introduction; who are the italian liberals?

When identifying liberalism in Italy after the Second World War, familiar comparative distinctions between types of liberalism are indeed relevant. Such distinctions as between ‘radical’ and ‘moderate’ – or between ‘social’ and ‘economic’ or simply ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ forms of liberalism are all directly applicable to the Italian Republican and Liberal Parties respectively, as a broad description of their basic and somewhat divergent programmatic outlooks over time. As to that other set of distinctions between liberal parties, namely whether they are ‘historical’ or de jure as against de facto or ‘behavioural’ forms of liberalism, the PLI and PRI fall respectively into the two different categories. This is first and foremost because the former calls itself ‘liberal’ and the latter does not, although this is not to deny that the Republicans represent a ‘historical’ party in Italy of their own variety.

In other words, the PRI and the PLI express different versions of the same ideological tendency as seen in comparative terms. So far as this Italian example is concerned, any diachronic assessment of the two parties in question will show that however much they have converged strategically and programmatically in recent years they nevertheless boast separate traditions, have usually followed different paths in government and have for most of their histories possessed rather distinct social and electoral bases. Acknowledging therefore the truism that political parties are hardly static entities, such mutual movement on the part of the PRI and PLI may well be viewed as pursuing ‘two roads of Italian liberalism’.

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Organised liberalism has survived in Britain in the face of a number of formidable obstacles. Although once one of two great parties of state, the principal social cleavage it helped articulate, religion, has long since lost its electoral significance. After the First World War British politics came to be dominated by class, and in the process the Liberal Party not only lost electoral support but also split on more than one occasion and saw one wing of the party joining the Conservatives. Since 1945 none of its members has held ministerial office and by 1951 its electoral support had fallen to 2.5 per cent of the vote. These difficulties have been compounded by the operation of the singlemember plurality system which has ensured that its geographically evenly spread vote has never been able to secure more than a handful of seats.

Yet despite this unfavourable combination of circumstances, organised liberalism has not only survived but now flourishes. There is but one Liberal Party able to command a level of support which would in any other West European country accord it major party status. True, it has given up some of its independence by entering into an electoral alliance with the Social Democratic Party, formed in 1981 after a split within the Labour Party. But the formation of that party was encouraged by the leader of the Liberal Party himself as a means of pursuing the party's long-term strategy and now the SDP–Liberal Alliance is seen by some as the rekindling of a progressive ideological tradition which originated within the Liberal Party at the turn of the century.

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Sweden is commonly looked upon as the middle-way Schlaraffenland, yet its citizens have not found the middle parties to their liking. Rather, the Liberal Party, (Folkpartiet) has often been made an object of ridicule by its opponents and in the media; television cannot resist the temptation to portray the party as an unholy alliance of atheist social science professors from Stockholm and pietist smallholders from the hinterland.

The Liberal Party's overall performance has not generally been applauded by the Swedish electorate. The party's reluctant stance on whether to join bourgeois coalition cabinets engendered much antipathy towards them among the public at large. The Liberal Party was seen as the champion of the ‘alternating-majority formula’ of governing, i.e. minority cabinets depending on either bourgeois or socialist support to pass legislation in parliament. Political tightrope walking is alien to the rationalist political culture of Sweden.

Time and again political commentators have prophesied the demise of the Liberal Party. Predictions of this kind have repeatedly turned out to be premature, most obviously in 1985 when the Liberal vote soared to 14.2 per cent from a previous all-time low of 5.9 per cent in 1982.

This chapter is meant to be an introduction to the nature and trends of Swedish liberal politics. The various topics raised in the course of the empirical analyses will be synthesised in a concluding discussion on whether Sweden is an illiberal society or, on the contrary, too liberal to be in need of a liberal party, or if the Liberal Party (until very recently) has misconceived its mission in Swedish politics.

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The question as to what is and what is not a liberal party has continually been raised throughout this volume, both explicitly and implicitly, while Gordon Smith addresses it directly in ch. 2, pointing out that answers depend fundamentally upon the analyst's perspective. Smith identifies two such perspectives, the historical and the contemporary, and correctly goes on to show that these are not necessarily entirely divorced from one another since contemporary liberalism is inevitably rooted in its own past in any case. Nevertheless, virtually all the country chapters in this volume have tended to concentrate upon the first of Smith's perspectives for the simple reason that the ‘contemporary’ mode of analysis is obviously a much more difficult one to conduct in a purely national context than it is in a comparative one. This chapter will attempt to correct this balance by concentrating upon a comparative analysis that in Smith's terms might be also be thought of as ‘contemporary’.

It is able to do so because of the recent availability of the data-set compiled by the ECPR manifestos project which, virtually for the first time ever, provides strictly comparable cross-national scores taken from the electoral programmes published by almost all significant parties from some 20 countries since the Second World War and on the basis of which a range of different political and ideological measures can be constructed.

historical development

The Liberal Party occupies a central position in Norwegian political history and its origin is intimately linked to crucial events in the development of the Norwegian state from the late nineteenth century onwards. As Diagram 12.1 shows, the Liberal Party was not only one of the first two parties to be formed in the Norwegian political system, but it is also directly linked to the development of several other parties.

However, as we shall see, the history of the Liberal Party is also one of more or less continuous decline: its greatest electoral success was in 1885 when it won 76 of the 123 seats in the Storting (parliament). One hundred years later it was without any parliamentary representation at all. The large number of splits in the party suggests an extreme heterogeneity in its origin, a heterogeneity that could not be continued once the reason for the party's establishment had become unimportant.

Origin

The formation of the Norwegian Liberal Association on 29 August 1884 was one step in the development of the most serious political crisis in Norway after the country had entered a union with Sweden in 1814. At issue was the question of whether the king had the right to veto a constitutional amendment which the parliament had voted in favour of three times. This issue was later referred to as the struggle over parliamentarianism. The first two Norwegian parties, the Liberals and their opponents – the Conservatives – emerged over this issue, with the Liberals as the reformers.

The study of political parties has long attracted the attention of social scientists with widely divergent interests and aims. Whether they have concentrated, for example, upon questions of internal party structure and organisation, the tasks of electoral mobilisation and interest aggregation or the overall effects of system change, it has invariably been assumed that parties have played and will continue to play indispensable roles in the political systems of Western democracies. This remains the case despite recent claims that parties are in ‘decline’ as a result of increasing bureaucratisation of the political process and the development of the ‘corporate’ state, doubts about the existence of genuine policy differences between parties and the increase in electoral volatility amongst the mass public.

Yet, whilst acknowledging the prominent place political parties have generally held in academic studies, liberal parties have been largely neglected as objects of such studies. Though liberal parties of four Western European countries are dealt with in the book by Morgan and Silvestri (1982), their analysis also contains conservative parties and they do not employ a systematic framework for comparing either type of liberal party. Similarly, though describing general features of liberal parties in terms of ideology, history and organisational features, the books by Stammen (1978) and von Beyme (1985) do not attempt a systematic comparison between liberal parties. There are no apparent reasons for the neglect of liberal party analysis although there are frequent references to liberal parties as ‘minor’ parties, presumably purely on the basis of size rather than influence or attraction over time.

The purpose of this book is to provide a comparative analysis of liberal parties in Western Europe. It not only tries to fill a gap in the study of political parties cross-nationally, but also to highlight the important role liberal parties play in the political systems, especially in governing coalitions of Western Europe. Whilst many liberal parties are small, they have sometimes been in positions where they can exert an influence which bears little relation either to their voting base within the electorate as a whole, or their parliamentary strength. Why this is so and whether liberal parties will retain this influence in the light of changes in voting patterns and the party system, are important questions for political scientists to which this book seeks to provide answers.

The stimulus to write this book came from work David Broughton and I undertook on the German Liberal Party (FDP) in 1983. I was fortunate to attract three scholars who, under the leadership of Michael Steed, had met in December 1981 in Marburg, West Germany, as part of a large group, for the purpose of compiling a book on liberal parties. In a meeting at Essex University, in March 1985, fourteen of the twenty-one contributors to the book met to finalise a common framework for research of the thirteen country studies. The country chapters are designed to produce descriptive analyses of liberal parties in national settings: past-, present- and future-oriented. Though the country analyses give the appearance of case studies, adherence to the common framework allows for comparability on, for example, liberal parties' policies and strategies, complemented by a number of specifically written comparative chapters.

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On the face of it, it may seem obvious that the Free Democratic Party (FDP) has acted as the standard bearer of liberalism in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1949. Certainly, the party is invariably classified by observers both inside and outside the country as being ‘liberal’. There is also considerable evidence, in the FDP's manifestos and other documents as well as in the fact that the party's candidates usually bear ‘liberal’ labels, to suggest that such a designation is widely accepted without question. In addition, the party has long been a leading member of the Liberal International.

Yet when we begin to look beyond the label at the actual principles which the FDP professes to champion and which it wants to see implemented and protected, any apparent clarity of purpose and distinctiveness immediately becomes blurred and ambiguous.

Whilst this can be partly explained by reference to the difficulties involved in defining ‘liberalism’ as a whole, the FDP's problems in establishing an identity for itself based on ‘liberal’ ideas have been accentuated by the party's enforced role within the post Second World War German party system as a ‘corrective’ or ‘pivot’ between the two major parties, the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD).

This means that the FDP is often able to exploit its structural position as a usually indispensable coalition partner in order to base its electoral appeal on its ability to prevent either main party achieving an absolute majority in the Bundestag. The party also claims that ‘moderation’ in the conduct of the federal government results from its fulfilling of such a role.

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In the same way as in neighbouring West Germany and Belgium, and for similar reasons, the identification of a liberal party in Luxemburg presents no difficulty, the Demokratesch Partei qualifying by virtually any criterion. Of all the parties considered in this volume, the DP is by far the smallest in absolute terms but this has not prevented it from becoming one of the more important. In recent years especially, both domestically and internationally, it has become one of the most highly-influential liberal parties in Europe. For this reason alone, no study of present-day liberalism in Western Europe could be complete without reference to the Luxemburg Demokratesch Partei.

This influential position is due to a number of factors, of which the most important are probably the DP's almost uniquely high (for a European liberal party) vote percentage; its regular participation in government (and hence from time to time the presidency of the EC council of ministers); its rather strategic position virtually in the ideological centre of European liberalism; and, not the least important, the personality of several of its leaders since the Second World War, most notably Gaston Thorn.

Yet, as an organised party political force, liberalism was a distinctly late developer in the Grand Duchy, the country's first proper liberal party not emerging until as late as 1925 or so, even though both as a philosophy and as a political tradition, liberalism has had a long history in Luxemburg.

historical background

During the 1820s, an alliance between Catholics and Liberals had successfully brought about the independence of Belgium from the Netherlands. This Catholic–Liberal alliance – or unionism as it came to be known – continued until 1840 given the need for national unity whilst the Netherlands refused to accept the legitimacy of Belgium's separate existence.

Unionism was characterised by the formation of bipartisan Catholic–Liberal coalition governments regardless of parliamentary strengths. The latent church–state conflict was kept off the political agenda and the main political battles were not between clericals and anti–clericals but between conservatives and progressives over issues such as the extension of the electoral franchise. The difference between the conservatives and the progressives was, as Kossmann points out, one of temperament rather than doctrine or social origin (see Kossmann (1978) 167).

Unionism effectively ended in 1839 with the recognition by the Dutch of Belgian independence, a move which led to greater and more open hostility between Catholics and Liberals. The Liberals, in particular, were the aggressors, feeling that too many concessions had been made to the Catholics in order to gain the support of the Roman church in the struggle for national independence. Although the Liberals were not anti-religious, (indeed, many were practising Catholics), the party demanded a clearer separation between church and state as well as a recognition that the church was subordinate to the state in all temporal matters. For many Liberals, the main bone of contention surrounded the Catholic church's monopoly control of primary education and its attempt to gain a similar position within the sphere of secondary education.

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France has never had a great liberal party in the way that Canada or Great Britain have. Furthermore the word ‘liberal’ in France does not mean the same as it does in English. In France, its principal meaning is opposition to state intervention in economic or social life. For the French, Thatcherism is a kind of liberalism. In identifying liberalism in France, therefore, we shall not be looking for a great party with a long tradition but we shall be seeking to identify political forces belonging to Gordon Smith's ‘liberal-conservative’ classification rather than to a ‘liberal-radical’ one.

The chapter chooses to identify the UDF (Union pour la Démocratie Franchise), a federation of parties which were known as the Giscardiens when Valéry Giscard d'Estaing was president, as the political force that is best described as liberal. There are two reasons for this. One is that the Giscardiens have always used the word liberal in their appeal to the electorate and in their attempt to distinguish themselves from their coalition partners, the Gaullist RPR. The second is that Giscard d'Estaing as a political leader has been an authentic liberal in the English as well as the French sense of the word. In his speeches and writings before and during his presidency he has argued for tolerance, civil liberties, social reform, a less authoritarian and centralist style of government, and more recently for moins d'état – rolling back the state.

Choosing the Giscardiens as the French liberal party is nevertheless risky. First of all, they are not a party but a collection of three parties (plus several other smaller fragments).

the legacy of historical liberalism

Political scientists have some difficulty in dealing with the nature of liberalism and the role played by liberal parties. The problems are not new. In The Rise of European Liberalism, Harold Laski drew attention to the latent conflict between two fundamental liberal principles:

It is not that freedom and property necessarily stand in conflict, but in the context of modern European political development, with the rise of mass democracy, the contradictions became evident, soon to be expressed as property versus freedom.

One consequence is that there is a streak of ambiguity running through European liberalism which is seen in the varied character of liberal parties: some are regarded as belonging to the left, some are more at home on the right, while others hover uneasily between the two. Other political traditions, it is true, also give rise to uncertainties, but not to the same extent. The major families – conservative, Christian democrats, social democrats, and communist – all have a greater ideological coherence.

In the 1960s, the USSR experienced an increase in nationalist feeling and activity. This was not confined to the non-Russian nationalities but occurred among the majority ethnic Russian population as well. In the 1970s, analysts in the West began to take note of this Russian nationalism. I shall attempt in this chapter to outline the main features of the Russian nationalist movement as it developed in the Brezhnev era (1964–82). After discussing briefly some of the Western studies of Russian nationalism, I shall then investigate how Russian nationalism has developed since 1982, under Iurii V. Andropov, Konstantin U. Chernenko and Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and try to assess its future prospects. A particular concern throughout will be the attitude of individual political leaders to Russian nationalism. For reasons of space, I shall concentrate on those manifestations of Russian nationalism permitted in the official political and cultural media, and not on unofficial activity and samizdat.

In Stalin's last years, the Russian people were presented with chauvinist official claims about their historical achievements, while the non-Russians were treated as second-class citizens. Under Stalin, this Russian nationalism was tightly controlled. Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in 1956 laid the basis for the development of Russian nationalism in a partly or wholly autonomous direction. The liberalization of controls over culture allowed a certain pluralism to appear in the official literary journals, and later for the expression of uncensored nationalist views in samizdat.