Political Parties in Britain: Then & Now

Leading constitutional expert Vernon Bogdanor tells Laurie Taylor that the age of the mass political party is over, but it still rules in our system of government.

Mass political parties started in the 1870s as a response to the advent of mass suffrage. 50 years ago, nearly one in ten people belonged to a party; it has now declined to one in 88, yet they still have a huge role in administering power in our democracy. It is that anomaly which constitutional expert Vernon Bogdanor claims lies behind the frustration and disillusionment that so many people feel towards our political system. He discusses his book, The New British Constitution, with Laurie.

Listen for more

FDR's Lessons for Obama

Alas for countless pundits and inspirational speakers, it is apparently not the case that the Chinese word for crisis is spelled by joining the characters for danger and opportunity. But that common fallacy nevertheless captures an important metaphorical truth: whatever the perils it brings with it, a crisis can be a grand opportunity. Among those who have understood that truth was Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Writing to his fellow Democrats in the 1920s, Roosevelt noted that their party could not hope to return to power until the Republicans led the nation “into a serious period of depression and unemployment.” The Great Depression soon brought a far longer and deeper period of woe than F.D.R. foresaw. But the crisis of the 1930s also provided an object lesson in the relationship between economic danger and political opportunity — a lesson Barack Obama is now trying to follow. Obama, too, came to office in the midst of an economic crisis, and in the solutions he has offered, it appears he has often looked to the example of F.D.R., whose presidency — and the very idea of activist government that it represents — is very much back in the public mind this year. Roosevelt pushed through policies that aimed not just to deal with the immediate challenge of the Great Depression but also to benefit generations of Americans to come. Pulling off a similar feat will require Obama to persuade Americans to see opportunities in the present crisis as well.

More from Time

THE SUNNI-SHIA SPLIT

In 680, near Karbala in Iraq, a man was killed in the desert. His name was Husayn, and he was the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. His death was a crucial episode in the growing split between two groups of Muslims – who would come to be known as the Sunni and the Shia.

And yet this dispute did not begin violently. Arguably, it was not at first a political or theological schism either, but a personal disagreement. And the two groups agree on many of the fundamentals of the religion.

So how did this profound split develop?

Listen to Melvyn Bragg conduct this round table discussion

 

In Mexican Vote, Nostalgia for Past Corruption

MEXICO CITY – “The PRI comes back” shouted the front page headline of the daily newspaper El Universal on Monday, the day after the political party known as the PRI swept midterm elections.

But the story was all in the photograph, a shot of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari as he left a voting booth. He was not running for any office, but the photograph seemed to ask why Mexicans were returning to power the party identified with Mr. Salinas, who left office 15 years ago amid political scandal and economic chaos.

His party, the PRI, or Institutional Revolutionary Party, governed Mexico with a blend of patronage and corruption for more than 70 years before it was voted out in 2000. But on Sunday, the PRI won effective control of the lower house of Congress and a broad swath of the country’s largest cities, as well as five out of six gubernatorial races.

The results were a blow to President Felipe Calderón, whose conservative National Action Party, or the PAN, failed to hold on to even its traditional strongholds.

Read on from the Times

July 2009 Protests in Xinjiang

URUMQI, China – The Chinese state news agency reported Monday that 156 people were killed and more than 800 injured when rioters clashed with the police in a regional capital in western China after days of rising tensions between members of the Uighur ethnic group and Han Chinese.

The casualty toll, if confirmed, would make this the deadliest outbreak of violence in China in many years.

The rioting broke out Sunday afternoon in a large market area of Urumqi, the capital of the vast, restive desert region of Xinjiang, and lasted for several hours before riot police officers and paramilitary or military troops locked down the Uighur quarter of the city

Read on at the Times

Here’s Foreign Policy Magazine’s take on the protests (China’s Latest Tibet)

The World is Bumpy: Deglobalization and its dangers

In the 1990s and early 2000s, nations around the world witnessed the sweep of globalization–the growing integration of economies, societies, and political systems–and the democratization of trade, migration, technology, and information. In many developing nations, governments threw their countries’ agriculture, resources, and services open to global competition and slashed subsidies for their domestic producers to force them to compete in global markets. Many countries provided incentives for the poor to migrate from farms to cities, where they began to manufacture goods for export to the West.

Many economists believed this global integration had become so deeply rooted it could never be undone. They were wrong. As the global financial crisis deepens, the world is undergoing exactly the reverse of the 1990s–a wrenching period of deglobalization in which governments throw up new walls and the ties binding nations together rapidly unravel. Nations like the United States, Japan, and Germany may suffer, but they will survive, as will powerful developing nations like China or Brazil that have large cash reserves, diversified economies, and enough political clout to protect their industries. On the other hand, poor and trade-dependent countries that remade their whole economies to take advantage of globalization will be devastated. Having opened up, these nations are now highly vulnerable to global financial currents, without the cash on hand to weather the storm. Perhaps even worse, these financial shifts are likely to spark massive social unrest and could take down one government after the next. If you thought globalization was destabilizing, just wait to see what deglobalization will do.

More from the New Republic

The New Democrats: An intellectual history of the Green Wave

What we are witnessing right now in the streets of Tehran is, first and foremost, a political battle for the future of the Iranian state. But closely linked to this political fight is also an old theological dispute about the nature of Shiism–a dispute that has been roiling Iran for more than a century.

Shiism, like most religions, is no stranger to heated schisms. Shia and Sunnis split over the question of whether Muhammad had designated his son-in-law, Ali, as his successor (Shia believed he had). Some Shia, called Alawites, believe the only divinely designated successor was Ali, while another group, Zaydis, believe there were four imams. A large, intellectually vibrant third group is known as the Ismailis because it believes the line of imams ended with the seventh, Ismail. And the largest Shia sect is called the Ithna Ashari–or the Twelvers. Dominant in Iran, they believe in twelve imams and posit that the last imam went into hiding some 1,100 years ago. His return, bloody and vengeful, will mark the redemptive dawn of the age of justice.

Read more about how the election protests have a deeply-rooted religious and intellectual history

Barack Hoover Obama

Three months into his presidency, Barack Obama has proven to be every bit as charismatic and intelligent as his most ardent supporters could have hoped. At home or abroad, he invariably appears to be the only adult in the room, the first American president in at least forty years to convey any gravitas. Even the most liberal of voters are finding it hard to believe they managed to elect this man to be their president.

It is impossible not to wish desperately for his success as he tries to grapple with all that confronts him: a worldwide depression, catastrophic climate change, an unjust and inadequate health-care system, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the ongoing disgrace of Guantanamo, a floundering education system.

Obama’s failure would be unthinkable. And yet the best indications now are that he will fail, because he will be unable-indeed he will refuse-to seize the radical moment at hand.
More from Harper’s Weekly