This book considers the emergence of centre right parties in Eastern Europe following the fall of communism, focusing primarily on the case of the Czech Republic.
Although the country with the strongest social democratic traditions in Eastern Europe, the Czech Republic also produced the region's strongest and most durable party of the free market right in Václav Klaus' Civic Democratic Party (ODS). Seán Hanley considers the different varieties of right-wing politics that emerged in post-communist Europe, exploring in particular detail the origins of the Czech neo-liberal right, tracing its genesis to the reactions of dissidents and technocrats to the collapse of 1960s reform communism. He argues that, rather than being shaped by distant historical legacies, the emergence of centre-right parties can best be understood by examining the responses of counter-elites, outside or marginal to the former communist party-state establishment, to the collapse of communism and the imperatives of market reform and decommunization. This volume goes on to consider the emergence of right-wing forces in the disintegrating Civic Forum movement in 1990, the foundation of the ODS, the right's period in office under Klaus in 1992-97, and its subsequent divisions and decline. It concludes by analyzing the ideology of the Czech Right, and its growing euroscepticism.
Frequently asked questions
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Yes, you can access The New Right in the New Europe by Seán Hanley in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Politics & International Relations & Political Parties. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
1 Getting the right right in post-communist Europe
Despite their importance in contemporary European politics, parties of the centre-right remain an under-researched area. This is particularly the case of the mainstream right in the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe, where centre-right parties in almost all countries held office for significant periods in the years following 1989 (see Table 1.1). The existing literature on the centre-right in Eastern and Central Europe is, therefore, small and fragmentary. In the immediate aftermath of the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, discussion of the re-emergence of the right centred on concerns that it would take the form of ultra-nationalism or Peronist anti-market populism leading to a possible breakdown of democracy in the region (Andor: 1991; Przeworski 1991; Tismaneanu 1996). However, when such predictions proved erroneous (for a critique see Greskovits 1998:1–34), scholarly interest rapidly moved elsewhere.
After more than a decade of competitive party politics in the region, published research barely amounted to a book-length treatment (Hellen 1996), which largely reviewed prospects for democratization, and short monographs on national cases (Schöpflin 1991; Held 1993; Roper 1998; Wenzel 1998; Kiss 2003; Sharman and Phillips 2004; Szczerbiak and Hanley 2006). Comparative perspectives on the right in the region amounted to two conference papers, one of which remained unpublished (Chan 2001; Vachudova 2001). A number of more general works discussed the centre-right in the region, often dealing with it as a subsidiary theme within accounts of economic transformation (see, for example, Orenstein 2002). Critical, left-wing scholarship also sometimes focused on East and Central European centre-right as the key political vehicle for the restoration of capitalism (Callinicos 1991; Gowan 1996; Saxonberg 2001:387–95). However, while such analyses raised important issues, they often lacked plausibility, sophistication and empirical grounding. As Ganev (2005) notes, many sweepingly depicted all post-communist societies and their citizens as passive victims of external manipulation by transnational capital, Western-led international organizations or local intellectual and technocratic (ex-nomenklatum) elites with a hidden pro-capitalist agenda (Andor 1991: Callinicos 1991; Gowan 1996; Saxonberg 2001:387–95; Shields 2003).1 Such analyses tended to underestimate not only the vitality of social forces resisting such pressures but also the role of domestic social and political forces in creating the East and Central European centre-right and supplying it with broader legitimacy. The relative paucity of literature on the centre-right in postcommunist Europe contrasted markedly with the voluminous, detailed and often sophisticated comparative literatures on the left—usually focused on communist successor parties (Grzymala-Busse 2002; Bozóki and Ishiyama 2002)—and on the extreme right (Hockenos 1993; Cheles 1995; Ramet 1999; Minkenberg 2003).
The right in post-communist Europe
Lewis (2003:160) suggests that ‘[b]y and large similar kinds of parties in terms of ideological orientation have developed in CEE as in Western Europe’ and groups them empirically according to their membership of transnational party groupings such as the European People’s Party (EPP) and the Liberal International (Lewis 2003:162–3). Although important in highlighting the recent role of European integration in (re-)shaping party identity in Central and Eastern Europe, membership in groupings like the EPP is, however, now so wideranging that it obscures as much as it reveals. Early comparative work identified three groups of parties in post-communist Europe as ‘right-wing or ‘conservative’ on the basis of their origins or ideology: (1) mainstream centre-right parties with ties to the West European centre-right, which Vachudova (2001) terms the ‘moderate right’ and others subdivide into traditionalist conservatives (including parties with a ‘Christian democractic orientation’) and liberal-conservatives (Lewis 2000a, 2003; Chan 2001); (2) broad populist-nationalist groupings, which played a dominant role in the politics of new nation-states, such as Slovakia and Croatia in the 1990s—termed the ‘independence right’ by Vachudova (2001); and (3) former ruling communist parties, with a ‘chauvino-communist position’, combining nationalism, social conservatism and economic populism—termed the ‘communist right’ by Vachudova (2001) and ‘communist conservatives’ by Chan (2001). Lang (2005) introduces a further set of sub-divisions, distinguishing large moderate conservative parties, such as Hungary’s FIDESZ, whom he terms ‘neo-traditionalists’, from niche-based, Christian-oriented ‘particularist traditionalist’ parties, such as the League of Polish Families (LPR) or Slovakia’s Christian Democratic Movement (KDH).2 He also distinguishes fullfledged market modernizing parties, such as New Era and the People’s Party in Latvia or Res Publica in Estonia, from more nationally oriented neo-liberal parties such as the Czech ODS. As Peter U
en (2003) has argued, however, such parties can, also be regarded as part of a broader phenomenon of pro-market ‘-anti-establishment right’,3 sometimes shading into the wider phenomenon of ‘centrist populism’, which emerges in response to the failures and compromise of established centre-right parties in the transformation process. The Czech Freedom Union (US) and Bulgaria’s Simeon II National Movement can both be seen in this light.
The identification of such a variety of ‘right-wing’ forces is valuable in pointing up different patterns of post-communist development (see also Snyder and
Table 1.1 Typologies of ‘right-wing’ parties in post-communist Europe 1989–2001
Vachudova 1997; Vachudova 2005) and the way nationalist and conservative discourses were appropriated by different political forces in different national contexts. However, in other respects it is confusing and unsatisfactory. ‘Chauvino-communist’ former ruling parties, for example, while clearly ‘conservative’ in reacting against change, fall most comfortably within the comparative study of communist successor parties. Parties of the ‘independence right’ such as the Croatian HDZ and Slovak HDZS—despite the nostalgia of a radical nationalist fringe for wartime clerico-fascism—are regarded by most other scholars as simply populist or nationalist (see, for example, Lewis 2000a, 2003; Mudde 2001). This reflects their inconsistency or indifference towards issues unrelated to state-building and the possibility that their dominance may prove transitory, ultimately giving way to more conventional patterns of programmatic competition (Vachudova 2005). Moreover, these typologies imply, in certain party systems in the region, that all major parties and blocs, even when separated by clear ideological and political divisions, are in some sense ‘right-wing’ or ‘conservative’. For this reason this study excludes parties of the ‘communist right’ and ‘independence right’ from discussion of the centre-right.4
The most recognizable centre-right forces from a West European perspective are the group of ‘moderate right’ or liberal-conservative parties. These parties define themselves as (centre) right formations and have been accepted into the main EU-level groupings, such as the European Peoples Party (EPP) and European Democrats (ED), founded by the West European centre-right. Both anecdotal and survey-based research (Kitschelt et al. 1999; Tworzecki 2002) suggest that in these cases understandings of ‘right-wing’ politics, at both elite and mass level, are consistent and have real programmatic and ideological content. However, even with this group of ‘moderate right’ parties, there is significant variation. In states such as Hungary and Poland ‘right-wing’ politics are understood in terms of Christian, conservative-national, national-populist or radical anti-communist positions (McManus-Czubi
ska et al. 2003; Fowler 2004; Szczerbiak 2004).5 As we will see, in the Czech Republic, by contrast, the centre-right largely defined itself in terms of economic liberalism and anti-communism, seeing its ‘conservatism’ in its commitment to bringing the ‘tried and tested’ neo-liberalism of the West to a provincial society overly inclined towards collectivism. In Romania and Bulgaria the initial dominance after 1989 of ‘chauvino-communist’ former ruling parties—or groupings that emerged from them—saw the ‘moderate right’ emerge as heterogeneous ‘democratic’ alliances of traditionalist nationalists, historic parties, liberals and radical anti-communists (Roper 1998; Tismaneanu and Klingman 2001; Peeva 2001).6 In new national states such as Slovakia and Croatia, despite the existence of strong nationalist, liberal and Christian forces, a self-identifying discourse of the right was largely absent from party politics during much of the 1990s. Here, political competition was polarized around a single set of issues relating to national statehood and its stewardship by Vladimír Me
iar’s Movement for Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) and Franjo Tudjman’s Croatian Democratic Community (HDZ) (Fisher 2000), what Vachudova terms the ‘independence right’. Only since the electoral defeat of these movements in 1998 and 2000 by broad coalitions of parties with more conventional ideologies of left and right has a moderate right akin to that elsewhere in Central Europe begun to emerge. Both HZDS and HDZ have expressed a desire to reinvent themselves as West-European-style, Christian Democratic parties (Cvijetic 2000; Haughton 2001; Hipkins 2002; RFE/RL Newsline 22, 23 April 2002). At the same time, however, Christian Democratic and liberal groupings in the opposition alliances, which displaced them, also claim to be on the centre-right and have links with centre-right groupings in Western Europe. A similar pattern can be detected in the Baltic states, where, despite not enjoying the degree of dominance of HZDS or HDZ, conservative nationalists have tended to present themselves as champions of recovered national independence against a Russophone ‘left’ (Zake 2002). In such states a number of new centre-right parties with conventional programmatic appeals, such as the neo-liberal People’s Party (TP) (Zake 2002) and later the ‘New Era’ party (Raubisko 2003) in Latvia, the business-oriented Alliance for the New Citizen (ANO) in Slovakia (Haughton 2003; Kope
ek 2006) or the conservative NGO-cum-party Res Publica in Estonia (Taagepera 2006), have made electoral breakthroughs, although few have consolidated such early gains.
Defining the centre-right
As the discussion above suggests, scholars working on parties and party systems have produced the most coherent accounts of the re-emergence of left and right in East and Central Europe. However, these analyses tend to stress the historical and cultural specificity of parties of the ‘right’ and the patterns of variation that underlie this without considering how the right or centre-right should be conceptualized and defined. At bottom, the ‘right’ is a culturally and historically contingent category—part of a ‘spatial metaphor’ which can be applied to many types of political competition—the meaning of which has varied across different contexts. Nevertheless the term is rooted in the political discourse of most West European states and, since the fall of communism, has re-rooted itself in that of many, but not all, post-communist societies—in the main those geographically and historically closest to core West European states. However, for conceptual clarity a more worked-out definition of the right and centre-right in Central and Eastern Europe, however provisional, is clearly necessary.
Some definitions view the right in essentialist terms as a set of enduring philosophical tenets or inherent psychological predispositions (Eatwell and O’Sullivan 1989). However, these are often both abstract and largely struggle to account for variation and change on the right or to relate it to its social context (Kitschelt and McGann 1995). Other political scientists have sought to define the ‘right’ in terms of defined locations in political space, often depicted in two dimensions with crosscutting axes for socio-economic positions and ‘values’ issues (Kitschelt 1994; Kitschelt and McGann 1995; Krouwel 2005). However, despite their methodological rigour and usefulness for tracking changes in political alignments and patterns of competition, such analyses do little to explain the nature of political space, unless bolstered with additional sociological theories (Kitschelt 1994; Kitschelt and McGann 1995), and tend to identify the centre-right arbitrarily as a certain portion of political space (Wellhofer 1990).
The literature on ‘party families’ in Western Europe groups parties on the basis of shared social and historical origins and a common set of values and ideological predispositions (Lipset and Rokkan 1967; Mair and Mudde 1998). West European Christian Democratic parties, for example, emerged after 1945 on the basis of reformed Catholic confessional parties, which had themselves emerged in the late nineteenth century on the basis of social movements mobilized to resist the encroachments of secularizing liberal states in countries with an unresolved Church—state cleavage (Kalyvas 1996).7 The ‘centre-right’ in a contemporary West European context thus comprises several party families: Christian Democracy, the conservative parties of Great Britain and Scandinavia, pro-market liberal parties such as the Dutch VVD, and, some would add, more recently formed ‘national movements’ such as the French Gaullists (Marks and Wilson 2000).
Adapting this methodology to identify parties of the right in CEE at first seems problematic.
Historically, the emergence of the political right in Western Europe and North and South America was associated the rise of distinct property-owning classes and a bourgeois civil society linked to the development of capitalism (Lipset and Rokkan 1967; Middlebrook 2000). The same is true of the re-emergence of the right in new or restored democracies such as West Germany, Italy and France after 1945 or Spain after 1975 (Wilson 1998). However, in East Central European countries the emergence of an organized political right after 1989 largely preceded the laying of social bases and the ‘transition to capitalism’. Moreover, in one case, that of Poland, the right had a substantial workingclass base, having largely emerged through the Solidarity movement (Wenzel 1998).
Moreover, whereas communist successor parties in Cental and Eastern Europe, despite their very different political trajectories since 1989, can be easily ident...
Table of contents
BASEES/Routledge series on Russian and East European studies
Contents
Tables
Preface
Acknowledgements
Czech and Slovak abbreviations
1 Getting the right right in post-communist Europe
2 Historical legacies and the Czech right
3 ‘Normalization’ and the elite origins of the Czech right
