redistribution of power at the international level (from one dominant state since the 1980s, the US, to two now) stems from the rise of China. A kind of bipolarity – a system dominated by two centres of power – has been re-established in global politics. As in other areas – trade, environment, security, public health, transport – the return to bipolarity has had a major impact. The implications of this are simple but profound: rules and norms that conflict in some way with the preferences of the Chinese government will no longer necessarily be
-liberalism’. Un passé qui ne passe pas In Western Europe, the principal line of cleavage has been between left and right in the post-war period (Gallagher et al., 2001: 95). Coalitions of parties have lined up facing each other across this divide. The norm has been a bipolar system with the main struggle for the centre ground – the middle or ‘floating voter’ – and a centripetal dynamic has been evident 32 The left over the long term. It was the intrusion of the big Communist Party into the French Party system that frustrated any such bipolar development in the Fourth
traditional bipolar format of French politics. It will then move on to analyse the historical and political factors underlying the split, the electoral performances of the two parties that emerged from this critical breakdown and the key features of party ideology within the extreme, right pole. Third, it will address the electoral prospects of the FN and MNR in the light of their results in the presidential and legislative elections of spring 2002. Extreme-right politics and party system change in the mid-1990s A glance at the results of elections over the past fifteen
structure of the party system in 1978 was that of a bipolar quadrille. Four parties of roughly equal political strength together obtained over 90 per cent of the vote and divided voter preferences evenly between the PCF and the PS in the left coalition, and the neo-Gaullist RPR and the liberal conservative UDF on the right. There are several explanations for this process of rationalisation. The first relates to the institutional rules of the game. From this perspective, the enhanced prestige of the presidency as modelled by de Gaulle between 1958 and 1969, the
their weight heavily against the parliamentary leadership’ (1991: 217). This particular belief is demolished by Minkin (1992: 194–5), who shows that union votes were evenly balanced on key issues. ITLP_C10.QXD 18/8/03 10:01 am Steve Ludlam Page 153 153 Needless to say, these two assessments have deeply contrasting consequences for understanding the recent history of the unions–party link. A third tendency is to explain the unions–party relationship in terms of a bipolar conflict between union leaders and union members, again emphasising the formers’ inadequate
7 The UDF in the 1990s: the break-up of a party confederation Nicolas Sauger The right The UDF in the 1990s Introduction The principal dynamic of the French party system under the Fifth Republic has been that of the so-called ‘bipolar quadrille’. By the end of the 1970s, four parties of approximately equal strength were monopolising over 90 per cent of the vote in their respective left and right blocs (Parodi, 1989). Nevertheless, this end-state had taken twenty years to produce, concluding in 1978 with the formation of the UDF. The UDF managed to create an
with a Bayrou list. Second, however, the UMP’s success could be expected to reinforce existing tendencies towards bipolarity. The party system of Fifth Republic France has been characterised by a fine balance between the dynamics of fragmentation and bipolarity (Knapp and Wright, 2001: 264–5), and the electoral cycle of 2002 was an excellent illustration of this. Fragmentation was expressed in a presidential first round that saw sixteen candidates competing, extremes of right and left picking up a third of the vote, and the candidate of the far right beating the
to correspond quite closely to the expected cyclical changes one finds in stable party systems – intra-bloc shifts and competition for the centre ‘floating’ voter. But one should not ignore that the extremes remain strong on the right, and have shown evidence of a pool of potential support on the left, even if this has so far been restricted to the presidential ballot. A very similar conclusion is reached by Alistair Cole, who chooses to give the system the status of ‘artificial bipolar multipartism’. In other words, the stresses between the parties and their
and geography, which tight bipolarity had kept in limbo for over forty years, have re-emerged as factors reconstituting Europe’s identity. The scope of political change, the rapidity with which events become known at the global scale, and the complexities involved in trying to understand the new security challenges, have been and continue to be discussed. Our traditional conception of the classic factors of power in analysing and explaining the changing security environment is still relevant. The difference today, as Dewitt put it, is ‘the reach of impact, the
Iraq at Arar was opened after a thirty-year closure, dating back to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The opening of the border reflected a round of diplomatic engagement that has taken place since 2015, reflecting a broader changing stance of the Kingdom’s policy towards its northern neighbour. After the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, regional security across the Gulf has been defined by bipolarity, shaped by the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, albeit a form of bipolarity underpinned by US support for Saudi