Free Democratic Research Articles

Free, Fair and Credible Election and Democratic Governance in Bangladesh: How Far the Dream of Success?

The paper has evaluated the relation between the free, fair and credible election and democratic governance in Bangladesh. The paper is a descriptive and qualitative in nature and mainly based on secondary literature. For doing this study, conceptual clarification has been done first and identified few elements of free, fair and credible elections. Then, how far these elements have been ensured in Bangladeshi elections has been evaluated by analyzing all the national elections held since independence. Apart from these, major factors and challenges of holding a free, fair and credible election in Bangladesh have been examined Major findings of this study are: Since the independence of Bangladesh, 10 national elections held in various regimes. 4 out of 10 national elections have been found free, fair and credible which have been conducted by the non-party caretaker government. Rests of the elections are not out of controversy and full of manipulation held under elected government. The present AL government is elected by the 10th parliamentary election under incumbent (AL) government, but a major opposition allies (20 parties) lead by BNP boycotted this election and 154 of the total 300 seats being uncontested. As a result, AL again came to the power without a competitive election and most of the national and International election observers including media world consider this election as unfair and the government is suffering from lack of legitimacy which creates political pressure for another interim election and need a permanent solution.

„Za obronę własnych przekonań” – działalność społeczno-polityczna Adama Pleśnara (1935–2013) do 1977 roku

The article is an attempt to scratch the biography of Adam Plesnar. The analysis was subjected to the activity of the protagonist until 1977. Plesnar was an active member of the Club of Young Catholics at the University of Wroclaw, co-founder of the Young Democrats (ZMD). Already in the sixties he was convicted for opposition activities. In the seventies he was an activist of Polish Esperanto Association. He participated in protests against changes in the Constitution of the PRL. Since 1977 belonged to the members of the Movement in Defense of the Rights of Man and Citizen (ROPCiO) and the leader of the Movement of Free Democrats (RWD), an activist of the Wroclaw opposition. Within the Movement sought to participation of the opposition in legitimate forms of political activity, including in the elections to the Sejm PRL, while remaining critical of the existing system.

The Prospects of the FDP in Comparative Perspective: Rest in Peace or Totgesagte leben länger?

This article examines the conditions under which political parties that have dropped below the threshold of legislative representation later re-enter parliament. To do so, it compares two German parties that did not return to the Bundestag and two that did. In light of the ‘lessons' of previous cases in the Federal Republic, the essay considers the prospects of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) in the wake of its 2013 federal election defeat.

Protecting Unborn Life in the Secular Age: The Catholic Church and the West German Abortion Debate, 1969–1989

In 1969, the newly elected coalition government of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Free Democratic Party (FDP) in West Germany announced plans to reform Paragraph 218, the law that regulated women's access to abortion. This announcement prompted a public debate in West Germany on the state's obligation to protect unborn life—a debate that continues today in reunified Germany. Through an analysis of key events in that debate between 1969 and 1989, this article makes a twofold argument. First it argues that despite West Germany's increasingly secular orientation, the Catholic Church exercised significant political influence with respect to abortion policy throughout the history of the Federal Republic. Second, it argues that the West German Church's participation in these debates exposed deep rifts within the Catholic community, which, in turn, contributed to the formation of a smaller, more activist, and conservative Church. This smaller Church has achieved a remarkable degree of political success in reunified Germany by mobilizing its conservative core constituency, embracing new arguments, and pursuing issue-specific alliances.

Zur Bedeutung des Manifests der Marktwirtschaft oder: Das Lambsdorff-Papier im 31. Jahr

Abstract In the German federal elections on September 22, 2013, for the first time after 64 years, the Free Democratic Party (FDP) was not elected to the German federal parliament, the Bundestag, anymore. Less surprising than this fact is the malice of its political opponents with which this landslide defeat was accompanied. In this paper, it is argued that the hostility towards the Free Democrats originates from its turn to the Christian Democrats in 1982 with the so called Manifesto for the Market Economy written by Otto Graf Lambsdorff, then Federal Minister of the Economy. The Manifesto argued for a consolidation of public finance and tax reductions, for reforms in the labor market and the social security systems, and for a liberalization and privatization policy. While the Free Democrats did not achieve much of that agenda during the coalition with the Christian Democrats, it influenced the Agenda 2010 by Chancellor Schröder. The paper concludes with a proposal for a renewal of supply side policies in Germany and a renewal of the reform agenda.

A Political-Economy Forecast for the 2013 German Elections: Who to Rule with Angela Merkel?

Our political economy model has correctly forecasted the 1998 and 2005 elections. However, in 2002 we predicted a tight race to the benefit of the Christian Democrats(CDU)/Christian Socialists(CSU)-Free Democratic Party (FDP) opposition, so underestimating the narrow defeat of the FDP by the Green Party. In the German political system, proportional representation makes single-party domination almost impossible. On the contrary, the big parties, Social Democratic Party (SPD) or CDU/CSU, are pushed to build a majority coalition. In this competition, the FDP has been the “pivotal party” in German political life, at least until 2002. Since then, the Greens have challenged the FDP, with the Ecologists allowing the SPD to form a red-green coalition in 1998 and in 2002. Similarly, in 2005 the FDP was not associated with the grand coalition driven by Angela Merkel.

Kariera polityczna Klausa Kinkela

Born in 1936, Klaus Kinkel is a representative of Germany’s Free Democratic Party (FDP). Among the leaders of that party, Walter Scheel and Hans-Dietrich Genscher may have won greater popularity, but even so, Kinkel also exerted an influence on the liberals’ policy line, primarily by means of the Wiesbaden Declaration. Working closely with Genscher, Kinkel amassed the experience of which he would avail himself in leading the FDP, in holding office as the Federal Minister of Justice and, subsequently, in heading the Federal Foreign Office. With his education as a lawyer, Kinkel demonstrated an adroitness and professionalism in carrying out his duties. He gained no renown for charisma and leadership skills, but neither did he ever become implicated in any scandals.The article presents Kinkel’s path into politics. As a politician, it was not until 1991 that he decided to become a member of the FDP, despite having worked with Genscher since 1968. Because he was the Federal Minister of Justice during the unification of the two Germanys, he was responsible for the restoration of the rule of law in the Eastern part of the new state. Then, on assuming Genscher’s former duties at the Federal Foreign Office, he pointed to the new role to be played by diplomacy following the collapse of the Cold War.

A Secret Society History of the Civil War by Mark A. Lause (review)

A Secret Society History of the Civil War. By Mark A. Lause. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011. Pp. 209. Cloth, $35.00.)Reviewed by Michael DeGruccioMark Lause's book has made a timely landing. More and more, historians of the Civil War era have been looking to challenge its standard periodization while shifting the focus away from Virginia's battlefields. The popular success of military and political narratives that follow along the same old ruts of domestic and military events has encouraged a kind of self-imposed, if lucrative, ghetto of Civil War era studies. Historians of postbellum America, especially Heather Cox Richardson, have extended Reconstruction to the early twentieth century, while weaving together military occupation of the ex-Confederacy with the violent ruptures throughout the industrial North and Europe, and the subjugation of western Indians. Scholars like Edward Rugemer have drawn the Civil War era backward and southward into the Caribbean, making the Haitian Revolution and Atlantic emancipation central to the road to secession. The field has long had a rich body of economic and diplomatic histories, but these have mostly focused on Britain and cotton. Now, by following the traces of secret societies, Lause has written a book that wanders through various temporal and political borders.Lause traces the fundamental divisions behind the American Civil War to particular secret movements bred long before the eighteenthcentury Atlantic revolutions, and the nineteenth-century struggles of post-Napoleonic Europe. Masonry, particular, provided a template for how reformers could access supposed ancient secrets, dabble with doctrines, and galvanize a small body of clandestinely gathered adherents to reorder their world. Lause breaks these secretive bodies into two rough categories: those, like the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini, who focused on a unified, secular nation, and insurrectionists like the French socialist, Louis Auguste Blanqui, who emphasized international cooperation between socially egalitarian republics (x, 16).Secret Society History argues that clandestine organizations, on both sides of the Atlantic, have formed the mortar of the nation-building process, the catalyst for new political parties. No wonder, then, that such societies would shape attempts to start and thwart national rebellion (x). After giving scant attention to Masonry the American Revolution, and giving almost no attention to the explosion of secret societies and the violent response of anti-Masonry antebellum America, Lause shifts to Europe's bloody conflicts 1848, and the influx of embattled emigrees into America the decade before secession. For Lause, Americans' various reactions to the foreign tumult (more than America's own history of secret societies) reflected what became the immediate political crises that led to the Civil War, which was in part the ultimate clash of two visions, siphoned from European struggles: the nationalism of the middle class versus the nascent internationalism of reformers (16-17).The book then winds through the shadowy, overlapping worlds of American reformers who drew from these two European models. Gothic writer George Lippard created the Brotherhood of the Union, which mirrored the radical nationalist idealism from across the Atlantic. nfluenced by secret societies the Old World, Lippard wanted to create a Palestine of redeemed labor on the American continent through secret ritual, aggressive expansionism into territories occupied by Mexicans and Indians, and land reform. Radical land reformers and socialists in and around the Brotherhood moved steadily toward racial integration and abolitionism, which many found the antislavery Free Democratic Party. But it was the Old World radicals who had washed up Gotham that created an urban, plebeian current within the American secret society tradition (37). …

Orchestrating a Low-Carbon Energy Revolution Without Nuclear: Germany’s Response to the Fukushima Nuclear Crisis

In October 2010, the German conservative ruling coalition (Christian Democratic Union/Christian Socialist Union (CDU/CSU) and Free Democratic Party (FDP)) passed a law permitting the extension of contracts for Germany’s seventeen nuclear power plants. This policy amended a law passed in 2001 by a Social Democratic Party (SDP) and Green Party majority to phase out nuclear energy by the early 2020s. The explosions in the nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility, however, resulted in a decision to speed up the phaseout of nuclear energy. The nuclear meltdowns in Japan sent hundreds of thousands of protesters onto the streets. Angry voters made their disillusionment with the nuclear politics of the conservative government coalition clear in local elections. The federal government responded by setting up an Ethics Commission for a Safe Energy Supply, which recommended an end to nuclear energy and a shift to a renewable energy-based economy. Within months of the Fukushima disaster, the government had permanently shut down eight of the country’s oldest nuclear power plants and issued a schedule for the phased shutdown of the remaining nine plants by 2022. In addition, the government reaffirmed its climate change plans, which call for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by around forty percent of 1990 levels by 2020 and eighty percent by 2050. Thus, out of a crisis, the German government is forging an opportunity to become a global leader in the promotion of new renewable energies, energy efficiency, and greenhouse gas emission reductions. In Japan, the nuclear crisis has also weakened support for nuclear energy, but with a strong industrial coalition calling for its continued use, both for energy stability and in response to climate change, a complete nuclear phaseout is less certain, at least in the short term.

Small but Perfectly Formed? The Rise and Rise of Germany's Smaller Parties

This article analyses the reasons for the rise and stabilisation of the Free Democrats, the Greens and the Left Party as long-term actors in the German party system. It explains why they have become more electorally relevant in recent years and also analyses what effect this is having on the dynamics of everyday political life in Germany. It analyses the bases of their support as well as their future prospects, before concluding with a discussion of their impact on the German party system.

Coalition Dynamics and the Changing German Party System

The article draws upon the formal coalition literature to demonstrate that party system change over the last thirty years means that the Volksparteien enjoy more coalition options and greater ideological leverage within coalitions that form than was the case in the past. The Free Democrats have lost their kingmaker status and the distribution of party weights over recent elections allows no other small party to act in this manner. By contrast, the numerical and ideological resources possessed by the two Volksparteien means that they remain the only parties within the German party system that can act as formateur in the coalition game and are less vulnerable to threats of a decisive defection by small parties to alternative coalitions than they were in the past.

The Next Step in German Tax Reform: Accelerating Economic Growth

The latest German federal election took place on 27 September 2009 to elect the members of the Bundestag, the federal parliament of Germany. As preliminary results had already shown, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Christian Social Union of Bavaria (CSU), and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) were able to form a conservative/liberal coalition that will govern during the next four years. The coalition agreement was signed on 26 October 2009 setting out the agenda for the upcoming legislative period. The agreement that describes the government’s policy goals and how it intends to achieve those goals includes some details on planned tax changes, which are likely to affect many taxpayers.

On the Way Back into Government? The Free Democratic Party Gearing Up for the 2009 Elections

After the first Bundestag elections in 1949, the Free Democratic Party (FDP) established itself as kingmaker either of the Christian Democrats or the Social Democrats. The entrance of the Green Party into the German Bundestag in 1983 brought about a significant change in the German political landscape, which challenged the German Liberals to redefine themselves. At present, it seems that the FDP is on its way back into the federal government after ten years of opposition, although "neoliberal" ideology is currently facing a severe international crisis. This constitutes a puzzling issue for political scientists, which is addressed in this article by analyzing the factors that can explain the German Liberal's latest success. Furthermore, the FDP's chances in comparison to the other two small parties (Left Party and Greens) are discussed. Finally, attention is focused on the characteristics of the FDP's election campaign and its coalition options for 2009 and beyond.

The chancellor model: Forecasting German elections

Our forecast model for German Bundestag elections relies on three predictors: (1) the popularity of the incumbent chancellor (hence the christening of it as the “Chancellor Model”); (2) the long-term partisan balance in the German electorate; and (3) the cost of ruling, as captured by the tenure of the government in office. The model forecasts the vote share of the governing parties (typically two, such as Social Democrats and Greens, or Christian Democrats and Free Democrats), except for instances of a grand coalition. The coefficients of the predictors are estimated based on elections since 1949, the beginning of the Federal Republic. The out-of-sample forecasts of the model deviate from the actual results by just over one percentage point, on average. The first real-time test of the model came in 2002. The forecast issued three months before Election Day picked the incumbent vote share to the decimal (47.1% for the SPD-Greens coalition); for the 2005 election, called a year early, our forecast three weeks before Election Day was just three-tenths of a percentage off the mark. For the upcoming election, we offer separate forecasts, conditional at this moment, for each of the two parties in the grand coalition.

Stanley Matthews: A Case Portrait of Gilded Age High Court Jurisprudence

Stanley Matthews: A Case Portrait of Gilded Age High Court Jurisprudence JONATHAN LURIE Introduction Why present a paper dealing with Stanley Matthews? Numerous readers, one suspects, will not be familiar with him. Yet his career includes several unusual aspects that warrant some attention, as was also true of the two Justices discussed in my earlier essays: John A. Campbell was the only member of the Supreme Court to resign from the Court when his state seceded and to be confined in a federal prison at the conclusion ofthe Civil War in 18651 ; and William Howard Taft was the only member of the Supreme Court who served as President, Solicitor General, and circuit judge as well as Chief Justice.2 What is unusual about Justice Stanley Matthews? Three points may be noted: (a) He was the only Justice to be appointed by, not one, but two Presidents; (b) he appears to have been the only Justice to be confirmed by the narrowest possible margin, a single vote;3 and (c) I believe he is the only Justice whose daughter married one ofher father’sjudicial colleagues, in this case Justice Horace Gray. Matthews was a devoted Republican, nominated by two Republican Presidents, yet his selection by Rutherford Hayes in 1880 stirred unusual opposition—and this in an era when it was routine for politics to reflect rancor, enmity, and personal recrimination. While such opposition was not to be unexpected, in Matthews’ case it came from his own party. Indeed, it was not Republican votes but more than a dozen from the Democrats that secured his ultimate confirmation. STANLEY MATTHEWS 161 I Stanley Matthews was born in 1824 in Lex­ ington, Kentucky, where his father held a professorship at Transylvania University, at which another future Supreme Court Justice— Samuel Miller—later studied, not law, but medicine. In 1832, Thomas Matthews moved his family to Cincinnati and became the first headmaster of Woodward High School, from which William Howard Taftwould later gradu­ ate in 1870. The oldest ofeleven children from his father’s second marriage (there were also five from his first), Stanley Matthews must have possessed considerable intellect, as he en­ tered Kenyon College as a junior at the age of fifteen. At Kenyon, he became close friends with another student from Ohio, Rutherford Hayes. This friendship had lasting political repercussions for both young men. Indeed, Hayes appears to have calmed some impetuos­ ity on Matthews’ part concerning a disagree­ ment between several students and the college administrators. Apparently, the altercation al­ most costMatthews his degree, buthe was able to graduate in 1840.4 He was not yet eighteen. Too young to gain admission to the Ohio Bar, Matthews studied law on his own in Cincinnati and relocated for a briefperiod to Tennessee, where he taught school, married, and practiced law. He returned to Cincinnati in 1844 and the nextyear, whenhe turnedtwentyone , was admitted to the Ohio bar. Here again Hayes encountered Matthews, as he served on the committee to examine the young appli­ cant. Hayes recalled that Matthews was “be­ yond dispute a better lawyer than any of the examining committee.”5 Mixing legal prac­ tice with local politics, Matthews became in­ volved with the Free Soil Democrats, served a term in the Ohio Senate, and was mentored by Salmon P. Chase, future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Still an anti-slavery Demo­ crat, he accepted an appointment from Pres­ ident James Buchanan as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio. In this capacity, he had to prosecute individuals accused ofviolat­ ing the Fugitive Slave Act, actions thatbrought him substantial abuse from the abolitionist press. Unfortunately, additional, personal, and much more severe tribulation came upon Matthews. Happily married and with a grow­ ing family, husband and wife suffered a terri­ ble loss in 1859 when a scarlet fever epidemic killed four oftheir six children. He andhis wife found solace in their Presbyterian faith, and, ironically, the strength ofhis religious beliefs later contributed to one of the greatest cases of his career as an attorney. In the meantime, Hayes and Matthews wentoffto war. Theyboth survived (otherwise this would be a very short essay) and returned to law and politics in...

Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854

Taking our understanding of political antislavery into largely unexplored terrain, Jonathan H. Earle counters conventional wisdom and standard historical interpretations that view the ascendance of free-soil ideas within the antislavery movement as an explicit retreat from the goals of emancipation or even as an essentially proslavery ideology. These claims, he notes, fail to explain free soil's real contributions to the antislavery cause: its incorporation of Jacksonian ideas about property and political equality and its transformation of a struggling crusade into a mass political movement. Democratic free soilers' views on race occupied a wide spectrum, but they were able to fashion new and vital arguments against slavery and its expansion based on the party's long-standing commitment to egalitarianism and hostility to centralized power. Linking their antislavery stance to a land-reform agenda that pressed for free land for poor settlers in addition to land free of slavery, Free Soil Democrats forced major political realignments in New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Ohio. Democratic politicians such as David Wilmot, Marcus Morton, John Parker Hale, and even former president Martin Van Buren were transformed into antislavery leaders. As Earle shows, these political changes at the local, state, and national levels greatly intensified the looming sectional crisis and paved the way for the Civil War.

No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics (review)

Reviewed by: No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics Michael A. Morrison No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics. By Frederick J. Blue. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. xii, 301 pp. Cloth $54.95, isbn 0-8071-2976-3.) Fredrick Blue's collective biography of ten antislavery activists adds a fresh and important dimension to our understanding of the antislavery movement in the 1840s and 1850s. Focusing on less-prominent figures, Blue greatly enhances our understanding of the antislavery movement generally and the politics of sectionalism in particular. Examining the private and public lives of individuals as diverse as Alvan Stewart and Jessie Benton Frémont and Charles Langston and David Wilmot, Blue analyzes their motivation to become politically active in politics, their antislavery ideology, and their varying commitments to equal rights for African Americans. He places them on a spectrum that ranges from an early commitment to the Liberty Party (Stewart and John Greenleaf Whittier, for example) to those who came to the antislavery movement later with the advent of the Republican Party (Frémont and Benjamin Wade). Each, however, was intensely committed to stopping the expansion of slavery and saw politics as the means to that end. Common threads bind together the lives of these activists. Central to their commitment to antislavery was a religious background that issued in the conviction that slavery was immoral. This sets them apart from other more conservative—or less enlightened—opponents of slavery who were largely concerned about the institution only as it affected white society and republican politics. These activists found their commitment to antislavery [End Page 154] politics a difficult one, occasioned as it was by hostility and threats from those less sympathetic to the plight of the enslaved. Save for David Wilmot, they also distanced themselves but were not entirely free from nineteenth-century racial stereotypes. Although they varied in their commitment to the enfranchisement of blacks, all (again, save for Wilmot) were determined to grant African Americans basic human and political rights. What most united these ten and set them apart from abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison was their conviction that political activism best served the antislavery movement. And here the Mexican-American War seemed to be a turning point, and an ironic one at that. On the one hand, it raised and made salient the question of slavery extension and thus heightened sectional tensions that focused on the institution. On the other, Wilmot's proviso had the effect (though not the intent) of blunting more radical antislavery activity by shifting its focus to restriction (not abolition) and making politics (not moral suasion) the broad-based grounds on which that contest would be fought. What Blue suggests is that "radical" antislavery activism is less a category than a continuum: if Whittier, Jane Swisshelm, and Owen Lovejoy were less extreme in their attacks on slavery than Garrison or Wendell Phillips, they were certainly no less committed to its elimination and to the advancement of equal rights. Blue's analysis of this antislavery cohort also illuminates and gives substance to the positions of those radicals and conservatives who opposed them. Thus, he expands and enriches the political landscape of the Middle Period. Separately and together, these biographies begin to map a path by which the moral element of abolitionism intersects with the antislavery politics of Free Soil Democrats and Republicans. Finally, Blue reminds us that abolitionism and the politics of antislavery were deeply personal, intensely felt, and mutually reinforcing. This is the rare collective biography in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. [End Page 155] Michael A. Morrison Purdue University Copyright © 2007 The Kent State University Press

Jacksonian Antislavery & the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854 (review)

Jacksonian Antislavery & Politics of 1824-1854. By Jonathan H. Earle. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. 282. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $22.50.)Jonathan H. Earle has written an important and overdue history of Soil Party's origins. terms Free Soil, Free and Free Men are familiar to historians today primarily of Eric Foner's work of same name, Labor, Men: Ideology of Republican Party Before Civil War (1970). It has been thirty-five years since publication of that influential volume, and during those years it has stood as our basic understanding of Soil Party. It makes good sense, then, that one of Foner's former students should offer historians another vantage point from which to consider Soilers. Yet rather than carrying readers into ideological origins of Republican Party, Earle takes us farther back, to earliest days of antislavery extension party, noting that because 'free soil' is one of antebellum America's most elusive terms, one of this study's ambitions is to clarify its origins and meanings (13). He finds that many of most important leaders came from steadfast Jacksonian roots.Men such as William Leggett, Thomas Morris, and David Wilmot, to name a few, were thoroughgoing, hard-money Democrats. They fought monopolies and banks that made up Money Power and argued against special privilege and aristocracy. They were also opposed to slavery early on and ultimately transferred their antiaristocratic ideals into a focused and effective attack on Slave Power, another form of elitist rule. Democratic dissidents, reasonably satisfied that Jackson and his administration had Money Power on run, writes Earle, discovered that another enemy-slavery-had risen in its place. Thomas Morris argued to Senate that the slave power of South and banking power of North, are now uniting to rule this country (7-8). Thus it was early opposition to slavery of staunch Democrats that fit snugly within their already fixed hatred of economic power that forged early Soil ideology. Earle is careful to point out that these men were not radical abolitionists. They wedded their attack on slavery with traditional beliefs, such as land reform and principles of political democracy: Free Soil Democrats went beyond simple hostility to Slave Power and its pretenses, linking their antislavery opposition to a land reform agenda that pressed for free land for poor settlers, in addition to land free of slavery. resulting union between radical Jacksonianism and antislavery movement . . . is far more important than historians have allowed (5).The apparent anomaly of Earle's argument is that Soil opposition to further western extension of slavery and their focus on Slave Power, both of which were major components of later Republican Party, had solidly origins. Party was, after all, proponent of Gag Laws and banning of abolitionist tracts from mail. Earle acknowledges, The Party leadership generally treated antislavery Jacksonians as heretics and often banished them from party. Morris and other early Soil dissident Democrats, however, claimed that proslavery leadership had abandoned true Jacksoman principles, not dissidents themselves (6-7). …

Nation, State, Europe and national revival in Hungarian party politics: the case of the millennial commemorations

POST-COMMUNIST TRANSFORMATION CONFRONTS all countries involved with questions of state redefinition. The strains that can be generated by these questions have been most evident, and most examined, in states newly emerged from the Czechoslovak, Soviet or Yugoslav federations and/or those with significant ethnic minorities. However, even in relatively old and ethnically homogeneous states, these issues cannot be tackled without engaging varying understandings of the national identity and the relationship between state and nation.! This article investigates the conceptions of the nature and purpose of the state presented by party political elites in one such state, Hungary. Hungary's relative ethnic homogeneity means that there has been no significant practical contestation about which national group the post-communist state is 'of and for', in Brubaker's terms.2 That is, questions have not arisen about public language use, for example (as between the language of the state's titular nationality and another, minority, national group), as has occurred in several other post-communist countries with larger and less assimilated minorities. Similarly, Hungary's well-established status has obviated any need to excavate a little-known national past to legitimate the state's existence. As then Prime Minister Viktor Orbtin commented in 1999, Hungarians could 'forget the word, invent Hungary. Hungary was invented quite well enough a thousand years ago, by St Stephen himself'.3 However, a 'national question' has consistently been identified as the single dominant dimension of the country's post-communist party competition.4 Partly, this dimension comprises familiar left-right differences over secularism and progressivism versus religiosity and cultural and social traditionalism. However, in the Hungarian context, as in many others, these differences also encompass divergent understandings of the national identity and of the nature and value of nationhood in general." In this respect, elite political competition since 1990 in part continues a central debate of modem Hungarian political and intellectual life, about what the Hungarian nation is and what its relationship to the Hungarian state should be.6 Prior to the 1920 Treaty of Trianon this debate indeed partly concerned the relationship between Hungarians, groups by then identified as being of other nationalities, and the Hungarian state. Since the

The ‘Greening’ of German Foreign Policy in the Iraq Case: Conditions of Junior Party Influence in Governing Coalitions

The special characteristics of parliamentary systems and coalition politics play an important role in the German foreign policy decision-making process. Power in the current German government is shared between a larger, senior party (the Social Democrats) and a smaller, junior party (the Greens/Alliance ’90). Throughout the history of democratic Germany, small parties like the Greens have exerted significant influence on German foreign policy, partly through the control of the German Foreign Ministry. This paper assesses the conditions of influence of the Greens, a left-of-center party in the current government (1998-present), compares this to the influence of the Free Democrats, a smaller centrist party, in coalition with the Christian Democrats (1982–1998), and analyzes how these conditions of influence came into play in the German position in the international debate over Iraq in 2002–2003. We argue that the ideological position and the internal disunity of the junior party were critical in this case, although in counter-intuitive ways. This study raises important questions about some of the neo-realist, cultural, and public opinion interpretations of contemporary German foreign policy.