative government such as Next Steps (see below). Augmenting the work of the departmental select committees are seventeen non-departmental select committees, which were appointed after Labour’s electoral victory in . Most of them deal with domestic matters cutting across traditional departmental boundaries. Examples include a catering committee, a standing orders committee, and a committee on standards and privileges. Other non-departmental committees have been charged with powers of investigative oversight over such matters as the environment, public administration, and European Union legislation. As indicated by the activities of the select committees, an important function of Parliament is the scrutiny of the political executive and its policies. Perhaps the most famous mechanism through which this takes place is Question Time. On four out of five sitting days during the week, the House of Commons opens its legislative day with an hour of questions for the government from members of the House. These questions have been submitted at least forty-eight hours previously in writing, so a minister has some opportunity to prepare an answer. In recent years, however, the practice has been to ask a very vague question in writing and then follow it orally with more probing supplemental questions. Thus a seemingly innocuous question as to whether the prime minister intends to visit Finland during the year may be an introduction to more important questions about foreign policy. All members of the government may be subjected to questioning, and the prime minister answers questions on one of the four days. Question Time places an additional burden on already overburdened ministers; but in a political system where secrecy is the norm, this institution serves as one mechanism for Parliament, and the people as a whole, to find out what is happening in government and to exercise some control through the ventilation of possible malfeasance. As an institution, Parliament is threatened. It has had difficulty maintaining its independent powers in the face of the growing powers of the prime minister and cabinet. Most of the important weapons in the struggle are in the hands of the executive. These assets include information, access to staff, and, more important, party discipline. Parliament now rarely exercises free and thorough scrutiny of the activities of the government; the outcomes of votes are known in advance, and it is the rare politician who will risk his political career on the basis of principle. There are instances in which Parliament does have a more open and influential debate on policy, as it did over European policy in the summer of , and there are still revolts by backbenchers—approximately sixty Labour MPs voted against a government social policy reform in the summer of , and backbench dissent has continued to rise in subsequent years. Even with those exceptions in mind, parliamentary government has, in effect, become cabinet or party government. These venerable institutions are, however, sometimes thought to be threatened by the increased power of the actor in the political process next to be discussed, the civil service. The Civil Service The civil service has changed perhaps more than any other institution of British government. The traditional pattern of a nonpolitical, career civil service with substantial influ-

where is the power?

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ence over policy has been one of the great paradoxes of British government. On the face of it, the British civil service has appeared unprepared to perform the expert role expected of it in the policymaking process. The recruitment of civil servants has been less on the basis of expert knowledge in a substantive policy area than on the basis of general intellectual abilities. Also, for a large proportion of their careers, civil servants are moved frequently from job to job (although many remain within a single department throughout their careers), gaining permanent appointments only rather late in their careers. The cult of the “talented amateur” and the generalist has dominated thinking about selection and training of civil servants, despite attempts at reform following the Fulton Committee, which expressed concern about the absence of specialized education of persons selected for the civil service.35 For several decades after Fulton the pattern of recruitment changed relatively little, and more humanities graduates than scientists or social scientists were entering the civil service.36 One of the changes introduced during the Thatcher government and continued in subsequent governments was to emphasize management, rather than policy advice, in the role of senior public servants. The policy advice role increasingly was to be handled by political appointees. This change also involved opening recruitment for many senior positions to noncareer appointees and in general breaking down the monopoly that career public servants had had over these positions. This pattern of recruitment has been especially evident for the chief executives of agencies created to implement public policies. In general, the civil service has been somewhat deinstitutionalized, with greater competition and less protection from political influence. Despite these changes, the civil service continues to have a substantial influence over policy. How can civil servants who themselves are hardly expert in the policy areas they administer have the influence over policy described by commentators and participants in policymaking? Several factors seem to be related to this influence. The first is that although its members may lack formal training in a policy area, the senior civil service is a talented group of individuals and thus has the intellectual ability to grasp readily the subject matter it must administer. Second, despite their relative lack of specialized training compared with civil servants in other countries, British civil servants are generally more knowledgeable than their political masters about the relevant subject matter of departmental policy. They learn a great deal on the job, while their ministers are not on the job very long themselves. Finally, civil servants have a much longer time perspective than politicians and so are able to wait out and delay any particular minister with whom they disagree. Further, their ministries have an even longer collective memory than any single civil servant, so the accumulation of expertise and experience can easily counteract the legitimacy of the political master. The relationship between civil servants and their political masters is important for defining and understanding the role of the civil service in policymaking. The prevailing ethos of the civil service is that it can serve any political master it may be called on to serve. But this service may be seen by ministers—and sometimes rightly so—as an attempt to impose the “departmental view,” or the particular policy ideas of the department, on the minister. Any number of reasons can be advanced to explain why the ideas

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of the minister are not feasible and why only the proposals made by the department itself will ever work. Only the exceptional minister is able to counter such views. The minister’s task of countering a departmental view is made more difficult because the department may appear to speak with one voice. American executive departments tend to be fragmented, with a number of independent bureaus advancing their policy ideas. Executive departments in Britain have had few such independent organizations; and policy ideas arising in departments are channeled upward through a hierarchical structure, with a permanent secretary being the primary link between the political world and the civil service. The permanent secretary is the senior civil servant in a department (though several departments now have two or more civil servants of this rank) and serves as the personal adviser to the minister. The creation of numerous executive agencies has fragmented British cabinet departments, so that the power exercised by permanent secretaries and senior public servants has been diminished. The principal effect, however, has been to separate implementation from policymaking. British central government looks increasingly like Scandinavian governments, with small policy-oriented departments supervising a number of larger agencies implementing policies. That separation is not as easy to make in reality as it is in theory, and indeed the quasi-autonomous agencies are beginning to link their managerial problems with policy. Because the minister lacks any substantial personal staff, he has had to rely heavily on the permanent secretary both for policy advice and for management of the department. This dependence, in turn, has provided the civil service, through the permanent secretary, a significant influence over policy. We would not argue that the civil service has abused this position, and in general the evidence is that its members have been responsible and scrupulous in the exercise of its office. Nevertheless, the structural position in which it is placed as the repository of information and of a departmental perspective, and the lack of alternative views coming to most ministers, places the civil service in a powerful position. The cozy world of the civil service is now under considerable challenge.37 We have already pointed out that Thatcher’s government brought its own advisers into government to augment the policy advice offered by civil servants. Her government and the subsequent Major government appeared to many observers to have sought to make the civil service more political, so neutrality of the civil service may no longer be either possible or valued. For example, some observers of the British civil service, whether correctly or not, believed that Thatcher played a more important role in the selection of senior officials than had previous prime ministers and that it would be difficult for some civil servants who were made permanent secretaries during her government to serve any subsequent Labour government. The Labour government that was elected in  appeared to recognize that difficulty and has found it easier than it would have previously to affect the nature of senior appointments. In all of these appointments there appears to be more attention to the policy concerns of the civil servants than to their partisan affiliation, but there is the sense that the civil service is now a more politicized body.38 A second major challenge to the traditional role and functions of the civil service is that many individual civil servants question whether they have obligations to Parliament

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and to the public that transcend their loyalty to ministers. Several civil servants who knew of malfeasance in government have chosen to blow the whistle, and in some cases the courts have supported their actions. Actions of this sort are uncomfortable and difficult in a system built on secrecy and ministerial responsibility, and the need for greater openness in government has become a political question. In  the Major government adopted rules removing some of the secrecy in the public sector, but there is still a long way to go to equal the openness found in most other European governments. In  the Blair government introduced its own legislation to create greater openness in government, but that too has been argued to be excessively weak by advocates of freedom of information.39 Third, the Thatcher and Major governments implemented a number of reforms in the civil service designed to minimize its policy advice role and to emphasize its managerial role. The most important of these reforms is Next Steps, which has created several hundred semiautonomous agencies (including local NHS trusts) to implement most policies of government.40 The policy and planning functions are being retained within relatively small ministries that are also responsible for supervising the operations of the agencies and are a mechanism for enforcing parliamentary accountability. The heads of the new agencies are not necessarily civil servants, and even if they have been, are hired on fixed-term contracts with performance standards. This administrative change also means that ministers may be less responsible for activities seemingly under their supervision and that some of the traditional mechanisms for accountability in the system of government will be less viable. For example, in October  the head of the Prison Service—a Next Steps agency—was fired because of a scathing report on the way in which the service handled escapes, even though the total number of escapes was down. He chose to contest this dismissal in court, arguing that he was held responsible for failures in government penal policy.41 Few things about the role and status of the civil service in the United Kingdom can now be taken for granted, as the internal machinery of government, and even some constitutional principles, undergo some very fundamental changes. Finally, there has been an increasing use of patronage for government positions in the United Kingdom, which threatens to undermine the tradition of apolitical public servants. The Judiciary By this time, the student of Western political systems such as Germany and the United States will have wondered what has happened to the court system. There are courts in the United Kingdom, but they are by no means as central to the political process as courts in the United States. In large part, this absence of centrality is the result of the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy and the consequent inability of the courts to exercise judicial review of legislation. There is little or no way that British courts can declare an act of Parliament unconstitutional. As Dicey put it many years ago: if Parliament decided that all blue-eyed babies should be murdered, the preservation of blue-eyed babies would be illegal.42 Several things have changed to expand the powers and activities of the judiciary in Britain. The most significant change in the role of the courts results from Britain’s membership in the European Union, with the European Court of Justice declaring some activ-

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ities of the British government to be out of conformity with the Treaty of Rome. For some conservatives (both small and large “c”) the European Court has become a much too pervasive influence on policies affecting Britain. Further, British courts now must play some role in deciding whether British government policies are in accordance with the obligations of its membership in the EU. Again, decisions to the contrary have angered many British political leaders and have raised more questions about the desirability of continued membership. The courts do have some role to play in the policymaking system. Although they lack the ability to declare actions unconstitutional, the courts can issue a number of writs, including ultra vires (literally, beyond the powers), inquiring as to the statutory authority of specific actions; and habeas corpus, requesting to know under what authority a citizen is detained by the authorities. These actions constitute a limited form of judicial review, constrained, however, by the courts’ reluctance “to endorse positions not upheld by the legislature and the executive.”43 Each case is judged on its own merits; the courts cannot make sweeping statements about the legality of actions, and the government may suspend even the issuing of these writs, as it has done in Northern Ireland. In general, the courts can have much more of an impact on administration than on the formation of policy. In recent years, the courts have become more aggressive in declaring the actions of a government to be ultra vires. This is in part a function of Britain’s joining the European Union and the necessity of monitoring government implementation of Community law and in part because of the perceived need for independent checks on government action outside the politicized arena of Parliament. In particular, there has been some revival of interest in the role of administrative law as a check on government.44 The courts do follow the election returns, however, and there are serious questions by some as to the extent to which there can truly be a government of laws when there is little independent ability to adjudicate the laws. This difficulty is further exacerbated by the attorney general’s being a political official who in several instances in the late s, and then later in the s, was charged with allowing his political affiliations to interfere with his legal duties. The courts have also found themselves having to deal with several major incidents of police misconduct that have shaken public confidence in the judicial system. The Rest of Government British government is unitary, but local governments have a substantial impact on the ultimate shape of public policies in the United Kingdom. In a similar manner, many public activities are carried out through public corporations, quasi-public bodies, and formerly government (but now largely regulated) industries rather than directly by a government department. This choice of institutions for service delivery has consequences for the ability of government to control these functions, as well as for the nature of the services being delivered. Local Government The first point to be made is that local government is not an independent set of institutions with its own constitutional base of authority, as found in a federal system such as Germany or the United States; instead, British local government is the creation and the

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creature of the central government. Local government is organized in different formats in Scotland and Wales, and in England. In Scotland and Wales there is now a single level of local government, following a reform that abolished the previous two-tier system.45 In England there is disparate system of counties, and districts under those counties, in much of the country, although there are an increasing number of unified authorities exercising the responsibilities of both levels. In addition, London has its own integrated government structure.46 The local government reorganization that created the current system of local government has been the subject of numerous criticisms, both of the apparent inefficiency of the arrangements created and the loss of political accountability and involvement. This latter critique is based on the large number of voters for each councillor in the large local government units that have been created. This apparent loss of local democracy has been offset to some extent by the creation of elected mayors in London and other cities, such as Lewisham (a district of London),47 but British local government is not the locus of grassroots democracy as in many other countries. The loss of democratic control is even more evident with the creation of unelected bodies to perform many services formerly provided by local governments, or were governed by boards named by local governments, is considered. Services such as housing, some aspects of health care, education, and training have all been turned over to a variety of local quangos or to other self-governing organizations.48 The Blair government has reversed this trend toward quasi-governmental service provision only slightly, in part because the existence of these organizations provides a convenient source of patronage positions to the government. Thus, unlike most other developed democracies, British government has been centralizing over the past several decades, leaving local governments with little autonomy and fewer functions to perform. Unlike American state and local governments, local governments in the United Kingdom are closely supervised by the central government. Since May , the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister is responsible for supervising local governments in England and for determining their range of activity, funding, and political structures. Even after devolution, the Scotland Office and the Wales Office continue to exercise some (limited) supervision over local governments in their respective portions of the United Kingdom; after home rule in Northern Ireland was revoked in early , supervision of local government in that province was returned to Whitehall. (Home rule was subsequently restored in late .) A much larger proportion of the expenditures of local governments in the United Kingdom are funded through grants from the central government than is true in the United States ( as opposed to  percent in ), making British local authorities more dependent on the center. These factors do not preclude conflict between central government and local authorities, especially when the two authorities happen to be governed by different political parties. The conflicts between Conservative central governments and Labour local councilors in Clay Cross (), Lambeth (–), and Liverpool ( onward) are indicative of such conflicts. In the early s there were major conflicts between central government and local governments over finance, especially the implementation of the poll tax. Conflicts with the

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Labour government have been less overt, but it has been clear that the current government has not met the expectations of many activists in local government, Labour and non-Labour alike. The Thatcher government sought to increase control over local authorities from the center. This was in part for financial reasons, to ensure that the activities of local authorities did not counteract central government financial policies, especially reducing public expenditures. It was also for policy reasons, as a means of ensuring that the “revolution” being implemented at the central government level would also be carried out at the local level. For example, local authorities were required to put their activities out for bid from private-sector contractors—compulsive competitive tendering—even before much of central government was. The Thatcher government also forced local authorities through parliamentary legislation to finance their component of the total costs of local government from the poll tax or “community charge,” a policy that helped bring the downfall of the government and the prime minister.49 The Labour government has talked a great deal about devolution (and certainly has implemented it for Scotland and Wales) but has retained central control over local authorities. The policies may be somewhat different, substituting a notion of “best value” for compulsory competitive tendering, but still imposing its control. Indeed, the Labour government has taken its control down to the individual institutions level, “naming and shaming” schools and other failing organizations. London has been an especially important locus for issues concerning local government and local democracy. In part because it was headed by Ken Livingstone, a member of the left wing of the Labour Party, the Thatcher government abolished the Greater London Council, an umbrella government for the city’s thirty-three boroughs, and required the boroughs to deliver services themselves. There were some common functions such as London Transport, but the notion of London as a political and governmental entity was largely abandoned. The Labour government subsequently re-created a unified government for London; Ken Livingstone was then elected mayor in May . Public Corporations and Regulatory Bodies Public corporations have been an important part of the total governmental sector in the United Kingdom even though they are, at least in theory, distinct from the government itself. The Labour government elected at the end of World War II proceeded to nationalize many of the major industries of Britain, including the railways, steel, coal, telecommunications, electricity, and gas. Government also was involved in other industries such as petroleum. The central government appointed members to the boards of the public corporations that ran these industries and made broad policy decisions (including about finance). The day-to-day decisions about these industries were made independently, although this independence was constrained by their reliance on government funds to cover operating deficits and to provide capital for new ventures. Also, decisions by a nationalized industry often provoked political discontent with a government, as when the decision by the National Coal Board in  to close several less productive Welsh pits

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prompted a strong outcry, and again in the mid-s more pit closings led to a bitter year-long strike. Nationalized industries constituted a significant share of economic activity in the United Kingdom, including such industries as coal, steel, shipbuilding, railroads, electricity, gas, road transportation, and most domestic automobile manufacturing when the Thatcher government took office in . Such a large share of industry in public hands obviously gave government a great, albeit indirect, influence over the economy. This was especially true in a period of high inflation when wage settlements in the nationalized industries were frequently used as guidelines for settlements in the private sector and when consequent pressures to keep wage settlements down produced labor unrest. The Thatcher government was anxious to reduce the role of the public sector in the economy and to strengthen the private economy. This desire led the Conservatives to privatize a number of nationalized industries, including gas, telecommunications, road transportation, and British Airways. The government also sold off much of a major local industry in its public housing to the occupying tenants. (Approximately  percent of tenants in London took advantage of this opportunity; only about  percent in the Glasgow region did so.) These sales helped balance the budget and helped fulfill ideological dreams and campaign promises on behalf of free enterprise. The process of privatization continued with other public assets, including such public utilities as electricity and water, being sold. The British government was becoming much less of a direct economic actor. Government has not been able to get out of the economy entirely, however, and almost every privatization has required increased regulatory authority to control the new industries. For example, privatizing gas led to the creation of the Office of Gas Regulation (Ofgas, which is now merged with the electricity regulator), and privatizing telecommunications produced Oftel, the Office of Telecommunications Regulation. The principal task of these independent offices was to set the rates that the newly created private monopolies, or oligopolies, could charge and also to set standards of service.50 Unlike most American regulators, these offices focused more on the retail price index rather than on return on capital in setting the rates, attempting to drive consumer prices downward and efficiency up. The rate-setting role of the regulators has diminished, however, as competition for services has increased. Government may have privatized industries and created nominally independent regulators, but they cannot escape political fall-out from the privatized industries. The public still remembers that these were once public and still thinks of them as public utilities that should be operated with some concern for the common good. For example, poor service, higher fares, and several major accidents have produced a hue and cry over the profits being earned by the firms that now provide railway services. One consequence is that the government has taken back ownership of rails and switches (although the railroads themselves remain in private hands). The Quasi-Governmental Sector The quasi-governmental sector is one of the biggest areas of activity in the public sector (up to one-third of public spending). A principal example is the National Health Ser-

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vice, actually the largest organization in Western Europe either public or private. Although government funded and controlled through the Department of Health, it represents an attempt to maintain some independence for the practice of medicine. The same attempt at independence is made for the universities, a number of which no longer rely on public funds for the majority of their income, and also for a number of research organizations funded more or less directly by the public sector. Other parts of the quasi-governmental sector are kept under somewhat closer control by government, although the control is indirect through appointment as much as it is through direct accountability mechanisms. Indeed, one of the most important critiques of the quasi-governmental sector is that it is less accountable than the more traditional means of delivering public services. The Thatcher government had launched an offensive against quangos early in its time in office, in part to impose greater control over government and public expenditure. By the end its period in office, however, it had created hundreds of new quasi-government organizations. These new organizations helped to make the public sector appeared even smaller and also provided ways to diminish Labour Party control over a number of local service delivery activities. Notes . Arend Lijphart, “Democratic Political Systems: Types, Cases, Causes, and Consequences,” Journal of Theoretical Politics  (): –. . The Scottish Parliament elected in  adopted the basic Westminster form of government but did have to create a coalition between the Labour and Social Democratic Parties in order to have a majority. . Ivor Jennings, Cabinet Government, d ed. (Cambridge, U.K..: Cambridge University Press, ), –. . D.L. Ellis, “Collective Ministerial Responsibility and Collective Solidarity,” Public Law (Winter ): –. . An eighteenth-century prime minister, Lord Melbourne, is responsible for the aphorism “It matters not what we say, so long as we all say the same thing.” . Ray Pierce, “The Executive Divided Against Itself: Cohabitation in France, –,” Governance  (): –. . David Butler, Andrew Adonis, and Tony Travers, Failure in British Government: The Politics of the Poll Tax (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). . R. Kent Weaver and Bert A. Rockman, “When and How Do Institutions Matter?” in Do Institutions Matter? Government Capabilities in the United States and Abroad, ed. Weaver and Rockman (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, ). . For example, immediately after the Kosovo crisis in , the Opposition called for a review of the policy and conduct of the war. . R. Blackburn, European Convention on Human Rights: The Impact of the European Convention on Human Rights in the Legal and Political Systems of Member States (London: Cassell Academic, ). . Peter Fearon, Behind the Palace Walls: The Rise and Fall of Britain’s Royal Family (London: Citadel Press, ). . The death of Diana, Princess of Wales, produced a major swing in public opinion against the royal family, although they have managed to recoup some of those losses. . Peter Hennessy, “The Throne Behind the Power,” The Economist,  December , –. . Walter Bageot, The English Constitution (London: Fontana, ). . Michael Foley, The Rise of the British Presidency (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, ). . Mark Perryman, The Blair Agenda (London: Lawrence and Wishart, ). . David Coates and Peter Lawler, eds., New Labour in Power (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, ), . . Ibid. . Ibid., .

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. Chris Clifford, “The Prime Minister’s Office in Britain,” in Administering the Summit, ed. B.G. Peters, R.A.W. Rhodes, and V. Wright (London: Macmillan, ). . “Quangos: Under the Carpet,” The Economist,  February ; Chris Skelcher, The Appointed State (Buckingham: Open University Press, ). . Nicholas Jones, Sultans of Spin: The Media and the New Labour Government (London: Victor Gollancz, ). . Kevin Theakston, Junior Ministers in British Government (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ). . Bruce Headey, British Cabinet Ministers (London: George Allen and Unwin, ). . Martin Burch and Ian Holliday, The British Cabinet System (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, ). . George Parker, “Reshuffle: Bill Affecting the City May be Disrupted,” Financial Times,  July ; David Wighton, “Reshuffle: Blair’s New Faces Lack Business Background,” Financial Times,  July . . Brian W. Hogwood and Thomas T. Mackie, “The United Kingdom: Decision Sifting in a Secret Garden,” in Unlocking the Cabinet: Cabinet Structures in Comparative Perspective, ed. Mackie and Hogwood (London: Sage, ). See also Simon James, “The Cabinet System since : Fragmentation and Integration,” Parliamentary Affairs  (): –. . Hussein Kassim, “The United Kingdom” in Coordinating European Policy: The National Dimension, ed. H. Kassim, B. Guy Peters, and V. Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). . This is done to improve the image of Parliament as well as to distance the Labour Party from the unions. See “Blair Set to Axe Trade Union Sponsorship of Labour MPs,” Sunday Times,  June . . Prior to the  constitutional reform, approximately , peers were nominal members of the House of Lords; in practice, however, fewer than a third of that number participated in legislative activities. The hereditary peers elected among themselves the ninety-two hereditary peers who remain in the House of Lords. (An analysis of the composition of the House of Lords is available at www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/ld/ldinfo/ldanal.htm) . The current Speaker’s immediate predecessor was the first woman to hold the position. . The Speaker generally follows the advice of the Commons’ Committee on Privileges. . This question is so called because Tam Dalyell, who represents the West Lothian constituency in Westminster, first raised it. . Gavin Drewry, The New Select Committees, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). . John Garrett, Managing the Civil Service (London: Heinemann, ); Colin Campbell and Graham K. Wilson, The End of Whitehall: Death of a Paradigm? (Oxford: Blackwell, ). . Gavin Drewry and Tony Butcher, The Civil Service Today (Oxford: Blackwell, ). . Campbell and Wilson, End of Whitehall. . Chris Clifford and Vincent Wright, “Politicization of the British Civil Service,” Unpublished paper, Nuffield College, Oxford, . . K.G. Robertson, Secrecy and Open Government (London: Macmillan, ). . Brian W. Hogwood, “Restructuring Central Government: The ‘Next Steps’ Initiative,” in Managing Public Organizations, d ed., ed. K. Eliassen and J. Kooiman (London: Sage, ); Patricia Greer, Transforming the Civil Service: The Next Steps Initiative (Buckingham: Open University Press, ). . “A Riot over Prisons,” The Economist,  October , –. . A.V. Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, th ed. (New York: St. Martin’s, ), . . Donley T. Studlar, Great Britain: Decline or Renewal? (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, ), . . All Souls–JUSTICE, Administrative Law; Some Necessary Reforms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). . See John McCarthy and David Newlands, eds., Governing Scotland: Problems and Prospects (Avesbury: Ashgate, ). . Michael Chisholm, Structural Reform of British Local Government (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, ). . For a personal account, see Ken Livingstone, Livingstone’s London (London: Victor Gollancz, ); also, “The Dangers of Devolution,” The Economist,  February . . See Skelcher, Appointed State. . In  local revenue was reorganized as a council tax system, which is based on the capital value of property. . Given that effective competition is difficult in many of these industries, the market is not an efficient price-setting institution.

Chapter 3

Who Has the Power? A DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL SYSTEM requires mechanisms for the public to influ-

ence the decisions of its political leaders. This influence may be exercised only intermittently, as during elections, but in most democratic systems it is exercised almost constantly through mechanisms such as political parties, through interest groups, and increasingly through public opinion polls and the media. The government of the United Kingdom is no different. While some commentators have said that the United Kingdom is a democracy only once every five years (the statutory maximum term for a sitting Parliament), in fact the day-to-day decisions of British government are influenced by popular demands and pressures. Further, the government is attempting to provide more opportunities for participation at times other than elections. The relative secrecy of British government may still protect it from as much external pressure on policy as is encountered by some other European countries, such as Sweden. Further, the majoritarian style of politics in the United Kingdom tends to give substantial power to a single majority party until it is thrown out of office. The popular pressures are, in part, transmitted through partisan institutions, but the significant influence of pressure groups on policymaking also requires careful scrutiny. Political Parties To an American reader accustomed to political parties that have been little more than electoral aggregations and have meant little or nothing in organizational or policy terms, British political parties may appear well-organized and at times even ideological. For other Europeans, however, British parties appear much more like American parties than like continental ones. British political parties do have discernible policy stances, even if sometimes these are adopted merely to oppose the stated policies of the other party. Although they do have policy stances, British parties are primarily “catchall parties” and include a relatively wide range of opinion within any one party. Thus, they also differ from the more ideological parties found in most other European countries. The catchall feature remains apparent despite the ideological bent of the Conservatives during the s and s. Following a series of electoral failures, the Labour Party has attempted to enhance its image as a broad, nonideological party, by purging its more confrontational elements on the left and then revoking its commitment to public ownership. This change helped to produce landslide electoral victories in  and May  by making Labour more acceptable to the expanding middle class. The policy change has, however, alienated a num-

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ber of more traditional Labour supporters in the working class who still want a party that advocates socialism and vehemently defends the interests of the industrial working class. Perhaps the major differences between British and European political parties are that the majoritarian style of the British parliamentary system means that a single party has been almost certain to form the government. Further, the party out of power must constantly be preparing to be capable of taking power with relatively little notice. British parties also differ from American parties by being national organizations, expected to deliver the same view on policy issues across the whole country and to be responsible for their policy stances in and out of office. More than in other countries, British elections tend to be about the performance of the party currently in government and the capacity of another (clearly identifiable) party to assume the role of government.1 This characteristic arises from the majoritarian nature of parliamentary government in the United Kingdom and makes the responsibility for policies and performance clearer than in many other parliamentary systems. The Party System The British party system has been described variously as a two-party system and as a two-and-one-half-party system. Historically, the dominant parties were the Tories (antecedents of today’s Conservatives) and the Liberals, both of which emerged out of legislative factions dating from the seventeenth century. The Tories were identified with the more privileged sectors of society and committed themselves to the defense of existing institutions and policies, including the Crown and church at home and imperialism abroad. They also affirmed the need for a strong state, the primacy of “law and order,” the sanctity of private property, and an evolutionary program of social change. The Liberals, in contrast, represented primarily the middle classes and positioned themselves ideologically as a party advocating free trade, home rule in Ireland, and social reform. The failure of the Liberals to accommodate the political and economic demands of Britain’s rapidly growing class of industrial workers during the latter part of the nineteenth century prompted a coalition of trade union leaders, socialists, and more idealistic Fabians to form the Labour Party in  as an extraparliamentary organization dedicated to a more radical course of reform. By the s the Labour Party displaced the Liberals as Britain’s other largest party. The United Kingdom has subsequently retained a predominantly two-party system in which ideological and regional “third parties” nonetheless play an important indirect role in the political process. The two major parties in the United Kingdom remain the Labour Party and the Conservative (Tory) Party. They are national parties in every sense of the word and almost always run candidates in every Parliamentary constituency in Great Britain. The Liberals constitute a “half ” party on the national level under their current name as Liberal Democrats. The Liberal Democrats were formed out of two parties, the original Liberals and the Social Democrats (a moderate faction that broke away from the Labour Party in the early s). The two parties formed a Liberal/Social Democratic Alliance based on their joint opposition to radicalization on the part of both Labour and the Con-

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servatives, and pledged not to nominate candidates against each other in national elections.2 In  the Alliance won twenty-two seats scattered from the Shetlands to Cornwall, with most of its support concentrated in Scotland and Wales. After that election, the party divided again into two parties. The larger portion went into the Social and Liberal Democrats, while a splinter led by Dr. David Owen retained for a while the name of the Social Democrats. This split eliminated, at least in the short run, any real potential this centrist grouping had of presenting an electoral alternative to the free-market neoliberalism of the Conservatives and the collectivism of the Labour Party. In the  election the Liberal Democrats lost two of the seats won in . The parties merged as the Liberal Democrats in , who have performed well in recent elections. In  they won . percent of the popular vote and  seats (an increase of  from the previous election) and increased their share to . percent and  seats in June . Election results during the s and party realignments during the s revealed the emergence of a more complex multiparty system. The parties that constitute the additions to the two- (or two-and-a-half ) party system have had some difficulty in organizing themselves and in presenting viable alternatives for forming a government to the two dominant parties, but yet there has been some real change in the system. In some parts of the United Kingdom one of the two major parties may actually be the third party; this appears increasingly true for the Conservatives in Scotland. In the  election the Tories won one seat in Scotland (with . percent of the vote), and the Scottish National Party, not the Conservative Party, is the official opposition in the Scottish Parliament. Two other political parties regularly win parliamentary seats in Great Britain. These are the Scottish National Party (SNP) in Scotland, and Plaid Cymru, the Welsh national party, in Wales. These parties experienced a marked decline in their electoral fortunes in , following defeat of devolution referendums in . They made a minor comeback in the  election, increasing their total from four to five seats, and then moved up to seven seats (four from Plaid Cymru) in . The vote of the nationalist parties as a percentage of the vote in their regions also increased to almost  percent for the SNP in Scotland in , and then increased to . percent in , and then to more than  percent in . Electoral support declined marginally to . percent in . In Wales Plaid Cymru increased its vote to  percent in , then to almost  percent in , almost  percent in , and . percent in . The SNP has been doing especially well in national elections, the election to the Scottish Parliament, and local elections since , to the point that only one Conservative was elected from Scotland in . In fact, the Liberal Democrats have become the third party, with ten MPs. There is also substantial variation in the vote for the nationalist parties within their own regions, with Plaid Cymru receiving a high of . percent and a low of  percent in Welsh constituencies in . The SNP vote ranged between . percent and . percent in Scottish constituencies in , but only two constituencies had less than  percent SNP votes. These variations are a function of factors such as the degree of urbanization and industrialization of the constituency. Finally, the partisan politics of Northern Ireland reflect the troubled history of that province and the religious and nationalist cleavages that divide the population. In ,

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four political parties elected members of Parliament from Northern Ireland. Two of these—the Democratic Unionists and the Ulster Unionists—are Protestant and are dedicated to the continuing union of Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom. These parties differ primarily in the intensity of their commitment to union, with the Democratic Unionists, led by the Reverend Ian Paisley (MEP), leading in that race. The other two parties winning seats in Northern Ireland are primarily Roman Catholic and would like to unite Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland to its south. The Social Democratic Labour Party is overwhelmingly Catholic and would like to unite all of Ireland as a single, socialist society; despite its sectarian appeal, it is a secular organization. The other Catholic party is Provisional Sinn Fein, generally regarded as the political arm of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Sinn Fein is committed to the unification of Ireland by almost any means, although since the mid-s it (and the IRA) have approached an agreement with Britain. Before discussing political parties any further, we should add several points on the British electoral system. The system for general elections is a single-member-district, plurality system. Each constituency elects a single representative (member of Parliament), and all that is required for election is a plurality (i.e., the individual with the most votes wins whether receiving a majority or not). Such a system has the advantage of producing majorities for Parliament, and although no British party since  has won a majority of the popular votes, parliamentary majorities have been produced at each election. The smaller parties are severely disadvantaged by this electoral system; the Liberal Democrats have advocated proportional representation as a more equitable means of selecting members of Parliament. Because their vote is spread widely across Great Britain they are disadvantaged more by the current system than are the nationalist parties whose votes are more concentrated. In  the Liberal Dems received only . percent of the seats with . percent of the votes. The Jenkins Commission, appointed by the Blair government (as part of a preelectoral deal with the Liberal Dems) to consider changes in the electoral system, recommended moving to a proportional representation system.3 The United Kingdom is beginning to experiment with proportional representation (PR). European elections are now being run on a PR basis, although the disappointing turnout in the  elections caused even some advocates to consider the appropriateness of the change in the United Kingdom. Also, almost half of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly are elected by PR. The Northern Ireland Assembly coming out of the Good Friday Agreement is elected entirely by the single transferable vote, the same complex system used in the Republic of Ireland. These are interesting experiments, but as long as the existing electoral system continues to benefit the parties in power, it is unlikely to be changed. One aspect of the British electoral system unlike that of the United States is that the legal principle of “one-person, one vote, one value” is not honored. Scotland and Wales are overrepresented, with more parliamentary seats than might be expected on the basis of population; this is due in part to the fact that both regions have more rural areas. Northern Ireland, meanwhile, was significantly underrepresented until  (see table .). The justification for this misdistribution of parliamentary seats is that Scotland and Wales, because of their national identity and history, were deemed to have special interests requir-

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Table 3.1 Citizens per Parliamentary Seat

Seats Citizens per seat

England

Wales

Scotland

Northern Ireland

529 89,600

40 73,900

72 71,500

18 92,900

ing greater representation. In contrast, Northern Ireland was under-represented because, until , it had substantially greater self-government, with its own parliament sitting at Stormont, than did other parts of the United Kingdom. With the imposition of direct rule from Westminster, that justification was no longer valid, and subsequent changes in the distribution of seats have made representation more like that in Great Britain, albeit still lower than in the other parts. The creation of the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly may produce greater equality of representation among the components of the United Kingdom. The Scotland Bill promised to reduce Scottish representation in the House of Commons from  to  seats at the next allocation (in ); the position of Wales is less clear given the limited powers of the Welsh Assembly. Given Scotland’s current overrepresentation in Westminster, the reduction of the number of Scottish MPs is not good news for the Labour Party since it will predictably lose some of the seats it claims from the region ( after the June  election). Another feature of the British electoral system that differentiates it from American and most European systems is the importance of by-elections. If a seat becomes vacant during the life of a Parliament, an interim election (by-election) is held to fill the seat. As well as ensuring full membership of the House of Commons, by-elections serve as something of an ongoing vote of confidence by the people, and poor electoral performance can be quite embarrassing for a sitting government. For example, by-elections in the winter of – were used as gauges of Thatcher’s electoral strength, as well as that of the SDP/Liberal Alliance, and became one component of the evidence used in deciding when to call the  election. By-elections can also lead to a loss of a parliamentary majority, as occurred in – and –. Elections to the European Parliament can also serve as a similar barometer of public opinion toward the government in power. By-elections also play a role in internal party politics. The electoral losses and troubles in by-elections in  helped set the stage for the revolt within the Conservative Party that pushed Thatcher out of office as prime minister. The continuing failures of the Major government in by-elections during , , and  were one factor that led to a leadership challenge in the party, although John Major was able to survive the challenge from a much more Thatcherite candidate. These poor by-elections results did, however, produce some softening of Conservative policies to attempt to win back moderate voters.4 The Two Major Parties Although many voters may choose other parties, only two parties—Labour and Conservative—can be expected to form a government. These governments may depend on the

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explicit or implicit support of smaller parties, as did the Labour government for much of the period from  to . During this time, the Labour Party had a narrow majority from the beginning of the session and frequently depended on Liberal votes, as well as the tacit support of the Scottish National Party and portions of the Northern Ireland delegation, to prevent a significant defeat in Parliament. This did not constitute a formal coalition government, however, and the Liberals had no cabinet positions. Likewise, John Major depended on the Ulster Unionists to stave off defeat toward the end of his government in . There is, however, a more explicit coalition between Labour and the Liberal Democrats in the Scottish Parliament seated in the summer of . There is a great deal that divides the two major parties in Britain, but in many ways they are similar. Both are essentially elite or caucus parties, having a relatively small mass membership compared to their electoral strength. The parties are also aggregative, with both covering a range of social and political opinion and consequently having internal ideological divisions as well as disagreements with the other party. Both are relatively centralized and disciplined parties, compared with decentralized American parties, although not so easy to discipline as some continental parties in which members of parliament lack direct links with constituencies. Finally, both are national parties, drawing strength from all parts of the country, and they generally have been the two top votegetters in each constituency.5 The Labour Party The roots of the British Labour Party lie in the Industrial Revolution. The Labour Party is the principal representative of the working class in British politics, although its support is broader than just industrial labor. Indeed, the  and  elections demonstrated that the Labour Party has substantial appeal among almost all segments of society. The Labour Party historically professed socialism as a major portion of its program but it is an aggregative party that includes many who do not accept socialism as the goal of the party or society. “New Labour,” for example, is very muted in speaking about socialism and has given up public ownership of the major means of production of as a significant policy goal. Ideological cleavages within the Labour Party are highly visible and intense. Factionalism in the party prevented it from being a viable competitor to the Conservatives for much of the s, but Neil Kinnock as leader of the party sought to create a more moderate image and heal some of the strife within the party. For example, the Labour Party in the early s dropped its campaign pledge of unilateral nuclear disarmament in an attempt to appear stronger in foreign affairs and moderated its stances on the renationalization of privatized industries, as well as its earlier criticism of the European Union. Thus, it has behaved like a party in a two-party system should—seeking the electoral center— but has found that center farther to the right than it had been. The Labour Party’s current leader, Tony Blair, has moved the party even more to the right on traditional class issues. Following his urging, in  the party dropped its commitment to Clause  of the party’s constitution of  and with that a commitment to government ownership of principal means of production and distribution.6 Blair also has sought to broaden the appeal of the party to women and minorities. For example, the party pledged to nominate female can-

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didates in half the safe Labour and winnable marginal seats in the  election.7 These decisions have alienated some traditional Labour supporters but appear to have enhanced the Labour Party’s popular appeal. To comprehend the organization of the Labour Party outside Parliament, one must first understand the role that labor unions play in the party. The British Labour Party originally was an alliance of trade unions and socialist organizations, with unions traditionally the dominant element in that coalition. Currently, many party members and the majority of the party’s financial base come from the labor movement. Thus, when one speaks of the membership of the Labour Party, one is really speaking of the unions, although the voting strength of the unions in the annual conference has been reduced by changes in the party constitution. Also, individual members, through socialist organizations and constituency parties, now have influence that is much greater than their numerical strength. Their power was increased by a change in the party’s constitution in  involving the election of the party leader through an electoral college that has a disproportionate share of constituency party members, albeit still dominated by the parliamentary party. The Labour Party has a National Executive Committee (NEC) that supervises party operations outside Parliament and, to an increasing extent, manages the whole party. Of the thirty-two members of this committee, twelve are direct representatives of labor unions and six represent the constituency parties. The remaining members are the leader and deputy leader of the party, the treasurer (who is elected by the annual party conference), three members of the Labour Parliamentary Party, two government representatives, two Labour councillors, the leader of Labour Members of the European Parliament, a Young Labour representative, and one representative of the Socialist Societies in Britain. Five of these members are women. Major voices in the NEC and the annual conference other than elective politicians make their actions less predictable and manageable than those of the Conservative Party’s Executive Committee. This is especially true when the Labour Party is the opposition party and the leader lacks the power of office. The bureaucratic arm of the party is the Labour Party secretary and his staff. As noted, the party bureaucracy is closely controlled by the National Executive Committee. This control extends to having subcommittees of the NEC supervise various sections of the party organization such as research, press and publicity, and finance. The Labour Party has regional organizations, but these organizations do not have the degree of importance of their equivalents in the Conservative Party. Also, there are constituency parties that, until the  changes in the party’s structure, lacked even the autonomy granted to their equivalents in the Conservative Party. These constituency parties now have the right to reselect their candidates before each election, removing that power from the central party. This power led to the selection of some extreme left-wing candidates and some further division within the party. For example, in a Liverpool by-election, the moderate Labour candidate was opposed by a “real Labour” candidate from Militant Tendency, the extreme left of the party. The power of the unions in the Labour Party has markedly declined at the party’s annual conference. Of the approximately , participants in these autumnal affairs,

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more delegates represent constituency parties than unions. Voting is not based on the number of delegates present, however, but on the number of dues-paying party members represented by those present. Unions formerly held the balance of power, controlling approximately five-sixths of all votes; presently, under Blair, their members cast only about one-third of the votes. At times, the annual conference has attempted to force its views on the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). The formal statements of the party do, in fact, indicate that the annual conference has the right to make binding policy decisions for the PLP, but party leaders from the inception of the party have been unwilling to be controlled by policy pronouncements of those out of office, especially when there is a Labour government. The tension arises from the fact that Labour began as a movement that created a parliamentary party to serve its interests, so there is a greater tradition of mass party control than in the Conservative Party, which began as a faction in Parliament. Some tensions, both institutional and ideological, between segments of the Labour Party have been illustrated by the conflict over the Commission of Inquiry mandated by the  annual conference. This commission was charged with investigating the structure and constitution of the Labour Party, especially questions of the authorship of the party manifesto, the reselection of parliamentary candidates in each constituency prior to each general election, and the election of the party leader by a more broadly constituted body than the PLP. All these issues pitted the ideological left of the party, based in constituency organizations, against the ideological right in the PLP, especially the leadership of the PLP (then most prominently James Callaghan and Denis Healey). These issues came to a head after the annual conference accepted the report of the commission favoring the stand of the left, whereupon Callaghan resigned as party leader. The provisions of the new constitutional arrangement for electing a party leader were now finally decided, and Michael Foot—a representative of the left, although a less divisive one than most— was elected leader. These changes in the Labour Party led to the defection of what became the Social Democrats from the party, and seemed to be pushing the Labour Party farther left than has been true in the past. Several disastrous electoral defeats of the more leftist leadership gave the right and center the opportunity to reassert their case for a more centrist party dedicated to winning elections, not ideological wrangles. Even the modernized Labour Party could not, however, win the  election, and Neil Kinnock resigned and was replaced by John Smith. Smith’s untimely death soon after his selection led to the selection of Tony Blair, a young, energetic, and reformist leader for the Labour Party.8 Blair’s subsequent success in transforming Labour into a more centrist “New Labour” party embracing neoliberal economic and social policies while distancing itself from organized labor was a principal factor contributing to Labour’s landslide electoral victories in  and . With . percent of the popular vote in  (compared to . percent five years earlier), Labour won  seats to displace the Conservatives as Britain’s governing party for the first time since . Popular support declined marginally in June  to . percent (largely because of a low voter turnout), but with  MPs the Labour Party easily won reelection for a second full term. Prime Minister Blair promptly affirmed his determination to act on the

Labour Party leader Tony Blair rallies his party for the general election in . (AP/ Wide World Photos)

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party’s campaign promises to improve public services (including education and health care) while cautiously exploring the prospect of Britain’s eventually joining the Eurozone within the European Union. The party chair and deputy leader are chosen by a majority vote of an electoral college comprising three groups (each comprising one-third of its membership): the Labour Parliamentary Party and European Parliamentary MPs, affiliated trade unions, and the constitutency parties. This procedure, which was implemented in  as a democratizing departure from the earlier practice of election by members of the Parliamentary Labour Party, has served to enhance the internal stature and legitimacy of the party leadership. The Conservative Party The Conservative (or Tory) Party has its roots in the political conflicts of the eighteenth century, and to some degree those roots produce conflicts within the emerging character of the Conservative Party today. In the late s, the majority of adherents to the Conservative Party would feel akin to conservative parties in Europe and North America, resisting encroachments into the affairs of individuals by government. Traditionally, however, the Conservative Party has advocated strong central government, in part because of the perception that the poor and less educated cannot be counted on to make proper decisions on their own and need guidance by their “betters.” Old Tories thus want significant governmental control over the private sector, albeit control used to preserve the interests of the upper classes, or at least to preserve the existing social order.9 New Tories, or Thatcherite Conservatives, tend to advocate greater freedom for individual and business activities, and consequently advocate a diminished role for government in economic and social life. Long after Thatcher left office there are conflicts within in the party over the meaning of conservatism. The leader of the party in , William Hague, appeared much closer to the Thatcherite wing than to the Old Tories, but he faced a formidable change in attempting to balance views within the party to win elections with a public that had grown skeptical of the perceived extremism of the party during the Thatcher years. Further, the Labour Party is no longer the extreme left-wing party that the Conservatives found easy to demonize during the s and s, so the electoral challenges are that much greater. The Conservative Party is an elite party, both in terms of the socioeconomic characteristics of the bulk of its adherents and in terms of the relationship between party members and the voting strength of the party. The number of British citizens voting for the Conservative Party is many times greater than its formal membership. The party is now thought to have some , members, down from over  million not too many years ago.10 Still, it remains a relatively small mass organization compared to its ability to organize voters and to manage national campaigns. The elitism of the party is further typified by the domination of the party by the parliamentary party, and perhaps even more by the leader of the party. There are a number of democratic structures within the party, but in practice a small leadership group tends to be dominant. The Conservative Party outside Parliament has two major components. One is a mass organization headed by the National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associa-

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tions in England and Wales; there are similar bodies in Scotland and Northern Ireland. The governing body of the National Union is its Party Board, which has seventeen members. Subordinate bodies include forty-two Area Councils. The territorial organization of the Conservative Party is similar to the national organization. There are twelve provincial area councils; within each council the party is organized by constituencies, each with a leadership structure similar to that of the national party. The constituencies are also served by agents responsible for the administrative functions of the party. The constituency parties are important because it is at this level that most funds are raised and the majority of campaigning is managed. Also, the constituency must decide to accept candidates offered to them by the national party or to develop candidates of their own who will be acceptable to the national party. Over time, constituency parties have become increasingly assertive and are now willing to deselect even sitting MPs as their candidates, or to retain candidates opposed by the party leadership. Thus, although the Conservative Party is centralized for many functions, such as the writing of the party platform (manifesto), for many important functions the party is becoming more decentralized to its constituency parties. Assisting the local and national officers is the second major arm of the Conservative Party outside Parliament: the Central Office. This office is directed by the chairman of the party organization and employs a number of professional workers, including those in the Conservative Research Department. The major officials in the Central Office are appointed by the party leader, and it is from this direct connection with party leadership that the Central Office derives most of its authority. The latter points to the overriding fact that the Conservative Party is largely a party based on Parliament. Certainly the annual conference of the party has become much more assertive than it once was, and a leader must pay attention to the mass members of the party, but the real control over a leader comes from the party in Parliament, not from the mass membership. The basis of Conservative Party organization in the House of Commons is the  Committee, composed of all Conservative members of the House of Commons, other than ministers when the party is in government. The  Committee has exercised considerable power over Conservative leaders, and that power had appeared to be increasing prior to Thatcher’s time as prime minister. The leader of the Conservative Party does not have to stand for annual election but can be challenged every year. Five of the ten leaders of the party since  have been forced out of the leadership by backbenchers, either by direct vote or by the obvious disapproval of the leader by the led. Even after serving as prime minister for over a decade and having molded the party in her own image did not prevent Thatcher from being removed from office when a majority of Conservatives in the House of Commons considered her policies to be poorly conceived and leading them toward electoral problems. In addition to exercising control over the leadership of the party, another function of the party in Parliament is to maintain the voting discipline of the party members. The Conservative Party has “denied the whip” (expelled any of its members) only once since . Eight Tory MPs abstained on an important vote on European policy in late  and were disciplined. Also, a number of members have refused the whip during that period,

Margaret Thatcher takes over as leader of the Conservative Party in . (Hulton/Getty Images)

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and one conservative MP did “cross the aisle” to Labour in , protesting the social policies of the Conservative government. Until the s the Conservative Party was not beset with the deep internal splits that have plagued the Labour Party, and therefore the Conservatives have found it less necessary to employ the available sanctions, although conflicts over European policy in particular have raised internal tensions. Also important for conflict management within the Conservative Party are certain genteel traditions, such as not taking votes in the  Committee but instead reading the sense of the meeting. The selection of party leader was traditionally left almost entirely to the parliamentary party, although there were provisions for constituency parties and other concerned groups within the party to make their views known. This method entailed a ballot of all Conservative MPs, with provisions for run-off elections among the leading candidates. The party broadened the selection process in  by establishing an electoral college consisting of all party members to elect the party leader among candidates receiving at least  percent of votes among parliamentary MPs. In September , a majority of  percent of the party’s , eligible members utilized the new procedure to elect Iain Duncan Smith—an erstwhile skeptic of European integration—over Kenneth Clarke, a former chancellor of the exchequer who had advocated closer ties with the European Union. Duncan Smith succeeded William Hague, who had announced his resignation following the party’s loss in the June  election. The Conservatives have in many ways gone from being the “natural” party of the government to one perceived by a significant portion of the public as being too divided and too inconsistent to be trusted with governing. Crucial divisions within the party concern domestic social and economic policy and, even more deeply, Europe and Britain’s role in an expanding and ever more powerful European Union. These divisions were an important factor in the disastrous showing of the Conservatives in the  election, when the party’s share of the vote plummeted to . percent (compared to . percent in ) and the number of Conservative MPs fell from  to . The Conservatives gained one seat in the June  election, but popular support for the party was the second lowest since  (and the number of its supporters at the lowest level since the introduction of universal suffrage in ). Both defeats prompted the change of party leadership and an intense internal debate over fundamental policy issues, including whether or not Britain should abandon the pound in favor of adopting the European Union’s common currency (the euro). Voting and Elections Elections are a crucial driving force for democratic politics. Or are they? Certainly all conventional analyses of British politics assume that the policies of government are decided by the clash of political parties over issues. In like manner, voters are assumed to be both interested in politics and to make their choices among parties on the basis of issues. These may be assumptions largely unsubstantiated by evidence. Let us look at the evidence about the turnout of voters and reasons for their voting choices, and then ask a few pertinent questions about the role of elections in policy choice in the United Kingdom. Before we do that, however, we should point to several salient features of British elec-

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tions. British elections are national elections, but they are national elections conducted in individual constituencies. Although it is clear who will be prime minister should one party or the other win, only two constituencies actually vote for prospective prime ministers. Also, these constituencies are quite small compared with electoral districts in most Western countries. The average English MP represents , people, and the average Scottish MP roughly , people. By way of contrast, the average member of the National Assembly in France represents more than , people and the average legislator in the United States over , people. In addition to size differences, the expenses of constituency campaigning in Britain are regulated so that a candidate in  could not spend more than £, plus . pence (about  cents) per voter in urban districts and . pence per voter in rural districts. These spending restrictions, combined with the short campaign period (usually six weeks or less), and the difficulty of purchasing electronic media time other than for the limited party political broadcasts provided free on all networks, make British campaigns very different than those in the United States. The expenditure restrictions on campaign spending by candidates understates the amount of money actually spent for elections, given that the parties themselves raise and spend substantial amounts of money on behalf of all their candidates. Still, British election campaigns are relatively inexpensive. Also, the parties control the selection of candidates more centrally than American parties do. The concept of a primary is unheard of, although the constituency parties do have an active voice in the initial selection of their candidates. A prospective candidate must be accepted by the constituency party, with the Central Office exercising a largely advisory role. This holds true for the acceptance of a new candidate, although candidates already sitting for a seat in Parliament, or having stood for a seat in the constituency in the previous election, do not have to be reselected in the Conservative Party although they now do in the Labour Party. Further, the Labour Party is now attempting to ensure that more women run as Labour candidates and is giving some constituencies the option of choosing only among women candidates. Turnout British citizens tend to vote more readily than American citizens do, although not so readily as citizens in most other Western democracies. Turnout is also relatively evenly distributed across the country. As is true for most other countries, the abstainers are concentrated in the working class, a factor that goes a long way to explain the ability of the Conservative Party to win as many elections as it does. A key variable in the absentee rate is the degree of political apathy prevailing among voters; the Labour Party in particular is vulnerable to abstentions. Citizens are legally required to register to vote. Partisan Choice by Voters As well as deciding whether to vote, a voter must decide for whom to vote. There has been a great deal of research on the determinants of the partisan choices of voters. Four factors are usually discussed as the principal determinants of partisan choice in Britain: social class, region of the country, demography, and issues. These four factors obviously

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interact. Members of social classes are not evenly spread across the country, with more working-class voters living in Scotland, Wales, and the industrial North and Midlands of England and more middle- and upper-class voters living in the southeast or southwest of England.11 The issues to which citizens are assumed to respond also have different impacts on members of different social classes, on different ethnic and age groups, and on residents of different regions of the country. Consequently it is hard to disaggregate the effects of these different influences, but we can at least discern and describe some apparent effects. Social Class. Social class is generally considered to be the dominant factor in explaining voting in Britain. As noted, much of British politics has been conceptualized in class terms. While there is strong evidence that class remains an important factor in the voting decisions, there is also some evidence that it is no longer so overwhelming as often believed.12 For example, as shown in table ., in the  election  percent of skilled manual workers voted for the Labour Party, whereas  percent voted Conservative and  percent Liberal Democrat. In contrast, a solid plurality of professional and managerial workers ( percent) supported the Conservatives, yet a third voted for Labour and more than a fifth for the Liberal Democrats. Thus, social class remains a general predictor of party preference, but its importance has declined in recent elections as voters have become more attuned to particular issues and personalities. Several factors reinforce class voting among citizens, especially members of the working class. Three factors of importance are membership in certain organizations, patterns of residence, and patterns of communication. In general, members of labor unions are substantially more likely to vote Labour than are members of the working class as a whole. For example, in ,  percent of union members voted Labour, while  percent of working-class voters who were not members of unions voted Labour. This was true even though many of those not voting for Labour were in objectively worse socio-

Table 3.2 Class Voting, 1979 and 1997 (in percentages)

Professional and Managerial 1979 1997 Office/Clerical 1979 1997 Skilled Manual 1979 1997 Semiskilled and Unskilled Manual 1979 1997

Conservative

Labour

Liberal Democrats

64 45

21 33

16 22

54 28

30 51

16 21

41 27

44 58

15 15

34 22

53 64

13 14

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economic conditions than the union members. The impact of union membership on voting has declined, in part because many union members who have jobs have begun to make middle-class incomes and have begun to behave politically more like the middle class. Moreover, aggregate trade union membership has fallen to approximately  percent of the workforce (see figure, p. ). Membership in religious organizations also tends to affect the class dimension of voting. On the one hand, adherents of the Church of England tend to vote Conservative more often than do members of other churches. To characterize the Church of England as the Tory party at prayer may be to overstate the identity of church and party, but church membership appears to have a significant influence. On the other hand, Catholic members of the working class tend to vote Labour more consistently than do workers as a whole. Even leaving aside the influence of Northern Irish politics on voting, Catholic voters in cities such as Glasgow and Liverpool are among the most consistent Labour supporters. Finally, certain lifestyle characteristics are important in explaining why members of the working or middle classes tend to vote for or against the nominal interests of their class. Working-class voters living in council (public) housing (which varies considerably by region) are much more likely to vote Labour than are members of the working class living in other accommodations. Similarly, members of the middle class who enjoy such middle-class amenities as automobiles and telephones are more likely to vote Conservative than their more deprived colleagues. Finally, the receipt of social benefits appears to have some influence on voting, with individuals receiving benefits more likely to vote Labour. These lifestyle characteristics have been characterized by Patrick Dunleavy as the “consumption cleavage” in British politics,13 meaning that it appears to matter less whether one has a working-class occupation than whether the services one consumes— housing, education, health care, and so on—are public or private. During her decade of leadership, Margaret Thatcher did a great deal to shift overall patterns of consumption in Britain in the private direction, for example, by selling off a significant percentage of all council housing to sitting tenants. That shift initially benefited the Conservative Party at election time. At least until the recession of –, working-class voters with jobs often had good incomes, and the Labour Party appeared to be becoming the party of the unemployed and intellectuals. In the  election there was a general shift to Labour voting, but some analysts have argued that these lifestyle factors have become more important in explaining patterns of voting behavior than simple membership in a social class. Patterns of Residence. Where people live seems to affect their voting behavior. First, living in the Celtic Fringe tends to affect voting. Leaving aside opportunities and motivations to vote for third-party candidates, the division of votes between the two major parties also differs in different parts of the country. Wales is the most heavily Labour portion of the United Kingdom, followed closely by Scotland. Were it not for Wales and Scotland, the Conservatives would have a permanent majority in the House of Commons be-

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cause of their strength in England. The north of England has become more similar to the Celtic Fringe, with the partisan divide (as well as the economic divide) in Britain now appearing to lie on a line from the Wash to Bristol Channel. Traditional class differences have persisted north of this divide, while those cleavages tend to have eroded south of that line.14 Second, rural voters tend to vote Conservative in greater proportions than do urban voters. This is in part a function of the concentration of workers in urban industrial areas. In addition, the constituency within which a voter lives influences voting. This is especially true of prospective Labour voters who vote Labour in much greater proportions in safe Labour seats than in competitive, or safe Conservative, seats. This is a function of the reinforcing effects of interactions with other Labour voters and of union efforts to mobilize the vote. Demography. Voters also appear to behave differently based on fundamental demographic characteristics. For example, women have historically tended to vote more for the Conservative Party than do men. The effect of gender appears less in Britain than in other European democracies, in part because the Tories have been seen as a somewhat radical party in recent years. The evidence of voting by age group is much less comforting to the Conservative Party. In  and  there was a linear relationship between age and voting Conservative—the older the voter, the more likely to vote Conservative. Given that voting patterns tend to persist across time, this means that the future for the Conservatives appears less positive.15 Race or ethnicity is an increasingly important issue for voting in Britain. The minority population of Britain is approaching  million (out of approximately  million). This population is also relatively young, so it will be of increasing importance as a voting group. The evidence is that Labour does very well among minority voters, especially in the industrial cities where they tend to be concentrated. There are a growing number of Labour politicians from ethnic minority groups. Once again, the demographic trends appear to favor Labour even though the electoral turnout among ethnic minority groups tends to be low. Issues. One assumption of democracy is that voters respond to candidates on the basis of the issues. British parties are at once centrifugal and centripetal. They express class differences more clearly than do U.S. parties, but they are also sufficiently centrist to attempt to disguise some of their potential policy differences in order to gain votes. Although some issues divide voters, the majority of voters of both parties tend to be on the same side of most major political issues in Britain, with conflicts often being over how best to reach the common goals. Labour and Conservative majorities were on the same side of seven of ten issues in , with the issues on which they were more divided having to do primarily with the powers of labor unions.16 In , majorities of the two parties agreed on ten of sixteen issues.17 The parties have continued to polarize somewhat, but their voters still share many common goals. Also, it should be noted that there continues to be substantial disagreement within the parties on the issues, es-

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pecially within Labour, and that the level of agreement within parties was not always higher than the level of agreement across parties. More than any other issue, perhaps, the role of the European Union in British public life tends to create cleavages within the parties. Despite the pressures toward greater ideological thinking by the Conservatives, and Labour’s attempts to call its faithful back to the fold after years of defection, partisan identification has been declining in Britain. Strong identifiers with parties have decreased by over  percent since the s. A similar popular dealignment is also found in most other Western countries. It appears that voters are indeed more willing to think for themselves and to make decisions in each election based on issues, candidates, performance in government, or whatever. This makes the task of political leaders that much more difficult because they cannot count on a solid base of party identifiers when they begin their election campaigns. There is no neat means of summarizing voting behavior in Britain. The class model does not seem to fit the increasing complexity of the situation as well as is often assumed. Yet no other model can adequately describe the complexity of the situation either. Given the importance of elections and parties for the choice of governments in the United Kingdom, a number of interacting factors enter into party choice by voters. More important, there is some question whether elections and the choice of parties really have much consequence for the policies of government. Richard Rose has conducted a detailed analysis of whether parties in Britain make a difference in policy terms, with the conclusion that such differences as do result are more matters of emphasis and the timing of policies than absolute differences in the content of policies.18 Clearly parties do make a difference, but the differences are subtle and not much based on a simple class model of politics. Pressure Groups and Corporatism One factor that has pushed toward the homogenization of policies between the two parties is the growing influence of interest groups in British politics. As with most industrialized countries, there was a movement toward “corporatism” in British politics from the s through the s, with a number of interest groups granted something approaching an official status as generators of demands and implementers of policies once adopted. The role of groups in British policy is rarely acknowledged officially—the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy is still invoked—but in practice much public policy is influenced, or even determined, by interest groups.19 One consequence of Thatcherism, as confirmed by the Major and Blair governments, has been a move away from corporatism. Nonetheless, no matter which party is in office, there are pressures for continuity of policies rather than change from one government to the next. Also, the policies made in conjunction with pressure groups tend to be made through stable patterns of interaction between civil servants and pressure-group leaders and through institutionalized processes of advice for the ministries. Changes in government, therefore, would have little opportunity to affect the basic content of the dynamics of policymaking. Interest groups may not be as closely linked into policymaking as in Ger-

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many or Sweden, but there are close and enduring connections between government and groups. Major Interest Groups A number of different interest groups affect policy in Britain. These range from small attitude groups with narrow and largely noneconomic concerns (e.g., ecological groups and peace activists) to large, influential interest groups that attempt to have their economic interests served through the policy process. The most obvious example of an economic group is the labor unions, although business and agriculture are also highly organized and effective politically. While the clout exercised by the large economic groups is substantial, there are notable cases of small attitude groups also exercising substantial influence over policy. Labor Unions. The largest and probably still most influential of the interest groups are the unions, with a total membership of  million workers, or nearly  percent of the total labor force. Most of these unions are organized into one national federation, the Trades Union Congress (TUC). The Labour Party is directly linked to the TUC, which gained a reputation as one of the world’s most vociferous labor movements because of the large number of strikes called in Britain in the s and s. Unions were once a major counterforce to the power of government, and British elections were fought over whether the unions or the government actually ran the country, with ambiguous results. The political power of the unions, combined with the threat of industrial action by their members, indeed made them a formidable political influence until their decline in membership in the s and s and their loss of political influence under Blair. Despite its large membership, the TUC has been losing some of its power. In the first place, a declining proportion of the labor force belongs to unions, and there is a shift from blue-collar to white-collar union membership. Although some white-collar unions have shown a willingness to use the strike weapon (e.g., those in the public sector), most are less militant than blue-collar workers. Further, the TUC has not been able to enforce any discipline on its own members. When the miners struck in –, after some negotiations with the government, the TUC urged them to return to work, but the miners refused. The failure of the miners to win concessions from the government weakened the trade union movement. Union militancy can still produce widespread and disruptive strikes (e.g., the transportation strikes of the summer of ), but a good deal of the power appears to be gone. This loss of power can also be seen by the willingness of the Labour government under Blair to almost ignore the unions when making policy. Management. Although there is a single large labor movement, business and management groups are divided into several groups. The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) is the major management organization, but a number of other general and specialized industrial groups also speak for management. The linkage between management groups and the Conservative Party is not so close as that between the unions and the Labour Party, although it certainly does exist. They have relatively less direct influence

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on party policies and programs than the unions do in Labour. In addition to the CBI, the Institute of Directors was increasingly important during the s and has emerged as another important group speaking for business. Although not really management per se, financial interests in the City of London (“the City”) also have a substantial influence over economic policy and over the Conservative Party. These became especially apparent as financial deregulation during the Thatcher government helped the London Stock Exchange and other financial markets to prosper. During the s several scandals and a general slowing in the economy reduced the influence of the City. Agriculture. Relatively few workers are employed in agriculture in the United Kingdom, but farmers and their colleagues in fishing are well organized and very effective. The most important organization is the National Farmers Union (NFU), but commodity groups ranging from beekeepers to dairymen are actively engaged in lobbying and other political activity. Agricultural groups have traditionally been successful in obtaining subsidies for their crops and have been especially advantaged by Britain’s entry into the European Community. They have shifted a good deal of their lobbying focus to the European level in Brussels but still are effective in extracting subsidies and benefits from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in London, and the Scottish Environment and Rural Affairs Department in Edinburgh. Professional Organizations. A large number of professional organizations exist in the United Kingdom, including groups such as the British Medical Association, the Royal College of Nursing (a trade union affiliated with the TUC), and the British Association of Social Workers. These groups tend to be politically unaffiliated and traditionally more concerned with the maintenance of professional standards of practice than with the protection of the political and economic interests of their members. In the former role, professional groups frequently serve in a public capacity as the source and implementers of standards and as accrediting agencies for practitioners. Nevertheless, given that the major employer of health care professionals and social service professionals is government, these associations do press their own political interests. These have to do with economic issues such as pay and working conditions, as well as social concerns such as the overall level of funding and service in the National Health Service. The changes in the National Health Service imposed by the Conservative governments provoked a good deal of opposition from these groups, including industrial action. Education is another service area dominated by the public sector. The major education associations in the United Kingdom are at once professional associations and unions. The National Union of Teachers (NUT) and the Association of University Teachers (AUT) are both affiliated with the TUC, and both have struck or have threatened to strike. They are also vitally concerned with professional issues such as academic freedom and tenure. The AUT was especially active during the Thatcher and Major years, attempting to ward off the effects of resource starvation and increased student numbers that have been implemented as a part of higher educational policy in Britain.

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Attitude Groups. In addition to the economic interest groups described above, a number of attitude groups are important in British politics. There are a huge number of such groups, covering almost the gamut of social issues. Three sets of groups have been particularly important. One of these sets consists of peace movement groups. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) has been the longest-lived of these, beginning its protests against British nuclear weapons and U.S. weapons on British soil in the s and continuing until the present. CND has been joined by a number of other peace and antinuclear groups, such as the Greenham Common women protesting the location of U.S. cruise missiles in Britain. Nature and environmental groups make up a second of these sets. With the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals on one end of a spectrum of tactics and radical antivivisection groups on the other, this movement has sought to protect wildlife in Britain and increasingly has been involved with similar issues throughout the European Union. The third of these sets are those stressing human rights rather than animal rights: Amnesty International, Oxfam, Save the Children, Shelter, and a host of other social service and international aid organizations.

Patterns of Influence As in virtually all democratic systems, there are a number of means through which pressure groups in the United Kingdom can attempt to influence the policies of government. Government in the United Kingdom is formally less receptive to interest groups than many other governments. It lacks institutionalized means of legitimating interest group involvement, and hence the routes of exerting that influence may be somewhat more circuitous. The four major methods for pressure-group influence in the United Kingdom are lobbying, direct sponsorship of MPs, direct representation on government bodies, and consultation with ministries. Lobbying. Lobbying the legislature is perhaps less common in the United Kingdom

than in the United States, in part because party discipline makes it less likely to influence an MP’s vote. Lobbying does occur, with the purpose being to get a voice in Parliament, more than a vote. MPs receive delegations from their constituencies or from nationally based organizations. Such delegations are particularly influential when a constituency has a single major economic interest, as with automobile manufacturing in Coventry or coal mining in some Welsh constituencies. Some pressure groups are sufficiently well organized to hire parliamentary agents or correspondents to maintain contact with members, attempting to influence the few potential crossover MPs and feeding friendly MPs with ideas and information. In turn, the lobbies receive attention for their interests during those opportunities that even backbench MPs have to interject themselves into parliamentary business (e.g., the Question Time or adjournment debates). The lobbying activity of interest groups has been increasing markedly since the s. This increase to some degree reflects the greater contact between the public and private sectors initiated by the Thatcher government. It further reflects the general increase in communications opportunities and activities in contemporary society, as well as increased societal demands for participation and involvement. British government has al-

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ways been subject to political pressure, but rather than the less overt patterns of pressure observed previously, there is now more overt lobbying. Despite being a democracy of long standing, the British population has been relatively quiescent, but that cultural pattern has been changing rapidly and markedly. Direct Sponsorship of MPs. In the United Kingdom it is permissible for interest groups to sponsor prospective MPs. Groups do not contribute a majority of an MP’s electoral and other expenses, but some do pay MPs to represent particular causes in Parliament (such as American tobacco interests). A group may even keep an MP on a regular retainer as long as that relationship is registered with the Register of Members’ Interests. Sponsorship historically has been especially important in the Labour Party as a means of permitting manual laborers to go to Parliament. Naturally, sponsorship involves some degree of control by the sponsor, although in cases such as those of unions and working-class MPs, it is unlikely that the sponsor would ask the MP to do anything he or she would not otherwise have done. Still, the increasing perception of impropriety is subjecting sponsorship to questioning and reconsideration. Direct Representation. British government has had very little of the corporatist pattern of interest intermediation that has characterized many other European countries. Despite that, interest groups have had direct and official links with government in several ways. In some instances, interest groups were directly represented in the advisory committees attached to ministries. In other cases, pressure groups have actually composed the majority of public organizations, such as the former National Economic Development Council (“Neddy”), which was established under Conservative aegis in the early s to promote economic growth through the cooperation of business, labor, and government. This experiment with corporatism was abolished in the mid-s because of Thatcher’s aversion to programs of this type. Finally, interest groups may actually administer programs for government, as the Law Society does with Legal Aid and agricultural groups do for some farm programs. In all of these cases it is clear, first, that governments cannot readily ignore interest groups so closely tied to the public sector, and second, that many of the traditional ideas about the separation of state and society in Western democracies make relatively little sense in the light of the increasing use of private organizations for public purposes. Consultation. Less formally, government organizations frequently consult with inter-

est groups. Interest groups have expert knowledge of their particular areas, and they are able to predict the reactions of their members to proposed policy changes. A government agency can gain not only in the technical quality of its proposals but also in their legitimacy by full consultation prior to the enactment. In an era in which delegated legislation is increasingly important, this means that a substantial amount of policy will be determined by consultations between civil servants and interest-group members. Also, interest groups are having an increasing impact on policies of all kinds, with a consequent decline in the relative influence of political parties and elective politicians.

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Notes . Peter Hennessy and Anthony Seldon, eds., Ruling Performance: British Governments from Atlee to Thatcher (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ). . David Denver, “The Centre,” in Britain at the Polls, , ed. Anthony King (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, ). . The chair, Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, is a prominent Liberal Democrat, and electoral reform has been a long-term concern for the Liberal Democrats. . Colin Brown and Patricia Wynn Davis, “Major Gives a Pledge to Listen,” The Independent,  May . . This latter feature is becoming less true as Liberal Democrats often come in second to Conservatives in constituencies in the south of England and second to Labour in Northern England. Further, in Scottish constituencies the Conservatives now frequently come in third, or even fourth. . Nyta Mann, “Blair Set for Clause Four Victory,” New Statesman and Society  ( March ): –. . Patricia Wynn Davies, “Labour to Impose All-Women Shortlists,” The Independent,  September . . See Paul Anderson and Nyta Mann, Safety First: The Making of New Labour (London: Granta Books, ). . The term “Old Tories” comes from Samuel H. Beer, British Politics in a Collectivist Era (New York: Knopf, ). For a very useful discussion of the contemporary Conservative Party, see Paul Whiteley, Jeremy J. Richardson, and Patrick Seyd, True Blues: The Politics of Conservative Party Membership (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). . These figures are estimates; no definitive figures exist for Conservative Party membership. . See J. Mohan, The Political Geography of Contemporary Britain (London: Macmillan, ). . Mark N. Franklin, The Decline of Class Voting in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ); Anthony Heath et al., Understanding Political Change: Britain Votes – (Oxford: Pergammon, ); Ivor Crewe, “Labor Force Changes, Working Class Decline and the Labour Vote,” in Labor Parties in Postindustrial Societies, ed. Frances Fox Piven (Oxford: Polity Press, ). . Patrick Dunleavy, “The Urban Basis of Political Alignment: Social Class, Domestic Property Ownership and State Intervention in Consumption Processes,” British Journal of Political Science  (): –. . In the south of England unemployment appears more important as a predictor of voting than does the nominal occupation of an individual. . There is some evidence that voters tend to behave somewhat more conservatively as they age, so these data do not mean that the same patterns necessarily will persist. . Richard Rose, Do Parties Make a Difference? (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, ), . . Richard Rose, Politics in England, th ed. (Glenview, Ill: Scott, Foresman, ), . . Rose, Do Parties Make a Difference? . Some scholars argue that groups are in many ways more central to policy than are parties. See Jeremy Richardson and A. Grant Jordan, Government Under Pressure (Oxford: Martin Robertson, ). For a critique of British pluralism, see Samuel H. Beer, Britain Against Itself (London: Faber, ).

Chapter 4

How Is Power Used? TO THIS POINT we have described the institutions of British government but have

done so in rather a static fashion. This chapter attempts to bring these structures to life and to demonstrate how actors and institutions produce public policies. We also will demonstrate how the distinctive character of British governmental institutions affects the policies produced so that they may be different from those emanating from other political systems, even those faced with similar policymaking problems. In particular, the majoritarian nature of British parliamentary democracy tends to produce somewhat broader swings in policy than might be found in the consensual democracies such as Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands. It is helpful in this discussion to consider two broad kinds of policymaking that must go on in any government. The first is making new policies, as when the institutions of government decide to have the public sector engage in new activities or to undertake their current activities in significantly different ways. This type of policymaking is typically a legislative process, although administrative actors are certainly involved in the propagation of new policy ideas and again during their implementation. Also, the making of new policies tends to be more overtly politicized, with parties and interest groups directly involved in the process. The second major form of policymaking is simply maintaining the existing policies and programs of government. This is frequently less political in a strictly partisan sense; instead, it may involve bargaining among ministers and the managers of existing programs with their financial overseers (in Britain, the Treasury), as well as overt or covert competition among the existing programs. Thus, the majority of this policymaking activity is not legislative but involves executive and administrative actors. Further, government does not have the opportunity to exercise very much discretion for most decisions in this category of policymaking because existing commitments of government to citizens and organizations must be honored. We now look at the British political system as it processes both kinds of policy decisions. One important departure from the typical pattern of policymaking has been the increased emphasis on reducing the size of the public sector. This means that very few programs are able to escape serious scrutiny when they come up for funding or reconsideration. While the Labour Party (with support from the Liberal Democrats) has defended programs that the Conservatives would like to eliminate or restrict, even the Blair government has acquiesced in a general tendency of retrenchment. It has refrained from the “tax

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and spend” characteristics of Old Labour, and has so far increased public spending somewhat less than might have been expected.1 One consequence of this approach has been New Labour’s failure to fulfill electoral promises to improve public services such as rail transport and the National Health Service—at its potential electoral peril. Nonetheless, the Labour government has been active in other policy areas, using its regulatory powers as much as its spending powers to promote its policy goals. The Parliamentary Process and New Policies To understand how new policies are made and then put into operation, it is convenient to follow a “typical” piece of legislation through the process of lawmaking, from an issue being placed on the agenda for consideration through its implementation. Of course, no piece of legislation is really typical; some bills are enacted in a matter of days (or even hours in an emergency) the first time they are proposed, while others must wait for years before being passed. For example, legislation implementing the Northern Ireland agreements in the summer of  was expected to pass through Parliament in one or two days; there were some delays, but still it passed in less than a week. Some policy ideas may never be passed into law, or they may have their intentions almost totally altered through implementation. Despite these differences, an underlying policymaking process is common to all proposals. Agenda Setting and Policy Formulation The first thing that must be done if a piece of legislation is to be adopted is to place it on the policymaking agenda.2 This is true in an informal sense in that the policy must be considered sufficiently important for the government to act on, and is true in the more formal sense of being placed before Parliament for consideration and possible adoption. In an even more fundamental way problems must be identified before they can be placed on a government agenda. For example, it has taken some time for the issue of race to be recognized in the increasingly heterogeneous country that is Britain.3 Deciding which issues are public and require the consideration of government is a very diffuse and uncertain process in Britain, as it is in almost all countries. Political parties and the governments they form are principal agents in placing issues on the agenda, but other actors are also involved. These others include individual members of Parliament who may have special interests and strive—sometimes for years—to have an issue considered. Interest groups are also involved in agenda setting and attempt to dramatize the needs and desires of their members. The media increasingly places issues into the consciousness of citizens and that of governing institutions. Finally, Britain’s membership in the European Union has meant that a number of issues arising in Brussels have to become a part of the agenda of the government in London, if only to implement EU decisions. In a formal sense, the easiest way for an issue to come before Parliament is for it to become part of the government’s legislative program. Parliament’s legislative time is limited, and the government must select those issues and bills it believes are most important. This selection requires difficult choices by the government because it introduces relatively few bills in any one year. For example, during the Thatcher and Major years, governments introduced an average of just under fifty bills per session; the Blair government has been

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more active, but still less than ninety bills were introduced in each of its first few years. Since several of the bills involved annual budget and financial considerations, and a large number of the remaining bills involved consolidation and clarification of existing legislation, few significant policy bills were introduced during each parliamentary session.4 In almost all cases, the policy bills that were passed were a part of the government’s program, and the government can, if it wishes (and it usually does), control the parliamentary agenda. Bills and issues may also come before Parliament without being a part of the government’s program. Backbenchers can introduce legislation, although it has little chance of being passed. First, a backbencher must win a lottery to have the opportunity to introduce a bill, and then there are generally only ten or twelve Fridays—the only day on which private members’ bills are debated—during a session in which a bill may be considered. Bills may also be introduced under the ten-minute rule, which allows for ten minutes of debate, pro and con, followed immediately by the vote. Both kinds of legislation can lead to consideration of issues the government may as soon forget or issues of a moral nature on which the government does not wish to take a stance, and sometimes private members’ bills are really submitted as a favor to a government that does not want to have to take a stand on a difficult issue. Most private members’ bills are not, however, likely to generate political controversy. One restraint on this form of legislation is that backbenchers cannot introduce legislation involving the expenditure of public funds— only ministers can make those proposals. It is easier for the nongovernmental parties and backbenchers in the majority party to have issues discussed in Parliament than it is for them actually to pass legislation. Question Time is an obvious opportunity for generating that discussion. Adjournment debates and motions by private members also allow individual MPs to air grievances; the last thirty minutes of each daily session is an adjournment debate on matters raised by backbenchers. On average, backbenchers receive approximately  percent of all parliamentary time, an allocation made by the government, and much of that time is spent discussing specific constituency grievances rather than general issues. This allocation permits the average member relatively little opportunity to have an impact on major policy issues. One strategy that MPs can employ to counteract some of this imbalance of power is to specialize in particular policy topics, a strategy made easier by the creation of the select committees.5 Also, the expanded use of the electronic media provides members of Parliament the opportunity to air their opinions and to have at least an indirect influence over policy. The Opposition is also given a substantial amount of parliamentary time to present its alternatives to the government program, the major opportunities being the extended debate on the Queen’s Speech (actually written for her by the government as a statement of its policy objectives for the session), which opens each session of Parliament, and the twenty-six “supply days” scattered throughout the parliamentary session. Again, however, this debate may be useful for ventilating opinions, but it may have little real impact on policy choices. This is in part because the government has already established the agenda, and all the Opposition can do is to react to its propositions. Further, if the government maintains its party discipline, there is little the Opposition can do to prevent the legislation from being adopted.

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In addition to controlling the agenda and timetable, the government must be heavily involved in formulating legislation. Most of the broad ideas for policy formulation come from the party’s election manifesto, and ministers also have their own ideas about good policy. Further, ministers receive advice about policy initiatives from their civil servants and from political advisers in their departments. Within the cabinet, legislation typically is first considered by a cabinet committee composed of interested ministers (usually with some Treasury representation) before being considered by the entire cabinet.6 The shape of legislation to be introduced generally will be decided by the full cabinet prior to the legislation’s being proposed to Parliament. In full cabinet, the prime minister will play a significant role, not least because he or she summarizes the debate and says finally what was decided. Nevertheless, parties and political leaders are not the only source of policy intentions and policy formulation, and many policy ideas come from the departments themselves. And, as is true in many industrialized democracies, the balance of power between elective and nonelective officials may have swung in favor of the unelected.7 No matter which set of actors is most powerful, the process of formulating policy is complex, involving the interaction of ministers with their civil servants and, in turn, consultation with the affected interests in society. The increased emphasis on managerialism in the British civil service has weakened its policy capacity, although the separation of many implementation functions from policymaking through the creation of agencies provides the remaining civil servants in departments with more time to deal exclusively with policy. Policy Legitimation Once the cabinet has agreed on a policy proposal, it is introduced into Parliament as a bill, with all politically controversial legislation by convention first going to the House of Commons. For a bill to become law, it must pass the House of Commons, pass the House of Lords (unless it is passed by three successive Houses of Commons or is a money bill), and gain royal assent. There are ways of short-cutting this process, and a significant amount of lawmaking in Britain is done by the government itself, using orders in council and statutory instruments that do not require the approval of Parliament.8 When a bill is introduced into the House of Commons, it is given a formal first reading and then printed for distribution. After two or three weeks, the second reading takes place, which is the major political debate on the principles of the legislation. For noncontroversial legislation, however, the second reading may occur in committee. After the second reading, a bill typically goes to committee for detailed consideration and possible amendment. Note that the committee stage occurs after Commons has agreed to the legislation in principle. Although committees are organized to mirror the partisan composition of Parliament, the government is much more willing to accept amendments in committee than on the floor of the House, where this might be taken as an admission of defeat. Finally, the bill is reported out of committee with any amendments, a third reading is given, and the legislation is passed. After passage in the Commons a bill then goes to the House of Lords for consideration and possible amendment. Any amendments made in Lords must be later considered

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Annual Immigration (in thousands) France

 .

Germany Italy Russia Sweden

.
. . 

United Kingdom

.

United States Canada



Source: Eurostat Yearbook (), and Russian Statistical Yearbook (). Data are for –.

by Commons. In the adversarial political system of the United Kingdom, the House of Lords can be an extremely useful institution. It is a place where the government can accept amendments and negotiate improvements in legislation without appearing to back away from its policy proposals. A government can even accept defeat in Lords without serious damage to its prospects of retaining office. And although deadlocks between the two houses are possible, they are infrequent. After agreement is reached, the bill is given to the Queen for royal assent, which is virtually automatic. Of course, legislation does not necessarily move so easily through the policymaking system, and so there must be some means of regulating the flow, particularly preventing the delay of important legislation. At the report stage, a number of amendments may be reported out of committee, and the Speaker is given the power to decide which amendments should be debated and which would be repetitious of debates in committee. The government can also attempt to impose closure and the “guillotine” (allocation of time order). Closure is a motion to end debate made by one hundred or more MPs, but it will be accepted only if the Speaker believes all relevant positions have been heard. When there are a number of different points of dissent and closure is ineffective, the guillotine is employed. An allocation of time order is voted by the House of Commons, and the government makes a determination of how much time will be spent on each section of the bill. Once that time is exhausted, the Speaker must move the section to a vote. The use of the guillotine is often cited as contradictory to the interests of the House as a deliberative body, especially when it is imposed on major constitutional issues, such as the devolution debates during the Callaghan government in the s. But the guillotine may be necessary if Parliament is to process the amount of legislation a contemporary democracy requires. With party discipline, much of the legislative activity of Parliament appears foreordained, but it is still important. First, the legal and constitutional requirements for the

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passage of legislation must be fulfilled. Second, amendments can be accepted and the amended legislation must be approved, both in the committee stage in Commons and in Lords. Finally, some legislation that seems perfectly reasonable to the majority of the cabinet may not appear so reasonable to backbenchers in the party, and the legislation may never be passed. On average, about  percent of all government bills introduced into Parliament do not become law; few are defeated, but others may be withdrawn. Thus, although the presence of disciplined majorities in the House of Commons is certainly important, legislative action is never certain. British democracy has long been representative democracy, but there were several interesting occurrences of direct democracy as a means of legitimating policies during the s. Of particular significance were two referendums on policy issues—in  on whether Britain should remain in the Common Market, and in  on the devolution proposals in Scotland and Wales. The latter proposals were voted on in Scotland and Wales only, but the principle was the same: The government and Parliament to some degree abdicated their decision-making powers to the people in an election. Although these referendums were not legally binding, they were declared binding by the major parties. Referendums represent a major departure from the traditional means of decision making in British government and have potential importance for major policy decisions, including the prospect of a referendum on British membership in Economic and Monetary Union within the EU. Policy Implementation After a bill is passed by Parliament, perhaps the most difficult portion of the process of changing society through government action occurs: the implementation process. This is the process of taking the bare bones of parliamentary legislation and putting some meat on them. This meat consists of both substantive policy declarations and organizational structure to carry out the intent of Parliament, or at times, to thwart that intent. Most legislation passed by Parliament is passed in a broad form, allowing a great deal of room for interpretation as the laws are put into effect. Public policies may be implemented in a number of ways. Probably the most common is through departments of the central government. Most legislation coming from Parliament contains a broad mandate of power, with the ministry then having the power and the requirement to make the necessary regulations and engage in the activities for the intent of the legislation to come into being. A principal means for the departments’ doing this is through statutory instruments developed pursuant to acts of Parliament. Statutory instruments contain more detailed regulations than acts do and allow the executive to have a major impact on the nature of the policy actually implemented. Parliament exercises scrutiny over these instruments but cannot hope to master completely the volume or technical content of all such regulations. Even when the issuance of a statutory instrument is not required, the departments are heavily involved in shaping the meaning of policy and in making it work. The departments may also be barriers to effective implementation, especially when the policy enacted by Parliament appears to run counter to their usual practices. In like manner, the existence of regional and local offices of the ministry

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The shuttle train emerges from the “Chunnel,” a direct link between Britain and the Continent. (JeanClaude N’Diaye/Imapress/The Image Works)

is frequently associated with varying patterns of implementation and, at times, great variations from the original intentions of Parliament in some parts of the country.9 Policies of the central government are also implemented through local authorities. Unlike a federal system, local authorities in Britain are creatures of the central government, and there is less differentiation between national and local policy than in the United States.10 While the major policy decisions in areas such as education, health, social services, and the police are made by the central government, these services are actually delivered by local authorities. These public services are not delivered uniformly; local authorities provide different quantities and qualities of service, albeit within centrally determined parameters and subject to inspection and control by the central government. This relationship between central policy making and local administration does not work without friction, especially when local and central governments are controlled by different parties. Recent examples of conflicts include Conservative local authorities delaying implementation of Labour policies for comprehensive education, and Labour local authorities refusing to implement Conservative cash limits on expenditures for health care and housing. In return for the administration of national policies, the local authorities receive the majority of their revenues from the central government. Some of the grants to local authorities are tied to the provision of specific services (e.g., the police), while the largest single grant—the rate support grant is a general grant. (The formula for computing the

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rate support grant does, however, include weightings for the levels of service provided by a local authority.) If a local authority wishes to provide services not funded directly by the rate support grant or the categorical grants from central government, then it must be willing to raise funds from local revenues, generally the council tax system. Finally, policies may be implemented by private organizations. Interest groups are frequently regarded as barriers to effective implementation, but such groups may have an increasingly important positive role to play in implementation. Minimally, an interest group can function as a watchdog on the implementation of a policy, substituting for the army of public inspectors that might otherwise be required. Environmental groups have been particularly active in this monitoring role. A more important involvement of groups in implementation involves the group actually implementing a policy for government. This occurs frequently in agriculture when the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) applies general policies in enforcing animal welfare legislation. These activities would otherwise require huge amounts of time and public money and might not be performed as well. Further, at times government subsidizes an organization to provide a service that government supports as a matter of policy and that would have to be provided at public expense if the private organization were not willing to provide it. One example of this is the Law Society’s providing legal assistance to the indigent. Policy Evaluation The last stage of making a policy occurs some time after the policy has been adopted or even implemented. This is the evaluation of the policy. Here we are discussing the formal evaluation of the policy, whereas informal evaluation begins almost at the time of passage. Policy evaluation is also closely related to policymaking for continuing policy, which is our next major topic, for the annual decisions to continue policies and programs made in the budgetary process to some degree involve evaluation of the effectiveness and efficiency of those policies. Parliament is assumed to conduct ongoing scrutiny of the policies of government, and a number of instruments for policy evaluation are housed within the government itself. The now defunct Programme Analysis and Review (PAR) and the diminished Public Expenditure Survey Committee linked program evaluation directly with financial management. The Select Committees of the House of Commons are increasingly active in evaluating existing programs, and the few committees in the House of Lords also are engaged in limited oversight. A growing staff in the Prime Minister’s Office also monitors policies on behalf of the executive. Through the parliamentary commissioner, or ombudsman, Parliament maintains additional evaluative control over the administration of policy. Finally, the comptroller and auditor general and the National Audit Office have become increasingly important watchdogs. Like auditing organizations in other industrialized nations, these offices have added policy evaluation to their former duties as financial auditors. These offices monitor policy developments in both the central government and the local authorities. A number of mechanisms for policy evaluation exist independent of the government.

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One of the most commonly used devices is the appointment of parliamentary or royal commissions to investigate particular policy concerns that are more fundamental than any government may want to become involved in without advice. These commissions and their reports often constitute milestones in the evolution of policy and program management. Such was the case of the Fulton Report on the civil service, the Plowden report on public expenditure control, and the Kilbrandon report on devolution. The commissions have no formal powers, however, and even excellent reports often go unheeded. In part because of her reliance on her own advisers and on a more ideological style of government, there were almost no royal commissions during the Thatcher years. A number of public inquiries into specific policy questions have taken place, some with substantial policy and political relevance (e.g., into nuclear power and into the fire in the London Underground). The Blair government has appointed several commissions, the most important being the Jenkins Commission on Electoral Reform. Finally, there are a number of less official mechanisms for generating policy evaluation. The news media constitute one such mechanism, which exercises a considerable degree of self-censorship. Privacy has become a more important issue in Britain than restrictions imposed by the Official Secrets Act and the lack of access to important information. The number of policy think tanks also continues to increase, some of them representing clearly defined ideological positions, while others strive toward greater objectivity. Finally, research units of political parties and pressure groups also produce evaluations of existing policies. A great deal of official and unofficial policy evaluation occurs, although tight control by the government over the parliamentary agenda makes consideration of many policy changes unlikely unless they suit the purposes of the incumbent government. Although policy evaluation ends one cycle of policymaking, it often begins the next.11 Governments rarely make perfect policies the first time they try, but often they know so little about the dynamics of the problem area into which they intervene that trial-and-error learning may be the only means available for improving conditions. Therefore, governments often have to modify existing policies based on their experiences with those policies. That experience is often reflected in the evaluation process. Further, the social and economic conditions that are the objects of a particular policy may also change, and government will have to modify its programs to meet those changing conditions. Thus, although we have depicted policymaking as beginning at the beginning and going through to the end, this may be just the start of another cycle. At times the messages from the consumers of policies are very clear signals for change, as they were for the poll tax in . Policy Continuation: Budgeting Most policymaking is not making new policies; it is reaffirming old policies or making marginal adjustments in those policies. In many ways this form of policymaking is politically more sensitive than making new policies, for existing programs have existing employees, clients, and organizations, while new policies have no inertia pushing existing commitments forward. Although there may be some modifications or even threatened

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terminations, in most years the most important decisions for continuing policies are made in the budgetary process. That process involves financing the huge number of existing policy commitments, with their relative priorities determined in pounds and pence. (Here we are speaking of the budgetary process in a U.S. sense; in Britain the term budget usually refers to the government’s revenue, not expenditure, proposals.) The control of the public purse has been central to the powers of the British Parliament historically, but the existence of disciplined partisan majorities, and the general uncertainty about economic growth, has transformed substantially the locus of effective budgetary powers. Even now, however, British government appears to spend more time in trying to get the machinery of financial allocation “right,” when compared to most other parliamentary systems. Budgeting can be best thought of as taking place in two stages. One is an administrative stage during which the spending ministries negotiate with the Treasury and with their colleagues in cabinet over expenditure commitments. The second stage is the parliamentary stage during which these decisions are legitimated but only occasionally changed. The Executive Stage The Treasury is the central actor at the executive stage of budgeting. The Treasury is charged not only with making recommendations on macroeconomic policy but also with formulating detailed expenditure plans that fall within those economic constraints. The Treasury has traditionally been the most prestigious appointment for a civil servant, and those in the Treasury have adopted the “Treasury view” concerning the proper amount of public spending and who should spend the money. Since at least the days of Gladstone, that view has been skeptical about expenditures and concerned with saving “candle ends” as well as billions of pounds. This view does not always prevail, but it must always be considered. The first round of bargaining over expenditures is typically at the level of civil servants—those from spending departments and those from the Treasury. This bargaining takes place with the knowledge of the relevant ministers, but can be conducted more easily by officials who know both one another and the facts of the programs. Both elements are important. Interpersonal trust and respect are important components of the success of any bargainer, especially when the spending departments must have their requests reviewed annually.12 The same Treasury civil servants may see the same departmental civil servants year after year, and any attempts to manipulate or deceive may gain in the short run but will surely lose in the long run. Also, civil servants tend to understand the technical aspects of their programs better than ministers do. In addition to their annual (or at times more frequent) bargaining for expenditures, departments must also bargain for deviations from expenditure plans during the year, allowing the Treasury a number of opportunities to monitor and intervene in departmental policies. The second stage of executive bargaining occurs among the spending ministers, the Treasury, and the cabinet as a whole. Budget decisions are manifestly political, and if nothing else, they reflect the relative political powers and skills of the ministers involved. The task of the spending ministers is to fight for their programs and to try to get as much

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money as they can. The Treasury ministers (the chancellor of the exchequer and the chief secretary of the Treasury) are the guardians of the public purse and play the role of skeptic. They perform an important function in budgetary politics, and are responsible for much of the “nitty-gritty” in day-to-day allocations and oversight. The prime minister must moderate any conflicts that arise, but knows that he or she can rarely go against the Treasury ministers if the government is to function smoothly. Also, in today’s more conservative period, there is some political advantage to opposing expenditure increases. The fight over the budget occurs on a one-to-one basis between spending ministers and the Treasury ministers, in cabinet committees, and finally in full cabinet meetings. Under the Thatcher government, a special cabinet committee (referred to as “Star Chamber”) was formed to review disputes between the Treasury and spending departments, usually siding with the Treasury. The position of Treasury was enhanced after , with the chancellor of the exchequer heading the cabinet committee reviewing expenditures. The Treasury is in a powerful position politically and enjoys the right of making the first presentation of expenditure figures in cabinet meetings, but after that there is a tendency for the spending ministers to gang up against the Treasury. As this is a political process, a coalition can usually be formed to increase expenditures that enable all spending ministers to make their constituents happy, and to make themselves look good in the eyes of their departments. It takes a very strong chancellor, backed by an equally strong prime minister, to oppose that type of coalition. Opposition to spending in government was very successful under Thatcher, but appeared less cohesive under the less assertive and somewhat less conservative Major. In keeping with his strategy to make fiscal policy long-term and to loosen the supply side (which no longer was considered a demand management tool), Major introduced threeyear expenditure plans that were to be discussed in the context of setting monetary policy. Major also introduced an “escalation clause” on fiscal taxes (i.e., taxes were to rise in percentage terms faster than inflation) and funding rulings for the NHS (i.e., spending was to rise to about  percent above inflation). Labour has stuck with the idea that current expenditures should not rise faster than growth, but investment expenditures are allowed to go beyond that. The idea is that current expenditures should not cause a deficit on the fiscal account, but investment expenditures may do so. Tony Blair and his chancellor, Gordon Brown, are not always in agreement on these policy issues, with Brown being somewhat more willing to spend on social issues than is Blair.13 British government has made a great deal of effort to control the costs of government through analytic programs such as PESC (Public Expenditure Survey Committee) and PAR (Programme Analysis and Review). The major input of PESC into the decision process is a projection of the expenditure implications of existing programs, showing what the expenditure level would be if programs were to provide the same level of service in the year being budgeted as in previous years. PAR was intended as a comprehensive evaluation of specific programs, with the intention of making those programs more efficient or perhaps eliminating them. PAR obviously ran counter to the established norms of government and budgeting and was quietly phased out by the Thatcher government. In addition to rationalist methods of expenditure control, the British government also has

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used blunter instruments, such as cash limits that assign a maximum expenditure level for a program, with the program not being allowed for any reason to spend any more money. The Parliamentary Phase After the civil servants and the cabinet prepare their expenditure plans (estimates), these are presented to Parliament for adoption. Although the emphasis on control and on techniques for budgeting such as PESC have produced significant modernization, much of the terminology and procedure used by Parliament when considering public expenditures dates from earlier periods in which the monarch and Parliament were engaged in more intense conflicts over power. The major debates on expenditures occur during the twenty-six “supply days” each session, although the topics selected by the Opposition for debate on these days range far beyond expenditures. The civil estimates are introduced into Parliament by the chief secretary of the Treasury in February, with the minister of defense introducing defense estimates at about the same time. Parliament then has until July or early August to pass the Consolidated Fund (Appropriations) Bill authorizing the expenditure of funds. Given the difficulties in forecasting expenditures, especially in uncertain economic circumstances, the government usually must also introduce supplemental estimates in December and March. The budget is an important locus for parliamentary control over the executive. By standing order, Parliament cannot increase expenditures on its own; any increases must be recommended by a minister. Parliament can, however, recommend decreases. One means of expressing displeasure with the management of a ministry is to move for the reduction of the salary of the minister, frequently by a trivial amount such as £. This signals a debate not so much about the £ as about the policies of the department in question. Members of Parliament may move for less trivial changes in expenditure plans as well, but all these are likely to be defeated by the majority party, lest they be seen to be losing confidence in the House. Even if they are not able to alter expenditure plans directly, Parliament has become more effective at monitoring the spending decisions of government. Parliament as a whole is perhaps too large and disorganized to scrutinize expenditure programs effectively, and so it has developed a pair of committees to more closely examine the government estimates. One is the Treasury and Civil Service Select Committee, a rather small committee composed of members of the House of Commons who are well versed in issues of public spending. Despite this expertise, it still cannot cover the total range of the budget each year. This is especially true given the almost complete absence of professional staff support. The committee therefore concentrates on particularly important spending issues. Still, this committee has played an important role in the development of policy in Britain and has ventilated a number of important issues, sometimes to the discomfort of the government. One such institution is the Expenditure Committee, the successor to the Estimates Committee. The Expenditure Committee does its work in subcommittees, but unlike the Appropriations Committee in the U.S. Congress, it does not presume to cover the entire range of public expenditures each year. Instead, each subcommittee focuses on one or a

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few particular topics for a more detailed analysis. Given the ability of the government to have what it desires passed by Parliament, the Expenditure Committee has been unable to alter much public policy directly, although it has played an important role in ventilating ideas and opinions about the expenditure of funds. The committee is also important in restoring some parliamentary control over expenditures. The second important parliamentary committee for controlling public expenditures is the Public Accounts Committee (PAC). Unlike most committees in Parliament, PAC is headed by a member of the Opposition; it has the task of monitoring public expenditures after they have been made and after they have been audited (by the National Audit Office). Out of the mass of public expenditures, PAC selects certain topics for consideration each year and has the power to call civil servants before it to account for their actions. Other than calling attention to mismanagement or outright deception, however, PAC has few powers to improve the expenditure of funds. In addition to the two principal committees examining expenditures, the select committees created during the late s for monitoring the activities of the executive departments may be a useful device for parliamentary control of expenditures. It appears that these committees have been more successful than had been anticipated in exercising oversight. They have attracted the interest of many MPs and have demonstrated their ability to keep track of the huge volume of paper and decisions produced by the ministries. The powers of these committees are primarily to publicize any failures in the executive to the public and to Parliament, but even that publicity can function as a useful restraint on the power of ministers and civil servants.14 To this point we have been discussing the expenditure side of budgeting. On the revenue side, there is the same balance of power in favor of the cabinet and the Treasury. If anything, the balance of power resides even more in the hands of the executive, as Parliament has yet to develop a committee structure for monitoring revenue proposals. A small subcommittee of the Treasury and Civil Service Select Committee does examine revenue issues, but this is a minor role compared to the scrutiny of public expenditures. And, within the executive, the balance appears to favor the officials, as there are no ministers pushing for increased taxation as they do for increased expenditures. This is not to say that there are no political influences on taxation, as the shift from direct taxation (income taxes) to indirect taxation (value-added tax) in the first Thatcher budget, and the launching of the poll tax in her third term, indicate. Revenue recommendations are introduced each year around the first of April in the chancellor’s budget message. Immediately, Commons will pass the necessary budget resolutions, allowing for the immediate collection of some or all of the proposed tax measures. This immediate action is taken to prevent the legal avoidance of taxes by purchasing large quantities of alcoholic beverages, selling assets, paying off debts, and so on, under the preexisting tax laws. After that action, there follows a period of debate leading to the formal introduction of the Finance Bill, which is usually passed sometime before Parliament takes its summer recess in August. Cases of Parliament’s voting down new taxes or increased government expenditures have been rare. A recent VAT increase on fuel was only rescinded after massive public protests and a complete stoppage of the economy

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in the fall of . But hostility to taxes in and out of Parliament has meant few increases in visible taxes (at least until ). Instead, Parliament has enacted many “stealth taxes” (e.g., on insurance premiums, air tickets, and most obviously on pension funds). One of the common criticisms about the British budgetary process, which is also true of the budgetary process in many other nations, is that there is little or no integration of revenue and expenditure decisions. Citizens and politicians both tend to like expenditures and loathe taxation, and this commonly results in government’s failure to collect adequate revenues to meet expenditures and the creation of a deficit budget. Changes to coordinate taxation and expenditures would involve changes in many historic procedures but might well produce an improvement in the management of public-sector finances. The Blair government promised to address some of these issues with the publication of a Green Paper in December  on planning reforms affecting land use. Despite these institutional problems, the British government (unlike that of the United States) has not run substantial deficits since the early s, apparently because of the political will of the prime ministers and their fiscal advisers. This commitment to fiscal probity has continued even though the British economy has not been as productive as many other economies. Policymaking in Britain involves the interactions of cabinet, Parliament, and the civil service—to mention only the primary actors. In this interaction the formal location of power and the actual location of decision may be markedly different. The formal powers of decision reside in Parliament, but the effect of strong party discipline has been effectively to make the cabinet the primary decision-making institution. Given a government majority, once the cabinet decides on a policy, the dutiful members of the party will almost certainly ratify it on the floor of the House of Commons. There are, of course, instances in which the backbenchers overtly or covertly oppose government policy, and the cabinet rarely tries to run roughshod over its own party members; policy toward the European Union is the one area in contemporary British politics where this may happen. In most policy areas, if it is willing to push, the cabinet does have the ability to get most of what it wants passed into law without much real internal party opposition. The powers of the cabinet are restrained in other ways. First, ministers must contend with skillful and permanent civil servants. Especially within the budgetary process, the Treasury and its “mandarins” dominate decision making. Even in nonfinancial decisions, the expert knowledge of the civil servants, when compared with the relative dearth of expertise held by their nominal political masters, places the permanent civil service in a powerful position to influence outcomes. The reforms of the structure of British government to separate executive agencies from policy advisers in the departments is designed to improve political control over implementation, but there still is civil service power at the formulation stage. Finally, a number of interests and organizations other than these three major actors within government influence policy decisions. Interest groups not only attempt to influence policy as it is being formulated, but also may directly implement policies for the government. The increased use of “quangos” and fully private-sector organizations for policy formulation and implementation in Britain also reduces the degree of direct control over policy implementation by government. Local governments administer and im-

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plement a significant share of the programs of central government, and the central government must attempt to co-opt and encourage local governments to implement the policy as it was intended. Local governments also are effective lobbyists for their interests and may help shape as well as merely implement public policy. Notes . Colin Hay, The Political Economy of New Labour: Labouring Under False Pretenses? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ). . On agenda setting in British government, see Simon James, British Government: A Reader in Policy-Making (London: Routledge, ), –. . S. Saggar, Race and Politics in Britain (Hemel Hempsted: Harvester, ); “Racial Politics,” Parliamentary Affairs  (): –. . These figures are drawn from Ivor Burton and Gavin Drewry, “Public Legislation,” Parliamentary Affairs, various years. . David Judge, Backbench Specialization in the House of Commons (London: Heinemann, ). . C. Hood and O. James. “The Central Executive,” in P. Dunleavy et al., Developments in British Politics  (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ). . Martin Smith, The Core Executive in Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ), –. . See R. Baldwin, Rules and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Parliament does, however, review the content of these instruments through a select committee. . Brian W. Hogwood and Michael Keating, Regional Government in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). . R.A.W. Rhodes, Beyond Westminster and Whitehall: The Sub-Central Governments of Britain (London: Unwin Hyman, ). . Brian W. Hogwood and B. Guy Peters, Policy Dynamics (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, ). . Hugh Heclo and Aaron Wildavsky, The Private Government of Public Money (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), –. . But see the comments from an “old Labour” politician: Roy Hattersely, “The Secret Socialist at Number ,” The Guardian ( March ). . Keith Khrebiel, Information and Legislative Organization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ).

Chapter 5

What Is the Future of British Politics? EVEN IN THE MOST prosperous and well-managed political system, there are always

crises and decisions, for governments are constantly facing challenges. Because Britain has been neither the most prosperous nor the best-managed nation on earth, it must sustain itself in the face of a significant number of challenges to its political and economic systems. Many of these challenges arise from the international economic and political environment within which Britain operates, as globalization and Europeanization alter that environment and perhaps lessen the capacity of governments to control the economy. Some of the challenges also arise from the changing character of the political system itself, as constitutional reform alters many traditional ways of doing things in government. The Economy The economy was a problem for British government for much of the postwar period, but in the first part of the new century the economy is performing well, and at this time the British economy is outperforming most of its European counterparts. Government had to take the blame for the poor performance of the past, and it is now attempting to take the credit for the positive performance of the present. In particular, Labour’s adoption of some aspects of Thatcherite economic policy (deregulation, maintenance of lower tax rates) and adding some features of its own (granting greater autonomy to the Bank of England to set monetary policy) have produced rapid and sustained growth.1 Although recent economic performance has been very positive, there are some potential challenges. One is the regional problem that persists in the economy, a disparity in performance that may have real political consequences. Northern Ireland, the north of England, and to some extent Scotland and Wales have not grown at the same rate as the south of the United Kingdom, especially the London area. The problem for the Labour Party is that the areas that have failed to profit as much from the reviving economy are also the traditional heartland of the party. Ironically, the Labour boom appears to be benefiting stockbrokers and merchant bankers much more than it does the average industrial worker. Also, despite the general success in the economy, as in many industrialized countries economic globalization is creating a group of people who appear to be faced with permanent unemployment or underemployment, and this economic problem poses an important political problem for any contemporary government. Further, this globalization process is generating economic forces that widen income disparities within the popula-

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tion. The policies of the Labour government (following many paths established by the Tories) reducing the level of welfare state benefits make the life chances for anyone left behind in this economic transformation much less favorable than they would have been prior to these policy changes. The underlying uncertainty about the economic future of Britain has increased as a result of the accelerated movement toward greater economic (and political) integration with the European Union. Not all the plans of the Single European Act were implemented, although the member nations of the EU now constitute much more of a single economic area than they did prior to the implementation of the  program. This increased depth of integration is true despite the expansion of the EU in . Even more important, the Maastricht treaty, the  Intergovernmental Conference, and the Amsterdam treaty all point toward further economic integration. These changes have included monetary integration and the creation of a common currency, the euro. The increased international openness may place British industries into very direct competition with continental industries usually considered more efficient. The British government has been reluctant to support all the moves toward economic integration, especially the creation of a common currency (the euro). The United Kingdom may not be able to avoid the competitiveness problems posed by Europe and the rest of the world economy and by an especially strong pound that makes British goods expensive. Thus, continuing to play the role of skeptic may not serve the long-term economic goals of Britain well. The Public Sector The nature of the public sector in Britain is associated with economic changes in Britain. Despite the efforts of the Thatcher and Major governments to reduce the size of government, public expenditures as a percentage of gross domestic product were little reduced by the end of the more than seventeen years of Conservative government.2 The amount of deficit public borrowing had been put under control, but Britain continued to spend a great deal of money through the public sector. While the Labour government might have been expected to begin even higher levels of public expenditure, the opposite has been true; the public sector has been stable or even declining (with the exception of increased spending on the NHS). Likewise, there has been no attempt to return to the high levels of public ownership of industry that had been a central policy of most previous Labour governments. What privatization did, however, was to shift the terms of the debate on the size and nature of the public sector in British political life. The postwar consensus on the mixed-economy welfare state has been broken, perhaps for good, and governments now have the capacity to make their own choices about the social and economic future of the nation. Such choices run the risk of accentuating economic divisions in the country and therefore raising the political stakes in any policy discussion. What may be happening, however, is that a new consensus is emerging across much of the population, a consensus that calls for a much smaller and less intrusive public sector, even if that leaves some portions of the population behind. By the time John Major left office, there was relatively little industry left to privatize,

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Percentage of Population Aged  and Older .

France Germany

. .

Italy Russia

. .

Sweden

.

United Kingdom United States Canada

. .

Source: Calculated from Department of Economic and Social Affairs,  Democratic Yearbook (New York: United Nations, ).

but the nature of the state in Britain continues to change significantly. Instead of shedding activities to the market, the continuing reforms tend to impose market-type mechanisms within government. On the one hand, many of the industries that have been privatized require regulation, given that they are monopolies, and the British government has by now developed effective means of controlling rates and quality. The level of support for, and the quality of service provided by, the NHS continues to be a major political issue in Britain. The Conservatives were charged with harming the service, but it appears that the Labour government has not been able to return the service to its former state of respect by the population.3 Further, a variety of evaluative, regulative, and expenditure review programs continue to be implemented within the public sector. These began to some extent with the purpose of reducing the size of the public sector, but they have continued more with the intention of improving the quality of the services delivered. The Labour government has been substantially more willing to use its power over local governments and other public services than was the Conservative government, threatening to close or assume direct management of schools and other facilities if adequate standards of service are not maintained. Who Rules Britain? One of the major outcomes of the seventeen years of Conservative rule and the subsequent years of the Blair government has been to reassert the primacy of cabinet, if not always parliamentary, government in Britain. This may sound like an odd statement, given that the existence of democracy was never challenged in the United Kingdom the way that it has been in other countries, even in other European countries. In Britain the central question was the role of trade unions and other interest groups and the domination of policy in some Labour governments by those interests. Likewise, there was always the

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sense that the City of London (meaning the finance industry) and other business interests dominated the Conservative Party, a characterization that now seems truer than the domination of Labour by the unions. The power of the trade unions was broken during the Thatcher government. The miners attempted several times to exert their control over government policy with mixed results, and in the summer of  the railway workers tried their hand. Somewhat later, the public-sector unions challenged the capacity of the Thatcher government to rule when it proposed reducing the size of the public sector and eliminating the recognition of unions at the General Communications Headquarters, a major intelligence installation. The unions lost all these battles against a determined Conservative government. “New Labour” moved to reduce the power of the unions within its ranks, and certainly the Labour government is less beholden to the labor movement than were previous governments from that party. What these changes in Labour strategy and ideology imply is yet another dimension of the new consensus within the center of British political life. Whereas the old postwar consensus stressed the importance of the welfare state and services provided through the public sector, the new consensus stresses the need for lower taxes, a government that intervenes more with regulation and incentives than with spending and ownership, and a commitment to serving the public rather than providing employment for large numbers of public employees. The two major parties may interpret this consensus somewhat differently and may emphasize different aspects of it, but there does appear to be some basic agreement. The problem for the Conservative Party, however, is that the Labour Party has adopted much of its natural agenda so that the Tories are left with no place to go except for the (perceived) extreme and unacceptable political right by advocating dismantling even more programs in the public sector. Who Rules in Government? Now that we are more certain that the government of the day does indeed manage Britain, we still need to know which institution(s) are most influential. The problem here is also one of democratic governance. Voters in the United Kingdom go to the polls every few years and make choices about the party they wish to govern them for a period of up to five years. And Parliament, to which the members of that victorious party are elected (along with the opposition parties), nominally has the power to govern. As we have been emphasizing, however, the cabinet within partisan institutions of government and the civil service within government as a whole are increasingly important in policymaking. This means that the voting choices of millions of citizens may be negated, or perhaps only ignored, in the policymaking process. This is a serious problem for all democratic political systems, as citizens believe that the institutions of government are no longer responsive to their wishes and are overly bureaucratic and technocratic, rather than democratic. This alienation appears weaker in the United Kingdom than in several other industrialized countries, but it is still an important threat to the legitimacy of the system of government.4 The Conservative government in the s addressed at least one component of this

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problem of democratic governance. Rightly or wrongly, that government did not consider many members of the civil service sufficiently committed to the party program to implement it faithfully. Therefore, the Conservatives (and perhaps especially Thatcher) sought to reduce the influence of the civil service over policy. They brought more personal policy advisers into government and therefore were able to ignore advice from senior civil servants. Also, through several structural reforms, they made the civil service more managerial and less a source of policy advice. Some analysts argued that the government even interfered in the appointment of senior civil servants, although the evidence on this point is far from clear. In short, the structure of government was changed, apparently permanently, to provide the party in power even greater control over policy. This may make the system more “democratic,” but perhaps at the price of reducing the overall quality of policymaking by government. The Blair government has maintained, and perhaps even extended, the influence of government over the civil service and over the noncareer officials now appointed as heads of executive agencies. Another question about who rules in government is whether Britain is a cabinet government (or perhaps a parliamentary government) or whether it is becoming more a government dominated by the prime minister. This issue was raised about Margaret Thatcher, but it appears at least as applicable to Tony Blair. The Blair government has strengthened the policy machinery in the Prime Minister’s Office and has (along with the party leadership who are very loyal to the prime minister) attempted to exert rather close control over what Labour members of Parliament say and do in their public life. Of course, party discipline is a part of political life in a parliamentary regime, but the degree of control now being exerted does appear greater than in the past. The success of the Labour Party and the great concern of the Blair government with party unity and consistency also raise questions about who rules. On the one hand, this government appears to provide the type of party government that analysts believed might not be possible within this political system.5 The party in government has done much of what it said it would during the  election campaign, often to the dismay of some “Old Labour” politicians. On the other hand, one could argue that the party itself may have replaced interest groups as a threat to conventional interpretations of democracy. It also could be argued that the most important problem for government in the United Kingdom is its own ability to make and implement unpopular policies with little effective restraint and thereby to reduce the legitimacy of government with the population. The clearest manifestation of this possibility was the poll tax debacle at the end of the Thatcher government. The continuing reductions of funding and assaults on the National Health Service had much the same impact. The adversarial and majoritarian nature of British politics enables the party in government to push through policies that ultimately will undermine government. Also, the electoral system of the United Kingdom raises some questions about the democratic nature of the system. The single-member-district, simple-plurality system of choosing members of Parliament has been an effective means of generating parliamentary majorities from what has become effectively a multiparty system. Although this is beneficial in a parliamentary system with a majoritarian tradition, it is also regarded by an in-

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creasing number of people as undemocratic. The Liberal Democrats (including their earlier manifestations) have been campaigning for a move to proportional representation (PR) for many years. Labour Party leaders promised that if successful in  they would look into the issue, but seeing the success that the old system produced for them, they decided rather to appoint a commission to investigate the issue. PR elects a portion of the members of the new Scottish parliament, however, and this system is now used for elections to the European Parliament, so the old system of election may be fading away. Finally, beyond the question of which institution within British government is dominant is the broader question of the role of the emerging government located in Brussels—the governmental seat of the European Union. The ideas of parliamentary sovereignty and cabinet government are being challenged from abroad just as they are at home. Many British politicians and citizens consider some actions of the EU undemocratic and intrusive, but extricating themselves from Europe does not appear a desirable option for most officials. The nature of the British role within an ever-expanding Europe is not yet known, but it is likely to be different from that existing today. Britain must decide what to do about monetary union with the rest of the EU, and remaining outside the euro zone, while seemingly profitable in the short term, may have serious long-term economic consequences. Likewise, the expansion of the EU to include a number of new members may require changing some of the decision procedures within the system so that the United Kingdom’s capacity to block action will become more limited and the threats to sovereignty perhaps more real. Devolution, Breakup, or What? Will there continue to be a United Kingdom? Indications are strong that this question can be answered in the affirmative, at least for the time being, although devolutionary pressures certainly do put the long-term situation in greater doubt. The referendums on Scottish and Welsh devolution in  indicated substantial support for a more independent Scotland (less support in Wales) but this support was not overwhelming. However, by the time of the referendums in September , opinion had changed, and the propositions won by a wide margin in Scotland, although by a smaller margin in Wales. The success of these two referendums resulted in new governments being established in Edinburgh and Cardiff and, especially for the Scottish government, a transfer of substantial powers to those new loci of governing. The process of moving toward greater autonomy in Northern Ireland has been, of course, much more complicated, but for at least a short period of time there was a devolved government in Belfast and agreement between London and Dublin about self-government in what remained a part of the United Kingdom. In the nation as a whole, there appears to have been relatively little interest in devolution or other substantial changes from the current constitutional arrangements. Support for some form of regional government for England is, however, also increasing, albeit from a much lower level. Perhaps the only issue that has much real resonance in England as a whole is the so-called “West Lothian question.” That is, why should Scotland have

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MPs in Westminster voting on issues having to do with policies in England when English MPs can no longer vote on issues that affect only Scotland? This asymmetry strikes some observers as undesirable and unsustainable. The other question about central rule from London concerns local government in England. The Conservative governments in the s and into the s centralized control over policy and local government finances. If anything, the Labour government has extended and tightened that control and has used its regulatory and inspection organizations to attempt to make the local authorities conform to the wishes of central government. One enduring question is whether the British government will find means of accommodating these interests within a governing framework that is historically unitary and centralized. British policymakers are much like other policymakers, although they have their own particular processes, problems, and potential. The conduct of contemporary democratic government requires British government to balance traditional norms and procedures that legitimate decisions with the more modern techniques for analysis and control. More technically sophisticated and professionally qualified officials challenge older institutions for policymaking. And the underlying social divisions in society refuse to be homogenized, despite the pressures of mass media, industrialization, and urbanization. Whether in the United Kingdom or elsewhere, modern government is a balancing act between the new and the old—those things that unite and those that divide. Notes . The greater linkage of the British economy with the booming U.S. economy than is true for the other European countries also may contribute to this performance level. . In fact, during the early years of the Thatcher government, public expenditures increased as a proportion of gross national product, in large part because GNP was stable or declining. . For example, the quality of services provided to cancer patients has been found to be much lower than in other European countries. . See Max Kaase and Kenneth Newton, Beliefs in Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). . See especially Richard Rose, The Problem of Party Government (London: Macmillan, ).

For Further Reading BOGDANOR, VERNON. Politics and the Constitution: Essays on British Government. Aldershot: Dartmouth, . BUTLER, DAVID, AND KAVANAGH, DENNIS. The British General Election of . Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s, . COATES, DAVID, AND PETER LAWLER, eds. New Labour in Power. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, . DREWRY, GAVIN, AND TONY BUTCHER. The Civil Service Today, d ed. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, . FOLEY, MICHAEL. The Rise of the British Presidency. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, . GEORGE, STEPHEN. Britain and the European Community: The Politics of Semi-detachment. Oxford: Clarendon Press, . HEATH, ANTHONY, ET AL. Understanding Political Change in Britain: The British Voter, –. Oxford: Pergamon, . HENNESSY, PETER. The Hidden Writing: Unearthing the British Constitution. London: Gollancz, . ———. Whitehall. New York: Free Press, . HOGWOOD, BRIAN. From Crisis to Complacency? Shaping Public Policy in Britain. Oxford: Clarendon Press, .

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JONES, TUDOR. Remaking the Labour Party: From Gaitskell to Blair. London and New York: Routledge, . KAVANAGH, DENNIS. Thatcherism and British Politics: The End of Consensus? Oxford: Oxford University Press, . KELLAS, JAMES G. The Scottish Political System. th ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, . KING, ANTHONY, ET AL. Britain at the Polls, . New York: Chatham House, . ———. New Labour Triumphs: Britain at the Polls. Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, . ———. Britain at the Polls, . Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, . KING, DESMOND, AND GERRY STOKER. Rethinking Local Democracy. Basingstoke: Macmillan, . MCILROY, JOHN. Trade Unions in Britain Today. d ed. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, . MARSH, DAVID. The New Politics of British Trade Unionism: Union Power and the Thatcher Legacy. Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press, . MARSH, DAVID, AND R.A.W. RHODES. Implementing “Thatcherism”: A Policy Perspective. Buckingham: Open University Press, . ———, eds. Policy Networks in British Government. Oxford: Clarendon Press, . MILLER, WILLIAM L., ET AL. Political Culture in Contemporary Britain: People and Politicians, Principles and Practice. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, . NORTON, PHILIP. Does Parliament Matter? New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, . PARRY, GERAINT, GEORGE MOYSER, AND NEIL DAY. Political Participation and Democracy in Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . STUDLAR, DONLEY T. Great Britain: Decline or Renewal? Boulder, Colo.: Westview, . THAIN, COLIN, AND MAURICE WRIGHT. The Treasury and Whitehall. Oxford: Clarendon Press, . THATCHER, MARGARET. The Downing Street Years. New York: HarperCollins, . WHITELEY, PAUL, PATRICK SEYD, AND JEREMY RICHARDSON. True Blues: The Politics of Conservative Party Membership. Oxford: Clarendon Press, .

Chapter 6

The Context of French Politics FRANCE HAS BEEN one of the important countries in the world. Its culture, architecture, and cuisine have been much admired and copied; its language once served as the chief medium of diplomacy; and its political philosophies and institutional patterns have exerted influences far beyond the country’s borders. Until the end of World War II, France was the second-greatest colonial empire, with possessions in Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and North and West Africa. The third-largest country in Europe (after Russia and Ukraine), France is more than twice the size of Britain,  percent larger than Germany, and four-fifths the size of Texas. Except in the north and northeast, France has natural frontiers: the Atlantic Ocean on the west, the Pyrenees in the south, and the Alps and Jura mountains in the east. Wide variations in landscape—the northern flatlands of Flanders, the forests of Normandy, the mountainous east and center, the beaches of the Vendée in the west, and the subtropical Riviera coast in the south—are accompanied by regional trends in cuisine, dress, speech, and attitude. For many generations the French referred to “our ancestors the Gauls”; they prided themselves on the notion that they were descended from Gallo-Roman tribes that had fused over centuries into a homogeneous nation. Many of the immigrants who were gradually added in the course of several generations, such as Italians, Germans, and Poles, dissolved easily into the melting pot of Celtic, Latin, and other elements, and the more recent arrival of immigrants from Africa and Asia has made the population of the country truly multiethnic. At the same time, living in one of the first large European countries to have its boundaries more or less permanently fixed, the French have acquired a deep sense of national identity. Recently, however, the collective consciousness of minorities has been reawakened: Alsatians, Bretons, Corsicans, and other ethnic groups—and more recently the Jewish community—have not been content with being merely French and have demanded that their cultural uniqueness be recognized. This development, in addition to the fact that the percentage of foreigners among the inhabitants of the country had risen from barely  percent in the s to . percent in , reaching more than  million, led to an extensive debate about the future of national identity. Note, however, that the acquisition of citizenship by the foreign-born has been relatively easy; it may be granted after a minimum of five years’ residence. Foreigners born in France may opt for French citizenship on reaching majority (age eighteen). Ever since the country’s early efforts at unification under centralized auspices, Paris

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Gross Domestic Product per Capita (in U.S. dollars, ) ,

France

,

Germany ,

Italy Russia

, ,

Sweden United Kingdom

, ,

United States Canada

,

Source: OECD, Economic Surveys, , and World Development Report (–).

has been the locus of national political power. Unchallenged by other cities, the political capital is also France’s cultural and economic center. Paris contains the biggest university complex, three-fourths of the nation’s theaters, and the majority of its museums and art galleries; and it is the hub from which most of the railroad lines radiate. The Paris region constitutes about  percent of the nation’s land area, but since the early s it has contained  percent of its total population, boasted its largest factories, and accounted for a third of its industrial production. For many years, the impression was widespread, among foreigners as well as natives, that apart from Paris, France was essentially a peasant country. That perception resulted from a number of factors. The Industrial Revolution did not proceed so early and so thoroughly in France as it did in Britain and Germany; by the end of World War II, an estimated one-third of the French labor force was still employed in agriculture. Most of the farms were and still are small; the consolidation of landholdings was impeded by the traditional division of a family’s acreage among several descendants, and industrial development was long delayed by the lack of private investment capital and the limited need for industrial manpower in the cities. In the past fifty years, however, there has been impressive progress in agricultural modernization. As a consequence, employment in agriculture has declined from more than  percent of the active population in  to less than  percent today. In , . out of . million people lived in cities; today,  million out of nearly  million do. While the number of farms and rural villages declined steadily, the number of urban agglomerations continued to grow, and the French began to speak of a “terminal peasantry.” In a parallel development, an extensive national superhighway system, high-speed rail transport, and a modern telecommunications network tied the provinces more closely to Paris, and the sense of separation between the small towns and the capital diminished. Despite urbanization, many French men and women continue to share the belief that life in the country is more satisfying than an urban existence. In re-

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cent years, that myth has been reflected in the tendency of middle-class big-city dwellers to acquire second homes in the country. For many years, a “peasant romanticism” was fortified by the patterns of family loyalty, parsimony, and conservative moral values carefully nurtured by the Catholic church; today, this romanticism has been rediscovered as an ideal by those disenchanted with the economic insecurities, overcrowding, unemployment, and growing social disorganization and crime in the cities and has become a component of the ideology of extreme-right movements. There is no doubt that urbanization has contributed to a rapid increase in criminality. In , the crime rate (counting over . million crimes) was . per thousand, compared with . in , . in , and . in . Religion and Social Class For a long time, most of the population embraced Roman Catholicism; France was considered the “most Catholic” of countries. To be sure, the Reformation spread to France; in the sixteenth century, the country was riven by bitter struggles between Catholics, who were supported by the ruling elite, and Protestant Huguenots (mainly Calvinists), many of whom were massacred. After a period of toleration, the privileges of the Protestants (e.g., the right to live in certain fortified towns) were revoked in the seventeenth century, and many Protestants left the country. With the consolidation of absolute rule under the Bourbon kings, the position of Catholicism as the state religion was firmly established. Dissatisfaction with monarchism implied a questioning of the church and its privileges, and revolutionary sentiments were accompanied by anticlerical attitudes. Anticlericalism and republicanism, then, are closely intertwined. The revolutionary commitment to laïcité (“laicism” or “secularity”), associated with a “religion of reason,” made considerable headway during the Third Republic, when, under the leadership of leftwing parties, a national school system was created from which religion was entirely absent. The hold of Catholicism gradually weakened as a consequence of industrialization, the rise of a new working class, and demographic and social changes. In the first decade of the twentieth century the Catholic church was formally “disestablished.” France became, like the United States, a secular country, at least in constitutional terms (except in the province of Alsace where, for historic reasons, the clergy is supported by public funds). Today, more than  percent of the population is Roman Catholic, but fewer than a third of the Catholics are “practicing.” A large proportion of inhabitants of the larger cities, and the great majority of industrial workers, are “de-Christianized” except in the most formal sense.1 Yet Catholicism cannot be divorced from French culture and political consciousness. The cathedral remains the heart of small towns, most legal holidays are Catholic ones, and many political movements and interest groups are still influenced by Catholic teachings. Furthermore, public policy attitudes have often been inspired by Catholic social doctrine: aid to large families, the notion of class collaboration (instead of conflict) and the “association” of employers and workers in factories, the long-held opposition to the legalization of birth control and abortion, and the legal dominance—until well into the s—of the male head of the family. Today, between  and  percent of parents opt to

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send their children to Catholic parochial schools, which benefit from governmental financial support. There are about . million French Protestants, many of them prominent in business, the free professions, and, more recently, politics and administration. Three prime ministers of the Fifth Republic have been Protestant (Couve de Murville, Rocard, and Jospin, the current holder of the office) as were numerous cabinet ministers and presidential candidates. There have been Jews in France since before the Middle Ages; today they number about ,. During the Dreyfus Affair in the s, antirepublican feelings were accompanied by a campaign to vilify Jews and eliminate them from public life. With the Nazi occupation of France (–) and the resulting persecutions and deportations, the Jewish community was ravaged and reduced by a third. Since the early s, the number of Jews has been augmented by repatriates from North Africa. Much like Protestants, Jews have tended to support republican regimes and have decidedly preferred left-of-center parties identified with anticlericalism. Jews are fully integrated into French life; nevertheless, anti-Semitism has not been eliminated and tends to be perpetuated by extremeright political parties. Since the mid-s there has also been a significant influx of Muslims, primarily from North Africa, many of whom perform the most menial work in industrial cities. The Muslim population, estimated at about  million, constitutes the second largest religious group. The growth of this population has provoked a reaction on the part of many French people (especially the lower-middle and working classes), who feel that the presence of these “exotic” immigrants has contributed heavily to the growth of unemployment and criminality and will ultimately disfigure the very nature of French society. Moreover, practicing Muslims, unlike other minorities, are said to adhere to a “fundamentalist” religion that is believed to reject the primacy of French civil law, secular education, gender equality, and religious pluralism and therefore to pose a challenge to the values of the republic. Superficially, the French social system is typical of that found in other European countries. The medieval divisions of society into nobility, clergy, townsmen, and peasants gradually gave way to a more complex social structure. The traditional, land-based aristocracy declined as a result of the use of the guillotine and the diminishing economic value of agriculture, and today the aristocracy has a certain vestigial importance only in the military officer corps and the diplomatic service. The modern upper class, or haute bourgeoisie—a status derived from graduation from a prestigious university or the inheritance of wealth or both—comprises the higher echelons of the civil service, the directors of large business firms, and bankers. The next social group is the grande bourgeoisie, which includes university professors, high school teachers, engineers, members of the so-called free professions (such as lawyers, physicians, and architects), middle-echelon government functionaries, and the proprietors of medium-sized family firms. The middle and lower-middle class, today the largest social category, comprises elementary school teachers, white-collar employees, petty shopkeepers, and lowerechelon civil servants. The lower classes (classes populaires) include most of the industrial workers, small farmers, and possibly artisans.

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These class divisions have been important insofar as they have influenced a person’s political ideology, general expectations from the system, lifestyle, place of residence, and choice of political party. Thus, as we will see below, a typical member of the free professions has tended to adhere to a liberal party (i.e., one oriented toward individualism), a businessman to a conservative (or moderate) one, and an industrial worker to a socialist party. The class system and interclass relationships have been constantly changing, however; these changes have taken place with particular rapidity since the dramatic events of May–June , when masses of students and workers joined in a general strike and almost brought down the government. Nor is there an exact correlation between class membership and adherence to a specific political party. In recent years there has been a growing underclass of uprooted farmers and redundant artisans, industrial workers made redundant by the decline of traditional manufacturing and the increasingly important high-technology sector, and immigrants who cannot be precisely categorized and whose relationship to the political system is fluid, if not marginal. Moreover, distinctions between classes have been partially obscured by the redistributive impact of a highly developed system of social legislation and the progressive democratization of the educational system. Table . gives an idea of some of the changes that have taken place in the past fifty years. Education The centralized national school system established at the end of the nineteenth century has been based on uniform curriculums stressing national, secular, and republican values and theoretically creating opportunities of upward mobility on the basis of talent, not

Table 6.1 France: Some Changes in Fifty-four Years

Total population (in millions) Number of adolescents over 14 enrolled in schools (in thousands) Average annual duration of full-time work (hours) Infant mortality per 1,000 live births Number of private cars in circulation (in thousands) Longevity of males (in years) Longevity of females (in years)













40.5

52.6

55.0

56.56

58.3

59.8

650

4,000

4,200

5,400

5,600

6,400

2,100

1,875

1,763a

n.a.

1,500

1,355

84.4

13.8

10.1

7.5c

4.9

4.4

1,000 61.9 67.4

15,300 69.1 77.0

20,800 71b 79b

22,750c 73.3 80.6

n.a. 73.8 81.9

27,500 75.2 82.7

Sources: Based on Jean Fourastié, Les Trente glorieuses ou la révolution invisible (Paris: Fayard, 1979), 36; Quid 1988, 1992, 1996, 2001 (Paris: Robert Laffont); Dominique Borne, Histoire de la société française depuis  (Paris: Armand Colin, 1988), 95; Gérard Mermet, Francoscopie  (Paris: Larousse, 2000), 195, 301–2. a1986. b1982. c1989.

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wealth. Traditionally, the Ministry of Education controlled the educational curriculums, from public elementary school in small villages to lycées in large cities, and had the major voice in the administration of universities. In practice the system (at least until the late s) fortified existing social inequalities because most children of the working and peasant classes were not steered toward the lycées, the academic secondary schools whose diplomas were required for admission to university, and thus were condemned to perpetual lower-class status. Since the early s, there has been a spate of reform legislation aimed at the “comprehensivization” of schooling, at least up to the age of sixteen. Curriculum design has been made more practical, more technological, and less classicalhumanistic. Laws have been passed to permit universities to become more flexible and less hierarchical and to allow students to participate in decision making (but there are complaints that the pace of implementation has occasionally been slowed down because of insufficient funds and the resistance of the academic establishment). In recent years there has been a veritable explosion of university enrollments, which reached  million in  and . million in . But the inability of many university graduates to find jobs has acted as a brake against further significant increases. A large proportion of students drop out after one or two years at a university; many others, coming from families in straitened circumstances, complain that state scholarship aid is inadequate. The attitudes of the French toward politics have been shaped by their education and social condition. Scholars have suggested that the French are more critical of their regime than are Americans or Englishmen of theirs. French citizens have frequently participated in uprisings and revolutions; they have exhibited “anticivic” behavior patterns such as tax evasion, draft-dodging, and alcoholism. They have often shown contempt for law (and the police), and members of the working class in particular have been convinced that the legal system favors the “established” classes. Finally, a large segment adhered to political ideologies and parties oriented to the replacement of the existing political order. The insufficient acceptance of the existing regime—a phenomenon called “crisis of legitimacy”—was produced by, and in turn reflected in, the apparent inability of the French to create a political formula that would resolve satisfactorily the conflict between state and individual, centralism and localism, the executive and the legislature, or representative and “direct” democracy. Since the abolition of the Old Regime of royal absolutism, there has been a dizzying succession of governments—republics, monarchies, empires, and republics again—most of them embodying drastically different conceptions of the proper division of governmental authority (see table .). Revolutions, Regime Changes, and Legitimacy Crises Many regimes created institutional solutions that were too extreme and therefore could not last. The Revolution of  led to the abdication of King Louis XVI in  and was followed by a series of experiments that, collectively, has been termed the First Republic. It was characterized by the abolition of the old provinces and the restructuring of administrative divisions, the reduction of the power of the church and the inauguration of a “rule of reason,” the proclamation of universal human rights, and the passing of power from the landed aristocracy to the bourgeoisie. It was also marked by assassinations and

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Table 6.2 Political Cycles and Regimes Moderate monarchy

Liberalization

Conservative reaction

Constitutional monarchy of 1791 Restoration of 1815

Republic of 1792

Dictatorial government of 1795 Second Empire (1852–70) Vichy regime (1940–44) Early Fifth Republic (1958–81)

Early Third Republic (1870–79)

“July Monarchy” of 1830 Later Third Republic (1879–1940) Fourth Republic Fifth Republic (since 1981)

Source: Adapted from Dorothy Pickles, The Fifth French Republic, 3d ed. (New York: Praeger, 1965), 3–5.

mass executions (the “Reign of Terror”), which were ended when order was established under Napoleon Bonaparte. At first leader of a dictatorial Consulate (), then president () of what was still, formally, a “republic,” Napoleon had himself proclaimed emperor in . Napoleon’s empire collapsed after ten years as a consequence of military defeat, but the emperor left behind a great heritage of reforms: the abolition of feudal tax obligations, a body of codified laws, the notion of a merit-based professional bureaucracy (much of it trained in specialized national schools), and a system of relationships (or rather, a theory about such relationships) under which the chief executive derived his legitimacy directly from the people through popular elections or referendums. The chief executive’s rule was unimpeded by a strong parliament, subnational government units, or other “intermediary” institutions or groups. At once heroic and popular, the “Bonapartist” approach to politics had a strong impact on segments of the French nation; much of what came to characterize Gaullism was heavily influenced by that approach. The power of the clergy and nobility was revived in  when the Bourbon monarchy was restored, but that was to be a constitutional regime patterned on the English model and guaranteeing certain individual liberties and limited participation of parliament. In  the Bourbon dynasty, having become arbitrary and corrupt, was in turn replaced by another regime, that of Louis-Philippe of the House of Orleans. In  the French rebelled once more and inaugurated what came to be known as the Second Republic. They elected Louis Napoleon (a nephew of Napoleon I) president for a ten-year term, but he soon (in ) proclaimed himself emperor. The “Second Empire” was a “republican” empire insofar as a weak legislative chamber continued to exist and, more important, because Louis Napoleon derived his power from the people rather than from God. The Second Empire was noted for many achievements: industrial progress, a stable currency, and the rebuilding and modernization of Paris. But popular disenchantment with what had become a dictatorial regime, boredom, and France’s military defeat at the hands of the Prussians in  brought it down.

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The Third Republic, the regime that followed, was inaugurated in bloodshed: the Paris Commune of , in which thousands of “proletarians” rebelled and were brutally suppressed by bourgeois leaders. Most of these leaders did not, in fact, want a republic. The Assembly elected to make peace with Prussia was dominated by monarchists, but the latter disagreed on which of the competing pretenders—Bourbon, Orleans, or Bonaparte—should be given the throne. Consequently, the Assembly adopted a skeletal constitution that provided, on a temporary basis, for an executive and legislative branch and outlined the relationship between them. This constitution, which contained no bill of rights, was to last nearly seventy years and set the pattern for subsequent republican regimes. In the beginning, the president (elected by parliament for seven years) tried to govern while ignoring parliament, and to dissolve the Assembly, whose political composition he did not like. In , parliament rebelled and forced the president to resign. Henceforth, presidents became figureheads, and prime ministers and their cabinets were transformed into obedient tools of powerful parliaments and were replaced or reshuffled about once every eight months. This instability was viewed by many as endemic to republican systems as such and encouraged romantic monarchists in attempts to subvert the republic. Yet this republic had many achievements to its credit, not the least of which was that it emerged victorious and intact from World War I; it might have lasted even longer had France not been invaded and occupied by the Germans in . Following the German defeat of France, the “unoccupied” southern half of the country was transformed into the “French State,” an authoritarian puppet regime led from Vichy, a provincial resort town, by Marshal Philippe Pétain, an aging hero of World War I. The behavior of the French during this period, both in the Vichy state and in the occupied part of the country, was complex and ambivalent, and the question of who collaborated and who resisted continues to be debated.2 The Fourth Republic, which was instituted in January , two years after Liberation, essentially followed the pattern established during the Third. Although its highly detailed and democratic constitution included an impressive bill of rights, it made for a system even less stable than that of the Third Republic. There were twenty governments (and seventeen prime ministers) in a twelve-year period; the Assembly, though theoretically supreme, could not provide effective leadership. Ambitious deputies, seeking a chance to assume ministerial office, easily managed to topple cabinets, and a large proportion of the legislators—notably the Communists on the left and the Gaullists on the right—were not interested in the maintenance of the regime. The Fourth Republic was not without accomplishments. It inaugurated a system of long-term capitalist planning under which France rebuilt and modernized its industrial and transport structures. It put in place an extensive network of welfare state provisions including comprehensive statutory medical insurance. It took the first steps in the direction of decolonization—relinquishing control of Indochina, Morocco, and Tunisia—and paved the way for intra-European collaboration in the context of the Coal and Steel Community and, later, the Common Market. Some of the failures of the Fourth Republic—for example, its inability to institute meaningful local democ-

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Charles de Gaulle, head of the provisional government, celebrates the liberation of France, . (AP/Wide World Photos)

racy and its foot-dragging on tax reform—were to be failures, equally, of the political system that replaced it. It is likely that the Fourth Republic would have continued if it had not been for the problem of Algeria and the convenient presence of a war hero, General Charles de Gaulle. Algeria could not be easily decolonized, or granted independence, because more than  million French men and women—many of them tracing their roots in that territory several generations back—considered it their home and regarded it as an integral component of France. A succession of Fourth Republic politicians lacked the will or the stature to impose a solution of the problem; the war that had broken out in the mid-s in Algeria threatened to spill over into mainland France and helped discredit the regime. Under the pressure of the Algerian events (and the threat of a military coup in continental France and North Africa), the Fourth Republic leadership decided, in mid-, to call on de Gaulle. De Gaulle had been a professional soldier, a member of the general staff, and several months after the outbreak of World War II, deputy minister of war. After France’s capitulation in June , de Gaulle refused to accept the permanence of surrender and the legitimacy of the Pétain regime. Instead, de Gaulle fled to London. There

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he established a “government in exile” and organized the “Free French” forces, which were joined by numerous Frenchmen who had escaped in time from the Continent. In  de Gaulle became the provisional civilian leader of liberated France, presiding over a government coalition composed of Christian Democrats, Socialists, and Communists. In  he retired from the political scene, having failed to prevent the ratification of the Fourth Republic constitution (a document he opposed because it granted excessive powers to parliament). In retirement de Gaulle continued to be a political force: more precisely, a force of inspiration to a political movement, the RPF, the Rassemblement du Peuple Français (Gathering of the French People). These original “Gaullists” wanted to replace the Fourth Republic with a new regime that would be led by a strong executive. The Fifth Republic, established in , is an institutional mixture of a very powerful executive and a weak legislature. The institutional relationships are discussed later; for the moment it is useful to make some remarks about French political culture (i.e., political attitudes that are widely held and behavior patterns that cut across specific social classes and party ideologies). Aspects of French Political Culture Except for parts of the industrial working class, most French people have shared the universal ambitions of French civilization and have not seemed to consider the (often exaggerated) chauvinism of their intellectual elite to be inconsistent with such ambitions. They have taken pride in France’s international prestige, cultural patrimony, and intellectual accomplishments, although these may have borne little relationship to objective reality, may not have benefited all citizens equally, and may not have compensated for the more immediate economic needs of the underprivileged. The French have had a tendency to hero worship that has led them, on several occasions, to accept “men on horseback”: the two Napoleons, Marshal MacMahon (in the s), Marshal Pétain, and General de Gaulle. This has been balanced by an equal tendency to rebel against authority. Moreover, the French have often opted for leftist or revolutionary ideologies and politicians; at the same time, such leftist thinking and speaking have sometimes been meaningless exercises because there was little expectation that they would (or ought to) translate into leftist governmental policies. Public opinion polls conducted from the s to the s have shown, typically, that the proportion of French voters preferring Socialist Party candidates was consistently higher than the proportion of those who favored the nationalization of enterprises or the equalization of incomes—both traditional components of Socialist ideology. The French have often held their politicians in contempt, but have allowed them greater leeway than do Americans with respect to tax evasion, collusion with business, or (personal) behavioral departures from bourgeois moral norms. It is only in the past few years that such toleration has been replaced by popular impatience with, and the electoral punishment of, corrupt politicians. A manifestation of that impatience, reflected in an increasingly independent judiciary, has been the indictment (and in some cases, conviction) of nearly a hundred elected officials (of both the right and the left) for the misappropria-

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tion of public funds and a variety of other legal violations.3 At the same time, there is a widespread desire to enter the public service, and much prestige is attached to it. Traditionally, the French have been sharply critical of the regime, but they have had a highly developed sense of belonging to the nation and great expectations from the “state” in terms of what it should do for them. Recent illustrations were provided by the strikes of public-transport workers in the fall of , who protested against threatened cuts in social-security protections and demanded a lowering of the retirement age; and the strikes, for similar aims, of drivers in the private trucking industry a year later. Although greatly inconvenienced by these events, the general public supported the strikers—both for reasons of social solidarity and because it did not wish to have traditional welfare-state entitlements for any part of the population called into question. Ideology is now far less important than it had been since the onset of the industrial revolution, and a growing number of French women and men have become market-oriented; such a change, however, is a far cry from an unqualified embrace of classic liberalism. France’s traditional nationalism has been moderated, and most of its citizens are more open to Europe and the world at large; at the same time, they are not quite willing to accept the consequences of globalization. There have been other important changes, especially in the past two decades. There is now little question about the legitimacy of the political system: More than  percent of the French people accept the institutions of the Fifth Republic, a consensus signalized by a gradual convergence between parties of the right and left and, indeed, in a growing impatience with ideological labels. Conversely, the state has been desanctified in the eyes of many French citizens; at the same time, it retains at once its multiple role as “protector, motor, and dinosaur,” insofar as  million French citizens work for it and several million more depend on it.4 While the French still have an “instrumental” view of the state in the sense that it is expected to continue to play an important role in economic, social, and cultural affairs, their expectations have become somewhat more realistic. This development is reflected in the fact that the French, in recent years, have been attaching a greater value to liberty than to equality. A poll taken a decade ago revealed that for  percent of the respondents, French national identity is essentially symbolized by a commitment to human rights—roughly the same percentage for whom that identity is symbolized by French cuisine.5 While the French have become more ego oriented, they have also come to attach increasing importance to “civil society” and its component parts. In addition to a greater reliance on the market, there has been a rapid growth of voluntary associations on national and local levels. These developments have served to reduce the social distrust, to lessen the “fear of face-to-face relations” that was once considered a major aspect of French political culture,6 and to foster a greater openness to “out-groups,” both within France and outside it. One manifestation of that change is the widespread public support of fairer treatment of immigrants (which compensates for pockets of intolerance) and a greater appreciation of aspects of non-French culture.

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Notes . A recent survey of the attitudes of young people (age fifteen to twenty-four) revealed that only  percent consider religion very important (compared to the family [%], friendship [%], work [%], and love [%]). SOFRES poll conducted in November , cited in Le Monde, – November , . . The debate even involved President Mitterrand. In , considerable details began to be revealed about his involvement with the Vichy regime and his earlier identification with right-wing movements and personalities. See Pierre Péan, Une jeunesse française, – (Paris: Fayard, ); and Emmanuel Faux, Thomas Legrand, and Gilles Perez, La main droite de dieu (Paris: Seuil, ). . This list has included Jean Tibéri, the mayor of Paris, and Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, the eldest son of the former president. See Jérôme Dupuis, Jean-Marie Pontaut, and Jean-Loup Reverier, “ élus dans le collimateur: Le Who’s Who des mis en examen,” Le Point,  June , –. . Gérard Mermet, Francoscopie  (Paris: Larousse, ), –. See also . . Passages/CSA poll of October , cited in Gérard Mermet, Francoscopie  (Paris: Larousse, ), . See also Claudius Brosse, L’Etat dinosaure (Paris: Albin Michel, ). . See Michel Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –.

Chapter 7

Where Is the Power? THE FIFTH REPUBLIC CONSTITUTION was drawn up several weeks after de Gaulle

was invested as the (last) prime minister of the Fourth Republic. The new constitution, which was adopted by an  percent affirmative vote in a popular referendum (September ), was tailor-made for de Gaulle. It contains many features found in previous French republics: president, prime minister, and a parliament composed of two chambers—a National Assembly and a Senate. Institutional relationships were rearranged, however, so as to reflect the political ideas that the famous general and his advisers had often articulated, that is, the ideology of Gaullism. The President and the Government De Gaulle and his advisers—foremost among them Michel Debré, the principal draftsman of the constitution, who was to become the Fifth Republic’s first prime minister— wanted to have a strong government. It would be capable of making decisions and conducting an assertive foreign policy without having to worry about excessive parliamentary interference or premature ouster. The president is clearly the central feature of the Fifth Republic system. He is elected independently of parliament. The constitution had originally provided for his election by an electoral college composed of some , national, regional, and local legislators; but since the approval by referendum of a constitutional amendment in , presidents have been elected by popular vote for seven-year terms. Many political leaders (including aspirants to the presidency and former presidents) consider the presidential term of office too long and advocated its reduction to five years—a change finally accomplished by referendum in the fall of . The president is invested with nearly monarchical powers, and these have been expanded through interpretation by at least the first three of the five incumbents of the office so far: Charles de Gaulle (–); Georges Pompidou (-); Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (–); François Mitterrand (–); and Jacques Chirac (since May ). According to the constitution, the president appoints the prime minister, who thereupon supposedly selects the rest of the cabinet. But de Gaulle and Pompidou took an interest in many of these appointments, and Giscard decided the composition of the entire cabinet on a rather personal basis. The composition of these cabinets was endorsed almost automatically by the Assembly, which was controlled by politicians more or less in the same (conservative) ideological camp as the president.

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Under President Mitterrand, a Socialist, the situation became more complicated. For five years following his election in , and the election immediately thereafter of a Socialist-controlled Assembly, the composition of governments reflected the president’s wishes to a large extent. But after the legislative elections of , and again in , when the Gaullists and their allies recaptured control of the Assembly, the president was forced to appoint a prime minister and cabinet to the Assembly’s liking rather than his own. The “cohabitation” of a Socialist president with a Gaullist government—a situation not clearly envisaged by the writers of the Fifth Republic constitution—led to a restructuring of the relationship between the two: a delicate form of power sharing in which the prime minister took responsibility for most domestic policies, while the president retained a measure of authority in foreign affairs and national defense as well as a vaguely defined influence in internal affairs. After the reelection of Mitterrand as president in , and the recapture of control of the Assembly by the Socialists immediately thereafter, the situation returned to “normal,” that is, the president’s preeminence was reestablished. Mitterrand, however, decided not to exercise his restored powers fully but to share it with his prime minister, Michel Rocard, and, to a lesser extent, with parliament—not only because the “cohabitation” experience had chastened him but also because he had, in a sense, become an elder statesman who transcended politics. A “normal” situation of presidential supremacy was restored again in  with the election of Chirac, a Gaullist, as president of the republic, and the appointment of Gaullist Alain Juppé as prime minister. Two years later, however, France was subjected to a third experiment with cohabitation as a consequence of a premature parliamentary election. The Assembly elected in  had until —that is, another three years—to remain in place; nevertheless, Chirac decided to dissolve it and call for early elections. This move was prompted by pressure on France to make drastic cuts in public expenditures in order to be ready to participate in the common European currency, which was scheduled to be inaugurated in January . The requirement to reduce the government deficit to a maximum of  percent of the gross domestic product would force the parliament to make unpleasant cuts in the welfare-state budget. Although the Assembly had an overwhelming Gaullist and center-conservative majority, the retrenchment measures required under the European Union’s common monetary policy could not be completely enacted before , the expiration of the normal life of the Assembly, and it was feared that the public would take revenge on that legislative chamber at the forthcoming regular election. The early election was, therefore, seen as a preventive step: although the president expected that the Gaullists and their allies would lose some votes, he was confident that they would still retain a comfortable control of the Assembly. The victory of the Socialist party and its left-wing allies in the parliamentary elections of  was as dramatic as it was unexpected. Since it was an unnecessary election, its outcome, a consequence of Chirac’s miscalculations, served to undermine Chirac’s presidential authority. He had no choice but to appoint Lionel Jospin, the Socialist leader who had run as a presidential candidate only two years earlier, as prime minister. In this new cohabitation, Jospin asserted himself strongly as a decision maker, so that he came to

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rival, and even eclipse, the authority of the president not only in domestic affairs but also in foreign policy. Under normal as well as cohabitation situations, the president has a variety of appointive powers, which he has continued to exercise without interruption: over military officers, political advisers, and some of the members of several judicial organs (on the advice, to be sure, of the prime minister). In addition, he retains the powers traditionally associated with chiefs of state: the appointment of ambassadors and other high civilian personnel, the receiving of foreign dignitaries, the signing of bills and the promulgation of laws and decrees, the issuing of pardons, and the right to preside over cabinet sessions and to send messages to parliament. The president cannot veto bills; however, he may ask parliament to reexamine all or part of a bill he does not like. Furthermore, the president has the right to dissolve the Assembly before the expiration of its maximum term of five years and thus to call for new elections. The only two constraints are rather mild: the requirement that he “consult” with the prime minister and the Speakers of the two chambers and the stipulation that the Assembly not be dissolved less than a year after its election. Thus far, presidents have made use of the dissolution power on five occasions: in , , , , and . The president may submit to the Constitutional Council an act of parliament or a treaty of doubtful constitutionality; and he may submit to a popular referendum any organic bill (i.e., one relating to the organization of public powers) or any treaty requiring ratification. The constitution stipulates that he may resort to a referendum only on the proposal of the government (while parliament is in session) or following a joint motion by the two parliamentary chambers (who meet in congress in Versailles for formal ratification). But President de Gaulle ignored this stipulation when he called for a referendum in . Since the founding of the Fifth Republic, there have been nine referendums (after the popular ratification of the constitution itself ): in January , on self-determination for Algeria; in April , on the Evian agreement on independence for Algeria; in October , on the method of electing the president; in April , on the reform of the Senate; in April , on approving Britain’s entry into the European Common Market; in November , on proposals for autonomy for New Caledonia, a French dependency in the Pacific; in September , on the ratification of the Maastricht treaty on European Union; and in November , on the reduction of the presidential term of office. It is the president who conducts the nation’s diplomacy. He negotiates and signs (or “ratifies”) treaties, and he must be alerted to the progress of all international negotiations conducted in the name of France. One of the most interesting—and awesome—provisions relating to presidential power is Article , which reads (in part) as follows: When the institutions of the Republic, the independence of the nation, the integrity of its territory or the fulfillment of its international commitments are threatened in a grave and immediate manner and when the regular functioning of the constitutional governmental authorities is interrupted, the president of the Republic shall take the measures commanded by these circumstances, after

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official consultation with the prime minister, the [Speakers] of the assemblies and the Constitutional Council. Such emergency powers, which can be found in a number of Western democracies, are intended for use during civil wars, general strikes, and similar public disorders that presumably cannot be dealt with through normal, and often time-consuming, parliamentary deliberative processes. De Gaulle invoked the provisions once, during a failed plot organized in  by generals opposing his Algerian policy. Although Article  is not likely to be used again soon, and though there is a stipulation that parliament must be in session when this emergency power is exercised, its very existence has been a source of disquiet to many who fear that a future president might use it for dictatorial purposes. Others view Article  more liberally, that is, as a weapon of the president in his role as a constitutional watchdog, mediator, and umpire. The constitution makes a clear distinction in its wording between the chief of state and the head of government. Thus it is the prime minister, not the president, who “directs the action of the government,” who “ensures the execution of the laws,” who “exercises regulatory powers,” and who “proposes constitutional amendments to the president.” There is, unfortunately, some doubt whether the prime minister and the government can be functionally separated from any president who wishes to be more than a figurehead. Indeed, the constitutional text is not without ambiguity. Thus, while one article provides that the prime minister is in charge of national defense, another makes the president commander-in-chief of the armed forces; similarly, the prime minister’s power to “determine the policy of the nation” may conflict with, and be subordinated to, the president’s responsibility for “guaranteeing national independence.” Except during the first two periods of cohabitation, prime ministers have in fact had little independence and little discretion vis-à-vis the president in all areas in which the latter has taken a personal interest. Furthermore—here again, except under “abnormal” conditions when the Assembly and the president are on different sides of the political divide—the prime minister may be dismissed not only by parliament but also (though the constitution does not stipulate this) by the president. Eleven of the fifteen prime ministers preceding Lionel Jospin were replaced while still enjoying the confidence of the Assembly. Prime ministers have come and gone for a variety of reasons. Their appointment does not need to be officially approved by parliament—though most prime ministers have in fact gone before the Assembly to be “invested” (that is, formally confirmed for office) by securing that chamber’s approval of the government’s general policy directions. Prime ministers do not, in principle, have to reflect the party composition of the Assembly, and they do not have to belong to any party at all—though it is clear that in practice they cannot function, or even remain in office, without the support of a majority of deputies. Michel Debré (–) had been a loyal Gaullist even during the Fourth Republic; but he was eventually replaced by Pompidou (–), who had been a lycée professor and banker (and not party politician) but had once worked intimately with de Gaulle and had been the leader of his presidential staff. Pompidou was in turn replaced by Maurice

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Average Annual Growth Rate of Gross Domestic Product, – (in percentages) .

France

.

Germany .

Italy Russia Sweden United Kingdom


. . . .

United States Canada

.

Source: Calculated from OECD, Economic Outlook  (December ), and Survey of Economic Policy of Russia in  (Moscow, ).

Couve de Murville (–), a professional diplomat, because blame for the mishandling of problems that had given rise to the mass rebellions of May–June  had to be deflected from the president. Jacques Chaban-Delmas (–), a former Radical-Socialist and hero of the wartime Resistance, was chosen by Pompidou on the election of the latter to the presidency because of the president’s desire to cultivate a more progressive image and thus entice centrist parties to join the government majority forces in parliament. Subsequently, Chaban-Delmas was ousted in part because his popularity threatened to eclipse the president’s own, and he was replaced by Pierre Messmer, a Gaullist (–). Jacques Chirac (–) was chosen prime minister of the first government under Giscard’s presidency as a reward for having bolted the Gaullist Party—temporarily, as it turned out—and having supported Giscard’s presidential candidacy; but he was later replaced by Raymond Barre (–), a “nonpolitical” professor of economics, because of disagreements over economic policy as well as over Chirac’s insistence on playing a more significant decision-making role. Pierre Mauroy (–), the first Socialist prime minister of the Fifth Republic, was selected by Mitterrand because of his nearly ideal background: scion of a working-class family and trained as a teacher, he served as the mayor of a large industrial city. He had been prominent in the old Socialist Party of the Fourth Republic and managed to get along well with the leaders of the party factions. Mauroy was succeeded by Laurent Fabius (–) when Mitterrand decided to change direction from a progressive, redistributive policy to a program of austerity and economic restraint. Chirac was reappointed as prime minister (–) because the president had little choice–because, as was pointed out above, the Gaullist Party that Chirac led had gained dominance of the Assembly. Michel Rocard was chosen to head the government in  in part because he had an important following within the ranks of the

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Socialist Party and among the population at large. An ambitious politician, a nondogmatic and technocratic Socialist, he had (in late ) been a rival of Mitterrand for nomination as a candidate for the presidency and had served in a number of ministerial posts under Mauroy. In May  Rocard was in turn replaced by Edith Cresson. It is unclear whether this change constituted an abrupt firing or an “amicable divorce” of two politicians whose political marriage had been one of convenience; in any case, it had become necessary because the public image of the government—and, by derivation, that of Mitterrand himself—had been tarnished by continued unemployment, growing delinquency, riots of immigrants, and scandals involving campaign funding of Socialist politicians. Cresson, the first woman prime minister in French history, had headed a succession of ministries. She had a reputation both as a loyal follower of Mitterrand and his brand of socialism (which was to the left of that of Rocard) and as a proponent of government policies favoring business and industry.1 In April , Mitterrand asked Cresson to resign as prime minister. This decision followed on the regional and cantonal elections a month earlier, in which the Socialist Party had incurred heavy losses. Cresson’s successor, Pierre Bérégovoy, had served as Mitterrand’s presidential chief of staff, as minister of social affairs, and (before and after the first cohabitation period) as minister of finance. In that last position, Bérégovoy developed a reputation for fiscal responsibility. After the parliamentary elections of March , the time for a change had come again. Since the RPR and the UDF won overwhelming control of the National Assembly, Mitterrand had to appoint a Gaullist, Edouard Balladur, to head a new government, which was a second experiment with cohabitation. Balladur had been a close collaborator of Prime Minister Pompidou, served as the general secretary of the presidential office when the latter became president, and later became minister of finance in the cohabitation government of Chirac. The first prime minister appointed by Chirac after his election as president was Alain Juppé. A close friend and political ally of Chirac, Juppé had begun his career in the higher civil service (as an inspector of finance); he developed close links with Chirac when he served as the deputy mayor of Paris, and later, as minister of the budget in Chirac’s cohabitation cabinet and subsequently as his official government spokesman. As foreign minister in the Balladur government, he was an early and consistent supporter of Chirac’s presidential candidacy. A change of prime ministers occurred in June , following the premature parliamentary elections. The new prime minister, Lionel Jospin, had been a member of the diplomatic service, a professor of economics, a secretary-general of the Socialist Party, and a minister of education. In the presidential elections of , he had been the Socialist candidate, capturing nearly half of the popular vote. Chirac had little choice in appointing Jospin, who had become the unchallenged leader of the democratic left and was widely considered the architect of the victory of the Socialists and their left-wing allies. Cabinet stability has been much greater under the Fifth Republic than under the

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Table 7.1 Political Composition of Selected Fifth Republic Governments before  President:

de Gaulle

Prime minister: Debré Political party Gaullists Republicans Centrists Radicals Left Radicals Socialists Communists Miscellaneous Nonparty Totals (including prime minister)

Pompidou

Pompidou

Giscard d’Estaing

Couve de Murville

ChabanDelmas

Messmer

Chirac

Barre

January 

April 

April 

July 

June 

July 

June 

August 

July 

6 — 3b 1 — — — 7g 10 — 27

9 3 5b 1 — — — — 11 — 29

21 3 — — — — — — 5 — 29

26 4 — — — — — — 1 — 31

29 7 3c — — — — — — — 39

22 5 3c — — — — — — — 30

12 8 2 6e — — — — 8 — 36

9 10 2d 5 — — — — 10i — 36

12 11a 4d 1f — — — 3h 10i — 41

aKnown until 1977 as Independent Republicans. bMRP. cCenter for Democracy and Progress (CDP). dCenter of Social Democrats (CDS). eReformers. f“Democratic Left.” gIncludes 5 Independents. hIncludes one “Social-Democrat,” one member of iCollectively designated as “presidential majority.”

CNIP, and the prime minister, attached to the UDF.

Fourth, with only fifteen prime ministers—one of them, Chirac, serving on two separate occasions—in a forty-two-year period (–) (see tables ., ., and .). But there have been more than two dozen important cabinet changes during that time. Such “rearrangements” have been made for a variety of reasons: deaths, changes in domestic or foreign policy orientations, voluntary resignations (often prompted by disagreements over government policy), and changes in the political party composition of the Assembly. During ordinary periods, most of these “reshuffles” have been made at the behest of the president; during cohabitation, they tend to be decided by the prime minister, often in order to rearrange the partisan makeup of the cabinet or to “freshen up” the image of the government. The constitution provides that the chief of state preside over cabinet sessions. Similar provisions had existed in previous regimes, but (especially in the Third and Fourth republics) had meant little, since working sessions of the cabinet were in effect led by the prime minister. In the Fifth Republic, the president—except, again, during “cohabitation” interludes—has effectively led most cabinet meetings and determined their agenda. Moreover, he has had a major voice in determining the size of the government (which has ranged from twenty-four to forty-nine “full” and “junior” ministers) and in deciding

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Table 7.2 Political Composition of Selected Fifth Republic Governments, 1981–88 President:

Mitterrand

Prime minister: Political party Gaullists Republicans Centrists Radicals Left Radicals Socialists Communists Miscellaneous Nonparty Totals (including prime minister)

Mauroy

Fabiusa

Chiracb

Rocard

May 

June 

July 

March 

May c

June d

— — — — 3 39 — 1f — —– 43

— — — — 2 37 4 1f — —– 44

— — — — 3 36 — 1g 3 —– 43

20 7 7e 2 — — — — 6 —– 42

— — — 1 2 26 — 2h 11 —– 42

— 1 1 1 3 25 — 3h 15 —– 49

aCabinet: 18 ministers (incl. 14 Socialists). bCabinet: 15 ministers (incl. 7 Gaullists, 5 various UDF, 3 nonparty). cCabinet: 19 ministers (incl. 14 Socialists). dCabinet: 22 ministers (incl. 14 Socialists, 1 Left Socialist, 4 UDF, 3 nonparty). eCenter of Social Democrats (CDS). fMovement of Democrats, an ex-Gaullist group supporting Mitterrand in the presidential gParti Socialiste Unifié (PSU). hDirect (nondifferentiated) members of UDF.

elections of 1981.

which of the full ministers—usually between sixteen and twenty-eight—are “cabinet” ministers (i.e., participate in the weekly cabinet sessions). That does not mean that the prime minister’s role has been negligible: most have been political personalities in their own right and have accepted the prime ministership for reasons of ambition, more than half viewing it as a stepping-stone to the presidency. Their leadership of the government has meant that the prime ministers have presided over important interministerial committees, counseled the president on policy, and promoted and defended legislation in parliament and before public opinion. But the association between president and prime minister does not necessarily constitute a genuine policymaking partnership; in fact, all presidents thus far have clearly rejected the notion that there is a two-headed or “dyarchical” executive and have affirmed presidential supremacy, except when, between – and –, and again in , the executive was temporarily “depresidentialized.”2 The Parliament In terms of its bicameral structure and internal organization, the Fifth Republic’s legislature bears a clear resemblance to that of earlier republics. The National Assembly is composed of  deputies— from metropolitan France and  from overseas départements

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Table 7.3 Political Composition of Selected Fifth Republic Governments since 1991 President:

Mitterrand

Chirac

Prime minister:

Cressona

Political party

May 

Bérégovoy April 

Balladur March 

Juppé May 

Jospin June 

— — 2b — 2d 32 — 1e 9 —– 46

— — — — 2 31 — — 9 —– 42j

14 7 5c 1 — — — 2f 1i —– 30k

19 8 6c 1 — — — 2g 6 —– 42l

— — — — 3 18 3 2h 1 —– 27m

Gaullists Republicans Centrists Radicals Left Radicals Socialists Communists Miscellaneous Nonparty Totals (including prime minister) aCabinet:

20 ministers (incl. 16 Socialists, 1 Centrist [France Unie], 1 Ecologist, 2 nonparty). The government included 6 women, 2 in the cabinet. Cresson was replaced by Pierre Bérégovoy in April 1992. bFrance Unie—a coalition formed in the Assembly in 1990 of Left Radicals and Centrists to enlarge the presidential majority toward the center and support Michel Rocard. cCenter of Social Democrats (CDS). dMRG—These 2 ministers also belonged to France Unie. eEcologist movement. fTwo “direct” adherents of UDF. gDirect (nondifferentiated) members of UDF. hComprising 1 from the Greens and 1 from the Citizens’ Movement. iMadame Simone Veil, a centrist close to Giscard d’Estaing. jIn cabinet: 21 ministers. kIn cabinet: 24 ministers. lIn cabinet: 27 ministers. mIn cabinet: 15 ministers.

and territories. All are elected for a five-year term by direct popular vote on a singlemember constituency basis. Members of the Senate are chosen for nine-year terms by an electoral college composed of National Assembly deputies, département councilors, and delegates of city councils. One-third of the membership is renewed every three years. In  the Senate contained  members; in , ; in , ; and since , . In theory, both chambers have equal powers, with the following exceptions: budget bills must always be submitted to the Assembly first, and only the Assembly may oust the government on a vote of censure (see below). The organization of parliament follows traditional patterns. Each chamber is chaired by a president (Speaker)—elected in the Assembly for five years, in the Senate for three— who is assisted by vice presidents (or deputy Speakers): six in the Assembly and four in the Senate, reflecting roughly the number of major party groupings in each chamber. These officers, who collectively constitute the “conference of presidents” in each chamber,

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formally determine the allocation of committee seats and the organization of parliamentary debates. In order for deputies to participate meaningfully in legislative affairs, they must belong to a “parliamentary party” (groupe parlementaire). In the Fourth Republic fourteen deputies sufficed for a parliamentary party. With the establishment of the Fifth Republic the required number was raised to thirty; this change has forced small contingents of deputies to align (s’apparenter) with larger ones, thus reducing the number of parties in the legislature. After the parliamentary elections of , the number was reduced to twenty in order to reward the twenty-seven Communist deputies for their selective support of the government and, in particular, for having supported Laurent Fabius, the former Socialist prime minister, as Speaker of the Assembly. The decision-making role of parliament is limited, particularly in comparison with earlier French republics and with other Western European democracies. The maximum duration of ordinary sessions of parliament used to be five and a half months per year: eighty days in the fall (from early October) and ninety days in the spring (from early April). In  the constitution was amended to provide for a single ordinary session of nine months, from October through June, totaling  days. Special sessions may be convened at the request of the prime minister or a majority of the deputies, but such sessions must have a clearly defined agenda. There have been many special sessions in recent years, convoked in most cases to deal with budgetary matters.3 The areas in which parliament may pass legislation are clearly enumerated in the constitution (Article ). They include, notably, budget and tax matters; civil liberties; penal and personal-status laws; the organization of judicial bodies; education; social security; the jurisdiction of local communities; the establishment of public institutions, including nationalized industries; and rules governing elections (where not spelled out in the constitutional text). Matters not stipulated fall in the domain of decrees, ordinances, or regulations, which are promulgated by the government directly. The distinction between “laws” and “decrees” is not a clear-cut one. In some areas—for example, local government, education, or labor and social policy—the parliament often does little more than establish general principles and leaves it to the government to fill in the details by decree. In addition, the parliament may be asked (under Article ) to delegate to the government the power to issue decrees in areas normally under parliamentary jurisdiction, a procedure resorted to on many occasions under de Gaulle’s presidency. As is the custom in all parliamentary democracies, a distinction is made between a government bill (projet de loi) and a private member’s bill (proposition de loi). The former has priority; in fact, since the founding of the Fifth Republic less than  percent of all bills passed by parliament originated with private members (or “backbenchers”), and most of these passed because the government raised no objections or because it encouraged such bills. Finance bills can be introduced only by the government, and backbenchers’ amendments to such bills are permissible only if these do not reduce revenues or increase expenditures. Furthermore, if parliament fails to vote on (in practice, to approve) a budget bill within a period of seventy days after submission, the government may enact the budget by decree.

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The government has a deciding voice on what bills are to be discussed and how much time shall be allocated to debate on parts of a bill. It can also make amendments to a bill virtually impossible by resorting to the “blocked-vote” procedure (i.e., demanding that the text of the bill as a whole be voted on). Thus far, this procedure has been used well over  times in the Assembly, with more than  percent of such bills passing. In the Senate, about a third of the bills introduced in the blocked-vote fashion have been rejected. Enactment of a bill requires passage in both the Assembly and the Senate. Should there be disagreement between the two chambers, a variety of procedures may be used. The bill in question may be shuttled back and forth between the chambers until a common text is agreed on; alternatively, the government may call for the appointment of a conference committee, or it may ask each chamber for a “second reading.”4 If disagreement persists, the Assembly may be asked to pronounce itself definitively by simple majority vote, thereby enacting the bill in question. Constitutional amendments are subject to a special procedure. The initiative belongs both to the president (after he consults with the prime minister) and to parliament. An amendment bill, having passed in both chambers in identical form, is then submitted to the people for ratification. A referendum may be avoided if the amendment is ratified by parliament in joint session—convoked for this purpose by the president—by a threefifths majority.5 Although the constitution grants the legislature jurisdiction in areas broad enough to embrace, in principle, the most important domestic policy matters, the Fifth Republic parliament has been in a poor position to exercise this power. In the Fourth Republic, more than two dozen Assembly standing committees contributed much legislative input. These committees, because of the expertise of their members, became quasi-independent centers of power. Though they produced high-quality legislative proposals, they sometimes offered counterproposals to government bills, designed to embarrass the government and bring it down. In contrast, in the Fifth Republic only six standing committees, consisting of  to  deputies each, are provided for. They do their work within carefully limited time periods and are forbidden to produce substitute bills. In theory, the parliament can do much more than just register and ratify what has been proposed to it by the government. During the first decade of the Fifth Republic, parliament, and above all the Assembly, was relatively docile; but (especially since the mid-s) parliament has become increasingly assertive. This can be seen in the growth of the number of amendments to government bills introduced and passed.6 In weekly question periods, questions (in written or oral form) are addressed to individual ministers. Answers, not immediately forthcoming, may be provided by a minister or by a person such as a higher civil servant deputized by him. Such question-and-answer sessions are sometimes followed by a very brief debate, sometimes by no debate at all. They cannot be followed by a vote of censure, which would cause the resignation of the government. Motions of censure must be introduced by a unique and specific procedure and separately from the Assembly’s routine business. These motions require the signatures of at

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least one-tenth of all the deputies—who may co-sponsor only one such motion during each parliamentary session (i.e., fall and spring)—and can be voted on only after a “cooling-off ” period of forty-eight hours; the motion carries only if an absolute majority of the entire membership of the Assembly supports the censure. The government may also challenge or provoke the Assembly to a motion of censure simply by making a specific bill or a general policy declaration a matter of confidence. If no successful censure motion is forthcoming, the bill in question is considered to have passed—and the government, of course, remains in place. In forty-two years (between  and ), the government has resorted successfully to this “provocation” method more than sixty times. During the same period, more than forty motions of censure have been introduced by deputies, but only one (in October ) obtained the requisite majority vote. In that particular instance, President de Gaulle was required to accept the parliamentary dismissal of his prime minister (then Pompidou). But de Gaulle nullified the effect of the censure vote by dissolving parliament and, after the elections that followed, simply reappointing Pompidou to head a “new” government. Another weapon that can be used by parliament against the executive is the Constitutional Council. This body consists of nine members—one-third each chosen by the president, the Speaker of the Assembly, and the Speaker of the Senate—appointed for nine-year terms (with a one-third renewal every three years). Its function was originally viewed as largely advisory. The constitution provides that it must be consulted on the constitutionality of an organic bill before it becomes law and of treaties before they are considered as “ratified.” It also pronounces on the legality of parliamentary regulations and the propriety of referendum procedures; it watches over presidential and legislative elections and confirms the results; and it must, of course, be consulted if the president invokes the emergency clause (Article ) of the constitution. In addition, any bills may, before they become law, be submitted to the council for a judgment by the president, the prime minister, the Speaker of either chamber, and (since the passage of a constitutional amendment in ) by sixty deputies or sixty senators. Under the Fourth Republic, deputies were often too willing to unseat a government in the hope that there would be a portfolio for them in a subsequent cabinet; if they should in turn be ousted from the cabinet, they would still retain their parliamentary seats. But the Fifth Republic constitution purposely changed all that. Under Article , a position in the cabinet is “incompatible” with simultaneous occupancy of a seat in parliament. Consequently, any deputy (or senator) who ascends to the cabinet must resign his parliamentary seat—which is immediately filled, without special election, by his “alternate” (suppléant), whose name was listed on the ballot alongside that of the deputy during the preceding Assembly elections. (If the alternate, too, resigns or dies, there must be a by-election.) The spirit of the incompatibility clause has been violated repeatedly. Cabinet ministers have run for parliamentary seats they do not intend to occupy; presidents have encouraged that practice because in this way popular support for the government can be tested; and constituents have voted for such candidates because it is much better, for securing “pork-barrel” appropriations, for local voters to have their representative sit in the

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cabinet rather than in parliament. Furthermore, deputies appointed by the government for special tasks (as chargés de mission) may retain their parliamentary seats if the appointment is for less than six months. The incompatibility rule has not affected the traditional accumulation of elected offices (cumul des mandats). For many years, most deputies were concurrently members of regional, departmental, and municipal councils, and a sizable number were serving as members of the European Parliament as well. Of the  deputies elected to the Assembly in ,  continued to be mayors (with an even larger proportion found among senators). Of the deputies elected to the Assembly in , about half continued to be mayors (with an even larger proportion found among senators);  deputies were mayors of towns of over twenty thousand inhabitants;  were members of general (departmental) councils; and , presidents of regional councils. A (perhaps extreme) example of multiple officeholding was that of the late Jean Lecanuet, who (in addition to holding the leadership of the UDF in the s), concurrently served as senator, mayor of a sizable town (Rouen), president of a general (departmental) council, member of a regional council, and member of the European Parliament. All these activities cut deeply into the time available to the deputies or senators to devote themselves to their parliamentary work, let alone to oppose the government. In order to rectify such a situation—and perhaps increase the attention span of parliamentarians—an act was passed in  to limit the accumulation of elective offices to no more than two.7 Such a limitation, let alone the abolition of the cumul, is not enthusiastically accepted by many politicians. Since the enactment of this reform, about half the deputies have opted to retain their positions as mayors as well as their parliamentary seats.8 On becoming prime minister, Jospin required all his cabinet appointees to relinquish their positions as mayors of large cities as a precondition for taking office; it is not certain, however, whether this practice will be followed by his successors. The limitations on the power of the deputy have not served to improve his or her public image or, indeed, self-image. Still, there is no proof that individual legislators in France are substantially less powerful or less rewarded than their counterparts in Britain. In  the gross annual salary of deputies and senators was about $, (roughly corresponding to that of higher civil servants and senior university professors), a sum that included base pay plus rental subsidy. In addition, the typical deputy received about $, a year for administrative assistance (partly paid for by the Assembly), as well as travel allowances and tax concessions.9 For many deputies, such compensation is insufficient to cover the cost of maintaining two apartments and traveling to and from their constituencies. Hence they may be forced to pursue their “normal” professions as best they can. Most deputies are not rich; in fact, in terms of social background, age, and occupation they are reasonably representative of the population. Statistics reveal that National Assemblies produced in the past five elections (i.e., –) have included a large number of government officials, educators (especially among the Socialists), white-collar employees, and a fair number of physicians. The number of blue-collar workers and farmers has been insignificant, however.

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The Administrative State One of the features of the French polity that has been subjected to relatively little change and that is not likely to alter drastically in the near future is the administrative system. Since the time of the Old Regime and Napoleon, that system has been highly centralized; the various echelons below the national government—départements, districts (arrondissements), and communes—have remained administrative rather than decision-making entities, whose responsibilities can be defined, expanded, or contracted at will by the national government. (For recent decentralization policies, see pp. –.) At the pinnacle of the system is the permanent civil service. Defined in its broadest sense, it is the corpus of more than  million government employees and constitutes about  percent of France’s total labor force. In addition to the ordinary national civil servants, it includes military officers, teachers from the public elementary schools through the university, employees of local bodies, and the staff employed by the railroads, civil aviation, electric power companies, and other nationalized sectors. Denationalization (or privatization) policies, pursued at a steady pace for the past several years, will undoubtedly result in a reduction in the number of state employees. The civil service proper (la fonction publique) numbers about one million. It is subdivided into several categories ranging from custodial and manual workers to high administrative functionaries who are directly responsible to cabinet ministers. The civil service is functionally divided into “sectoral” categories. The most prestigious of these are the General Inspectorate of Finance, the Court of Accounts, the Foreign Ministry, and the Council of State (the pinnacle of the national administrative court system)—collectively labeled the grand corps. This body also includes the prefectoral corps, whose members, the prefects, are the chief agents of the government on departmental and regional levels and are under the authority of the minister of the interior. Since the time of Napoleon, recruitment to the higher civil service has been tied to the educational system. A variety of national schools, the likes of which are not found in other countries, trains specialized civil servants. These schools, the grandes écoles, are maintained alongside the regular universities and have highly competitive entry and graduation requirements. The best known are the École Polytechnique, for training civil engineers and scientists, the École Normale Supérieure, whose graduates become professors in prestigious lycées and universities, and the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA). The last-named, which opened its doors only in , has trained the majority of higher administrative personnel for the grand corps and the prefectoral corps. It numbers among its graduates the incumbent president (Chirac), a former president (Giscard), several prime ministers (Fabius, Chirac, Rocard, Balladur, Juppé, and Jospin), and many cabinet ministers.10 The French have often criticized the important position of the higher civil service. They have argued that while it makes for stability, it tends to undermine democracy. This criticism has been based on the upper- and upper-middle class origins of most of the higher functionaries, on the fact that they are subject neither to popular elections nor adequate controls, and on the belief that they have tended to serve not the citizen but an abstraction called “the state.”

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Nevertheless, the higher civil service has not been monolithic or dictatorial, nor has it been immune to internal conflicts and external pressures. Although the ENA has recruited only a minuscule portion of its student body from the working class and the peasantry—despite a number of half-hearted attempts to broaden the method of recruitment11—its graduates, the Énarques, have been as likely to be identified as progressives, or even leftists, as conservatives or reactionaries. Sometimes there is a conflict between those civil servants who work for the Ministries of Finance and Industry, who often have close personal and ideological ties with big-business managers, and those who work in the Ministries of Health and Education, who tend to have affinities with their clientele and therefore to have a “social-reform” outlook. Frequently there is a difference of opinion between the civil servants in the Ministry of Justice, who are concerned with procedural propriety, and those in the Ministry of the Interior, who tend to be sympathetic with the police’s preoccupation with public order. There is also a certain tension between the traditional bureaucrats who serve in the standard ministries and have a legalistic orientation and the technocrats who have been trained in economics, statistics, and management methods and are found in the National Economic Planning Commission. Public Corporations A component of the administrative system that is difficult to categorize, yet is of great importance, is the nationalized sector. From the beginning of the postwar period to the early s about  percent of the French economy was in government hands, including (but not limited to) the following: mass transport, gas, electricity, nuclear energy, the postal service, civil aviation, the procurement and distribution of fuel, a large proportion of banking and insurance, and one automobile manufacturing firm (Renault). The reasons behind nationalization—the influence of Socialist ideology, the limits of the private capital market, the monopolistic nature of certain enterprises, the need to consolidate production or services in order to make them more efficient, and so on—need not detain us here. Suffice it to say that the state’s involvement in the management of economic matters has resulted in special approaches to recruitment, job classification, and political control. On occasion, positions of responsibility in nationalized, or “public,” enterprises are given to individuals coopted from the private sector or are handed over as political “plums” to politicians who have proved their loyalty to the president. Because of the complexity of the management problems, nationalized enterprises have been difficult to subject to parliamentary surveillance; at the same time, their very existence can be a useful weapon in the hands of a government interested in long-term economic planning, or at least in influencing the behavior of the private economic sector in its production and pricing policies. In –, the Socialist government (in conformity with its preelection platform) introduced bills to bring additional sectors under public control, among them a dozen industrial conglomerates (manufacturing metals, chemicals, electronics, machine tools) and most of the remaining private banks. Such a policy proved to be ill advised, and soon after coming to power in , the Gaullist government of Chirac proceeded to denationalize most of these sectors, as well as most of the (hitherto government-owned) television

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networks. When the Socialists returned to power in , they continued this privatization policy at a slower pace, which sped up considerably after the installation of the Gaullist governments of Balladur and Juppé. For them, privatization, in addition to conforming with Gaullists’ recently emerging “neo-liberal” (i.e., market-oriented) ideology, served to bring a quick infusion of funds into the public treasury. Not all the privatization projects had smooth sailing, however: Juppé’s proposal to privatize the Thomson firm, France’s largest industrial-military production conglomerate, was shelved as a result of widespread opposition; for similar reasons, the Socialist government of Jospin, which took office in , had to scale down the privatization of the country’s civilian airline and the telecommunications monopoly. Control and Redress One of the institutions that has played a significant role as a watchdog over administrative activities is the Council of State (Conseil d’Etat). Originally created in  by Napoleon for resolving intrabureaucratic disputes, it has gradually assumed additional functions. It advises the government on the language of draft bills; it passes on the legality of decrees and regulations issuing from the executive; and most important, it acts as a court of appeal for suits brought by citizens against the administration. Such suits, involving charges of bureaucratic arbitrariness, illegalities, or abuse of power, are initiated in department (prefectoral) administrative tribunals. Unfortunately, several years may elapse before such cases are dealt with by the Council of State. A  innovation is the “mediator,” the French equivalent of the ombudsman, or citizens’ “complaint” commissioner. This official, appointed by the president for a six-year term on the recommendation of parliament, may take upon himself the examination of a variety of complaints involving, for example, social security agencies, prisons, nationalized industries, and administrative and judicial malfunctions. He may request from any public agency information he considers pertinent, initiate judicial proceedings against misbehaving bureaucrats, and suggest to the government improvements in the laws. Appeal to the mediator (which is free of charge) cannot be direct; it must be made via a deputy or senator. Subnational Government and Administration The extent to which national decisions can be, or should be, influenced or deflected on local levels has been a matter of intense debate in France for the past two decades. There has been some question whether the existing subdivisions are of the proper size, whether they are adequately financed, and whether they provide a meaningful arena for the political participation of citizens. Metropolitan France consists of  départements, which are the basic subnational administrative units into which the country was divided during the Revolution of . In addition there are five overseas départements. Each département is both self-administering and an administrative subunit of the national government. Whatever autonomy the départements possesses is reflected by its General Council, which votes a budget, decides on local taxes and loans, and passes laws on housing, roads, welfare services, cultural pro-

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grams, and educational services (supplementary to those made mandatory by the national government). The General Council, which is elected by popular vote (by single-member constituencies—the cantons) for a six-year term (with half of the membership renewable every three years), in turn elects a president, or chairperson. Traditionally the latter, however, was not properly speaking the executive officer of the département. That role was filled by the prefect, an agent of the national government who used to be charged with administering the département in behalf of the Ministry of the Interior and other national ministries. Thus the prefect (together with the mayor of a town) would be involved in the maintenance of public order, but the (local) police was itself an instrument of national administration and, as such, was directly under the authority of the minister of the interior in Paris. In  the office of prefect was abolished and replaced by that of commissioner of the republic (which meant, in effect, that the prefects were renamed commissioners). The commissioners still functioned as agents of the national government, but they left budgetary and many other policy decisions to the General Councils (except for services and expenditures mandated by national legislation). In , the title of commissioner was changed back to that of prefect. The prefect is assisted by a cabinet composed of specialists in public works, agriculture, housing, and other services. On the next lower level, are the  arrondissements, the basic (single-member) constituencies for parliamentary elections. (Some heavily populated arrondissements are subdivided into two or more constituencies.) A further subdivision is the canton, which contains a number of agencies such as units of the national gendarmerie, tax offices, and highway services. Since  the départements have been grouped into twenty-two regions. These have their own assemblies, elected by popular vote (on the basis of proportional representation) for six-year terms. The regional assemblies and their presiding officers all serve to coordinate the activities of several départements. The lowest, but most significant, administrative unit is the commune. Communes, of which there are more than ,, may range in size from villages of fewer than  inhabitants to the national capital. Communes have varied responsibilities, ranging from fire protection, the upkeep of elementary school buildings, the provision of selected social services, the imposition of certain taxes, and the maintenance of public order.12 Some communes have become too small to provide a full range of services; they have been either administratively merged with neighboring communes or compelled to associate with them functionally. Under provisions put into effect in the early s, certain services, such as water supply and fire protection, may be performed jointly by several communes. Conversely, some communes are so large that special regimes have been invented for them. For instance, Paris and Lyon are themselves subdivided into arrondissements. Paris has always been a special case. Between  and , Paris did not have a mayor but was ruled by two prefects directly on behalf of the national government: a prefect of the Seine (the former name of the département in which the capital is located) and a prefect of police. Each of the twenty arrondissements had its own mayor, whose functions were generally limited to the maintenance of civil registers, the performance of

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marriages, the changing of street names, and the like. Since the reinstitution of the mayor for all of Paris, the twenty district mayors have been replaced by “civil administrators.” The prefect of the Paris département and the prefect of police, however, remain in place. The relationship between the national government and subnational units has been rendered confusing by the existence of functional units that overlap geographical boundaries. Thus in addition to the départements and regions there are twenty-five educational districts (académies), which administer the educational system from elementary school through universities; sixteen social security regions; and six military districts. All of these have been, in the final analysis, administrative conveniences put in place by the national government and have provided little in the way of local decision-making opportunities. The situation improved considerably after the election of Mitterrand, however, when (under the decentralization laws enacted between  and ) municipal and General Councils were given greater authority to collect revenues. This development has been welcomed by the mayors of the larger towns, but the increasing pressure placed on them has caused many of them to refrain from seeking reelection, or to give up their parliamentary mandates. For many small communes, however, decentralization has been a handicap, because they are too poor to manage by themselves some of the services that had earlier been the responsibility of the national government.13 A major purpose of subnational units is to serve as arenas of citizen involvement in politics and the recruitment of politicians for both national and subnational echelons. This is particularly true of communes: the outcome of municipal elections, which occur every six years and produce nearly , councillors, ultimately affects the composition of the Senate, since the councils are part of the electoral college that chooses senators. Municipal elections also enable the citizenry to express “midterm” attitudes regarding the performance of the national government and, more specifically, that of the party in power. Thus, the outcome of the municipal elections of March , in which many Socialist and Communist councillors (and, indirectly, mayors) were replaced by Gaullist or Giscardo-centrist ones, was viewed as an expression of voters’ impatience with the record of the Mitterrand presidency and the Socialist government after two years in office; conversely, the outcome of the municipal elections of March , in which many Gaullists were in turn ousted, was interpreted as a reflection of a relative satisfaction with the performance of the Socialist government led by Rocard. In the most recent municipal elections, which took place in March , local issues predominated. At the same time, these elections were of national significance, insofar as the outcome reflected the national image of the major political parties and were thought by many to serve as a political “weather vane” for their prospects in the national—that is, presidential and parliamentary—elections scheduled for . On the one hand, the victories of right-wing parties in many of the provincial towns were encouraging to the Gaullists and their right-of-center allies; on the other hand, the victories of the left in two of the three largest cities—Paris and Lyons—were good news to Prime Minister Jospin and the Socialist leadership. However, the election of a Socialist (Bertrand Delanoë) as mayor of Paris for the first time in a century was due less to ideology or policy than to the

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fact that the outgoing Gaullist mayor (Jean Tibéri), had been charged with acts of corruption that dated back to the time when President Chirac was the mayor. These acts included the appointment of phantom municipal employees, whose salaries went into the coffers of the Gaullist party, as well as the maintenance of electoral registers that included nonexistent voters. Notes . Cresson developed a reputation for outspokenness and lack of tact, and within a few weeks of her assumption of office, the popularity of her government plummeted, as did that of Mitterrand. . For a detailed statement of the legal-constitutional position of the prime minister, see Philippe Ardant, Le Premier Ministre en France (Paris: Montchrestien, ). For a discussion of the evolution of the prime ministers’ actual relationship with presidents, see Robert Elgie, The Role of the Prime Minister in France, – (New York: St. Martin’s, ). . There were seventeen special sessions between  and , four between  and , four in , and eleven between  and . . Typically, more than half of the bills passed have not required the use of conference committees. The breakdown for selected years has been as follows: Bills adopted* Without use of committee After use of committee of which committee succeeded in modifying bill Total bills passed

.

.

. .

. . .









33 21

13 12

16 11

30 19

21 54

12 25

4 27

8 49

Source: Année Politique  (Paris: Evénements et Tendances, 1999), 151. *not counting treaties. The most recent constitutional amendments adopted by such a joint session—a “congress” assembled in Versailles—were passed in June  and January . The former provided for the domestic applicability of decisions handed down by the International Penal Court and for gender equality in putting up candidates for elective office. The latter ratified the Treaty of Amsterdam of , which empowered the European Union to determine “supranational” immigration and asylum policies. In , , amendments to bills were introduced in the Assembly, of which  passed; in , , (, passed); in , , (, passed); and during the “cohabitation” period –, , (, passed). In , , amendments were introduced (, by legislative committees, , by backbenchers, and  by the government). Only , passed, few of them originating with backbenchers. See Les grands textes de la pratique institutionnelle de la Ve République. Didier Maus, ed. (Paris: Documentation Française, ), . See Albert Mabileau, “Le cumul des mandats,” Regards sur l’Actualité  (March ): –. One of the rare exceptions to this development was the decision of Alain Carignon in  to resign his position as deputy while retaining that of mayor of Grenoble and member of the general council of his département. In , however, he was forced to resign these offices in the wake of his conviction for the misuse of public funds. “Ce que possèdent vos élus,” Le Point,  January , . Another specialized school, the École Nationale de la Magistrature, created in  and located in Bordeaux, trains states attorneys, investigating magistrates, and judges. In , the Socialist government attempted to diminish the existing bias in favor of Parisians, graduates of the better universities, and children of higher civil servants by providing for an alternative entry into the ENA (by means of special examinations) to local politicians and middle-echelon officials of public agencies; the Chirac government subsequently suspended that method. In a related move, the Cresson government in  initiated a policy of “delocalizing” the ENA by moving it from Paris to the provincial city of Strasbourg. Although subsequent governments committed themselves to continuing this move, some classes have in effect been retained in Paris or returned to it.

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. Since the mid-s, a series of laws have been passed to permit localities to appoint their own municipal police as supplements to the national gendarmerie. The size of such police forces, appointed by mayors and approved by prefects, and their relationships to the national police, vary widely. See Marie Vogel, “La loi sur les polices municipales,” Regards sur l’Actualité  (July–August ): –. . The relative poverty of small towns and the low salaries of elected municipal positions have impelled many mayors (especially those who hold well-paid parliamentary seats) not to seek reelection to that office. Cécile Chambraud, “Les nouveaux paramètres des élections municipales de l,” Le Monde,  February .

Chapter 8

Who Has the Power? FRANCE HAS A COMPLEX political party system, which many view as symptomatic of disorder and confusion. At any given time—especially during elections—it is possible to distinguish more than a dozen parties. Some of these can be traced back several generations and have been of national importance; others are of passing interest because of their ephemeral or purely local nature or weak organization; and still others are mere political clubs, composed of small clusters of people more anxious to have a forum for expressing their political views than to achieve power. From the point of view of national politics, one may identify six major “ideological families” within which political parties have been arranged—at least from the post–World War II period until recently: Communists and Socialists; Radical-Socialists and Catholics; and Conservatives and Gaullists. For the sake of analytic convenience, these may in turn be grouped into the left, the center, and the right. Each of the “families” has tried to represent different social classes and/or different views regarding economic policy, executive-legislative relations, and the place of religion in politics. Before looking at specific parties, one should be warned that their positions have not always been consistent; that their traditional ideologies often failed to be adjusted in terms of changing socioeconomic realities, including the structure of the electorate; that politicians elected under the label of one party have sometimes shifted to another; and that tactical considerations have often forced parliamentary deputies to vote on issues in such a way as to ignore their party platforms.

The Old Right Historically, the political right was characterized by its identification with the status quo. It had favored monarchism and deplored the Revolutions of  and . Inclined toward authoritarian rule, the right evolved from support of Bourbon kings to that of Napoleon and other “heroic” leaders. It favored an elitist social structure; defined society in “organic” (i.e., hereditary) and hierarchical terms; had contempt for the masses, who were considered too irrational and selfish to be entrusted with political participation; and invested the “state” with an aura of sanctity. Originally, the support of the right was derived from the established classes: the aristocracy, the landed gentry, the clergy, and later, the military and big business. The importance of the political right was gradually reduced with the transformation of the French economy and society, specifically, the decline of those sectors that

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Average Unemployment Rates, – (percentages) .

France .

Germany

.

Italy .

Russia .

Sweden

.

United Kingdom United States Canada

. .

Sources: Calculated from OECD, Economic Outlook  (December ); Tacis, Russia and the EU Member States. Statistical Comparisons – (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Comunities, ).

had been its main electoral base. Furthermore, by the beginning of the Fourth Republic, much of that ideological family had become discredited because many of its adherents had been collaborators of the Germans during the war, while the “respectable” right had become converted to republicanism. The main political expression of the postwar right was the National Center of Independents and Peasants (Centre National des Indépendants et Paysans—CNIP), a group of politicians sometimes also known as “moderates.” The CNIP (later known simply as CNI) was feebly represented in the Assembly, in part because it reflected two conflicting positions: a “liberal” one (i.e., a belief in laissez-faire economics) and a “conservative” one (i.e., a continued commitment to the values of elitism, religion, authority, and family). Another reason for the weakness of the traditional right was that it had to compete with the “center” parties for voters. A third, and most important, reason was the rise of Gaullism, a political movement that drained off many of the right’s old supporters, notably the nationalist and populistauthoritarian elements. Gaullism is a unique phenomenon. Many Frenchmen had shared General de Gaulle’s dislike of the Fourth Republic. They objected to its central feature: a parliament that was, in theory, all-powerful but in practice was immobilized because it was faction ridden. They favored a regime with a strong leader who would not be hampered by political parties and interest groups; these were considered particularistic and destructive interpositions between the national leadership and the citizenry. Above all, Gaullists wanted France to reassert its global role and rediscover its grandeur. Many of their early supporters had been identified with the general as members of his Free French entourage in London or had been active in the Resistance. Others had worked with him when he headed the first provisional government after the Liberation; still others saw in him the embodiment of the “hero-savior.” Gaullism can thus be described as nationalistic as well as “Cae-

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sarist” or “Bonapartist,” in the sense that the legitimacy of the national leader was to be based on popular appeal. Nevertheless, Gaullism never contained a clear domestic policy program and, at least in the beginning, did not seem to show great interest in economic reform or social justice and therefore failed to get significant support from the working-class electorate. Yet Gaullists would vehemently reject the label of “rightist” because, they argued, nationalism is not incompatible with social reform, and because the first Gaullist party, the Rally of the French People (Rassemblement du Peuple Français—RPF), established in , was intended to be a movement that would appeal to all social classes. The RPF, however, was not to become a mass party until the collapse of the Fourth Republic. The Old Left Leftism and socialism have been particularly important in modern French political history because they have stood for progress, equality, rationalism, and democratic government—the aims with which the Revolution of  was associated. In response to the gradual democratization of the suffrage and the growing electoral importance of the working class, many parties appropriated the label “socialist.” Socialist parties have been inspired by different traditions, some of them dating to the eighteenth century—utopian, revolutionary, and reformist—but these parties shared a preoccupation with the systematic explanation of social phenomena: an emphasis on the importance (and the claims) of society as a whole; and a belief that economic, political, and social structures were intimately related. The major party of the left is the Socialist Party (Parti socialiste—PS). Originally formed in  out of small and disparate leftist groups, and known until  as the SFIO (Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière), it was inspired by revolutionary Marxism and appealed to the industrial working class. Increased parliamentary representation, participation in bourgeois governments, and the takeover of leadership positions by intellectuals and other middle-class elements caused the Socialist Party to lose its revolutionary dynamism and commit itself to the idea of gradual, nonviolent reform. The party came to attach as much value to the maintenance of democratic processes as to socioeconomic redistributive policies. In  Léon Blum, the party leader, headed a government that (with the support of some of the other leftist parties) instituted far-reaching social reforms. When the party was reconstituted in the Fourth Republic, it continued to promote progressive legislation. But the Socialist Party was hampered in its growth by competition from the Communist Party. Established in , the Communist Party (Parti communiste—PC) had taken much of the Socialists’ working-class electorate from them. The two parties of the left collaborated on many bills in the legislature; but whereas the Communists wanted to bring down the Fourth Republic, the Socialists were committed to maintaining it. In , most Socialists voted in favor of the investiture of de Gaulle as prime minister; the Communists opposed it. Later that year, while a large number of Socialist leaders endorsed the Fifth Republic constitution, the Communists expressed opposition to it. In the s the Socialists lost much of their membership, whereas the Communists were able to retain

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most of their hard-core adherents. Both leftist parties were consigned to opposition status from which they emerged only in . The Old Center For at least a century there has been a political family that has represented the broad interests of the petite bourgeoisie—the shopkeepers, artisans, and certain farmers—as well as portions of the intellectual and free professional classes. It has occupied the “center” position in French politics insofar as it rejected both the elitism and static orientation of the Conservatives and the loudly articulated egalitarianism of the left. It favored selective social reforms but rejected collectivism. It was committed to republicanism and to a progressive democratization of political institutions, which meant, among other things, the extension of the suffrage and the increased power of parliament. The political center has always been difficult to pin down with precision because many centrists pretended to adhere to a more fashionable “leftism” and provided themselves with misleading labels, and because the center has been fragmented. It is necessary to distinguish between two basic kinds of centrism: Catholic and Radical-Socialist. The Radical-Socialist Party is the oldest existing party in France. Officially founded in , its origins must be traced to the beginning of the Third Republic and, as some would insist, to the French Revolution. The party backed a strongly centralized republic but has been consistently led by local notables. It was “radical” in the sense that it favored—and helped achieve—the elimination of the role of the Catholic church in politics and the promotion of a secular school system. It viewed the state as the enemy and hence argued strongly for civil rights (especially property rights). But this did not prevent the Radicals from asking the state to give protection to that segment of their electorate that felt its livelihood to be threatened by economic consolidation at home and competition from abroad. Such attitudes were “leftist” enough as long as the petite bourgeoisie constituted the bulk of the politically underprivileged masses. With industrialization, a new class became important: that of factory workers. The ideology of Socialist parties— the belief in the class struggle and opposition to private productive property—that this new class embraced made the Radicals’ leftism increasingly illusory and pushed them into a defensive posture. Nevertheless, the tactical position of the Radical Party often made it an indispensable partner in government coalitions and allowed it to play a dominant role in the Third and Fourth republics and to provide both regimes with numerous prime ministers. Another orientation that must be classified as centrist is that of Christian (or Catholic) democracy. Originally, Catholicism could not be equated easily either with republicanism or with social progress; the Popular Party founded toward the end of the Third Republic, which supported the parliamentary system, was relatively insignificant. But political Catholicism gained a new respectability during World War II; after Liberation, devout Catholics who had been active in the Resistance established the Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP), which, although clericalist in orientation, was committed to civil liberties and social reform in a republican context. In the beginning of the Fourth Republic, the MRP’s position was leftist enough, and its parliamentary representation

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strong enough, to make it a coalition partner with the Socialists and Communists. Moreover, the party competed with the Radicals in its adaptability. Toward the end of the Fourth Republic the MRP was weakened for the same reason as the Radicals. Some of the party’s leftist adherents turned with interest to the Socialists, while its conservative ones, who were far more numerous, embraced Gaullism. In  a large proportion of the MRP politicians joined the Gaullist bandwagon. (The pitiful remnant of the MRP dissolved in .) Elections and Political Parties in the Fifth Republic The return of de Gaulle to power produced a temporary eclipse of all political parties that the public mind associated with the discredited Fourth Republic. Under that republic, an electoral system based on proportional representation had made it possible for many parties to gain parliamentary seats. The “game of politics” had been such that most parties could easily turn rightward or leftward, or switch from support of the government to opposition status. The system of Assembly elections instituted in , however, forced parties to make the kind of clear choice they were often unprepared to make. That system is based on the single-member district: a candidate for the Assembly is required to obtain an absolute majority of all votes cast in his constituency. If no candidate obtains such a majority, a second, or “runoff,” balloting must be held one week later, in which a candidate needs only a plurality of the votes. (Only those candidates who received at least . percent of the first-round votes may run in the second.) The system of presidential elections is quite similar: if an absolute majority is not obtained on the first round, a “face-off ” contest occurs two weeks later between the two candidates who had received the largest number of first-round votes. The French are fond of saying that “on the first ballot one votes, and on the second, one eliminates.” Electoral realism has required that a political party, in order to maximize its chances, think in terms of combining forces with another party by means of preelectoral deals and second-round withdrawal, or mutual-support, agreements. Such activities have produced polarizing tendencies: the reduction of the number of political parties and their rearrangement into two opposing camps, much in the manner of the United States and Great Britain (see tables . and ., pp. –). The Gaullist party emerged as the major beneficiary of the new system. Relabeled the Union pour la Nouvelle République (UNR), subsequently renamed as Union Démocratique pour la République (UDR), and obtaining a dominant position in the Assembly, it became relatively institutionalized; in many localities, Gaullist machines were set up, and many local notables, drawn by the magnet of power, associated with them. Most of the old centrist formations remained in the Opposition (though a large proportion of centrist voters had flocked to the banner of de Gaulle while not necessarily embracing Gaullist ideology). One of the collecting points of centrist anti-Gaullism was the Democratic Center, which included some of the old MRP politicians who distrusted or detested the general. Both major parties of the left were reduced to impotence. The Communist Party could count on the support of about  percent of the electorate, but could not win without allies. Clearly, the only possible ally was the Socialist Party. The Socialists had, theo-

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Table 8.1 Parliamentary and Presidential Elections, 1958–97 (in percentage of total votes cast) Elections Parliamentary

Presidential

1958 (1) (2) 1962 (1) (2)

Communists

Socialists

18.9 20.7 21.7 21.3

15.5 13.7 12.6 15.2 32.2a 45.5a 18.8d 24.1d 16.5d 21.3d 5.1f

1965 (1) (2) 1967 (1) (2) 1968 (1) (2) 1969 (1) (2) 1973 (1) (2)

22.5 21.4 20.0 20.1 21.5e 21.5 20.6

1974 (1) (2) 1978 (1) (2) 1981 (1) (2)

20.5 18.6 15.3m

Radicals & Left-Radical

MRP

11.5 7.7 7.5 7.0

11.6 7.5 8.9 5.3

21.2 25.1 43.2a 49.2a 22.5 2.3k 28.3 2.3k a 25.8 5i.8a

Democratic Center

Independents & Moderates 19.9 23.6 4.4 1.6

9.6 7.8 15.8b 17.9 10.8 10.3 7.8 23.4g 42.4g

17.6 26.4 31.9 40.5 43.7c 54.5c 37.8 42.6 43.7 46.4 43.8h 57.6h 36.4 46.2

13.1i 6.1i 32.6j 50.8j 23.9l 24.8l 2.2n

Gaullists

15.1

28.3j 48.2j

22.6 26.1 17.9o

National Front

Others 5.0 0.4 0.4 1.3 8.3 — 3.0 1.1 9.5 4.4 6.1 — 7.8 2.0 10.1 — 8.2 — 10.3p

1981 (1) (2) 1986 1988 (1) (2) 1988 (1) (2) 1993 (1) (2) 1995 (1) (2) 1997 (1) (2)

16.2 6.9 9.8 6.7s 11.3 3.4 9.2 4.6 8.6ad 9.8 3.6

37.5q 49.3q 31.0 34.1a 54.0a 37.5w 48.7w 19.2w 31.3aa 23.3ae 47.4ae 25.7q 39.1q

19.2l 18.6l 0.4k

21.5r

40.4x 46.8x 39.7y 55.0ab 18.6af 6.7ag 5.6ag

14.9ah 21.2ah )  extent of support. Left Radicals (MRG) and other allies. xUnion du Rassemblement et du Centre (URC), an electoral alliance of RPR and UDF. yUnion pour la France (UPF), and alliance of RPR (19.83), UDF (18.64), and smaller groups. zOf these, three environmental parties, 10.7 (subdivided among Verts [Greens] 4.02; Generation Ecologie, 3.61; and Nouveaux Ecologistes, 2.5). wIncluding

20.8o 52.5o 16.5 23.6

9.7 14.4u

6.3 2.7 0.9 8.2v

9.7 1.1 12.4 5.7 15.0u

0.9 2.6 19.5z 3.3ac

15.2 5.7

11.2 1.2

aaSocialist

party 29.79, Left Radicals and other allies 1.54. of which RPR 27.84, UDF 25.11. acEcologist groups 0.18, miscellaneous right-wing parties 2.85. adRobert Hue. aeLionel Jospin. afEdouard Balladur. agIncludes Greens, Movement for France, and other democratic left candidates. ahUDF. abUPF,

who has the power?

Note: (1)  first ballot; (2)  second ballot; horizontal arrows ( , lUDF and “presidential majority.” mGeorges Marchais. nMichel Crépeau, a Left Radical. oJacques Chirac. and SopIncluding 3.9 for Brice Lalonde, the cialist Left (FGDS). eJacques Duclos. Environmentalist candidate. qIncluding Left Radicals (MRG). fGaston Defferre. rGaullist-UDF combined list. gAlain Poher, Christian-Democratic sAndré Lajoinie Centrist. tRaymond Barre, UDF. hGeorges Pompidou. uJean-Marie Le Pen. i“Reformers.” vIncluding Ecologists (Greens) 3.8, jValéry Giscard d’Estaing. kLeft Radicals (MRG). and miscellaneous left, 4.4. aFrançois Mitterrand. bJean Lecanuet. cCharles de Gaulle. dFederation of Democratic

8.3l 16.6t

20.8 22.4 11.2 19.9o 45.9o

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Table 8.2 Composition of the National Assembly since  Parliamentary elections 1956 1958 1962 1967 1968 1973 1978 1981 1986 1988 1993 1997

Communists 150 10 41 73 34 73 86 44 35 27 23 36

Socialists and allies 99 47 66

Radicals and allies

MRP and Center

94 40 43

84 56 55 41c 34c

121b

105 286e 214e 277e 70e 250

57b 100e 10g

Conservatives, Moderates, Independents 97 129

34f

33o

123h 62k 132k 130k 213k 113k

aGaullists and Independent Republicans. bSocialist and Radical alliance. cProgress and Modern Democracy. dGaullists, Independent Republicans, and progrovernment Centrists. eSocialist and Left Radicals. fReformers (Moderate Radicals and Opposition Centrists). gLeft Radicals (MRG). hUDF. iIndependents and Peasants (CNIP). jIdentified only (and directly) with UDF rather than one of its components. kUDF (Republican, CDS, and Moderate Radical-Socialists). lIncluding 32 National Front and 6 unaffiliated. mIncluding 13 miscellaneous right and 1 National Front deputy (who has since nCNIP and others affiliated with the center-right coalition. oIncluding 13 Left Radicals, 8 Ecologists, and 7 Citizens’ Movement. pIncluding 1 National Front and 1 Movement for France.

Gaullists 22 206

268a 242a 344d 270d 9i

153 88 158 129 247 140

Miscellaneous and unaffiliated

Total seats

50 64 9 10 18 13 5 11 38l 14m 24n 5p

596 552 482 487 487 490 491 491 577 577 577 577

left the party).

retically, two options: an alliance with either the Communist Party or the opposition centrists. In the presidential elections of , a “united left” tactic was preferred, but one that implied the cooptation of part of the center. Both major parties of the left agreed on a single presidential candidate, François Mitterrand. Mitterrand’s hand had been considerably strengthened when he succeeded in forming the Federation of the Democratic and Socialist Left (Fédération de la Gauche Démocratique et Socialiste—FGDS), which grouped around the Socialist Party a variety of small leftist clubs as well as the RadicalSocialist Party (which had begun its decline into insignificance). But after various electoral failures, and because of the continued disunity between the Socialists and Communists, this alliance disintegrated, and in  each of the two parties fielded its own presidential candidate. The Socialists then decided to restructure their organization, rejuvenate their leadership, alter their platform, and project an image of dynamism. One of the ideas the Socialists were (later) to advocate for a number of years was autogestion, a form of self-management of

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industrial firms by workers. At the same time, the party enrolled many members of the bourgeoisie: shopkeepers, artisans, white-collar employees, technicians, and even devout Catholics. Its new position of strength encouraged the Socialist Party to rebuild its alliance with the Communists. In  the two parties signed a joint platform (the “Common Program of the Left”) and agreed to support each other in subsequent national elections. The centrists, meanwhile, remained weak. Pompidou’s election in  had been the excuse for some politicians of the Democratic Center, already starved for power, to join the conservative majority; they reasoned, somewhat disingenuously, that the new president, although a Gaullist, was much more inclined to accommodate himself to centrist thinking than de Gaulle had been. Specifically, they hoped that Pompidou would support the policies most dear to them: European unification, more power for parliament, and meaningful decentralization within France. Those centrists who were still disinclined to make peace with Gaullism embraced another option: an electoral alignment with the Radical-Socialists known as the Reformers’ Movement. The creation of that movement marked a turning point in French politics because it implied that the Catholic–anticlerical discord had been reduced to a manageable scale. But the movement rested from the start on too narrow an electoral base. Moreover, the left wing of the Radical Party was offended by this open collaboration with “clericalist” forces and wanted no part of the Reformers’ experiment; instead, they reorganized into a distinct party, the Movement of Left Radicals (Mouvement des Radicaux de Gauche—MRG), which became the third partner of the Common-Program alliance. Bipolarization and Fragmentation By the early s the French party system appeared to have become permanently bipolarized into a right-wing majority and a left-wing opposition. But the presidential elections of May , into which France was propelled by the sudden death of Pompidou, began as a three-way race. Mitterrand was again the candidate of a united left. The Gaullist Party’s candidate was Jacques Chaban-Delmas, whose background as a faithful adherent of the late general and as a former Radical-Socialist could appeal to a good portion of the (heretofore oppositionist) centrist electorate. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s candidacy complicated the presidential race. Giscard had been a prominent politician since the beginning of the Fifth Republic, had supported de Gaulle’s presidency, and had served as minister of finance for several years while never, formally, joining any Gaullist party. He had been originally associated with the conservative CNIP, which had remained a component of the majority. But in the early s he had formed his own political organization with the help of a number of other CNIP parliamentarians. This group, the Independent Republicans, articulated a technocratic, problemsolving approach to a policy of industrial modernization and a more serious reorientation to free-market economics, as distinct from the Gaullist emphasis on the directing hand of the state. Giscard had differed from the Gaullists also in taking a stronger stand in favor of civil liberties and an enlarged role of parliament, political parties, and interest groups. Finally, he had opposed the Gaullist-sponsored referendum of  for the restructuring of the Senate, and was instrumental in its defeat, and thus in bringing about the resigna-

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tion of de Gaulle. Giscard’s background, his youthful image (he was born in ), his selective non-Gaullist policy positions, his promises of social reform, and his apparent sympathy for close intra-European cooperation—all these secured for him the support of most of the Democratic Centrists and most Radicals. They were persuaded that Giscard was essentially a centrist himself and that he would pursue policies that would be neither Gaullist nor collectivist. Giscard’s election to the presidency (with the support of the Gaullists in the second round) raised the question whether the old polarization of French politics was ending and whether France was in the process of becoming “post-Gaullist.” A year before the parliamentary elections of , it still appeared that bipolar confrontation would continue. The parties adhering to the Common Program of the Left pledged to support each other electorally, as did the various components of what came to be known as “the presidential majority”: the Gaullists, the Independent Republicans (now known as the Parti Républicain), the Radicals, and the Democratic Center (restructured since  and relabeled the Centre des Démocrates Sociaux—CDS). Unfortunately, the internal cohesion in both camps was more apparent than real. Within the left, a bitter quarrel had broken out between the Communists and the Socialists over the meaning of the Common Program, particularly the extent of the nationalization of industries, the equalization of wages, and the distribution of cabinet seats in the event of a victory of the left. The Communist Party accused the Socialist Party of not wanting a genuine restructuring of the economy and of merely trying to “use” the Communists to gain power. The Socialists, now the senior partner of the left alliance, in turn accused the Communists of not having “de-Stalinized” themselves sufficiently and of hoping to destroy democratic institutions. In the end, the left failed, by a few percentage points, to gain a parliamentary majority, a result widely attributed to the refusal of the left-wing parties in many constituencies to support each other in the second round. Within the majority there were similar problems. Upon assuming the presidency, Giscard had, so it seemed, managed to co-opt the Gaullists—they had no place to go— by giving them a few cabinet posts and by retaining the essentials of Gaullist foreign policy: hostility to NATO, the development of an independent nuclear strike force, and a show of independence vis-à-vis the United States. Giscard’s first prime minister, Chirac, was a Gaullist, but he resigned from the prime ministership in  in the wake of disagreements with Giscard. Subsequently Chirac became the leader of the Gaullist party—by then renamed Rassemblement pour la République (RPR)—as well as mayor of Paris, and he made no secret of his ambition to run for the presidency in . Giscard, who had every intention to run for a second term, still needed the support of the Gaullists, the largest party in the Assembly, but he wanted to reduce this dependence. Shortly before the  legislative elections, he encouraged the establishment of the Union pour la Démocratie Française (UDF), an electoral federation of all non-Gaullist elements of the presidential majority: the Republicans, the CDS, the Radicals, and a few smaller groups. The UDF had decided to put up single first-round candidates in many districts and to support Gaullist candidates only if necessary in the second round. One of the results of this tactic had been realignment within the majority: an impres-

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sive expansion of the number of “Giscardist” deputies at the expense of the Gaullist parliamentary party. The Elections of 1981 Early in , as the presidential elections approached, the Common Program had been shelved, the unity of the left appeared to be near collapse, and the Socialist and Communist parties each ran its own candidate, Mitterrand and Georges Marchais, respectively. Before the first round of balloting in April, Marchais had been almost as critical of Mitterrand as of Giscard; but after obtaining only  percent of the popular vote (the lowest for the party since the end of World War II) as against over  percent obtained by Mitterrand, Marchais endorsed Mitterrand in the second round without qualification, thereby permitting himself to claim the victory of the Socialist candidate as that of his own supporters. Similarly, the mutual-support agreement between Socialist and Communist candidates was effective for the second round of the parliamentary elections that followed in the wake of the Mitterrand’s accession to the presidency, and Socialist parliamentary candidates were the principal beneficiaries. After these elections it was clear that, although the Socialist Party had emerged with an absolute majority of all Assembly seats (for the first time since ), the Communist Party, with barely  percent of the seats, had been reduced to a marginal status. Several reasons may be cited for this decline: the excessive Stalinism of its leadership; the deteriorated public image of its secretary general, Marchais; the party’s refusal to condemn Soviet aggression in Afghanistan and elsewhere; a widespread attribution to the party of the blame for the defeat of the left in ; and the lack of internal democracy. In any case, the Communist Party had become a supplicant; in exchange for several unimportant ministerial posts, the party accepted the conditions imposed on it by Mitterrand: a condemnation of Soviet actions in Afghanistan and Poland, a commitment to the Western alliance, a respect for public liberties, and an adherence to a policy of transforming the economy (including selective nationalization) on the basis of gradual and democratic methods. Within the camp of the Gaullist and centrist-conservative alliance there were far greater complications. In the first round of presidential balloting, both Giscard and Chirac were candidates competing for the same (bourgeois and right-of-center) electorate. While continuing to be critical of each other’s personalities and policy preferences, both candidates stressed the disastrous consequences for France of a victory of the left. During the runoff between Giscard and Mitterrand, Chirac gave only a halfhearted endorsement of Giscard. Chirac’s refusal to issue a clear call to his Gaullist supporters to vote for the incumbent was considered by the latter to have effectively sabotaged his reelection. During the parliamentary elections, the erstwhile majority of Gaullists (RPR) and Giscardists (UDF) reestablished an uneasy electoral alliance. The optimistically named Union for the New Majority (Union pour la Nouvelle Majorité—UNM) decided to support common first-round candidates in more than  constituencies and made the usual mutual-support agreements for the second round. The alliance was virtually buried by the Socialist landslide, which significantly altered the complexion of the parliament and, in-

President François Mitterrand holds a rose, the Socialist Party symbol, after his election in . (AP/Wide World Photos)

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deed, of the whole political party system for the first time since the founding of the Fifth Republic. There were a number of reasons for the defeat of the Gaullist-Giscardist forces. The first was the lack of unity: the incessant infighting between Giscard’s friends and the “Chiraquists” had sapped the strength of both. Second, there were the growing inflation and unemployment and the widespread conviction that Giscard’s policies were inadequate for dealing with these problems. Third, there were several scandals involving a number of ministers and, in fact, Giscard himself. The feeling that Giscard had been corrupted by power was exacerbated by his increasingly “monarchical” behavior: his contempt for parliament, his unsatisfactory press conferences (which, in terms of their stage-managed nature, came to resemble those of de Gaulle), the tightening of presidential control over the news media, and what many considered to be an unscrupulous use of presidential patronage— the appointment of many of Giscard’s friends to important positions. Many French voters had been uneasy over the prospect of having Giscard as president for fourteen years, a longer term than had ever been served by a president in France, and they thought that in a democracy there must be an occasional transfer of power from one group to another. But for several years the Gaullists and Giscardists had argued that a transfer of power to the left would be too dangerous, since the Socialists would be “hostages” to the Communists. Such an argument proved less convincing as the Socialist Party strengthened its position vis-à-vis the Communist Party, and it lost most of its “scare value” after the first round of the presidential elections in which, as we have seen, the Socialists received nearly twice the support that the Communists got. After the parliamentary elections of , the now leaderless UDF was reduced to a demoralized vestige of some sixty deputies (i.e., about half of its previous strength). Some of the UDF politicians were hoping that, at some time in the future, Giscard would come out of his retirement, as de Gaulle had once done, and revive their party. Several leaders of the CDS, the Christian Democratic component of the UDF, were examining the possibility of autonomous behavior including, perhaps, a rapprochement with the new majority; the Radical Party, however, had been so decimated that it seemed to have no credible options left. Chirac now prepared to assume the leadership of the combined centrist-conservative (or Giscardist and Gaullist) opposition forces. He appeared finally to have achieved his ambition of eclipsing Giscard; but it was a hollow victory, since the Gaullist contingent in the Assembly had itself been cut in half. The Socialist majority in the  Assembly was so overwhelming that Mitterrand and his government could use it to put into effect an ambitious program of reforms. Among the most important of these were the enhancement of civil liberties, an expanded budget for education, the liberalization of the penal code, cultural programs for ethnic minorities, and an ambitious program of administrative decentralization. In addition, bills were enacted providing for the nationalization of a number of industries and the redistribution of income by means of more steeply progressive taxation, higher minimum wages, and expanded social benefits. These redistributive policies corresponded to elements of the Common Program and were, by and large, supported by the Communists. By , Socialist reforming zeal had begun to cool; as the budget deficit grew, the cost of

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nationalizing proved too high and its benefits doubtful; production slumped and unemployment, which stood at over  percent, was not reduced. In response to these developments, the government abruptly changed course and embraced an austerity program aimed at rationalizing industry, keeping wages under control and encouraging economic growth. The changed strategy alienated the Communist Party, whose ministers opted out of the government. A more serious consequence was the Socialists’ slippage in public support; this was a result of the government’s failure to solve the problems of unemployment, increased crimes of violence, and the presence of masses of North African immigrants— all three phenomena widely believed to be interrelated. One symptom of the growing public concern with these problems was the sudden rise of the National Front, an extreme-right party led by Jean-Marie Le Pen. Founded in , that party is a conglomerate of fascists, Pétainists, right-wing Catholics, ultranationalists, erstwhile supporters of Algérie Française, antiparliamentarists, former Poujadists,1 anti-Semites, racists, and xenophobes. It burst upon the French political scene in the municipal elections of , when it captured  percent of the vote in an industrial town near Paris heavily settled by immigrants, and in the elections to the European Parliament a year later, when it won . percent of the popular vote. At the same time, the popularity of the RPR and UDF was rising, and public opinion polls predicted that in the next parliamentary elections, the Socialists would lose their majority. In order to limit the damage, the government reintroduced a variant of the old (Fourth Republic) system of proportional representation. It was thought that under such a system the National Front would get enough votes to gain representation in the Assembly, but in so doing would take enough electoral support away from the Gaullists to make the victory of the latter less certain and less crushing. The First Cohabitation Interlude The results of the legislative elections of March  proved the wisdom of Mitterrand’s electoral stratagem. The RPR and UDF together obtained a bare majority ( out of ) seats) in the Assembly, not enough to enable them fearlessly to undertake policy changes without the support of the National Front, which managed to seat  deputies. But it was enough to enable them to insist on the appointment of a politically compatible (i.e., Gaullist-Giscardist) government. The new government embarked on an unprecedented experiment in power sharing (see above). Its head, Gaullist leader Chirac, was forced to cohabit with a Socialist president. During the early phases of cohabitation, France appeared to undergo a process of “de-presidentialization” as Chirac asserted his (and the government’s) leadership in the formulation and execution of internal policies, particularly in regard to “privatizing” public enterprises, fighting terrorism, and controlling the movements of resident aliens. Mitterrand confined himself largely to foreign policy pronouncements and, intermittently, to selective criticism of Chirac’s domestic measures. Chirac’s power to govern turned out to be less than absolute. It was limited by the need of the Gaullists to cohabit with the Giscardists, who were not always in a cooperative mood; they were unhappy over some of Chirac’s policy choices as well as over an in-

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adequate sharing of political patronage. Furthermore, there were rivalries between the leaders of the RPR and UDF, as well as disagreements between them—and within the RPR itself—about the posture to be adopted vis-à-vis the National Front. The “liberals” wanted to have nothing to do with Le Pen (whom they regarded as a danger to democracy), while the “hardliners” (notably among the Gaullists) advocated a selective embrace of the National Front’s positions, especially on immigrants, in order to strengthen their support base within the Assembly and, more important, to retrieve the support of former Gaullist voters who had crossed over to the National Front and prevent further attrition. In view of these conflicts, Chirac’s leadership suffered and he became the major target of popular discontent; Mitterrand, in contrast, appeared increasingly like a conciliatory and unifying statesman. Consensus and Convergence: The Elections of 1988 The presidential elections of April and May  pitted Mitterrand against three major rivals on the right: Chirac (RPR), Raymond Barre (UDF), and Le Pen (National Front). Several months before the elections, cohabitation—at first welcomed by most French citizens—had already become a dubious pattern as the president and the prime minister each sought to draw electoral advantage by discrediting the other. The reelection of Mitterrand suggested that he had succeeded better than his rival. But his impressive margin of victory must also be attributed to the disunity among the right. The outcome of the first round reflected that disunity, as Barre and Chirac publicly criticized one another. In addition, Le Pen, the leader of the National Front, drew votes from the “respectable” right (especially from the RPR), and made a surprisingly strong showing. Mitterrand’s decision to dissolve the Assembly and call for new elections was made in hopes that the delicate power-sharing pattern of the previous two years would be replaced by a more “normal” relationship between president and parliament. The result of the Assembly elections, however, was ambiguous. Although the RPR and UDF (putting up joint candidates in most constituencies) lost control of the Assembly, the Socialists failed to get the absolute majority the pollsters had predicted. There are several explanations for the outcome of that election, in which the abstention rate (over  percent) was the highest since . Some traditional Socialist voters had abstained because Mitterrand, running as a statesman above parties rather than as a Socialist, had not made great efforts to appeal to them or even to mobilize the party activists. Others had been so sure of a Socialist victory that they believed their votes to be unnecessary, and still others were tired of voting so often. In addition, there were those who had supported Mitterrand but did not want a clearly Socialist regime, hoping instead that Michel Rocard, the new prime minister, would construct a pragmatic center-left government. Rocard did not disappoint them; his government (as reconstituted after the legislative elections) included twenty-five Socialists and twenty-four non-Socialists, among them six centrists (of the UDF). Moreover, in an attempt to show that he paid as much attention to “civil society” as to the political establishment, he also included fourteen nonparty people.

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Rocard’s overture toward the political center was a reflection, however imperfect, of the changes in France’s party system, changes in which some parties had lost their traditional supporters, others their credibility, still others their ideological coherence, and all of them much of their dues-paying membership.2 Just as the victory of Mitterrand was not quite a victory for the PS, the reestablished dominance of the latter in the political arena and in the Assembly was not quite a victory for socialism. Under the pressures of electoral reality and, later, of governmental responsibility, the PS had given up most of its Marxism and had transformed itself into a social-democratic party not unlike the socialdemocratic parties of Scandinavia or Germany. During the  election campaigns, it presented a minimum platform whose ingredients—social justice, productivity, solidarity among various segments of French society, and the construction of Europe—did not differ sharply from the equally vague generalities of the RPR/UDF—about liberty, security, economic progress, and patriotism. This platform was designed to paper over continuing disagreements among the major party personalities, including Mitterrand, Rocard, and former Prime Ministers Mauroy and Fabius. These disagreements were not only matters of personal ambition but related also to the tactical and long-term orientations of the Socialists. Thus while Rocard wanted to distance himself as much as possible from the Communists, Mitterrand continued to express the need to keep the left as united as possible and to keep the door open to traditional Communist voters. These disagreements were echoed at the PS congress in Rennes in . There the nationalists were pitted against the Europeanists, the Jacobins—the believers in a France “one and indivisible”—against the pluralists and decentralizers, the statists against the “liberals,” and the growth-oriented productivists against those favoring redistribution and socioeconomic equality. This “war of party factions” was hardly resolved by a document that aimed at a synthesis of these diverse positions.3 The internal divisions were aggravated during the Persian Gulf crisis, which set Mitterrand and his loyalists, who supported the U.S. war effort, against a faction led by Jean-Pierre Chevènement, which favored a foreign policy that was a combination of Gaullist independence-mindedness and hysterical anti-Americanism. These divisions and the conflict between tactical and programmatic orientations were reflected in the government of Edith Cresson, who was accused of “conducting a policy of the right while positioning herself on the left.”4 Specifically, she prepared a rapprochement with the Communists and alienated the centrists while abandoning the Socialists’ traditional infatuation with the Third World, continuing the denationalization policies of Rocard, and even appearing to adopt the kind of hardnosed stance toward immigrants that had previously been associated with the right. Nevertheless, the various factions decided to suspend their disputes until the Assembly elections of . The Communist Party, too, was divided. Already in , Communists who rejected the rigid Stalinism of the party and held that outlook—and its leader, Marchais—responsible for its steep electoral decline set up a rival party of “Renovators” and put up their own presidential candidate in . After the elections, the PC alternated between a desire to remain in opposition and a readiness to support the government on specific issues. How much the PC leadership would be influenced by perestroika and glasnost in the

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Soviet Union remained to be seen. The twenty-seventh congress of the PC in  saw an expression of interest in a “pluralistic” communism instead of a bureaucratic and authoritarian one, a more open discussion than had been known previously, and even the submission of a minority report.5 Yet the autocratic leadership of Georges Marchais was reconfirmed. The RPR was torn between the nationalism and populist statism of the disciples of de Gaulle on the one hand, and a pro-European “neoliberalism” on the other. Moreover, though some Gaullist politicians were still thinking of a rapprochement with the National Front, most of the Gaullist leadership had come to reject collaboration with that party on any level. The UDF (from which the RPR had copied much of its neoliberalism) was divided between the probusiness elitism of the Republican Party, its largest component, and the moderate progressivism of a number of Christian Democratic (CDS) and Radical politicians. There was also a confusion of strategies. Some Giscardists wanted to align themselves closely with the RPR and harden their opposition to the new government; others (including Giscard himself, who had become the official leader of the UDF) wanted to signal their centrist views by a “constructive opposition”; and still others (including Barre) even held out the possibility of an eventual cohabitation with the Socialistled government. Meanwhile the CDS (which had increased its Assembly representation from thirty-five to fifty) reconstituted itself as a separate parliamentary party while still formally remaining a component of the UDF! Finally, as the RPR and UDF were preparing their list of candidates for the elections to the European Parliament (in the spring of ) there were (abortive) attempts by younger politicians in both parties to oust Giscard and other veterans from leadership positions. In , in order to maintain the integrity and influence of their respective organizations yet to achieve a measure of unity—and, incidentally, to be better equipped to face Le Pen and his National Front—the RPR and UDF founded a “confederation” entitled Union pour la France (UPF). The UPF began issuing joint communiqués and discussing the adoption of a system of primaries for designating a common candidate for the presidential election of . This common approach would, it was hoped, be used for future legislative elections as well. The National Front, which was responsible for some of the problems of the RPR and UDF, was itself torn; it alternated between the bourgeois and respectable behavior of some of its politicians and the provocative pronouncements of others—the one reflected in an emphasis on the neoliberal segments of the party’s platform (e.g., the free market and individual rights), the other in a stress on nationalist and racist themes. Some regarded the National Front as a genuine alternative to the “gang of four” (the PC, PS, UDF, and RPR), but many more voters were turned off from the party by Le Pen’s irrepressible penchant for demagogy and came to consider him a danger to democracy. As the National Front’s credibility as a democratic alternative party weakened, that of another party, the Greens (ecologists), assumed increased importance. Formed in the early s out of a number of environmental associations, the Greens opposed the construction of nuclear reactors. Although officially aligned neither with the right nor the left, the

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Greens advocated a number of policies often associated with the left, such as the reduction of the workweek, the strengthening of local government, and a foreign policy more sympathetic to the Third World. The Greens did surprisingly well in the first round of the presidential elections, but achieved insignificant scores in the parliamentary elections. By the early s the popularity of the Socialists was beginning to decline. This was manifested in the regional and cantonal elections of March , in which less than  percent of the electorate voted for that party. The PS was held responsible for a number of problems and failures: the persistent unemployment; crime and urban violence; financial scandals involving Socialist politicians; the revelation that the government allowed the use of blood products contaminated with the AIDS virus; and the Habbash affair, in which a Palestinian terrorist leader was secretly flown to France for medical treatment and (after a public outcry) spirited out of the country. The position of the PS was not helped by the fact that it continued to be riven by internal divisions—between the radical egalitarians and the pragmatists; those favoring the development of the European Union and those against it; and those advocating closer collaboration with other leftist forces (including the Communist Party) and those opposed to it. The other major parties did not fare much better, with the RPR and UDF together gaining only  percent of the votes in the cantonal elections. The two right-wing parties suffered from internal divisions and a lack of credibility. The major gainers were the National Front and the environmentalist parties, which made significant inroads into regional councils. But the environmentalists were hurt by a division of this movement into two parties, the Greens and Génération Écologie, whose leaders sniped at one another while proclaiming a desire for unity. The results of recent elections signaled above all a disenchantment with the “political class.” This disenchantment was reflected in a steeply falling approval rating not only of Prime Ministers Cresson and Bérégovoy (and their governments) but of President Mitterrand as well. The Parliamentary Elections of 1993 The public’s disenchantment with the government was starkly reflected in the results of the  parliamentary elections. These results constituted a virtual rout of the Socialist Party and its allies, the Left Radicals (Mouvement des Radicaux de Gauche—MRG). Gaining only fifty-seven seats (compared with the combined total of  seats obtained by the RPR and UDF), the Socialists were left with the lowest Assembly representation since . The outcome threatened to fragment, if not destroy, the party as a whole, and reduced the role of Mitterrand, already a lame-duck president, to a marginal and symbolic one. The new government of Edouard Balladur began with high popular opinion ratings and a parliamentary majority of more than  percent—the largest majority enjoyed by any group in more than a century. These ratings, which held for several months, reflected the public’s perception of Balladur as a calm and reasonable political leader; and they improved as a result of a number of apparent policy successes, among them the international trade negotiations of .

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The Presidential Elections of 1995 In preparing for the presidential election, the Socialist Party was in a much weaker position than the right-wing parties. The party had been in power too long and had to bear the brunt of attacks for policy shortcomings and for scandals involving a significant number of Socialist politicians. Mitterrand had been president for nearly fourteen years, and many French voters decided that it was time for a change. Still, there were indications that the PS might win the presidential race if Jacques Delors, the outgoing president of the European Commission, became the Socialist candidate. But he declined to run, and the PS hurriedly chose Jospin, a former minister of education, as the alternative candidate. Jospin was not enthusiastically supported by all Socialist politicians; moreover, Mitterrand gave him only a perfunctory endorsement. These developments would normally have guaranteed the election of a Gaullist candidate. That party and its ally, the UDF, were reasonably united; the Maastricht treaty on the European Union, the issue that had split the two conservative formations and had split the RPR internally, seemed to have been resolved. There had been an informal understanding that Chirac, the mayor of Paris and the president of the RPR, would be that party’s candidate again, as he had been in  and . But public opinion polls throughout  and  were so favorable to Prime Minister Balladur that he was encouraged to become himself a candidate for the presidency. The Gaullists, then, had two presidential candidates. As late as January , polls showed Balladur considerably ahead of Chirac, and it was widely taken for granted that the former would easily be elected president. But suddenly the French electorate’s enthusiasm for Balladur began to turn sour. He was held responsible for weak and inconsistent handling of a number of problems, among them education and employment; and his patrician demeanor suggested an inability to identify with the problem of ordinary French men and women. As the election approached, voters had reservations about both major formations. In previous years, voters had tended to opt for one or another of these formations on the basis of their own habitual positions on the right-left continuum. But the distinctions between right and left had gradually been moderated by a growing programmatic convergence on several issues, such as decentralization, the need to check the growth of welfare state expenditures, and above all, the institutions of the Fifth Republic. On other issues there was an overlap, such as education, tax policy, and the development of the European Union. This convergence explains the fact that two weeks before the first round,  percent of the electorate was still undecided. To compound the problem was the voters’ difficulty in detecting differences between Jospin, Chirac, and Balladur. All three seemed to favor measures to reduce unemployment, improve the system of justice, further European integration, improve the environment, reduce the public deficit, maintain an independent French nuclear strike force, modernize and further democratize education, reduce the contribution of employers to social security, improve the condition of the least-favored segment of the population, fight against discrimination and social exclusion, and enlarge the role of parliament. If there was a difference between the three, it revolved around the presidency, with Jospin advocating a reduction of the presidential term of office to five

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years, Balladur favoring the existing seven-year term but eliminating the possibility of reelection, and Chirac preferring the status quo.6 In addition, Jospin favored reducing the workweek from thirty-nine to thirty-seven hours, while Chirac and Balladur wanted to leave that matter to the marketplace (and to collective contract negotiations). Just before the first round, Chirac, especially when speaking to workers and young people, assumed a progressive “social” pose in order to garner the support of those who had traditionally voted on the left; when speaking to shopkeepers and farmers, he spoke in tones of socioeconomic moderation tinged with nationalism, in order to get the support of the traditional electorate of the “republican” right as well as those who were attracted to the National Front. Jospin, too, conducted an ambivalent campaign. On the one hand, he had to dissociate himself from a president and a number of Socialist governments whose image had become tarnished; on the other hand, he could not disavow his predecessors completely, lest he be accused of having abandoned the Socialist heritage. Such electoral acrobatics help to explain why more than  percent voted for candidates of minor or marginal parties. In this regard they had a wide choice among nine candidates: in addition to the two Gaullists and a Socialist, the list included a Communist (Robert Hue, elected a year earlier as the general secretary of the party), a charismatic figure who conveyed an impression of moderation; a “Trotskyist” radical (Arlette Laguiller); a youthful and left-oriented leader of the Green Party (Dominique Voynet); a right-wing nationalist running under the label of Mouvement pour la France (Philippe de Villiers), whose positions on sovereignty, immigration, law and order, and family values was somewhat comparable to the rhetoric of Patrick Buchanan, one of the Republican contenders for the U.S. presidency; an extreme-rightist (Le Pen); and a right-wing political newcomer (Jacques Cheminade) who had unexpectedly entered the race under the label of the Federation for New Solidarity and whose precise programmatic orientation was difficult to describe but whose rhetoric included references to international conspiracies. In the second round there was a kind of electoral recomposition: Jospin secured the support of most of the left-of-center to extreme-left electorate, while Chirac reassembled most of the right-of-center electorate. Exit polls, however, indicated that more than  percent of the . million citizens who had voted for extreme-rightist Le Pen in the first round abstained or cast blank ballots in the second round. Chirac’s second-round victory must not be interpreted as a victory for the Gaullist Party (the Socialist Party did almost equally well in terms of popular votes) but the victory of a person who had not been in power in several years and could therefore not be blamed directly for recent policy failings. The election results indicated that the right-left distinction in French politics retained some meaning and that more than  percent of the working-class electorate had opted for one of the parties of the left. Nevertheless, about a third of the various parts of the population classified as underprivileged had voted for Le Pen in the first round.7 The results also showed that Chirac had transcended the limitations of previous Gaullist presidential candidates by broadening his electoral base. In the second round, Chirac captured the votes of  percent of the workers,  percent of the students,  percent of the

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retired, and half of the – year olds. According to an exit poll,  percent of the voters interpreted the election of Chirac as signifying a desire for change and reform, and only  percent saw it as a victory of the left over the right.8 The election results also suggested that the National Front had achieved sufficient respectability to be seen by many as having entered the mainstream of French politics. It had attracted members of the urban working class who had traditionally supported leftwing parties and had increased its appeal to the educated electorate. Conversely, as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union and a change in the party leadership, the Communist Party, while not able to widen its appeal beyond the working class, was no longer feared as the tool of a foreign power. The Parliamentary Elections of 1997 Chirac’s victory proved to be short-lived; it was abruptly undermined by the unexpected victory of the Socialists and their left-wing allies in the Assembly elections of .9 As was pointed out earlier, that election had been a needless miscalculation; it discredited not only Prime Minister Juppé but President Chirac as well, and it weakened the authority of both within the Gaullist party. That party was thrown into disarray as internecine conflicts broke out, not only over the leadership but also about its future direction and its relationship with other right-wing parties. Some Gaullists favored a more rapid evolution toward the market and a more positive stance toward European integration (including a common European currency), while others, reacting to the victory of the left, were pressing their party to return to its traditional statism (and a concern with the protection of national sovereignty) and to adopt a more “social” orientation. Some Gaullists argued for a merger with the UDF; others favored a rapprochement with the National Front, or at least a more systematic effort at capturing that party’s electorate. Still others argued for a change of name to give the party a new image; others again (notably former Prime Minister Balladur) favored a fusion of all right-of-center formations into a single party, with the RPR as the nucleus. This last outcome remained an unlikely prospect, largely due to rival personal ambitions of the leaders of these factions. Some of the RPR politicians (including Chirac himself ) are no longer Gaullists in the traditional sense; others are still nostalgic for the old nationalist rhetoric that makes little sense in an age of transnationalism and globalization. This group includes Gaullist nationalists who have opposed the surrender of sovereignty to the European Union; among them Charles Pasqua, who, jointly with Philippe de Villiers, formed a new party, the Rally for France (Rassemblement pour la France). De Villiers soon abandoned that party, however, claiming that Pasqua wanted to dominate it.10 The UDF was particularly disoriented: Giscard d’Estaing, its former leader, and the original raison d’être of that electoral umbrella organization, had aged and had become politically marginalized, while its major component parts, especially the Republican Party (now relabeled Démocratie Libérale—DL) and the CDS (henceforth known as Force Démocrate), maintained their respective individualities. In  the DL left the UDF altogether.11 The Socialist Party, in contrast, conveyed the impression of being more united than

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ever, as the authority of Jospin had silenced its traditional internal factions. Moreover, Jospin had succeeded in reestablishing an alliance with most of the other left-wing formations, including the Communist Party, which were rewarded for their cooperative attitudes with cabinet positions. In the afterglow of the left’s election victory, there seemed to be considerable coherence in government policy as most left-wing politicians rallied around Joplin’s leadership; but it remained to be seen how long this cohesion would last in the face of controversial economic policy decisions that would have to be made. As the parliamentary and presidential elections of  loomed on the horizon, and Jospin began to lay the groundwork for a second attempt to gain the presidency, the PS maintained its unity. To be sure, factionalism was not entirely eliminated,12 but it was moderated by the readmission of party’s “old elephants,” including Mitterrandists, into leading government positions; the reduction of policy options; and the need to present a solid front in face of PS relations with other parties in the “pluralist left” government—the Citizens’ Movement (Mouvement des Citoyens—MDC), the Greens, and the PC. The PC had become virtually “social democratic” (except for a small group among the rank and file that retained its radicalism), but the Greens increasingly articulated policy differences.13 The parties outside the mainstream had their own problems. In , the National Front (FN) split into two rival formations largely owing to personal conflicts—one continuing to be led by Le Pen, and the other, now called Mouvement national républicain (MNR), and led by Bruno Mégret. Le Pen, the more charismatic figure, appealed largely to the electorate, while Mégret’s support came from the party apparatus. Both, however, tend to have the same platform, except perhaps that Mégret is more favorable to making deals with other (smaller) right-wing formations, in particular those that could serve as “bridges” to the mainstream parties, especially the RPR. One of these is the Hunters’ party (Chasse, Pêche, Nature et Traditions—CPNT). Formed in the early s, it argues that it represents traditional farming interests; but its basic strength derives from its interest in protecting the “rights” of hunters (in particular those who like to shoot birds as they migrate south, an activity that violates the rules of the European Union and produces a clash with the Green Party). The cleavages between right and left have been moderated by a growing convergence on a number of issues: the reduction of the gap between rich and poor; the need to retain the welfare state; the continuation of decentralization; the modernization and democratization of the educational system; the reform of the judiciary; and a greater role for civil society and the market. At the same time, there are disagreements within each of the two camps that cut across them: on decentralization; on the growth of supranational powers of the European Union; on immigration and naturalization; and on electoral reform, in particular the reintroduction of proportional representation in parliamentary elections (favored by the smaller parties of both right and left). A note of caution is in order. The bipolarization of the party system and the national electoral successes of one or another mainstream party that apply to the National Assembly or the presidency do not necessarily apply to other elective bodies in France. As tables . (p. ) and . (p. ) indicate, multipolarity—specifically a meaningful representa-

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tion of the left, the center, the Gaullists, and the traditional right—can still be observed in the Senate and the general (departmental) councils, the latter chosen in cantonal elections. In the municipal elections that followed the presidential contest (in June ) there was no Chiraquist “carryover” for Gaullist candidates: most of the mayors belonging to left-wing parties were reelected, and the National Front secured control over one fairly large city (Toulon) and three smaller towns. Regional and local elections correspond to parliamentary elections neither in form nor alliance building. The use of proportional representation in subnational and supranational elections (e.g., regional councils, Senate, and European Parliament) explains why there are many more parties in the game, including those of purely local interest, and why alliances are more diverse and unpredictable.14 The Elections of 2002 A stark illustration of bipolarization elections was provided by the most recent national elections. The two rounds of the presidential election were scheduled for  April and  May, to be followed in June by the two rounds of parliamentary elections. Sixteen candidates were in competition, more than in any previous presidential election in the Fifth Republic; they ranged from the National Front’s Le Pen on the extreme right to nominees of three different extreme-left (Trotskyist) parties. During the campaign it was widely assumed (and predicted by public-opinion polls) that Chirac, the incumbent president, and Jospin, the incumbent prime minister, would emerge as the two top vote-getters and would confront each other in the second round. The first-round result, however, was an unexpected upset: Chirac had come in first and Le Pen second, having edged out Jospin by less than one percent.15 There were several explanations for this shocking outcome. Only three months before the election, the

Table 8.3 Recent Cantonal Elections: Number of General Councilors Elected (results after second round)

Extreme Left Communists Socialists Left Radicals Miscellaneous Left Ecologists Regionalists UDF Gaullists Miscellaneous Right Extreme Right











4 199 515 59 39 — — 555 348 295a —

1 149 424 57 59 2 — 525 400 425 2

6 175 592 44 68 1 1 441 365 328 2b

16 147 514 35 142 5 — 395 380 363 3

— 136 646 36 149 4 — 330 303 341 3

Sources: Regards sur l’Actualité, Année Politique, and Le Monde. Figures for each party include affiliated (apparentés) councilors. aModerates and CNIP. bIncludes 1 National Front.

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Table 8.4 Composition of the Senate, 1959–99 (selected years)

1959 1965 1968 1981 1989 1992 1998

Communists

Socialists

Democratic Left a

14 14 17 23 16 15 16

51 52 54 63 66 70 78

64 50 50 38b 23e 23 22

Democratic Center

MRP/ Independents

Gaullists

Unaffiliated

Total

34 38 40 67c 68c 66c 52

92 79 80 51d 52d 47d 47

41 30 29 41 91 90 99

11 11 13 15 5 10 7

307 274 283 305 321 321 321

Sources: L’Année politique, 1959–1998; Le Monde; and Regards sur l’Actualité. Figures for each party include affiliated (apparentés) senators. aMainly Radical Socialists bIncludes Left Radicals (MRG) cCenter Union dRepublicans and Independents eRassemblement démocratique et européen

polls had shown Jospin clearly ahead of Chirac, who was considered to be a politician without a clear program and more interested in political power for its own sake. Moreover, he had been accused of corruption both as mayor of Paris and as president, and he would have been indicted but for the fact that the incumbent presidency gave him immunity. In contrast, Jospin was regarded as one of the best prime ministers of the Fifth Republic. Unfortunately, Jospin lacked the charisma of Chirac, who was an excellent campaigner. More important, the government of the “pluralist left” Jospin had led was riven by disagreements between the PS and its coalition partners as well as well as by rivalries within the party. Traditional leftist voters criticized Jospin both for abandoning the working class—in mid-campaign he had asserted that his program was not socialist—and for minimizing the importance of a rapidly growing crime rate. Many of these voters therefore opted for the candidates of smaller leftist parties and even for the National Front. They wanted not to help these candidates to win, but rather to give a warning to Jospin. The dissatisfaction with both major candidates was reflected in the belief that there was little programmatic difference between Chirac and Jospin, in the low voter turnout, in electoral indecision—more that  percent of the electorate remained undecided as late as two weeks before the election—and in the fact that both Chirac and Jospin got fewer popular votes than they had obtained in , as did Le Pen. The second-round choice, between Chirac and Le Pen, was viewed as unpleasant by most of the supporters of leftist and left-of-center parties. But voting for Le Pen presented too great a risk—given his reputation and program, his election was regarded as endangering democracy—so, with the slogan “vote for the crook, not the fascist,” the overwhelming majority of “republican” voters opted to continue Chirac in office. In the runoff, Chirac thus won easily, with the overwhelming support of the left, who voted for

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him not because they endorsed him or his program but rather because, in the name of “republican defense,” they rejected Le Pen. In the ensuing Assembly elections, voters provided Chirac with a clear majority.16 Most did so because they were pressing for legislative action and did not want a continuation of power sharing (cohabitation) between a president belonging to one party and an Assembly controlled by an opposing party. The victory of the political right in this election was also due to to the fact that it had capitalized on Chirac’s victory. Several months before the presidential elections, Chirac had created the Union en Mouvement (UEM), an electoral alliance of various right-of-center formations, led by the RPR, that would support him. Immediately after the first round, the UEM was transformed into the Union pour la Majorité Présidentielle (UMP), an umbrella party that swallowed up both the RPR and several smaller parties, including Démocratie Libérale and most of the UDF. A wing of the UDF, led by François Bayrou, held out for independence, but, given the fact that UMP had gained an absolute majority of seats in the Assembly, the party’s influence in that chamber would amount to little if anything. The political left was in a state of disorganization and demoralization. The Communist Party was near collapse—it had obtained its lowest score in national elections since the end of World War II—but still managed to get a bare minimum of the number of Assembly seats to constitute itself into a parliamentary group. The Greens had lost most of their support, ending up with only three seats. The Trotskyists got no seats; the MDC (rebaptized during the election campaign as the Pôle Républicain) was finished, as was, so it seemed, the political career of Chevènement. The PS survived as the largest formation of the left, but it was beset with confusion and uncertainty about its leadership and its future orientations. There was a tug of war between the more ideological leftists—who wanted to return to the traditional redistributive policies of the Socialist Party and retrieve the lost working-class support—and the pragmatic moderates—who wanted to embrace the market more fully and widen the party’s appeal to the bourgeoisie. Both the National Front (FN) and its extreme-left rival, the Mouvement National Républicain (MNR), were left out in the cold, gaining no seats at all. Although it appeared that about a third of the French electorate shared many of the FN’s ideas—e.g., on immigrants, on law-and-order issues, and on Europe—its future prospects did not seem promising, given the aging of its leader (he was ) and the bipolarizing effect of the national electoral system. Interest Groups A French citizen who becomes disillusioned with political parties, finding them confusing or doubting their effectiveness, has the opportunity to voice demands more directly through interest groups. Originally, political thinkers with “revolutionary” and centralizing perspectives were as suspicious of economic and professional associations as of political parties. Consequently, after the Revolution of , organized groups were banned for nearly a century. Today, interest groups are freely organized, very numerous, and play a significant role in France’s political life. There are groups representing, on a national level, every conceivable sector and interest: labor, business, agriculture, the free professions,

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teachers, and proponents of such diverse outlooks or policies as laicism, Catholicism, elitism, racism, antiracism, birth control, women’s rights, and environmental protection. Interest groups in France participate in the political process in much the same way as they do in the United States. They lobby with legislators, help elect candidates to political office, engage in collective bargaining, and seek to influence the higher civil service and the leadership of political parties. Two of the more important characteristics of French interest groups are their ideological fragmentation and their linkage to political parties. These characteristics can be clearly seen in the case of labor, which is represented by several competing organizations. The oldest, and once the largest, is the General Federation of Labor (Confédération Générale du Travail—CGT). Essentially a federation of constituent unions (such as the automobile, chemical, metal, and transport workers’ unions), it has had a revolutionary ideology, that is, the conviction that the interests of the working class can best be promoted through direct political action. In its belief in the class struggle and its opposition to the capitalist system, the CGT has shown a clear affinity to the Communist Party. Many of the CGT’s members (numbering today about ,) had in the past voted Communist, and a significant proportion of its leaders had been prominent in the PC hierarchy. In fact, the relationship between the CGT and the PC was sometimes so close that the union was described as a “transmission belt” of the party. The CGT frequently engaged in strikes and other political action for the Communists’ political purposes, such as opposition to NATO, to French policy in Algeria, to German rearmament, and (more recently) to the Socialist government’s overall socioeconomic policies. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the dramatic weakening of the Communist Party, the CGT has assumed a more autonomous and somewhat more moderate stance.17 Another labor union is the French Confederation of Labor (Confédération Française Démocratique de Travail—CFDT), with about , members. Originally inspired by Catholicism, it split, in the mid-s, from the French Confederation of Christian Workers (Confédération Française des Travailleurs Chrétiens—CFTC), which continues to exist, and “deconfessionalized” itself. One of the most dynamic trade unions, it is closely related to, though not formally affiliated with, the Socialist Party. An important idea of the CFDT, the promotion of self-management (autogestion), was incorporated into the PS platform in the s. The Workers’ Force (Force Ouvrière—FO) and the General Confederation of “Cadres” (Confédération Générale des Cadres—CGC), are two other unions of some importance. The FO (with about . million members) is an industrial workers’ federation noted for its preference for union autonomy vis-à-vis political parties, for its staunch anticommunism and for its emphasis on U.S.-style collective bargaining. The CGC (with about , members) is not very ideological in orientation; it represents supervisory, middle-echelon technical, and other white-collar employees. Finally, there are several teachers’ unions, fragmented on the basis of professional level or ideology.18 This fragmentation, coupled with a relatively feeble extent of unionization—fewer than  percent of French workers are unionized today—has added to the predicament of organized labor. Until recently, unions had been at a disadvantage because their “patron”

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parties, notably the Communists and Socialists, were in the opposition. In order to overcome that disadvantage, unions learned to cooperate in practical matters. They often present common demands to employers and the government and join in demonstrations and strikes. During the Socialist government of –, trade unions gained important concessions under legislation (the Auroux laws) that strengthened their right to organize and bargain collectively at plant levels. But these concessions have been in part nullified by developments that have weakened the position of unions: the “scab” effect of immigrant workers; the growth of the tertiary sector, in which unionization has been weak; and the decline of traditional “smokestack” industries and the concomitant reduction of total union membership.19 Organized business is much more unified than organized labor. The major business association is the MEDEF (Mouvement des Entreprises de France), known until  as the Conseil National du Patronat Français (National Council of French Employers—CNPF), the umbrella organization of more than eighty manufacturing, banking, and commercial associations represents more than , firms. In its lobbying efforts, this employers’ group has been fairly effective. Many of its leaders have old-school ties with the government’s administrative elite; it is well-heeled financially; it provides ideas and other kinds of assistance to the Gaullist and Giscardist (notably the Republican) parties that ruled France from  to  and again from  to ; and it has been an important partner of the government in the push toward economic modernization. Small- and medium-sized manufacturing firms, shopkeepers, and artisans have their own organizations. These have lobbied separately in order to fight against economic consolidation policies that have been a threat to them (including the growth of supermarkets), but their success has been mixed. The greatest organizational complexity is found in agriculture, where associations speak for different kinds of farms, product specialization, ideology, and even relationships to the government. Thus there are associations of beet growers, wine producers, cattle raisers, young farmers, Catholic farmers, agricultural laborers, and so on. Farmers’ interests were in the past well represented by centrist and conservative parties; the decline of these parties has been associated with the decline in the number of farmers and the reduced importance of agriculture in the French economy. Yet the farmers cannot be totally neglected, if only for social reasons; and they often find a receptive ear in the government. In recent years, farmers’ associations have collaborated with the government in the shaping of policies that encourage land consolidation, mechanization, the retraining of redundant farmers, and the promotion of agricultural exports, especially in the context of the European Union and its supranational Common Agricultural Policy. Patterns and Problems of Interest-Group Access One of the important features of French interest-group politics is the fact that most groups have a fairly institutionalized relationship to government authorities. Numerous advisory councils are attached to ministries; these councils, composed largely of representatives of interest groups, furnish data that may influence policy suggestions and regulations that emanate from ministries. Similar councils are attached to nationalized indus-

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tries in which one finds spokespersons for consumers and trade unions. One of the most important entities is the Economic and Social Council, a body of  delegates of trade unions, business associations, civil servants, and other groups, which must be consulted on all pending socioeconomic legislation. In addition, there is a network of regional economic development committees, composed in part of interest-group spokespersons, which provide input for the four-year economic plans. Similarly composed councils are attached to the highly differentiated national and regional social security organisms that administer statutory health care, unemployment insurance, pension schemes, and family subsidy programs. The implementation of pricing policies takes place with the participation of farmers’ groups; the application of rules on apprenticeships involves employers’ associations; and the adjudication of labor disputes takes place in specialized tribunals (conseils de prud’hommes), which include trade union representatives. Interest-group delegates to these bodies and to regional professional, agricultural, and commercial chambers, factory councils, and similar institutions are elected by the groups’ rank-and-file members without the mediation of political parties. On occasion, interest groups “colonize” parliament in the sense of having their officials elected (via a sympathetic party) to the National Assembly. Finally, interest-group leaders may be co-opted into official positions in a ministry with which they have “clientelistic” relations. It is a matter of controversy whether the institutionalization of relations enhances or reduces the power of groups. In the first place, not all interests are sufficiently important or well enough organized to benefit from reliable patterns of relationship with the government—for example, foreign workers, ethnic minorities, domestics, and certain categories of small businessmen. Second, while a formalized network of involvement, sometimes labeled “neocorporatism,” guarantees group access to public authorities, such access does not by itself ensure that the views of a particular group will prevail. Furthermore, highly formalized relationships with the government may weaken the will of a group to bargain collectively or resort to more traditional means of pressure, such as strikes. To many observers, the events of May–June  suggested that the access of interest groups to the authorities was too underdeveloped and inadequate to influence political decisions. It is not necessary to recount the complexities of these events. Suffice it to recall that students and workers, in a rare display of unity, engaged in a massive general strike that, for two weeks, paralyzed the country and threatened to bring down the government and endanger the republic itself. These events had several causes: for the workers, dissatisfaction with de Gaulle’s economic and social policy that seemed to favor big business and permitted wages to lag woefully behind prices; for the students, disgruntlement over the failure to modernize, with sufficient speed and thoroughness, a university system whose curriculum was antiquated and not relevant to the labor market, whose physical facilities were cramped, and whose administration was too rigid. The general strike—an example of anomic political behavior—achieved certain reforms that formalized interest-group relations with the government had failed to achieve: the partial democratization of university governance, enormous wage increases for workers, improved trade union rights, and a loosening of relations between social classes. In the process, however, de Gaulle’s leadership was discredited and his image severely tarnished. The

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most recent examples of the effectiveness of massive strikes (and of the power of labor unions despite their numerical weakness) were the strikes of public transport workers in  and of the private truckers in , both of which succeeded in derailing Premier Juppé’s attempts to reform the social-security system. These successes must be attributed in part to the support of many other sectors of the general public, which (although inconvenienced) expressed solidarity with the strikers because they feared that their own welfare-state entitlements might be endangered. As a consequence, Juppé’s authority was severely weakened. The preceding discussion must be supplemented by a reference to a host of noneconomic interests or sectors, such as women, ethnic minorities, and environmentalists. France has several national women’s associations. These may not be so large or so well organized as their U.S. counterparts; yet they have successfully pressured the authorities, since the middle and late s, to abolish legal disabilities based on gender (e.g., inheritance, adoption, and property ownership), to legalize birth control and abortion, and to make the initiation of divorce easier for women. A major, and more recent, political victory for women has been legislation providing for “gender parity”: the requirement that  percent of the candidatures in legislative elections be set aside for women.20 Environmental groups grew rapidly during the same period; in all parliamentary elections since , and in the presidential elections of , , and , ecologists (under various labels) fielded their own candidates. (As we have seen, the Green Party has several deputies in the Assembly, and its leader was an important member of Jospin’s leftist coalition government.) Antiracist groups, such as SOS-Racisme, have developed rapidly since the early s to fight for the rights of ethnic minorities, particularly immigrants. At the same time, the government legalized (and sometimes encouraged) immigrants to form their own associations. Recent strikes by nurses, teachers, physicians, investigating magistrates, and municipal bus and tram drivers, most of them of a spontaneous nature rather than organized by their respective associations, have taken place largely to promote economic as well as noneconomic demands—for example, for more staff or better protection against violence. One of the developments of increasing importance (and increasing violence) has been the anomic street action of poorly organized categories, such as undocumented immigrants, the homeless, and the unemployed.21

Notes . The Poujadists were supporters of the Union for the Defense of Shopkeepers and Artisans (UDCA), an interest group established during the Fourth Republic to protect elements of the petite bourgeoisie against the vicissitudes of rapid economic modernization. Led by Pierre Poujade, the UDCA ran in the parliamentary elections of  under the label of Union et Fraternité Française, combining hostility to industrialism with antiparliamentarism and anti-Semitism. . As of , the membership of the various parties was estimated as follows: RPR, ,; PC, , according to some sources, , dues-paying members according to others; PS, ,–,; MRG, ,; National Front, ,; UDF, , (of which Republican Party, ,; RadicalSocialists, ,; and CDS, ,). These figures are approximate and based on a number of (often conflicting) sources. Typical annual membership dues are about $. In the past few years all political parties have lost dues-paying members; it is estimated that in , after its electoral defeat the PS had no more than , members and the PC even fewer.

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. On these cleavages, see Pascal Perrineau, “Les Cadres du Parti Socialiste,” in SOFRES, L’Etat de l’Opinion , ed. Olivier Duhamel and Jérôme Jaffré (Paris: Seuil, ). . Jean-Pierre Soisson, “Les grands mots,” Le Point,  July , . . Alain Rollat, “M. Leroy se réfère au communisme . . . balsacien!” Le Monde,  September . . See “Les propositions des candidats,” Le Monde,  May , . . Le Monde, Dossiers et Documents, , . . Specifically, the electorate voted for Chirac because they had confidence that he would address himself seriously to the following themes, in descending order: unemployment, the construction of Europe, immigration, and the fight against social exclusion. Thomas Ferenczi, “Les Français attendent de M. Chirac qu’il mette en oeuvre le changement,” Le Monde,  May ,  . See Le Vote Surprise: Les Élections Législatives des  Mai et er Juin . Pascal Perrineau and Colette Ysmal, eds. (Paris: Presses de Sciences-Po, ); and How France Votes, ed. Michael S. Lewis-Beck (New York: Chatham House, ). . Pasqua has often acted like a “loose cannon.” In the municipal elections of March , he supported the reelection of Jean Tibéri, the mayor of Paris. Tibéri, after being disavowed by the Gaullist leadership because of corruption and prevented from leading the right-of-center ticket for the Paris mayoralty, ran as an independent. . One of the signs of the incoherence of the UDF has been the rapprochement (especially within the Parliament) of its moderate component, the Radical Party, with the left-wing Radicals (which continues its alliance with the Socialists). . For example, between traditional leftists—such as Martine Aubry (minister of labor) and Henri Emmanuelli (a former Speaker of the Assembly)—who favored a reduction of the workweek to thirty-five hours, and pragmatists—such as Dominique Strauss-Kahn, minister of economics, and his successor Laurent Fabius—who were more reserved about such a policy. . William Safran, “The Socialists, Jospin, and the Mitterrand Legacy,” in How France Votes, ed. Lewis-Beck, –. . For example, UDF and Gaullists have made selective deals with the National Front, despite opposition from the national leadership of these mainstream parties. . For vote totals and percentages of all major candidates, see table A, “Presidental Elections, ” at www.sevenbridgespress.com/chathamhouse/hancock. . For vote totals and numbers of Assembly seats won by all major parties, see table B, “Parliamentary Elections, ” at www.sevenbridgespress.com/chathamhouse/hancock. . Hervé Nathan and Pascal Virot, “La CGT lache le PCF en rase campagne,” Libération,  October . . Among the most important of them are the Fédération d’Education Nationale (FEN), oriented toward socialism and secularism (laïcité), and the Fédération Syndicale Unitaire de l’Enseignement, de l’Education, de la Recherche et de la Culture (FSU), with more eclectic membership. Each of the two unions has about , members. . On the steep decline of union membership, see Dominique Labbé and Maurice Croisat, La Fin des Syndicats? (Paris: L’Harmattan, ). . See Béatrice Manjoni d’Intignano, Egalité entre femmes et hommes: aspects économiques. (Paris: Documentation Française, ). . See Johanna Siméant, La cause des sans-papiers (Paris: Presses de Sciences-Po, ).

Chapter 9

How Is Power Used? THE MERE OUTLINE of the powers of the principal institutions—the executive, the

legislature, and the civil service—found in the constitution and the laws cannot adequately convey how policies in France are decided and implemented. The distinction between what the French have called “the legal country” and “the real country” can be seen, first, in the tendency of Fifth Republic presidents to interpret the constitution in such a way as to increase their power at the expense of that of the prime minister. This has applied not only to cabinet appointments, in which most presidents have had an almost free hand (except during cohabitation episodes). Most important, it has also applied to the content of policy decisions. De Gaulle (who took little interest in economics) and Pompidou allowed their prime ministers a great deal of discretion except in the areas of foreign and defense policies; but Giscard d’Estaing (an Énarque specialized in economic matters) took an active lead in almost all aspects of domestic policy (even while his government was headed by Barre, a professor of economics) and even “meddled” in the drafting of the language of government bills. In short, the president’s domain, as distinct from that of the government, has been stretched almost at will. Under de Gaulle, presidential decisions included the blackballing of Britain’s entry into the Common Market, the raising of the minimum wage of industrial workers, and the vetoing of an appointment to the prestigious Académie Française; under Pompidou, the devaluation of the franc, the lowering of value-added taxes on foodstuffs, and the modification of rules on the maximum height of buildings in Paris. Under Giscard, there were hundreds of intrusions in matters affecting taxes, wages, social security, and interest rates. Mitterrand (before and after the cohabitation interludes) personally decided on the construction of a series of grandiose public buildings and even interfered in the appointment of the director of an opera house. In promoting his policies, the prime minister and the cabinet help the president, who “uses” his ministers to transform his ideas into concrete legislative proposals, to defend them in parliament, and to take the blame for them when they prove unpopular or unsuccessful. The distance the president thereby establishes in the public mind between himself and his ministers is a political convenience. To provide one example: although the austerity policies adopted between  and  were largely of Giscard’s inspiration, public opinion surveys showed that the president was less unpopular than Prime Minister Barre. Much of the above did not, of course, apply during the exceptional period of –; even then, however, Mitterrand was able to veto Prime Minister Chirac’s origi-

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nal choices for several cabinet posts (including that of foreign minister). Moreover, although Mitterrand could not interfere effectively in the government’s domestic policy decisions, he was able to prevent a number of measures from being enacted by decree. Yet the president was sufficiently removed from the daily operations of government so that his popularity rose while that of Prime Minister Chirac declined. During the second cohabitation period, Mitterrand left virtually all aspects of domestic policy to the discretion of Prime Minister Balladur because the control of the Assembly by the RPR and UDF was so overwhelming and the degree of cohesion between these parties so significant that Mitterrand was unable to exploit internal political differences. Furthermore, Mitterrand was afflicted by a terminal illness (he died in ), and he wished to devote his remaining energies to symbolic acts and the safeguarding of his positive leadership image for future historians.1 Whatever the reason, his withdrawal from an active decision-making role contributed to a relatively amicable relationship between him and his prime minister. Some observers suggest that in calling for an early and unnecessary parliamentary election in which his party was defeated, Chirac so undermined his presidential authority that he transformed himself prematurely into a lame-duck president despite the fact that his presidential term had five years left. Others, however, argue that he retained significant presidential power, including the power to dissolve the Assembly again in the event that Jospin’s government became unpopular. The relationship between Chirac and Jospin was a tense one, oscillating between cooperation on selective policy issues (e.g., the expansion of European Union membership, the reduction of the presidential term to five years—a change realized by constitutional referendum in —and the reform of the judiciary) and competition in appealing to public opinion. In this contest, Jospin initially seemed to have the upper hand; his popularity rating was uncharacteristically high for a prime minister after nearly four years in office. He used this situation to advantage: He had a fairly free hand in reshuffling his cabinet, and he increasingly concerned himself with foreign policy, a matter that was hitherto considered an almost exclusively presidential domain. Conversely, Chirac had difficulty recovering from his ill-advised dissolution of the Assembly, and his relationship with his own Gaullist party and other right-of-center forces was frequently less than cordial. Normally—and to some extent even during cohabitation—the president makes use of the cabinet, but he does not rely on it alone. He appoints, and presides over, “restricted” committees composed of selected ministers, higher civil servants, and whatever additional personalities he may co-opt. Furthermore, there is a growing staff of presidential experts who, like the White House staff in the United States, often function as a supplementary cabinet. Deputies, Senators, and Decisions In a formal sense, parliament has been weakened by the constitution as well as by the legislature’s own standing orders. Nevertheless, that institution is not intrinsically so weak as to be dismissed. Although in most cases—and certainly in all budget matters—the initiative belongs to the government, deputies have succeeded in significantly modifying government bills through amendments: for instance, on abortion, unemployment, farm

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credits, education, the reorganization of the television networks, and the reform of local fiscal administration. Sometimes the government virtually abandons a legislative project to which it is ostensibly committed if it becomes apparent that there is insufficient support for the project among deputies belonging to the majority, as happened in  with capital-gains taxation and in  and  with Balladur’s proposals relating to the employment of young people at wages below the minimum and a variety of educational reforms. In other cases, the government permits, or encourages, leaders of a parliamentary group belonging to the majority to introduce legislation. This is what occurred in  with a Gaullist-sponsored bill on “participation”—the distribution of industrial shares to the workers in given firms. The government itself lacked enthusiasm for the policy but did not wish needlessly to antagonize the Gaullist Party, whose support would be required for other matters. In still other cases, public opposition to the project may be strong enough to entail political risks for its supporters and lead deputies to abandon their endorsement of it and, finally, cause the government to abandon it. This happened in  in the case of a bill to bring private schools under greater control of the Ministry of National Education, and in the case of another bill, introduced in , to reform the citizenship and naturalization laws. Finally, government bills affecting labor, social security, and the naturalization of immigrants have been significantly modified by parliamentary input. One of the most recent government proposals, which was intended to legalize the cohabitation of gay and samesex couples, was extensively altered by the parliament, especially in the Senate, which has increasingly been in an “oppositionist” mode.2 If there is little evidence of open conflict over policy between majority deputies and the government that does not necessarily mean that deputies have resigned themselves to inaction. Instead, it may indicate that they have made their influence felt during the billdrafting phase through “backstage” negotiation with ministers or higher civil servants. Frequently, too, a government bill reflects the pressures of interest groups. The watering down of tax bills, the softening of price controls, and the government’s failure to institute the genuine participation of workers in industrial decisions within firms—all these have been due largely to the successful lobbying of the business associations. Similarly, the government’s acquiescence on wage demands and retirement benefits must be attributed to the pressure of labor unions (especially those representing transport workers). It must be understood that this is not U.S.-style lobbying by means of appearances before legislative committees; instead, lobbying is done through frequent contacts between leaders of big business and higher civil servants. In this respect trade unions have been at a disadvantage because the personal links of their leaders to upper-echelon bureaucrats are weak. In the past, unions compensated for this weakness by threatening strikes and unrest and succeeded in pushing the government into making periodic wage adjustments in their favor, particularly during election years. But with the continuing moderation and the increasingly “centrist” orientation of the Socialist leadership under Jospin, such methods were likely to bear less fruit than they had in previous years, even when the PS was in power. When the right controls the government, as was the case from  to , unions are in an even weaker position. The Jospin government, which took office thereafter, was so de-

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pendent on the support of Communist and other leftist deputies, some of them close to the unions, that it had to initiate a number of policies favored by organized labor, including a reduction of the workweek to thirty-five hours, a raise in corporate taxes, and the modification of a number of privatization attempts. Parliamentarians who are unhappy with government bills have a juridical weapon at their disposal. They may try to block the passage of bills by resorting to the Constitutional Council. That body is not a “judicial review” organ in the sense of the U.S. Supreme Court; it is not a court of appeals to which citizens’ complaints about constitutional violations may be brought; and it does not have the authority to nullify laws already in effect. Its major legislative function used to be the examination of “organic” bills (which may also include the budget) before their complete parliamentary passage and before they are signed into law. (It is for these reasons that many observers have regarded the council as a supplementary branch of the legislature rather than a court.) In recent years, the council has widened its scope considerably—beginning with a ruling in  by which it forced the government to withdraw a bill that would have given prefects the power to forbid or cancel public meetings. In this case the council acted on the grounds that the bill violated freedom of association.3 In  the council nullified a bill that would have allowed the police, without a warrant, to search parked cars, because the bill violated a constitutional provision (Article ) on judicial safeguards of individual liberties. In  the council nullified a bill aimed at special surveillance of foreign workers on the grounds that it violated the principle of equality before the law. In , the council voided parts of the Socialist government’s nationalization legislation dealing with the compensation to private shareholders on the grounds that it amounted to an unconstitutional deprivation of property. During the earlier period of the Fifth Republic (i.e., under Presidents de Gaulle and Pompidou), the council, being heavily Gaullist in composition, tended not to take issue with decisions by the executive. Since then—in large part because it has been increasingly called on by opposition deputies—it has taken a very independent position.4 If contributions of parliament to the legislative process have amounted to less than many had hoped, it has reflected not only the “rationalized” legislative process but also the condition and behavior of the deputies themselves. Parliamentarians have often lacked the expertise of the administrative professionals who draft government bills. Furthermore, the deputies’ absenteeism has made it difficult for them to acquire mastery over a subject or to participate in parliamentary debates with consistency. Absenteeism has continued to be a problem despite the recent limitation of the number of additional elective offices a deputy might hold. Even if such problems were completely overcome, deputies would still be unable to make their wills prevail as individuals. Under Gaullist presidents and under Giscard d’Estaing, the deputies belonging to parties of the left lacked unity and voting strength; the Gaullist or Giscardo-centrist deputies hesitated to confront the government in open parliamentary sessions, for they, too, were divided between enthusiastic and reluctant supporters of the government. After the elections of  the tables were turned: the rightof-center parties were too small and fragmented to fight the executive, whereas the Socialist deputies became part of an obedient machine for endorsing presidential wishes. After

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the parliamentary elections of  the tables were turned again. The conservative control of the Assembly and the internal cohesion of the RPR and UDF, to which we referred earlier, strengthened the position of the prime minister vis-à-vis the president, but it also strengthened the position of the conservative parliamentary parties vis-à-vis the prime minister. After  the position of these parties, and of the Assembly as a whole, was strengthened not only because Prime Minister Balladur disliked confrontation and was inclined to share the burden of delicate policies with parliament but also because the new Speaker, Philippe Séguin, worked hard to upgrade the level of participation of the Assembly. He did so by taking an active role in the articulation of policy alternatives, encouraging legislative amendments, inviting foreign dignitaries to the Assembly, and controlling absenteeism by attempting to do away with “proxy” voting. Laurent Fabius, who succeeded Séguin as Speaker in  (resuming the position he had held from  to ) continued efforts at upgrading the role of the Assembly in the shaping of domestic policy until he moved to a cabinet position in . There is still the factor of party discipline; there is also the fact that majority deputies do not wish to endanger their prospects for political advancement (i.e., appointment to ministerial posts) or pork-barrel favors to their constituents. Moreover, the lack of seriousness with which deputies have often viewed their own efforts could be attributed in part to the realization that much of the work done in parliament does not necessarily have permanent value: the decisions that count are made elsewhere. Bureaucratic Politics In theory, civil servants do not make policy, but only do the research and prepare the groundwork for policy and then implement it at various levels. But career administrators have been in effect co-decision makers. During the Fourth Republic, the political executive had been subject to such frequent change, and hence had been so unstable and weak, that the permanent, professional civil service was depended on for decisional continuity and even initiative. In the Fifth Republic, the distinction between the political decisionmaking elite and the higher bureaucracy has been obscured by the tendency of presidents to recruit a large proportion of the cabinet from the administrative corps. In addition, civil servants have frequently dominated interministerial committees as well as the cabinets ministériels, the staffs of collaborators appointed by each minister. In principle, the members of these cabinets are responsible to the minister whom they serve; but since they understand the technicalities of a dossier better than the minister, they often act according to their own discretion, sometimes in concert with the staffs of other ministries. The “old-boy network” consisting of Énarques—graduates of the National School of Administration (École Nationale d’Administration—ENA)—facilitates this relationship, for, as insiders have observed, “there is less difference between an Énarque of the left and an Énarque of the right than between an Énarque and a non-Énarque.”5 The position of the Énarchie in the French political system can be appreciated from the fact that five of the nine candidates for the presidential election of  were graduates of that institution. There has been a steady growth of the size of the staff of the cabinet ministériel, from an average of about  per minister, and about  for the ministries collectively, during

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the s and s, to . per minister, with a total of  under Chirac () and more than  in the Rocard government. This growth of what has been called a “parallel administration”6 in part reflects the growth in the number of ministries; but it is also a manifestation of a spoils system in which jobs are given to more people but money is saved at the same time because a smaller proportion of the appointees (i.e.,  percent under Rocard, as compared to  percent under Chirac) are professional civil servants who graduated from the ENA, as were Jospin and seven of his ministers. In recent years, the adequacy and utility of ENA have been increasingly questioned, and proposals have been made to rethink the structure and recruitment basis of that institution. There are also the comités des sages, “study commissions” whose appointment is from time to time encouraged by the president, the prime minister, or individual ministers. These commissions (which are roughly comparable to the Royal Commissions in Britain) may include academicians, managers of public enterprises, and politicians, but civil servants have tended to dominate them. Military officers may also be members of such commissions, as in the case of a committee on defense appointed by Prime Minister Balladur. There have been many study commissions: for example, the Toutée Commission on wage negotiations in nationalized industries (); the Sudreau Commission on workers’ participation in industrial management (); the Nora Commission on the impact of computer technology (); the Giraudet Commission on the reduction of the workweek (); and the Long Commission on the reform of citizenship and naturalization laws (). The commissions’ reports to the government, which reflect the input of interest-group representatives and miscellaneous experts, may be used by the government as a basis for legislative proposals; or, if the government does not agree with the reports’ conclusions, they may be ignored. There have been several reasons for the proliferation of such commissions: the need to circumvent a parliament that might make proposals that would be unwelcome to the government or, conversely, to supplant a parliament that has been unwilling to make decisions (and failed to use the power to set up its own special study or investigation committees); the desire of the government to “pass the buck” for politically risky policies; and—on a more positive note—the quest for a policy based on a broad consensus. Once the parliamentarians have passed a bill, it gains substance only when it is enforced. But governments (and higher civil servants) may show their reservations regarding a bill by failing to produce the necessary implementing regulations or ordinances. Thus the government has “denatured” acts of parliament by delaying, or omitting, follow-up regulations on bills dealing with educational reforms, birth control, prison reform, and the financing of local government. Occasionally the administrative bureaucracy may, at the behest of a minister, produce regulations that contravene the intent of the law passed by parliament. For example, after parliament had passed a bill requiring equal treatment of immigrant workers, administrative regulations subjected them to special disabilities; similarly, an act of parliament forbidding discrimination on the basis of religion or race aimed at firms engaged in international trade was followed by a government regulation permitting such discrimination. The Council of State may nullify such regulations after a legal challenge; however, litigation is selective and may take several years.

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The Delegation of Responsibility In order to weaken the effects of long-established legislation, the executive and its administrators may resort to various forms of buck-passing. Thus, to avoid using public moneys to keep the government-controlled health insurance funds solvent, the funds were permitted to raise the social security contributions of the insured. Similarly, the autonomous public corporation that runs the Paris transport system contracted with private firms to obtain workers to clean the metro stations, instead of employing its own workers and having to pay them the minimum wage generally granted by legislation to public employees. Finally, although all subnational administrative activities remain ultimately subject to the supervision or “guardianship” (tutelle) of the national government, the latter has saved itself trouble and money by permitting considerable local variations in the implementation of primary-school curriculums and vacation policies, public health standards, and social services for the aged. The decentralization measures begun in – institutionalized that approach and at the same time provided for greater local autonomy and grassroots participation. Since the early days of the Fourth Republic, governments have been committed to a form of capitalist national planning. The four-year economic modernization plans were prepared through complex procedures involving the cabinet (notably the Ministry of Finance), governmental statistical offices, and several hundred technocrats working in a National Planning Commission, and numerous interest-group spokespersons who were consulted regularly in the Economic and Social Council and the regional modernization committees. This harmonization of conflicting class interests was supposed to result in a fair macroeconomic plan that represented a fine balance between a productivity orientation and a social one. Hence the plan was invested with a certain moral authority; it led the government and parliament to process specific pieces of legislation that were consistent with the plan: bills on public-works investments, social welfare, wages, employment, housing, and so on. For both de Gaulle and Pompidou, the plan was an “ardent obligation”; under Giscard d’Estaing and his prime ministers, the planning institutions were retained, but planners did little more than prepare position papers and statistical forecasts, while many of their policy recommendations were ignored by the government. After the election of Mitterrand (and the appointment of Rocard as minister of planning), the economic plan was not only to be revived, geared to the production of social goods, and made more redistributive in orientation, but was to be given extra weaponry with an enlarged number of nationalized industries and a plethora of economic regulations. But the Ninth Development Plan, theoretically in effect in , became in practice a dead letter, as it was “displaced” by an interim plan conforming to the austerity policy to which the government committed itself. Part of the plan, moreover, was replaced by piecemeal economic policy contracts with individual regions (contrats État-région). Under the Chirac government, not much remained of the plan except its name and its institutions; whatever economic policy there was to be was confided to the cabinet as and, more specifically, to the Ministry of Finance. Indeed, given its program of reprivatizing a variety of industries and banks, its commitment to deregulation and “degovernmentalization,” and its reliance on market forces, the government would have little if any room for planning. With the installation of the Rocard government, a plan

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(the Tenth Development Plan, –) was adopted; but there was only a junior minister in charge of it, and planning in a meaningful sense was not revived. Under Rocard’s successors planning has fared no better; plans are still made, but, given the increasing role of the market and the relocation of certain aspects of economic decision-making and monetary policy to the transnational levels of the European Union, the plans’ policy impact is open to question. Conflicts within the System It should not be inferred that governmental attitudes are monolithic. Occasionally, the national administration is hampered by internal conflicts as well as conflicts with parliamentary and local politicians. For instance, the ministers in charge of labor (especially unskilled labor) and social affairs have been interested in raising minimum wages and upgrading working conditions, but ministers of finance have interfered with such policies in the interest of saving money both for the treasury and for the influential business sector whose profits are maximized by cheap labor. While the minister of solidarity has been concerned with protecting the rights of immigrants, the minister of the interior has attempted (in the name of “law and order”) to control their movements. Some of these conflicts are resolved in response to political (i.e., electoral) considerations rather than merely administrative ones. It is true that the cabinet, the parliament, and other political institutions have been bureaucratized; it is also true that administrative institutions have remained politicized. Deputies may serve on the boards of nationalized industries, on regional bodies, and in agencies involved in economic policymaking. These deputies may be trained technocrats or civil servants and hence professionally concerned with “objective” approaches to problem solving; at the same time, they are politicians responsive to local electorates. The conflict between administration and politics is seen most clearly in the relationship between the mayor and prefect. The latter is legally responsible to the national government; he still (even after the passage of the decentralization laws) has the power to nullify acts of a city council, to veto the budget adopted by the general council, and even, under certain circumstances, to depose a mayor. He takes such action rarely, however, for a mayor may be more powerful than a prefect, especially if the former heads a large city and is simultaneously a member of parliament or, better, a cabinet minister. Here it should be noted that a large number of ministers (including most of the prime ministers) continued to function as mayors of towns while exercising their national functions. In fact, shortly after becoming prime minister after the presidential elections of , Alain Juppé was selected as mayor of Bordeaux in the municipal elections that followed. When Jospin became prime minister, he obliged all his cabinet members to relinquish their posts as mayors, so that they would be able to devote their full attention to their national tasks. This innovation may serve as a precedent for his successors. Sometimes a mayor may be too political and too powerful to suit the taste of the national government. In  Chirac, the mayor of Paris, was “punished” for his presidential ambitions and his unreliable support of the president: the mayor (at the president’s instigation) failed to get a national financial supplement for the maintenance of the municipal

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police force—a situation that forced the mayor to increase local tax assessments and threatened to reduce his popularity. The preceding is not intended to suggest that France has a mixed political system in which various institutions and individuals filling a variety of different political positions play equally significant roles. Still, the fact that the constitution has given the chief of state vast powers to make decisions and that he has added to these powers by one-sided interpretation does not mean that he always makes use of these powers. Under Giscard d’Estaing, for instance, the distinction between president and prime minister was made more obscure than before. Giscard did not, in reality, freely decide all policies. He sometimes avoided tough decisions for electoral reasons, contenting himself with making a good impression on television and otherwise “playing at being president.” During the election campaign of  Mitterrand, in a “Letter to all the French,”7 outlined his ideas about the constitution, economic policy, education and research, social security, citizenship, and foreign and defense policies, but after he retrieved his presidential powers he gave only general direction to Prime Minister Rocard. The latter, in turn, produced his own “circular” in which he articulated his ideas of government.8 In a television debate with Jospin during the presidential election campaign of , Chirac deplored the “monarchical drift” of French decision-making patterns and contended that presidents had come increasingly to behave like “super prime ministers” instead of confining themselves to articulating grand visions and providing general “impulses” to political actions. He argued that the French regime was basically a parliamentary rather than a presidential one and called for an increase in the power of the parliament to legislate and control the actions of the government.9 To what extent these views would be reflected in actual changes in institutional relationships remained to be seen. Notes . Mitterrand failed in that effort, for a number of unpleasant aspects of his past were revealed, including his extreme-right connections before World War II, his involvement with the Vichy regime, and his continuing friendships with fascist collaborators after the war. . One of the most recent examples of this mode concerned the government bill to legalize the status of unmarried and same-sex couples, the “Civil Solidarity Pacts (Pacte civil de solidarité—PACs). The Senate watered the bill down by exempting incestuous and other “unnatural” cohabitation. See Suzanne Daley, “France Gives Legal Status to Unmarried Couples,” New York Times,  October . . The actual provisions of the  constitution do not include a bill of rights. Nevertheless, the preamble of that document includes references to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of  and to the preamble of the Fourth Republic constitution, both of which have extensive listings of rights and liberties, among them freedom of association. In its decisions, the Constitutional Council has “inserted” these references into the constitution by according them operational validity. . Between  and , the Constitutional Council rendered decisions on  pending bills: only  between  and ,  between  and ,  between  and , and  in –. Of these,  (or %) voided the bills in question. See Louis Favoreu, “Conseil constitutionnel: mythes et réalités,” Regards sur l’Actualité  (June ): . . See Philippe Rocqueplo, “Regards sur la complexité du pouvoir: Enquête dans les cabinets ministériels,” Annales des Mines, June , –. . Jean-François Doumic, “L’administration parallèle,” Le Monde,  February . . “Lettre á tous les Français,” in Le Monde,  and  April . . “Gouverner autrement,” dated  May , in Regards sur l’Actualité  (July–August ): –. . “Le débat télévisé entre les deux candidats,” Le Monde, Dossiers et Documents, L’Election présidentielle, , .

Chapter 10

What Is the Future of French Politics? IF INSTITUTIONAL STABILITY and economic progress are used as the principal criteria for judging a political system, the Fifth Republic must be considered a success. Four decades after its inauguration, the regime has amply reflected the themes of “change within continuity” articulated by both Presidents Pompidou and Giscard d’Estaing. A remarkable balance has been achieved between French traditionalism and the spirit of innovation; the old institutions have been retained, but their functional relationships have been rationalized. The executive has sufficient unity and power to make decisions, and it has used this power fairly effectively. Stability, Modernization, and Democracy The political party system has been simplified, and political conflicts have been reduced—in part by means of a manipulation of the system of elections but, more important, as a consequence of socioeconomic changes and a clear popular consensus about the legitimacy of the constitutional system. As a result of the decentralization reforms that began in the early s and are still continuing, subnational (i.e., regional, district, and municipal) administration has been adapted to respond to new realities, and local communities have been given significantly greater powers of decision and revenue gathering. The voting age has been lowered to eighteen, and great progress has been made toward legal equality for women, minorities, homosexuals, and children born out of wedlock. Institutions have been created to make the bureaucracy more accountable. Apart from occasional lapses, freedom of association, including the rights of workers to organize in factories, has been made more secure. There has been continuing experimentation aimed at modernizing and democratizing the educational system and at adapting it to the requirements of the job market, despite budgetary constraints and the opposition of part of the traditional academic establishment. Decolonization was achieved without undue bloodshed (except for Indochina and, later, Algeria) and without tearing French society apart, and the North African “repatriates” have been for the most part successfully integrated. The French economy has adapted with remarkable success to the challenges of the European Union, and France has reached the status of the world’s fifth-largest industrial power and fourth-largest exporter. The national and urban mass transport networks have been modernized and are among the finest in existence. The social security system has responded fairly well to the needs of the majority, and it is holding its own despite the pressures imposed by the European Union and by globalization to hold the line in welfare-

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Percentage of Females in Workforce () .

France

.

Germany Italy Russia

. . .

Sweden United Kingdom United States Canada

. . .

Sources: Tacis, Russia and the EU Member States. Statistical Comparisons – (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, ); World Bank, World Development Indicators on CDRom, .

state expenditures. In short, France has become a prosperous country oriented to mass consumption; its currency is stable, and the living standard of its people corresponds to that of Americans. Administration and Justice: Developments and Reforms To many of the French, especially Gaullists, the “administrative state” has been preferable to the “regime of parties” because civil servants have been viewed as more professional, less ideology-ridden, and less particularistic than party politicians. Being less influenced by electoral pressures, the administrative bureaucracy is supposed to be much better able to make long-term policy in the public interest. It is true that most upper-echelon civil servants are highly cultivated and public-spirited; moreover, the social esteem and excellent pay they have received have made them, by and large, immune to corruption (at any rate in comparison with elected politicians). But given their bourgeois or upper-class origins, they have also tended to be elitist and paternalistic. They are often too far removed from the people, and their actions are not subjected to adequate parliamentary surveillance. The citizens’ means of redress against bureaucratic misbehavior are unreliable, despite such institutions as the administrative courts, topped by the Council of State (Conseil d’État) and such newer institutions as the mediator. The judicial system, too, whose essential features date to Napoleon’s rule, is in need of liberalization. The network of courts is large; the appeals echelons are well distributed geographically, and most Western-type due process criteria are followed. Although AngloAmerican style habeas corpus provisions are omitted in the constitution, they have been introduced gradually by means of ordinary legislation. Yet elements of class justice persist; preventive (pretrial) detention is often still too long, especially for suspects belonging to

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Average Balance of Trade, – (in billions of dollars) France

. .

Germany Italy Sweden

. .

United Kingdom


.

United States


.

Canada

.

Source: OECD Economic Outlook  (December ).

the working class and the peasantry. The police, the prosecuting attorneys, and the courts have dealt particularly harshly with immigrants from the Third World. For many years, the government hesitated to liberalize the penal code, a hesitancy attributed in part to continued fear (shared by large segments of the population) of disorder and violence. This fear had (until ) prevented governments from sponsoring legislation to abolish the death penalty; it also explained the retention of the State Security Court, which dealt with cases of sedition. That court had been set up in  in the wake of a series of violent acts by opponents of de Gaulle and his policies. Under Mitterrand, the State Security Court was abolished. In the spring of , the government introduced (and the Assembly passed) a bill to reform the penal code. This bill, labeled “Security and Liberty,” aimed at making the punishment for crimes of violence more severe and at reducing the discretion of judges in the imposition of sentences. At the same time, the bill provided for a reduction of the maximum period of pretrial detention. During the first term of Mitterrand’s presidency, the government, in particular the minister of justice, Robert Badinter, initiated numerous measures aimed at reforming the legal system. The illiberal features of the “Security and Liberty” law were rescinded; prison conditions were improved; the indigent were guaranteed the right to counsel; the rights of immigrant aliens were more or less aligned with those of citizens, and the former were given greater protection against harassment by public officials; and the power of the police was curbed—not without opposition from the minister of the interior.1 The process of reforming the judicial system is continuing. In mid-, a blueribbon commission appointed earlier by President Chirac recommended a number of measures to modernize the judiciary and make it more independent. Yet much remains to be done to deal with the problems of understaffed courts, underpaid police officers, overcrowded prisons, and the (still) inadequate protection of the rights of citizens against the state. The rights of those detained for criminal investigation have been enlarged, and legislation is being considered to make firmer the presumption of innocence of the accused.2

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Finally, in order to afford better protection of human rights, Mitterrand came out in favor of a constitutional amendment that would permit the Constitutional Council to examine bills at its own initiative and that would grant ordinary citizens the right to bring the issue of the constitutionality of a law before the council. Some of the impetus for improvement has come from the European Union. For example, the constitutional amendment to grant alien residents the right to vote in municipal elections, passed in , brought France in line with a supranational European standard. The same is true of gender equality with respect to working conditions.3 Other pressures have come from the Council of Europe; thus, in  the European Court of Human Rights censured France for the use of torture.4 Finally, France continues to be under pressure to conform to European norms regarding the legitimation of minority languages. On occasion, governments have intervened in judicial matters, thus degrading political democracy. Such intervention was sometimes inspired by foreign policy considerations: for example, in  the release, without trial, of an Arab suspected of terrorist action; in , the physical interference by the (nationally controlled) Paris police in a peaceful demonstration in front of the Soviet embassy; and in , the (unsuccessful) attempt by the Chirac government to interfere in the trial of another Arab implicated in the assassination of diplomats in Paris. Conversely, the judicial establishment has become less lenient in prosecuting and convicting high government officials. Under the presidencies of de Gaulle, Pompidou, and Giscard, there were a number of constraints to the expression of opinion in the mass media. The television networks and most radio stations were public monopolies, and they were often used by the government to distort the news. The press was free and pluralistic, but governments would occasionally confiscate issues of periodicals that had published articles critical of the president, and in one case (under Giscard d’Estaing) even instituted legal proceedings against a newspaper. Under Mitterrand such practices ceased; moreover, the setting up of private radio stations was permitted, and the television networks were put under autonomous management and, in most cases, privatized. Problems and Prospects The Economic Challenge: Welfare Statism and “Neoliberalism” For many years, most French citizens accepted their country’s version of the “mixed economy” under which a large and pluralistic private sector coexisted with a significant array of nationalized industries. In addition, France has had a highly developed welfare state, reflected in a complex of redistributive policies that had been gradually evolving from the end of the Third Republic through the first years of the Mitterrand presidency. These policies include a progressive income tax; income supplements to families with several children; low- and moderate-rent housing; state-subsidized (and virtually tuition-free) higher education; and (compared with the United States) generous retirement, unemployment, maternity, and medical benefits and paid vacations (of five weeks) financed in

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Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and President Jacques Chirac appear at a news conference at the EU summit in Nice, December . (AP/Wide World Photos)

large part by employers. In addition, there are governmentally imposed minimum wages (which are higher than in the United States), complemented, until recently, by a system of semiautomatic wage increases, pegged to the cost-of-living index. Although most citizens accepted these features as almost inalienable rights, they were not regarded as solutions to a number of persistent problems, among them the inequality of incomes, housing shortages, unemployment, and large-scale tax fraud (compensated only in part by the more or less automatic (but regressive) system of value-added taxes required for all members of the European Union). Moreover, the heavy governmental involvement in social and economic matters was thought to have a stifling effect on private initiative in general and industrial (and employment-creating) investment in particular; and the existence of a large nationalized sector was held responsible for impeding productivity and competition. Responding to the pressures of the international and the European market, and inspired to some extent by the (presumably) successful examples of the United States (under Reagan) and Germany, French governments—especially under the prime ministerships of Barre, Fabius, and Chirac—discovered the virtues of the marketplace and promoted policies of selective denationalization and deregulation. Such “neoliberal” policies continued under the Gaullist governments of Balladur and Juppé, but

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they were subjected to modification under electoral pressures and partially reversed when Jospin assumed the prime ministership. Foreign Policy Under de Gaulle, France’s foreign policy had been inspired by aspirations to grandeur. Given the limitations of the country’s economic and military power, however, these aspirations could not be realized. Unable to play a decisive role in the international system, de Gaulle pursued a policy of symbolism and rhetoric that expressed itself in hostility to the two superpowers, in opposition to the institutional development of a supranational Europe, in futile attempts to interfere in regional disputes outside Europe (e.g., the Middle East), and in efforts to mediate relationships between industrialized Europe and the developing countries (notably in Africa). An important element of de Gaulle’s policy was his resentment of the “Anglo-Americans,” reflected in his hostility to NATO. Such attitudes were in part determined by fears of U.S. economic domination and of U.S. cultural hegemony and by doubts about the reliability of the U.S. commitment to defend Europe in case of Soviet aggression. Responding to the pressures of the Gaullist party, and reflecting the outlook of much of the French intellectual elite, Pompidou and (to a lesser extent) Giscard continued the main lines of de Gaulle’s foreign policy, but it was becoming considerably less hostile to the United States and to the development of European unity. Under Mitterrand, France continued to develop its national nuclear deterrent and, on the cultural level, to foster as much as was still possible the cultivation of the French language abroad; at the same time, the country abandoned the Gaullist illusions about its international power and became more favorably inclined toward NATO. Henceforth, France’s foreign policy came increasingly to be marked by a concern with its economic aspect, such as global and regional competitiveness. This aspect, however, could not be separated from France’s role in Europe. From the early s on it had become clear that Germany was the economic powerhouse in Europe; as long as Germany was divided, however, France retained a degree of political dominance on the Continent. With the reunification of Germany, French fears of that country were revived, mixed with resentment and admiration. To compensate for their reduced weight in Europe, the French have utilized a number of opportunities for asserting their role in world affairs, whether military (e.g., peacekeeping in Bosnia and elsewhere), economic aid (to Russia and the Third World), humanitarian (e.g., French medical missions around the globe), and symbolic (e.g., participation in the Gulf War). Some of France’s foreign policy moves have been indicative of a hard-nosed realism tinged with cynicism; these have included, in particular, the country’s dealings with Third World dictatorships and an almost automatic pro-Arabism. Other moves have been little more than efforts at maintaining France’s presence on the diplomatic stage and shoring up its cultural influence, efforts manifested in Chirac’s frequent (and often maladroit and futile) travels to the Middle East, China, Africa, and Russia. A more recent policy—France’s participation in the setting up of a ,-member European rapid intervention force—is designed both to retain the country’s military “parity” with a reunited Germany and assure its autonomy vis-à-vis NATO.

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Societal and Systemic Issues The problems that preoccupy the majority of the residents of France are domestic in nature. Chief among them is the presence of several million immigrants and their impact on French society. Progressive elements, led by Mitterrand and other moderate Socialists, attempted to fight racism and speed the process of legal integration and cultural assimilation of immigrants, and to that end they promoted a liberal approach to naturalization. But opponents expressed the fear that easy acquisition of French citizenship would actually hamper the assimilation process and that ultimately French society would be changed beyond recognition. A related problem has been the existence of regional and nonterritorial French ethnic minorities (e.g., Bretons, Alsatians, Basques, Arab Muslims, and Southeast Asian immigrants). A growing sensitivity to these minorities has been evinced in the Socialists’ decentralization policies, a greater tolerance to cultural diversity, and the grant of autonomy to Corsica, a particularly violent and troublesome region, and a number of overseas territories (including New Caledonia). Nevertheless, there are those who fear that excessive attention to the claims of minorities might weaken France’s cultural and political unity and undermine its “national identity.”5 The growing sensitivity toward minorities and provincial aspirations constitute evidence that the traditional Jacobin ideology characteristic of republican regimes—the idea of France as a uniform and centralized nation-state—that has been an important aspect of French “exceptionalism,” is increasingly being called into question and that pluralisms of all kinds are developing. This can be seen not only in the existing rivalries between political parties and interest groups, and more specifically between the various trade unions, but also in the more assertive behavior of parliament; in the increasing frequency and acceptance of power sharing between president and prime minister; in the greater readiness to grant a degree of legitimacy to regional ethnic languages; and in the competition between private and public educational systems and mass media, between national and subnational centers of decision (albeit stopping short of federalism), and between the state and the market.6 There are numerous social and economic problems, among them overcrowded (and often unsafe) secondary schools and an insufficient number of teachers; the pollution of the environment; and the persistence of unemployment and its corollary, the risk of depleted social security funds. Finally, there is a widespread recognition of the need for strong steps to curb delinquency, urban violence, and terrorism and to protect society from the spread of AIDS, but there is an equal interest that in the process there would be no infringement on civil liberties. In recent years, there has been some concern about citizens’ loss of interest in traditional forms of political participation. There has been a growing electoral abstentionism: it was . percent in the first round of the  Assembly elections and . percent in the second round; . percent in the  cantonal elections; . percent in the first round of the  municipal elections; . percent in the first round of the  Assembly elections and . percent in the second round; and nearly  percent in the  referendum to reduce the presidential term of office. Furthermore, there has been a steady decline of identification with political parties, as reflected in a loss of dues-paying mem-

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bers in all the major parties—a situation that is only partly compensated by growing membership in interest groups, especially on the local level. These phenomena are indicative of an impatience with mainstream political parties and a distrust of politicians. The fact that in recent national elections marginal parties, including the National Front, garnered more than a third of the vote does not, however, mean that the French want to replace the existing democratic system with another one; on the contrary, there is a widespread consensus about the regime itself. To be sure, there continue to be disagreements about the best ways to reduce the social security deficit and to administer the welfare state; about reform of the educational system; about stemming the delocalization of labor-intensive industries; and about policies to be adopted with regard to immigration. There continue to be disagreements about specific institutional questions as well, among them the following: whether there should be a (full or partial) return to proportional representation for Assembly elections; whether the practice of holding more than one elective office simultaneously should be maintained or abolished; whether the referendum should be resorted to more or less frequently; and the extent to which the relationship between the judiciary and the executive should be redefined. But there is little doubt that the constitutional system as a whole is sound and well enough designed to meet France’s challenges in the future. Notes . See William Safran, “Rights and Liberties under the Mitterrand Presidency: Socialist Innovations and PostSocialist Revisions,” Contemporary French Civilization , no.  (Winter/Spring ): –. . At the end of , members of the judiciary, while fully supporting such a policy, went on strike to obtain an addition to the panels of investigating magistrates needed to deal with the added caseload required to implement it. . In order to provide such equality, the French government has introduced a bill to change the labor code, under which “women may not be employed in any job that requires night work.” Clarisse Fabre, “Le travail de nuit des femmes divise la majorité,” Le Monde,  November . . Services France et Société, “La condamnation de la France pour ‘torture’ embarrasse le gouvernement,” Le Monde,  July . . See William Safran, “State, Nation, National Identity, and Citizenship: France as a Test Case,” International Political Science Review , no.  (): –. . See Vivien A. Schmidt, “The Changing Dynamics of State-Society Relations in the Fifth Republic,” in The Changing French Political System, ed. Robert Elgie (London: Frank Cass, ), –.

For Further Reading ALDRICH, ROBERT, AND JOHN CONNELL, eds. France in World Politics. London and New York: Routledge, . ANDREWS, WILLIAM G., AND STANLEY HOFFMAN, eds. The Fifth Republic at Twenty. Albany: State University of New York Press, . ARDAGH, JOHN. France Today. New York and London: Penguin, . BAUMGARTNER, FRANK R. Conflict and Rhetoric in French Policy Making. Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, . BOY, DANIEL, AND NONNA MAYER, eds. The French Voter Decides. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, . CHRISTOFFERSON, THOMAS R. The French Socialists in Power, -. Newark: University of Delaware Press, . CONVERSE, PHILIP E., AND ROY PIERCE. Political Representation in France. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, .

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DE GAULLE, CHARLES. The Complete War Memoirs.  vols. New York: Simon & Schuster, . ELGIE, ROBERT. The Role of the Prime Minister in France, –. New York: St. Martin’s, . ———, ed., The Changing French Political System. London: Frank Cass, . FELDBLUM, MIRIAM. Reconstructing Citizenship: The Politics of Nationality Reform and Immigration in Contemporary France. Albany: State University of New York Press, . FENBY, JONATHAN. France on the Brink. New York: Arcade Publishing, . FLYNN, GREGORY, ed. Remaking the Hexagon: The New France in the New Europe. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, . FRIEND, JULIUS W. Seven Years in France: François Mitterrand and the Unintended Revolution, –. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, . GODT, PAUL, ed. Policy-Making in France From De Gaulle to Mitterrand. London: Pinter, . GOUREVITCH, PETER A. Paris and the Provinces. Berkeley: University of California Press, . GUYOMARCH, ALAIN, HOWARD MACHIN, AND ELLA RITCHIE, eds. France in the European Union. London: Macmillan, . HAUSS, CHARLES. Politics in Gaullist France: Coping With Chaos. New York: Praeger, . HAZAREESINGH, SUDHIR. Political Traditions in Modern France. New York: Oxford University Press, . HOLLIFIELD, JAMES F., AND GEORGE ROSS, eds. Searching for the New France. New York and London: Routledge, . JUDT, TONY. The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, . KEELER, JOHN T.S. The Politics of Neocorporatism in France. New York: Oxford University Press, . KEELER, JOHN T.S., AND MARTIN A. SCHAIN, eds. Chirac’s Challenge: Liberalization, Europeanization and Malaise in France. New York: St. Martin’s, . NORTHCOTT, WAYNE. Mitterrand: A Political Biography. New York: Holmes & Meier, . PENNIMAN, HOWARD, ed. France at the Polls,  and : The National Elections. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, . RAYMOND, GINO G., ed. Structures of Power in Modern France. New York: St. Martin’s, . ROHR, JOHN A. Founding Republics in France and America. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, . ROSS, GEORGE, STANLEY HOFFMAN, AND SYLVIA MALZACHER, eds. The Mitterrand Experiment. New York: Oxford University Press, . SAFRAN, WILLIAM. The French Polity, th ed. New York: Longman, . SCHMIDT, VIVIEN A. From State to Market? The Transformation of French Business and Government. New York: Cambridge University Press, . STONE, ALEC. The Birth of Judicial Politics in France: The Constitutional Council in Comparative Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, . SULEIMAN, EZRA. Elites in French Society: The Politics of Survival. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, . THODY, PHILIP. The Fifth French Republic: Presidents, Politics, and Personalities. London and New York: Routledge, . TIERSKY, RONALD. France in the New Europe: Changing Yet Steadfast. Belmond, Calif.: Wadsworth, . WEBER, EUGEN. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, –. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, . WILSON, FRANK L. French Political Parties Under the Fifth Republic. New York: Praeger, . ———. Interest-Group Politics in France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, .

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Chapter 11

The Context of German Politics IN ANY STUDY of modern European politics an examination of Germany must occupy

a prominent place. Germans are the most numerous people in Western and Central Europe. From  to , Germany was divided into two states: the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), or West Germany, and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), or East Germany. The unified Federal Republic, which was formed in –, unlike France, Britain, Italy, or Sweden, is now in the process of integrating  million new citizens into its economy, society, and polity. The vast majority of these former East Germans have had little or no experience in democratic citizenship. The collapse of the East German state in – and its incorporation into the Federal Republic is another example of the frequent and sudden changes that have characterized Germany’s history. Indeed, the study of modern German politics offers an exceptional opportunity to examine the problems associated with political change and development. Few societies have experienced such drastic changes in their political system, as has Germany. In little more than a century Germany has had an empire (–), an unstable democratic republic (–), a totalitarian dictatorship (–), military occupation (–), two separate states (–)—a federal republic in the West and a one-party communist state in the East—and, since , a single federal state. Thus Germany and the Germans have experienced most of the major political and ideological movements in modern history. The development of the Federal Republic during the past five decades, however, illustrates the extent to which a country can largely overcome its political heritage and change its political culture. Few modern democracies have been as stable, effective, and legitimate as the Federal Republic that we examine in the following chapters. The success of West Germany and its attraction to East Germans was an important factor in the deterioration of the East German communist regime. How can all these changes be explained? Not only is the Federal Republic a stable democracy; in recent years it has emerged out of the shadows of the Third Reich to become an increasingly important and assertive actor in European and international politics. It is one of the world’s largest trading nations and has Europe’s strongest and most dynamic economy. Its army is the largest national contingent in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Germany has also supplanted Great Britain as the chief European ally of the United States. Yet the Federal Republic is firmly committed to deepening its relations with Eastern Europe and the states of the former Soviet Union and has become the leading advocate in the West of a new era of East-West cooperation. The collapse of

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communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union together with the breakup of the Soviet empire means that the Federal Republic will assume a greater leadership role in Central and Eastern Europe. Clearly, much is to be gained from an examination of Germany’s politics. Historical Europe has known German-speaking people and German political units for almost a thousand years. Nevertheless, the Federal Republic of Germany is one of Europe’s and the world’s newest states. In May  it observed only its fiftieth anniversary—a time span hardly comparable to that of most of its European neighbors. Although a relatively young state, the Federal Republic claims to be the legitimate successor to the Third Reich (–) and the Bismarckian Second Reich (–). This claim also makes the Republic the heir to the German political tradition, a tradition characterized by national division and frequent change. Before there were “Germans,” Europe was populated by numerous Germanic tribes: Saxons, Franks, Bavarians, Swabians, Silesians, and Thuringians, to name a few. No single state has ever united all of Europe’s ethnic Germans. The – division between West Germany, East Germany, and the “Eastern territories,” now part of Poland and the Russian Federation, was thus only one more variation on a constant theme in German and European history. The political division of the German nation has been the rule rather than the exception. The Empire (1871–1918) Until , Europe’s German-speaking people were divided into many small principalities, a few moderate-sized kingdoms, and two large yet divided major powers: Austria in the southeast and Prussia in the north. The German Reich, or Empire, proclaimed in  was a Prussian-dominated structure that did not include Austria. Nonetheless, it was by far the most successful unification effort in German history. This empire was largely the work of the Prussian prime minister and first imperial chancellor, or head of government, Otto von Bismarck, and was brought about through classical European power politics. Prussia, under Bismarck, fought successful wars against Denmark (), Austria (), and France () to become the dominant power in northern and western Germany. National unification did not, however, represent any success for German liberalism. Nationalism, which historically has been closely associated with liberalism in countries such as France and the United States, has been an illiberal force in the German political experience. The empire was established through the fabled “blood and iron” policies of Bismarck and not by Germany’s parliamentary liberals. After , most of them in fact deferred to the “Iron Chancellor” and became more national than liberal. During the imperial period, Germany became one of the world’s great powers. Industrialization and urbanization advanced rapidly, as did the Reich’s military power. Yet the industrialists and other members of the expanding middle class did not challenge the political authority of the traditional Prussian ruling elites: the military, the bureaucracy, and the landed nobility. Germany had become a modern society ruled by a premodern, traditional elite. The empire was an authoritarian political structure with some democra-

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tic features. While the kaiser appointed the chancellor and his government, a freely elected parliament held the power of appropriations and could exert some influence and control over the executive. The upper house, however, which represented the states and could block most lower-house initiatives, was effectively dominated by Prussia. And in Prussia the voting system still gave a disproportionate influence to the upper-middle and upper classes. Military and foreign policy as well as internal security remained very much the province of the traditional Prussian elite. Parliament could not prevent, for example, Bismarck’s campaigns of suppression against Catholics and socialists. None of Bismarck’s successors could maintain the delicate foreign and domestic equilibrium that characterized Germany from  to . In creating the Reich, Bismarck and the Prussians made many enemies in Europe, especially France, which lost the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine after the  Franco-Prussian War. To the east, Russia feared German power. Bismarck was able to avoid a Franco-Russian alliance, but his successors were not. With Kaiser Wilhelm—a romantic nationalist—on the throne, Germany after Bismarck sought to acquire overseas colonies and through the expansion of the fleet to challenge British naval superiority. By the turn of the century, this aggressive postBismarckian foreign policy had managed to provoke Britain, France, and Russia to ally against the Reich. Internally, the paradox of a rapidly modernizing society controlled by premodern political elites continued to produce socioeconomic and political tensions. The expanding working class provided a solid electoral base for the Social Democratic Party, which, however, was unable to achieve political influence commensurate with its growing numerical strength. The middle-class parties that also grew throughout the empire were unable and probably unwilling to oppose the militarist and imperialist policies of the kaiser and his chancellor. Indeed, in many cases, Germany’s middle-class parties deferred to the traditional Prussian elites and supported measures such as the naval arms race with Great Britain. Unlike their counterparts in Britain and France, the German middle classes did not exert a moderating influence on policy. Militant nationalism was one means by which the traditional elite could unify a divided society and maintain its power position. The empire so carefully constructed by Bismarck did not survive World War I. As the war dragged on after the failure of the initial German offensive, the many tensions and contradictions in the socioeconomic and political structures of the empire became apparent. Socialists, liberals, and Catholics began to question a conflict that pitted Germany against countries such as Britain and the United States, whose democratic values and constitution they hoped someday to achieve in Germany. A victory on the battlefield would strengthen a regime they had opposed in peacetime. Severe rationing caused by the Allied blockade, mounting casualty lists, and the pressures of wartime production began to take their toll on civilian morale, especially among factory workers. When the army’s spring offensive in  failed, the military, which in the final years of the war actually made most key economic and political decisions, advised the kaiser to abdicate and the parliamentary leadership to proclaim a republic and negotiate a peace with the Western powers.

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The Weimar Republic (1919–33) In January  Germans elected delegates to a constituent assembly that met in the city of Weimar to formulate a new constitution for the postwar republic. The delegates, many of whom were distinguished legal scholars, produced a model democratic constitution, one of the most advanced in the world. It contained an extensive catalogue of human rights and provided numerous opportunities for popular participation through referendums, petition, and the direct election of a strong president. The republic, however, began under very unfavorable circumstances. Following the departure of the kaiser, some German Marxists attempted to duplicate the Bolsheviks’ success in Russia. Workers’ and soldiers’ councils were established in several cities, and Bavaria experienced a short-lived socialist republic. A coalition of moderate social democrats, liberals, and conservative nationalists crushed these abortive efforts at a communist revolution. As a consequence, the working class remained divided throughout the Weimar Republic between the Social Democratic Party, which supported the parliamentary system, and the German Communist Party, which sought its overthrow. These events also established a pattern of political violence that was to continue throughout the period. In addition, the republic was identified from the beginning with defeat, national humiliation, and ineffectiveness. The conservative nationalists, urged on by the military, propagated the myth that Germany had not really lost World War I but had been “stabbed in the back” by the “November criminals,” identified as socialists, communists, liberals, and Jews. Large segments of the bureaucracy and the judiciary also were more attached to the authoritarian values of the empire than to those of the republic, and they acted accordingly. The republic’s brief history was characterized by a steady polarization of politics between left and right. In the early elections of the s, pro-Republican parties—Social Democrats, the Center (Catholic) Party, and the Democratic Party (Liberals)—had a solid majority of seats. By the early s, the pro-Republican share of the vote had dropped from about  percent to only  percent. The Nazis on the right and the Communists on the left together held over half of the parliamentary delegates. With most voters supporting parties opposed to the republic, it became impossible to build a stable governing coalition. Policymaking became increasingly the responsibility of the president, who made extensive use of his power to issue executive decrees without regard to the wishes of the fragmented parliament. The worldwide depression of  dealt the republic a blow from which it could not recover. By , over a third of the workforce was unemployed, and the Nazis became the largest party in the parliament. The German public wanted an effective government that would “do something.” The democratic parties and their leaders could not meet this demand. The Third Reich and World War II (1933–45) The only party that thrived on this crisis was the Nazi Party, under its leader, Adolf Hitler. The Nazis, or National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), was one of many nationalist and völkisch (racialist) movements that had emerged after World War I.

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Hitler’s leadership ability set it apart from the others. A powerful orator, Hitler was able to appeal to a wide variety of voters and interests. He denounced the Versailles treaty that had imposed harsh terms on Germany after World War I and the “criminals” who signed it for Germany. To the unemployed, he promised jobs in the rebuilding of the nation (rearmament and public works). To business interests, he represented a bulwark against communism. To farmers and small businessmen, caught between big labor and business, he promised recognition of their proper position in German society and protection against Marxist labor and “Jewish plutocrats.” In January  President von Hindenburg asked Hitler to form a government. The conservatives around the president believed they could easily control and “handle” Hitler once he had responsibility. Two months later, the Nazis pushed an Enabling Act through the parliament that essentially gave Hitler total power; the parliament, constitution, and civil liberties were suspended. The will of the Führer (leader) became the supreme law and authority. By , almost all areas of German life had become “synchronized” (gleichgeschaltet) to the Nazi pattern. There is little doubt that most Germans until at least the start of World War II supported Hitler. A survey conducted in , six years after the war, found that a majority of Germans less than forty-five years of age still stated that the prewar years of the Third Reich (–) were the “best” that Germany had experienced in this century.1 These were years of economic growth and at least a surface prosperity. Unemployment was virtually eliminated; inflation was checked; and the economy, fueled by expenditures for rearmament and public works, boomed. That during these “good years” thousands of Germans were imprisoned, tortured, and murdered in concentration camps, and hundreds of thousands of German Jews were systematically persecuted, was apparently of minor importance to most citizens in comparison with the economic and policy successes of the regime. Most Germans, at least between  and , were willing to give up the democratic political order and the liberal society and accept the regime’s racism and persecution of political opponents in exchange for economic prosperity, social stability, and a resurgence of national pride. World War II in Europe was, in the words of a former chancellor of the Federal Republic, Helmut Schmidt, “totally started, led, and lost by Adolf Hitler acting in the name of the German people.”2 The world paid for this war with a total of  million dead, including  million Jews and other political and racial victims murdered in concentration camps. The most ruthless and inhuman Nazi actions were directed against European Jewry. From the beginning of the Nazi movement, the Jews were regarded as the prime cause of all the misfortune, unhappiness, and disappointments endured by the German people. Hitler in his autobiography, Mein Kampf, written in the early s, repeated in print his oft-spoken conviction that Jews were not humans, nor even subhumans, but rather “disease-causing bacilli” in the body of the nation that must be exterminated. Unfortunately, at the time, few took his ranting seriously, yet Hitler and the Nazis remained firm to this policy after they came to power. From  on, first in Germany and then throughout the conquered lands of Europe, the Nazis systematically began a process that denied the Jews their dignity, economic livelihood, humanity, and finally, by the early s, their right physically to exist.

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The “final solution” to the “Jewish problem” meant the murder of millions of Jewish men, women, and children, first by special SS killing units, German military personnel, and militarized police detachments and later at extermination camps especially constructed for this purpose in isolated sections of Europe. Hitler and other leading Nazis were able to carry out this holocaust in part because of deeply rooted traditions of antiSemitism in Germany and other parts of Europe. As recent research has shown, many “ordinary” Germans who were neither Nazis nor members of the SS willingly participated in the torture and murder of innocent Jews. They believed, as did Hitler, that Jews were a mortal threat to Germany that had to be eliminated.3 Only the total military defeat of the Third Reich by the United States, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and forces from other allied nations in May  prevented the Nazis from exterminating European Jewry. The remnant that remained amounted to less than  percent of the prewar Jewish population of Europe. The Federal Republic has accepted legal and moral responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era. It is, of course, impossible to atone for the Holocaust. Nevertheless, since the early s the Federal Republic has paid almost $ billion in reparations to the state of Israel and Jewish victims of Nazism. In  the first and last freely elected government in the German Democratic Republic acknowledged East Germany’s responsibility for the Holocaust and apologized to the world Jewish community and the state of Israel for the refusal of the communist regime to deal with this issue. For many Germans, the real distress began after the war. During the war, the Nazis, mindful of the effects of Allied blockades during World War I, had gone to extensive lengths to ensure a relatively well-fed, housed, and clothed population. That this meant the ruthless exploitation of regions conquered by the German armies was a matter of minor concern to the Nazi leadership. Military defeat ended this supply of foodstuffs, raw materials, and labor from the occupied territories. The Germans after  were put in the same position as the populations in other European countries. In  and , the average caloric intake was set at only a third of the daily requirement. In large cities, such as Berlin and Düsseldorf,  to  percent of all houses and apartments were uninhabitable; in Cologne, a city with a population of , before the war, only , people remained during the winter of –. Heating fuel was also in critically short supply. Before the war, the coalmines of the Ruhr had an average daily production of , tons; in –, this dropped to only , tons per day. The end of World War II meant the end of Germany as a political entity. The victorious Allies returned some of the territory conquered by the Nazis to its prewar owners (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Austria, France) and divided the remainder into zones of military occupation. But by the late s, the onset of the Cold War dashed any hopes that the wartime coalition could agree on a single postwar German state. In  the U.S., British, and French zones of occupation became the Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany, with its capital in the small city of Bonn on the Rhine River. In the same year the Soviet zone of occupation became the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, with East Berlin as its capital.

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The Federal Republic During the past five decades the Federal Republic has developed into a strong, dynamic democracy. Unlike the Weimar Republic, the Federal Republic has from the beginning been identified with economic prosperity and foreign and domestic policy successes. There is also considerable evidence that a consensus on democratic values and norms has developed during this period. The vast majority of the German population supports this system and believes in its fundamental norms: individual freedom, the rule of law, civil liberties, free political competition, and representative institutions. In this sense, Germany and the Germans have changed. The history of the Federal Republic can be divided into five rather distinct phases. The first, from  to , was characterized by an emphasis on economic reconstruction and the stabilization of the new political system both internally and externally through German participation in the European Community and the Atlantic Alliance (NATO). This stabilization occurred within the context of the Cold War. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the republic’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, dominated politics during this period. The construction of the Berlin Wall in  marked the end of this period. The Cold War foreign policy of “strength” had failed to reunify Germany or “roll back” communism in Eastern Europe. The search for alternatives to confrontation had begun. The second phase encompassed most of the s and ended with the election of  when, for the first time in the Federal Republic’s history, the Christian Democratic Union was put into the opposition and was replaced by a government led by the Social Democratic Party (SPD). This phase was marked by a search for new domestic and foreign policy directions. Many domestic areas, such as education, urban development, economic planning, and social welfare programs, relatively neglected during the hectic years of reconstruction, now moved up on the political agenda. The s also witnessed the beginning of the increase in mass political participation that continued throughout the s. The student protest movement, the “extra parliamentary opposition” spawned by dissatisfaction with the  “Grand Coalition” between the CDU/CSU and the SPD, and the beginnings of a grassroots citizens’ action group movement (Bürgerinitiativen) were all expressions of this growing politicization. The third phase began with the social-liberal coalition of . The politics of “internal reform,” the modernization and expansion of the republic’s social security and welfare system, liberalized divorce and abortion legislation, criminal law reform, and worker codetermination in industry were major domestic developments in this period. Although Germany, like its Western neighbors, experienced an economic recession following the first oil price shock in , the levels of unemployment and inflation remained well below those of other industrial societies. More important, the – recession did not produce any significant antisystem political movements. In foreign policy, reconciliation and normalization with Germany’s Eastern neighbors were continued and extended through treaties with the Soviet Union and Poland (), East Germany (), Czechoslovakia (), and an additional agreement with Poland (). The second oil price

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shock in  sent the Federal Republic into another major economic recession, the worst since the Great Depression of the s. High unemployment, inflation, and rising state deficits took their toll on the social-liberal coalition, which collapsed in . The fourth phase in the republic’s history began with the return to power of the Christian Democrats in  and lasted until the unification with East Germany in . Together with their Free Democratic partners, they promised a Wende, or fundamental change, especially in the republic’s domestic policies. Social programs were cut, incentives to business were increased, and government budget deficits declined. This was a modest German version of the supply-side economics practiced by Prime Minister Thatcher in Great Britain and the Reagan administration in the United States. But the new government also attempted to turn Germany away from what it regarded as the excessive permissiveness and liberalism of the social-liberal era. Traditional values of family, country, thrift, work, and duty were emphasized, at least by the new chancellor, Helmut Kohl. Yet the trends toward increased politicization and mass protest evident since the late s continued. In  the first new political party in almost thirty years, the Greens, entered the national parliament. Their success was due above all to the “new politics” of environmental protection, women’s rights, and disarmament. This phase saw the Federal Republic assume a higher profile in international relations. In  West Germany strongly opposed the policies of the United States over the question of the modernization and deployment of new short-range missiles in West Germany. The fifth and present phase in the Federal Republic’s development began with the collapse of the East German communist regime in – and the admission of the five East German states into the federation in . These dramatic changes were part of the larger disintegration of communism throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union and are closely connected with the reform policies of former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. No Eastern European communist regime was more opposed to democratic reform than East Germany because, unlike Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Hungary, East Germany was not a nation. Indeed, its only source of identity and legitimacy was its claim to be the only “socialist” German state. East German leaders believed that if this commitment to the ideology of Marxism-Leninism were to be diluted or abandoned, as Gorbachev seemed to be proposing, it would eventually lead to demands for unification and the end of the East German state. They were right. In the summer and fall of  East Germans on “vacation” used the newly opened border between Hungary and Austria to escape to the West. Later, the “Great Escape” would also take place via Czechoslovakia and even Poland. Between May and September , over , East Germans had fled, the largest number since the construction of the Berlin Wall in . Meanwhile, those who stayed behind began to demonstrate and organize new, but illegal, opposition political parties. By October , when Gorbachev arrived in East Berlin to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the regime, an additional , East Germans had departed. Gorbachev told the aging and ailing East German leader, Erich Honecker, that the time for reform had come and that “life punishes those who arrive too late.” His warning fell on deaf ears. The demonstrations continued as hundreds of thousands took to the streets in

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Leipzig, East Berlin and other cities, chanting “Wir sind das Volk!” (“We are the people!”) and demanding reform. For the first time in German history, a grassroots democratic revolution was under way. By mid-October, Honecker was forced to resign. On  November , in a desperate attempt to acquire some popular support, the new communist leadership opened the country’s borders to West Germany, including the Berlin Wall. As the world watched, millions of East Germans flooded into Berlin and West Germany. But the vast majority returned and now called for a unified Germany—“Wir sind ein Volk!” (“We are one people!”) was added to their demands. By the end of , the East German state was on the verge of collapse. The country’s first (and last) free elections were set for March . West German parties moved quickly to organize the East German electorate. At the election, about  percent of the voters supported parties advocating a speedy unification. In May , the two German states concluded a treaty that unified their monetary, economic, and social security systems (see table .). On  July  the West German mark (DM) became the sole legal currency for all of Germany. On  October , less than a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany ceased to exist and, reconstituted as five states (Länder), joined the Federal Republic. Europe’s  million Germans were once again united in a single state. But unlike the Bis-

Table 11.1 German Unity, 1989–90: A Chronology Summer–Fall 1989 October 1989 9 November 1989 13 November 1989 24 November 1989 28 November 1989 3 December 1989 12 December 1989 19 December 1989 1 January 1990 2 January 1990 18 March 1990 12 April 1990 5 May 1990 1 July 1990 14–18 July 1990 23 August 1990 12 September 1990 3 October 1990 2 December 1990

East Germans flee through Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland to the West Mass demonstrations in Leipzig and other cities Opening of the Berlin Wall Hans Modrow becomes prime minister of East Germany Communist Party gives up its monopoly of power Kohl announces 10-point plan for unity Communist Party leadership resigns Round-table talks (Communists and democratic opposition) in East Germany Kohl and Modrow agree on a “community of treaties” Demonstrations in Leipzig demand German unity Modrow announces plan for unity First free elections in East Germany; Kohl-led “Alliance for Germany” is the strongest party Lothar De Maiziere (CDU) becomes East German prime minister Beginning of talks between the four World War II powers and the two German states over unification and the status of Berlin Currency union between the two German states; the West German DM becomes the sole currency Kohl-Gorbachev summit in the Soviet Union GDR parliament agrees to join the Federal Republic on 3 October 1990 Conclusion of “2 + 4” talks; World War II allies agree to give up all rights in Germany and Berlin GDR joins the Federal Republic; Day of Unity a national holiday First all-German election. Kohl-led governing coalition is returned with an increased majority

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marckian Reich or Hitler’s Third Reich, German unity in  was achieved without violence and with the full support of its neighbors in Eastern and Western Europe. The economic, social, and political integration of these new East German states into the Federal Republic is a major policy problem. In the present phase Germany must also adapt to a new role as Western and Central Europe’s strongest power. While the Federal Republic remains committed to the Western Alliance and is firmly embedded in the European Union, it must accept more responsibility in the international arena, especially in its relationships with the newer democracies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The days when the Federal Republic was content to be an “economic giant but a political dwarf ” are past. Federalism Germany, unlike Britain, France, Italy or Sweden, is a federal state in which certain governmental functions are reserved to the constituent Länder (states). Each of the sixteen states has a constitution and parliament. The states have fundamental responsibility for education, the mass media, and internal security and order (police power). In addition, the bureaucracies of the Länder administer most laws passed at the national level. As table . shows, German states vary widely in area, population, and socioeconomic structure. The three “city states” of Hamburg, Berlin, and Bremen are largely Protestant and industrial commercial areas. They have generally been strongholds of the Social Democrats throughout the postwar period. The two other northern Protestant states are Schleswig-Holstein, which is relatively rural and small town, and Lower Saxony, which is more balanced between urban-industrial and rural-agrarian activity. Politically, Schleswig-Holstein’s politics have been generally in the hands of the Christian Democrats. In , however, following a major Watergate-style “dirty tricks” scandal, the Social Democrats won an absolute majority for the first time in the state’s history. Lower Saxony has had a more competitive style of party politics with relatively frequent alternations between Socialist and Christian Democratic-led governments. The most populous state is North Rhine–Westphalia, which contains over  percent of the Federal Republic’s  million inhabitants. A heavily industrialized and urbanized state, North Rhine–Westphalia has a relative balance between Catholics and Protestants. Its politics have been largely controlled by the Social Democrats during the past fifteen years. Another very industrialized, religiously balanced, western Land is Hesse, which has been ruled by Social Democrats for most of the postwar period. The remaining Western states—the Rhineland-Palatinate and the Saarland—are heavily Catholic. The Rhineland is less industrialized than the much smaller Saarland, which has had an extensive, but now declining, steel industry. In the Saar, the Social Democrats were in the minority until , when they won their first state election since . In  they returned to the opposition. The Rhineland-Palatinate, until , had been governed continuously by Christian Democratic–led coalitions. The current Social Democratic–Free Democratic coalition is the first in the state’s history. West Germany’s “sunbelt” is composed of the two states of Bavaria and BadenWürttemberg. Bavaria is heavily Catholic. It is the only large German Land whose borders

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Table 11.2 The States of the Federal Republic

1. Area and Population North Rhine–Westphalia Bavaria Baden-Württemberg Lower Saxony Hesse Saxony Berlin Rhineland-Palatinate Saxony-Anhalt Schleswig-Holstein Brandenburg Thuringia Mecklenburg–West Pomerania Hamburg Saar Bremen Total or average

Capital Düsseldorf Munich Stuttgart Hannover Wiesbaden Dresden — Mainz Magdeburg Kiel Potsdam Erfurt Schwerin -— Saarbrücken —

 population (millions)

Area (thousands of sq. km.)

Population per sq. km.

18.0 12.0 10.4 7.8 6.0 4.5 3.4 4.0 2.7 2.8 2.6 2.5 1.8 1.7 1.1 .7 82.1

34.1 70.6 35.8 47.6 21.1 18.4 .9 19.8 20.4 15.8 29.5 16.2 23.2 .8 2.6 .4 357.2

527 170 291 165 286 246 3,846 202 132 175 87 153 78 2,257 421 1,667 230 Continued...

Source: Federal Statistical Office (Wiesbaden).

were restored intact following the war. It terms itself a “free state” with its own strong historical traditions. Separatism in various forms has at times been a significant force in Bavarian politics. It has been governed without interruption since  by the Christian Social Union (CSU), the sister party of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU); that is, the CDU does not contest elections in Bavaria. Historically rural and small town in character, Bavaria has become an increasingly industrialized and urbanized state in the postwar period. It is the center of Germany’s aerospace industry. Baden-Württemberg in the past twenty years has had the most dynamic economy of any state. It is the center of Germany’s computer, robotics, and other high-tech industries and the home of Daimler-Benz and Porsche. Its high rate of economic growth contrasts with the more sluggish economies of many northern areas. The Christian Democrats have been the dominant party in this state. The New Eastern States The five new states that joined the Federal Republic in  are all relatively small. The largest state, Saxony, with about  million residents, is only the sixth largest of the sixteen states. Saxony is also the major industrial center of the former East Germany, accounting for about  percent of the area’s gross national product. Before  Saxony was a strong-

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Table 11.2 (continued)

II. Gross national product ()

Total ($ billions)

Percentage of total

North Rhine–Westphalia Bavaria Baden-Württemberg Lower Saxony Hesse Saxony Berlin Rhineland-Palatinate Saxony-Anhalt Schleswig-Holstein Brandenburg Thuringia Mecklenburg–West Pomerania Hamburg Saar Bremen Total or average

698.0 526.0 449.0 279.0 306.0 84.0 123.0 134.0 48.0 98.0 50.0 44.0 32.0 119.0 39.0 35.0 2,313.6

22.8 17.2 14.7 9.1 10.0 2.7 4.0 4.4 1.6 3.2 1.6 1.4 1.0 3.9 1.3 1.1 100.0

Per capita ($a) 28,943 32,713 32,174 26,726 38,065 15,827 28,374 25,777 15,623 27,112 16,759 15,502 14,975 52,574 26,359 38,750 27,265 Continued...

Source: Federal Statistical Office (Wiesbaden). aDM .  $..

hold of the Social Democrats, but the Christian Democrats won an absolute majority at the state’s first free election in  and were reelected in  and . The strip-mining of lignite, an outmoded chemical industry, and decades of neglect have left the state with major environmental problems. The remaining four states are all smaller and less industrialized than Saxony. Its neighbor, Saxony-Anhalt, has the shortest history as an independent political entity. The state, which contains some of Germany’s most fertile farmland, is currently governed by the Social Democrats. This SPD government, however, does not have a majority of legislative seats and depends on the former Communist Party, now named the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), for its programs to be passed. Thuringia, with . million inhabitants, has a more mixed economy than Saxony or Saxony-Anhalt. It was the center of the former East Germany’s high-tech microelectronics industry. The Christian Democrats currently govern this state. Brandenburg, which was once the core province of Prussia, is a sparsely populated state in the northeast. Until  Berlin was a province of Brandenburg; the city lies within its borders, and the two states have been discussing a merger. Since  it has also been governed by the coalition of Social Democrats and Free Democrats. The smallest of the new states in population with less than  million residents is the coastal state of Mecklenburg–West Pomerania. This region is primarily agricultural,

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Table 11.2 (continued)

III. Workforce, religion, politics

Foreign residents %

Workforce in agriculture () %

Unemployment () %

Roman Catholics %

North Rhine–Westphalia Bavaria Baden-Württemberg Lower Saxony Hesse Saxony Berlin Rhineland-Palatinate Saxony-Anhalt Schleswig-Holstein Brandenburg Thuringia Mecklenburg–West Pomerania Hamburg Saar Bremen Total or average

8 9 12 6 14 2 14 8 2 5 2 1 1 18 7 12 9

2 4 3 4 2 3 — 3 4 3 5 4 6 — — — 3

9.0 7.9 7.1 11.5 9.1 18.9 16.3 9.2 21.8 10.7 18.3 17.0 20.1 11.2 11.4 15.2 11.6

51 69 46 19 33 5 11 55 8 6 5 9 5 8 73 10 36

 governing party or coalition SPD-Green CSU CDU-FDP SPD CDU-FDP CDU SPD SPD-FDP SPD SPD-Green SPD-CDU CDU SPD-PDS SPD-Green CDU SPD-CDU

Source: Federal Statistical Office (Wiesbaden).

but it has a shipping industry that could become competitive in the international marketplace. In  the Social Democrats, in a controversial decision, formed a governing coalition with the former Communist Party, the PDS. This marked the first time since unification that the PDS had assumed power at the state level. Geography Unified Germany comprises about three-fourths of the pre–World War II territory of the German Reich. The remainder is now part of Poland or the Russian Federation. With a total area of about , square miles, the Federal Republic is roughly half the size of Texas. Its population of about  million, however, makes Germany one of Europe’s largest and most densely populated states. Since , the population has grown through () the influx between  and  of  million refugees and expellees from Germany’s former eastern territories and East Germany; () the migration of foreign workers, which began in the late s and reached a high point of about  million workers in ; and () the addition of  million East Germans by unification. Since the late s, almost  million ethnic Germans, largely from Poland, the Soviet Union, and other areas in Eastern Europe, have resettled in West Germany. During the past two decades, however, the Federal Republic has had one of Europe’s

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and the world’s lowest birthrates. Indeed, deaths have outnumbered births in most of these years, and whatever growth in population West Germany has experienced has been the result of foreign workers and their much higher birthrates. Between  and , the native German population actually declined by . million, while the number of foreign residents increased by . million. If these trends continue, the native German population will decline to  million by the year . In East Germany following unification, the birthrate dropped by almost  percent. Uncertainty about the future, the massive loss of jobs, and the end of special state subsidies for children and child-care programs were the major factors in the decline. One East German state in  even offered a $ grant to the parents of each newborn child. The effects of World War II are still noticeable in the age and sex distribution of the population. The low wartime birthrate and casualty losses have left some age groups (–, –, and –) underrepresented in the population relative to other groups. Because of the war, women are still in the majority ( percent), and almost  percent of persons over sixty-five are females. Religion Most Germans are “born” into one of two churches: the Roman Catholic or the Evangelical Protestant (Lutheran).4 Since the Reformation, Protestants and Catholics have been divided along regional lines. The east and north are predominantly Protestant; in the south and west adherents of Roman Catholicism are in the majority. Historically the respective secular rulers (princes) in these areas acted as “protectors” of the faith in their kingdoms, thus making the churches dependent on state authority for their survival. The close, dependent relationship with the state meant that both churches, but especially the Protestant, which has no international ties comparable to those of the Roman Catholics, were conservative, status quo–oriented institutions. The separation of church and state, fundamental in the political tradition of the United States, is thus alien to the German political tradition; both churches occupy a privileged position in German society and politics. The Lutheran and Catholic churches are largely financed through a church tax, a surcharge of about  percent on the individual income tax. The tax is collected by the state via withholding and is transferred free of charge to the churches’ treasuries. This tax ensures them of a generous and inflation-proof income. The Cologne archdiocese of the Roman Catholic Church, for example, is the richest in the world. An individual can escape the church tax only by formally leaving the church, a procedure that most West Germans have declined to follow. Yet between  and , the proportion of Germans electing to contract out of the church tax increased from  percent to over  percent. Religious instruction in public schools by teachers acceptable to the churches is paid from public funds, and the state also pays the salaries of some church officials. Although formal affiliation with the established churches is generally automatic and hence high, most West Germans and especially Protestants are religiously not very active. Only about  percent of Protestants and  percent of Catholics report “regular” attendance at church services. Church attendance is strongly related to gender and age, with older females being especially active.

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In spite of this at best moderate level of religiosity in postwar Germany, the political position and influence of the churches have been strong. The postwar occupation authorities viewed the churches as relatively untainted by Nazism and gave them preferential treatment. In addition, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the dominant political party from  to , was generally successful in projecting an image as a political movement that would govern with some regard to Christian principles. Cynics and political opponents strongly disputed this CDU claim to be more concerned with religion and morality than other parties, but the CDU has definitely enjoyed the favor of, especially, the Catholic Church. While in power, the CDU reciprocated by being particularly sensitive to the issues such as state support of church schools and strict divorce and abortion laws stressed by the church. This close CDU/CSU Catholic church relationship also compelled the Social Democrats by the late s to seek at least a normalized, less conflictual relationship with the church. Religion in East Germany Historically, the regions that constituted East Germany were predominantly (about  percent) Protestant. The communist regime imposed after  at first tried to eliminate the churches as independent social institutions. Funds for the upkeep of church buildings, seminaries, and publications, as well as the salaries of pastors, were steadily reduced. Religious instruction was banned from the schools and replaced by courses on scientific atheism. As a substitute for the traditional confirmation, the Communist Party instituted a Jugendweihe ceremony in which young people pledged fidelity to socialism and eternal friendship with the Soviet Union. Failure to participate usually meant that the young person would be denied admission to a university-track secondary school program. This antireligious policy of the regime had some success. Only  percent of East Germans, as compared to  percent of West Germans, believe “there is a God,” and belief in a life after death is held by  percent in the East and  percent in the West.5 About  percent of East Germans report no religious affiliation as compared to  percent in West Germany. About  percent of East Germans remain affiliated with the Protestant church, which throughout all the turmoil of the past forty years still maintained close ties with its West German counterpart; about  percent are practicing Catholics. The addition of East Germany to the Federal Republic in  has made it a more secular society. The proportion of Germans with no ties to the churches has increased to about  percent. Whether East Germans who left the churches because of political pressures will now return is an open question. Social and Economic Structure Throughout its history West Germany has enjoyed a relatively continuous pattern of increased economic growth and prosperity. While not immune to the ups and downs of the business cycle and the world economy, West Germany’s economic record cannot be matched by any other large, advanced, industrial society, with the possible exception of Japan. The country’s four postwar recessions in –, –, –, and – were mild by prewar German and international standards.

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Table .

Income by Occupation, 1998 (in percentages) Net monthly income a Less than $, b

Occupational group Independents (owners, directors of enterprises, free professionals, farmers) White collar, civil servants Manual workers

$,–,

$,–,

More than $,

West

East

West

East

West

East

West

East

7 7 9

14 10 13

15 20 33

20 25 33

27 35 44

34 41 46

49 38 15

32 24 10

Source: Federal Statistical Office, ed. Datenreport  (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 2000), 113. aAfter deduction for taxes and social insurance contributions, approximately 40–50 percent. bDM 1.50  $1.00

The last recession, from  to , was the most severe and almost brought down the government of Helmut Kohl in October . Unemployment grew to almost  million, over  percent of the workforce, and the economy in  failed to grow for the first time in eight years. The recovery from this recession was just enough and just in time to reelect the government, but economic growth in the s was sluggish and insufficient to make any serious inroads into unemployment. Nonetheless, when compared to its European neighbors, Germany remains the strongest economy on the Continent. What has this economic performance meant for the average German in the past half-century? Table . shows the average net yearly wage for German employees, blue and white collar, from  to . In  the net annual wage, after taxes and social security deductions, for a German employee was about $,. By  this had increased to about $,, and in  the net annual wage of a German worker was about $,. Thus there has been an increase of almost , percent in net wages. In terms of buying power (i.e., net wages adjusted for inflation), the increase has been over  percent. This is the highest real increase in wages and salaries among the world’s ten major industrialized countries. Urbanization Most Germans live in towns and cities with populations greater than ,; over half of the  million inhabitants live on less than  percent of the land. There are nine major urban areas whose population exceeds  million: the Rhine-Ruhr region between the cities of Düsseldorf and Dortmund, the Rhine-Main, or Frankfurt, area, Berlin, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Munich, the Rhine-Neckar region, and in the East the Leipzig and Dresden regions. Germany is one of the world’s major economic powers. Its per capita income, industrial production, and currency reserves are among the world’s highest. It consistently ranks along with the United States and Japan as one of the world’s largest trading nations.

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Table 11.4 The Ten Largest Firms in the Federal Republic (by gross sales) Enterprise Daimler-Benz (motor vehicles, electronics) Siemens (electronics) Volkswagen (motor vehicles) VEBAa (energy) RWEa (energy) Hoechst (chemicals) BASF (chemicals) BMW (motor vehicles) Bayer (chemicals) Thyssen (steel)

in DM billion 104 89 88 66 53 52 46 46 45 39

Source: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 9 July 1996, 16. aPartially under state ownership.

The economic system is mixed with private property and free enterprise coexisting with substantial state involvement. It is also a social market economy in which an elaborate social welfare system is supported by both management and labor, as well as by all significant political parties. Industrial production is the largest single contributor to the country’s gross national product. A look at table . shows that the dominant industrial enterprises are concentrated in the electronics, automobile, chemical, and energy fields. White-collar, technical, and service employees now constitute the largest occupational group. Between  and , the proportion of the workforce in these occupations increased from  percent to  percent. Industrial workers, once the largest group, now constitute  percent of the workforce. The remainder is composed of those in independent nonmanual occupations (small businessmen, shopkeepers), independent professionals (physicians, lawyers), and farmers. The fruits of the economic system have enabled the vast majority of Germans to achieve a high standard of living. In spite of inflation, the disposable income of all occupational groups, including industrial workers, has steadily risen during the past forty years. Foreign vacations, automobiles, television sets, and modern appliances and gadgets are now commonplace in most German families. Nonetheless, inequality is very much a characteristic of German society. The same manual worker who is satiated with consumer goods is much less likely to own a home or apartment in his lifetime. His or her children in all likelihood will not receive a university education. In the West almost half of the independent group had net monthly incomes of over $, in  as compared to  percent of the white-collar employees and only  percent of manual workers. While only  percent of white-collar employees had net monthly incomes of less than $,, over  percent of manual workers were in this category. In the East income differences were substantially less in  than in West Germany.

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Both independents and white-collar employees had similar net monthly incomes. About  percent of manual workers had monthly incomes in the East of less than $,, as compared to about one-third of the white-collar and independent groups. The incomes of East German independents and white-collar employees were actually closer to those of West German manual workers than to their nonmanual colleagues in the West. As economic development proceeds in the former East Germany, these regional differences should decline (see chapter ). There is even greater inequality in the ownership of capital resources: land, stocks, bonds, securities, savings, and life insurance. In , the last year for which these data are available, the top . percent of the population owned almost  percent of these resources and the top  percent controlled almost half of the nation’s productive wealth. The bottom half of Germany’s population held only  percent of its wealth, usually in the form of lower-interest savings accounts or life-insurance policies.6 There has been little change in this general pattern over the past twenty years. This indicates that German governments, including those led by the Social Democrats, have not pursued policies designed to redistribute the country’s wealth. These data show that beneath the surface prosperity of the Federal Republic are substantial differences in personal wealth. This distribution of capital reflects in part the postwar decision of German and Allied occupation elites to take the free-market route to economic recovery. West German political leaders of all major parties, even the Social Democrats, have generally sought to create a favorable climate for investment capital through low tax rates on profits and dividends, as well as subsidies and tax benefits for new plants and equipment. The currency reform of , for example, clearly favored capital-holding groups. Germans with savings accounts or cash in old Reichsmarks received only about  new mark (DM) for every  old marks. Thus millions of lower- and lower-middle-class Germans saw their savings largely wiped out. Those with stocks, securities, and land lost nothing. Education The German educational system has generally reflected and reinforced this socioeconomic inequality. Traditionally this system was designed to give a basic, general education to all and advanced academic training to only a few. Most German education is still structured along three tracks. At about the age of six, all children enter a four-year primary school. But in most states, after the fourth year, with most children at about the age of ten, the tracking process begins. . About  percent of all children will attend a general secondary school for an additional six years. After this, at about the age of sixteen or seventeen, they will enter the workforce, in most cases as apprentices, and attend vocational school part-time for about three years. . A second group, comprising about  percent of a given age group, will attend an intermediate school (Realschule) for six to eight years. The Realschule combines academic and job-oriented training. Medium-level careers in business and administration usually require a middle-school educational background.

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. The remaining school-age children will pursue an academic or university-level educational program. Attendance at an academic high school (Gymnasium) or comprehensive school (Gesamtschule) for up to nine years culminates in the Abitur (a degree roughly comparable to a U.S. junior college diploma) and the right to attend a university. It is possible for children to change tracks, especially during the first two or three years, which are considered an orientation period. Most students, however, do not switch, and the decision made by their parents and teachers after four to six years of school is usually decisive for their educational and occupational future. The entire system has had a class bias. The Gymnasium and the university are still largely preserves of the middle and upper-middle classes, and the majority of children in the general vocational track come from working-class backgrounds. One study, conducted in , found that the children of government officials were twenty times more likely to attend a Gymnasium than were the children of manual workers; the children of self-employed and white-collar employees also were much more likely to be in the academic track than were the offspring of manual workers.7 But the trend since the s has been toward a reduction of this bias. Between  and , for example, the proportion of children from working-class families enrolled at universities increased from  percent to  percent. This is in part the result of a large enrollment increase in the Gymnasia. In the past twenty years, attendance in the university preparatory tracks has tripled. German education also has no lack of critics. There has been no more controversial policy area in the past twenty years than education. Critics and reformers emphasize, in addition to the class bias, the system’s inflexibility: the difficulty children have in changing tracks as their interests and values change. The key element in plans for reforming and restructuring education is the merger of the three-tracked secondary system into a single comprehensive school (Gesamtschule). Instead of tracking after the fourth grade, all children would remain in the same school for an additional six years, or until about the age of sixteen. At that point, the tracking process would begin. The purpose of the comprehensive school plan is to provide more equality of educational opportunity and social mobility. Since , comprehensive schools have been introduced in all states, but more extensively in those governed by social democratic or liberal political parties. Conservatives have generally opposed comprehensive schools, citing their concerns about a decline in educational standards and their support for the traditional Gymnasium. Politics thus has a lot to do with access to the various types of schools. In Bavaria, where the traditional structure supported by the conservative Christian Social Union is still dominant, less than  percent of children in  attended the Gymnasium, as compared to  percent of the children in Hamburg, a city-state where the Social Democrats have been the major party.8 Education in East Germany In the past decade the East German states have restructured their educational systems to the West German pattern. This has been a massive task involving the establishment of new schools, curriculums, textbooks, and teacher retraining. The communist system, in

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addition to the standard academic subjects, included extensive programs designed to indoctrinate young people with Marxist-Leninist ideology and thus produce the “new Socialist man.” The influence of the Communist Party was pervasive. Most teachers and almost all school administrators were in the party. Communist youth organizations, modeled on their counterparts in the former Soviet Union, were present in all schools. Most teachers were placed on probationary status for as long as five years. Many administrators—principals and assistant principals—were dismissed or demoted. By  about , of the , East German teachers had been either replaced or retired. Many of these teachers, however, were let go for financial and not political reasons. The East German schools, like many other sectors of the state administration, were overstaffed. Political Attitudes In , few if any observers in Germany or elsewhere gave the Federal Republic much of a chance to survive, much less prosper. The decision to establish a West German state was made by neither the German political leadership nor the German electorate in any referendum; it was the decision of the three victorious Western powers in World War II—the United States, Britain, and France. The Federal Republic was a product of the foreign policies of these countries, which sought to counter what they perceived as a growing Soviet threat in Central and Western Europe. The Germans living in the American, British, and French occupation zones thus had imposed on them by their conquerors a new political system, which they were to regard as their own. Moreover, the new state was to be a liberal parliamentary democracy, a form of government that Germany had tried between  and  with disastrous consequences. Even the committed democrats in postwar Germany had few fond memories of that first democratic experience—the Weimar Republic. In addition, some citizens perceived the establishment of a West German state as a move that would result in the permanent division of the country. Hence the regional and state leaders in the Western zones, who were requested to begin the process of drafting a constitution for the new state, were very reluctant to make the republic appear as a permanent entity. The constitution that was drafted was not even called such, but rather a Basic Law. Although the Germans were not consulted about their new state, many of them in  did not really care. The great majority of the population was fed up with “politics,” “parties,” and “ideals.” Following the mobilization of the Nazi years, the incessant propaganda, the endless calls for sacrifice, and the demands of total war, they wanted above all to put their private lives back together again. They had been badly burned by politics and were quite willing to let someone else, even foreigners, make political decisions for them as long as they were more or less left alone to pursue their private concerns: the family, making a living, catching up for all that was missed during the war years. This privatized character of postwar attitudes meant that both Allied and German political elites had considerable freedom to develop and initiate policies. The Germans, in short, were willing to follow the orders of their occupiers that they now be citizens in a democracy, even though most inhabitants had little if any experience with a successful, functioning democratic political order. Thus the institutions of democracy preceded the development of an

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attitudinal consensus on democracy. The need to educate the postwar population and change political attitudes was, however, strongly perceived by Western and especially American occupation authorities and by some Germans. But one did not have to be an enthusiastic supporter of political democracy to oppose any sort of return to a Nazi-style dictatorship after . Apart from any personal predilection for a one-party state, the performance of the Third Reich made it distinctly unattractive as an alternative to most Germans in the postwar period. While there has been a consistent relationship between a positive attitude toward the Third Reich and opposition to the key values and institutions of the Bonn Republic after , it should not be overlooked that a sizable proportion of respondents with little sympathy for liberal democracy still rejected a return to some form of dictatorship. These non- or antidemocrats were nonetheless not willing to support a restoration. This was hardly a firm foundation on which to build a stable and effective political democracy, yet it did provide postwar elites and the consciously democratic segments of the larger population with a breathing space in which the republic was given an opportunity to perform and socialize postwar generations to its values and norms. The early years of the republic were characterized by ambivalence on the part of many citizens about political democracy. Surveys revealed that significant proportions of the population retained the traditional authoritarian if not antidemocratic attitudes acquired during earlier regimes. In , for example, about half the population still agreed with the statement that “National Socialism was a good idea, which was only badly carried out.” When asked to choose between a hypothetical government that guaranteed economic success and security and one that guaranteed political freedom, Germans in the late s preferred the former by a two-to-one margin.9 In the early s, about a fourth of the adult population still preferred a one-party state; almost half of the electorate in  stated they would be “indifferent” to an attempt by a new Nazi party to take power; and one of every three adult Germans had positive attitudes toward a restoration of the monarchy. Moreover, although the turnout at elections was high, most voters went to the polls out of a sense of duty and not because they believed they were participating in the making of important political decisions. Only about a fourth of the population in the early s expressed any interest in political questions, and most Germans reported that they rarely talked about politics with family or friends. They had, in short, largely withdrawn from political involvement beyond the simple act of going to the polls. This pattern of mass political attitudes and behavior was not conducive to the long-run viability of the new Federal Republic should it have encountered a major economic or social crisis. Most citizens in the s, even those with fascist or authoritarian dispositions, were quite willing to support political democracy as embodied in the Federal Republic as long as it “worked,” but they could not be counted on if the system encountered major problems. The Germans were “fair-weather” and not “rain or shine” democrats, but they were willing to give democracy a chance. After fifty years of experience with democratic government, this pattern of political attitudes has changed.10 There is now a solid consensus on the basic values, institutions,

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Table 11.5 Satisfaction with Democracy: Germany, Britain, France, Italy, European Union (in percentages)

Satisfiedc Not satisfiedd Undecided or no response

Germanya

Britain

France

Italy

European Unionb

68 29 3

53 39 8

48 45 7

22 75 3

50 45 5

Source: European Commission, Euro-Barometer, Trends, ‒ (Brussels, 1995), 23–36; Eurobarometer Nos. 46, 48, 50, 53. aGerman percentages include the former East Germany. bTwelve-nation average. cPercentages “very satisfied” and “fairly satisfied.” dPercentages “not very satisfied” and “not at all satisfied.”

and processes of parliamentary democracy. Support for such key values as political competition, freedom of speech, civil liberties, and the rule of law ranges from a minimum of about  percent to over  percent for a principle such as political competition. Similar proportions of West German citizens by the s had a positive orientation toward the parliament, the constitution itself, and the federal structure of the state. Consistent with this consensus on the present political system is the high level of satisfaction with the way democracy is functioning. As table . shows, Germans are the most satisfied of the major European countries in which this question was asked. Political Attitudes in East Germany The  million Germans who joined the Federal Republic in  lived for forty years in a different political, economic, social, and cultural setting than West Germans. What effects will unification have on the overall pattern of German political attitudes discussed above? Will the postwar consensus on liberal democratic values, institutions, and processes change? Will the Federal Republic move to the left as East Germans demand the social and economic programs—a guaranteed job, low rents, subsidized food, low-cost day care—that some in the old German Democratic Republic consider the successes of the former communist regime? It is too early to give definitive answers to these questions. Only since the opening of the Berlin Wall in  have social scientists had free access to East Germany. The rapid pace of events since —the opening of the borders, the currency union, unification, the collapse of the East German economy—also make it difficult to determine how well-defined East German political attitudes have become. Tossed and turned by unprecedented developments, it could be argued that few East Germans have any stable political attitudes. The evidence thus far is mixed. On the one hand, there is little doubt about the commitment to democratic values among the East German revolutionaries who brought down the communist regime. The great majority of voters in a series of free elections in  also supported democratic parties. On the other hand, there is also evidence that forty years of authoritarian rule have left their mark on the East German political psyche. Recent studies have found that East Germans are more authoritarian and alienated than

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West Germans. They are more supportive of the “old” German values of discipline, order, and hard work than of the “new values” of individualism, self-realization, and tolerance. East Germans have less trust in the institutions of liberal democracy such as the parliament and courts than West Germans do. Their acceptance of foreign residents is also lower than that of West Germans. East Germans also have a more simplistic, either/or conception of democracy than do West Germans. They see democracy either as a very elitist system—the chancellor or state must take care of them, or as a very participatory system—we must demonstrate to secure our demands. Democracy as a system in which intermediate organizations such as parties, interest groups, and parliament play key roles of channeling citizen demands into policies is still poorly understood in the former East Germany.11 These findings are not surprising. While they have been able to watch democracy in the West through television, East Germans are new at participation in democratic politics. As in West Germany during the s and s, the performance of the democratic order will be a key factor in the political integration of East Germany. The stability and performance of German democracy during the past fifty years does not mean that the Federal Republic is a political system without problems or that it has become an ideal democracy. As we discuss later, Germany is a society with many problems; they include the massive challenge of rebuilding East Germany’s society and economy, that is, putting Germany “back together again,” discrimination against both political and social minorities, as well as myriad economic and social problems—energy, the environment, housing, health-care costs, unemployment—shared by other advanced industrial societies. Germany must still deal with the legacy of its Nazi past, its national identity, and its new role in international politics. It also does not mean that there are no individuals and groups calling for basic changes in the country’s social, economic, and political structures. What the data signify, however, is that these problems will be debated within a consensual framework. In short, the question is no longer whether Germany will remain a liberal democracy, but what kind of and how much democracy Germany will have. This is a question that other European democracies also face. Notes . Most respondents over age  in  considered the imperial years, –, to be the best Germany had experienced in this century. Institut für Demoskopie Survey No. , October . . Helmut Schmidt, “Erklärung der Bundesregierung zur Lage der Nation vor dem deutschen Bundestag,”  May , printed in Bulletin  (Bonn,  May ): . . See Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion  and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, ), and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (New York: Knopf, ). . About , Jews live in the Federal Republic. Seventy-three Jewish congregations receive state financial support. The largest (over , members) Jewish communities are in West Berlin and Frankfurt. There are also about . million Moslems living in the Federal Republic, most of whom are Turkish nationals. About , Moslem organizations, including mosques, have been established. They generally do not receive state financial support. . Der Spiegel, Special Edition,  (): B. . Der Spiegel, Die gespaltene Gesellschaft  ( September ): . . Jutta Pilgram, “Nach der vierten Klasse trennen sich die Lebenswege,” Süddeutsche Zeitung,  May . . Cited in Russell J. Dalton, Politics in West Germany (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, ), .

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. Max Kaase, “Bewusstseinslagen und Leitbilder in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” in DeutschlandHandbuch. Eine doppelte Bilanz, –, ed. Werner Weidenfeld and Hartmut Zimmermann (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, ), . . For an analysis of these changes, see David P. Conradt, “Changing German Political Culture,” in The Civic Culture Revisited, ed. Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba (Boston: Little, Brown, ), –, and “Political Culture in Unified Germany: Will the Bonn Republic Survive and Thrive in Berlin?” German Studies Review  (February ): –. . Ursula Feist, “Zur politischen Akkulturation der vereinten Deutschen. Eine Analyse aus Anlaß der ersten gesamtdeutschen Bundestagswahl,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte – (March ): –. For more recent data, see Oskar Niedermayer and Klaus von Beyme, eds., Politische Kultur in Ost- und Westdeutschland (Leverkusen: Leske und Budrich, ).

Chapter 12

Where Is the Power? Policymaking Institutions POLITICAL POWER IN the Federal Republic is fragmented and dispersed among a wide variety of institutions and elites. There is no single locus of power. At the national level, there are three major decision-making structures: () the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament; () the Federal Council (Bundesrat), which represents the states and is the German equivalent of an upper house; and () the federal government, or executive (the chancellor and cabinet). In addition, the sixteen states that constitute the Federal Republic play important roles, especially in the areas of education and internal security. These states also have a direct influence on national policymaking through the Bundesrat, which is composed of delegates from each of the states. The Federal Constitutional Court, which has the power of judicial review, has also become an increasingly powerful institution. Also, at the national level, a federal president, indirectly elected but with little independent responsibility for policy, serves as the ceremonial head of state and is expected to be a unifying or integrating figure, above the partisan political struggle. Finally, the Federal Republic, like other members of the European Union, has transferred some policymaking power and responsibility to European-wide institutions. Monetary policy, for example, is now largely the province of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt; the European Commission and the Council of Ministers (both in Brussels) and the European Parliament (which divides its sessions between Strasbourg, France, and Brussels) make most agricultural policy. In recent years the European Court of Justice (Luxembourg) has also issued rulings that have been accepted as binding on German courts. National political institutions, however, still hold a veto power over many of the decisions of European Union bodies. Formal power is vested in these institutions, but their integration and effectiveness are also very much functions of the party system that has emerged in the postwar period and the well-organized, concentrated system of interest groups. The Bundestag Constitutionally, the center of the policymaking process is the Bundestag, a legislative assembly consisting of about  deputies who are elected at least every four years. They are the only political officials in the national constitutional structure directly elected by the people. The constitution assigns to the Bundestag the primary responsibility for () legislation, () the election and control of the government, () the supervision of the

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bureaucracy and military, and () the selection of judges to the Federal Constitutional Court. Parliamentary government has a weak tradition and a poor record of performance in German political history. During the empire (–), effective control over important areas such as defense and foreign affairs and the supervision of the civil service was in the hands of a chancellor appointed by the monarch. In addition, Prussian control of the upper house meant that important legislative proposals of the parliament could be blocked at the will of the Prussian ruling elite. Parliament did have the power of the purse as a source of influence, but it could not initiate any major policy programs. Its position toward the executive, bureaucracy, and military was defensive and reactive. While parliament “debated,” the government “acted.” Under the Weimar constitution, the powers of parliament were expanded. The chancellor and his cabinet were directly responsible to it and could be removed by a vote of no confidence. But the framers of the constitution made a major error when they also provided for a strong, directly elected president independent of parliament, who could, in “emergency situations” (i.e., when the government lost its parliamentary majority), rule by decree. The Weimar parliament, especially in its later years, was also fragmented into many different, ideologically oriented parties, which made effective legislation difficult. The institution became immobile—there were frequent majorities against governments, but rarely majorities in favor of new governments. At the last elections, most voters elected parties (Nazi, Nationalist, Communist) that were in one way or another committed to the abolition of the institution. The parliament became identified in the public mind as weak and ineffective. By approving the Nazi Enabling Act in , it ceased to function as a legislative institution. In the postwar parliament, this pattern of legislative immobility has not been repeated. While important initiatives remain the province of the restructured executive, the parliament’s status as an instrument of supervision and control has grown. The Bundestag, similar to other parliaments, has the responsibility to elect and control the government. After each national election, a new parliament is convened, with its first order of business the election of the federal chancellor. The control function is, of course, much more complex and occupies a larger share of the chamber’s time. Through the procedure, adopted from English parliamentary practice, of the Question Hour, a member may make direct inquiries of the government either orally or in writing about a particular problem. A further control procedure is the parliament’s right to investigate governmental activities and to demand the appearance of any cabinet or state official. The key organizational unit of the Bundestag is the Fraktion, the parliamentary caucus of each political party. Committee assignments, debating time, and even office space and clerical assistance are allocated to the Fraktionen and not directly to individual deputies. The leadership of these parliamentary parties effectively controls the work of the Bundestag. The freshman deputy soon discovers that a successful and influential parliamentary career is largely dependent on the support of the leadership of his or her parliamentary Fraktion. The parliament has a committee system that is more important than those in Britain

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and France, yet less powerful than the committees in the U.S. Congress. The twentythree standing committees, like their U.S. counterparts, mirror the partisan composition of the whole parliament; but committee chairmanships are allotted proportionately according to party strength. Thus the minority opposition party or parties will chair several of the standing committees. These committees have become more significant in recent years as a result of the introduction of U.S.-style hearings and the greater use of committee meetings as forums by the opposition. But German committees, like those in other unitary systems, are still reluctant to engage in the full-blown criticism of the executive associated with presidential systems. This reflects the generally higher level of party discipline and the dependence of the government for continuance on having a parliamentary majority. Committee criticism, if comprehensive enough, could be interpreted as an attempt to bring down the chancellor. This is a major problem with strong committee systems in parliamentary governments. There is also considerable specialization among committee members, and thus the day-to-day sessions tend to concentrate on details of proposed legislation and rarely produce any major news. German committees cannot pigeonhole bills; all must be reported out. About four of every five bills submitted by the government will be reported out with a favorable recommendation, albeit with a variety of suggested revisions and amendments. Outright rejections are rare. When the government discovers that a bill is in trouble, it is usually withdrawn for “further study” before a formal committee vote. The Bundesrat (Federal Council) The Bundesrat represents the interests of the states in the national policymaking process. It is composed of sixty-eight members drawn from the sixteen state governments. Each state, depending on its population, is entitled to from three to six members. Most Bundesrat sessions are attended by delegates from the state governments and not the actual formal members, the state-level cabinet ministers. Throughout most of its history, the Bundesrat has concentrated on the administrative aspects of policymaking and has rarely initiated legislative proposals. Since the states implement most national legislation, the Bundesrat has tended to examine proposed programs from the standpoint of how they can be best administered at the state level. The Bundesrat has thus not been an institution in the partisan political spotlight. Since  Germany has frequently had a form of “divided government,” that is, the party in power in the Bundestag has not had a majority in the Bundesrat. While the chambers are not coequal, the party controlling the Bundesrat can cause many problems for the government. From  to , the Christian Democrats were the majority party in the Bundesrat. During this period, the frequency of Bundesrat objections to government legislation increased to the point where the leaders of the government accused it of becoming the “extended arm” of the parliamentary (Bundestag) opposition. It was suggested that the CDU/CSU was seeking to obstruct the government’s electoral majority by turning its majority in the Bundesrat into a politicized countergovernment. Thus the Bundesrat blocked or forced compromises on the government on issues such as divorce

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law reform, speed limits on autobahns, higher education reform, tax policy, the controversial “radicals” in public employment law, and the  treaty with Poland. In  the Social Democrats, now the opposition party, after a series of victories in state elections, gained control of the chamber. The party promptly used its majority to force the government to change some provisions of a new tax law designed to finance the costs of unification. The  Solidarity Pact, which restructured the financing of unification, was passed only after SPD objections were met. In  the SPD Bundesrat majority blocked a major tax reform proposal of the Kohl government. This SPD veto became an issue in the  federal election. In , less than a year after their victory in Bundestag elections, the governing SPD-Green coalition lost its majority in the Bundesrat, and Germany once again had divided government. Before passage of landmark citizenship legislation in  the Schröder government had to make concessions to the Bundesrat or the legislation would have failed. In  the government’s tax reform program passed only after Schröder made a host of last-minute “concessions,” that is, promises of extra money, to several key states. To become a genuine second chamber, however, the Bundesrat’s delegations, still controlled by state leaders, must also be willing to accept direction from the opposition party’s national leadership in the lower house. Thus far, this has happened on only some issues. Generally, the more remote the issue from the concerns of state leaders, the more likely they are to go along with the national leadership in the lower house and try to block the bill in the Bundesrat. Conversely, state leaders can quickly forget their party loyalty if the issue directly impacts their region. A Federal Council veto of a proposed bill by a majority of two-thirds or more can be overridden in the Bundestag only by a two-thirds majority of the members present and voting. This means that a party controlling forty-six or more delegates in the Bundesrat, which is in a minority in the Bundestag, can nonetheless bring the legislative process to a halt and force new elections. Such a development would run counter to the intentions of the framers of the Basic Law, who did not envision the Bundesrat as such, a party-political body. Since the respective state governments determine the composition of the Bundesrat, political and electoral developments at the state level can have direct national political consequences. A series of defeats at state elections in  greatly weakened the national government. State elections have become Germany’s version of “midterm” elections at which national issues and personalities dominate the campaign. The Chancellor and Cabinet The chief executive in the Federal Republic is the chancellor. The powers of this office place it somewhere between those of a strong president in the United States and the prime minister in the British parliamentary system. Constitutionally, the German chancellor is less powerful than a U.S. president, yet a chancellor has more authority and is more difficult to remove than a prime minister in the British model. The Weimar constitution provided for a dual executive: a directly elected president and a chancellor chosen by the parliament. The president was chief of state, commander-

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in-chief of the armed forces, and could in an emergency dismiss the chancellor and his cabinet and rule by decree. The president during the final years of the Weimar Republic, former Field Marshal von Hindenburg, misused especially this latter power and helped undermine public support for democratic institutions. During , for example, the last year before the Nazi seizure of power, the parliament passed only five laws, while the president issued sixty-six decrees. The framers of the Basic Law sought to avoid a repetition of this problem by concentrating executive authority in the chancellor. The power of the chancellor in the Federal Republic derives largely from the following sources: the constitution, the party system, and the precedent established by the first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. The constitution makes the chancellor responsible for determining the main guidelines of the government’s policies. This places him above his ministers, although they are in turn responsible for policy within their specific area. The chancellor also essentially “hires and fires” cabinet ministers. If the parliament wants the removal of a particular cabinet member, it must vote no confidence in the whole government, including the chancellor. Bringing down the government via a vote of no confidence has, in turn, become more difficult in the postwar system because of the constructive vote of no confidence provision. This means that a parliamentary majority against an incumbent chancellor does not suffice to bring down the government; the opposition must also have a majority in favor of a new chancellor before the chancellor and cabinet are dismissed. The provision was intended to protect the chancellor from the shifting and unstable parliamentary majorities that brought down so many Weimar governments without, however, being able to agree on a replacement. The constructive vote of no confidence has been tried only twice, in April  when the CDU/CSU opposition attempted (unsuccessfully) to bring down the Brandt government and in October  when Helmut Kohl replaced Helmut Schmidt as chancellor. The rare use of this procedure reflects the strength of the new party system. A chancellor in the Federal Republic, unlike his Weimar predecessors, can usually count on the firm support of a majority of the parliament throughout the four-year session. Since there are fewer but larger parties in the Federal Republic, the political ties between government and parliament are much stronger. The concentration of electoral support in two large, disciplined parties and three smaller parties has assured most chancellors of firm parliamentary majorities. Chancellor Democracy From Adenauer to Schröder The first chancellor of the Federal Republic, Konrad Adenauer, set the standards by which future chancellors would be evaluated. His performance in the office and the substance he gave to its constitutional provisions have influenced all his successors. Adenauer assumed the office at the remarkable age of seventy-three in  and remained until . Before the Third Reich, he had been lord mayor of Cologne, but he had never held any national political office during the Weimar Republic. Shortly after the Nazi seizure of power, he was removed from office and was allowed to retire. Although he had some con-

Chancellor Konrad Adenauer announces his determination to run for reelection in . (Bettman/Corbis)

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Voter Turnout (percentage of eligible voters, legislative elections –) .

France

.

Germany

.

Italy .

Russia

.

Sweden .

United Kingdom United States

.

Canada

.

Note: Parliamentary elections, – (U.S.:  presidential election).

tact with anti-Nazi resistance groups and was arrested, imprisoned, and nearly executed in , he essentially sat out the Third Reich. Adenauer’s first government had a majority of only fourteen seats. From the beginning, his chancellorship was characterized by a wide variety of domestic and foreign political successes: the “economic miracle,” the integration of  million refugees from the Eastern territories, membership in the European Community, and the alliance with the United States. Adenauer used to the fullest extent the powers inherent in the chancellor’s office. In firm control of his party, he was out front on all major foreign and domestic policies and usually presented decisions to his cabinet and the parliament as accomplished facts. Under Adenauer, there was no extensive consultation within either the cabinet or the parliament before important decisions were made. The chancellor led; he initiated policy proposals, made the decisions, and then submitted them to the cabinet and parliament essentially for ratification. He did not always succeed in this approach, but on most issues, such as rearmament, membership in NATO, and the Common Market, his views prevailed. During his tenure, the office of the chancellor clearly became the center of the policymaking process. All his successors have benefited from the power Adenauer gave to the office. This presidential-like control over the cabinet, bureaucracy, and even parliament soon became known as “chancellor democracy,” a parliamentary system with a strong, quasi-presidential executive. Chancellor Adenauer was pessimistic about the capacities of the average German to measure up to the demands of democratic citizenship. Through his authoritarian-paternalistic style, he encouraged Germans to go about the rebuilding of their private lives and leave politics to the “old man,” as he was often termed. Most Germans probably agreed with this approach, but it meant that his successors would encounter a host of unfinished business, particularly in the area of citizen involvement in public affairs. In retrospect,

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Adenauer’s major contribution was to demonstrate to many Germans, who were indifferent if not ignorant of democratic norms and values, that a liberal republic could be efficient and successful in Germany. Since Adenauer’s departure in  the Federal Republic has had eighteen governments headed by only six chancellors, a record of stability that compares well with other European democracies. Adenauer’s first two CDU/CSU successors, Ludwig Erhard and Kurt-George Kiesinger, assumed the office at the time when support for the CDU/CSU was on the decline. Erhard, a very successful economics minister, never had control of his party. As long as conditions remained favorable, he could attract voters and was thus tolerated by the Christian Democrats. When the first economic recession came in –, he was promptly dropped, with his own party taking the lead in urging his departure. Kiesinger became chancellor of the Grand Coalition government with the SPD, a novel arrangement that called for a person adept at compromise and mediation with a record of good relations with the Social Democrats. There was no one in Bonn who met these requirements, and Kiesinger came from Stuttgart, where he had been chief executive of Baden-Württemberg. When the CDU/CSU failed to gain sufficient votes at the  election to form another government, Kiesinger passed from the national scene. The First Social Democratic Chancellors: Brandt and Schmidt The first two Social Democratic chancellors, Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, offer a contrast in personality, political style, and policy emphasis. Willy Brandt’s two governments, from  to , were characterized by the introduction of a new foreign policy of reconciliation with Germany’s Eastern neighbors and the acceptance of the permanence of postwar boundaries in Eastern Europe. This Ostpolitik (Eastern policy) involved the negotiation and ratification of treaties with the Soviet Union (), Poland (), East Germany (), and Czechoslovakia (). This policy put West Germany at the forefront of the worldwide trend toward détente and made Brandt one of the world’s most respected political leaders. For this policy of reconciliation he was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in , only the fourth German ever so honored. For many, he personified the “other Germany,” a man of peace and goodwill accepting moral responsibility for the acts committed in Germany’s name by the Nazis. As the first chancellor with an impeccable record of uncompromising opposition to Nazism, he contributed greatly to the republic’s image abroad as a society that had finally overcome its totalitarian past. For many Germans, especially the young, he became a symbol of a political system that was now democratic in content as well as form. These foreign policy successes and great international prestige could not in the long run compensate for Brandt’s ineffective leadership in most domestic political areas. During his first government his inability to institute a wide variety of promised domestic reforms, codetermination in industry (worker representation on a firm’s board of control), profit sharing, tax and educational programs, could be attributed to the government’s small (twelve-seat) majority. But after  his second government held a comfortable majority of fifty seats. Yet his domestic legislative program stalled again. Brandt had little interest in many internal policy areas and little knowledge of economics and finance. He

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was also unwilling to resolve the conflicts within the cabinet and the SPD, which flared up after . The very weak response of his government to the  Arab oil embargo and the subsequent economic recession prompted suggestions even from within his own cabinet that he step down. Finally, when an East German spy was discovered on his personal staff in April , Brandt assumed full responsibility and resigned. The fifth chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, assumed the office with more successful national-level experience than any of his four predecessors. An academically trained economist, he had been the leader of the SPD parliamentary party (–), defense minister (–), and finance minister (–). In these posts Schmidt acquired the reputation as a very capable political decision maker. He was also criticized for what some regarded as an overbearing, arrogant, “cold” personal style. He clearly lacked the emotional, “warm” image of Brandt, yet he is given higher marks for his concrete performance. Schmidt became chancellor in the midst of the worldwide economic recession that followed the  Arab oil embargo and subsequent astronomical rise in oil prices. His expertise and experience in national and international economic affairs and his ability to take charge in crisis situations (e.g., a  terrorist hijacking and commando raid) soon became apparent. Within two years, inflation was brought under control and unemployment reduced, although it would remain well above pre- figures. In addition, the Schmidt governments continued, albeit at a lower key, the Ostpolitik of their predecessors. Unlike Brandt, Schmidt had little patience with the SPD’s left. He was a strong supporter of the mixed economy and maintained a close relationship with the Federal Republic’s economic and industrial elite. Indeed, even many CDU voters saw him as more capable than their own party’s candidates. Schmidt’s policy successes, however, were not matched by his performance as the leader of the Social Democrats. He was unable to overcome and integrate the opposition of the SPD left to many of his policies, especially the  NATO decision, which Schmidt initiated, to station a new generation of mid-range nuclear missiles in the Federal Republic should negotiations with the Soviet Union fail. He also overestimated the intensity of opposition within his own party and in the country as a whole to nuclear power as an energy source. Germany was unable to avoid the worldwide recession that followed the second oil price shock in . By , unemployment had increased to . percent, up from less than  percent in . The worsening economy coupled with increasing conflict within the Schmidt government over budget cuts for social programs took their toll, and in September  Helmut Schmidt lost his parliamentary majority as the Free Democrats, the junior partner in the coalition with the SPD, left the government. Shortly thereafter, the leader of the CDU, Helmut Kohl, became the republic’s sixth chancellor, heading a new coalition composed of the Christian Democratic Union and the Free Democrats. At the March  national election, the voters endorsed these parliamentary changes by giving Kohl and his coalition a solid majority in the parliament. Helmut Kohl and German Unity Helmut Kohl has been a significant figure on the German political scene since  when he became chief executive of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate (Rheinland-Pfalz). His suc-

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cesses at the state level coincided with the decline of his party, the CDU, in national politics. After CDU/CSU defeats in  and , Kohl moved out from his provincial power base and in  assumed the leadership of a badly divided and weakened CDU. He is credited with initiating a thorough modernization and revitalization of the party’s organization. In , as the chancellor candidate, he conducted a well-planned and executed campaign, which almost toppled the SPD-FDP government. More than any of his predecessors, Helmut Kohl, as the first chancellor who did not experience the Third Reich as an adult, attempted to appeal to patriotic symbols and national pride. The evocation of national themes remains a very sensitive topic in the German political culture. Terms such as Vaterland (fatherland) and nation and an emphasis on the past fifty years of German history as an object of pride were a frequent theme in Kohl’s speeches. He pushed plans for the construction of two large museums, in Bonn and Berlin, dealing with German history. While not denying Germany’s responsibility for the Third Reich and World War II, Kohl, together with some conservative intellectuals, urged Germans in general and postwar generations in particular to develop a positive sense of German history. The collapse of the East German communist regime in – and the desire of most East Germans for unity with West Germany provided Kohl with the greatest opportunity and challenge of his political career. Seizing the initiative in late November , just weeks after the opening of the Berlin Wall, Kohl outlined a ten-point plan for unity within five years. The continuing exodus of East Germans to the West, however, caused the government to accelerate this timetable. His personal intervention in East Germany’s first free election in March  was a major factor in the victory of the “Alliance for Germany,” a coalition of three center-right parties put together by Kohl only a month earlier. Two months after this vote, the two states completed a treaty that unified their currencies, economies, and social welfare systems. The opposition parties and some foreign governments criticized Kohl’s “rush to unity,” but he continued to press for the complete unification of the two states, including all-German elections and the end of all four-power (United States, Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union) rights in Germany and Berlin, by the end of . The victory of his governing coalition at the December  election, the first free vote in all of Germany since , made him Germany’s “Unity Chancellor.” The breakneck pace of the unification process was prompted by both political and policy factors. Kohl was in fact more popular among East German voters than those in the West. His promises of rapid economic prosperity corresponded to East German desires to catch up with their cousins as soon as possible. The drive for unification, however, also reflected the fear that any delay could prompt a massive exodus to the West by millions of East Germans with the resultant collapse of the East German state and an unbearable burden for the West German political, economic, and social system. In  Kohl became the first chancellor since Adenauer to win four straight elections. His government’s majority in the parliament, however, fell from  seats to only . The slow pace of economic and social unification in the East coupled with an economic recession and voter discontent in the West over the higher taxes needed to finance unification took their toll on the chancellor’s majority. In short, after profiting from the

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upside of unification in the heady days following the  unification, Kohl in the early s experienced the downside of this issue as Germans struggled with the day-to-day frustrations of putting their country back together. The elder statesman among the West’s major political leaders, Kohl in  became the longest-serving German chancellor since the legendary Otto von Bismarck. Still, considering the successful completion of the European Currency Union to be his last major task, he decided to run in  for an unprecedented fifth term. It was his last hurrah. In  after a record sixteen years in power, German voters told Kohl and his Christian Democrats that it was time to go. The government was soundly defeated by the Social Democrats and Greens led by Gerhard Schröder and Joschka Fischer. A weak economy, high unemployment and continued discontent in the East with the slow pace of unification were major factors contributing to Kohl’s defeat. Kohl’s legacy as the unifier of Germany and a champion of European union was tarnished badly when he was implicated in a major scandal involving the finances of the Christian Democratic party. The scandal broke in , about a year after Kohl left office. Kohl admitted that he indeed had kept secret bank accounts outside of regular party channels to reward favored CDU regional organizers and leaders. He vehemently denied, however, that the funds had come from illegal kickbacks. A parliamentary investigation was launched in , and Kohl also faces possible criminal charges. Gerhard Schröder: First Chancellor of the “Berlin Republic” Gerhard Schröder, Germany’s current chancellor, succeeded where five previous candidates had failed. His  victory marked the first time in German history that an entire incumbent government, that is, all parties in the coalition, was replaced. Schröder differed from his unsuccessful predecessors in his single-minded determination to win the election by changing his party’s reputation for big government tax-and-spend programs. Schröder’s childhood spanned the end of World War II, the Allied occupation, and the formative years of the Federal Republic. Born in Lower Saxony, Schröder left school early to work as an apprentice sales clerk. He later earned a law degree at the University of Göttingen and joined the SPD shortly after the completion of his degree. Schröder rose quickly in party ranks and was first elected to the Bundestag in . A leader of the Young Socialists during his early political career, Schröder gradually abandoned his leftist sympathies in favor of ideological moderation and a probusiness orientation. In  he was elected head of the Lower Saxon SPD and a member of the party’s national executive in Bonn. The May  election in Lower Saxony catapulted Schröder into the national political limelight. The SPD defeated the incumbent CDU and joined with the Green Party in forming a coalition government with Schröder as minister-president. He utilized his executive status to develop a political profile that distinguished him from most traditional Social Democrats—above all, a reputation for toughness tempered by pragmatism and a savvy sense of public relations. Schröder’s effectiveness in office helped the SPD win a narrow majority in its own right in  and then sweep to an even more convincing victory in . Party leaders honored the latter triumph by choosing Schröder as their chan-

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cellor candidate over his chief rival, Oskar Lafontaine (minister president of the Saar), to oppose Chancellor Kohl in the national election that fall. Borrowing image and tactics from British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Schröder presented himself during the campaign as a centrist “modernizer” in a calculated effort to mobilize crucial swing voters while retaining the loyalty of the SPD’s core supporters. He also drew on Bill Clinton’s skillful use of the media to project himself and his party as trustworthy architects of “innovation” in national politics. Schröder shrewdly kept his options open concerning the choice of a potential coalition partner after the election, leaving it to political pundits to speculate whether the SPD might enter into a Grand Coalition with the Christian Democrats or form a “Red-Green” government with the Greens. In the end, Schröder opted for the Green Party. The SPD–Green cabinet got off to a slow start during its first year in office, due partly to the inexperience of its members in holding national office but also intense rivalry between Schröder and the more leftist Lafontaine, who had joined the cabinet as minister of finance. Lafontaine’s abrupt resignation in March  freed Schröder to concentrate executive power within the party in his own hands and to focus his energies as chancellor on a major tax reform in . The result was a turn-about in public confidence in the government. Schröder’s forceful engagement on Germany’s behalf in the Kosovo conflict further enhanced his prestige as an international statesman at the very time that the CDU’s reputation became badly tarnished because of the financial scandals recounted above. Cuts in social programs, above all the large pension and health care systems, remain priorities on Schröder’s agenda. His goal is to stimulate investment, create jobs, and make Germany more competitive in the global economy. Future electoral prospects of the SPD will depend in large measure on the government’s ability to deliver on these promises. Formal Policymaking Procedures Legislation Most legislation is drafted in the ministries of the national government and submitted to the parliament for action. Two additional, but relatively minor, sources of legislative proposals are the state governments and the parliament itself. State governments may submit national legislation via the Bundesrat (Federal Council), but at least six states (a majority) must support the bill. If at least  percent (about thirty-five) of the parliamentary deputies cosponsor a bill, it also enters the legislative process. Administrative regulations and legal ordinances that deal largely with the technical, procedural aspects of existing programs are introduced and enacted by the government and do not require the consent of parliament. If regulations and ordinances affect the states, however, they must be approved by the Bundesrat. They can also be challenged in the courts. The president can in some cases refuse to sign the regulation or ordinance. Before a draft bill is submitted to parliament, it is discussed and approved by the cabinet (government). If the legislation affects several ministers, the Chancellor’s Office will coordinate the drafting process and attempt to resolve any interministerial conflicts. At

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the cabinet level, the states, through the Bundesrat, will be asked to submit their reaction to the legislation. Since cabinet approval is necessary for all draft legislation coming out of the ministries, a minister will usually have the legislation put on the cabinet agenda only if approval is very likely. Indeed, since the chancellor directs this entire process, most cabinet meetings dealing with legislation already in draft tend largely to formalize decisions already taken informally between the chancellor and the relevant ministers. After governmental approval, the proposed bill is presented to the Bundesrat for its first reading. The Bundesrat usually assigns it to a committee, which issues a report and recommends the acceptance, rejection, or (in most cases) the amendment of the legislation. Since the Bundestag can override a Bundesrat veto, it considers the bill regardless of Bundesrat action. In parliament, the bill is given a first reading and assigned to the relevant committee. Since the government has a majority in each committee, a bill will rarely be returned to the floor with a negative report. The committee report before the whole chamber is the occasion for the second reading, at which time amendments to the proposed legislation can be considered. If after debate on the second reading the bill is approved without amendment, the third and final reading follows immediately. After adoption by the Bundestag, the bill goes back to the Bundesrat for a second reading. If approved there without amendment, the legislation goes directly to the president for his signature and promulgation. If the policy area requires Bundesrat approval and it vetoes the bill, it is dead. In some cases, the Bundesrat proposes amendments to the lower-house version, and the two houses form a conference committee to resolve the differences. The Judiciary Germany is a law- and court-minded society. In addition to local, regional, and state courts for civil and criminal cases, corresponding court systems specialize in labor, administrative, tax, and social security cases. On a per capita basis, there are about nine times as many judges in the Federal Republic as in the United States. The German legal system, like that of most of its Western European neighbors, is based on code law rather than case, judge-made, or common law. These German legal codes, influenced by the original Roman codes and the French Napoleonic Code, were reorganized and in some cases rewritten after the founding of the empire in . In a codified legal system, the judge only administers and applies the codes, fitting the particular cases to the existing body of law. A judge, in theory at least, may not set precedents and thus make law, but must be a neutral administrator of these codes. Counsel for the plaintiff and defendant assist the judge in this search for justice. The assumption behind this system, which is common to other Western European societies, is that a right and just answer exists for every case. The problem is to find it in the codes. The judge is expected to take an active role in this process and not be merely a disinterested referee or umpire of court proceedings. Court observers accustomed to the AngloAmerican system would be surprised by the active, inquisitorial posture assumed by the judge. At times, both judge and prosecution seem to be working against the defendant.

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Unlike the Anglo-American system, the process is not one of advocacy, with both sides presenting their positions as forcefully and persuasively as possible and with the judge or jury making the final decision; it is more inquisitorial, with all participants, defense attorneys, the prosecution, and judge expected to join together in a search for the “truth.” This approach to law has been termed “legal positivism” or “analytical jurisprudence.” Some critics of the German legal system consider positivism to be a basic cause for the scandalous behavior of German judges during the Third Reich, when most judges disclaimed any responsibility for judging the content of laws they were to administer. The independence of judges, protected by law, is limited by their status as civil servants. All judges, with the exception of those at the Federal Constitutional Court, are under state or national ministers of justice. To move up the judicial hierarchy obviously requires that they perform their duties in a manner consistent with the standards set by their superiors. This bureaucratization of the judiciary, common to all continental Western European societies, discourages the type of independence associated with judges in Anglo-American systems. Judges in Germany are also a tightly knit, largely middle- and upper-class group. Hardly radicals, their attitudes and values (as determined in a number of studies) are quite conventional and conservative. Some critics have charged that many judges dispense “class justice” because they know little about the problems or lifestyle of the workingclass and lower-middle-class defendants who come to their courts. Justice in East Germany During the forty-year reign of the Communist Party in East Germany, the rule of law was generally subordinate to the ideological and demands of the party. All East German judges were members either of the Communist Party or of the puppet parties associated with it in a pseudo-democratic “National Front.” They were instructed to consider, above all, the interests of the “working class” and its party, the Communists. Once again, Germany must deal with judges who administered political justice for offenses such as “fleeing the republic” and “behavior damaging to the state,” which resulted in numerous political prisoners and questionable legal judgments. Since unification, most of the , East German judges and prosecutors have either retired or been dismissed. West German judges and recent graduates of West German law schools are filling the gap. East German law schools are also beginning to produce graduates who are pursuing a career in the judiciary. The Federal Constitutional Court The practice of judicial review—the right of courts to examine and strike down legislation emanating from popularly elected legislatures if it is considered contrary to the constitution—is alien to a codified legal system. Nonetheless, especially under the influence of American Occupation authorities and the tragic record of the courts during the Third Reich, the framers of the postwar constitution created a Federal Constitutional Court and empowered it to consider any alleged violations of the constitution, including legislative acts. Similar courts were also established at the state level.

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This new court, located in the southwestern city of Karlsruhe, has in its first fifty years built an impressive record of constitutional interpretation. In doing so it has also become an increasingly powerful political institution. Unlike other courts, it is independent of any justice ministry. Both houses of parliament select its members, and its budget and other administrative matters are dealt with in direct negotiations with parliament’s judiciary committees. It took several years for the Court to achieve this independence, but it was recognized as an indispensable prerequisite for the performance of its constitutional responsibilities. In recent years, the Court has rendered decisions on such controversial political cases as the Ostpolitik treaties, abortion reform, university governance, the powers of the Bundesrat, the employment of “radicals” in the civil service, codetermination in industry, the deployment of German military forces in non-NATO areas, and the right of Bavarian school authorities to display a crucifix in public school classrooms. Like the U.S. Supreme Court, the Federal Constitutional Court has also been criticized for becoming “too political,” for usurping the legislative and policymaking prerogatives of parliament and government, and for not exercising sufficient “judicial restraint.” To students of judicial review, this is a familiar charge and reflects the extent to which the Court since its founding has become a legitimate component of the political system. Most important, both winners and losers in these various cases have accepted and complied with the Court’s decisions.

Chapter 13

Who Has the Power? Political Parties THE DISPERSION OF power in the Federal Republic creates a need for its integration

and aggregation if there is to be any coherence in the policy process. The key agencies performing these functions of integration and aggregation in the postwar period are the political parties. One of the most striking changes in postwar Germany has been the emergence of a system of political parties that has effectively organized and controlled the political process. Traditionally, parties were marginal factors in German political life. Their home was the legislature, but the executive and the bureaucracy dominated politics; the parties had little influence in these institutions. This pattern was also dominant during most of the Weimar Republic when the party system was fragmented and stable parliamentary majorities became impossible to form. By the late s, effective political power, in spite of the democratic structure of the state, had passed once again into the hands of the executive and the state bureaucracy. This system of weak, unstable, and fragmented parties did not reemerge after . Indeed, democratic political parties began to assert themselves early in the Occupation period, and they assumed major leadership roles in the parliamentary council that drafted the Basic Law establishing the West German state. Never before in German history have democratic political parties been as important and powerful as they are in the Federal Republic today. Related to the increased power of political parties is the sharp decrease over the past forty years in the number of parties seriously contending for power. During the Weimar Republic, up to  parties contested elections, and as many as  gained parliamentary representation with no single party able to secure a majority of seats. Coalition governments consisting of several parties were the rule. These were, for the most part, unstable; this meant governments had to expend their resources on surviving instead of planning and implementing policy programs. During the thirteen-year Weimar Republic, there were twenty different governments. In contrast, the postwar party system has been characterized by a concentration of electoral support in two large parties, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic party of Germany (SPD), together with a much smaller third party, the Free Democrats (FDP). A new political party, the Greens, entered parliament in  and then joined the Social Democrats in a national coalition government in . Unification in  also brought the former East German Communist Party, now named the

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Vote for Radical Left Parties (percentage in most recent legislative election) .

France Germany

. .

Russia Sweden

.

Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) into the parliament. In , seventeen different parties contested the first national election, and fourteen succeeded in entering the first parliament. By , this had dropped to three parties, and they have carried the Federal Republic. They have dominated the selection and control of governmental personnel and have had major influence in the setting of the policy agenda. The postwar democratic parties had several advantages over their Weimar predecessors. First, their competitors in previous regimes—the state bureaucracy, the army, the landed nobility, and even big business—were discredited through their association with the Third Reich. Second, the parties from the outset enjoyed the support of the Occupation powers. This gave the parties numerous material and political benefits and put them in a strong starting position when the decision was made (by the Allies) in  to launch a West German state. Third, the parties largely organized and controlled the proceedings of the parliamentary council. The constitution made the parties quasi-state institutions by assigning them fundamental responsibility for “shaping the political will of the people.” This provision has also been used to justify the extensive public financing of the parties both for their normal day-to-day activities and during election campaigns. Fourth, these same parties, exploiting their strong constitutional and political position, ensured that their supporters staffed the local, state, and national postwar bureaucracies, at least at the upper levels. In contrast to the Weimar bureaucracy, the civil service in the Federal Republic has not been a center of antirepublican sentiment but has been firmly integrated into the republican consensus. There has also been a downside to this system of strong political parties. Recent scandals have shown that all too frequently parties have manipulated the laws governing their financing. They have voted themselves generous subsidies for election campaigns and have not been fully accountable for the funds they have received. Currently, there are several major investigations in progress involving the payment of large kickbacks to party officials in exchange for favorable political decisions. The Christian Democrats The Christian Democratic Union (CDU), together with its Bavarian partner, the Christian Social Union (CSU), is a postwar political movement. Like the Gaullists in France, the CDU/CSU developed largely as a vehicle to facilitate the election and reelection of a single political personality, Konrad Adenauer. The Union did not even have its first na-

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tional convention until after it became the major governing party in . From the outset in , the CDU was a broadly based movement that sought to unite both Protestants and Catholics in a political organization that would apply the general principles and values of Christianity to politics. The religious division between Protestants and Catholics was regarded as one factor for the rise of Nazism. But the Union also stressed that it was open to all social classes and regions. The CDU/CSU became a prototype for the new “catchall” parties that emerged in postwar Europe: parties that sought through a pragmatic, nonideological image to attract as broad an electoral base as possible. The CDU wanted voters, not necessarily believers, and it refused to place itself in one of the traditional liberal, conservative, socialist, or communist ideological categories. To more traditionally minded politicians and some intellectuals, this was nothing more than opportunism. How could one have a party without a clearly articulated ideology and program? The CDU/CSU represented a new development in politics. In the s, the remarkable success of Chancellor Adenauer in foreign policy and the free-market policies of his economics minister, Ludwig Erhard, made the Union Germany’s dominant party. At the  election, it became the first democratic party in German history to secure an absolute majority of the popular vote. The CDU/CSU’s program was very general: free-market economic policies at home, alliance with the United States and other NATO countries, and a staunch anticommunism abroad; otherwise, “no experiments” (the party’s main slogan at the  election). This approach worked well throughout the s, but the Berlin Wall in  and the – economic recession showed the weaknesses in the CDU/CSU’s policies. Anticommunism and a refusal to recognize the legitimacy of postwar boundaries in Eastern Europe had not brought Germany any closer to unification. Moreover, the weak U.S. response to the Wall was for many a sign that the Federal Republic could not rely entirely on the United States to run its foreign policy. The - recession, although mild in comparison with past economic declines and in comparison with those experienced by other industrial societies, indicated that the postwar boom was over and that the economy was in need of more management and planning. Almost two decades of governing had taken their toll on the leadership of the party. Adenauer’s successor, Ludwig Erhard, lacked the political skill of the “old man.” Also, the Social Democrats, as we discuss below, had since the late s begun to revamp their program, organization, and leadership. The collapse of the Erhard government in  was followed by a Grand Coalition with the Social Democrats. By sharing power with its chief adversary, the Union enabled the SPD to show Germany’s middle-class voters that it could indeed be entrusted with national political responsibility. After the  election, the SPD and FDP formed a coalition that ended twenty years of CDU/CSU government in Bonn. Lacking a programmatic focus, the party went through four different chancellor candidates in search of a winner who could bring it back to power. In opposition it expended much of its time in internal conflicts revolving around this leadership question. In , after thirteen years in opposition, the Christian Democrats returned to power. While the party did not receive any direct electoral mandate in , both state

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elections and national public opinion polls showed that the CDU/CSU enjoyed a sizable advantage over the Social Democrats. This was confirmed at the March  election when the Union scored a solid victory over the SPD. The party’s most difficult task following its return to power in  was to deliver on its promise of economic recovery. In other policy areas it pursued its traditional pragmatic course: the innovations of the Socialist-Liberal years in foreign policy were consolidated and even extended; the commitment of the previous government to deploy new missiles was carried out; cuts in social programs were limited. The Christian Democrats and Unification Prior to the opening of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the East German regime, the fortunes of the Christian Democrats were at low ebb. In public opinion polls throughout the first ten months of  the party’s level of support ranged from  percent to  percent. In June, Chancellor Kohl’s leadership of the party was challenged by several intraparty dissidents. The prospects for the CDU at the upcoming national election were not good. The unity issue clearly gave the party new political life. Led by Chancellor Kohl, the CDU received . percent of the vote in the December  all-German election and together with the Free Democrats enjoyed a commanding majority of  seats in the parliament. But after the  election German taxpayers began to get the bills for unification. In spite of its campaign pledge of “no new taxes,” the CDU-led government in  announced that Germany’s contribution to the Gulf War and the unexpectedly high costs of unification necessitated a temporary tax increase. The voters were not amused, and the CDU’s performance in state elections declined sharply. Only an improving economy, the popularity of Chancellor Kohl, and the mistakes of the rival Social Democrats enabled the party to stay in power after the  election, albeit with a majority of only ten seats. In , after sixteen years in power, the party suffered the worst defeat in its history. “Kohl fatigue” and a poor economy, especially in the eastern regions, were the major factors in the electoral debacle. The CDU must now prepare for a life after Helmut Kohl. In  the Kohl legacy took a new and ominous turn for the Union. The party was hit by a major scandal when the former chancellor admitted that he had kept secret bank accounts, and several other party figures were accused of accepting illegal kickbacks for favorable government decisions. In  the scandal spread to Kohl’s successor as party leader, Wolfgang Schäuble, who admitted that he had also received campaign contributions from the same people under investigation in the Kohl case. Schäuble resigned under heavy pressure from CDU members of parliament. Hoping to turn the party’s fortunes around, the CDU selected Angela Merkel as its new leader. Merkel became the first female to lead any major political party. She also became a prime contender to oppose Chancellor Schröder at the national election in . The Social Democrats (SPD) The SPD is Germany’s oldest political party and the only one to emerge virtually intact following the collapse of the Third Reich. The heir to Germany’s rich Marxist tradition,

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the SPD was outlawed and persecuted during the nineteenth century by Bismarck and the kaiser and by the Nazis in the twentieth century. In  it appeared that the SPD’s hour had finally come. Unlike other Weimar parties, its record of opposition to Nazism was uncompromising. In  it was the only political party to vote against Hitler’s Enabling Act. Its commitment to socialism had long been tempered by an even greater support for the principles and values of political democracy. Even during the Weimar Republic, the party’s interest in the class struggle and the realization of the revolutionary vision had given way to a policy of reformist gradualism designed to change the society and economy by peaceful, political means. During the Third Reich, the SPD retained a skeletal organization in exile and a small underground movement in Germany. While many Socialists did not survive the war and the concentration camps, the party was still able to regroup in a relatively short time after —its loyal members emerged literally from the ruins of Germany’s cities to begin the task of reconstruction. Yet the SPD at the first parliamentary election in  did not become the largest party and found itself in opposition. After the landslide CDU/CSU victories of  and , it could claim the support of only about  percent of the electorate. The SPD’s first postwar leader, Kurt Schumacher, was unable to convert the party’s opposition to Nazism and its resultant moral authority into electoral success. While he made a substantial contribution to the Bonn democracy by preventing a fusion between the SPD and the German communists and shaping the SPD into a viable opposition party, his overall political strategy was unsuccessful. Specifically, Schumacher failed to recognize that the post- success of free-market (capitalist) economic policies left the bulk of the German electorate with little interest in socialism, with its connotation of government ownership of the means of production, centralized economic planning, and the class struggle. He also overestimated the interests of the average German in an independent “nationalist” foreign policy designed to secure the reunification of the country. Most West Germans, at least by the early s, were willing to accept the division of the old Reich in exchange for the economic prosperity, individual freedom, and security they received from German integration into the U.S.-led Atlantic Alliance. Finally, Schumacher’s political style, with its emphasis on conflict, polarization, and ideology, simply reminded too many voters of the Weimar Republic. Postwar Germany and Western Europe had tired of this approach to politics—this was the heyday of the “end of ideology,” and most voters were supporting consensual, middle-of-the-road parties and leaders.1 During the s, however, an increasing number of SPD leaders in Länder such as Hamburg, Frankfurt, and West Berlin began to advocate major changes in the party’s program, organization, and leadership. The reformers wanted the party to accept the pro-Western foreign policy course of Adenauer and abandon its opposition to the free-market economic policies of the CDU/CSU. This reform movement culminated in the party’s  program, which was adopted at its convention in Bad Godesberg. In the Bad Godesberg program the SPD dropped its advocacy of nationalization of the means of production and compulsory economic planning. It stressed its opposition to communism and its support of NATO and the Western alliance. Shortly thereafter, the party sought to broaden its membership base to include

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Chancellor Willy Brandt kneels in tribute at the Jewish Heroes monument in Warsaw, . (Bettman/Corbis)

more white-collar employees and even independent businessmen. It also made the young, politically attractive mayor of Berlin, Willy Brandt, its national chairman and  candidate for chancellor. National political responsibility also brought new problems, especially from the SPD’s old and new left. The old left, composed of socialists who had always opposed the Bad Godesberg reforms, and the new left, mainly in the party’s youth organization, argued that the party had sold out its ideological and revolutionary heritage and its commitment to social and economic change for political power. It had become as opportunistic as the CDU/CSU and in reality was a tool of the “ruling capitalist elite.” Conflicts within the party peaked during the latter years of Helmut Schmidt’s chancellorship and were a major factor in the party’s return to the opposition after the  election. In opposition, the party was unable to make significant progress toward resolving its internal divisions until , when it won decisive victories in two state elections. But in the  national election, the question of how to deal with the Greens again divided the party, and its vote dropped to  percent, its lowest level since .

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The Social Democrats and Unification The – unification both surprised and divided the SPD. For years the party had sought to improve the concrete living conditions of East Germans by negotiating with the Communist regime. This contact with the GDR leadership, however, also gave the Communists a certain legitimacy and status in the view of many Germans. When the revolution began, the SPD was ill prepared. While the party had good contacts with the now beleaguered GDR “elite,” it had few if any with the “street,” that is the fledgling democratic opposition including the churches. The “rush to unity” that followed the opening of the Wall also divided the party. Many members under the age of forty-five had no living memories of a united Germany. They had accepted at least tacitly the permanence of Germany’s division, or believed that it could be overcome only within a united East and Western Europe. In the  election, these SPD activists, including the party’s  chancellor candidate, Oskar Lafontaine, were unable to recognize the broad appeal that German unity had in the West and its fundamental importance for the new voters in the East. Older Social Democrats, such as the former chancellors Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, enthusiastically supported unification and had few problems with the euphoria this issue generated. Lafontaine’s lukewarm approach to this issue hurt the SPD at the  election, especially in the East, where the SPD received only . percent of the vote. Overall, its total of . percent represented the party’s worst performance since . In  the party had high hopes of finally returning to power. Through numerous victories in state elections it had in  gained control of the Bundesrat. Its internal divisions appear to be resolved as Björn Engholm, the party’s leader from  to , and Rudolf Scharping, the SPD’s chancellor candidate for , moved toward the center of the political spectrum. A weak economy throughout  further enhanced the SPD’s electoral fortunes. But in early  the economy began to improve, and the Kohl government was able to eke out a narrow victory in October. While the SPD’s proportion of the vote increased to its highest level since , it still lost its fourth straight election. Not long after the vote, internal conflicts flared up again among the SPD’s leadership. The aggressive minister-president of Lower Saxony, Gerhard Schröder, who narrowly lost out to Rudolf Scharping in the vote for party leader in , attacked Scharping and the national leadership for their continued advocacy of classic Social Democratic nostrums such as increased spending for public works, welfare programs, and a reduced workweek. The indecision of the SPD’s national leadership over the use of German forces in UN military operations also drew his criticism. According to Schröder, there are no longer “Social Democratic” or “conservative” economic policies, but rather “modern” or “unmodern” economic policies. He clearly put Scharping’s positions in the latter category. Soon thereafter, Scharping removed Schröder as the party’s chief spokesman on economic questions. Schröder returned the favor by calling the entire national SPD leadership a “cartel of mediocrity.” In November  after a disastrous election in Berlin in which the party fell to less than  percent in its former stronghold, Scharping was successfully challenged for the

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leadership by Oskar Lafontaine at the SPD convention. After the leadership change the party’s fortunes in public opinion polls improved. The SPD went on the offensive and focused on the high unemployment and sluggish economic growth record of the Kohl government. Lafontaine had unified the party, but the SPD still needed a candidate to challenge Kohl in . Lafontaine yearned for another chance at Kohl, but Schröder was convinced that he was the only Social Democrat who could defeat the chancellor. Schröder’s victory at a state election in early  and his standing in public opinion polls compelled even his opponents in the party to concede that he had the best chance of dethroning Kohl. While the SPD’s heart wanted Lafontaine, its brain said Schröder could win. In , after eighteen years in the political wilderness, the Social Democrats finally regained national political power. It had been a long and rocky road back. The party had lost four straight national elections and had tried five different chancellor candidates before finally selecting a winner. The party finally presented a united front in  and positioned itself in the center of the electorate. Like the Democratic Party in the United States under Bill Clinton and the British Labour Party of Tony Blair, the SPD now advocates a “third way” between unfettered capitalism and traditional social democracy with its emphasis on big government and high taxation. But it took one more intraparty struggle between the Traditionalists, led by Lafontaine, and the Modernizers, led by Schröder, before this new course was set. After a stormy cabinet meeting in early , Lafontaine left the new government, but not before he denounced Schröder’s probusiness policies. The Free Democrats The Free Democratic Party (FDP) is the only small party to survive the postwar emergence of a concentrated and simplified party system. Ideologically and programmatically, it is somewhere between the two large parties. On economic issues it is closer to the CDU/CSU than the SPD; but on matters such as education, civil liberties, and foreign and defense policies, the FDP has had more in common with the Social Democrats. The FDP owes its continued existence and relative success to the electoral system, which gives the party a proportionate share of the parliamentary mandates as long as it secures at least  percent of the vote. The FDP has held the balance of power in most national elections. Both major parties have tended to prefer coming to terms with the Free Democrats in a small coalition to forming a Grand Coalition with the other major party. Between  and , and again from  to , the Free Democrats were the junior coalition partner in CDU/CSU governments. From  to , it was in coalition with the Social Democrats. In , the FDP changed partners once again and returned to the Christian Democrats. This last move sharply divided the party, but it was still able to surmount the -percent barrier at the  and  elections. With  percent of the vote at the  all-German election the FDP achieved the third-best result in its history. This success was largely a tribute to the role the party’s titular leader, the long-time (since ) foreign minister and vice-chancellor, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, played in the unification process. As FDP campaign speakers never tired of re-

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minding the voters: “Bismarck unified Germany with blood and iron. Helmut Kohl did it with Hans-Dietrich Genscher!” The FDP also benefited from its “no new taxes” pledge and did especially well in East Germany, from which Genscher had fled in the s. Following Genscher’s departure in , the party went into a deep tailspin. From September  to October , it lost nine straight state elections and was soon represented in only four of sixteen state legislatures. Its return to the Bundestag in  was due largely to Christian Democratic voters who split their ballots in an effort to prevent the party from dropping below the -percent minimum needed for representation. In  the party went down with Kohl. For the first time in almost thirty years the Free Democrats were not in the national government. While the party was able to surmount the -percent barrier, it ran a lackluster campaign devoid of popular leaders or an attractive program. But many saw the defeat as an opportunity to rejuvenate the party. Freed from its ties to Kohl and the Christian Democrats, the FDP can now move in new directions. The Greens In the late s, a variety of environmentalist groups with a common opposition to the government’s plans for the expansion of nuclear energy plants banded together into a Federal League of Citizen Groups for the Protection of the Environment, or simply, the “Environmentalists,” or “Greens.” The Greens were a new face on the political scene. Their antiestablishment, grassroots, idealistic image had an appeal that was especially strong among younger Germans. In October , the Green Party gained entrance into the parliament of the city-state of Bremen, and in March , it surmounted the -percent hurdle in the relatively large state of Baden-Württemberg. After a poor showing at the  national election, the environmentalists rebounded by gaining representation in the state parliaments in Berlin, Lower Saxony, Hamburg, and Hesse. The Greens in the early s were above all a protest movement with a single issue—the environment. Their opposition to placing U.S. middle-range missiles in West Germany gave them the additional issue they needed to gain representation in the Bundestag in , the first new party to enter the parliament since the s. The party’s string of successes was snapped in  when it fell below the -percent minimum in two state elections. The internal divisions within the movement had become an issue. The critical problem was the party’s relationship to the Social Democrats. Should the Greens seek power through a coalition with the SPD, or should they remain a protest movement unsullied by any association with the established parties? Most Green voters preferred the former alternative (i.e., an alignment with the SPD). The party’s activists and leaders were divided. One group, the Fundamentalists, rejected any cooperation with the SPD, whereas a second wing, the Realists, were willing to form coalitions with the Social Democrats at state and national levels in order to achieve Green goals, if only in piecemeal fashion. The  nuclear accident at Chernobyl in the Soviet Union brought the Fundamentalists back in control of the party. At their convention that year, the Greens passed resolutions calling for West Germany’s immediate withdrawal from NATO, unilateral demil-

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itarization, and the dismantling of all nuclear power stations in the country. The Greens also refused to distance themselves from the violent demonstrations that took place at nuclear power plants and reprocessing facilities following the accident. In the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, support for the party in public opinion polls doubled to over  percent. For a time it appeared that if the Greens decided to coalesce with the SPD, the two parties would have an absolute majority after the  election. By mid-, however, the effects of Chernobyl had begun to wane, and the potential GreenSPD vote dropped from  percent to  percent. Although the Greens clearly gained support because of the Russian accident, they also lost voters because of their radical positions on foreign policy, defense, and domestic issues. In spite of these problems, the party was able to increase its share of the vote at the  elections from . percent to . percent. By the end of the s, the party was also able to gain representation in most state parliaments. It had clearly become accepted by most German voters as a legitimate political force. In  the Greens were ill prepared for the unification issue. Their predominantly young electorate had little interest in a unified Germany, having known only the reality of two German states throughout their lifetime. Most Greens wanted the indigenous East German revolutionary groups to have more time to find a “third way” between the Stalinism of the old GDR regime and what they considered the antienvironmentalist capitalism of the West. With only . percent of the vote, down from . percent in , the party failed to return to parliament. Low turnout among Green voters and losses to the Social Democrats were the major factors in the party’s poor performance. The Greens in the former East Germany, however, did surmount the -percent barrier in their region and entered the parliament. Following the  election, the Greens rebounded in public opinion polls and in state elections. With the euphoria over unification past and the Realists firmly in control of the party, the Greens in  became the first party ever to return to the Bundestag following a failure to clear the -percent hurdle at a prior election. By  the Realist faction, led by Joschka Fischer, had control of the party. The Greens were determined finally to assume national political power as a junior coalition partner with the Social Democrats. This was the Greens’ goal at the  election and they succeeded. Fischer became foreign minister and other Greens took over the Environmental and Health ministries. The party is now part of the establishment it once so strongly condemned. But can classic Green demands such as the elimination of atomic energy and drastic cuts in defense spending be achieved, or has the party been co-opted by the very consensual structures it once vowed to change? German interest in environmental questions is waning. Among younger voters, once the core of Green support, the environment is an “uncool” topic. The Greens must also redefine themselves if they are to remain a viable component of the party system. Other Parties Since  a variety of parties in addition to the Greens have attempted to break the monopoly of the three system parties. Thus far, all of them, with the exception of the East

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German PDS, which owes its presence in the parliament to special provisions of the electoral law, have failed to surmount the -percent mark, but one of them came fairly close. In the mid-s, the radical right (if not neo-Nazi) NPD won seats in several state parliaments and seemed to have a good chance to enter the national parliament at the  election. The party secured only . percent, however, and thus failed to win any seats. Following this near miss, the NPD faded quickly. In  a new radical-right party, the Republicans, burst on the political scene at state elections in Berlin, a local election in Frankfurt, and the election of deputies to the European Parliament. Led by a former Waffen-SS officer, the party attracted enormous media attention. Its success resulted largely from its strong antiforeigner theme (i.e., its hostility to foreign workers, residents, and even ethnic Germans who since  have been allowed to emigrate from the Soviet Union, Poland, and other Eastern European countries). Voter interest in the Republicans, however, dropped quickly in the wake of the unification movement during –. After losses in several state elections, the party at the  election received only . percent of the vote. The party made a slight comeback at state elections in , again largely because of the asylum issue. But the passage in  of a constitutional amendment restricting the right of asylum deprived the party of its major appeal. Its support dropped rapidly, and in  it secured only . percent of the party vote. The East German Party Alignment The opening of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the communist regime led to rapid changes in the political party spectrum in the GDR. The once subservient “bloc parties” (the Christian Democrats, Liberals, National Democrats, and Farmers’ parties) replaced their leaders and began to distance themselves from the Communist Socialist Unity Party (SED). At the same time the various dissident groups who played a crucial role in East Germany’s gentle revolution regrouped, with some difficulty, into party-like organizations for the March  parliamentary elections. East German versions of West German parties not previously present in the GDR—the Social Democrats, Free Democrats, and Greens—were also formed. Even an East German CSU emerged in the state of Saxony, with the help of the Bavarians, in the form of the German Social Union (DSU). Finally, the deposed communists replaced their leadership and changed their name to the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). A few months after the election, most East German parties merged with their West German equivalents in preparation for the December  all-German election. The only indigenous East German party now in the national parliament is the old Communist Party, the PDS. In  the party surmounted the -percent barrier and returned to the parliament. That same year the PDS entered its first governing coalition at the state level when it formed an alliance with the Social Democrats in the eastern state of Mecklenburg–West Pomerania. These successes have been due to the party’s role as the voice of the discontented in the former East Germany. But the PDS is still lost in unified Germany. It has been unable to attract any significant support in the West, where  percent of the electorate resides.

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Interest Groups As in other Western European societies, in the Federal Republic a wide variety of groups, associations, and movements play significant political roles. The major interest groups— business, labor, agriculture, the churches, and professional organizations—are well organized at local, state, and national levels and work closely with the political parties and state bureaucracy. They have been joined in the past two decades by less structured but widely based “new social movements”—environmentalists, peace and disarmament activists, women’s rights groups, as well as other movements for various social minorities. Less established than the traditional interest alignments, the new social movements have nonetheless had a growing influence in the political process. The hierarchical organizational structure of the established German interest associations means that their top officials can speak authoritatively for the membership and ensures them access to state and party elites. Indeed, the rules of procedure in German ministries require officials to consult with the leading representatives of interest groups when drafting legislation that relates to a group’s area of concern. Unlike the United States, where the terms “interest” or “pressure” groups and “lobbyists” have negative connotations, Germany treats their counterparts as legitimate and necessary participants in the policy process. Each major interest-group alignment also maintains contact, although not to the same extent, with all major parties. Labor unions, for example, have closer ties to the Social Democratic Party than to the Christian Democrats or the Free Democrats. Yet there is also a labor wing within the CDU; and the FDP, at least while it was in coalition with the Social Democrat, maintained contacts with trade union leaders. Business and industrial interests enjoy a warmer relationship with the center-right CDU/CSU than the SPD, but again, there are supporters of the SPD among the ranks of Germany’s business-industrial elite. This pattern of strong government interest-group/political party integration even became somewhat institutionalized during the late s when the top representatives of each area met in a Concerted Action, a regular conference at which general economic conditions were discussed and guidelines for wages, prices, and economic growth were set. At these meetings business, labor, and the national government sought to reach a consensus on () what a “reasonable” wage increase would be for various industrial workers, () the acceptable level of price increases, and () the amount of government spending and taxation necessary to ensure stable economic conditions and moderate (i.e., noninflationary) economic growth. In  newly elected Chancellor Gerhard Schröder made his “Alliance for Jobs” the cornerstone of his plan to reduce unemployment. The Alliance consists of representatives from business, labor, and government who periodically meet to propose job programs. It is similar in structure and purpose to the old Concerted Action. The Alliance for Jobs and the other less formal interest-group government contracts have prompted some analysts to term Germany a “neocorporatist” state.2 Corporatism is an old term in social and political thought; it refers to the organization of interests into a limited number of compulsory, hierarchically structured associations recognized by the state and given a monopoly of representation within their respective areas. These associations become in effect quasi-governmental groups with state approval, training, licensing,

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and even exercising discipline over the members. The power of these associations is not determined by a group’s numerical size alone but also by the importance of its function for the state and community. Major Associations Business and Industrial Interests Three organizations speak for business and industry in the Federal Republic: the League of German Industry, which represents large industrial and business interests; the National Association of German Employers, which represents essentially small- and medium-sized firms, and the German Industrial and Trade Chamber, composed of smaller, independent businesses (shopkeepers, artisans). The impressive accomplishments of the German economy and the importance of economic conditions for the political health of any government assure these associations easy access to the political elite. Recently they have been most concerned with opposing union plans for a shortening of the workweek to thirty-five hours with no reduction in wages. Business interests also advocate cuts in government spending and business contributions for social programs, usually citing their negative effect on Germany’s competitive position in the world market. The ability of business interests to influence government policy even under the Social-Liberal coalition that governed from  to  is seen in the relatively weak Codetermination Law passed in , under which the representatives of capital and management still retained a majority on a firm’s supervisory board; and the Apprentice Education Bill of , which continued to assign fundamental responsibility for the training and control of young apprentices, who still account for almost half of the sixteen- to nineteen-year-old age group, to employers and not the school or the state. Government efforts to institute a more progressive tax structure in the late s were also, for the most part, successfully opposed by business interests. Labor The German labor movement, like the German political parties, has changed extensively in the postwar period. During the Weimar Republic, labor was divided along politico-ideological lines into socialist, communist, Catholic, and even liberal trade unions. These unions, especially the socialist and communist groups, were concerned with more than wages, hours, and working conditions. They sought to mobilize their members into supporting and implementing a comprehensive ideology of social, economic, cultural, and political change. Many of their resources were spent on developing and refining this ideology and the accompanying tactics that included confronting fellow workers in competing unions. The German labor movement was thus fragmented and relatively ineffectual in securing solid economic gains for its members or, of course, in preventing the Nazi seizure of power. The postwar Western Occupation authorities and many prewar German trade union leaders sought to restructure and reform the unions. The result of their work is the Ger-

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man Trade Union Federation (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund—DGB), an organization composed of twelve different unions with a total membership of over  million in West Germany and about  million in the former East Germany.3 The DGB has become labor’s chief political spokesperson and has pursued essentially a policy of “business unionism” concentrating on wages and working conditions. Labor leaders as well as economic policymakers within the Social Democratic Party advocate a pragmatic position toward the market economy best summed up by the adage “Do not kill the cow we want to milk.” The trade unions have been successful in securing steady and solid economic gains for German workers. The unions have also shared in this prosperity. One factor in the low strike rate is the economic strength of organized labor, which induces business to take union proposals seriously and seek compromises. Business knows that labor has the financial resources to sustain an extensive strike action. The unions’ ties to all parties, especially to the Social Democrats, give them direct access to the government. This political power is an additional factor that produces close worker-management cooperation. Unification and the Trade Unions The communist-controlled trade unions in the former East Germany collapsed with the larger communist state and party. Union membership was compulsory in the old GDR, but the unions were under the control of the party. Collective bargaining, the right to strike, and the free election of union officials were unknown. After unification, the West German DGB organized about . million East German workers, or about  percent of the membership of the old communist trade unions.4 But by  about half of these new members had left the trade unions as unemployment in the East increased sharply. Union membership, Easterners discovered, could not protect them from the unemployment that accompanied the restructuring of the East German economy. Agriculture Few interest groups in the Federal Republic have been as successful in securing governmental policies beneficial to their members as have the various organizations representing German farmers. Farmers constitute less than  percent of the workforce, and agriculture’s contribution to the gross national product is less than  percent. Yet no occupational group is as protected and as well subsidized by the government as German farmers. They receive guaranteed prices for most of their products; they are given subsidies and tax benefits for new equipment, construction, and the modernization of their holdings. And the increase in the value of farmland has led some observers to term them Germany’s “secret rich.”5 While they may be “land rich” but “cash poor,” it is difficult to consider them an impoverished or disadvantaged minority in German society. A succession of “green plans” has consolidated many small farms into larger, more efficient units, but German agriculture still could not compete with other Western societies were it not for the strong European Union protective tariff system for farm products and additional subsidies from Berlin. These benefits to farmers have been estimated to add an

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additional  to  percent to the food bill of consumers; but all governments since , regardless of their party configuration, have essentially continued these policies. Agriculture in the former East Germany is in a state of transition. Under the communists, almost all farmers were forced to join collective farms. Since the revolution, some have reclaimed their land and are attempting to become independent, while others are reorganizing the former collectives into cooperatives. Many of these new cooperatives are run by the managers of the former collective farms. These “Red Barons” acquired a controlling interest in the cooperatives by buying out former members at cut-rate prices. They then modernized the operation through investments in new equipment and personnel cuts. The result: many East German farms are twenty to thirty times larger than their West German counterparts. The large size of agricultural holdings makes them more efficient. Indeed agriculture is one of the most productive sectors of the East German economy.6 Elections Elections in the Federal Republic offer citizens their chief opportunity to influence the political process. Convinced that the German common man had been supportive of Hitler and the Nazi regime during most of the Third Reich, the Federal Republic’s founding fathers essentially limited popular involvement at the national level to participation in periodic elections.7 There are thus no provisions for the direct election of the president or the chancellor, referendums, the recall of public officials, or direct primaries to ensure more popular involvement at the national level.8 As in other Western European parliamentary systems, national elections do not directly determine the chief personnel of government. The chancellor and cabinet are elected by parliament after parliament has been elected by the voters. Elections must be held at least once every four years but can take place more frequently if a government loses its majority and parliament is dissolved. The Federal Republic has automatic registration and universal adult suffrage for all citizens over eighteen years of age. Electoral System Generally, there are two basic procedures in Western democracies for converting votes into legislative seats: a proportional system in which a party’s share of legislative mandates is proportional to its popular vote, and a plurality, or “winner take all” system, under which “losing” parties and candidates (and their voters) receive no representation. Proportional systems are usually favored by smaller parties because under “pure” proportionality, a party with even a fraction of a percent of the vote would receive parliamentary representation. Conversely, plurality systems are usually favored by the large parties, which have both the resources and candidates to secure pluralities in electoral districts. Some political scientists have hypothesized that there is a causal relationship between the electoral law and the number of political parties, with a proportional law causing a multiparty pattern and a plurality system producing a concentration of electoral support in two parties. The German electoral law has elements of both plurality and proportionality, but is essentially a proportional system. One-half of the delegates to parliament are elected on a

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Table 13.1 Seat Distribution in the 1998 Election Party SPD CDU/CSU Greens FDP Minor parties Total

Percent first ballot

Percent second ballot

Seats entitled toa

District seats wonb

List candidates electedc

43.8 39.5 5.0 3.0 3.8 100.0

40.9 35.1 6.7 6.2 6.0 100.0

268 230 44 41 39 656

212 112 0 0 0 328

86 133 47 43 0 341

aNumber of seats entitled to under proportional representation. bNumber of district contests won on first ballot. cNumber of list candidates elected.

plurality basis from  districts; the other half are chosen on the proportional principle from state (Land) lists. The voter thus receives two ballots—one for a district candidate, the other for a party. But the second ballot is by far the more important. The proportion of the vote a party receives on the second ballot determines ultimately how many seats it will have in parliament because the district contests won by the party’s candidates are deducted from the total due it on the basis of the second ballot vote. An example from the  election should illustrate this procedure (see table .). In  the SPD won . percent of the second ballot vote and was thus entitled to  mandates. Since it had already won  contests at the district level, however, these were deducted from the total due it on the basis of the second-ballot vote. Thus its total of  was composed of  direct district victories plus  from the second-ballot party lists. Similarly, the CDU/CSU with  district victories received an additional  from the second ballot to bring its total to . Note that the PDS won only four districts while neither the FDP nor the Greens won a single direct victory in any district. Thus all the FDP’s forty-three seats and the forty-seven received by the Greens came from the partylist part of the ballot. Since all other smaller parties failed to surmount the -percent hurdle, the  percent of the vote and approximately thirty-nine seats they would have received under “pure” proportionality were awarded to the parties that did secure representation. Thus the final total for the SPD, for example, was  seats; thirty more than the party actually “earned.” These additional seats came from the SPD’s share of the smaller parties’ vote (seventeen) and from the “excess mandate” provision (thirteen) described below. There are two further exceptions to pure proportionality. If a party secures more district mandates than it would be entitled to on the basis of the second-ballot vote, it is allowed to keep these excess mandates and the parliament is enlarged accordingly. In  there were thirteen of these seats; all of them went to the SPD. Finally, if a party wins three direct district victories, the -percent minimum on the second ballot is waived. In  the PDS returned to the parliament under this provision. Its four direct victories meant that it would participate in the proportional payout even though it failed to

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achieve the -percent minimum. It thus received an additional twenty-two seats from the list mandates.9 This complicated electoral law, which most German voters do not fully understand, was intended to combine the best features of the plurality and proportional systems. The district contests were to introduce a “personalized” component into elections and give voters a means of identification with “their” parliamentary deputy; the party-list allocations were meant to ensure that a programmatic or policy dimension to elections would be present. The -percent clause was designed to prevent small, antisystem splinter parties from gaining representation and making coalition building in parliament difficult. In spite of its basically proportional character, the German party system has become more concentrated over the past fifty years. The small parties, the Free Democrats, the Greens, and in the East, the PDS, owe their existence to this system. They are all, of course, opposed to any change in the direction of an Anglo-American plurality system. Candidate Selection Candidates for the party lists are selected at state-level conventions held several months before the general election. The composition of a list involves considerable bargaining within the party and between it and its major interest clientele. Generally, the very top positions are reserved for the party’s notables in the state, followed by representatives of factions and interest groups. In some cases, a candidate assigned a relatively weak district will be compensated by a promising list position. All participants in this procedure have a rough idea of how many list positions will be allotted to the party; that is, how many candidates will actually be elected. As the assumed cutoff point is approached, the intensity of the bargaining increases. District candidates are nominated at local meetings of party organizations. These meetings are intended to provide an opportunity for all party members to screen prospective candidates. In fact, the district leadership of the party dominates the proceedings. Nonetheless, state and national party leaders have relatively little influence in the district-level nominating process, and there have been cases where prominent legislators have had difficulty because they had paid insufficient attention to the grassroots membership. Since most candidates are incumbents, the most obvious qualification for nomination to the parliament is previous experience in the job. A successful local- or state-level legislative background, long service in a local party organization, and close association with an interest group important to the party are other major qualifications. For a list nomination, expertise in a particular policy area can also be an important factor. The German Voter, 1949–98 The results of the fourteen national elections held between  and  reveal several major trends in German elections: . A generally high rate of turnout, which by the s exceeded  percent, the highest proportion of any major Western democracy without legal penalties for nonvoting. This high turnout reflects the strong emphasis in the political

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culture placed on voting as a duty, but it also indicates a tendency to perceive elections as a means of citizen influence in the policymaking process. The increasing concentration of support in two large parties from  to , and between  and  two small but strategically important third parties, all of which support the basic democratic structure of the system. The dominant position of the CDU/CSU between  and  and again since . During this period, the Union was the largest political party and the major partner in all coalition governments. The steady rise of the SPD between  and  from the “ percent ghetto” to relative parity with the Christian Democrats. The decline in support for the two major parties since the s. At the  election, the CDU/CSU-SPD share of the vote, which has been as high as  percent, was about  percent.

In  fourteen political parties entered the parliament. Most of them were absorbed by  into the Christian Democrats led by Konrad Adenauer. Extremist parties such as the Communists and several radical right-wing groups also disappeared by , rejected by the electorate. Campaigns of the s focused on the performance of Adenauer’s governments. CDU gains during this period came largely from the ranks of the smaller parties. Most SPD advances between  and  were from CDU/CSU voters and new voters, not from those of the minor parties. The Free Democrats, depending on their coalition partner, attempt to appeal to CDU/CSU and SPD voters dissatisfied with their “normal” party. The FDP projects itself as a “liberal” corrective to the major parties: less conservative and clerical than the CDU/CSU, but not as “radical” or “socialist” as the SPD. In election campaigns, the FDP must to an extent campaign against its coalition partner. At the  election, the voters solidly endorsed the CDU/CSU-FDP government of Helmut Kohl, which had governed since October . The Christian Democrats, with . percent of the vote, achieved their best result since . The CDU/CSU gains came largely at the expense of the Social Democrats, and almost  million  SPD voters switched to the Union. The major issues of the campaign were unemployment, the security of the pension system, the reduction of deficit spending, and price stability. In all these areas the CDU/CSU was regarded as better qualified to deal with these problems than the SPD. The Social Democrats’ campaign focused on the missile question, which was not nearly as important to the majority of voters as the bread-and-butter economic problems. The Free Democrats, with  percent of the vote, were able to gain the support of voters dissatisfied with the Christian Democrats but who also wanted the coalition to remain in power. Nonetheless, the party’s performance was its worst since . In  German voters returned the ruling Christian Democratic-Free Democratic coalition, but with a reduced majority. For the first time in postwar German electoral history, both major parties lost support at the same election. The combined CDU/CSU (. percent)—Social Democratic ( percent) share of the vote dropped to  percent, the lowest level since . The Free Democrats increased their vote to . percent, while

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the Greens’ proportion of the party vote rose to . percent. Voting turnout dropped to . percent, the lowest since the first federal election in . Unified Germany at the Polls, 1990–98 In the  all-German election, the first democratic election in all of Germany since the s, the Kohl-led coalition was returned for the third straight time. Within the governing coalition, the big winner was the Free Democratic party, which achieved the thirdbest result ( percent) in its history. This vote was largely a personal tribute to Foreign Minister Genscher for his achievements in the unification process. The parties on the left of the political spectrum were the major losers in . The Social Democrats, with only . percent of the vote, dropped to their lowest level since . In the new East German states the party received less than a fourth of the vote. This poor result was in part a reaction to Oskar Lafontaine’s lukewarm attitude toward unification. The big surprise of the election was the failure of the West German Greens to return to parliament. In  the ruling CDU/CSU-FDP government led by Helmut Kohl won its fourth straight election, but by a very narrow margin. Only about  percent of the German electorate voted for the government. The complexities of the electoral, however, turned this minority vote into a thin majority, . percent, of the seats. In  German voters went to the polls for the fourteenth time since , and for the first time, they removed an entire incumbent government. In office since , Chancellor Kohl’s coalition government of Christian Democrats and Free Democrats was defeated soundly and replaced by a coalition of Social Democrats and Greens, nicknamed “Red-Green.” The new government was headed by Gerhard Schröder, the chief executive of the state of Lower Saxony. Several factors led to this decisive shift of power. First, the Social Democrats ran a carefully planned, professional campaign closely modeled on the  effort of Tony Blair in Great Britain and the  and  campaigns of Bill Clinton in the United States. Second, the SPD put aside its chronic ideological quarrels and presented itself as a united party that would take a pragmatic approach to the pressing problems of unemployment and global economic competition. Third, after sixteen years, many German voters had grown tired of Chancellor Kohl and wanted at least a new face, if not new policies. Finally, Kohl and his Christian Democrats were abandoned en masse by voters in the former East Germany. Since  the Christian Democrats had been the strongest part in the East in both national and regional elections. But in  Eastern voters reacted to continued high unemployment and the slow pace of economic and social unification, turning on Kohl and the CDU with a vengeance. The party lost almost  percent of its Eastern support. Voting Behavior The votes of most Germans can be explained by () demographic characteristics of voters, especially social class and religion; () voter attitudes toward major candidates; () the policies and images of the political parties; and () voter attitudes about important policy issues facing the country.

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Demographics. Germany’s unionized manual workers still form the core of the Social Democratic electorate, while the Christian Democrats and the FDP do well in middle-class or nonmanual occupations. In  unionized manual workers preferred the SPD over the other parties by about a : margin. Among middle-class voters, Christian Democratic and Free Democratic support is about as high. The religious factor also structures the party vote. Most German Catholics who regularly attend church are staunch supporters of the Christian Democrats. But the party preference of Catholics varies significantly by their attachment to the church (as measured by church attendance). Catholic voters who seldom or never go to church are far less likely to support the Christian Democrats than those who regularly attend services. For nominal Catholics, social class, rather than religion, is a more important determinant of voting behavior. The SPD and FDP and the Greens receive disproportionate support from Protestants, especially those with a weak attachment to their church. The Greens also do very well among voters who report no religious affiliation. While social class and religion remain important factors in voting behavior, their relative impact has declined over the past forty years. The proportion of Germans in manual occupations has dropped from  percent in  to  percent in . Thus there is less of a “proletariat” for the Social Democrats to draw on. Similarly, the “old” middle-class component of the electorate, the small shopkeepers, farmers, self-employed doctors and lawyers, has declined from  percent in  to only  percent by . This reservoir of Christian Democratic–Free Democratic strength has also become smaller. The erosion of the social-class cleavage is also evident for the religious division. A generation ago, conservative German politicians characterized elections as a competition between Christian good and atheist evil, and such rhetoric succeeded in polarizing many voters along religious lines. But social change in the Federal Republic includes a strong secular trend. In the s, over  percent of voters reported going to church on a weekly basis; by the  election, barely  percent attended church this regularly. Among German Catholics, regular church attendance has declined from  percent in  to  percent in . While churchgoing Catholics were about as likely to vote for the CDU/CSU in the s as they were in the s, their numbers and hence the aggregate impact of religion on the vote have declined.10 These social changes have an especially strong impact among young voters. They are the least likely to be tied to the old class and religious networks and hence the most likely to seek out new alternatives. In short, age is one demographic factor whose importance has increased. Age is of particular importance in explaining support for the Greens. In , for example, over half the Green vote came from Germans under thirty-five years of age. While over  percent of voters under age twenty-five supported the Greens, almost twice their national average in , only about  percent of Germans over age sixty voted for this party. As Green voters age, this polarization should decline, but in the near future the generation gap will remain an important factor in voting behavior. The Social Democrats in  made a strong appeal to younger age groups, and among those voters under thirty-five years of age the SPD was indeed the strongest party.

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Attitudes toward Candidates. Voters’ perceptions of major candidates, especially party leaders and those slated for the chancellorship or cabinet membership, are important influences on voting behavior. The incumbent chancellor, for example, generally has an advantage, or “bonus,” over the challenger. As in other Western societies, the chief executive can to an extent influence the news—announce new programs such as tax reductions, increased spending for social programs, tax cuts, and subsidies to various groups, all timed to the election. A major factor in the landslide CDU/CSU victories in  and  was the personal popularity of Adenauer. More voters liked Adenauer than liked his party, and the SPD’s chancellor candidates were less popular than their party. The low popularity of the Christian Democratic candidate in , Franz Josef Strauss, was an important factor in the victory of the SPD-FDP coalition. In , following unification, Chancellor Kohl became more popular than his party. Party Policies and Strategies. Through their policies and strategies the parties have also played an independent role in shaping electoral outcomes. The SPD’s  decision, for example, to all but ignore the unemployment issue and emphasize noneconomic issues such as the NATO missile decision cost the party sizable blue-collar support. In  the Christian Democrats underestimated the extent of discontent among Germany’s farmers, many of whom stayed home. The Social Democrats’ decision to seek an absolute majority, with their chancellor candidate conducting a U.S.-style campaign, lacked credibility in the view of most voters. By bringing down the Schmidt government in , the Free Democrats lost many voters and were able to return to the parliament in  only with the support of many CDU/CSU supporters who split their ballots; the party narrowly escaped political extinction. In  the Social Democrats’ division over the unification question was an important factor in the party’s poor performance. In  the decision of Helmut Kohl to seek a fifth term was a major factor in the Christian Democratic defeat. Issues. In most elections, the issues of prime concern to German voters revolve around the economy and social stability: inflation, unemployment, law and order (terrorism), and the viability of the social welfare system. Security is a word often used by all major parties in their electoral appeals; the bulk of the electorate does not want any major political or socioeconomic changes. In  the economy was the major issue, and the economic upturn that began in late  was just in time and just enough to bring the Kohl government a narrow victory. Kohl became the first chancellor to escape unscathed from a recession. In , however, record high unemployment worked against the incumbent government. More specific issues, while not of concern to a great majority of the electorate, can be important in effecting the small voting shifts that can be decisive in an election. In , for example, the SPD-FDP coalition was clearly helped by the issue of Ostpolitik, the government’s policy of improving relations with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Some voters, normally CDU/CSU, supported the Brandt government because of this issue; they saw the policy as a step toward a more lasting peace in Europe.

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Since the early s, noneconomic or “new politics” issues have increased in importance. Chief among them was the protection of the environment, and specifically the problem of nuclear power plants. By , almost  percent of German voters considered the environment to be a “very important” issue, second only to unemployment. The  nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in the Soviet Union struck Germany with a special force, as citizens were told not to eat certain foods and to keep their children indoors. This crisis was soon followed by a series of chemical spills into the Rhine. The ecological cries of the Greens were now taken seriously by supporters of all political colors, and support for the Greens in public opinion polls soared. Over  percent of all German voters considered the Greens to be the “most competent” party to deal with nuclear power issue; this was almost five times greater than the party’s vote at the  election. Other noneconomic issues whose importance increased in the s and s were women’s rights, peace and disarmament, and the treatment of foreign minorities. Notes . For a discussion of this point, see Gordon Smith, Democracy in Western Germany (New York: Holmes and Meier, ),  ff. . Gerhard Lehmbruch, “Liberal Corporatism and Party Government,” in Trends toward Corporatist Intermediation, ed. Philippe Schmitter and Gerhard Lehmbruch (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, ), –. . There is a union for white-collar employees (Angestellten) with about a half million members that is not affiliated with the DGB. This is the only non-DGB union of any significant size in the private sector. . Michael Fichter, “From Transmission Belt to Social Partnership? The Case of Organized Labor in Eastern Germany,” German Politics and Society  (Summer ): . . Michael Jungblut, “Die heimlichen Reichen,” Die Zeit  ( November ): . . Adalbert Zehnder, “Wo die ‘Roten Barone’ das Sagen haben,” Süddeutsche Zeitung,  September . . Kurt Sontheimer, “Die Bundesrepublik und ihre Bürger,” in Nach dreißig Jahren, ed. Walter Scheel (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, ), –. . Referendums are constitutionally possible in most states, and a little-known provision of the Basic Law allows local communities to be governed by citizen assemblies. Thus far, no locality has employed this form of governance. . Two additional changes in the law were in effect for only the  election, the first free all-German vote since . First, largely as a concession to the East German parties, a party in  was required to secure the  percent minimum in either the former West or East Germany. Hence the PDS, the former Communist Party and the East German Greens, now allied with the East German citizen democracy movement, Bündnis , both are in the parliament even though they only received . percent and . percent respectively of the national vote. In the former GDR they met the  percent minimum. Second, parties were allowed to combine their electoral lists, that is, form alliances in the various states. This was also designed to help the new East German parties. Ironically, had the West German Greens formed such an alliance with their East German counterparts, they would have returned to parliament with about twenty-six seats. . David P. Conradt and Russell J. Dalton, “The West German Electorate and the Party System: Continuity and Change in the s,” Review of Politics, January , –. For the  election, see Rainer-Olaf Schultze, “Bekannte Konturen im Westen—ungewisse Zukunft in Osten,” in Wahlverhalten, ed. Hans-Georg Wehling (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, ), ; for  church attendance among Catholics, see ALLBUS (General Social Survey), .

Chapter 14

How Is Power Used? THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC is a complex political system characterized by the presence

of several power centers. Although the national executive with its control over the civil service initiates the broad outlines of policy, it cannot secure the approval of its policy proposals or their implementation without at least the tacit prior approval of other actors in the political system: major interest groups, extraparliamentary organizations of the governing parties, key members of parliament, the states, the courts, the health and social security system leadership, the Federal Employment Service administration, and even the opposition parties through their chairmanship of several parliamentary committees and their delegates in the Bundesrat. Strong opposition by any of these actors will hinder the efforts of the government and chancellor to determine the “main guidelines” of policy. Successful policymaking must be accomplished within the framework of the politico-economic consensus that has developed over the past five decades. This means that the system resists any efforts at introducing major innovations within a relatively short time frame. Change tends to be gradual and incremental and rarely will it have a redistributive effect. The issue of subsidies for agriculture, the coal and steel industry, shipbuilding, and the construction trade has been a policy problem throughout much of the republic’s history. Economic advisers, countless study commissions, and in the case of the coal industry even the courts have recommended their drastic reduction or elimination. Most governments on entering office promise finally to tackle the problem, but regardless of their partisan composition the subsidies continue. Even the enormous financial demands of unification have not made a dent in programs that pay construction workers when the weather is bad, coal miners to produce coal for which there is no market, and farmers to grow crops that will be added to the huge stockpiles of the European Union. Attempts to change the tax system in the direction of more progressive rates have been stymied partly by factions within the ruling political parties, but also through the efforts of well-organized interest groups that have extensive contacts with governmental ministries. The federal structure of the republic, which gives the states extensive responsibilities in implementing national legislation, represents a further dispersion of political power and is thus a further inhibiting factor on major policy innovation.1 The importance of the constituent states in the policy process has increased as the scope of their veto power in the Bundesrat has expanded. At present, almost two-thirds of all legislation is subject to a Bundesrat veto.

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In addition, between  and  the combination of a CDU/CSU majority in the Bundesrat and a Social Democratic-Free Democratic majority in the Bundestag reduced the chances of the national government using its power without extensive bargaining with the states. Thus the  treaty with Poland, although negotiated by the national government, was ratified only after a variety of changes and concessions were made at the insistence of the CDU/CSU majority in the Bundesrat. State opposition also thwarted planned changes in education policy and the liberalization of regulations governing the employment of “radicals” in the public service. But even friendly states (those governed by the same coalition that rules in Berlin) can and indeed have opposed national policy initiatives when they perceive a threat to state interests. Thus the national government had to struggle for decades to change significantly the distribution of taxes between the national and state governments or to expand its influence in higher education, urban planning, and environmental protection legislation. In these areas, all the states have guarded their prerogatives. In  this condition of divided government returned as the Social Democrats acquired a majority in the Bundesrat, while the Christian Democrats and Free Democrats held a solid majority in the Bundestag. The Social Democrats used this new influence to force changes in the government’s tax program to finance unification. Because of the SPD majority in the Bundesrat, the Kohl government had to make changes in a wide variety of planned policies including the  asylum law, the new system of long-term nursing care insurance, and legislation allowing the deployment of German troops outside NATO territory. Finally, the Federal Republic has transferred some important policymaking power to the institutions of the European Union. Agricultural policy is made largely in Brussels under the terms of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Since  control over monetary policy is in the hands of the European Central Bank as part of Germany’s membership in Euroland, that is, the twelve nations who have adopted a common currency, the euro. Semipublic Institutions The use of political power in the Federal Republic is not restricted to the formal governmental institutions. Germany has an extensive network of semipublic institutions that play major roles in determining how power is to be used and how policy is to be implemented. Among the semipublic institutions, the German social security and health systems, like the bureaucracy and courts, have survived the frequent and sudden regime changes of the past century. Both were established in the s by the conservative chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who sought to ensure that the growing German working class would support the existing monarchical regime and not the socialists. Through these social welfare programs, Bismarck in effect tried to buy the workers’ political support. The Federal Labor Institute (Bundesanstalt für Arbeit), located in Nuremberg, which administers a nationwide network of employment offices, was established during the Weimar Republic and reemerged relatively intact after . These institutions assume functions performed by national governments in centralized systems such as Britain and France. In

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Germany, they lessen the total political load carried by the national government, but they also reduce its strength. Their distance from the national and state governments has also generally shielded them from the conflicts of partisan politics.2 The Social Security and Health Systems The German welfare state is one of the most generous and comprehensive in the world. Expenditures of the health, pension, industrial accident, child support, public housing, and veterans’ programs account for about  percent of the national government’s budget and provide citizens with over a fourth of their disposable income. The pension and health care programs are financed largely through equal employer and employee contributions. The state does pay for civil servant pensions and about  percent of the pension costs for farmers. The costs of other programs, such as child support, housing and rent subsidies, and welfare, are taken from general tax revenues. Employers must pay the costs of the accident insurance program. Yet the administration of these huge programs is not carried out by either the national or state governments, but by more than , social security and health funds located throughout the country. The health, or “sickness,” funds cover about  percent of the population. They are organized by economic sector (business, agriculture, professions), occupational group, and geographic area. The social security (pension and accident) programs insure about  million adults. Although dating from the late nineteenth century, the programs have undergone extensive changes since the founding of the Federal Republic. The governing boards of all the funds are now based on the principle of parity representation for the various businesses, professional, and labor interests most concerned with the programs. After , the left or labor wing of the ruling Christian Democratic Union, working with the trade unions and the opposition Social Democrats and enjoying the support of Chancellor Adenauer, was able to convince business interests that the confrontational class politics of the Weimar Republic should be replaced with a new emphasis on “social partnership.” This required concessions from both business and labor. The trade unions gave up their majority control of the health funds, while employers did the same for the pension and accident insurance programs. The administrative independence of the funds is limited by federal law. The size of pension payments and the taxes to pay for them, for example, are determined by the parliament. But they do have considerable power to set the fee structure for physicians, the construction and management of hospitals, and the investment of pension fund capital. The concept of social partnership thus extends to the state as well. The health and pension system funds, according to one authority, are “political shock absorbers,” connecting “state with society because they leave it to the major economic interest groups to mediate the state’s administration of major social welfare programs.”3 The postwar emphasis on consensus and social partnership is seen most clearly in the  reform of the pension system. Previous pension legislation based the size of payments largely on the individual’s contributions. The  law, while retaining some elements of individual insurance, linked increases in pension payments, with some time lag,

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to increases in the overall national wage level. This dynamic feature enabled all pensioners, regardless of their individual contribution, to share directly in the expanding national economy. The  law was a political compromise. Conservative business interests and the Christian Democrats accepted its dynamic provisions, that is, indexing pensions to the national economy, while the labor unions and the Social Democrats abandoned their preference for a more uniform, egalitarian pension scheme. The system now combines elements of individual insurance with collective welfare. In recent years the combination of an aging population, a sluggish economy, and the costs of unification have severely strained the postwar consensus on the welfare state. Contributions from employers and employees to the pension and health programs have not kept pace with expenditures. The resulting deficits have been covered from general tax revenues. In addition, persistently high unemployment has put the unemployment insurance system into the red, adding further to the state deficit. Since the s a variety of piecemeal cuts were made in the welfare state, but in  Chancellor Schröder’s SPD-Green government passed a massive overhaul of the pension system. Over the opposition of its core electoral clientele—blue-collar workers and the trade unions—the new system effectively reduced pension payments from about  percent of a worker’s prior income to  percent for at least two years. This was accomplished by linking pension increases not to the average annual increase in wages, but rather to the increase in the cost of living. The “dynamic” in the dynamic pension system was gone. To compensate for the decreased payments, workers will be encouraged to establish their own retirement accounts. Up to  percent of annual income, capped at about $, for singles and $, for married couples, can be invested tax free in an individual retirement account. In addition, from  on the state will contribute an additional $ annually as a premium to the individual accounts. For each child, an additional $ will be added to the accounts. These funds will accumulate on a tax-deferred basis. Lower-income groups will also receive tax credits to encourage them to establish supplementary retirement accounts. The Federal Labor Institute The Federal Labor Institute is a semipublic institution that is assigned primary responsibility for organizing the labor market (i.e., bringing jobs and job seekers together) and administering the system of unemployment insurance. The institute also administers programs, financed from unemployment insurance revenues, that retrain workers and supplement the income of those put on short time. In its programs, the institute must give special attention to the elderly, women, the handicapped, long-term unemployed, and other special groups such as seasonal workers. The institute, which was established in , is located in Nuremberg and is under the supervision, but not the direct control, of the Labor Ministry in Bonn. It is governed by a president, an executive committee, and a supervisory board, which has representatives from trade unions, employers, and federal and state officials. The major guidelines determining labor policy are developed in Nuremberg and administered in hundreds of branch, local, and regional offices. Most of the unemployment compensation programs are financed by equal employer and employee contribu-

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tions, which amount to about  percent of a worker’s gross income. If the unemployment level is high, however, the federal government must subsidize the institute. Thus in certain circumstances it can be financially dependent on the federal government. But, as in the case of the pension and health systems, business and labor representatives are closely involved in the work of the institute’s employment offices through their membership on its local, regional, and national administrative committees. The members of these committees are proposed by the trade unions, business associations, the federal government, and local government authorities. The mass unemployment in the former East Germany since unification has strained the resources of the institute. From  to  its budget increased from about $ billion to $ billion. Currently about half of the institute’s unemployment payments go to the unemployed in the East although the population in this region comprises only about  percent of the country’s total. Unemployment insurance payments made by westerners are thus also being transferred to the East. Between  and  national government subsidies to cover the institute’s shortfall grew from about $ billion to almost $ billion.4 Since , private commercial employment agencies have been permitted, thus ending the near-monopoly of the Federal Institute. These private agencies are now allowed to place employees in all available positions; previously, they were restricted to placing managers, artists, and models. Their fees, however, must be paid by employer, not the job seeker. About , private employment agencies have opened since the  law went into effect. Use of Power in the Social-Liberal Era, 1969–82 The basic pattern of incrementalism, a problem-solving bargaining orientation to politics, continued unchanged under the Social-Liberal coalition that governed from  to . Indeed, the Social Democrats since  were committed not to change the rules of the game if they did achieve national political responsibility. Most of Germany’s Social Democrats do not propose any basic changes in the structure of the economy or polity. In economic policy they have advocated only gradual changes in capitalism German style. Capital and labor are viewed as “partners,” rather than opponents, with government mediating any major differences. This basic orientation means, of course, that governmental power will be used cautiously and above all in a manner that will not disrupt consensus. The thirteen years (sixteen including the – Grand Coalition) of Social Democratic rule did not produce any basic changes in this pattern. What the SPD effected was a gradual shift in distributive policies in the direction of greater benefits for lower- and lower-middle-status groups (tax, welfare, education policies) and the beginnings of a possible shift in the distribution of power and influence within the industrial enterprise (codetermination). The other major change associated with SPD rule from  to —Ostpolitik, the normalization of relations between West Germany, the nations of Central Europe, and the Soviet Union—did not in fact represent any major challenge to the consensus but drew on previous initiatives made during the mid- and late s when the Christian Democrats were still the dominant party. Thus was considerable support for the “new policy” within the parliamentary opposition.

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Conflicts between the two coalition partners were more frequent in socioeconomic policy and especially over questions of the organization of the economy, the reform of vocational (apprenticeship) training, land-use laws, the inequality of capital resources (compulsory profit sharing), and tax reform. The Free Democrats generally are opposed to increased state intervention in the economy and the extension of worker participation in a firm’s decision-making process at the expense of capital and management. The leveling implied in the profit-sharing plans supported by the Social Democrats and their plans for increasingly progressive taxation were also opposed by the FDP. In short, when the issue involved the redistribution of economic resources and power, that is, increasing the resources of one group (workers) at the expense of another (the middle and upper classes), there was extensive conflict within the coalition. The Free Democrats were usually able to force a compromise that benefited its largely upper- and middle-class clientele. The Social Democrats, in this area, probably gave up more than their numerical strength required; also, the Free Democrats exerted more influence than their size would have entitled them to.5 The coalition was more harmonious when problems were largely regulative and distributive in character. There was essentially little difference between Social Democrats and Liberals in the areas of civil liberties, education, internal security, defense, and foreign policies. These latter problems dominated the legislative program of the first SPD-FDP government led by Willy Brandt (–). How Power Was Used after the Wende, 1982–89 The Christian Democrats returned to power in  promising a fundamental change (Wende) in the republic’s policies and its “moral-cultural” climate. The era of free-spending, permissive socialism had, in the view of the Christian Democrats, had a corrupting effect on the West German community. Kohl promised a return to traditional values: thrift, hard work, and discipline, and an end to the entitlement mentality of the Social Democratic-Liberal years. The victory of his government in the  election, however, was due primarily to the recession of –, Germany’s worst since the Great Depression of the s. Many voters associated this economic slump with the policies of the previous government. The Christian Democrats promised an economic upturn through a German version of supply-side economics: cuts in government spending including most social programs, investment incentives for business, lower taxes, and reduced state deficits. While these policies, when finally implemented, did not produce changes as drastic as those associated in the early s with “Reaganomics” or “Thatcherism,” they did represent a departure from the generous support given to social welfare programs during the SPD-FDP governments. But the German welfare state was by no means drastically cut during these years. Indeed, most analysts argue that most of the cutbacks in education, health, and pension spending lasted only until early .6 And by  the Kohl government suffered sharp losses in state elections to the Social Democrats that were related to public opposition to any further reductions in the welfare state. Numerous surveys over the past twenty years have consistently shown that while Germans are willing to accept marginal reductions

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during difficult economic times, they still firmly support welfare programs and expect the state to assume fundamental responsibility for the health and well-being of the population. Thus spending for social programs dropped only from . percent of GNP in  to  percent in . While budget deficits dropped from $ billion in  to $ billion in , by  they had risen again to about $ billion. At the  election there was little talk of a Wende, or of any further reductions in social programs by the Christian Democrats. How Power Was Used in the Unification Process The speed and effectiveness of the external dimension of unification belied the conventional wisdom that modern democracies cannot act in a timely and decisive manner. In less than eleven months after the opening of the Berlin Wall on  November  the Kohl government concluded • treaties with the four World War II powers ending their occupation rights in Germany, including Berlin, reduced the Germany Army by about half, and set the eastern borders of the unified country. • a separate agreement with the Soviet Union in which Moscow agreed to withdraw its twenty-one Red Army divisions from East Germany by  and allowed a unified Germany to remain in NATO in exchange for about $ billion in German aid. • two major treaties with East Germany merging the countries’ economic and social welfare systems (June ) and regulating the entrance of East Germany into West Germany’s political, constitutional, and legal order (August ). The government in these eleven months secured the support of all of Germany’s neighbors and allies as well as its adversaries in the former communist bloc. While both Britain and France were opposed to unification, their influence was more than countered by the strong support of the United States. Internal unification has been a much more difficult process, requiring the usual bargaining and compromise between and among the key domestic political players described above. Some difficult unification-related issues such as abortion and the question of property rights were not resolved in the unification treaties, but left to the new German parliament and/or the courts to resolve. The financing of unification has also thus far been another example of incrementalism with political and electoral considerations playing important roles. The government in  was unable to agree on an abortion bill, and it was left to an ad hoc coalition of government and opposition deputies to hammer out a compromise proposal that the government actually opposed. But the new law was promptly challenged in the Constitutional Court, which in  invalidated the legislation. The government returned to the drawing board with new legislation in , which was rejected by the SPD-controlled Bundesrat. It was not until  that another compromise law was passed, which pleases no one. The new abortion statute does grant a woman the right to a

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state-financed abortion in the first trimester provided that she participates in a counseling session aimed at discouraging her from having the operation. Since unification in , almost  million claims have been made on property confiscated either by the Nazis after  or by the Communists after . Many East Germans acquired these homes, shops, and farms under laws and regulations issued by the Communist regime, which was a sovereign state until . The national and state parliaments, courts, and administrative agencies must now decide whether the rights of East Germans, who in many cases have lived on the property for decades, take precedence over the rights of former residents, or their heirs, who fled or were deported from the country. The final unification treaty in  set forth as a general principle that the “restitution of property to its former owners takes precedence over monetary compensation.” This maxim has proved difficult to implement and has led to a huge backlog of court cases. In  and  two new laws were passed by the parliament, which were designed to speed up the legal process and encourage new investment in the region. The “restitution before compensation” rule has also been opposed strongly by many East Germans who believe that they have acquired rights to “their” property by virtue of having lived on the land. Under then-valid East German law, most Eastern Germans were in fact the legal owners of the real estate. In financing unification the Kohl government proceeded with the usual political caution. While some advisers in  urged that Chancellor Kohl appeal to patriotic sentiments and call on West Germans to sacrifice and accept stiff tax increases to finance the rebuilding of the East, most public opinion polls found little support for such an approach. Instead the government has borrowed about half of the $ trillion spent thus far on unification and raised the rest through a series of direct and indirect tax increases. It was only after the  election that German taxpayers began to get the bills for unification. In spite of his campaign pledge of “no new taxes” Kohl in  announced that the unexpectedly high costs of unification would necessitate a temporary increase in income taxes, specifically . percent “Solidarity” surtax. Additional revenues were raised by sharp hikes in gasoline taxes and social insurance premiums. The surtax did expire prior to the  election, but a new Solidarity Pact reinstated the levy in , that is, after the  election. This  Solidarity Pact setting forth the long-term financing of unification was supported by the government, the opposition Social Democrats, and the sixteen state governments. Overall, since  there have been thirteen different tax increases imposed, usually in the manner described above. Between  and , the proportion of the average German’s gross income deducted for taxes and social insurance premiums has increased from  percent to  percent.7 Since , unification has cost each West German man, woman, and child over $, in increased taxes or public debt. The Use of Power by Schröder’s Red-Green Coalition Following their dramatic victory in  the Social Democrats and the Greens assumed the reins of power with a full policy agenda. Few governments have ever gotten off to a worse start. Both parties had little experience in governing at the national level. The So-

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Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder answer questions in parliament, January .

cial Democrats had been out of power since , and the Greens were in their first-ever national government. This lack of experience showed in the early months as confusing and conflicting policies were announced. The SPD was divided between a traditionalist wing led by Finance Minister Oskar Lafontaine and the Modernizers under Schröder. Both played important roles in the  election victory, with Lafontaine appealing to the party’s historic working-class core and Schröder bringing in new voters from the center. But only one could eventually govern. Lafontaine wanted to stimulate consumer demand through tax cuts for lower- and middle-income groups and increases in spending for social programs. Schröder favored a more probusiness policy of reductions in the costs of hiring new employees, tax breaks for investors, and reductions in welfare state spending. Lafontaine also advocated major changes in the international monetary system by returning to fixed exchange rates and limiting international capital movements. The conflict between the two men came to a head in early  when Lafontaine—following an emotional cabinet meeting at which Schröder declared that his government must stop antagonizing business interests—

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resigned as finance minister and leader of the SPD. Schröder himself replaced Lafontaine as head of the party and appointed a new finance minister who would support his centrist policies. In the short run the intraparty conflict cost the government dearly at a series of local and state elections. The SPD faithful were dismayed at Schröder’s probusiness approach and stayed home in protest. But by late  Schröder, helped by the Kohl finance scandal, had stopped the party’s free fall. An improving economy and declining unemployment—albeit slightly—also helped the Red-Green government. The crowning policy achievement of the Schröder government thus far came in  when he was able to skillfully guide a major tax reform package through both houses of parliament. Under the new law, the most significant since World War II, the top corporate tax rate would drop from about  percent to  percent by . Individual rates would also be cut from a current high of  percent to  percent, while the bottom rate would go from  percent to  percent. The tax package was very similar to the one the Kohl government failed to pass in . Like Kohl, Schröder had a solid majority in the Bundestag, but was in the minority in the second chamber, the Bundesrat, which represents the states. To pass the Bundesrat, the Schröder government would need  votes. The five state governments governed either by the SPD alone or in coalition with the Greens were secure, but their vote total was only . Six states with  votes were governed either by the CDU, the CSU, or CDU-FDP coalitions. They would, of course, vote against the tax package. Thus Schröder’s only change was to secure at least  of the  remaining votes of the five states where the SPD governed either in coalition with the CDU (Berlin, Bremen, Brandenburg), or with the FDP (Rhineland-Palatinate), or the PDS (Mecklenburg–West Pomerania). In the case of the FDP and PDS states ( votes) the SPD had a dominant position; in the Grand Coalition states, it was the largest party in Bremen and Berlin. Time to Deal Schröder and Finance Minister Hans Eichel had various sweeteners ready for the potential turncoats: Berlin received about $ million to cover the extra security costs incurred by the visits of foreign dignitaries since becoming the national capital again and for the city’s museums; the small and very poor state of Mecklenburg–West Pomerania received support for a new power plant. The smallest state of Bremen was assured that the weighting system for state-to-state revenue sharing, which benefits the small states, would not change. This was pork-barrel politics German style. Late on the eve of the decisive vote Schröder had his majority. The next day he triumphantly proclaimed the end of slow growth and high unemployment; Germany was a competitive global economic player. The CDU, of course, cried foul. “Never in my  years in politics,” lamented Thuringia’s Minister-President Bernhard Vogel, “have I witnessed such an abuse of a constitutionally established institution. Behind the backs of elected state officials, new majorities were shamelessly put together.” Bavaria’s Stoiber observed that the CDU states had been bought by the Schröder government. He considered the CDU governments in Berlin and Bremen to be traitors to the party. Irrespective of party, small states do not like

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to be dominated by the larger states. Schröder was able to play on this fundamental principle of federalism. Of course, it did not hurt that historically there has been little love lost between Berliners (Prussians) and Bavarians. The CDU mayor of Berlin essentially told his fellow Christian Democrat in Bavaria to mind his own business. Policy Implementation The process of implementing national legislation takes place largely through the administrative structures of the state (Land) governments. The national government is thus dependent, in many cases, on the states if legislation is to have its intended effect. At first glance, this system would seem to allow the sixteen states, especially those governed by parties not in power in Bonn, to sabotage or undermine national legislation they oppose on ideological or partisan political grounds. In practice, this has not taken place. German federalism has a number of unifying or centralizing characteristics that make this implementation phase function remarkably well. First, as we have discussed, state governments and their bureaucracies have extensive input into the national-level legislative process through their membership in the Bundesrat. They are well aware of what the legislation will entail in terms of administrative machinery and resources. Second, the laws and rules of procedure for state bureaucracies are unified. Unlike U.S. federalism, constituent states do not have different laws for divorces, bankruptcy, or criminal offenses. Also, the rules by which the civil service operates are the same for all states and the national government. Third, the constitution requires that there be a “unity of living standards” throughout the republic. In practice, this has meant that richer states, such as North Rhine–Westphalia and Hamburg, must pay via grants and tax transfers to bring the poorer states up to their level of government services and standards. Thus the expenditures of poorer states for public works or welfare are not drastically different from those of more prosperous Länder. Differences between resources and expenditures are made up by this system of tax redistribution, or revenue sharing. Differences between states do exist in policy areas where the Länder have sole or major responsibilities—mainly education (especially primary and secondary) and internal security (police and law enforcement). Educational reform, for example, has proceeded differently in the various states. Although the CDU/CSU governs six of the sixteen Länder, only one of every ten comprehensive schools is in a CDU state. Procedures for the screening of candidates for public employment have also varied, with CDU/CSU states taking a more hard-line position on this issue. There have been cases of prospective schoolteachers whose applications were rejected in CDU/CSU-governed states such as Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg for alleged radical political activity securing positions in SPD states. Until  the abortion issue, described above, also divided the West German states and the five new East German regions. Notes . Although Berlin is now the official political capital and the seat of the parliament and central government, not all major administrative units of the federal government will have their central offices there. The current practice of dispersing national offices throughout the country will continue. For example, none of the major federal courts is in the current capital, Bonn; they are scattered about in Karlsruhe, Kassel, Berlin,

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and elsewhere. The federal railways and federal bank are in Frankfurt, the airline has its administrative center in Cologne, the national archive is in Koblenz, the Federal Criminal Office (the German version of the FBI) is in Wiesbaden. This dispersion of administrative offices reflects the decentralized character of the Federal Republic and, perhaps more important, the fact that the states preceded the federal government after . Indeed, many of these offices were the product of the Occupation period. The five new states are also beginning to receive their share of federal offices. The Federal Administrative Court will soon move from West Berlin to Leipzig (Saxony). The national Environmental Protection Office will move from Berlin to Dessau (Saxony-Anhalt), and Erfurt (Thuringia) will be the new home for the Federal Labor Court, which has been in the West German city of Kassel. Peter J. Katzenstein, Policy and Politics in West Germany (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, ). Ibid., . Institute figures cited in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,  July , . Manfred G. Schmidt, “The Politics of Domestic Reform in the Federal Republic of Germany,” Politics and Society , no.  (): –. Jens Alber, “Der Wohlfahrtstaat in der Wirtschaftskrise—Eine Bilanz der Sozialpolitik in der Bundesrepublik seit den frühen siebziger Jahren,” Politische Vierteljahresschrift , no.  (March ): –. Das Parlament  ( November ): .

Chapter 15

What Is the Future of German Politics? AS THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC enters the twenty-first century, it is faced with a vari-

ety of domestic and foreign political problems, many of which are common to other advanced industrial democracies: unemployment, environmental protection, crime, drug abuse, urban development, energy, the financing of the extensive social welfare system, European integration, economic growth, and East-West relations in a post–Cold War world. To these problems common to other developed democracies must be added the challenge of unification. The Federal Republic is attempting to integrate  million East Germans into its Western-style society, economy, and polity. Most of these new citizens have lived for most of their lives under either Nazi or communist dictatorships. Their experience with Western democracy is limited to the period since November  during which they have experienced a rapid and sometimes difficult transformation of their society and way of life. Unified Germany must also define its role in the international arena and especially its relationship to the postcommunist societies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. This chapter examines these issues. None of the republic’s current tasks, however, should obscure its fundamental accomplishments since : a consensus on liberal democracy has finally been achieved in a German political order. The Federal Republic has become an effective and legitimate democratic political system. Indeed, for some, it has become a model of an advanced industrial society.1 Its critics, those who view it as vulnerable to a major economic crisis and those who regard it as a neofascist “restoration,” are simply mistaken. That these clichés endure testifies to the power of stereotypes and not to any actual political developments in the past fifty years. This process of consensus building and legitimating has taken most of the postwar period to develop. As a result, many institutional and policy changes have been slower to emerge in the Federal Republic than in other Western democracies. Thus there is no lack of problems for Germany. Nevertheless, few modern industrial democracies have more resources to deal with these issues than the Federal Republic. Putting Germany Back Together Again: The Rebuilding and Integration of the East The October  unification of the two German states ended a legal and international political process that began less than a year earlier with the breaching of the Berlin Wall.

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Germany was formally united, but the signing of a few agreements and treaties cannot simply bring together two societies divided for forty years. Unification has political, economic, social, and psychological dimensions. What happened on  October ? Was West Germany simply enlarged by the addition of  million new citizens, about a fourth of the population of the “old” Federal Republic? Or was a new state created from the merger of two independent states? Or was the Germany that was defeated and divided in  reunified in ? Will the addition of  million East Germans produce a new political cultural mix? Will Germany now look more to the East and reassert its historic economic and political role in this region? These are the questions that Germans themselves are now posing. Discussion and debate over these issues and related problems will constitute much of the substance of German politics in the years ahead. The  unification was not a merger of two independent sovereign states but a friendly takeover. East Germany was bankrupt, the communist regime discredited, and the great majority of Easterners wanted unification—the security, prosperity, and freedom they associated with the West—as soon as possible. After the disappearance of their own state, however, East Germans discovered that many West Germans considered them an economic and political burden. Over  percent of East Germans, according to surveys conducted from  to , feel that they are second-rate citizens. They resent the arrogance of some West Germans, the Besserwessis (“know-it-all” Westerners), who treat them like colonial subjects. East Germans also see the Westerners as too materialistic and manipulative. Many East Germans feel that their condition was just an accident of history. They have a sense neither of guilt nor of responsibility for the forty years of communist dictatorship.2 Since unification, West Germans have realized that stiff tax increases and

Table 15.1 What Has Become Better, What Has Become Worse since Unification? East Germany, 2000 Better Consumer goods services Condition of streets and buildings My own living standard Freedom of speech Housing conditions Political participation Personal freedom My own self-esteem Sense of social well-being Health services Opportunities for children

Worse 95% 86 76 74 71 63 62 55 41 37 34

Protection against crime Social justice Opportunities for children Time alone, reflection Relations with friends Sense of security against life’s risks Health services Schools

78% 52 50 49 49 44 38 36

Source: Infratest-DIMAP survey cited in Rita Müller-Hilmer, “Zehn Jahre Vereinigung,” Die Zeit 40 (29 September 2000). Note: Multiple responses were allowed.

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The new Chancellery opens in Berlin, May . (AP/Wide World Photos)

large deficits are the price for real unity, and many question why they should continue to sacrifice. Some Westerners see the Ossies (Easterners) as lazy, always expecting a handout: “They think they can live like we do without working for it.” German political leadership is now attempting to deal with this “Wall in people’s heads” or “inner” unification. After a decade of living together, some progress toward breaching the psychological Wall has been achieved. When asked in  whether they consider themselves to be the “winners” or “losers” in the unification process, about  percent of Easterners saw themselves as winners,  percent as losers, with the remaining  percent somewhere between these two positions. Between  and  the proportion of winners rose from  percent to  percent. Younger, better-educated Easterners were the most likely to feel that they were winners. As Table . shows, after ten years of unification most residents of the former East Germany see the positive results of unification outweighing the negatives. A better standard of living, freedom of speech, political participation, and greater self-esteem are recognized by solid majorities of Easterners as the positive results of unification. The biggest negative is the problem of crime and the perceived lack of social justice in the market society of modern Germany. A New Capital The June  decision to move the government and parliament to Berlin was in part an attempt to demonstrate to East Germans that unified Germany was more than a simple

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enlargement of the old Federal Republic. The narrow vote in parliament was preceded by a nationwide debate. Supporters and opponents of Berlin and Bonn were found in all the political parties. The  unification treaty stated that Berlin was the capital, but left open the question whether the government and parliament would remain in Bonn or move to Berlin. Supporters of Bonn contended that moving the government would weaken the postwar federal system. Bonn was associated with West Germany’s postwar transformation into a stable democracy and a model member of the Western community of nations. For some, Berlin is a symbol of Germany’s militaristic, authoritarian, and totalitarian past—the Prussian Kaisers and Hitler all waged war from Berlin. The city’s supporters counter that it is unfair to blame an entire city for the acts of a few individuals many years ago. They pointed to Berlin’s steadfast commitment to Western values during the darkest days of the Cold War. The controversial vote expressed the conviction of at least a narrow majority of political leaders that Germany had to integrate its new eastern regions into the larger political community as quickly as possible. Unified Germany will be a more eastern, northern, and secular society than the “old” Federal Republic. The close vote was followed by over eight years of planning and frequent postponements of the eventual move. It was not until the summer of  that the government finally settled in Berlin. The Economic and Environmental Reconstruction of the East Unification revealed the full extent of the former East Germany’s economic problems. Its economy was characterized by an outmoded, overstaffed industrial sector, an underdeveloped service sector and a dilapidated infrastructure. Many of the region’s industrial enterprises were largely incapable of competing in a market economy. Many East German products were obsolete, of poor quality, and when priced in “hard” currency, more expensive than those of Western competitors. The country’s largest customers, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, could not afford to pay for imports in the Western currencies demanded after the July  unification treaty. East Germans themselves also stopped buying the products from their own region. Most East Germans were also underemployed; feather-bedding was widespread. By , the average West German worker produced almost four times as many goods and services as his or her East German counterpart, that is, the gross national product produced by East Germany’s . million workers only equaled the GNP of . million West Germans. Following unification, the country’s economy went into free fall; hundreds of plants were closed, some for environmental reasons, and unemployment soared. Production in some areas dropped by  to  percent. By the end of , the region’s workforce had declined by about  percent from . million in October  to . million. One million were unemployed, an additional million and a half were on subsidized short time, and over a half-million had moved to the West. Beginning in , the East German economy began to recover. Since then, more jobs have been created than have been lost, but the economy is still dependent on transfer payments from the West. Between  and  total transfer payments to the East

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amounted to about $ trillion (this figure does not include tax and other payments that then flowed back from the East to the West). About  percent of this money has been used to supplement the East’s social welfare programs—pensions, unemployment payments, health care—in order to bring them up to Western standards. The remaining  percent has financed a variety of infrastructure investments: transportation, telephone systems, and hospitals. Private-sector investment during the – period has totaled an additional $ billion. These funds have been used above all for new housing, commercial and industrial offices and plants, and equipment. Unification: The Record after Ten Years These transfers from West to East Germany have had a dramatic impact on the living standards of East Germans since . The net monthly income of East Germans increased from  percent of the Western level in  to almost  percent by . Pensioners in the East have fared even better. Under the communist regime pensions were very low; in  the core East German pension amounted to only  percent of the Western level. By  this had risen to about  percent. East Germans have used some of this increased income to acquire the services and durable goods long regarded as necessities in the West, but which under communism were scarce luxuries. In  only  percent of East Germans, largely the trusted party and state elite, had private telephones. By  telephone service had reached the nearuniversal level of the West. A similar pattern was found for items such as computers, microwave ovens, and other household items. Private bathrooms and central heating were enjoyed by less than half of all East German households in ; by  this had increased to  percent. The average living space per member of an East German household has also increased from . to . rooms. As table . shows, the economy of the eastern regions has made substantial progress in achieving parity with the West. Between  and  the East German per capita gross domestic product (GDP) as a percentage of the Western level rose from  percent to  percent. Wages and salaries grew from about half the Western level to almost  per-

Table 15.2 Catching Up: East vs. West, Economic Indicators, 1991–99 (Eastern level as percentage of Western level) Indicator









Gross domestic product, per capita Investment in plant and equipment Wages and salaries Productivity Unit labor costs

33 70 49 41 144

57 164 73 65 113

60 176 74 66 113

61 147 78 69 114

Source: Arbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher wirtschaftlicher Forschungsintitute e.V, Die Lage der Weltwirtschaft und der deutschen Wirtschaft im Herbst , Halle, 2000, 81.

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cent by . Productivity, however, by  was just at  percent of the Western level. Thus East Germans continue to earn or receive more than they produce; transfers have made up the difference from the West. This productivity/income relationship means that the relative cost of labor is higher in the East, even though the wages are lower. Unit labor costs in  were about  percent of the costs in the West, but this is a substantial improvement from the situation in  when they were  percent of the Western level. The key factor in increasing productivity is new investment in plants and equipment. By , the investment level in the East was  percent of that in West Germany, an increase of almost  percent over , but below the levels in –. As discussed in chapter , West German taxpayers, present and future, are largely footing the enormous bill for this economic and social reconstruction. By , unification was costing the average West German family about $ monthly in increased taxes. Future taxpayers must also deal with a rapidly expanding national debt. By , total public-sector debt passed the  trillion DM (about $. trillion). Since the collapse of East Germany in , this debt has almost doubled—as a proportion of the country’s GDP the debt has increased from  percent in  to over  percent in . Interest payments on this debt now consume over  percent of public-sector budgets.3 While this is still below the level of other Western societies, most notably the United States, it is a cause of growing concern for economists and some political leaders. By the end of  one important economic task, the privatization of the formerly state-owned economy, had been largely completed. The Trusteeship Authority (Treuhand), the agency charged with this task, has sold almost , enterprises to private owners or turned them over to state and local governments. About , formerly state-owned companies were shut down. The proceeds from the sale of these companies, however, greatly exceeded the authority’s expenses and left the taxpayers with a bill of about $ billion. In order to sell the enterprises quickly, the authority, in many cases, had to assume the debts of the old companies and the liability for their damage to the environment. The Environmental Crisis Cleaning up the environment in the East has become a harder task than rebuilding its economy. Water, ground, and air pollution levels are among the highest in Europe. This monumental clean-up job will last well into the next century. Only  percent of the region’s rivers and streams are ecologically intact, and only  percent of its lakes are free from pollution. Almost  percent of the area’s water sources are either biologically dead or heavily polluted. The remainder are only “moderately” poisoned. The most important waterway in the East, the Elbe, is the most polluted river in Europe. Pollution is most severe in the industrialized south and southwest parts of the region. Outmoded industrial plants, many built before World War II, dumped millions of pounds of untreated industrial and chemical wastes into waterways or huge pits each year. The area’s major source of energy, lignite or brown coal, was the chief cause of air pollution including virtually nonstop smog during the fall and winter months. The sulfur

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dioxide emitted when lignite is burned affects the nose, throat, and lungs. Skin cancers and respiratory ailments are two to three times higher in this area than in the rest of the former East Germany. Soil pollution is most extensive in the uranium mine areas in the states of Saxony and Thuringia. From  until , over , tons of uranium were shipped to weapons factories and power stations in the Soviet Union. Whole villages were evacuated and destroyed during the mining operations. The total cleanup of this area will not be completed until . Since unification, substantial progress has been made in dealing with these huge environmental problems, but much remains to be done. The closing down of many of the worst polluting industries, chemical plants, and coal-fired industrial plants, mainly for economic reasons, has produced some improvement, especially in air quality. Since unification, about $ billion has been invested for environmental protection, by far the largest clean-up project in Europe: sewage treatment plants, filtration facilities, desulfurization units, waste incinerating systems, and modern recycling facilities have begun to have an effect. The largest clean-up project is in the brown-coal region in Saxony, the most industrialized and polluted region of the old East Germany. By  brown coal production had been reduced by  percent and almost half of the land damaged by strip mining had been restored. Air quality in the state now approximates that achieved in the Ruhr region in the West in the s. Over  sewage treatment plants have been built, which has improved water quality in most rivers and streams. Scientists in  reported that over  species of mussels have reappeared in the Elbe, the region’s largest river. The concentration of heavy metals such as lead, cadmium, zinc, and nickel in the river has dropped by over  percent since . Environmentalists, however, remain very concerned about the amount of toxic materials present in the river’s sediments. Minorities: Foreign Residents and Right-Wing Violence After unification, the most complex social problem confronting the Federal Republic is the condition of its almost  million foreign residents. The economic miracle of the s transformed Germany from an economy with a surplus of labor to one with an acute labor shortage. There were simply too many jobs available for the native workforce, especially in menial, low-paying positions. To remedy this problem and maintain economic growth, the government, working closely with employers, recruited workers from Italy, Greece, Spain, Turkey, and other less-developed countries. Guest workers (Gastarbeiter), as they were euphemistically termed at the time, usually occupy the lowest rung on the occupational ladder: unskilled manual positions, sanitary and sewage workers, custodial and janitorial staff. They tend to be concentrated in large cities: Berlin, for example, is the city with the third-largest Turkish population in the world.4 They have been subjected to discrimination in housing. Apart from their jobs, most foreign workers have little or no social contact with the native German population. The dependents of foreign workers, especially their children, make this a potentially

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Vote for Social Democratic/Labor Parties (percentage in most recent legislative election) .

France

.

Germany .

Italy

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.

United Kingdom Canada

.

explosive issue. Many of these children have spent most or all of their lives in Germany. Yet their parents cling to the goal of someday returning to their home country and thus want the children to retain its language and values. The result is that children grow up in a sort of twilight zone—they master neither their parents’ language nor German. They invariably drop out of school and, urged on by the parents, attempt to secure employment to augment the family’s finances and hasten its “return” to the homeland. But in recent years the tightened job market has made it difficult for young, half-literate, and untrained foreign people to find work. The result is a growing body of unemployed adolescents, especially in the large cities, involved in petty crime and, increasingly, the drug trade. Discrimination, a lack of social mobility, and poor educational and job opportunities for their children are the result, in part, of the guest workers’ lack of political influence. As non-Germans, they cannot vote, and the acquisition of citizenship is a difficult process even for those foreign residents who want to be naturalized. The political system has simply not responded to the needs of an unorganized, politically powerless minority, and as long as foreign workers do not have the vote, it is difficult to envision any major changes. In fact, new restrictions on residency for foreign workers, imposed by some local governments, hinder their freedom of movement and hence decrease their prospects for upward social mobility. The problem is compounded by the ambiguity of the foreign workers’ future plans. Many still insist that their goal is to return to their home country. They are in Germany just to earn as much money in as short a period of time as they can and are thus not interested in becoming politically involved. For some, this “return to the homeland” has become a myth or illusion that enables them to endure the discrimination and deprivation they experience. By the second and third generation, however, it becomes less viable, and the frustration of their children increases. Several proposals have been made to improve the status of guest workers and their families. One involves giving the franchise to foreign workers for local elections. Two states, Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg, passed such legislation in . This would—it is argued— make local officials more responsive to their needs, especially in housing and education. In , however, the Federal Constitutional Court declared the law unconsti-

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tutional. Citizens from other member countries of the European Union, however, can since  vote in local elections. In  after years of debate, the new Social Democratic–Green government passed legislation reforming the country’s  citizenship and naturalization laws. Based largely on the principle of lineage or blood, the old laws made it very difficult for the country’s foreign residents to become naturalized citizens. The new legislation grants automatic citizenship to anyone born in Germany if at least one parent has lived in the country for at least eight years. Dual citizenship is allowed until the age of , when a choice must be made. The new laws also liberalized the naturalization process for foreign residents by reducing the required length of residency and the costs of the process. Immigration and Asylum By the late s, the problem of foreign workers was compounded by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of “political” refugees from various Third World countries and ethnic German resettlers from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. A strong antiforeigner backlash also developed among native Germans in some cities and was related to the successes of the radical right-wing Republican Party. Germany had the most liberal political asylum law in Western Europe, which is due in part to the fact that many of the founding fathers of the Federal Republic were themselves political refugees during the Third Reich. But, in recent years, a flood of asylum seekers prompted the government to change the existing laws. Germany contends that many asylum seekers are not victims of political persecution but want access to the Federal Republic’s prosperous economy and generous welfare state. In  and  groups of skinheads and young neo-Nazis attacked some of the hostels and dormitories where many asylum seekers are housed. Resentment toward foreigners was especially strong in the former East Germany. While German political leaders and the great majority of the public condemned the violence, growing support for reducing the influx of foreigners into the country prompted the government with the support of the opposition in  to amend the constitutional right to asylum. The amendment sought to exclude persons who attempt to enter the country for largely economic reasons. By  the number of asylum applications had declined by  percent. Xenophobia and Right-Wing Violence The new citizenship and asylum laws have improved, but by no means solved the problem of foreign residents and immigration. Globalization means not only the free flow of capital but also the increased mobility of people. In Germany, as in other West European countries, the end of the Cold War and increased world trade has increased the number of immigrants. With Europe’s largest economy, it is the chief target country for immigrants from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Right-wing violence against foreigners, which began in the early s, has not disappeared. In , for example, neo-Nazi activity increased with about  percent more hate crimes including vandalism, beatings, murder, and the display of Nazi symbols than in . A disproportionate amount of radical right-wing activity took place among

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young people in the East. The relatively few foreigners in the Eastern regions make them ideal targets for skinheads and other radical right-wing groups. Emigrants from Asia and Africa, whose skin color easily distinguishes them from Germans, are routinely insulted, harassed, and physically attacked by roving gangs of skinheads. Many East Germans have thus far been passive and indifferent, thus giving some legitimacy to the violence. But West Germany was not immune from these xenophobic attacks. With the end of the Cold War, Germany’s Jewish community, largely through immigration from the former Soviet Union, has more than tripled, to about ,. Governmental support for Jewish immigration is based on the conviction that the Nazi past requires the country to be open to Jewish refugees. Among some ordinary Germans, however, there is a latent resentment about what is termed “Jewish blackmail.” Responding to the problem, the Schröder government, joined by several states, proposed a ban on the radical right National Democratic Party (NPD), which many believe serves as a cover for the illegal neo-Nazi groups. Such a ban is permitted by the constitution, but the Federal Constitution Court must issue it. Critics of the ban argue that it will focus more attention on the party, which is electorally weak, and drive it underground. The great majority of the public condemns these outbreaks of rightist violence. In November , on the occasion of the fifty-second anniversary of Kristalnacht (Night of Broken Glass), when synagogues and Jewish businesses across Germany were attacked in a Nazi-orchestrated campaign and many Jews were sent to concentration camps, demonstrations were held throughout the country. In Berlin , people, including Chancellor Schröder, marched through the capital in protest against right-wing violence. The leaders of Germany’s Jewish community lashed out at conservative politicians for whipping up a national debate on immigration and suggesting that minorities had to adopt German culture. Germany’s International Role Like Japan, Germany since the end of World War II has maintained a low profile in the international political arena. While an economic powerhouse, it has been content, indeed has encouraged, other Western nations, especially the United States, Britain, and France, to take the lead in dealing with international issues. During the  Gulf War, for example, it sent no combat troops to the Middle East, but did make a multibilliondollar financial contribution to the effort. But because of its size and strength, Germany’s allies and neighbors expect it to be a more important player in international politics in the future. In , for example, Germany contributed , troops to the UN Bosnian peace force. It was the largest single deployment of German soldiers since World War II. The German contingent was composed of medical, transport, and logistics units rather than combat troops. Mindful of Nazi atrocities against Serbs during the war, the government has requested that German forces be stationed only in Croatia. A new chapter in post–World War II German foreign policy began in March , when Luftwaffe jets took off from bases in Italy to participate in attacks on Serbia as part of NATO’s Kosovo operation. It marked the first time since the s that German mili-

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tary forces, once the most feared on the Continent, had engaged in combat. The action was not without controversy. Several members of Schröder’s SPD-Green government opposed the military deployment. It was one factor in the resignation of Oskar Lafontaine, the leader of the SPD’s left wing. At a stormy Green Party convention, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who once advocated Germany’s withdrawal from NATO and the country’s unilateral disarmament, was pelted with bags of paint after he argued strongly for Germany’s responsibility to stop Serbian aggression in Kosovo. But while participating in the air war, the Schröder government steadfastly opposed the deployment of ground troops to drive out Serbian forces. The eventual cease-fire spared the government from an open conflict with the United States and Britain over this issue. Germany has contributed over , troops to the NATO peacekeeping force in the region. In spite of its Kosovo involvement, Germany is still reluctant to assume a leadership role for a variety of reasons. First, its leaders and most of its citizens know that many of the country’s neighbors still remember the Third Reich and what the Nazis did to Europe and the world. There is still a residual distrust of Germany stemming from this experience. Second, this low political profile approach has been successful. Never before in its history have so many Germans had so much peace, prosperity, and freedom as they have had since . Third, Germans fear that increased international leadership will eventually bring the country into a major military conflict somewhere in the world. The memories of the death and destruction caused by the world wars of this century are still very alive; they have been passed down from generation to generation. There is a latent yet pervasive pacifism in the country that inhibits the actions of its political leadership. Fourth, the country will be preoccupied with unification, the common European currency, and the enlargement of the European Union for at least the next decade. Any international initiatives would be premature and not supported by public opinion. Finally, Germany hopes that its international responsibilities can be accommodated through its membership in the European Union. It wants the Union to assume a stronger role and it wants to act only with and through a united Europe. Yet it is doubtful that these factors will be as important in Germany’s future foreign policy as they have been in the past. With the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe and of the Soviet Union itself, a vacuum has developed. Germany has been in the process of assuming a leading economic and political role in this region. Hopes that this can be accomplished through the European Union have thus far been unfulfilled. The Union, for example, failed its first foreign policy test when it was unable to stop the civil war in Yugoslavia. The Federal Republic has in fact become Russia’s major sponsor within the council of NATO and the European Union (EU). Stressing the West’s obligation to Russia, Germany has urged that NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe be accompanied by special partnership agreements between the Alliance and Russia. Yet its involvement in the East must not come at the expense of the requirements of Western European integration. As one authority has observed “German leaders know that a race is currently being waged between integration in Western Europe and disintegration in Eastern Europe; hence they also know that they must forge a set of policies that facili-

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tate the deepening of the European Community and simultaneously keep it open as a safety net to deal with the problems produced by the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the Soviet Union.”5 From  to , as a divided country protected against Soviet power by the nuclear shield of the Western Alliance, Germany led a sheltered existence. Unification and the collapse of the Soviet empire will increase German influence, but they will also impose new responsibilities and challenges on the Federal Republic. Notes . M. Donald Hancock, West Germany: The Politics of Democratic Corporatism (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, ), –. . EMNID surveys cited in Der Spiegel  ( July ): . . Federal Finance Ministry statistics cited in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,  September , . . In  the country experienced a wave of bombings of Turkish mosques, travel agencies, and cultural centers as the religious and ethnic conflicts in Turkey spilled over into Germany. As in their homeland, German Turks are divided into groups of Islamic fundamentalists, secularists, and Kurdish separatists. The radical left-wing Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) is believed responsible for much of the current violence against Turkish institutions in Germany. The PKK apparently receives support from extreme left-wing German groups including the former East German Communist Party. Police officials fear that the violence could provoke a backlash against all Turks by radical, antiforeigner German groups. . Ronald D. Asmus, “A Unified Germany,” in Transition and Turmoil in the Atlantic Alliance, ed. Robert A. Levine (New York: Crane Russak, ), .

For Further Reading ASH, TIMOTHY GARTON. In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent. New York: Random House, . BAKER, KENDALL L., RUSSELL DALTON, AND KAI HILDEBRANDT. Germany Transformed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, . BOTTING, DOUGLAS. From the Ruins of the Reich: Germany, -. New York: Crown, . BRACHER, KARL DIETRICH. The German Dictatorship. New York: Praeger, . BRAUNTHAL, GERARD. Parties and Politics in Modern Germany. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, . BREYMAN, STEPHEN. Why Movements Fail: The West German Peace Movement, the SPD, and the INF Negotiations. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, . BRUBAKER, ROGERS. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, . CONRADT, DAVID P.. The German Polity, th ed. New York and London: Longman, . CONRADT, DAVID P., ET AL., eds. Power Shift in Germany. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, . FISCHER, MARC. After the Wall: Germany, the Germans, and the Burdens of History. New York: Simon and Schuster, . FRANKLAND, GENE E., AND DONALD SCHOONMAKER. Between Protest and Power: The Green Party in Germany. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, . FULBROOK, MARY. Anatomy of a Dictatorship. London and New York: Oxford University Press, . GOLDHAGEN, DANIEL JONAH. Hitler’s Willing Executioners. New York: Knopf, . GUNLICKS, ARTHUR B. Local Government in the German Federal System. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, . HAMILTON, RICHARD. Who Voted for Hitler? Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, . KLEIN, HANS, ed.. The German Chancellors. Chicago: EditionQ, . KOMMERS, DONALD. Constitutional Jurisprudence in the Federal Republic of Germany. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, . LARRES, KLAUS, ed. Germany since Unification. New York: St. Martin’s, . LEES, CHARLES. The Red-Green Coalition in Germany: Politics, Personality and Power. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, .

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LEWIS, DEREK, AND JOHN R.P. MCKENZIE. The New Germany: Social, Political, and Cultural Challenges of Unification. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, . NAIMARK, NORMAN M. The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, . PATTON, DAVID F. Cold War Politics in Postwar Germany. New York: St. Martin’s, . POND, ELIZABETH. After the Wall: American Policy toward Germany. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, . SINN, GERLINDE, AND HANS-WERNER SINN. Jumpstart: The Economic Unification of Germany. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT University Press, . SMYSER, W.R. From Yalta to Berlin: The Cold War Struggle over Germany. New York: St. Martin’s, . ZELIKOW, PHILIP, AND CONDOLEEZZA RICE. Germany United and Europe Transformed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, .

Chapter 16

The Context of Italian Politics AMONG THE LARGER industrial states of Western Europe, Italy possesses certain striking characteristics. It has become one of the world’s seven leading industrial powers, yet the southern half of Italy is relatively underdeveloped and lags far behind the rest of the country—to say nothing of Western Europe—in per capita income. It has achieved spectacular social and economic progress since World War II, yet the former Italian Communist Party that in  adopted the name Democratic Party of the Left (Partito Democratico di Sinistra—PDS) is the strongest communist or ex-communist party in Western Europe. Its predecessor, the PCI, was much more powerful than communist parties in such less prosperous societies as Spain, Portugal, and Greece. Italy has attained a high degree of modernization in its economic structures, yet it is burdened with an antiquated, inefficient bureaucratic apparatus. In short, Italy presents a dramatic contrast between rapid economic and social change on the one hand and the survival of anachronistic regional imbalances, political cleavages, and administrative deficiencies on the other. Moreover, it has become evident in the past few years that longstanding rumors of widespread corrupt practices were substantially true and that corruption has come to permeate every level of the Italian political system. Thus, the Italian polity has come to lag ever farther behind the Italian economy. This political lag characterizes a dangerous transitional period, which Italy is now traversing on the road to becoming a stable and modern democracy. Italy covers an area of only , square miles, compared to the , square miles that comprise the domestic territory of the French republic. Italy’s population, however, is almost as large as that of France: ,, compared to France’s ,,.1 Italian population density should not be overstressed, however. Impressive by U.S. standards, it is actually lower than that of Belgium, Great Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands. Moreover, the Italian birthrate (. percent) is now one of the three lowest in Western Europe: only Spain and Portugal have equal or lower birthrates. The historic Italian predicament of too many people on too little land no longer seems to be as difficult to resolve as it was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thanks to its mountainous Alpine frontier, which makes for clearly defined boundaries, Italy has an overwhelmingly Italian-speaking population. Ethnic minorities are relatively insignificant: , to , German-speaking people in Bolzano Province, less than , French-speaking people in the Val d’Aosta, and a few thousand Slovenians near the Yugoslav border. The religious composition of Italy’s population is also quite

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homogeneous. There are only about , Protestants and about , Jews, with the rest of the population being at least nominally Catholic. To be sure, a very significant number of nominal Catholics are also confirmed anticlericals—especially in north-central Italy—who resist the Catholic Church whenever it attempts to exercise influence or obtain special privileges from the government. While the people of Italy are almost entirely of Italian nationality, they are divided by significant regional differences. These differences may be attributed partly to Italy’s mountainous terrain. The Apennine mountain range divides central and southern Italy from the Po Valley in the north and impedes transportation between the major cities of the south. Regional differences are also the result of the many waves of invaders that have swept across the Italian peninsula, Sicily, and Sardinia. Latins, Greeks, Etruscans, Celts, Germans, Moors, and Normans have settled and intermingled in various parts of Italy, producing a great variety of regional customs and dialects. Although the Italian language and its dialects are based on Latin, the transformations Latin has undergone reflect the ethnic background and composition of each region. For example, the dialect of Piedmont in the northwest bears some resemblance to French. To be sure, standard Italian (which derives from Tuscany, with Dante as its linguistic father) prevails in the schools and in the political and commercial life of the country; dialect usage is usually confined to the family and other face-to-face groups. Historical Context Like Germany, Italy did not attain national unification until the latter half of the nineteenth century.2 There were a number of reasons for this long delay in the nation-building process. For several centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire, the north of Italy was under German political domination (in the form of the Holy Roman Empire) while most of the south was under Byzantine or Moorish rule. Later, the south came under the control of the centralized and autocratic, but largely inefficient, Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, while northern and central Italy were divided into a number of prosperous but mutually antagonistic city-states. This internal division permitted foreign powers such as Spain and, later, Austria to dominate large portions of Italy. Not until the French Revolution of – and Napoleon’s subsequent invasion of Italy did a sense of Italian nationality begin to gain ground among Italy’s educated elites. Even so, after Napoleon’s defeat in –, Italy was still split into eight territorial units: the Kingdom of Sardinia (Piedmont) in the northwest; the Lombard and Venetian possessions of the Hapsburg Empire in the north and northeast; the duchies of Parma and Modena in north-central Italy; the duchy of Lucca, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and the Papal State in central Italy; and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the south. Nationalist agitation in the nineteenth century culminated in – in a resurgence of nationalistic sentiment known as the Risorgimento. During that period, the Kingdom of Sardinia (Piedmont) led the drive for national unification after a republican movement headed by Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi had launched several unsuccessful uprisings against Austrian and papal rule. Receiving military support first from France () and later from Prussia (), exploiting and taking over control of

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Garibaldi’s unexpectedly successful invasion and occupation of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the Kingdom of Sardinia occupied the entire Italian peninsula by . Backed mostly by a town-dwelling educated minority, the Risorgimento resulted in the creation of a unified Kingdom of Italy. In most of Italy, the process of unification consisted partly of a military occupation by Piedmont and partly of a revolution from above, viewed with hostility or apathy by the peasantry. Moreover, foreign intervention played a key role in ensuring the success of this process. The newly established Kingdom of Italy was a constitutional democracy with a parliamentary form of government, but it faced a severe problem of legitimacy because of the way in which it had been founded and consolidated. First, Italy had been unified by a series of military conquests, involving the elimination of several existing Italian states and their simple annexation by the Kingdom of Sardinia. Second, the fait accompli was ratified by obviously rigged plebiscites in the various Italian regions. Third, a rigidly centralized unitary system was set up, and no political or institutional concessions were made to the autonomist aspirations of the several regions. This extreme centralization followed the French model of a prefectoral unitary system (the German Second Reich was to move instead toward a federal system). Finally, by annexing the Papal State and storming Rome, the Kingdom of Italy provoked a conflict with the Catholic Church. As a result, devout Catholics abstained for almost half a century from playing an active role in Italian politics. They, and many other Italians, did not feel a moral obligation to obey the commands of the Italian government. When obedience is based mainly on expediency, a political system lacks full legitimacy. In addition to its problem of legitimacy, the Kingdom of Italy faced the difficult task of achieving national integration, of creating a sense of nationhood among Italians with diverse regional allegiances and ethnic origins. The elitist character of the Risorgimento had failed to give the peasant masses a feeling of participation in the nation-building process. It also had tended to create certain contempt for majority rule among many Italian intellectuals, who were fully aware of the fact that the Risorgimento had been the work of an active minority. There was also a feeling among Italian elites that only new foreign conquests and foreign wars could create a sense of national allegiance among the common people of Italy. This sense of incomplete integration helps explain why the right to vote was withheld from most industrial workers and peasants until . It also helps explain why Italy embarked on a series of colonial adventures in East Africa and Libya and why Italy intervened in World War I on the Allied side against the wishes of a neutralist parliamentary majority. The Italian constitutional monarchy lasted barely half a century. Italy’s costly participation in World War I, in which more than , Italian soldiers died, brought the crises of legitimacy and integration to a head. The Italian masses—workers and peasants barred from the polls until —voted mainly for the Socialist and Popular (Christian Democratic) parties, both of which threatened to encroach on the rights of private property. Also, these parties had shown a marked reluctance to support Italy’s entry into World War I in . After the war, the rise of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party represented, to a considerable degree, a middle-class backlash against the redistributive and

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pacifist implications of the entry of the Italian masses into politics. With the aid of an armed militia, which was financed by industrialists and large landowners, the Fascist Party between  and  unleashed a reign of terror against the Socialist and Popular parties in local communities all over the nation. The army and police, like the Italian government itself, were unable or unwilling to intervene effectively against Fascist violence. Finally, in October , Mussolini’s blackshirt militiamen marched on Rome, the king refused to sign a government decree to declare a state of emergency, the government resigned, and the king appointed Mussolini to be the next prime minister. Mussolini soon took advantage of his executive powers to establish a Fascist dictatorship—a regime that was to last until . The Italian Fascist regime differed in a number of ways from Adolf Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship. Italian fascism was far less totalitarian. Controls over Italian business and agriculture were nowhere near as thoroughgoing as in Germany, though labor unions were suppressed and replaced by Fascist-sponsored organizations. Italian fascism was much more closely identified with propertied interests than was Nazism. It did a much less effective job of mobilizing the economy for total war. Corruption and inefficiency plunged to almost incredible depths. Italian fascism never laid primary stress on doctrines of racial supremacy, and the means it employed to suppress political opposition were less radical than those employed in Germany. In addition, it retained the king as nominal constitutional monarch (whereas Hitler assumed the position of chief of state as well as head of government after President Hindenburg’s death in ). By so doing, Italian fascism paved the way for its own legal demise. In July , with the Western Allied armies newly landed in Sicily and Italian forces in full retreat, the king was persuaded by a number of military and civilian notables to exercise his rarely used constitutional prerogative to remove the prime minister. He appointed Marshal Badoglio to replace Mussolini, and the Badoglio government signed an armistice with the Allies on  September . This was followed by a rapid German occupation of continental Italy. Until May , which marked the Allied victory over Nazi Germany, the Italian government exercised some limited authority only over the Allied-occupied areas of central and southern Italy. The democratic parties, which had emerged in the liberated zones of Italy under the protection of the Western Allies, had not forgotten the failure of the monarchy to support the legally elected government of Italy in  during the march on Rome. After considerable discussion, it was decided to hold an institutional referendum on the question whether the monarchy was to be retained. The referendum was duly held on  June , and about  million Italians voted for a republic; about  million voted to keep the monarchy. As a result of the referendum, the royal family went into exile and Italy became a republic. An elected Constituent Assembly then drew up and ratified a constitution, which went into effect in . The constitution of the Italian republic provided for a parliamentary system but with some deviations from the classic parliamentary model. To be sure, it included the customary provisions for an elected parliament, a prime minister and cabinet responsible to that parliament, and an indirectly elected, largely ceremonial president. It also possessed features that differentiated it from most other parliamentary systems. First, both houses of

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the Italian parliament were to be popularly elected and were to be roughly equal in power, in contrast to the weaker, less representative upper houses in Great Britain, France, and West Germany. Second, a constitutional court was to exercise the function of judicial review over parliamentary legislation. This was consistent with constitutional innovations in West Germany, but not with the British parliamentary system, characterized by parliamentary sovereignty, or with most other pre–World War II parliamentary systems. Third, there was an element of direct democracy in the form of provisions for the initiative and referendum. Finally, certain specified powers were entrusted to semi-autonomous regions listed in the constitution. These regions were not to have as much power as states or provinces in a federal system, but they would enjoy a much higher status than did the subnational units of government in a unitary system such as the British or the French. In short, the Italian constitution established neither a unitary nor a federal system, but an intermediate form: regional devolution. One flaw in the Italian constitution was the failure of postwar Italian governments to implement the provisions cited above with a reasonable degree of dispatch.3 The Constitutional Court was not set up until  and did not begin to function until . Legislation to implement the referendum was not passed until . As for the regions promised by the constitution, four “special regions” with special ethnic or separatist problems— Sicily, Sardinia, Val d’Aosta, Trentino–Alto Adige—were created shortly after World War II; the fifth special region, Friuli–Venezia Giulia, was established by parliament in . But the fifteen “ordinary regions” listed in the constitution were not instituted until . These delays in implementing the constitution could be attributed to the unwillingness of the ruling Christian Democratic Party to share power with the opposition or to tolerate potentially crippling restraints on its power to govern Italy. Before , when Communists, Socialists, and Christian Democrats had governed together in a tripartite cabinet, the Christian Democrats had been staunch advocates of decentralization, judicial independence, and other checks on the executive. The Communists and Socialists, in contrast, had favored a strong parliament and cabinet and had opposed any checks on absolute majority rule, since they expected that a leftist government was just around the corner. After the  parliamentary elections, which gave the Christian Democrats an absolute majority and made it clear that they would be the dominant force in Italian politics for many years to come, the roles were reversed. Now the Communist and Socialists demanded regional autonomy, judicial review, and similar checks on the government indicated by the constitution; the Christian Democrats dragged their feet on implementing such measures. The political history of postwar Italy may be divided into phases corresponding to the type of government formula that usually, but not invariably, prevailed. Between  and , the three major Italian parties—the Christian Democrats, the Communists, and the Socialists—collaborated in cabinet coalitions, with the help of several minor parties of the center. This was the period of so-called tripartite rule, which ended in  when the Communists and their Socialist allies were ousted from the cabinet. From  through , Italy was usually governed by centrist coalitions, which were always dominated by the Christian Democratic Party. The minor center parties (the Social Demo-

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crats, the Republicans, and the business-oriented Liberals) played the role of junior partners in these coalitions. Then, in , the first center-left government was formed: the Christian Democrats and the minor center parties formed a cabinet with the favorable abstention of the Italian Socialist Party, which had gradually drifted away from its former close alliance with the Communists. After abstaining on confidence votes for a year, the Socialist Party finally entered the cabinet in December  after sixteen years in opposition. The center-left formula simply subtracted the Liberals from, and added the Socialists to, the center coalitions of the – period. From  until , the center-left coalition was the dominant combination in Italian politics, though developments in the s and early s eroded this dominance. One development was the increasing moderation and consequently enhanced respectability of the Communist Party. The Communists were actually treated as part of the parliamentary majority between  and  (although they were not granted any cabinet posts), and Italy seemed for a time to be on the verge of being governed by a grand coalition of all non-Fascist parties. A second development was the declining strength of the Christian Democratic Party. This trend compelled the party to make greater concessions to its allies as the price for preserving the center-left formula. One concession was a willingness to relinquish the party’s monopolistic stranglehold on the position of prime minister. Thus, in , Italy had its first non-Christian Democratic prime minister in thirtyfive years: Giovanni Spadolini, leader of the Republican Party. And in , the Socialist leader, Bettino Craxi, was able to form a cabinet. In , a new phase was initiated. The moderate rightist Liberal Party was asked to share cabinet office with the four center-left parties. Thus, for most of the period from  until , the center-left formula was replaced by an oversized five-party coalition ranging from the moderate left through the moderate right. During the first nine months and the last four years of this period, the small centrist Republican Party chose to remain outside the coalition, thus reducing the coalition membership to four. With the corruption scandals, which began to see the light of day in February  and implicated a very large proportion of Italy’s political elites during the next two years, and with the electoral earthquake which took place in the parliamentary elections of April  and March , traditional Italian coalition formulas have undergone some startling changes. After the  elections, the four-party coalition formula (Christian Democrats, Socialists, Social Democrats, and Liberals, with the Republicans not participating in the cabinet) was adopted once again. Its leader, however, was not a Christian Democrat but a Socialist, Giuliano Amato (Craxi had been vetoed by the Christian Democrats). And when Amato nominated a short-lived reshuffled cabinet in February , he included a number of nonpolitical technocrats. These developments reflected only the first signs of the Christian Democrats’ political eclipse—the loss of twenty-eight seats in the Chamber of Deputies in  and the rising strength of the fledgling Lombard League. As the corruption scandals continued to unfold in  and voter confidence in the traditional parties continued to decline, truly fundamental changes took place in the Italian party system and in the composition of Italian cabinets. In April , Carlo Azeglio

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Ciampi, director of the Bank of Italy, took over as prime minister. He was the first nonpolitician and nonparliamentarian to occupy that post. His cabinet included not only the four parties of the Amato coalition and a number of nonpolitical technocrats, but also three members of the PDS (the Democratic Party of the Left: the former Communist Party) and one Green. To be sure, the PDS members and the Green all resigned less than twenty-four hours after their appointment, in protest against the Chamber of Deputies’ refusal to lift Craxi’s parliamentary immunity so that he could face corruption charges. The fact remained that the former Communist Party, for the first time in forty-six years, had actually been invited to enter a cabinet. After the parliamentary elections of April , which fatally weakened the parties that had hitherto dominated Italian politics and which brought a number of new parties to parliament, it became evident that the old coalition formulas were not merely going to be revised, but were going to be drastically transformed. The new cabinet, formed in May , was headed by Silvio Berlusconi, a media magnate and leader of Forza Italia! (Go, Italy!), a new catch-all party of the center-right that had been established only three or four months before the election. The other major parties in the coalition were the Northern League (a relatively new federalist and quasi-separatist party of the center-right) and the National Alliance (a party of former fascists and monarchists, whose central core was the MSI—the neofascist Italian Social Movement). There had been a few center-right cabinets in Italy since , but never one that actually included a party dominated by exFascists, and that included some leaders who refused to renounce their Fascist past. For the first time since , Italy had veered sharply to the right, and former Fascists entered the corridors of power. It seemed clear that Italian coalition politics had entered new and uncharted waters. Yet, the Berlusconi cabinet lasted only seven months: he was compelled to resign in December , as the result of serious disagreements that split his center-right coalition. His successor was Lamberto Dini, a technocrat and top official of the Bank of Italy. Unlike the Ciampi cabinet of –, which was partly composed of technocrats, the Dini caretaker cabinet of  was all technocratic—another new departure. After Dini’s resignation on  December , the elections of March  resulted in a center-left victory. Romano Prodi, a Christian Democrat running under the new label of the Italian Popular Party, became prime minister. His cabinet coalition was center-left, but with a major difference from preceding center-left coalitions. Included in the cabinet were members of the Popular Party; of Italian Renewal (a small new party formed by Dini); of the Democratic Union (a moderate party of the center-left); of the Greens; and above all, of the PDS, the former Communist Party. The PDS had become much more of a moderate center-left movement. Nevertheless, its admission to the cabinet as the dominant partner in the coalition marked a sharp break with the past. This break with the past was further confirmed in October , when the Prodi cabinet resigned and Massimo D’Alema, leader of the PDS, became the new prime minister. His cabinet, too, was largely center-left, but it included an extreme left element and a center-right element—Armando Cossutta’s small and newly-formed Italian Communist Party (a far cry from the old and much more powerful PCI of pre- days) and the

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Democratic Union for the Republic or UDR (a center-right party of former Christian Democrats, led by the former president, Francesco Cossiga. Cossiga apparently aspired to construct a vast centrist movement appealing to both Catholic and laic forces, as well as to those voters who currently support Forza Italia! He saw Prodi (a member of the Catholic Popular Party) as an obstacle to his construction of such a movement.4 Following elections in May , Berlusconi returned to office as head of a center-right coalition. It is evident today that the extreme left and the extreme right have become relatively weak players on the Italian stage. The PDS is clearly no longer a party of the extreme left; it greatly overshadows two small avowedly Communist parties to its left on the political spectrum. As for the extreme right, Gianfranco Fini, leader of the National Alliance, has very recently renounced the Fascist past, and particularly its racial excesses. The National Alliance is now regarded as a conservative party of the center-right, comparable to the Popular Alliance in Spain. Italy seems to be moving toward a bipolar system alternating between moderate left and moderate right ruling coalitions.5 Socioeconomic Context Before World War I, the Italian economy was only partly industrialized, with most heavy industry concentrated in the Milan-Genoa-Turin industrial triangle; total Italian industrial production lagged far behind that of France, Germany, and Great Britain. The Fascist era was marked by a sluggish, stagnant economy, held back by the rigorously deflationary policies of the Fascist regime. World War II brought devastation to Italian industry and transportation facilities alike. After an arduous period of postwar reconstruction, Italy managed to bring about an economic take-off, which has been generally described as the “economic miracle.” During the s, per capita income in Italy rose more than it had during the ninety-year span from  to .6 The occupational composition of the labor force also underwent a remarkable transformation that both fueled and reflected economic expansion. At Liberation in , over  percent of the Italian labor force was employed in agriculture; by , only . percent was so employed, compared to  percent in industry and . percent in the service sector.7 Growth in per capita income and growth in industrialization and services at the expense of agriculture were accompanied by massive movements of population. People migrated from rural areas to cities, from southern Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia to the northwest industrial triangle, and from southern Italy to northern Europe. These migrations had far-reaching implications for the Italian economy and Italian society. Overloaded social services in the cities, soil erosion and eventual flooding in depopulated mountainous rural areas, rising expectations, and a general loosening of social bonds and restraints—these were some of the less desirable side effects of the “economic miracle.” Nevertheless, the s and s were times of great economic progress and expanding horizons for most Italians. The spectacular economic growth depended on a number of favorable conditions. A war-shattered economy cried out for reconstruction and provided entrepreneurs with many investment opportunities. Marshall Plan aid from the United States furnished the necessary capital. A divided and weak labor movement was in no position to make major

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An assembly line at the Fiat automobile plant in Mirafiori, Italy, epitomizes the industrialization of the northern provinces. (David Lees/Corbis)

demands on Italian employers. Foreign raw material prices were conveniently low. And vigorous economic leadership was furnished by a free-spending public sector headed by giant public corporations that formed part of two industrial empires: the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (Istituto per Ricostruzione Industriale—IRI) and the National Hydrocarburants Corporation (Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi—ENI). The bold entrepreneurs who managed Italy’s public corporations helped to create the climate of optimism and adventure that pervaded the growth-oriented Italian economy. By the late s, however, these favorable conditions were beginning to fade, and the s brought a rude awakening to the Italian economy. A wave of unprecedented labor unrest during the “Hot Autumn” of  gave a clear signal that Italian employers could no longer expect to deal with a docile, self-denying labor force. Far-reaching wage concessions had to be granted; indexation arrangements had to be accepted, tying wages more closely to the cost of living; and discipline in the factories had to be greatly relaxed. Moreover, parliament passed legislation consolidating and extending the gains labor had achieved through collective bargaining. Italy’s three labor confederations were impelled by these developments to work more closely together and to adopt a more militant posture. As a result, Italian labor costs rose sharply, not only in terms of wages but also in terms of social security benefits. The competitive advantage formerly enjoyed by Italian manufactured products was a thing of the past.

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In the s, further misfortunes befell the Italian economy. The rise in raw material prices, particularly the price of oil, did serious damage to the balance of trade by raising the prices of imports and making Italian exports more expensive. Public corporations were increasingly involved in financial speculation, empire building, currying favor with the major political parties, and allowing political considerations to influence their hiring and personnel policies. As a result, the public sector was running large deficits, keeping sick industries alive, and creating grave problems for the Italian economy. The decade was marked by declining economic growth, a high rate of inflation combined with rising unemployment, and serious deficits in the balance of trade. The larger corporations, burdened with onerous health insurance and pension costs imposed by the unions as part of the wage package, were especially affected by this situation. As a result of the hard times of the s, the s, and the early s, some entirely new problems have come to the fore. One has been the issue of unemployment, especially among young people seeking their first job. Facing oppressive wage and social security costs, and restricted in their ability to discharge surplus labor, many Italian employers are reluctant to hire new personnel. This creates a bulge of unemployment among psychologically vulnerable high school and university graduates, with frightening implications for the future of Italian society. A second problem has been the emergence and proliferation of a “submerged economy” consisting of a multitude of small employers who pay their workers substandard wages, fail to pay social security or payroll taxes for their employees, and keep their economic operations a well-guarded secret from the prying eyes of the government. Such clandestine employers provide second jobs for moonlighting civil servants, low but untaxed wages for migrants or part-time workers, and part-time employment for housewives or pensioners. And a third related socioeconomic question is posed by the growing gap between the relatively prosperous employed worker, protected until very recently by indexation against economic vicissitudes, and the various “marginals”—workers in the submerged economy, the unemployed, students facing a precarious future, and others who have been left behind by economic progress. All of these threats to social stability would appear to call for the traditional remedy of increased government spending. But it has become painfully and urgently evident in Italy that government spending has reached excessively high levels, especially with regard to social welfare programs and pensions. Unsustainable high levels of government spending are now regarded as dragging down the Italian economy, building large deficits, and perpetuating inflation. In , the Italian national debt had represented . percent of Italy’s gross domestic product (GDP); in , it had grown to . percent of the GDP. By , it had crossed the threshold of  percent of the GDP. Annual budget deficits had reached an intolerable peak (. percent of the GDP) in . Strenuous economizing measures by post- Italian governments (especially the post– governments) managed to reduce the annual deficit to  percent of the GDP in  and  percent of the GDP in .8 In the early s, it was estimated, “ percent of fiscal income went to cover internal charges on the national debt.”9 Clearly this situation could not continue in a world characterized by a global economy and by fierce international competition, and in a Western Europe that was moving

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toward a common market, common monetary policies, and eventually a common currency. The desire to be part of a closely knit Western European economic and political union is very deeply rooted among reform-minded Italians, who see such a union as enabling them to overcome backward and corrupt tendencies in their own society. In order to be admitted to the Economic and Monetary Union and to the euro zone, Italy needed to reduce its annual deficit to  percent of GDP and its national debt to  percent of GDP. The first criterion was met by , thanks to an all-out effort by the Prodi government in –—an effort that relied far more heavily on tax increases than on structural reforms in the social welfare and pension systems. The second criterion could not be met over the short run; but Italy gained admission to the euro zone nevertheless, on the ground that substantial and satisfactory progress toward debt reduction was being made.10 Religion The Catholic Church has traditionally played a major role in Italian politics. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the Papal State, the temporal domain of the pope, resisted numerous attempts by the Germanic Holy Roman Empire to unite Italy. In the nineteenth century, the Papal State opposed Piedmont’s bid to unify the Italian peninsula; and in fact the final event of the Risorgimento was the forcible seizure of Rome by Italian troops in . From  to , the church hierarchy advised religious Italians to abstain from voting in Italian national elections. The Gentiloni Agreement of , under which Italian Catholics began to give large-scale electoral support to candidates for parliament, brought this boycott of the Italian state to an end. In , a Christian Democratic party—the Popular Party led by Don Sturzo—entered Italian national elections and openly campaigned for the support of religious voters. After Mussolini’s coming to power, the Popular Party was disbanded and in  the Church signed the Lateran Agreements with the Fascist state, signaling a complete reconciliation between church and state. One of these agreements, the Concordat of , recognized the sovereignty of the pope over Vatican City, guaranteed religious education in Italian public schools, and declared Catholicism to be the official religion of the Italian state. The Church was granted a number of far-reaching privileges with regard to the holding of property, jurisdiction over divorce, and so on. After the defeat of Fascism, the Church was able to strike a favorable bargain with the new Italian republic. The Lateran Agreements of  were actually incorporated into the new constitution. Article  provided that the agreements could be modified only by mutual consent of both parties or by a constitutional amendment. It is interesting to note that the Communist delegates to the Constituent Assembly actually voted for Article  in , possibly in an effort to conciliate their Christian Democratic coalition partners and avert the impending expulsion of the Communist Party from the Italian cabinet in lieu of Pope Pius XII’s effective policy against the Communist Party. During the s and s, political Catholicism was an aggressive and pervasive force in Italian politics. With the Christian Democratic Party playing a dominant role in the Italian political system, the Church and its lay organizations enjoyed privileged access

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A farm woman at work in Apulia province represents the rural lifestyle of the southern region. (Hulton/Getty Images)

to national centers of decision-making. Priests and bishops openly took sides in election campaigns, urging the faithful to support candidates sympathetic to the Catholic Church. Catholic Action, a church-sponsored lay organization, set up a network of civic committees to conduct canvassing and propaganda activities on behalf of the Christian Democratic Party. A number of Catholic interest groups representing labor, peasants, teachers, and others were directly affiliated with the Christian Democratic Party, with which they enjoyed a parentela relationship. Such groups had the right, as ‘‘members of the family,” to be consulted on appointments to cabinet positions, nominations of candidates for parliament, and policy questions affecting their interests.11 In short, the Italian Catholic Church was much more prominent on the political scene than its French counterpart. Since the early s, the political aggressiveness of Italian Catholicism has waned. Under Popes John XXIII and Paul VI, the Church assumed a lower profile in Italian politics and displayed much less hostility toward leftist parties. To be sure, the church was by no means united. Some bishops continued to maintain a politically active stance and to oppose any alliances with leftist forces. Nevertheless, as the papacy in the early s abandoned its hostility to the idea of a center-left coalition government, most bishops reluctantly followed suit. Later, even the partial collaboration between Christian Democrats and Communists at the national level in – did not call down the anathema of the church.

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What underlay the more cautious line followed by the Church was the growing secularization of Italian society. Church attendance was declining in the s and s. An increasing number of Catholics, especially Catholic intellectuals, displayed independent attitudes in direct conflict with the dictates of the Church hierarchy. Some Catholic associations loosened their ties with the Christian Democratic Party. Also, the exodus from Catholic rural strongholds to the big cities, from agricultural occupations to industrial and service jobs, seriously undermined the influence of religious tradition. Clear evidence of the weakening of religiosity in Italy was the passage of a divorce bill in , despite the strong resistance of the Christian Democratic Party and the Vatican. More striking still was the aftermath of the bill’s passage. When militant Catholics pushed the issue to a referendum in an effort to get the divorce law repealed, the result was a clear-cut victory for secularism. A  referendum upheld the divorce law, with only  percent of the voters casting their ballots for its repeal. Forces favoring divorce carried most of Italy with the exception of the Catholic northeast and the continental south. Even Sicily, Sardinia, and Latium (the region that includes Rome) voted to retain divorce. During the campaign, a number of priests and Catholic laymen spoke out against repeal. Moreover, the size of the vote against repeal clearly indicated that repeal lacked the support of a considerable number of Christian Democratic voters. The receding influence of the Catholic Church in Italy was in line with a tendency toward secularization that is affecting all of Europe. This tendency was reflected not only in declining Christian Democratic voting strength but also in the increasingly secular attitudes of those voters who (often for socioeconomic reasons) continued to support Italian Christian Democracy. That secular attitudes were spreading and intensifying is evident when we observe the results of a referendum held in  to decide whether or not a rather liberal abortion law should be repealed. Sixty-eight percent of Italians who took part in the balloting voted against repeal—a bigger majority than the pro-divorce majority of . It is probably in recognition of its waning strength that the Catholic Church agreed in  to accept a revision of the Concordat. Education The Italian educational system has undergone a major transformation since World War II. In the s,  percent of the population had not attended school more than five years. Moreover, at the end of fifth grade, the child was assigned either to an academic junior high school or a terminal vocational school. This was more or less standard European practice at the time; yet to assign a child to a secondary school on the basis of aptitude at such an early age meant that aptitude was all too frequently determined on the basis of family background and social class. In the s, with the entry of the Socialist Party into center-left cabinets, educational opportunities were broadened. A unified junior high school was established to replace the earlier two-track system. The decision regarding eligibility for eventual university entrance was thus postponed several years to the time when the student was admitted to one of several types of senior high school. Even in the senior high schools, transfers from one type of school to another were permissible during the first two years. Compre-

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hensive schools have thus come to Italy, but so far only at the junior high school level (as in France) rather than at the senior high school level (as in Britain and Sweden). The educational changes of the s led to a great increase in high school enrollment. They also led, naturally enough, to the lowering of standards to accommodate the incoming masses. Moreover, pressure for further democratization led to the adoption in  of an open admissions policy for the universities. Thus the universities, too, became overcrowded, and lost much of their usefulness, performing neither their traditional function of training an elite nor their supposed new function of facilitating social mobility. Initial results of these reforms have been somewhat disappointing, producing unforeseen side effects. The great wave of student unrest that submerged Italian universities in the late s and early s, and brought chronic indiscipline and frequent violence in its wake, was a direct outcome of the skyrocketing enrollments. The depressing working conditions that prevailed, the frustrated expectations of the students, and the example of what was happening in American and French universities combined to foment student unrest. Many a young terrorist spent his formative years in the chaotic milieu of Italian higher education. Even today, when the more obvious and blatant disorders of – appear to have abated, there is a residual climate of laxity and indiscipline. For this reason, perhaps, the Conference of University Rectors recommended in  that Italian universities be allowed to restore a selective admissions policy. As things stand at present, Italian education is marked by declining scholastic achievement, a dropout rate markedly superior to that of most countries in Western Europe, and a below average level of spending on education. A number of reforms have been proposed to improve the quality and rigor of Italian primary and secondary education; but only a few have been adopted, and these do not appear likely to do more than scratch the surface of the school problem. One interesting proposal—to achieve parity between public and private schools by government financing of the latter—has yet to overcome the opposition it has aroused.12 Political Culture What we have seen thus far in the Italian political context is a pattern of drastic change— a remolding of the Italian political, social, economic, religious, and educational landscapes. In the five decades since liberation, Italians have seen their country transformed. Inevitably, this metamorphosis has had a notable impact on political attitudes. The most significant attitudes that have traditionally characterized Italian political culture may be summed up briefly before we examine changes that have taken place since the early s.13 First, Italians have ranked rather low in social trust: they have appeared to lack faith in the motives and actions of their fellow citizens. Second, Italians have had a low degree of political trust; that is, they have had little confidence in the efficiency and integrity of government institutions and officials. Both elected officials and bureaucrats are distrusted. Third, Italians have had a tendency to seek protection against a potentially hostile environment by joining informal but hierarchical groupings (cliques and clienteles) where they could enjoy the protection of a powerful patron. Fourth, Italians have finally acquired a sense of national identity after two world wars and a period of partisan

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resistance against German occupation forces in –. Fifth, Italians have had a low sense of political competence (they have felt unable to influence the formation of public policy) and a low sense of administrative competence (they have not believed they could obtain fair treatment from government agencies). Sixth, many Italians have been politically alienated. They have felt very little pride in and much suspicion toward the political system; their alienation has frequently expressed itself in riots, demonstrations, and, more recently, kneecappings and assassinations. The most important feature of Italian political culture has been its heterogeneity and fragmentation. The above attitudes have not been universally shared; instead, there have been competing sets of values and attitudes—competing subcultures, in other words. These divergent subcultures—elite and mass; northern and southern; liberal or clerical or Marxist—have helped shape Italy’s party system and the tendency of Italian voters to think in left-right, clerical-anticlerical terms. They also account for the pre- pattern of stable partisan preferences (voters frequently continued supporting the same parties election after election) and the high degree of hostility that some parties aroused among voters at the other end of the political spectrum. During the years –, this set of attitudes underwent some significant changes. The balance of forces among competing subcultures shifted visibly, with Catholic (clerical) traditions losing popular support and suffering from a weakened organizational network. Partisan hostility diminished a great deal, especially with regard to the former Communist Party, which gained considerable acceptance as a legitimate political force among Italian political elites. Among more educated, influential Italians, there seemed to be a pronounced movement toward bridging the cleavages that had divided the respective subcultures. At the level of mass culture, however, much remained the same. Voters still tended to place themselves along a left-right spectrum, identifying themselves as left, center, or right. While the Catholic tradition had declined, about  percent of Italian voters still supported repeal of the divorce law. Distrust of the political system was still very pronounced despite the improvement in socioeconomic conditions experienced by most Italians. Actually, evaluations of the political system were more negative in the s and s than they were in the s. The sense of political competence had also dropped considerably since the s. Widespread political alienation and political distrust still existed. This would help explain the frequent occurrence of direct confrontations between demonstrators—using a variety of provocative strategies—and public authorities. It would also help explain the tendency of disaffected fringe groups to resort to acts of terrorism. Nevertheless, some scholars came to the conclusion that alienation and distrust did not represent a passionate rejection of the Italian style of democracy, but a sober and realistic recognition of the limited potentialities of any political system.14 In general, it seemed in  that although Italian political elites were conducting their quarrels with more moderation and mutual forbearance, the potential for unrest and violent upheaval was still alive and well among noninfluentials. Italian mass culture still posed a major threat to Italian democracy, should the political system fail to perform more adequately in the years ahead than it had in the past. Yet, the Italian political system had a record of great resiliency. There were some very

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promising elements in the picture to offset the negative features we have described. For instance, it was hoped that the growing convergence among Italian elites might eventually have an impact on the residual cleavages in the mass culture. Voters seemed to be giving somewhat greater support than in the past to the middle-of-the-road minor parties. Secularization was visible in both the Catholic and Marxist camps, as Italian voters appeared to reject extremist tendencies. In short, it was widely suggested that the Italian polity might once again survive the dangers we have outlined, as it had done so often in the past. The corruption scandals of – did much to undermine the optimistic prospectus presented in the previous paragraphs. With the investigation or arrest of over , political office holders and business people on charges of corruption and bribery in the awarding of government contracts, a sharp decline in the levels of social and political trust, and of political and administrative competence, was bound to take place. An increasing sense of alienation has had the effect of thoroughly discrediting the leftist and Catholic traditions, since the Socialist and Christian Democratic parties had been most deeply involved in the general pattern of corruption known as “Kickback City.” The smashing victory of the center-right parties in  has made it clear that the electoral stability of partisan preferences is a thing of the past: most of the parties that had dominated Italian politics since  suffered enormous losses and in some cases were denied representation in parliament. And new political parties have come to the fore. It appeared, in , that Italian political culture might be tilting to the right, with laissez faire, authoritarian, and separatist tendencies receiving spectacular support from the Italian masses. However, it soon became evident that the victory of right-wing populism was to be short-lived indeed. Berlusconi was ousted in late , and the elections of  brought the center-left to power. What seems to be in the cards, for the time being, is an alternation, in control of the national government, of moderate center-left and moderate center-right coalitions. It is probably far too early, however, to project even such a mildly hopeful trend in the face of persistent social and economic privations and inadequate system performance, which are affecting at least a large minority of the population. Notes . See “France” and “Italy” in The Europa World Year Book  (London: Europa Publications, ), Vol. I, – at –, and – at . . For the period before , see Raphael Zariski, Italy: The Politics of Uneven Development (Hinsdale, Ill.: Dryden Press, ), chap. . . See Norman Kogan, A Political History of Italy: The Postwar Years (New York: Praeger, ), –, and –. . See Michele Simone, “Il Governo D’Alema inizia la sua navigazione,” La Civilta Cattolica  (), – at –. . See Vittorio Bufacchi, “The coming of age of Italian democracy,” Government and Opposition (), –. . See Rosario Romeo, Breve Storia Della Grande Industria in Italia (Bologna: Capelli, ), –. . See “Italy,” . . See Dermot McCann, “European Integration and Explanations of Regime Change in Italy,” Mediterranean Politics  (): – at –. See also “Charlemagne: Prodi’s Prayer,” The Economist,  January , . . McCann, .

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. See Claudio M. Radaelli, “Networks of Expertise and Policy Change in Italy,” South European Society and Politics  (): –. See also “Charlemagne: Prodi’s Prayer,” . . See Joseph La Palombara, Interest Groups in Italian Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ), chap. . . Giancarlo Ggasperoni, “The Uncertain Renewal of Italian Education,” in Italian Politics Mapping the Future, ed. Luciano Bardi and Martin Rhodes (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, ), chap.. . On the traditional features of Italian political culture, see, for example, Zariski, Italy, chap. ; and Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ). On recent changes in Italian political culture, see Giacomo Sani, “The Political Culture of Italy: Continuity and Change,” in The Civic Culture Revisited, ed. Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba (Boston: Little, Brown, ), chap. . . See Joseph La Palombara, Democracy Italian Style (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ), –, –.

Chapter 17

Where Is the Power? ITALY, LIKE BRITAIN and Germany, has a parliamentary system. There has been some discussion in recent years about setting up a quasi-presidential system on the French model, but such institutional reform at the national level has thus far not generated sufficient support. There are some additional similarities with Germany. First, Italy is a parliamentary republic with a weak, indirectly elected president. Also, Italy is far more decentralized than most parliamentary systems. It does not actually have a federal system like that of the German Federal Republic, but it has a form of regional devolution that differentiates it quite clearly from unitary systems such as Great Britain and France.

The President: Ceremonial Chief of State Unlike the hegemonic French president, the Italian president resembles the ceremonial chief of state in other parliamentary republics (e.g., Germany). Most of his formal executive powers—including the promulgation of laws, signing of treaties, making of executive appointments, and command of the armed forces—require the prior initiative of a member of the cabinet before the president can act and ministerial countersignature before the president’s action can have legal effect. Like other ceremonial chief executives, Italy’s president is expected to greet visiting dignitaries, dedicate major public projects, visit disaster zones in order to comfort the populace, and perform other purely formal duties as the symbolic head of the Italian state. To be sure, the president’s position is more powerful than that of a British monarch. First, a strong, ambitious president may hold press conferences and discuss current issues or may include controversial statements about public policy matters in a public address. Second, he may deliver a message to parliament and comment critically on the state of the nation. Third, he may return a bill to parliament for reconsideration, along with a message stating his reasons for doing so. Such a suspensive veto may be overridden by a simple majority of those voting in each house in parliament. Fourth, given the complex nature of Italy’s multiparty system, the president’s formal function of appointing the prime minister provides him with a great deal of potential influence. For no one party has a majority in parliament, and the appointment of a new prime minister is therefore preceded by intricate negotiations among various parties and factions. In the course of those negotiations, the president could seek to promote a candidate of his own, as President Scalfaro did in  and , when he put forward the names of Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and Lamberto Dini, respectively. Or he could ask a resigning prime minister to reconsider

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his resignation. Fifth, the president appoints five of the fifteen judges of the Constitutional Court and has the power to dissolve parliament on the prime minister’s request. Apart from the constitutional and customary restraints cited above, the power of an Italian president is limited mainly by the manner of his selection. He is elected indirectly by an Electoral Assembly composed of the members of the Chamber of Deputies (), the members of the Senate (), and a delegate from the Val d’Aosta, and three delegates from each of Italy’s other nineteen regions. Election is by secret ballot. On the first three ballots, a two-thirds majority of the members of the Electoral Assembly is necessary to elect a president; from the fourth ballot on, an absolute majority suffices. The secret ballot makes party cohesion and party discipline impossible. A party cannot really compel its members to support its officially designated candidate. The nominee who emerges from this intricate procedure lacks the mandate to act as a popular tribune, to speak for the Italian nation over the head of its government. This system of election, with its clandestine procedures and resulting breakdowns in party discipline, often produces unforeseen results. It can turn out factional bosses capable of unpredictable adventures rather than men of broad vision. Some presidents have been quite distinguished: Luigi Einaudi (–), a prominent Liberal economist; Giuseppe Saragat (–), leader of the Social Democratic Party; Sandro Pertini (–), a venerable and respected Socialist factional leader with a slight tendency to outspokenness. Others have been Christian Democratic factional chieftains who have reflected little credit on the office: Giovanni Gronchi (–), who appointed the notorious Fernando Tambroni to head a cabinet that brought Italy to the brink of civil conflict; Antonio Segni (–), who was suspected by some journalists of having been involved in the preliminary planning for an abortive military coup; and Giovanni Leone (–), who was forced to resign six months before his term expired because of alleged complicity in several cases of tax fraud and bribery. The Italian president from  to , Francesco Cossiga, was also a Christian Democrat. During the first five years of his term, he maintained a relatively low profile. After , however, he became extremely outspoken, making numerous controversial and often intemperate statements on public issues and delivering blistering personal attacks on the competence and integrity of a number of Italian political leaders, even demanding the resignation of the chief justice of the Italian Constitutional Court. He was one of the chief advocates of a stronger presidency and, on one occasion, claimed he might have the right to dissolve the parliament on his own, without the prime minister’s consent. A number of Italian commentators expressed grave doubts about his emotional balance. Be that as it may, he indubitably overstepped the boundaries of his ceremonial functions. In a break with precedent and with the letter of the constitution, Cossiga dissolved parliament during his last six months in office—the so-called blank semester when a president is constitutionally barred from dissolving parliament. This action was apparently taken at the behest of the leaders of the various parties, since parliament’s term had only two more months to run. In May , in a surprise move, Cossiga resigned, two months before his term was due to expire. The next president, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, also a Christian Democrat, appeared to be

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more stable and less controversial than his mercurial predecessor. Yet, in the turmoil of the post- years, he too found it impossible to avoid making highly controversial decisions. When Prime Minister Berlusconi resigned in December  and asked for dissolution of parliament and new elections, President Scalfaro refused to comply with his request until the possibility of forming another cabinet had been fully explored. A cabinet was eventually formed in  under an independent central bank official and former member of the outgoing cabinet, Lamberto Dini. But President Scalfaro was denounced and vilified by Berlusconi’s supporters. It should also be noted that neither Dini nor the prime minister appointed in , Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, was a member of parliament: both were high officials of the Bank of Italy. By appointing non-MPs to head the cabinet, President Scalfaro was venturing where other presidents had feared to tread. He also established an informal custom whereby prime ministers consult the president before making important decisions with regard to presidential appointments. It remains to be seen whether future presidents dare to magnify the president’s role as Scalfaro has done.1 It is quite conceivable that, if the system settles down to a more normal and predictable rhythm with alternation in power between center-left and center-right majority coalitions, future presidents may be more inclined to confine themselves to their ceremonial duties. In all likelihood, Scalfaro’s successor as president, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, who was supported by both the PDS and Forza Italia! because of his nonpartisan image, is less likely to stir up controversy. Two-thirds of the Electoral College elected Ciampi on the first ballot in May , which was a major departure in Italian politics. In his first address to parliament later that month, Ciampi emphasized the need for constitutional and political reform. The Prime Minister and the Cabinet The Italian cabinet (officially labeled the Council of Ministers) and the prime minister (whose official title is president of the Council of Ministers) constitute the political wing of Italy’s dual executive. They resemble the classic model of the political executive in a continental European parliamentary system. The prime minister is asked by the president to form a cabinet, after the president has first engaged in a series of consultations with the leaders of the various parties in parliament. The newly designated prime minister selects a cabinet—usually a coalition cabinet, composed of members of several parties—from among the members of parliament. Then, on the prime minister’s recommendation, the president proceeds to appoint the cabinet. (It should be noted, however, that the appointment of technocrats to the Ciampi and especially to the Dini cabinets represented a departure from this model.) In discussing the Italian cabinet, we shall first describe its pre- characteristics. We shall then touch on any major changes that seem to be taking place in response to the upheavals of the s. The Italian cabinet was considerably larger than the British one, for it included all the ministers in the government, including the ministers without portfolio. Its size could be attributed in large part to the representative function it had to perform. Because Italy

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had a much more complex party system than France or Germany, to say nothing of Britain, it was necessary to provide each party in the governing coalition with adequate representation in the cabinet. In most cabinets, at least two parties were involved and had a right to their share of cabinet posts. Moreover, each Italian party contained within its ranks a number of highly organized factions; these, too, demanded representation in the cabinet. A disgruntled intraparty faction was just as capable as a disaffected party of withdrawing its support from a coalition cabinet, thereby causing that cabinet to fall. Since the cabinet usually consisted of several parties, and because even one-party cabinets were usually torn by interfactional strife, the cabinet could not and did not function as a united team. Its members, even when they belonged to the same party, regarded one another as political rivals. Consequently, they often failed to consult one another before initiating new legislation and frequently leaked information to the press regarding what took place in cabinet meetings. It should also be noted that the prime minister did not really enjoy freedom of choice in selecting his cabinet. Before nominating members for appointment by the president, he had to consult the leaders of the various parties in his coalition, as well as a number of leaders of intraparty factions. Also, because he was more or less obligated to accept the recommendations of these party and factional leaders, his power of appointment was severely restricted. At the same time, he could not dismiss cabinet members. (To be sure, even if he had the power to force them to resign, he would still be running the risk of alienating the parties or factions that had sponsored them.) In addition to its heterogeneous partisan and factional character, the cabinet was split by some major functional cleavages. Most notably, financial and economic policy was divided among three separate ministries with overlapping functions: the Ministry of the Treasury, the Ministry of the Budget and Economic Planning, and the Ministry of Finance. The Ministry of the Treasury, primarily interested in a stable economy, usually prevailed over the expansion-minded Ministry of the Budget. Unlike the French cabinet, the Italian cabinet had no residual or reserved powers to govern by decree in areas from which parliament had actually been excluded by the constitution. In this respect, it was again in line with the classic parliamentary model, in which legal sovereignty is vested in parliament, as opposed to the French quasi-presidential system. The Italian cabinet could issue decrees under only two types of conditions. Legislative decrees could be enacted if parliament first passed an enabling act, with a time limit attached, authorizing the cabinet to legislate on a specified subject matter in accordance with certain guidelines. Decree laws could be promulgated by the cabinet in case of emergency: they expired within sixty days of their publication unless converted into statutory law by parliament. In addition to these two types of decrees, the cabinet and individual ministries could issue administrative orders (“regulations” ) without prior authorization by parliament. These regulations were presumably more specialized in content and inferior in legal status to decrees. Italian cabinets did not normally enjoy a long or peaceful existence. Their average lifespan was slightly less than a year, though some managed to survive for eighteen or even twenty-four months. Cabinets could be forced to resign in a variety of ways by either house of parliament. The legal procedure prescribed by the constitution stipulated that, if

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 percent of the members of either of the two houses of parliament signed a motion of no-confidence, and if a majority of those voting in that house supported the motion at least three days after it had been presented, then the cabinet had to resign. However, numerous cabinets resigned without waiting for this procedure to be employed. Some cabinets resigned after having suffered a defeat on a government bill or after a party or faction had announced that it no longer intended to support the cabinet. Even a hostile statement by a party secretary outside of parliament or an adverse resolution by a party congress or executive committee might precipitate a cabinet’s resignation. Yet what appeared on the surface to be extreme cabinet instability in Italy was accompanied by some features of continuity, until the massive changes that took place after . From  to , with only two exceptions (Giovanni Spadolini of the Republican Party in – and Bettino Craxi of the Socialist Party in –), all prime ministers were Christian Democrats. A number of Christian Democratic leaders headed not one but several cabinets: there were seven De Gasperi cabinets, five Moro cabinets, five Rumor cabinets, and five Fanfani cabinets. Some cabinet positions—the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of the Treasury, for example—were continually or almost continually under the control of the same party from  to . Some cabinet ministers held the same position year after year, in successive cabinets. For example, Emilio Colombo was treasury minister in no less than eleven cabinets. Since , this continuity has been abruptly interrupted and Christian Democratic hegemony has become a thing of the past. What usually happened after a cabinet fell was not a complete turnover but a slight shift in the balance of power within the majority coalition. From  to , it was an unwritten rule of Italian parliamentary politics that the Christian Democratic Party MUST form part of any majority coalition in order for the coalition to have sufficient votes to survive in parliament. The only two questions left open were which allies the Christian Democratic Party would select and how cabinet positions were to be allocated among the various Christian Democratic factions and among the other parties in the cabinet. Between  and  there were relatively few general formulas available for forming a cabinet. They included the tripartite formula, the center coalition, the center-right coalition, the center-left coalition, and a broader center coalition embracing five parties from the moderate left to the moderate right. When no decision could be reached among these formulas, a monocolor all-Christian Democratic caretaker cabinet would be set up for the purpose of buying time to reach an agreement on the establishment of one of the above types of coalition cabinet.2 Some additional formulas were advocated in the s but were never employed at the national level: . The left alternative. A Communist-Socialist-Social Democratic-Republican coalition cabinet, seeking the support of left-wing Christian Democrats. It was advocated by the Communist Party. . The historic compromise. A cabinet including Communists, Christian Democrats, Socialists, and all or almost all non-Fascist parties. Major emphasis

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was placed on the Communist-Catholic alliance. This formula was advocated by Communist Party leaders between  and , but was temporarily dropped by them in favor of the left alternative. It bore some resemblance to the tripartite formula of –, and to the Grand Coalition that has been tried out in West Germany and Austria. From  through , some interesting variations on past formulas were adopted. It remains to be seen whether these variations will prove to be only fleeting experiments or will become permanent alternatives in the process of cabinet formation: . A broadened center coalition with nonpolitical technocrats playing a major role. The Ciampi cabinet in – was headed by a former central bank executive who was neither a member of parliament nor a politician. . A center-right coalition with a sharp tilt to the right: the Berlusconi cabinet, appointed in . . An all-technocratic cabinet, headed by another former central bank executive: the Dini cabinet of . . A broader center-left coalition, expanded to include the ex-Communists of the PDS in a leading role of external support: the Prodi cabinet of –. . A much more inclusive center-left coalition, headed by the PDS/DS, but stretched to include two alien elements: a small newly formed orthodox Communist Party (Armando Cossutta’s PCI) and a small center-right party of former Christian Democrats (Francesco Cossiga’s UDR). This was the D’Alema cabinet, formed in October , and the successor government headed by Giuliano Amato. While the cabinet before  was a loosely jointed and motley body with a great number of uncoordinated ministries often operating at cross purposes, there was a growing trend, in the s and s, in the direction of a dominant position for the prime minister. The premier increased his influence by virtue of his ability to mediate differences among various power centers within and outside the cabinet and to give some measure of central direction to the government. He was able to assume this key role with the help of the Office of the Prime Minister, a staff agency that had grown remarkably since the s and that employed about  people by . In the s, the Office of the Prime Minister acquired control over government spending, over the expenditures of public corporations, over supervising relations with the regions, and over some aspects of security and public order. This increase in the prime minister’s influence depended less on his formal powers than on his strategic location and his possession of a growing and skilled staff.3 In the years since , the cabinet and the executive branch it controls have been further strengthened.4 First, technocrats and ex-central bankers have played a dominant role in the economic ministries and have served as prime ministers on a number of occasions. As we have noted, there were several technocrats in the reshuffled Amato cabinet of

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February  and in the Ciampi cabinet of April . Ciampi himself had been director of the Bank of Italy. In , the Dini cabinet was again headed by a top official of the Bank of Italy and was composed entirely of technocrats. The Prodi cabinet of – was headed by a distinguished professor of economics, who had been at the helm of a giant public holding company (the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction—IRI). It also included Ciampi as Treasury Minister. In the D’Alema cabinet, appointed in October , Ciampi was once again entrusted with the key Treasury portfolio. Second, the premier seems to have more discretion in making appointments, particularly with regard to the key economic ministries. The party groups in parliament are still consulted, to be sure, but they are no longer in the position of being able to dominate the appointment process to the extent they had in the past. In fact, Prime Minister Ciampi did not bargain with the parties at all when he selected his cabinet. Third, on a number of occasions, the executive has been delegated a virtual free hand to deal with certain economic problem areas. For instance, the Amato cabinet was authorized to govern by decree in four policy areas which were considered to be the chief sources of budget deficits: health, pensions, public sector employment, and local government finance. Such delegations were often justified by citing the need for Italy to conform to the economic and monetary guidelines laid down by the European Union. In addition, there has been a major reform of public finance that places severe restrictions on parliament’s power to modify the government’s budgetary and financial proposals. Fourth, some progress was made toward cutting down the size of the cabinet and making it a less unwieldy body. A number of ministries were actually abolished, some by law, some by referendum, despite the resistance of vested interests within the executive branch and in parliament. Finally, both the Prodi cabinet (–) and the D’Alema cabinet (–) resolved the longstanding conflict between the expansion-minded Budget Ministry and the stability-biased Treasury Ministry by merging them into a single super ministry headed by the Minister of the Treasury. In both cabinets, that minister was Ciampi, formerly director of the Bank of Italy. The hegemonic role of technocratic and banking interests in Italy, and the concomitant commitment to economic stability, was vividly symbolized in May  by the election of Ciampi as president of the republic. The Parliament In its structure and mode of operation, the Italian parliament differs in some significant ways from most other Western European parliamentary bodies. First, it is truly bicameral. A bill must pass both houses—the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate—in order to become law. Moreover, the cabinet is equally responsible to both houses. This legal equality is reinforced by the fact that both houses are elected by popular vote. The main differences between the two elections are these: () the minimum voting age for senatorial elections is twenty-five, whereas the minimum voting age for elections to the Chamber of Deputies is eighteen; () senators are elected from somewhat larger single-member districts, within a regional framework: each deputy represents about , voters, whereas each senator represents about , voters. Because these differences are not very strik-

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Vote for Centrist Parties (percentage in most recent legislative election) .

France Germany

. .

Russia .

Sweden United Kingdom United States Canada

. . .

ing, the Senate can rightfully claim that it is hardly less representative than the Chamber of Deputies and is therefore entitled to equal legislative power. Representing roughly similar electorates, the two houses do not differ sharply in their political make-up: the respective strength of the various parties is roughly the same in both chambers. Moreover, they tend to represent the Italian electorate at the same point in time. Although the Chamber of Deputies originally had a five-year term and the Senate a six-year term, in practice the Senate was always dissolved simultaneously with the Chamber of Deputies. Finally, in , the constitution was amended to establish a fiveyear term for both houses. Thus, given the similarity of composition of the two houses, the Senate fails to give special representation or protection to any specific minority interest (as do the French Senate and the German Bundesrat). Bicameralism becomes little more than a device for delaying the passage of legislation. A second, rather distinctive feature of the Italian parliament is the power possessed by its standing committees. They receive a bill just after first reading and may subject it to drastic changes before reporting it to the floor. The chairperson of a standing committee appears to be master of the committee’s timetable and can expedite or slow down the progress of a bill without having to worry about pressure from the presiding officer (president) of the chamber. Most important, the committees have the power to pass certain bills. When the president of the chamber refers a bill to a standing committee, he or she decides whether the committee is to act in sede referente (report the bill back to the chamber with proposed amendments) or in sede deliberante (take final action on the bill: pass it and send it on to the president of the republic, or defeat it once and for all). Thus, Italian standing committees literally act as miniature legislatures. Most bills approved by the Italian parliament are enacted through this rather unique in sede deliberante procedure. There are only two limitations on its use. First, certain kinds of important legislative proposals (constitutional amendments, electoral laws, delegations of legislative power, treaties, budgetary and spending bills) must be discussed on the floor after being considered in committee. Second, a bill being considered in sede deliberante must be brought to the floor of

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the chamber if so requested by the cabinet or by  percent of the members of the chamber or  percent of the members of the standing committee. The procedures of the Italian parliament include several atypical usages, which help to differentiate it from the parliaments of other West European democracies. First, there is no effective limit on the number of private-member bills that may be introduced; the cabinet has far less control over the agenda than is the case in Britain and Germany. Second, there is no conference committee to iron out differences between Senate and Chamber of Deputies versions of a bill. Consequently, many bills shuttle between the two houses for years without ever achieving passage. Finally, there was until recently a requirement in the rules of the Chamber of Deputies that the final vote on a bill be taken by secret ballot. Such a procedure permitted recalcitrant Christian Democratic deputies (“snipers”) to vote against measures supported by their party leadership. Of course, when a bill was defeated in a secret ballot, the cabinet could ask for a formal vote of confidence, which required a roll call. However, sniping was an embarrassing event that lowered the prestige of cabinet members and might impel them to resign. The parliamentary secret ballot has recently been abolished. In other respects, the Italian parliament is much more in line with other West European parliamentary systems (excluding France, which possesses both presidential and parliamentary features). It can pass any law that does not violate a provision of the constitution, and it can manage its own procedures without being subject to external interference. Its powers are fairly conventional. It can pass laws, delegate rulemaking power to the cabinet, ratify treaties, approve the budget, and conduct investigations. It meets in joint session to elect the president of Italy, to impeach the president for high treason or offenses against the constitution, and to elect one-third of the members of the Constitutional Court. It may also amend the constitution. An amendment has to be passed twice by each chamber with the two votes at least three months apart. The second vote requires an absolute majority of each house. Unless at least two-thirds of the members of each house support the amendment on the second vote, it may have to be submitted to a popular referendum on the demand of one-third of the members of each house, or of , voters, or of five regional councils (legislatures). The organization of the Italian parliament is also fairly orthodox. Two presiding officers, the president of the Senate and the president of the Chamber of Deputies, have partial control over the order of business, which they must share with the Conference of Presidents (heads of various standing committees and parliamentary groups). They have the power, subject to appeal, to assign bills to standing committees, and to determine whether a bill should be passed in the committee itself in sede deliberante or reported to the floor in sede referente. And they appoint the members of select committees. Unlike the Speaker of the House of Commons, they tend to be prominent partisans with ambitious plans for future advancement (e.g., to president or prime minister). Yet, given the loose power structure of the Italian parliament, the two presiding officers are very limited in the power they can exercise. In , both houses of the Italian parliament adopted some major changes in their rules and procedures. One of the most ambitious of these changes gave formal recogni-

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tion to the Conference of Presidents and assigned it the task of setting the legislative agenda, by unanimous agreement, for periods of from two to three months. The pious hope that long-term legislative planning by unanimous consent would somehow be possible has proved to be unjustified. What was supposed to be an organic plan for a longterm legislative program has turned out to be either an incoherent shopping list based on log rolling or a series of brief one- or two-week calendars for which unanimity is not required.5 In addition to a presiding officer who resembles the continental European model of an avowedly partisan Speaker and who has political clout and ambitions of his own, each house of the Italian parliament possesses another characteristic trait of a continental European parliamentary system. It is divided into parliamentary groups that are more or less cohesive and disciplined caucuses of the respective parties. These groups are responsible for assigning members to standing committee positions that have been allocated to each group; they also advise the president of the chamber on the appointment of investigating committees and on filling vacancies on select committees. The president of each parliamentary party group represents the group on the Conference of Presidents, which is supposed to reach agreement on the order of business for the chamber. The president of the republic also consults the parliamentary group leaders during a cabinet crisis, when a prime minister has resigned and a successor must be appointed. The parliamentary group reaches binding decisions as to how its members are to vote on pending legislation. Finally, the parliamentary group has itself been subject to pressure from the party organization outside parliament. Some parliamentary groups have been more successful than others in maintaining a certain degree of autonomy against directives issued by extraparliamentary party organs. Overall, however, the party outside parliament has traditionally exercised more influence over legislative affairs in Italy than is the case in Britain or Germany. Since , party organizations outside parliament have lost much of their customary clout. Such parties as the Socialists and the Christian Democrats have become much weaker and more loosely organized—or have literally disintegrated. And new parties like Forza Italia! and the Northern League have become much more like U.S. parties in their emphasis on election campaigns and in their responsiveness to the political themes stressed by the party leader. It is evident, from what we have observed so far, that the sort of executive domination of parliament that exists in Britain and France has not really been present in the Italian parliamentary system. The multiparty, multifactional system that has prevailed in Italy made the Italian parliament almost unmanageable, despite the existence of some degree of party cohesion (generally solid bloc voting by each parliamentary group) and party discipline (sanctions against individual legislators who stray from the party line). The power of dissolution, which the president of the republic could exercise on the recommendation of the prime minister, was rather ineffective since elections rarely could be counted on to improve the government’s mandate. What was the use of dissolving parliament when the percentage of the total vote polled by each party was subject only to relatively minor changes and proportional representation minimized the impact of these

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changes? As a result, between  and , parliament always was allowed to serve out its full five-year term. After , with the increasing volatility of the Italian electorate, shorter intervals (four years, except in –) occurred between elections in , , , , and . The adoption in  of a new election law providing for the election of most deputies and senators from single-member districts with election by plurality seemed to portend that the power of dissolution would be relied on more heavily in the future. And in fact, only two years after the election of , parliament was dissolved again. It is far too early in this period of transition to make predictions about future patterns of dissolution. When Prime Minister Berlusconi asked President Scalfaro for yet another dissolution in the fall of , he refused. However, the parliament elected in the spring of  only served a two-year term: it was dissolved in . The subsequent parliament served until May . One factor seems to militate in favor of more frequent dissolutions and elections, however: the current election law produces somewhat more decisive verdicts than did the old system of proportional representation. Some of the structural characteristics and procedures of the Italian parliament have tended to protect it further against executive dominance. These include the absence of any limit on private-member bills; the lack of tight cabinet control over the agenda; the power of Italian standing committees to enact laws in sede deliberante; and the presence of a powerful popularly elected second chamber. And of course, lacking a secure majority, cabinets have come and gone; parliament has been protected against dissolution by the party system and, until , by the electoral law. One other basic characteristic of the pre- Italian parliament should be noted in closing: its hybrid nature. On the one hand, it had relatively cohesive, disciplined parties acting through parliamentary groups, in the tradition of European parliamentary systems. On the other, it had a fragmentation of decision making among the presidents of the two chambers, the standing committees and their chairs, and even private members, who played a far larger role than elsewhere in Europe. In these respects, the Italian parliament bore some vague resemblance to the U.S. Congress. This curious combination of “a fragmented but mostly stable and internally cohesive structure of parliamentary groups with parliamentary rules protecting individual and minority prerogatives” 6 made it difficult to fit the Italian parliament into a neat category for classification purposes. What impact does the post- upheaval appear to be having on parliament?7 First, as we have noted, the executive has managed to establish a more dominant position vis-àvis parliament. The economic ministries, headed by or highly responsive to technocrats, have used their expertise, their power to issue and reissue executive decree laws, and the moral authority conferred on them by the general consensus that Italy should reduce deficits in order to retain good standing in the European Monetary Union (EMU), to bypass many of the parliamentary barriers to policymaking. Parliament continues to service the demands of constituents, submit questions to the executive, and disseminate information. In fact, it performs these functions more vigorously than it did in the past. However, when it comes to general economic policy, the cabinet has increased its influence to a very marked degree.

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A second and related point is that there is no longer a major party in permanent opposition; it is therefore much easier to build a strong and reasonably coherent cabinet enjoying a working majority. Before , the Communist Party was barred by longstanding custom from entering the cabinet, as was the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI). These two parties at the extreme poles of the system commanded over one-third of the seats in parliament. Any cabinet could survive only with the support of over  percent of the members of parliament; but in practice this meant that the support of about threefourths of the non-Communist, non-Fascist MPs was indispensable. Currently, both the ex-Communist PDS/DS and the ex-Fascist National Alliance are regarded as within the mainstream. Over the long run, this situation should reduce the power of parliament to precipitate cabinet crises and to multiply the frequency of elections. The Bureaucracy It is estimated that there are about  million state employees in Italy at present. However, if one subtracts over a million employed in the schools and in the armed forces, the number of regular civil servants is approximately ,, about , of whom are higher civil servants with policymaking duties. In addition to this vast army of state employees, there are approximately . million employed by the parastatale (state-controlled) sector. These people work for local and regional governments, public corporations, service agencies, and the like.8 The Italian higher civil service (carriera direttiva) is staffed mostly on the basis of merit, though there are a certain number of patronage appointments and a fairly sizable minority of positions is filled without competitive examination by temporary appointees who eventually acquire permanent status. For those recruited by competitive examinations, either by direct entry from the universities or by promotion, the examinations tend to stress legal training rather than the broad social science background emphasized in France. This recruitment system results in the overrepresentation of the south in the higher civil service because the south, like other developing and economically backward areas, has a higher percentage of its university population attracted to traditional professions like law and medicine. Moreover, southerners are more apt to be attracted to the secure if rather humdrum career provided by the bureaucracy; young people from economically stagnant regions often lack the contacts and know-how to embark on a business career. Many southern recruits are apt to be of lower-middle-class origin, in sharp contrast to the upper-middle-class Parisians recruited into the French higher civil service. Thus, Italian higher civil servants are drawn disproportionately from the most underdeveloped, tradition-bound regions of Italy. This bureaucracy, which also receives a brief period of in-service training, tends to be cautious and negative in its attitude toward policy innovations. Moreover, its members are obsessed with the need to find a legal justification for every action, and this obsessive legalism makes for a certain reluctance to take any action if it can possibly be avoided. Finally, it should be mentioned that the Italian bureaucracy—unlike the British, French, and German bureaucracies—is regarded by many Italians as corrupt. The recent

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revelations about the power exercised by political parties over bureaucratic decision making, and about the use of that power to reward friends, punish enemies, and extort financial support for the party machines, appear to vindicate what was hitherto regarded as an exaggerated set of public perceptions, stemming from a low level of political trust. Since , it would appear that there has been no thoroughgoing coherent effort to reform the bureaucracy. Unlike public finance, which was under the control of the powerful Treasury Ministry, bureaucratic reform came under the aegis of the Minister of Public Administration, who was in effect a minister without portfolio dependent on the commitment and support of the prime minister, who did not usually give this problem top priority. Also, it was urgent to reform public finance in order to conform to European Union expectations. There were no such external pressures to satisfy in the case of bureaucratic reform.9 Public Corporations and Semi-Independent Agencies Another major source of policymaking in Italy is the so-called para-state sector: public corporations and the semi-independent agencies that preside over the Italian public sector and a variety of regulatory and welfare functions. These include such holding companies as the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI), the National Hydrocarburants Corporation (ENI), and the Corporation for Stockholding and Financing of the Manufacturing Industry (EFIM), each of which supervises a number of subsidiary companies that hold controlling stock in a broad assortment of enterprises ranging from steel mills to oil refineries to motels. Also in the para-state sector are ENEL, the public corporation that runs the electric power industry (nationalized in ); and EFIM and GEPI, two financial agencies set up to help businesses in distress. A number of social welfare and social insurance funds, and a hodgepodge of miscellaneous agencies and companies, are also part of the heterogeneous para-state sector. State control over the public sector has been uncoordinated and therefore ineffective. Both IRI and ENI were placed under the Ministry of State Share Holdings, but this cabinet department was unable to check the expansionist policies pursued by these giant holding companies and their subsidiaries. (In a referendum held in April , . percent of the voters voted to abolish this ministry.) More recently, the Office of the Prime Minister has gradually extended its sphere of influence to encompass many of the public corporations. Other para-state agencies are under the Ministry of Industry (ENEL, for instance) or under one of the ministries concerned with social welfare. So, supervisory responsibility has been divided among a number of ministries. This situation, along with interparty, interfactional division within the Italian cabinet, seems to have made it virtually impossible for the executive to impose a measure of coherence and discipline on the para-state sector. In the s and early s, numerous observers regarded the public corporations, headed by adventurous entrepreneurs like Enrico Mattei of ENI, as a major constructive force in Italy’s economic recovery. By the s, however, it had become all too evident that the public enterprises had contracted some serious economic maladies and had developed some deplorable managerial and fiscal habits. Employing about  percent of the

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Italian labor force and producing about  percent of Italy’s gross domestic product, the Italian public sector became a serious drain on the country’s economy. The defects of the public enterprises have often been recited. Their executives and managers have engaged in reckless speculation and unscrupulous empire building. Gains in productivity have slackened or disappeared altogether; large sums have been squandered on mergers and takeovers. Executive positions at the helm of these public-sector enterprises have become political patronage plums to be divided among members of various parties or even warring factions within a party. Such patronage appointments have certainly bolstered the political influence of the public sector, but at the price of efficiency. Finally, the state holding companies have sheltered their weaker, less viable enterprises, thus encouraging the unfit to survive. As one caustic commentator put it, the state holding companies have become “paddle ponds for lame ducks.”10 The new financial and managerial elite that has emerged in the public sector has come to be regarded as a new parasitical class—a “state bourgeoisie.” Obsessed with patronage and with financial manipulations, members of this new class were responsible for overstaffing Italian factories, permitting labor discipline to deteriorate, and piling up huge debts. Placing increasing reliance on state grants and on loans from public credit institutions, the public holding companies have contributed heavily to the rising tide of inflation and to the alarming budget deficits that have resulted from excessive public spending. During the s, there seemed to be some heartening signs that the Italian government might be addressing itself seriously to the problem of limiting the excesses of the public sector. There were some widely heralded efforts to reduce deficits and weed out firms that were losing money, by reducing the amount of government subsidies and privatizing unsuccessful or superfluous firms. These objectives, however, had to be pursued in the face of political interference (by the patronage-addicted party machines) and working-class resistance to industrial layoffs. The corruption scandals of the early s revealed the degree to which public corporations like ENI had illegally subsidized the Socialist Party and the Christian Democratic Party, in exchange for various economic and political favors. Pressure for privatization was greatly enhanced by these revelations and the resulting prosecution of public corporation executives and the politicians with whom they had dealt.11 Entrenched habits die hard. Consequently, until the Ciampi government took office in mid-, little real progress had been made. Some privatizations had actually occurred, but these were considered to be semiprivatizations, since the state continued to retain control. They “represented little more than tinkering at the edges when taken in relation to the overall state holdings.”12 Lack of confidence in the government’s willingness or ability to pay off the debts of public-sector companies generally made for a certain reluctance on the part of private investors (especially foreign banks) to acquire state holdings when these were placed on the market. It should be noted, however, that the technocratic Ciampi cabinet did accelerate progress. Between mid- and mid-, about $ billion in state holdings were sold off by the Italian government.13 As Minister for Economic Affairs (responsible for both the Treasury and the Budget ministries) in the Prodi cabinet, Ciampi made additional progress on the privatization

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front. In , he gave notice to the newly appointed director of IRI, that that mammoth public holding company was to sell off its holdings within three years. He also moved toward privatizing the telephone industry and continued his efforts to hasten the sale of ENI’s assets. But all of these projects faced active and passive resistance from the trade unions, from some top-ranking bureaucrats, from the ex-Fascists, and from Communist Refoundation, a small but strategically placed party of orthodox communists.14 The Judiciary Like France and Germany, Italy has a legal system in the civil-law tradition, which stems originally from Roman law. The judge is simply supposed to apply the law as stated in the relevant provisions of the legal code, not to analyze the facts of the case and explore the applicability of past judicial decisions as is the case in the British and American common law systems. Law is not determined primarily by an accumulation of judicial opinions, but is to be found in statutes, executive decrees, legal codes, and accepted interpretations of legal scholars. In short, the concept of judge-made law is foreign to the civil-law tradition. The judge’s function appears to be viewed as somewhat mechanical, and there is little room for judicial discretion. To be sure, there are inevitable departures in any civil-law country from this model of the civil-law tradition. The Italian judicial system has some features in common with that of France. There are two parallel judicial hierarchies: five tiers of ordinary law courts, culminating in the Court of Cassation, and a system of administrative courts. As in France, judges are recruited into a judicial career service after graduation from law school and work their way up the judicial ladder in a series of promotions and transfers. There are some significant differences between the two systems. First, Italian judges at the lowest rung of the hierarchy receive much lower salaries than their French and German counterparts. Second, there is nothing corresponding to the National Center of Judicial Studies in France, which provides modern training for future magistrates; Italian judges enter the judicial corps with only the formalistic legal training they received in law school. Third, promotion in Italy is less dependent on executive fiat than it is in France. While it is generally agreed that the French executive branch has come to dominate the promotion process, in Italy a Superior Council of the Judiciary has effective control over appointments, transfers, and promotions. From its inception, this council has been dominated by senior judges of the higher courts, who tend to be somewhat conservative. Thus, Italian judicial independence has been threatened less by executive encroachment than by the financial penury that younger judges have had to endure and the domination senior judges of the higher courts have exercised over the promotion process. However, the hegemony of the senior judges was eroded in the s and early s by a number of reform measures, which made promotion based on seniority virtually automatic and which provided for guaranteed salary increases at periodic intervals. In the s and s, judicial power and prestige were greatly expanded as a result of the key role played by the judiciary in the struggle against terrorism and organized crime.15 The administrative court system deviates from the French model to a still greater degree than the ordinary judicial system. There are two separate hierarchies of administra-

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tive courts, one headed by the Court of Accounts and the other by the Council of State. Italian administrative courts are less prestigious and self-assertive than the French, since at the lower levels they are staffed by civil servants rather than by full-time judges. Unlike the French administrative courts, which can hear both suits by private citizens for damages against the state and suits challenging the legality of executive decrees, Italian administrative courts can consider only the question of legality. Damage suits must be introduced in the ordinary law courts. Finally, the Italian Council of State has been much more cautious in challenging the executive than has the French Conseil d’ État. We have noted how both the Italian cabinet and the public corporations have been permeated by partisan and factional conflicts. The same phenomenon is to be found in the Italian judiciary. A split has developed among Italian judges between the older and more senior judges associated with the Court of Cassation and the younger, more interventionist judges who seek a more active, socially conscious judiciary. As a result, two competing judicial associations have been formed, and they compete for control of the Superior Council of the Judiciary. Despite the personal and political ties that many Italian judges have developed with the world of partisan and factional politics, and despite the fact that significant elements in the Italian judiciary have allowed those ties to influence their behavior, the Italian judicial system enjoys a high degree of independence from executive control. This applies also to public prosecutors, who are considered to be part of the judiciary and are consequently responsible to the Superior Council of the Judiciary rather than to the Ministry of Justice. This de jure independence enabled a portion of the judiciary, especially in the Milan region, to initiate a series of investigations of political corruption in —the so-called “Operation Clean Hands.” The investigations, followed by a wave of prosecutions, were to some degree influenced and encouraged by some unprecedented events: heavy Christian Democratic losses and Northern League gains in the parliamentary elections of  and in municipal and provincial elections; and the rapidly declining electoral strength of the main political parties. At first, southern judges and prosecutors, more closely connected to the political parties than their Milanese counterparts, took a more cautious stand; but the mushrooming of the corruption crisis seemed likely to result in a general weakening of the bonds between judges and politicians.16 The post- investigations and prosecutions involving the network of bribery and corruption widely referred to as “Kickback City” resulted in the arrest of many national and local politicians, as well as businessmen, industrial managers, and high-ranking bureaucrats. Thousands more were investigated. Prosecutors like Antonio Di Pietro in Milan became national heroes in the eyes of large segments of the Italian public. Even the new political forces that came to power in  were not immune from judicial scrutiny. The brother of Prime Minister Berlusconi, leader of the Forza Italia! party, had to face trial on corruption charges, as did a number of senior executives of his Fininvest financial empire. The leader of the Northern League, Umberto Bossi, also came under investigation for possible involvement in the illegal financing of political parties. And Berlusconi himself was eventually indicted and convicted for bribery and fraud. The ongoing investigations highlighted some of the less appealing features of the

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Italian judicial system. Preventive detention may be used to subject a suspect to a lengthy period of imprisonment while he or she is awaiting trial. Moreover, given the unpleasant conditions prevailing in Italian prisons, the prospect of indefinite preventive detention may be employed to coerce a suspect into collaborating with the authorities. These possible abuses were cited by Prime Minister Berlusconi in July , when his government issued a decree suspending the powers of the judiciary to order the preventive detention of corruption suspects. However, the decree aroused a major political uproar, involving not only threats of resignation by several well-known public prosecutors and protests by the leaders of the opposition parties, but also vocal objections by Berlusconi’s coalition partners, the Northern League and the National Alliance. As a result, the decree had to be rescinded.17 Since the mid-s, a backlash has emerged against the judiciary—a backlash not confined to the center-right. The excesses of the judiciary have been denounced; a number of prominent prosecutors have themselves been accused of corrupt practices; and the charge has been made that prosecutors wield excessive powers and enjoy an autonomy and lack of accountability that only judges should possess. One of the proposals submitted to the Bicameral Commission for constitutional reform was to separate the public prosecutors from the judges and to place their initiatives under a certain degree of control by the Ministry of Justice. No agreement on proposals for reform of the judiciary (supported by the Forza Italia! party but opposed by numerous judges and by the PDS) could be reached.18 In one important respect, the Italian judicial system bears a strong resemblance to that of Germany. There is a Constitutional Court with powers of judicial review. Established by the constitution, this court was not actually set up by parliamentary law until . It had taken almost a decade to overcome the foot-dragging of the Christian Democratic Party, which saw the court as a threat to majority (i.e., Christian Democratic) rule. The Constitutional Court has fifteen members, five selected by the president of Italy, five elected by a three-fifths vote of a joint session of parliament, and five elected by judges of the highest Italian courts (the Court of Cassation, the Council of State, and the Court of Accounts). The members serve a twelve-year term, which is not immediately renewable. The Constitutional Court has the power to determine the constitutionality of national and regional laws. Any case may be brought before the Constitutional Court on the appeal of an individual, a group, or a region. There is one serious obstacle to utilization of the appellate procedure. The judge of the lower court from which an appeal to the Constitutional Court is being sought may block the appeal by issuing an interlocutory judgment to the effect that the appeal is patently unfounded. Because many Italian judges (especially in the Court of Cassation) resented the establishment of the Constitutional Court as a departure from the traditions of the Italian legal system, and could not accept the concept of judicial review, such interlocutory judgments were not uncommon during the first years of the court’s existence. The Constitutional Court has had a major impact on the Italian political system. It has struck down numerous provisions of the penal code adopted during the Fascist regime. In , for example, it declared the unconstitutionality of an old law that for-

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bade any individual from moving from one locality to another unless he first had a guarantee of a job in his new locality. A number of laws restricting freedom of expression have also been invalidated. In controversies over divorce and abortion, the court has strengthened the cause of secularism. In , it decided that a pending divorce bill would not require an amendment of the constitution, despite the fact that Article  of the constitution incorporated the Concordat of . Also in , the court declared the Italian law forbidding adultery to be unconstitutionally discriminatory against women. In , a law prohibiting the publication of birth control information and the sale of contraceptives was struck down. In , the court declared unconstitutional some provisions of an antiabortion law of long standing. Many restrictions on civil liberties are still on the books. The Constitutional Court has done a great deal to extend individual freedom, while avoiding any major clash with the executive branch. Subnational Governments The three main tiers of governmental authority below the national level are the regions, the provinces, and the communes. The regions—five “special regions” and fifteen “ordinary regions”—correspond in size to the French regions and the German Länder. The provinces,  in number, are comparable to French departéments. And the , communes are counterparts of the French communes, although they are far less numerous and fragmented than the French. There have traditionally been some strong similarities between French and Italian patterns of local government. Both have been characterized by elected local and departmental/provincial councils, which in turn elected executive committees or juntas from their ranks. Both had a system of appointed central officials—the prefects—named by the minister of interior to supervise the departments/provinces and communes. There was a prefect for each department/province, and he had the power to annul the decisions of communal or departmental/provincial councils and to suspend local officials who were derelict in their duties. At the communal level, the executive committee or junta was headed by a mayor whose job was to supervise the executive organs of the commune and negotiate both with central government agencies and with the prefect. Finally, before World War II, both systems were highly centralized (the central government had direct control over the schools, the prefect had authority over local police functions) and unitary (the departments/provinces and communes possessed only such powers as the central government chose to grant them). There were no regional units of government in either country before World War II. The main difference between the two systems lay in the role of the prefect. While the French prefect also acted as coordinator and supervisor of central government field agencies, the Italian prefect was confined to controlling local government. Moreover, unlike the French prefect, he had to share this power of control with a number of central government field services. In short, while France had an integrated prefectoral system, the Italian prefectoral system was unintegrated.19 In , with the ratification of the constitution of the Italian republic, Italy adopted a system that is neither unitary nor federal but possesses some quasi-federal features. Un-

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der a form of regional devolution, the Italian regions have been granted extensive concurrent powers to share with the national government in a number of fields. As in a federal system, the powers of regional governments are specified in the Italian constitution and may be formally repealed only by constitutional amendment, although of course the Constitutional Court may restrict or dilute those powers by judicial interpretation. Moreover, the regions are specifically named in the constitution, thus protecting them against any ordinary parliamentary statute or executive decree reorganizing the boundaries and powers of subnational governments. However, the Italian system of regional devolution contains some definitely nonfederal restrictions on regional autonomy. First, the regions cannot exercise their concurrent powers until central government organs have issued the necessary enabling statutes and decrees. Second, the regions have no original taxing power of their own and have to depend upon central legislation to authorize such taxes as they are permitted to impose. Third, an appointed central government commissioner in each region has a suspensive veto over bills passed by the regional councils (legislatures). Finally, a bill passed once again by a regional council after such a veto can be blocked either by the Constitutional Court (which can rule on its constitutionality before it goes into effect) or by the Italian parliament (which can declare that a bill is contrary to the national interest). Thus, not only is national law supreme over regional law, but regional law must give way to the national interest as defined by parliament. Before , the regional autonomy provided by the  constitution remained largely a dead letter. Five “special regions” had been created because they contained special ethnic minorities or displayed marked separatist tendencies. These regions comprised three ethnic border zones—French-speaking Val d’Aosta, partly German-speaking Trentino– Alto Adige, and partly Slovenian Friuli–Venezia Ginlia—and the two big islands of Sicily and Sardinia. The other fifteen regions—the “ordinary regions”—remained only on paper, since no enabling legislation had been passed. Once again, as in the case of the Constitutional Court, the fault lay with the dominant Christian Democratic Party, which did not want to establish any institutional checks on majority rule. By the late s, however, the situation had become ripe for change. The centrist coalition cabinets of the s had given way to a series of center-left cabinets that included the Italian Socialist Party; and the Socialists wanted to see the regions established at long last. There was also a great deal of support for the regions among a number of more progressive factions in the Christian Democratic Party; and the Communist Party was favorably inclined, since it expected to control several regional governments. Moreover, after the strikes and demonstrations of the Hot Autumn of , it seemed advisable to deflect some popular grievances to lower levels of government. Accordingly, enabling legislation was passed, and regional councils were elected in the “ordinary regions” in . Even then, the position of the regions was still quite precarious. While regional councils existed and regional juntas were assuming their executive duties, very few decisionmaking powers had been transferred to the regions. Not until , when the left and particularly the Communists made remarkable gains in the second set of regional elections, was parliament induced to authorize real progress toward regional devolution. In , a

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law was passed directing the government to complete the transfer to the regions of all powers assigned to them by the constitution. In , a set of decrees was issued carrying out many but by no means all of the transfers envisioned by the  law and turning over to the regions approximately  percent of the national budget. With Law No.  () and D.P.R.  (), the regions were finally in business.20 Since , the regions have been engaged in a continuing contest with the central government to defend and, if possible, extend the powers they have been granted, to obtain an adequate share of national revenues, to protect their turf against encroachment by the central government, and to clarify their role vis-à-vis central and local authorities. Their status leaves much to be desired from the regional point of view.21 First, the process of transferring the constitutionally defined regional powers from the central to the regional governments is incomplete. There are still policy areas where delegation of powers to the regions has not taken place. Second, the parliament and the ministries often take it upon themselves to saddle the regions with the task of enforcing certain national laws, thus reducing the resources and options available to regional governments. Third, the central government still decides what revenues will be assigned to each regional government. Fourth, the central government has tended to develop direct ties with local authorities, bypassing the regions. Fifth, the Constitutional Court has generally ruled against the regions in cases involving conflict between national and regional powers. Finally, consultation between the central government and the regions has been sporadic and unsystematic at best. The situation of Italian local governments was even less satisfactory. Despite the repeated introduction of abortive bills and numerous debates, it was not until the early s that the Italian parliament finally got around to passing new legislation (Law / and Law /) redefining the structure and powers of local governments and their relationship to the regions and the central government. Until such laws were passed, everything was provisional at the subnational level. Even before the passage of Laws / and /, some trends were discernible. The prefect had been stripped of most of his supervisory powers over local government, especially those involving prior surveillance of local government decisions. That function was now performed by a regional Control Committee, a majority of whose members were elected by the regional council. A second development was a delegation of certain powers to the local governments on the part of both the national government and the regions. But it should be noted that the regions showed a marked tendency to procrastinate in delegating functions to the local authorities, or to delegate only minor functions, or to attempt to exercise rigid controls over how those functions were carried out. This points to a third tendency in Italian local government, one that was already manifest before the s: the regions seemed to be pushing for a centralized relationship with the local authorities. And by way of reaction, local governments were sometimes seeking a closer link with the central government, which was seen as a protector against regional domination. What are some of the most significant changes projected for the s as the result of the passage of Laws / and /?22 Law / has granted statutory autonomy to the provinces and communes, permitting them to set up their own administrative

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structures and procedures instead of conforming to a national model imposed from above. It has stripped the regional Control Committees of most of their powers to exercise external controls over local decisions. It has strengthened the executive role of the junta and confined the role of the elected council to legislative and oversight duties. It has introduced the German constructive vote of no confidence to make it impossible for a council to overthrow an executive junta and mayor, unless it simultaneously designates their successors. Finally, it has charged the regional governments with the task of creating metropolitan authorities for nine of the largest cities in Italy. On this last matter, however, no action whatsoever has yet been taken or even projected. Law / is even more far-reaching: it provides for the direct election by popular vote of the mayor and the president of the provincial junta (both had hitherto been elected by their respective councils) and replaces proportional representation with majority voting for the election of communal and provincial councils. Also the members of the executive are to be appointed directly by the mayor and are to be responsible to him/her, not to the separately elected communal council. The years since  have already provided some first indications of how these reforms are affecting local and regional government. A new class of strong mayors with personal mandates from the electorate has emerged from the reform of local elections; these mayors have been free to appoint nonpolitical experts to key executive posts in local government. The stifling influence of the party machines over local and provincial administration has been greatly weakened. Also, the financial autonomy of local governments has been augmented by the creation of a local authority property tax (the ICI) for which individual local governments can set rates. There has also been increased talk of an evolution toward a federal system; but there is no agreement on this point as yet, or indeed on what kind of federal system is being contemplated. In any event, pressure by the Northern League ensures that this debate will continue. These laws leave many loose ends and unresolved problems. The possibility of deadlock between an elected council and a separately elected mayor; the question of what will be the relationship between the regional governments and the strengthened local and provincial governments (and, above all, the new metropolitan authorities, which may in some cases comprise over half the population of the regions in which they are located); the degree to which local and provincial authorities will be able and willing to make use of their expanded opportunities and responsibilities—these are issues that will arise in the years ahead. Notes . See “Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, Italy’s Meddlesome Nanny,” The Economist,  April , ; and David Hine and Emanuela Poli, “The Scalfaro Presidency in : The Difficult Return to Normality,” in Italian Politics: The Center-Left in Power, ed. Roberto D’Alimonte and David Nelken (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, ), chap. . . On Italian Cabinet formulas since , see Alberto Marradi, “Italy: From ‘Centrism’ to Crisis of the Center-Left Coalitions,” in Government Coalitions in Western Democracies, ed. Eric C. Browne and John Dreijmanis (New York: Longman, ), chap. , esp. –. . See Sabino Cassese, “Is There a Government in Italy? Politics and Administration at the Top,” in Presidents

where is the power?

.

.

. .

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . .

291

and Prime Ministers, ed. Richard Rose and Ezra N. Suleiman (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, ), –. See Vincent della Sala, “Hollowing Out and Hardening the State: European Integration and the Italian Economy,” in Crisis and Transition in Italian Politics, ed. Martin Bull and Martin Rhodes (London: Frank Cass, ), –, at , ; Gianfranco Pasquino, “No Longer a ‘Party State’? Institutions, Power and the Problem of Italian Reform,” in Bull and Rhodes, – at ; Giacinto della Cananea, “The Reform of Finance and Administration in Italy: Contrasting Achievements,” in Bull and Rhodes, –, at –. See Giuseppe Di Palma, “The Available State: Problems of Reform,” in Italy in Transition: Conflict and Consensus, ed. Peter Lange and Sidney Tarrow (London: Frank Cass, ), –; and Giuseppe Di Palma, “Risposte parlamentari alla crisi del regime,” in La crisi italiana, ed. Luigi Graziano and Sidney Tarrow (Torino: Einaudi, ), , . See Giuseppe Di Palma, Surviving Without Governing: The Italian Parties in Parliament (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), . See della Sala, “Hollowing Out and Hardening the State,” , . See also Vincent della Sala, “Italy: A Bridge Too Far?” Parliamentary Affairs  (July ): – at –; and Luca Verzichelli, “The Majoritarian System, Act II: Parliament and Parliamentarians in ,” in D’Alimonte and Nelken, chap. . See Cassese, “Is There a Government in Italy?” ; and Carlo Donolo, “Social Change and Transformation of the State in Italy,” in The State in Western Europe, ed. Richard Scase (London: Croom Helm, ), . See della Cananea, “The Reform of Finance and Administration in Italy,” –. “A Survey of Italy,” The Economist,  July , . See Martin Rhodes, “Financing Party Politics in Italy: A Case of Systemic Corruption,” in Bull and Rhodes, –. See Peter Curwen, “Privatization, the Italian State and the State of Italy,” International Review of Administrative Sciences  (): – at . See Michael Brush, “Saving Italy’s Economy,” Europe: Magazine of the European Union  (June ): – at . See “Going Private at Last: Privatization in Italy,” The Economist,  February , . See also Luciano Bardi and Martin Rhodes, “Introduction: Mapping the Future,” in Italian Politics: Mapping the Future, ed. Luciano Bardi and Martin Rhodes (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, ), – at –. See Carlo Guarnieri, “The Judiciary in the Italian Political Crisis,” in Bull and Rhodes, –, at –. See Carlo Guarnieri, The Italian Judiciary and the Crisis of the Political System, Italian Journal  (): –; and Francesco Sidoti, “The Italian Political Class,” Government and Opposition  (summer ): – at –. See “Luck Runs Out for Berlusconi,” The Economist,  July , –. See Mary L. Volcansek, “Justice as Spettacolo: The Magistrature in ,” in Bardi and Rhodes, ed., –; David Nelken, “Stopping the Judges,” in Italy: The Stalled Transition, ed. Mario Caciagli and David I. Kertzer (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, ), chap. ; and Carlo Guarnieri, “The Judiciary in the Italian Political Crisis,” in Bull and Rhodes, –. For a critical discussion of the entire corruption investigation, see Stanton H. Burnett and Luca Mantovani, The Italian Guillotine: Operation Clean Hands and the Overthrow of Italy’s First Republic (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, ). See Robert C. Fried, The Italian Prefects: A Study in Administrative Politics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ), –, –, –. Robert Leonardi, Raffaella Y. Nanetti, and Robert D. Putnam, “Devolution as a Political Process: The Case of Italy,” Publius  (winter ): –. See “Editoriale,” Le Reqioni,  (January–April ): –. For the main highlights of regent legislation reforming local government in Italy, see Marco Cammelli, “Eletto dal popolo: il sindaco fra ruolo nuovo e vecchi poteri,” Il Mulino  (July–August ): –; and R.E. Spence, “Institutional Reform in Italy: The Case of Local Government,” Local Government Studies  (summer ): –. For the impact and outcome of that legislation, see Bruno Dente, “Sub-National Governments in the Long Italian Transition,” in Bull and Rhodes, –; and James Newell, “At the Start of a Journey: Steps on the Road to Decentralization,” in Bardi and Rhodes, –.

Chapter 18

Who Has the Power? SINCE , THE ITALIAN party system has undergone a sweeping realignment. But

during the period -, this party system appeared to be relatively stable, with relatively few shifts in party identity, party strength, and voting behavior. In order to put contemporary changes in perspective, it is necessary to survey briefly some of the principal features of the traditional pre- party system. Ever since , the Italian multiparty system has been much more complex than that of France or Germany.1 No fewer than nine national parties (parties that presented lists of candidates in all or most constituencies) were represented in the Italian parliament in . These included the following: . Democrats of the Left (DS), known until  as the Italian Communist Party (which was the strongest communist party in Western Europe) and subsequently as the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). The DS is usually referred to now as the ex- (or post-) Communist Party. . The Party of Communist Refoundation (PRC), a party of orthodox communists, who object to the moderate course and symbolic change of label adopted by the PDS. . The Green Party, which tends to focus its efforts on environmental questions. . The Italian Socialist Party (PSI), once allied with the Communists but since , much closer to the center-left of the political spectrum. . The Italian Social Democratic Party (PSDI), even more cautious and moderate than its socialist cousin. . The Italian Republican Party (PRI), moderately left-of-center and very prestigious, despite its small size and voting strength. . The Christian Democratic Party (DC), which had played a dominant and usually hegemonic role in Italian politics since . . The Italian Liberal Party (PLI), actually a moderately conservative party of the center-right. . The Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neo-Fascist party that was something of an outcast among the national political parties. In addition to these national parties, there were a number of regional, ethnic, or splinter parties: the newly powerful Lega Nord (Northern League); the Liga Venta; the

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Südtiroler Volkspartei (a German-speaking party in Bolzano Province); the Val d’Aosta List; the Network, representing an anti-Mafia movement in Sicily; the Pannella Lists, an assortment of former Radicals concerned with postmaterialist lifestyle issues; and the Party of Pensioners. Some of the traditional characteristics of the post–World War II Italian party system should be duly noted in order that the significance of recent trends may be assessed. One set of characteristic features had to do with the relative strength of the parties in the system. There was a dominant party—the Christian Democratic Party—that had headed every Italian cabinet between  and . The second-ranking party—the Communist Party (now the DS)—was the strongest communist party in Western Europe (now its strongest ex-communist party). The Italian Social Movement had been split ever since , with the exception of a brief interval from  to , and consequently the position of Italian socialism was much weaker than in most other West European countries. And nowhere else in Western Europe except in France was there a neo-Fascist movement whose strength even remotely approached that of the Italian Social Movement. Some authors stressed the polarization of the Italian party system, which included powerful extremist parties (the communists and the neo-Fascists) at its left and right poles. Others referred to its remarkable stability. Parties made only minor gains or suffered only minor losses in general elections, and voters rarely shifted far along the political spectrum but moved, say, from extreme left to moderate left or from center to centerright. This stability was attributed partly to the very high degree of party identification, partly to the existence of one-party regions like the Catholic Veneto, and partly to the remarkably large turnout which reduced the number of undecided voters to be mobilized. Finally, it was pointed out that two of the parties in Italy’s multiparty system tended to corner the lion’s share of the vote. Between them, the Communists and the Christian Democrats polled between  percent and . percent of the votes in every election from  through , reaching a high point of . percent in  before beginning to ebb (see table ., pp. ).2 (The outcomes for party representation in the Chamber of Deputies are given in table ., p. ).3 This led to the conclusion that Italy had an “imperfect two party system,” with one of the two major parties permanently in the cabinet and the other permanently in the opposition.4 Events during the – decade had cast considerable doubt on this thesis, however. The combined vote of the Communists and Christian Democrats dropped to . percent in , . percent in , and a startling . percent (counting the votes of both the PDS and Communist Refoundation) in . Italian parties also possessed some organizational traits that endowed them with a distinctive character. They were highly centralized, and the central party organization did not hesitate to intervene in nominations at the local level. They were cohesive: members of the party in parliament generally voted together as a solid bloc though there were deviations. And they were relatively disciplined: legislators who failed to follow the instructions of their party leaders and whips might be courting severe disciplinary sanctions, not excluding expulsion from the parliamentary party group. Another point to be stressed is the important role played by the party outside of parliament in its relationship with the

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Table 18.1 Percentages of Total Vote Polled by Italian Parties in Elections for the Chamber of Deputies, 1948–96

PDUP PRC Radicals Greens PCI/PDSa PSI/PSUb PSDI PRI Prodi Listc Dini Listd DC/PPI CCD/CDUe PLI LN FI PNM MSI/DN/ANg Othersf



























— — — —

— — — — 22.7 14.2 4.5 1.4

— — — — 25.3 13.8 6.1 1.4

4.5 — — — 26.9

7.1 2.5

— — — — 22.6 12.7 4.5 1.6

1.9 — — — 27.1 9.6 5.1 2.8

1.5 — 1.1 — 34.4 9.6 3.4 3.1

2.3 — 3.5 — 30.4 9.8 3.8 3.0

1.5 — 2.2 — 29.9 11.4 4.1 5.1

1.7 — 2.6 2.5 26.6 14.3 3.0 3.7

— 5.6 — 2.8 16.1 13.6 2.7 4.4

— 6.1 — 2.7 10.3 2.2 — —

48.5

40.0

42.4

38.3

38.7

38.7

38.3

32.9

34.3

29.7

11.1

— 8.6 — 2.5 21.1 — — — 6.8 4.3 5.8

3.8 — — 2.8 2.0 2.3

3.0 — — 6.8 5.9 2.9

3.5 — — 4.8 4.8 1.7

7.0 — — 1.7 5.1 1.3

3.9 — — — 8.7 2.1

1.3 — — — 6.1 .7

1.9 — — — 5.3 1.7

2.9 — — — 6.8 3.2

2.1 — — — 5.9 3.3

2.8 8.7 — — 5.4 8.2

— 8.4 21.0 — 13.5 14.7

— 10.1 20.6 — 15.7 4.5

31.0

14.5 2.0

5.8 — — 1.3 4.5 1.4

Note: Party abbreviations: PDUP: Democratic Party of Proletarian Unity PRC: Party of Communist Refoundation PCI/PDS: Italian Communist Party/Democratic Party of the Left PSI/PSU: Italian Socialist Party/United Socialist Party PSDI: Italian Social Democratic Party PRI: Italian Republican Party DC/PPI: Christian Democratic Party/Italian Popular Party CCD: Christian Democratic Center PLI: Italian Liberal Party LN: Northern League FI: Forza Italia! (Go Italy!) PNM: National Monarchist Party MSI/DN/AN: Italian Social Movement/National Right/National Alliance (neo-fascist, but National Alliance professes to be ex-fascist). aIn 1948 the Communists and Socialists formed a single electoral bloc, the People’s Democratic Front (FDP). The experiment was not subsequently repeated. In 1992 the PCI changed its name to the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS). An orthodox minority seceded to form the Party of Communist Refoundation (PRC). bIn 1968 the Socialists and Social Democrats ran as a unified party: the United Socialist Party (PSU). The party split in 1969. cIn the 1996 election, the Prodi List consisted of the Popular Party of Italy (see note e below), the South Tyrol Volksparten, the Republican Party, and the Democratic Union. dThe Dini List of candidates, which was headed by caretaker Prime Minister Lamberto Dini, sought support during the 1996 campaign from various moderate members of various right-wing parties. eIn 1994 the DC disintegrated. It was replaced by two Christian Democratic parties: the Popular Party of Italy (PPI) in the center and the much weaker Christian Democratic Center (CCD) on the right. In the 1996 election, the PPI campaigned as part of the Prodi List of candidates. fThe CCD formed part of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia! electoral slate in both the 1994 and 1996 elections. gIn December 1976, the MSI split, with about half of its deputies joining a new right-wing party, the National Right (DN). The DN failed to gain any representation in 1971. Between 1992 and 1994, Gianfranco Fini formed a broader National Alliance (AN). The AN included most of the old MSI (which was later dissolved as a party) and other right-wing factions. It claimed to have put the fascist experience behind it and to be a mainstream conservative alternative, committed to the preservation of democracy.

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Table 18.2 Seats Won by Various Italian Parties in Elections for the Chamber of Deputies, 1948–96

PDUP PRC Radicals Greens PCI/PDS PSI/PSU PSDI PRI DC/PPI PLI LN FI PNM MSI/DN/AN Others Total



























— — — —

— — — — 143 75 19 5 262 14 — — 40 29 3 –— 590

— — — — 140 84 22 6 273 17 — — 25 24 5 –— 596

— — — — 166 87 33 6 260 39 — — 8 27 4 –— 630

2.3 — — — 177

0 — — — 179 61 29 14 266 21 — — — 56 4 –— 630

6 — 4 — 228 58 15 14 262 5 — — — 35 3 –— 630

6 — 18 — 201 62 20 16 262 9 — — — 30 6 –— 630

7 — 11 — 198 73 23 29 225 16 — — — 42 6 –— 630

8 — 13 13 177 94 17 21 234 11 — — — 35 7 –— 630

— 35 — 16 107 92 16 27 206 17 55 — — 34 25 –— 630

— 40 — 11 115 15 — — 33 — 122 97 — 109 88 –— 630

— 35 — — 284a — — — — — 59 246b — — 6 –— 630

183 33 9 305 19 — — 14 6 5 –— 574

91 9 266 31 — — 6 24 3 –— 630

Note: Party abbreviations: see note, table 18.1. aOlive Tree Alliance, consisting of the PDS, the Greens, the PPI/Prodi List, and the Dini List. bFreedom Alliance, consisting of Forza Italia!, the Christian Democratic Center (CCD), and the National Alliance (AN).

parliamentary party. Many cabinet crises originated outside parliament with decisions reached by party secretaries or party directorates (executive committees). To be sure, there was much overlap between the parliamentary and extraparliamentary party organizations. The secretaries and members of party directorates were frequently themselves simultaneously members of parliament. Perhaps the most interesting property of Italian political parties was the presence within their ranks of highly organized competing factions. These intraparty groupings reflected more than mere tendencies or currents of opinion. They had, in many cases, a well-defined organizational structure, press, and research organs to formulate and disseminate their views, their own sources of financing independent of the party organization, and their own leadership hierarchy. Factions vied with one another for control over the party organization and over patronage appointments, and they demanded appropriate representation when cabinets and regional and local juntas were being formed. On numerous occasions, the formation of a cabinet or a regional or municipal junta was held up while negotiations proceeded to determine which Christian Democratic or Socialist factions were to be assigned which executive posts. The Elections of 1992 With the Italian parliamentary elections of , some of the traditional features of the Italian party system seemed to be undergoing major and perhaps permanent alterations. For one thing, the Christian Democratic Party (DC) appeared to be in serious danger of

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losing its hegemony over the Italian party system. It had already lost considerable ground in  and ; but the  election results were disastrous for the DC. With . percent of the total vote, it plumbed new depths of electoral failure, . percentage points below its  all-time low. The PDS (formerly the Italian Communist Party or PCI) was still the second-ranking party on the Italian political scene. But the hitherto consistent forward progress of Italian communism had already been halted as early as , when the PCI captured only . percent of the votes as compared to its  high-water mark of . percent. This retrogression continued in the  elections and, more sharply, in , when the Communist Party received only . percent of the votes, its weakest showing since . This was the “second most serious defeat in its history [as of that time].”5 But the worst was yet to come. In , in response to an initiative launched by PCI Secretary Achille Occhetto to dissociate the Italian left from the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, the PCI split into the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS) and the Party of Communist Refoundation (PRC)—the former, led by Occhetto and representing the bulk of the former PCI, committed to a moderate leftist posture, the latter a party of diehards rebelling against the triumph of reformist tendencies in Italian Communism. In , the PDS received . percent of the votes, whereas Communist Refoundation mustered only . percent. The combined total of . percent was . points below the already deplorable  mark of . percent and was the worst showing since . The Socialist movement was still divided between Socialists (PSI) and the somewhat more centrist-oriented Social Democrats (PSDI). Both parties were rather on the weak side, especially the PSDI, and their combined vote since  had always oscillated between  and  percent of the total votes cast. In the  elections, after four years of relative stability under the commanding leadership of Socialist Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, the Italian electorate rewarded the PSI with . percent of the total vote—its highest percentage as an independent and distinctive party since . However, in , the PSI dropped back to . percent, undergoing its first slump in twenty years. As for the PSDI, it steadily lost ground after , receiving  percent in  and . percent in . The other two minor center parties (the Republicans—PRI, and the Liberals—PLI) had chalked up very modest electoral achievements, with their combined vote since  ranging from . percent to  percent of the votes cast. In , they registered rather modest gains: the PRI rose to . percent and the PLI rose to . percent. As for the neoFascists of the MSI, they had been in a state of decline since . In , despite the presence of Mussolini’s granddaughter on their ticket, they polled only . percent of the total vote. Thus, the MSI, along with the centrist PRI and PLI, appeared in  to be facing a very unpromising electoral future. Italy’s “imperfect two-party system’’ seemed to be in critical condition in light of the  results. As we have seen, the combined DC, PDS, and Communist Refoundation vote dropped to . percent of the total vote. By contrast, if one adds the PSI vote to that of the three minor center parties (PSDI, PRI, PLI), the “laic bloc” (the bloc of secular

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democratic parties) won . percent of the votes in . Thus, the “imperfect two-party system” was showing signs of unraveling, whereas the laic bloc seemed to be emerging as a powerful third force in Italian politics, reaching its highest levels in twenty years. It also appeared that the . percent of the vote garnered by the regionalist Northern League (dominated by the Lombard League) and the . percent captured by Communist Refoundation had been won at the expense of the DC and the PDS, not the laic bloc. Yet, the apparent renaissance of the laic bloc was to prove a short-lived phenomenon. The emergence of the Northern League, with . percent of the votes, as a major protagonist on the Italian political scene was one of the more striking outcomes of the  elections. With its demands that a federal Italy be created, that major functions and a significant share of national revenues should be shifted from the central government to the regions, and with its clearly expressed anti-southern, anti-immigrant biases, the Northern League represented a new and possibly centrifugal force in Italian politics. Like the split in Italian communism, the Northern League’s appearance made it clear that the Italian party system of – was a thing of the past. The  election also called into question the stability so often ascribed to the Italian party system. Both of the factors that had contributed to this stability in the past— strong party identification and high voter turnout—seemed to be declining. Voter turnout dipped below  percent for the first time in  and never regained that level. Moreover, more voters were casting blank and invalid ballots. As we see later, Italian voting traditions seemed to be eroding under the impact of the social and cultural changes we observed in chapter . One result has been a remarkable downward dip in the Christian Democratic vote. The Christian Democratic decline was already foreshadowed in  when the Christian Democratic grip on the office of prime minister was finally broken. In that year, the Republican leader, Giovanni Spadolini, became prime minister. A number of factors facilitated Spadolini’s takeover: a referendum vote to retain the relatively liberal abortion law, Christian Democratic implication in a scandal involving the political influence of a secret Masonic lodge, Christian Democratic losses in local elections that year, and Socialist demands that the office of prime minister be given to a Socialist or at least to a leading member of one of the center-left parties. Spadolini emerged as a compromise candidate because the Christian Democrats were not yet ready to let the Socialist leader, Craxi, become prime minister. The visibility and credibility bestowed on the Republican Party by Spadolini’s sixteen-month tenure as prime minister probably help explain Republican gains and Christian Democratic losses in . From  to , Craxi’s four-year span as prime minister further weakened the Christian Democratic image of being the perennial ruling party. The Election of 1994 Between April  and March , the Italian party system underwent a series of massive transformations, which altered the political map of Italy, decimated the ranks of Italy’s political elites, and brought a new cohort of political leaders to power. The precipitating factor was public revulsion resulting from the revelation that very large segments of

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the Italian political class had accepted kickbacks from business firms in exchange for government contracts and licenses, or had cultivated and maintained illicit connections with the Mafia and other criminal organizations. As a result of these scandals and the ensuing prosecutions, many Christian Democratic and Socialist political leaders at the national, regional, and local levels came under criminal investigation. This included such former prime ministers as Bettino Craxi (PSI) and Giulio Andreotti (DC). The disgrace befalling the DC and the PSI led to the virtual disintegration of these parties, and the formation of successor rump parties under new leadership. While fragments of the DC and PSI did survive and soldier on, the Social Democrats, Republicans, and Liberals virtually disappeared.6 The parties of the left, led by the PDS, had hoped to win the general election of  and  March . After all, they had won against a divided right in a majority of the mayoral elections held in November . Only four months later, however, the left alliance confronted a newly formed right alliance, led by the charismatic media magnate, Silvio Berlusconi, and a new center alliance as well. In the  elections, the Progressive Alliance, formed by the parties of the left, suffered a clear-cut defeat. This alliance, designed to maximize leftist probabilities of carrying single-member districts by the necessary plurality, comprised the PDS; Communist Refoundation; the Greens; the moribund rump of the PSI (which was to disband shortly after the elections); the anti-Mafia Network Party (headed by Leoluca Orlando, mayor of Palermo); the Democratic Alliance, composed mostly of former supporters of the minor center parties; the Christian Socialists; and one or two additional splinter movements. It received only . percent of the total PR vote.7 Of this total, the PDS contributed . percent (as compared to . percent in ); Communist Refoundation contributed . percent (as compared to . percent in ); the Greens obtained . percent (. percent in ); the Network polled . percent (no change since ); the Democratic Alliance (which had not existed in ) received . percent; and the hapless Socialists, who had received .  percent of the votes in , eked out a meager . percent.8 In looking at these figures, we should note that the combined vote of the PDS and Communist Refoundation was . percent—a clear-cut gain over the . percent attained in ; and that the great bulk of that gain was chalked up by the PDS, which has definitely become the recognized standard-bearer of the moderate left. The decline of the left as a whole from over  percent of the votes in  to . percent of the votes in  may be attributed almost entirely to the collapse of the scandal-ridden PSI, some of whose voters migrated to the PDS, while others drifted to Berlusconi’s Forza Italia! or to the Northern League. In general, one could say that the Italian left suffered a severe defeat, but that, within the left, the PDS had recovered from its debacle of . The minor center parties—the PSDI, the PRI, and the PLI—had polled a total of . percent of the total votes in . And the DC, weakened as it was in , had still received . percent. So these four center parties had totaled . percent of the votes. What happened to the center in  was a defeat of staggering proportions: the center parties went down to . percent of the votes. The minor center parties simply disappeared, obliterated by the scandals and by the  percent threshold imposed by the new

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election law as a precondition for receiving seats under proportional representation. Some of their votes may have gone to the Democratic Alliance on the left, others to the Segni Pact in the center. As for the DC, two Christian Democratic parties had replaced it: the Popular Party in the center, and the Christian Democratic Center (which formed part of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia! slates) on the right. The centrist alliance in  was called the Pact for Italy. It included two parties: the Popular Party to which we have just referred, and the Segni Pact, led by Mario Segni, the former Christian Democrat who had led a number of successful referendum campaigns for electoral reform since , including a drive to change and simplify the system of preferential voting and a movement to virtually eliminate the system of proportional representation in Senate elections. In , the Popular Party obtained only . percent of the votes, and the Segni Pact (which contained former supporters of the minor center parties and some former Christian Democrats) received only . percent. Of the three major political alliances in Italy, the centrist alliance was the weakest. The winner of the  elections was the rightist bloc, labeled the Freedom Pole in the north (where Forza Italia! was allied with the Northern League) and the Pole of Good Government in the south (where Forza Italia! was allied with the National Alliance). This curious binomial bloc consisted of three major political forces and two minor parties. The first was Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia!, a new center-right mass movement revolving around a charismatic business leader and including on its electoral lists candidates of a minor center-right Christian Democratic grouping called the Christian Democratic Center and of a centrist splinter movement called the Center Union. The second was Umberto Bossi’s Northern League, particularly powerful in Lombardy. And the third was a self-styled post-Fascist party, the National Alliance, led by Gianfranco Fini, formerly the leader of the neo-Fascist MSI. The Pole of Liberty and the Pole of Good Government had the largest number of voters: . percent of the total. Twenty-one percent of the electorate voted for the Forza Italia! lists (including about . percent for the Christian Democratic Center); . percent (as compared to . percent in ) voted for Bossi’s Northern League; and . percent (as compared to only . percent in ) voted for Fini’s National Alliance. The Northern League had barely held its own since ; but the National Alliance had more than doubled the strength of the neo-Fascist MSI; and Forza Italia! had carved out spectacular gains at the expense of the discredited old parties of the center and moderate right. A number of striking results of this election should be noted. First, the Pole of Liberty and the Pole of Good Government won a clear majority in the Chamber of Deputies ( seats out of ) and a near majority in the Senate ( seats out of ). This permitted Berlusconi to form a cabinet composed of members from Forza Italia! (), the Northern League (), the National Alliance (), the Christian Democratic Center (), and the Center Union (), plus three independents. Second, the complexion of the parliament had changed remarkably since . Of the nine national parties listed at the beginning of this chapter, the DC had vanished to be only partially replaced by two weak successor parties, the PSI had been reduced to a mere fragment, the three minor center parties were no more, and the MSI had expanded into a watered-down post-Fascist movement whose

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leader preached moderation. On the right, the Northern League had become a major national actor rather than a regional protest movement, and Forza Italia! had emerged as a new and possibly dominant protagonist on the national scene. Third, the composition of Italy’s governing elite had undergone a bewildering metamorphosis. Of the  members of parliament elected to the two chambers,  were new, only  had prior service in parliament.9 And most of the big political names that had dominated the headlines for so many years—Andreotti, Forlani, and Gava for the DC, Craxi and De Michelis for the PSI—seemed to have vanished from the front pages. Finally, however, the results of the  elections were inconclusive and somewhat deceptive, for two reasons. One is that the election was conducted under a hideously complex electoral system devised by the outgoing lame-duck Parliament in . The second and more compelling reason is that the center-right coalition that took power in the spring of  proved to be fatally split by conflicting policies and personalities. In December , under a hail of criticism, much of it coming from his coalition partners of the Northern League, Berlusconi felt compelled to resign as prime minister. The Election of 1996 On  April , after Berlusconi’s  victory had been dissipated by dissension among members of his center-right coalition, and after Dini’s cabinet of technocrats had outlived its legitimacy and could no longer deal with a deadlocked parliament, new elections were called by President Scalfaro despite the fact that parliament’s term still had three years to run. Because no agreement could be reached on a new election law, the complex election law used in  was retained. As a result of the bewildering electoral alliances spawned by this law, the media were unable to give a prompt report on the exact distribution of seats in parliament. It was announced that the Olive Tree center-left alliance had won  seats in the Chamber of Deputies (plus an additional thirty-five seats garnered by Communist Refoundation, a maverick member of the alliance), and that the Freedom Pole center-right alliance had won . The Northern League, running alone, had won fiftynine, and other lists had won five. It took some time for the exact distribution of seats among the parties composing each alliance to be ascertained.10 The Olive Tree Alliance received a plurality of the votes (. percent) and a bare majority of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies ( out of ) and in the Senate. But one party in this alliance, Communist Refoundation (which polled . percent of the votes and won thirty-five seats in the Chamber), indicated that it would support Olive Tree initiatives only on a case-by-case basis and that its loyalty to the alliance would depend on the policies the alliance chose to adopt. The leading party in the alliance was the ex-communist Democratic Party of the Left (PDS). It polled . percent of the votes, a gain of . percent since , whereas Communist Refoundation picked up . percentage points over its  showing. In terms of seats, the PDS far outnumbered the PRC:  seats to . The other three parties in the Olive Tree Alliance included the Greens, who polled . percent of the vote compared to  . percent in , and who won twenty-one seats; the Prodi List, led by the alliance’s candidate for prime minister, Romano Prodi; and the

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Italian Renewal Party, led by the outgoing prime minister and former top official of the Bank of Italy, Lamberto Dini. Neither the Prodi List nor the Italian Renewal Party was on the ballot in . Italian Renewal received . percent of the total vote and twenty-four seats. The Prodi List (which received the support of the Popular Party of former Christian Democrats, the South Tyrol Volkspartei, and the Republican Party, plus some even smaller splinter groupings) received . percent of the votes as compared to . percent polled by the Popular Party in  (part of that vote had obviously been captured by Italian Renewal). Virtually all the seats won by the Prodi List went to the Popular Party, which picked up sixty-seven seats, while “Others” received five. Together, the Prodi List and Italian Renewal polled . percent of the vote, compared to . percent received by the centrist alliance (Pact for Italy, composed of the Popular Party and the Segni Pact) in . Thus, the centrist alliance of  simply converged with the leftist Progressive Alliance of  to form a center-left bloc, the Olive Tree Alliance. The Olive Tree voting totals of . percent were actually less than the combined total polled by the leftist and centrist alliances, running separately in  (. percent). Why, then, did the Olive Tree Alliance win an electoral victory over the center-right? It won because the center-right alliance (called the Freedom Pole in , as it had been in ) had lost one of its most electorally powerful members: the Northern League. The Northern League ran as an isolated list this time and obtained . percent of the votes and  seats as compared to . percent of the votes and  seats in . As for the Freedom Pole, it racked up very respectable totals of . percent (. percent in ). Of these voting percentages, . percent was accounted for by Forza Italia! ( percent in ), . percent by the ex-Fascist National Alliance (. percent in ), and . percent by the Christian Democratic Center/Christian Democratic Union (. percent in ). Of the  seats won by the Freedom Pole,  went to Forza Italia!,  to the National Alliance, and  to the CDC/CDU. This was a respectable showing. But the split with the federalist Northern League cost the Freedom Pole what would otherwise have been a popular majority and a probable majority in parliament. In the Chamber of Deputies, with its total membership of , the  seats won by the Olive Tree Alliance constituted a slender majority. But, as we have seen, the orthodox communists of Communist Refoundation had declared their independence. Subtracting their  seats would leave the Olive Tree Alliance with only  seats, short of a majority. It would therefore be necessary for the Olive Tree Alliance to court the support of Communist Refoundation and/or the Northern League ( seats) in order to muster a majority on controversial legislation. As we have noted, the Olive Tree itself was a rather loosely jointed alliance of leftist and centrist parties, and its future cohesion was in doubt. Thus, it would appear that the media exaggerated the extent and significance of the center-left victory in , just as they had exaggerated the extent and significance of the center-right victory in . The Election of 2001 The tenure of the Olive Tree coalition indeed proved fragile, although it managed to remain in office for the duration of its five-year term. Romano Prodi served two-and-a-half

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Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi campaigns for reelection in the general election of May . (Reuters NewMedia Inc./Corbis)

years as the first of three Olive Tree premiers, resigning in October  after Communist Refoundation deputies rejected his government’s austerity budget. (Prodi was subsequently chosen president of the European Commission in March .) His successor was Massimo D’Alema, a leader of the PDS and Italy’s first post-communist head of government. D’Alema stepped down a year later following losses by Olive Tree coalition parties to the center-right opposition in regional elections in April. Giliano Amato reconstituted the Olive Tree coalition but failed to mobilize popular enthusiasm for either himself or the government’s policies. Silvio Berlusconi emerged early as the leading contender to wrest the premiership from the center-left in the campaign leading up to national elections in May . He forged a more disciplined coalition between his own party, Forza Italia!, and the Northern League and the National Alliance than had been the case in , and succeeded in casting himself (thanks in large part to his virtual monopoly ownership of private television in Italy) as a man of vision and action. Berlusconi seized on his honorary title of il Cavaliere (the knight) to proclaim himself “the greatest politician in the world.” Campaigning jointly as the “Freedom House,” the center-right parties relentlessly attacked the Olive Tree coalition for its internal dissension and alleged adherence to the status quo. Advocating radical changes in domestic policies, Berlusconi called for tax reform (including the abolition of the inheritance tax), greater flexibility on the labor market, the modernization of Italy’s transportation system, and safer cities. Members of the Olive Tree coalition responded by nominating Francesco Rutelli, the popular mayor of Rome,

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to oppose Berlusconi in what became an electoral contest more between strong personalities than between competing ideologies. The center-left’s criticism of il Cavaliere focused on legal charges of corruption, which had been dismissed on appeal, and his collusion with the National Alliance. Berlusconi and his allies swept to a solid victory in both houses of parliament on  May. The Freedom House parties won . percent of the popular vote and  seats in the Chamber of Deputies, compared to the Olive Tree’s . percent and  seats. The center-right coalition’s margin of victory was even greater in the Senate: . percent compared to . percent for the Olive Tree. The electoral outcome dismayed many Europeans who were concerned about the rightest tilt of the winning coalition, but Italian president Ciampi duly appointed Berlusconi premier in accordance with established democratic norms. The Main Political Parties The Ex-Communists and Orthodox Communists (PDS, PRC, new PCI) The Party of Democratic Socialists (now known as the Democrats of the Left) was founded in February , only thirty-two months after Achille Occhetto became secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in June . Almost immediately after becoming party secretary, Occhetto, aided by a new generation of leaders of middle-class origin, began to campaign for radical changes in the structure and goals of the PCI. In doing so, he was continuing and accelerating the reformist course set by his predecessors, Enrico Berlinguer and Alessandro Natta. But he went further. He proposed to break with the Marxist tradition, to establish close links with West European socialist parties, to democratize the internal organization of the PCI, and (after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November ) to change the name of the PCI. At a special party conference held in March , he won approval for his proposal for a party constituent assembly to debate and approve a statute for the new party he intended to create. Despite considerable internal opposition, his motion prevailed by almost a two-thirds majority. Ten months later, after much wrangling over the name, symbols, and goals of the new party, a party congress at Rimini in late January and early February of  voted to terminate the existence of the old PCI and to establish a new Party of Democratic Socialists (PDS). A week or so later, many of Occhetto’s opponents convened to found another new party, pledged to continue the communist tradition: the Party of Communist Refoundation or PRC.11 In one sense, the establishment of the PDS was not a complete break with the past in the history of Italian communism. Ever since , when the PCI (responding to the invasion of Hungary by Soviet troops) had shifted from all-out opposition to constructive opposition within the system, the Communist Party had moved in the direction of greater moderation.12 From  to , with Berlinguer as secretary, the Communist Party had proposed a “historic compromise” that would include all Italian parties that were willing to uphold the constitution but would emphasize an alliance between the Communists and the Christian Democrats. It had also pledged to come to power through free elections; to maintain a multiparty system; to allow itself to be voted out of

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office; to enforce the constitution; to forego further nationalizations; and to crack down on both left-wing and right-wing terrorism. Its leaders had occasionally, though rather tentatively, spoken out for wage restraint and austerity. And in the field of foreign affairs, the PCI had clearly and repeatedly asserted its independence from Soviet influence. The PCI’s independent and moderate stance had paid off in electoral terms. Practicing Gramsci’s “politics of presence,” offering sensible pragmatic solutions to concrete problems in every area of Italian life, the PCI had won many positions in local, provincial, and regional government. There were Communist mayors in some of Italy’s largest cities. In national elections, the Communist voting percentages had peaked in , but the PCI still commanded . percent of the Italian voters in . However, the PCI was facing increasingly serious difficulties before its demise—the price of its success. Its moderate policies had somewhat dissipated the feelings of distrust that animated many Italians, but only at the cost of arousing PCI rank-and-file discontent with its lack of militancy. Its collaboration with the Christian Democrats in – had laid it open to charges that it had joined the establishment and had saddled it with part of the blame for hard times. And if it tried to halt the desertion of marginals and students on its left by making militant noises, it then proceeded to lose some moderate votes on its right. When the PDS was founded in , it did not escape the difficulties that the old PCI had encountered. Quite the contrary, in fact. The secessionist diehards of Communist Refoundation (PRC) received . percent of the votes in , as compared to . percent for the PDS. The secession of the PRC had further weakened the already dwindling forces of Italian communism (Communist Refoundation) and ex-communism (the PDS). However, the disintegration of the PSI in – gave the PDS a new lease on life. It became, in effect, the standard-bearer for the moderate left. In the  election campaign, the PDS advocated a program of economic austerity and privatization of state industries; it supported tax reduction and a shifting of control over tax revenues from the central to the regional and local governments; it demanded that pensions be equalized; and it called for further progress toward European integration and the strengthening of NATO. It promised to back the outgoing prime minister, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, a former governor of the Bank of Italy and champion of austerity.13 On the other hand, Communist Refoundation, its ally in the Progressive Alliance favored a pump-priming program of decreasing work hours and increasing pensions, and also expressed opposition to NATO. While its more radical ally cast some doubt on the credibility of the PDS, the Democratic Party of the Left nevertheless gained considerable ground in . At the end of , after the resignation of Achille Occhetto, and the rise to power of a new PDS leader, Massimo D’Alema, the PDS appeared to have preempted that moderate left area of the political spectrum that was once occupied by the PSI. In the election of , it was the leading party in Prodi’s Olive Tree Alliance. And when Prodi became prime minister, it became a leading protagonist in the Prodi cabinet. When Prodi was forced to resign in October , D’Alema succeeded him and formed a center-left cabi-

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net that was, however, broadened to include the PCI (a new and recently formed orthodox Communist Party that had seceded from the PRC) and Cossiga’s center-right Democratic Union for the Republic (UDR). The D’Alema government continued to follow the policies of monetary stability, controlled public spending, and austerity to pave the way for Italian admission to the euro zone at the beginning of . For example, Ciampi, who was Treasury Minister under Prodi, retained that post under D’Alema until he was designated President of the European Commission in March . At the same time, D’Alema made conciliatory gestures toward the center-right Democratic Union for the Republic (headed by ex-president Cossiga) and toward the newly established Italian Communist Party (headed by Armando Cossutta). The PRC, headed by Fausto Bertinotti, continued to demand heavier government spending (especially in the south), a thirty-five-hour workweek, the perpetuation of the existing cumbersome and expensive welfare structures, and opposition to NATO. It was clear that the PDS and its leader faced a very difficult balancing act, and that the policy cleavage between the PDS, on the one hand, and the PRC and PCI on the other posed a very critical threat to the future of the Italian left.14 Following heavy losses in regional elections in April  to the center-right parties, D’Alema submitted his resignation. He was succeeded by Giuliano Amato, until then Treasury and Budget minister in the D’Alema cabinet. A majority of  deputies in the Chamber of Deputies confirmed Amato as prime minister on April . Amato reconstituted the center-left coalition, resisting opposition demands to call an early election. As noted earlier in this chapter, the PDS had obtained . percent of the votes and  seats in the Chamber of Deputies in the  elections. By October , it still held  of those seats. There had been virtually no defections. The PRC was less fortunate. In , it had won . percent of the votes and  seats. By October , it was down to  seats. Of the twenty-two defectors, twenty-one had joined Cossutta’s secessionist PCI. While claiming to be orthodox Marxists like the PRC they had abandoned, Cossutta and his followers felt that Bertinotti (the PRC leader) had acted recklessly by repeatedly threatening to withdraw his support from the Prodi cabinet. Overthrowing that cabinet, they argued, might bring Berlusconi and the center-right back to power. So the PCI entered D’Alema’s cabinet and supported the Amato coalition. The Death of the Socialist Party (PSI) After the returns were in for the elections of , it was clear that the Italian Socialist Party was, to all effects and purposes, history. A tiny splinter group, the Italian Socialists (SI), had been allotted twelve single-member district candidacies under an electoral agreement with the predominantly ex-Christian Democratic Dini List. Thanks to the Dini List’s support, it carried three of those twelve districts. 15 It takes more than three members in the Chamber of Deputies to form a parliamentary group, however. So the three lonely Socialist deputies are part of the group of unaffiliated members of the Chamber of Deputies. In those same elections, the PDS-European Left electoral coalition, the main component of Prodi’s Olive Tree Alliance, allotted twenty-eight single-member-district

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candidacies to a variety of allied splinter parties. Thanks to the support of the PDS, eighteen of those single-member districts were carried by the splinter-party candidates: six by the Unitary Communist Movement, four by the Social Christians, six by the Labourites, one by the Movement for the Unity of the Reformist Left, and one by the Social Democratic Party. Of these assorted leftist splinter groups (none of which was able to form a parliamentary group of its own), it seems possible that the Labourites () and the Reformist Left () could be regarded as remnants of the old PSI. Adding these to the three SI deputies, we may conclude that only ten ex-Socialists, under three different labels, found their way into the Chamber of Deputies in .16 The demise of the PSI came as a severe disappointment for those who had hoped that this party would eventually lead Italy to a brighter future. Its gradual disengagement from its – alliance with the Communist Party, and its entry into a center-left cabinet with the Christian Democrats in , had seemed to usher in a new and progressive era in Italian politics. However, this “opening to the left,’’ as it was called, had a disillusioning outcome. The Socialist Party became simply a captive junior partner in Christian Democratic-dominated center-left cabinets. It proved unable to have much impact on government policy or to spur the Christian Democrats into speeding up progress toward social reform. Instead, it proved very adept in obtaining its share of patronage. Just as the PSI’s reputation had been seriously damaged by its earlier dependence on the Communist Party, similarly its post- alliance with the ruling Christian Democrats had overtones of dependency and opportunism. The result was electoral decline. Efforts by the PSI to stem that electoral decline and establish a separate identity were partly successful in electoral terms, especially after Bettino Craxi took over as party leader in . But the PSI’s attempts to formulate attractive policies had a reactive quality to them. It almost seemed as if the Socialist leaders were more interested in distinguishing their party from its giant neighbors on the political spectrum (the PCI and the DC) than in developing a coherent policy line of their own. This tactical opportunism seemed to pay off at the polls, however, especially after Craxi became prime minister and pursued moderate, pragmatic policies in the domestic and foreign spheres from  to . In , the PSI polled an almost unprecedented . percent of the votes—its high-water mark since . And in , it dipped only slightly—to . percent. By  the PSI was reduced to the status of a discredited splinter party, which desperately needed an alliance with the PDS in order to pick up a handful of seats in parliament. After the elections of , the PSI, thoroughly disgraced by the scandals of “Kickback City,” closed up shop. To avoid a prison sentence after a conviction for corruption, Craxi fled into exile to Tunisia (where he died of heart failure in January ). Some new movements were founded to succeed the defunct PSI (one of these movements labeled itself the SI—Italian Socialists); but the elections of  seemed to indicate that the old PSI tradition, so thoroughly tainted by Craxian opportunism and corruption, cannot be revived. If there is to be a renaissance of Italian Socialism, it seems more likely that it will be led by the PDS, which has staked a powerful and rather credible claim to the moderate left space on Italy’s new political spectrum.

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The Successors to the DC (PPI, CDC/CDU, Democratic Renewal, UDR) During the period –, the DC suffered the same catastrophe that befell the PSI. Both parties, along with their minor center allies, were fatally damaged by the series of judicial inquiries that revealed how corrupt and, in some cases, how closely linked to organized crime, many of their more prominent leaders had been. The growing competition from the Northern League also played a role in shaking Christian Democratic morale. Heavy Socialist and Christian Democratic losses in the local elections of December  revealed the extent of resulting public disaffection and induced the Christian Democratic Party to terminate its own existence. On  January , the DC was officially dissolved, to be replaced by the Italian Popular Party. This new party’s title was meant to conjure up memories of Don Sturzo’s Popular Party, which had led a brief but relatively honorable existence from  through most of . The leader of the new party (Mino Martinazzoli) had not been one of the top DC hierarchs and was untainted by the “Kickback City” scandals. Under his leadership, the Popular Party steered a resolutely centrist course, rejecting overtures from both the left and the right alliances. Its only ally was also centrist: the Pact for National Renewal, led by Mario Segni, a former Christian Democrat. The votes polled by these two parties in  were only . percent of the total. Another group of former DC members—the Christian Democratic Center (CDC)—rejected Martinazzoli’s glorious isolation and chose to run candidates for parliament on Berlusconi’s center-right Forza Italia! The fact that the PPI and the Segni Pact center parties were able to poll a combined total of only . percent of the votes in the parliamentary election of  was an unmistakable symptom of the sharply reduced influence of the Catholic Church. To be sure, there were a few other Catholic lists of a splinter nature (the votes of the CDC could not be ascertained because it formed part of the Berlusconi Forza Italia! lists); but the total Catholic vote was well below  percent. The collapse and fragmentation of the DC was a revolutionary development in Italian politics. From  through , the DC had been the leading party in Italy. From  to , every Italian prime minister had been a Christian Democrat. So, unlike the Communists and the Socialists, the Christian Democrats had formed the major part of every cabinet. The question of what alliances the party should form had been a perpetual bone of contention, and had helped to keep the DC divided into warring factions. The characteristics of the DC as a party had included, first and foremost, its heterogeneous catch-all nature: it had ranged across a large part of the Italian political spectrum, from moderate left to moderate right, and had included in its ranks supporters of virtually every type of alliance or cabinet combination. Among those who had voted for the DC were industrialists, Catholic workers, small farmers, housewives, pensioners, and shopkeepers—a mixed bag indeed. Not only had the DC been faction-ridden, but the factions had been bewilderingly volatile. A given faction might, within the space of one or two years, completely reverse its position on an issue involving party policies or party alliances. Frequently, a faction that had professed to be left, right, or center would turn out to be little more than the personal following of one or more prominent DC leader. And personal rivalries among the leaders might outweigh policy considerations.

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The DC had also been internally divided on policy matters, more so than other Italian parties. It had contained strong supporters of private enterprise and champions of the state sector (which helped finance the party), representatives of management and spokesmen for organized labor, diehard opponents of divorce and advocates of a more liberal set of moral codes for Italian society. The party had essentially been all things to all men. As Aldo Moro once put it, in a revealing slip of the tongue, “The DC emphasizes everything.”17 Perhaps the one common denominator that might be discerned throughout the DC had been a distributive approach to public policy. The party had built its strength, especially in the south, by judiciously allocating contracts, jobs, and public money. Patronage, however, had become more than a means to an end; it had become an end in itself. The ambiguity and ambivalence of the DC had taken their toll in elections. Even before the electoral debacles of  and , the DC had been unable, all through the s and s, to regain the  percent level it had once attained. In addition to voter reaction against its lack of a clear sense of purpose and against its image of patronage and corruption, the DC had suffered the inevitable erosion that affects any dominant party after an extended period in power. Efforts had been made in the s to commit the party to a program of economic austerity, to an abandonment of excessive reliance on the spoils system, to an emphasis on productivity gains rather than purely distributive policies. But this new rigor had failed to convince and may actually have contributed to the DC’s losses over the short run. After the schism in , the Catholic camp was still divided and weak in the  elections. The center-left Popular Party, Italian Renewal (the center-left list headed by Lamberto Dini, former prime minister), and the CCD/CDU (Christian Democratic Center/Christian Democratic Union, allied with Berlusconi’s center-right alliance), polled a combined total of . percent of the vote for party lists.18 After the elections, there was a further repositioning of the Catholic forces. Francesco Cossiga, a former president of Italy, formed a new party of ex-Christian Democrats—the Democratic Union for the Republic (UDR). This center-right party apparently received much of its support from legislators elected on the CCD/CDU party lists. In October , out of  members of the Chamber of Deputies,  adhered to the Popular Party (same as in ),  adhered to Dini’s Italian Renewal ( in ), and  identified with the UDR (the CDC/CDU had elected  in , but was not listed as a party group in October .19 Thus, apart from a few splinter deputies, the Catholic deputies in the Chamber totaled —about . percent of the membership. The presence of political Catholicism in parliament has been dramatically reduced by the electoral revolution of the s. But it is still a formidable force, despite its internal divisions: it has not been wiped off the political map as the Italian Socialist Party has been. It remains to be seen whether the segments of the former Christian Democratic Party can ever reunite. For the time being, all three segments are represented in the D’Alema cabinet, led by the PDS. The Minor Parties: A Forest of Shrubs Before , the minor center parties included the Social Democrats (PSDI), whose commitment to social democracy appeared to focus on public works, social welfare measures,

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and a preoccupation with the interests of pensioners; the Republicans (PRI), a moderately left-of-center party committed to fiscal austerity and honesty in government, whose leader, Giovanni Spadolini, was the first non-Christian Democratic prime minister since ; and the Liberals (PLI), a party of the moderate right, competing with the Christian Democrats for the votes of businessmen and large landowners. The one common strand connecting these three parties was their commitment to democracy and to a secular society. They tended to side with the DC on many issues but not on matters having to do with church-state relations. In the years since , the minor center parties registered very modest electoral performances, with their combined share of the total vote usually less than  percent. But the scandals of “Kickback City” and the new election law of  sounded the death knell for these parties, which disappeared from the Italian parliament. In their place was a multitude of “shrubs”— a large number of splinter parties that allied themselves with major parties like the PDS and Forza Italia! in the hope of being allotted a few safe seats that they could carry because they enjoyed the support of their major-party ally. Such “shrub” deputies are hard to pin down and identify once they get elected to parliament. They join the group of unaffiliated deputies because their respective splinter parties are not strong enough to be allowed to form parliamentary groups of their own. An already cited article written in October  lists  “others” (unaffiliated deputies) out of a total of . Seventeen of the  were elected as members of the Olive Tree Alliance.20 It would probably take a paragraph or more to list the splinter “shrubs” to which these unaffiliated deputies belong. One shrub that was rather easy to identify was the Green Party, part of the Olive Tree Alliance, which obtained . percent of the votes and twenty-one seats in , but is not listed in the cited article dealing with the members of the Chamber in . Probably, those missing Green deputies are to be found among the “other” members of the Olive Tree Alliance. In February , former premier Romano Prodi formed yet another shrub party by creating the Democrats for the Olive Tree. Prodi’s intent was to strengthen the center-left coalition, but critics feared that his initiative would further fragment the left. The Northern League In the local and regional elections of , a relative newcomer appeared on the Italian political scene: the Lombard League, which polled  percent of the votes in Lombardy (equivalent to . percent of the votes in Italy). Far outnumbering similar regional leagues elsewhere in northern Italy, the Lombard League stood for a much greater measure of regional autonomy, restrictions on immigration from foreign countries, and an end to the colonization by southern Italians of the bureaucratic field services in northern Italy. It also demanded that the northern regions have much greater control over their own revenue base, instead of being taxed heavily by the central government to finance allegedly unproductive public investments in the south. In the elections of , the Lombard League formed an electoral bloc—the Northern League, in which it was the preponderant element—with several other regional leagues in northern and north central Italy. Its showing in the elections of  was little short of spectacular for a new competitor in Italian party

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politics. With . percent of the votes in Italy as a whole, the Northern League received over  percent of the votes in Lombardy, replacing the DC as the leading party in a number of Lombard provinces. And it won no less than fifty-five seats in the Chamber of Deputies. In short it had become the fourth largest party in Italian party politics. The Northern League made further progress at the local level when the PSI and the DC, hitherto dominant in Lombard local government, were brought to their knees by the wave of scandals and resulting indictments that captured public attention in  and . In local elections held in several Lombard provincial capitals in , the Northern League out polled both the DC and the PSI. In September , Marco Formentini of the Northern League was elected mayor of Milan, a city where the PSI had held sway for the past twenty years. In the  elections, after considerable vacillation, the volatile leader of the Northern League, Umberto Bossi, formed an electoral alliance in northern Italy with Berlusconi’s Forza Italia! and with the Christian Democratic Center. In the elections of – March , the Northern League once again polled . percent of the votes cast in Italy, but about  percent of the votes cast in Northern Italy, where the great bulk of its strength was concentrated. Thanks to its electoral alliance with Forza Italia!, Northern League candidates, designated to represent the electoral alliance entitled the Pole of Liberty and receiving the support of their electoral allies, won far more single-memberdistrict seats in the Chamber of Deputies than would have been possible under a system of proportional representation: , as compared to  for Forza Italia! and its CDC allies, and  for the National Alliance. After the elections, both the Northern League and the National Alliance of former neo-Fascists entered the Berlusconi cabinet. This center-right coalition, however, was internally divided from the start. Bossi disliked and distrusted both Berlusconi and the former neo-Fascists. He accused Berlusconi of not taking sufficiently bold steps toward a federal or quasi-federal Italy, of making some very questionable appointments to the regulatory boards charged with supervising the public sector in the field of mass communications, and of attempting to interfere with the way the judiciary was handling the investigations of corrupt practices by politicians and business leaders. As for the former neo-Fascists, Bossi claimed that they were still untrustworthy because of their past connections with fascism. He also wanted privatization to be stepped up and was antagonized by the National Alliance’s insistence that the public sector remain quite strong, in order that it might continue to transfer subsidies and public contracts to the south. As a result of Bossi’s attitudes, the Berlusconi cabinet was driven by internal conflict, and Berlusconi resigned as prime minister, after bitterly denouncing Bossi, in December . In , the Northern League obtained . percent of the votes but only fifty-nine seats in the Chamber of Deputies. Its percentage of the total vote had risen from . percent; but it had won far fewer seats ( instead of ) because it was no longer part of an alliance with other center-right parties. Consequently, its candidates in single-member districts could no longer count on the help and support of the center-right alliance. By late , the Northern League still had fifty-eight members in the Chamber of Deputies: less than half of its – delegation.21

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During the campaign preceding the April  elections, the Northern League had adopted a more militant and dramatic posture. Instead of speaking of autonomy and a federal Italy, its leader, Umberto Bossi, spoke of the establishment of a northern state of Padania, which would secede from the rest of Italy and proclaim its independence. Lacking allies, the Northern League expected to lose many seats in parliament—as, in fact, it did. But it expected to play a balance-of-power role, because it believed that neither the center-left nor the center-right would be able to command a majority in a deadlocked parliament. These hopes were doomed to disappointment. Facing an unanticipated center-left majority in the new parliament, the Northern League launched a series of mass demonstrations along the entire length of the Po River. Mass participation in these demonstrations fell far short of expectations, however, and in the next few years the power and prestige of the Northern League visibly waned. It suffered losses in local and provincial elections (for example, it lost the mayoralty election in Milan); and its strength was increasingly confined to the middle-sized cities and small towns of the Alpine foothills. The big metropolitan areas of the north were increasingly out of its reach. Under these circumstances, Bossi had to modify his message. In early , independence was abandoned as an immediate goal and presented as a long-range possibility, to be preceded by experimentation with a federal system under which the north would enjoy a high degree of fiscal autonomy. So, temporarily, the threat from the Northern League has diminished in intensity; but the grievances it expressed have not abated, and the possibility of a massive resurgence of northern separatism should not be discounted.22 Forza Italia! Forza Italia! (Go, Italy!) is an entirely new addition to the Italian party system. Unlike the other parties discussed in this chapter, it was created only a few months before the  election as the personal political vehicle of one man—Silvio Berlusconi, head of a vast private media, publishing, real estate, and retail merchandising empire held together by a giant holding company, Fininvest, and also owner of the Milan soccer club. (Ironically, Berlusconi had been a close friend of the former PSI prime minister, Bettino Craxi, who is under indictment for his involvement in the “Kickback City” scandals.) Alarmed by the victory of the left bloc against a demoralized and discredited right center, all too often represented by neo-Fascist candidates, in the municipal elections of  December  Berlusconi decided to launch his own party in order to pick up votes from former Christian Democrats and former Socialists. With the aid of his media properties, he created a network of about , Forza Italia! clubs with about  million members.23 These clubs were established in order to give Berlusconi a base of popular support and were not really designed to exercise policymaking or control functions or to practice internal democracy. Unlike the uninspiring and rather pedestrian platform of the born-again moderate leftists of the PDS, Forza Italia! presented the disillusioned Italian electorate with a series of right-wing populist appeals. It promised, not austerity, but a “new Italian miracle,’’ tax cuts and a single income tax bracket at  percent, reductions in the deficit, privatization

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of health care and pensions resulting in lower costs and higher benefits, a million new jobs, and a quasi-presidential system resembling the system of the French Fifth Republic. In short, it offered new vistas rather than the humdrum moderate formulas put forth by the PDS.24 In the elections of , Forza Italia! obtained  percent of the votes cast for proportional representation candidates in the Chamber of Deputies (including . percent cast for the Christian Democratic Center) and a total of ninety-seven seats (thirtytwo additional seats were allotted to the Christian Democratic Center candidates who were allowed to represent the Forza Italia! slate in far more than their proportionate share of single-member districts). As a result of the  elections, in which Forza Italia! ’s  percent represented a plurality of the votes cast, Berlusconi was asked by President Scalfaro to form a cabinet. The Berlusconi cabinet, like most of the Italian cabinets that preceded it, was never a united team. Two of its most important component parties, the Northern League and the National Alliance, were in constant conflict with each other. Umberto Bossi, the leader of the Northern League, sniped continually at Berlusconi and his policies from a vantage point outside the cabinet. And Berlusconi himself proved to be a disappointing and vacillating leader, unable to meet the far-reaching expectations he had aroused during the election campaign of March . Also, only a few months after taking office, he came under judicial investigation for bribery and conflict of interest involving his vast private holdings of which he had failed to divest himself. During Berlusconi’s seven months in office, he attempted unsuccessfully to restrict the power of the judiciary to conduct investigations into political and business corruption and to place suspected culprits under preventive detention. Because the ongoing investigations were affecting his own Fininvest holding company and were implicating his own brother in a bribery scandal, Berlusconi’s actions aroused a great deal of suspicion regarding his motives. His long-delayed budgetary proposals for deep cuts in health and pension benefits resulted in a storm of popular protest and had to be watered down. And he provoked widespread criticism by his efforts to intervene in the internal management of RAI, the state-owned broadcasting organization, and of the Bank of Italy. Local elections in November  for mayors and councils in cities and towns in various parts of Italy—elections involving about  million voters—revealed a very adverse voter reaction to the Berlusconi cabinet. Forza Italia!, which had polled  percent of the votes in the general elections of March , and had risen to . percent of the votes in the elections to the European parliament in June , dropped to a mere . percent in the local elections of November . The Northern League also suffered a loss of popularity, but of a steadier and more continuous nature: from . percent in March to . percent in June to . percent in November.25 Under the pressure of judicial investigations, economic and political unrest, and constant bickering among members of his unwieldy coalition, Berlusconi finally resigned as prime minister in December . President Scalfaro refused to accede to his request for a dissolution of parliament and resulting new elections. Instead, after several weeks of consultation, Lamberto Dini, an independent who had served as Minister of the Treasury in the Berlusconi cabinet, and who had

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been the second-ranking administrator in the Bank of Italy, was designated to form a cabinet. The fall of the Berlusconi cabinet, and the strong possibility that Berlusconi might eventually be indicted and even convicted for corrupt practices, raised serious questions about the future of Forza Italia! This party, the personal vehicle of Silvio Berlusconi, had been compared to the Gaullist Party in France. But the Gaullists had been led by an incorruptible and untarnished military hero—a far cry from a business magnate like Berlusconi, whose actions and associations had been far from immaculate. It appeared conceivable that the decline of Christian Democracy in – might be followed by a similarly dramatic decline of Forza Italia! The decline came, but it was not as far-reaching as many had anticipated. In the  elections, Forza Italia! suffered a very slight setback. It garnered . percent of the votes (as compared to  percent in ) and it won  seats in the Chamber of Deputies (as compared to  in ). The gain in seats was illusory: it simply represented a number of single-member districts that had been allotted to Northern League candidates by the Pole of Liberty Alliance in , and were now allotted by the same alliance to Forza Italia! candidates. But with the defection of the Northern League, the center-right alliance had suffered a clear-cut defeat and the center-left had come to power. Yet, Berlusconi remained the leader of Forza Italia!, which was basically his own personal vehicle, and continued to survive his problems with the judiciary (in  he was convicted three times for bribery and fraud, but shrugged off the convictions as politically motivated, and remained at liberty pending a long and tortuous appellate procedure) and with his increasingly indebted business empire (Fininvest), for which he was frequently seeking special privileges from the Italian state. For all his faults, Berlusconi retains the support of the middle-class masses that backed him in  and again in . With regard to his convictions in court, the polls show that about one-third of the electorate express hostility to him based on his fraudulent record, one-third feel he is unjustly accused, and one-third are neutral and believe the judges may be going too far. While the Northern League is a populist middle-class party appealing to the industrialized small towns and small businessmen of the Alpine foothills, Berlusconi’s Forza Italia! is a populist middle-class party appealing to the great metropolitan areas of the north. So far, at least, Forza Italia! is still the strongest element in Italy’s divided center-right opposition. The “Post-Fascists”: National Alliance (AN, formerly MSI) From the late s until , the neo-Fascists of the MSI were little more than a minor irritant on the right flank of Christian Democracy. They reached their peak in , with . percent of the votes, but usually polled between  and  percent. In , they received . percent of the votes. Their positions on public issues seemed conventionally ultraconservative. They opposed national economic planning and restrictions on free enterprise, they favored repeal of the divorce law in the  referendum campaign, and they advocated heavy defense spending. Nevertheless, their commitment to a corporate state

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based on functional representation, and the undercurrent of violence that seemed to lurk behind their speeches and their party rituals, placed them under much suspicion. The other Italian parties generally treated them as untouchables, and their external backing for a coalition cabinet was considered tainted and unacceptable. Between  and , under the leadership of Gianfranco Fini, a serious effort was made to transform the MSI into a mainstream conservative party, committed to the maintenance of liberty and democracy, and soft pedaling, though never completely repudiating, the fascist past. While some diehards still utter racist and fascist statements, Fini himself has rejected anti-Semitism, has said that fascism belongs to the past, and has projected a moderate and reasonable image. His party has advocated a centralized Italy (rejecting Bossi’s federalism); a unified national health service; a revamped pension system but with adequate safety nets to protect the neediest cases; a reformed policy of public investment in the south (again, contrary to the demands of the Northern League that such investment be drastically reduced); and the retention of the big public corporations that have conducted investment programs in the south (disagreeing with both Bossi and Berlusconi on this score). With regard to Europe, Fini supports NATO and the European Union. But there is one note of familiar nostalgia: the National Alliance favors renegotiating with Slovenia the status of the Istrian peninsula, which was annexed by Yugoslavia after World War II.26 The National Alliance’s new model message more than doubled in  the votes cast for the MSI in . In , with the collapse of the patronage-nourished DC machine in the south, the National Alliance received . percent of the votes and  seats in the Chamber of Deputies (. percent and  seats in ). It also was allotted six portfolios in the Berlusconi cabinet (the MSI had never been admitted to any cabinet). In the  elections, it continued to advance in terms of votes (. percent) but lost some seats ( in ,  in ) because of the Northern League’s defection from the Pole of Liberty. Since , Fini has steered an ever more moderate course. He has worked closely with D’Alema on the Bicameral Commission for constitutional reform; he has disavowed Mussolini and has edged the younger firebrands of fascist leanings out of the National Alliance (some of these extremists ran their own Social Movement Tricolored Flame [MSFT] list in  and polled only . percent of the vote); he has come to support privatization and Italy’s entry into the euro zone; he has softened his stand on immigration; and he has sought to identify with foreign conservative parties like the Gaullists and the British Conservatives, rather than with fascist parties like Le Pen’s National Front in France.27 Thus, it would appear that, whatever Fini’s ultimate objectives may be, his “post-Fascist” party has attained a modicum of respectability and credibility among many Italian political leaders and a sizable minority of Italian voters, especially in the south. The Electoral System and Voting Behavior Until , members of the lower house of parliament, the Chamber of Deputies, were elected by a list system of proportional representation from multimember districts. The number of seats awarded to a party in an electoral district was arrived at by dividing that party’s total vote by an electoral quotient (total number of seats + ). The remainders re-

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sulting from this operation (if a party received no seats, its entire vote was treated as a remainder) were then sent to Rome to be totaled up for each party in the Single National College, which then proceeded to allocate several dozen additional seats on the basis of proportional representation.28 A system of preferential voting gave the voters a chance, not only to support their party list, but also to express their preferences among the names on the party list. A more complex system, relying mostly but not entirely on proportional representation, was employed in electing members of the upper house, the Senate. As a result of this electoral system, each party obtained a share of parliamentary seats roughly proportional to its share of the total votes. Moreover, under the distribution of remainders for the Chamber of Deputies by the Single National College, even a party with between  and  percent of the vote might be able to win a few seats. The Italian electoral system had some important consequences for the party system. First, as we have seen, it favored the proliferation and survival of splinter parties with as little as  to  percent of the vote, since even such tiny parties were able to win a few seats. Nor was there anything like the German  percent rule to block splinter parties from entering parliament. Second, the Italian electoral system prevented any landslide in parliamentary elections, and consequently made it all but impossible for one party to get a majority in parliament. Under proportional representation, small shifts in voting behavior only resulted in equally small shifts in legislative representation. Third, the system of preferential voting encouraged factionalism, by giving minority factions in a party a chance to appeal to party voters over the heads of party leaders. It also encouraged corruption by compelling candidates on the same party lists to launch very expensive personal campaigns for preference votes and to solicit funds from private interests for that purpose. After Italian voters in April  had approved a referendum proposal to elect threefourths of the members of the Senate from single-member districts by plurality vote (firstpast-the-post), a parliamentary committee prepared a bill to adopt a plurality system for each of the two houses of parliament. The committee presented its proposal on  August , and it was adopted by the parliament later that year. Because the current election law is extremely complex, no attempt will be made here to describe the law in any great detail. Rather, the fundamental characteristics of the law will be briefly stated, as well as the effect the law has had thus far on the Italian party system. About three-fourths of the members of each house are elected from small singlemember constituencies with election by plurality. The remaining one-fourth of the members in each house are elected from somewhat larger multimember districts on the basis of proportional representation. In order to be awarded any of the proportional representation seats set aside for the Chamber of Deputies, however, a party must poll at least  percent of the total votes cast for the proportional representation lists nationwide. Yet a hideously complex device known as the Scorporo renders this electoral hurdle easier for a small party to overcome. In calculating the votes of party lists at the national level, each party list is penalized a varying number of votes (determined by a formula which need not detain us here) for every single-member district it has carried. Thus, the larger, more successful parties are penalized somewhat, mitigating the damaging effect the  percent rule is supposed to have on smaller parties.

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The effect of the  law, combined with the public revulsion engendered by “Kickback City,” was to eliminate the three minor center parties (the Social Democrats, the Republicans, and the Liberals) that had played a supporting role in so many coalition cabinets. Even the Greens, the Network, the PSI, and the Democratic Alliance were unable to scale the  percent barrier. Nevertheless, these latter parties were able to win single-member seats by taking advantage of the law’s provision for the formation of electoral alliances. By entering an electoral alliance (the Pole of Liberty) with Berlusconi’s Forza Italia!, the Northern League, and the Christian Democratic Center were rewarded by being allowed to have their candidates run as sole standard-bearers for the Pole of Liberty in a number of single-member districts. In this way, they were able to “win” more single-member districts than would have been possible had they contested those districts without allies. As for the Greens, the Network, the PSI, and the Democratic Alliance, they were able to achieve the same goal (of avoiding utter extinction) by entering the Progressive Alliance, led by the PDS. Even Communist Refoundation was able to carry twenty-nine singlemember districts by representing the Progressive Alliance, while the PDS obligingly stood aside. For this reason, the move to single-member districts with plurality voting, did not result in an early transition to a two-party system.29 How has the current electoral law affected or altered the consequences that the previous electoral law entailed for the Italian party system? Not as much as was hoped. For instance, the previous electoral law favored the proliferation of splinter parties. Under the current law, such parties can still gain entry to parliament by forming alliances with major parties. The previous law prevented landslides in parliamentary elections and made it virtually impossible for a single party to win a parliamentary majority. The current law permits landslides, but they are landslides for electoral alliances rather than single parties; and the parties in the Berlusconi alliance were soon at loggerheads and generated gridlock. One major achievement of the current law has been to eliminate preferential voting, thus making it much more difficult for minority factions to appeal to party voters over the heads of party leaders. Yet, single-member districts may conceivably reintroduce factionalism through the back door, and may also (as in the United States) make candidates dependent on lobbies rather than party machines. Another achievement of the current law seemed, at first glance, to be to encourage a kind of moderate pluralism, with centerleft and center-right alliances alternating in power: a bipolar system. But the bargaining power of splinter parties has been enhanced: their refusal to join an alliance can actually cost the alliance a number of crucial single-member districts. Thus, the MFST, with only . percent of the vote, cost the Pole of Liberty several highly competitive seats simply by running its own separate candidates. It has been suggested that the current election law has conferred greater political weight on smaller and medium-sized parties, and that this results in a serious lack of cohesion and stability within the coalitions that emerge from the electoral process. And the number of parties remains quite high. The party system is still fragmented.30 Because the current electoral law was generally regarded as unsatisfactory and provisional at the time of its passage in , it was considered probable that a new election law

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would be enacted before very long. So far this has not happened. The chief obstacle has been a desire on the part of the strategically placed smaller- and medium-sized parties to keep the present system because it guarantees their survival and increases their clout. Such parties as Communist Refoundation, the Northern League, the Popular Party, and Cossiga’s Democratic Union for the Republic (UDR) played a leading role in opposing a referendum proposal to scrap the rule whereby  percent of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies are assigned on the basis of proportional representation.31 The proposal obtained a majority in the referendum but failed because of insufficient turnout. Voting patterns in Italy have been based, to a considerable degree, on traditional cleavages of a social, economic, or religious nature. The prime example of a socioeconomic cleavage has been, of course, the ever-present factor of social class. Before the political earthquake of the s, the Communists had a plurality of the working-class vote, with substantial minorities being polled by the Socialists and Christian Democrats. Among middle-class voters, the Christian Democrats had a majority of the votes cast by shopkeepers and artisans, and at least a plurality among business and professional people, with the Liberals and neo-Fascists being their chief competitors. The Communists and Socialists had substantial success in penetrating one stratum of middle-class voters: white-collar workers and lower-level civil servants. Social class also served to divide the agricultural electorate, with large landowners supporting Liberals and neo-Fascists, for the most part; medium and small landowners voting overwhelmingly for the Christian Democrats; and sharecroppers and farm laborers backing the Communists and Socialists. Other cleavages reduced the impact of social class. One such division was religious practice as opposed to anti-clericalism. The Christian Democrats polled a substantial share of the working-class vote, especially in devoutly Catholic areas in the northeast. Communist and Socialist successes among a substantial minority of middle-class voters in north-central Italy could be explained partly in terms of the anticlericalism of regions like Emilia-Romagna. Region was another line of demarcation. Regional voting traditions cut across class lines in influencing voting behavior. As we saw, however, such regional traditions may have simply been expressing or reinforcing religious cleavages. Finally, union membership may have been a more reliable factor than mere social class in predisposing voters to cast their ballots for leftist parties. These traditional patterns of the s and s have been undergoing some major changes. For one thing the rural exodus has uprooted great numbers of transplanted small landowners, sharecroppers, and farm laborers from their traditional political and social networks and often from their home regions as well. Second, the rise of the service sector has injected a new element of ambiguity into the Italian class structure. Third, families and social networks such as the church and its lay organizations seem to be losing their ability to socialize young voters into traditional patterns of voting behavior. As a result, more and more voters are remaking their choices less on the basis of traditional party identification (vote of appartenenza or belonging), and more on the basis of the parties’ positions on the issues (vote of opinion). At the same time, the number and variety of voters who cast ballots on the basis of satisfaction or frustration of their personal needs by the incumbents (vote of exchange) is growing, especially now that the Christian Demo-

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crats have lost their monopoly over sources of patronage. While the urban middle classes are most likely to cast a “vote of opinion,” the “vote of exchange” characterizes the precariously employed service workers of the urban subproletariat.32 Some early assessments of voting patterns in  indicated more stability on the left than on the right. The PDS, like the PCI before it, continued to be the dominant party in the four regions of north-central Italy: Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, Umbria, and the Marches; but the defection of most PSI voters reduced the strength of the left even in these historic strongholds. The PDS also showed a great deal of strength in parts of the south: Campania, Basilicata, and Calabria. The Northern League was particularly strong in Lombardy and the Veneto, but Forza Italia! carried most of the north and also led in Sardinia and Sicily (where it was rumored to have Mafia support). In large parts of the continental south (especially Lazio, Abruzzi, and Puglia), the National Alliance led the field. Thus, the chief beneficiaries of Socialist and Christian Democratic collapse have been the National Alliance and—to a lesser degree—the PDS in the south; and Forza Italia! and—to a lesser degree—the Northern League in the north.33 After the  elections, a number of observers pointed out that the Northern League was becoming the dominant force in northeastern Italy, especially eastern Lombardy and the Veneto, in an area of flourishing small and medium industry and bustling small cities. In this area, which was once known as the “white” (i.e., devoutly Catholic) northeast, and in which the Christian Democratic Party had once enjoyed hegemony, the Northern League appealed increasingly to all classes and segments of the population. On the other hand, Forza Italia! was outstripping the Northern League in the big metropolitan centers of the north, in a more competitive political milieu with many service workers. The old class alignments were losing their hold in the north.34 It is much too early to speak of a permanent party realignment. But the deeply rooted class and regional allegiances of the s, s, and early s seem to have been seriously weakened in Italy and other parts of the Western world, as the postindustrial age brings social and class disintegration in its wake. Pressure Groups The Italian interest-group system has both traditional and modern features. An example of the kind of interest group that one finds quite frequently in developing countries is the anomic group in the form of more or less spontaneous violent demonstrations. The –  riots in Reggio Calabria, to protest the designation of Catanzaro to be the capital of the region of Calabria, are a case in point. Also, nonassociational groups—groups that articulate their demands on an ad hoc basis without setting up a formal public organization— are quite common in Italy. Examples would be the various informal patron-client networks. At the same time, like other West European countries, Italy has a system of well-organized associational interest groups—labor confederations, farm organizations, employers’ associations, and so on—that operate continuously with the aid of professional staffs. The Italian interest-group system since World War II has borne some similarity to the French system, while differing in some significant ways. Like France, Italy has had an

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ideologically divided labor movement: there was a Communist-dominated labor confederation (the CGIL), which contained some Socialist members; a labor confederation (the UIL) in which Socialists and Republicans were the prevalent element; and a Catholicdominated labor confederation (the CISL). The confederations have survived the disappearance of the parties that used to dominate them. In both countries, too, anomic group behavior (riots and demonstrations) has been somewhat more acceptable in the eyes of public opinion than has been the case in Northern Europe. (To be sure, anomic group behavior is beginning to flourish also in Britain and Germany.) There have also been some notable contrasts. Because the Italian parliament influences policymaking so much more than does the parliament of the Fifth Republic, Italian interest groups have expended much more effort in the legislative arena. They have found the powerful standing committees, with their ability to enact minor bills directly into law, a most rewarding site for their endeavors. Many interest groups, going beyond mere lobbying, have tried to get their officials elected to parliament on some party’s list. These socalled parentela groups have had very close official ties with a political party and would openly act as organized factions within that party in parliament. They can be contrasted to the clientela groups, which are regarded by government agencies as sole official representatives of a given set of interests. An example of a clientela group would be the Italian General Confederation of Industry (Confindustria); an example of parentela groups would be Catholic Action in the Christian Democratic Party. With the disappearance of the formerly dominant mass parties like the DC and the PCI, the parentela groups are having to strike out on their own. Agricultural Interest Groups Because Italian family farms have tended to be much smaller on the average than French or German family farms, the Italian farm organization that speaks for medium and large landowners, the Italian General Confederation of Agriculture (Confagricoltura), has represented only a minority of Italian agricultural proprietors. A much more powerful farm organization has been the National Confederation of Direct Cultivators (Coldiretti), whose members mostly live on smaller farms. Coldiretti has been a parentela group directly affiliated with the Christian Democrats, while a much smaller rival organization, the National Peasants’ Alliance (ANC), has been sponsored by the Communist Party. By virtue of its control over the Federation of Agricultural Consortiums (Federconsorzi), a quasi-public organization that furnished credits, subsidies, storage facilities, and other services to farmers, Coldiretti has been one of Italy’s most powerful pressure groups. In addition to organizations speaking for landowners and peasant proprietors, there are three separate federations of farm laborers, associated with the three major labor confederations. Similarly, there are several competing associations of agricultural cooperatives. Most of these farm organizations have in the past been under either Communist or Christian Democratic leadership. What appears to have taken place in the past thirty years has been a remarkable debilitation of Italian agricultural pressure groups. This trend is comprehensible, given the steady movement of agricultural emigrants to cities and towns. With the farm population

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rapidly diminishing, groups such as Coldiretti have suffered severe loss of clout. Farm organizations are still powerful, but the curve plotting their influence definitely slopes downward. Among other manifestations of relative weakness has been the inability of southern citrus growers to get the kind of protection from the European Community that is liberally accorded north European (and north Italian) producers of grain, beef, and dairy products. Labor Interest Groups Italian organized labor has been weakened in the past by its division into the Italian General Confederation of Labor (CGIL, Communist-dominated), the Italian Confederation of Workers’ Unions (the Catholic CISL), and the Italian Union of Labor (UIL, Socialists and Republicans). Also, Italian unions have been chronically weak in membership recruitment, dues collections, and economic resources to support possible strikes. Lack of leadership at the plant level has been another disability. Heavy unemployment in the post–World War II era weakened the bargaining power of Italian unions and resulted in persistently low wages for Italian workers. It also resulted, it must be admitted, in lower prices and other competitive advantages for Italian exports, thus encouraging the expansion of the Italian economy. After , new tendencies developed within the Italian labor movement. First, the three labor confederations manifested increasing independence from their respective parties. Second, the three labor confederations showed a marked tendency to cooperate with each other on many issues. Third, the unions no longer allowed their officials to hold a parliamentary seat and a trade union office simultaneously. Fourth, labor became temporarily much more powerful in the s and the CGIL, CISL, and UIL confederations were much more militant in pushing their demands. In fact, at times, particularly in – when the Communist Party was supporting austerity, the Catholic unions made more far-reaching demands than the Communist unions. Labor’s increased intransigence reflected pressure from newly employed southern migrants and semiskilled workers, who demanded more rapid progress to make up for past privations. Developments in the trade union field were by no means marked by linear progression, however. After greater expansion, intransigence, and decentralization of authority to the plant level in –, there was a movement toward a decline of trade union membership, recentralization of union authority at the national level, and a more cooperative relationship with employers and with the state during the s. The problem of selling Italian products in increasingly competitive export markets, the impact of free collective bargaining in improving the lot of skilled workers while raising economic hurdles against the employment of marginal workers, and the rising burden of inflation greatly weakened the unions and induced union leaders to moderate their demands. The January  agreement by the noncommunist unions to accept a slight downward modification of the system of wage indexation (the so-called scala mobile, or escalator, that ties wages to the price index) was a straw in the wind. The failure of a communist attempt to challenge the government’s settlement with the noncommunist unions by appealing to the voters in a referendum, was a clear indication of labor’s diminished influence. In July , the Am-

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ato cabinet was able to reach an agreement with the three principal labor confederations and the representatives of organized business, to abolish the system of wage indexation altogether. This achievement marked the beginning of a new and more positive decade in labor-government relations. What seemed in the late s to be a dismal prospect for organized labor has improved considerably over the past decade. In –, the Amato and Ciampi cabinets, in which nonpolitical technocrats played a prominent role, showed a new willingness to bring the unions into the decision-making process as equal partners. The ongoing disintegration of the major political parties made this kind of close cooperation more feasible, for neither the labor confederations nor the cabinet could any longer be viewed as mere mouthpieces for the party machines. The improved climate in government-labor relations was temporarily interrupted in , during the short-lived Berlusconi cabinet. When Berlusconi attempted to push through pension reform without eliciting sufficient input from the labor confederations, the unions launched a wave of massive protest demonstrations that helped to bring down the government. But when the Dini cabinet took office in early , the unions showed their willingness to collaborate closely with Dini (another nonpolitical figure) in drawing up a plan for pension reform. Thus, the position of organized labor in Italy has improved substantially. The three labor confederations are much more inclined to cooperate with each other than in the past (they are frequently referred to as the Triple Alliance), now that they are no longer party-dominated. Their moderation, and their willingness to accept industrial, economic, and social change as long as they are given a major voice in shaping that change, has made the government willing to use them as virtual coalition partners. Their greater readiness to consult their rank-and-file at the plant level through a newly established system of works councils has made it easier for them to obtain rank-and-file support for whatever bargains they strike with the government. Their new authority and credibility has induced the center-left government to use them as unofficial coalition partners to counterbalance the extreme demands of Communist Refoundation. To be sure, economic hardships stemming from Italy’s entry into the euro zone could eventually spoil this promising picture.35 Business Interest Groups In the first few decades after World War II, Italian business had several leading characteristics. There was a higher degree of concentration and less distrust of big business than in France. Also, small business lacked the autonomy and self-assertiveness of the big firms of the Genoa-Milan-Turin industrial triangle. Confindustria, representing the great majority of industrial firms, tended to speak for big-business interests. Confindustria had a classic lobbying relationship with the Christian Democratic Party. Its efforts to transform this clientela relationship into a parentela bond, however, were not successful. It was also unsuccessful in preserving a united front among Italian employers. Some industrial giants (e.g., Fiat) preferred to pursue their own policies, independent of Confindustria guidance. Far more important was the position taken by the public corporations, which had their own employers’ association, Intersind. While Con-

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findustria tended to be allied with the Liberals and with the right wing of the Christian Democrats, Intersind seemed more inclined toward a kind of Italian New Deal, based on welfare capitalism and social reforms. In this, it had much in common with the Socialists and with the left-wing Christian Democrats. Recent developments have changed the above picture. First, the public-sector enterprises have been pretty thoroughly discredited by their partisan connections and by the gross inefficiency that increasingly reigned in their factories. By the s they had lost the aura of infallibility they had acquired in the s. With the disintegration of the Christian Democratic and Socialist parties in the early s, they were deprived of their principal political allies. Their current situation is perilous: they are the targets of a government privatization campaign that seems likely to dismantle a sizable proportion of the public sector in the next decade or so. Second, Confindustria staged something of a comeback in Italian public opinion in the s, profiting from the backlash against the Hot Autumn of –. Third, small businessmen are playing a much more decisive role in Confindustria. This reflects the economic slump that has hit the traditional heavy industry of the northwest triangle, while medium and small enterprises have brought great prosperity to the central Italian regions of Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, Umbria, and Latium. And finally, Confindustria has become much larger and more heterogeneous; for it has virtually absorbed Intersind, now that the public corporations Intersind represented are threatened with privatization. Catholic Interest Groups: The Church and Its Lay Organizations The Catholic church and various associations of Catholic laypeople have been very active in Italy’s interest group system. As we saw, the Concordat of  had constitutional status and could be altered only by bilateral agreement between church and state or by a formal constitutional amendment; and religion was part of the public educational curriculum. Heavily influential throughout Italian public life, the church intervened openly in Italian domestic politics in the first two decades after World War II. But its intervention tended to diminish in intensity in the s and s under Popes John XXIII and Paul VI. It should also be borne in mind that there have always been factional disputes within the Church regarding the scope and purpose of political intervention. The principal church-sponsored lay organization is Catholic Action, which at its peak had  million members and contains a number of separate groups or branches, such as the Union of Men, the Union of Women, Italian Catholic Action Youth (GIAC), and the Federation of Italian Catholic University Students (FUCI). The president of Catholic Action and the presidents of its component branches are appointed by individual bishops at the diocesan level. In addition to such organizations as Catholic Action, which are directly controlled by the hierarchy, there are Catholic associations set up to pursue specialized nonreligious goals that are not under the tutelage of the hierarchy. These include Coldiretti, the Italian Association of Catholic Schoolteachers (AIMC), and the Christian Association of Italian Workers (ACLI). These organizations have acted as economic and social pressure groups and have not behaved primarily as spokespersons for the church. Since the late s, the influence of the church and its lay organizations has greatly

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diminished. The failure of a referendum campaign to repeal the divorce law (), the more recent failure of a referendum campaign to repeal an abortion law (), and the revision of the Concordat are all indicative of waning clerical influence. It should be noted that some Catholic lay organizations (e.g., the Confederation of Catholic University Students) actually came out in favor of the divorce law. It should also be noted that such associations as ACLI have been steering a more autonomous course: even before the political upheaval of the ls, ACLI cut its formal ties with both Catholic Action and the Christian Democratic Party, though it still maintained a dialogue with the church. Perhaps one reason for the increasingly independent stance adopted by Catholic organizations was their greatly reduced strength, which was itself a symptom of the growing secularization of Italian society. Catholic Action, which had  million members at its peak in the s, was down to , by the late s. ACLI, which had about a million members in the s, had only , in the late s.36 Clearly, Catholic organizations are no longer the dominant, hegemonic force they were in the immediate postwar decades. And there is no longer a single mass Catholic Party to unite and energize these organizations. Nor is such a party being encouraged by the dominant elements in the church, which seem to favor something like the German CDU—a large center party composed of both Catholics and center-right liberals.37 Current Trends: The Advent of Fragmented Pluralism The Italian interest-group system seems, according to some observers, to be moving in the direction of fragmented pluralism: the weakening of old established interest groups speaking for business or labor as a whole, and the rise of a multiplicity of new groups, each expressing a more narrow range of interests and concerns. These groups are now referred to in Italy with the newly accepted term “lobbies,” and like U.S. lobbies, they are concerned only with serving the short-run interests of their members.38 With the disappearance of the clearly defined classes that typified Italian industrial society, the Italian interest-group system could become as unstructured and as incapable of generating constructive leadership as its chaotic counterpart in the United States. And thanks to the trend toward single-member districts, interest groups may come to have a disintegrating and corrupting effect on the party system, thus recreating the U.S. model. And yet, as we have seen, there is strong evidence of a countervailing tendency: the increasing leadership and sense of responsibility being displayed by labor’s Triple Alliance and the growing inclusiveness of Confindustria. Only time and the impact of EMU on the Italian economy and Italian society will determine which tendency will prevail. Notes . See Raphael Zariski, “Italy,” in Western European Party Systems: Trends and Prospects, ed. Peter H. Merkl (New York: Free Press, ), –. . Ibid., , and “The New Parliament,” News from Italy (published by the Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli)  (July ): . See also Robert H. Evans, “The Italian Election of June ,” Italian Journal I, nos.  and  (): . . See Zariski, “Italy,” , and “New Parliament,” . See also “A Comprehensive Report on the  Political Elections: Nine Tables of Statistical Data,” Italian Journal I, nos.  and  (): . . See Giorgio Galli, Il bipartitismo imperfetto (Bologna: Il Mulino, ).

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. See Evans, “Italian Election,” . . For the disastrous effects of the corruption scandals and the Mafia connections on the DC, the PSI, and the minor center parties, see Mario Caciagli, “Italie : vers la Seconde Republique?” Revue française de science politique (April ): –. . Under the new election law of , three-fourths of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies were allocated to single-member districts that could be won by the candidate of a party (or alliance of parties) if he or she obtained a plurality of the votes cast. The other one-fourth were to be distributed on the basis of proportional representation. Since several parties did not run candidates in every single-member district, party voting performance is calculated on the basis of each party’s share of the PR vote. . For the results of the  elections, see Edmondo Berselli, “Solution on the Right: The Evolving Political Scenario,” Italian Journal  (): –; Robert H. Evans, “Italy . . . Quo Vadis?” Italian Journal  (): –; Michael Gallagher, Michael Laver, Peter Mair, Representative Government in Western Europe, d ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, ), –; Mark Gilbert, “Italy Turns Rightwards,” Contemporary Review  (July ): –; and Francesco Sidoti, “The Significance of the Italian Elections,” Parliamentary Affairs  (July ): –. . La repubblica,  March , . . For the results of the  elections, see James L. Newell and Martin Bull, “Party Organizations and Alliances in Italy in the s: A Revolution of Sorts,” in Crisis and Transition in Italian Politics, ed. Martin Bull and Martin Rhodes (London: Frank Cass, ), –, at . . For an analytical account of the process that led to the demise of the PCI and the formation of the PDS, see Leonard Weinberg, The Transformation of Italian Communism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, ). . See Donald L.M. Blackmer, “Continuity and Change in Postwar Italian Communism,” in Communism in Italy and France, ed. Donald L.M. Blackmer and Sidney Tarrow (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ), –. . On the PDS program in , see Evans, “Italy Quo Vadis?” ; and Sidoti, “The Significance of the Italian Elections,” –. . On the PDS Conflict with the PRC, see Stephen Hellmann, “The Italian Left After the  Elections,” in Italian Politics: The Center-Left in Power, ed. Roberto D’Alimonte and David Nelken (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, ), –. . For the seats held by the various parties in the Chamber of Deputies in October , see “Number : Italy Searches for a Government,” The Economist,  October , – at . . See Aldo Di Virgilio, “Electoral alliances: Party identities and coalition games,” European Journal of Political Research  (): –, especially at , . . “Centro sinistra e politica locale,” Il Mulino  (March ): . . See Newell and Bull, “Party Organization and Alliances in Italy in the s,” – at . . “Number : Italy Searches for a Government,” – at . . Ibid., . It should be noted that the  election law, which permits major parties to throw their support to designated candidates of allied splinter parties in single-member districts, makes it very difficult to pinpoint the party affiliation of a sizable minority of deputies. For this reason, even in the same edited work, one can find two articles giving slightly different figures as to the respective number of seats won by each party in the Chamber of Deputies. See Newell and Bull, “Party Organization and Alliances in Italy in the s,”  (whose figures were relied on by this author); and, on the other hand, see Roberto D’Alimonte and Stefano Bartolini, “Electoral Transition and Party System Change in Italy,” Bull and Rhodes, – at . . For some early discussions of the Northern League, see for example, Tom Gallagher, “The Regional Dimension in Italy’s Political Upheaval: Role of the Northern League –,” Government and Opposition  (summer ): –; and Dwayne Woods, “The Crisis of the Italian Party-State and the Rise of the Lombard League,” Telos  (fall ): –. . See Ilvo Diamanti, “The Lega Nord: From Federalism to Secession,” in D’Alimonte and Nelken, –; and Roberto Biorcio, “La Lega Nord e la transizione italiana,” Revista italiana di Scienza Politica  (April ): –. . See Adrian Lyttelton, “Italy: The Triumph of TV,” New York Review ( August ): ; and Vincent R. Tortora, “Italy’s Second Republic,” The New Leader  (– May, ): . . See Evans, “Italy . . . Quo Vadis?” –; and Sidoti, “The Significance of the Italian Elections,” –. . See “Hanging On,” The Economist,  November , –.

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. See Evans, “Italy . . . Quo Vadis?” –; and Sidoti, “The Significance of Italian Elections,” –. . See “Gianfranco Fini: A Nearly Respectable Post-Fascist,” The Economist,  February , . . For a fuller discussion of the Italian electoral system under the pre- electoral law, see Raphael Zariski, Italy: The Politics of Uneven Development (Hinsdale, Ill.: Dryden, ). . On the  election law and its effects, see Evans, “Italy . . . Quo Vadis?” –; and Gallagher, Laver, and Mair, Representative Government in Western Europe, –. . See Stefano Bartolini and Roberto D’Alimonte, “Majoritarian Miracles and the Question of Party System Change,” European Journal of Political Research  (): –, especially – and –. . See Carlo Fusaro, “The Politics of Constitutional Reform in Italy: A Framework for Analysis,” South European Society and Politics  (autumn ): – at –, –; see also “Take It to the People: Referendum in Italy,” The Economist,  February , . . See Arturo Parisi and Gianfranco Pasquino, “Changes in Italian Electoral Behaviour: The Relationship Between Parties and Voters,” in Italy in Transition: Conflict and Consensus, ed. Peter Lange and Sidney Tarrow (London: Frank Cass, ), –. . See Evans, “Italy . . . Quo Vadis?” –. . See Diamanti, “The Lega Nord,” – at –; Biorcio, “La Lega Nord,” –; and Patrizia Messina, “Opposition in Italy in the s: Local Political Cultures and the Northern League,” Government and Opposition,  (autumn ): –. . See Marino Regini and Ida Regalia, “Employers, Unions, and the State: The Resurgence of Concertation in Italy?” in Bull and Rhodes, –; Michael Braun, “The Confederated Trade Unions and the Dini Government: The Grand Return to Neocorporatism?”’ in Italian Politics: The Stalled Transition, ed. Mario Caciagli and David I. Kertzer (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, ), –; and Claudio M. Radaelli and Marcello G. Bruni, “Beyond Charlemagne’s Europe: A Sub-National Examination of Italy within the EMU,” Regional and Federal Studies  (summer ): – at –. . See Gianfranco Pasquino, “Italian Christian Democracy: A Party for All Seasons?” in Lange and Tarrow, Italy in Transition: Conflict and Consensus, –. . See Sandro Magister, “The Church and the End of the Catholic Party,” in Caciagli and Kertzer, –. . See Raphael Zariski, “Italy: The Fragmentation of Power and Its Consequences,” in First World Interest Groups: A Comparative Perspective, ed. Clive S. Thomas (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, ): –.

Chapter 19

How Is Power Used? WE HAVE OBSERVED the sharp divisions of power that existed within the Italian decision-making system before : the coalition cabinets that were split, not only by competing parties, but by competing intraparty factions as well; the parliament that was not really under the unifying tutelage of any cohesive leadership structure or ruling committee; the public corporations that enjoyed a high degree of de facto autonomy. These cleavages within the decision-making apparatus made it difficult to ascertain who, if anyone, was in charge. Reflecting these internal divisions, the policymaking process was itself fragmented and incoherent. Although we have become increasingly aware of the inefficiency and lack of central direction that exist in any policymaking system—including the muchtouted British and American models—Italy seemed to constitute a particularly acute case of poor coordination and lack of harmony. In this chapter, we describe the traditional process of policymaking and policy implementation and then point to some important changes that have apparently taken place within the past decade and especially since .

Policy Formulation The process of policy formulation begins with the initiation of proposals. In any democratic country, proposals are brought to the attention of policymakers by parties, pressure groups, higher civil servants in the bureaucracy, and individual legislators. In Italy, the individual member of parliament was given a comparatively large voice in the process of policy initiation. Italy, in fact, was one of the few Western democracies that placed no restrictions on the introduction of private-member bills in parliament. Nevertheless, even though a majority of the bills introduced in parliament were private-member bills, only a minority of bills passed by parliament had been initiated by individual deputies and senators without some sort of executive sponsorship. So, once the phase of proposal initiation was completed, the executive still emerged as wielding more weight than the legislature in the process of policy formulation. While most bills originated in the ministries, there was strong reason to suspect that parties and pressure groups played a much more important part in initiating legislation than did the bureaucracy per se. It is a well-known fact that Italy lacks a strong bureaucratic tradition, that Italian civil servants tend to be conservative and legalistic in their attitudes and to show little interest in policy innovations. Unlike French higher civil servants, they are unlikely to search for new and controversial solutions to socioeconomic problems.

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The political parties affected the initiation of policy proposals in a number of ways. While they did not bother with the great number of leggini (“little laws,” that is, private or minor bills) initiated by government agencies and individual members of parliament, they did stimulate the introduction of broader bills of general application. And they had other ways of exercising influence. In a broad sense, they had on occasion replaced the cabinet as the source of general policy decisions. Between  and , when the Communist Party was part of the ruling coalition without actually holding ministerial positions, the cabinet was committed to applying a program agreed upon by the parties that supported the ruling coalition. Since these parties included some (like the Communist Party) that were not represented in the cabinet, a particular procedure was followed. The government program was drawn up outside parliament by leaders of the parties committed to supporting the cabinet. The cabinet then adopted it. In effect, the cabinet was simply ratifying decisions adopted by an extraparliamentary conference of party leaders.1 Parties also had a major impact on detailed and specific policy initiatives, even if they did not as parties introduce vast numbers of proposed leggini in parliament. There developed, especially after the opening to the left in the early s, a tendency to allocate policymaking positions in various executive and administrative agencies to the various political parties supporting the cabinet. Before the s, it was almost invariably the Christian Democrats who received patronage in the form of such decisional posts. After the opening to the left, the Socialists and the other allies of Christian Democracy were increasingly successful in obtaining a significant share of strategic jobs. The distributive spending decisions made by such government agencies were in effect made by the political parties that participated in managing the agencies. What had changed since the s was that a Christian Democratic-dominated spoils system had been broadened to include other parties, with pieces of the action distributed on a quota basis.2 In addition to political parties, Italian pressure groups were responsible for initiating many proposals that ministries adopted as their own. One reason for the accentuated role of pressure groups was that the Italian bureaucracy was neither willing nor able to generate many proposals on its own. This was partly caused by the inadequacy of the research facilities available to the bureaucracy and to parliament. Both the bureaucracy and parliament were unusually dependent on pressure groups for information and expertise. Once a proposal had been initiated, the ministry involved engaged in a long process of consultation with affected interests. Each ministry had an advisory council representing the various clientela groups with which the ministry dealt. Moreover, an intricate system of cabinet committees was supposed to keep ministers informed about what their colleagues were doing or planning to do. But there were gaps in this consultation process, and very often interested groups and agencies were not kept informed, and ministries were unaware of each other’s projects. The complaint was often voiced that there was no adequate coordination of the various policy proposals initiated by government agencies. The great number of cabinet committees made for a functional decentralization of policy. Each cabinet committee had its own restricted sphere of public policy in which it all too often acted as final arbiter; the cabinet, supposedly the supreme organ of policy coordination, was too large and too in-

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ternally divided to perform this function. As a result, many bills came before the cabinet without adequate notice and caught ministers by surprise; meetings were called suddenly with much the same effect; minutes were sketchy and incomplete; and there was no regular exchange of information among cabinet members. In short, the cabinet did not maintain adequate control over policy formulation.3 In the absence of effective cabinet surveillance, there were few real limitations on the activities of Italy’s various executive agencies and public corporations. Many of their decisions involved the awarding of grants or contracts or loans and required no action by the legislature. The Office of the Prime Minister exercised some oversight over policy formulation but was in no position routinely to block initiatives of which it disapproved. Some checks on excessive spending could be imposed by the Ministry of the Treasury and the governor of the Bank of Italy by regulating the cash reserves required of Italian banks, thus encouraging or curtailing borrowing or lending. But the Bank of Italy, for all the technocratic expertise of its governor, had not been as independent as many observers assumed. The Administrative Council of the bank, which chose the new governor, was made up of the incumbent governor and fifteen members, of whom twelve were nominated by an assembly of banks and credit agencies that held Bank of Italy stock. The governor was responsible, then, to Italian banking interests, but these interests in turn had been partly under the influence of Christian Democratic-controlled public corporations such as the Institute of Industrial Reconstruction (IRI).4 The policies pursued by the Bank of Italy in the s and s had the effect of favoring business while simultaneously strengthening the position of Christian Democracy. With the opening to the left in the s, the Bank of Italy loosened controls to a degree that encouraged large-scale wage increases—a policy designed to retain Socialist support for the new center-left cabinet formula. This was in accordance with the views of Christian Democratic factions committed to the opening to the left, factions powerfully entrenched in the public corporations that exercised a significant influence on the Italian banking sector and consequently on the Bank of Italy. Apart from the credit and monetary restraints imposed by the Ministry of the Treasury and the Bank of Italy, there was no effective check within the executive branch on the process of policy formulation. The cabinet did not serve as a reliable gatekeeper preventing the introduction of bills, which did not enjoy general support within the executive branch, because the executive branch did not speak with one voice. In its divisiveness and lack of coherence, it bore more resemblance to the U.S. executive branch than to the executive branch of a model parliamentary system. Some executive and administrative agencies had more clout than others (just as a feudal system has greater and lesser feudal lords), but no single committee or institution was clearly in charge.5 As we have seen, numerous policy proposals—such as those involving investments, grants, and loans undertaken by the public corporations and other government agencies— did not need approval by parliament. It was sufficient for them to secure the approval of the relevant supervisory ministry (often, in the past, the recently abolished Ministry of State Holdings) or of the entire cabinet, approval that was usually forthcoming. The pres-

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Vote for Conservative Parties (percentage in most recent legislative election) .

France

.

Germany Sweden United Kingdom

. . .

United States Canada

.

ident of the Chamber of Deputies or the president of the Senate assigned policy proposals that did go the parliamentary route in the form of bills to a standing committee. He or she would instruct the committee to report the bill back to the floor in sede referente with its recommendations, or to enact the bill into law in sede deliberante. Whichever path was chosen, the committee stage was the crucial stage in the life of a bill. Many controversial bills never emerged from committee. In fact, the standing committees, by preventing bills from reaching the floor for a vote, spared the executive branch much embarrassment by sidetracking measures the executive organs did not support wholeheartedly but were afraid not to sponsor. If the in sede referente procedure was followed and if the bill was reported to the floor, the Conference of Presidents (heads of parliamentary party groups) decided the bill’s place on the legislative calendar. The bill was then discussed in the chamber, first on a general motion for approval and then article by article. In this second and more detailed discussion, amendments could be introduced and voted on. The final version of the bill after the amendment stage was then voted on by the entire house. If it passed, it went on to the other chamber where the same lengthy and cumbersome procedure was followed. It had to pass both chambers in the same form to become law, and this meant it might have to shuttle between the chambers in order for discrepancies to be ironed out. Most laws were adopted in committee through the in sede referente procedure. This procedure was used mostly for leggini—incremental bills of minor importance that affected relatively small segments of society. Such bills were often introduced by the government as an alternative to an executive decree, which might be blocked by the Court of Accounts, or they originated with private members seeking to curry favor with some constituents. It should be remembered that, under the in sede deliberante procedure,  percent of the members of parliament or  percent of the members of a standing committee could prevent a bill from being passed by insisting it be brought to the floor for plenary debate. This meant that the Communist Party always had enough votes to prevent the procedure from being used. Yet it did not usually employ this power to obstruct legisla-

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tion, even in the s and s when it was still considered an antisystem party. Evidently, many behind-the-scenes compromises with the Christian Democratic regime took place even before the s. In the case of executive orders (legislative decrees, decree laws, and regulations), numerous consultations were required by law or by administrative practice. If a cabinet measure was involved, not just a minor regulation of interest to only a single ministry, the measure had to be considered by a cabinet committee before obtaining the consent of the cabinet as a whole. The cabinet committee stage was crucial in most cases. Also the Council of State had to be consulted in its advisory capacity; and the Court of Accounts could refuse to register the executive order. Finally, the president of Italy had the right (he exercised it only occasionally) to refuse to authorize the issuance of a cabinet decree or the introduction of a government bill in parliament. One device for redressing the apparent weakness of the executive branch vis-à-vis parliament, the parties, and the pressure groups was a tendency to resort more and more to decree laws as a way of proposing legislation. They were used as a means of obtaining quick, temporary action and bypassing normal legislative procedures. To be sure, decree laws expired within sixty days unless approved by parliament, but meanwhile an accomplished fact had been created. Moreover, if parliament, during the sixty days, rejected or drastically modified a decree law, the cabinet did not feel obligated to resign.6 Some major changes have taken place in the Italian policymaking process within the past decade—changes that were accelerated by the political cataclysm of the s, but were already under way in the late s. First, the political parties began to play a muchdiminished role in initiating policy proposals. The winding down of the Cold War had led to a sharp diminution of U.S. aid for such government parties as the Socialists and the Christian Democrats, and their research capabilities diminished accordingly. Their heavy reliance on patronage and subsidies to a very wide variety of beneficiaries was piling up an unsustainable burden of debt and injuring Italy’s ability to compete in world markets. Directives and guidelines from the European Union were increasingly calling for policy changes in the direction of austerity and stability—changes that the party machines were ill equipped and unwilling to adopt. And finally, after , both the DC and the PSI virtually vanished from the political scene.7 Second, the key role in the initiation of major economic and financial policy decisions has been taken over by technocrats and academic experts. Officials from the Bank of Italy, technocrats at the helm of the Treasury Ministry, professors of economics at the head of the Ministry of Finance have replaced the career politicians who used to dominate the economic and financial ministries. Ministerial cabinets, which provide ministers with crucial advice on economic and financial policy matters, are staffed by technocrats and social scientists rather than legalistically inclined high civil servants. And think tanks, such as the Europe Research Center (CER), the Institute of Social Research (IRS), and the Rosselli Foundation, have served as forums for the discussion of economic and financial policy and have helped to shape the prevalent elite consensus on the desirability of maintaining economic stability, cutting deficits, and reducing spending.8

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Third, the executive branch has been considerably strengthened in various ways. There is greater executive control over the budgetmaking process, particularly with regard to setting forth the main objectives, controlling the timetable, and rejecting amendments by the Chamber of Deputies to the government’s financial proposals. Also, the cabinet is not only relying more and more frequently on decree-laws to bypass potential resistance in parliament, but is also demonstrating a tendency to reissue those decree-laws again and again, should parliament fail to approve them within the sixty-day time limit.9 Finally, there has been increasing recourse to the referendum as a device to overcome parliamentary resistance to a controversial policy proposal. The legalization of divorce and abortion, and the establishment of a plurality system for the election of three-fourths of the members of the Chamber of Deputies—these goals were ratified by the Italian public in referendums. But there seems to be a significant voter backlash against what is seen as overuse and abuse of the referendum. This backlash seems to be confirmed by very low turnout in recent referendum votes.10 For example, in the spring of , a referendum proposal to scrap the rule whereby  percent of the seats in parliament are assigned by proportional representation was approved by a comfortable margin of those voting. But the turnout was too low for the referendum to be legally binding. Policy Implementation The responsibility for implementing policies that emerged from the policy-formulation process lay with the Italian bureaucracy. Italian civil servants tended to be obsessed with the primacy of the law and with the need to find a legal justification for every action. This attitude—laudable enough under normal circumstances and when balanced against other considerations—was carried to ridiculous extremes in Italy because of the predominantly legal training and traditionalist orientation of most Italian civil servants. Policy implementation proceeded with agonizing slowness and indecision. Each step in the implementation of a law or decree had to be subjected to a series of controls and procedures: approval by a subsidiary branch of the General Accounting Office, registration by the Court of Accounts, consultation with the Council of State for all contracts above a certain sum, and so on. At any one of numerous way stations, a file might be sent back to the point of origin because of some minor irregularity or might even be mislaid. Cases might literally take years to resolve, even when no particularly controversial problem was involved. Overcentralization also slowed down the policy implementation process. Local authorities and regional authorities were subject to a variety of central controls. National field services of ministries in Rome were compelled to refer a great number of relatively minor decisions to the capital for the signature of the director general of a bureau. In fact, even when the rules did not so specify, minor officials often preferred to pass the buck to their superiors in the hierarchy. This centralizing tendency had deep roots in Italian political culture. It should be noted that, ever since the regions were created in , the new regional governments had employed the same techniques of overcentralization in their relations with local authorities.

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Other factors impeding effective policy implementation were overstaffing and corruption. The expansion of the bureaucracy since World War II had contributed to the sluggishness of bureaucratic procedures. The introduction of more modern methods would mean a reduction in staff; on the other hand, the imposition of an additional set of checks or controls might serve to justify an individual’s salary. As for corruption, cases of favoritism, often based on family or friendship ties, were constantly discussed in the media, to a greater degree than in other Western democracies. In a civil service recruited from a traditionalist region like the Italian south, family loyalty was bound to have a serious impact on behavior. One glaring example of the inefficiency of the policy-implementation process was the growing importance of so-called residui passivi (residual liabilities) in Italy. These are funds that have been allocated to an agency in a given budgetary period but have remained unspent. Residual liabilities were increasing in size; this helps explain why so many reform measures represented only paper promises, given the bureaucratic controls that stood in the way of transforming words into deeds.11 Since the late s, there has been a thoroughgoing and coordinated reform of Italian public finance. But administrative reform has lagged far behind. There have been a sizable number of piecemeal directives, but no coherent overall plan and very little follow-through to insure directives are enforced. Many civil servants have a vested interest in the present system with all its faults. Therefore, reform proposals encounter bitter resistance. The Ministry of Public Administration often spearheads this resistance, for it tends to put the interests of government employees ahead of those of the general public. Finally, administrative reform has been assigned a lower priority by the Italian government than reform of public finance, because the immediate stimulus of conforming to European Union guidelines or being denied admission to the European Monetary Union and the euro zone has been lacking.12 Notes . See Stefano Bartolini, “The Politics of Institutional Reform in Italy,” West European Politics  (July ): –. . See Carlo Donolo, “Social Change and Transformation of the State in Italy,” in The State in Western Europe, ed. Richard Scase (London: Croom Helm, ), –; and Giuseppe Di Palma, “The Available State: Problems of Reform,” in Italy in Transition: Conflict and Consensus, ed. Peter Lange and Sidney Tarrow (London: Frank Cass, ), –. . See Sabino Cassese, “Is There a Government in Italy? Politics and Administration at the Top,” in Presidents and Prime Ministers, ed. Richard Rose and Ezra N. Suleiman (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, ), , –. . See Alan R. Posner, “Italy: Dependence and Political Fragmentation,” in Between Power and Plenty: Foreign Economic Policies of Advanced Industrial States, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ), –. . See Donolo, “Social Change and Transformation of the State in Italy,” –. . See Bartolini, “The Politics of Institutional Reform in Italy,” . . See Martin Bull and Martin Rhodes, “Between Crisis and Transition: Italian Politics in the s,” in Crisis and Transition in Italian Politics, ed. Martin Bull and Martin Rhodes (London: Frank Cass, ), –, at –. . See Claudio M. Radaelli, “How Does Europeanization Produce Domestic Policy Change? Corporate Tax Policy in Italy and the United Kingdom,” Comparative Political Studies  (October ): –, at

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. . .

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–; and Claudio M. Radaelli, “Networks of Expertise and Policy Change in Italy,” South European Society and Politics  (autumn ): –, at –. See Vincent della Sala, “Hollowing Out and Hardening the State: European Integration and the Italian Economy,” in Bull and Rhodes, –, at –; Giacinto della Cananea, “The Reform of Finance and Administration in Italy: Contrasting Achievements,” in Bull and Rhodes, –, at –; and Vincent della Sala, “Italy: A Bridge Too Far?” Parliamentary Affairs  (July ): –, at –. See “Referendum in Italy: Take It to the People,” The Economist,  February , . See Donolo, “Social Change and Transformation of the State in Italy,” . See della Cananea, “The Reform of Finance and Administration in Italy,” –.

Chapter 20

What Is the Future of Italian Politics? OUR TREATMENT OF the Italian political system has focused on its weaknesses and imperfections. We have seen the serious problems facing the Italian economy and Italian society; the disruptive effects of rapid modernization; the survival of widespread political alienation at the level of the mass culture; the lack of unified, coherent political leadership; the absence of effective coordination over the institutions responsible for policy formulation and policy implementation; and the ubiquity of patronage and corruption. Yet, this system endured for over forty years, until the upheavals of the s. We begin this final appraisal with a brief discussion of the positive features of the pre Italian political system—features that enabled the system to survive for almost five decades and to weather a number of crises. We also deal briefly with the catalytic factors that helped to bring about—after so many false alarms—the political earthquake of – . We then turn to some of the more critical problems Italy must still confront.

Elements of Strength and Seeds of Crisis in the Italian Political System Some contemporary observers of Italian politics have pointed to some of the possible reasons why the Italian Republic, prior to , was able to remain in existence despite all its travails.1 We deal first with the political factors. As we have seen, until , Italy lacked a strong party of the extreme right. The Communist Party—representing the extreme left over most of the past five decades—was generally a moderate and constructive force. There were no protracted foreign wars or colonial adventures to politicize the Italian armed forces. And, until the s, no ethnic or regional minority had called into question the continued existence of the Italian state. In short, there were no irreconcilable conflicts to overload the Italian polity. Other political factors have been identified as contributing to system survival. First, the Christian Democratic Party, with all its faults, managed to bridge the divisions among social classes by virtue of its catchall nature, strengthened small and medium industry and gave invaluable transfusions to backward regions, and kept the Catholic middle class committed to democratic institutions and democratic methods. Second, the Italian political elites—with all their inefficiency and seemingly unprincipled opportunism—showed resourcefulness, imagination, and an ability to take remedial action in a crisis. They were also far more united and willing to cooperate than they appeared. Third, subcultural differences were narrowing, as the secularization of Italian society and the increasing moder-

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ation of the Communist Party brought the Catholic and Marxist subcultures closer together. In the s, the rising generations of party activists appeared to be less ideologically committed than their fathers had been. Fourth, the parties of the left—including the Communists—had acquired a stake in the system. They were by no means excluded from the politics of patronage practiced by the Christian Democratic-dominated regime. Quite the contrary, their share of the action was increasing. Certain socioeconomic factors contributed to the resilience and underlying strength of Italian democracy. Living standards had risen enormously since the late s when movies like Bitter Rice and Bicycle Thief dramatized the plight of the Italian masses. Indicators of this trend included the decline in both the birth rate and the death rate, the growing per capita consumption of meat and dairy products, and the increasing acquisition of automobiles and household appliances by the masses.2 Urbanization, too, undermined the traditional allegiances that had divided Italy into regions committed to different political families. Although the regional differences in voting behavior remained, they no longer seemed to reflect fundamental cleavages in values and political orientations. Also, the rise of the service sector was doing much to reduce the intensity of class conflict. And the advent of mass education had fostered national integration, reduced the differences among regional subcultures, and perhaps contributed to the more pragmatic attitudes displayed by Italian voters (e.g., the “vote of appartenenza”—based on pure party identification—was to some degree being replaced by the “vote of opinion” and the “vote of exchange”). While the Italian economy and Italian society had undeniable major weaknesses, many of them were weaknesses that are beginning to surface throughout the Western industrial world. It was, therefore, no longer possible simply to dismiss Italy as the sick man of Western Europe; this would have been true even if Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and Greece had not recently joined the West European club. However, there were some profound long-term economic trends that were undercutting these apparently hopeful socioeconomic and politico-cultural tendencies.3 First, the need to compete in world markets and in the European Union had led to a restructuring of Italian industry, to mass layoffs in the big industries of the northwest industrial triangle and to the emergence of an increasing number of medium and small enterprises in northeastern and north-central Italy. This had weakened class consciousness and strengthened regional consciousness, had aroused resistance to high levels of taxation and government spending, and had fueled resentment of welfare programs that seemed to benefit more backward and unproductive regions and social strata at the expense of the emergent social groups in the center and north. Second, the new social programs and heavy spending of the early s had increased the annual deficit from . percent of GDP in  to . percent in . Efforts to trim the deficit after  were not very successful. In , it still stood at . percent of GDP, and in  at . percent. But far more intolerable was the growth in the public debt:  percent of GDP in , . percent in , . percent in , but a staggering . percent in . It reached a peak of . percent in  and has receded only about five percentage points since then. The size of the deficit was causing interest payments on the public debt to skyrocket; these interest payments had become the largest item of expendi-

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Number of Postwar Cabinets 

France 

Germany



Italy Russia (since 1992)

 

Sweden United Kingdom



ture in the national budget. Obviously, this situation was intolerable. Either spending had to be drastically cut, taxes heavily increased, or both. Third, however, the pre- Italian patronage system depended very heavily on patronage and subsidies for all groups and categories whose political support was being solicited by the governing parties. This cozy but rather indiscriminate and enormously costly politics of distribution was financed in large measure by tolerating huge deficits. Meanwhile, tax evasion was tolerated to a greater degree than in the other major Western countries. For many years, the explicit costs of this kind of public policy were not too visible to the average Italian. By the early s they could no longer be glossed over. The Italy that had reaped the benefits of the economic miracle would now have to face some hard and politically disruptive decisions. The Italian Economy: The Endangered Miracle One of the chief problems facing Italy is the same one that confronts every modern industrial society: how to maintain an expanding economy with a low rate of unemployment while avoiding excessive inflation and an unstable currency, and keeping exports competitive in world markets.4 This problem became acute in the Hot Autumn of , when Italian labor abandoned its postwar behavior pattern of relatively docile industriousness, and in the fall of , when skyrocketing oil prices began to affect the economy. Since that time, the Italian economic miracle has lost much of its magic. Inflation, unemployment (particularly among young people), and a balance of payments deficit are chronic threats. And government spending has grown by leaps and bounds, producing massive deficits. Italy has had occasional spurts of growth since —the economy expanded by  percent between  and —but the unbroken linear progression of the s and early s is a thing of the past. In fact, a further increase in oil prices in  led to a trade deficit of $ billion and an inflation rate of  percent. The Bank of Italy had to impose a squeeze on credit that promptly reduced economic growth and pushed up unemployment. Strong measures taken by the Craxi (–), Amato (–), and Ciampi (–) governments were successful in lowering the rate of inflation to less than  per-

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cent (. percent in mid-); unemployment and interest rates remained high, however, and the budget deficit approached U.S. levels (despite the fact that Italy has a much smaller economy than the United States). As we have seen, the annual deficit grew rapidly in the s and s. In , it was . percent of Italy’s gross domestic product (GDP), and Italy’s public-sector debt was a staggering  percent of GDP. By way of contrast, the much-touted U.S. deficit was only  percent of GDP, and the public sector debt was only  percent of GDP.5 Is there an alternative to this stop-go process marked by frequent administration of debilitating financial castor oil by the Bank of Italy? The answer seems to be to reduce government spending and establish some control over wage increases. In a word, a policy of austerity. This has already involved (under the Amato government in ) eliminating the escalator (scala mobile) system of wage indexation, under which wages rose every three months to conform to upward movements in the price index. It would also require either reducing the vast amounts disbursed by the public corporations, the pension funds, and various public services (especially in the social welfare area) or increasing taxes and users’ fees. The trouble with austerity is that it is a politically unpalatable solution in any democracy, and it ran counter to several basic characteristics of the pre- Italian political and social system. For example, it directly repudiated the distributive policy that had been followed by the Christian Democratic regime as a means of building electoral support and that had been later adopted by the Socialists as well. It would require very unpopular decisions. And it might well restore class conflict and general alienation, which had seemed until  to be playing a diminishing role in Italian politics. When Prime Minister Berlusconi, in the fall of , introduced a budget that included sharp cuts in spending on pensions, even his own coalition partners criticized him; a general strike was threatened; and masses of hostile demonstrators took to the streets. The proposals had to be greatly watered down. (To be sure, Berlusconi had committed the cardinal error of failing to devote enough effort to consulting the labor confederations.) Worse, austerity could bear an electoral price tag, at least in the short run. Young voters (in the labor force but still looking for their first job) and marginal workers (lacking modern skills required by today’s labor market) might be particularly affected by austerity and might retaliate by backing minor parties of the extreme left like the PRC or Cossutta’s recently formed PCI. The evidence for this alleged pattern of electoral revenge is by no means conclusive. Nevertheless, widespread fear remains that a policy of austerity would result in drastic reprisals at the polls. Despite the potential dangers of a policy of austerity, something of a majority consensus has developed in Italy around this issue. Even the ex-Communists of the PDS seem to concur in the need to cut spending, raise taxes, reform the social welfare and pension systems, and reduce the public-sector annual deficit and the public-sector debt. Minor parties of the extreme left, certainly the PRC and possibly Cossutta’s PCI, are outside this consensus. They demand the thirty-five-hour workweek and a special fund to deal with unemployment in the south (now over  percent). The union confederations are somewhat reluctant, especially with regard to cuts in welfare spending and social services,

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but are open to persuasion since they strongly support Italian membership in the euro zone. As for the center-right, most of it also tends to form part of this consensus, though the National Alliance (with its power base in the south) is rather ambivalent about heavy cuts in government spending on social programs, and the maverick Northern League is hostile to large tax increases. Thus, austerity itself is no longer a major issue. The question is, what methods are to be used to achieve austerity? With the exceptions noted above, the center-left prefers to emphasize tax increases, whereas the center-right usually leans toward cuts in government spending.6 How did this consensus develop? We have already noted the economic factors that precipitated the political crisis of –. Major stress should also be placed on the globalization of the world economy: in a world where protection against foreign competition was becoming a thing of the past, the old free spending ways would have to be jettisoned. And finally, Italy’s desire to enter the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the euro zone was a crucial factor. After the Maastricht treaty had been signed in , a growing consensus developed among central bankers, social scientists, and members of think tanks. The central theme of this consensus was the perceived need for Italy to adjust its economy and its public finance to the goals set by the Maastricht treaty. This meant sound money, control of inflation, the independence of the Bank of Italy from the executive branch, and restraints on government spending. By the mid-s this point of view was shared by the vast majority of the policy-oriented intellectuals who were beginning to exercise so much influence on the Italian economic decision-making process.7 Italy and the European Union Italy was one of the original six members of the European Union (EU), which was known as the European Economic Community (EEC) when it was first established in , and was later named the European Community (EC) from  until . After the first few years of Italian membership in the EEC, a general consensus in favor of continuing this link with France, West Germany, and the Benelux countries had replaced the relative apathy with which large segments of the Italian public had greeted the decision to enter the Common Market. The European connection was regarded as stimulating and challenging Italy’s already burgeoning industrial economy and providing enlarged markets for Italian products. It also provided employment opportunities for Italian workers in Northern Europe and thus eased Italy’s labor surplus and unemployment problem. And finally, Italy’s poorer regions (the south and the islands) received a good deal of assistance from EEC agencies. There were also some powerful and compelling political reasons why many Italians, especially those who wanted to modernize and reform their country, gave solid support to the ambitious programs being formulated in Brussels. And these political motives have became paramount now that Italy has attained prosperity and no longer needs economic assistance to the same degree as in the past. First, membership in the EU gives Italian policymakers a sense of belonging to a larger and more powerful entity and of being accepted as having a vital role to play in the building of a new Europe. International recognition and prestige enhances their status. Second, many Italians see membership in a united Eu-

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rope as a kind of ideal goal to compensate for the perceived backwardness and corruption of their own political and administrative system. Finally (and this factor has become increasingly salient), EU obligations furnish Italian political leaders with convenient leverage for demanding domestic reforms and rigorous stabilization measures to enable Italy to fulfill its duties as a member of the EU.8 The Italian government loyally accepted some of the more onerous side effects of EC obligations in the past and continues to do so with the EU today. EC policies hurt southern agriculture and compelled the shutdown of a number of unprofitable steel mills, which the Italian public sector was enjoined from subsidizing any longer. The enlargement of the EC, admitting South European competitors like Spain and Portugal, was actually sponsored by the Italian government. So Italy played the role of a constructive and public-spirited member of the EC, always ready to sacrifice its own short-run interests for the greater good of Western Europe as a whole. However, while the Italian government displayed a very cooperative attitude on major issues, it was somewhat laggard in following through on its ambitious commitments, in implementing EC regulations and in enacting legislation to fulfill the terms of EC directives. This legal and administrative delinquency reflected the archaic and obstructionist character of Italian parliamentary and bureaucratic institutions. The Single European Act of , the Maastricht treaty of , and the EU’s decision to press ahead toward the adoption of a common monetary policy and currency once again presented Italy with some weighty tasks to undertake. Certain convergence criteria were laid down by the protocols attached to the Maastricht treaty. In order to be admitted to be part of the single EU currency (the euro), a member state should (among other less specific requirements) have an annual public deficit approaching  percent or less of GDP, a national debt approaching  percent or less of GDP, and an inflation rate below certain clearly defined limits. Also, the central bank of the member state had to be independent of direct government control. The performance of member states in meeting their obligations under the Maastricht treaty was to be monitored by the Commission of the EU on an annual basis, and noncompliance was to be publicized. To meet these convergence criteria, and to continue to meet them in the future, the Italian government would have to sacrifice its ability to devaluate its way out of a serious recession.9 This was austerity with a vengeance. The Prodi cabinet of – accepted the mission of making significant progress toward meeting the convergence criteria. By mid-, Prodi had succeeded in his goal: several of the convergence criteria had been met (including the prescribed reduction of the annual deficit), and moderate but satisfactory progress had been made toward reducing the national debt. As a result, Italy was admitted to participation in the monetary union. However, in order to obtain the support he needed from the extreme leftist PRC, Prodi had to rely on increases in taxation to pay most of the cost of conforming to the convergence criteria: he did not feel prepared to defy the PRC by tackling welfare or pension reform. In order to appease his leftist allies, he was compelled to incur the displeasure of the center-right—especially the Northern League, but also, to a lesser degree, Forza Italia!10 Once again, then, the Italian government has successfully played the European card

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as a means of dragooning the Italian economy and the Italian body politic into greater progress by conjuring up an external threat: Italian exclusion from the inner circle of the EU. Both the D’Alema and Amato cabinets were committed to a continuation of Prodi’s policies of conforming to EU guidelines. With Romano Prodi serving as the newly designated president of the EU Commission, and with two Italians (Emma Bonino and Mario Monti) serving on the Commission as unusually active and prestigious members, Italy’s status in the new Europe seems to be quite secure. However, this victory has its downside. Support for Italy’s compliance with EU guidelines is no longer as strong as it was.11 The Northern League, representing the thriving but competitively embattled medium and small business sector in northern and northeastern Italy, has been turned off by the center-left’s decision to saddle the middleclass taxpayer with the lion’s share of the cost for Italy’s adhesion to the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). Its representatives have been the sole Italians in the European Parliament to vote against the euro. Moreover, polls indicate that negative attitudes toward the euro are also rising among northern industrial workers. Italy’s adoption of the euro still commands a majority in the north, but that majority is threatened with erosion not only because of the economic interests of northern taxpayers but also because of a rising tide of regional and ethnic consciousness in the north. Moreover, the rest of the center-right—the National Alliance and especially Forza Italia! —is showing signs of disaffection with the way the EMU mission is being financed. Forza Italia! ’s gains in the European parliamentary elections of  and regional elections in April  and its victory in the national election of May  are clearly straws in the wind. A more serious problem looms ahead. Who can predict what the eventual costs of Italy’s entry into the EMU will be? As some observers point out, that bill has yet to be paid in full.12 With a population that is likely to decline in the near future and to have a sharp increase in the percentage of senior citizens, Italy needs to have a drastic reform of its pension system and its welfare state or costs will skyrocket and annual deficits will begin to climb once more. So far, the Italian government has not really gotten at the roots of this problem, but has relied primarily on quick-fix tax increases. With Italy in the EMU, unemployment in the south may increase beyond its present unacceptable level of over  percent. EMU obligations are likely to require that the public sector of the Italian economy be privatized more speedily and that tens of thousands of its employees be dismissed. They are likely to prescribe significant reductions in the number of civil servants. The south, which relies very heavily on these two sources of employment, would be especially hard hit. And given the financial and monetary restraints imposed by the EU, the Italian government could not give its depressed areas the emergency economic aid they would need. Thus, while the northern problem is the center of attention today, the southern problem may take center stage in hard times. The Question of Institutional Reform Numerous Italian politicians have raised the question whether Italy’s political institutions should be altered to enable the government to develop a more coherent set of policies based on a firm mandate.

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One such proposal would be to emulate the French quasi-presidential system. A popularly elected chief executive might be better able to dominate parliament and coordinate his own cabinet. An electoral law based on single-member districts with election by absolute majority, or a runoff election if the threshold was not reached, might force the major parties to combine their forces (as in France) and might bring about firm parliamentary majorities such as those attained by the Gaullists in the s or by the Socialists in . This type of proposal (generally championed by Berlusconi and the center-right) has aroused considerable opposition on the part of the center-left. It is feared that, given Italian political traditions, the system might produce an Italian reincarnation of Mussolini rather than an Italian de Gaulle or an Italian Mitterrand. On the other hand, the idea of adopting a French-style system of single-member districts with runoff elections is resisted by the small- and medium-sized parties. They are afraid that larger parties such as the PDS and Forza Italia! might dominate electoral alliances promoted by a French-type runoff system. There is no assurance, then, that the adoption of certain French constitutional procedures would result in a duplication of the positive result achieved in France: the establishment of a strong, stable, democratic executive with a popular mandate and (usually) a firm majority in parliament. Others want to reform the present parliamentary system by bolstering the power of the prime minister and the cabinet. Supporters of this goal are often attracted by those features of the German system that would strengthen the prime minister and his cabinet and reinforce the dominant party at the expense of the smaller parties in the system. Some would like to adopt the German constructive vote of no confidence, which would make it impossible for Parliament to overthrow a cabinet except by a resolution approved by an absolute majority of the members of either chamber—a resolution that would specifically designate the outgoing prime minister’s successor. Some have also suggested reducing the number of parties in the Italian parliament by adopting something similar to the German -percent rule, which permits a party to benefit from proportional representation in Bundestag elections only if it carries three single-member districts or polls  percent of the total vote. A -percent rule was applied in Italy by the  electoral law governing elections to the Chamber of Deputies. It required a party to obtain  percent of the votes in order to obtain a proportional share of the seats reserved for party lists elected by PR (about one fourth of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies were covered by this provision). It did have the effect of reducing the number of parties in Parliament somewhat; but its effect was diluted by the formation of interparty alliances for the capture of single-member districts—alliances in which some splinter parties were allotted a quota of seats by their more powerful allies. As matters stand today, neither a presidential nor a strengthened parliamentary model has enough solid support in parliament to guarantee its adoption in the face of sharp partisan opposition. Adoption would be rendered doubly arduous by the fact that most reform proposals would need to be passed as constitutional amendments. It may even be politically unfeasible to pass a new election law replacing the mind-blowing statute now in force. When the Prodi center-left cabinet came to power in , it prepared a bill provid-

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ing that a bicameral Parliamentary Commission be set up to formulate and submit to parliament a project to reform the constitution. This Commission, referred to in the Italian media as the Bicameral, was to draw up a final draft of its recommendations and lay it before the Chamber of Deputies. The project was to be discussed by each chamber and— if passed by an absolute majority of each chamber—submitted to the voters for their approval in a referendum. The bill creating the Bicameral was approved by parliament on  January . The Bicameral, chaired by D’Alema (leader of the PDS, who became prime minister in October ), submitted a final draft of its project to parliament on  November . The reform proposals constituted a mixed bag, the products of tension and compromise between center-left and center-right. The president was to be elected by popular vote for a six-year term and was to have some power in the fields of defense and foreign affairs: a semipresidential reform modeled on the French Fifth Republic and representing a concession to the center-right viewpoint. On the other hand, as a concession to the center-left, the prime minister, selected by the president, would have the power to dismiss cabinet members, and would be subject to removal from office only by an absolute majority of the Chamber of Deputies: the constructive vote of no confidence employed in the German parliamentary system. Both houses of parliament were to have a reduced number of members; and the Chamber of Deputies was to become stronger than the Senate, with sole power to remove the prime minister and with final power to decide whether certain types of bills were to be enacted into law. A rather odd form of federalism was to be established, with provinces and communes receiving constitutional recognition and thus being in a position to challenge regional supremacy. After extensive discussion in parliament, the project foundered, when Berlusconi, disappointed by his failure to obtain agreement on a far-reaching reform of the judiciary, withdrew his support. In June , Forza Italia! announced it was no longer backing the Bicameral’s project. Institutional reform would have to wait for more consensual times.13 An Uncertain Future At the turn of the millennium, the future of the Italian polity is difficult to predict. Despite its elements of strength, Italian democracy is undergoing an unprecedented crisis. In many ways, it is the same crisis confronting other Western democracies: public unrest over widespread corruption and over an increasingly depressing long-term economic outlook is breeding alienation and intransigence. It takes on particularly dramatic dimensions in Italy, however, where corruption is more pervasive and blatant than elsewhere in the West, and where the economy rests on shakier ground than in other industrial democracies. A flamboyant manifestation of regional protest against corruption and against alleged “colonialists” in Rome occurred in September  when the leader of the Northern League, Umberto Bossi, symbolically declared the creation of a separate “state” of Padania stretching north of the Po River. Bossi’s theatrical efforts to proclaim regional independence prompted counterdemonstrations elsewhere in Italy and were promptly denounced as illegal by then-President Scalfaro and Prime Minister Dini. Despite a subsequent decline in electoral strength, the Northern League continues to reflect a basic de-

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cline in the legitimacy of the Italian state—not just the Italian political system or the government of the day—in the eyes of a sizable minority of its people. Italy’s new political elites are challenged both to legitimize their authority and to tackle the arduous task of ensuring Italy’s continued compliance with the convergence criteria for membership in economic and monetary union (EMU) within the European Union. They must cope with whatever political crises such compliance or a slump in the global economy may cause. While meeting these challenges, they must also consider the desirability and feasibility of constitutional changes, if indeed consensus can be reached on any such changes. Meanwhile, the Italian political system—its institutions, political parties, and new governing elites—remains in a state of transition and uncertainty. Whether Berlusconi’s electoral victory in  will prove a decisive turning point remains to be seen. Notes . See, for example, Sidney Tarrow, “Italy: Crisis, Crises, or Transition?” in Italy in Transition: Conflict and Consensus, ed. Peter Lange and Sidney Tarrow (London: Frank Cass, ), –. See also Norman Kogan, A Political History of Italy: The Postwar Years (New York: Praeger, ), chap. . . Kogan, A Political History of Italy, . By , there was one automobile in Italy for every . people. . See Vincent della Sala, “Hollowing Out and Hardening the State: European Integration and the Italian Economy,” in Crisis and Transition in Italian Politics, ed. Martin Bull and Martin Rhodes (London: Frank Cass, ), – at –; Maurizio Ferrera, “The Uncertain Future of the Italian Welfare State,” in Bull and Rhodes, – at –; and Dermot McCann, “European Integration and Explanations of Regime Change in Italy,” Mediterranean Politics  (autumn ): – at –. . See “The Flawed Renaissance: A Survey of the Italian Economy,” The Economist,  February , special insert, –. . Ibid., , . See also “Until the Fat Lady Sings: A Survey of Italy,” The Economist,  June , special insert, – at . . On the position of the various actors vis-à-vis austerity, see della Sala, “Hollowing Out and Hardening the State,” in Bull and Rhodes, –; Stephen Hellman, “The Italian Left after the  Elections,” in Italian Politics: The Center-Left in Power, ed. Roberto D’Alimonte and Daviv Nelken (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, ), – at –; Luciano Bardi and Martin Rhodes, “Introduction: Mapping the Future,” in Italian Politics: Mapping the Future, ed. Luciano Bardi and Martin Rhodes (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, ), – at –; “Now for a Party?: Italy’s Troublesome Trade Unions,” The Economist,  April , . . See Claudio M. Radaelli, “Networks of Expertise and Policy Change in Italy,” South European Society and Politics  (autumn ): – at –. . See Kogan, A Political History of Italy, –; Frederic Spotts and Theodor Wieser, Italy: A Difficult Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –, ; and Christopher Tugendhat, Making Sense of Europe (New York: Columbia University Press, ), –. . See della Sala, –. . See James I. Walsh, “The Uncertain Path to Monetary Union,” in Bardi and Rhodes, Italian Politics, –; “Charlemagne: Prodi’s Prayer,” The Economist,  January , ; “Burning While Rome Fiddles: Italy’s Budget Disaster,” The Economist,  April , –; “Italy’s Back” and “Eurogeld: Italy’s Government Restored,” The Economist,  October , , . . See Roberto Borcio, “L’Unione in Italia: chi ha paura dell’euro,” Il Mulino  (May–June ): –. . See Claudio M. Radaelli, “Beyond Charlemagne’s Europe: A Sub-National Examination of Italy within the EMU,” Regional and Federal Studies  (summer ): –. . See Carlo Fusaro, “The Politics of Constitutional Reform in Italy: A Framework for Analysis,” South European Society & Politics  (autumn ): –; “Funeral March? Italy’s Constitutional Flop,” The Economist,  June , ; and “Hard Cop, Soft Cop: The Politics of Italian Reform,” The Economist,  November , –, .

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For Further Reading ABERBACH, JOEL D., ROBERT D. PUTNAM, AND BERT A. ROCKMAN. Bureaucrats and Politicians in Western Democracies. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, . ALLUM, P.A. Italy: Republic Without Government? New York: Norton, . BARDI, LUCIANO, AND MARTIN RHODES, eds. Italian Politics: Mapping the Future. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, . BARNES, SAMUEL H. Party Democracy: Politics in an Italian Socialist Federation. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, . BARZINI, LUIGI. The Italians. New York: Bantam, . BELLONI, FRANK P., AND DENNIS C. BELLER, eds. Faction Politics: Political Parties in Comparative Perspective. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio Press, . BLACKMER, DONALD L.M., AND SIDNEY G. TARROW, eds. Communism in Italy and France. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, . BULL, MARTIN, AND MARTIN RHODES, eds. Crisis and Transition in Italian Politics. London: Frank Cass, . BURNETT, STANTON H., AND LUCA MANTOVANI. The Italian Guillotine: Operation Clean Hands and the Overthrow of Italy’s First Republic. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, . CACIAGLI, MARIO, AND DAVID I. KERTZER, eds. Italian Politics: The Stalled Transition. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, . CASSESE, SABINO. “Is There a Government in Italy? Politics and Administration at the Top.” In Presidents and Prime Ministers, ed. Richard Rose and Ezra N. Suleiman, –. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, . D’ALIMONTE, ROBERTO, AND DAVID NELKEN, eds. Italian Politics: The Center-Left in Power. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, . DIANI, MARIO. Green Networks: A Structural Analysis of the Italian Environmental Movement. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, . DI PALMA, GIUSEPPE. Surviving without Governing: The Italian Parties in Parliament. Berkeley: University of California Press, . FRIED, ROBERT D. The Italian Prefects: A Study in Administrative Politics. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, . GALLI, GIORGIO, AND ALFONSO PRANDI. Patterns of Political Participation in Italy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, . GREW, RAYMOND. “Italy.” In Crises of Political Development in Europe and the United States, ed. Raymond Grew. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, . KOGAN, NORMAN. A Political History of Italy: The Postwar Years. New York: Praeger, . LANGE, PETER, AND SIDNEY TARROW, eds. Italy in Transition: Conflict and Consensus. London: Frank Cass, . LA PALOMBARA, JOSEPH. Democracy Italian Style. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, . ———. Interest Groups in Italian Politics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, . LOW-BEER, JOHN R.. Protest and Participation: The New Working Class in Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . PASQUINO, GIANFRANCO, AND PATRICK MCCARTHY, eds. The End of Postwar Politics in Italy: The Landmark  Elections. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, . PUTNAM, ROBERT D. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, . ———. The Beliefs of Politicians: Ideology, Conflict and Democracy in Britain and Italy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, . RANNEY, AUSTIN, AND GIOVANNI SARTORI, eds. Eurocommunism: The Italian Case. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, . SANI, GIACOMO. “The Political Culture of Italy: Continuity and Change.” In The Civic Culture Revisited, ed. Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, –. Boston: Little, Brown, . TARROW, SIDNEY. Between Center and Periphery: Grassroots Politicians in Italy and France. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, . ———. Peasant Communism in Southern Italy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, . VANNICELLI, PRIMO. Italy, NATO, and the European Community. Cambridge, Mass.: Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, .

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WEINBERG, LEONARD. The Transformation of Italian Communism. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, . WILLIS, F. ROY. Italy Chooses Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, . ZARISKI, RAPHAEL. Italy: The Politics of Uneven Development. Hinsdale, Ill.: Dryden, . ZUCKERMAN, ALAN S. The Politics of Faction: Christian Democratic Rule in Italy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, .

Chapter 21

The Context of Swedish Politics SINCE AT LEAST the mid-s, Sweden has fascinated many outside observers. Some

commentators have enthusiastically praised Sweden’s economic and social achievements as a “middle way” between competitive capitalism and state socialism and as a “model for the world.”1 Others, ranging from skeptical conservatives to radical socialists, have criticized the centralization of political and economic power in the hands of public officials, unions, and/or an alleged governing class made up of a small group of wealthy capitalists.2 These diametrically opposed assessments underscore Sweden’s singularity in comparison with more familiar capitalist democracies such as Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. Sweden has undeniably attained one of the world’s highest standards of living and most fully developed welfare systems. At the same time, twentieth-century economic and social reforms have resulted in an extraordinarily high rate of taxation and pervasive tendencies toward bureaucratization. Sweden’s political parties and organized interest groups have responded with different strategies of policy modification and system change. The result is an ongoing struggle to redefine fundamental tenets of the “Swedish model” of advanced industrial society. In this and following chapters, I describe basic historical, contextual, institutional, party, and group characteristics of modern Sweden. Analytically, my principal objective is to assess Sweden’s status with respect to the distinction that Lawrence D. Brown draws between breakthrough politics and a more restrictive form of rationalizing politics. By breakthrough politics, Brown means government initiatives to expand the scope of public commitment in response to socioeconomic need. By rationalizing politics, in contrast, he means the attempts by public officials “to solve evident problems of existing government programs.” Thus, breakthrough politics denotes a strategy of system reform, whereas rationalizing politics constitutes less ambitious government measures to make public policies “more rational, that is, problem free.”3 The latter approach, Brown contends, characterizes contemporary American politics and, by implication, earlier policy choices by Thatcherite Conservatives in the United Kingdom, the Christian Democrats in Germany, and “nonpartisan” government experts in Italy as well. The empirical test of these contrasting approaches to economic and social management in contemporary Sweden involves opposing efforts to reconstitute the Swedish model in response to domestic and international changes. Can the Social Democrats and

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their trade union allies realize their long-term ideological aspirations to achieve an unprecedented form of economic democracy? Or will key features of the Swedish model be modified or even abandoned as political and economic elites seek to “rationalize” political power and public policy? Geography, Resources, Population Sweden is geographically part of the northwestern European land mass known as Scandinavia, or Norden, located on approximately the same latitude as Alaska and northern Siberia. The other Nordic states include neighboring Denmark, Norway, and Finland, as well as more remote Iceland in the North Atlantic.4 Sweden is the largest of the Scandinavian countries, with an area somewhat greater than California. It shares a long, largely mountainous boundary with Norway to the west and a considerably shorter border with Finland to the northeast. The rest of Sweden is surrounded by water: the Gulf of Bothnia to the east, the Baltic Sea to the east and south, and a narrow passageway known as the Kattegat, which separates Sweden from Denmark to the southwest. Sweden is a land of rugged beauty. Much of the country is covered by forests and lakes, with the hills of central and northern Sweden yielding gradually to majestic peaks along the northwestern border. Approximately  percent of the land is arable. The richest soil is located in the southernmost province of Skåne, although highly productive farms also surround lakes Vättern and Vänern in the south-central lowlands. A relatively mild climate, attributed to warming winds from the Atlantic and the indirect effects of the Gulf Stream, permits good harvests despite a short growing season. Rivers crisscross the country, providing transportation links and indispensable sources of natural energy. Two large islands guard the Baltic approaches to Sweden: Gotland, with its ancient fortress city of Visby, and Öland, now connected by a modern causeway to the mainland. Various natural resources serve as the mainstay of Sweden’s economy. Among them are large deposits of some of the world’s highest-grade iron ore, timber and timber by-products, and abundant fish in the coastal waters. Partially compensating for the absence of domestic supplies of coal and oil are numerous rivers and waterfalls that provide a plentiful and cheap source of hydroelectric power. The principal other sources of energy are imported oil and twelve nuclear energy plants. Sweden’s population of . million inhabitants is unevenly distributed. Fully  percent of the Swedes live in the southern half of the country, where most industry, services, and agriculture are concentrated. The remainder of the populace is scattered throughout the various provinces that make up the forested and mining regions of Norrland. Stockholm—Sweden’s capital—is the largest city, with a population of . million (including surrounding suburbs). Göteborg, on the west coast, is second, with ,. Third in size is Malmö, which is located in Skåne directly across the Sound from Copenhagen, with , inhabitants. Other important cities include Uppsala, the site of Scandinavia’s oldest university (founded in ); Västerås, Örebro, Norrköping, and Helsingborg, all of which are centers of industry, shipping, or both; and the mining town of Kiruna in the far north. Similar to the other Scandinavian countries but in contrast to the United Kingdom

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and most of continental Europe, Sweden is a highly homogeneous nation. Ethnically, most Swedes are descendants of the ancient Germanic tribes that settled the region beginning in – B.C. The native exceptions are some , Finnish-speaking Swedes who live along the Finnish border and approximately , Samis (Lapps) in the northern provinces. Traditionally, many of the latter were nomads, moving with their herds of reindeer across northern Scandinavia in search of pasture with the annual change of seasons. In recent decades, however, more and more Samis have settled in permanent residences. In August  a cabinet official formally apologized to the Sami people for centuries of economic and social discrimination by mainstream society. Like Britain, Germany, and France, Sweden also claims a sizable contingent of immigrants. In  they numbered more than , and made up . percent of the total population. Most of the immigrants occupy lower-paid jobs in industry and services. By far the largest group, the Finns (who constitute  percent of foreign nationals) are followed in descending order by Yugoslavs, Iranians, Bosnians, Norwegians, Turks, and Danes. Because of their close linguistic, ethnic, and other affinities with the Swedes, the Danes and the Norwegians are virtually invisible within the majority culture. In contrast, many Finns and especially the Middle Eastern, southeastern European, and Asian immigrants are less well integrated. Most live in semisegregated housing in working-class neighborhoods and suburbs and interact socially far more with members of their own subculture than with the majority Swedes. Nonetheless, government efforts to provide quality housing for the immigrants and facilitate instruction in Swedish for the adults during working hours and bilingual education for their children at school have lessened the degree of social alienation that many guest workers experience in Britain and elsewhere on the Continent. Religion and language reinforce national cohesiveness. An overwhelming majority of Swedes ( percent) belong to the state Lutheran Church. The remainder are either members of dissenting Protestant sects, Catholic, or non-Christian. In addition, virtually all citizens speak Swedish as their common language, albeit with regional variations in pronunciation (especially among Finno-Swedes and in Skåne, which until the seventeenth century belonged to Denmark). Although Sweden’s ethnic and cultural homogeneity strikes some foreign observers as monotonous in comparison with more colorfully diverse societies elsewhere in Europe, the absence of significant social cleavages has proved an important factor contributing to distinctive national political traits. Among them is Sweden’s largely peaceful transition from an agrarian society governed by a traditional monarchy to today’s advanced industrial democracy. Early Political Development Swedish political development is a product of both regional and domestic factors of system change. From the appearance of the first hunters and fishermen in prehistoric times until the beginning of the Viking era in the ninth century A.D., Swedish history was virtually indistinguishable from that of the Scandinavian region as a whole. Gradually, however, separate Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish kingdoms began to evolve on the basis of rudimentary legal codes, recognized political authority in the form of elected monarchs, a

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sense of national identity shaped by language and an oral tradition of heroic sagas, and warfare with other Europeans. The advent of Christianity in the ninth century helped domesticate Viking impulses of pillage and conquest and facilitated the incorporation of the Scandinavian kingdoms into the larger fabric of Western civilization. Christianization also encouraged incipient processes of modernization within the region as members of the clergy introduced literacy and codified the legal basis of state authority. Through conquest, Sweden absorbed present-day Finland in the thirteenth century. Domestically, feudal estates similar to those elsewhere in Europe, which consisted of a landed aristocracy, the clergy, and farmers, gradually evolved. By the fifteenth century, a fourth estate of urban “burghers” (borgare) had emerged as well. Unlike later developments in Russia and even neighboring Denmark, however, the independence of the farmers, which was rooted in their ownership of land, prevented the emergence of serfdom in Sweden. Thus, each estate retained its corporate autonomy. The three Scandinavian kingdoms were united temporarily under Danish dominance in . In subsequent decades, the more numerous Swedes became increasingly resentful of their Danish rulers. Representatives of the nobility and the borgare undertook an early move toward Swedish independence when they convened Sweden’s first parliament (Riksdag) in  to select a military commander. Full rebellion ensued in  when peasants, miners, and nobles joined in an armed uprising in response to a number of punitive acts by the Danes. Their efforts succeeded, and in  the Riksdag unanimously elected the leader of the rebellion, Gustav Vasa, Sweden’s king. As Gustavus I, the youthful monarch centralized political and administrative authority in Stockholm and proclaimed Sweden’s break with Catholicism in support of the Protestant Reformation in . During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, successive kings and their armies wrested sovereignty over Skåne and other southwestern provinces from Denmark and established a formidable Baltic empire. The most important of Sweden’s heroic monarchs was Gustavus II Adolphus, who reigned from  to . Under his energetic leadership, Sweden extended its boundaries eastward and southward at the expense of both Russia and Poland and intervened decisively in the Thirty Years War (–). To pursue Sweden’s wartime exploits more effectively, Gustavus Adolphus and his advisers further centralized state authority by reorganizing the Riksdag as a four-estate parliament formally representing the nobility, clergy, borgare, and farmers. Through a series of taxation and financial reforms, the government also encouraged economic development and the growth of Stockholm, Göteborg, and other urban centers. Defeat at the hands of Russia in  marked the beginning of an extended period of territorial retrenchment that culminated in Russia’s annexation of Finland in –. The victorious anti-Napoleonic coalition sought to compensate Sweden for the latter loss by transferring control over Norway from Denmark to Swedish authorities in . Norway’s peaceful bid for independence in  reduced Sweden to its present boundaries. Democratization and Industrialization From independence through the Napoleonic Wars, Sweden experienced successive constitutional cycles that oscillated between extremes of monarchical and parliamentary su-

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premacy. Defeat by Russia prompted a palace coup against the last of the despotic monarchs in , resulting in the adoption of a new constitution that institutionalized shared authority between the king and the four-estate Riksdag. The outcome was broadly based elite consensus on constitutional arrangements comparable to the Glorious Revolution in England in . Members of parliament elected Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, a French marshal, regent in . He served as king from  until his death in . The diffusion of liberal political doctrines during the first half of the nineteenth century, coupled with the spread of industry and the advent of social democracy during the second half, brought about Sweden’s piecemeal democratization. Liberal demands to transform the archaic four-estate parliament into a more modern representative body resulted in the introduction of a bicameral Riksdag in –. Popular agitation for more sweeping political reforms followed in the wake of industrialization, which began in the s and reached “takeoff ” proportions in the s. Out of industrialization arose an organized labor movement and the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SAP), founded in . Together, the Liberals and the Social Democrats advocated an extension of the right to vote and the introduction of a parliamentary form of government. Conservative leaders at first resisted, but, acknowledging the inevitable, they conceded manhood suffrage in exchange for the introduction of proportional representation in the “Great Compromise” of –. This agreement codified a new elite consensus on fundamental political principles comparable to the constitutional settlement of . The Liberals and the Social Democrats established a parliamentary form of government, modeled on the British pattern, when they formed a majority coalition in . The coalition partners proceeded to introduce universal suffrage in , which was ratified by constitutional amendments in –, as the final major step in Sweden’s democratization. Subsequent constitutional revisions have refined but not substantially modified the historic achievements of –. Political Culture: Constants and Change Sweden’s evolutionary process of system change during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is both cause and effect of a political culture that affirms traditional values and simultaneously endorses efforts at political creativity. Linking these attributes is a willingness among political actors to seek compromise solutions to partisan disagreements. The most important traditional element inherent in Swedish political culture is a deeply ingrained respect for constitutionalism and law. Among Sweden’s oldest historical documents are legal codes that served to limit kingly power and prescribe procedures for settling private disputes. Indeed, as Dankwart Rustow observes, an ancient Swedish adage proclaims: Land skall med lag byggas (“The country shall be built with law”).5 Shared respect for orderly legal procedures among legislative, administrative, and military officials underlay the restoration of constitutional government in  and has served as a powerful stimulus for regulating conflict within the political system and on the labor market in the intervening years. Associated with diffuse support for government by law is elite-mass veneration of es-

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tablished political institutions. The Riksdag dates from the fifteenth century and the monarchy from the sixteenth. As they do in British custom, important monarchical occasions serve as unifying symbols of national identity and pride. These range from annual ceremonies opening the Riksdag and honoring Nobel Prize recipients to intermittent royal marriages, births, and funerals. Other institutions that have proven their worth over time are similarly valued, including the office of the parliamentary ombudsman (a form of legislative watchdog) and Sweden’s decentralized form of public administration (both of which are discussed in the next chapter). Respect for law and traditional institutions by no means translate into resistance to system change. On the contrary, receptivity to institutional reform and policy innovation stands out as a third basic tenet of Swedish political culture. Legal codes have been continually revised to meet changing political, economic, and social conditions, just as both the Riksdag and the monarchy have undergone profound transformation in the course of democratization. In each instance, reforms were products of group demands to revise existing structures and government policies advanced variously by Liberals, Conservatives, farmers, Social Democrats, and others. That reform aspirations did not spark violent social confrontations comparable to events in France, Germany, and Russia reflects, finally, shared values of moderation and pragmatism. These attributes of Sweden’s acclaimed “politics of compromise” are rooted in diverse factors. Among them are cultural-ethnic homogeneity; a historical pattern of collaboration among members of the medieval estates; the absence of oppressive government measures directed against the advocates of reform; and responsible behavior on the part of Liberal, Social Democratic, and trade union officials. A willingness among key political and economic actors to seek compromise solutions to partisan disputes significantly facilitated the constitutional settlements of , –, and –, as recounted earlier. In more recent decades, party and interest-group leaders have similarly acted on traditional values of moderation and pragmatism to achieve consensus on successive economic, social, and constitutional initiatives, as is explained below. Sweden’s compromising style of politics has not precluded recurrent class or political conflict. Employers and public officials linked forces to disperse striking workers in a major local dispute in  and on a national scale in . In more recent decades, nonsocialist spokesmen have vehemently opposed postwar Social Democratic initiatives to establish supplementary pensions, extend worker rights, and introduce a compulsory system of wage-earner funds, as is discussed below. Nonetheless, a willingness among political and economic elites to accept reforms (at least ultimately) rather than sabotage them through obstructionist tactics remains a central hallmark of Swedish political culture. Nor have prevailing traditions of moderation and restraint precluded individual acts of violence, as tragically demonstrated by the assassination in February  of Prime Minister Olof Palme. Chair of the Social Democratic Party and head of government from  to  and after September , Palme was gunned down by an assailant late one evening on a street in Stockholm as he and his wife were returning home by foot from a movie. In late , the police arrested a native Swede previously convicted of murder as a suspect in the slaying. He was later tried and acquitted for lack of evidence.

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Neutrality and Internationalism A key instance of political consensus in Sweden is elite-mass endorsement of the country’s foreign policy of neutrality. Since , Sweden has successfully avoided involvement in successive European wars. National attempts to escape invasion during World War II failed in Denmark, Norway, and Finland, but not in Sweden. As a result, Swedish leaders resolved to maintain a voluntary policy of nonalignment during the postwar period despite decisions by Iceland, Norway, and Denmark to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Finland, too, remains nonaligned within the Nordic region, albeit on the basis of a state treaty with the former Soviet Union that bound the country not to undertake measures detrimental to the Soviets. Sweden enforces its neutrality by maintaining a strong national defense. In  the government spent . percent of Sweden’s GNP on military expenditures, with principal emphasis on air and naval defense. This percentage was lower than that of the United States (. percent) and the United Kingdom (. percent), but it was approximately equal to that in most other advanced industrial democracies. Sweden’s per capita defense expenditures in  were approximately $, compared to $ in the United States, $ in France, $ in the United Kingdom, $ in Italy, $ in Canada, and $ in Germany.6 Because of a diminished security threat in the Baltic region following the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the Swedish government announced in October  that it would reduce military expenditures by  percent through . Government officials further underscored Sweden’s neutrality by carefully circumscribing economic cooperation with other European nations. In  Sweden joined the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), which is strictly an intergovernmental organization designed to promote industrial free trade among its member states,7 but studiously refused in the early s to follow Britain, Ireland, Denmark, and Norway in applying for membership in the more ambitious European Economic Community (EEC). However attractive the economic advantages of tariff-free access to the EEC market for the country’s industrial and agricultural exporters, cabinet spokesmen declared that membership in the Community would undermine the international credibility of Sweden’s policy of neutrality by potentially restricting the government’s freedom of action in the event of war. Hence, Sweden negotiated a more restricted industrial free-trade agreement in  that did not formally bind the nation to political or economic decisions by the EEC. Norway negotiated a similar agreement after a narrow majority of voters rejected a proposed membership treaty in a popular referendum. The following year, Britain, Ireland, and Denmark formally joined the European Community (EC). The subsequent demise of communism in Eastern and Central Europe and the virtual end of the Cold War, however, prompted national leaders to reconsider Sweden’s relations with the European Community. After a majority of the members of parliament voted in December  to endorse full membership in the European Community, the cabinet submitted Sweden’s application in . The European Commission issued a favorable position on the Swedish application (along with parallel applications by Austria and neighboring Finland and Norway) in , and government officials negotiated a treaty of accession the following year. A majority of . percent of Swedish voters en-

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dorsed the membership treaty in a national referendum on  November , and Sweden officially joined the European Union (EU) on  January .8 Leaders of the principal political parties have affirmed that Sweden will maintain its established policy of neutrality in wartime even as a full member of the EU. Sweden couples its policy of nonalignment with strong support for the United Nations and other international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Sweden’s internationalism is rooted in a blend of economic self-interest and political idealism. Economically, Sweden is highly dependent on trade with other industrial nations and Third World countries for continued growth and affluence. In , for instance, exports accounted for nearly . percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP). Sweden’s principal trading partners are fellow memberstates of the EU (notably Germany, the United Kingdom, and Denmark) and North America. Politically, the Swedes and other Scandinavians have affirmed collective security and principles of international economic and social cooperation since the founding of the League of Nations in the s. In the post–World War II period, all the Scandinavian states have contributed men and material to a variety of UN peacekeeping operations in Africa and the Middle East. Dag Hammarskjöld, a distinguished civil servant whose father was Swedish prime minister during World War I, served as Secretary-General of the United Nations from  until his untimely death in a plane crash in Africa in . Development of the Welfare State An object of both widespread support and partisan dissent in Sweden is the nation’s vast array of welfare services. The development of the Swedish welfare state is primarily associated with the Social Democrats. With the support of the Agrarians and occasionally the Liberals, they sponsored legislation from the mid-s onward that provided for a voluntary program of unemployment insurance, an improved national pension system, school lunch subsidies, and public assistance to individuals and families in need. World War II interrupted the social reform movement, but by the late s the Social Democrats resumed their efforts to provide minimum standards of collective social security. Postwar legislation included the introduction of compulsory sickness insurance (), improved basic retirement benefits (), a new system of supplementary pensions based on individual earnings (), and a Law on Social Help () that consolidated and extended a variety of welfare benefits. Among the latter are government-financed maternity care, quarterly cash allowances to single parents or families with children, and rent subsidies to those in need. The cumulative effect of these measures is that all citizens and registered aliens (including guest workers) experience an extraordinary degree of social security. Swedes pay relatively little “out of pocket” for health care and education and are guaranteed generous pensions on retirement. Since workers and families whose income falls below minimum standards receive a variety of government payments to help defray rent and other expenses, a strikingly visible consequence of Sweden’s comprehensive welfare system is the

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Table 21.1 Comparative Tax Payments, 1998 (in U.S. dollars)

Country Sweden Denmark Norway Finland France Germany Italy Canada United Kingdom United States

Annual per capita tax payment

As percentage of gross domestic product (GDP)

13,973 16,313 11,512 10,821 10,821 9,694 8,822 7,572 8,814 9,213

52.0 49.8 43.6 46.2 45.2 37.0 42.7 37.4 37.2 28.9

Source: Revenue Statistics of OECD Member Countries (Paris: OECD, 2000), 68, 84.

virtual absence of urban slums comparable to those in most metropolitan areas in North America and elsewhere in Western Europe. To finance their extensive welfare provisions, the Swedes pay one of the highest levels of taxes in the world (although the tax rate has marginally declined in recent years). As indicated in table ., the per capita tax contribution in  in Sweden was the equivalent of $,. This amount was lower than in neighboring Denmark but higher than in other advanced capitalist democracies. As a percentage of GDP, Sweden’s tax rate of . percent is the highest among OECD member countries. A majority of the electorate has repeatedly honored the Social Democrats for their social policy achievements. As indicated in table . (see p. ), the Socialists steadily increased their share of the popular vote during the s and s and have achieved an absolute majority on five occasions. Since the end of World War II, their electoral strength has fluctuated between a high of . percent in  and a low of . percent in , for a postwar average of . percent in national elections. Because of their majority status in parliament, the Social Democrats were able to retain control of the national executive from  to  with virtually no interruption. Since then the Social Democrats have alternated in power with various nonsocialist governments. Yet the welfare state is not without its critics. Conservatives and other nonsocialists have repeatedly attacked both the nation’s high rate of taxation and bureaucratizing tendencies within the public sector. On the left, radical socialists earlier condemned the Social Democrats for their failure to achieve a socialist society and, more recently, have criticized the majority party for cutbacks in welfare state provisions. These opposing views, combined with a counteroffensive initiated by the Social Democrats in the s to extend worker and union rights, helped set the stage for an intense public debate concerning Sweden’s political and economic future.

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Comparative Tax Payments (as a percentage of GDP, ) .

France .

Germany

.

Italy

.

Sweden .

United Kingdom United States

.

Canada

.

Source: OECD, Revenue Statistics of OECD Member Countries (Paris, ), .

Notes . See, for example, Marquis W. Childs, Sweden: The Middle Way, rev. ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ); and Hudson Strode, Sweden: Model for a World (New York: Harcourt, Brace, ). Childs has updated and marginally revised his optimistic assessment in Sweden: The Middle Way on Trial (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ). . For contrasting right vs. left critiques, see Roland Huntford, Sweden: The New Totalitarians (New York: Stein & Day, ); and Jan Myrdal, Confessions of a Disloyal European (New York: Pantheon, ). . Lawrence D. Brown, New Policies, New Politics: Government’s Response to Government’s Growth (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, ), . . Greenland, a self-governing county of Denmark, located off the North Atlantic coast of Canada, is also culturally and politically a part of Scandinavia. . Dankwart A. Rustow, The Politics of Compromise (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ), –. . Calculated from data reported in Sveriges officiella statistik, Statistisk årsbok för Sverige  (Stockholm, ), . . The other founding members included the United Kingdom, Denmark, Norway, Austria, Switzerland, and Portugal. Finland and Iceland later joined EFTA. . An even greater majority of  percent similarly endorsed membership in a national referendum in Finland the same month, but . percent of Norwegian voters rejected membership in a referendum in November.

Chapter 22

Where Is the Power? SWEDEN’S CONTEMPORARY INSTITUTIONAL ARRANGEMENTS are the product

of a century and a half of evolutionary political and constitutional change. Whereas the constitution of  provided for a division of power between the king and parliament, the Riksdag gradually acquired increased competence in the course of the nineteenth century as various categories of law become subject to joint rather than royal jurisdiction. In parallel fashion, members of the king’s advisory council (the cabinet) gradually displaced the monarch as the effective center of executive authority. The prime minister and members of the cabinet subsequently became politically accountable to the Riksdag in the course of Sweden’s democratization between  and . Sweden’s contemporary status as a parliamentary democracy was formally ratified with the adoption of a series of constitutional amendments in – and a wholly new constitution in –. The cabinet and the Riksdag are thus the principal sites of policy initiative and ratification, with the role of the monarch reduced to ceremonial and symbolic functions. Since Sweden is a unitary rather than a federal state, national and local institutions that are constitutionally subordinate to parliament and the central government exercise other political functions. The Riksdag From  until , the Riksdag consisted of two houses: a popularly elected “second chamber” equivalent to the British House of Commons and a smaller, indirectly elected “first chamber” whose members were chosen by Sweden’s twenty-four provincial assemblies. Constitutional reforms ratified in – and implemented in  abolished the bicameral system and established in its place a unicameral parliament similar to the national legislatures in Denmark and Finland. Further changes were incorporated with the adoption of a new Instrument of Government and Act of Parliament in –, which went into effect in . These documents, which are of equal constitutional weight, define executive and legislative functions and the organization of the Riksdag, respectively. The two acts can be amended only by majority vote by two successive sessions of parliament with an intervening election.1 The preamble to the Instrument of Government defines the principles of Swedish parliamentary democracy as follows: All public power in Sweden emanates from the people. The Swedish democracy is founded on freedom of opinion and on universal and equal suffrage and shall be

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realized through a representative and parliamentary polity and through local self-government. Public power shall be exercised under the laws. The first of these principles is institutionalized in the form of free, competitive elections to the Riksdag and the nation’s city and county representative assemblies. Full rights of suffrage are accorded citizens eighteen years of age and older. Registered aliens also have the right to vote, but only in local elections. Until the abolition of the previous bicameral parliament, national and city-county elections were held at staggered four-year intervals. Accompanying the advent of unicameralism in  were constitutional provisions for simultaneous national and local elections every three years. The constitution was subsequently amended in  to reestablish a four-year electoral cycle. Parliamentary elections are held on the third Sunday in September, unless a dissolution election intervenes. In the latter event, Riksdag deputies merely serve out the remainder of the legislative term rather than constitute a new parliament as is the practice elsewhere in Europe. The result is that dissolution elections are extremely rare in Sweden; since the advent of parliamentarianism, the Riksdag has been dissolved only once (in , as recounted below). Sweden employs a proportional electoral system, dating from the constitutional reforms of –, which utilizes a modified version of the St. Lague method for distributing seats among contending parties.2 The nation’s twenty-four provinces serve as regional constituencies for the election of the Riksdag’s  deputies. Most of the seats () are allocated among the constituencies on the basis of the number of eligible voters and the relative strength of the parties competing for support in each of them. The remaining thirtynine seats are distributed among the parties according to their aggregate percentage of votes within the country as a whole. The purpose of the latter provision is to compensate the largest party or parties for the possible loss of seats in individual constituencies and thereby ensure strict proportionality. To be represented in the Riksdag a party must receive a minimum of either  percent of the national vote or  percent of the vote in a single constituency. The Riksdag provides the legislative basis for cabinet formation and tenure and serves as Sweden’s principal lawmaking body. In its former capacity, the Riksdag elects the prime minister (statsminister) following each general election. If a government resigns, as was the case in  and , the Riksdag elects a successor prime minister. The Instrument of Government does not require that a candidate receive an absolute majority (as is true under normal circumstances in, for example, Germany). Instead, a prime minister is elected if not more than half of the members of the Riksdag vote against him. This feature of Swedish constitutionalism makes possible the formation of minority governments in the absence of a majority by a single party or coalition of parties. Since , the Riksdag has also been empowered to move a vote of no confidence against an incumbent prime minister and individual cabinet officials. Such a motion must be signed by a tenth of the deputies and approved by an absolute majority. In such an event, a prime minister or cabinet member would be compelled to resign. To date, however, no votes of no confidence have passed in Sweden.

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As in other parliamentary systems, one of the most important functions of the Riksdag is to hold the government accountable for its actions and omissions on a day-to-day basis. For this purpose, Riksdag deputies utilize written as well as oral questions, which are addressed to cabinet ministers, and the right of general debate. Although party discipline has thus far ensured the survival even of minority cabinets in the face of parliamentary queries and criticism, the various control devices usefully serve as means to extract information and official justifications concerning government policy. The number of written questions (known as interpellations) averaged  per year between  and , while the annual number of oral questions averaged nearly  during the same period.3 The Riksdag’s legislative powers include the exclusive right of taxation and appropriation. In addition, parliament shares authority with the cabinet to propose constitutional amendments, initiate changes in civil and criminal law, and schedule advisory referendums on major political issues. National referendums were held five times in the twentieth century on the following legislative proposals: prohibition in , which failed; a switch from left- to right-hand traffic in , which also failed but was nonetheless implemented by the Riksdag in ; supplementary pensions in ; nuclear energy in ; and Swedish membership in the European Union in . The latter three measures are discussed below. For deliberative purposes, the Riksdag is divided into seventeen standing committees whose powers of scrutiny and amendment are broadly comparable to those of committees in the U.S. Congress and the German Bundestag. They include committees on finance, taxation, agriculture, economic affairs, justice, laws, foreign affairs, defense, the European Union, social insurance, social welfare, cultural affairs, education, communications, the labor market, local government, and the constitution. A principal purpose of the latter committee is to examine the minutes of cabinet meetings to determine whether or not any member of the government has violated the law. If such proves the case, the committee on the constitution is authorized to bring legal charges against the offending official before a special court of impeachment. In practice, the committee has not initiated formal charges against a cabinet member since . All bills, whether submitted by the cabinet or backbench members of the parliament, are referred to the relevant committee for deliberation. Unlike U.S. congressional practice, Swedish committees may not pigeonhole (and thereby kill) legislation but must report all bills back to parliament. Their recommendations almost invariably serve as the basis of legislative enactment. Riksdag officers include a Speaker and three vice-Speakers, all of whom are elected by majority vote. (In practice, the positions are distributed among the major parties represented in parliament.) The Speaker and vice-Speakers play a key legislative role by presiding over parliamentary deliberations and determining, in consultation with the chairmen of the standing committees and four other elected members of parliament, the order in which bills and committee reports are considered on the floor of the Riksdag. In addition, the Speaker is empowered under the  constitution to nominate the prime minister prior to his election by parliament.

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The Prime Minister and the Cabinet The relative significance of the Riksdag and the cabinet in Sweden’s policymaking process varies in relation to the strength of the government’s parliamentary backing. During the s, when no party or coalition commanded a stable majority, the Riksdag was the dominant partner. The advent of “majority parliamentarianism” under Social Democratic–Agrarian aegis in – marked the beginning of a long-term shift in the balance of power in favor of the prime minister and his cabinet. More recently, periods of minority rule under the Social Democrats and later the nonsocialists resulted in the reassertion of parliamentary influence during the s and early s. Because of its direct access to administrative structures and organized interest groups, however, the cabinet remains the central source of policy initiative and coordination. Since , most Swedish prime ministers have been selected because of their status as chairs of either the largest party in parliament (the Social Democrats) or the largest party within a nonsocialist coalition (as was true in –, –, and –). Recent exceptions include nonsocialist leaders who held office as prime ministers in minority cabinets in – and –. Until the constitutional reforms of –, the king appointed the prime minister on the advice of party leaders in parliament. Since , as previously noted, the Riksdag has elected the prime minister. The prime minister is primus inter pares among the seventeen or so persons who make up the cabinet. (The actual number varies from government to government.) Thus, the prime minister chairs cabinet sessions and is primarily responsible for determining the broad outlines of government policy. He is also the chief spokesman for cabinet policy both within and outside parliament. The prime minister is assisted by a deputy with cabinet rank, whose task is to coordinate and plan government activities, and a staff of political advisers and professional civil servants who make up the royal chancery. The prime minister selects the members of the cabinet. They may be dismissed by him or through a vote of no confidence by parliament, as described earlier. Ministerial positions, which correspond in most cases to the standing committees in the Riksdag, include finance, budgetary affairs, foreign policy, defense, the European Union, justice, social policy, communications, education, agriculture, interior, labor market, housing, industry, and interior. The deputy prime minister and three to five ministers without portfolio serve as policy generalists with rotating responsibilities. Each of the designated ministers heads an administrative “department” that is responsible primarily for policy formation (including the preparation of the annual budget). Unlike the national ministries in other Western democracies, Swedish departments are quite limited in size. Typically, they consist of an administrative assistant to the minister (a “state secretary,” who in most cases is a high-level civil servant rather than a political appointee), an office manager, a legal adviser, and a relatively small number of civil servants who handle departmental planning, budgetary proposals, and policy coordination. The actual implementation of policy is delegated to a decentralized network of administrative agencies (see later discussion). Thanks in large measure to its executive authority over the various departments and administrative agencies, the cabinet plays the central role in Sweden’s formal policymak-

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ing process. Riksdag deputies by no means hesitate to propose legislation on their own initiative (, motions in –), but most private members’ bills are dismissed in committee. In contrast, virtually all government proposals (which numbered  in – ) are duly enacted into law.4 Its authority to mobilize the resources of Sweden’s powerful organized interest groups in the prelegislative stage of parliamentary decisions further enhances the cabinet’s policymaking role. Since the nineteenth century, Swedish cabinets have regularly appointed “state commissions” (statsutredningar, commonly translated as Royal Commissions) to gather facts and advise the government on pending legislation. In major questions, such commissions characteristically consist of experts representing the important interest groups, political parties, and relevant administrative agencies. Commission members are usually very thorough in their work, with their final recommendations frequently serving as the basis of the cabinet’s legislative proposal concerning the issue. Interest-group viewpoints are also solicited through a consultative process known as remiss. According to this procedure, ministerial departments invite organized groups and administrative agencies to comment on pending legislation. A government proposal to the Riksdag contains a summary of the state commission’s report and remiss replies along with the government’s own recommendation for action. Together, the state commissions and the remiss procedures constitute the formal core of Sweden’s version of democratic corporatism as defined in the introduction to this volume: namely, institutionalized consultative arrangements that permit public officials and representatives of the nation’s principal interest associations to confer jointly about pending policy issues. By serving as channels for initiating and/or reviewing important legislative initiatives, the commissions and the practice of remiss accord organized interest groups a more direct means to influence policy outcomes than is true of most Western democracies. The Monarch The reigning monarch in Sweden is Carl XVI Gustav, who was crowned king in September  following the death of his grandfather, King Gustaf VI Adolf. The latter performed residual executive functions dating from the nineteenth century in his constitutional role as chairman of formal cabinet sessions, but even this monarchical prerogative was deleted with the adoption of the present constitution in –. A key reason was lingering Social Democratic resentment of efforts by King Gustaf V Adolf, who had reigned from  to , to influence cabinet policy in Germany’s favor during both world wars. Thus, since , the monarch’s role has been restricted largely to ceremonial acts, such as presiding over the annual opening of parliament and conferring Nobel prizes on academic and literary dignitaries. King Carl XVI Gustav helped ensure the survival of the monarchy through his marriage in  to an attractive West German “commoner” from Bavaria, who as Queen Sylvia has charmed even many erstwhile republicans within Social Democratic ranks. Three children have been born to the royal couple. First in line of succession is Princess Viktoria Ingrid Alice Desiree, born in  as the eldest of two daughters and a son. The

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Queen Silvia, Princess Madeleine, King Carl XVI Gustav, Prince Carl Philip, and Crown Princess Viktoria attend the Nobel Prize award ceremony, December . (AP/Wide World Photos)

constitution was amended in – to permit Viktoria, as the first-born, to succeed her father as future Swedish monarch. Previously, the constitution had permitted succession only by male offspring. Other Institutional Actors While policymaking authority is concentrated in the hands of the cabinet and parliament, powers of implementation and enforcement are functionally dispersed among a variety of institutions. They include public administrative bodies, county and local government units, state-owned enterprises, the court system, and four ombudsmen. The Public Administration Responsible for most policy implementation in Sweden is a decentralized network of central administrative boards (centrala ämbetsverk) and a dual system of county and municipal government. On the national level, the administrative boards number approximately eighty. Among the most significant are the National Board of Health and Welfare, the National Industrial Board, the Labor Market Board, the National Nuclear Energy Inspection Board, and the Central Office of Statistics. Other important administrative agencies include the national railways, the postal service, telecommunications, civil defense, and

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the court system (see below). Many administrative agencies, especially those dealing with economic and social policy, maintain regional offices on the level of county government.5 Alongside the central administrative boards are several legislative agencies that perform important policy tasks as well. They include the Bank of Sweden, which issues currency and controls the nation’s supply of money, and the National Debt Office, which is empowered to borrow money in the name of the government and is responsible for administering the national debt. In contrast to the hierarchical structure of public administration in Britain and on the Continent, Sweden’s administrative boards and agencies are legally autonomous from the cabinet and parliament. The present system, which dates from the seventeenth century, was established to maximize the rational implementation of public policy. As Thomas Anton observes: “Administrative power was . . . a function of Swedish insistence that ‘political’ and ‘administrative’ decisions were clearly distinct and that the latter could be made simply by applying law to the facts of a particular case. The administrative boards . . . were designed to provide such legal judgments, and officials were assigned full authority to make those judgments, free from ‘political interference.’ ”6 Despite their legal autonomy, Sweden’s administrative agencies are nonetheless subordinate to the central government and the Riksdag for authoritative policy directives. Moreover, cabinet officials have increasingly relied in recent decades on detailed budgetary guidelines as a means to oversee and coordinate day-to-day administration. Regional and Local Governments Regional and local governments consist of partially overlapping structures made up of appointive state county administrative boards and elected county and municipal councils. Heading the former in each of Sweden’s twenty-four counties is a provincial governor appointed by, and therefore responsible to, the cabinet. The elected members of the parallel county councils designate the fourteen other members of the administrative boards. The appointive boards supervise regional planning, county employment offices, worker retraining programs, environmental protection, and the administration of justice. Sweden’s  elected provincial councils and  subordinate rural and municipal assemblies are responsible for implementing medical and health care; social welfare; education; housing policy; land use; ambulance service; fire protection; and cultural, youth, and athletic policies. The regional administrative agencies, appointive county boards, and elective councils work closely together in coordinating and implementing their designated policy assignments. Growth of the Public Sector Sweden’s public sector has grown significantly in both size and economic importance in recent decades. From fewer than , civil servants at the turn of the century, the number of public officials has increased to approximately . million out of the country’s workforce of . million (nearly  percent of the total). Private consumption accounts for the lion’s share of the gross domestic product ( percent in ), while public consumption comprises  percent of the total. County and local government expenditures

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account for  percent of expenditures on gross domestic product; the central government and its administrative agencies expend  percent.7 Contrary to postwar policies of the British Labour Party and the French Socialists, Sweden’s Social Democrats have nationalized very little industry.8 The Swedish state owns  percent or more of shares in only fifty-two industrial enterprises and financial institutions. Although state-owned firms constitute less than  percent of Sweden’s overwhelmingly private economy, they accord the national government varying degrees of control over investments, production, and sales in designated economic sectors. The major economic sectors in which the government is sole owner or majority shareholder include various banks and insurance companies, forestry, home mortgages, the nation’s waterworks and canals, and Systembolat (a monopoly controlling the distribution and sale of wine, liquor, and strong beer).9 Courts and the Administration of Justice The Swedish court system dates from legislation originally passed in . Three levels define its basic structural hierarchy: some ninety-seven district courts of first instance (tingsrätter), six intermediate courts of appeal (hovrätter), and a Supreme Court (högsta domstolen). Jurisdiction extends in each case to both civil and criminal law. By far the largest number of cases are settled in the courts of first instance. In , for example, the district courts heard , civil disputes and , criminal cases. The courts of appeal, in contrast, reviewed , civil appeals and , criminal cases. That same year, the Supreme Court passed judgment in only  cases and rejected , other appeals. Judges must have university degrees in legal studies and are appointed by the cabinet. They are assisted in all criminal and most civil cases on the local level by panels (nämnd) of lay judges who are elected for six-year terms by the county assemblies. Unlike AngloAmerican juries, the nämnd not only hear evidence and help reach a verdict but also confer with the judge concerning points of law. The Riksdag has also established various specialized courts to deal with conflicts that arise outside normal civil and criminal jurisdiction. They include the fiscal courts of appeal, the supreme administrative court, the labor court, and a market court. The purpose of the latter is to help enforce the Competition Act of , which the Riksdag implemented to prohibit restrictive business practices. The Ombudsman A distinctive Swedish institution that serves as an important legislative control device over administrative behavior is the parliamentary ombudsman (Justitieombudsman, or JO for short). The office was created under the constitution of  as a means to prevent the potential abuse of executive-administrative power. Elected for a four-year term by the Riksdag, the JO is accorded legal autonomy to investigate internal records of all state agencies (including the central administrative boards, courts, the military, and county and local governments) in an effort to determine whether public officials are guilty of vi-

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olating constitutional or statutory law. A JO may undertake such investigations either on his own initiative or in response to complaints by individual citizens. Through the years, the JO’s caseload has increased so substantially that the office has been steadily expanded. In  a military ombudsman was added. In  the two offices were merged and three ombudsmen were established in their place, each with equal legal competence. A fourth ombudsman was added in . In – the ombudsmen reviewed ,, most of which are filed by private citizens (,). The ombudsmen instigated  investigations on their own volition.10 Only a handful of cases ultimately resulted in a formal reprimand or prosecution through the courts. In –, for instance, the ombudsmen undertook disciplinary action against offending officials in only  cases while issuing  milder rebukes and  public pronouncements. More recent official Swedish statistics no longer contain detailed summaries of JO activities. Corporatism and Swedish Democracy The distribution of political power in Sweden thus corresponds to Stein Rokkan’s concept of a “two-tiered system of decision-making,” which he used in the mid-s to describe neighboring Norway.11 The first tier consists of popularly elected members of the parliament and the county and municipal assemblies who are responsible for formulating and ratifying government policy. The second tier of decision makers encompasses representatives of the principal organized interest groups and the public administration who are accorded a recognized policy role through their participation in state commissions and the remiss consultative procedure. The sum of these arrangements is a form of democratic corporatism characterized by institutional openness and broad group participation in the policy process. Coupled with the strength of the Social Democratic Party and organized labor (described in the following chapter), democratic corporatism facilitated efforts by political and group leaders to sustain a pattern of active system change throughout much of the postwar era. Notes . Four documents constitute the composite Swedish constitution. They include the aforementioned Instrument of Government and the Riksdag Act, as well as the Act of Succession and the Freedom of the Press Act. They are compiled in English translation in the Swedish Riksdag, Constitutional Documents of Sweden (Stockholm: Norstedts Tryckeri, ). . Under the St. Laguë method of proportional representation, which was adopted in , the total of the votes for each party in a given electoral district is divided by a succession of uneven numbers (., , , etc.), and seats are awarded to the highest quotients obtained among the various parties. For a detailed discussion of Swedish electoral law, see Dankwart A. Rustow, The Politics of Compromise (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ), –. . Statistiska centralbyrån, Statistisk årsbok för Sverige  (Stockholm, ), . . Statistiska centralbyrån, Statistisk årsbok  (Stockholm, ), . Swedish scholars reported that during a single legislative session (–), the cabinet initiated fully , executive actions. They included  government bills, , budgetary and other decrees, , appeals, and , miscellaneous measures (including administrative appointments). See Bengt Owe Birgersson and Jörgen Westerståhl, Den svenska folkstryrelsen (Stockholm: Liber Förlag, ), . . Ibid.

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. Thomas J. Anton, Administered Politics: Elite Political Culture in Sweden (Boston/The Hague/London: Martinus Nijhoff, ), . . Statistiska centralbyrån, Statistiskt årsbok  (Stockholm, ), , . . Instead, the SAP has relied much more on a combination of fiscal, monetary, and active labor-market policies to achieve its economic objectives of continued growth and full employment. In ironic contrast, the nonsocialist parties nationalized the shipbuilding industry while they were in office from  to  in an attempt to salvage the branch in the face of increased international competition. See chapter . . Statistisk årsbok för Sverige  (Stockholm, ), , . . Ibid., . . Stein Rokkan, “Norway: Numerical Democracy and Corporate Pluralism,” in Political Oppositions in Western Democracies, ed. Robert Dahl (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ), .

Chapter 23

Who Has the Power? THE CAPACITY TO PARTICIPATE in policy decisions in Sweden is shared by political

parties, organized interest groups, and administrative elites. Of these diverse political actors, parties and interest groups have played the key role in initiating systemic reforms as well as basic policy decisions, including political democratization, the rise of the welfare state, the extension of worker rights, and ongoing changes in the political management of the economy. Administrative elites, in contrast, are significant with respect to policy refinement, continuity, and implementation. Political Parties From the early part of the twentieth century through most of the s, Sweden sustained a multiparty system consisting of five major parties: a small Left Party (formerly the Communists), the far larger Social Democrats, the Liberals, the agrarian-based Center Party, and the Moderates (Conservatives). A sixth political movement, known as the “Environmentalist Party—the Greens,” became in September  the first new party to enter the Riksdag in seventy years. In the September  election two other minor parties succeeded in gaining representation in the Riksdag: the conservative Christian Democratic Union and New Democracy, the latter a “new right” movement advocating substantial tax cuts and other radical reforms. Although New Democracy subsequently disappeared from the political landscape, Sweden’s party system nonetheless resembles the more complex multiparty systems of neighboring Denmark, Norway, and Finland. Party fragmentation in Sweden has not meant political stalemate or parliamentary immobilism, as was true in the final years of the Weimar Republic of Germany and frequently in postwar Italy and the Third and Fourth republics of France. Instead, Sweden’s multiparty system has proved capable of sustaining stable governments and adapting to changing economic and social conditions. The principal explanation lies in the persistence of loosely united socialist and nonsocialist blocs that partially blunt the parliamentary effects of party fragmentation. The Social Democrats and Left Party are popularly identified as the socialist bloc because they usually vote together on most legislative matters, while the Liberals, the Center, the Moderates, and the Christian Democrats make up the nonsocialist bloc. During the – legislative session and again after September , the Greens were officially unaligned but generally sided with the Social Democrats, just as New Democracy tacitly supported the other nonsocialist parties in the Riksdag during the – legislative session. The existence of opposing socialist and nonsocialist

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alignments thus facilitates both cabinet stability and legislative cooperation across party lines. The Social Democrats The Swedish Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Socialdemokraterna, or SAP) is Sweden’s oldest political party (founded in ) and, since , its largest. The party was initially established to represent working-class political and economic interests with respect to suffrage reform, the introduction of parliamentarianism, and improved working conditions and social services. With time, the party extended its appeal to middle-class voters as well. Thanks to the success of its economic and social policies after , the SAP increased its popular support from  percent in the s to an average of nearly  percent during the s and s. From  through , the party averaged  percent of the popular vote in successive national elections. Its postwar peak came in  when the SAP received . percent. The SAP received only . percent in the September  election; party strength rebounded to . percent in  only to fall in September  to . (its lowest level since ) (see table .). For reasons to be explained below, its losses were primarily to the more radical Left Party. The SAP’s principal ideological commitment—comparable to that of other West European democratic socialist parties—is to collective measures designed to enhance individual economic and social security and the equality of opportunity. Social Democratic leaders have pursued these objectives through economic policies designed to promote material growth and full employment, parliamentary action (e.g., in the form of welfare legislation, educational reforms, and the extension of worker rights), and trade union negotiations with employer associations on the labor market (see below). A distinctive feature of Swedish social democracy is that the movement emerged simultaneously with organized liberalism during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Because both parties were intent on achieving similar political objectives, they were able to cooperate during the formative decades of industrialization and democratization rather than engage in fratricidal conflict (as was the case with competing Liberal and Social Democratic parties in much of continental Europe). This historical legacy has contributed to the emergence of Sweden’s largely consensual political culture. The SAP is also distinguished by a tradition of stable leadership. Since the party was founded, only six men have served as party chair: Hjalmar Branting (–), Per Albin Hansson (–), Tage Erlander (–), Olof Palme (–), Ingvar Carlsson (–), and Göran Persson (since ). Each leader has been an able parliamentarian and adept at forging unity among diverse party factions, thereby enhancing the party’s claim to long-term executive competence. A major strength of the Social Democratic Party is its close organizational link with the Swedish Federation of Trade Unions (Landsorganisationen—LO). Through a combination of overlapping leadership on the party’s Executive Committee and rank-and-file membership between the unions and the party, the LO contributes important policy initiatives as well as the bulk of the SAP’s electoral support. Unions also provide a major share of SAP financial contributions.

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Table 23.1 Election Results, 1932–98

1932 1934 1936 1938 1940 1942 1944 1946 1948 1950 1952 1954 1956 1958 1958 1960 1962 1964 1966 1968 1970 1973 1976 1979 1982 1985 1988 1991 1994 1998

Typea

VPb

R C R C N C R C R C R C R R C R C R C R R R R R R R R R R R

8.3 6.8 7.7 5.7 4.2 5.9 10.3 11.2 6.3 4.9 4.3 4.8 5.0 3.4 4.0 4.5 3.8 5.2 6.4 3.0 4.8 5.3 4.8 5.6 5.6 5.4 5.8 4.5 6.2 12.0

MP

SAP

FP

C

M

5.5 3.4 4.1 4.5

41.7 42.1 45.9 50.4 53.8 50.3 46.7 44.4 46.2 48.6 46.1 47.4 44.6 46.2 46.8 47.8 50.5 47.3 42.2 50.1 45.3 43.6 42.7 43.2 45.6 44.7 43.2 37.7 45.3 36.4

11.7 12.5 12.9 12.2 12.0 12.4 12.9 15.6 22.8 21.7 24.4 21.7 23.8 18.2 15.6 17.5 17.1 17.0 16.7 14.3 16.2 9.4 11.1 10.6 5.9 14.2 12.2 9.1 7.2 4.7

14.1 13.3 14.3 12.6 12.0 13.2 13.6 13.6 12.4 12.3 10.7 10.3 9.4 12.7 13.1 13.6 13.1 13.2 13.7 15.7 19.9 25.1 24.1 18.1 15.5 12.4 11.3 8.5 7.7 5.1

23.5 24.2 17.6 17.8 18.0 17.6 15.9 14.9 12.3 12.3 14.4 15.7 17.1 19.5 20.4 16.5 15.5 13.7 14.7 12.9 11.5 14.3 15.6 20.3 23.6 21.3 18.3 21.9 22.4 22.9

KDS

NYD

1.4 1.4 1.9 2.9 7.1 4.1 11.7

6.7 1.2

aType

of election: R identifies Riksdag (parliamentary) elections; C identifies communal (county and municipal) elections. bParty abbreviations: VP  Left Party (postcommunists); MP  Environmentalist Party–the Greens; SAP  Social Democratic Party; FP  People’s Party (Liberals); C  Center Party; M  Moderates (Conservatives); KDS  Christian Democrats; NYD  New Democracy.

The Left Party Similar to other European communist movements, the Swedish Communist Party was formed in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution in  as a leftist offshoot of the Social Democrats. Unlike most of their continental counterparts, Sweden’s Communists have maintained a tradition of ideological independence of the former Soviet Union rooted in their country’s historical antipathy toward Russia and prevailing political cultural values of moderation and pragmatism. A Stalinist faction exists within the party, but it is overshadowed by a revisionist (Eurocommunist) majority that affirms Western-style

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parliamentary democracy and individual civil liberties. A small group of hard-core Stalinists broke with the party to form a separate Swedish Communist Party in , but thus far they have failed to attract appreciable electoral support. Party leaders adopted the name of Left Party–Communists (Vänsterpartiet-kommunisterna) and a new party program in  in an effort to affirm their allegiance to democratic norms. Left Party activists define themselves as a radical alternative to the SAP through their ideological critique of capitalism; their advocacy of state ownership of key industries, banks, and insurance companies; and their strong support for welfare provisions. In  party leaders dropped the designation “Communist” altogether and shortened the official party name to Left Party (Vänsterpartiet—VP) in an effort to distance themselves from discredited Marxist-Leninist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe. The VP draws most of its electoral support among industrial workers and intellectuals. During the Cold War era, the Left’s share of the popular vote fluctuated between a high of . percent () and a low of . percent () for an average of nearly . percent. The Left Party has recently expanded its electoral base at the expense of the SAP, mobilizing fully  percent of the popular vote in the  election. Given its minuscule size, the VP’s only hope of affecting policy outcomes is through a tactical alliance with the Social Democrats in the Riksdag. Thus, party deputies usually support SAP parliamentary initiatives (or at least abstain in crucial votes) and have thereby helped ensure the continuance of Social Democratic governance throughout most of the postwar era. The Environmentalist Party—the Greens Also identified as a “left” party but with a much less clearly defined ideological profile than either the VP or the Social Democrats are the Greens. Officially, the movement calls itself the Environmentalist Party–the Greens (Miljöpartiet De Gröna, abbreviated MP). The movement was founded during the early s in emulation of similar parties in Germany and neighboring Finland and Denmark. By mid-decade the Greens had succeeded in winning seats on more than half of Sweden’s city and county councils, and in September  they made their first entrance into parliament with . percent of the popular vote. Similar to their counterparts in other West European countries, the Greens stress measures to protect the natural environment and promote the socioeconomic interests of less privileged groups. Accordingly, they advocate an end to the use of nuclear energy, the introduction of new taxes on energy use and factory and automobile emissions, and tax cuts for lower-income workers. They also urge a ban on new highway construction in favor of increased reliance on the nation’s extensive railway system. The Greens are a highly heterogeneous movement. They attract most of their members and voters from among younger, better-educated, and urban citizens. They are led by a committee made up of rotating members, with no spokesperson standing out as a discernible leader. Twenty MP deputies served in the Riksdag from September  until the September  election, when the Greens received only . percent of the vote and thereby failed to garner sufficient support to remain in parliament. The Greens reentered the

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Riksdag in  after winning . percent of the popular vote. In the  election they marginally increased their support to . percent. The Nonsocialist Bloc The fragmentation of Sweden’s nonsocialist forces has inhibited the emergence of a cohesive alternative to Social Democracy comparable to the Conservative Party in Britain or the Christian Democrats in Germany. Nonetheless, leaders of the Liberal, Center, and Moderate parties forged a limited form of bourgeois unity that enabled them to displace the Social Democrats in executive office from  to . The nonsocialist parties once again won a majority in  and governed jointly until the September  election. The Liberals The Liberals were the smallest bourgeois party from  until the parliamentary election of September  when they scored . percent of the popular vote to become the second-largest nonsocialist party. In subsequent elections Liberal support has steadily dwindled to approximately a third of that level (see table ., p. ). Their literal name, Folkpartiet (People’s Party), suggests the Liberals’ simultaneous strength and weakness. As a broadly based movement appealing variously to businessmen, workers, intellectuals, prohibitionists, and free thinkers, the Liberals have at times been Sweden’s largest nonsocialist party. They peaked at  percent of the popular vote in , fell below Conservative strength during the s and early s, and then resumed their dominant status among the nonsocialist parties from  until . At the same time, the very diversity of the Liberals’ popular support makes them highly vulnerable to electoral shifts within the nonsocialist bloc. Thus, from  through the mid-s, the Liberals lost votes to both the Center and the Moderates, declining to . percent in . Their temporary resurgence in  was, in turn, primarily at the expense of the other two nonsocialist parties. Electoral support for the Liberals subsequently declined in the next three elections to a postwar low of . in . The Liberals’ support of suffrage reform and parliamentarianism enabled them to play an important role, through cooperation with the Social Democrats, in achieving Sweden’s democratization. They lost votes to the left during the s and s because of their opposition to government activism in the economy and society. Under new leadership, the Liberals dramatically increased their electoral support in the late s by endorsing the Social Democrats’ social program and simultaneously advocating greater individual economic freedom. Their recovery was halted in  when they proposed a compromise solution to a controversy over supplementary pensions that failed to satisfy either the left or right (see below). Liberal spokesmen have contributed significantly to the nonsocialist critique of centralizing tendencies within government and the economy, even though the party itself has suffered recurrent electoral losses in recent decades. In an attempt to assure the party’s survival in the light of the  percent minimum threshold for parliamentary representation, Liberal deputies elected a new chairman in October : Bengt Westerberg, a former state secretary in the Department of Finance and an acknowledged party moderate.

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Westerberg’s factual and pragmatic style of leadership contributed to the Liberals’ advance during the mid-s. Westerberg was succeeded in  by Maria Leissner, who in turn was followed two years later by Lars Leijonborg. The Center Party The Center Party (Centerpartiet) is more solidly anchored than the Liberals in terms of socioeconomic support. Yet, like the Folkpartiet, the Center is vulnerable to recurrent electoral shifts. Founded in  as the Farmers’ Party (a successor organization to several nineteenth-century ruralist movements), the Center adopted its present name in  along with a more broadly based program emphasizing the need for economic decentralization and a more humane urban environment. The party’s transformation coincided with increased public concern about ecological issues as symbolically expressed by the advent of a popularly based gröna vågen (green wave). The result was an increase in electoral support, primarily at the expense of the Liberals. Center strength rose from . percent in  to an average of  percent during the s and a peak of  percent in . Most of the increase reflected the party’s strategic success in expanding its appeal from farmers (who still contribute a quarter of the party’s support) to include blue- and white-collar workers (who together make up  percent of Center voters). Like the Liberals, the Center has subsequently lost support to the Moderates. Party strength began to decline in ; by  it had fallen to . percent. Recent fluctuations in the Center’s electoral fortunes reflect the party’s stand on policy issues. Increased Center support in the  election, for example, was attributed primarily to chairman Thorbjörn Fälldin’s opposition to an expansion of Sweden’s nuclear energy program as a central plank in the party’s pro-ecological stance. Conversely, the party’s electoral declines in  and  were related to an interim resolution of the nuclear energy conflict in  (see below) and the Center’s subsequent failure to identify new policy issues as a basis for mobilizing continued popular support. Largely in response to the party’s recent electoral decline, Fälldin resigned under pressure as Center chairman in . He was succeeded by Karin Söder, former foreign minister and the first woman to head a major Swedish political party. Söder subsequently stepped down a year later because of ill health; she was succeeded by Olof Johansson, party secretary and a specialist in economics. In  Maud Olofsson, a party activist in northern Sweden who has never served in the national government, was unanimously elected chair at a special party congress. The Moderates Since , the largest of Sweden’s nonsocialist parties, the Moderates (Moderaterna) have consistently offered clear policy alternatives to those of the Social Democrats. Among their chief demands are tax reductions, deregulation of private enterprise, and the partial privatization of education and childcare services. The Moderates also strongly opposed measures undertaken by the LO and the SAP during the s and s to extend the collective economic influence of organized labor.

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A linear descendant of nineteenth-century bureaucratic-economic conservatives, the Moderates initially opposed democratization. Their ideological forebears notwithstanding, to ensure the political survival of Swedish Conservatism they endorsed the introduction of manhood suffrage in the Great Compromise of – in exchange for proportional representation. Separate party organizations were established in the former upper and lower houses of parliament in ; they were known as the National Party and the Ruralist and Citizens’ Party, respectively. The two factions merged in  as “the Right” (Högern), a term utilized throughout Scandinavia from the mid-nineteenth century onward to designate Conservatives. From the s through the s, the Right distinguished itself primarily by its opposition to the Social Democrats’ activist economic and social policies. As a consequence, the party steadily lost popular support. Its share of the national vote fell from . percent in  to an average of . percent during the s and . percent in the s. Conservative strength rose marginally to . percent during the s under the articulate leadership of a new chairman, Gunnar Heckscher, a political scientist at the University of Stockholm who sought to establish a more positive party profile. His successors have pursued a similar strategy, with the adoption of the party’s present name and a progressive program in  signaling a determined effort by Conservative spokesmen to adjust the party’s image and ideology to changing economic and social conditions. Thus, the Moderates have embraced a more positive view toward government intervention in the economy and society while defending principles of private ownership and political decentralization. The Moderates’ ideological affirmation of individual “freedom, independence, and security” rooted in an ethical tradition of humanism1 has facilitated the party’s recent electoral recovery. Its strength increased from . percent in  to . percent in  and continued to climb through the  election. The party lost support in  and  but reversed its decline in subsequent elections. During the s the Moderates averaged . percent of the popular vote to retain their position, which they have held since , as Sweden’s largest nonsocialist party. Carl Bildt, who was elected chairman of the Moderates in  on the basis of his experience as a former political secretary and coordinator for nonsocialist governmental cooperation in –. From  to September , Bildt served as Sweden’s first conservative prime minister in sixty years. The Moderates elected Bo Lundgren, a former minister of finance, to succeed Bildt in August . Christian Democrats and New Democracy Two new center-right political parties gained entrance to the Riksdag in  to add further complexity to Sweden’s multiparty system: the Christian Democratic Union (Kristlig demokratisk samling—KDS) and New Democracy (Ny Demokrati—NYD). Only the former, however, survived subsequent national elections. The Christian Democrats established themselves as a national political party in the s on the model of Christian Peoples’ parties in neighboring Denmark and Norway.

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The party’s programmatic sober affirmation of traditional values of family and Christian morality appealed to fundamentalist voters, but its organizational weakness and lack of a solid socioeconomic basis restricted its initial electoral advances to local and provincial assemblies. The Christian Democrats sought to legitimize their claim to national office through a tactical electoral alliance in  and  with the Center, and in September  they finally managed to surpass the minimum threshold for representation in the Riksdag when the party won . percent of the vote (primarily at the expense of the Center and the Liberals). Contributing to its electoral success was widespread public confidence in the party chair, Alf Svensson. Popular support for the KDS fell to . percent in  but rebounded to . percent four years later. New Democracy was a self-proclaimed maverick in Swedish politics. The party was founded in late  by two antiestablishment cultural figures: Bert Karlsson, an amusement park owner and publisher of popular music, and Ian Wachtmeister, a satirist and industrialist who is a member of Sweden’s nearly extinct aristocracy. Both leaders claimed to speak for an emergent “new populism” that reflected a growing popular distrust of state bureaucrats and the high cost of government. In addition to its attacks on the state and demands for steep tax cuts, New Democracy demanded stiffer penalties for criminals and restrictions on rights of immigration. Ideologically, the party thus corresponded closely to other “new right” parties elsewhere in Europe—including the Progress parties in Denmark and Norway, the National Front in France, and the Republikaner in Germany. New Democracy scored an overnight success in the September  election by attracting the support of . percent of the electorate. The party subsequently lost political credibility, in part because of public bickering between its two leaders, and received only . percent of the popular vote in September  and therefore is no longer represented in the Riksdag. Interest Groups Alongside Sweden’s national parties, three organized interest associations stand out as major centers of political power: the National Federation of Trade Unions (LO), the Swedish Association of Employers (Svenska Arbetsgivareföreningen—SAF), and the Central Organization of Salaried Employees (Tjänstemännens centralorganisation—TCO). Also important, though less influential than the preceding groups, are the Swedish Central Organization of University Graduates (SACO-SR), the National Association of Farmers (LRF), and the Swedish Cooperative Association (KF).2 The political significance of Sweden’s principal organized interest groups lies primarily in their affiliation or alignment with important political parties and their participation in state commissions and the remiss consultative procedure, as described in the preceding chapter. In addition, the LO, the SAF, and their constituent organizations play an important role in economic and social outcomes through their direct negotiations with each other on the labor market. Employer groups and organized labor also participate in the formation and implementation of labor-market policy through their membership (along with government officials) in the National Labor Market Board (Arbetsmarknadsstyrelsen— AMS), which is discussed in the next chapter.

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Landsorganisationen (LO) The most important labor association is the LO, which was founded in  as a federation of local and regional craft (later, industrial) unions. Since then, the federation has grown to encompass twenty-two national trade unions that together claim as members  percent of Sweden’s total labor force (. million members out of nearly  million employees in ). The LO’s largest constituent units are the Association of Local Government Workers with , members and the Metal Workers’ Union with , members ().3 As previously noted, the LO is closely linked with the SAP through a combination of overlapping leadership and the collective membership of most rank-and-file union members in the party. Its affiliation with the Social Democratic Party has enabled LO leaders to initiate a number of significant legislative measures in recent decades. As discussed below, these primarily have involved extensions in the rights of individual workers and unions at the workplace. In its simultaneous role as Sweden’s principal bargaining agent on behalf of higher wages and improved working conditions, the LO until recently negotiated directly with the Association of Employers (the SAF) to establish annual framework agreements covering all its member unions. This practice, which was instigated in the s, was abandoned in  when the Metal Workers’ Union negotiated its own wage pact. The LO remains responsible for coordinating the overall negotiation process, but actual agreements are now reached on an industry-by-industry basis. Both union leaders and employers have welcomed the return to a more decentralized system of wage negotiations on the grounds that it permits greater flexibility. Throughout the postwar period, the LO and its member unions have pursued a largely cooperative strategy in their relations with the SAF. As a result, Sweden has sustained one of the world’s lowest levels of industrial conflicts. A major exception was a protracted dispute over wages in  that resulted in a national lockout by the SAF and a retaliatory strike by the LO affecting nearly a million workers. The country was virtually paralyzed for three days before the two labor-market partners agreed on a compromise solution. Since then, organized labor and employers have succeeded in reaching wage agreements with a minimum of open strife. The pattern of peaceful labor relations is rooted in two important historical accords: () the Collective Agreements Act of , which prohibited strikes and lockouts over the interpretation of wage contracts and required that they be settled instead by a newly created Labor Court; and () the “Saltsjöbaden Agreement” of , which was negotiated by the SAF and the LO and established a consensual framework governing wage negotiation and grievance procedures. The Central Organization of Salaried Employees (TCO) Sweden’s second most important labor organization is the TCO (Tjänstemännens Centralorganisation). Representing primarily white-collar workers, the TCO consists of nineteen national unions that together claim . million members (). Slightly more than half of its membership is employed in the public sector on either the national or regional/local levels of government; the remainder work for private firms.

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The TCO comprises a more heterogeneous clientele than the LO. As a result, its leaders studiously pursue an official strategy of “neutrality” in their relations with the principal political parties rather than one of alignment or affiliation. In practice, however, the TCO cooperates closely with the LO in promoting bread-and-butter economic issues such as annual wage increments on behalf of its members. As a result, the TCO leadership is inclined, on balance, to endorse SAP legislative initiatives more than those of the nonsocialist parties. One consequence is that the Social Democrats tapped the TCO chairman, Lennart Broström, to become foreign minister after their electoral victory in September . Broström later shifted cabinet seats to assume duties as minister of education in . Association of Employers (SAF) The SAF (Svenska Arbetsgivareföreningen) was founded in  as a counterpart employer organization to the LO. Similar to both the LO and the TCO, the SAF is a national federation made up of constituent parts (in its case, branch associations of industrial and service firms). Its membership in  consisted of , companies represented in the national organization through  branch associations. The largest corporate members are those involved in manufacturing, commerce, and forestry. Like the LO, the SAF has a dual identity. On the labor market, the SAF and its branch associations are responsible for negotiating wage and related agreements with organized labor, as described earlier. Politically, the SAF is closely aligned with the nonsocialist bloc, especially the Moderates. Through a combination of research and publication activities, publicity campaigns, its participation in government commissions and the remissive procedure, and lobbying efforts vis-à-vis the cabinet and parliament, the SAF seeks to maximize employer influence in policy outcomes. In recent decades, the SAF has concentrated on tax reform, wage restraint, and a campaign to impede Social Democratic–LO initiatives to extend the power of unions in economic decisions. Overlapping in large part with the SAF is a second employer association: the Swedish Federation of Industry (Svenska Indistriförbundet—SIF). The SIF concentrates on promoting economic, trade, and environmental policies favorable to business interests. Administrative Elites High-level civil servants (i.e., the administrative elites who manage the planning and budgetary processes within the various cabinet-level departments) are also instrumental actors in Sweden’s policy process. Unlike leaders of the various parties and interest groups, they are not politically accountable to the public at large or organizational members. Instead, they exercise power on the basis of their academic qualifications, institutional status, and bureaucratic skills. As such, Sweden’s departmental bureaucrats are a principal source of empirical information, technical expertise, and long-range reform perspectives. As Thomas Anton observes in his assessment of elite political culture in Sweden, the administrative elites who constitute the ministerial departments in Stockholm are distinctive in comparative perspective primarily because of their close personal interaction “in a world that is small, comfortable, well-understood, and highly specialized”; their social

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skills, coupled with a pragmatic orientation toward people and problem solving; and their formal participation alongside politicians and interest-group representatives on Sweden’s myriad state commissions.4 Together, these personal and institutional attributes of the administrative elites contribute significantly to Sweden’s highly deliberative and rational mode of policymaking. Elections Electoral outcomes determine whether the socialist or nonsocialist bloc—and therefore indirectly which organized interest groups—dominates the legislative agenda. Between elections, the composition of the cabinet and interparty as well as intergroup bargaining determine the specific content of policy choice. Sweden is the only country among the six nations presented in this volume that held competitive elections on schedule throughout the twentieth century. Even the onset of World Wars I and II did not cause political leaders to postpone national elections. From democratization through , Riksdag elections were held every four years (except for a special dissolution election in ). Elections to county and city assemblies were also conducted at four-year intervals, albeit midway through each legislative session. Thus the Swedes voted every two years, alternating between Riksdag and county/local elections. The election dates were merged through the constitutional reforms of – (effective in ) that reduced the terms of national and regional office from four to three years. As previously noted, legislative terms were extended once again to four years beginning in the fall of . Electoral outcomes are associated with three distinctive stages in Swedish parliamentary development. The first was one of “minority parliamentarianism,” which spanned the years from  to  and was characterized by the absence of stable legislative majorities by a single party or governing coalition. The Social Democrats’ advance in the  election inaugurated a shift toward “majority parliamentarianism,” which involved forty-four years of informal and formal coalitions between the SAP and other parties alternating with periods of a Social Democratic legislative majority. Since , Sweden has experienced more indeterminate electoral results resulting in the formation of successive majority and minority cabinets and an alternation of executive power between the Social Democrats and nonsocialist parties. The Social Democrats have consistently remained Sweden’s largest political party since . Their strength has peaked during two electoral cycles during the twentieth century: in the late s and early s and for a shorter period in the s. Within the nonsocialist bloc considerable electoral fluctuations have occurred over time. The Liberals relinquished their dominant status to the Conservatives in the aftermath of World War II, but regained it from the mid-s through the mid-s. From then through the early s, the Center and the Moderates vied for leadership among the nonsocialist forces. The Liberals subsequently displaced the Center as the second-largest nonsocialist party from  until , when the Center reclaimed that position. The emergence of a shared sense of nonsocialist identity among the Liberal, Center, and Moderate parties during the s effectively transformed the conditions of electoral

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Table 23.2 Bloc Alignments, 1958–98 Year

Type of electiona

Socialist partiesb

Nonsocialist partiesc

1958 1960 1962 1964 1966 1968 1970 1973 1976 1979 1982 1985 1988 1991 1994 1998

C C C R C R R R R R R R R R R R

50.8 52.3 54.3 52.5 48.6 53.1 50.1 48.9 47.5 48.8 51.2 50.1 54.4 45.6 55.6 52.9

49.1 47.6 45.7 43.9 45.1 42.9 47.6 48.8 50.8 49.0 45.0 47.9 41.8 46.6 41.4 44.4

aType of election: R  Riksdag; C  Communal. bCombined support for the SAP, the Left Party, and the Greens. cIncludes support for the KDS in 1985 and 1988, when the Center

and the KDS formed an electoral alliance,

and after 1991; excludes support for New Democracy.

competition. Henceforth, bloc rather than merely party outcomes became decisive for determining government formation and the thrust of policy decisions. An increase in aggregate nonsocialist strength from the communal election of  onward, as indicated in table ., thus enhanced bloc competitiveness between the socialist and nonsocialist parties and presaged later shifts in executive leadership. Electoral advances by the Christian Democrats and New Democracy contributed to a discernible increase in aggregate nonsocialist strength in . Continuity and change characterize recent electoral behavior. Each party retains an identifiable core of supporters. Both the Social Democrats and the Left Party draw most of their support among workers and lower-level salaried employees; the Liberals recruit broadly among all major occupational groups; the Center draws most of its support from among farmers, workers, and civil servants; and the Moderates attract the bulk of their voters among businessmen and higher- and medium-level civil servants. At the same time, new political issues have motivated many voters (especially younger ones) to abandon their occupational or class identities to vote across party or bloc lines. Among such issues are nuclear energy, environmental concerns, and economic and social policy. Increased electoral volatility has contributed in turn to discontinuities in executive leadership from the mid-s onward.

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Table 23.3 Government Formation, 1932–2002 Year

Compositiona

Prime minister and party

1932–36 1936 1936–39 1939–45 1945–51 1951–57 1957–76 1976–78 1978–79 1979–81 1981–82 1982–91 1991–94 1994–98 1998–2002

SAP C SAP-C SAP-C-FP-M SAP SAP-C SAP C-FP-M FP C-FP-M C-FP SAP M-FP-C-KDS SAP SAP

Hansson (SAP) Pehrsson i Bramstorp (C) Hansson (SAP) Hansson (SAP) Hansson/Erlander (SAP) Erlander (SAP) Erlander/Palme (1969) (SAP) Fälldin (C) Ullsten (FP) Fälldin (C) Fälldin (C) Palme/Carlsson (SAP) Bildt (M) Carlsson/Persson (SAP) Persson (SAP)

aParty abbreviations: SAP  Social Democratic Party; FP  Liberals; C  Center Party; M  Moderates; KDS  Christian Democrats.

Governments and Opposition From  through the – legislative sessions, fourteen distinct coalitions or single-party governments have held executive office (see table .). The Social Democrats controlled the cabinet, either alone or in coalition with one or more of the nonsocialist parties, between  and . A succession of nonsocialist cabinets governed from  to : first, a three-party coalition led by the Center, then a Liberal minority cabinet, next a restored three-party coalition, and finally a Center-Liberal minority coalition. The Social Democrats resumed executive leadership following the  parliamentary election. They lacked an absolute majority but could rely, depending on the policy issue at stake, on either the VP, the Greens (after ), and/or one or more of the nonsocialist parties to enact their legislative agenda. In October  a four-party coalition was formed consisting of the Moderates, the Liberals, the Center, and the Christian Democrats that was tacitly supported by New Democracy. The nonsocialists governed until the September  election when Ingvar Carlsson resumed the prime ministership as head of a minority SAP cabinet supported by the VP, the MP, and tactically by some members of the bourgeois bloc. The SAP retained executive office following the September  election. Long-term Social Democratic governance, interrupted by nonsocialist interregnums in – and –, thus distinguishes Swedish politics from that of other advanced industrial democracies. The SAP has utilized its executive status to pursue a succession of transforming—and often controversial—policy initiatives that constitute a long-term pattern of breakthrough politics followed by a shift toward neoliberalism similar to policies pursued by Britain’s Tony Blair and Germany’s Gerhard Schröder. Perceived short-

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comings of these strategies have prompted spirited public debate and recurrent electoral realignments. Notes . Moderata samlingsparti, “Moderat grundsyn” [Moderate Principles], adopted at the  party congress. www.moderat.se. . The latter organizations are discussed more fully in Nils Elvander, Intresseorganisationerna i dagens Sverige, d ed. (Lund: CWK Gleerup Bokförlag, ). . Statistiska centralbyrån, Statistisk årsbok för Sverige  (Stockholm, ), . . Thomas J. Anton, Administered Politics: Elite Political Culture in Sweden (Boston/The Hague/London: Martinus Nijhoff, ), esp. –.

Chapter 24

How Is Power Used? QUALITIES OF PRAGMATISM and a willingness to seek compromise solutions to parti-

san differences have facilitated a consensual approach to many aspects of both domestic and foreign policy. Thus, leaders of the major political parties, SAF, the LO, and other organized interest groups have jointly affirmed the constitutional reforms that modernized Swedish parliamentarianism in the s, the need to sustain material growth on the basis of SAF-LO-TCO cooperation, an active labor-market policy, and neutrality. Within this broad consensus on fundamental principles of Swedish politics and economics, however, the socialist and nonsocialist blocs have simultaneously promoted competing ideological visions of system change. In short, power is used by political parties and organized interest groups on behalf of both shared and divergent socioeconomic objectives. Between Sweden’s key political actors, the Social Democrats and the LO have decisively influenced policy outcomes because of their numerical and organizational strength, the SAP’s long-term parliamentary majority, and the fragmentation of the nonsocialist opposition. During more than five decades of executive leadership, the Social Democrats undertook major policy initiatives and systemic reforms that culminated in today’s comprehensive welfare state. Many of the attributes associated with the Swedish model are products of the SAP-LO’s strategic commitment to active system change, including the “historic compromise” between private capital and organized labor codified in the Saltsjöbaden agreement of  and an overarching commitment to full employment and equality of opportunity for all citizens. The nonsocialist parties, the SAF, and other organized groups have endorsed many of the SAP-LO innovations, but on important occasions they also resisted Social Democratic initiatives. With the maturation of the Swedish model during the s and s, the result has been a mixed record of economic and social performance accompanied by recurrent political conflict. Economic Performance Economic factors significantly enhanced the SAP’s long-term claim to cabinet office. By introducing expansionist fiscal policies along Keynesian lines when they first came to power in the early s, the Social Democrats helped engineer Sweden’s recovery from the devastating effects of the prevailing international economic crisis. The advent of World War II led to a sharp reduction in trade and the introduction of rationing, as well as numerous economic controls that resulted in a temporary decline in the nation’s stan-

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Table 24.1 Per Capita Gross Domestic Product, 1997 (at current prices using current purchasing power parities) Country

Amount

Sweden Canada France Germany Italy Japan United Kingdom United States

$20,439 23,242 21,993 22,049 21,265 24,574 20,483 29,326

Source: OECD, “Basic Statistics: International Comparisons,” Economic Surveys  (Paris, 2000).

dard of living. But from the late s onward, Sweden, like most of Western Europe, North America, and Japan, experienced an unprecedented rate of economic growth and national prosperity. The upshot, as indicated in table ., is that today Sweden claims a per capita income that ranks among the highest among the world’s industrial democracies. Much of Sweden’s postwar economic expansion is the result of external factors. Among them are American loans and grants to Sweden and other West European countries under the Marshall Plan (initiated in ), a rapid expansion of world trade from the early s onward, and the success of the European Coal and Steel Community (founded in ) and the European Economic Community (established in ) in stimulating growth throughout Western Europe as a whole. Yet international economic trends alone do not account for other, more distinctive Swedish patterns of economic performance. Among them are one of the lowest unemployment rates among the industrial democracies and a long-term pattern of labor peace. During the postwar period Sweden sustained virtually full employment until the early s. The unemployment rate fluctuated between a high of . percent in  and a low of . percent in , the former at a time when unemployment climbed to record postwar levels in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and North America. Equally noteworthy, Sweden experienced a comparatively low level of labor-management conflict. During the s, workers went on strike an average of only  times a year, compared to an annual average of  times in Germany, , in France, , in Britain, and , in the United States. The number of strikes in Sweden increased during the s to an annual average of eighty-seven. Yet even this figure is significantly lower than the annual averages during the same decade in other industrial democracies: , in Britain, , in France, and , in the United States.1 During the s, only Germany among the countries surveyed in this volume maintained a lower record of industrial conflict.2 Sweden’s low levels of unemployment and industrial conflict have not been accidental. First, the SAP’s executive leadership from  to  and again from  to  facilitated long-term efforts to fine-tune the nation’s economic performance through a combination of indicative economic planning, short-term adjustments in fis-

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cal and monetary policies, and government measures designed to encourage economic rationalization.3 As a result, Sweden was spared abrupt changes in macroeconomic policymaking associated with periodic shifts in power between conservative and socialist parties in postwar Britain and during the s in France. Second, the Social Democrats have utilized their executive status to promote an active labor-market policy in collaboration with their LO allies and the SAF. The concept of an active labor-market policy was originally formulated by several prominent LO economists during the s and was formally implemented by the Social Democrats in response to an economic slowdown during the late s. In contrast to Keynesian theory and practice, which emphasize reliance on fiscal measures to combat unemployment, advocates of an active labor-market policy urged collaborative actions by administrative officials, unions, and employers to maintain or create jobs on the level of individual firms. A basic instrument for this purpose is the National Labor Market Board (AMS), which is composed of government, union, and employer representatives. The AMS coordinates public and private efforts to promote employment through a combination of training and retraining programs, the relocation of workers displaced when companies are forced to shut down, and temporary relief work. The government supplements the activities of the AMS and its decentralized network of county and local employment agencies by providing cash subsidies to companies willing to hire workers who might otherwise not be able to find a job, among them many young people and the handicapped. An important consequence of the active labor-market policy is that Sweden has far fewer people “on welfare” than has traditionally been the case in the United States. Augmenting Sweden’s active labor-market policy are other political factors that have contributed specifically to labor peace. One is the numerical strength of the LO and its member unions, which has permitted organized labor to bargain effectively with employer groups on behalf of higher wages and improved working conditions, thereby lessening potential causes of employee dissatisfaction. A second is the pattern of institutionalized collaboration between employers and unions that has governed SAF-LO relations since their Saltsjöbaden accord of . The joint resolve by leaders of both associations to resolve differences with minimum government interference and, during the s and s, to negotiate nationwide collective wage agreements, significantly facilitated labor-management cooperation. This does not mean that labor disputes do not occur in Sweden. As previously noted, a major wave of strikes and a national lockout by employers took place in May , but the conflict proved shorter and less disruptive than comparable labor-management confrontations in most other industrial democracies. The Welfare State: Achievements and Dissent A crucial adjunct of the Social Democrats’ emphasis on active economic management is their successive extension of welfare services, as recounted in chapter . Postwar SAP reform initiatives have included improved unemployment and retirement benefits, a national health insurance program, and a variety of individual and family cash allowances. As a prominent LO economist observes, the result of these measures is that “public ser-

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vices and payments are provided, under specific rules, to everyone who is entitled to them, regardless of means-tested need. Good examples are children’s allowances and pensions, which are sent automatically to millionaires and the unemployed alike.”4 With varying degrees of enthusiasm, nonsocialist leaders endorsed most of the SAP’s early postwar reform initiatives. A dramatic exception occurred in the mid-s, however, when the LO and the Social Democrats moved to introduce a new system of supplementary pensions (ATP). The basic purpose of the ATP was to accord individual workers additional retirement benefits amounting to an average of  percent of their taxable income during their fifteen best-paid years of employment. In addition, the Social Democrats viewed the reform as a means to generate collective savings that could be used for government-sponsored economic objectives (such as the construction of new apartments to relieve recurrent housing shortages). All three nonsocialist parties, as well as the SAF, opposed the compulsory features of the SAP-LO proposal. Dissent was so intense that the Center Party withdrew from the government coalition with the Social Democrats in . A national referendum, held that same year, and a dissolution election, conducted in , were required to settle the issue. The Social Democrats obtained a relative majority of votes in both the referendum and the dissolution election. The Center and the Moderates, both of which rejected mandatory legislation, gained in electoral support, while the Liberals, who advocated a “positive compromise solution” that would enable individual workers to contract out of a collective system of supplementary pensions, lost heavily (see table ., p. ). The Social Democrats interpreted their electoral advance as a mandate to proceed with implementing their version of supplementary benefits. The ATP proposal was endorsed by a narrow parliamentary majority in May . In subsequent decades, Swedish welfare provisions have become among the most comprehensive in the world. Sweden’s current government disbursements (including the purchase of goods and services as well as transfer payments) are among the highest in the world, while its annual rate of infant mortality is one of the lowest. In parallel fashion, postwar Social Democratic legislative initiatives to enhance educational opportunities for lower-middle-class and working-class youth have led to a greater public investment in education than in most other advanced democracies (see table .). In – the largest expenditures in Sweden’s annual welfare budget were for health care, retirement, and disability benefits (which consisted of  percent of the total) followed by economic assistance to families with children ( percent). As noted in chapter , the Social Democrats have implemented a correspondingly high rate of taxation to finance Sweden’s extensive social programs and other government services. In , current government expenditures accounted for . percent of the country’s gross national product (GNP), compared to . percent in France, . in Italy, . percent in the United Kingdom, . percent in Germany, and . percent in the United States.5 Critics on the right and left have joined in attacking the concentration of power and the high cost of government in welfare Sweden while advocating specific partisan remedies. Nonsocialist leaders have criticized bureaucratization and “excessive” government

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Table 24.2 Measures of Commitment to Public Welfare

Country Sweden France Germany Italy United Kingdom United States Canada Japan

General government disbursements as a percentage of GDP a

Public spending on education as a percentage of GNP b

Infant mortality per , live births c

62.9 . 46.8 49.4 41.4 33.9 44.7 28.4

8.3 . 4.8 4.9 5.3 5.4 6.9 3.6

5  5 7 7 7 6 4

Source: Based on Francis C. Castles, The Social Democratic Image of Society (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 68. aOECD, “Basic Statistics: International Comparisons,” Economic Surveys  (Paris, 2000). Data are for 1997. bUnited Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Statistical Yearbook  (New York: 1997), 68–69, 71, 73–74. Data are for the years 1994–96. cUnited Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Statistical Yearbook  (New York: 1997), 86–88. Data are for the years 1995–2000.

expenditures and have repeatedly denounced Sweden’s high tax rate as a disincentive to private initiative and savings. From the opposite end of the political spectrum, the VP and other left socialists attacked the Social Democrats for their failure to socialize industry and thereby mitigate the concentration of private economic power in the hands of wealthy shareholders. The cumulative effect of left and right criticisms of Social Democratic governance was the onset of a continuing pattern of dealignment in electoral behavior and the gradual erosion of central tenets of the Swedish model. The Nonsocialist Interlude Joint left-right criticism of Social Democracy resulted in a sharp decline in SAP electoral strength in the  county and municipal elections. The SAP recovered in the  parliamentary election but gradually lost support during the s as the nonsocialist parties succeeded in projecting an image of bloc unity on behalf of an alternative program of government decentralization and tax reduction. The outcome was a nonsocialist electoral victory in  and the formation of a Center-Liberal-Moderate coalition that displaced the Social Democrats from cabinet office after forty-four years in power (see table ., p. , and table ., p. ). Once in power, however, the Center, the Liberals, and the Moderates proved incapable of maintaining interparty unity on important policy issues. The first partisan conflict involved nuclear energy. During the  campaign, Center Party leaders had strenuously opposed SAP plans to increase the number of Sweden’s nuclear energy plants from six to thirteen by the mid-s. Liberal and Moderate officials, in contrast, endorsed the

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measure. Following the election, the latter compelled Prime Minister Fälldin to reverse his party’s campaign stance and agree that a seventh plant could begin operations. The Center Party subsequently held firm in its resolve to oppose any further development of nuclear energy. A government crisis subsequently ensued in October  when the Moderates and Liberals endorsed a recommendation of the National Nuclear Energy Inspection Board to activate two additional nuclear energy plants. Fälldin and his fellow Centrists promptly resigned from the cabinet in protest. The Liberals formed a minority government in place of the previous three-party coalition. The nuclear energy impasse was resolved in March  when a majority of the Swedish electorate voted in a national referendum in favor of a temporary expansion of the country’s nuclear energy program to include a maximum of twelve plants. The Liberals and the Social Democrats concurred on a joint government-opposition decision eventually to phase out all twelve plants by the early part of the twenty-first century in tandem with a policy of stringent conservation and the development of alternative sources of energy such as solar and fusion. Despite their interbloc disagreement on the nuclear energy issue, the nonsocialist parties won a one-seat majority in the September  Riksdag election (see table ., p. , and table ., p. ). Accordingly, they reconstituted a three-party coalition government under Center leadership. Ultimately, the nonsocialists failed once again to sustain executive unity. Ironically, the second divisive issue proved to be taxation policy. Center and Liberal spokesmen acted in the spring of  to honor an earlier agreement with the Social Democrats to reduce marginal tax rates in exchange for a simultaneous cut in the amount of deductions allowable for interest paid on home mortgages. In response, Moderate spokesmen, who were opposed to the tradeoff on ideological grounds, angrily withdrew from the government coalition. As a result, the Center and the Liberals formed a minority government in May . They governed jointly until September , when the Social Democrats resumed power with the indirect support of the Left Party. The Quest for Economic Democracy Intense partisan disagreements over nuclear energy and tax policy during the late s and early s revealed a deepening conflict between nonsocialist forces and the Social Democrats over long-term economic policy and strategies of system change. Similar to other advanced industrial nations, Sweden has experienced a slowdown in economic growth since the mid-s. The causes are rooted primarily in global factors, including successive oil price increases in – and – and increased international trade competition from Asia in such industries as steel production and shipbuilding. The onset of “stagflation” as an international phenomenon meant that Sweden’s average annual growth rate fell from . percent during the s to  percent or less from  through the early s. Accompanying the decline in economic growth were increases in the rate of inflation, which jumped from an annual average of . percent during the s to . percent in the s, and unemployment, which rose from an annual average of . percent in – to more than  percent by the summer of . A spiral-

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ing budgetary deficit and a negative trade balance further exacerbated Sweden’s bleak economic situation. During their time in office, nonsocialist leaders sought to restore domestic growth through a combination of measures. Among them were the Liberal-Center-SAP accord in  to reduce marginal taxes, the introduction of tax-sheltered savings and equity programs designed to stimulate the growth of investment capital, the socialization of Sweden’s ailing shipbuilding industry, and government subsidies to encourage increased employment among younger persons. To pay for these expansionary measures, the nonsocialists resorted to heavy borrowing from international capital markets and raised the value-added tax (VAT), which is a form of national sales tax, from . to . percent. In addition, the Center-Liberal minority government reduced health care benefits marginally in  in an effort to decrease public expenditures and thereby restrict the growing budgetary deficit. The Social Democrats attacked the nonsocialists’ economic strategy from both an immediate and a longer-term perspective. In the short run, the SAP and the LO criticized the nonsocialists on the grounds that their fiscal policies were inadequate to achieve the economic recovery that presumably all Swedes desired. Above all, the SAP cited the unprecedented postwar jump in the unemployment rate after  as evidence of the inadequacy of the nonsocialist response to prevailing international conditions of stagflation. As an alternative approach, the Social Democrats called for even greater government economic activism to be financed by yet another increase in the VAT. Far more controversial was the SAP-LO’s ideological commitment to a “breakthrough” strategy of industrial and economic democracy. LO and SAP leaders had jointly launched a series of important legislative reforms during the mid-s that considerably strengthened the status of individual workers and unions vis-à-vis private management. The bills included the Employment Security Act of , which restricted the right of employers to dismiss workers; the Work Environment Act of , which accorded floor-level safety stewards sweeping powers to enforce strict health and safety standards; and the Employee Participation Act of , which transformed the traditional right of managers to “direct and allocate work” into an object of collective bargaining.6 In , LO spokesmen formally urged that these increments in the collective power of organized labor be augmented through the introduction of a national system of wage-earner funds. The LO’s proposal can be traced to a resolution at the federation’s  congress to appoint a study group to investigate steps to implement some form of profit-sharing arrangement that would tap so-called excess profits in private industry to the collective advantage of organized labor.7 Five years later, the study group, which was headed by Rudolf Meidner, a leading LO economist, submitted a report recommending the creation of a collective system of employee funds that would be financed through a tax on company profits. The funds would be empowered to purchase company shares on the domestic stock market. Thus, in time the funds could acquire majority ownership of individual companies. Precisely that prospect outraged employer groups and the nonsocialist parties and caused even many rank-and-file Social Democrats to question the wisdom of the Meidner plan. The resulting controversy over the LO proposal proved a major factor in the SAP’s electoral defeat in .

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While in opposition, the LO and the SAP refined the original Meidner concept to include provisions for a decentralized system of funds and the transfer of dividend income into the ATP system as a means of safeguarding future individual retirement benefits. From  onward, the Social Democrats also stressed the importance of the wage-earner funds as a source of domestic investment capital. These revisions were endorsed by overwhelming majorities at LO and SAP congresses held during the early fall of . The Social Democrats thus conducted their  campaign against the Moderates, the Center, and the Liberals on the dual basis of short-term charges of economic mismanagement and their longer-term advocacy of enhanced economic democracy. The SAP victory in September  enabled the Social Democrats to proceed with new initiatives on both fronts. The Social Democrats Back in Office Prime Minister Palme and members of his cabinet proceeded cautiously but with a clear sense of direction when they resumed office in . As initial steps, they honored the SAP’s campaign promises to restore nonsocialist-sponsored reductions in health care and increase government expenditures on behalf of job creation (both of which were financed by a higher VAT rate). They also moved to stimulate renewed economic growth by devaluing the Swedish krona (crown) by  percent in an effort to reduce the cost of Swedish exports and thereby encourage an export-led recovery from the economic doldrums of the early s. The cabinet simultaneously enacted an austere budgetary policy designed to reduce the government’s deficit below levels projected by the previous Center-Liberal coalition. In the process, Social Democratic leaders incurred the temporary wrath of some trade unionists and rank-and-file activists who demanded a more expansionist economic policy even at the cost of a greater budget deficit. Early in their renewed term of office, the Social Democrats also acted to implement the controversial system of wage-earner funds. Despite nonsocialist criticism and the absence of a popular majority in support of the concept (as measured by successive public opinion surveys), the SAP formally proposed during the summer of  the creation of five regional funds to be financed through a combination of a  percent tax on company profits and a . percent increase in employee contributions to the ATP retirement system. They would be governed by appointive boards dominated by trade union officials. The government sought to diffuse nonsocialist fears that the wage-earner funds could eventually acquire majority ownership of specific companies by restricting both their total capitalization (to a maximum of . billion Swedish crowns by ) and the percentage of shares that each of the funds can purchase in a single enterprise (namely  percent per fund for a hypothetical total of  percent shared by the five funds). Moreover, the Social Democrats stipulated that the wage-earner funds would remain in place only through . This seven-year period would suffice, in the view of the cabinet, to facilitate the necessary structural transformation of the Swedish economy with the assistance of the additional investment capital generated by the five funds. The Riksdag endorsed the government’s proposal in December . The Social Dem-

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ocrats voted solidly in favor, the VP abstained to ensure the bill’s passage, and the three nonsocialist parties voted against. The bill went into effect on  January . Tactically, the SAP legislative initiative on the wage-earner fund issue was dictated by both the timing of parliamentary elections and the party’s calculation of foreseeable international economic trends. The Riksdag’s approval of the government’s proposal in late  ensured that the funds would be operative prior to the September  election. If the domestic economy noticeably improved by then, the Social Democrats could reasonably expect an electoral plurality and thus a renewed parliamentary mandate. To help ensure the latter outcome, the LO and its constituent unions negotiated—as an explicit tradeoff for the introduction of the wage-earner fund system—wage settlements averaging a modest  percent or less in both – and –. The intent of the LO’s policy of wage restraint was to curtail domestic inflationary pressures and thus facilitate Sweden’s economic recovery from the doldrums that prevailed at the beginning of the decade. The full implementation of the wage-earner fund system promised a partial transformation of authority relations in the Swedish economy. The diluted version of the wage-earner fund system enacted in  was not designed to achieve outright nationalization or “trade unionization” of industry (to the consternation of some left Social Democrats), since the legislation explicitly restricted the total percentage of company shares that the regional funds were permitted to purchase. Nonetheless, SAP and LO leaders could reasonably anticipate that the extension of collective ownership of company stock—in combination with the various workplace reforms implemented during the s and sketched above—would inevitably induce managers to be more responsive to union demands concerning employment, investments, and production. The minimum result of the funds would thus be to increase managerial awareness of the social consequences of microeconomic decisions and thereby indirectly strengthen workplace democracy. Precisely because the wage-earner fund system involved central issues of share ownership and managerial prerogatives, the nonsocialist parties, the SAF, and other private interests remained adamant in their opposition to the concept of collective ownership and control of the funds as a potentially important source of investment capital. Accordingly, nonsocialist leaders repeatedly announced their determination to abolish the funds when they returned to power. Economically, Social Democratic policies met with greater interim success. The SAP’s return to power coincided with the beginning of a general improvement in international economic conditions. Renewed growth of world trade and a decline in the world price of oil by the mid-s helped stimulate renewed domestic growth. From a negative rate of . percent in , Sweden experienced a steady expansion of its real gross national product (GNP) through , when the rate peaked at  percent. Accompanying the restoration of growth was a decline in the unemployment rate, which fell from . percent in  to less than  percent by the end of the decade (see table A., p. ). Other positive signs included a substantial increase in exports and the attainment of a slight budget surplus in . These solid achievements contributed to a Social Democratic victory in the September  election and the extension of the SAP’s executive mandate into the early s.

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In a major departure from its ideological principles, however, the Social Democrats signaled through their actions that the era of social reform was at an end. They were determined to maintain the existing welfare state, but because of severe budgetary constraints, they in effect announced that no additional benefits would be forthcoming. In addition, party leaders yielded to longstanding nonsocialist claims that Sweden’s taxation rate was too high. In  the SAP initiated negotiations with the Liberals and other opposition parties to reduce taxes and thereby bring them closer in line with prevailing rates in their principal trading partners. The declared purpose of tax reform was to encourage greater private investment at home and, in the process, discourage a damaging drain of investment capital abroad (primarily to EC countries and the United States). The principal architect of Sweden’s new “politics of austerity” was Kjell-Olof Feldt, a moderate Social Democrat whom Prime Minister Palme appointed minister of finance when the SAP resumed power in . Economically conservative and distrustful of LO demands to transform property relations via the wage-earner fund system, Feldt sought to impose financial discipline on the nation by urging unions to practice self-restraint in their negotiations over annual wage increases with employers. His most compelling argument was that wage increases in excess of government guidelines of  percent or less contributed to a higher inflation rate during the s in Sweden than in other industrial democracies. When union leaders balked at his demands, Feldt induced the cabinet to adopt a stringent anti-inflationary program in February  that prescribed a freeze on prices, wages, and rents and prohibited strikes by unions. The cabinet’s restrictive economic proposals and attempt to curtail trade union activity sparked immediate outrage on the part of organized labor, the Left Party, many rank-and-file Social Democrats, and the nonsocialist parties. After a heated debate, an overwhelming majority of Riksdag deputies rejected the government package in February . The cabinet temporarily resigned as a result, but Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson, who had succeeded Palme following the latter’s assassination in February , formed a new Social Democratic government when nonsocialist leaders rejected an offer from the speaker of the Riksdag to form a minority coalition. Feldt thereupon resigned from the cabinet. Electoral and Political Flux Although the Social Democrats survived the government crisis of February , they remained thereafter on the political defensive. They clearly confronted a policy and ideological crisis from which they could not readily recover. Growing LO and rank-and-file worker dissatisfaction with SAP economic and financial policies coincided with an incipient electoral dealignment at the expense of the Social Democrats. The Social Democrats had confronted an earlier decline in support during the late s and s as the number of industrial workers (who are their traditional core of supporters) dwindled in the wake of postindustrialization, but they managed to recoup their losses during the s by extending their appeal among members of the new middle class of salaried employees. Beginning in the early s, however, the party experienced a renewed erosion of support (except for periodic fluctuations during the early s) as more and more citizens

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switched partisan allegiances or abstained from voting altogether. By the spring and summer of , opinion polls indicated a clear realignment in favor of the nonsocialist bloc, with the Christian Democrats and New Democracy emerging as the principal beneficiaries. Explanations for the electoral shift include voter protests against short-term Social Democratic economic policies, disappointment on both the left and right concerning tax reform, discontent among women over wage inequalities, and the diffusion of “postmaterialist” values among many younger citizens who are critical of conformist norms and bureaucratic constraints associated with the established welfare state.8 Diverse international and domestic factors thus converged in  to spell another interim disruption in Social Democratic governance. As indicated in table . (p. ) and table . (p. ) the SAP lost heavily in the September election—falling to its lowest point since the early s—while the nonsocialist bloc garnered . percent of the popular vote. The election revealed a pattern of continued electoral volatility, accompanied by a decline in the importance of party as a determinant of voter choice. Electoral participation declined for the third time in a row, falling to . percent (compared to  percent in  and . percent in ). At the same time, the number of voters who did not know which party they would support a week prior to a given election steadily rose from  percent in  to . percent in  to . percent in . Whereas only  percent of Swedish voters switched party allegiances between elections during the late s, fully . percent changed loyalties in . In the September election voters deserted not only the Social Democrats but also the Liberals, the Center, and the Greens. New Democracy benefited most dramatically from the decline of voter loyalty, drawing support from both the traditional nonsocialist parties and especially the Social Democrats. Indeed, exit polls revealed that a majority of New Democracy adherents were trade unionists. Prime Minister Carlsson promptly submitted his resignation, and in early October Carl Bildt formed a nonsocialist coalition made up of the Moderates, the Liberals, the Center Party, and the Christian Democrats. To achieve its declared determination to bring Sweden’s “age of collectivism” to an end, the Moderate-led cabinet announced the following shared objectives: a reduction in public expenditures, economic deregulation, additional tax reforms designed to encourage private savings and strengthen small business firms, the partial privatization of education and social services, and a reaffirmation of Swedish membership in the European Community. From the outset, the nonsocialist coalition confronted several formidable challenges to its capacity to enact a coherent agenda of policy innovation. One was its minority status in parliament. While the four parties together commanded  out of  seats in the Riksdag, they lacked nine votes for a majority in their own right. Hence, the coalition was indirectly dependent on the support of New Democracy’s twenty-five deputies to remain in office. This dependency not only posed the ever-present risk of a government crisis but also accorded the New Democrats a disproportionate policy influence despite strong antipathy among traditional nonsocialist leaders, especially the Liberals, toward their populist ideological demands. An even more daunting obstacle was Sweden’s continuing economic malaise. In the

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face of sluggish growth, increased inflation, and a surge in the unemployment rate from . percent in  to . percent in , the nonsocialist cabinet assigned highest policy priority to reducing government expenditures to encourage private investments and curtail Sweden’s worsening public deficit as means to stimulate economic recovery. This entailed a succession of budget cuts from January  onward, primarily at the expense of established welfare entitlements—including unemployment and retirement benefits, sick pay, and housing subsidies. Simultaneously, the nonsocialists acted to eliminate taxes on electricity and fuel for industrial use and declared their intention to lower the nation’s high value-added tax rate. Both of these obstacles ultimately thwarted nonsocialist aspirations to achieve fundamental changes in Sweden’s political economy and the established welfare state. New Democracy repeatedly held the minority government hostage to specific policy demands (including a successful effort in  to earmark a portion of the wage-earner funds as risk capital accessible to small businesses) even as leaders of the maverick party discredited themselves in the eyes of the electorate through an extended public feud. Members of the New Democracy legislative faction voted against cabinet bills twice in  (including the proposed budget for –), but abstained in a crucial vote of no confidence to ensure the government’s survival. Economic imperatives loomed even larger. In their efforts to trim public expenditures and welfare entitlements, the nonsocialists confronted Sweden’s worst economic crisis since the s. In tandem with recessionary international economic trends in – and an accompanying European currency crisis, which triggered intense pressure on Swedish banks and a de facto devaluation of the krona by  percent, the nation’s growth rate stagnated. The annual rate of inflation fell from . percent to . percent by the end of , but unemployment spiraled relentlessly upward from  percent in  to fully  percent by . Sweden’s economic doldrums, combined with the government’s tax cuts, caused the public debt to jump from . percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in  to . percent a year later. Return of the Social Democrats to Power Swedish voters responded to the worsening economic conditions and nonsocialist cuts in social entitlements by restoring the Social Democrats to power in the September  election. Electoral participation fell marginally to . percent, but the SAP dramatically reversed its earlier decline by mobilizing . percent of the national vote. The Left Party increased its share to . percent, and the Environmentalists—Greens returned to parliament with  percent of the vote. The Moderates increased their share slightly to . percent, but the Liberals, the Center, and the Christian Democrats lost support (see table ., p. ). New Democracy effectively disappeared from the political scene with only . percent. Following Bildt’s resignation as leader of the nonsocialist coalition, Ingvar Carlsson was once again sworn in as Social Democratic prime minister. The Social Democrats introduced an austerity budget of their own that prescribed further reductions in a number of public expenditures but also included an increase in taxes and the restoration of the

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previous government’s curtailment of unemployment and sickness benefits. Prime Minister Carlsson declared that the SAP’s principal policy objective would be to reduce the nation’s high unemployment rate through economic growth. As a means to that end, the Social Democrats successfully led the campaign to ratify Sweden’s accession treaty with the European Union in November . In a statement to parliament immediately following his election, Prime Minister Carlsson announced that the first priority of his government was to combat Sweden’s high unemployment rate ( percent in ). To this end, he declared that the Social Democrats would seek to reduce the government deficit (which peaked under nonsocialist governance at  percent of GDP in ) to  percent by the end of ; “improve conditions for enterprise” as a means to encourage job growth in small- and medium-size firms; encourage new forms of social and political cooperation; and promote “lifelong learning” by integrating school, preschool, and leisure center activities and expanding postsecondary educational opportunities. “Sweden will be competing [in the world market] with high qualifications,” Carlsson declared, “not low wages.”9 Prime Minister Carlsson’s policy declaration contained echoes of traditional Social Democratic values—for example, his emphasis on “the equal value of all persons”—but in essence it affirmed a neoliberal reorientation of public policy in conformity with EU norms. Indeed, the government’s fiscal and economic objectives were explicitly formulated to meet the so-called “convergence criteria” required for eventual participation in the European Union’s program of economic and monetary union (EMU; see chapters  and ). Carlsson announced his decision to retire as party chair and prime minister in November . He was succeeded by Göran Persson, a moderate Social Democrat and former minister of finance who was elected prime minister by the Riksdag in March . Persson’s cabinet consisted of fifteen new appointments and seven ministers who had served in the previous government; ten of the twenty-two incumbents were women (including the heads of the crucial ministries of foreign affairs, justice, culture, agriculture, environment, and the labor market). Persson’s election heralded the latest phase in the continuing redefinition of the Swedish model. Under his leadership the Social Democrats have utilized executive power to modify public policy in accordance with EU norms while confronting paradoxical consequences of electoral backlash and economic revitalization. Notes . The averages are tabulated on the basis of annual data published in International Labour Office, Year Book of Labour Statistics (Geneva: ILO,  to the present). . During the s the number of working days lost in Sweden as a result of strikes and lockouts ranged from none in  to . days per civilian worker in . In Germany the only statistically relevant year of conflict during the decade was  when twenty-one working days were lost per worker. . A useful though decidedly apolitical account of postwar Swedish fiscal and monetary policy is Assar Lindbeck’s Swedish Economic Policy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ). A central component of the government’s effort to facilitate structural and technological modernization on the part of Swedish industry and services has been increased public expenditure on research and development as part of an active industrial policy. See the chapter on “Industrial Policies in the United Kingdom, Sweden,

394

. . . . .

.

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and Germany: A Study in Contrasts and Convergence,” in Managing Modern Capitalism: Industrial Renewal and Workplace Reform in the United States and Western Europe, ed. M. Donald Hancock, John Logue, and Bernt Schiller (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood-Praeger, ). Gösta Rehn, “The Wages of Success,” Daedalus, spring , . World Bank, World Development Report / (New York: Oxford University Press, ), , . These reforms are described and assessed in greater detail in M. Donald Hancock and John Logue, “Sweden: The Quest for Economic Democracy,” Polity, fall/winter . See also Bernt Schiller’s chapter, “The Swedish Model Reconstituted,” in Hancock, Logue, and Schiller, Managing Modern Capitalism. “Excess profits” referred, in the eyes of the LO, to those additional profits gained by individual firms attributable to wage restraint exercised by the trade unions. An excellent assessment of citizen demands for new forms of political participation in Sweden is Olof Petersson’s “Democracy and Power in Sweden,” Scandinavian Political Studies  (): –. Diane Sainsbury discusses efforts by the Social Democrats to respond to domestic economic and social change in “Swedish Social Democracy in Transition: The Party’s Record in the s and the Challenge of the s,” West European Politics  (): –. The diffusion of postmaterialist values in Western democracies is explored in Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ); and idem., Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ). Sweden, Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Press Section, “Statement of Government Policy Presented by the Prime Minister to Parliament, Friday  March ” (unofficial translation).

Chapter 25

What Is the Future of Swedish Politics? TRENDS IN RECENT DECADES reveal a gradual transformation of the Swedish model as a consequence of multiple factors of international and domestic change. Among them are the consequences of Sweden’s membership in the European Union and an incipient erosion in solidarity within Social Democratic ranks. At stake in the redefinition of the Swedish model is a continuing tension between “breakthrough politics” of reform and “rationalizing politics” of retrenchment.

Transition in the 1990s The s marked a significant transition in the role of the Swedish state in managing domestic economic and social change. An important exogenous factor constraining traditional Social Democratic policy preferences for an expansive public sector and a regulated economy was Sweden’s increasingly close ties with the European Community.1 Recognizing that the country’s economic fortunes were inexplicably linked with the EC by virtue of expanding trade with its continental neighbors, the Swedish cabinet had issued a policy paper in December  outlining a strategy to promote intensified cooperation between Sweden and the EC.2 The proposal entailed extensive coordination of Swedish monetary, fiscal, and industrial policies with those of the EC; the elimination of existing restrictions on the free flow of investment capital; and deregulation of agriculture (including a gradual reduction in government subsidies to farmers). The government hoped thereby to encourage the “increased movement of goods, services, people, and capital in Western Europe as well as the maintenance of full employment and social security.”3 The fall of the Berlin Wall less than two years later, symbolizing the collapse of Soviet-style communism in Central and Eastern Europe, subsequently induced Swedish leaders to conclude that neutrality no longer precluded formal collaboration with the EC. Accordingly, Prime Minister Carlsson submitted a bid for membership in June . As recounted in chapter , Sweden negotiated an accession treaty with the European Union in  that a majority of voters affirmed in a national referendum in November . While membership in the EU promises to encourage long-term material growth through trade expansion, the necessity to adapt Swedish structures and policies to accord more closely with EU regulations imposes discernible constraints on national policy autonomy. The political consequence, as John Logue observes, is that the nation state no longer serves as “the appropriate unit for both economic and social policy making.” In-

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Total Government Expenditures as a Percentage of Gross Domestic Product () .

France .

Germany

.

Italy Russia

. .

Sweden .

United Kingdom United States Canada

. .

Source: World Bank, World Development Report /: Attacking Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, ), and Survey of Economic Policy in Russia in  (Moscow, ).

stead, “there is a clear tendency to turn to Brussels rather than . . . Stockholm [for authoritative decisions].”4 Domestic changes also contributed to a transformation of the Swedish model. The first of these was the abandonment of centralized wage negotiations between the LO and SAF on the labor market. Simultaneous pressure on the part of both individual trade unions (notably in the engineering industries) and employer associations within SAF to pursue direct bargaining over wages and other terms of employment yielded during the s a more decentralized mode of industrial relations. While direct negotiations have facilitated more flexible responses to changing labor-market conditions (including labor shortages in manufacturing and construction), an unintended consequence has been to undermine worker solidarity. The result has been increased trade union “egoism” and heightened discord between public- and private-sector employees. Empirical measures of lessened solidarity among LO and TCO members include an increase in strike activity during the latter part of the decade, noted earlier, and resistance by the unions to Feldt’s ill-fated attempt to impose greater trade union discipline through legislation in February . A further change was heralded by intermittent conflict between the LO and the SAP over key political issues. Incipient discord was already apparent during the s when the LO promoted, much more aggressively than the party itself, the introduction of wage-earner funds. LO leaders were partially mollified when the Social Democrats proceeded to introduce a version of the system in , but the fact that the regional wage-earner funds were restricted in their capitalization and capacity to purchase majority shares in individual firms curtailed their effectiveness as a direct instrument of economic democratization. Instead, with the maturation of the wage-earner funds in , the Social Democrats proposed that they be merged with existing national pension funds to cre-

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Trade Union Density (percentage of workers, –) France

. .

Germany

.

Italy

.

Sweden .

United Kingdom United States Canada

. .

ate a series of five “superfunds” with capital assets totaling , million kronor that would be used for investment purposes. The result was the demise of the wage-earner fund system as an instrument to promote economic democracy. Tensions heightened between the two branches of Swedish Social Democracy over the government’s austere budgetary policies and its agreement with the nonsocialist parties in  to proceed with a overhaul of the tax system designed to benefit middle- and upper-income citizens. LO leaders charged that the reform would prove disadvantageous to lower-income workers and successfully pressed the SAP into granting marginal concessions. Despite continued LO misgivings, the tax reform was implemented on  January . Each of these outcomes reveals a gradual weakening of the LO in relation to other economic and political actors. Similar to Tony Blair’s “New Labour” party in Britain, the SAP has marginally distanced itself from organized labor in its embrace of an EU-inspired neoliberal approach to economic and social management. Paradoxes into the Twenty-First Century The transformation of the Swedish model remains a work in progress, characterized by multiple political and economic paradoxes. While in office from  to , the nonsocialist parties had implemented a number of policy changes, which were designed to trim the national budget deficit (including the introduction of a waiting period before workers could claim sickness benefits) that proved highly unpopular. Moreover, the nation’s sluggish economic performance in the early s undermined the credibility of the nonsocialists to offer a viable set of policy alternatives to those of the Social Democrats. The cumulative effect of these discontents was a convincing SAP victory in the  national election. Substantively, the Social Democrats continued many of the policies initiated by the nonsocialists, particularly with respect to budgetary austerity and marginal reductions in welfare benefits. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Göran Persson, who succeeded

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Ingvar Carlsson in , the government simultaneously adjusted national policy principles in response to EU precepts. A primary example was “the transition to a credible inflation targeting regime, from the highly inflationary environment during the s and s, which embodied a cycle of excessive wage growth and exchange rate adjustment.”5 The government also initiated greater independence on the part of the Central Bank and proclaimed price stability as “the explicit objective of monetary policy,” targeting the attainment of an annual inflation rate of  percent.6 A central feature of the government’s embrace of a neoliberal approach to economic management was deregulation in accordance with the EU’s Single European Act directives of  (see chapter ). In the OECD’s assessment of Swedish policy, “Sweden embraced rapidly all the directives under the internal-market programme of the European Union. . . . Sweden has gone farther than most countries in exposing the former public monopolies to competition.”7 Another important SAP initiative was a decision to dismantle Sweden’s nuclear power plants in accordance with the outcome of the national referendum in  (see chapter ). The  election campaign exposed the Social Democrats to simultaneous attacks from the right and the left. The Moderates, joined by the Liberals, criticized the government’s tax and nuclear energy policies, while the Christian Democrats tapped into electoral discontent about the continued secularization of Swedish society. The Left Party, meanwhile, positioned itself as a stanch opponent of retrenchments in welfare benefits. The Left Party also drew on a populist groundswell of resistance to the encroachment of the EU in national politics. The result was a devastating decline in SAP electoral support, down from . percent three years earlier to . percent (its lowest level since the introduction of democracy in .8 The SAP’s downward electoral spiral continued a year later in the June  elections to the European Parliament, when it received a scant . percent (compared to . percent for the Left Party). Despite these setbacks, the Social Democrats remained in power with the indirect support of the Greens and the Left Party. Paradoxically, the SAP’s electoral outcomes came at a time when the Swedish economy began to demonstrate a resounding turnaround. The annual rate of national growth jumped to . percent in —when the Social Democrats resumed power (up from . percent in )—and averaged . percent a year from  through . From a high of . percent in , meanwhile, the annual inflation rate plummeted to . percent in . Simultaneously, unemployment fell from . percent in  to a projected rate of . percent in .9 Much of Sweden’s economic revitalization can be attributed to a combination of government policies, especially deregulation; expanding exports; and the success of numerous new start-up small enterprises exploiting cutting-edge computerbased technology. “Breakthrough” vs. “Rationalizing” Politics Recent policy enactments by both the nonsocialists and the Social Democrats confirm a retreat in Sweden from what Lawrence Brown depicts as reformist “breakthrough politics” toward a more restrictive style of “rationalizing politics.”10 From their rise to power in  through most of the postwar period, the Social Democrats sponsored successive

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“breakthrough” initiatives that had the cumulative effect of achieving a distinctive model of advanced industrial society: the implementation of a coordinated approach to economic management, the extension of welfare benefits, the introduction of a supplementary pension system (which not only provided individualized retirement benefits but also accorded the state significant sources of investment capital), legislation during the s that significantly enhanced workers’ rights, and the creation of the wage-earner fund system. By the early s, however, the Social Democrats embarked on a strategy of ideological retrenchment when they began to embrace a market approach to economic management and suspended the march toward economic democracy as well as further social reforms. The welfare state remains largely intact, but in practice the Social Democrats have increasingly sought to harmonize Swedish policies with those of the EU as they struggled to cope with erratic patterns of economic performance. In the process the SAP shifted course toward a “rationalizing” approach to public policy. The nonsocialist victory in the  election intensified the new direction in Swedish politics. While the Social Democrats have restored some welfare entitlements since their return to power in , they, too, recognize the compelling fiscal limitations of further breakthrough reforms (at least for the foreseeable future). Whether Sweden’s contemporary era of rationalizing politics will necessarily make politics “more problem free,” as Brown suggests, is another question. Notes . European Community officials declared their intention to eliminate remaining restrictions on free trade and the movement of capital and labor within the EC with the adoption of the “Solemn Declaration on European Union” in  and the “Single European Act” in . The Swedish cabinet coupled Sweden’s affirmation of closer ties with the EC with a renewed declaration that prospective membership in the Community would be incompatible with the nation’s traditional foreign policy of neutrality. . “Ökat samarbete utan medlemskap är Sveriges linje mot EG,” Från Riksdag & Departementet,  January , . . Sweden, Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Press Section, “Statement of Government Policy Presented by the Prime Minister to Parliament, Friday  March ” (unofficial translation). . John Logue, “Small Frogs, Big Pond. Can the Scandinavian Social Democratic Welfare States Adopt to Globalization?” Paper presented at the conference on the “Swedish EU Presidency and the Nordic Countries in the st Century,” U.S. Department of State ( January ): , . . OECD, OECD Economic Surveys –, Sweden (Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, ), . . Ibid., –. . Ibid., . . Tommy Möller, “The Swedish Election : A Protest Vote and the Birth of a New Political Landscape?” Scandinavian Political Studies  (): –. . OECD, OECD Economic Outlook  (Paris, June ): . . Lawrence D. Brown, New Policies, New Politics: Government’s Response to Government’s Growth (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, ).

For Further Reading ADLER-KARLSON, G. Functional Socialism: A Swedish Theory for Democratic Socialism. Stockholm: Prisma, . ANTON, THOMAS J. Administered Politics: Elite Political Culture in Sweden. Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, .

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CASTLES, FRANCIS. The Social Democratic Image of Society: A Study of the Achievements and Origins of Scandinavian Social Democracy in a Comparative Perspective. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, . CHILDS, MARQUIS W. Sweden: The Middle Way on Trial. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, . DAEDALUS, “Nordic Voices,” Spring , and “The Nordic Enigma,” Winter . EINHORN, ERIC S., AND JOHN LOGUE. Modern Welfare States: Politics and Policy in Social Democratic Scandinavia. New York: Praeger, . ESPING-ANDERSEN, GØSTA. Politics Against Markets: The Social Democratic Road to Power. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, . ———. Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economics. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, . FREEMAN, RICHARD B., ROBERT TOPEN, AND BIRGITTA SWEDENBORG. The Welfare State in Transition. Reforming the Swedish Model. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . FURNISS, NORMAN, ed. Futures for the Welfare State. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, . FURNISS, NORMAN, AND TIMOTHY TILTON. The Case for the Welfare State. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, . GEYER, ROBERT, CHRISTINI INGEBRITSEN, AND JONATHAN MOSES, eds. Globalization, Europeanization and the End of Scandinavian Social Democracy? Houndmills and London: Macmillan, New York: St. Martin’s, . GIDDENS, ANTHONY. The Third Way and Its Critics. Cambridge: Polity Press, . HANCOCK, M. DONALD. Sweden: The Politics of Postindustrial Change. Hinsdale, Ill.: Dryden Press, . HANCOCK, M. DONALD, AND JOHN LOGUE. “Sweden: The Quest for Economic Democracy.” Polity  (Winter ): –. HANCOCK, M. DONALD, JOHN LOGUE, AND BERNT SCHILLER, eds. Managing Modern Capitalism: Industrial Renewal and Workplace Democracy in the United States and Western Europe. New York and Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, . HECKSCHER, GUNNAR. The Welfare State and Beyond: Success and Problems in Scandinavia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, . HECLO, HUGH. Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, . HECLO, HUGH, AND HENRIK MADSEN. Policy and Politics in Sweden: Principled Pragmatism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, . HEIDENHEIMER, ARNOLD J., HUGH HECLO, AND CAROLYN TEICH ADAMS. Comparative Public Policy: The Politics of Social Choice in Europe and America. d ed. New York: St. Martin’s, . KATZENSTEIN, PETER. Small States in World Markets. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, . KORPI, WALTER. The Democratic Class Struggle. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, . ———. The Working Class in Welfare Capitalism: Work, Unions and Politics in Sweden. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, . LEWIN, LEIF. Ideology and Strategy: A Century of Swedish Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press, . LINDBECK, ASSAR. Swedish Economic Policy. Berkeley: University of California Press, . ———. The Swedish Experiment. Stockholm: SNS Förlag, . MEIDNER, RUDOLF. Employee Investment Funds: An Approach to Collective Capital Formation. London: Allen & Unwin, . MILNER, HENRY. Sweden: Social Democracy in Practice. New York: Oxford University Press, . MISGELD, KLAUS, KARL MOLIN, AND KLAS ÅMARK, eds. Creating Social Democracy. A Century of the Social Democratic Labor Party in Sweden. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, . PETERSSON, OLOF. The Government and Politics of the Nordic Countries. Stockholm: Fritzes, . PONUSSON, JONES. The Limits of Social Democracy: Investment Politics in Sweden. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, . ROTHSTEIN, BO. The Social Democratic State: The Swedish Model and the Bureaucratic Problem of Social Reforms. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, . RUSTOW, DANKWART. The Politics of Compromise: A Study of Parties and Cabinet Government in Sweden. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, . SAHR, ROBERT C. The Politics of Energy Policy Change in Sweden. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, . SAINSBURY, DIANE. “Swedish Social Democracy in Transition: The Party’s Record in the s and the Challenge of the s.” West European Politics  (): –.

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SCHILLER, BERNT, et al. The Future of the Nordic Model of Labour Relations: Three Reports on Internationalization and Industrial Relations. Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers, . SCOTT, FRANKLIN D. Sweden: The Nation’s History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, . SULLIVAN, MICHAEL. The Politics of Social Policy. Herts, U.K.: Harvester Wheatsheaf, . TILTON, TIM. The Political Theory of Swedish Social Democracy: Through the Welfare State to Socialism. New York: Oxford University Press, . TOMASSON, RICHARD F. Sweden: Prototype of Modern Society. New York: Random House, .

Chapter 26

The Context of Russian Politics WINSTON CHURCHILL ONCE complained that Russia was a “riddle in a mystery wrapped inside an enigma.” A nineteenth-century Russian poet, Fedor Tiuchev, went even further: Russia, he insisted, could not be understood, it could “only be believed in.” Modern social scientists are understandably less willing to explain the politics of the world’s largest state by referring to the complexities of the Slavic soul. As everywhere else, resources are limited, and their allocation is determined by the competition of organised interests within a structured framework. But if Russia is not unique, it is certainly distinctive: in its territorial expanse, its encompassing of Europe and Asia, its centuries-long experience of authoritarian rule. Its distinctive characteristics, in turn, have helped to shape a political system that combines the formal institutions of Western democracy with a strong emphasis on central leadership of a kind that has not always respected the rights of ordinary citizens.

A Continent More than a Country Of all the forces that make Russia what it is today, geography is arguably the most important. Every Russian government, whatever its political complexion, has to reckon with the fact that this is the world’s largest state (over  million square kilometers, or about a seventh of the world’s land surface) with an extraordinary variety of human and physical features. Such is its size and variety that it is better described as a continent than as a country. Its land area stretches over , km across Europe and Asia, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, embracing eleven different time zones, and for up to , km from north to south. It has the world’s longest land frontier (with China) and the world’s longest (mostly frozen) coastline. And it borders sixteen other states, from Norway and Finland in the west to Mongolia and North Korea in the Far East, and then to sea borders with Japan and the United States. Many of these borders, following the collapse of the USSR and the emergence of an independent Russian state at the end of , are still undemarcated, and in some cases—such as the Kurile islands, claimed by Japan—they are in dispute. The great extent and variety of the Russian landmass have always made it difficult for central governments in the Kremlin to impose their authority on outlying areas, especially in earlier centuries when communications were few and imperfect. Russia’s great size, for instance, presents major difficulties for the operation of a national railway and air transport system (the whole of the network uses Moscow time even when this is very different from local time, otherwise there would be total confusion), and there are similar

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difficulties for Russian radio and television, which have to rebroadcast their programs at different times in different time zones. Russia’s vast open boundaries have also meant that this is a country that has often been invaded, from the east as well as the west; but its enormous size has also meant that this is a country that is almost impossible to conquer as warlords from the Tatars, Poles, and Swedes to Napoleon in the early nineteenth century and Hitler’s armies during World War II all discovered to their cost. The climate makes a difference as well, with its wide variations from place to place and from season to season. This is largely because few parts of Russia are close to the moderating influence of the sea. The whole of Russia, in fact, lies in relatively northern latitudes compared with most of the world’s other industrial powers. Its northernmost point is just a few hundred miles south of the North Pole, and  percent of the surface area consists of permafrost—land that is permanently frozen. The southernmost parts of the Russian landmass, by contrast, are in the subtropical regions that border on the Black and Caspian Seas, and farther south is desert. Moscow, the capital, is about as far north as Newfoundland in Canada, but it is much colder in January (when the average temperature is ‒ºC) and rather warmer in summer (the average in July is ºC). St. Petersburg, the former capital, is nearly as far north as Anchorage in Alaska; the average temperature here is ‒ºC in January and ºC in July. Elsewhere in the country the range of climate variation is far greater. Yakutsk, in eastern Siberia, has an average January temperature of ‒ºC; temperatures here are as low as anywhere in the inhabited world, but in summer (an average of ºC in July) they are as high as in most parts of Western Europe. This wide range of climatic variation makes agriculture difficult in all but the most temperate parts of the country, it hinders transport, and it makes construction slow and much more expensive (at such low temperatures metal becomes brittle and oil rapidly solidifies). Some have even speculated that it may help to explain the Russian character, with its characteristic swings between sorrow and joy, apathy and enthusiasm, and sobriety and drunkenness. Climate, in turn, has implications for settlement. Population densities across the country as a whole are relatively low at just . for every square kilometer, which is half the level of the United States and just a seventeenth of the population density of the European Union. What matters more is that settlement is very unevenly distributed, with nearly  percent of the population concentrated in the European part of the country although it accounts for no more than a quarter of the total land area. The far north, by contrast, with about  percent of the country’s land area, accounts for no more than  percent of its entire population. There is a similar mismatch between the distribution of population and of natural resources. More than three-quarters of Russian industry is in European Russia, to the west of the Urals. But  percent of the country’s coal reserves lie in Siberia and the Far East; so too does most of its oil and gas, and two-thirds of its hydroelectrical power potential. That potential, moreover, is enormous: Russia accounts for more than a third of the world’s known reserves of gas, and for – percent of its oil. There is a mismatch even in the water supply, with only  percent of Russia’s river water flowing across its central and southern regions, and most of its , rivers emptying themselves uselessly into the Arctic.1

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Table 26.1 Some Characteristics of Russia’s Population Total population, 1998

147,105,000

Of which:

(in percentage)

Urban Rural Male Female

73 27 47 53 Ethnic composition, 1994 microcensus

Russians Tatars Ukrainians Chuvash Others

82.95 3.77 2.35 1.17 9.76

A Slavic People Russia is equally varied in its ethnic composition, although Russians and other Slavs account for the overwhelming majority. Russia, in fact, has never been more “Russian” than it is today: the population of the Russian Empire in  was just  percent ethnically Russian, and in the Soviet period Russians were just over half the total (see table .). Altogether, there are at least a hundred recognized nationalities in contemporary Russia and  spoken languages, of which  are written and about two-thirds of which are sustained by substantial indigenous communities. Russian, for obvious reasons, is the most widely spoken language, not only among Russians themselves but also among other peoples,  percent of whom claimed to know it well at the time of the most recent census in  and about a quarter of whom were reported to consider it their native language. Overall, nearly  percent of the entire population was reported to be fluent in Russian by the same date, and nearly  percent considered it their native language. Russian, for such reasons, is recognized as the official state language (other languages can have official status at lower levels of government), and it operates as the medium through which the country’s different nationalities can most easily communicate with each other. Many Russians lived outside their own republic during the Soviet years, and at the end of  when the USSR broke up they found themselves in what had now become independent and foreign states. At the time of the last national census in  nearly  percent of all Russians lived within the Russian Federation (still, at this time, one of the republics of the USSR), and nearly  percent of the population of the Russian Federation consisted of Russians. But more than  million Russians lived elsewhere, in what were originally other Soviet republics but which became foreign states in the early s. There were more than  million of them in Ukraine, for instance, and more than  million in Kazakhstan; they were often a large proportion of the population of the state in which they now lived—more than a fifth of the population of a newly independent Ukraine and about a third in Kazakhstan, Latvia, and Estonia. Understandably, the fate of these fellow nationals has been a central concern for Russian foreign policy, particularly in the Baltic

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States, where they have been denied citizenship and the right to vote unless they satisfy a number of linguistic and other requirements. Russians are united by their religion, as well as by their language and territory. Historically they are a Christian people, more specifically members of the Russian Orthodox Church, which is a branch of Eastern Christianity. Although all confessions suffered from a variety of forms of direct and indirect repression during the Soviet period, at least half the population—according to the survey evidence—claim to be believers, although few of them attend church with the regularity that is a feature of many Western countries. About  percent of the adult population attended a service at least once a month in the late s; this compared with  percent in the United Kingdom and  percent in the United States, which is an unusually high figure in comparative terms.2 But although Russians are often prepared to identify themselves as Orthodox and as believers, they also appear to be unsure of many of the essentials of their faith. They may be Christians, for instance, but at the same time believe in flying saucers, the evil eye, and various forms of Oriental wisdom. Atheists, for their part, are often positive toward the role of Orthodoxy in their society, attend church services on a regular basis, and want their children to have a religious upbringing. These loose and amorphous patterns have helped to ensure that there are few clear divisions between believers and others in their political attitudes or party support, although frequent attendees (as in other countries) are somewhat more inclined to support “conservative” positions on questions that relate to censorship, or the role of women, or the rights of sexual minorities. As well as Russian Orthodox believers, there are substantial and well-established communities of Muslims, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and (in the Far East) Buddhists. Patterns of History Russia today is a product of its history as well as of its geography, and some features of its past are still of great importance if we wish to understand policies and attitudes in the early years of a new century.3 One of the most important of these legacies is the tradition of autocratic rule, a pattern established in early medieval times and virtually unbroken up to the present. Scandinavian traders—the records suggest—established the first Russian state, founded in the ninth century in the city republics of Novgorod and Kiev, but it was the southern city that quickly became its cultural capital. It was under one of the first rulers of this Kievan state, Vladimir, that Russia embraced Christianity as its official religion and, later, began to establish its own codes of law. But an enduring pattern was soon established of disputed successions and local rivalries, and this made it less easy to defend the new state against outside invaders. Profiting from these divisions, Mongol armies led by the grandson of Genghis Khan overran the country in the thirteenth century, taking Kiev and the other major cities and imposing a pattern of subordination, tribute, and military service. It was their patronage that helped the city of Moscow to establish a dominant position among the Russian principalities, and it was that position that in turn allowed the city to assemble a military force and lead them to a victory over the Mongols at the battle of Kulikovo field in , and to the final overthrow of the “Mongol yoke” in the following century.

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Under a succession of skillful leaders, Moscow went on to extend its rule over other Russian cities and to establish itself as the core of a revived and independent Russian state. Ivan the Terrible was the first to be known as tsar, and it was he who began its territorial expansion to the east, annexing the Kazan khanate in  as the Mongol empire itself began to collapse. Russia’s territorial boundaries expanded much more rapidly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and relations became much closer with the rest of Europe, particularly under the modernizing leadership of Peter the Great (–). A large part of Poland and Lithuania was annexed under Catherine the Great in the late eighteenth century, together with the northern shores of the Black Sea. The nineteenth century saw another series of advances, into Central Asia and the Far East, in a pattern that was reminiscent of the colonial expansion that other European powers were conducting in their overseas dominions. It was an empire built on conquest and occupation, and any resistance was mercilessly suppressed; Poland, which rose several times in resistance, was eventually incorporated as a Russian province and its people subjected to a campaign of Russification. Russian rule was autocratic—not just in its territorial acquisitions but also within the lands that formed the historic core of the state itself. Tsars and emperors ruled with a firm hand, their subjects had little influence on the decisions of government, and their rights and liberties were poorly respected even by the standards of the time. Under the laws of the empire, the tsar was an absolute ruler, subordinate only to God himself. The nobility were scarcely a check on his authority, as their position was defined by state service; and the commercial and professional classes were few in number and weak in their political influence. Considerable changes did take place in the later tsarist period, particularly after  when a constitutional reform allowed an elected parliamentary body (the State Duma) to come into existence. But its electoral base was narrow and its powers were very limited; it had no direct influence on the composition of government, or on two-thirds of state expenditure. A limited freedom of the press was also permitted after , and bodies like trade unions and political parties were given some legal standing. The Provisional Government, in , extended these freedoms further. But even on the most generous interpretation, this was a short break in a tradition of authoritarianism that arguably survives to the present day. Russians, in addition, were accustomed to a state that played a prominent part in economic and social as well as in political life, as owner and manager and not simply as custodian of the public interest. Before , as well as after it, the state owned a considerable proportion of the country’s productive resources, including coal, oil, and gold, and most of the railway system. There were more peasants in the hands of the state by the time serfdom was abolished in  than in the hands of private landlords. And the state had a large measure of control over remaining parts of the economy through the banking system, and particularly through the State Bank, which was the largest in the world in the assets it controlled and a central agency of economic management. The state decided appointments and regulated what was taught at all levels of the educational system, and it exercised a strict system of censorship over all forms of publication (one of its decisions was to allow the publication of Marx’s Kapital on the grounds that it was far too compli-

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cated to influence an ordinary worker, but Bolshevik newspapers had to be smuggled into the country in false-bottomed suitcases and all Western publications were carefully scrutinized at the border). Equally, there was only a limited rule of law. Although there had been significant reforms in the s, including a declaration that judges were independent of government, there was no trial by jury in political cases, and a system of special courts introduced in  allowed the governors in each region to arrest or exile any citizen, to ban any meeting, and to close any newspaper or journal. Considerable numbers were held in prison camps in various parts of the country, or were exiled to remote places for extended periods; Lenin’s brother lost his life for his part in a conspiracy to assassinate the tsar, and the Soviet leader himself spent three years in Siberia. The state also exercised a considerable degree of influence over organized religion. The Russian Orthodox Church, as the national church, was given a series of privileges as well as financial support, and other denominations were subject to various forms of discrimination (this was most obviously true in the case of Jews, who were allowed to live only in certain parts of the country—the Pale of Settlement—and who were admitted to higher education in deliberately restricted numbers). The effectiveness of government control was admittedly far less outside the towns, and the great majority who still lived in the countryside were normally able to get on with their lives with little external interference. Villagers were generally part of a peasant commune, the mir, and their social world revolved around it. The mir made its decisions collectively, and usually unanimously, based on the participation of the heads of all the households concerned. It was responsible for most of the economic activities of the community, for administrative matters such as taxation and military service, and it took a close interest in the beliefs and behavior of its members as well. Although the mir was beginning to break up in the years before World War I, in part because of government support for individual farming, this was the way in which their social world was organized for the great majority of Russians until comparatively recent times. It would be surprising, in turn, if this did not have at least something to do with the apparent acceptability to many Russians in more recent times of forms of government that are authoritarian and collectivist, but which also include some genuine concern for the public welfare. The Impact of Communist Rule There was strong support for a change from tsarist rule in , although not necessarily for a Bolshevik dictatorship. The old regime had provided incompetent leadership during the war; the court itself was compromised by the German nationality of the empress and by the unsavory intrigues that circulated around Rasputin, the semiliterate Siberian monk who established a hold over the tsarina and who was eventually put to death by patriotic noblemen in . Tsarist rule was ended by the February revolution of , which led to the abdication of the tsar and the formation of a Provisional Government headed by Alexander Kerensky, a moderate socialist. But the new government failed to provide decisive leadership, above all by its refusal to withdraw from an increasingly disastrous war, and in October (or, by the Western calendar, early November) it was replaced in its turn

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by a Soviet government headed by Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, more widely known by the name he used in revolutionary politics, Lenin. In the elections to a constituent assembly that took place over the following weeks, Lenin’s Bolshevik Party took about a quarter of the vote; but it had a majority in the bigger cities, and about two-thirds went to socialist parties that were committed in various ways to a republic that would give a wider range of rights to ordinary people. Lenin had not expected that a Soviet government would remain in power in an isolated country. Russia, after all, was one of Europe’s most backward regions, far from the developed capitalism that Marx had suggested was the natural precursor to a socialist society. All Russia by itself could do was to set off a wider European and then a worldwide revolution, taking advantage of the fact that the major capitalist countries were interconnected and that Russia was their “weakest link.” Equally, it took some time for the Soviet government to establish authority within its own territory, after a civil war and foreign intervention had failed to dislodge it. But there was no serious domestic challenge to the Soviet government after the early s, and over the seventy years or more in which it was in power the new regime pushed through a series of policies that were designed to reshape all aspects of the society they had inherited. One of the most important features of the new regime was political monopoly. The early Soviet government had been a coalition, but after the summer of  the Bolsheviks ruled by themselves, acting in the name of a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” A detailed censorship was imposed, on a “temporary” basis that lasted until the end of the s. Opposition parties were marginalized and then closed down. Elections became increasingly formalistic, and elected institutions became passive instruments of the ruling party. Within the party itself, internal opposition and differing opinions of any kind were gradually eliminated. The party leadership became a source of unchallengeable authority, and within it the general secretary (from , Joseph Stalin) became the central figure. Stalin had established his dominance by the end of the decade, and under his leadership authoritarianism gradually became a full-fledged terror. The lowest point was in the late s, when a series of show trials was staged at which former members of the leadership confessed to the most ridiculous of “crimes,” such as plotting to assassinate Lenin. There has been no agreement on the number of victims of the purges, which swept across the whole of the society and not simply the political elite, but it is clear that at least , death sentences were handed out for what were essentially political offences between the late s and .4 In addition to deaths there were prison sentences, periods of exile, and other forms of repression. During the years of Stalinist rule, a full-scale offensive was launched to industrialize and collectivize a still backward society. Industrialization involved the elimination of what remained of private ownership, and a drive to expand production at a rate that was without historical precedent. Industrialization was promoted by a series of five-year plans, the first of which was introduced in  and pronounced achieved “ahead of time” in . The plans emphasized heavy industry and defense rather than consumer goods, and impressive achievements were recorded. In  Soviet industrial output was just  percent of the corresponding U.S. figure; by  it was up to  percent. For many inside

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the USSR and even outside it, it appeared that the USSR had discovered the secret of rapid and continuing economic growth at a time when the West was suffering from depression and mass unemployment. “The plan” became a rallying point; the whole country began to be organized around its continuous fulfillment; and children, reflecting the popular enthusiasm, began to be called “Tractor,” “Five-Year Plan,” or even “Ninel” (Lenin spelled backward). The collectivization of agriculture was launched a year later, in . By this date only  percent of rural homesteads had been “collectivized,” or grouped into rural co-operatives. By  the proportion had reached more than  percent. The campaign focused particularly on “kulaks,” who were defined as rich and exploiting farmers but who were often simply more efficient; Stalin called for their “liquidation as a class.” But the campaign extended much further as the regime consolidated its control over the countryside and brought the entire society within its ambit. Perhaps  million died in one of the largest and most brutal social changes that have ever been attempted. The modern Soviet Union emerged from these processes of change; it was also shaped by the impact of war when Hitler broke off the Nazi-Soviet Pact of  and ordered an invasion in . The German army blockaded Leningrad and reached the outskirts of Moscow; but resistance was increasingly determined, and the harsh winter conditions took their toll. A turning point was the battle of Stalingrad in , when Field-Marshal von Paulus and his huge army were forced to surrender. The Red Army was able to launch a counteroffensive, and in  it was the first to reach Berlin and plant its flag on the Reichstag. But the losses that had been suffered in the war were enormous: at least  million dead (half of them civilians or prisoners),  million left homeless, and transport and industry devastated. The war had other effects as well: it helped to legitimate Communist rule (it was the party that had led the resistance, and  million of its own members had died); and it increased the determination of Soviet leaders to ensure that they established firm control over Eastern Europe at the Yalta conference in . Communist rule began to liberalize after the war, reflecting a society that was itself maturing. The single most important development was the Communist Party’s th Congress in , at which Khrushchev accused his predecessor of a “whole series of exceedingly serious and grave perversions of party principles, of party democracy and of revolutionary legality.” Over the years that followed, there was a gradual attempt to establish at least a limited rule of law, or “socialist legality.” There was a wider degree of freedom in the arts, with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for instance, allowed to publish his harrowing account of a Stalinist prison camp, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (). Internationally, the Soviet Union established closer relations with India, Egypt, and other developing countries. Khrushchev made the first-ever visit by a Soviet leader to the United States, where he got into an argument with Richard Nixon and banged his shoe on the podium at the United Nations. The momentum of reform slowed down under Khrushchev’s successor Leonid Brezhnev, party leader from  up to , but it speeded up under Yuri Andropov (–) and then acquired an entirely new scope and purpose under Mikhail Gorbachev (–), when it became known as perestroika, or “economic restructuring.”

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The developments of these years, as well as of the postcommunist period, are considered in more detail in later chapters. For Gorbachev himself (and for many Western scholars), the broadening of the political process that took place in the late s was a reflection of a society that had become more urban, educated, and differentiated. In  only  percent of the Soviet population lived in towns, and the proportion was no higher in  (indeed, the proportion was scarcely higher than it had been at the end of the previous century). By the end of the s, however, more than half of the population lived in towns, and by the s the proportion was over  percent. There had been comparable changes in educational levels. Illiteracy, which had affected almost three-quarters of the population before World War I, was reduced and then eliminated during the s. At the other extreme, just under . million had a university degree in , at the time of the first postwar census; by , at the time of the last Soviet census, there were  million. As a proportion of the adult population, that was four times as many college graduates as at the beginning of the period.5 In the workforce, fewer were employed in agriculture, but many more in the services, and the USSR alone maintained a quarter of the world’s scientific staff. There were even the beginnings of a “civil society” as the professions became larger and more organized and as increasing numbers of ordinary people came together to pursue their common interests—in sport, ballroom dancing, or French cuisine, although not yet in politics. Russian Political Culture: Values and Attitudes after Communism The Soviet authorities had originally taken a dubious view of the study of public opinion—what differences, after all, could there be in a society based on the “monolithic unity” of its people. From the early s, however, it began to be acknowledged that there could be differences of attitude and even conflicts of interest under socialist conditions, and that public policy would be more successful if they were known and taken into account. The first substantial step in this direction was in , when the Central Committee of the Communist Party agreed that a feedback mechanism was needed that would bring changes in the public mood to the attention of its leading officials. Perhaps, they suggested, it was time to establish a national public opinion research center, as in some of the East European countries. The All-Union Center for the Study of Public Opinion, headed by a prominent reform-minded sociologist, Tatyana Zaslavskaya, was finally established at the end of ; it remains today the most substantial of a large number of such institutions. Surveys were, in principle, the best way of establishing the distribution of opinion across a heterogeneous and changing society. But, in part because the society was changing so rapidly and because there was still some reluctance to express views on public issues (or even, with the increase in crime, to open the front door), they were often ambiguous and a poor predictor of election outcomes. Telephone surveys were particularly problematic because not much more than a third of the population had access to a receiver, and the last available census, conducted at the end of the s, became increasingly irrelevant as thousands became refugees or changed their address for other reasons. As elsewhere,

President Mikhail Gorbachev. (© Peter Turnley/Corbis)

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Table 26.2 Russians’ Main Concerns in the Late 1990s Issue







Inflation Increasing unemployment Economic crisis Delays in pay Increasing crime Social inequalities Weakness of state authority Corruption, bribery Moral and cultural crisis Shortage of foodstuffs Environmental deterioration

47 54 47 — 54 45 40 38 26 7 26

40 65 57 67 50 41 37 32 26 5 24

87 60 58 56 43 36 34 25 20 13 13

Source: Ekonomicheskie i sotsialnye permeny: monitoring obshchestvennogo mneniya, various issues.

surveys could in principle provide a representative impression of the public mood, but they were always best interpreted within a context that took proper account of the ways in which ordinary citizens were inclined to conceive of their own problems on the basis of their own experience. What, so far as surveys were concerned, were the main concerns of ordinary Russians at the start of a new century?6 For the most part they had little to do with constitutional design, or even the crisis in culture and public morality; most people were more concerned about how they were to earn a living in a rapidly changing economic environment. In the late s, prices and unemployment came first in the list of public concerns, followed by the collapse of industrial and agricultural output. These were followed by delays in the payment of wages (only a third of those who were asked in  had received the previous month’s salary in full and on time). The next most important public concerns were crime and the widening gap between rich and poor (see table .). What about the market, to which Russians had been committed by their government even before the end of communist rule? To begin with, the popular view was broadly supportive, but as the real-life consequences of a market became apparent, including unemployment and higher prices, ordinary Russians became increasingly disillusioned. By the late s, according to the surveys, Russians were more favorable to a system “based on state planning” rather than on “market relations,” although a substantial minority were unable to make up their minds. There was overwhelming agreement, in particular, that the state should provide a job for all who wished to work and that it should guarantee a basic standard of living for all its citizens. At the same time, a majority thought a freemarket economy was “necessary for Russia’s economic development” and there were as many who thought the reforms “should be continued” as who thought they “should be ended” (still larger numbers found it difficult to say). At least in retrospect, the principles of socialism were also attractive. Who, for instance, were the “most outstanding political leaders in Russia’s history in the twentieth

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Infant Mortality Rate (–) .

France .

Germany

.

Italy

.

Russia Sweden

. .

United Kingdom United States Canada

. .

Source: Department of Economic and Social Affairs,  Democratic Yearbook (New York: United Nations, ).

century”? The first choice, ten years after the collapse of the system he had established in its modern form, was Joseph Stalin ( percent); Lenin, who had led the Bolsheviks to power, came second with nearly  percent, and the austere party leader of the early s, Yuri Andropov, was in third place with  percent. More than half of those who were asked thought it would have been “much better if the situation had remained the way it was before ,” when Gorbachev began his reforms and the system began to disintegrate; much larger numbers regretted the passing of the USSR, which was the most obvious source of their economic difficulties. Yet only a minority, at the same time, thought it would actually be better to restore the communist system, and no more than a very substantial minority were prepared to vote for the Communist candidate in the  presidential election, when there was a genuine choice between alternative political futures. What, the national public opinion center asked in the late s, were the main characteristics of the Soviet system that had existed in the s and s, and of the postcommunist system that had succeeded it in the s? The Soviet system had certainly been “bureaucratic” and “shortsighted,” but much larger numbers thought it was “close to the people,” “legal,” and “familiar.” The postcommunist system, by contrast, was just as “shortsighted” as its communist predecessor, but the most general opinion was that it was “corrupt and criminal,” “remote from the people,” or even “illegal,” in spite of its formally democratic character. In all these matters, Russians were typically much more dissatisfied than their East European neighbors. They were more likely to take a favorable view of the past than of the present or the immediate future, whereas Central Europeans (on the whole) preferred the present to the past and took a still more positive view of their immediate future. And equally, they were the most dissatisfied of all the postcommunist nations that were asked by Eurobarometer to assess the performance of the country in which they lived in terms of “democracy” and “human rights.”

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There was at least one other way to discover what ordinary Russians actually thought and that was in the form of “letters to the editor.”7 Petitioning the authorities was a practice that went back to medieval times, when a bucket, in which petitioners could place their grievances, was lowered from a window in the Old Kremlin Palace. In the Soviet period, it developed into the most widely employed of all the forms of communication that linked the Kremlin and those over whom they ruled. Substantial numbers wrote to the Soviet government, or to party headquarters, or (in the early years) to Lenin himself. Still larger numbers wrote to the daily papers—the peasant paper Krestianskaia gazeta received half a million letters a year in the s on all kinds of subjects, including their reflections on a socialism that was “like the building of the Great Wall of China, which had swallowed up a lot of energy but to no obvious effect.”8 Letters maintained their significance into the postcommunist period, although there were now many other ways of attempting to influence the public agenda. Boris Yeltsin, for instance, received about , letters a day while he was president, raising all kinds of questions from the state of the museum in Leo Tolstoy’s birthplace to the conditions in student dormitories (some of them using uncensored language). Much larger numbers wrote to the daily papers, including the bestselling weekly Argumenty i fakty (Arguments and Facts), where the editorial day began with the “enormous bags of mail” that had come in from their readers. There were four main kinds of letter-writer, the paper reported. They included “irreconcilables,” who disagreed with what the paper had to say; “analysts,” who had their own ideas for the improvement of the society in which they lived; and “fighters for justice,” who wanted to call attention to a social problem. Others raised personal concerns, such as Polevik of Moscow, who had observed a “large collection of condoms of various sizes” floating down the river and wondered which “institution (?!)” had been responsible.9 The letters that appeared in Argumenty i fakty in the late s raised all kinds of concerns. Some of the paper’s correspondents were most interested in questions of public life: for instance, how much were the presidents of the post-Soviet republics paid? (Yeltsin, it emerged, was not the best rewarded.) And what about Yeltsin himself: was it true that his father had served in an anti-Bolshevik army during the civil war? (Apparently not.) But more often, it was a private matter or simply curiosity that led readers to take up their pens. For instance, could you take a dog on the underground? Could you bequeath your apartment to your cat? (Apparently you could.) Could you buy a place in a graveyard with the privatization vouchers that began to be distributed in the early s? How could you open a licensed brothel? What was the best way to lose weight? Was it true that a Russian emigré had designed the U.S. one-dollar bill? (It was.) Was Jesus Christ a Jew or not? And when He came again, would He take his believers? If so, what about the rest? As these reflections suggest, Russians were still rather confused a decade or more after the system in which they lived had changed in fundamental ways. They were unhappy about the higher prices they had to pay and about the unemployment that appeared to threaten their future livelihood. They deplored the chaos and disorder of public life and the wave of organized crime that appeared so intertwined with government that there was no way to resist it. They regretted the collapse of the state in which they had grown up and

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the diminished role that had been allocated to Russia on the world stage. On balance, they thought multiparty elections and the right to strike had brought more harm than good. But they welcomed some of the other changes that had taken place since the late s, including a greater freedom of the press and of public opinion. Perhaps more than anything else, Russians wanted to “live normally”: in reasonable dignity, without further convulsions, and without bothering about the label they put on a society of this kind. As the twenty-first century started, this still seemed a distant prospect. Notes . See A.P. Gorkina et al., Rossiia: entsiklopedicheskii spravochnik (Moscow: Drofa, ), . Several good modern geographies are available, including Denis J.B. Shaw, Russia in the Modern World: A New Geography (Oxford: Blackwell, ). . The discussion draws at this point on Stephen White, Bill Miller, Sarah Oates, and Ase Grodeland, “Religion and political action in postcommunist Europe,” Political Studies , no.  (September ): –. . There are numerous modern histories of Russia from the earliest times to the postcommunist years: see for instance Paul Dukes, A History of Russia c. –, d ed. (London: Macmillan, ), and Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, ). . This is the estimate presented in Gregory L. Freeze, ed., Russia: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, ), . There is a fuller discussion of the contentious issues involved in J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning, eds., Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, ). . Itogi Vsesoyuznoi perepisi naseleniya  goda: SSSR (Moscow: Gosstatizdat, ), ; and Narodnoe khozyaistvo SSSR v  godu (Moscow: Finansy i statistika, ), . . In the following I have drawn, unless otherwise stated, on the following standard sources of poll data: the All-Union Public Opinion Center’s bimonthly journal Ekonomicheskie i sotsialnye peremeny: monitoring obshchestvennogo mneniya; the Central and Eastern Eurobarometer, published under the auspices of the European Commission from  to ; and the New Russia Barometer and New Democracies Barometer, published periodically by the Centre for the Study of Public Policy, University of Strathclyde (summaries are available at www.strath.ac.uk/Departments/CSPP; current data are available at www.russiavotes.org). . For a fuller discussion see Stephen White, Russia’s New Politics (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, ), –. . Neizvestnaya Rossiya: XX vek, vol.  (Moscow: Istoricheskoe nasledie, ), . . Argumenty i fakty, no. , , .

Chapter 27

Where Is the Power? IN THE SOVIET PERIOD there was no doubt where political power was located. The Communist Party enjoyed a monopoly of political authority, enshrined after  in a constitution that declared it the “leading and guiding force of Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system, of all state bodies and public organisations.” Within the party the leadership was exceptionally powerful, helped by a principle of “democratic centralism” that required each lower level of the party organization to accept its instructions. Within the leadership itself the first or (as he was more often known) general secretary was clearly the person who mattered most of all. His judgments were the most authoritative. His statements were the ones that were quoted most often in Pravda editorials and his picture was the one that appeared most frequently on its front page. His six-hour speech was the one that, by convention, opened the party congress, and it was the one that was applauded the most enthusiastically. When Leonid Brezhnev spoke in , at his last party congress, his address was interrupted seventy-eight times by “applause,” forty times by “prolonged applause,” and eight times by “stormy, prolonged applause”; there were shouts of “hurrah” a few days later when it was announced that he had been unanimously reelected to head the new Politburo.1 Central control of this detailed kind, in fact, was already breaking down in the last years of Soviet rule. The party leadership had steadily evolved into a collective one based on discussion and consensus and representing the most important interests in Soviet life—the army, the ministerial bureaucracies, the largest cities and regions. A diversity of opinion began to emerge in public life, reflecting an increase in the numbers of highly educated professionals and the increasing complexity of policy choices. The media began to reflect a wider variety of subject matter, particularly after Gorbachev had begun to promote his policy of glasnost from the mid-s. The rule of law began to strengthen at the same time, encouraged by legislative changes that gave more independence to the courts and to those who worked within them. There were largely competitive elections from  onward and a new working parliament. And the Communist Party began to share its authority with other parties and movements, particularly after March  when its guaranteed political monopoly was removed from the constitution. This was still a Soviet system, but it was already one in which a considerable degree of political pluralism had been institutionalized. Communist rule came to an end in December . The USSR itself fragmented into its fifteen constituent republics, and political power moved into the hands of a strongly

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anticommunist president. But the end of communist rule, clearly, was not the same as the establishment of a liberal democracy. A decade or more after its “transition,” political power in Russia remains highly centralized, with a concentration of power in the hands of an enormously powerful president and his administration. There is a choice of political parties at elections, but few that have a substantial and committed following. There is a choice of newspapers and television channels, but few that have escaped the control of Russia’s newly rich oligarchs. The courts, meanwhile, offer little protection against the abuse of office, still less from a wave of organized crime that clearly enjoys a measure of political protection. Some, like the economist Grigorii Yavlinsky, have called this a “criminal oligarchy with a monopolistic state”; others have described it as a “nomenklatura democracy” that has left ordinary people with no more influence over those who rule them than they enjoyed in the last years of Soviet rule.2 The Russian Presidency However its political system was classified, the central institution in postcommunist Russia was clearly the powerful presidency that had been established in the spring of . Mikhail Gorbachev had established a Soviet presidency the year before, in the spring of ; over the months that followed, almost all of the Soviet republics moved toward a fully presidential system. Russians themselves voted overwhelmingly in favor of an elected executive presidency in the referendum that took place in March , at the same time as a referendum was held on the future of the USSR itself; and then, in June , Boris Yeltsin was elected to the newly established office with  percent of the vote in a six-sided contest. Russia was still, up to the end of that year, one of the republics of the USSR; but there was already no doubt that the dominant figure in its political life was its first-ever directly elected president, not the Soviet president to whom he was nominally subordinate. When the USSR itself collapsed at the end of , the authority of the Soviet president passed naturally to the newly elected Russian president, and Russia itself assumed the position that the USSR had occupied in the international community. Yeltsin owed much of his authority to the fact that he had been directly elected, unlike the Soviet president who had been elected (in the first instance) by the national parliament. He had won additional respect when he faced down an attempted coup in August , at some risk to his own life; the whole world saw him standing on a tank in front of the Russian parliament, reading out his denunciation and demanding the immediate release of the Soviet president. Yeltsin’s public standing was never higher than in the immediate aftermath of the coup, and he became the dominant figure in the negotiations among the republics that led eventually to the collapse of the USSR and its replacement by a Commonwealth of Independent States. At the same time he had to govern through a parliament that had also been elected, in , and could also claim to represent the popular will. The parliament had originally been supportive and had elected Yeltsin as its own first chairman; but as the Yeltsin government pushed through a package of economic reforms that left millions of Russians in destitution, there was understandably some resistance from their elected representatives. Yeltsin, speaking to the parliament in December , complained that it was creat-

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President Boris Yeltsin defends the Russian White House during the August  coup. (AP/Wide World Photos)

ing “intolerable working conditions for the government and the president” attempting to turn deputies into the “absolute rulers of Russia,” and aiming in the last resort at the “restoration of the totalitarian Soviet-communist system.” It had, he told the deputies, become “impossible” to go on working with such a parliament, and he demanded a referendum to resolve the tension between “two irreconcilable positions.” The referendum, when it took place in April , suggested that most Russians supported the president and his policies in this confrontation. The result encouraged the presidential camp to press ahead with the preparation of a new constitution that would resolve the constitutional impasse in favor of the president. The parliamentarians had a rather different view, and they raised a rather different issue: should government be accountable, not just elected, and should a broadly representative parliament be allowed to act as a counterbalance to what would otherwise be an overly powerful executive? For the parliamentary speaker, Ruslan Khasbulatov, the state in Russia had always been identified with the power of an autocratic ruler, and in the communist years the party leader had become “almost a tsar.” Parliament, in these cir-

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cumstances, had a vital role: it could represent the society as a whole, and it could help to limit the power of the executive in matters like public spending and the composition of government. A parliamentary system was particularly important in postcommunist Russia, Khasbulatov argued, with its need to reconcile the differences that still remained and to build up a supportive consensus. These were differences that would have been recognized by most constitutional theorists, and they formed the focus of a series of discussions that took place between the two sides during  and  with a view to securing an agreed and workable compromise. In the end, however, the differences that still remained were resolved by military force. The Russian parliament was first of all suspended by a presidential decree in late September ; in early October it was shelled and taken over by the Russian army after it had voted for Yeltsin’s impeachment and a popular demonstration had encouraged its leaders to believe they were about to take power. Khasbulatov and the other leaders of this “parliamentary insurrection” were taken into custody, a number of parties and publications were banned, and another referendum was held in December that allowed Yeltsin to secure approval for a new version of the draft constitution that incorporated a more strongly presidential form of executive authority.3 Presidential Power in Postcommunist Russia Under the  Russian constitution, the president is head of state and guarantor of the constitution itself, to which he swears an oath of allegiance. It is the president who represents the Russian Federation at home and abroad, and who defines the “basic directions of the domestic and foreign policy of the state” (Art. ). He prepares an “annual address on the situation in the country,” clearly modeled on the U.S. president’s State of the Union address, which he delivers to both houses of parliament at the start of each year (Art. ). The president, moreover, has extensive powers of appointment. He appoints the prime minister “with the consent of the State Duma,” which is the lower house of parliament, and can preside over meetings of the government. He nominates candidates to head the State Bank; he appoints and dismisses deputy premiers and ministers; and he nominates candidates to the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court, and the Procuracy. He forms and heads the Security Council and appoints and dismisses his representatives in the Russian regions as well as the high command of the armed forces and diplomatic representatives (Art. ). The Russian president, in addition, can initiate legislation (Art. ), and he has the right to dissolve the Duma in specified circumstances—for instance, if it refuses his prime ministerial nomination three times in a row or if it votes in favor of motions of no confidence in the government twice within three months (Arts.  and ). The Russian president also enjoys the right to issue his own decrees, which have the force of law throughout the federation (Art. ). Formally, any decrees of this kind are supposed to be consistent with the constitution and with existing legislation, but in practice they have often exceeded such limits. The decree that suspended the parliament in September , for instance, was in clear violation of the constitution that prevailed at the time; the president also broke new ground in the decree in December  that began the war with

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Chechnya and in some of his decrees on privatization. The president, finally, heads the armed forces and can declare a state of war as well as a state of emergency (Arts.  and ). There are, in fact, few limits on the powers of a Russian president. He can be impeached, but less easily than in the constitution that prevailed before : the Duma must first vote in favor of proceedings by a two-thirds majority on the initiative of at least a third of the deputies after a special commission of deputies has decided he has been guilty of treason or a crime of similar gravity. The Supreme Court then must rule that there are grounds for such an accusation, and the Constitutional Court must confirm that the proper procedures have been followed. The Federation Council, which is the upper house of the Russian parliament, must then vote in favor by a two-thirds majority, not less than three months after the original charges have been presented (Art. ). It is unlikely, given this elaborate procedure, that any Russian president will be forced out of office on this basis, although attempts have periodically been made to initiate proceedings. A more serious restriction is the ability of the Russian parliament to override the presidential veto, provided a two-thirds majority in both houses rule in favor (Art. ). There is a lower age limit for a candidate for the Russian presidency but no upper age limit, presumably because Yeltsin would have passed the age of sixty-five before his first term came to an end. There is no provision, as there had been before the  constitution, that the president cannot dissolve the Russian parliament or suspend its operation (Yeltsin’s decree of September  was in effect a constitutional coup). It became the president’s responsibility to approve the military doctrine of the Russian Federation, which was a constitutional novelty (Art. ), and it was for the president, not the parliament, to call a referendum once the necessary procedures had been completed. Nor was there any provision for a vice president who could deputize for the president whenever necessary and help to ensure continuity if the president died or became incapacitated. The president, indeed, has additional powers that are not fully specified in the constitution. The constitution, for instance, mentions that the president forms an “administration” (Art. ), but gives little indication of its role in government. It has served, in practice, as a sort of supergovernment, headed by the president’s closest advisers and with a substantial staff, and reminiscent in many ways of the central party bureaucracy of the Soviet period (indeed it is housed in the same buildings). The head of the presidential administration (at the start of , Alexander Voloshin) has always ranked among the most influential figures in Russian political life, although his position is not an elective one. This, in effect, is the presidential “court,” with its favorites and its gossip, its intrigue, and (it became increasingly clear in the late s) its greed and corruption. Electing a President in 1996 and 2000 Under the constitution, the Russian president is directly elected for four years by universal, direct and equal ballot, and cannot be elected for more than two consecutive terms (Art. ). Unlike his U.S. counterpart, he can in theory be elected on a subsequent occasion. A Russian president must be at least thirty-five years old and must have lived in the Russian Federation for at least ten years (Art. ): this was presumably intended to rule

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out the émigré candidacies that had been seen in some of the other East European countries in the postcommunist period (a Canadian businessman of Polish origin had come an astonishing second in the Polish presidential election of , and a Lithuanian-American who had retired from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency won the Lithuanian presidential election of early ; Latvians elected an émigré Canadian psychology professor to their own presidency in , but by a parliamentary rather than a popular vote). Boris Yeltsin had lost most of his earlier charisma when he stood in his second presidential election in the summer of . He had, indeed, almost lost his voice and made the announcement of his candidacy with some difficulty. But he mounted a remarkable campaign that carried him to victory in the second round over his Communist challenger, Gennadii Zyuganov. It was a victory that owed a good deal to the prerogatives of the presidency itself. Yeltsin made full use of his control over the state media, particularly television. He invited the head of Russia’s newly established independent television service, which had been critical of his policies in the breakaway republic of Chechnya, to join his campaign staff. He committed public funds with increasing abandon to small businesses and the Academy of Sciences, pensioners, and those who had lost their savings. An end was declared to conscription in the armed forces, and the troops themselves were allowed to avoid compulsory duty in Chechnya and other hot spots. Nearly all of these commitments were rescinded or simply not fulfilled after the election. In addition, Yeltsin spent his own funds without restraint. Formally, his campaign spending should have been limited to about $ million, but estimates of his expenditure range up to $ million. Most important, Yeltsin campaigned with increasing confidence, travelling around the country with an energy that belied his sixty-five years and presenting himself as the only serious alternative to a return to the Soviet system. After one of his trips, at least four of the accompanying journalists suffered pneumonia, and so did two of Yeltsin’s own staff. The changes in his behavior were so extraordinary that ordinary Russians began to believe he had been connected to a battery; another view, put about by a financier involved in his campaign, was that “at key points in his life, Boris Yeltsin wakes up.”4 The outcome in the first round, on  June , was a narrow plurality (see table ., p. ): Yeltsin took first place with  percent of the vote, not far ahead of his Communist challenger with  percent. But within a few days Yeltsin had received the thirdplace candidate, former general Alexander Lebed, and offered him a place in his administration as secretary of the Security Council with particular responsibility for public order. Zyuganov found himself unable to extend his coalition of supporters between the two rounds, despite attempts to form a broadly based “government of national confidence.” In the second round, Yeltsin won a clear victory, with most of Lebed’s voters behind him as well as the overwhelming majority of the voters who had backed other reform-oriented candidates in the first round. Yeltsin had first been elected the president of Russia when Russia was one of the constituent republics of the USSR. The Constitutional Court, however, ruled that this must count as a first election to the post he now occupied, and so he had no alternative but to stand down at the following election, which was due to take place in June . Yeltsin

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Table 27.1 The 1996 Russian Presidential Election Candidates

Percentage support

First round, 16 June (turnout 69.7 percent) Boris Yeltsin Gennadii Zyuganov Alexander Lebed Grigorii Yavlinsky Vladimir Zhirinovsky Svyatoslav Fedorov Mikhail Gorbachev Martin Shakkum Yuri Vlasov Vladimir Bryntsalov Against all Invalid votes Second round, 3 July (turnout 68.8 percent) Boris Yeltsin Gennadii Zyuganov Against both Invalid votes

35.3 32.0 14.5 7.3 5.7 0.9 0.5 0.4 0.2 0.2 1.5 1.4 53.8 40.3 4.8 0.7

took the political world by surprise when he resigned at the end of December , allowing Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to take over as acting president. Yeltsin had already identified Putin as his chosen successor when he nominated him to the premiership in August . With his early resignation the presidential election was brought forward to  March , which gave Putin, already the incumbent, a substantial advantage. Putin’s success, however, owed even more to the campaign against “terrorism” in Chechnya, a war that appalled international opinion because of its violations of human rights, but which appeared to have persuaded Russians that at last they had found a vigorous leader who could ensure their physical security. Putin’s rating, only  percent when he became prime minister, had reached  percent by mid-January, and the only real question at the start of the campaign was whether there would be any need for a runoff or if he would win on the first ballot. Putin refused to campaign directly, or to use the public funds he had been allocated for publicity, and he did not issue a preelection manifesto. He did, however, publish an “Open Letter to Russian Voters,” and in early March  he published a series of interviews with journalists, entitled First Person. Two themes were given particular attention: the need for a strong state and for a properly functioning market economy. The stronger the state, Putin suggested, the stronger the individual. Nor was there any conflict between a strong state and a market economy: the state was needed to protect the rights of property, encourage entrepreneurs, and collect taxes. Putin emphasized the dangers of a “second Yugoslavia” in Russia if fundamentalist Islam was allowed to spread from Chechnya to the middle Volga, and more generally he promised to restore Russia’s place as a great

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Table 27.2 The Russian Presidential Election of 26 March 2000 Candidate Vladimir Putin Gennadii Zyuganov Grigorii Yavlinsky Aman-Gel’dy Tuleev Vladimir Zhirinovsky Konstantin Titov Ella Pamfilova Stanislav Govorukhin Yuri Skuratov Aleksei Podberezkin Umar Dzhabrailov Against all

Votes

Percentage Support

39,740,434 21,928,471 4,351,452 2,217,361 2,026,513 1,107,269 758,966 328,723 319,263 98,175 74,898 1,414,648

59.94 29.21 5.8 2.95 2.7 1.47 1.01 0.44 0.43 0.13 0.10 1.88

Note: The total electorate was 109,372,046, of whom 75,181,071 took part (68.74 percent).

and respected power among the leading nations.5 His campaign was greatly assisted by the attention he automatically attracted as prime minister and acting president; he made a further contribution by undertaking a series of energetic stunts, like piloting an air force jet between two of his engagements, which underscored the difference between him and his ailing predecessor. In the end, Putin won narrowly on the first ballot (see table .). The runnerup was Communist leader Gennadii Zyuganov, with a more respectable vote than many had expected; Yabloko leader Grigorii Yavlinsky came third, but with a smaller share of the vote than he had secured in . None of the other candidates secured more than  percent, which meant that they would be obliged to return the state funds that had been made available for their campaigns. The turnout, at . percent, was very close to the turnout that had been recorded in the first round of the  presidential campaign. This gave Putin a decisive victory and one that took him beyond a margin of victory that might have been attributed to his manipulation of the airwaves. It was equally clear that he had enjoyed all the advantages of office, including the de facto support of the state machine, and that he had received a quite disproportionate degree of attention in the mass media (more than a third of the television coverage that was given to all of the candidates put together and about half of the entire news and current affairs output). Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin With a political system that invests the president with so much power, and with few of the informal constraints on executive authority that have developed in Western countries, the personal qualities of the Russian president make a real difference. This was certainly true of the bulky Siberian figure who dominated Russia’s early postcommunist politics, Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin.6 Yeltsin was born in a village in the Sverdlovsk region, in the Urals, in . According to his autobiography he was lucky to have survived at all, as the

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priest nearly drowned him when he was being baptized (the priest, not in the least put out, remarked that this showed the young Boris was a “good plucky lad”). Yeltsin’s own family was affected by the repression that swept through the country during these years; both his father and his uncle were persecuted in  when they fell foul of the campaign against better-off peasants and were accused of conducting anti-Soviet agitation. Although they protested their innocence, they were given three months’ hard labor. Yeltsin himself, though only three, claimed to remember the “horror and fear” years later. These were years of shortage and even famine in the Siberian countryside, and the family might not have survived the war but for the milk and sometimes the warmth of their nanny goat. The young Yeltsin lost two fingers when he picked up an unexploded grenade; his father beat him regularly; he broke his nose and contracted typhoid fever. Later, he lost almost all hearing in one ear. But he did well at school and graduated as an engineer at the Urals Polytechnical Institute, which was the classic background for a career in the party bureaucracy. Yeltsin began work as a construction engineer, managing a large state enterprise that specialized in prefabricated housing. He joined the Communist Party in , becoming a full-time official in  and then in  first secretary of the Sverdlovsk regional party organization. One of his first duties was to order the demolition of the Ipatiev house in which the tsar and his family had been shot in , to prevent its becoming a royalist shrine. (Yeltsin made atonement in , when the family’s remains were moved to St. Petersburg and interred in the Peter and Paul Cathedral). Yeltsin’s management style attracted the attention of his party superiors, and in  he was invited to Moscow to take up a position in the central party administration, moving at the end of that year to become the city’s party first secretary. Yeltsin had already attracted attention with his outspoken comments at party meetings. Then, in October , came what turned out to be the decisive moment in his career. The Central Committee was discussing Gorbachev’s important speech on the seventieth anniversary of the October revolution. It was a formal and somewhat reverential occasion. Yeltsin caused shock and outrage when he complained that the party had failed to feed and clothe the people adequately in those seventy years and went on to speak of an increase in “adulation” of the general secretary and of the development of a “cult of personality” around his wife. Not surprisingly, Yeltsin was replaced as Moscow party first secretary within a couple of weeks and demoted to a junior position in the state construction committee. He was dropped from the party’s ruling Politburo in early , and his career seemed at an end. Yeltsin saw himself at the time as a “political outcast, surrounded by a vacuum.” But the more the party leadership denounced him, the more Yeltsin attracted the support of ordinary people as an opponent of privilege and an over-mighty bureaucracy. In March  he was able to turn this support to his advantage when he stood as a candidate in Moscow in the first largely competitive elections to the Soviet parliament. He won over  percent of the vote and a majority of over  million. It was an extraordinary comeback. Yeltsin was still a member of the Communist Party, but an increasingly disillusioned one. There had, it seems, been a decisive moment in this intellectual trajectory. In late

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, he visited a Moscow bathhouse and found himself surrounded by about forty naked men, all urging him to keep up his challenge to the party leadership. It was, he later recalled, “quite a sight.” Yeltsin was also impressed by his visit to Houston in September  and by the abundance that was on display in ordinary supermarkets there. By early  he was pushing for a looser federation in which Russia would be able to make its own decisions; he also wanted the private ownership of land, financial independence for factories and farms, and freedom of political association—in other words, multiparty politics. This, in turn, was the program he brought with him when he was elected to the chairmanship of the Russian parliament in late spring  and to the Russian presidency a year later. Yeltsin was also the decisive figure in the discussions that led to the dissolution of the USSR into its constituent republics, although this was not necessarily his original intention. Over the s, Yeltsin gave a distinctive character to the Russian presidency. Formal position mattered rather less than personal associations: whether, for instance, you shared the president’s passion for tennis (this was no help to prime minister Chernomyrdin, but very good news for the national team coach), or whether you came from the same part of Russia (there was a “Sverdlovsk mafia,” composed mostly of former party officials who played an important part in the early years of the Yeltsin presidency). Loyalty mattered more than competence: the president’s bodyguard, for instance, had no constitutional authority but began to exert a major influence on matters of state in the mid-s. The president’s family mattered most of all, particularly his younger daughter Tatyana, who advised Yeltsin on his public image and became an official adviser in . By the end of the s, “the family” had become an even broader term. It extended beyond Yeltsin’s biological family to his closest associates, including wealthy financier Boris Berezovsky, who was the main shareholder in the international carrier Aeroflot, whose director was the husband of Yeltsin’s older daughter, and who took personal responsibility for the publication of the second volume of Yeltsin’s memoirs in . Not surprisingly, given these associations between politics and private wealth, there were persistent rumors of corruption. In the summer of  particularly serious charges surfaced: that highly placed persons in the Kremlin had benefited from the enormous contract to redecorate its public rooms and that the sums involved had flowed out of the country into foreign banks. A crucial element in the deal that was struck when Yeltsin stood down at the end of that year was that not only he but also his immediate family would be exempted from any further investigation in connection with these very serious charges. The Yeltsin court was a distinctive place in other ways as well. There was an atmosphere of intrigue and suspicion, in which leading officials had reason to believe their phones were tapped. And there was a male, sometimes locker-room aspect. For instance, on a trip along a Siberian river, Yeltsin became fed up with his press secretary and demanded that he be “thrown overboard.” The president himself was fond of drinking songs and was a skillful instrumentalist. Even on official trips he would demand, “bring spoons!” His “favorite trick,” his bodyguard recalled, was to “play knick-knack-paddywhack with his spoons” on the head of his chief of staff; on one occasion it was the president of Kyrgyzstan, Askar Akaev, who had to suffer this indignity.7

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President Vladimir Putin speaks at the Kremlin, September . (Reuters NewMedia Inc./ Corbis)

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Yeltsin’s indifferent health provided a continuing element of uncertainty throughout his presidential years. He continually suffered from “colds” and other illnesses, even after a complicated heart bypass operation at the end of , and there were extended periods of absence from his Kremlin duties. There were also repeated indications that the president shared the national weakness for alcohol. He was visibly “tired,” for instance, when he arrived in Berlin in  to review Russian troops as they returned to their homeland. After a well-watered lunch, he asked for a coffee as he traveled with the German chancellor to the official ceremony, but then poured it all over his shirt; at the ceremony itself he caused some surprise when he stepped forward and conducted the Berlin police band in a “stirring rendition of Kalinka.” Visiting Ireland shortly afterward, he failed to appear after the plane had landed at Shannon airport. The president, staff explained, had overslept (in fact, it appears, he had suffered another heart attack); opponents complained that he was in a “permanent state of visiting Ireland.” 8 Vladimir Putin was much younger and a judo black belt; reportedly, he spent fortyfive minutes every day jogging and doing physical exercises.9 There was certainly no reason to think he would be subject to the same physical difficulties as his predecessor. His policy priorities, however, remained somewhat opaque, apart from bringing the “antiterrorist operation” in breakaway Chechnya to a successful conclusion. Putin, born in Leningrad in , had graduated from Leningrad University’s law faculty in . He went to work in the foreign intelligence administration of the KGB and spent a long time in East Germany, developing a fluent knowledge of the language as well as of the international intelligence community. He returned to Leningrad in  and worked in the city administration, becoming closely associated with its reform-minded mayor. In Leningrad, press reports suggested, he was “considered an eminence grise, whose opinion often counted for more than that of the mayor himself.” He kept a low profile and avoided making public statements and was reserved in his statements—“no one ever saw him show his feelings in public.”10 Putin moved to Moscow in , working in the presidential administration and then from July  as the director of the Federal Security Bureau, the successor to the KGB, moving on to the premiership in August . Some of Putin’s objectives became a little clearer in the address he issued at the end of  on “Russia at the turn of the millennium.” Putin rejected a return to the totalitarian past, while recognizing its considerable achievements; at the same time he rejected the “abstract models and schemes taken from foreign textbooks” that had been applied during the free-market experiments of the s. He appeared to recognize the importance of universal values such as freedom of expression and freedom to travel abroad. But there was rather more emphasis on traditional Russian principles of government, such as patriotism and the greatness of the nation itself. Russia, Putin insisted, was and would always remain a great power, in economic and cultural if not necessarily in military terms. “Statism” was another traditional virtue: the state and its institutions had always been strong in Russia, and there was no immediate or even long-term prospect that Russia would become a “second edition of, say, the U.S. or Britain in which liberal values have deep historic traditions.” Social solidarity was also important, with its emphasis on cooperation rather than individualism. This, clearly, was a view of the Russian future that would re-

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spect liberal freedoms, but one that would also emphasize the need for a strong and protective state in line with rather longer-standing national traditions.11 Prime Minister and Government The daily business of Russian government is in the hands of the prime minister and his colleagues under the overall authority of the president. (The arrangement is not very different from the Soviet practice by which the party ruled and the government carried its decisions into effect.) The president “with the consent of the State Duma” appoints the prime minister, under the constitution; the entire government submits its resignation to the new president (Art. ), and the president has in turn to submit his prime ministerial nomination within two weeks of taking office (Art. ). But unlike parliamentary systems, there is no question of the prime minister submitting his resignation to a newly elected Duma and securing the support of deputies in order to continue. Indeed Viktor Chernomyrdin, who was prime minister at the time of the December  Duma election, went out of his way to insist that there would be no change of policy or personnel even though the party he had led into the election—Our Home Is Russia—had secured no more than  percent of the popular vote. Conversely, the succession of changes in the premiership that took place in  and  had nothing to do with an election, a Duma resolution, or a change in public attitudes. The Duma does have some influence over the choice of prime minister, but it is a power of last resort. The Duma has a week to vote on any prime ministerial nomination. If it rejects three nominations in a row, the president is obliged (and not simply empowered) to dissolve the Duma and call a new election (Art. ). The Duma has another power of last resort, which is its right to call for a vote of no confidence in the government as a whole. If it does so twice within three months, the president must either announce the resignation of the government or dissolve the Duma. The government can also decide to offer its own resignation, which the president can either accept or reject (Art. ). Both of these powers are unlikely to be used in normal circumstances, however, as they would normally precipitate a constitutional crisis. The ordinary business of government is in the hands of the prime minister and his colleagues. The prime minister makes proposals to the president on the structure of the government as a whole, and on deputy premiers and ministers (Art. ). More generally, he is supposed to identify the “basic guidelines” of government activity and to “organize its work” (Art. ). It is the government that submits an annual budget to the Duma and reports on its fulfillment. The government also takes charge of finance, credit, and currency matters; and it conducts a “uniform state policy” in culture, education, science, health, social security, and the environment. The government is additionally responsible for state property, public order, and foreign policy (Art. ), and it can issue resolutions and directives to put its decisions into effect (Art. ). At the start of  there were twenty-four federal ministers in the Russian government, with portfolios that included defense, justice, foreign affairs, finance, economics, health, culture, and education. There were eleven state committees, including youth, the environment, telecommunications, and housing; two federal commissions; fifteen federal services, including tax collection,

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foreign intelligence, security, broadcasting, and currency; ten agencies; and two inspectorates; and three other bodies that were associated with the presidential office. Soviet ministers held office for long periods of time—sometimes decades—and there was a comparable period of stability at the prime ministerial level after December , when former oil minister Viktor Chernomyrdin was nominated and approved by the Russian parliament. Yeltsin, however, became jealous of the “presidential” role that Chernomyrdin had begun to play—for instance, in his regular dealings with U.S. Vice President Al Gore—and in March  he was unexpectedly dismissed together with his entire government (as the law required). Yeltsin’s choice to replace him was Sergei Kirienko, a boyish thirty-five-year-old who had served as energy minister but was otherwise unknown (“Sergei who?” asked the weekly paper Moscow News). Rejected in a first and second vote, he was finally confirmed in late April . But in August a further convulsion occurred following a default on Russia’s international obligations and a dramatic collapse in the value of the currency. Kirienko had been celebrating his “first hundred days,” but he was out of office a week later. As Yeltsin explained, the times required a “heavyweight,” and for this reason he nominated Chernomyrdin once again. But this time it was the president who backed down, as the Duma rejected Chernomyrdin in the first two votes with every indication that they would reject him again in the third and decisive ballot. Following negotiations, Yeltsin was persuaded to put forward an entirely new candidate, foreign minister Evgenii Primakov, and an overwhelming majority approved him in early September . Primakov had the support of the Duma as well as of the president, and it appeared that a rather larger shift of power had taken place away from the president and toward government and parliament. Yeltsin, however, was clearly dissatisfied with these new arrangements, and in May  he caused a further upheaval when he sacked Primakov and his government, nominating interior minister Sergei Stepashin in their place. Primakov, Yeltsin suggested, had shown “insufficient dynamism,” but it appeared that Yeltsin had again become jealous of the popularity of his premier and that he was alarmed by the way in which he was protecting the prosecutor general in his investigation of high-level corruption, an investigation that was coming very close to the presidential family itself. Stepashin in his turn was replaced in early August by Vladimir Putin, an even more committed Yeltsin loyalist, in an unexpected move that, for Izvestiya, was the “president’s way of showing the Duma who’s boss.” These were rapid and unsettling changes, and they strengthened the hand of those who had been arguing for a fundamental revision of the constitution or even its replacement. The most widely favored proposal was that government should be accountable to parliament as well as president, in what elsewhere was called semipresidentialism; some called for the abolition of direct election of the Russian president, and even for the abolition of the post itself.12 Yeltsin, however, resisted any diminution of his formidable prerogatives, and there was little sign that his successor would be more accommodating. Indeed how could it be otherwise, Yeltsin asked Izvestiya, “in a country that is used to tsars and strong leaders?”13 The Duma and the Legislative Process Just as its elections lacked any element of choice until the late Gorbachev years, so too the Soviet system had lacked any element of parliamentarianism. The elected soviets (or

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councils) were meant to be very different. There was no separation of powers, for a start, as working people were supposed to have a common interest that made it unnecessary for an artificial division between making laws and adjudicating on their application. The Soviet parliament, the USSR Supreme Soviet, met very briefly, for two or three days at a time twice a year, and its votes were normally unanimous. So predictable were its proceedings that parliamentary correspondents could file their reports the previous day. Deputies were part-timers, so that they could combine their representative duties with their ordinary employment; and a high proportion were replaced from election to election, so that others could have a chance to run their own state. In practice, this meant that ministers were immune from criticism and that ordinary people had little confidence in the institution through which their interests were supposedly being represented. There were fundamental changes in this system in the Gorbachev years, as part of the new party leader’s program of “democratization.” The first working parliament in modern Soviet history was established in , with deputies who carried out their responsibilities on a full-time basis; and there were competitive elections to ministerial positions, which were to be held for limited terms. A still larger change took place with the adoption of the new constitution in December . An entirely new Federal Assembly was established, with a lower house (the State Duma) made up of deputies elected either by individual constituencies or by a competition between party lists; the upper house, the Federation Council, was made up of two representatives each from the eighty-nine republics and regions. The upper house considered issues that related to the federation as a whole: it approved boundary changes, the introduction of martial law, and the deployment of Russian troops in foreign countries. But because its members had full-time positions in the regions from which they came, it met irregularly, for just one week in three. Most parliamentary activity took place in the lower house, or State Duma. It was the Duma, for instance, that gave its agreement to nominations to the premiership; it also appointed and dismissed the chairman of the State Bank, and the Accounting Chamber, who scrutinized the use of public funds. The Duma, above all, was a legislative body. The first Duma alone, between  and , adopted more than  laws, many of which were designed to consolidate the postcommunist state system. Much of the work of the Duma was conducted through its twenty-eight committees, whose chairmen were often figures of some political authority. The Duma’s legislative decisions had to be approved by the upper house, but the Duma could override a veto by confirming its original decision by a two-thirds majority. The president could refuse to sign a bill that had gone through both houses, but again, a two-thirds majority in both houses could override his veto. The conduct of the Duma and its members did not always encourage respect for their positions. One nationalist deputy, for instance, a deputy chairman of the committee on women, families, and youth, lived openly with three women and proposed a bill to legalize polygamy—because, he explained, there weren’t enough men to go around. “The majority of Russian men are too poor to support one family, let alone several,” he told reporters. “I have the money and energy to keep all my women fully satisfied, materially and physically.”14 A session in September , which had been convened to discuss NATO bombings in Bosnia, was particularly remarkable. A far-right deputy, Nikolai Lysenko, took the opportunity to attack one of his opponents, Orthodox priest Gleb

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Yakunin, as he was returning to his seat. Another deputy tried to separate them but became involved in the melee; so did two women deputies. At this point the Liberal Democrat leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky waded in, elbowing one of the women out of the way (she suffered a concussion) and seizing the other in an armlock. A bloodied Yakunin later announced that he would be taking legal action against Lysenko for the theft of his cross, banditry, and offending the sensibilities of believers. The press took a somewhat different view, describing the whole incident as the “Duma’s solution to women’s issues.”15 There appeared some prospect, in spite of these inauspicious beginnings, that the Duma would eventually become a responsible participant in the legislative process. The deputies elected in December  appeared more willing than their predecessors to negotiate with the government. They adopted a state budget with reasonable promptness. The chairmen of both houses met regularly with the president and prime minister as a “big four” that helped to stabilize relations among the branches of government. Russians, it seemed, did want a parliament of some kind, even if they were cynical about the representative body they actually had. A more fully “parliamentary” role for the Duma, however, was hindered by the political system itself. So long as its powers remained restricted, there was little incentive for parties to organize in order to win a majority of seats, and little reason for ordinary Russians to regard it as a central rather than peripheral element in the formation of public policy.16 Notes . Iu. K. Aksyutin, ed., L.I. Brezhnev. Materialy k biografii (Moscow: Politizdat, ), . . Quoted respectively in Sotsiologicheskii zhurnal  (): ; and Izvestiya,  June , , . . The text of the Russian constitution was published in Rossiiskaya gazeta,  December , –. For a convenient edition, see Vladimir V. Belyakov and Walter J. Raymond, eds., Constitution of the Russian Federation (Lawrenceville, Va.: Brunswick, ). . Stephen White, Richard Rose, and Ian McAllister, How Russia Votes (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, ), , and chap.  more generally. . Ot pervogo litsa. Razgovory s Vladimirom Putinym (Moscow: Vagrius, ); an English translation has been published, First Person (New York: HarperCollins, ). . Biographies include Leon Aron, Boris Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (London: HarperCollins, ); and John Morrison, Boris Yeltsin: From Bolshevik to Democrat (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ). Yeltsin’s own memoirs appeared in two English-language translations: Against the Grain: An Autobiography (London: Cape, ); and The View from the Kremlin (London: HarperCollins, ). . New York Review of Books,  April , . . Alexander Rutskoi in Lipetskaya gazeta,  March , . . Izvestiya,  August . . Vremya,  August . . Rossiiskaya gazeta,  December . . For a fuller discussion, see Eugene Huskey, Presidential Power in Russia (Armonk and London: Sharpe, ). A broader comparative discussion is available in Ray Taras, ed., Postcommunist Presidents (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, ); and Robert Elgie, ed., Semi-Presidentialism in Europe (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, ). . Izvestiya,  November . . Gosudarstvennaya Duma Rossiiskoi Federatsii vtorogo sozyva. Spravochnik (Moscow: Ves’ mir, ). . New York Times,  January , section . . New Statesman and Society,  September .

Chapter 28

Who Has the Power? THE SOVIET SYSTEM, up to almost the very end, had allowed no choice of party or even candidate at its periodic elections. Indeed, there was little choice about voting or not, although in principle the exercise of the franchise was entirely voluntary. In practice, there was never more than a single candidate on the ballot paper; and to vote in favor all that was required was to drop it, unmarked and possibly unread, into the box. A vote against was rather less easy: there was a screened-off booth for this purpose inside the polling station, but if voters went off to use it their intentions could hardly be secret. The results were so predictable that newspapers could prepare their front pages with pictures of the successful candidates the day before the election; the Politburo, as late as the s, could approve the report of the central electoral commission two days before the polls had opened. In , in the first partial break with these arrangements, a small number of combined districts in the local elections of that year were allowed to nominate more candidates than seats available; and then in , as “democratization” developed further, a new election law was adopted that provided for the first elements of genuine competition. There was no limit on the number of candidates who could be nominated (formally this was not a change, but now it was going to be more than an empty provision). More important, nominations could be made by ordinary citizens, provided there were  or more signatures, rather than by the Communist Party and other approved organizations. Candidates had for the first time to put forward their own manifestos, even if they had to stay within the bounds of the constitution and legal system, and they had campaign staff to assist them, paid from public funds. The results, in March , were a sensation, as nearly forty officials, including a member of the ruling Politburo, went down to defeat, and Boris Yeltsin romped home in Moscow with a majority so large that it went straight into the Guinness Book of Records. The Politburo’s leading conservative, Yegor Ligachev, called the whole exercise “political shock therapy.”1 Ten years or more into postcommunist Russia, it was far less clear that the institution of free elections had handed power back to ordinary citizens in a way that made it possible to speak of Russia as a democracy. Certainly, there were regular multiparty elections, but government itself was accountable to the president, not to elected representatives. Elections themselves were heavily influenced by national television, which in turn reflected the views of a small number of newly rich oligarchs. In many of the republics and regions the political process was even more strongly dominated by executive authority,

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with Soviet-style majorities for single candidates and a press that was entirely in the pockets of the local administration. Ordinary Russians, if the surveys were any guide, thought that their fundamental liberties were much better secured than in the Soviet period, but that they had less influence over the government that ruled in their name—even though they were able to choose it for themselves. For some, this made Russia an “electoral” but not yet a “liberal democracy”; for New York-based Freedom House, Russia was no more than “partly free” at the start of the new century, and regressing rather than advancing.2 Parties and Elections Although the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had been mentioned in earlier versions, the constitution that was adopted under the guidance of Leonid Brezhnev in  had converted the party’s effective dominance into a formal political monopoly. From March , Article  of the constitution was amended to refer to the CPSU and “other political parties, as well as trade union, youth, and other public organisations and mass movements.” A legal basis for multiparty politics was established the following October when a new law on public organizations was adopted, covering the formation of trade unions, sporting clubs, women’s and veterans’ associations as well as political parties, and setting out a procedure for them to register with the Ministry of Justice. The new constitution, adopted in December , made it clear that postcommunist Russia was firmly committed to “political diversity and a multiparty system,” subject only to a requirement that parties and associations refrain from a forcible challenge to the state and from incitement to social, ethnic, or religious strife. And there could, under the new constitution, be no state or compulsory ideology (Art. ). The first test of this emerging but still weakly formed party system was the election of December , called on the same day a referendum was taking place to approve the new constitution. The election came less than three months after President Yeltsin had issued his decree suspending the Russian parliament and after he had ordered the Russian army to seize the parliament building when substantial numbers of deputies refused to accept the legitimacy of his action. Some newspapers were banned, several of Yeltsin’s leading opponents had been taken out of the parliament building with their hands in the air, and sixteen parties or movements were suspended on the grounds that they had been involved in the “events” of early October. All of this created a rather unusual and inhospitable environment for the conduct of what was, in effect, Russia’s first multiparty election. In the end, thirty-five parties or movements began a campaign to collect the , signatures they needed to secure the right to put forward candidates. Thirteen were able to do so and to register their lists, with a total of , candidates upon them. A similar number of candidates (,) sought election in one or another of the  singlemember constituencies, nominated either by a party or by electors themselves.3 The results were a considerable shock, not just to Yeltsin and his colleagues but to the Western governments that had backed his attack on an elected parliament. Most successful of all were the independents, who won  of the  constituency seats; this gave them nearly a third of all the seats in the new Duma. The most successful of the parties was Russia’s Choice, led by former acting premier Yegor Gaidar, with a total of seventy seats. But

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there was a sensational result in the party-list contest, which was won by the right-wing nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky with nearly a quarter of the vote, with the Communists in third place. Television coverage was suspended in the early morning because of “technical difficulties,” and U.S. Vice President Al Gore, invited to witness the birth of a new Russian democracy, had to leave in some embarrassment. Gaidar acknowledged that reformers had suffered a “bitter defeat”; the Moscow evening paper, more dramatically, warned that Russians had “woken up in a new state” after the “Communo-Fascists’ success.” The  Duma, however, was a transitional one that was to hold office for only two years. The elections that followed in December  would obviously be far more important, with the potential to shape Russian party politics for the following four years or even longer. Parties or movements had this time to collect , signatures, no more than  percent of which could be drawn from any single republic or region; forty-three eventually satisfied this requirement, more than three times as many as in , with a total of , candidates on their lists. In the single-member districts there were , candidates, each of whom had been able to collect the signatures of at least  percent of the electors in their constituency.4 With so many parties competing for seats, it was clear that very few would reach the -percent threshold; and in the end only four did so (see table .). The Communist Party of the Russian Federation took more than a fifth of the total vote; Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democrats and Prime Minister Chernomyrdin’s Our Home Is Russia each took just over  percent; the reformist party Yabloko came fourth, with just under  percent. These four accounted for just over half the total party-list vote, which meant that just under half of the vote had been “wasted”; it also meant that the parties that reached the threshold would secure twice as many seats in the new Duma as their share of the vote would otherwise have secured for them. There was no precedent anywhere in the world for this degree of disproportionality, and there were understandable complaints that the “rights of millions of voters had been violated.”

Table 28.1 Elections to the Russian State Duma, December 1995 Proportional representation party list Parties clearing 5-percent threshold: Communist Party Liberal Democrats Our Home Is Russia Yabloko Won single-member seats (19 parties): Independents Won votes but no seats (20 parties): Against all lists Invalid vote

Percentage 22.3 11.2 10.1 6.9

2.8 1.9

Seats 99 50 45 31

Single-member district seats

Total seats

Seats 58 1 10 14 65 77

Total 157 51 55 45 65 77

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Elections in the single-member constituencies did something to rectify these imbalances, and some of the parties that won no seats in their own right were able to gain some representation. The Communists, again, did well, but so did their allies in the Agrarian Party, who spoke for the interests of state and collective-farm agriculture rather than for private farmers. The number of seats won by independents went down sharply, but they were still the most successful of the “parties” in the single-member districts and the second-largest “party” overall. The Liberal Democrats, by contrast, won no more than a single single-member seat; Women of Russia, a feminist grouping that had won a place in , fell short of the threshold but took three seats, and Gaidar’s Russia’s Choice, which had also fallen short, took nine. The turnout was  percent, an improvement on the  percent that were reported to have voted in December  but still far down on earlier totals. The 1999 Duma Election The election law that had led to this skewed result came under increasing criticism over the years that followed, and attempts were made to have the results themselves declared unconstitutional. In the end, no significant changes were made to the law that was approved in June  and which then governed the elections that took place the following December. As before, the new Duma would be divided into two halves, one of  partylist and the other of  single-member seats. But the law now provided that if the parties or movements that reached the threshold secured less than half the party-list vote among them, other parties that had won at least  percent would be added, starting with the one that was closest to the threshold, until their combined total reached at least half of the entire party-list vote. Similarly, if a single party won more than half the total party-list vote and no other party reached the threshold, a second party would be added to the allocation of seats. This was a “floating,” rather than a fixed threshold. Another innovation was that parties and candidates were allowed to register on the basis not of a certain number of signatures but of an electoral deposit (for a party, , times the minimum wage or about $, at the prevailing rate of exchange; for an individual candidate, , times the minimum). But if parties won less than  percent nationally, or candidates less than  percent in their individual districts, their deposits would be forfeited. Equally, candidates who failed to secure at least  percent of the vote, and parties that failed to secure at least  percent were obliged to repay the entire cost of their free time on radio and television, and their free newspaper coverage. Candidates, in a further innovation, were required to declare any court sentence they were still serving (it was hoped this would reduce the number of criminals in the new Duma) and to make a full declaration of their income and property. Russian parties represented a spectrum of opinion, although it was difficult to classify them in conventional terms.5 The Union of Right Forces (Soyuz pravykh sil or SPS), however, identified itself explicitly with the political right. It was formed in late ; its leaders were former Prime Minister Sergei Kirienko, former deputy premier Boris Nemtsov, and deputy Irina Khakamada. The SPS, in its program, stood for the “values of a free society” and for a “European capitalism” in Russia. Its other priorities were private property,

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public order, the targeting of social benefits to those who really needed them, and the separation of business and government. In the view of the SPS, the market should properly be responsible for guaranteeing development and prosperity. The party’s full economic program, a document of over , pages, was intended to provide the guidelines for a rather longer period of government. It was handed over to Prime Minister Putin at a wellpublicized meeting shortly before the election, at which the premier endorsed substantial parts of it. Kremlin strategists were apparently determined to ensure that the SPS reached the -percent threshold and won a share of the party-list seats. Yabloko (Apple) was another party that identified itself as “democratic,” or broadly supportive of the political and economic reforms that had taken place since . Its emphasis, however, was less on the market and more on the classic liberal objective of good and honest government, and it saw itself as a “democratic alternative to the current regime.” In its manifesto, Yabloko promised to “clear corrupt elements out of the state apparatus” and replace them with “honest professionals, ready to serve the public good.” Its economic proposals assumed a greater role for the state as the “main representative of the national interest,” and social benefits would be improved, including health, education, pensions, and a “happy childhood for all whatever their parental income.” Russia would meanwhile return to a worthy place among the nations, united with Belarus in a treaty that was open to the other former Soviet republics, and integrated into the world economy but without the “shameful dependence on the IMF” that had developed in recent years. Yabloko’s list was headed by economist Grigorii Yavlinsky, the party’s longstanding leader and its presidential candidate in . Second place went to former Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin, who announced his adhesion in late August and who stood, in addition, in a St. Petersburg constituency. The “centrist” parties were those that broadly supported the policies of the Kremlin and of the Putin government. Our Home Is Russia (Nash dom Rossiya, or NDR) was associated with former Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin and had originally been formed in  to enable him to campaign for a pro-government majority in the Duma election of that year. Our Home promised a “new level of responsibility of the state before society,” including a balanced budget and the prompt payment of social benefits. There would also be an emphasis on job creation and a program of legislation that would restore the faith of domestic and foreign investors; there would be a campaign against crime and corruption and a constitutional reform that would increase the role of parliament. Chernomyrdin, speaking to a congress in August, claimed that NDR had acquired a “new inspiration,” and it enjoyed considerable resources as the historic “party of power” with close ties through Chernomyrdin to the gas industry. But its rationale had become a little doubtful after Chernomyrdin left the government in the spring of , and the party could thereafter present itself as no more than a “party of influence on power.” Not surprisingly, many of the regional governors who had supported NDR in the past came to the conclusion that their time might be better invested in other and more effective ways of advancing their interests. The most intriguing of the new parties was the Inter-Regional Electoral Association “Unity” (Yedinstvo), also known from its Russian initials as Medved (Bear). Unity had

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come into existence in late September as a movement of governors through which the Kremlin could seek to influence the composition of the new Duma in its favor. The new grouping was evidently intended to counter the support that was being enjoyed by the main oppositional groupings; it was also thought to enjoy the support of financial and Kremlin insider Boris Berezovsky. For one of the daily papers, Unity was simply an “antiFatherland bloc, a sort of disposable kamikaze party, whose one and only task [was] not to win the elections but to prevent disagreeable political groups from doing so.” For another, it was the “Kremlin’s final attempt to get a ‘party of power’ of its own into the running.”6 The party’s list was headed by emergencies minister Sergei Shoigu, who had the great advantage that he could appear constantly on television in connection with his official duties; the other leading figures on its list were an Olympic wrestling champion and the former head of the organized crime division of the interior ministry. For Shoigu, Unity was “not a political party” but an “association of sensible people, fed up with seeing others decide their fate.” Its ideology, he told interviewers, was actually the “absence of ideology.” What did it matter what a society was called if its people lived well and peacefully? What mattered more was that Unity was a movement very closely associated with the Putin government: Putin himself declared that “as a citizen” he would be voting for it, and Unity itself accepted that it might be called the “Putin party.” The parties of the left-center were represented above all by another new grouping, Fatherland–All Russia (Otechestvo-Vsya Rossiya, or OVR). OVR was again an association that had simply been formed to fight the coming elections, but it drew on two more substantial and continuing organizations: the Fatherland Party that had been founded in late  by Moscow mayor Yuri Luzkhov and a movement of governors and regional elites known as All Russia. Its list was headed by former prime minister and foreign secretary Yevgenii Primakov, followed by Luzhkov and the governor of the St. Petersburg region, Vladimir Yakovlev. Fourth place went to Yekaterina Lakhova, leader of the “Women of Russia” Party (which nonetheless contested the election independently because it had been offered too few well-placed positions on the OVR list). OVR, according to its program, was above all a party that favored a strong state, which alone could establish conditions for the development of the whole society and of its individual members. OVR also favored a “socially oriented market economy” in which particular attention would be attached to the “real sector” and to the encouragement of domestic producers. Like others, it promised the timely payment of social benefits and a determined onslaught on terrorism and organized crime. OVR, in its own view, was “neither on the right nor on the left,” and it was equally opposed to “pseudoliberal reforms” (in practice, the policies that had been followed since the start of Yeltsin’s presidency) and to a “return to the totalitarian past” (in other words, to the Soviet system). The parties of the orthodox left included, most notably, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. The list was headed by the party’s long-standing leader, Gennadii Zyuganov, by Duma Speaker Gennadii Seleznev, and by Vasilii Starodubtsev, a farm director who had taken part in the attempted coup of August . The fourth position was held by Aman-Geldy Tuleev, governor of the coal-mining Kemerovo region. The Communists, however, failed to enlist all the parties that had previously supported them, in-

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cluding the Agrarian Party (most of whose leaders joined OVR) and the Movement in Support of the Army, Military Science, and the Defense Industry, which contested the election independently. So too did Spiritual Heritage, led by a Duma deputy who had been expelled from the Communist faction. The Communist ideal, according to their program, was a “society that harmoniously combined social justice with dynamic economic development.” This meant the establishment of a “renewed socialist system,” including a “powerful public sector” that would sustain social benefits, education, culture, and science. But it also meant a “spiritual revival” and a strengthening of the state itself. There were also nationalist parties, including Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party, which had also been the surprise winner of the party-list contest in  and finished second in . The Liberal Democrats were nationalist and anti-Western in their foreign policy, strongly in favor of the restoration of federal control in Chechnya, and promarket but also protectionist in their economic strategy. They were equally opposed to the break up of the USSR and called for it to be restored within its earlier boundaries or, “ideally,” the boundaries the Russian Empire had enjoyed after the Crimean War, including Finland, the Baltic States, and Alaska. The Liberal Democrats were well financed, had a national network of activists, and enjoyed a high level of support within the armed forces. But they owed most of it to their leader, a charismatic campaigner who successfully identified the problems of ordinary Russians and suggested simple ways of dealing with them— such as shooting the leaders of organized crime. In spite of their oppositional rhetoric, the LDPR tended in practice to support the government in the Duma: they voted in favor of the budget and prime ministerial nominations, and opposed the attempt that was made in the spring of  to initiate the impeachment of President Yeltsin. The LDPR’s ratings had certainly sagged since the last election, but it regularly did better than the polls suggested. The Kremlin, moreover, had every reason to offer its own support so that another broadly pro-government fraction entered the new Duma, either under its own auspices or (when there were last-minute difficulties about nominating the LDPR itself ) as a “Zhirinovsky bloc.” In all, twenty-six blocs were listed on the ballot paper in the federal-list competition, with a total of , candidates on their lists; a further , sought election as independent or party-sponsored candidates in the single-member constituencies. The final results took some time to emerge, but from an early stage on election night it was clear that pro-Kremlin parties—and particularly Unity—had performed much better than expected (see table ., p. ). The winner, as in , was the Communist Party, with a larger share of the vote. But Unity followed closely and secured almost as many party-list seats in the new Duma. Fatherland–All Russia came in third, but with a smaller share of the vote than the polls had predicted, and the Union of Right Forces did rather better than expected, helped (it was thought) by an energetic and imaginative campaign as well as by the implicit support of the prime minister. Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democrats came in fifth with scarcely more than half of their  vote, but they were still above the threshold; Yabloko failed to achieve the breakthrough it had hoped for (indeed its vote was slightly down in ), but it was the sixth of the parties that secured representation in their own right. The parties that had reached the threshold accounted, among them, for . percent of the party-list vote, a result that gave few grounds for

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Table 28.2 Elections to the Russian State Duma, December 1999 Proportional representation party list Parties clearing -percent threshold: Communist Party Unity Fatherland–All Russia Union of Right Forces Zhirinovsky bloc Yabloko Won single-member seats (8 parties): Independents Won votes but no seats (12 parties): Against all lists Invalid vote

Percentage 24.3 23.3 13.3 8.5 6.0 5.9

Seats 67 64 37 24 17 17

Single-member district seats

Total seats

Seats 47 9 29 5 0 0 17 105

Total 114 73 66 29 17 17 17 105

3.3 1.2

challenging the representativeness of the result. Turnout, at  percent, was slightly down from the level that had been achieved in , and in eight single-member constituencies—for the first time—the vote was declared invalid because the number of ballots cast “against all” the candidates exceeded the number that had been cast in favor of the most successful candidate. Parties were also able to sponsor candidates in the single-member constituencies, but not all of them did so. As in previous elections, independents—some of whom had a well-known party affiliation but who preferred to stand on this basis—were more successful than any of the parties, winning nearly half of the single-member seats for which they could compete. Even when the results from the party-list election were added, independents were still more numerous than all but Communist deputies. Few, however, were expected to remain independent in the new Duma, and the pro-government parties were normally in a position to offer the most substantial inducements for their support. The outcome was a new Duma that was expected to be much more supportive of the new prime minister and his policies; Izvestiya, for instance, estimated that half of the new Duma would be relatively “loyal.” Much, however, depended on the independents, and as the year ended they were being energetically courted by both sides. Party Politics in Postcommunist Russia By the start of the new century, the postcommunist electorate had acquired a number of established characteristics. Communist and OVR voters, for a start, were somewhat older than the electorates of other parties, while the Union of Right Forces and Zhirinovsky appeared to have made a successful appeal to the younger voter (see table .). The SPS had also appealed to the woman voter, but so had the Communists, and the clearest gender effects were—as before—for the Liberal Democrats, whose support was much less than

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Table 28.3 Some Characteristics of Party Support, December 1999 Category Age 18–29 >55 Gender Female Residence Village or small town Moscow/St. Petersburg Religion Attends church Nationality Ethnic Russian Attitudes Feels European Prefers private ownership

Communist

Fatherland–AR

Right forces

Unity

Yabloko

Zhirinovsky

6 58

11 44

31 24

23 31

9 37

33 24

56

47

58

50

52

35

38 6

28 29

16 14

35 3

8 18

39 10

22

24

24

22

19

9

79

77

88

88

87

94

55 8

65 29

58 51

56 29

44 32

54 31

Source: New Russia Barometer VIII, fieldwork 1–29 January 2000, N  1940.

that of other parties among women, who in fact accounted for slightly more than half of the electorate. Zhirinovsky was also less successful in appealing to voters with a higher or technical education, but he and his bloc were strongly supported in villages and small towns, along with Unity and the Communists. OVR was the strongest party in the “two capitals,” reflecting the influence of Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov. Religion, by contrast, made little difference, except that those who attended church at least a few times a year were much less likely to vote for Zhirinovsky; conversely, his support was particularly strong among ethnic Russians, while there was relatively more support for the Communists and for OVR among the other nationalities. OVR supporters, for reasons that were not obvious, were the most likely to feel European; the Union of Right Forces were the most strongly in favor of private rather than state ownership, with Communist supporters at the other extreme. The polls made clear some other features of party support. Unity, whose supporters were otherwise a cross-section of the entire society, did better than the other parties in terms of their leadership: a reflection of the prominence that Shoigu and his colleagues had enjoyed over the few months since their establishment, as well as of the obscurity of the principles on which the new party had been founded. Communist supporters, however, were more likely to say they agreed with the program of their party and to believe it would defend their interests. They were also the most likely to report that they supported their party because they “always had done so” and the least likely to say it was a party that “had a future.” The Union of Right Forces, by contrast, was the most likely to have supporters who believed it had a future and that it was a “party of the young.” On the other hand, it was seen as the weakest of the parties, while the Communists, followed by Fa-

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therland–All Russia, were seen as the strongest. Not a single party, however, had more than  percent of supporters who claimed to “know something about it.” Russia, as this evidence suggested, could scarcely be said to have a party system. Political parties, for a start, were the most distrusted of all public institutions. Only  percent of Russians, at the end of , “completely trusted” the political parties, compared with  percent who “completely distrusted” them. Yeltsin had the confidence of just  percent of Russians, but the parliament, government, police, and trade unions all ranked higher, and the mass media, army, and (at the top) the church were all trusted more than they were distrusted.7 Was there, another question asked, a party or movement with which respondents felt able to identify themselves? Just over a quarter ( percent) chose the Communists,  percent the “democrats,” but nearly half ( percent) were unable to identify with any of them or indeed to answer at all.8 Not surprisingly in these circumstances, parties appeared and disappeared with alarming rapidity (of the six that won party-list places in December , three had been formed earlier the same year). There was also a much greater tendency than in Western countries for voters to split their ticket, favoring one party in the national party-list contest but another (or an independent) in their local district. Russian parties were typically centered on an individual leader or a small group of leaders. Yabloko, for instance, was identified with its leader Grigorii Yavlinsky (the party’s name incorporated the first two letters of his surname), and the Liberal Democrats with their flamboyant standard-bearer Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Some of the parties that had taken part in the  election were known simply as the “bloc of ” a particular leader, and the same was true in : there was the Zhirinovsky Bloc (formed when difficulties arose with the registration of the Liberal Democrats as a party) and the Bloc of General Nikolaev and Academician Fedorov. Only the Communist Party enjoyed a substantial individual membership, of perhaps ,. Over the country as a whole no more than . percent were estimated to belong to one or another of the parties, and no more than  percent identified themselves as committed supporters. This compared with a level of about  percent in the United States, and  percent in the United Kingdom.9 Many of the new parties, indeed, avoided the word party altogether, reflecting the long period of Soviet rule during which there had been a single ruling organization that was generally agreed to have abused its position. The weakness of Russian parties reflected the long years of Communist rule and the lack of the kinds of organized interests—of labor or of capital—that might have helped to sustain them. It also reflected the political system itself. The electoral system certainly gave parties a real advantage in that they were quite deliberately allocated half the Duma seats in addition to the seats they could hope to win in the single-member constituencies. But there were few incentives to put forward a coherent or responsible program, as even a majority party would not necessarily play any part in government. Equally, the composition of the new Duma bore a very loose relationship to the outcome of the election. In a Western parliamentary system, deputies sit and vote together with their party colleagues. In the Duma, party fractions and groups were formed after the election, and they had a much more distant relationship to the election outcome. Independents typically trans-

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ferred to one or another of the party fractions, deputies elected on a party ticket became independents, and some moved from one party to another. In these circumstances, parties were less a means of attempting to “win power,” and rather more a device through which prospective presidential candidates could obtain media exposure (and free air time) and in this way strengthen their position in the contest that really mattered. Other Political Actors If parties were relatively minor political actors, who was shaping the new Russia? From the polls that were regularly conducted with a view to defining the politically influential, it was clear that—after the president and prime minister—it was the oligarchs who commanded the greatest weight. The oligarchs were financial-industrial tycoons and bankers. They included figures like Vladimir Potanin, a former official of the ministry of foreign economic relations who had founded an import-export bank at an advantageous moment and who later became, for a year, first deputy chairman in the Chernomyrdin government. Vladimir Gusinsky was another, an oil and gas engineer who was also a qualified theater director and who went on to head Most-Bank. So was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Moscow engineer who had risen through the Communist Party’s youth wing and who went on to head the banking and industrial group Menatep. Others owed their positions to their control over the country’s vast natural resources, including Rem Vyakhirev, an engineer who had risen from management of the gas industry in Tyumen to a deputy ministerial position and the chairmanship of Gazprom, the world’s largest gas company and in effect the former USSR ministry of the gas industry. He had been closely connected with Prime Minister Chernomyrdin, another gas man, for more than thirty years. Boris Berezovsky, perhaps the most influential of all, had been a mathematician with a doctorate in management who had gone on to become the head of an automobile dealership that became the center of a group of companies, as well as a close friend (as we have seen) of the Yeltsin family. He was also, for a year, deputy chairman of the Security Council and later, for another year, executive secretary of the Commonwealth of Independent States. The influence of oligarchs like Berezovsky was broadly based and often included a segment of the media: Gazprom controlled the newspapers Trud and Rabochaya gazeta, Berezovsky held shares in the Russian Public Television (the country’s main channel) and in the now ironically named Nezavisimaya gazeta or Independent Newspaper. Potanin’s Oneksimbank owned Komsomolskaya pravda, a popular daily, and shared ownership of the well-respected Izvestiya with oil interests; Gusinsky and his bank owned a series of newspapers including the influential Segodnya (Today) as well as independent television and a radio station. There was continuing controversy about the extent to which the oligarchs constituted the “real government of Russia,” as the Financial Times once described them. The oligarchs were certainly prepared to exaggerate their own influence. But, it was clear that it had been the oligarchs, meeting early in , who had decided collectively to bankroll Boris Yeltsin’s campaign to secure his reelection—a campaign that had been successful, although not simply because of their funding. It was also clear that Berezovsky had helped to fund Unity, an openly pro-Kremlin grouping, in the  Duma election. And in a po-

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litical campaign that was dominated by television, his control of the most important of all the channels was an enormously important weapon. The content analysis that was conducted during the campaign showed that Berezovsky’s channel ORT, the only one that had a genuinely national reach, gave disproportionate attention to Unity and to other pro-Kremlin parties, but sponsored an unceasing stream of “black PR” addressed toward their main competitors, this, even though all channels and the public service channels in particular were required by Russian law to be fair, impartial, and unbiased. Labor and industrial capital, by contrast, had relatively little influence. The trade unions still had a mass membership, but they were in no position to offer strike pay, and indeed their income came largely from the management of the range of properties they had inherited from Soviet times. This made them less concerned to challenge the system, even though their members were experiencing a sharp fall in their standard of living and were often losing their employment altogether. Business was divided by rivalries among the oligarchs, and it had no representative structures of any significance. An influential governor could lobby the interests of his own region; but the Academy of Sciences, which was almost entirely dependent on public funds, found itself obliged to suffer a chronic deficit, and many of its most talented staff joined the brain-drain to Western countries. Ordinary citizens, arguably, had even less influence than they had enjoyed in the Soviet period, when they could hope that party intervention would help them to resolve a local difficulty—such as street lighting, public transport, or housing. The armed forces were in a very different position. Russia had always maintained a disproportionately large number of servicemen, and military spending had represented an unusually large share of state expenditure since at least the eighteenth century. With a conscript army, a very large proportion of Russian males had served within its ranks at some point in their lives. An older generation, still influential in public life, had fought during World War II and celebrated Victory Day ( May) with special enthusiasm. Russia’s national heroes were often its military leaders: Suvorov, Kutuzov, or Georgii Zhukov. Peter the Great, and later Stalin, were political leaders who acquired additional authority as the leaders of a national war effort. A successful military career, in fact, could be a springboard into national politics; for example, Alexander Lebed went from general to presidential candidate and then governor of the vast Krasnoyarsk region, and Boris Gromov (who had led the withdrawal from Afghanistan) won the governorship of Moscow region in December . Of all the organized interests that help to shape the allocation of resources in postcommunist Russia, this is almost certainly the most important. In spite of the ending of the Cold War, Russia has still one of the world’s largest and most formidable concentrations of military might.10 The regular army numbers ,, of whom , are conscripts; the proportion of conscripts will diminish in the future with the gradual move to a wholly professional force. It deploys some , battle tanks, , multiple rocket launchers, and , surface-to-air missiles. The strategic nuclear ground forces have a further , men divided into five rocket armies, responsible among them for Russia’s  intercontinental ballistic missiles. The navy had thirty-eight strategic and sixty-six nuclear attack submarines in the late s, although the refitting and refueling of all the fleets remained at a low level because of lack of funding, and there

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was a continuing dispute with Ukraine about the ownership of the Black Sea fleet. A further , troops were deployed in the late s in the air and air defense forces, with a fleet that included nuclear-capable bombers. The overall management of these forces rests with the General Staff and the Ministry of Defense in Moscow, and the president is formally commander in chief. Russia inherited the international treaties that the USSR had signed, including the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty of  and the Strategic Arms Reduction (Start) treaty of . With the ending of the Cold War, signalled by the signing of the Charter of Paris in November  even before the USSR itself had collapsed, there was a widespread belief in Russia as well as in the West that spending levels and troop numbers would fall and that there would be a “peace dividend” to distribute. One of the reasons the Soviet leadership had withdrawn from Afghanistan and avoided any similar foreign adventures was that it was no longer possible to sustain their cost. In any case, it appeared, the Western democracies were Russia’s “natural allies.” But disagreements began to multiply: over the bombing of Iraq, over the expansion of NATO toward the east, and over the bombing of Serbia in the spring of . As Russian leaders made clear, there must be a global balance, not a unipolar world in which the United States could unilaterally impose its wishes. Reflecting these circumstances, military spending was still a remarkably large part of the state budget in the late s. The  budget as a whole came to just under  billion rubles; defense came to about a sixth of the total (just under  billion), and it was by far the largest single item of state expenditure. Social and cultural expenditure came next, with  billion rubles; but then came internal security, at just under  billion (these were the allocated sums; the totals actually spent diverged in various directions). The armed forces were short of the resources they needed to maintain an adequate level of combat readiness, but they were still innovating and still introducing new weapons systems into their repertoire. And they had the backing of public opinion, which was strongly supportive of the army as an institution and of higher levels of military spending. Domestic circumstances were part of the explanation, in particular the threat of terrorist attacks from Chechnya, as well as a worsening international environment. The army itself had always taken a skeptical view of Western intentions, and it continued to regard NATO (in the national security concept that was published in January ) as its main potential adversary. Clearly, it had been able to argue its case to some effect in the still rather fluid process by which public policy was formulated in early postcommunist Russia. Notes . Ye. K. Ligachev, Zagadka Gorbacheva (Novosibirsk: Interbuk, ), . . For the distinction between electoral and liberal democracy, see particularly Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy: Towards Consolidation (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). There is a further discussion of Freedom House and its indicators in chapter  below. . For book-length treatments, see Peter Lentini, ed., Elections and Political Order in Russia (Budapest: Central European University Press, ); and Jerry F. Hough and Timothy J. Colton, eds., Growing Pains: The  Russian Duma Election (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, ). . For a fuller discussion of the  Duma election, see Stephen White, Richard Rose, and Ian McAllister, How Russia Votes (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, ), chaps. –.

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. There are several studies of the development of Russian party politics: see particularly John Lowenhardt, ed., Party Politics in Post-Communist Russia (London: Cass, ); Matthew Wyman, Stephen White, and Sarah Oates, eds., Elections and Voters in Post-Communist Russia (Cheltenham, U.K., and Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar, ); and Timothy J. Colton, Transitional Citizens (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ). . See, respectively, Segodnya,  October , and Kommersant,  September . . See Ekonomicheskie i sotsialnye peremeny: monitoring obshchestvennogo mneniya  (): –. . Ekonomicheskie i sotsialnye peremeny: monitoring obshchestvennogo mneniya  (): . . See White, Rose, and McAllister, How Russia Votes, . The estimate of party membership levels nationally is from Argumenty i fakty  (): . . The most convenient source of information on military strengths is the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Military Balance (London: IISS, annual).

Chapter 29

How Is Power Used? IN THE COMMUNIST PERIOD the task of policy implementation was relatively simple. There was, in principle, a “correct” position, based on the official ideology. It was the job of the ruling party to express that position and of the government to carry it into effect. The party dominated all key positions and supervised the government in its work. The parliament was effectively appointed; so was the leadership of lower levels of government. There was no opportunity, in practice, to challenge official policies through the courts or to mobilize opposition to them on the streets. And there was no opportunity to criticize official policies, directly at least, in the mass media, because their editors were party appointees and their contents were censored. The Soviet policy process, in fact, was rather more complicated. The leadership, for a start, were often divided in their loyalties—by region or by the sector of the economy with which its individual members were most closely associated. There were increasingly open differences between hardliners committed to central planning and a “class approach,” and their more moderate colleagues, who were prepared to allow a greater element of private ownership in the economy and a wider range of opinion in public life. There could be criticism of the performance of leading officials, if not of the principles on which they operated. If all else failed, the mass public had other ways of making its wishes known, from contacting their elected representatives to strikes and public protests. The postcommunist system, in principle, was a very different one. There was open competition between political parties and presidential candidates. Implementation was a matter of government decision, enforced where necessary by the rule of law. Decisions that violated the law or constitution could be contested in the courts (there were occasions when even Boris Yeltsin was overruled, as when he tried to merge the interior ministry with the security service). And every aspect of policy could in theory be challenged by a newly independent media. But in practice, much remained the same. The ruling group was largely made up of the same people as before, particularly in the regions. Parliament was still peripheral, the media were mostly in the pockets of tycoons, and decisions were enforced by criminals rather than the courts. In these circumstances, policy advanced—if it did at all—through a series of one-time deals between the Kremlin and the larger organized interests, centrally and in the regions. Russia was certainly postcommunist, but there was little sign by the early years of the new century that the long-standing gulf between regime and society had been bridged and that ordinary people had at last been given the means of ensuring that public policy reflected their own preferences.

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Privatizing the Economy The central challenge, for Russia’s postcommunist leadership, was to replace a failing command economy with a capitalist market.1 “We must,” Yeltsin declared in October , “provide economic freedom, lift all barriers to the freedom of enterprises and of entrepreneurship, and give people the opportunity to work and to receive as much as they can earn, throwing off all bureaucratic constraints.” Presidential decrees later in the year abolished limits on earnings, liberalized foreign economic relations, and commercialized shops and services. Most dramatically of all, prices were “freed” on  January ; within a month they had risen three-and-a-half times, and over the year they rose twenty-six times. Price reform, Yeltsin acknowledged, was a “painful measure,” but it was the path the “whole civilized world” had been obliged to follow. A program for the next stages of reform was adopted in July . It set out a series of objectives, including deregulation, a balanced budget, privatization, structural change (including demilitarization), and the creation of a competitive market economy. The main outlines of a privatization program had already been approved by the Russian parliament in July , and a committee for the management of state property had been appointed to supervise the entire exercise. All citizens, it was agreed in the summer of , would receive “privatization checks” or vouchers to the value of , rubles (about $ at the time), which was the nominal value of all property that belonged to the state divided by the population. Vouchers could be used to buy shares in one’s own workplace, or to buy shares at an auction where other enterprises were being sold, or placed in investment funds. The first were distributed in October , and they had all to be used by the end of . “The more property owners and business people there are in Russia,” Yeltsin declared in a television address, “the sooner Russia [would] be prosperous and the sooner its future [would] be in safe hands.” By the time voucher privatization came to an end in June , approximately , enterprises had changed their forms of ownership, and more than  million citizens had nominally become property owners—indeed there were more private shareholders in Russia at this time than in either Britain or the United States. A second stage of privatization began in , involving the sale of large enterprises at auction; a third stage, involving smaller individual projects, began in . The pace of privatization was slowing down by this time; but already  percent of all Russian enterprises had moved from state into private hands, accounting for about a quarter of total output (this was because relatively few of them were in large-scale heavy industry, and many more in retail trade and catering). At least for Western advisers, the whole exercise had been an “extraordinary achievement.”2 Privatization of agriculture had been taken less far by the late s, even though the private ownership of land had been incorporated into the Russian constitution in  and had then formed part of the new constitution that was adopted in . A presidential decree of March  and a further decree in June had provided for the sale of private plots of land. A more far-reaching decree of October , hailed as a historic step, established that it was legal for those who owned it to buy, sell, lease, and exchange land, although any change in ownership had to take due account of the “rational organization of

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land areas.” Changes in ownership, for this and other reasons, advanced slowly: the number of commercial farms increased but then fell again, and by  they accounted for no more than  percent of the value of all agricultural output (they were most important for their production of sunflower seeds). The larger problem, apart from the regulations themselves, was that Russia’s farms were mostly unprofitable, which provided little incentive to take over their ownership. By the late s, over  percent of collective and state farms were running at a loss. There was strong political opposition in any case to the “speculation” that might result from a free market in land. The Russian parliament pushed in these circumstances for lifetime leasing rather than outright ownership, and there was little willingness to legislate for private ownership in the Russian regions. Meanwhile, agricultural output fell steadily from year to year, livestock numbers collapsed, and farmers who continued to produce slipped even deeper into a debt abyss. There were mixed results from the privatization of industry as well. The change in ownership had certainly had little effect on investment or enterprise behavior. There was a fall, not an increase, in labor productivity. Output was even more highly concentrated in a small number of factories than it had been before the move to private ownership. Energy costs per unit of output had risen, not fallen. And there were few signs of a revolution in managerial attitudes. Managers, on the contrary, were just as keen as their Soviet predecessors to retain state subsidies, cheap credits, and protection from foreign competition. And although there was an investment crisis of “astounding proportions,” managers as well as workers were opposed to the sale of shares in their enterprise even if a new owner was likely to bring them the resources they needed to expand and modernize.3 Why was privatization being carried out at all? More, it appeared, for political reasons than for economic ones. Once a substantial share of property had been placed in private hands, there would be a powerful group with a vested interest in the postcommunist order. It was less important who the new owners were or how the property itself had been acquired; capitalism in the West, after all, had established itself by violence and robbery as well as by thrift and innovation. But once a new class of owners had been formed, they would, it was assumed, find it in their interests to establish more civilized procedures. The new owners, in fact, found it easier and quicker to make money by exploiting their control of the state to secure public assets at prices that were below historic costs, and safer to invest their money in foreign bank accounts than in the future of their own society. They were committed to public order, but not necessarily to the rule of law (which might mean an investigation of their own fortunes) or to democracy (which might mean they lost their influence over government, and possibly their liberty). Communists and nationalists had been skeptical from the outset, and they were scathing about the results. Pravda, for instance, spoke of an “enormous swindle” in which a “narrow stratum of ‘new Russians’ feeding off the budget and raw material exports had got richer and richer”; a former minister spoke similarly of an exercise in which “under the guise of ‘reforms’ the most substantial property in world history [had] come into the hands of a criminal community.”4 A liberalized economy was meant to achieve its purposes, in part, by attracting for-

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eign direct investment. As part of this process, Russia became a member of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) during ; and the Group of Seven of the major industrial nations eventually became a Group of Eight, although Russia was clearly in a rather different position than the other members. A series of agreements, meanwhile, brought Western funds to the assistance of the Russian economy, starting with a ruble stabilization fund in  that was worth $ billion. Foreign assistance, at the same time, was unlikely to bring about the transformation that had widely been expected. It took some time to materialize; it came with strings attached; and it cost more and more to finance, swallowing up resources that might otherwise have been devoted to domestic investment as well as to social programs of various kinds. Russian capital, meanwhile, was moving abroad more quickly than foreign assistance was arriving; an estimated $ billion was leaving every year in the late s, much of it to acquire property. In Nice alone at least fifty villas valued at $, or more were being sold to Russians every year in the late s; in the spa town of Carlsbad in the Czech Republic a “ruble mafia” had bought up most of the hotels, and locals concluded it had become a “ ‘zone of peace’ for Russian godfathers seeking a break from life at home and a convenient place to launder their profits.”5 Foreign investment, meanwhile, remained at a low level, less (for instance) than in Peru. Why were foreign investors so reluctant to entrust their resources to a newly democratic Russia but happy to do so in Communist-ruled China? Some of them confided their reservations to the weekly paper Argumenty i fakty. A French electronics entrepreneur found that new Russian businessmen were simply too vulgar: they threw money around in the casino, while he read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and tried to develop his firm so that it could employ more workers in the future. Others were worried by the level of serious crime, and the threat of political instability. Others still were discouraged by the bribes they found they had to pay (Russia was one of the most corrupt countries in the world, according to the figures that were produced annually by Transparency International). “How to make a million in the former Soviet Union?” asked one exasperated American investor. “Bring two million and it will soon be down to one.”6 Ten years or more after they had been launched, the record of economic reforms was decidedly mixed. Growth, for a start, had failed to materialize. The Soviet economy, certainly, had already been contracting in its final years: by  percent in  and by  percent in  as the state itself fell apart. But there were further falls in almost every year of the Yeltsin administration, with a minor upturn in  but a still more dramatic collapse in August the following year as Russia defaulted on its foreign debt and the ruble collapsed on the foreign exchanges. By the end of the decade the Russian economy had contracted to about half its size at the end of the period of communist rule—a steeper fall than the West had experienced during the Great Depression and a steeper fall than Russia itself had experienced during World War II (see table .). It had widely been expected that there would be a short period of adjustment and that growth would then resume; equally, that there would be a fall in the output of heavy industrial goods for which there was no longer a demand and that the economy would bounce back leaner and fitter. In the event, the sharpest falls were in the output of mod-

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Table 29.1 Russian Economic Performance, 1992–98 (official data, percentage change year on year)

Gross domestic product Index (1990  100) Industrial output Agricultural output Investment















86 81 82 91 60

91 74 86 96 88

87 65 79 88 76

96 62 97 92 90

97 60 96 95 82

101 60 102 101 95

95 57 85 88 93

ern consumer goods, including electronics: oil, steel and gas fell by a third or more, but the output of personal computers was down by  percent, of cameras and watches by more than  percent, and of color televisions by more than  percent. Investment, meanwhile, had fallen every year to just a quarter of its  level; and foreign trade was even more overwhelmingly in raw materials, including oil and gas, rather than manufactured products incorporating added value. At least for critics of the government’s strategy, this was deindustrialization rather than regeneration, and it carried the risk that Russia would become a colonial appendage of the Western countries, exporting its natural resources and importing a few luxuries while taking over some of the low-tech and environmentally detrimental production that Western countries had no wish to retain. These rates of decline, in turn, had obvious implications for Russia’s economic place among the nations. In  Russia’s gross domestic product had been about a third of the U.S. level; by the end of the decade it was barely a fifth. The Russian economy was still, in absolute terms, one of the largest in the world, but by the late s it had fallen behind Brazil, China, and South Korea, as well as the major Western democracies. Expressed in terms of population, Russian was well below the global average and (on World Bank figures) behind Latin American countries such as Costa Rica and Ecuador, and African countries such as Gabon and Namibia. For a nationalist like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, what had been taking place was nothing less than the “destruction” of the Russian economy, rather than the rapid turnaround that Western advisers had rashly predicted; others went even further, speaking of “genocide.”7 What did ordinary Russians make of it all? For a start, they were deeply skeptical about the whole privatization exercise. Not many, according to the survey evidence, thought it would “make the economy more productive,” “give people a material stake in the economy,” or “put more goods in the shops” (between  and  percent agreed with these propositions). It was much more likely, in the popular view, to “make a few people rich” ( percent), “increase prices” ( percent), and “create unemployment” ( percent). In a survey conducted for the U.S. Information Agency in , there was overwhelming agreement ( percent) that privatization had “mainly benefited the mafia and members of the former CPSU nomenklatura.” Russians were meanwhile losing their early faith in the market. In , as the reform process began,  percent had been in favor of a “market economy, one that [was] largely free of state control,” with  percent opposed. By  support had halved, to  percent, and opposition had increased to  percent.8

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In the short run, certainly, economic reform had led to a sharp fall in living standards, a Third-World gulf between rich and poor, increasing unemployment, and the degradation of public services. It was hardly surprising that Russians were looking for another way forward in the new century, one that was neither a return to the past nor the continuation of a liberal experiment that appeared to have failed even more comprehensively. Foreign and Security Policy Foreign policy was already changing in the late Soviet years.9 The term “new thinking,” apparently, was inspired by a book written by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell some years earlier, with the title New Hopes for a Changing World. As conceived by Gorbachev and his colleagues in the leadership, it meant a reconsideration of almost all aspects of the Soviet relationship with the outside world. They lived, Gorbachev insisted, in a “vulnerable, rather fragile but interconnected world.” This was partly a matter of nuclear war, in which there could be no winners. But it was also a matter of responding to challenges that were global, in which neither capitalism nor socialism had all the answers. This included environmental pollution and depletion of the world’s natural resources. It also included the difficulties that were facing the developing nations, including debt and the degradation of their traditional cultures as a result of the wider availability of cheap but low-quality films and television. These were propositions that departed from earlier Soviet orthodoxy and from Marxism-Leninism itself, which placed its primary emphasis on class forces. They led in turn to a series of departures in foreign and security policy that brought about the end of the Cold War itself. The costly Soviet presence in Afghanistan was wound up, following international negotiations, in . Soviet relations with Cuba were “deideologized,” and relations were opened or restored with Israel, the Vatican, and the Arab monarchies. An agreement was reached with the United States in  that eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons, land-based intermediate and shorter-range missiles; it was followed by a Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in , which made the first substantial cuts in the weapons available to each side. And there was a still more far-reaching change in Soviet relations with Eastern Europe, as the “Sinatra doctrine” (“I’ll do it my way”) replaced the Brezhnev doctrine that had been imposed after the Prague Spring had been crushed in . Russia’s new president, Boris Yeltsin, had little experience of foreign affairs before he assumed the leadership of the USSR’s largest republic and then of an independent state at the end of . But he lost no time in signaling the change that had taken place. In January  he announced that Russian nuclear weapons would no longer be directed against targets in the United States and went on to announce a series of unilateral cuts in nuclear and conventional arms. He addressed the UN Security Council, where he insisted that he saw the Western powers “not just as partners, but as allies.” While he was in North America he met President Bush, who announced that they had met “not as adversaries, but as friends” and presented him with a pair of cowboy boots (they turned out to be too small, but the Russian president kept them anyway). The “Camp David declaration” that was issued at the end of their talks confirmed that relations between the two countries were

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now based on “friendship and partnership,” and that both presidents would personally seek to “eliminate the remains of the hostile period of the ‘Cold War.’” The first Russian-U.S. summit, in the summer of , saw both sides speak of a still closer “democratic partnership.” At a further summit, in January , an ambitious arms reduction treaty, Start , was concluded, under which each side undertook to dismantle two-thirds of its strategic nuclear warheads. It was, Yeltsin suggested, the most important agreement that had ever been reached in the history of disarmament (it had, admittedly, to be ratified by the Russian parliament, and this had not yet been achieved by the end of the decade). Yeltsin met Bill Clinton three months later in Vancouver, and both presidents committed themselves to a “dynamic and effective Russo-American partnership.” A new Russian military doctrine, adopted at the end of the year, underscored the change in attitudes that had occurred. No country would be regarded as an adversary of the new Russia, and there would be no use of military force unless Russia was itself attacked. Equally, the primary purpose of the armed forces, under these new and rather different circumstances, would be domestic peacekeeping. Older rivalries, however, soon began to make themselves apparent. For a start, Russian diplomats were firmly opposed to the expansion of NATO toward the east, incorporating former communist-ruled countries and perhaps eventually some of the former Soviet republics. Yeltsin, addressing the UN in , called for a more general framework of European security rather than the expansion of existing alliances and a “new confrontation.” The new Duma, elected at the end of that year, was one in which the communist presence was much larger, which meant that there was less domestic support for the proWestern policies that had characterized the first years of the postcommunist administration. Yeltsin’s first foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, came under increasing attack (critics claimed he was representing the interests of the West, not of his own country), and in early  he was replaced by Yevgenii Primakov, a career Arabist who had served in the CPSU Politburo and who took a much more skeptical view of Western actions. Russia, Primakov insisted, was still a great power, and it had not “lost” the Cold War but shared in common victory. Russia, accordingly, would be looking for an “equal partnership” with the United States, one in which relations with the West as a whole were less important than before and in which a greater emphasis would be placed on the former Soviet republics and China. There were further difficulties when the West began to intervene in Yugoslavia, which had been a zone of influence if not a military ally during the Soviet period. Russia had historic ties with the Serbs, who were Slavs and (like them) Orthodox Christians. Sanctions, for such reasons, were very unpopular in the Duma, and even among moderate opinion there was real anxiety that NATO was extending its sphere of action well beyond the territory of its own members, whatever Russia and the international community might think. There was particular indignation when NATO nations launched air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs without bothering to consult their Russian counterparts—who were, after all, members of the UN and of its Security Council. The Western powers, for their part, were more sympathetic toward the Bosnians and later the Albanian people of Kosovo because of the Serb aggression that had started the conflict and because of a pol-

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icy of “ethnic cleansing” that led to a series of acknowledged atrocities. These were the ostensible grounds on which NATO launched a ferocious assault on Serbia in the spring of ; Boris Yeltsin described it as an act of “undisguised aggression” that risked a full-scale Balkan conflict; his foreign minister thought it was “genocide.” Russian mediation, in the end, helped to bring the conflict to a close, but not before it had placed a heavy strain on the Russian relations with the major Western powers. There were similar difficulties when the United States and its allies launched a series of air attacks against Iraq in January , without the prior consultation that had taken place before the Gulf War. Russia, once again, had interests that diverged from those of the Western nations. There was a long-standing treaty with Iraq, signed originally in . But more than this, there were several thousand Russians living and working in Iraq; there were substantial Russian investments that would be repaid only if relations were maintained. There was also a personal element in that Primakov had been a friend of Saddam Hussein since the s. When the United States and Britain launched missile strikes against Iraq at the end of , following its failure to comply fully with the demands of UN weapons’ inspectors, the Russian government withdrew its ambassadors from London and Washington in a gesture of official dissatisfaction that had not been seen since the worst days of the Cold War. The CIS and the East Relations were easier with the other states that had formerly been part of the USSR and with the Asian states that had formerly enjoyed a close relationship with the USSR—particularly India and China. The new framework within which relations were conducted with the former Soviet republics was the Commonwealth of Independent States, which had been founded in December  as the USSR itself collapsed into its constituent republics. The CIS was not a state, or a supranational structure of any kind; it had no capital, only a headquarters. Least of all was it a “USSR Mark .” It did, however, provide a mechanism by which a group of states that had formerly been very closely integrated could consider their common purposes. In practice, those purposes were the promotion of trade and the maintenance of public order through the deployment of peacekeeping forces in trouble spots throughout the territories of its member states, such as the civil war in Tajikistan. The CIS conducted its affairs through a council of heads of state, which was its “supreme organ”; there were other forms of coordination at the ministerial level and an interparliamentary assembly. But in the view of its own executive secretary, the CIS was a “mechanism for reconciling interests, nothing more,”10 and relations among its member countries reflected quite distinct sets of considerations. Among the CIS member countries, there were particularly close relations with neighboring Belarus, where Alexander Lukashenko had won an overwhelming victory in the presidential election of . The following year Lukashenko and Yeltsin signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation during a visit by the Russian president to what he described as “Russia’s closest partner.” In  the two countries established a “deeply integrated Community,” with wide-ranging powers, including a common foreign policy, shared use of military infrastructure, a common power grid, and eventually a common

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currency. A further agreement of April  converted the Community into a Union, which would involve a common legislative space and a single citizenship. There were further agreements, which carried forward the process of integration but stopped well short of the loss of sovereignty on either side, in December  and December . The new treaty, Yeltsin explained at the last of these meetings, would “enable both sides to move forward in keeping the worldwide tendency toward integration,” and he added that it was “not directed against any third parties—not even Bill Clinton.” Reviewing the whole pattern of relations with the other CIS states in , Izvestiya noted that they spanned a wide spectrum. There were “almost model” relations with Belarus, but “uncertain” relations with Ukraine in spite of “encouraging tendencies” (a treaty of peace, cooperation, and partnership had been signed in  that appeared to place the relationship on a new footing). There was “no convergence” in relations with Georgia, but neighboring Armenia was “almost an ally,” and the Moldovans were “well-disposed partners.” In Central Asia, Uzbekistan was “demonstratively independent” and “pragmatic,” there were “contradictory” relations with Tajikistan and “less and less understanding” with Turkmenistan, but “more clarity and consistency” in relations with Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan was a “loyal and well-disposed partner.”11 Popular attitudes reflected the same emphases, with most support for closer relations with the other Slavic states, and so did foreign trade, with the largest flows of imports and exports linking Russia with Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Perhaps not coincidentally, these were three of the four republics with the largest numbers of Russians resident within their boundaries. The Soviet relationship with Asia was dominated by the relationship with a stillcommunist China, with which the USSR had shared the world’s longest land boundary as well as its system of government. The Chinese authorities were clearly distressed by the gradual relaxation of communist control in the USSR and Eastern Europe, but both sides agreed to preserve normal relations and to accept differences in their “ways and means of pursuing reforms within the framework of the socialist choice.” The collapse of the USSR at the end of  meant that the two countries could no longer share their ideology, but there were other forces that helped to unite them: both favored a multipolar world in which the United States was not allowed to dictate its will; both insisted that their domestic affairs (including Tibet and Chechnya) were no proper concern of the outside world; and both had every reason to favor an increase in trade, particularly (on the Chinese side) in armaments. By the late s, with Russian foreign policy becoming more assertive in relation to the West, there was a further convergence toward the larger Asian powers. In particular, during Yeltsin’s visit to Beijing in  the two countries established “relations of equal partnership, based on trust, that [were] aimed at strategic cooperation in the twenty-first century.” In their joint communiqué Yeltsin committed Russia once again to the Chinese positions on Taiwan and on Tibet, while the Chinese endorsed Russian policy toward Chechnya (an internal affair of Russia) and toward the expansion of NATO; and there was an elaborate declaration on a “multipolar world and the formation of a new world order.” By the following year “virtually all issues” that related to their common boundary had been regulated. But while both sides could agree to deplore the “hegemonism” of a

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single power, the Chinese remained reluctant to underwrite Russian plans for a joint system of Asian security, and bilateral trade remained at a disappointing level. By December , when Yeltsin (against his doctor’s advice) made a further visit to the Chinese capital, the Russian press concluded that a “political alliance—or at least the basis for forging one” was already in place.12 There were striking signs throughout the postcommunist years that foreign and domestic policies were connected and that foreign policy in particular was part of the wider patterns of the international system. The USSR had maintained an official exchange rate for its ruble, which insulated it from the vicissitudes of the international economy and from speculative pressures; now the ruble was bought and sold inside the country and outside it, and more Russians held their assets in dollars so as to protect them against inflation than in the national currency. The USSR had regulated movement across its frontiers and jammed the foreign broadcasts that it regarded as hostile. Now there were no serious restrictions on foreign travel (it was Western countries, worried about Russian godfathers extending their criminal empires, that raised the most difficulties), and virtually anything could be broadcast or published if there was a commercial demand for it. The Gorbachev leadership had begun a partial reintegration into the international economy, liberalizing foreign investment and moving toward a convertible ruble. Postcommunist Russia had become a part of the global economy, but a weak and vulnerable part, with a productive base that was uncompetitive and a domestic environment that did not encourage investment in the future. To begin with, there was every wish to assist a newly democratic Russia back into the world community. But Western opinion began to change as the Russian economy showed no real sign of revival and as the Russian government showed little respect for human rights in its campaign against breakaway Chechnya. Soon, Russia was being marginalized, most obviously in Yugoslavia, with every indication that the NATO powers intended to take over the peacekeeping functions that had previously been the prerogative of the UN. With a contracting economy and a much smaller territory and population than in the Soviet years, Russia just mattered less. It was still a member of the UN Security Council and a nuclear power. But there was less talk of a “strategic partnership” with the Western powers, more of a “candid realism” that appeared to leave no room for partnership at all. Russian policymakers, by the start of the new century, had a difficult hand to play. They had to stand up to the West to show they were independent, but at the same time look for its economic assistance. They had to press for a share in the resolution of regional and global issues, but without the geopolitical weight that would have assured it. They had to take account of the interests of Russians in other countries, not just in Russia. And they had to act as if they represented a great power, but one that was scarcely able to pay its armed forces or even their own salaries. It was hardly surprising in the circumstances that Russian policy was often contradictory or ambiguous, or that those who helped to shape it sometimes appeared to have different objectives. Notes . For a fuller review, see, for instance, Marshall Goldman, Lost Opportunity: What Has Made Economic Re-

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.

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form in Russia So Difficult? (New York: Norton, ); Thane Gustafson, Capitalism Russian-Style (New York: Cambridge University Press, ); and Jerry F. Hough, The Logic of Economic Reform in Russia (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, ). See, for instance, Anders Aslund, How Russia Became a Market Economy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, ), , ; similarly, Brigitte Glanville, The Success of Russian Economic Reforms (London: RIIA, ); and Richard Layard and John Parker, The Coming Russian Boom (New York: Free Press, ). Joseph R. Blasi, Maya Kroumova, and Douglas Kruse, Kremlin Capitalism: the Privatization of the Russian Economy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ), , –. Pravda,  September ; Sergei Glazev, Genotsid. Rossiya i novyi mirovoi poryadok (Moscow: Astra sem, ), . Izvestiya,  May ; Sunday Telegraph,  September . Quoted in Jerrold L. Schecter, Russian Negotiating Behavior: Continuity and Transition (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, ), . Solzhenitsyn is cited from Argumenty i fakty  (): ; Glazev, Genotsid. See, respectively, Richard Rose and Evgeny Tikhomirov, Trends in the New Russia Barometer, – (Glasgow: Centre for the Study of Public Policy, University of Strathclyde, ), ; Richard B. Dobson, Is Russia Turning the Corner? Changing Russian Public Opinion, – (Washington, D.C.: USIA, ), ; and the Central and Eastern Eurobarometer, –. A fuller discussion of late Soviet and Russian foreign policy is available in several studies, including Robert H. Donaldson and Joseph L. Nogee, The Foreign Policy of Russia: Changing Systems, Enduring Interests (Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, ); Neil Malcolm, Alex Pravda, Roy Allison, and Margot Light, Internal Factors in Russian Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ); Mark Webber, The International Politics of Russia and the Successor States (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ); and Michael Mandelbaum, ed., The New Russian Foreign Policy (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, ). Izvestiya,  September . On the CIS itself, see, for instance, Martha Brill Olcott, Anders Aslund, and Sherman W. Garnett, Getting It Wrong: Regional Cooperation and the Commonwealth of Independent States (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, ). Ibid.,  April . Nezavisimaya gazeta,  December .

Chapter 30

What Is the Future of Russian Politics? IT IS ALWAYS difficult to make predictions, Oscar Wilde once remarked, especially about

the future. Predictions of the future of Soviet and now of Russian politics have been particularly wide of the mark. In its early days few expected the Bolshevik government would last, not least because it seemed to have turned economic science on its head. “No sane man would give them as much as a month,” the London Daily Telegraph pronounced in January . The New York Times gave its readers a similar impression. In the two first years of Soviet rule, a careful investigation revealed, the demise of the regime had been announced at least ninety-one times. It had twice been reported that Lenin was planning retirement, three times that he had been imprisoned, and once that he had been killed. Four times, the paper told its readers, Lenin and Trotsky were planning to flee; three times it reported that they had already left the Kremlin. Rather later, when the rigors of war communism were replaced by the New Economic Policy, there were equally confident assurances that the communist experiment had been officially abandoned.1 Scholars did little better when it came to predicting the end of the USSR. The Soviet system was well understood to have systemic weaknesses; and the falling rate of growth was there for all to see. But it had survived so long that it had, some thought, become taken for granted. It had survived the Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War, and it appeared to have forged a sort of bargain with its population based on full employment and low prices as well as authoritarian forms of political control. Gorbachev’s difficulties, wrote one respected scholar as late as , had been “grossly exaggerated”; the real story of that year had been the “further consolidation of Gorbachev’s political position,” and he was “almost certain to remain in power at least until the  presidential election.” The Communist Party itself, according to an article published in , was likely to become a “dominant electoral party . . . [for] the rest of the century.”2 The U.S. ambassador in Russia, a long-standing student of Soviet affairs, was meanwhile telling his government that Gorbachev was likely to remain in power “for at least five (possibly ten) years.”3 Russia’s postcommunist system seems more securely established, a decade or more after its foundation. There is still substantial support for communist rule, and more Russians subscribe to communist ideas than any other; but even more have no commitment to any philosophy at all, and few of them in any case are willing to accept the social costs of another transition. Nor is there substantial support for other forms of rule, such as a monarchy or military rule (only  percent strongly supported either alternative at the start of the new century, although somewhat more— percent—favored a dictatorship).4 The

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Days Lost Annually through Strikes and Lockouts per , Employees, – 

France Germany

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Russia Sweden



United Kingdom

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Canada

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questions that remain are within-system ones: for instance, is the federation itself falling apart, as the regions seize more powers from the central government? Or will President Putin be able to reassert central control, for instance, by appointing his representatives to seven “federal districts” standing above the regions and their governors? Will the media continue to offer a variety of viewpoints, or will the central government be able to muzzle them as it clearly wishes to do? And will Russia continue to democratize or are there pressures that will pull it in a Latin American direction, with wide social divisions, a ruling class that is at least partly criminalized, and few means by which ordinary people can resist them? An Incomplete Democracy Formally, at least, the new constitution of December  had marked a step forward. It was a constitution that committed the new state to “ideological pluralism,” “political diversity,” and “multipartyism.” In a clear break with the past, there could be no “state or compulsory ideology.” A whole section dealt with the rights and freedoms of the individual, including equality before the law and equal rights for men and women. There were guarantees of personal inviolability and privacy. There was an explicit commitment to freedom of information, under which citizens had to be given access to any documentation about them that was held by an official body unless security considerations were involved. There was freedom of movement across and within national boundaries. There was freedom of conscience, of thought and speech, and of association and assembly. Press freedom was guaranteed, and censorship was abolished. At the same time, there were grave weaknesses in Russia’s new constitutional design. For a start, it had been unilaterally imposed after the parliament had been bombed into submission. This made it “Yeltsin’s constitution,” not a document that reflected a broader national consensus. It was, moreover, a seriously unbalanced constitution. Formally, there was a separation of powers: the president had powers in relation to the Duma and the

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Members of the Russian Army rehearse for the annual May Day parade in . (Laski Diffusion/East News/Liaison/Getty Images)

Duma had powers in relation to the president, both of them protected from abuse by an independent judiciary. But the president’s powers were much greater, in theory and practice: in particular, his power to sack the government, as Yeltsin did four times in  and  without reference to parliamentary or public opinion. The parliament also enjoyed a direct popular mandate, but its influence over the president was very limited: its “consent” was needed for the appointment of a new prime minister, but if that consent was withheld it ran the risk of dissolution. And there was no serious prospect that the president could be impeached, which was the parliament’s ultimate sanction. Countervailing forces of all kinds, meanwhile, were very weak. There were plenty of political parties, but by common consent only one—the Communist Party of the Russian Federation—that had achieved a degree of institutionalization that made it comparable with parties in the liberal democracies. And yet how else were Russian voters to be given a choice of alternatives? There were trade unions as well, and they repeatedly made it clear that they could bring millions into the streets on “days of action,” but there was little point in striking, as the employers, and sometimes, entire regional administrations, were themselves bankrupt. The press was vigorous and often oppositional, but it had increasingly become the plaything of rich financiers, and its circulation had fallen dramatically—by more than half between  and . Judges, in accordance with the constitution, were “independent” and “inviolable,” but the Constitutional Court, which was supposed to regulate the behavior of the highest levels of government, was appointed on the recommendation of the president himself (it had previously been elected by the parliament).

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An influential school of thought recently distinguished between “electoral democracies” and more broadly based “liberal democracies.” Democracy, for such scholars, involves more than competitive elections. It means a government that is limited by law and one that is accountable to the electorate directly or through representative institutions. It is also important, in this view, to establish if the rights of ordinary citizens are respected, whether or not they are seeking to influence government. Can they travel freely and express their views in the media without undue restriction? Do they have freedom of worship and the right to assemble peacefully? Is there, finally, a “democratic society,” including a network of groups and associations, economic institutions that are accountable to those who work within them as well as to the public, and a “culture of tolerance and civic responsibility?”5 Turkey, for instance, is an electoral democracy in that there are regular opportunities to choose among competing parties and candidates, and government itself has changed hands at regular intervals. But there are restrictions on the basic rights of Kurds (who are about a tenth of the total population), and there are extrajudicial killings and attacks on the rights of assembly.6 Russia, for bodies like Freedom House, occupies a similar position in the hierarchy of democratic performance. There are certainly competitive elections, but the regime itself enjoys an undue degree of influence on the whole process through its control of the media, particularly television. And there have been disturbing signs in some of the regions that local officials are continuing to control the electoral mechanism in much the same way they were able to do in the Soviet period. How else was one to explain the presidential election in Bashkortostan in the summer of , for instance: the main opposition candidates were kept off the ballot paper, the Supreme Court called for their reinstatement but was ignored, and the incumbent won reelection with more than  percent of the vote.7 Or a by-election in neighboring Tatarstan, with a . percent turnout; the republic’s prime minister won  percent of the vote, his opponent a modest . percent.8 Human Rights These departures from fully democratic norms were reflected in a human rights performance that caused serious concern among the Western organizations that regularly surveyed such matters. Amnesty International, for instance, was concerned about the physical abuse of conscripts and the deportation of asylum seekers. Conditions in pre-trial prisons were “appalling,” with overcrowding, an inadequate diet, a lack of medicines, and even oxygen starvation. Thousands died awaiting trial; those who survived had often been tortured or otherwise maltreated. In Chechnya, particularly, there were indiscriminate killings, detention without trial, torture, and extrajudicial executions. Several outrages reached the attention of the Western press: in Samashki in April , for instance, when about  civilians (including women and children) were reported to have been killed by troops who were burning down houses and throwing grenades into the shelters where local people were taking cover. There were other reported atrocities after the war had resumed in , including well-documented cases of torture and indiscriminate killings.

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The number of prisoners, meanwhile, was the highest in the world per head of population (the United States, admittedly, followed just behind).9 Human Rights Watch had a wider range of concerns, including freedom of thought and expression as well as the physical abuse of prisoners. They drew particular attention to the Russian provinces, which had degenerated into “fiefdoms that engage[d] in civil and political rights violations with impunity from Moscow.” In what was apparently a quid pro quo for support of its policies, the central government turned a blind eye to corruption by regional leaders and refused to investigate the human rights violations for which they were clearly responsible. Regional leaders, for their own part, were making every effort to extend their control over local newspapers and radio stations; this usually presented few difficulties as they typically ran at a loss, but in some cases local leaders were prepared to sanction beatings and even murders to achieve their ends. The editor of an oppositional paper in the Kalmyk republic, for instance, was stabbed to death in the summer of  in what Human Rights Watch described as “by far the most convincing case of government collusion in the death of a journalist.”10 The Russian judicial system was another cause for concern. According to Human Rights Watch, it was moving further away from Council of Europe standards as well as those that were appropriate to a democracy. Their investigators found, for instance, that corruption and abuse were the “rule rather than the exception,” and that torture while in police custody had reached “epidemic proportions.”11 Criminal justice officials solicited and accepted bribes; and crime-solving statistics were “improbably high, due in part to torture.” Torture, it emerged, was most likely to occur in the early hours of detention when police isolated suspects from their families and lawyers; confessions were then extracted using beatings, asphyxiation, electric shock, and other forms of physical and psychological torture. Requests for legal assistance were routinely refused and “often resulted in more violence.” A shortage of judges slowed down the trials themselves and acquittal rates were below  percent, “reminiscent of the Soviet era.”12 What, over this period, was the broad trajectory of change? Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch chose not to attach a figure to the human rights performance with which they were concerned, and there was no way in which the countries they considered could be ranked or otherwise compared with each other. A rather different approach was adopted by New York–based Freedom House, in ratings that came to be increasingly widely used by students of comparative politics. Freedom House issued an “annual evaluation of political rights and civil liberties everywhere in the world,” evaluated on a -point scale in each case. Combined, this yielded a threefold classification: a regime was “free” if it scored between  and , “partly free” if it scored between  and ., and “not free” if it scored between . and . At the start of the century  percent of the world’s independent states were rated “free,”  percent were “partly free,” and  percent (but with  percent of the world’s population) were “not free.”13 It was clear, on this evidence, that there had been no dramatic improvement in civil and political rights following the end of communist rule. The USSR, in the Brezhnev years, had been “unfree,” but by the start of , while still under communist rule, it was rated “partly free.” The new union treaty that was under consideration at this time, Free-

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Defense Expenditures as a Percentage of Gross Domestic Product .

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United Kingdom

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Source: U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Verification and Compliance, ).

dom House considered, was based on human rights and the creation of a democratic state that was founded on the principle of popular representation and the rule of law. All the fifteen republics had declared some form of sovereignty, reformers had been successful in local elections in many parts of the country, Gorbachev’s directives were being routinely disregarded, and the Soviet parliament had adopted laws guaranteeing freedom of the press and freedom of religion, both in .14 Postcommunist Russia was initially placed much higher than its Soviet predecessor, though still “partly free.” Ten years on it was still “partly free,” but with a lower score. Remarkably, it was rated no more “free” at the start of the new century than it had been in the last year of Soviet rule. In terms of Freedom House’s criteria, it was about as “free” as Gabon, Jordan, Pakistan, Turkey, and Tanzania, just above Haiti and Kuwait, but below Ukraine (also “partly free”) and Uganda. Freedom House had several concerns about the quality of democracy and human rights in early postcommunist Russia. Economic life, they pointed out, in an “alarming trend,” was increasingly dominated by the major energy and industrial corporations, which had been privatized by the nomenklatura that had managed them in the past and who continued to enjoy substantial privileges. By contrast, a nascent private sector of small businesses and entrepreneurs had made very little headway, and former communists and nationalists were winning a larger share of the vote, often by appealing to ultranationalist and anti-Western sentiment in a way that contributed to “long-term problems that promised to afflict transitions to democracy in many countries of the former Communist world.” The Russian media, in a separate exercise, were judged only “partly free” because of libel laws, harassment, violence against journalists, and the disproportionate influence of financial and industrial interests connected to the government.15 Communist rule in Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia had accommodated a variety of

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regime practices. Poland and Yugoslavia retained private agriculture and handicrafts; Hungary had a burgeoning “second economy”; all three allowed the publication of authors—like Orwell and Solzhenitsyn—who would have been banned elsewhere in the region. There was even less uniformity in the postcommunist period as long-standing cultural differences made themselves apparent. Two of the former Soviet republics, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, were among the seventeen most oppressive countries in the world according to Freedom House. The three Baltic republics, at the other extreme, were all “free.” So were nineteen of the twenty-seven countries of Central and Eastern Europe that had formerly been under communist rule. But of the twelve members of the Commonwealth of Independent States, not a single one was considered “free.” Six, including Russia and Ukraine, were “partly free,” and the remaining six—including all the Central Asian republics apart from Kyrgyzstan—were “unfree” (Belarus had become “partly free” in  because of the “deteriorating human and political rights climate under the tyrannical President Aleksandr Lukashenka”). The outlook for the region as a whole, Freedom House concluded, was “bleak.”16 Why had democratic practices been restored in postcommunist Hungary and Poland, and in post-Soviet Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania but not in Russia? Clearly, at least a part of the explanation related to external influence. German investment made more of a difference in the Czech Republic—a smaller country, with a common border— than it could possibly do in Russia. The Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland became full members of NATO in the spring of , which bound them politically as well as militarily to the West. Equally, the countries of East-Central Europe that were preparing for eventual European Union membership (the same three countries, Estonia and Slovenia in the first instance) had to accept the “Copenhagen criteria” for accession, which included minority rights and the rule of law. Even before they had entered the Union, their domestic structures were beginning to adapt to these new requirements. There was no prospect of Russia joining the Western alliances; nor could the mechanisms of democratic compliance work in the same way. Russia’s future politics depended much more on domestic processes; and they in turn reflected a culture and practice that pointed more firmly toward a form of nationalist authoritarianism than toward liberal democracy. In an influential study of Italian civic traditions, Robert Putnam suggested that Palermo might be the “future of Moscow”—essentially because of Russia’s lack of the “networks of civil engagement” that had been built up in Italy since the middle ages and which underpinned its democracy in more recent times.17 This suggested in turn that the construction of democratic institutions in the former Soviet republics would take longer—and might not take place at all—as compared with the former communist countries that had shared in the Western experience of cooperation and self-government within the framework of a rule of law. In Russia, and in the other Soviet republics, there was little of this tradition that was available to be restored; it had to be “democracy from scratch.” The changes that were taking place in postcommunist Russia, equally, were often unhelpful to a democratic outcome. The institution of an overly powerful presidency weak-

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ened the parliament and inhibited the development of political parties. The collapse in living standards that took place under the Yeltsin government was on a scale that had undermined the state itself in other countries. Nor was it a just a matter of statistics: life expectancies were falling, the population had been declining continuously since , and social divisions were widening dramatically. The fall in levels of economic activity was particularly marked in the “official” economy, and this in turn had a more than proportionate effect on state budgets. So libraries closed, hospitals went short of medicines, scientists fled abroad, and police forces found they lacked the personnel and equipment to chase an increasing number of criminals. Certainly, there were forces that were pulling Russia toward more pluralist forms of politics at the start of the new century. Many new freedoms were securely established, including religious liberty and a freedom that was peculiarly important in a formerly communist society, the freedom not to play a part in political life. Almost anything could be published. A large part of the economy was outside the direct control of the state— admittedly, it included disproportionate numbers of small traders. And large numbers, comparatively speaking, had a higher education. But there were enduring weaknesses in terms of popular control over government action; and an increasing disposition, on the part of figures like the newly elected president, to seek to resolve the country’s problems by the reimposition of a Soviet-style discipline. Clearly, there was no inevitability about “democratization”: a few of the former Soviet republics had established market economies and liberal democracies, but others had regressed to forms of government that were often more authoritarian than the later years of communism. Russia, entering a new century, seemed likely to retain its basic freedoms, but its political system was more likely to emphasize the Russian tradition of executive authority than the Western tradition of limited and accountable government within a framework regulated by law. Notes . See S.J. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist (New York: Oxford University Press, ), , . . Jerry F. Hough, “Gorbachev’s endgame,” World Policy Journal , no.  (fall ): , ; Hough, “Understanding Gorbachev: the importance of politics,” Soviet Economy , no.  (April–June ): . Wider issues of interpretation are considered in Michael Cox, ed., Rethinking the Soviet Collapse: Sovietology, the Death of Communism and the New Russia (London: Pinter, ). . Novaya i noveishaya istoriya  (): , in a telegram of February . . These data are drawn from the New Russia Barometer , fielded in January  with an N of . See www.russiavotes.org. . See Stuart Weir and David Beetham, Political Power and Democratic Control in Britain (London: Routledge, ), . There is a very extensive literature: see, for instance, Juan J. Linz and Albert Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ); Richard Rose, William Mishler, and Christian Haerpfer, Democracy and Its Alternatives: Understanding Post-Communist Societies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ); and Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). . This discussion is based on the U.S. State Department Country Reports on Human Rights for  (consulted at www.state.gov/www/global/human_rights/). . Izvestiya,  June , . . Izvestiya,  November , . . Izvestiya,  March , ; and, more generally, the annual reports of Amnesty International.

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. This discussion is based on the relevant sections of Human Rights Watch World Report  (New York: Human Rights Watch, ). . Guardian (London),  November , . . Human Rights Watch World Report, –. . Journal of Democracy , no.  (January ): –. . Freedom Review , no.  (January–February ): . . Freedom Review , no.  (January–February ): ; and Adrian Karatnycky, ed., Nations in Transit: Civil Society, Democracy and Markets in East Central Europe and the Newly Independent States (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, ), . . Freedom Review , no. (January–February ): , , . . Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ), , .

For Further Reading BARANY, ZOLTAN, AND ROBERT G. MOSER, eds. Russian Politics: Challenges of Democratization. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, . BREMMER, IAN, AND RAY TARAS, eds. New States, New Politics: Building the Post-Soviet Nations, d ed. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, . BROWN, ARCHIE. The Gorbachev Factor. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, . ———, ed. Contemporary Russian Politics: A Reader. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, . COHEN, STEPHEN F. Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia. New York: Norton, . COLTON, TIMOTHY J. Transitional Citizens. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, . DONALDSON, ROBERT H., AND JOSEPH L. NOGEE, The Foreign Policy of Russia. Armonk and London: M.E. Sharpe, . DUNLOP, JOHN B. The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, . GILL, GRAEME, AND ROGER D. MARKWICK. Russia’s Stillborn Democracy? From Gorbachev to Yeltsin. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, . GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL. Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World. London: Collins and New York: Harper and Row, . ———. On My Country and the World. New York: Columbia University Press, . GUSTAFSON, THANE. Capitalism Russian-Style. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, . HOUGH, JERRY F. Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985–1991. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, . ———. The Logic of Economic Reform in Russia. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, . HUSKEY, EUGENE. Presidential Power in Russia. Armonk, N.Y., and London: M.E. Sharpe, . LOWENHARDT, JOHN. The Reincarnation of Russia. London: Longman and Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, . ———, ed. Party Politics in Post-Communist Russia. London and Portland: Frank Cass, . MAWDSLEY, EVAN, AND STEPHEN WHITE. The Soviet Elite from Lenin to Gorbachev. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, . MICKIEWICZ, ELLEN. Changing Channels. Television and the Struggle for Power in Russia, rev. ed. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, . MILLER, WILLIAM L., STEPHEN WHITE, AND PAUL HEYWOOD. Values and Political Change in Postcommunist Europe. London: Macmillan and New York: St Martin’s, . PUTIN, VLADIMIR. First Person. New York: Random House and London: Hutchinson, . REDDAWAY, PETER, AND DMITRI GLINSKI. The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, . SAKWA, RICHARD. Russian Politics and Society, d ed. London: Routledge, . SHEVTSOVA, LILIA. Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Reality. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment, . SMITH, STEVEN S., AND THOMAS F. REMINGTON. The Politics of Institutional Choice. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, . URBAN, MICHAEL E. The Rebirth of Politics in Russia. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, .

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WHITE, STEPHEN. After Gorbachev, th ed. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, . ———. Russia’s New Politics: The Management of a Postcommunist Society. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, . WHITE, STEPHEN, RICHARD ROSE, AND IAN MCALLISTER. How Russia Votes. Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, . WYMAN, MATTHEW. Public Opinion in Postcommunist Russia. London: Macmillan and New York: St. Martin’s, . WYMAN, MATTHEW, STEPHEN WHITE, AND SARAH OATES, eds. Elections and Voters in Post-Communist Russia. London and Northampton: Edward Elgar, .

Chapter 31

The Context of European Union Politics ALONGSIDE NATIONAL GOVERNMENTS in Britain, France, Germany, and other European countries, the European Union (EU) constitutes a crucial international organization for the coordination and implementation of economic, structural, and foreign policies on the regional level of governance. The significance of the EU lies not only in its economic status as a single integrated market and the world’s largest trading bloc but also in its attainment of economic and monetary union (EMU) among most of its members in —an achievement accompanied by the introduction of a common currency, the euro. Implementing EMU has entailed the transfer of significant degrees of national decision-making authority to supranational institutions,1 a process that began when the European integration movement was launched during the early s and has been deepened by a succession of treaties from the mid-s onward.2 Further efforts to strengthen common institutional arrangements and implement a common foreign and security policy will firmly establish the European Union as a powerful governmental system in its own right.

A Comparative Overview The contemporary European Union consists of fifteen countries, including six founding members and nine that have joined the EU in successive rounds of enlargement beginning in the early s. Its territory stretches from Finland and Sweden in the north to Italy and Greece in the south/southeast and from France, Ireland, and the United Kingdom in the west/northwest to Austria in Central Europe. Geographically, the largest member state is France, followed closely by Spain and Sweden. Germany claims the largest population, followed at a distance by the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Spain. The smallest member state, measured in terms of both geography and population, is Luxembourg (see table ., p. ). Despite its small size, Luxembourg claims the highest per capita gross domestic product (GDP) nation among the fifteen member states. A majority of EU members similarly count among the most affluent in the world, while Greece and Portugal are the least well off. Closely associated with differences in national wealth are contrasting levels of national economic development. The Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, and the United Kingdom rank as the most “postindustrial” member states, as measured by the percentage of workers engaged in public and private services. The least developed countries, as mea-

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Table 31.1 Area and Population of EU Member States (in rank order) Area (in square kilometers) France Spain Sweden Germany Finland Italy United Kingdom Greece Portugal Austria Ireland Denmark Netherlands Belgium Luxembourg

Population (in millions) 550,754 504,750 449,792 357,000 304,593 301,300 245,273 131,957 92,000 84,000 70,000 43,000 41,526 30,528 2,596

Germany United Kingdom France Italy Spain Netherlands Greece Belgium Portugal Sweden Austria Denmark Finland Ireland Luxembourg

81,380,000 58,782,000 58,380,000 57,473,000 39,167,744 15,807,641 10,707,135 10,157,000 9,918,040 8,827,000 8,139,299 5,356,845 5,158,372 3,632,944 429,080

sured by the percentage of those employed in agriculture, are Greece, Portugal, and Ireland (see table .). In international comparison, the EU as a whole is approximately one-third smaller than the United States (,. million square kilometers vs. ,. million square kilometers) but has a larger population (. million vs. . million). The EU’s population Table 31.2 Indicators of Economic Development (in rank order) Per capita GDP (in U.S. dollars) Luxembourg Denmark Sweden Austria Germany France Finland Belgium Netherlands U.K. Ireland Italy Spain Greece Portugal

37,346 32,179 25,746 25,549 25,470 23,789 24,420 23,820 23,280 21,740 21,104 19,913 13,530 11,438 10,184

Percentage of employees in public and private service Netherlands Belgium Sweden U.K. Denmark France Luxembourg Finland Austria Ireland Spain Italy Germany Greece Portugal

74.1 71.4 71.3 71.3 69.5 69.5 66.1 65.5 63.8 61.7 61.7 61.2 60.2 56.9 54.8

Percentage of employees in agriculture U.K. Belgium Luxembourg Sweden Germany Netherlands Denmark France Italy Austria Finland Spain Ireland Portugal Greece

1.8 2.3 2.7 2.8 3.2 3.7 3.7 4.6 6.8 6.8 7.1 8.4 10.4 13.7 20.3

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Founding fathers of the European Community — including Walter Hallstein, Konrad Adenauer, Herbert Blankenhorn, Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman — meet in Paris, April . (Hans Hubmann/Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz)

density per square mile is significantly greater than that of the United States (. vs. .). Its aggregate GDP slightly exceeds that of the United States ($,. billion vs. $,. billion), while the unemployment rate in the United States is substantially lower (. percent vs. . percent). EU member states export more goods and services to the world than does the United States (. percent of total world trade compared to . percent in the case of the United States) but they import marginally less (. percent compared to . percent; all data are from ). From the ECSC to the EU In its present form the European Union is the institutional culmination of early postwar initiatives by West European governments—which were inspired by a combination of idealism, national self-interest, and political and economic pragmatism—to transcend historical factors of national rivalry that had contributed to the outbreak of World Wars I and II.3 Political leaders from France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg established the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in  as a first step toward regional economic and political integration. The purpose of the ECSC was to eliminate customs duties on iron, coal, and steel products among the six member countries and simultaneously to erect a common external tariff, thereby creating a limited customs union. Executive and legislative powers of the new organization were divided between a Council of Ministers, representing the six

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governments, and an appointive High Authority with supranational executive authority to initiate common decisions and oversee their execution. Largely symbolic consultative authority was vested in a European Assembly, whose deputies were appointed by the national parliaments of the six member states. In addition, a European Court of Justice was established to adjudicate disputes over the interpretation and implementation of the ECSC treaty. The signatories agreed that the Council of Ministers and High Authority would meet in Brussels, the Assembly would conduct its plenary sessions in Strasbourg, and the Court of Justice would hear its cases in Luxembourg. The success of the ECSC in promoting regional economic growth encouraged the same six nations to create a much more ambitious European Economic Community (EEC) in . “Determined to lay the foundations of an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe [and] resolved to ensure the economic and social progress of their countries by common action to eliminate the barriers which divide Europe,”4 France, Germany, Italy, and the Benelux countries pledged to achieve economic integration as a crucial move toward ultimate political union. Alongside the ECSC and the EEC, the six signatories also established a third regional organization known as Euratom, which was designed to promote intergovernmental cooperation in the development of peaceful uses of nuclear energy.5 The Treaty of Rome, which provided the legal foundations for the new European Economic Community, called for the gradual elimination of customs duties on all industrial and agricultural products, the establishment of a common external tariff, the free movement of labor and capital, and the implementation of common policies in such areas as agriculture, transport, and competition. Parallel executive-legislative structures to those of the ECSC were established in the form of an intergovernmental Council of Ministers and a supranational European Commission. Serving both regional organizations were the European Assembly and the Court of Justice. The United Kingdom, which had refused to join in the negotiations leading to the creation of the ECSC and the EEC because British officials and most citizens objected to relinquishing national sovereignty to supranational bodies such as the High Authority and the European Commission, led a regional counteroffensive to establish a strictly intergovernmental economic organization that would restrict itself to the elimination of tariffs on industrial products among its members. British efforts resulted in the creation of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) in . In addition to Britain, founding members of EFTA included Austria, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland. Institutional authority was vested in an EFTA Council, where each member country was represented by a single delegate with the power to veto any collective decision. Finland, Iceland, and Liechtenstein later joined EFTA. Rapid economic expansion within the EEC during the s and early s prompted Britain to abandon its commitment to EFTA and apply for membership in the EEC in . French President Charles de Gaulle publicly vetoed the British initiative at a press conference in January , but his successors proved much more responsive to expanding the boundaries of the EEC to include Britain and other European democracies. Thus, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Ireland joined the Community in ; they were followed in  by Greece and in  by Spain and Portugal. On  January ,

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Austria, Finland, and Sweden became full members as well. Norway twice negotiated treaties of accession with the Community (in  and ), but both times a majority of citizens rejected membership in popular referendums. In October  the European Community negotiated an agreement with the remaining EFTA nations to establish a joint European Economic Area (EEA) for the free flow of capital, goods, services, and people among eighteen of the nations that make up the two regional blocs. Only Switzerland refused to join the EEA when a majority of voters rejected the treaty in a referendum in December . The EEA treaty was implemented on  January . The demonstrated advantages of regional economic integration, as measured by a steady expansion of industrial and agricultural production and foreign trade on the part of the EEC countries, inspired French, German, Italian, and other European leaders to broaden the Community’s policy responsibilities and accord it greater institutional autonomy. In  they agreed on the implementation of a common agricultural policy designed to stabilize prices and guarantee a higher standard of living for farmers through a system of subsidies; achieved the completion of a customs union in  (eighteen months ahead of the original schedule); and accorded the Community financial autonomy in  by agreeing to allocate to it all custom duties on imported industrial and agricultural goods and a percentage of the value-added tax collected by each of the member countries. Simultaneously, the EEC members acted to strengthen the EEC’s institutions. In  they concluded a treaty to combine the ECSC, the EEC, and Euratom as the European Communities (effective ). Accordingly, the two Councils became a single Council, and the High Authority and the European Commission merged to form a unified Commission. A decade later, in –, the Council of Ministers agreed to allow the direct election of delegates to the European Assembly (which was renamed the European Parliament). This move, which was accompanied by an enlargement of the Parliament and an increase in its budgetary powers, significantly enhanced the authority of the Parliament vis-à-vis other Community institutions by according it greater legitimacy in the eyes of national electorates. The first direct elections to the European Parliament were held in ; subsequent elections occurred in , , , and . The integration movement experienced a serious interim setback in December . The Treaty of Rome stipulated that majority voting in the Council of Ministers was to take effect in . Fearing a reduction in France’s influence in the Council of Ministers and encroachments on French national sovereignty, President de Gaulle ordered a boycott of Community activities by French officials in protest against the scheduled introduction of majority voting.6 Seven months later, in June , Community officials resolved the crisis by negotiating an agreement known as the “Luxembourg compromise,” which in effect retained the original rule of unanimity in Council decisions in issues deemed of “vital interest” to an individual member.7 Mollified, de Gaulle ordered a resumption of French participation in Community affairs. Toward Economic, Monetary, and Political Union Under de Gaulle, the French had been consistently mistrustful of the value of European integration for the French economy. Official French skepticism about the scope and pace

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of European integration abated, however, following de Gaulle’s resignation from the presidency in . Under subsequent Presidents Georges Pompidou, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, François Mitterrand, and Jacques Chirac, France has linked forces above all with Germany in promoting not only a territorial enlargement of the Community during the s and s but also an expansion of the EC’s policy responsibilities. In successive moves, the EC implemented common measures regarding regional policy, research and development, the free movement of labor, workers’ rights, vocational training, the environment, energy, and fisheries. In – the Community undertook an important qualitative step beyond functional integration when its members agreed to establish a common European Monetary System (EMS) as a means to promote economic stability and growth in response to the international crisis of “stagflation” during the early s. Key components of the EMS included a new European Currency Unit (the ECU) for accounting and budgetary purposes, provisions for informational exchange about economic conditions, stable currency exchange rates via an Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), and greater convergence of economic policies among the member countries.8 To improve high-level policy consultation and coordination, the Council inaugurated regular meetings of the foreign ministers of the member states in . At a summit meeting in  in Paris, the heads of government and the French head of state concurred that they, too, should personally convene several times a year as the European Council. Together, these moves created highly visible and effective mechanisms for the Community to extend its role from regional economic and social policy to foreign policy as well. A Conservative electoral victory in  and the formation of an assertive new government under Margaret Thatcher set the stage for an incipient cleavage between Britain and other members of the Community concerning the pace and scope of European integration. Voicing reservations about the expansion of EC policy responsibilities and concern about the costs of membership, Prime Minister Thatcher and her ministers strenuously advocated changes in the common agricultural policy and a reduction in British contributions to the annual EC budget. The other EC countries reluctantly acceded to both demands, agreeing at successive Council meetings in  to curb agricultural surpluses and grant the United Kingdom monetary compensation for what the British considered to be excessive budgetary payments to the Community (which the Thatcher cabinet depicted as subsidies to less efficient agricultural markets on the Continent). Prime Minister Thatcher criticized Community aspirations to achieve economic and political union in a widely publicized speech in Bruges, Belgium, in September  and adamantly refused at a meeting of the European Council in  to join the other eleven members of the EC in affirming a common Social Charter designed to protect workers’ rights. Mrs. Thatcher and her partisan supporters viewed her actions not as a repudiation of the European idea but instead as an affirmation of legitimate national self-interests and a commitment to a form of internationalism that includes but is not restricted to the European Union.9 Several factors converged during the s to add increased momentum to the integration movement despite British misgivings. First was a second international economic crisis in –, which had prolonged effects. That crisis compelled European leaders to intensify their efforts to coordinate policies in an effort to combat inflation and revive

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growth. Second was the appointment of Jacques Delors as president of the Commission in . Delors, a former minister of finance in the French government, proved a determined policy activist. He repeatedly utilized his institutional position to mobilize support in favor of expanding the responsibilities and authority of the Community. Third, influential members of the elective European Parliament demanded a renewed commitment to European political integration. Their demands culminated in the adoption by the Parliament in  of a draft treaty on European union. Under Delors’s leadership, the Commission in June  submitted to the Council a White Paper that outlined a comprehensive strategy for transforming the European Community from a customs union and free-trade area into a fully integrated regional market. As the Commission declared: “Europe stands at the crossroads. We either go ahead—with resolution and determination—or we drop back into mediocrity.”10 Emphatically favoring the former approach as consistent with the Treaty of Rome’s vision of eventual European union, the Commission recommended nearly  measures to eliminate technical and other barriers to the attainment of an integrated regional market by the end of . The measures, which required the approval of the member countries to be fully implemented, ranged from the abolition of frontier controls and technical restraints on the free movement of goods to technological standardization, the mutual recognition of professional qualifications, the attainment of a common market for services, and the harmonization of financial and fiscal policies within the Community.11 The initiatives of the European Parliament and the Commission resulted in the formation of an intergovernmental conference that drafted a treaty entitled the Single European Act, which members of the European Council signed in Luxembourg on  February . The agreement endorsed the goal of economic and monetary union envisioned in the Commission’s White Paper of  (including the free movement of goods, services, people, and capital) and called on the member countries to cooperate to ensure policy convergence in these important areas. To facilitate this process, the Single European Act substituted the earlier unanimity rule with a new “qualified majority voting” procedure with regard to Council decisions governing the implementation of the internal market, research and development, economic and social cohesion, and improved working conditions. Under the new procedure, France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom were each accorded ten votes; Spain eight; Belgium, Greece, the Netherlands, and Portugal five each; Denmark and Ireland three votes; and Luxembourg two. Fifty-four votes constituted a “qualified majority,” which meant that at least seven states had to concur in a Council decision. Neither the large countries as a bloc nor a coalition of small ones could therefore prevail over each other, which placed a premium on compromise and joint decisions in Council deliberations. The arithmetic of qualified majority voting in Council decisions changed marginally with the accession of Austria, Finland, and Sweden as new member states on  January  (see chapter ). In addition, the Single European Act established a new “cooperation procedure” involving an expanded role by the European Parliament in Council decisions that are subject to qualified majority voting. Henceforth, the Council was required to consider parliamentary opinions on proposed legislation (including possible amendments and rejection)

Jacques Delors of France, president of the European Commission, –. (Eye Ubiquitous/Corbis)

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in a second reading of a proposed decision. The agreement also granted Parliament the right of joint decision making with respect to the accession of new members and agreements of association and cooperation with nonmember countries. The Single European Act was merged into the Treaty of Rome in the form of amended and new articles of the original treaty. In a crucial summit meeting held in Hannover in June , the European Council appointed a committee headed by Commission President Delors and composed primarily of the governors of the central banks in the twelve member countries to study and propose concrete stages that would lead to economic and monetary union (EMU). The Delors committee published its report in June . Its central provisions called for progress toward EMU through successive stages of implementation: an initial preparatory stage; a second stage involving the attainment of monetary union encompassing ever-closer cooperation among the central banks in the member states, the attainment of permanently fixed foreign currency exchange rates, and the creation of a European System of Central Banks as a precursor to a central European bank; and a third stage characterized by economic union, which would encompass “effective competition policy, common policies for structural change, and macroeconomic policy coordination.”12 The European Council endorsed the Delors report that same month in Madrid and declared that the first stage leading to monetary and economic union would begin on  July . At a summit meeting in Dublin in June , members of the European Council resolved to formulate a concrete integration agenda by convening parallel intergovernmental conferences on economic, monetary, and political union. European commissioners and high-level diplomats from each of the twelve member states labored for the next year and a half to produce successive drafts of such a treaty. Thatcher and her Conservative successor, Prime Minister John Major, restated British opposition to key features of the envisioned union, but all parties to the deliberations concurred on the basic objective to “deepen” institutionalized economic and political cooperation within the Community. The work of the intergovernmental conferences culminated in a historic accord at a European Council meeting in early December  in Maastricht, Holland, in which the EC heads of government, foreign ministers, and finance ministers signed separate draft treaties on political union and economic and monetary union. Important provisions of the Maastricht agreement (officially known as the Treaty on European Union) included an enhanced role of the European Parliament in Community decisions; a commitment to a common foreign and security policy; and the attainment of economic and monetary union through successive stages of institutionalized policy coordination, beginning with the implementation of the second stage of the Delors plan and the establishment of a European Monetary Institute (EMI) on  January . The stated purposes of the EMI were to “strengthen cooperation between the national central banks; strengthen the coordination of the monetary policies of the Member States, with the aim of ensuring price stability; . . . [and] monitor the functioning of the European Monetary System.”13 A decisive third stage in movement toward economic and monetary union entailed the creation of a common currency and a Central European Bank. To join in this stage,

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Inequality Index .

France .

Germany .

Italy Sweden United Kingdom

. . .

United States Canada

.

Source: Anthony B. Atkinson, Lee Rainwater, and Timony M. Smeeding, Income Distribution in OECD Countries (Paris: OECD, ).

the treaty requires the member states to meet four stringent convergence criteria: () a high degree of price stability as measured by “an average rate of inflation . . . that does not exceed by more than  / percentage points that of, at most, the three best performing Member States”; () the absence of “excessive” budgetary deficits; () the maintenance of currency exchange rate stability within “the normal fluctuation margins provided for by the exchange-rate mechanism of the European Monetary System”; and () an average long-term interest rate “that does not exceed by more than two percentage points that of, at most, the three best performing Member States in terms of price stability.”14 The Treaty on European Union stipulated further that the European Council could decide by a two-thirds vote to implement the third stage as early as  if at least seven member states met these criteria. If the Council did not make such a decision, the third stage would begin automatically on  January . Britain joined the other eleven members of the EC in affirming the Maastricht treaty’s basic intent to establish “an ever closer Union of the peoples of Europe” as well as most of its specific provisions, but the Major government reserved the right to “opt out” of the commitment to establishing a common currency and refused to endorse an accompanying “Agreement on Social Policy” that commits the member states to promote a number of economic and social objectives within the European Union as a whole.15 The separate treaties on economic and monetary union and political union were subsequently merged in a single Treaty on European Union, which was formally signed by the twelve governments on  February . Political euphoria over the Maastricht accord quickly dissipated in the face of domestic and international events that unexpectedly delayed the treaty’s ratification and implementation. Whereas ratification was subject only to a majority vote in parliament in most of the member states, the ratification process became highly politicized in those countries whose constitutions either require or permit national referendums on important political decisions. Populist concerns about the centralization of bureaucratic power in Brussels

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and fears of potential dominance by the larger states in the proposed European Union resulted in the treaty’s rejection by a narrow majority of . percent of Danish voters in a referendum on  June . A domestic conflict over abortion initially clouded the prospect outcome of a referendum in Ireland as well, although  percent of the electorate endorsed the Treaty on European Union when the vote was held on  June.16 In response to the negative outcome of the Danish referendum, President Mitterrand hastily announced that he would schedule a referendum in France to restore European confidence in the ratification process. Although opinion polls initially indicated strong French support for the treaty, opponents mobilized an effective campaign during the summer against its ambitious objectives. In the end, only . percent of French voters endorsed the accord in the September referendum. France’s lukewarm “petit oui” to the Maastricht treaty coincided with a European currency crisis, which was triggered by heavy international speculation in favor of the strong German mark at the expense of weaker currencies. As a consequence, both Britain and Italy suspended participation in the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), and the Italian lira was effectively devalued by . percent. Moreover, this first major realignment of the European Monetary System (EMS) since its inception was accompanied by a deepening recession during , which was marked by a decline in national growth rates and a precipitous jump in unemployment throughout Europe. In a dual effort to assuage domestic opponents and sustain the ratification process under increasingly difficult international economic conditions, the Danish government submitted a White Paper in early October  that would allow Denmark to opt out of the proposed currency union and common defense arrangements envisaged by the Maastricht treaty. Community leaders met in a special session of the European Council in Birmingham in mid-October to affirm their support for ratification of the treaty “without renegotiation,” but at a second summit in Edinburgh in December they accepted the Danish conditions. In a second national referendum held on  May , . percent of voters in Denmark endorsed the “amended” Treaty on European Union.17 Facing intense opposition to prospective economic and political union among both his fellow Conservatives and some members of the opposition Labour Party, British Prime Minister John Major delayed a final decision on the Maastricht treaty until after the second Danish referendum. The British Parliament subsequently ratified the accord in July. Once Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court dismissed a domestic legal challenge to the treaty in October , Community leaders reconvened in Brussels to proclaim the “completion of the ratification process.” The Treaty on European Union was formally enacted on  November . With this step, the European Community became the European Union. Despite domestic controversies surrounding the Maastricht accord and recurrent economic crises, movement toward economic and monetary union within the European Union continued through the s, albeit at a slower pace than optimists had originally anticipated. Ninety percent of the directives contained in the White Paper of  were implemented by June , and at the beginning of January  the single market became a reality. A second currency crisis in August  temporarily strained Franco-German polit-

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ical relations because the refusal of the German Bundesbank to lower its discount rate prompted intense speculative pressure against the franc, but the crisis eased when the EU financial ministers agreed to allow the exchange value of European currencies to fluctuate more broadly on both sides of the central ERM rate. Gradually improving economic conditions accompanied the implementation of the second stage of economic and monetary union on  January  in accordance with the timetable stipulated in the Treaty on European Union. A central feature of the second stage was the creation of the European Monetary Institute (EMI), with headquarters in Frankfurt. Determined efforts by governments of the member states to meet the “convergence criteria” required for EMU membership proved successful in a majority of cases. The EMI certified in April  that eleven countries qualified for inclusion in EMU: Austria, the three Benelux nations, Ireland, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. The United Kingdom and Denmark acted on their treaty right to opt out of membership, at least for the time being, as did Sweden (the latter for domestic political reasons). Only Greece—with a high budgetary deficit and inflation rate—failed to qualify. The European Central Bank (ECB) was duly established in Frankfurt in July . The third and decisive stage of EMU was subsequently implemented on  January , albeit excluding Britain, Denmark, Sweden, and Greece. After meeting the requisite economic criteria, Greece joined EMU as its twelfth member in January . The ECB assumed responsibility for macroeconomic and monetary policy among the participating states in EMU, and the euro became their common currency for transaction purposes. Actual euro bills and coins began to circulate in January  in place of the more familiar francs, marks, lira, and other national currencies. The Treaty of Amsterdam and Beyond Accompanying the EU’s progress toward economic and monetary union have been successive steps toward further “deepening” and a pending eastward enlargement of the Union. At the behest of the European Council, an intergovernmental conference was convened in  to review the EU’s institutional arrangements and policy competence. Preliminary assessments by both the Commission and the Council of Ministers concurred on the need to revise the Treaty on European Union to simplify decision-making procedures, enhance the role of the European Parliament, and provide a more effective basis for the conduct of a common foreign and security policy.18 Most of these proposals (along with French-inspired provisions on employment and economic growth) were subsequently incorporated in the Treaty of Amsterdam, which the European Council endorsed in June . Following ratification by the member states, the treaty was implemented in . An eager participant in the Amsterdam summit was Britain’s new Labour prime minister, Tony Blair, who announced his government’s reversal of an important tenet of earlier Conservative policy toward the EU by agreeing to endorse the EU’s Social Charter. Despite its achievements, the Treaty of Amsterdam was conspicuous for its omissions—namely, the failure of the EU member states to agree on proposed changes in the composition of the European Commission and the weight of individual country votes in

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qualified majority voting. A new intergovernmental conference, convened in early , addressed these issues in preparation for a new treaty by the end of the year. The outcome was the Treaty of Nice, which members of the European Council endorsed in December  (see chapter ). Additional political initiatives anticipate further widening of the European Union. As discussed in chapter , the European Council has authorized the Commission to negotiate terms of accession with Malta and Cyprus in the Mediterranean as well as a number of postcommunist countries in Central Europe—including Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the Baltic states, Slovenia, and Slovakia. The expansion of the EU from fifteen to potentially twenty-seven member states will have profound consequences for institutional arrangements, Community finances, and a wide range of policies. A fundamental question is what these changes portend for the EU’s future as a regional economic and political system. Notes . Supranational institutions can be defined as decision-making structures in international organizations that possess legal authority to make rules that are binding on the nation-states that belong to the organization in question. Supranational laws and policies thereby transcend national policymaking autonomy to a greater degree than intergovernmental treaties or agreements whose enforcement is contingent on the willingness of individual countries to comply with their terms. The European Community combines supranational and intergovernmental features in its institutional arrangements and decision-making powers, as explained in this and following chapters. . The most important of these treaties, as discussed below, include the Single European Act (), the Treaty on European Union (), and the Treaty of Amsterdam (). . The concept of European regional integration has deep philosophical and historical roots, but it did not begin to take concrete form until shortly after the end of World War II. Important milestone events included a widely publicized speech by wartime British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Zurich in  in which he advocated the creation of a United States of Europe, the formation of a privately supported “European Movement” later that same year, U.S. encouragement of European economic cooperation with the proclamation of the Marshall Aid program in , the formation of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation in  to promote the reduction of financial and tariff barriers to free trade throughout the region, and the creation of the Council of Europe in . These initiatives, which many idealistic adherents hoped would culminate in a federal political system, coincided with the formation of partially overlapping military security systems in the form of the Western European Union () and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in . A comprehensive account of postwar integration efforts is Derek W. Unwin, The Community of Europe: A History of European Integration since 1945 (New York: Longman, ). . Quoted from the preamble to the Treaty of Rome, published by the Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, Treaties Establishing the European Communities (Brussels and Luxembourg: ECSC-EEC-EAFC, ), . . In contrast to the ECSC and the EEC, Euratom proved relatively moribund as a regional organization. . Prior to this scheduled change in voting procedures, all Council decisions required unanimous consent among the member countries. De Gaulle was also strongly opposed to efforts by the other member countries to grant the EEC financial autonomy. . The agreement is named after the city where it was reached. . The ECU served as a unit for calculating Community revenues and expenditures and in accounting for intergovernmental transactions among member states. Its value “derive[d] from a weighted average of the value of the different Community currencies, with each currency given an influence to reflect its relative economic importance.” House of Lords, Select Committee on the European Communities, The Delors Report. With Evidence (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, ), . The ECU did not physically exist in the form of banknotes and coins, but it [became] the basis [for the introduction of the euro]. The ERM, meanwhile, promoted currency exchange rate stability within Western Europe by establishing a

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. . . . . . . . . .

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central parity for each national currency against the currencies of the other member states. With the introduction of EMU in January , currency exchange rates among the participating states became fixed in relation to the euro. Such commitments include British membership in NATO and the United Nations and its leadership role in the Commonwealth of Nations. See Stephen George, Britain and European Integration since  (Cambridge, Mass., and Oxford, U.K.: B. Blackwell, ). Commission of the European Communities, “Completing the Internal Market,” White Paper from the Commission to the European Council (Brussels, June ), . Ibid. The Delors Committee Report, . Council of the European Communities and Commission of the European Communities, Treaty on European Union (Brussels and Luxembourg: ECSCC-EEC-EAEC, ), . Ibid.,  and –. These include “the promotion of employment, improved living and working conditions, proper social protection, dialogue between management and labor, the development of human resources with a view to lasting high employment and the combating of exclusion.” Ibid., . The controversy involved a legal and moral conflict between the Republic of Ireland’s constitutional ban on abortion and Community law permitting the free movement of persons (e.g., to EC countries where abortions are permitted). Consistent with the declaration by members of the European Council at the Birmingham summit, the treaty was not formally renegotiated; instead, the Danish conditions were appended to the treaty in a special protocol. Commission of the European Communities, Report on the Operation of the Treaty on European Union (Brussels, ); and Council, Draft Report of the Council on the Functioning of the Treaty on European Union (Brussels, ).

Chapter 32

Where Is the Power? THE EUROPEAN UNION has a singular governmental structure. It is simultaneously an international organization and the proto-government for a regional political system. As such, EU institutions as they were originally designed have some characteristics of an international organization, but they have also always had a more governmental nature than most international organizations. As they have evolved over time, the institutions have come to resemble those of a national government, although the analogues with national legislatures and executives are not at all exact. Understanding the European institutions, therefore, requires understanding that the principal institutions perform several types of tasks and that both legislative and executive functions are divided between multiple structures. It also requires understanding the evolutionary path upon which the institutions are embarked. Moreover, it requires understanding the importance of the EU executive, and especially the fragmented nature of the executive, in segmenting conflict and allowing decision making in what might otherwise be difficult political circumstances. The most important EU institutions include the Council of the European Union and the European Council, which are intergovernmental bodies made up of executive officials representing the fifteen member states; the European Commission, a supranational body that exercises important executive and supervisory powers on behalf of the Community as a whole; an elective European Parliament; and an appointive Court of European Justice. Other key institutions include the European Central Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, a Court of Auditors, the Economic and Social Committee, and the Committee of the Regions. A persisting conundrum facing the EU concerns the relationship between these institutions and citizens in the member states. From the outset, the European integration movement has been elite-driven, with all major initiatives to create, deepen, and expand the Community emanating from the national and regional political levels of politics. Decisions on EU policies are typically made behind closed doors (with the notable exception of deliberations in the European Parliament), and are announced to the public only after the fact. On the citizen level of politics, EU decision making is thus commonly perceived as remote and inaccessible. Critics characterize this feature of the European Union as a serious “democratic deficit” in institutional behavior and accountability.

Council of the European Union and the European Council Among the various EU decision-making structures, the Council of the European Union (formally known as the Council of Ministers prior to the implementation of the Maas-

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tricht treaty) is the most similar to an institution that might be found in a conventional international organization. According to the Treaty on European Union, the Council consists “of a representative of each Member State at ministerial level, authorized to commit the government of that Member State.”1 Thus, the Council directly represents the nationstates that constitute the EU, and its mode of interactions is to [a great extent] diplomacy and bargaining among sovereign powers rather than the more collegial interactions that might be expected within an organization pushing toward full economic integration in a relatively short period of time. As a result, the Council often operates as a brake on movement toward further economic and especially political integration. Yet, at the same time, movement toward fuller economic integration could not have occurred unless the Council had made decisions to proceed. It is at this level, and especially in the European Council (which, as previously noted, is composed of the heads of government and the French head of state), that the most visible decisions about integration are processed. Moreover, individual members of the Council have been instrumental in the process of integration, so that individuals as well as institutions have mattered at this level of executive-legislative decisions. The Council is empowered to make decisions with the effect of Community law. Council decisions take the form of directives, which are binding as to the results to be achieved. The member states retain the right, however, to select the form and method of implementation. The Council may also issue regulations, which are directly binding and require no implementing national legislation. The Council also has the authority to request studies by the European Commission that, in time, may become the basis of Community legislation. Informally, individual members of the Council may also suggest policy initiatives to the Commission. As its name implies, the Council of the European Union is composed of cabinet ministers who are appointed (one each) by the fifteen member governments. In addition, the Commission designates one representative to the Council to propose and defend policies and represent the interests of the Union as a whole. Assisting the Council is a Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER), which is made up of senior civil servants from the member countries. Its task is to help on a day-to-day basis in the preparation and management of the work of the Council. The Council is also served by a secretary-general, who heads a General Secretariat made up of professional civil servants recruited from the member countries. Members of the Council are elective politicians from the member countries; they are rotated according to the issue being debated. For example, if agriculture is on the agenda, ministers of agriculture will represent each country during that particular session of the Council. Similarly, if financial matters are to be discussed, the ministers of finance from the member countries serve as the Council. When particularly important matters are debated, the foreign minister or even the prime minister of each country (the president in the case of France) will attend the Council sessions. The presidency of the Council rotates among the member countries every six months; toward the end of each presidency, the European Council convenes in the host country. These meetings have been a major source of movement toward greater economic and political integration. Because the ministers who participate in the Council for the European Union are

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major political figures in their own countries, considerations of national politics characteristically motivate their behavior. This means that the ministers must be concerned about the impact of any decisions made in Brussels on the population back home and about the impact of those decisions on any upcoming elections (and there is almost always an election of some sort looming somewhere in the fifteen countries). As the populations of the member states have become increasingly cognizant of the importance of the EU for their economic and political futures, it has become more difficult for politicians to escape repercussions for decisions they may take within the European framework. For example, a loss of popular support for the Conservative Party in Britain in both local elections and the European election in  was attributed in part to the anti-European attitudes of former Prime Minister Thatcher and her willingness to broadcast those views in official venues. The Council functions through a number of component councils. A relatively sparse policy agenda during the early years of the Community meant that the work of the Council could be processed by the general Council of the European Union, which was usually attended by the foreign ministers of the member countries. As the workload became more extensive and had more policy foci, however, the need arose for more specialized councils. The most important of those is the General Affairs Council, which is composed of the foreign ministers or their deputies. Several other long-standing councils have also been established. Paramount among them is the Council of Finance Ministers, which is responsible for coordinating and harmonizing monetary and fiscal policy among the member countries. It is also responsible for monitoring the European Monetary System (EMS) and the euro in international financial markets. The Agriculture Council, composed of the fifteen agricultural ministers, is another well-established and important council. Since the largest proportion of the EU budget is allocated to agricultural programs, the importance of agricultural constituencies and the central place of the agricultural program in EU politics have made the Agriculture Council a central locus of policymaking. As the EU’s policy concerns have expanded, the number of other specialized councils functioning under the umbrella of the Council has gradually increased. They include councils dealing with fisheries, budgets, the nonfinancial aspects of the internal market, foreign aid, social affairs, environment, and science and technology. Each council involves the relevant ministers from the member countries and establishes a basis for ongoing personal cooperation and negotiation among executives specializing in a given policy area. Since the completion of the internal market during the early s involved greater harmonization of all these activities, the work of these specialized councils has inevitably increased. The functional differentiation of the councils is an important element of EU governance. It contributes to the complexity of governance, and beneath a proliferation of professional and expert language it tends to mask many potentially divisive issues. Furthermore, these councils are linked directly to experts at the national level; interest groups such as farmers, unions, and employer associations lobby at both national and European levels of governance. Specialization and differentiation make policymaking within the

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European Union resemble policymaking in the U.S. federal government, with the numerous EU policy communities or networks appearing to exert significant influence (if not control) over public policy to a greater degree than in most national governments in Europe. One of the most important functions of the COREPER and the Council for the European Union is monitoring the numerous decisions taken within the Commission in the name of the EU and analyzing draft legislation emanating from the Commission. This constitutes, in essence, one executive institution exercising oversight over another (even though, as previously noted, the Council embodies features of a legislative body as well). The Commission is the principal source of the large volume of rules and regulations required to implement the Treaty of Rome and other agreements having the force of law in the EU. Although the Commission has the authority to act independently in making some rules, the Council is organized for oversight of these decisions through a large number of working groups. The working groups are composed of members of the permanent missions of the member states as well as numerous national civil servants who fly back and forth between their national capitals and Brussels. As with the full Council of the European Union, its component councils, and COREPER, the Commission has a representative on each working group to defend the position of the Commission, present draft texts, and thereby advance the cause of increased integration. The Commission representatives are often unsuccessful in preventing national interests from being voiced in opposition to specific Commission proposals, but they do have an opportunity to defend such proposals. The Council remains the locus of most parochialism in the European Union. Indeed, it was conceived from the outset as an institution that would permit member nations to express national views about communitywide policy. There are, however, supranational checks on nationalism. First, a member of the Commission is present at every level of the Council’s operations to represent the “European” perspective and to prevent any manifestation of nationalism from remaining unchallenged. This means that the style of Council deliberations is usually more that of a discussion within a partnership rather than a debate between adversaries, although there will always be debate. Second, with at least two levels of officials always functioning beneath the more manifestly political level of activity within the Council, much of the Council’s work can be performed with less regard to domestic political considerations. Likewise, the involvement of professional civil servants from the various EU member states means that decisions at the official level often are made in conformity with the technical standards prevailing in a given policy area rather than along national lines. (Again, a bureaucratic or “policy community” perspective is more apt for understanding policy in the EU than strictly political or nationalist perspectives.) It is especially important that the agenda and draft decisions are prepared for the Council by COREPER and other permanent officials (e.g., members of the Council’s secretariat). If issues can be kept off the agenda or defused before they reach it, parochial conflict can be minimized. This is one indication of the importance of bureaucratic processes for understanding politics in the European Union. This will be even more evi-

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dent when we look at the role of the Commission in fostering integration and at the role of national bureaucracies in implementing European policy. Continued movement toward economic and political union under the Maastricht treaty is perhaps better served by nonpolitical processes (“political” here meaning partisan and national). Progress toward supranationalism appears possible when manifestly political institutions are confined to the mere “enregisterment of decisions made elsewhere,”2 a point that was raised in much of the functionalist and neofunctionalist literature during the initial phase of the integration movement.3 The institutions of the European Community have not achieved that bureaucratized state perfectly, but they do permit substantial policymaking activity by bureaucracies before political officials ever see the prospective decisions. Decision Modes Three types of decision-making modes characterize the legislative activities of the Council: () unanimity, which applies to the admission of new member states, treaty revisions, the initiation of new policies, and the modification of an existing policy framework; () a simple majority, which usually applies to procedural issues; and () qualified majority voting (QMV). The adoption of QMV through the Single European Act of  has significantly altered the role of the Council and, to some extent, changed the European Union. Since the Council was designed as a venue where national representatives could defend their national interests, voting rules prior to the acceptance of the Single European Act required unanimity on most issues. Provisions of the Single European Act have changed decision-making rules so that a majority vote is now sufficient to enact most policies. (The exceptions are those that clearly fall within the unanimity mode.) In , for example, the Council “continued to adopt instruments by majority vote whenever appropriate with the Commission’s agreement. In many other cases the prospect of a qualified majority vote was sufficient to secure a unanimous decision.”4 The introduction of QMV has thus moved policymaking in the Community away from what might be expected in an international organization toward what might be expected in policymaking and coalition formation in a parliamentary democracy. The enlargement of the European Union in  to include Austria, Finland, and Sweden dictated a change in the arithmetic of qualified majority voting, which in turn provoked partisan conflict among some of the member countries. The Council agreed well in advance of enlargement on the allocation of votes among the applicant nations: four apiece in the case of Austria and Sweden and three for Finland. Prior to enlargement, a qualified majority in Council decisions constituted fifty-three votes out of a total of seventy-six. Twenty-three votes were therefore sufficient to comprise a “blocking minority” against a controversial measure. The projected admission of Austria, Finland, and Sweden would increase the total number of votes in qualified majority decisions from seventy-six to eighty-seven, as depicted in table .. The member states could not initially agree, however, on what would constitute a future blocking minority. Britain (with the support of Spain) sought to retain a twenty-three-vote threshold, which would permit a coalition of two larger states and one smaller state to block decisions. The other EU countries argued, in contrast, that increasing the threshold to twenty-seven seats would be a more eq-

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Table 32.1 Number of Votes in Qualified Majority Voting Member countries France, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom Spain Belgium, Greece, Netherlands, Portugal Austria, Sweden Denmark, Ireland, Finland Luxembourg Total

Number of votes per country

Number of votes per group or country

10 8

40 8

5 4 3 2

20 8 9 2 87

uitable proportion in the enlarged Union. Following extensive diplomatic negotiations, EU members reached a compromise agreement in March  whereby the blocking minority was increased to twenty-six but twenty-three votes would suffice to postpone Council decisions while delegates on the Council seek to reach a consensus on controversial measures. Sixty-two votes constitute a qualified majority. Although the larger members of the Community are clearly more powerful than the smaller countries, the requirement that a qualified majority must consist of sixty-two votes out of the total of eighty-seven prevents the former from dictating policy to the latter. The same decision-making rule simultaneously protects the larger countries from attempts by the smaller countries to impose policies they oppose or that may require more from their greater economic contributions to the Community budget. Decision making within the European Union, therefore, involves more of an emphasis on coalition formation than reliance on national vetoes for protection. More subtle procedural changes have also influenced the manner in which the Council functions. Following the adoption of the “Luxembourg compromise” in , package deals analogous to U.S. legislative “logrolling,” which benefit all the involved parties, became a common means to generate policy consensus, albeit sometimes an expensive one. Although this practice did not silence opposition by Britain or other member states to particular Council decisions, many politicians and informed citizens in the member countries increasingly perceived national isolation as a real danger. For example, many Conservative politicians viewed official British reservations about movement toward monetary union during the summer and fall of  as a major threat to Britain’s role in the Community; their growing unease helped intensify internal party opposition to Thatcher’s leadership and contributed to her decision to resign as prime minister in late November. Greater use of qualified majority voting in the Council has also altered policymaking dynamics among the member countries. If countries run the risk of becoming isolated by bargaining too hard on an issue, they may become more compromising and willing to accept some short-term losses to perceived national interests in preference to losing a vote publicly. Furthermore, if one country were to lose frequently in Council decisions, it would risk becoming a pariah within the Community and losing even more power and

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influence with respect to other countries. Isolation would be a much greater danger for smaller countries, but the established pattern of decision making, in which playing the game is as important as winning all the time, is a more familiar pattern of politics in those countries than in the larger European democracies. The Netherlands, in particular, has managed a political pattern of inclusion and accommodation that has been beneficial in preserving the democratic stability and effective decision making that are crucial for the future success of the EU. The European Commission The European Commission is the more permanent executive of the European Union and has been the source of much of the movement toward greater integration. With the accession of new EU members during the s and s and in , the Commission was gradually expanded to include twenty members who are appointed by the Council (subject to the approval of the European Parliament) from the member countries in consultation with the other member states. France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom have two commissioners each; the other countries have one each. With the implementation of the Treaty on European Union in , the commissioners’ term of office was lengthened from four to five years. Once appointed to office, commissioners take an oath of loyalty to the European Union and pledge to accept no national instructions on policy. Members of the Commission are often individuals who have been politically active but who have decided, for personal or ideological reasons, to leave the fray of national politics and work on the European stage. Perhaps less generously, the Commission has become a place where national governments can “exile” politicians too difficult to have at home or who need to be retired with an honorable (and remunerative) position. This pattern has begun to change, however, with the appointment in recent years of younger and more “technocratic” commissioners. What is most interesting is that politicians who have been deeply involved in national affairs (including Roy Jenkins of Britain and Jacques Delors of France) have honored their oaths of office and became rather quickly active in, and committed to, broader European issues. Some commissioners, on the other hand, have been seen by critics to be extremely anxious to receive portfolios from which they could benefit their home countries and to remain too much as national representatives. The Council, in close consultation with the member countries, appoints one commission member to be president of the Commission and thereby primus inter pares. The president of the Commission serves a five-year renewable term and is assisted by two vice presidents who are also appointed by the Council. The operating understanding has been that the presidency will alternate between larger and smaller member countries. Member countries tend to nominate their commissioners to reflect in part national political pressures. Germany, for example, has tended to have one commissioner from the major government party and the second commissioner from the opposition. Clearly then, although the Commission is a European and supranational institution, it also has direct and important links to national politics and national policy considerations. Commission presidents have generally been chosen on the basis of prior consensus

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among the member countries. An exception occurred at a European Council meeting in June , when British Prime Minister John Major unexpectedly vetoed the anticipated appointment of the Belgian foreign minister as Delors’s successor. Responding primarily to anti-EU sentiment within the ranks of the Conservative Party, Major declared British opposition to the candidate’s alleged “interventionist” approach to economic management. Council members subsequently agreed at a special summit in Brussels in July on the appointment instead of Jacques Santer, the prime minister of Luxembourg and a member of the Christian Democratic Party. Santer assumed office as president of the Commission, along with the other nineteen commissioners, on  January . Following the mass resignation of the entire Commission in March  in the wake of personal and financial scandals (see chapter ), members of the Council promptly closed ranks to choose Romano Prodi, a former prime minister of Italy, as Santer’s successor. In addition to meaning the commissioners themselves, the term Commission is applied to all the permanent staff of the Community—namely, the “Eurocrats.”5 At present, the Commission employs approximately , senior civil servants plus , additional staff members. Some of these employees are on secondment from their national governments, although an overwhelming majority are direct employees of the European Union. While certainly smaller than the bureaucracies of any of the member nations, this is still a sizable staff with impressive professional capabilities for rulemaking and rule enforcement. The EU bureaucracy is divided into thirty-six directorates-general (DGs), which correspond to specific functional or policy tasks. Each DG is headed by a director-general who serves under the supervision of a commissioner and a cabinet of no more than six personal advisers who coordinate the work of a number of subordinate directorates and sections. As a result of reforms initiated by the Prodi Commission, the cabinet members must be recruited among at least three different nationalities.6 Given the sensitivity of the Commission’s role and the possibility of trampling on national sensibilities, component sections of the directorates tend to work on a somewhat shorter leash from their political leaders than might be true in many national bureaucracies. The various directorates are currently grouped into nineteen policy portfolios, as listed in table . (p. ). Prodi himself serves without portfolio in his capacity as Commission president, while the two vice presidents (Neil Kinnock of Britain and Loyola de Palacio of Spain) exercise responsibility for administrative reform and relations with the European Parliament, transport, and energy, respectively. The activity of the Commission is analogous to that of a public bureaucracy in a nation-state except for one important factor: the European bureaucracy is concerned less than its national counterparts with the direct implementation of laws. In most instances, they must depend on national bureaucracies (including national police forces) to implement Community law.7 The principal task of the Commission, therefore, is to generate rules—specifically, European rules. Much as a national bureaucracy issues secondary legislation (comparable to American “regulations”) to supplement primary legislation passed by the legislature, the Commission generates rules and regulations in pursuit of the Treaty of Rome, the Single Europe Act, the Treaty on European Union, and the Treaty of Amsterdam. These rules are monitored by working groups within the Council, as well as by

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Table 32.2 The Prodi Commission, 2000–2005 Nationality Italian (Prodi) British (Kinnock) Spanish (de Palacio) French Dutch German Belgian Irish Greek Austrian French Finnish Italian Danish British Luxembourgeois Spanish German Portuguese Swedish

Portfolio(s) President (without portfolio) Vice president: Administrative reform Vice president: Relations with the European Parliament; transport; energy Regional policy; institutional affairs Internal market Budget Research Consumer protection Employment and social affairs Agriculture and fisheries External trade Enterprise and information society Competition Development and humanitarian aid External relations Education and culture Monetary affairs Enlargement Justice and home affairs Environment

committees in national governments, and most must be approved by the Council. The initiative for rulemaking, however, lies in the hands of the Commission, which accords its members considerable influence over the final shape of EU policy. As well as having the capacity to generate a few rules on its own, the Commission has the exclusive right to introduce legislation to the Council. The Council may accept a proposal or not, but it cannot act without prior initiation by the Commission. Few items ever come to the Council without previous widespread discussion within its working groups, COREPER, and to some extent with the national governments, but the Commission sets the Council’s agenda. This right of initiation gives the Commission the ability to speed up the pace of integration, or at least the capacity to attempt to speed up the pace. At times, it may be able to accelerate the pace simply by the volume of its activity. With hundreds of employees and highly specialized personnel in the various directorates, the Commission may be able to overwhelm the more political bodies of the Community by sheer volume and speed of action. Again, this may be analogous to the central position that permanent bureaucracies have achieved by virtue of their size and technical capacity in most national political systems. One consequence is that the Commission has provoked reactions similar to those in national political systems. An example is a recent decision by the Council to expand its secretariat as a means to ensure that the overtly political arms of the EU government have the institutional ability to make their own voices heard effectively.8

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As previously noted, the Commission has been the locus of much of the movement toward greater economic and political integration. A great deal of this movement has resulted from gradual bureaucratic pressure rather than from more dramatic political decisions. Political decisions by the Council may receive greater media attention, as was the case with the passage of the Single Europe Act in  and agreement on the draft treaties on economic, monetary, and political union at Maastricht in , but day-by-day activities by the Commission and its Eurocrats—in the form of regulation after regulation— have established the public policy foundation for integration envisaged by such political acts. Likewise, their seemingly incremental and “bureaucratic” activities interpret and extend the meanings of political actions and may at times push integration even further than the more politicized Council intends or considers politically possible. The position of the Commission constitutes something of a dilemma for both the Commission and its leadership. On the one hand, the Commission is recognized as the “conscience” of the Community and the most powerful force for a more integrated Europe. On the other hand, the Commission embodies a substantial “democratic deficit” in that its appointive and bureaucratic nature makes its members appear remote and intrusive to many actors in national governments, if not to the average citizen in Europe. Thus, the Commission must at once be active in advocating its own agenda and remain cognizant of the needs of the individual member countries and their political leaders. This dilemma encourages the Commission to utilize bureaucratic politics as a means of preserving its position within the Community. That is, individual commissioners are conscious of the need to build coalitions around specific proposals with members of affected interests and relevant national actors, political as well as bureaucratic. This is not democracy in the usual sense, but it does constitute a means of responding to functional and national demands. The European Parliament The third major political institution of the European Community is the European Parliament (EP). Its evolution reveals a great deal about the development of the European Union. The parliament began as an institution in which member states were in reality the dominant players; its members were initially appointed by their national parliaments and therefore behaved more like national ambassadors than citizen representatives. Since the advent of direct elections in , however, the European Parliament has evolved to the point that it can fill some of the “democratic deficit” that afflicts the Community as a whole because citizens now have a direct electoral relationship with their representatives. Membership in the European Parliament was increased from  to  deputies prior to the June  election, primarily to take into account the growth in German population following unification in . The European Parliament was expanded once again in January  to allow for the inclusion of additional deputies from Austria, Finland, and Sweden. Its current size is . Member countries are accorded seats in the European Parliament in proportion to the size of their population (see table ., p. ). From  through , deputies were chosen in the continental members of the Community according to national varieties of proportional representation, whereas delegates

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Table 32.3 Distribution of Seats in the European Parliament Member countries Germany France, Italy, United Kingdom Spain Netherlands Belgium, Greece, Portugal Sweden Austria Denmark, Finland Ireland Luxembourg Total

Number of seats 99 64 31 25 22 21 16 15 6 626

from the United Kingdom and Ireland were elected on the basis of their country’s plurality electoral system. The European Parliament subsequently established a Communitywide electoral system in which the June  election was conducted under various forms of proportional representation throughout the Community.9 Once elected, deputies are formally designated Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). They elect a president and fourteen vice presidents for two-and-a-half-year terms to preside over day-to-day parliamentary proceedings. Elections to the European Parliament are conducted every five years. Candidates are nominated by political parties organized on a Europe-wide basis or that at least campaign in several countries. Once elected, MEPs sit by party, not by nation, with nine groups currently represented in the European Parliament (see table .). National party caucuses are sometimes (if rarely) convened, but the basic organization of the European Parliament is partisan and supranational. This does not mean that the issues on which candidates are elected to the EP are necessarily European; many campaigns are concerned with the relationship of the nation-state to Europe, as electoral difficulties experienced by British Conservatives during the campaigns of  and  indicated.10 Still, Europe-wide issues (including the attainment of the single market and monetary and economic union) are also a component of electoral campaigns. The Treaty on European Union explicitly recognizes the importance of political parties in the Community. Article  (ex a) asserts: “Political parties at the European level are important as a factor for integration within the Union. They contribute to forming a European awareness and to express the political will of the citizens of the Union.” Under the Treaty of Rome, the European Parliament was vested with limited powers. Among them is the right to approve the Community’s annual budget, which MEPs have consistently exercised in a serious fashion. In addition, Article  (ex ) of the Treaty of Rome accords Parliament the authority to censure the Commission by a two-thirds vote of its members and thereby force the resignation of the Commission as a body. The right of censure, which is analogous to a vote of no confidence exercised by national parliaments, constitutes a blunt instrument of control that the European Parliament has yet to

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Table 32.4 Elections to the European Parliament, June 1999: Number of Seats by Party Group, 1999–2004 Party/group European People’s Party and European Democrats (PPE-DE)a Party of the European Socialists (PES) European Liberal Democrat and Reform Party (ELDR) Greens/European Free Alliance Confederal Group of the European United Left/Nordic Green Leftb Europe of Nations Groupc Technical Group of Independent Membersd Europe of Democracies and Diversitiese Non-affiliated Total

Seats 233 180 51 48 42 30 18 16 8 626

aChristian Democrats and (since 1992) the British Conservatives. bIncludes Communists from France, Greece, and Portugal. cAnti-integration French and Danish MEPs. dFrench National Front and other right-wing MEPs. eIrish Fianna Fail and French Gaullists.

employ with success.11 Other important functions of Parliament include its right to debate Community issues and review the annual general report of the Commission. For this and other purposes, the Treaty of Rome stipulates that the EP shall meet in annual sessions, beginning in March (Article , ex ). Parliament may also meet in extraordinary sessions at the request of a majority of its members, the Council, or the Commission. Commission members are allowed to attend sessions of the European Parliament and are required to reply, either orally or in writing, to questions posed by its members. The EP’s legislative powers were significantly enhanced through successive treaty revisions, beginning with adoption of the Single European Act. The SEA introduced a new cooperation procedure involving decisions by the Council affecting the internal market, social policy, regional policy, and research. Previously, Parliament would render an opinion on legislation proposed by the Commission before the Council took final action, but that opinion had little real impact. Under the SEA, in contrast, the European Parliament was accorded the right to review a Council’s “common position” before the Council can make a final decision. The cooperation procedure spelled out three legislative options: () the position can be approved or simply not disapproved within three months; () the position can be rejected, in which case the legislation fails unless the Council acts unanimously (with approval of the Commission) within three months to endorse it; or () the European Parliament may propose amendments, which, if they are supported by the Commission, require unanimity on the part of the Council to overturn. (A qualified majority suffices for the Council to accept proposed amendments.) Amendments rejected by the Commission require unanimity on the Council for passage. Rejection and amendment of Council positions require a simple majority of Parliament.12 The Treaty on European Union further strengthened parliamentary prerogatives.

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First, it requires EP approval of the Council’s nomination of members of the European Commission and all accession and association agreements with other states. Second, it authorizes a quarter of the EP’s members to request the appointment of temporary committees of inquiry “to investigate . . . alleged contraventions or misadministration in the implementation of Community law” (Article , ex c). In addition, the TEU empowered Parliament to appoint an investigatory ombudsman who is “empowered to receive complaints from any citizen of the Union” (Article , ex e). The Treaty on European Union and the Treaty of Amsterdam further expanded the legislative role of the European Parliament by according it complicated new “co-decision” powers shared with the Council. As under the Single European Act, Parliament retains the right to approve or not take a decision on a common position by the Council, in which case the Council shall “definitively enact” the proposal and it becomes law. Alternatively, an absolute majority of the members of the European Parliament may decide to reject or amend a common position. In the case of rejection, the Council may convene a Conciliation Committee composed of a representative of the Commission and an equal number of Council members or their deputies and the European Parliament in an effort to reconcile the differences. Following such deliberations, Parliament has the option of once again rejecting the proposal by an absolute majority (in which case it fails) or of proposing amendments to the act in question. In the case of proposed amendments, both the Council and the Commission are required to state their opinions. The Council may decide within three months to accept such amendments, either by a qualified majority if the Commission concurs in them or unanimously if the Commission rejects the amendments. In either event, the proposal becomes law. If the Council does not approve the proposed amendments, the presidents of the Council and of Parliament are required to convene a meeting of the Conciliation Committee. If the Conciliation Committee approves a joint text within a six-week period, the Council and the European Parliament may decide by qualified and absolute majorities, respectively, to enact the proposal. The failure of either institution to approve the text, however, means that it will not be enacted. Conversely, if members of the Conciliation Committee are unable to reach a compromise agreement, the proposal automatically fails unless the Council reaffirms its original position on the proposal by a qualified majority. In such an event, the act is adopted unless Parliament rejects it by an absolute majority. An important organizational feature enhancing the decision-making powers of the European Parliament is its well-developed committee structure. Unlike many national parliaments, the Parliament has developed an elaborate structure consisting of twenty permanent committees specialized by policy area. Members are assigned to a committee at the beginning of a five-year term of office (roughly according to the partisan distribution of seats) and can therefore serve long enough to develop substantial policy expertise. Furthermore, the committees meet in Brussels (unlike the European Parliament itself, which conducts most of its plenary sessions in Strasbourg) and hence have the capacity to oversee the work of the Commission and Council at close range. Because these committees review, at least informally, most draft legislation by the Commission and Council, they have a substantial influence on the shape of the final rules.

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The differentiation of the European Parliament into functional committees facilitates cooperation between MEPs and Commission bureaucrats in the equally differentiated DG structure. The predictable outcome is policy segmentation, much as in the United States. The resultant symbiotic relationship that is emerging between the committees and the DGs whose work the committees oversee appears heightened by informal linkages between both of these institutional actors and European and national interest groups, and policy communities are emerging around each of the major issue areas within which the Community has competence. The European Court of Justice Established as an extension of the European Coal and Steel Community during the initial take-off phase of the integration movement, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has evolved into an increasingly potent instrument of supranational authority within today’s EU. The central purpose of the Court, in the language of the Treaty of Rome, is to “ensure that in the interpretation and application of [the] Treaty the law is observed.”13 In performing this vital task, the ECJ complements the role of the European Court of Human Rights, which serves to enforce provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights drawn up by the Council for Europe in .14 Decisions by both courts have contributed, perhaps even more than “high politics” at the level of ministerial councils and the European Parliament, to a growing sense of a “European” identity among ordinary citizens. The ECJ consists of fifteen justices, one representing each of the member states. They are appointed by the fifteen governments for staggered six-year terms of office, which are frequently extended. The judges are assisted by nine advocates-general, five of whom are recruited from the largest EU member states while the remaining four are appointed from the smaller countries on a rotating basis. Their assigned duty is “to make, in open court, reasoned submissions on cases brought before the Court of Justice, in order to assist the Court in the performance of the task assigned to it in Art. .” The Treaty of Rome stipulates that both the ECJ judges and the advocates-general “shall be chosen from persons whose independence is beyond doubt and who possess the qualifications required for appointment to the highest judicial offices in their respective countries . . . .”15 These provisions ensure both continuity and periodic renewal of incumbents as well as high levels of legal competence. The European Court meets in Luxembourg, either in plenary sessions attended by all of its members or in smaller chambers consisting of three or five judges whose task is “to undertake certain preparatory inquiries or to adjudicate on particular categories of cases in accordance with rules laid down for these purposes.”16 Court decisions are based on majority votes, with no specific provision for judges to publish dissenting opinions comparable to the well-established practice of their counterparts on the U.S. Supreme Court.17 As legal guardian of EU institutions and rules, the ECJ exercises authority under the amended Treaty of Rome in three principal areas: . The power to enforce conformity to EU rules among the member states. If the Court concurs in formal charges brought by the European Commission or a member

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state that a member state has failed to fulfill a treaty obligation, it is empowered to require the country in question “to take the necessary measures to comply . . . .” In such a case the Court can impose, at the behest of the Commission, a “lump sum or penalty payment” on the offending government.18 . The power of judicial review. Several key provisions of the Treaty of Rome accord the ECJ the right to determine whether EU policies and institutional behavior conform to treaty provisions. Article  (ex ) allows the court to “review the legality of acts” adopted by the Council, the Commission, the European Parliament, and other Community institutions. The treaty continues: “If the action is well founded, the Court of Justice shall declare the act concerned to be void.”19 In addition, the Rome Treaty empowers the ECJ to make “preliminary rulings concerning (a) the interpretation of [the] Treaty; (b) the validity and interpretation of acts of the institutions of the Community . . . ; [and] the interpretation of the statutes of bodies established by an Act of the Council, where those statutes so provide.”20 . The power to intervene in domestic judicial disputes. Article  (ex ) also requires the ECJ to rule on questions concerning validity and interpretation issues raised in courts in the member states, if national courts so request as a basis for making their own decisions. This provision effectively extends the court’s power of judicial review on the Community level to the member states. Over time the European Court of Justice has evolved from a weak judiciary with no authority to enforce compliance with its rulings to a much more activist and powerful institution. An important milestone in this process was the creation of a Court of First Instance in , which relieved the ECJ of responsibility for dealing with most cases involving individual challenges to domestic or Community law. As a result, the Court is able to concentrate more of its energy on selective cases involving macro issues such as legal integration and the supremacy of EU law. In addition, the preliminary ruling procedure contained in Article  has enabled the ECJ to extend its authority to national courts in the member states. A binding precedent was a  ruling in which “the ECJ won for the EC legal system the right to provide remedies for some violations of European law, declaring that national courts could require compensation by the national government for individuals hurt by a failure of a national government to implement EC directives punctually and properly (Francoovich v. Italy).”21 The long-term consequence, as Simon Hix observes, has been “a high penetration of EU law into the national legal system. . . . [By] enabling national courts to enforce ECJ judgements, the preliminary references procedure has the effect of making national courts the lower tier of an integrated EU court system, and the ECJ the quasi-supreme court at its pinnacle.”22 Moreover, recent rulings by the ECJ have reinforced growing appreciation of the importance of European law on the citizen level of politics. A case in point was an ECJ decision in January  declaring a German military law that forbade a female recruit from bearing arms to be unconstitutional because it violated EU guidelines governing equal rights of men and women at the workplace. Following the ruling, the woman who had

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pressed her case through German courts to the ECJ in Luxembourg declared: “It was an absolute discovery, and a very good discovery, the existence of this European court. I used to think of myself as German. Now I feel a little European, too.”23 The German parliament subsequently amended the country’s Basic Law, or constitution, to permit women to take on combat roles in the armed forces, effective in . The Central European Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development A new institution that has commanded a high European and international profile since its inception in  is the European Central Bank (ECB), with headquarters in Frankfurt. The ECB serves as the executive arm of the European System of Central Banks (ESCB), which represents the national central banks of the nations belonging to EMU. With the implementation of the third stage of Economic and Monetary Union on  January , the ECB and the ESCB assumed supranational responsibility for macro economic policy on behalf of the member states comprising the EU’s “euro zone.” Their joint task is to promote the basic objectives of Economic and Monetary Union as contained in the Treaty on European Union: “the adoption of an economic policy that is based on the close coordination of the Member States’ economic policies, on the internal market and on the definition of common objectives, and conducted in accordance with the principles of an open market economy with free competition.” Means to these ends include “the irrevocable fixing of exchange rates leading to the introduction of a single currency, . . . and the definition and conduct of a single monetary policy and exchange rate policy the primary objective of both of which shall be to maintain price stability and . . . to support the general economic policies of the Community. . . .”24 The ESCB and the ECB are empowered by the Treaty on European Union to define and implement monetary policy, conduct foreign exchange operations, and hold and manage the official foreign reserves of the member states.25 The chief purpose of the ESCB is to maintain price stability, while the ECB is authorized to fix interest rates and issue a common currency. The ECB’s decision-making bodies consist of a Governing Council, made up of the governors of the national banks, and an Executive Board consisting of a president, a vice president, and four other members who are appointed for eight-year nonrenewable terms by the European Council (after consultations with the European Parliament). The Treaty accords both the ESCB and the ECB complete independence from “Community institutions and bodies, from any government of a Member State or from any other body.”26 A second European Union financial institution is the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), which the European Council authorized in December  in response to an initiative by former French President François Mitterrand. The EBRD was established with an initial capitalization of $ billion to disburse loans for technical assistance, equity investment, and security offerings in the emerging postcommunist regimes in Central Europe. Its declared purpose was “to foster a transition toward open-market economies and to promote private and entrepreneurial initiatives in the Central and East European countries committed to and applying the principles of multi-

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party democracy, pluralism, and market economics.”27 After the collapse of the Soviet Union in , the Federation of Russia and its successor states became eligible for EBRD loans as well. EU member states collectively own a majority of shares in the bank, although the United States is the largest single shareholder. In deference to France, the first two EBRD presidents have been French officials.28 Other Institutions Other EU institutions include the Court of Auditors, the Economic and Social Committee, and the Committee of the Regions. The first of these serves as an independent “watchdog” agency, while the latter two perform advisory functions in the Community’s legislative process. The Court of Auditors was established as an independent oversight body in  to allay parliamentary concerns about the proper monitoring of Community finances. It consists of twelve members who are appointed for six-year terms by the European Council (subject to parliamentary approval). Their assignment is to “examine the accounts of all revenue and expenditure of the Community . . .” and to “provide the European Parliament and the Council with a statement of assurance as to the reliability of the accounts and the legality and regularity of the underlying transactions.”29 In addition, the Court assists the European Parliament and the Council in exercising their budgetary control functions. Both the Economic and Social Committee (ESC) and the Committee of the Regions allow “voice” to constituencies that are not otherwise represented in the various councils and the European Parliament. The ESC dates from the creation of the European Economic Community in  and represents employers, trade unions, professional associations, farmers, and consumers. It consists of  members who are apportioned among the member states according to their relative size. They are nominated by their national governments and appointed by the Council, acting unanimously, for four-year terms. The Treaty of Rome stipulates that the Council and Commission must consult with members of the ESC in specified policy matters and in other cases “in which they consider it appropriate.”30 Opinions of the ESC, however, are not binding on actions by either the Council or the Commission. The Committee of the Regions (COR) was established under the Treaty on European Union to represent regional and local bodies within the member states. COR consists of  members who are appointed for four-year terms by the Council. They are nominated by their home governments but once in office, “may not be bound by any mandatory instructions. They shall be completely independent in the performance of their duties, in the general interest of the Community.”31 Comparable to the role of the ESC, the Committee of the Regions performs strictly advisory functions in relation to the Council and the Commission. In practice, COR has demonstrated that it more effectively represents regional interests in member states with functioning state or regional political structures—notably, Germany, Spain, and Italy—than in unitary states such as France.

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Notes . Article  (ex ), Treaty on Political Union, . . Alfred Grosser, cited in Mattei Dogan, “The Political Power of the Western Mandarin,” in The Mandarins of Western Europe, ed. Mattei Dogan (New York: Halstad, ). . See, for example, Ernst Haas, Beyond the Nation State (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ). . European Commission, General Report on the Activities of the European Union  (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, ), . . The term comes from Altiero Spinelli, a leading Italian advocate of European federalism. . John Peterson, “Romano Prodi: Another Delors?” ECSA Review  (winter ): , . . Heinrich Seidentopf and Jacques Ziller, Making European Policies Work: The Implementation of Community Legislation in the Member States (London: Sage, ). . These differences are explained in the country chapters of this volume. . Article  (ex ) of the Treaty on European Union stipulates that the “European Parliament shall draw up proposals for elections by direct universal suffrage in accordance with a uniform procedure in all member states.” Despite these provisions, Ireland and Northerrn Ireland continued to use a single transferable vote system in the June  election. . Geoffrey Pridham and Pippa Pridham, Towards Transnational Parties in the European Community (London: Policy Studies Institute, ); and Roswitha Bourguignon-Wittke et al., “Five Years of the Directly Elected European Parliament,” Journal of Common Market Studies  (): –. . Members of the European Parliament moved a vote of censure against the Commission in December , but it failed when  percent of the MEPs rejected the motion the following month. See chapter . . Conservative strength fell from . percent of the popular vote in the  election to . percent in the European election two years later (a loss of . percent). In contrast, the opposition Labour Party advanced from . percent in  to . percent in . The trend continued through the mid-s. In the general election of  in Britain, the Conservatives received . percent of the popular vote; two years later, in elections to the European Parliament, Conservative support plummeted to . percent. The Labour Party, in contrast, received . in the British election of  and . percent in the European parliamentary election in . . Article  (ex ) of the Treaty of Rome. . The European Convention on Human Rights, whose declared purpose is to enforce individual rights contained in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of , was enacted in . The Court of Human Rights itself was established in  and currently exercises jurisdiction in  European nations. . Article  (ex ) of the Treaty of Rome. . Article  (ex ) of the amended Treaty of Rome. . See Simon Hix, The Political System of the European Union (New York: St. Martin’s, ), . . Article  (ex ) of the Treaty of Rome. . Article  (ex ) of the Treaty of Rome. . Article  (ex ) of the Treaty of Rome. . Karen J. Alter, “European Court of Justice (ECJ),” in Encyclopedia of the European Union, ed. Desmond Dinan (Boulder, Colo., and London: Lynne Rienner, ), . . Hix, Political System of the European Union, . . “A European Identity: Nation-State Losing Ground,” New York Times,  January . . Article  (ex a) of the Treaty on European Union. . Article  of the Treaty on European Union. . Article  (ex ) of the Treaty on European Union. . Bernt Schiller and M. Donald Hancock, “The International Context of Economic and Political Transitions,” in Transitions to Capitalism and Democracy in Russia and Central Europe, ed. M. Donald Hancock and John Logue (Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger, ), . . Encyclopedia of the European Union, . . Article  (ex c) of the Treaty of Rome. . Article  (ex ) of the Treaty of Rome. . Article  (ex a) of the Treaty of Rome.

Chapter 33

Who Has the Power? THE EUROPEAN UNION is deeply embedded in the national and subnational systems

of its member states while simultaneously manifesting a high degree of institutional and political autonomy in its own right. Political power in the EU, in short, is distributed among multiple domestic, intergovernmental, supranational, group, and individual actors who interact in making Community policy and shepherding the course of European integration. Hence, addressing the question, “Who has the power in the EU?” necessarily involves multilevel analysis. Knowledge about conventional models of international organization or parliamentary systems is inadequate for understanding the intricacies of power relations within the EU. The most important instruments of Community power, as the preceding chapter explains, are national governments, the Council of the European Union and the European Council, the European Commission, the European Parliament, the European Court of Justice, and the Central European Bank. Other players include private-interest groups, notably industrial firms, employer associations, and organized labor. Public opinion also affects EU actions, sometimes in a forceful fashion. National Governments as Actors Since the inception of the European Coal and Steel Community in the early s, national governments have embodied the intergovernmental principle of the European integration movement. As such, they are represented on the basis of member state equality in the EU’s most important legislative-executive institutions: the Council of the European Union and the European Council. Until the advent of qualified majority voting under the Single European Act, important Community decisions were based on the unanimity principle. This allowed each member state a potential veto over Community initiatives, which had the effect of postponing (sometimes indefinitely) Council decisions. Qualified majority voting (QMV) has significantly facilitated joint decision making since the mid-s, but even QMV does not diminish the central fact that national governments continue to exercise ultimate authority over treaty revisions and the initiation of new policies. They also exercise executive oversight over Community policies (including EMU and common foreign and defense policies) and play a decisive role in deciding Community legislation and the admission of new member states. Moreover, national governments—acting through the Council on the basis of prior agreement among themselves—appoint leading EU officials such as members of the European Commission (in-

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cluding the Commission president and vice presidents,1 the European Court of Justice, and other Community institutions. Domestic political considerations determine, to a significant degree, behavior by member states in the various Councils. Among them are contrasting degrees of national commitment to European integration based on subjective calculations of costs and benefits, the partisan composition of governments, and coalition strategy within the EU. Leaders of some of the smaller member states, notably the Benelux countries, have traditionally been among the most ardent supporters of the European idea as a means to promote their political and economic interests vis-à-vis their larger and more powerful neighbors. Similarly, peripheral nations such as Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Ireland have been positive players in expectation of EU financial assistance in the form of regional development funds. In contrast, some of the larger member states have at important junctures expressed serious reservations about further integration. A key example is de Gaulle’s veto of Britain’s application to join the EEC in  on the grounds that British membership would allegedly diminish French influence within the Community. Another is Britain’s resolve in  to opt out of automatic membership in EMU under terms of the Treaty on European Union to avoid subordinating its macroeconomic policies to supranational institutions. Scandinavian members of the EU are divided in their orientations toward the EU. For reasons similar to Britain’s ambivalence toward the EU’s supranational powers, both Denmark and Sweden chose to postpone joining EMU. A majority of Danish citizens subsequently voted against full EMU membership, at least for the foreseeable future, in a national referendum in September  in which . percent of the electorate rejected the euro as a common currency. Finland, however, has ardently embraced full responsibilities and consequences of EU membership (including EMU) as a means to enhance its national security and economic ties with the West. Who governs in individual countries affects national policy toward the EU as well. Georges Pompidou, who became French president in , reversed de Gaulle’s negative stance toward British membership in the EEC when he agreed with German Chancellor Willy Brandt and other heads of government to expand the Community. Nearly thirty years later, New Labour’s electoral victory under Tony Blair led to more positive British engagement in EU affairs than had been the case under Conservative leaders Margaret Thatcher and John Major. An early instance was Blair’s decision to endorse the EU Social Charter when he attended his first session of the European Council in June . Germany constitutes a special case. During the early postwar years, the two major parties—the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats—were sharply divided in their attitudes toward European and trans-Atlantic relations. The Christian Democrats, under the leadership of Konrad Adenauer, proved ardent advocates of both economic and military cooperation within Europe and the broader North Atlantic community, while the Social Democrats were skeptical of any steps that would deepen Germany’s division. That the Christian Democrats dominated national executive office when the formative decisions were reached to launch the ECSC and later the EEC thus made an enormous difference in Germany’s commitment to the integration movement. Only later, with the adoption of a new pro-Western and a more moderate ideological program in , did the

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Social Democrats unequivocally embrace European integration as well. Subsequent changes of government have had little substantive impact on Germany’s involvement in European affairs. National governments also affect Community actions—and, therefore, the course of the integration movement—through coalition strategies with other member states. The most important and durable coalition is a strategic alliance between France and Germany. The alliance is rooted in a mutual recognition among postwar leaders in both countries of the imperative of political reconciliation after three disastrous wars in less than a century. It was deepened by a close personal friendship between Charles de Gaulle, the first president of the Fifth Republic, and Adenauer, the first chancellor of the Federal Republic. The two leaders signed a historic Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation in January  that institutionalized Franco-German reconciliation and established the foundation for long-term policy rapport between the two countries.2 Their mutual support was decisive for achieving important milestones in the EU’s parallel processes of widening and deepening. More recently, French President Jacques Chirac publicly affirmed Franco-German cooperation as the “motor” driving European integration in a speech in June  to members of the German parliament in Berlin.3 A crucial instrument for the exercise of national power within the EU is the intergovernmental conference (IGC), a diplomatic forum in which representatives of the member governments consider the adoption of new European treaties or treaty amendments. The first IGC spanned the negotiations among the six founding members of the European Coal and Steel Community to establish the EEC and Euratom in . Important subsequent IGCs include those leading to the Single European Act, the Treaty on European Union, the Treaty of Amsterdam, and the Treaty of Nice. The Final Provisions of the Treaty on European Union provide the legal basis for constituting IGCs: The government of any Member State or the Commission may submit to the Council proposals for the amendment of the Treaties on which the Union is founded. If the Council, after consulting the European Parliament and, where appropriate, the Commission, delivers an opinion in favour of calling a conference of representatives of the governments of the Member States, the conference shall be convened by the President of the Council for the purpose of determining by common accord the amendments to be made to those Treaties. . . . The amendments shall enter into force after being ratified by all the Member States in accordance with their respective constitutional requirements.4 The most recent IGC was convened in early  to deliberate proposed treaty changes governing QVM and the composition of both the European Commission and the European Parliament in the context of a pending expansion of the EU eastward. Deep partisan divisions among the member states on these portentous issues initially clouded prospects of agreement on requisite treaty amendments. The protracted disagreement underscored the power exercised by national governments within the Union, straining even

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the cohesiveness of the Franco-German alliance as a crucial force driving the European integration movement.5 Another manifestation of national power within the EU was a decision by fourteen of the member states to impose a bilateral freeze on high-level political contacts with Austria after the right-wing Freedom Party joined the conservative People’s Party in a national coalition in February . The fourteen states were motivated by their displeasure over neo-Nazi sympathies expressed by a leader of the Freedom Party. The sanctions, while not formally an action by the EU itself, resulted in strained relations within the Community that were eased only when they were lifted toward the end of the year. The Councils as Actors Despite national autonomy in bilateral relations and important aspects of Community affairs, the Single European Act, the Treaty on European Union, and the Amsterdam Treaty have nonetheless diminished the intergovernmental character of the various Councils. Each of these treaties has significantly deepened European cooperation, according the Council and other EU institutions (including the Commission and the European Parliament) new collective powers and policy responsibility. While national governments retain the right of veto over a number of executive and legislative matters, the dynamics of QVM have transformed the Council of the European Union and the European Council into quasi-supranational bodies. Peer pressure, combined with the arithmetical imperative of QMV for member states to enter into policy coalitions in Council deliberations, serve to discourage obstructionist behavior on the part of national actors. On occasion, when a member government decides it cannot endorse a collective action, it chooses to “opt out” of the decision rather than unilaterally veto it. Such was the case when the Thatcher government chose not to endorse the Social Charter in . The right of member states to “constructive abstentions” from Council decisions is explicitly recognized in provisions of the Treaty of Amsterdam governing the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), as explained in the following chapter.6 The long-term trend toward increased supranationalism in the legislative-executive functions on the Council level has been reinforced by the increasingly important role of the Union itself (usually represented by the Commission president) at the highly visible sessions of the European Council, when political leaders of the member nations meet to negotiate among themselves concerning the future shape of Europe. The momentous decisions that have moved Europe through cyclical phases of “Eurosclerosis” and “Europhoria” throughout the course of the integration movement have been announced from these summit meetings. Political outcomes emerging from European Council sessions have at times appeared to be almost counter to the interests of the participants, given that their own powers may be reduced, but participants have made such decisions notwithstanding. The European Commission and “Bureaucratic Politics” The EU’s overtly supranational institutions are also important instruments of power and decision making. Most visible among them is the European Commission, which (as discussed in earlier chapters) exercises administrative oversight over Union policies and pos-

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sesses the legal authority to initiate policy proposals for subsequent deliberation by the Councils. In contrast to the “high politics” characteristic of Council decisions, the European Commission with its staff of some , professional civil servants embodies a less visible level of “bureaucratic politics” that is highly significant in the day-to-day activities of the Union. This level of activity has been important for promoting policy integration within the European Community and now the European Union. With enhanced policy integration has come an increased need for political integration. The bureaucratic level of policymaking—and therefore of politics—is characterized by a gradual accretion of common policies and standards through the European bureaucracy (and its masters within the Commission) and through its contacts with national bureaucracies and with national and transnational interest groups. Policymaking at the bureaucratic level appears fragmented into relatively narrow, specialized fields of competence. This apparent fragmentation and increased linkages between components of the Commission and components of national bureaucracies constitute a crucial aspect of decision making within the EU. Accordingly, much of the politics of the European Union can best be understood as bureaucratic politics.7 Moreover, the tendency of bureaucratic decision making to occur within policy communities (especially those of a technical nature) has been to depoliticize what could have been highly divisive issues. As a result, the less overt politics of the EC has been able to force, or perhaps cajole, integration along. The process of bureaucratic rulemaking is facilitated by the powers given the Commission to initiate rules and the regulatory nature of much of the emerging European political system. Parliament as Legislator and Watchdog Although the European Parliament remains institutionally and politically subordinate to the various Councils and the Commission, its authority has steadily expanded as a result of the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty of Amsterdam. The newly acquired power of co–decision making in important policy areas significantly augments the EP’s established authority with respect to plenary debates, budgetary issues, and the right of policy consultation with the Council and the Commission. Within Parliament, power is concentrated in the various party factions whose members are elected at five-year intervals. The moderate European People’s Party (PPE) and the Party of the European Socialists (PES) dominate legislative procedures because of their sheer size (see table ., p. ). Since  these two groups have alternated at regular intervals in claiming the presidency of the European Parliament, except for a brief interlude from  to  when a Liberal MEP held the office. Because neither the PPE nor the PES can claim an absolute majority of seats in its own right, they have been compelled to cooperate in asserting parliamentary authority vis-à-vis the Council and the Commission. Facilitating the strategic alliance between the two groups is their shared support for a more assertive role of the European Parliament in Community affairs and their agreement especially on social issues. Institutional authority, meanwhile, is dispersed among the EP’s presiding officials

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Table 33.1 Consultations and Cooperation and Co-Decision Procedures in the European Parliament, 1998 Cooperation procedure Session January February March April May July September October November December Total

Consultations

First reading

11 15 11 58 33 1 18 14 16 177a

Co-decision procedure

Second reading

First reading

Second reading

Third reading

2 10 4 1 2

3 14 14 16 11

3 3 2 5

4 2 4

10 5 6 34e

2 12

2 3

0b

19c

6 69d

Source: European Commission, General Report on the Activities of the European Union  (Brussels-Luxembourg, 2000), 401. aIncludes 86 cases in which Parliament proposed amendments to the Commission proposal. bAll proposals pending in first reading under the cooperation procedure were transferred to the co-decision procedure after entry into force of the Treaty of Amsterdam. cIncludes 12 cases in which Parliament amended the Council’s common position. dIncludes 56 cases in which Parliament proposed amendments to the Commission’s proposal. eIncludes 24 cases in which Parliament amended the Council’s common position.

(including the president and fourteen vice presidents) and its intricate committee structure. The former play a decisive role in determining the parliamentary agenda and overseeing daily proceedings, while the EP’s twenty committees are responsible for most preparatory work and drafting parliamentary reports and resolutions. MEPs have utilized their powers of debate and legislation in recent years to address economic and monetary union, future challenges of institutional reform and enlargement, public health issues, and the environment. Consultations remain the largest domain of EP legislative activity, followed closely by co-decision procedures and, at a distance, cooperation procedures (see table .). In , the EP assented to  measures and issued  opinions on Commission communications,  resolutions in response to statements by other institutions, and numerous reports, recommendations, and miscellaneous resolutions of its own (see table ., p. ). A dramatic exercise of parliamentary power occurred in January  when MEPs exercised their authority under Article  (ex ) of the Treaty of Rome to create a Committee of Inquiry to investigate allegations of fraud among members of the European Commission. (An earlier motion to censure the Commission failed to receive the requisite two-thirds majority.) The committee’s findings that individual commissioners were indeed guilty of favoritism and financial mismanagement subsequently prompted the voluntary resignation of the Santer commission in March. The commissioners continued

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Table 33.2 Decisions and Resolutions Adopted by the European Parliament, 1998

Session January February March April May July September October November December Total

Assent

Other opinionsa

1 3 2 3

11 13 18 20 22

1 7 17

7 6 5 2 104

Budget questions

CFSP recommendations

2

7 9 9 5 5

7 1 3 3 1 1 18

35

Own initiatives Reports

Resolutionsb

5 5 6 6 6 6 3 8 3 9 57

9 8 10 6 9 8 8 9 11 77

Urgent subjectsc

Miscellaneous decisions and resolutionsd

2 5 1 1 3 12

Source: European Commission, General Report on the Activities of the European Union  (Brussels-Luxembourg, 2000), 401. aMainly opinions on Commission reports or communications. bResolutions in response to statements by other institutions or following oral questions. cResolutions on topical and urgent subjects of major importance. dDecisions concerning waiver of immunity, amendments to the Rules of Procedure and interinstitutional agreements.

their work in a lame-duck capacity until Romano Prodi and a new set of officials took office in May. Alongside authoritative rulings of the European Court of Justice on such issues as job discrimination (see chapter ), activities of the European Parliament come closest to addressing the EU’s persisting “democratic deficit.” The direct election of its members, its expansive legislative functions, and its watchdog functions constitute an effective link with a European citizenry familiar with the prerogatives and functions of national parliaments. For the European Parliament to become more analogous to a parliamentary regime will require future treaty revisions according it the right of legislative initiative and closer scrutiny of the behavior of individual members of the European Commission. Private Interests, “Social Partners” While national governments and the EU’s own institutions are the key instruments of power within the Community, trans-European interest groups exercise varying degrees of influence in their own right. According to informed estimates, offices in Brussels are maintained by some , groups whose unadorned purpose is to lobby the EU on behalf of special interests. The most important among them are industrial firms and employer associations, followed at a distance by organized labor. Together, representatives of private capital and labor constitute recognized “social partners” who play an important role in the “low politics” of economic and social legislation.8 Industrial firms are represented in Brussels by two major groups: the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT) and the Union of Industrial and Employers’ Confed-

50 80 81 119 110 7 25 57 37 63 629

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erations of Europe (UNICE). The former is made up of the CEOs of a number of leading European companies—among them, Philips, Fiat, Olivetti, Bosch, and Volvo. Created in , the ERT formulated the original vision of a single European market that was later transformed through the Commission and the European Council into the Single European Act.9 UNICE, in contrast, is a larger and more bureaucratized organization that was founded in  to represent national employer associations on the Community level. Its principal function is to “review and provide position papers on most horizontal (cross-industry) EU legislation.”10 Institutionally, UNICE consists of a Council of Presidents, made up of the presidents of the national federations; a Committee of Permanent Delegates, consisting of “ambassadors” of the federations; policy committees assigned functional responsibilities with respect to economic and financial affairs, external relations, social affairs, industrial affairs, and company affairs; and a professional secretariat whose task is to coordinate the work of the policy committees and disseminate UNICE views on both the Community and national levels. Shared policy priorities of the ERT and UNICE include market liberalization and deregulation, which they promote through multiple informal and formal contacts primarily with Commission officials. UNICE also utilizes its membership on the advisory Economic and Social Committee for similar purposes. Organized labor’s counterpart organization is the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC). Union leaders were initially highly skeptical of the integration movement because it seemed to benefit private business more than ordinary workers, but the economic realities of a deepening Community prompted representatives of national trade union federations in the member states to establish ETUC in . ETUC accords organized labor an institutional voice on the Economic and Social Committee and in Commission deliberations, albeit one that is relatively muted in comparison with the better financed and more powerful ERT and UNICE. Given ETUC’s weaker status, the Commission “has consistently bolstered ETUC in order to provide a counterweight on the labor side to UNICE on the management side.”11 The European Commission has purposely encouraged a “social dialogue” involving UNICE, ETUC, and other labor market partners to augment the material dimensions of European integration, particularly since the advent of the single market in the s. Their collaboration has frequently been fruitful, although the social partners differed in their attitudes toward the Social Charter and the Social Protocol attached to the Treaty on European Union. (The ETUC was strongly supportive, while UNICE officials were far more reserved.) In recent years, both partners have constructively contributed to Commission efforts to devise strategies to promote Community-wide economic growth and reduce unemployment. Public Opinion An indirect source of influence in the European Union are ordinary citizens. Lacking direct access to executive instruments of power in Brussels, they nonetheless affect Community activities in myriad ways. Most important, they determine the composition of national governments and the European Parliament through the electoral process. While (as

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previously noted) the integration movement is primarily elite-driven, executive bodies in the member states—and through them the decisive EU institutions—are ultimately dependent on generalized support and/or prospective electoral sanctions expressed by the voting public. In addition to their manifest role in determining the outcome of national and European elections, voters in some of the member states exercise the right of referendum in deciding the fate of crucial EU initiatives. Nowhere is this more important than in Scandinavia, where national constitutions require a positive vote by citizens on pending constitutional amendments (including those involving accession to the Union). Norway has twice rejected membership in the Community through national referendums ( and ). In Denmark, six referendums have been held on the EU. The first was in  when  percent of the electorate voted in favor of joining the EEC. A narrower majority approved the Single European Act in , but in June  Denmark stunned its fellow member states when . percent of voters rejected the initial version of the Treaty on European Union. Only after the European Council agreed to add a “Danish protocol” allowing the nation to opt out of Economic and Monetary Union did a majority of Danes approve the treaty in May .12 Denmark once again proved a naysayer to the EU in September , when . percent of the voters rejected joining EMU and adopting the euro as its currency. National referendums were also held in neighboring Sweden and Finland on accession to the EU in the fall of , with positive outcomes in each case. Swedish government officials have announced tentative plans to schedule a referendum on membership in EMU in . The outcome of the Danish referendum in , however, is likely to cast a long shadow on the referendum campaign in Sweden. Public opinion polls indicate a majority of Swedes are similarly opposed to economic and monetary union. Other member states have conducted referendums on the EU as well. On successive occasions, sizable majorities of Irish voters have approved membership in the Community (), the Treaty on European Union (), and the Treaty of Amsterdam (). Two referendums have been conducted in France: the first endorsing EEC enlargement in , the second narrowly approving the Treaty on European Union in . One national referendum on the EU has been held in Austria and the United Kingdom. In the former case, . percent of voters approved accession to the EU in ; in the latter,  percent favored continued membership in the EEC in . British Prime Minister Tony Blair has promised to schedule a referendum on whether the United Kingdom should join EMU. Given the intensity of anti-EMU sentiment among a majority of British voters, the campaign will undoubtedly prove contentious. The linkage between public opinion and election outcomes and the European Union is thus meaningful, if sometimes fitful and disruptive. Recurrent voter skepticism toward the integration process reflects both citizen malaise concerning the EU’s “democratic deficit” and widespread concerns that further harmonization of fiscal and social policies on a European level constitutes a potential threat to domestic political systems. Specifically, most Brits seem loath to cede further slices of national sovereignty to central deci-

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European Parliamentary Election, June  (number of deputies by party group) European People’s Party/European Democrats (PPE-DE)

 

European Socialists (PES) European Liberal Democrat and Reform Party (ELDR)

 

Greens/European Free Alliance



European United Left/Nordic Green Left 

Europe of Nations Group 

Independents



Europe of Democracies and Diversities Non-affiliated



Note: See notes to table . (p. ) for details of the membership of these groups.

sion-making institutions on the Continent, just as many Danes and Swedes are reluctant to relinquish distinctive features of their well-established welfare states. Influential Individuals Alongside collective actors such as governments, EU institutions, private interest groups, and voters, key individuals also wield significant influence in Community affairs. Foremost among them were the “founding fathers” of the integration process: Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman of France, Konrad Adenauer of Germany, Paul-Henri Spaak of Belgium, and Alcide De Gasperi of Italy. Together, these statesmen forged an unprecedented degree of European elite unity that was a necessary condition for launching the ECSC and EEC in the s. In contrast to their more nationalist predecessors in executive office, they shared a commitment to international cooperation rooted in their individual origins as “borderland” Europeans and shared humanistic religious values.13 Willy Brandt, chancellor of West Germany from  to , similarly proved an effective architect of both deeper and wider European union based in his wartime exile submersion in the internationalist traditions of Norwegian and Swedish Social Democracy. Activist presidents of the European Commission have also played a conspicuous role in advancing the European idea. Among them were Walter Hallstein of Germany, who served as the first president of the Commission from  to ; Roy Jenkins of the United Kingdom (–), and especially Jacques Delors of France, president from  to . Hallstein helped institutionalize the fledgling EEC, Jenkins skillfully managed the Community’s second round of enlargement and the introduction of the European

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Monetary System, and Delors was a principal author of both the Single European Act and economic and monetary union. Romano Prodi assumed the Commission presidency in September  intent on following in Delors’s footsteps. His would-be activism, however, has been curtailed by a more assertive European Council vis-à-vis the Commission as a whole. Prodi’s eclipse thus suggests that the autonomous authority of Commission presidents is subject to the assent of national government officials comprising the Council. Notes . As previously indicated, the appointment of members of the European Commission is subject to the approval of the European Parliament. . See, in particular, Haig Simonian, The Privileged Partnership. Franco-German Relations in the European Community – (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). . “French Leader, in Berlin, Urges a Fast Track to Unity in Europe,” New York Times,  June . . Article  of the Treaty on European Union. . “The Franco-German Axis Creaks,” The Economist,  November . . Article  (ex Article J.) of EC Treaty. These provisions apply to abstentions only by one or at most a small number of EU members. If abstentions constitute a third or more of a Council vote, “the decision shall not be adopted.” . Jerel Rosati, “Developing a Systematic Decision-Making Framework: Bureaucratic Politics in Perspective,” World Politics  (): –. . A third social partner is the European Center of Public Enterprises (CEEP), which represents civil servants. . Maria Green Cowles, “Setting the Agenda for a New Europe: The European Round Table of Industrialists and EC ,” Journal of Common Market Studies  (December ): –. . Encyclopedia of the European Union, . . Desmond Dinan, Ever Closer Union? An Introduction to European Integration, d ed. (Boulder, Colo., and London: Lynne Rienner, ), . . They did so by a margin of . percent to . percent. In a fifth referendum on the EU in May , . percent of the Danes endorsed the Treaty of Amsterdam. . Monnet was active before World War I in international business in Canada and served as an international economic adviser in China and Romania during the interwar years. Schuman was born in Luxembourg, grew up in France, and studied at German universities in Bonn, Munich, and Berlin. Adenauer was a native of the Rhineland in western Germany, physically closer and personally more sympathetic to neighboring France, Luxembourg, and Belgium than to “Prussian” Berlin to the east. Similar to Brandt’s experience, Spaak learned to think in global terms while in wartime exile in London. De Gasperi had served as a deputy in the Austrian parliament before becoming an Italian citizen in . All were Roman Catholics.

Chapter 34

How Is Power Used? AS THE PRECEDING ASSESSMENT of political actors indicates, the European Union

is characterized by distinctive features of decision making and implementation. One is the dichotomy between national interests and supranational interests and the dynamic interplay among individuals and institutions representing these often divergent interests. A second distinctive feature is the importance of bureaucratic decision making within the EU. Even if the European Union is not wholly dominated by permanent bureaucrats in the Commission, it is certainly heavily influenced by them and their interactions with the bureaucrats of member states. Finally, a problem of “democratic deficit” persists within the European Union. Despite direct elections to the European Parliament, the EU still lacks a strong direct relationship with its citizens and has a considerable distance to go before it will resemble a conventional parliamentary democracy. The comparison between West European parliamentary democracies and EU institutions should not be extended too far. For example, public revenue and expenditure issues— while important for the EU—are not as central as they are for most national governments. The major impact of the European Union on its constituent nations is increasingly felt through law and regulation rather than through spending programs. Reliance on regulatory instruments as mechanisms for integration may be a wise choice. It is a characteristic of regulative instruments that they tend to mask the effects of policies and to make winners and losers less visible than expenditure programs commonly do. This characteristic of regulatory policy may minimize (although not eliminate) national, regional, and class conflicts over EU policy. The choice of this policy instrument, however, also enhances the relative powers of the Commission and the bureaucracy. Executive Accountability The European Union has an executive and a parliament. What it still lacks is a clear, democratic means of linking the one with the other comparable to parliamentary systems in the member countries. The members of the Council of the European Union are accountable to their national governments and will remain thereby constrained in the foreseeable future. Therefore, it remains for the Commission to be held accountable to the European Parliament. As currently constituted, the Commission is a responsible body but not an accountable or responsive institution in the usual meanings of these terms. The commissioners are responsible—primarily to their own consciences—for acting in a European manner and for defending the various treaties undergirding the EU. This does not yet

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constitute a conventional democratic government, and there are few means available for directly enforcing responsibility or accountability on the members of the Commission or even the bureaucrats employed by the Commission. One check available to the European Parliament is to dismiss the entire Commission through a vote of no confidence. Although this has not yet occurred, the European Parliament came close when  percent of its members supported a vote of censure against the Santer Commission in January  on charges of corruption. After a group of independent experts reported that some of its members had indeed misspent funds, the Commission resigned en masse in March. The Commission continued to serve on an interim basis until the Council appointed Romano Prodi as Santer’s successor at a summit later that month in Berlin. The Treaty on European Union introduced a second check on the Commission by requiring parliamentary approval of all the commissioners after their nomination by the Council but before they can formally assume office. The European Parliament has exercised this authority twice, after conducting extensive committee hearings on the various nominees on both occasions: approving the Santer Commission by a vote of – (with  abstentions) in January  and the Prodi Commission by a vote of – (with  abstentions) in May . Thus far, the established system of responsible government has worked. The commissioners have been deeply committed to the European Union and its goals, and most of them have played their roles responsibly. Indeed, most members and especially the presidents of the Commission have promoted supranational values and have been driving forces in developing greater Union powers over policy. Still there is a need, if the EU is to become a genuine political entity, for better articulated mechanisms of popular and political accountability on the part of the Commission. Until the European Parliament achieves greater direct control over the commissioners, the EU must depend on the goodwill and competence of national governments to send the correct people to Brussels. The national governments have thus far acted very responsibly, but few political systems can afford to rely on the goodwill of others too long and survive. Some changes have made EU institutions more closely approximate the governments of European nations. One important move is that budgetary accountability to the European Parliament has now been institutionalized, and the Parliament has twice rejected budgets submitted by the Commission. Historically, the power of the purse has been the central lever for legislative acquisition of power, and it appears that the development of legislative-executive relationships in the EU will be little different. In addition, a “question hour” has been institutionalized in Parliament, with members of the Commission required to attend when issues under their purview within the various DGs are discussed. Likewise, members of the Commission increasingly are expected to attend committee meetings in the European Parliament and may have to respond to questions advanced there. What is missing in these existing processes is a clear conception of cabinet government and ministerial responsibility. First, if the president of the Commission is to become the analogue of a prime minister, he or she should be able to select the other members of the “cabinet.” At present, however, all commissioners are appointed by the

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member states with the approval of the European Parliament. The Dooge Commission, which submitted a comprehensive report on the functioning of Union institutions in , suggested that the president should be empowered to select the other commissioners, subject to review by the national governments.1 This suggestion was incorporated in the Treaty on European Union, which stipulates that the “Governments of the Member States shall, in consultation with the nominee for President, nominate the other persons whom they intend to appoint as members of the Commission.”2 A persisting problem, which the Maastricht treaty does not address, concerns the inability of either the president or Parliament to dismiss individual commissions once they are appointed. The president and the Council have the power to assign portfolios and can bury a less competent or cooperative commissioner in a minor position, but such an individual remains a commissioner until his or her normal replacement, voluntary retirement, or “compulsory retirement” by a member government. If the European Parliament were to achieve more complete control over the Commission as the equivalent of its own government, it would have to be able to dismiss individual commissioners, rather than resort to the draconian treaty provision for dismissing the Commission as a whole. Given the delicate balance that exists between national interests and the role of the Commission, this would be a difficult reform for many governments to accept. Such a change, however, is almost inevitable if governance as understood in European democracies is to be fully achieved within the EU. Policymaking Policymaking in the European Union involves processes by which EU institutions decide which proposals to accept as authoritative and therefore which proposed laws they should attempt to implement. A decision at the community level, more than at a national level, involves strategic choices in addition to the usual questions concerning the desirability and feasibility of a given policy. Leaders of EU institutions must decide not only what they want to do substantively but also how fast and how far they can push member governments and citizens of member countries. Some dedicated Europeanists are willing to push very hard and very far, but they risk creating manifest opposition to economic and political union and the European Union more generally. If the EU and its integration can be compared to a “bicycle” that remains upright only so long as it is going forward, then creating manifest (and needless) opposition is dangerous.3 Feasibility is used too facilely as a constraint on policymaking at the national level, but it becomes a crucial consideration at this level.4 The regulatory issues central to the Union generate sufficient controversy, but in general not as much as fiscal issues, in which the winners and losers are more visible. In accordance with the initial formulation of decision making in the Treaty of Rome, the Commission prepared draft legislation and the Council of Ministers made the principal decisions. For a few issues, the Commission could issue laws and engage in quasilegislative activities; this was closely analogous to secondary legislation by national bureaucracies. In this arrangement, the European Parliament was largely excluded. It might debate the merits of legislation, but it had little impact on final decisions. The Single Europe Act changed the relative powers of institutions by introducing a “cooperation proce-

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dure,” the second reading described above, which accords Parliament powers of co-decision with the Council over a substantial range of policy issues. In addition to the formal changes brought about through this procedure, there is now substantially more consultation and indirect contact between the Parliament and the other institutions.5 With these changes in the decision-making process, the European Parliament became for the first time a significant legislative body. This is important for reasons other than simply constituting an increase in the relative institutional power of the European Parliament. The most important secondary feature of enhanced powers for the Parliament is that, like the Commission, it appears to have a more European perspective than does the Council of the European Union. This perspective is demonstrated in the workings of unofficial components of the Parliament as well as the official support of the Parliament for federalist solutions to European political relations such as those contained in the Treaty on European Union, which (as previously noted) accords Parliament even greater authority in joint decision making with the Council. As Parliament assumes an enhanced role in European legislation in years ahead, it appears that the rider on the bicycle may have to pedal very fast to keep up with the changes in the political system. In fairness, it would be easy to exaggerate the importance of the “cooperation” and “co-decision” procedures established by the Single European Act and the Treaty on European Union. The ultimate powers of decision making remain in the Council as long as it can achieve unanimity. The Parliament has to date rejected outright several “common positions” from the Council. For one on occupational health, there was no chance of unanimity, and a compromise emerged. On others, the Council achieved unanimity.6 This pattern of rulemaking makes the interactions between these institutions somewhat analogous to the separation of powers in the United States, except that the executive has the right to overturn the veto and therefore to make the final decision, rather than vice versa. Further, the unanimity rule is a much tougher standard—even if the Council has worked with such a rule when not technically required—than is the two-thirds requirement for Congress to overturn a presidential veto. As important as the Council and parliamentary levels of decision making are for the EU, the impetus for most European rulemaking occurs at a lower level. The impetus typically comes from the Commission and its component units. In addition to broad legislative statements, rulemaking in the European Union comes in three forms. The simplest—and most compelling—rules are called regulations, which must be put into effect automatically by national governments. Such rules are directly binding on national governments and other actors (including corporations and individuals) and pass into national law without additional action. Regulations may be made by a simplified written procedure rather than by the more complex oral procedure required for most rulemaking. A second level of rules made through this process is directives. The goals expressed in a directive are also binding, but the actual content remains open to some variation and interpretation by the member nations. Unlike regulations, national governments can decide how they put a directive into effect, and this gives them the opportunity for delay, bargaining with the Commission, and bargaining with interests within their own borders. To become effective, directives must be incorporated in some manner into national law.

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As a result, directives provide substantial latitude to national governments to impose their own priorities. Finally, the Union also issues decisions, which are very specific and apply only to the individuals or governments to which they are addressed. They are, however, binding on the target of the action. Although the Council has preponderant authority in making EU decisions, the Commission is not without some direct and indirect powers of its own. For administrative matters, it can make binding declarations and issues several thousand rules of its own each year. As the experience with secondary legislation at the national level indicates, administrative discretion can include a wide variety of issues with significant policy consequences. At least twice, for example, the Commission has had to decide on the amount of price supports in the common agricultural program because the Council was deadlocked.7 In addition, the Commission decides what cases should be submitted to the European Court of Justice and can, in essence, use the Court (if successful) to make rules on its own behalf. Finally, simply by announcing its opinion on an issue, the Commission (and especially its president) has been able at times to gain compliance without resort to formal rulemaking. Some of that power may be a function of the personal influence of the Commission president rather than a function of his office, but in the short run the Commission does have this kind of informal influence. The Role of Implementation A realistic assessment of rulemaking in the European Union must necessarily take into account the substantial powers exercised by national bureaucracies in the implementation of EU regulations, directives, and decisions. What does it mean, for example, that a government must “automatically” enforce the regulations made by the Commission and Council? Numerous studies of national policymaking indicate that a purely legalistic conception of the performance of administrative systems in implementation is at best self-delusory on the part of politicians.8 In fact, a great deal of interpretation and even redefinition of policy occurs during implementation. Unless that influence of administration on policy intentions is understood adequately, analysts risk making errors in assigning responsibility for policy failures or even policy successes.9 Implementation in the European Union is no less subject to the impact of implementing agents. The process within the EU is analogous to implementation of policies in a federal regime such as Germany, in which policies are made centrally and implemented by subnational governments. Thus, even if policy emanates from Brussels, the national governments are by no means impotent.10 They have the opportunity to bargain over policy and its meaning with their counterparts in Brussels and can then attempt to interpret policy in their own terms. The existing evidence on implementation of EU directives and regulations is that there is still substantial room for national action and that such actions can substantially alter the meaning of regulations in practice.11 These findings further reinforce multilevel “interlocking” interpretations of the EU, with winning and losing the game being defined differently at different levels and at different stages of the rulemaking process. Losing at the policymaking stage in Brussels may

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not be so important if there is a second round at the implementation stage, at which time the national government, through its bureaucracy, has an opportunity to determine what will actually happen in the policy area in that country. The Budgetary Process The budgetary process is a crucial process in any political system, even one emphasizing primarily laws and regulations. The question of who gets what remains a central political issue, and the budgetary process is where that question is answered most explicitly. The obverse question of who pays what is equally important, especially when it has nationallevel as well as individual-level answers. For example, countries that have efficient agricultural sectors (the United Kingdom, for one) have expressed reservations about subsidizing less efficient agriculture elsewhere. We need to understand, therefore, where the money to run the European Union comes from, where it goes, and who makes the decisions about these flows of funds. The adequacy of the funding arrangements for any movement toward greater integration, especially greater political integration, should also be understood as a way of understanding the likelihood of greater integration. The Revenue Process Where does the money come from? Compared to most international organizations, the European Union is in an extremely advantageous position in raising money. It has four designated revenue sources, three of which it can claim as its own (see table .). Therefore, the EU generally does not have to beg member countries for funds. In contrast to the United Nations, the EU is reasonably sure of receiving its rightful revenues. On the other hand, the revenues the European Union does receive are still conceptualized somewhat in national terms—who is “contributing” how much. As a result, arguments about fiscal equity and fairness revolve more around national considerations than around socioeconomic class, progressivity, or even the horizontal neutrality of the revenue structure. The EU does not have a mechanism for taxing citizens directly; the tax revenues it enjoys are indirectly collected for it by national governments. Consequently, the national governments continue to play an obvious and significant role in the revenue process.12 The EU’s first two revenue sources are comparable to national government taxes on goods and services. One is a common levy on industrial imports from outside the EU. This is derived from virtually the same revenue process as national governments’ tariff collections on imports except that national customs agents hand the money directly over to the EU. The other is a common levy applied to all relevant agricultural products imported from outside the Union, which is collected in much the same way as the common industrial tariff. The EU’s third source of revenue is tied to the nationally assessed value-added tax (VAT), which is an excise or sales tax paid by consumers at the time of purchase on incremental increases in the value of goods during their production. The EU is entitled to . percent of the base used for calculating the VAT in each country. The member states are largely free to make their own regulations establishing that base and to extract their VAT in their own manner; hence, the tax rates vary from country to country, although harmo-

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Table 34.1 European Union Budget: Sources of Revenue, 1999–2000 (in millions of euros) 



Type of revenue

Amount

%

Amount

Customs duties Agricultural duties (including sugar and isoglucose levies) Own resources collection costs VAT own resources GNP-based own resources Balance of VAT and GNP own resources from previous years Budget balance from previous year Other revenue

13,016.8

15.3

12,300.0

14.0

2,390.9
1,540.8 31,212.2 37,010.7

2.8

2.6

36.8 43.6

2,264.9
1,456.5 32,544.6 43,0580.8

447.5 3,022.2 877.6

.5 3.6 .1

674.1

Total

86,437.1

%

37.0 48.96

.8

89,387.9

Source: European Commission, General Report on the Activities of the European Union  (Brussels-Luxembourg, 2000), 358.

nization in this area has begun. Thus, the revenue to the EU is not a flat . percent of national VAT but rather . percent of the arithmetic base that each country uses to calculate the national VAT obligations of businesses and services. The European Union’s fourth revenue source, recently added and still controversial, grew out of a Community financial crisis during the mid-s that was resolved in the form of the “Brussels agreements” of . The Brussels agreements established a negotiated level of resource availability for the European Community based on a percentage of the combined gross national products (GNP) of the member countries.13 If revenues from the three sources just described do not provide sufficient resources to meet this GNP ceiling in a given year, then special levies can be imposed on the member countries. In , for example, a deficit of . billion ECUs was covered by a levy of approximately one-tenth of one percent of each member’s GNP. European Council members agreed in  to increase the levy in incremental steps from . percent of GNP to . percent by . This fourth source of revenue has strengthened the financial basis of the Union, but it also raises doubts about the EU’s financial future. The new source of funds permits resources to keep up with expenditure demands. Furthermore, the agreement acknowledges that the European Union must have sufficient money to implement its programs and that, to some extent, expenditure commitments will determine the size of the annual EU budget. Moreover, this source of additional funds is flexible and can be used to meet the financial needs of the Union without regard to revenues generated by the volume of international trade or other uncontrollable economic aggregates. On the other hand, this additional source of revenue represents a departure from the principle of EU fiscal independence and places the European Union more at the mercy of the member countries.14 This move toward potentially greater dependence occurred at precisely the same time that the

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European Community was seeking a more independent role through the adoption of the Single Europe Act. Revenue policy in the EU is an administratively driven and virtually automatic process even more than are equivalent processes within single countries. Two of the four revenue sources function automatically and depend more on trade and implementation by national tax collectors than on decisions made in Brussels. The third source of revenue (the percentage of the VAT base) is also beyond the control of EU policymakers as it depends upon the tax systems of the member countries. Admittedly, national representatives must decide through meetings of the European Council or the Council of Ministers what the EU percentage of the national tax base will be; but once those decisions are made, the process becomes automatic and wholly dependent on economic activity. Likewise, after the initial agreement on the fourth source of revenue (including the provision that it could be levied on national governments), the process itself appears largely statistical; the real decisions concerning whether member states will use their financial obligations to the EU to exert leverage over the Union devolve onto the national governments. Although the collection and remittance of the EU’s revenues from these four sources are nearly automatic, government officials are fully aware of the magnitude and costs of their countries’ contributions to the Union. Hence, revenue questions remain important issues, both for the European Union and the member states. Expenditures The EU budgetary process is now largely driven by expenditure commitments. The budgetary agreements of the s established a ceiling, linked to the total GNP of the member states, above which expenditures should not rise; beneath that ceiling, expenditure commitments determine how much money will pass through the budget.15 The European Union now spends money for a wide variety of purposes. The EU’s expenditures, unlike those of other international organizations, often have a direct impact on citizens of the member countries. Expenditures on the common agricultural policy (CAP) accounted for . percent of the  budget (down from  percent at the beginning of the s). In descending order, other key expenditures include funds for regional economic development (structural operations); internal policies (research and technological development, transport, education, culture, employment, industry, environment, energy, the internal market, the labor market, the harmonization of social policies, and transEuropean networks); external affairs (such as aid to countries in the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Africa); and preaccession assistance to countries in Central and Eastern Europe (see table .). Like that of national governments, a great deal of EU spending is mandatory and largely uncontrollable. Agricultural expenditures are obligatory under the Treaty of Rome and the agreements arising out of it, so any Union budget will contain forecasts of expenditures in this area rather than imposing ceilings on the amount that can legally be spent. In , the Council issued a decree that the rate of increase on agricultural spending should not exceed the rate of increase in its own source revenues. That was an admirable guideline, but in practice it is useful primarily for determining how much excess spending

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Table 34.2 European Union Expenditures, 2000 (in millions of euros) Type of expenditure

Amount

Percentage

Agriculture Structural operations Internal policies External policies Administration Reserves Preaccession aid to applicant nations Total

40,993.9 32,678.0 6,027.1 4,805.1 4,703.7 906.0 3,166.7 88,473.3

46.3 36.9 6.8 5.4 5.3 1.0 3.6 105.3

Source: European Commission, General Report on the Activities of the European Union  (Brussels-Luxembourg, 2000), 344–47. Note: Percentage column does not sum to 100 due to rounding.

has occurred. Subsequent changes in agricultural policies, such as a reduction in levels of support for cereals after  million tons of production, have introduced some degree of control over agricultural expenditures. Recent Commission decisions have further tended to reduce agricultural expenditures. Agriculture is forecast to be a declining component of EU expenditures in future years, and even greater overall budgetary control may be obtainable. Although there is a substantial uncontrollable element of expenditures determined by the treaty and other agreements, the process for determining EU expenditures is broadly similar to revenue processes on the national level. The European Parliament has a greater role in expenditures than it does with respect to revenues and can, as it did in both  and , reject the budget presented by the Commission. Moreover, the Parliament can affect the amount and purpose of expenditures that do not result directly from treaty provisions (which are called “noncompulsory expenditures”). Perhaps most important is the dual fact that the overall level of expenditures has not kept pace with ceilings established in the Brussels agreements and that, unlike most legislatures in national democratic systems, the European Parliament has some flexibility with which it can agree to finance policy initiatives. Such decisions will not occur without politics, however, as the poorer members states (notably Spain, Portugal, and Greece) press for full use of the GNP ceilings to fund development programs for themselves. In contrast, the more affluent countries urge financial restraint and advocate the expansion of high-tech research and development projects that are likely to benefit their own citizens. Furthermore, the increased need to finance economic development in Central and Eastern Europe in the aftermath of communism’s demise has placed substantial additional strains on the Union budget. Assessment The budget has been one means through which central governments in newly formed federations have expanded their influence and power over their component units. The evidence to date about the success of European institutions in using the budget for similar

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Contributions of Own Resources by EU Member States as a Percentage of the  Budget .

Belgium .

Denmark

.

Germany .

Greece

.

Spain

.

France .

Ireland

.

Italy Luxembourg

. .

Netherlands .

Austria Portugal

.

Finland

.

Sweden United Kingdom

. .

Source: Official Journal of the European Communities, Court of Auditors—Annual Report Concerning the Financial Year , “Estimated and Actual Resources in , by Member State,” vol.  ( December ): , table .. Available at www.eca.eu.int/EN/reports_opinions.htm.

purposes is mixed. On the one hand, the European budget remains a relatively small component: approximately  percent of total public expenditures in the fifteen member nations. Even with GNP ceilings to provide greater latitude for European spending, the EU operates with greater budget constraint than does any of its members. If for no other reason, the EU is forbidden by Article  (ex ) of the Treaty of Rome from running a deficit.16 Finally, most Community spending has been on a single program—agriculture—and that program has become highly controversial in some of the member countries as well as for many individual Europeans. Thus, the EU has gained somewhat less public support (with the major exception of farmers and agricultural interest groups) through public expenditures than its adherents might have hoped. On the other hand, the budgetary base of the European Union has expanded. The GNP ceiling has provided substantial latitude for decision makers to utilize expanded revenues to undertake new policy initiatives. In addition, the European Parliament is becoming a more central actor in setting expenditure priorities and promoting nonmandatory expenditure programs such as research and development, regional development, and

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aid to Central and Eastern Europe. Now that these programs are in place, it will be difficult for the European Union to withdraw from such activities, and public expenditures are therefore likely to increase. Furthermore, some of the most effective instruments for integration are regulatory in nature and may not require great financial resources to implement. The Union’s institutions now have a stronger financial base and a stronger budgetary process and thus appear to have the capacity to achieve continued increases in supranational policymaking activity. Common Foreign and Security Policy In addition to their primary preoccupation with domestic economic and social issues, European Union leaders have also begun the arduous process of establishing a common foreign and security policy. This has become a compelling necessity as the EU increasingly emerges as a political entity in international politics. The quest for consensus among its members on foreign policy and regional security represents a more difficult challenge than even the thorniest economic and institutional issues in that foreign policy has traditionally been the reserve of national governments. European politicians and EU officials are fully cognizant of the European Union’s dependence on the international economy, which underscores the necessity to link economic and foreign policy concerns. Moreover, the dramatic political and economic changes in Central and Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War, and wars in the Balkans have accelerated the movement toward a common foreign policy. The reactions of the EU and its leaders to these extraordinary events have brought the European Union closer to a common policy toward foreign events, including such matters as economic assistance to the postcommunist countries in Central and Eastern Europe and peacekeeping efforts in Southeastern Europe. Nonetheless, the special problems of forming a common foreign policy within the EU should be understood separately from other policy areas. The member governments established a preliminary framework for forming a common foreign policy when they launched a consultative procedure known as European Political Cooperation (EPC) in  and agreed to convene regular meetings of the European Council, beginning in . This framework for foreign policy consultations was partially institutionalized in the form of a Political Committee, which served common administrative purposes, and a Group of Correspondents in the member countries, which monitored EPC activities. The linkage between the European Community and EPC was deepened when the European Council adopted the “Solemn Declaration on European Union” in Stuttgart in June , which bound the member states to “intensified consultations with a view to permitting timely joint action on all major foreign policies.”17 The relationship between the Community and EPC became more formalized through the Single Europe Act, with its requirements for consultation and policy consistency between the two organizations. Economic globalization and increased international political fluidity in the wake of the collapse of communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe intensified pressures for greater economic and foreign policy coordination among EU members. The need for the European Union to serve as a unitary actor in international affairs will be true regard-

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Disbursements Made in Each EU Member State as a Percentage of the  Budget .

Belgium

.

Denmark

.

Germany .

Greece

.

Spain

.

France .

Ireland

.

Italy Luxembourg

. .

Netherlands Austria

. .

Portugal Finland Sweden United Kingdom

. . .

Source: Official Journal of the European Communities, Court of Auditors—Annual Report Concerning the Financial Year , “Payments Made in , in Each Member State,” vol.  ( December ): , diagram VI. Available at www.eca.eu.int/EN/reports_opinions.htm.

less of whether its partners in economic and political negotiations are nation-states such as the United States and Japan or regional blocs such as EFTA. Forging closer economic ties with European nations that are not currently members of the Union has substantial political implications in addition to the economic ones over which the EU already has competence. Indeed, the European Council and commissioners have already targeted the eventual admission of a number of Central European states—including Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, the Baltic republics, and the Slovak Republic—as one of the Union’s principal goals during the first decade of the twenty-first century. In short, the attainment of a single European market and the attainment of economic and monetary union among a majority of the EU’s members are necessarily matched by continuing efforts to forge a common European foreign policy. Tentative steps in that direction began with an attempt by Community members to negotiate a peaceful settlement to the Gulf crisis in January  and gathered momentum later in the year when the Community’s foreign ministers sought with mixed results to mediate a cease-fire among warring nationalist factions in the Yugoslav Civil War. The Treaty on European Union created a comprehensive legal basis for a common

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foreign and security policy. Affirming a collective commitment to safeguarding “the common values, fundamental interests and independence of the European Union” and strengthening “the security of the Union and its Member States in all ways,” the member countries agreed to establish joint cooperative procedures for “gradually implementing . . . joint action in the areas in which the Member States have interests in common.” They pledged that a joint Council (made up of the foreign ministers) shall define a common position on foreign and security policy “whenever it deems it necessary” and that “Member States shall ensure that their national policies conform to the common position.” The European Council will be responsible for defining general guidelines for determining whether “a matter should be of joint action.”18 Detailed decisions concerning policy implementation are to be made by qualified majority voting. Provisions governing a common foreign and security policy (CFSP) were elaborated in the Treaty of Amsterdam, in which the member states affirmed their resolve “to make . . . (CFSP) more effective and to equip the Union better for its role in international politics. This reform seems particularly urgent after the disintegration of former Yugoslavia. The tragic course of events there made it clear that the Union needed to be able to act to avert disaster and not merely react after the event. The Yugoslav crisis also threw into relief the weakness of uncoordinated Member State reactions.”19 Article  of the Amsterdam treaty spells out the following objectives of CFSP: • to safeguard the common values, fundamental interests, independence and integrity of the Union in conformity with the principles of the United Nations Charter; • to strengthen the security of the Union in all ways; • to preserve peace and strengthen international security, in accordance with the principles of the United Nations Charter, as well as the principles of the Helsinki Final Act and the objectives of the Paris Charter, including those on external borders; • to promote international cooperation; • to develop and consolidate democracy and the rule of law, and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. The Treaty of Amsterdam empowers the European Council to “define the principles of and general guidelines for the common foreign and security policy, including for matters with defence implications.”20 These include decisions on common strategies, joint actions, common positions, and steps to strengthen “systematic cooperation between Member States in the conduct of policy.”21 Specific functions of a future EU military force will include peacekeeping, crisis management, humanitarian, and rescue operations. The rotating presidency of the Union is assigned formal authority to represent the Union in all matters pertaining to CFSP and “shall be responsible for the implementation of decisions taken under this Title; in that capacity it shall in principle express the position of the Union in international organisations and international conferences.” To assist the presidency and the Council in these important tasks, the Treaty of Amsterdam authorized the

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transformation of the secretary-general of the Council into the office of High Representative for the common foreign and security policy.22 Members of the European Council appointed Javier Solana Madariaga, a Spaniard who had served until then as secretary-general of NATO, as the EU’s first High Representative at a summit meeting in Cologne in June . The formation and implementation of a common foreign and security policy are subject to complex rules codified in the Treaty of Amsterdam. Article  of the treaty authorizes the Council to adopt “joint actions” that “address specific situations where operational action by the Union is deemed to be required. [Joint actions] shall lay down their objectives, scope, the means to be made available to the Union, if necessary their duration, and the conditions for their implementation.” The same article affirms that member states are committed to support joint actions “in the positions they adopt and in the conduct of their activity.” In addition, article  empowers the Council to adopt “common positions” on foreign policy issues of a nonoperational nature. Such positions will constitute a joint approach “to a particular matter of a geographical or thematic nature. Member States shall ensure that their national policies conform to the common positions.” Different rules govern operational and nonoperational policies. Council decisions on military and defense issues are subject to the unanimity principle, although Article  of the Treaty of Amsterdam qualifies this requirement as follows: “Abstentions by members present in person or represented shall not prevent the adoption of such decisions.” In the case of an abstention, a member state “shall not be obliged to apply the decision, but shall accept that the decision commits the Union. In a spirit of mutual solidarity, the Member State concerned shall refrain from any action likely to conflict with or impede Union action based on that decision.”23 If more than a third of the member states abstain, however, no decision is reached. Nonmilitary decisions concerning joint actions and common positions, in contrast, are based on qualified majority voting in the Council. The adoption of such measures requires at least sixty-two affirmative votes cast by a minimum of ten member states. Member states retain the right of an implicit veto in such decisions, however. If one of them declares it intends to oppose a decision “for important and stated reasons of national policy,” no vote is taken. Instead, the Council “may, acting by a qualified majority, request that the matter be referred to the European Council for decision by unanimity.”24 Successive Council agreements and new treaty provisions have affirmed the autonomous capacity of the Union to undertake joint measures in security and defense. Tony Blair acted in  to resolve an earlier dispute among member states about whether military aspects of CFSP should be subordinated to NATO or the Western European Union (WEU) by advocating the institutional integration of WEU and the EU.25 The European Council affirmed the merger of both organizations at a summit in Berlin in March , declaring that EU armed forces would be subordinate to the WEU in peacetime but to NATO in the event of war. The Treaty of Nice subsequently provided an institutional basis for future military action by authorizing the creation of a political and security committee, a military committee, and a military staff within the EU to address

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potential European crises in close consultation with NATO. As France declared at the conclusion of the Nice summit in December : “Consultations and cooperation between the two organizations will be developed in matters of security, defence and crisis management of common interest in order to make possible the most appropriate military response to a given crisis and ensure effective crisis management, while fully respecting the decision-making autonomy of NATO and the EU.”26 The military ambition of the EU is to deploy, by mid-decade, a force of , soldiers to deal with situations comparable to the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia during the late s. Notes . Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Institutional Affairs (the Dooge Report) (Brussels: The European Commission, ). . Article  (ex ), Treaty on Political Union, . Italics added for emphasis. . Michael Emerson, “ and After: The Bicycle Theory Rides Again,” Political Quarterly  (): –. . Giandomenico Majone, “The Feasibility of Social Policy,” Policy Sciences  (): –. . John Fitzmaurice, “An Analysis of the European Community’s Co-operation Procedures,” Journal of Common Market Studies  (): –. . Richard Corbett, “Testing the New Procedures: The European Parliament’s First Experiences with Its New ‘Single Act’ Powers,” Journal of Common Market Studies  (June ): . . Alan Swinbank, “The Common Agricultural Policy and the Politics of European Decision Making,” Journal of Common Market Studies  (): –. . The classic study is Jeffrey L. Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky, Implementation (Berkeley: University of California Press, ). . For discussions of these contrasting outcomes, see William S. Pierce, Bureaucratic Failures (New York: Humanities Press, ); Nelson Polsby, Political Innovation in America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ); and John Schwartz, America’s Hidden Policy Successes (New York: Norton, ). . Warner Feld and John Wildgen, “National Administrative Elites and European Integration: Saboteurs at Work?” Journal of Common Market Studies  (): –. . Heinrich Siedentopf and Jacques Ziller, Making European Policies Work: The Implementation of Community Legislation in the Community States (London: Sage, ). . Citizens are not totally unaware that some portion of their taxes helps fund the European Community, but the process remains less visible than direct EU taxation would be. . The percentage of GNP available to the EC was to increase gradually from . percent in  to . percent in . The original Commission target had been . percent. . When, however, member countries have withheld revenues collected for the EC (as Britain did in ), the European Court has ruled that they were, in essence, ultra vires and required them to pay interest. . Michael Shackleton, The Budget of the European Community (London: Pinter, ). . There are, however, a variety of borrowing arrangements financed by the Community, although these activities are “off-budget” and are not figured as a part of the official Community budget. . Federal Republic of Germany, European Political Co-operation (EPC), th ed. (Bonn: Press and Information Office, ), –. . Articles , ,  (ex J., J., J.), “Provisions on a Common Foreign and Security Policy,” Treaty on European Union, –. . EUROPA Home Page, “The Amsterdam Treaty: A Comprehensive Guide” (http://europa.eu.int/). . Treaty of Amsterdam, Article . Italics added for emphasis. . Treaty of Amsterdam, Article . . Treaty of Amsterdam, Article . . These provisions are another instance of “constructive abstention” discussed in the preceding chapter. . Treaty of Amsterdam, Article . . The Western European Union (WEU) was founded in  as successor military alliance to the Brussels Treaty Organization, established in . WEU serves as an institutional voice for European views on re-

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gional security and coordinates EU defense policy. It currently has ten full members (Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom); six associate members (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Iceland, Norway, Poland, and Turkey); and seven associate partners (Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia). Denmark and the four neutral members of the EU (Austria, Finland, Ireland, and Sweden) have observer status within the organization. . “Presidency Report on the European Security and Defence Policy,” Press Release, Brussels ( December , nr. //).

Chapter 35

What Is the Future of EU Politics? AS THE ASSESSMENT of European institutions and political processes in preceding chapters suggests, institutional analysis constitutes a useful means to explain changes that have already occurred within the European Union and to anticipate future changes. Although much of the day-to-day attainment of a single market might be explained through functional and neofunctionalist logic,1 the major transformations of the EU have taken place as a result of political acts. Some of these have been individual acts of leadership, such as political initiatives by former Commission Presidents Roy Jenkins and Jacques Delors in relation to monetary and fiscal policy and advocating the Single Europe Act and specific target dates for completing the internal market and attaining the third stage of EMU. Individual actions, however, must be translated into an institutional framework if they are to persist and produce the intended policy outcomes. These outcomes can be explained and interpreted in different ways, each of which provides particular utility for understanding highly complex problems of analysis. A useful approach is an explanation that draws on both the “new institutionalism” advanced by some political scientists and the old bureaucratic politics characteristic of the “real world” of politics.2 An institutional analysis of the European Union must, first of all, take into account multiple interconnected “games” being played simultaneously within the EU. The idea of a two-stage game or decision-making process, in which actors first negotiate “the best possible terms for agreeing to pursue another’s preferences” and then “execute the contracts,” is much too simplistic to capture the complexity of motives and interactions occurring within the EU.3 Instead, one game is the national game, in which individual nations attempt to extract as much from the European Union as possible while relinquishing as little as possible. Phrased differently, this is a game of coping with interdependence. A second game is played by the institutions themselves, with each seeking to gain powers vis-à-vis other institutions. This game may be played for all the right reasons (e.g., the Commission believes that it is the protector of the Treaty of Rome while the Council considers itself the protector of national interests), but it is a complex, multifaceted game nonetheless. This second game is, of course, intimately linked with the first. Finally, there is a bureaucratic game that appears to be becoming an important subtext for everything else that is occurring within the EU. The twenty-three directoratesgeneral within the Commission appear to be developing their own organizational cultures and approaches to policy. As in most governmental structures, the boundaries among different policy competences are not entirely clear, and the DGs may therefore compete for

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policy space. Where, for example, is the boundary between research and development on the one hand and the telecommunications industry or science policy on the other? Even within a single DG, conflicts may occur over policy definitions. For example, is vocational education a concern of education policy or of labor-market policy? The components of the European bureaucracy also appear to be developing their own working relationships with national governments, or at least with relevant components of national governments. Likewise, individuals and organizations in the national bureaucracies are promoting their own relationships and their own policy goals with organizations in Brussels. At times, policies with little support within a nation (such as environmental protection in Britain) may have a great deal of support in Brussels. While these developments in the EU may lead to the diminution of national dominance over policy, it also raises the prospect that the European government may have to fight the “government against subgovernment” battle familiar at the national level.4 It will be important to remember throughout this discussion that all these games are occurring simultaneously and that strategies adopted in one may have real consequences for outcomes in another.5 The National Basis of EU Politics It would be misleading to analyze institutional and policymaking changes in Europe solely from the perspective of the European Union and its institutions. We must remain aware of the role that the member states have played and will continue to play in the integration process. Furthermore, policy choices made by the member states are, to some extent, conditioned by events in their own international economic and political environments. Hence, it would also be incorrect to assess regional change without considering what has been occurring outside Western Europe. The European Union is becoming a major actor on the international stage, but it has yet to supplant fully the nation-states that belong to it or to achieve its own capacity to steer the international political economy.6 One of the most significant developments for the EU, which is rooted in domestic politics and policy management, has been a tendency for many regimes to minimize the role performed by central governments in delivering government services and even policymaking. At the least extreme level, this has involved decentralizing many policymaking and implementation activities to subnational governments, even in states such as France and Spain that historically have been highly centralized.7 At a more extreme level, a number of governments have undertaken to supply public services through paragovernmental or “third party” organizations.8 At the most extreme level, many European governments have privatized a number of public corporations and public services.9 Such privatization has been carried out by governments with traditions of étatist management of their economies and societies as well as those with histories of laissez-faire policies toward the economy. The principal question that these changes have generated is whether the nation-state remains of central importance. Numerous governments, and a particularly large number of politicians, have opted for a governing style that permits the private sector to make an increasing number of decisions that once would have been made by government. If government is not the best way to make policy decisions—especially about the economy—then

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does it perhaps not matter so much who constitutes the government? Hence, devaluing the role of national governments may make the creation of a more powerful “European government” of some sort more palatable to politicians and citizens alike. It may be that governing in the twenty-first century is not so much undesirable as it is impossible or at least difficult. Interdependence has become a buzzword to describe ongoing changes in the international political economy, and it contains a considerable element of truth. National governments, or even large blocs like the EU, are increasingly incapable of determining their own economic futures. As a consequence, being compelled to take responsibility as a national government is often like being handed a poisoned chalice; taking credit for the good times in the s, s, and s makes it difficult not to be blamed for the economic slowdown of the s and early s. Adopting a more cooperative attitude toward Europe and permitting more economic decisions to be made in Brussels is a means of avoiding blame for anything that goes wrong and perhaps making a few things go right. Indeed, politics in this era has been described as “blame avoidance” rather than credit claiming.10 Federalism We can begin a discussion of institutional politics in the European Union with the institutional option that most clearly addresses the issue of the national game. To many adherents of European integration, the political situation of the EU appears ripe for a federal solution. Federalists such as the Italian politician Altiero Spinelli are not content with maintaining a regional system whose political foundations remain a number of independent states. Instead, they advocate the transformation of the EU into a full political union as a means to transcend nationalism and achieve a common European identity.11 German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer sketched a similar vision in a speech in August  when he declared: “We are passing the phase of the Confederation and entering the period of the constitutional process and federation. Either Europe will have a weak central body and a confederation of independent states, and that will not work. Or we will move ahead to a real European constitution and a new European central body.”12 To such activists, a federal arrangement appears to be a natural mechanism for accommodating the existing nation-states while still providing a superordinate government for the entire aggregation. If there is indeed to be a federal solution to the European political question, an immediate question arises concerning what type of federalism is meant. For Anglo-Saxons, the contractual and constitutional model of federalism appears to be the most logical answer. According to this approach, the component governments, acting as independent and autonomous units, initially agree to establish a new level of government and grant certain specified powers to that new, superordinate entity. The granting of those powers is never sufficiently clear to prevent a need for future elaboration and interpretation, but some attempt would be made to allocate powers and to form a binding and enduring contract. Where such federal arrangements have been established, as in the United States and Australia, political power has tended to gravitate toward the highest level of government, in part because of the availability of financial resources and in part because of

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“spillover” effects. These national outcomes are analogous to the same effects deemed important by functional and neofunctionalist theorists of supranational integration.13 That is, in most federal systems, it quickly becomes apparent that only the higher level of government is capable of regulating the numerous interactions and externalities that result from the independent actions of individuals and subnational governments. The Subsidiarity Principle For many continental Europeans, federalism may have a very different connotation, one based on the concept of “subsidiarity” in Roman Catholic social thought. This term first appeared in Pope Pius XI’s Encyclical Letter Quadragesimo Anno () and means, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “the principle that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level.”14 In other words, all actions in social and political life should be performed by the smallest possible unit of government. The subsidiarity principle implies a more organic view of society and political life than does the more mechanistic and legalistic approach of Anglo-Saxon federalism. A leading European advocate of subsidiarity was former Commission President Delors. The subsidiarity principle is likely to serve as the basis for a European federation. Commission documents repeatedly cite the term, and the Treaty on Political Union explicitly affirms that the Union “shall respect the principle of subsidiarity.”15 As a logic of federal structures and political processes, subsidiarity implies that a supranational EU government would do as little as possible, leaving most functions to the national and perhaps especially subnational governments. It may even imply that as many things as possible would be done by private and voluntary organizations rather than by any level of government. This approach would appear to give the subnational governments an important place in European government, even though the European Court has ruled that it is the responsibility of national governments to make subnational governments conform to European policy. The concept of subsidiarity also leaves a great deal of room for interpretation, most obviously with respect to the “lowest possible” unit of government that should perform a given function. From the perspective of the national game being played in Europe, these alternative visions of federalism have rather different implications. The Anglo-Saxon version would place the nation-state in the central position in bargaining over the shape of a future political entity in Europe. In essence, the nation-states would bargain over how much of their “sovereignty” they would be willing to grant to the European Union in exchange for how much benefit they would derive from the coordination of policies, reduced trade barriers, and direct subsidies for some sectors (e.g., agriculture and less developed regions). In the continental conception of federalism with its emphasis on subsidiarity, the nation-states are important but are only one among many sets of institutions that have a right to participate in the bargaining process. The subsidiarity approach, therefore, would permit the EU to deal directly with subnational governments, interest groups, and citizens without having to be overly concerned with the rights of nation-states. Of course, the EU is already involved with relationships circumventing national governments, so the

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acceptance of subsidiarity as the defining principle of federalism might only institutionalize and legitimize current practices. Although federalism and other ideas about intergovernmental relations are usually discussed in terms of the political relationships among the political units, we should also note that these alternatives may have consequences for the other games being played within the EU. In particular, the acceptance of the continental version of federalism might encourage the development of “picket fence federalism” and intergovernmental relations similar to established practices in the United States.16 These patterns could develop under other more formal models of federalism (as indeed they have), but they appear more likely with the continental version. If a nation-state comparable to the federal system in the United States has no special claims to bargaining on behalf of its constituent units, it would be easy for a government in Brussels to seek out smaller units where policy can be made and implemented. Those units could be political (e.g., local governments) or functional (e.g., interest groups, businesses). In any case, policymaking would be likely to develop along functional lines, with important linkages forged between Brussels and the smaller units. This would, in turn, enhance the powers of the DGs within the Commission or any other bureaucratic structures that manage interactions with the public and private entities that actually deliver services. If the pattern of intergovernmental relations within the European Union assumes a functional style in which the intermediate political institutions (in this case nations) can be virtually bypassed, then most vertical constitutional models of federalism would appear to be inapplicable. In their place, something more like the “policy community” approach would seem to make greater sense for understanding policymaking relationships. This suggests that any “top-down” conception of intergovernmental relations dominated by the center and involving the equivalent of diplomatic relations between the levels of government would not be an appropriate analytical approach. Instead, problems demanding consideration would appear to “bubble up” more than trickle down, and multilateral negotiations involving all or several nation-states would be an appropriate means of problem solving. Moreover, the shift in the general approach to European policymaking from harmonization to mutual recognition means that there would be less need for close coordination and control from the center. So long as the constituent units act as they are expected (comparable to the practice of “full faith and credit” in the United States), the center would have less need to impose Union rules and standards from above. The European Polity In a European Union requiring unanimity among the members on almost all issues, all countries could expect to be heard and to have a substantial influence over policies. They could therefore also afford to bargain very hard for their national interests, with only goodwill and the rather intangible commodity “political influence” as the possible costs. Such a political phase of European integration occurred from the late s through the early s, which was a period of largely sustained affluence. Affluence meant that countries could extract substantial “side payments” if they conceded on a point that other members of the Union (and perhaps most of all the Commission itself) wanted to have

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approved. After the adoption of the Single Europe Act in , however, the advent of qualified majority voting in most Council decisions initiated a different political dynamic that may enable the Union to ameliorate some of the decision-making problems apparent on the national level of decision making in some of the larger member countries. This dynamic appears similar to the politics of smaller European democracies that seek to accommodate a wide range of interests within potentially fragile political systems; Martin Heisler and Robert Kvavik have referred to this pattern as “the European polity.”17 The fundamental dynamic of the European polity is that the members must adopt more constrained strategies to remain active and effective participants in the political process. In this model of a political system, continuing to play the game is as important a component of politics as winning or losing any single decision. Nation-states within the EU almost certainly would never be excluded from participation in the same way that interest groups might be in a single nation, but they can be isolated and excluded from the informal stages of policymaking. Participation in bargaining and coalition formation have become crucial now that unanimity is no longer required in Council decisions, and a number of possible winning coalitions exist concerning any policy under deliberation. In a policymaking setting such as this, nations may be willing to accommodate the interests of others to ensure both their continued access to the early and often determinative stages of negotiations and their right to be consulted throughout the policymaking process. Bargaining too implacably for national interest under majority rule ultimately may produce formal inclusion for a nation in less important decisions, but exclusion when it counts the most. Unanimity is still required in some instances, especially in responding to amendments by the European Parliament to common positions adopted by the Council, but the changes in the rules are sufficient to produce some rethinking of the policymaking dynamics within Europe. It could be argued that the events surrounding the European Council meeting in Milan in  constituted a first step toward instituting a European polity system. During the summit, which addressed proposals for European political union, Britain isolated itself by resisting a decision to convene an intergovernmental conference to deliberate appropriate measures. Britain’s isolation was especially pronounced because of close political cooperation between France and Germany in Community affairs.18 In response, Prime Minister Thatcher began to modify her more extreme stances and play a somewhat more positive and conciliatory role. Similarly, Greece has also modified some of its reservations about the completion of the internal market to minimize the risk of isolation. Such evidence is far from conclusive, but it does point to the potential for an evolutionary new political dynamic within the Union. In particular, if the European polity model is appropriate for the EU, it would feed back into at least one of the institutional decision-making processes discussed earlier by making coalition formation appear a great deal more like coalition politics in a nationstate. As Heisler and Kvavik argue, a central dynamic component of the European polity model is that political actors have more to gain by being co-opted into the encompassing system than by going it alone.19 This utilitarian balance is almost always in favor of participation in the decision-making process by interest groups within nations, and the same

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would be true for national actors within the EU if membership were perceived to create greater benefits than the costs imposed. Thus, participation in the EU can be analyzed in terms of the costs and benefits of national involvement, with an increasing number of decision-making situations becoming positive-sum games. Likewise, some of the pressures in favor of economic and monetary union have come from widely publicized reports of projected large-scale economic benefits arising from full integration.20 The country that has questioned this positive balance most often is Britain, but events since the Milan summit and the Labour Party’s victory in the  general election have converged to yield a more positive British approach toward Community affairs. Finally, another component of the dynamic of the European polity model is that actors, once they are involved in joint decision making, must bear some responsibility for the actions taken by the political unit. In other words, participation is traded for complicity in decisions. This complicity means that national governments, to be credible, will have few opportunities of returning home and blaming Brussels. They are now a part of Brussels even more than perhaps in the past. The European polity model appears to some extent contrary to the bureaucratic politics model described below. In particular, the European polity model depends more on the individual nation-states deciding that the benefits of participation in the system for them outweigh the costs of membership. This requires them to make overt choices about continued involvement in, and acceptance of, policy decisions made within the EU. While the bureaucratic politics style of governing, and the regulatory policies associated with it, seek to disguise decisions and obfuscate the values involved in choices, the European politics model is a more political model that emphasizes understanding on the part of policymakers and their need to make a choice about participation and acquiescence. It may be that policymaking in the EU oscillates between large-scale politics and small-scale increments of regulation and that no single model is able to capture the totality of motives and processes involved in building Europe. Bureaucratic Politics A third, and very promising, approach to understanding policymaking dynamics within the institutions of the European Union is bureaucratic politics. This approach is closely linked with many ideas such as the “picket-fence federalism” mentioned above, but it considers the linkages existing within a policy area from the perspective of the bureaucratic organizations involved rather than from the perspective of the national or subnational governments.21 According to the politics of bureaucracy approach, the component units of a government administrative apparatus are assumed to be quasi-autonomous actors pursuing their own goals through the policymaking process. Many or most of those goals may be held in common with other organizations in government, but some are confined to each particular organization. All, or virtually all, of the organizations will assume that they are indeed serving the public interest by promoting their more individualized goals. Further, some organizations’ goals are purposive, being concerned with achieving policy goals (including in this case greater integration within the EU), while other goals may be reflexive, having to do primarily with enhancing the power and prestige (or at a minimum survival)

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of the organization itself.22 In the case of reflexive goals, it may be difficult to distinguish the individual goals of key members from the collective goals of their organizations. Bureaucratic politics may be occurring within the European Union on two levels at once. The first is on the level of the major institutions: the Council, the Commission, and the European Parliament taken as a whole. The goals pursued by some of these institutions may be attainable only if certain changes occur in the overall structure of the European Union. If the European Parliament is to achieve greater power, for instance, it may be successful only if the EU itself obtains greater power vis-à-vis the national governments. Similarly, the Commission may perceive the Council as its natural rival for power and authority in the sense that both are playing a “zero-sum” bureaucratic game in a competitive quest for greater or lesser European integration. In short, if the bureaucratic politics model is to be applied to interorganizational interactions and change, then the analyst must be clear when purposive and reflexive goals are being pursued (if the two types can be separated) and what the principal actors are attempting to gain through their interactions with other institutions. The president of the Commission has also become a central player in EU decision making and the process of institutional change. The president’s potential role as a political catalyst became highly visible during Delors’s tenure in office, but previous presidents also played major roles in defining the nature and speed of progress toward European solutions to policy problems.23 From the perspective of bureaucratic politics, the question arises whether the institutional goals of the presidency are compatible with specific policy goals. By attempting to focus attention on himself, the power of the Commission, and very broad goals of supranationalism, the president may be able to minimize potential national opposition to specific policy initiatives within the Council. Likewise, focusing on the presidency may help reduce fragmentation within the Commission itself; Delors appeared to have accepted this role at times to the exclusion of other members of the Commission. For example, he issued some Commission papers virtually without prior consultation with other commissioners, and he made some of the most important economic policy issues his personal concern rather than that of the commissioner nominally in charge of economic affairs. The president of the Commission is far from the only actor in the game of bureaucratic politics. Another principal aspect of the game involves coalition formation over specific issues and agendas. At this level, we move into the second level of bureaucratic politics in the European Union: the politics of functional policy areas. In organizational terms, each policy area is populated with its allotment of organizations—including DGs and their commissioners, committees in the European Parliament, and representatives of affected interests. As we discussed in chapter , the formation of coalitions is crucial for determining the final shape of European policies. Given the decentralized structure of policymaking in Europe, with multiple actors involved at the European stage and even more involved at the national level, it should not be surprising if policies were the product of loosely organized and flexible policy communities. Once a coalition is formed within a particular policy area, another coalition must be constructed across EU institutions as well as with the relevant actors in national governments.

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Several important features of the fragmentation of policymaking and politics in Union affairs stand out. First, coalition formation and bargaining occur at several points throughout the policy process. This process involves interest groups and functional ministries on the national level of politics, Europe-wide interest groups, and relevant Directorates-General in Brussels. Extensive discussions occur within the Commission itself concerning, first, the allocation of a policy among relevant commissioners and DGs and, second, policy coordination. Often, consultations are required with the advisory committees organized by the Commission for various policy areas as well. Then, at both the national and supranational levels, negotiations necessarily involve functional government organizations (such as ministries) and other government institutions (such as the Commission). Moreover, discussions can take place between the national government and the EU at either the functional and/or general political level. Thus, EU policymaking is highly interactive, with preliminary decisions, bargaining over policy ideas, and so forth, constantly flowing throughout the system. Such a fragmented arrangement for policymaking provides multiple points of access and may make coherent policymaking difficult. Whether the European or the national bureaucracy proves the dominant actor, the policymaking process manifests characteristics of decentralization and outcomes beneficial to interest groups typical of bureaucratic politics. Institutionally, the actors involved will strive to preserve their own powers, perhaps even in the face of a reduction in the capacity of the resulting arrangements to make “good” policy for the European Union as a whole. The fragmentation of policymaking may be further increased through the increased powers of the European Parliament under the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty of Amsterdam. First, the addition of “co-decision” provisions discussed in chapter  have already transformed the Parliament into an actor that must be reckoned with in almost all policy decisions. If nothing else, a parliamentary majority is theoretically able to form blocking coalitions with other actors such as single nation-states in cases when unanimity is required to override parliamentary wishes. This makes decision making more difficult and simultaneously provides additional incentives for a national actor to pursue action through bureaucratic channels (perhaps at home) rather than through more overtly politicized European institutions. Of course, this option is not available for all issues, but it may be for many; and a seemingly slower accretion of decisions may prove faster for a member country in the long run than attempting more dramatic action through the Council. The Council retains, after consultation with Parliament, the final powers of decision, but the Commission has an increasing number of weapons at its disposal and apparently increasing influence. This is in part a function of the sheer volume of decisions associated with both the single market and EMU. The Council is a well-articulated structure, and with the assistance of its working groups it can monitor the activities of the Commission. But the Council still cannot compete with the expertise available to the Commission and its DGs. Moreover, the Commission sets the agenda for decisions, albeit after extensive discussion with the relevant national and European actors. The linkages between the DGs and various components of national governments tend to be functionally specific, so pro-

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fessional and technical criteria often guide decisions more than national concerns that may arise in the Council. Finally, the Commission can claim the moral high ground of being the defenders of Europe and standing above national concerns. The emphasis on bureaucratic politics and policymaking in the European Union also has important implications for the character of future European policies. Decision making in the Commission is a crucially important element of policymaking in the EU, and its increasing importance made the transition to a single market during the early s that much easier. In essence, a shift has occurred from the Council’s earlier preoccupation with large-scale issues such as budgetary disputes to greater attention to regulatory directives and indirect intervention by the European Union in national markets. Commission regulations over competition policy as well as recent court cases involving a variety of topics have supplanted the budget, at least for now, as the most visible actions emanating from Brussels. As previously noted, regulatory policymaking has the advantage of obscuring who wins and who loses in the policies; the outcomes are uncertain and widely variable within individual countries. Issues of revenue collection and spending, however, make redistributive issues readily apparent to national participants. Therefore, reliance on bureaucratic decision making and regulative rulemaking should, everything else being equal, make the transition to economic (though not necessarily monetary and political) union less divisive. Although less divisive, a pattern of bureaucratic rulemaking may not necessarily produce the “best” objective policy decisions for Europe or the Europeans. If the preceding description of fragmented policymaking is accurate, policymaking in the EU is beginning to bear a substantial resemblance to policymaking in the U.S. government. The traditional characterization of “iron triangles” in American government may have been replaced by “big sloppy hexagons” and a wider range of interests participating in decisions, but the tendency to divide and subdivide policy domains persists.24 In the European context, this fragmentation is heightened by an ongoing shift from harmonization to mutual recognition of policies and standards as the standard for measuring successful integration. No longer will a common standard necessarily prevail if there can be agreement for each member country to accept the laws and standards of the others. In addition, qualified majority voting in the Council means that member countries have less incentive to package decisions together to produce agreement. As a result, an important control over policy decisions may well be undermined. Finally, policymaking is further fragmented among policy communities within both the EU itself and in the national policymaking systems. As a result, policymaking may have become somewhat easier but relatively ineffective in producing coherence and uniformity. The political question that immediately arises involves appropriate tradeoffs between the value of making decisions that are simply “European” and the value of making the best possible decisions in the name of Europe. Fritz Scharpf has characterized the problem of coherence in decision making in Europe in terms of a “joint decision trap.”25 His argument is that policymaking in Germany and other federal systems requires the need to obtain agreement between at least two levels of government and therefore tends to produce suboptimal decisions. This problem is exacerbated in the context of European policymaking when unanimity is required among

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the constituent units before a decision can be reached. Scharpf argues further that this pattern of joint decision making enables the constituent units to extract resources from the center, resulting in a high level of cost relative to output in the system as a whole and incoherent outputs, since policies are adopted to satisfy particular constituent units. Partially offsetting such dangers in the European Union are several crucial features of central policymaking, including the capacity of the Commission and its component units to structure the decision-making agenda and the move to qualified majority voting in the Council. Scharpf ’s analytic perspective, however, does raise interesting and important questions about the institutional dynamics of European policymaking. Finally, if we return to the “games” metaphor we used earlier, we can see a number of games nested within the overall process of decision making. National games are played at the highest level of EU politics by member countries seeking to gain as much as possible, in both financial and policy terms, and European institutions attempting to press their common agendas against those of the individual nation-states. Games are simultaneously played within each of the European institutions, with functional differentiation encouraging contests over the allocation of money and policymaking attention. Fragmentation may result in policy patterns that are not well coordinated unless the Commission president or the Commission as a whole can intervene. After decisions are made at the European level, political games continue in the form of interactions among EU institutions, member states, and interest groups as various players develop strategies for policy implementation. In short, it makes sense to think of policymaking within Europe as highly differentiated and functionally specific. The great decisions about Europe may be made at the level of heads of government and foreign ministers, but much of what happens after a European summit concludes depends on less glamorous bureaucratic interaction and bargaining. Pending Changes in the EU Recent and pending political acts will inevitably affect the multitiered games that characterize EU politics. The first concerns the attainment of economic and monetary union, including the introduction of a common currency among the states that make up “Euroland.” EMU brought with it the creation of an important new power structure in the form of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. The authority vested in the ECB to formulate monetary policy, determine interest rates, and issue the euro as hard currency means a significant step toward further “deepening” of supranational institutions. Member states retain an indirect capacity to influence monetary policy through the membership of the governors of their national banks on the ECB’s Executive Board, but the legal independence of the ECB significantly enhances the EU’s central authority over member states as policy actors. Given the political dynamics associated with decisions affecting EMU, the ECB’s role is better understood in terms of “new institutional” analysis rather than bureaucratic politics. Moreover, EMU has introduced an unprecedented cleavage between “ins” and “outs” within the Community. The twelve states belonging to EMU comprise an inner core of members with a more privileged status in EU affairs than Britain, Denmark, and Sweden,

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German euro notes and coins are readied for distribution prior to the  January  date of issue of the new currency in all EMU countries. (AP/Wide World Photos)

which have chosen (at least for now) to remain outside. This dualism not only yields greater complexity in the interconnected games played by national and institutional actors in an increasingly differentiated Community but also dramatically affects domestic policy agendas in the “out” nations, as competing actors debate the potential costs and benefits of future membership in EMU. Future referendums on this issue in Britain and Sweden are likely to prove highly divisive and possibly detrimental to the EU. Additional challenges to the EU are associated with the pending admission of new states and requisite institutional changes to accommodate their membership in the Council, the Commission, and the European Parliament. In response to democratic and economic transitions in the former communist countries of Central and East Europe, the EU embarked on an ambitious program of bilateral and multilateral economic assistance to the region beginning as early as . A series of “Europe Agreements” was concluded with a number of Central European nations in the early s that established a policy framework for increased economic cooperation and cultural exchange with the EU. These efforts led to an affirmation by the European Council at a meeting in Copenhagen in June  that “the associated countries in central and eastern Europe that so desire shall become members of the European Union. Accession will take place as soon as an associated country is able to assume the obligations of membership by satisfying the economic and political conditions required.”26 These conditions include the attainment of “institu-

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tions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and respect for and protection of minorities”; the existence of a functioning market economy “as well as the capacity to cope with competitive pressures and forces within the Union”; and “the ability to take on the obligation of membership, including adherence to the aims of political, economic and monetary union.”27 Following extended negotiations between the Commission and Central European nations over terms of accession to the EU, the European Council endorsed the prospective membership of ten Central European countries (plus Cyprus and Malta in the Mediterranean) at a summit in Helsinki in February . They include the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and the three Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). Various factors have delayed the admission of the applicant nations, among them the inability of some of them to meet the Copenhagen criteria for membership and concern among existing EU members about the economic costs to themselves of accession by lessdeveloped countries to the East. Nonetheless, the EU remains committed to expansion— if not as early as leaders in the applicant nations (notably Poland) would wish, then by mid-decade or possibly several years beyond. This aspiration was the major motivation for convening the intergovernmental conference on institutional reform that culminated in the Treaty of Nice in December . An expansion of the European Union from fifteen members to potentially twentyseven has inevitable consequences for the composition of the European Commission as well as the arithmetic of qualified majority voting in the Council. The larger member states (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain) conceded that they could not continue to claim two commissioners apiece because a vastly expanded Commission would prove institutionally unwieldy, but in compensation they demanded a reallocation of votes in their favor in QMV. An agreement on the precise terms of such a reallocation eluded EU member states in negotiations leading to the Treaty of Amsterdam and nearly caused failure on the eve of the European Council meeting in Nice in December . At issue was French insistence on voting parity with Germany despite the latter’s much larger population. In the end, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder yielded to the French demand— declaring after a presummit meeting with French President Jacques Chirac that “We have agreed that we will agree.”28 The result was a package agreement to limit the number of commissioners to one from each of the member states and to modify the distribution of weighted votes in an expanded Community. As table . (p. ) indicates, the present number of votes under QMV will increase from  to  in the “post-Nice” era. The four largest member states will each be allocated twenty-nine votes (in place of ten); Spain and Poland will have twenty-seven votes apiece; and the remaining states will receive from fourteen to three, depending on the size of their population. A future qualified majority will require  votes (instead of ), while the number of votes comprising a blocking minority will increase from twenty-six to ninety-one. Participants in the Nice summit agreed to equivalent adjustments in the membership of the European Parliament. The total number of MEPs will increase from  at present to  to accommodate the new members. Within this total Germany will retain the

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Table 35.1 Treaty of Nice: Qualified Majority Voting Votes Country Germany France Britain Italy Spain Poland Romania Netherlands Greece Czech Republic Belgium Hungary Portugal Sweden Bulgaria Austria Slovakia Denmark Finland Ireland Lithuania Latvia Slovenia Estonia Cyprus Luxembourg Malta Totals QMV Blocking Minority

Percentage of EU population

Current

Post-Nice

Current

EU-

10 10 10 10 8 0 0 5 5 0 5 0 5 4 0 4 0 3 3 3 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 87 62 26

29 29 29 29 27 27 14 13 12 12 12 12 12 10 10 10 7 7 7 7 7 4 4 4 4 4 3 345 255 91

21.90 15.74 15.81 15.38 10.51 0.00 0.00 4.20 2.81 0.00 2.72 0.00 2.66 2.36 0.00 2.15 0.00 1.41 1.37 0.99 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.11 0.00

17.05 12.25 12.31 11.97 8.18 8.03 4.67 3.27 2.18 2.09 2.12 2.09 2.07 1.83 1.71 1.67 1.12 1.10 1.07 0.77 0.76 0.50 0.41 0.30 0.15 0.08 0.07

Source: Delegation of the European Commission, Fact Sheet on the “Nice Treaty: Qualified Majority Voting and the Members of the European Parliament” (Washington, D.C., December 2001).

largest delegation with  MEPs, followed by France, Britain, and Italy (each with , constituting a decrease of 15 compared to the present EP). The other members will be allocated a declining number of seats from  to , based on population (see table .). The realization of these reforms depends, first, on whether the member states actually ratify the Treaty of Nice through a combination of domestic legislation and national referendums; and, second, on the successful conclusion of the accession process in a timely fashion. The expansion of the Council, the Commission, and the Parliament, coupled with modifications in weighted voting in the Council, will inevitably make decision

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Table 35.2 Treaty of Nice: Number of Members of the European Parliament Country Germany France Britain Italy Spain Poland Romania Netherlands Greece Czech Republic Belgium Hungary Portugal Sweden Bulgaria Austria Slovakia Denmark Finland Ireland Luthuania Latvia Slovenia Estonia Cyprus Luxembourg Malta Totals

Current

EU-

99 87 87 87 64 0 0 31 25 0 25 0 25 22 0 21 0 16 15 15 0 0 0 0 0 6 0 626

99 72 72 72 50 50 33 25 22 20 22 20 22 18 17 17 13 13 13 12 12 8 7 6 6 6 5 732

Source: Delegation of the European Commission, Fact Sheet on the “Nice Treaty: Qualified Majority Voting and the Members of the European Parliament” (Washington, D.C., December 2001).

making more cumbersome in the future. These changes, however, will not alter the fundamental nature of simultaneous forms of gamesmanship involving multiple national, subnational, institutional, and group actors described above. At the same time, new patterns of coalition bargaining and formation are likely to emerge as new member states join the EU. One possibility is that the nations of Central Europe will coalesce as a bloc, voting together on behalf of common regional interests such as agricultural and development aid. Alternatively, they may deviate in their national orientations toward EU policies in support of policy positions favored by existing member states with which they share strong historical, economic, and political affinities. A hypothetical example would be an informal “Baltic coalition” made up of the three Scandinavian member states and the three Baltic republics.

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Toward a Multispeed Europe Three observations summarize our analysis of the European Union. The first is that institutions matter. The formal institutions established by the Treaty of Rome, the Single European Act, the Treaty on European Union, and other basic agreements, and the rules governing the relationships of those institutions, have established the parameters of political action within the EU. The complexity built into institutional relationships has been increased by the structural elaboration that they all have undergone in response to the pressure of increased workloads, the attainment of a single market and EMU, and the most recent round of EU enlargement. These institutions play a crucial role in the continuing process of closer political and economic union among the member states. More than theoretical concepts such as functionalism or neofunctionalism, institutional relationships within the European Union have defined the pace of integration and the character of the emerging European political and economic system. It is especially important to understand that the institutions are not static structures that simply process external policy demands but, instead, constitute a dynamic factor of change in their own right.29 At the same time, European institutions are not the only things that matter. The Council, Commission, and European Parliament only establish the parameters within which individuals and groups function. Changes in the institutional rules of the game, such as the transition from unanimity to qualified majority voting in most Council decisions, matter to the extent that the actors permit them to matter. If preexisting patterns of decision making persist—as was the case with the Luxembourg compromise of — then formal changes in rulemaking will make very little difference. In particular, there is no institutional basis for predicting the influence of individual leaders in moving the process of integration forward or retarding it. It appears that the use of qualified majority voting has had the desired impact and perhaps an even greater impact than anticipated. Furthermore, the complex patterns of consultation and bureaucratic involvement in policymaking that have been created could not have been predicted adequately from formal institutional patterns. Institutions do matter, but individual policymakers and informal understandings among the inhabitants of the institutions matter as well. Our concluding observation is that the integration movement will necessarily proceed at multiple speeds in the “real world” of European economic and political development. Not all of the EU member countries met the convergence criteria when the Union entered its third phase of economic and monetary union in , and some otherwise qualified nations have chosen to remain outside EMU. Given the different degrees of willingness among the member states to commit fully to the union agenda, a prominent member of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union issued a discussion paper in  that envisages the emergence of an EU core of nations comprising Germany, France, and the Benelux countries that will attain further integration at a faster pace than a second group of nations (notably Britain, Italy, and the Scandinavian countries).30 Former French Prime Minister Edouard Balladur similarly advocated the creation of a “multitier Europe” comprising an inner circle that is “better structured, monetary as well as military,” a second circle made up of the weaker EU countries, and a third circle “of other European states which would have security and economic links with the EU.”31 President Chirac

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expressed a similar view in an address to the German parliament in June  when he “urged Germany . . . to join France in spearheading a core group of European Union countries that would move faster than others toward political and economic union. ‘Those countries that want to proceed further with integration, on a voluntary basis and in specific areas, must be allowed to do so without being held back by those who, with every right, do not want to proceed as quickly.’ ”32 The dynamic interplay among multiple institutional, individual, and national actors will continue to characterize the European Union as member states seek to balance contrasting visions of “an ever closer union” with citizen concerns about its “democratic deficit.” Especially in a more fully integrated and expanded but multitiered Union, politics will remain a multiplayer game with uncertain outcomes.33 Notes . For an analytical overview of functionalism, neofunctionalism, and other theoretical perspectives on integration, see Charles Pentland, International Theory and Economic Integration (New York: Free Press, ). . Paul Taylor, “The New Dynamics of EC Integration in the s,” in The European Community and the Challenge of the Future, ed. Juliet Lodge (London: Frances Pinter, ); and Richard Corbett, “The Intergovernmental Conference and the Single Europe Act,” in The Dynamics of European Union, ed. Roy Pryce (London: Croom Helm, ). . James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics (New York: Free Press, ). . George Tsebelis, Nested Games: Rational Choice in Comparative Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, ). . Other games may also be played simultaneously. The member countries themselves are not homogeneous actors, and subnational components, both public and private, may be using the EU as an arena to advance their own purposes. Firms, for instance, may believe that greater European control of environmental policy would mean a less restrictive regulatory environment than national standards. Likewise, interest groups that have been relatively unsuccessful at home may find the European arena more congenial for promoting their policy objectives. . John Fitzmaurice, “European Community Decisionmaking: The National Dimension,” in Institutions and Policies of the European Community, ed. J. Lodge (London: Frances Pinter, ). Some scholars argue that the integration process has actually strengthened the nation-states. See Stanley Hoffman, “Reflections on the National State in Western Europe Today,” Journal of Common Market Studies  (): –. . Michael Keating, “Does Regional Government Work? The Experience of Italy, France and Spain,” Governance  (): –. . Christopher Hood and Gunnar Folke Schuppert, Delivering Public Services in Western Europe (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, ). . C. de Croisset, Denationalisations (Paris: Economica, ); and Cento Veljanovski, Selling the State (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, ). . R. Kent Weaver, “The Politics of Blame Avoidance,” Journal of Public Policy  (): –. . See Michael Burgess, Federalism and European Union (London: Routledge, ). . Quoted in New York Times,  August . . Robert E. Riggs and I. Jostein Mykletun, Beyond Functionalism (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, ). . Select Committee on the European Committees, House of Lords, Economic and Monetary Union and Political Union, vol. I, Report (London: HMSO, ), . The Select Committee’s report notes that subsidiarity “has frequently been used in ‘federal’ Member States, notably with reference to the relationship between the Länder and the federal government in Germany.” Its first application in an EC document occurred in the preamble to the European Parliament’s Draft Treaty Establishing the European Union in , which states: “Intending to entrust common institutions, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, only those powers required to complete successfully the tasks they may carry out more satisfactorily than the States acting independently.” Ibid. . Article  (ex B), Treaty on Political Union, .

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. See Neil S. Wright, Understanding Intergovernmental Relations, d ed. (Pacific Grove, Calif.: Brooks/Cole, ). “Picket-fence federalism” refers to the tendency of interactions to develop among experts and administrators along functional lines (e.g., health, education) rather than between political actors such as presidents and state governors. . Martin O. Heisler with Robert B. Kvavik, Politics in Europe: Structures and Processes in Some Postindustrial Democracies (New York: David McKay, ). . Haig Simonian, The Privileged Partnership: Franco-German Relations in the European Community, –  (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). . Heisler with Kvavik, Politics in Europe. . Paolo Cechini et al., The European Challenge : The Benefits of a Single Market (Aldershot: Wildwood House for the European Commission, ). . The bureaucratic politics approach has been used to analyze both international and domestic politics. Important examples include Graham Allison, The Essence of Decisions (Boston: Little, Brown, ), and Anthony Downs, Inside Bureaucracy (Boston: Little, Brown, ). . Lawrence B. Mohr, “The Concept of Organizational Goal,” American Political Science Review  (): –. . Guy de Bassompierre, Changing the Guard in Brussels: An Insider’s View of the EC Presidency (New York: Praeger, ). . Charles O. Jones, The United States Congress (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey, ). . Fritz W. Scharpf, “The Joint Decision Trap: Lessons from German Federalism and European Integration,” Public Administration  (): –. . European Commission, The European Councils: Conclusions of the Presidency, – (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, ). . Ibid. For an overview analysis of the EU’s preaccession relations with Central and Eastern Europe, see Bernt Schiller, M. Donald Hancock, and John Logue, “The International Context of Economic and Political Transitions,” in Transitions to Capitalism and Democracy in Russia and Central Europe: Achievements, Problems, Prospects, ed. M. Donald Hancock and John Logue (Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger, ), –. . Quoted in Desmond Dinan and Sophie Vanhoonacker, “IGC  Watch (Part ): Long Live the IGC,” ECSA Review  (winter ): , –. . The Treaty of Nice was to be ratified by the end of . . Schäuble’s CDU “discussion paper,” September . . Balladur’s proposal in Figaro interview of  August . . New York Times,  June .  . New York Times,  May .

For Further Reading ANDERSON, SVEIN S., AND KJELL A. ELIASSEN, eds. Making Policy in Europe, d ed. London: Sage, . AVERY, GRAHAM, AND FRASER CAMERON. The Enlargement of the European Union. Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, . BACHE, IAN. The Politics of European Union Regional Policy: Multi-Level Governance or Flexible Gatekeeping? Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, . BALDWIN, RICHARD E. Towards an Integrated Europe. London: Centre for Economic Policy Research, . BURGESS, MICHAEL. Federalism and European Union. London: Routledge, . CORBETT, RICHARD. The European Parliament’s Role in Closer EU Integration. New York: St. Martin’s, . COWLES, MARIA GREEN, AND MICHAEL SMITH, eds. The State of the European Union, vol. . Oxford: Oxford University Press, . DINAN, DESMOND. Ever Closer Union? An Introduction to the European Community, d ed. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, . ———, ed. Encyclopedia of the European Union, updated ed. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, . DECKMYN, VEERLE, AND IAN THOMSON, eds. Openness and Transparency in the European Union. Maastricht, Netherlands: European Institute of Public Administration, . EL-AGRAA, A.M., ed. The Economics of the European Community, th ed. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, .

what is the future of eu politics?

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HAAS, ERNST B. Beyond the Nation State: Functionalism and International Organization. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, . ———. The Uniting of Europe: Political, Social, and Economic Forces, –. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, . HEISENBERG, DOROTHEE. The Mark of the Bundesbank. Germany’s Role in European Monetary Cooperation. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, . HENDERSON, KAREN, ed. Back to Europe: Central and Eastern Europe and the European Union. London: UCL Press, . HIX, SIMON. The Political System of the European Union. New York: St. Martin’s, . IFESTOS, P. European Political Cooperation: Towards a Framework of Supranational Diplomacy. Aldershot: Avebury, . JONES, ROBERT A. The Politics and Economics of the European Union: An Introductory Text. Cheltenham, U.K., and Brookfield, Vt.: Edward Elgar, . KAPTEYN, PAUL. The Stateless Market: The European Dilemma of Integration and Civilization. London and New York: Routledge, . KAY, A. The Reform of the Common Agricultural Policy. Oxon, U.K.: CABI Publishing, . KERR, ANTHONY J.C. The Common Market and How It Works, d ed. Oxford and New York: Pergamon, . LINDBERG, LEON, AND STUART SCHEINGOLD. Europe’s Would-Be Polity: Patterns of Change in the European Community. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, . LODGE, JULIET, ed. The European Community and the Challenge of the Future, d ed. New York: St. Martin’s, . MCCORMICK, JOHN. The European Union: Politics and Policies, d ed. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, . MILWARD, ALAN S. The European Rescue of the Nation-State, d ed. London and New York: Routledge, . MORGAN, ROGER, AND CAROLINE BRAY. Partners and Rivals in Western Europe: Britain, France, and Germany. Aldershot, England, and Brookfield, Vt.: Gower, . NUGENT, NEILL. The Government and Politics of the European Community, th ed. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, . PAGE, EDWARD C. People Who Run Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press, . PENTLAND, CHARLES. International Theory and European Integration. New York: Free Press, . PETERSON, JOHN, AND ELIZABETH BOMBERG. Decision-Making in the European Union. New York: St. Martin’s, . PRIDHAM, GEOFFREY, AND PIPPA PRIDHAM. Towards Transnational Parties in the European Community. London: Policy Studies Institute, . ROSAMOND, BEN. Theories of European Integration. New York: St. Martin’s, . ROSS, GEORGE. Jacques Delors and European Integration. New York: Oxford University Press, . SBRAGIA, ALBERTA M., ed. Euro-Politics: Institutions in the “New” European Community. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, . SCHMITTER, PHILIPPE C. How to Democratize the European Union . . . And Why Bother? London: Rowman and Littlefield, . SEIDENTOPF, HEINRICH, AND JACQUES ZILLER. Making European Policies Work. The Implementation of Community Legislation in the Member States. London: Sage, . SHACKLETON, MICHAEL. The Budget of the European Community. London: Pinter, . SIMONIAN, HAIG. The Privileged Partnership: Franco-German Relations in the European Community, –. Oxford: Clarendon Press, . SMITH, KAREN. The Making of EU Foreign Policy: The Case of Eastern Europe. London: Macmillan, . SPAAK, PAUL-HENRI. The Continuing Battle: Memoirs of a European, –. Trans. by Henry Fox. Boston: Little, Brown, . SPRINGER, BEVERLY. The Social Dimension of : Europe Faces a New EC. New York: Praeger, . SYMES, VALERIE. Unemployment and Employment Policies in the EU. London: Kogan Page, . URWIN, DEREK W. The Community of Europe: A History of European Integration since . New York: Longman, . WALLACE, HELEN, WILLIAM WALLACE, AND CAROLE WEBB, eds. Policy-Making in the European Community, d ed. Chichester: Wiley, . WOOD, DAVID, AND BRIOL A. YESILADA. The Emerging European Union. White Plains, N.Y.: Longman, . YOUNG, JOHN W. Britain and European Union –, d ed. New York: St. Martin’s, .

Appendix

appendix

547

Table A.1 National Election Outcomes: Percentage of Popular Support France, – (National Assembly, First Ballot Year

PCF

1962 1967 1968 1973 1978 1981 1986 1988 1993 1997

21.9 22.5 20.0 21.4 20.6 16.1 9.7 11.2 9.2 10.0

Ecologists/Greens

PS

UDF, Other Centrists

RPR

FN

Other

2.0 1.1 1.2 0.4 7.6 8.0

12.4 18.9 16.5 19.1 22.8 36.6 31.3 36.6 20.3 23.5

21.6 22.9 20.8 29.4 26.1 23.1 18.8 22.5 24.1 15.7

33.7 33.0 38.0 26.0 22.8 21.2 26.8 19.1 20.4 14.2

— — — — 0.3 0.2 9.8 9.8 12.4 15.0

10.3 2.8 4.6 5.8 9.7 4.2 4.5 2.2 6.0 13.6

Note: Explanation of party abbreviations: PCF  Communist Party of France; PS  Socialist Party; UDF  Union for French Democracy (moderate liberals); RPR  Rally for the Republic (Gaullists; moderate right); FN  National Front (radical right).

Federal Republic of Germany, – Year

Participation

KPD/PDS

1949 1953 1957 1961 1965 1969 1972 1976 1980 1983 1987 1990 1994 1998

78.5 86.0 87.8 87.7 86.8 86.7 91.1 90.7 88.6 89.1 84.3 77.8 79.1 82.2

5.7 2.3

0.6 0.3 0.4 0.2

2.4 4.4 5.1

Greens

SPD

FDP

CDU/CSU

Radical Right

Other

1.5 5.6 8.4 5.1 7.3 6.7

29.2 28.8 31.8 36.2 39.3 42.7 45.8 42.6 42.9 38.2 37.0 33.5 36.4 40.8

11.9 9.5 7.7 12.8 9.5 5.8 8.4 7.9 10.6 7.0 9.1 11.0 6.9 6.2

31.0 45.2 50.2 45.3 47.6 46.1 44.9 48.6 44.5 48.8 44.3 43.8 41.5 35.1

1.8 1.1 1.0 0.8 2.0 4.3 0.6 0.3 0.2

20.3 13.1 10.3 5.7 3.6 0.5 0.1 0.2 0.1 0.5 1.4 0.2 1.6 3.0

2.1 1.9 3.0

Note: Explanation of party abbreviations: KPD/PDS: Communist Party of Germany/Party of Democratic Socialism; SPD  Social Democratic Party of Germany; FDP  Free Democratic Party (moderate liberals); CDU/CSU  Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union; the radical right includes the NPD (National Democratic Party of Germany) and the Republikaner (Republicans).

548

politics in europe

Italy, – Year

Greens

PCI/ PDS

5.6 6.0

2.5 2.8 2.7

22.6 22.7 25.3 26.9 27.1 34.4 30.4 29.9 26.6 16.1 20.4

8.6

2.5

21.1

PRC

1948 1953 1958 1963 1968 1972 1976 1979 1983 1987 1992 1994 1996

PSI/ PSU 31.0

2001

PSDI

PRI

DC/PPI

PLI

48.5 40.0 42.4 38.3 39.1 38.7 38.7 38.3 32.9 34.3 29.7 11.1

3.8 3.0 3.5 7.0 5.8 3.9 1.3 1.9 2.9 2.1 2.8 —

2.5 1.6 1.4 1.4 14.5 2.0 9.6 5.1 2.8 9.6 3.4 3.1 9.8 3.8 3.0 11.4 4.1 5.1 14.3 3.0 3.7 13.4 2.7 4.4 2.2 — — Olive Tree Coalition 6.8a Olive Tree Coalition 38.69 12.7 14.2 13.8

7.1 4.5 4.5 6.1

4.3b

LN

8.7 8.4 10.1

FI

MSI/ DN/AN

Other

2.0 5.1 5.9 9.7 4.8 6.5 5.1 3.0 4.5 7.2 8.7 4.0 6.1 3.3 5.3 7.5 6.8 6.9 5.9 7.6 5.4 8.2 21.0 13.5 14.7 Freedom Alliance 20.6 15.7 5.8c House of Freedoms 42.52

Note: Explanation of party abbreviations: PRC  Party of Communist Refoundation; PCI/PDS  Italian Communist Party/Democratic Party of the Left; PSI/PSU  Italian Socialist Party/United Socialist Party; PSDI  Italian Social Democratic Party; PRI  Italian Republican Party; DC/PPI  Christian Democrats/Italian Popular Party; PLI  Italian Liberal Party; LN  Northern League; FI  Forza Italia! (Go Italy!); MSI/DN/AN  Italian Socialist Movement/National Right/National Alliance (neo-Fascist, but National Alliance professes to be ex-Fascist). aPPI/Prodi List. bDini List. cChristian Democratic Center (CCD).

Sweden, – Year

Type a

VP

1944 1946 1948 1950 1952 1954 1956 1958 1958 1960 1962 1964 1966 1968 1970 1973

R C R C R C R R C R C R C R R R

10.3 11.2 6.3 4.9 4.3 4.8 5.0 3.4 4.0 4.5 3.8 5.2 6.4 3.0 4.8 5.3

MP

SAP

FP

C

M

46.7 44.4 46.2 48.6 46.1 47.4 44.6 46.2 46.8 47.8 50.5 47.3 42.2 50.1 45.3 43.6

12.9 15.6 22.8 21.7 24.4 21.7 23.8 18.2 15.6 17.5 17.1 17.0 16.7 14.3 16.2 9.4

13.6 13.6 12.4 12.3 10.7 10.3 9.4 12.7 13.1 13.6 13.1 13.2 13.7 15.7 19.9 25.1

15.9 14.9 12.3 12.3 14.4 15.7 17.1 19.5 20.4 16.5 15.5 13.7 14.7 12.9 11.5 14.3

KDS

NYDb

appendix

549

Sweden, – (continued) Year 1976 1979 1982 1985 1988 1991 1994 1998

Type a R R R R R R R R

VP 4.8 5.6 5.6 5.4 5.7 4.5 6.2 12.0

MP

5.5 3.4 4.1 4.5

SAP 42.7 43.2 45.6 44.7 43.9 37.6 45.3 36.4

FP 11.1 10.6 5.9 14.2 12.0 9.2 7.2 4.7

C 24.1 18.1 15.5 12.4 11.9 8.4 7.7 5.1

M 15.6 20.3 23.6 21.3 17.9 21.9 22.4 22.9

KDS 1.4 1.4 1.9 2.9 7.0 4.1 11.7

NYDb

6.7 1.2 —

aType

of election: R refers to Riksdag (parliamentary) elections; C refers to communal (county and municipal) elections. bExplanation of party abbreviations: VP  Left Party (Communists); MP  Greens; SAP  Social Democratic Party; FP  People’s Party (Liberals); C  Center; M  Moderates (Conservatives); KDS  Christian Democrats; NYD  New Democracy.

United Kingdom, – Year 1945 1950 1951 1959 1964 1966 1970 1974 Feb. Oct. 1979 1983 1987 1992 1997 2001

Participation

Labour

Liberals/SDP/Liberal Democrats

Conservatives

Other

83.6 81.9 78.7 77.1 75.8 72.0

61.4 46.1 48.8 43.8 44.1 42.9 42.9

1.9 9.1 2.6 5.9 11.2 7.5 7.5

31.1 43.4 48.0 49.4 43.4 41.9 46.4

5.6 1.4 0.6 0.9 1.1 1.7 3.2

78.2 72.8 76.0 71.8 73.2 77.7 71.0 59.4

37.2 39.3 36.9 27.6 30.8 34.4 44.4 42.2

19.3 18.3 13.8 25.4 22.6 17.9 17.2 18.8

38.1 35.8 43.9 42.4 42.2 41.9 31.4 32.7

6.6 5.5 5.5 4.6 4.4 5.7 7.0 5.4

Note: Explanation of party abbreviation: SDP  Social Democratic Party. The Liberals and a majority of Social Democrats merged in 1989 to form the Social Liberal Party.

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politics in europe

Table A.2 Distribution of Seats in National Legislatures France, – (National Assembly) Year

PCF

PS

Radicals

MRP

Dem-Cen/UDF

RPR

Cons

1962 1967 1968 1973 1978 1981 1986 1988 1993 1997

41 72 33 73 86 43 32 24 23 38

64 118 57 89 102 268 198 260 54 241

41

32 7 8 15 10 10 4 8

18 52 90 75 124 59 128 130 213 108

230 191 282 178 142 80 146 123 247 134

32 7 8 15 10 10 4 8 24 14

aIncludes

21 diverse left-wingers, 12 Radical Socialists, and 1 nonpartisan.

Greens 7

FN

Other

Total

11 10 14 13 9 16 34a

465 470 470 473 474 474 556 555 577 577

35 1 0 1

Federal Republic of Germany, – (Bundestag) Year

KPD/PDS

1949 1953 1957 1961 1965 1969 1972 1976 1980 1983 1987 1990 1994 1998

15

17 30 35

Greens

SPD

FDP

CDU/CSU

Other

Total

52 48 41 67 49 30 41 39 54 34 46 79 47 44

139 244 270 247 245 242 225 243 237 244 223 319 294 245

65 44 17

27 42 8 49 47

131 151 169 190 202 224 230 214 228 193 186 239 252 298

402 487 497 499 496 496 496 496 497 498 497 662 672 669

appendix

551

Italy, – (Chamber of Deputies) Year

PRC

1948 1953 1958 1963 1968 1972 1976 1979 1983 1987 1992 1994

35 40

1996 2001

35 11

Greens

PCI/ PDS

13 16 11

143 140 166 177 179 228 201 198 177 107 115

PSI/ PSU

PSDI

PRI

DC/ PPI

PLI

75 84 87

33 19 22 33

9 5 6 6 9 14 14 16 29 21 27 —

305 262 273 260 266 266 262 262 225 234 206 33

19 14 17 39 31 21 5 9 16 11 17 —

183

91 61 58 62 73 94 92 15

29 15 20 23 17 16 —

284a 184a

LN

FI

55 122

97 246b 368b

59

MSI/ DN/AN 6 29 24 27 24 56 35 30 42 35 34 109 Others 6

Total 574 590 596 630 630 630 630 630 630 630 630 630 630

aOlive

Tree Coalition (1997), Olive Tree (2001), consisting of the Democrats of the Left, the Greens, and various centrist groups. bFreedom Alliance (1997), House of Freedoms (2001), consisting of Forza Italia!, the National Alliance, the Northern League, and various center-right groups.

Sweden, – (Riksdag) Year

VP

1944 1948 1952 1956 1958 1960 1964 1968 1970 1973 1976 1979 1982 1985 1988 1991 1994 1998

15 8 5 6 5 5 8 3 17 19 17 20 20 19 21 16 22 43

MP

SAP

FP

C

MS

20 — 18 16

115 112 110 106 111 114 113 125 163 156 152 154 166 159 156 138 162 131

26 57 58 58 38 40 42 32 58 34 39 38 21 51 44 33 26 17

35 30 26 19 32 34 33 37 71 90 86 64 56 44a 42 31 27 18

39 23 31 42 45 39 32 29 41 51 55 73 86 76 66 80 80 82

KDS

NYD

Other

5 7

26 14 42

25 — —

—

Total 230 230 230 231 231 232 233 233 350 350 349 349 349 349 349 349 349 349

Note: Through 1968, the distribution of seats is shown for the former lower house (Second Chamber). Elections from 1970 onward are to the unicameral Riksdag. aIncludes one seat for the KDS.

552

politics in europe

United Kingdom, – (House of Commons) Year 1945 1950 1951 1955 1959 1964 1970 1974 (Feb.) 1974 (Oct.) 1979 1983 1987 1992 1977 2001

Labour

Liberals/SDP/Liberal Democrats

Conservatives

Other

Total

393 315 295 277 258 317 288 301 319 269 209 229 271 419 413

12 9 6 6 6 9 6 14 13 11 23 22 20 46 52

199 298 321 344 365 304 330 297 277 339 397 375 336 165 166

39 3 3 3 1

640 625 625 630 630 630 630 635 635 635 633 650 651 659 659

4 23 16 16 45 24 24 29 28

appendix

553

Table A.3 Postwar Executive Leadership France, – Years

Governing Party, Coalition

President/Premier

1958–69 1969–74 1974–81 1981–95 1995–

Gaullist Gaullist Independent Republican Socialist Gaullist

1958–81

Parliament RPR  UDF  other centrists

1981–84 1984–86 1986–88 1988–93 1993–95 1995–97 1997–

PS  PCF PS RPF  UDF PS RPF  UDF RPF UDF PS  PCF  Greens

President De Gaulle Pompidou Giscard d’Estaing Mitterrand Chirac Debré, Pompidou, Couve de Murville, Chabas-Delmas, Messmer, Chirac, Barre Mauroy Fabius Chirac Rocard, Cresson, Bérégovoy Balladur Juppé Jospin

Federal Republic of Germany, – Years

Governing Coalition

Federal Chancellor

1949–66 1966–69 1969–82 1982–98 1998–

CDU/CSU  FDP  smaller nonsocialist parties CDU/CSU  SPD SPD  FDP CDU/CSU  FDP SPD  Greens

Adenauer, Erhard Kiesinger Brandt, Schmidt Kohl Schröder

554

politics in europe

Italy, – Years

Governing Coalition

Prime Minister

May 1948–January 1950 January 1950–July 1951 July 1951–July 1953 July 1953–August 1953 August 1953–January 1954 January 1954–February 1954 February 1954–July 1955 July 1955–May 1957 May 1957–July 1958 July 1958–February 1959 February 1959–March 1960 March 1960–July 1960 July 1960–February 1962 February 1962–June 1963 June 1963–December 1963 December 1963–June 1964 July 1964–February 1966 February 1966–June 1968 June 1968–December 1968 December 1968–August 1969 August 1969–February 1970 March 1970–August 1970 August 1970–February 1972 February 1972–June 1972 June 1972–June 1973 June 1973–March 1974 March 1974–June 1974 June 1974–October 1974 November 1974–January 1976 February 1976–July 1976 July 1976–March 1978 March 1978–January 1979 March 1979–March 1979 August 1979–April 1980 April 1980–September 1980 October 1980–May 1981 July 1981–August 1982 August 1982–November 1982 November 1982–August 1983 August 1983–March 1987 April 1987–June 1987 July 1987–March 1988 April 1988–May 1989 July 1989–March 1991 April 1991–June 1992

DC  PSDI  PRI  PLI DC  PSDI  PRI DC  PRI DC DC DC DC  PLI  PSDI DC  PSDI  PLI DC DC  PSI DC DC DC DC  PSDI  PRI DC DC  PSI  PSDI  PRI DC  PSI  PSDI  PRI DC  PSI  PSDI  PRI DC DC  PSI  PRI DC DC  PSDI  PSI  PRI DC  PSDI  PSI  PRI DC DC  PLI  PSDI DC  PSDI  PRI DC  PSI  PSDI DC  PSI  PSDI DC  PRI DC DC DC DC  PSDI  PRI DC  PSDI  PLI DC  PSI  PRI DC  PSI  PSDI  PRI PRI  DC  PSI  PSDI  PLI PRI  DC  PSI  PSDI  PLI DC  PSI  PSDI  PLI PSI  DC  PRI  PSDI  PLI DC (minority government) DC  PSI  PSDI  PRI  PLI DC  PSI  PSDI  PRI  PLI DC  PSI  PSDI  PLI DC  PSI  PSDI  PLI

DeGasperi DeGasperi DeGasperi DeGasperi Pella Fanfani Scelba Segni Zoli Fanfani Segni Tambroni Fanfani Fanfani Leone Moro Moro Moro Leone Rumor Rumor Rumor Colombo Andreotti Andreotti Rumor Rumor Rumor Moro Moro Andreotti Andreotti Andreotti Cossiga Forlani Forlani Spadolini Spadolini Fanfani Craxi Fanfani Goria DeMita Andreotti Andreotti

appendix

555

Italy, – (continued) Years

Governing Coalition

Prime Minister

July 1992–April 1993 April 1993–April 1994 April 1994–January 1995 January 1995–March 1966 March 1996–April 2000 April 2000–May 2001 May 2001–

PSI  DC  PSDI  PLI Nonpartisan technocrats FI  LN  AN Nonpartisan technocrats Olive Tree Coalition Olive Tree Coalition Freedom House Coalition

Amato Ciampi Berlusconi Dini Prodi, d’Alema Amato Berlusconi

Sweden, – Years

Governing Party, Coalition

Prime Minister

1944–51 1951–57 1957–76 1976–78 1978–79 1979–81 1981–82 1982–91 1991–94 1994–98 1998–

SAP SAP  C SAP C  FP  M FP C  FP  M C  FP SAP M  C  FP  KDS SAP SAP

Hansson, Erlander Erlander Erlander, Palme Fälldin Ullsten Fälldin Fälldin Palme, Carlsson Bildt Carlsson, Persson Persson

United Kingdom, – Years 1945–51 1951–64 1964–70 1970–74 1974–79 1979–92 1992–97 1997–

Governing Party Labour Conservatives Labour Conservatives Labour Conservatives Conservatives Labour

Prime Minister Attlee Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Douglas-Home Wilson Heath Wilson, Callaghan Thatcher, Major Major Blair

556

politics in europe

Table A.4 Per Capita Gross National Product (GNP), 1975–97 (in U.S. dollars)

1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997

France

Germany

Italy

Sweden

United Kingdom

United States

Canada

6,530 6,960 7,620 8,580 10,490 12,660 12,750 11,630 10,070 9,470 9,420 10,910 13,900 17,810 18,740 19,710 20,490 22,720 22,490 22,944 26,445 26,326 23,789

7,260 7,740 8,300 9,660 12,110 14,150 13,550 11,920 10,780 10,630 10,560 12,100 15,400 20,060 21,250 22,720 20,660 23,360 23,560 27,826 29,542 28,738 25,470

4,020 4,180 4,430 4,980 6,380 8,010 8,220 7,710 7,140 7,230 7,480 8,770 11,340 14,870 16,050 17,360 18,810 21,050 19,840 17,796 18,984 21,127 19,913

9,100 9,610 10,140 11,190 13,280 15,410 15,530 13,960 12,020 11,500 11,550 13,450 16,960 21,120 22,700 24,330 25,660 27,530 24,740 22,389 26,096 28,283 25,746

4,260 4,380 4,630 5,270 6,780 8,550 9,560 9,550 9,760 8,240 8,180 9,180 11,320 14,200 15,330 16,170 16,580 18,130 18,060 17,468 18,799 19,621 21,740

8,070 8,510 9,130 10,250 11,690 12,830 13,720 13,410 13,800 15,180 16,270 17,840 19,810 21,620 22,040 22,380 22,600 23,790 24,740 25,512 26,438 27,821 29,326

7,710 8,440 8,750 9,350 10,140 11,040 11,850 11,400 11,700 12,610 13,250 13,870 15,470 17,690 18,970 19,640 19,990 20,270 19,970 18,915 21,031 19,330 20,064

Source: The World Bank, World Tables  (Baltimore, Md., and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Data for 1994–97 are from annual “Basic Statistics: International Comparisons,” OECD Economic Surveys (Paris: OECD), 1995–2000.

557

appendix

Table A.5 Growth of Real Gross Domestic Product (GDP), 1970–2001 (percentage change from previous years)

France Germany Italy Sweden U.K. U.S. Canada EU Euro area

Average

Average

–

–





















 a

 a

3.5 2.9 3.6 2.0 2.4 3.5 4.9 3.2

3.5 1.8 2.4 2.1 2.4 2.8 3.0 2.2

2.5 5.7 2.0 1.6 0.6 1.8 0.3 3.0 3.6

1.1 5.0 1.4 –1.1 –1.5 –0.5 –1.9 1.8 2.4

1.3 2.2 0.8 –1.6 0.1 3.1 0.9 1.1 1.4

–0.9 –1.1 –0.9 –2.9 2.3 2.7 2.3 –0.4 –0.8

1.8 2.3 2.2 4.1 4.4 4.0 4.7 2.7 2.3

1.9 1.7 2.9 3.7 2.8 2.7 2.8 2.4 2.2

1.1 0.8 1.1 1.1 2.6 3.6 1.5 1.7 1.4

1.9 1.4 1.8 2.0 3.5 4.4 4.4 2.5 2.3

3.2 2.1 1.5 3.0 2.6 4.4 3.3 2.7 2.8

2.9 1.6 1.4 3.8 2.2 4.2 4.5 2.4 2.5

3.3 3.0 2.8 4.0 3.0 5.2 4.8 3.4 3.5

2.9 2.7 2.7 3.2 2.6 3.5 3.4 3.0 3.1

Source: Adapted from Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD Economic Outlook 68 (December 2000), 211. aProjected.

558 politics in europe

Table A.6 Consumer Prices, 1970–99 (percentage change from previous year)

France Germany Italy Sweden U.K. U.S. Canada EU

Average –



 

 











 















9.6 5.1 13.8 9.2 13.7 7.8 8.0 10.4

13.3 6.3 18.0 12.1 11.9 10.3 12.4 11.8

12.0 5.2 16.5 8.6 8.6 6.1 10.8 10.3

7.7 2.4 10.8 8.0 5.0 4.3 4.3 6.9

2.5
0.1 5.8 4.2 3.4 1.9 4.2 3.2

3.3 0.2 4.7 4.2 4.1 3.7 4.3 3.0

2.7 1.3 5.1 6.1 4.9 4.1 4.0 3.4

3.5 2.8 6.3 6.6 7.8 4.8 5.0 4.9

3.6 2.7 6.5 10.4 9.5 5.4 4.8 5.4

3.2 3.6 6.3 9.7 5.9 4.2 5.6 4.8

2.1 4.4 4.6 4.7 1.6 3.0 1.9 3.4

1.7 2.8 4.1 2.4 2.5 2.6 0.2 2.9

1.8 1.7 5.2 2.9 3.4 2.8 2.2 2.9

2.0 1.4 4.0 0.8 2.4 2.9 1.6 2.4

1.2 1.9 2.0 0.9 3.1 2.3 1.6 2.0

0.8 0.9 2.0 0.4 3.4 1.6 1.0 1.7

0.5 0.6 1.7 0.3 1.6 2.2 1.7 1.2

9.5 3.3 14.6 8.9 4.6 3.2 5.9 8.0

5.8 2.1 9.2 7.4 6.1 3.5 4.0 5.8

2.4 5.1 5.3 2.6 3.7 3.0 1.5 4.3

Source: Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD Economic Outlook 68 (December 2000), 226.

559

appendix

Table A.7 Average Unemployment Rates, 1960–99

France Germany Italy Sweden United Kingdom United States OECD average

–

–

–

–

–

–

1.5 .8 4.9 1.6 1.5 5.0 3.1

n.a. .8 5.7 2.2 2.4 4.6 3.4

4.5 3.5 6.6 1.9 4.2 6.7 5.1

9.0 6.8 9.9 2.5 9.5 7.2 7.4

10.6 6.4 10.7 6.6 9.1 6.4 7.3

11.8 9.0 11.7 7.2 7.1 4.9 7.1

Source: OECD, Economic Outlook. Historical Statistics – (Paris, 1991); OECD, Economic Outlook  (June 1995); and OECD, Economic Outlook 68 (December 2000).

Table A.8 Annual Unemployment Rates, 1985–99 (commonly used definitions)

France Germany Italy Sweden U.K. U.S. Canada E.U.































10.2 8.0 8.6 1.0 11.6 7.2 10.5 10.2

10.4 7.7 9.9 0.8 11.8 7.0 9.6 10.3

10.5 7.6 10.2 0.8 10.2 6.2 8.8 10.0

10.0 7.6 10.5 0.7 7.8 5.5 7.8 9.3

9.3 6.9 10.2 0.6 6.1 5.3 7.5 8.4

8.9 6.2 9.1 0.5 5.9 5.6 8.1 7.8

9.4 5.5 8.6 1.1 8.2 6.8 10.3 8.1

10.4 6.6 8.8 2.5 10.2 7.5 11.2 9.2

11.7 7.8 10.2 4.5 10.3 6.9 11.4 10.7

12.2 8.3 11.2 4.7 9.4 6.1 10.3 11.1

11.6 8.1 11.7 4.2 8.6 5.6 9.4 10.7

12.3 8.8 11.7 4.7 8.0 5.4 9.6 10.8

12.4 9.8 11.8 5.2 6.9 4.9 9.1 10.6

11.8 9.3 11.9 3.9 6.2 4.5 8.3 10.0

11.1 9.0 11.5 2.7 5.9 4.2 7.6 9.2

Source: Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD Economic Outlook 68 (December 2000): .

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politics in europe

Table A.9 Central Government Total Outlays as Percentage of Nominal GDP, 1986–2002 France Germany Italy Sweden U.K. U.S. Canada OECD Avg.





























 a

 a

 a

51.2 45.0 50.6 58.3 .. 34.2 56.4

50.2 45.3 50.3 54.6 43.0 33.9 54.5

49.9 44.9 50.4 54.8 40.6 32.9 52.4

49.0 43.5 51.2 55.1 39.3 32.8 50.8

49.6 43.8 53.1 55.8 41.9 33.6 50.8

50.0 44.2 53.1 58.0 43.5 34.2 51.8

51.7 45.0 53.3 63.6 45.3 34.8 51.9

53.9 46.2 56.4 67.5 44.5 34.1 53.3

53.8 45.9 53.9 64.9 44.7 33.1 51.3

53.6 46.3 52.3 62.1 44.4 32.9 50.3

53.8 47.3 52.5 60.2 43.0 32.4 50.3

52.8 46.4 49.9 58.6 40.9 31.4 48.8

52.4 45.8 48.7 56.2 39.7 30.5 48.2

52.1 45.9 48.3 56.0 39.1 30.0 47.9

51.2 43.0 46.7 53.9 38.4 29.3 46.7

49.4 44.5 47.1 53.1 38.8 29.0 45.8

49.7 43.8 46.6 52.7 39.0 28.8 45.2

38.4

38.3

37.6

37.2

38.2

39.9

39.8

40.5

39.6

39.5

39.2

38.0

37.7

37.5

36.6

36.5

36.1

Source: Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD Economic Outlook 68 (December 2000): 237. aProjected.

Table A.10 General Government Total Tax and Nontax Receipts as Percentage of Nominal GDP, 1986–2002 France Germany Italy Sweden U.K. U.S. Canada OECD Avg.





























 a

 a

 a

48.0 43.8 39.3 57.1 — 28.9 37.6

48.3 43.5 39.4 58.7 41.2 29.6 37.9

47.4 42.8 39.7 58.2 41.2 29.3 38.4

47.1 43.6 41.4 60.2 40.8 29.5 38.6

47.4 41.8 42.1 59.8 40.4 29.3 40.1

47.6 41.2 43.1 56.9 40.7 29.2 40.8

47.5 42.5 43.8 56.2 38.8 28.9 41.0

47.9 48.2 43.0 43.5 47.0 44.8 55.5 54.0 37.5 37.9 29.2 29.4 40.3 39.9

48.0 43.0 44.7 54.2 38.6 29.8 40.0

49.7 43.9 45.4 56.8 38.6 30.2 40.5

49.7 43.7 47.2 56.6 38.9 30.5 41.0

49.6 43.8 45.9 58.1 40.2 31.8 41.2

50.4 44.5 46.4 57.9 40.4 31.0 40.9

49.8 44.4 46.6 57.3 41.2 31.6 40.3

49.3 42.8 46.0 56.4 40.9 31.6 39.5

48.8 42.6 45.8 56.5 40.8 31.5 38.9

34.1

35.1

35.1

35.3

35.4

35.4

35.4

35.6

35.6

36.1

36.3

36.5

36.7

37.1

36.8

36.6

35.5

Source: Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD Economic Outlook 68 (December 2000): 237. aProjected.

561

appendix

Table A.11 Days Lost Through Strikes and Lockouts per 1,000 Employees, 1960–2000 –

–

–

–

–

315 25 1120 25 230 850 710

288 70 1975 52 925 1408 1715

312 76 1806 20 1055 930 1980

150 130 1040 10 970 310 15

77 11 159 51 29 40 220

France Germany Italy Sweden U.K. U.S. Canada

Sources: 1960–80: International Labor Organization data governing mining, manufacturing, construction, and transportation from Great Britain, Department of Employment Gazette, as cited in Solomon Barkin, ed., Worker Militancy and Its Consequences: The Changing Climate of Western Industrial Relations, d ed. (New York: Praeger, 1983), 387. 1982–86: Data covering mining, quarrying, manufacturing, construction, transportation, and communications, as cited in Great Britain, British Information Service, Survey of Current Affairs 18 (August 1988): 276. 1990–99: International Labour Organization data covering all industries and services, as cited in Great Britain, National Statistics, Labour Market Trends 109 (April 2001): 196. Ernst B. Akyeampong, “A Statistical Portrait of the Trade Union Movement,” in Statistics Canada, Perspectives 9 (winter 1997): 52. Note: Swedish figures for 1971 cover only manufacturing and are therefore not directly comparable to other figures.

Table A.12 Infant Mortality Rates, 1960–90s (per , live births)

France Germany Italy Russia Sweden U.K. U.S. Canada















Latest Year a

27.4 33.8 43.9

21.9 23.9 36.0

18.2 23.6 29.6

13.8 19.8 21.2

10.0 12.6 14.6

8.3 8.9 10.3

7.3 7.5 8.5

16.6 22.5 26.0 27.3

13.3 19.0 24.7 23.6

11.0 18.1 20.0 18.8

8.6 15.7 16.1 14.3

6.9 12.1 12.6 10.4

6.8 9.4 10.6 7.9

6.0 8.4 9.1 6.8

5.0 4.4 5.2 7.4 4.0 4.2 4.5 6.1

Source: United Nations, United Nations Demographic Yearbooks (New York, 1978–2000). aData for individual countries range from 1993 to 1998.

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politics in europe

Table A.13 Life Expectancy at Birth, 1960–90s –

France Germany Italy Russia Sweden U.K. U.S. Canada

–

–

Latest Year a

Male

Female

Male

Female

Male

Female

Male

Female

67.6 67.2 67.4

74.5 72.9 72.6

68.6 67.6 39.2

76.2 73.7 75.2

70.5 70.4 71.2

78.7 77.2 78.0

71.6 67.9 66.7 68.8

75.6 73.8 73.4 75.1

72.1 69.0 67.5 70.2

77.5 75.2 75.3 77.5

73.4 70.7 70.6 73.0

79.4 76.9 78.1 79.8

74.2 73.3 74.6 58.3 76.5 74.7 73.6 74.6

82.0 79.7 81.0 71.7 81.7 79.6 79.2 80.9

Source: United Nations, United Nations Demographic Yearbooks (New York, 1978–2000). aData for individual countries range from 1992 to 1997.

Table A.14 Student Enrollment Rates (1998) Full-time and part-time students As a percentage of the population aged –

As a percentage of the population aged –

As a percentage of the population aged –

99.9 97.5 99.1 96.5 98.9 99.8 97.0

87.8 88.3 69.8 86.1 69.5 74.2 78.0

19.1 21.7 16.8 30.4 18.1 21.4 19.8

France Germany Italy Sweden U.K. U.S. Canada Source: OECD , 135.

Table A.15 Religious Adherents by Major Denominations, mid-2000 (in percentages of total population)

France Germany Italy Russia Sweden U.K. U.S. Canada

Catholic

Protestant

Anglican

Orthodox

Other Christian

Jews

Muslims

82.3 34.9 97.2 1.0 2.0 9.6 20.8 41.8

1.5 37.0 0.8 1.1 94.5 8.6 23.2 17.2

0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 44.7 0.9 2.6

1.1 0.8 0.2 51.7 1.4 0.6 2.1 1.9

0.0 1.6 1.4 5.4 1.3 4.5 31.8 1.5

1.0 0.1 0.1 0.7 0.2 0.5 2.0 1.3

7.1 4.4 1.2 7.6 2.3 2.0 1.5 1.0

Source: David B. Barrett, George T. Kurian, Todd M. Johnson, World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and Relgions in the Modern World, d ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Index Note: EU = European Union; UK = United Kingdom. abortion issue: Germany, –; Italy, ,  Act of Union (UK),  Adenaur, Konrad, , –, , , ,  Agrarian Party (Russia), ,  agriculture/agricultural interest groups: EEC/EC/EU policies, , , –; France, , ; Germany, , –; Italy, , –; Russia, , –; UK,  Agriculture Council (EU),  Akaev, Askar,  Algeria,  Alliance for Jobs (Germany),  All-Union Center for the Study of Public Opinion (Russia), – Amato, Giuliano, , –, ,  Amnesty International, – Andreotti, Giulio,  Andropov, Yuri, ,  Anglo-Irish Agreement,  Anton, Thomas, , – Apprentice Education Bill (Germany),  Argumenty i fakty (Russia),  arrondissements (France), – Association of Local Government Workers (Sweden),  Association of University Teachers, UK (AUT), – attitude interest groups. See interest groups Austria, , , , , , ,  Baden-Württemberg,  Badinter, Robert,  Badoglio, Marshal,  Bagehot, Walter,  Balkan conflict, –, – Balladur, Edouard, , , –, ,  Bank of Italy,  Barre, Raymond, , ,  Bashkortostan election,  Bavaria, –, , –

Belarus, –,  Belgium, ,  Bérégovoy, Pierre,  Berezovsky, Boris, , , – Berlin, , , –, – Berlinguer, Enrico,  Berlusconi, Silvio: coalition leadership, , , ; corruption charges, , , ; Freedom House campaign, –; government policies, , ; judicial reform efforts, , ; party formation, ; resignations, , , ,  Bernadotte, Jean-Baptiste,  Bertinotti, Fausto,  Bicameral Commission (Italy),  Bildt, Carl, ,  Bismarck, Otto von, –,  Blair, Tony: EU policies, , , ; executive reorganization, ; Irish agreement, ; party leadership, , , ; Treasury relationship, ; and UK’s image,  Blair government: constitutional reforms, ; EU policies, ; governing style, , , , , ; secrecy rules, –; union relationships,  Blum, Leon,  Bolshevik revolution, – Bonaparte, Napoleon, ,  Bossi, Umberto, , , , ,  Brandenburg, ,  Brandt, Willy, –, ,  Branting, Hjalmar,  breakthrough politics, defined,  Bremen, ,  Brezhnev, Leonid,  Broström, Lennart,  Brown, Gordon,  Brown, Lawrence D.,  Brussels agreements,  budget policymaking: EU, , –; Italy, , ; United Kingdom, –, –. See also taxes

564

politics in europe

Bulgaria,  Bundesrat, –, –,  Bundestag, –, , ,  Burton, John,  business interest groups: EU, –; France, –; Germany, ; Italy, –; Russia, –; Sweden, ; UK, –, – by-elections (UK),  cabinets, overviews: Germany, –; Italy, –, –, , ; Russia, –; Sweden, , , –; UK, –, –. See also prime minister roles; individual country policymaking, e.g. Sweden, policymaking history cabinets ministériels (France), – Callaghan, James,  campaign financing (UK),  Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, UK (CND),  Canada, military spending,  Carlsson, Ingvar, , , , , –,  Carl XVI Gustav (king of Sweden), – Catholic Action, , ,  Catholic Church. See religion Center Party (Sweden), , , , –, , –,  Central Office (UK),  Central Organization of Salaried Employees, Sweden (TCO), , – Chaban-Delmas, Jacques, ,  Chamber of Deputies (Italy), , –, –, – chancellor powers (Germany), – Chechnya, –, , – Cheminade, Jacques,  Chernomyrdin, Viktor, , , ,  Chevènement, Jean-Pierre,  China-Russia relations, – Chirac, Jacques: cabinet staff expansion, ; economic policies, ; EU policies, , , –; Giscard relationship, ; Mitterand relationship, –; Paris mayorship, , ; party leadership, , –; presidential campaigns, –, –; on presidential powers, ; prime ministers, , – Christian Association of Italian Workers (ACLI), ,  Christian Democratic Center (Italy), , , , , ,  Christian Democratic Party, Italy (DC): corruption scandals, –, , , ; decline/dissolution, –; economic/social policies, –, –; history highlights, –, –, ; interest group relationships, –, ; regional devolution, ;

voter support patterns, , –, , , – Christian Democratic Union, Germany (CDU): overview, –; Catholic Church relationship, , –; corruption scandals, , ; European integration advocacy, ; history highlights, , , , –, ; voter support patterns, –, , –, , –,  Christian Democratic Union, Sweden (KDS), , –, ,  Christian Socialists (Italy),  Christian Social Union, Germany (CSU), , –. See also Christian Democratic Union, Germany (CDU) Christian Social Union (CSU),  Churchill, Winston,  Church of England, ,  Church of Scotland,  Ciampi, Carlo Azeglio, –, , , –, ,  City of London,  civil service: EU, , ; France, –, –, ; Italy, –, –; Sweden, –, –; UK, –, , ,  Clarke, Kenneth,  class structure: France, –; Germany, –; UK, , –, –, –. See also voting patterns, socioeconomic characteristics closure procedure (UK),  “cohabitation” government (France),  Collective Agreements Act of  (Sweden),  collective responsibility (UK), – Colombo, Emilio,  comités des sages (France),  Commission of Inquiry (UK),  Committee of Permanent Representatives, EU (COREPER), , – Committee of Regions, EU (COR),  committee systems: European Parliament, –; France, ; Germany, –, ; Italy, –, ; Russia, ; Sweden, ; UK, –, , – Common Market,  Common-Program of the Left (France), ,  Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), , –,  communes: France, ; Italy,  communist parties. See Communist Party, France (PC); Communist Party, Italy (PCI); Communist Party of the Russian Federation; Left Party (Sweden); Party of Democratic Socialism, Germany (PDS) Communist Party, France (PC), –, –, , , –, ,  Communist Party, Italy (PCI): coalition partners,

index –, –; constitution vote, ; devolution legislation, –; Occhetto-led changes, –; union relationships, ; voter support patterns, , , , . See also Democratic Party of the Left, Italy (PDS); Party of Communist Refoundation, Italy (PRC) Communist Party, Italy (new PCI),  Communist Party of the Russian Federation, –, –, – Concerted Action (Germany),  Conciliation Committee (EU),  Concordat of , , ,  Confederation of British Industries (CBI), – Confederation of Labor (France),  Conference of Presidents (Italy), – Confindustria (Italy), – Conservative Party (UK): overview, , –; candidate selection, ; and class structure, –; economic policies, ; history highlights, ; sponsorship issue, ; union relationships, –; voter support patterns, , , , –. See also Thatcher government Constitutional Council (France), , ,  Constitutional Court (Italy), – Constitutional Court (Russia), , ,  constitutions: France, , , –, , , , ; Germany, , , –, –, ; Italy, –, , –, , , –; Russia, , , , , , –; Sweden, , –, –; UK,  “consumption cleavage” (UK),  corruption: EU, , ; France, , ; Germany, , ; Russia, , ,  corruption (Italy): Berlusconi cabinet, , ; Craxi cabinet, ; judiciary role, –; pervasiveness, , , , –, –,  Cossiga, Francesco, , , ,  Cossutta, Armando, ,  Council of Auditors (EU),  Council of Finance Ministers (EU),  Council of Ministers (EU), –, . See also Council of the European Union Council of State (France),  Council of the European Union, –, , –,  courts. See judicial systems Couve de Murville, Maurice, – Craxi, Bettino, , , , , ,  Cresson, Edith, ,  crime rates (France),  Crossman, Richard,  currency: ECC accounting, ; EMU criteria, –; EU issues, –; Germany, 

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Cyprus,  Czech Republic, , ,  D’Alema, Massimo, , , –,  Debré, Michel, ,  decree laws (Italy),  deficits. See spending levels de Gaulle, Charles: Adenaur relationship, ; EU policies, , , ; governing style, , , , ; provisional government leadership, – Delanoë, Betrand, – Delors, Jacques, , , , , , ,  Democratic Alliance (Italy), ,  Democratic Center (France), ,  democratic corporatist systems, defined, xvii Democratic Party of the Left, Italy (PDS): coalition partners, ; corruption scandals, ; history highlights, , , –; voter support patterns, , , –, , ,  Democratic Union for the Republic, Italy (UDR), , ,  Democratic Unionist party (UK),  Democratic Union party (Italy),  Démocratie libérale, France (DL),  democratization: Germany, –, –; Sweden, –, , ; UK, . See also Russia Democrats for the Olive Tree (Italy),  Democrats of the Left, Italy (DS), . See also Democratic Party of the Left, Italy (PDS) Denmark, , , , , , ,  de Palacio, Loyola,  départements (France), , – de Villiers, Philippe, ,  devolution movement (UK), –, –, , – Dini, Lamberto, , , , – Di Pietro, Antonio,  divorce referendum (Italy), ,  Dooge Commission,  Douglas-Home, Sir Alec,  Duma functions, , , –, – Duncan Smith, Iain,  East Germany: economic activity, , –; environmental problems, –; history overview, , , –; judiciary, ; political culture, –; population characteristics, –, , , –, –; postunification party system, ; property claim issue, ; unemployment levels, , ; unification challenges, –; union membership,  École Nationale d’Administration (France), , , –

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economic activity: EU countries compared, –; France, , –; Italy, –, –, –; Russia, , –, –, ; Sweden, , , –, –, , , ; UK, , , –, –, – economic activity, Germany: overview, –, –; guest worker issue, –; history highlights, , , , –, ; labor programs, –; unification difficulties, , – Economic and Monetary Union, EU (EMU), –, –, , , , – Economic and Social Committee, EU (ESC),  Economic and Social Council (France),  education: France, , –, , ; Germany, , , –, ; Italy, –; Russia, ; Sweden, ; UK, , – Eichel, Hans,  Einaudi, Luigi,  elections. See electoral systems; individual country party systems, e.g. France, party system; voting patterns, socioeconomic characteristics Electoral Assembly (Italy),  electoral systems: European Parliament, –; France, , , , , –; Germany, , , –, –; Italy, –, , –, ; Russia, –, , , –; Sweden, , –, ; UK, , , –, –, –. See also referendum process; voting patterns, socioeconomic characteristics employment patterns. See unemployment levels Engholm, Björn,  England, . See also United Kingdom entries Environmentalist Party (Sweden), , –,  environmental problems, Germany, , – Erhard, Ludwig,  Erlander, Tage,  Estonia, ,  étatist systems, defined, xvii ethnic groups: France, , ; Germany, , –; Italy, ; Russia, , ; Sweden, ; UK, ,  European Assembly, ,  European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), – European Central Bank (ECB), , ,  European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), –,  European Commission (EC): overview, , , –; expansion challenges, –; history highlights, , , ; member admission approvals, ; Parliament relationship, –; policymaking processes, –, –, , –

European Council, , –,  European Court of Human Rights,  European Court of Justice, , , – European Currency Unit (ECU),  European Economic Area (EEA),  European Economic Community (EEC), , –, . See also European Union entries European Free Trade Association (EFTA), ,  European Monetary Institute (EMI), ,  European Monetary Systems (EMS), ,  European Parliament (EP), , –, –, –, –, , – European People’s Party (EEP),  European Political Cooperation (EPC),  European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), – European System of Central Banks (ESCB),  European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC),  European Union (EU): countries compared, –; France relationship, , , , , ; Germany relationship, , –, –; institutional predecessors, –; interest groups, –; Italy relationship, –, ; Maastricht agreement and revisions, –; membership expansion challenges, , –; purpose, ; Sweden relationship, , –, , , , , , ; UK relationship, –, , , , , , , ,  European Union (EU), government structure: overview, ; executive councils, –; financial institutions, –; judiciary, –; Parliament, – European Union (EU), policymaking processes: overview, , –, –; budgetary, –; bureaucratic challenges, –, –; EU institutions’ influences, –; executive accountability, –; implementation, –; individual influences, –; national governments’ role, –, –; public opinion role, –; security/foreign affairs, – Eurotom, ,  Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), ,  Expenditure Committee (UK), – Fabius, Laurent, ,  Fälldin, Thorbjön, ,  Fascist Party (Italy), – Fatherland-All Russia (OVR), , , – Federal Assembly (Russia),  Federal Constitutional Court (Germany), –, – federalism option, European Union, –

index Federal Labor Institute (Germany), , – Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), history overview, , –, –. See also Germany Federal Republic (unified Germany). See Germany Federation Council (Russia), ,  Federation for New Solidarity (France),  Federation of Agricultural Consortiums (Italy),  Federation of the Democratic and Socialist Left, France (FGDS),  Feldt, Kjell-Olof,  Fifth Republic of France, . See also France entries Fini, Gianfranco, , ,  Finland, , , , , , ,  First Republic of France, – Fischer, Joschka, , , ,  Foot, Michael,  foreign policy: EU, –; France, ; Germany, , , , , , –; Russia, , , –; Sweden, – Formentini, Marco,  Forza Italia!: overview, –; Bicameral Commission proposal, ; coalition partners, , ; EU policy opposition, ; formation, , ; voter support patterns, , –, ,  Fourth Republic of France, – Fraktion (Russia),  France: ECC relations, –; history overview, , , –; interest groups, –; military spending, ; political culture, –; political effectiveness, –; population characteristics, –; reform needs, –. See also European Union entries France, government structure: administrative units, –, ; executive powers, –; history overview, –; judiciary, –, –; local, –, ; parliamentary bodies, –. See also France, policymaking process France, party system: ideological comparisons, –; local government, ; s through s, –; s, –; s, –; voter support overview, – France, policymaking process: civil service influence, –; implementation barriers, –; interest group role, –; parliament’s role, –, –; presidential role, –. See also France, government structure Free Democrats Party (Germany), , –, –, , –,  Freedom House, evaluation of Russia, , – Freedom House (Italy), –

567

Freedom Party (Austria),  Freedom Pole (Italy), , ,  Gaidar, Yegor, ,  Garibaldi, Giuseppe, – Gasperi, Alcide De,  Gaullism/Gaullist parties (France), –, –, , –, – Gazprom,  GDP statistics. See spending levels General Confederation of “Cadres” (France),  General Council (France), – General Federation of Labor (France),  Genscher, Hans-Dietrich, – geography: EU countries compared, –; France, ; Germany, ; Italy, ; Sweden,  German Democratic Republic (GDR). See East Germany German Industrial and Trade Chamber,  German Republican Party,  German Trade Union Federation, – Germany: ECC/EU, , –, –; history overview, –; interest groups, –; military spending, ; political culture, , –, –; population characteristics, , –; unification challenges, –. See also European Union entries Germany, government structure: overview, ; executive powers, –; history highlights, , , ; judiciary, –; local, , ; parliamentary bodies, –, ; semipublic institutions, –. See also Germany, policymaking characteristics Germany, party system: overview, –; electoral system impact, –, ; history highlights, , , , ; major parties compared, –; minor parties compared, –; voter support patterns, –, –, , , , , , , – Germany, policymaking characteristics: overview, –, –; governments compared, –, –; implementation process, ; semipublic institution influences, –; unification period, –. See also Germany, government structure Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry, , –, –, , ,  Good Friday agreement (UK), – Gorbachev, Mikhail, , –, ,  Gore, Al,  government structures. See individual country government entries, e.g. France, government structure Great Britain. See United Kingdom entries “Great Compromise” (Sweden),  Greater London Council, 

568

politics in europe

Greece, , , , ,  Green Party: France, –, , ; Germany, , , –, –, –, , , –; Italy, , , , , , ; Sweden, , –, ; UK,  Gromov, Boris,  Gronchi, Giovanni,  guest workers (Germany), – guillotine procedure (UK),  Gulf War, Russian response,  Gusinsky, Vladimir,  Gustaf V Adolf (king of Sweden),  Gustaf VI Adolf (king of Sweden),  Gustavus I Adolphus (king of Sweden),  Gustavus II Adolphus (king of Sweden),  Hague, William, ,  Hallstein, Walter,  Hamburg, , ,  Hammarskjöld, Dag,  Hansson, Per Albin,  health care systems: Germany, –; Sweden, ; UK, ,  Heckscher, Gunnar,  Heisler, Martin,  Hesse (German state),  Higher Authority, ,  Hindenburg, Paul von,  history overviews: EU development, –; France, –; Germany, –; Italy, –, ; Russia, –; Sweden, –; UK, – Hitler, Adolf, – Hix, Simon,  Honecker, Erich, ,  House of Commons (UK), , , –, , –,  House of Lords (UK), –, – Hue, Robert,  human rights, Russia, – Human Rights Watch,  Hungary, , ,  Hunters’ party (France),  Iceland,  immigrants/immigration: France, , , , ; Germany, , , –; Sweden, ; UK,  income levels: Germany, , , –, –; Sweden, ; UK, ,  incompatibility rule (France), – Independent Republicans (France), – in sede deliberante/referente procedures (France), –,  Institute for Industrial Reconstruction, Italy (IRI), , , 

Institute of Directors (UK),  Instrument of Government (Sweden), – interest groups: EU, –; France, –, –; Germany, –; Italy, –, ; Russia, –; Sweden, , –; UK, , –, , – intergovernmental conference, EU (IGC), – Inter-Regional Electoral Association, Russia (UNITY), –, , – Intersind (Italy), – Ireland, , , , , . See also United Kingdom entries Irish Free State, – Irish Republican Army (IRA), ,  Italian General Confederation of Agriculture,  Italian General Confederation of Labor (CGIL), – Italian General Confederation of Workers’ Unions (CISL), – Italian Liberal Party (PLI), , –, , ,  Italian Renewal Party, , ,  Italian Republican Party (PRI), , , –, , ,  Italian Socialist Democratic Party (PSDI), , –, , – Italian Socialist Party (PSI), , , , –, , ,  Italian Social Movement (MSI), , , , , , –, – Italian Union of Labor (UIL), – Italy: ECC/EU relationship, –, ; future challenges, –; history overview, –; interest groups, –; military spending, ; political culture, –, –; population characteristics, –, –. See also European Union entries Italy, government structure: civil service, –; executive powers, –; historic, , –; judiciary, –; local, –; parliament bodies, –; public corporations, –; reform proposals, –. See also Italy, policymaking process Italy, party system: overview, –, –, –; cabinet representation, , –, ; communist party strength, ; electoral system impact, –; history highlights, –, –, –, –; and parliament effectiveness, –; policymaking role, –, ; voter support patterns, , –, – Italy, policymaking process: cabinet role, ; formulation/passage of bills, –; implementation barriers, –; judicial role, –;

index parliament’s role, , –. See also Italy, government structure James I (king of England),  Jenkins, Roy, – Jewish populations: France, ; Germany, –, ; Italy, ; Russia,  Johansson, Maude,  Johansson, Olof,  “joint decision trap,” – Jospin, Lionel, –, , , –, , –, ,  judicial systems: EU and preceding institutions, , –; France, –, –; Germany, –; Italy, , –; Russia, , , , ; Sweden, ; UK, , – Juppé, Alain, , ,  Justitieombudsman, Sweden (JO), – Karlsson, Bert,  Kazakhstan, ,  Kerensky, Alexander,  Khakamada, Irina,  Khasbulatov, Ruslan, – Khodorkovsky, Mikhail,  Khrushchev, Nikita,  “Kickback City,” , . See also corruption (Italy) Kiesinger, Kurt-George,  Kinnock, Neil, , ,  Kirienko, Sergei, ,  Kohl, Helmut, , –, , , , ,  Kosovo, Germany’s role, – Kozyrev, Andrei,  Krestianskaia gazeta,  Kvavik, Robert,  labor unions. See unions Labour Party (UK): overview, –, –; candidate selection, ; constitution-oriented legislation, ; economy-related challenges, –, ; ideological trends, –, –; sponsorship issue, , ; union relationships, , , ; voter support patterns, , , , , –. See also Blair government Lafontaine, Oskar, , –, –,  Laguiller, Arlette,  Lakhova, Yekaterina,  languages: Italy, ; Russia, ; Sweden, ; UK,  Lateran Agreements of ,  Latvia, ,  Law / (Italy), – Law / (Italy), –

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League of German Industry,  Lebed, Alexander, ,  Lecanuet, Jean,  Left Party (Sweden), , –, ,  legislative process. See individual country policymaking entries, e.g. Italy, policymaking process Leijonborg, Lars,  Leissner, Maria,  Lenin, , ,  Leone, Giovanni,  Le Pen, Jean-Marie, , , ,  letter writers (Russia),  Liberal Democratic Party, Russia (LDPR), , , , – Liberal Democrats (UK), –, , – Liberal Party (Italy),  Liberals (Sweden), , , –, –, , –,  Liechtenstein,  Ligachev, Yegor,  Lijphart, Arend,  Lithuania,  Livingstone, Ken,  Lloyd George, David,  lobbying activity. See interest groups local government structures: France, –, , ; Germany, , ; Italy, –, ; Sweden, –; UK, –, –,  Logue, John,  Lombard League, – Louis XVI (king of France),  Lower Saxony,  Lukashenko, Alexander, ,  Lundgren, Bo,  Luxembourg, , ,  Luxembourg compromise, ,  Luzkhov, Yuri,  Lysenko, Nikolai, – Maastricht agreement. See Treaty on European Union Madariaga, Javier Solana,  Major, John, , , , ,  Major government, , , , , ,  majoritarian parliamentary government, defined,  Malta,  Marchais, Georges,  Martinazzoli, Mino,  Mattei, Enrico,  Mauroy, Pierre,  Mazzini, Giuseppe, – Mecklenburg–West Pomerania, –,  MEDEF (Mouvement des Entreprises de France), 

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media (Russia), –, , ,  mediator functions (France),  Mégret, Bruno,  Meidner, Rudolf,  Meidner proposal (Sweden), – Mein Kampf (Hitler),  Merkle, Angela,  Messmer, Pierre,  Metal Workers’ Union (Sweden),  military spending: countries compared, ; Russia, –; Sweden, . See also foreign policy ministers. See cabinets, overviews minority groups. See ethnic groups mir (Russia),  Mitterrand, François: campaigns, , , , , ; economic policies, ; EU policies, , ; prime minister relationships, –, –, –,  Moderate Party (Sweden), , , –, –, , –, ,  monarch functions (modern): Sweden, , , –; UK, , , –, , ,  monarchy referendum (Italy),  Mongol empire, – Monnet, Jean,  Moro, Aldo,  Mouvement national républicain, France (MNR),  Mouvement Républicain Populaire, France (MRP), –,  Movement in Support of the Army, Military Science, and the Defense Industry (Russia),  Movement of Left Radicals, France (MRG), ,  Muslim populations (France),  Mussolini, Benito, – Napoleon, Louis,  Napoleon I (Bonaparte), ,  National Alliance (Italy), , , , , –, , –,  National Assembly (France), – National Association of German Employers,  National Center of Independents and Peasants, France (CNIP),  National Confederation of Direct Cultivators (Italy),  National Democratic Party, Germany (NPD), ,  National Executive Committee (NEC),  National Federation of Trade Unions, Sweden (LOSW), , –, , , , –, , – National Front (France), , , , , , 

National Health Service (UK), ,  National Hydrocarburants Corporation, Italy (ENI), , ,  nationalized industries. See public corporations nationalizing politics, defined,  National Labor Market Board, Sweden (AMS),  National Peasants’ Alliance (Italy),  National Socialist German Workers Party, – National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations (UK), – NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), , –, , –, – Nazi Germany, , –,  Nemtsov, Boris,  Netherlands, , ,  Network Party (Italy), ,  neutrality stance (Sweden), – New Democracy, Sweden (NYD), , , , , ,  New Labour. See Blair government; Labour Party (UK) Next Steps (UK),   Committee (UK),  Ninth Development Plan (France),  Northern Ireland, –, , , , . See also United Kingdom entries Northern League (Italy): overview, –; coalition partners, , , –, , ; EU policy opposition, ; “secessionist” proposal, –; voter support patterns, , , , , ,  North Rhine–Westphalia,  Norway, , , , , ,  nuclear-related issues: France, ; Germany, –, ; Russia, , –; Sweden, – Occhetto, Achille, ,  oligarchs, Russia, – Olive Tree Alliance (Italy), –, ,  ombudsman responsibilities: France, ; Sweden, – “Operation Clean Hands,” . See also corruption (Italy) Opposition principle (UK), –,  Orlando, Leoluca,  Our Home Is Russia (NDR), , ,  Pact for Italy,  Pact for National Renewal (Italy),  Paisley, Ian,  Palme, Olof, ,  parliamentary bodies, overviews: EU, –; France, –, –; Germany, –;

index Italy, –, –; Russia, –; Sweden, –; UK, –, –. See also electoral systems; individual country policymaking entries, e.g. United Kingdom, policymaking process PAR (Programme Analysis and Review) (UK),  Party of Communist Refoundation, Italy (PRC), , –, , , , , ,  Party of Democratic Socialism, Germany (PDS), , , , –,  Party of Democratic Socialism, Italy (PDS), , –, , –. See also Democratic Party of the Left, Italy (PDS) Party of European Socialists (PES),  Pasqua, Charles,  pension systems: Germany, –, ; Sweden, , ,  People’s Party (Sweden), , , –, –, , –,  Persson, Göran, , , – Pertini, Sandro,  PESC (Public Expenditure Survey Committee) (UK),  Pétain, Philippe,  Plaid Cymru, ,  pluralist systems, defined, xvii Poland, , , ,  Pole of Good Government (Italy),  Pole of Liberty (Italy), , ,  political cultures: France, –, –; Germany, , –, –; Italy, –; Russia, –; Sweden, –; UK, – political parties. See individual country party entries, e.g. France, party system polity model (EU), – pollution (Germany), – Pompidou, Georges, , –, ,  Popular Party (Italy), , , , , ,  population statistics: EU countries compared, –; France, , ; Germany, , , –; Italy, ; Russia, –, ; Sweden, –; UK,  Portugal, , , , ,  Potanin, Vladimir,  prefects: France, –, ; Italy, ,  presidential powers: European Commission, –, ; France, –, –, –; Germany, –; Italy, –, ; Russia, –, , –. See also individual country policymaking entries, e.g. Germany, policymaking characteristics Primakov, Evgenii, , ,  prime minister roles: France, , , –, –; Italy, –, , , –, ; Russia, , –; Sweden, , , –; UK, –, –, . See also individual coun-

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try policymaking entries, e.g. France, policymaking process privatization: France, –; Germany, ; Italy, –; Russia, –; UK, , , –, –, . See also public corporations Prodi, Romano, , –, , , –, , ,  Prodi Commission, ,  Progressive Alliance (Italy), ,  proportional representation. See electoral systems Protestant churches. See religion Provisional Sinn Fein,  Prussian empire, –,  Public Accounts Committee (UK), ,  public corporations: France, –; Italy, , , –, –, ; Sweden, ; UK, , –, –. See also privatization Putin, Vladimir, –, –, , ,  Putnam, Robert,  qualified majority voting (QVM), , –, ,  Queen’s Speech,  question hours: EU, ; Germany,  Question Time (UK), , , ,  Radical-Socialist Party (France), –, , ,  Rally for France,  Rally of the French People (RPF),  Rasputin,  Rassemblement pour la République, France (RPR), , –, – referendum process: EU initiatives, ; France, ; Italy, , ; Sweden, ; UK,  Reformer’s Movement (France),  regional government: France, ; Italy, –. See also local government structures reiss procedures (Italy),  religion: France, –, –; Germany, , –, , ; Italy, –, –, , , , –; Russia, , , ; Sweden, , ; UK, –, , , ,  Republic of Ireland, – residui passivi (Italy),  revenues. See budget policymaking; taxes Rhineland-Palatinate,  Riksdag functions (Sweden), – Risorgimento movement, –,  Rocard, Michel, , –, –, , , – Rokkan, Stein,  Romania,  Rose, Richard,  Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (UK), 

572

politics in europe

Russia: future challenges, –; geography/climate, –; history overview, , –; interest groups, –; political culture, –; population characteristics, –,  Russia, government structure: cabinet responsibilities, –; Duma functions, , , , –; history highlights, –, , –, –; presidential powers, –, , –; prime minister role, – Russia, party system: overview, –, –; ideological comparisons, –; voter support patterns, –, – Russia, policymaking history: overview, ; economic sector, –; foreign affairs, – Russia’s Choice, ,  Rustow, Dankwart,  Rutelli, Francesco, – Saarland,  Saltsjöbaden Agreement (Sweden),  Santer, Jacques,  Santer Commission, ,  Saragat, Guiseppe,  Sardinia, Kingdom of, – Saxony-Anhalt,  Saxony, ,  Scalfaro, Oscar Luigi, –,  Scharpf, Fritz, – Scharping, Rudolf, – Schäuble, Wolfgang,  Schleswig-Holstein, ,  Schmidt, Helmut, ,  Schröder, Gerhard, –, –, , –, –,  Schumacher, Kurt,  Schuman, Robert,  Scorporo procedure,  Scotland: committee system, , ; devolution referendum, , ; electoral system, ; local government, ; party support patterns, –, , , ; population characteristics, , –. See also United Kingdom entries Scottish National Party, , –,  Scottish Parliament,  Second Republic of France,  Security and Liberty bill (France),  security/foreign policy. See foreign policy Segni, Antonio,  Segni, Mario, ,  Segni Pact (Italy),  Séguin, Philippe,  Seleznev, Gennadii,  Senate (France), –, – Senate (Italy), , –, –,  Serbian conflicts, –, – Shoigu, Sergei, 

Single European Act, –, , –, , – Sinn Fein, –,  Slovak Republic, ,  Slovenia, ,  Smith, John,  Social Democratic Labour Party (UK),  Social Democratic Party, Germany (SPD): overview, , –; church relationships, ; economic/social policies, , , –, –, , ; European integration policies, –; governing coalitions, , –; history highlights, , , , , ; Schröder’s leadership, –; voter support patterns, , –, , , , , – Social Democratic Workers’ Party, Sweden (SAP): overview, , –, ; economic policies, –, , –, , –, –; social legislation tradition, , , –, ; union relationships, , , –; voter support patterns, , , , , , –,  social interest groups. See interest groups Socialist Party, France (PS), –, –, , –, –, –, –,  Socialist Party (Italy), –, ,  social security. See pension systems social welfare systems: France, –; Germany, –, ; UK, , –, . See also Sweden Söder, Karin,  “Solemn Declaration on European Union,”  Solzhenitsyn, Alexander,  Spaak, Paul-Henri,  Spadolini, Giovanni, , , ,  Spain, , , ,  spending levels: countries compared, , ; EU, –; Germany, , –, ; Italy, , –; Russia, –; Sweden, , –, – Spinelli, Altiero,  Spiritual Heritage (Russia),  sponsorship of MPs (UK), ,  Stalin, Joseph, , ,  Starodubtsev, Vasilii,  Statutory Instruments Committee (UK), – Stepashin, Sergei, ,  Strauss, Franz Josef,  strikes: countries compared, ; France, , –, ; Germany, ; Sweden, , ; UK,  study commissions (France),  subsidiarity principle, – Svensson, Alf,  Sweden: ECC/EU issues, –, , , , , , ; future challenges, –; history

index overview, –; interest groups, , –; political culture, –; population characteristics, – Sweden, government structure: administrative agencies, –, –; executive branch, –; history, –; judiciary, ; local, –; ombudsman role, –; parliamentary bodies, –; public corporations,  Sweden, party system, – Sweden, policymaking history: economic influences, –, –, , –; nonsocialist coalition periods, –, –; Social Democrat dominance, –, –, – Swedish Association of Employers (SAF), , , ,  Swedish Federation of Industry (SIF),  Switzerland, ,  Tambroni, Fernando,  Tatarstan election,  taxes: EU, –; Germany, , , , , ; Sweden, –, , ,  Thatcher, Margaret, , , , , , ,  Thatcher government: civil service reforms, ; economic policy, , , –, , , ; governing style, , , ; local authority controls, –; union relationship,  Third Reich, – Third Republic of France,  Thuringia, ,  Tibéri, Jean,  Tiuchev, Fedor,  Tories. See Conservative Party (UK) Trades Union Congress (TUC),  Treasury (UK), – Treaty of Amsterdam, –, , – Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation,  Treaty of Nice, , –, – Treaty of Rome, , , –, –, , ,  Treaty on European Union: Central Bank responsibilities, ; Commission controls, –; Committee of Regions responsibilities, ; Council composition, ; development/adoption, –; EU admission requirements, , ; foreign policy, –; intergovernmental conference functions, ; Parliament responsibilities, ; political party recognition, ; referendums on,  Trimble, David,  Trusteeship Authority (Germany),  trust of government. See political cultures

573

Tuleev, Aman-Geldy,  Turkey, ,  Ukraine, ,  Ulster Unionists (UK),  unemployment levels: Germany, –, , , , ; Italy, , , ; Sweden, , , , ; UK,  unification of Germany: overview, –, ; future challenges, –; party responses compared, , –, , ; policymaking processes, –; union changes, . See also Germany Union Démocratique pour las République, France (UDR),  Union for the New Majority, France (UNM), – Union of Industrial and Employers’ Confederations of Europe (UNICE), – Union of Right Forces, Russia (SPS), –, , – Union pour la Démocratic Française (UDF), –, –,  Union pour la France (UPF),  unions: EU, ; France, , –, , –; Germany, , –, , ; Italy, , , –, –; Russia, , ; Sweden, , –, , –, –, , –; UK, , , –, –, , – United Kingdom: countries compared, –, –; ECC/EU issues, –, , , , , ; future challenges, –; Gulf War, ; history overview, –; institutional stability, –; interest groups, –, –; Irish problem, –; military spending, ; policy tradition, –; political culture, –. See also European Union entries United Kingdom, government structure: overview, , –; cabinet, –; change trends, –; civil service, –; judiciary, , –; local, –; monarch, –; Parliament, , –; prime minister, –; public corporations, –; quasi-governmental sector, ; stability tradition, –. See also United Kingdom, policymaking process United Kingdom, party system: overview, –, , –, –; election process, –, –; major parties compared, –; nationalist-oriented groups, , –; voter support patterns, , , – United Kingdom, policymaking process: overview, –, –, –; budgeting, –; civil service influence, –, , ; monarch’s role, –, , ; stages in, –. See also United Kingdom, government structure United Nations, 

574

politics in europe

United States: EU banking activities, ; EU comparisons, –; Gulf War, ; income levels, ; Russia compared, ; spending levels, , ; Yeltsin relations, – Unity (Russia), –, , , – urbanization: France, –; Germany, –; Russia,  value-added tax (VAT), – Viktoria Ingrid Alice Desiree, Crown Princess (Sweden), – Vogel, Bernhard,  Voloshin, Alexander,  von Hindenburg, Paul,  voting patterns, socioeconomic characteristics: France, , –; Germany, –; Italy, –; Russia, –; Sweden, , , , , , ; UK, –. See also electoral systems; individual country party entries, e.g. France, party system Voynet, Dominique,  Vyakhirev, Rem,  Wachtmesiter, Ian,  wage-earner fund proposal (Sweden), – wages. See income levels Wales: committee system, , ; devolution referendum, , ; electoral system, ; local government, ; party support patterns, , , ;

population characteristics, , –. See also United Kingdom entries Weimar Republic, , , –, ,  welfare state. See social welfare systems Westerberg, Bengt, – Western European Union (WEU),  West Germany, history overview, , –, –. See also Germany “West Lothian Question,” , – Women of Russia, ,  Workers’ Force (France),  World War I, ,  World War II, , –, , ,  Yabloko (Russia), , , ,  Yakovlev, Vladimir,  Yakunin, Gleb, – Yavlinsky, Grigorii, , , ,  Yeltsin, Boris: characterized, –; conflicts with parliament, –, , ; dismissals of government officials, ; economic policy, ; elections, , ; foreign policy activity, –, –; letters from populace, ; oligarch support, ; resignation, – Yeltsin, Tatyana,  Zaslavskaya, Tatyana,  Zhirinovsky, Vladimir, , , , –,  Zyuganov, Gennadii, , , 