The Future Catches Up: Selected Writings of Ralph M. Goldman

By Ralph M. Goldman

Professor Goldman has contributed articles and books in divers fields of political science. This is a partial collection of his principal published and unpublished journal articles as well as brief references to his principal books.

Volume I focuses on the emergence of transnational political parties. His researches have led Goldman to conclude that transnational parties are the precursors of a world party system and that a world party system will become the institutional alternative to international warfare.

In the near-term prospects of transnational party development, he traces the methods and consequences of international collaborations among national parties and the implications of transnational party developments for the Democratic and Republican parties of the United States. Many of his forecasts came to fruition two or three decades after they were made, hence, the title of this collection: The Future Catches Up.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 9, 2002
• ISBN: 9780595733866

Ralph M. Goldman

Professor Goldman’s doctorate in political science is from the University of Chicago. His professional career has encompassed teaching, research, academic administration, and practical politics. He is author or co-author of more than a dozen books. He has served as dean for faculty research at San Francisco State University. His publications and career information may be found in Volume I of this collection.

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All Rights Reserved © 2002 by Ralph Morris Goldman

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Contents

Epigraph

Foreword

Preface

The International Political Party

United States Leadership Responses to Transnational Parties: The Expectations of an Attentive Elite¹

The Emerging Transnational Party System

and the Future of American Parties

Military and Party Institutions in the Arms Control Process: English and Mexican Cases

Transnational Parties:

Organizing the World’s Precincts

Reconsideration of Public Law 98-164 Establishing the National Endowment for Democracy

Implementing the Democracy Program:

Issues for Management

Promoting Democracy: Opportunities and Issues

NAMFREL: Spotlight for Democracy

Is the U.S. Party Experience Applicable to Colombia?

Botswana

The Nominating Process:

Factionalism as a Force for Democratization

How to Build and Maintain a Democratic Party System

Transnational Parties

and Central American

Democratization

Political Parties

Parties, Transnational

Transnational Political Parties and the Full Employment Priority

Political Parties: Principal Arenas of Policymaking Conflict

About the Author

Endnotes

Dedicated to my dear wife, Barbara Alban, and to Laurel and Austin Prince, exemplary grandchildren.

Epigraph 

Akora Dua Kube (An Old Man Plants a Coconut Tree)

An old, old man dug in his garden,

Working hard to plant a tree.

His grandson said: "I beg your pardon.

What you’re doing puzzles me."

"You’re ninety now. Have you no fears

Of dying while your tree takes root?

A coconut takes many years

Before it ripens and bears fruit."

"My boy, I’m thinking of tomorrow,

And you must learn to do the same.

This land of ours is what we borrow

From those to come, who bear our name."

"I leave a legacy behind me

From which, myself, I will not gain.

There should be no need to remind me

My labor may have been in vain."

If a man of ninety’s growing

Trees that he will never see,

The Youth should work to be sowing

The seeds of our prosperity."

—Daniel Koo Nimo Amponsah

Foreword 

Foreword to the Collection

The title of this collection The Future Catches Up implies that I have seen the future and it is unfolding as predicted. It also implies that I am some sort of seer, gifted with prescience and foresight. Would that it were so!

Instead, I have brought together in these volumes for the convenience of my colleagues and their students in political science my journal articles, unpublished writings, and brief references to my books. The journal articles were published in a variety of non-political science locations, and hence may be difficult to find. Overall, the collection may be viewed as an intellectual autobiography. It also reflects the diverse roles and interests of a fairly typical academician: involvement in basic research; experiments in teaching methods; performance in administrative roles; participation in practical politics; recommendation of public policies, and prognostications of political trends. In addition, my professional interest in two distinct fields—political parties and arms control—landed me between stools. While professional friendships were made in both fields, I was never able to join collaborations in either field over the long term. In all, a set of team relationships and obligations that was difficult to balance.

While several of the articles seemed visionary at the time of publication, many of the circumstances that they envisioned have come to pass to one degree or another. They were originally written as an obligation that I believe should be the duty of all professional researchers: speculating about the implication of their finding for the future. Even at the risk of being embarrassingly wrong (as I, at times, have been), these experts often have insights that are relevant in their area of expertise. Astronomers, for example, often seem to speculate with abandon about large topics, past and future, and do so on the basis of flimsy evidence. Political scientists, perhaps more heavily burdened by ideological bias and university publish-or-perish requirements, seem to avoid the risks of speculating about anything more remote than a few days or months.

Speaking for myself, I have been willing to set forth my basic assumptions and to reveal the visionary aspects of my professional work. This focus has inevitably led me to inquiries and conclusions beyond my primary specialization in political parties. Crossing academic boundaries is always fraught with danger to one’s career, but, then, there is the joy and new insights that come from learning about different fields of knowledge

* * *

Academics, in their teens during the Great Depression of 1929-1934, usually studied economics, determined to find ways to avoid the human tragedies of unemployment and economic stagnation. Other academics, in their teens during World War II (1941-1945), often became political scientists and sociologists, determined to find ways to prevent the devastation and suffering of mortal combat. I fell into the latter category. Later generations appear to have concentrated on the environment and technology.

As early as high school (1933-1937), I founded a non-Marxist peace committee. (Socialist and communist factions at the time were engaged in endless and useless squabbles among themselves, even as they succeeded in capturing the symbols of the peace movement.) I was also fascinated by political campaigns and parties, joining the youth wing of the then anti-communist American Labor Party in New York and running a high school buddy’s (Tom Tanis) successful campaign for student body president. These experiences left indelible marks.

I entered college still indecisive about my career choice. I was looking for distractions. One came along in the person of Uncle Morris Frankel, an encyclopedia salesman and ex-pharmacist, who was establishing himself in Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Venezuela. I dropped out of college and joined him for more than two years, selling encyclopedias to Venezuelans enjoying their first taste of freedom after thirty years of the dictator Juan Vicente Gomez. Then, disenchanted with the world of business and the tensions of dysfunctional family life, I returned to college.

Pearl Harbor cut short my studies. World War II brought four years of service as a junior officer (lieutenant and captain) in the Adjutant General’s Corps of the United States Army, after which I said to myself, There’s got to be a better way (than war) to disagree and resolve issues. Somehow, a career in law (the preferred choice for a Jewish lad from Brooklyn) seemed an unlikely way to find an answer to my particular question. I chose political science, hopefully.

In graduate school at the University of Chicago, I met Professor Quincy Wright, whose A Study of War impressed me mightily. During my many discussions with Professor Wright, I learned that he was on the board of directors of the American branch of the Liberal International, an emergent transnational political party. Given my high school political experiences, my interest was piqued. However, it was during my doctoral research at the Library of Congress that interest became obsession.

Somehow, I do not recall the details, I met Mrs. Dwight W. Morrow, widow of the U.S. Senator from New Jersey and one-time Ambassador to Mexico. Mrs. Morrow and I discussed my dissertation topic on the national party chairmanships. Subsequently, she sent me a copy of a book edited by Ambassador Morrow. It was the collected papers of one of the earliest observers of political parties, Professor Anson D. Morse (1846-1916) of Amherst College. (Parties and Party Leaders [Boston: 1923]).

In his lengthy foreword to the book, Ambassador Morrow wrote: "The fundamental idea in Morse’s theory of party is that, historically, party is a substitute for revolution." [Italics in the original.] Shortly later, he added: There must be an electorate of some kind before there can be party government. These sentences, and others, were read with receptive eyes. This was the path I should explore: political parties as the alternative to warfare.

Since then, and after much research reported here, my assumption has been that a transnational party system is highly likely to become the institutional alternative to international wars just as national parties have in certain civil wars.

The concept of a transnational party system, it turned out, was not original with me. The notion was first suggested by Professor Frederick Jackson Turner of Harvard University. In a memorandum to President Woodrow Wilson as the President departed for Versailles, Turner wondered whether a transnational political party could democratized the newly founded Soviet Union. (W. Diamond, American Sectionalism and World Organization, by Frederick Jackson Turner,

American Historical Review, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 545-51.)

* * *

Doctoral research on the institutional development of the party national committees and chairmanships revealed how fragmented and fragile our United States party system was during the nineteenth century. Recalling Professor Morse’s injunction that some kind of electorate must exist if there is to be party government, I designed a simple classification system that facilitated my research, namely, party-in-the-electorate, party as organization, and party in government. This was later picked up by colleagues as PI, PO, and PIG, a catchy acronym that apparently proved useful in their teaching and researches.

Work on my dissertation at the Library of Congress brought me in touch with my first employers: Bertram M. Gross, research director of the Democratic National Committee, and Paul T. David, director of American political studies at the Brookings Institution. Both were on the drafting committee of the much-heralded Report of the American Political Science Association’s Committee on Political Parties. At the time (1951-1952), Gross, drawing upon his experience as the staff director who pushed the Full Employment Act of 1946 through Congress, was writing a textbook entitled The Legislative Struggle. He asked me to edit it down from 650 to 300 printed pages, which I did. It won the American Political Science Association’s Woodrow Wilson award as the best book on American politics. Gross hired me as a research consultant to the Democratic National Committee in 1952. It was my first fling at professional practical politics, as manifest in my highly partisan papers, one on Republican campaign finance and the other on McCarthy’s presidential prospects. Many years later, I saw correspondence indicating that Adlai Stevenson was considering me for a job as one of his speechwriters. The privilege never materialized.

Gross and others introduced me to Paul David. David was involved in a large-scale cooperative project studying the local and state politics of delegate selection to the Democratic and Republican national nominating conventions. The project had the sponsorship of the American Political Science Association and, later, the Brookings Institution. Given my dissertation on the national party chairmanships and Gross’s referral, David hired me as his staff associate. 1952 was an exciting political year, and, as it turned out, probably the last in which the presidential nominating decisions were actually made by the national conventions. Our five-volume report (1954) was a mine of data and led to our groundbreaking analytical follow-up, The Politics of National Party Conventions (1960), the first systematic study of the presidential nominating process.

* * *

By now I was identified as a parties and legislative specialist. I joined the political science faculty at Michigan State University (1956). As soon as I arrived in East Lansing, I was assigned the directorship of the American Politics Graduate Training Program. The program awarded fellowships to students of party politics and assigned them to internships with both major state parties in Michigan. The program became a model for similar Falk Foundation grants to other universities.

If I were ever to pursue my interest in transnational parties, I would first have to try out my theory and research tools on United States parties. I continued work on the national party chairmanships, bringing the story up to John F. Kennedy’s nomination (1960), and began looking into the details of British, American, and Mexican revolutionary and party history. The latter eventually produced From Warfare to Party Politics (1990), wherein I conceptualized the hypothesis of a critical transition from warfare to party politics.

During a year’s visiting professorship at my alma mater, the University of Chicago, I was invited to join the faculty at San Francisco State College (soon after, University). The West Coast, the City on the Bay, and the opportunity to work at a primarily teaching institution were attractive. I accepted and remained affiliated with SFSU for the next 25 years. Little did I anticipate the administrative involvements I would encounter: directing a graduate program, serving as dean of faculty research, enduring a famous student uprising, becoming president of the local American Association of University Professors, serving as department chair, and chairing the campus research foundation. San Francisco State gave me opportunities for experiments in several areas: academic administration, instructional projects, and community service, much of which is told in the writings that follow in these books.

* * *

Arms control was the widely accepted solution to war during the 1960s and 1970s, particularly nuclear war. Still adhering to my yet unarticulated obsession with transnational parties, I nevertheless began to study the literature on arms control and United Nations peacekeeping. I was particularly stimulated by my participation in the work of an arms control group at nearby Stanford University and also the University of California at Los Angeles. This led to subsequent journal articles and books.

Upon my retirement from San Francisco State University, my career took a new turn. I was invited to join the faculty at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., as director of its off campus graduate programs, which included a masters degree in Congressional studies and a doctoral degree in international affairs serving military students at the Pentagon. With the collaboration of colleagues at Catholic and other universities, I was able to create the Center for Party Development as a nonprofit organization and became its president. Among the things we produced were an essay series and a newsmagazine called Party Developments. The newsmagazine was 24 pages long, published five times a year, covering elections and party events as they occurred in all nations of the world. I was the editor and, as it turned out, prepared most of the articles.

These many years of study, research, teaching, and administration resulted in a publishing binge in my retirement. I suppose I have viewed my Social Security and other retirement annuities as a senior fellowship with which to pursue my career and my obsessions. I hope the reader will enjoy sharing them with me.

Preface 

My first article dealing with transnational parties was published in the United Nations Association’s Vista in 1967. It was written for laymen and published by a supportive organization. When I subsequently prepared a professional paper on this subject, journal editors sent me nine or ten rejection slips, mainly for being visionary.

In 1978, my first comprehensive treatment of the subject appeared in a collection of papers edited by Sandy Maisel and Joseph Cooper. I edited my own collection in 1983, with collaborators associated with the Communist, Socialist, Christian Democratic, and Liberal internationals as well as related organizations.

The other books and articles mentioned or reproduced in this volume deal with matters growing out of the emergence of transnational parties: the National Endowment for Democracy devoted to informing overseas party leaders about the requirements and practices of democratic institutions; the relationship between the transnational parties and global democracy; party developments in the Philippines, Colombia, Botswana and Central America, and the way transnational parties attend to a particular global issue (full employment).

In How to Build and Maintain a Democratic Party System, I tried to put together what I knew of political parties (including the transnational) and democratization. I was gratified by the reception this booklet received: bulk purchases by the American Bar Association (which also produced a Russian translation), the United States Information Agency, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the Office of Democratic Institutions (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe), and lesser purchases by other agencies.

The most significant observation among these publications is my conclusion that a transnational political party system will eventually become the institutional alternative to international warfare.

Chapter 1

The International Political Party 

[This article in Vista Magazine (November-December 1967), pp. 35-42, was a first effort to introduce the subject of transnational political parties to the United Nation Association of the USA. In plain language, I wrote how the concept and the reality might become a familiar one to an otherwise disinterested U.S. public and leadership. By the mid-1990s, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs and the International Republican Institute, both affiliated with their respective National Committees as well as the National Endowment for Democracy, represented the United States as Observer Members of different transnational parties.]

If the United Nations had a President directly elected by the peoples of all nations …

If the General Assembly had delegates directly elected by the citizens of their respective nations …

then most Americans and others accustomed to popular elections would have little trouble seeing the need and practicality of world political party organizations. Over the last 200 years, parties have become the accustomed form of organization for mobilizing citizens in a nation’s electorate and representatives in its legislature. Historically, in fact, it is the legislators who first unify themselves into partisan groupings; organization of the voters in the precincts tends to follow soon after.

But popular elections for United Nations offices do not occur and are not likely to be a reality for some time. Therefore, the analogy between national party systems and a world party system may seem farfetched. In some quarters, particularly in the United States where a career in practical politics is viewed with ambivalent feelings, the suggestion that a world party system may be emerging may be offensive, even alien. Nevertheless, the concept has been discussed among academic specialists, and the evidence grows that the international political party has arrived.

* * *

Perhaps the most explicit cases of emergent world parties are the regional and continent-wide collaborations that came into being after World War II. Usually these are associated with one or another international representative assembly. Their evolution has fit the historical generalization that parties-in-legislatures develop prior to parties-in-the-electorate.

The European Parliamentary Assembly is a 142-member body representing the six members of the European Economic Community (EEC, or Common Market): Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany. It discusses the policy proposals and actions of the nine-member EEC Commission, the Common Market’s autonomous supranational executive agency, and has powers of advice and censure.

The representatives to the European Parliamentary Assembly are chosen from and by the national parliaments of the six members, although the treaties permit direct popular election. In actual practice, the national parliaments select delegations from lists nominated by domestic political parties in proportion to party strength in the where majority-minority party politics is more contentious; loss of national party seniority because of service in the European Assembly at Strasbourg, and so on.

These problems suggest the growing importance of international party work within the autonomous Common Market supranational organization. This importance will multiply dramatically if the time arrives for direct popular election of representatives to the European Assembly.

Similar international party alignments have appeared in another regional organization: the Assembly of the Western European Union. WEU was organized in 1955 primarily as a vehicle for working toward European arms control, but also dealing with economic and cultural issues. Its Assembly consists of 178 delegates and alternates representing seven member nations. As in the European Assembly, the greatest number has been Social Democrats, with Socialists and Liberals in second and third place as minority parties. The occasions for partisan voting are more frequent in this Assembly, and there are indications that party cohesion in such votes is increasing.

International party organizing has also taken place outside these incipient European legislatures. The International Union of Christian Democrats was established in 1947, with headquarters in Paris. The backbone of the organization was the Christian Democratic parties of eight European countries. The IUCD held annual congresses. Its executive committee and staff have been devoted to the promotion of the electoral fortunes of affiliated parties throughout the world as well as coordination of party efforts in regional and international bodies. By 1956, IUCD had enough momentum to convene the First International Conference of Christian Democrats, with delegations from nearly thirty national parties in Latin America as well as Western and Central Europe.

The Socialists, with substantial experience in earlier internationals, lost no time in forming a post-war International Socialist Conference in 1946. Convened by the leadership of the British Labour Party, representatives from the major Socialist parties in Europe attended, founded ISC, created an executive committee, set up headquarters in London, and planned periodic conferences. Over the years ISC has pursued anti-Cominform programs, supported the Marshall Plan, and promoted European integration. During the 1950s, many non-European Socialist parties joined, and ISC relations with the Asian Socialist Party Conference were cultivated. The 1965 Congress of the Socialist International, with representatives from nearly fifty national parties, resolved to work toward closer ties with sister parties in Latin America and Africa.

Similar efforts have been forthcoming from the Liberals. In 1947, the World Liberal Union, or Liberal International, was founded in Oxford, England, with an initial membership of thirteen national parties. Headquarters were set up in Lucerne, Switzerland, and a Liberal Manifesto issued. Other activities characteristic of party organization were pursued: annual conferences of member parties; issuance of policy platforms; coordination of party affiliates within supranational organizations, etc. Growth in Liberal membership and influence outside the European area has been less impressive than that of the Social Democrats and the Socialists.

Party-like organizations have emerged elsewhere. In Latin America the Aprista movement has origins in student reform efforts as long ago as 1918. The first Aprista party was organized in Peru in 1931. Since then, several national Aprista parties have arisen and modest efforts at international organization were made during the decade between 1950 and 1960.

In many respects the Arab League founded in 1945 was a mixture of association of states and alliance among partisan leaders. Faction and party strife within each of the seven member nations soon undermined the regional influence of the League, although it continues to have activities at the United Nations. Today, the Renaissance Party (Ba’ath), based in Syria, is active, legally and otherwise, in several Arab countries. The Ba’ath has armed elements, is collectivist in its policies, and declares itself the best organizer of Arab unity.

The beginnings of international party groupings in Africa have been evident at such gatherings of the past decade as the All-African People’s Conferences, the Organization of African Unity, and the Organization for Afro-Asia Peoples’ Solidarity. In 1954, the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League was established, with headquarters in Saigon. During the meetings of the Organization of American States, fellow-partisans from various countries find occasion to consult with each other.

* * *

The oldest and most self-conscious of the world parties are, of course, the Marxist parties. Founded as a world-wide movement in 1864 by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, the First International was formally titled The International Workingmen’s Association. It was active for about ten years. In 1889 a Second International resulted from a merger of two gatherings: one, of Marxist revolutionary groups; the other, of reformist and trade union organizations. By 1910, the International’s meetings were being attended by nearly a thousand delegates representing more than two dozen different nationalities.

Led by Lenin, the Russian Bolsheviks embarked upon their own organizational path in 1919, founding the Third International, or Comintern. Joining the Comintern from the outset were the Communist parties of Sweden, Norway, Eastern and Central Europe, and the Italian Socialists. Rejecting parliamentarianism (which was part of the program of the Second International) and gradual change, the Third International professed a program of violent overthrow of established governments to be displaced by dictatorships of the proletariat. In 1943, however, as the Soviet Union fought alongside the Allies against the Axis, Stalin disbanded the Comintern as an act of friendship toward his comrades in arms.

Four years later, representatives from Communist parties in nine countries met to establish the successor to the Comintern: the Communist Information Bureau, or Cominform. The Cominform coordinated not only propaganda on behalf of the member parties but also advised and supported affiliates in nations where Communists were a minority, e.g., France, Italy, China, and elsewhere. The training of party organizing cadres from different countries was a primary activity.

Today, Communist parties are the ruling parties in 14 nations and significant political organizations in 35 or more others. In all, some 9095 Communist parties exist around the world, with enrolled memberships estimated at about 45,000,000. Many of these parties have become skilled in the ways of Western competitive electoral politics, most notably the French, Italian, and Finnish parties. Not only has this hurdle to a dictatorship of the proletariat been accepted, but one Soviet authority-Pyotr N. Fedosyeyev of the Academy of Science-has acknowledged the possibility and even desirability of having a multiparty system in certain communist states that are in a period of transition.

Communist party coordination has manifested itself most overtly in international organizations. According to Professor Jan F. Triska of Stanford, 10 of the 14 Communist-ruled states are in the United Nations. If each member nation has 18 ways of participating in UN agencies, most of the 10 Communist members participate in from eight to 14 ways. Voting cohesion among Communist delegations, particularly prior to the Sino-Soviet estrangement, was invariably high and often carried with it the votes of nearby countries. World Communism outside the United Nations is, of course, rapidly becoming a multifactional system as pro-Soviet, pro-Chinese, Titoist, and neutralist Communist parties engage each other whenever some occasion permits.

* * *

The inescapable fact is that international political parties do exist. A world party system is emergent. The implications for the future of the United Nations as well as world and regional political development will inevitably be great and are already being felt. Yet, the concept of American involvement in such world party developments continues to be an interest of very few academicians and government specialists.

Among the academicians, Professor Frederick Jackson Turner of Harvard, historian of the American frontier, prepared a special memorandum for President Woodrow Wilson to take with him to the Paris Peace Conference, in which Turner explained the nationalizing influence of American parties and expressed the hope that the democracies would make ample use of international parties in a similar fashion within the proposed League of Nations. In more recent years, Professors Arthur N. Holcombe and Samuel P. Huntington, both of Harvard, Professor Quincy Wright of the University of Chicago, and this writer have in various books and journals commented on the prospects for a world party system.

In the mid-1950s, a small organization called the American Liberal Association, with headquarters in New York, affiliated with the Liberal International, but made little progress as a practical political group. American distrust of parties as a form of political organization reaches back to President Washington’s observation that the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of Party are sufficient to make it the interest and the duty of a. wise People to discourage and restrain it. Significantly, Washington’s own Federalist Party declined and disappeared within a generation, its principal spokesmen insisting that political parties should not be permitted.

A brief survey of the characteristic activities of political parties, even before they have a government to elect, will indicate that party systems may, under different circumstances, be either producers of violence or promoters of nonviolent political integration.

Revolutionary parties, such as the American. Committees of Correspondence or the Russian Bolsheviks, are declared users of violent techniques for the overthrow of established political organizations or arrangements. On the other hand, the very weakness or failure of long-established parties may invite the violence of civil war, as in the case of the disruption of the Whig and Democratic parties just prior to the American Civil War. In the international arena, contemporary wars of national liberation, of the type that have torn Southeast Asia, are basically civil wars promoted and aided by international party associates across national boundary lines. In these cases, political parties serve as paramilitary organizations with functions in the fields of violence, subversion, and espionage.

On the other hand, under political conditions that encourage the substitution of votes and words for bullets and bombs, political parties are incomparable developers and integrators of governmental systems. Parties have been the founders and developers of governmental organizations at the national (United States, Soviet Union, Turkey, many African states, etc.) and regional (European Economic Community) levels. Out of the dynamics of electoral and legislative debate among parties in multiparty systems or within parties in some democratic one-party systems has come evidence that parties are the principal motivators of constitutional development in contemporary societies. A by-product of constitutionalization has been the realization among politicians that nonviolent conflict within a party system can be vigorous and meaningful yet infinitely less costly than violent means.

From these generalizations may we infer that a world party system is likely to be a fundamental force for the constitutional development of the United Nations and the institutionalization of nonviolent means for world political conflict?

Consider, too, that legislative and electoral parties tend to become expert in the use of propaganda in lieu of bullets, the design of policy programs in lieu of fixed and sterile ideological jargon, the toleration and wooing of political minorities in lieu of prohibition of dissent, and the substitution of overt and public contest for conspiracy, subversion, and corruption. With these techniques and skills, political parties, under competitive circumstances, are without equal as educators and activators of the politically indifferent, unknowing, and inert.

Perhaps most significant is the function of contemporary parties as recruiters and trainers of political leaders. Some parties, particularly those of the Left, perform this function most deliberately. In more voluntaristic party systems such as the American, recruitment and training tend to be less formal and meaningful mainly among the youth of the nation. Thus, for example, the concept and activity of world party development is most likely to arouse interest among the affiliates of the Council on International Relations and United Nations Affairs (formerly the Collegiate Council for the United Nations) and similar international student movements than among the political elders. Cross-national communication and cooperation among students of similar party affiliation, particularly on issues involving the United Nations, would, in fact, introduce substantial realism into the international political interests of students.

World parties, then, are a reality, with profound implications for the development of the United Nations and the self-governance of international regions. Americans are already tardy in studying, understanding, and organizing such parties as political weapons less drastic than war, more facile than formal diplomacy, and more productive than counter-intelligence operatives in the creation of meaningful political alliances. The world is our precinct.

Chapter 2

United States Leadership Responses to Transnational Parties: The Expectations of an Attentive Elite¹ 

[Presented at a panel on Limits of Leadership: The Case of Political Parties at the 1979 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Washington, D.C. From the advantage of more than two decades of hindsight, the Practitioners rather than the Academics made the more optimistic forecasts about the eventual emergence of transnational parties and their positive influence on United States foreign policy.]

Abstract

Forecasting the future development of political institutions is a difficult judgmental task. Using a mail questionnaire, this inquiry solicited forecasts about the future of transnational political parties from 29 active political Practitioners (senior party leaders, journalists, and political staffers) and 19 Academics (mainly political scientists). The 22 who responded were principally Academics. The respondents held widely divergent perceptions and expectations about transnational parties and their implications for United States major parties, foreign policy, and security. Practitioners, more than Academics, tend to see the growth of transnational parties as a favorable development, coming sooner (one or two decades), with which United States parties will have difficulty accommodating, and with little impact on U.S. foreign policy. The respondents’ views were divided on the implications for U.S. security. The author speculates about the reasons for neglect of these institutional developments on the part of U.S. political leaders and scholars.

* * *

Well, politicians are busy men. Primarily they are not paid to indulge in the pastime of shaping the world in an ideal mold, out of pure theory and pure reason; they are paid to get us through the day as best they can. A public servant has a thousand pressing obligations as well as a strong distaste for theoretical ideas that are bound to irritate voters.

—E. B.White (1977)

Professional politicians and academic experts are reputedly institution watchers, that is, close observers of the impact of public policies and events upon the growth or decline of particular social, economic, and political institutions such as the family, marketplaces, legislatures, political parties, etc. Whether immersed in the daily practice of politics or the search for new knowledge, these professionals (Practitioners) and experts (Academics) presumably take the long view on the rise and fall of institutions—the long view back into history and, oft-times presciently, the long view forward into the future.

The emergence of transnational political parties, particularly since the end of World War II and in connection with the 1979 European Parliament elections, affords an opportunity to consider (a) the prospects for the institutional development of a transnational or world party system and (b) the expectations of senior American political professionals and academic observers regarding the institutional future of the transnationals, particularly as that future may influence U.S. domestic politics. The present inquiry endeavored to make this examination.

This exploratory inquiry into United States leaders’ expectations about transnational political parties raised two general questions. One was methodological. Can busy professional operators of political party institutions be enticed to respond to a short mail questionnaire on that subject if the questionnaire has unusual features, e.g., a Delphi feedback procedure that may provide them with useful information about their peers’ views?² The second question was substantive. What are the perceptions and expectations of senior practicing politicians and academic experts regarding transnational party movements?

Recent Transnational Party Developments

Transnational political party activity has recently been particularly visible in the light of the June 1979 direct popular election of representatives from the nine European Community countries to the European Parliament. The 410 representatives elected were the first ever to be chosen by direct popular vote to a supranational political body. The election campaign stimulated considerable transnational cooperation among European national parties that already had experienced decades of on-and-off collaboration across boundaries. These collaborations, in fact, have extended well beyond Europe into other parts of the world.

The Communist internationals are the oldest of the transnational partisan movements and deemed by many at times to be a world party organization. The First International was founded in 1848 and had several successors: the Second International, which operated from 1889 to 1914; the Third International, or Comintern, which functioned from 1919 to the midst of World War II in 1943; the Communist Information Bureau, or Cominform, created in 1947 and dissolved in 1956; and the re-established Comintern in 1957. During the decade of the 1970s, more than ninety Communist parties operated throughout the world, including more than a dozen that controlled their national governments. In recent years Communists have claimed a world party membership of 60 million, with an additional 40 million supporting voters in capitalist states.

Although devoted to dictatorships of the proletariat and one-party totalitarian states, world Communism has for some time been divided by the factionalism characteristic of all political party institutions: Titoism at the Soviet Union’s southwestern border; Maoism to the East; most recently, Eurocommunism, a collaboration principally between the Italian and French Communist parties. Anticipating the June 1979 election, Italian and French Communist leaders issued a joint statement in November 1975 aimed at assuring European voters of their independence from Moscow and their loyalty to European democratic institutions. However, Eurocommunists, with divergent views, were unable to create a transnational party organization for the election campaign. In the European Parliament prior to June 1979 the Communists and allied parties held only 17 of the total of 198 seats, less than 10 percent. In the June election the Communists won 44 of the 410 seats of the new Parliament, slightly more than 10 percent.³

Also out of the Marxist lineage are the Socialist, Labor, and Social Democratic parties that comprise the contemporary Socialist International. Between 1923 and 1931 a Labor and Socialist International declared itself heir to the Second International and held four congresses until driven from the Continent by the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy. This international and its national affiliates, unlike the Communists, were devoted to political and economic change through nonviolent parliamentary means. In 1945, as World War II ended, the British Labour Party convened remnants of the Labor and Socialist International and inaugurated a Committee of the International Socialist Conferences (Comisco) to serve as the permanent agency of a new Socialist International.

In the last decade, the Socialist International has reported a membership of nearly 20 million among its 57 party affiliates in 50 countries, with nearly 80 million voters supporting the Socialist tickets in their respective home countries.

To prepare for the European Parliament election, a Confederation of Socialist Parties of the European Community was formed in April 1974 by nine national parties drawn from eight of the European Community states; Great Britain, hence the British Labour Party, had not yet joined the Community. Later, the Federation grew to include eleven affiliated parties, two each from France and Italy. Until the British Labour Party joined in 1975, the Socialist Party Group, as the caucus of Socialist representatives to the European Parliament are called, was perhaps the best organized and most ideologically united of the party groups in that body.⁴ In the June 1979 election the Socialists, often referred to as Social Democrats, won 108 seats in the new European Parliament.

Christian Democracy had its partisan beginnings in the nineteenth century, mainly inspired by the Catholic Church’s interest in the domestic politics of many nations at that time. Following World War II, European Christian Democratic parties softened their strong Catholic orientations, broadened their programs and appeals, most particularly in the direction of trade union movements, created regional organizations in Western Europe, Eastern Europe (often in exile), and Latin America, and by the mid-1970s claimed affiliated parties in 60 nations.

In 1965, the European Union of Christian Democrats (EUCD) established itself as a regional organization of the World Union of Christian Democrats (WUCD). EUCD had party affiliates from nations both in and outside of the European Community. In July 1976, thirteen political parties in seven of the nine countries of the European Community created the European People’s Party (EPP). During 1976-1978, EPP drafted a manifesto as its platform for the June 1979 elections. Despite numerous ideological and policy divisions among themselves, EPP carried 108 seats in the election, tying the Socialists.

Liberalism also has a long tradition in European thought and partisan action. At the conclusion of World War II, convinced of the need for transnational cooperation, British Liberals took the initiative in convening representatives from nineteen nations in April 1947. This meeting founded the World Liberal Union, or Liberal International. Reflecting the general decline in their fortunes since their hey-day of a century ago, Liberal parties have recently been somewhat unsuccessful in national electoral contests. The Liberal International’s most important affiliate has been the Liberal Party of Canada.

The stimulus of the European Parliament election led to the formation of the Federation of Liberal and Democratic Parties of the European Community (ELD). Troubled by ideological and factional differences, ELD nonetheless won 40 seats in the new European Parliament. Ironically, British Liberals, who started the transnational mobilization of Liberals in 1947, won no seats despite receiving 13 percent of the vote.

There have also been several minor transnational party movements in recent decades: the Fascists; the International Peasant Union, or Green International; the Aprista Party (Alianza Popular Revolucionara Americana) in Latin America; and the pan-Arab Ba’ath parties.⁵

Institutionally related to transnational party development has been the growth in numbers and activity of transnational organized interest groups, or international non-governmental organizations (INGOs). Some 2,500 of these transnational pressure groups now operate supranationally, a substantial number formally accredited to the Commission of the European Community and to the United Nations.

Transnational party collaborations may be observed in regional political institutions, most notably in the European Community, less visibly in the Organization of African Unity and the Organization of American States. The transnationals concern themselves as well with domestic political developments in emerging and developing nations, especially those with revolutionary nationalist movements.

Transnational political parties, in one stage of organization or another, are obviously at hand in world politics. But have the people of the United States and their