The US Hegemonic Origins of the Cartel Party: The South European Cauldron

In their 2009 restatement of the cartel party thesis, Katz and Mair noted that “external factors drawn from the worlds of international politics and economics” had contributed to the development of the cartel party and cartel party systems. The years surrounding 1990 constituted a major historical watershed that had a “profound—and still largely underestimated—impact on the configuration of domestic politics in most of the European countries we originally studied.” One key but under-specified factor was the end of the Cold War. This study concurs, but adds that, first, 1989 was not the birth point of the cartel party, but rather marked the acceleration of a longer process. Second, the critical process was that which Epstein called long ago “the contagion from the right”—where the right was represented by the USA’s socially delinked parties as opposed to Europe’s membership-based mass parties with delineated ideologies. This study, based on ethnographic research and archival research, argues that post-WWII US intervention by elite and non-elite actors into parties, party-systems, and union movements projected the US image onto states under US purview. US intervention in all West European party-systems with “Resistance” alliances across the social democratic left and communist left was based on a “politics of (anti-communist) proscription.” It was particularly emphatic in Greece, France, and Italy in the 1940s and early 1950s and again in the 1970s in Spain and Portugal, each of which emerged from war/authoritarianism with stronger communist elements within the Resistance alliance than their northern counterparts. Focussing on these countries and two periods of time, this study shows that hegemonic intervention, first, narrowed the ideological range of parties in a party system when it weakened and deligitimised communist parties on the left of the ideological spectrum, thus shifting the party system as a whole to the right. Second and most importantly, hegemonic intervention shaved off the left wing factions of labour and social democratic parties, thus reducing ideological competition within parties and thus facilitating collusion across disparate parties. With the end of the Cold War, party government systems were already well structured to engage in a US-led “politics of (neoliberal) prescription”. The depoliticisation that Katz notes as a key feature of cartel party systems and of the Third Way party of labour was the end result of a long-term process of hegemonic self-image projection.