Non-communist Parties Research Articles

The Issue of Institutionalization of Political Parties in Post-soviet Georgia

Political Parties are regarded as one of the main actors. They act as a mediator between the state and the citizens. Moreover, the proper functioning of strong party systems in the country guarantees the stability of the political system. The stability of party systems is particularly important and relevant in relatively young democracies where state institutions are not fully established. A clear example of this is the countries of the post-Soviet space. Where the formation of party systems is encountered differently but with some similar difficulties, taking into account the experience and adapting it to the interests of the country is prominent and relevant for the Georgian reality. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the most pressing issue in the world has been the observation of the development of post-socialist countries. During this period, political systems were also established in Eastern European countries and in the Caucasus region to allow non-communist parties seeking power to come to power. Institutionalization of the party system, which in the post-communist countries, has encountered considerable obstacles subsequently, Georgia is not an exception. However, it should be noted that compared to other countries, the process of institutionalization and transformation in Georgia has lasted a very long time. It is interesting how the political systems and parties of the post-socialist states went through the formation and what is the current state of their representation today. This is one of the main issues in this article.

The origins of the Southeast Asian Cold War

How and when did the Cold War manifest itself in Southeast Asia? More particularly, how are we to understand the connections between global great power rivalry and the specific regional problems and tensions which marked Southeast Asia in the five years after the end of the Second World War? What were the connections, if any, between the global powers and the nascent political forces of the region during this period? These are some of the issues which the five contributors to this collection address as they explore the origins of the Southeast Asian Cold War. These contributions challenge existing interpretations of the origins of the Southeast Asian Cold War. They employ new evidence gleaned from party archives and memoirs, and from Soviet, British, Australian, Dutch, Indonesian and Vietnamese state archives. They use this evidence to suggest that Southeast Asian communist parties, far from being totally autonomous on the one hand, or pliant tools of larger powers on the other, interacted with changing international communist lines as proactive agents. This interaction is the key to understanding why a regional pattern of increasing violence, and of decreasing cooperation with non-communist parties and democratic politics, emerged in 1948; while also allowing us to understand the uniqueness of the individual parties' paths to revolution. Discussion of the origins of the Southeast Asian Cold War inevitably involves examination of the policies pursued by the colonial powers returning to the region post-World War II, their relations with the great powers, as well as the agendas pursued by the local nationalist forces and communist parties of the region. One of the key issues which has exercised scholars minds in this area has been the switch to armed conflict by communist parties in 1948. The switch was rapid. In 1947 communist parties in this region were generally engaged in broad united fronts, and with the exceptions of China and Indochina, were mostly committed to participation in open political activity and trade union work. Then, in 1948 almost every regional communist party abandoned the broad united front policy and the emphasis on trade union work and legal political activity, and began pursuing a policy of armed revolt. Communist revolts occurred in India, Burma, Malaya, Indonesia and the Philippines in this year, and there were key changes to communist party policy in Indochina. Not surprisingly, people have long asked: Was this a calculated policy of extending the Cold War in Europe to a new front? It is suggested both here and in the papers comprising this collection that existing answers to this question, and explanations of this change, have failed to fully capture the complex interactions between international and local communisms, offering instead 'one hand clapping' explanations which emphasise either international directives, or very local and national factors. Orthodox Cold War historiography held that Moscow issued instructions, which were disseminated at two 1948 conferences held at Calcutta in India: the South East Asia Youth and Student Conference hosted by the World Federation of Democratic Youth, a Moscow-controlled movement (19-24 February 1948); and the Second Congress of the Indian Communist Party (28 February-6 March). According to the orthodox interpretations written in the late 1940s to 1950s, these instructions sparked revolts in the following few months of 1948. (1) Revisionist scholarship soon challenged the orthodox position. By the late 1950s, some academics were already arguing that there had been no clear instructions from Moscow, that the Calcutta Conferences were of debateable significance, and that the revolts were above all locally motivated and uncoordinated. The classic expression of this line was Ruth McVey's The Calcutta Conference and the South-East Asia uprisings. (2) This re-examined the impact of the 'two camp' line being promoted by Moscow and the newly formed Cominform in late 1947 to 1948. …

Increasing Math and Science Achievement: The Best and Worst of the East and West

IN MARCH 2005, during the annual session of the Chinese National People's Congress, a group of members of the Chinese legislative body introduced a proposal calling for an immediate overhaul of the New Mathematics Curriculum Standards for elementary and secondary schools. A similar proposal was introduced by members of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the highest political organization representing non-Communist parties and social elites without party affiliations. Both proposals were initiated and supported by prominent mathematicians and scientists who believe that the New Math Curriculum Standards, released by the Chinese Ministry of Education in 2001 and largely modeled after the 1989 version of the standards issued in the U.S. by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), are ruining education in China. The New Math Curriculum has been sharply criticized for betraying an excellent educational tradition, sacrificing mathematical thinking and reasoning for experiential learning, giving up disciplinary coherence in the name of inquiry learning, lowering expectations in the name of reducing students' burden, and causing confusion among teachers and students. 10 years, when we find our next generation cannot think logically and reason mathematically, says Jiang Boju, a professor at Peking University and a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences who sponsored the proposal, it will be too late. Similar concerns have been voiced by ministry officials, parents, mathematicians, and textbook publishers. BACK TO THE FUTURE: THE IRONY OF EDUCATION REFORM IN THE EAST AND WEST The math wars in China are also taking place in other East Asian education systems. Over the past decade, Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, and Singapore have all engaged in dramatic curricular reforms and are now beginning to debate the results. (1 When they first embraced reform, these high performers in international and science tests appeared to be extremely unhappy with their own and science education. They seemed eager to abandon what the rest of the world, particularly the United States, would love to have: a rigorous, coherent, systematic and science curriculum instead of inquiry-based, constructivism-driven, child-centered, progressive and science education, which many American educators now seem similarly eager to throw away. The East Asian reformers were not crazy, nor were they agents of the U.S. government on a secret mission to wipe out America's competition by lowering and science achievement elsewhere, as some Chinese teachers jokingly accused. They were well-intentioned and diligently looking for a way to address their own problems: students' lack of creativity, an overemphasis on testing, a focus on memorization over application, a disconnection between school learning and real-life situations, and overworked students. In essence, what the East Asian reformers wanted for their future was America's past and present. In their eyes, students in the United States were happy, creative, and socially responsible--products of an education system that focused on children over knowledge, pedagogy over content, and the individual over the group--all traits seen as the secret to America's economic success and dominance. Comparing their own curriculum with that of the United States, the reformers found that they tried to teach too much and were knowledge--and teacher-centered. Thus they began to ease students' burdens by removing basic concepts, formulae, and computation skills; turning a staircase curriculum into a spiral one; and requiring students to construct and discover knowledge through inquiry. Meanwhile, on this side of the Pacific and in the land that exported NCTM and AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) standards and constructivism, Singaporean textbooks have become increasingly hot commodities for parents, (2) Japanese lesson study is viewed as an exemplary teacher professional development model, (3) Chinese teachers have become models of excellence, (4) and coherent and logical East Asian curricula are synonymous with the path to and science excellence in U. …

The Demise of Non-Communist Parties in North Korea (1945–1960)

This article, based on newly declassified material from the Russian archives, deals with the fate of non-Communist parties in North Korea in the 1950s. Like the “people's democracies” in Eastern Europe, North Korea had (and still technically has) a few non-Communist parties. The ruling Communist party included these parties within the framework of a “united front,” designed to project the facade of a multiparty state, to control domestic dissent, and to establish links with parties in South Korea. The article traces the history of these parties under Soviet and local Communist control from the mid-1940s to their gradual evisceration in the 1950s.

The Effect of Legal Thresholds on the Revival of Former Communist Parties in East-Central Europe

Since 1989 six Central and East European countries have held competitive elections under 17 different electoral systems. After some experimentation, the new electoral systems, adopted on the initiative of noncommunist parties, provided for proportional representation, with legal thresholds designed to protect the new parties from smaller, more recent, and more extreme formations. These legal thresholds favored noncommunist parties initially but subsequently appeared to facilitate a return of postcommunist parties to power. A multivariate model of the effect of electoral system thresholds in 13 elections confirms that they contributed to disproportionality but fails to confirm that they consistently favored either former communist or noncommunist parties. Further analysis reveals that legal thresholds have exaggerated the effect of volatility in the electorates on the representation of parties in parliament, causing systems of proportional representation to behave more like single-member plurality systems.

The 1975 Gujarat Assembly Election in India

THE JUNE 1975 State Assembly election in Gujarat had a far reaching impact on Indian politics. The Congress lost power and for the first time a coalition government was formed in Gujarat. This paved the way for unity among the non-communist opposition parties, enhancing confidence in their capacity to challenge the Congress at the national level. The Gujarat election was not one of the routine elections held in India at five years intervals. The fifth Gujarat Assembly, elected in March 1972, was dissolved prematurely in 1974, and eventually the Union government was compelled to hold elections in 1975 because of the dramatic direct action tactics of the opposition leader, Morarji Desai. What follows is a brief account of the events and forces that played an important part in the 1975 election.

Deradicalization of the Japanese Communist Party Under Kenji Miyamoto

The phenomenal growth of the Japanese Communist Party's electoral strength during a period of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity (1961–1974) clearly deviates from Benjamin's and Kautsky's “curvilinear theory” of the economic development and strength of Communist parties. Nor does it conform to Lipset's hypothesis that there exists an inverse correlation between the economic growth and the strength of Communist parties. It is my basic contention that the recent growth in the JCP's organizational strength and electoral successes should be ascribed to the overall deradicalization of the party which has taken place since 1961. The findings of this study as a whole substantiate theories en deradicalization of the Marxist movement advanced earlier by Robert Michels and more recently by Robert C. Tucker, who hypothesized that there exists an inverse correlation between the deradicalization of a revolutionary party and its “worldly success.” His findings also confirm Triska's and Finley's hypothesis that deradicalized Communist parties in the developed countries would become not significantly different from other non-Communist parties either in structure or functions.

The Repluralization of Czechoslovak Politics in the 1960s

Czechoslovakia has undergone revolutionary changes in its political and institutional structure several times in the twentieth century. In 1918 the leaders of the Czechs and Slovaks decided to sever their political umbilical cords to Vienna and Budapest, giving birth to the Czechoslovak Republic, a democratic state that differed considerably from the Austro-Hungarian Empire from which it had emerged. In 1938 this democracy gave way to a semiauthoritarian regime, the so-called Second Republic. The Second Republic existed for a few months at Hitler's sufferance, only to be divided into two parts, both controlled by the Third Reich from 1939 to 1945. In 1948, after a three-year attempt to harmonize Communist and non-Communist parties in a left-leaning National Front government, Czechoslovakia became for twenty years an autocratic Communist state. During these two decades the methods of rule varied from totalitarian (1948-53) to what might be called moderately authoritarian (1963-67).

The U.S.S.R. - France - Germany

SOVIET attitudes toward the Western powers fluctuate principally, though not exclusively, according to these powers' policies regarding Germany. The reason is obvious to any reader of the Soviet press, which regularly devotes much of its space to the German problem. Even now, Vietnam and the related question of competition with the Chinese party within the Communist movement have not relegated the German question to a secondary place. The most one may say is that the post-Khrushchev Soviet leaders look in two directions: at the German question insofar as Europe is concerned, and at the competition with the Chinese party for primacy among the non-European Communist parties and among the radical nationalists in the undeveloped countries. Vietnam is the most spectacular battleground of that Soviet-Chinese competition in the eyes of non-European Communists and radical nationalists. The Twenty-Third Congress of the C.P.S.U. marked the moment, perhaps only fleeting, of Soviet resounding triumph over the Chinese rivals. Except for the Chinese, Japanese, Albanian, one or two small and insignificant parties such as that of New Zealand, and, of course, the routed Indonesian party, all Communist parties were represented at that Congress and all paid dutiful homage to Moscow. The antiWestern oriented non-Communist parties such as those of the United Arab Republic, Mali and Guinea, joined the chorus of praise. The highlight of the Congress came with the enthusiastic exclamation by the chief Vietnamese delegate who declared that every one of his countrymen had two Fatherlands: Vietnam and the Soviet Union!