Abstract
Stefano Bartolini and Peter Mair's classic book is probably one of the most widely read and highly cited works in the field of political parties and party systems today. This edition, which is published as part of the ECPR ‘Classics’ series, contains a new introduction and will undoubtedly widen access to this 1990 winner of the Stein Rokkan Prize.
The authors' main research question is: what explains variation in electoral volatility? The predominant thesis on West European electorates questions Lipset and Rokkan's ‘freezing hypothesis’ in the wake of increased electoral volatility and instability in the 1970s and 1980s. Bartolini and Mair differ from this line and persuasively argue that cleavages continue to be frozen, and that from a long-term perspective there has been a stabilisation of electorates. Their explanation is that those shifts that have taken place have been between parties on the same side of the cleavage rather than across cleavages. Focusing on shifts between individual parties therefore obscures the resilience of class, which continues to remain an important basis for political identity.
The study covers 303 general elections in thirteen West European countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom) between 1885 and 1985. It is innovative on two counts. Firstly, it creates a new data set to replace the established Mackie-Rose set; and second it substitutes the usual Pederson index which measures electoral volatility with a more refined tool. Electoral volatility, the main dependent variable, is broken up into electoral and class cleavage volatility. Electoral volatility is in turn divided into bloc and within-bloc volatility. The five main independent variables are the degree of cleavage closure, policy distance, party system format, change in electoral institutions and levels of electoral participation. The authors conclude that socio-organisational bonds and institutional incentives help explain the changes in electoral behaviour. While the former sustains and reinforces identities, institutional incentives determine the bounds of political choice.
This is undoubtedly a convincingly argued book, but what about the other untested cleavages such as religion? Researchers need to take up the challenge thrown down in this new edition. The model needs to be tested with the increased electoral data available; and the proposal that other institutional constraints and incentives and other cleavages such as religion and centre–periphery need to be analysed to understand electoral change should be considered.
Many other countries have also witnessed party-system transformation and it would be worthwhile applying the Bartolini-Mair logic to understand transformations elsewhere. The book has surely been useful to those interested in European politics and it could prove worthwhile to those studying other electoral transformations and party systems as well.
K. K. Kailash
(Panjab University, India)
Michele Battini's book The Missing Italian Nuremberg: Cultural Amnesia and Postwar Politics tries to explain why the trial of the military command of the Nazi power structure in Italy, carefully prepared by the Allies on the model of the Nuremberg Trials, has never taken place. By reassembling the different elements of the preliminary investigations for the ‘maxi-trial’ and by investigating some of the less important trials that replaced it, he tries to shed light on the consequences that this unrealised act of justice has had on Italian law on the one hand, and on public memory on the other. One of his main hypotheses is that the trials – held or not held – have led to a very selective public memory, hindering a full understanding of the deep-seated causes of the Second World War.
Battini offers a comprehensive analysis of the circumstances that led to cultural amnesia and juridical oblivion by investigating the outcome of the Nuremberg Trials and Allied policy towards Italy in the immediate post-war years. His declared aim is not to ‘denounce political opportunism or inadequate justice’ (p. 26), but to shed light on the nature of post-war trials, the construction of a public memory of the war and the development of an Italian and European identity. He comes to the conclusion that ‘postwar justice was, first of all, a sort of political and symbolic legitimization of the new States that had arisen from the Liberation, but an inadequate one from the juridical point of view’ (p. 17). The Italian case in this context is used as a paradigm of many Western democracies built on oblivion. The chapter dedicated to the role of Vichy for the French political, cultural and juridical history and references made to contemporary war trials in Iraq, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia in the introduction to the American edition of this book clearly show that the question of how the crimes of a totalitarian regime should be judged and punished is still topical today.
The accurate analysis of a great variety of primary sources together with a detailed investigation of the cultural, social and political pressures present in postwar Europe offer an important insight into the reasons for the ‘missing Italian Nuremberg’. Battini's clear, fluent writing style in combination with frequent direct quotes from primary documents render the book accessible to all including non-historians and allow the reader to follow the line of his arguments with great ease.
Wounds of Memory: The Politics of War in Germany by Maja Zehfuss, meanwhile, investigates the way German memories of the Second World War have been articulated in various contexts. By exploring the verbalisation of memories in a number of novels that have created public controversies and by setting them against the dominant political debates, she wants to ‘destabilise the certainty with which much is claimed’ about what Germans do and should remember (p. xiii). At the centre of her research is the question: ‘What does it mean to remember and what does remembering tell us about how we understand the reality we live in?’ (p. xiii) She argues that the tensions and uncertainties emanating from this question have political implications that have to be confronted by politics and society. By pointing out the different ways in which Germany has tried to find an answer to the right format of remembrance in private and public and by demonstrating how Second World War memories are being discussed and instrumentalised in order to legitimise political decisions, she tries to illustrate how memory produces a past that might then condition the future. In doing this, she criticises the contemporary German tendency – often adopted when it comes to political decisions involving the use of force – to claim preferential knowledge about the right way to react in the present because of experiences from the past.
In order to investigate the logic within which articulations of memory operate, Zehfuss draws from a wealth of sources ranging from political speeches held in the German Bundestag to the literary in-depth examination of novels. While the use of novels to explore German memories of the Third Reich is not unusual, the innovative interdisciplinary approach that Zehfuss adopts in combining literary with political and sociological analyses is noteworthy. It allows her to put the different expressions of Second World War memories into context and to demonstrate how they can be collocated within the wider social and political framework.
Zehfuss' book is written in a very fluent and accessible style, combining her own observations with direct quotes from primary and secondary sources. Her analytical approach towards the comprehensive analysis of Germany's struggle to come to terms with its memories of the Third Reich is very convincing, making her book an important contribution to the already rich literature on the Second World War.
Aline Sierp
(University of Siena)
Nearly two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, scholarly historical accounts of the end of the Cold War are still to a great extent dominated by a ‘superpower’ narrative that focuses primarily on the actions and decisions of the United States and the Soviet Union. In this narrative, the European countries most intimately involved in the events of 1988 to 1992 – particularly the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic – have often been reduced to a seemingly peripheral or marginal role in their own histories. Yet the latest archival resources that have become available to researchers have challenged the ideas and assumptions of this bipolar perspective; as a result, the historiography of the end of the Cold War appears increasingly in need of revision. The newest volume in Routledge's highly regarded ‘Cold War History’ series brings together a number of well-written articles that seek to address this need – and, in doing so, to ‘reinstate “Europe” at the centre of the attention of historians looking at the end of the Cold War' (p. 2).
Europe and the End of the Cold War: A Reappraisal examines its central topic from a number of different angles, illuminating the different facets of the Cold War's climactic ending. Many of the contributions look at the place of the European Economic Community (as it was then) in the debate over Europe's future, illustrating the views of different member states and individual leaders regarding the pace of German unification and the rapidly shifting balance of power across the continent. The United States and the Soviet Union are not ignored, of course, but the authors tend to evaluate the superpowers' contributions in terms of their reactions to events that were often out of their immediate control.
This book offers a refreshing reassessment of contemporary European history by some of the most knowledgeable historians and researchers currently working in the field, many of whom have contributed to previous volumes in the same series. By breaking free of the limits of the old superpower narrative, the authors clear up a number of long-standing misconceptions and shine new light on previously neglected areas of historical inquiry. On the whole, the entire volume is a welcome and long-overdue encouragement for future historians who have an interest in Europe's unquestionably central role in the Cold War endgame.
Shannon Granville
(Independent Scholar)
Marion Demossier's edited volume is a short but valuable contribution to the literature on the European identity debate. It addresses this debate from the perspective of the political structuring of cultural identity and examines the gradual process of Europeanisation in European societies. In a collection of essays from a wide variety of fields including political science, history and sociology the authors challenge the traditional nation-centred notions that shape the debates around the making of European identity, seeing this as an imperative for exploring the complex and multifaceted nature of identity in Europe.
The book proceeds to achieve these aims through three separate but nevertheless thematically linked sections. Part I provides a history of the European identity debate in relation to nation states and national identity. Anne-Marie Thiesse provides a historical analysis of attempts to create European identity, while Richard Vinen highlights the mechanisms of history in creating identity, described as the primary factor for generating identity. Ralph Grillo examines European identity in a transnational era and underlines the ongoing importance of ethnic identity and a national sense of belonging. Part II then engages with the complexity of cultural and political identities within tradition and identity relationships in Europe. Ullrich Kockel analyses the relationship between tradition and identity and Christian Bromberger looks at the history of football as a sociological analysis of class struggles, political activism and cultural boundaries in Europe. Finally, Part III continues this analytical theme, but within a context of questioning how it is possible to construct a European identity. Susan Milner in her chapter argues that cities are central to European identity, with their contribution to emerging European civic space.
The book claims that its primary aim is to reconcile unity and diversity by offering an interdisciplinary approach to questions of European identity/identities. Despite the variety of approaches and themes developed, the book successfully bridges this interdisciplinarity and provides a coherent flow of analysis of European identity which, as the title best illustrates, still remains a puzzle to be explored. The book therefore highlights the complexity of constructing European identity from political and cultural means. Appreciating that European identity is a complex and large subject, the book might have benefited from more substantive discussion of the debates surrounding what it is to be European. However, overall it intellectually alerts the reader to some of the most significant challenges facing European identity and will be very useful to experts in the field.
Gokhan Kosar
(Royal Holloway, University of London)
Democracy and Lobbying in the European Union offers a concise theoretical and scholarly analysis of concepts such as democracy, interest groups, common good, consociational democracy, corporatism and pluralism. Specifically, it examines the European Union (EU) system and the workings of democratic principles in that system via various theoretical tools, revealing the consociational system as one of the most important features of the EU system and the democratic deficit as one of its most serious problems. The book successfully reviews previous literature and empirical studies on the development and strategies of EU lobbies as well as the process pursued. The author aims to reconcile the theoretical basis and practical developments in the actual workings of EU democracy and lobbying. The perspective focuses on the future of EU democracy and offers a set of solutions to overcome deficiencies created by the inherent character of the EU system and its lobbying practices.
The book deals with the challenges presented by attempting to find the right balance for the integration of interest lobbying in the processes and structures of representative democratic governance. Integration presupposes the existence of a variety of interests in society and the contribution of organised interests for the solution of complex problems. The balance also requires that principles of democracy need to be safeguarded against the dominance of special interest groups (p. 11). The author's main question is whether such a balanced integration is possible in both theory and practice in the EU.
Since the work is the result of a doctoral dissertation, it is founded upon the requisite academic apparatus which includes a coherent and detailed theoretical approach, a concise review of the relevant literature and a valuable attempt to reconcile the findings with the hypothesis of the study. It also includes useful and elucidating charts and tables which summarise the findings of many authors. The book's author consistently, coherently and successfully employs the ‘cornerstones of democratic governance’ as a theoretical analytical tool throughout the book. However, whether the solutions offered as a remedy to the problems of EU lobbying and practices can be analysed in the same framework is not clearly stated. One of the features of the work is that it takes a mainly theoretical approach based on substantial literature in both English and German. The book will be attractive to scholars and students of European Studies in particular and political science in general.
Ahmet Arabaci
(Fatih University, Turkey)
Whether Turkey is a European country is still a controversial issue among academics and politicians. In this valuable book Lauren McLaren compares Turkey with Southern European countries (Italy and Spain). However, this is not because she regards Turkey as European, but rather because there is no other fully functioning democratic Middle Eastern country to compare Turkey with.
Questions at the heart of this book include why some regimes are democratic while others are not, and in particular why Turkish democracy has faltered for decades despite being in similar circumstances to the European regimes. To explore the reasons behind these differences, McLaren examines the role of both domestic and external factors in the transition to democracy and democratic consolidation.
This book is composed of eleven chapters and the largest section of the book is devoted to discussions on the role of domestic factors (chs 2–9). Chapter 2 considers whether having ‘stateness’ problems (rebels or opposition to the existence of the state) would weaken the transition to democracy, and it finds that this factor is unlikely to be a cause of failed consolidation. Chapter 7 shows that the functioning of government depends on how consensual the institutions are, and whether the parliament is able to serve as a central institution for conflict resolution. Chapter 8 then assesses the role of differential handling of regional conflicts in democratic consolidation and concludes that oppressive approaches such as forced assimilation encourage and underpin separatism (regional or ethnic), as seen in Spain (Franco's forced assimilations in the Basque and Catalan regions) and Turkey (the declaration of long periods of states of emergency in the south-east).
However, chapter 10 changes the focus of the book by drawing attention to the potential impact of external factors such as NATO and the EU. McLaren's analyses show that these factors are less effective, illustrated by reference to the Turkish military's overthrow of civilian governments despite Turkey's being a member of NATO since 1952.
The main strength of this book is that it provides a detailed comparison between three different countries' experiences of transition to and consolidation of democracy. The gap the author leaves behind is a detailed examination of external factors. On the whole, this is an empirically lively and theoretically rigorous book. It will be of interest to students of comparative and democratisation studies, and those who are keen to comprehend the predicament of Turkish democracy.
Gulay Icoz
(Royal Holloway, University of London)
Even after decades of persistent scholarly endeavour, the EU Council of Ministers still remains an opaque institution. This volume sets out an ambitious agenda to shed some light on the Council, as reflected in the title. However, in spite of the promise to ‘unveil the Council’, black holes in our understanding persist after reading this collection. That said, this volume nonetheless makes a significant contribution to the Council literature, broadening and deepening our understanding of the intra-institutional working of this unique institution.
Naurin and Wallace have assembled some of the leading experts on the Council who, with methodological and analytical rigour, succeed in unearthing some real gems. The most important contribution is that many of the chapters assess the impact of the 2004 Eastern Enlargement round, and reveal that Council politics can be characterised as ‘business as usual’ (p. 19). It adds to the quality of the volume that the contributions, which all underwent ‘a double-blind peer review process’ (p. xi), reflect the diverse approaches to studying the Council. One will find qualitative and quantitative accounts that are approached with alternating theoretical and empirical emphasis, making the book a well-balanced read.
The book can be broadly divided into six parts. The first section constitutes the editors' introduction, in which they carefully discuss the existing literature on the Council and critically place the volume's contribution within this literature. The next part, comprising three chapters, is concerned with coalition building among member states. In the third section, a theoretical and an empirical chapter explore the culture of consensus in the Council, while the fourth section elaborates deliberation and bargaining in three chapters. The fifth part, comprising four chapters, then takes up the issue of formal and informal leadership in the Council. The collection's final section accommodates a methodological debate between Dorothee Heisenberg and Gerald Schneider, who discuss in lively fashion the prospects of applying rational choice scholarship to study of the Council of Ministers.
The volume's excellent choice of contributions and its comprehensive and encouraging insights raise the bar in Council studies several notches. It is strongly recommended to any scholar interested in legislative politics in general, as well as in the Council in particular, serving as a significant supplement to our mainstream textbook accounts.
Tim Veen
(University of Nottingham)
These two recent books edited by Aleks Szczerbiak and Paul Taggart mark a turning point in the study of party-based Euroscepticism. The two volumes represent an attempt both to systematise what has been done to date within the framework of the OERN project and to propose new analytical perspectives to enlighten still largely neglected aspects of the phenomenon. Szczerbiak and Taggart adopt a comparative-inductive approach as is evident from the structure of the work. The first volume aims at mapping party-based Euroscepticism in seventeen member states (plus Norway) ‘in order to discern and inform the broad parameters of subsequent research’ (vol. 2, p. 1). The second volume proposes a wide range of comparative and theoretical questions which are addressed in the light of the country-based analyses.
Szczerbiak and Taggart reformulate their original distinction between hard (principled opposition) and soft (qualified opposition) Euroscepticism, shifting their focus from parties' attitudes towards EU membership to parties' commitment to the EU integration project. Their categorisation represents the interpretative framework though which the individual country case contributions must be read. The chapters follow a common pattern which allows for comparison between them: (1) contextualisation of party systems; (2) definition of the nature and relevance of party-based Euroscepticism; and (3) analysis of parties and factions identified as Eurosceptic. Particularly innovative is the analysis of Euroscepticism in the new member states from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Noteworthy for their originality are the cases of Estonia (by Mikkel and Kasekamp) and Slovenia (by Krašovec and Kustec Lipicer), along with Norway (by Sitter).
Taggart and Szczerbiak conclude that ‘Euroscepticism is incorporated in very different ways into the different polities’ depending on the nature of the political system, while a common pattern is emerging towards ‘limited contestation’ (vol. 2, p. 363). Soft-Eurosceptic parties have indeed more chances to succeed both electorally and in terms of blackmail potential. Their pragmatism seems to facilitate their inclusion as reliable coalition partners. Pridham lists three basic conditions for inclusion: ‘ideological compatibility, democratic conditionality, and [conditional] pro-EU commitment’ (vol. 2, p. 100). Similarly, Di Benedetto identifies heterogeneity as one of the key reasons behind the poor parliamentary performance of Eurosceptic parties: ‘some of the right-wing Eurosceptics … do not see themselves as anti-system parties and do not adapt themselves to a protest-based anti-system role in the EP’ (vol. 2, p. 131). Of primary relevance is the chapter on Euroscepticism at sub-national level in CEE (by Hughes, Sasse and Gordon). The authors conclude that, given the weak involvement of the sub-national levels during the accession process and the lack of strong parties at regional level, fertile ground is emerging among the local elites for disaffection and Euroscepticism. The 2004 enlargement emerges as a milestone of key importance. Szczerbiak and Taggart suggest that, while approaching the accession date, some CEE states (e.g. the Czech Republic) gradually shifted from artificial Euroidealism to Euroscepticism. Accordingly, as we shift from the earliest to the most advanced phases of enlargement the problematisation of the EU increases, since the costs of accession become increasingly more evident.
The open and non-dogmatic nature of the work emerges clearly in the pages devoted to the discussion of Mudde and Kopecký‘s well-known alternative model. While expressing their disagreement, Szczerbiak and Taggart recognise the relevance of some arguments: ‘we accept that our definition of Soft party-based Euroscepticism may indeed have been too broad’ (vol. 2, p. 242). What emerges is therefore a fair degree of theoretical syncretism and constructive self-criticism which grant the model the necessary degree of flexibility and adaptational potential. The fact that most of the 30 contributors are originally from the country they discuss represents another asset of the book. This allows greater analytical depth, given the possibility to tackle primary non-English sources.
What might further strengthen the reliability of the results proposed is the use of more accurate statistical methods of analysis. However, two reasons can be identified behind the editors' choice to use a more qualitative approach. On the one hand, the adoption of over-selective statistical analysis might well have severely reduced the coherence of the work, given the conceptual complexity and polymorphous nature of the issue. On the other hand, this choice would have implied the systematic collection of comparable data for all of the eighteen countries included in the study, which clearly goes beyond the scope and ambition of the work.
The books are well written and the high degree of comparability, along with the common pattern of the chapters, makes them an extremely flexible tool. The two volumes, which can be read both in succession and separately, represent a successful attempt to go beyond single-country studies and to embrace a wider comparative perspective. For these reasons, they represent necessary reading for all those eager to develop a clearer and systematic understanding of today's party-based Euroscepticism.
Stefano Braghiroli
(University of Siena)
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