Persistence and renewal: the German Left Party's journey from outcast to opposition

This article examines electoral support for the German Left Party (Die Linke) at the 2013 Federal election. It focuses on two substantive issues. The first is that whilst studies have commonly linked the party's support to political culture, the party has modernised and it is unclear how this has influenced its support. The second is that the election was held amidst the fallout of the global financial crisis and thus enables us to test if the party benefitted from economic adversity. Using multivariate logistic regression models, these issues are investigated at the individual-level using data from the German Longitudinal Election Study. The results demonstrate that the party's support is steeped in political culture, but with important east–west variation. Further, there is no evidence that the party attracted support from economically anxious voters. These findings present a basis for broader reflections on the party's influence on the contemporary political landscape.     

A Prehistory of the Best Value Regime

Best Value was one of the central planks of New Labour's modernisation agenda for local government. This article uncovers the origins of the regime by unpicking the activities of two working groups responsible for its design. Licking its wounds in the aftermath of the 1987 General Election the Labour Party's leadership had come to see the party's record in local government as a source of increasing embarrassment. A series of policy initiatives, first emerging from the party's policy review, later given the Best Value tag, were intended to neutralise producer interests and improve the party's reputation for governing competence.     

From Patriotic Memories to ‘Patriotic History’ in Zimbabwe, 1990 – 2005

This article examines how military veterans and political veterans of Zimbabwe's nationalist movements competed for power and access to state resources, using their distinctive contributions to legitimate their claims and de-legitimate others' claims. Drawing on parliamentary debates over state assistance for war veterans and state pensions for heroes, the article seeks to highlight previously unexplored continuities between the political discourses within the ruling party in the 1990s and the ruling party's brand of nationalism after 2000. More generally, the essay suggests a much longer pattern of nationalists using struggle credentials to legitimate themselves and de-legitimate others in competition for power and resources.     

From War to Peace: The Nepalese Maoists's Strategic and Ideological Thinking

In February 1996, the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M) initiated a bloody war to establish a Mao-style “people's republic.” A decade later, however, they signed a peace agreement with the government, joined the mainstream political parties in parliament and in an interim government, and participated in democratic elections. This article provides some insight into the Nepalese Maoists's strategic and ideological thinking. More specifically, this article shows the reason behind the party's change of tactics and goals and describes the process in which these changes materialized.     

Chaos in the Field: Soviet Karelia's Food Supply Detachments, 1918–1920

This article traces the creation, experiences and success of Karelia's food supply detachments during the Russian Civil War and focuses on three target provinces: Kursk, Simbirsk and Saratov. It emphasises the early political and economic stumbling blocks faced by the Bolsheviks in their attempts to implement the party's food supply policies in the periphery and indicates that, although the Soviet food supply system by mid-1919 was more centralised and resistance from local soviets lessened, improvements were only relative to the more chaotic conditions of the previous year.     

Management information bulletins and social services managers

Partnership and participation have co-evolved as key instruments of New Labour's agenda for the ‘modernisation’ and ‘democratic renewal‘ of British local government. It is often assumed that partnerships are more inclusive than bureaucratic or market-based approaches to policy-making and service delivery. This article argues that partnership working does not in itself deliver enhanced public participation; indeed, it may be particularly difficult to secure citizen involvement in a partnership context. The article explores the relationship between partnership and participation in a wide range of local initiatives, exemplifying difficulties as well as synergies. The article concludes that public participation needs to be designed-in to local partnerships, not assumed-in. A series of principles for the design of more participative local partnerships is proposed.     

Villagers into Comrades: Literacy Education in the Jiangxi Soviet

This article sheds light on the literacy-education mechanism by which the literacy programs of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) were able to mobilize villagers during the Jiangxi Soviet period (1931–1934). Beginning in the late 1920s and continuing throughout the Jiangxi period, the CCP gave substantial attention to literacy education. Based on political documents and published literacy primers, this article explores the CCP's notion of what was possible and desirable with respect to the way the party and villagers would participate in political life. The Jiangxi Soviet conceived of literacy education within the context of military and political struggle against the Nationalists. Literacy education in this period reflected the party's desire to socialize villagers into its revolution, equipping them with a class-centered worldview and transforming them into Communist comrades. Meanwhile, owing to the modernization ideology of literacy formed around the turn of the twentieth century in China, literacy education also served as the legitimating symbol for the soviet government's rule nationwide.     

Compliance and non-compliance as sources of recognition: Slovakia and NATO

This article argues that there is a difference in what constitutes the sources of recognition prior to countries' membership in the Euro-Atlantic community represented by NATO and after countries become its members. While prior to membership, countries are recognized for their compliance with NATO standards and policies, upon membership countries get the opportunity to promote specific interests legitimately and may seek recognition via non-compliance with NATO mainstream.The paper explores this dynamic of recognition on the issue of Kosovo independence where Slovakia went from supporting NATO in its effort to protect civilians in Kosovo in the late 1990s to non-recognition of Kosovo in defiance of the majority of NATO member states less than a decade later. The crucial point proposed here is that there was a shift in how recognition by NATO worked prior to Slovakia's membership and upon membership in these frameworks. While prior to membership recognition was achieved by compliance and identification with NATO standpoints, policies and actions, upon membership, recognition is achieved by differentiation from these patterns. More generally, the study shows that NATO membership is a powerful source of conditionality in relation to future members and a powerful source of legitimacy in relation to current members' actions. While this has been discussed in the literature, the point here is that recognition in its various forms is an important driving force in these conditionality processes.     

Status Quo Bias or Institutionalisation for Reversibility?: The EU's Political Conditionality,Post-Accession Tendencies and Democratic Consolidation in Slovakia

The EU's political conditions have been a consistent and at times salient element in the accession process, since Brussels enlarged their scope and tightened procedures from the mid-1990s. But so far little attention has been given to post-accession compliance with these conditions. This is important, for while the European Commission no longer monitors them, the political conditions were imperfectly implemented by the time of the 2004 enlargement. The question that therefore arises is whether compliance continues or whether there are any tendencies to reverse the process. Using a comparative approach based on four alternative hypotheses, this problem is explored in detail using the case of Slovakia, a country where the EU has been a prominent factor in its return to the path of democratisation after the Me?iar years. Comparing Slovakia's performance on the EU political conditions before EU entry in 2004 and during the three years after, two competing approaches, ‘rationalist’ and ‘constructivist’, are assessed. It is found that the fears of the rationalists have not been strongly justified nor have the hopes of the constructivists been much encouraged. The outcome of political conditionality is related to democratic consolidation in Slovakia, and the conclusion is that the former assisted the latter despite its limitations but much more with respect to reforming institutions than to changing either attitudes or behaviour.     

Local Government Partnerships in Urban Management: The Case of South Asia

The article examines emerging partnerships in local government in South Asia. It argues that public private partnerships at local authority level tend to emerge where existing service deficiencies are greatest and most often involve the private voluntary sector. These partnerships typically function as 'hybrid' concessions where the private operator performs a service and collects a fee but without responsibility for capital investment. Many of the most successful partnerships have operated at the most localised level involving a coalition of stakeholders under local authority co-ordination. However, few partnerships have developed adequate mechanisms for joint planning, management and monitoring of services.     

The Notion of Kosovo as a Precedent and the Impact of the Hungarian Minority Issue on Slovakia's Policy towards Kosovo's Independence

This essay examines the importance of the Hungarian minority issue and the role of precedent in Slovakia's policy towards Kosovo. It shows that the Slovak view was not only a product of its issues with the Hungarian minority but also a response both to the activities of representatives of Hungary and of the ethnic Hungarian party in Slovakia, the SMK. On the basis of Brubaker's concept of ‘triadic nexus’ it explains relations between Slovakia and Hungary based on the minority issue. It also highlights the role of collective rights as presented in the Ahtisaari plan in 2007 and their perception by Slovak officials.     

The power of partnerships in global governance

Development partnerships are frequently represented as a way of giving recipient countries ‘ownership’ of their development programmes, whereas critics argue that partnerships are little more than conditionality by another name. Drawing on analyses of governmentality in modern liberal societies, this article advances an alternative understanding and argues that development partnerships can be regarded as a form of advanced liberal rule that increasingly govern through the explicit commitment to the self‐government and agency of recipient states. Focusing in particular on the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), it argues that as a form of advanced liberal power, partnerships work not primarily as direct domination and imposition, but through promises of incorporation and inclusion. They derive their power through simultaneously excluding and incorporating, and by using freedom as a formula of rule partnerships help produce modern, self‐disciplined citizens and states by enlisting them as responsible agents in their own development.     

Perception vs. Reality: Slovak Views of the Hungarian Minority in Slovakia

After Slovakia and the Czech lands separated in 1993, concerns arose regarding Slovakia's ethnic Hungarian, or Magyar, minority. There were concerns about the Slovak government's attitude toward its considerable Magyar population as well as worries about the Hungarian government's stance regarding Magyars in Slovakia and the Slovak-Hungarian border. Frequently over the past decade, the topic of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia has been manipulated by politicians. In both Slovakia and Hungary, Slovak and Hungarian politicians alike have tried to expose “injustices” or “excesses” for political gain. Indeed, the maneuvering of national politicians might lead one to perceive that the reality of contemporary Slovak-Magyar relations was tenuous and acrimonious. But politics aside, what does the average Slovak think of the Magyar minority and Magyar-Slovak relations generally? To what extent do the political debates encompass their actual concerns and deeply held views? In June 2002, I visited Slovakia and pursued these questions in a series of informal interviews with an ad hoc sample of natives, aged 28 to 78. Among them were bankers, administrators, educators, small business owners, doctors, tour guides, taxi drivers, accountants, and one retiree. My quest to find out what ordinary Slovak citizens think about Slovak-Hungarian relations explored both long-held perceptions and present-day thinking. Very often I discovered a marked divergence between perception and reality where the Hungarian minority was concerned. Slovakia is home to a variety of non-Slovak cultures and languages, including Czech, Ukrainian/Ruthenian, and Romany (gypsy). But the largest cultural and linguistic minority are the c. 600,000 Hungarians, who comprise 11% of the population overall and up to 87% in certain towns and villages in southern Slovakia. For example, a 1994 report by the British Helsinki Human Rights Group (BHHRG) lists the southwestern Slovak towns of Dunajska Streda and Komarno as 87.26% and 72.27% Hungarian, respectively.     

Great Expectations or Misplaced Hopes? The Role of the Visegrád Group in the Brexit Process

Abstract

The article explores the role played by the Visegrád Group—a multilateral platform of four Central and Eastern European states (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia)—in the Brexit process. It surveys the group's performance during two distinct phases of the Brexit process: first, David Cameron's EU renegotiations and, second, the first phase of the Article 50 (withdrawal) negotiations, ending in December 2017. The author concludes that while the group managed to maximise its clout in the case of EU renegotiations, it has been much less effective during the withdrawal negotiations in the period under study.     

Service Domains – The New Communities: A Case Study of Peterlee Sure Start,UK

In this paper, a Sure Start programme is used to explain an emergent ‘Service Domain’ model, built around innovative and creative service integration and complementary multi-professional partnerships for pre-school children and their families in disadvantaged communities. Sure Start, the cornerstone of the government's ambitious policy to eradicate child poverty in the UK by 2020, and a major departure from traditional single agency service delivery, emulates the Head Start initiative in the USA where funding came directly from federal government and by-passed state legislatures. The Sure Start funding mechanism had a pre-requisite to establish multi-agency partnerships with equal parent representation, as a result of central government's frustration with the failure of mainstream agencies to unite strategically and operationally to deliver integrated services. The Sure Start initiative represented a nationally coordinated attempt by central government to address previously disjointed approaches to children's services integration.     

Know thy enemy: Hizbullah, ‘terrorism’ and the politics of perception

The labelling career of the Lebanese armed group and political party Hizbullah is an interesting case with which to investigate the epistemological consequences of the politics of naming. Having found itself since its inception in the mid-1980s on the receiving end of mainly US and Israeli policy makers' and analysts' scorn for being an archetypical terrorist organisation, Hizbullah has been surprisingly successful in achieving its stated aims and in enduring the verbal and military onslaught against it. Although it is not the intention here to reduce explanations for Hizbullah's durability to discursive politics, this article suggests that both the labelling of Hizbullah as terrorist and, conversely, its identification as a ‘lebanonised’ political force that is about to make its conversion into an unarmed political party are misleading and incapable of grasping this organisation's complexities. In fact, both ‘terrorist’ and ‘lebanonised’ labels produce a quality of knowledge inferior to that produced by Hizbullah's own conceptualisation of its enemies. But most importantly, the debate on Hizbullah's alleged terrorist nature has obscured several of its traits that many should register before passing judgement on it. Our analysis shows that the variety of institutions Hizbullah has been carefully elaborating and readapting over the past two decades in Lebanon operate today as a holistic and integrated network which produce sets of values and meanings embedded in an interrelated religious and political framework—that of the wilayat al-faqih. These meanings are disseminated on a daily basis among Shi'a constituencies through the party's institutionalised networks and serve to mobilise them into ‘the society of the Resistance’ (mujtamaa’ al-muqawama), which is the foundation of the hala al-islamiyya (Islamic sphere) in Lebanon. Accordingly, any prospect of Hizbullah's transformation away from armed ‘resistance’ should be firmly placed in an analysis of its hegemony among the Shi'a of Lebanon and of the tools it uses to acquire and sustain this status.     

Populism in Taiwan: The Rise of a Populist-Democratic Culture in a Democratising Society

Taiwan's democratic transition has emerged alongside a rise of populism. Based on an analysis of post-electoral survey data, it is shown that populist resentments – embodied in such emotion-laden campaign issues as ethnic identity, national identity and a party's image of interest representation and clean politics – have been the most efficient vote-getting appeals in Taiwan's post-authoritarian electoral competition between two major political parties, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT). In Taiwan's democratic transition, mass demands for the ‘indigenisation’ of politics and the people's worry about an ever-increasing military threat from Mainland China have also popularised as well as polarised these populist appeals. As empirical data show, due to its position as the first Taiwanese party with a lion's share of populist advantages, the DPP was able to win the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. In sum, Taiwan's electoral politics in the past decade have given rise to a kind of ‘populist-democratic culture’, which inclines Taiwanese politicians to bring up populist issues rather than the rational policy debates of an electoral democracy.     

Towards a new past: Some reflections on nationalism in post-socialist Slovakia

By analysing two commemorative events organized shortly before and after the 2010 parliamentary elections in Slovakia, this article demonstrates how the Prime Minister Robert Fico and his collaborators exploited these ceremonies to promote a more inclusive definition of political community than their right-wing counterparts. Although commentators have interpreted the continuous political success of the political party Smer-SD in terms of negatively connotated nationalism and national populism, Fico's discursive framework allows him to address those who have been stigmatized by post-1989 neoliberalism, especially former communists and people unable or unwilling to adapt to the rapid changes brought about by post-socialist social, economic, political as well as cultural transition(s). Instead of backwardness, Fico's anti-elitist and anti-capitalist rhetoric opened a new symbolic universe to these groups. The history narratives that formed an important part of this universe were not used to exclude the Other, but rather to create a meaningful future for those who have been ignored by (neo-)liberal ideals. This paper argues for an interpretation of post-socialist populist parties that would take into account culturally relevant symbolic structures advanced by these parties.     

Conceptual Issues in Inter-Agency Collaboration

Inter-agency collaboration – or partnership as it now commonly termed – is central to New Labour's agenda, but the general support for a partnership approach conceals disputes about definitions and approaches. This article begins by examining the shift to more complex and ambitious partnerships in health, social care and regeneration, which require new modes of governance. The three main modes – market, hierarchy and network – are briefly described and contrasted, and located within the recent history of public service development. It is argued that they are best seen as overlain and co-existing, resulting in a hybrid mode of governance which is characterised by tension and contradiction. The article goes on to discuss the issues this raises for real partnerships in trying to understand the collaborative imperative and the barriers to its effective achievement. Although the network mode has its attractions, there are complex issues of membership, management and culture which need to be addressed. It is concluded that hierarchy, markets and networks will co-exist better where each acknowledges its own limits and the strengths of others.     

Process and practice: groupness,ethnicity, and habitus in Carpathian Rus’

This article synthesizes Wimmer's and Brubaker's processual approach to analyzing ethnic groups with Jenkins and Bentley's practice-based theories of ethnicity to explain the role played by socio-emotional experiences and practical concerns in Carpatho-Rusyns, both mobilizing as an ethnic group as well as resisting such mobilization. Data were gathered from interviews and participant observation during the eight months of fieldwork in 10 different villages, towns, and cities in the Pre?ov region of Slovakia and the Zakarpattia oblast of Ukraine. Carpatho-Rusyns live in an area where borders have changed frequently and where religions, states, and political movements have encouraged the inhabitants’ assimilation to a new or larger group. Rusyns tend to describe ethnicity as instrumentalist theorists do, that is, something largely produced as a result of struggles over territory, resources, and political power. Nevertheless, they evince a profound emotional connection to their language, land, and spirituality. This emotional connection manifests itself among “ethnopolitical entrepreneurs” as well as among the general population, but only motivates explicit political organization among the former.