Ruling the Void (8 page)

Although this new form of consensus may now be taken for granted, it represents quite a fundamental shift from the patterns that prevailed even as late as the 1970s. Consider the situation in Italy, for example, where the contrast can be most visibly marked. In the mid-1970s, the key dynamic in Italian politics was that associated with the so-called ‘historic compromise’, by which the powerful Italian Communist party (PCI), then the strongest such party in western Europe, had come to knock on the door of cabinet office. The issue
of communist participation had come to a head in January 1978, with the resignation of Giulio Andreotti’s minority Christian Democrat (DC) government – the thirty-fifth DC-led government since 1946, and the most recent in a long row of unstable ruling combinations all based on the exclusion of the PCI on the left and the small neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI) on the right. By early 1978, however, it appeared impossible to reconstitute such a government again, leaving the only remaining option that of formally incorporating the PCI into the parliamentary majority. For many commentators, both inside and outside Italy, this was an extremely worrying prospect. So much so, indeed, that it prompted an exceptional public warning from the US State Department, which on 12 January 1978, midway through the one-term presidency of the Democrat Jimmy Carter, issued the following statement:

The same argument was echoed by the former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger in a review of the electoral successes and potential successes of communist parties in Italy, France, Portugal and Spain. For Kissinger (Ranney 1978: 184–85), ‘the accession to power of Communists in an allied country would represent a massive change in European politics;… would have fundamental
consequences for the structure of the postwar world as we have known it and for America’s relationship to its most important alliances; and … would alter the prospects for security and progress for all free nations.’ At a time of renewed cold war, in other words, the communist electoral alternative was simply unacceptable. The ideological gap was too wide, and the strategic intentions as well as the legitimacy of the party itself were too deeply suspect.

In the event, of course, the PCI never did win admittance to government. Andreotti went on to form a new minority administration and continued his successful career in US-friendly politics until his party collapsed in a wave of corruption scandals and he himself was brought before the courts on charges of complicity in Mafia-related crimes. Indeed, it was not until 1996 that the more moderate successors to the PCI, the Party of the Democratic Left (PDS), finally entered government as the then leading party in a broad-based centre-left coalition, under the leadership of Romano Prodi, later president of the European Commission. Three years later, this government again came into close contact with a US administration, this time led by Bill Clinton, the first Democrat to hold the presidency since Carter. In November 1999, Clinton travelled to Florence to take part in an international gathering of various national political leaders. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss their shared styles of politics, with the intention of sketching out a blueprint for ‘Progressive Governance for the 21st Century’. Among the other national leaders taking part in these ‘Third Way’ discussions were Fernando Henrique Cardoso from Brazil, Tony Blair from the UK, Lionel Jospin from France and Gerhard Schröder from Germany. More strikingly, the meeting itself was hosted and chaired by Massimo d’Alema, then leader of the PDS – that is, the former Communist party
– and by then also head of the new Italian centre-left government. Now that the Cold War was over, his party was no longer seen – by the Americans or by others – as a threat to the prospects of all free nations. On the contrary, it was now being heralded as a co-creator of the putative blueprint for progress. For d’Alema himself, meanwhile, ‘the most “progressive” undertaking we [the Italian centre-left] have accomplished has been to get the national accounts in order and take the lira into the European currency by cutting inflation, lowering interest rates.’
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This was a far cry from threatening the future of the free world.

While times have changed for parties trying to survive outside the mainstream, they have also changed for those inside the boundaries of conventional politics. This is the second level at which major changes can be highlighted. Just three years before Kissinger and the US State Department warned Italy about stretching its government too far, the noted political scientist S.E. Finer (1975) was mounting a major assault on what he called Britain’s ‘adversary politics’. Britain was then characterized by a highly competitive pattern of two-party politics. The Labour party had governed, at first with a tiny majority, then with a landslide, from 1964 to 1970, when it lost to the Conservatives, who held office with a modest majority until March 1974. Labour then returned as a minority government, and, following a second election in late 1974, managed to retain office with a small overall majority. The party remained in office until 1979, when it lost its working majority and was then displaced by Margaret Thatcher’s first
Conservative government. From that point on, what had been a classic two-party system shifted towards what might better be seen as an alternating predominant party system, with the Conservatives holding power through three further elections, usually with massive majorities, followed by Labour with its own overwhelming majority in 1997, and the further victories of 2001 and 2005. In the mid-1970s, however, the pattern was obviously much more changeable, competitive and adversarial, and it was this that was of particular concern to Finer. Not only did the politics of the time reflect a marked degree of polarization and conflict; there was also a dramatic policy see-saw, with each newly incumbent government seeking to undo the policies that had been promoted by its predecessor. For Finer, British politics had deteriorated into ‘a stand-up fight between two adversaries for the favour of the lookers-on … [and] what sharpens this contestation is that the stakes are extremely high’. Later, in the same book,
Adversary Politics and Electoral Reform
, he spoke disparagingly of ‘the discontinuities, the reversals, the extremisms of the existing system’ (1975: 3, 32). A similar concern was voiced by the rather self-serving Lord Hailsham, a veteran of Conservative cabinets, who complained that the British system was becoming ‘an elective dictatorship’, in which the opposition was powerless in the face of strongly partisan government programmes.
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Since the last years of the Thatcher governments, however, and in sharp contrast to this earlier pattern, the parties in Britain have rushed to the centre, with the win-win politics of New Labour’s ‘Third Way’ in particular being promoted as a way of superseding ideology and partisanship as central forces in the process
of policy-making. In place of the politics of party, and hence in place of the reversals and extremisms of the earlier system, there came what Burnham (1999, 2001) has identified as ‘the politics of depoliticization’ – a governing strategy in which decision-making authority is passed over to ostensibly non-partisan bodies and in which binding rules are adopted which deny discretion to the government of the day. This was a politics couched in strictly non-party terms, and in the British case in particular it was presented as a new synthesis overcoming the traditional divisions of left and right and as such non-contestable: the politics of ‘what works’. As Britain’s two-party system gave way to alternating periods of predominance, so too adversarial politics gave way to a new centrist consensus. The parties might still compete with one another for votes, sometimes even intensively, but they came to find themselves sharing the same broad commitments in government and confining themselves to the same ever-narrowing repertoire of policy-making.

The increased sharing of commitments is also evident in other systems, and particularly those in which there is a pronounced separation of powers, and/or those in which government is usually formed by a coalition of parties. In France, at least prior to the reform that shortened the presidential term, it had become quite common to see a form of US-style ‘divided government,’ whereby left-wing presidents cohabited with right-wing parliaments and governments, or vice versa, with both sides being more or less obliged to find agreement, or consensus, on what government did. Across the continental European parliamentary systems, the basis for consensus and the sharing of commitments has also become more marked. In the Netherlands, for example, precedent was broken when in 1994, for the first time in Dutch history, a new government coalition was formed bringing together in
one cabinet the Labour party and the right-wing Liberal party, the two formations that, up to that point, had constituted the main alternative poles within the system. In Ireland, the traditional bipolar pattern of competition was irrevocably broken in 1993 when Labour, long the parliamentary ally of Fine Gael, crossed the traditional ‘civil war’ divide to form a government with Fianna Fáil. In Germany, a few years later, a new coalition brought the Greens and Social Democrats together in government, and, as a result of the institutional constraints that operate in the German Federal Republic, forced both to work together with the opposition Christian Democrats, the party that held sway in the powerful upper house of parliament. In contemporary politics, in other words, it has become less and less easy for any one party or bloc of parties to monopolize power, with the result that shared government has become more common.
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As all parties become coalitionable, more or less, coalition-making has become more promiscuous. This, together with the need for balance across separated domestic and European institutions, has inevitably led policy-making to become less partisan.

This last assertion is important and requires some justification. Since at least the late 1970s, a large number of political scientists from a variety of scholarly traditions have spent countless hours assessing, evaluating and debating research into the impact of parties on public policy, and discussing whether partisanship in government can be related to policy-making, policy choices and policy outputs (for early assessments, see Rose,
1980; Castles, 1982). Initially, the balance of the argument seemed to favour the relevance of partisanship – the ‘parties-do-matter’ school. The radical conservative governments led by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and the sudden shift towards a neo-liberal consensus in the 1980s, offered telling testimony in this regard, while over the course of the decades, a series of more or less sophisticated cross-national comparisons also emphasized the impact of parties, whether or not in conjunction with other socio-structural, institutional or political determinants of outcomes (see Schmidt, 1996; Keman, 2002). In sum, the evidence suggested that partisan differences mattered.

This view also persisted even into the 1990s, despite the expectation that any residual partisan effects might have been undermined by the growing impact of globalization. In a much-cited analysis that incorporated evidence up to the late 1980s, for example, Geoffrey Garrett argued that globalization had failed to erode either national autonomy (in the sense that it had not prevented nations forging their own policy solutions), or the capacity of left-wing or social-democratic governments to pursue policies aimed at reducing market-generated inequalities. In other words, despite globalization, countries and their governments – and hence also the parties in these governments – retained a major capacity for political control, suggesting that ‘the impact of electoral politics has not been dwarfed by market dynamics’ (1998: 2). Garrett went on to advance two main reasons for this conclusion. First, far from disempowering partisan constituencies, globalization had actually ‘generated new political constituencies for left-of-centre parties among the increasing ranks of the economically insecure that offset the shrinking of the manufacturing working class’; second, globalization offered new ‘political incentives for left-wing parties to pursue economic policies
that redistribute wealth and risk in favour of those adversely affected in the short term by market dislocations’ (1998: 10, 11). Even in the changed circumstances of late-twentieth-century politics, therefore, party differences and left-right oppositions still played a major role in the policy-making process.

However, while another highly authoritative analysis of the impact of partisan politics on macroeconomic policies (Boix, 1998) came to similar conclusions, in this case the most recent evidence appeared to suggest an actual weakening of the relationship over time. When first faced with pressure to liberalize financial markets in the 1980s, for example, non-socialist governments tended to act quite quickly, whereas socialist governments delayed or even resisted the process. By the end of the decade, however, these differences had evaporated, and ‘an autonomous monetary policy became extremely hard to pursue’ (Boix, 1998: 70). Indeed, Garrett’s later figures were also beginning to tell a different story. Looking at data that stretched into the 1990s, and in contrast to his earlier conclusions, he now found there was much more support for the idea that globalization limited domestic autonomy and hence helped to force parties into common positions (Garrett, 2000: 36–37). This conclusion was echoed in other contemporaneous analyses of policy profiles and outcomes. Within the traditionally contentious area of welfare policy, for example, Evelyne Huber and John Stephens’s exhaustive analysis showed ample evidence of the ‘reduction and then the disappearance of partisan effects’ (2001: 321), while Miki Caul and Mark Gray’s analysis of party manifesto data showed a strong tendency to convergence between left and right, such that already by the end of the 1980s, ‘political parties across advanced industrial democracies increasingly find it difficult to maintain distinct identities’ (2000: 235).