Party system in Germany and France and their internal policy.

Germany is a federal parliamentary republic, based on representative democracy. The Chancellor is the head of government, while the President of Germany is the head of state, which is a ceremonial role with substantial reserve powers. Executive power is vested in the Federal Cabinet (Bundesregierung), and federal legislative power is vested in the Bundestag (the parliament of Germany) and the Bundesrat (the representative body of the Länder, Germany's regional states). There is a multi-party system that, since 1949, has been dominated by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). The judiciary of Germany is independent of the executive and the legislature. The political system is laid out in the 1949 constitution, the Grundgesetz (Basic Law), which remained in effect with minor amendments after 1990's German reunification. The constitution emphasizes the protection of individual liberty in an extensive catalogue of human rights and divides powers both between the federal and state levels and between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches.

Bismarck and the Socialist Party

Main feature Bismarck’s domestic policy was his clash with the German Social Democratic Party. Bismarck had no liking for Socialism. So when after a period of reorganization the German Social Democratic Party obtained half a million votes in the Reichstag in 1877 Bismarck became alarmed. So in 1878 he began a campaign against the Social Democratic party with the express object of crushing the whole movement. A law against the Socialists went through the Reichstag. Offencing Socialist papers were suppressed, many clubs broken up and meetings stopped, and some of the leaders banished. Nevertheless it was still possible for a Social Democrat to take part in political activity and to stand for the Reichstag, even if his meetings had to be licensed in advance. Yet in spite of his power Bismarck failed to crush Socialism. Too intelligent to rely on purely negative means he also tried a more positive approach by sponsoring what he would call welfare legislation. He succeeded in passing between 1883-1889 three welfare measures of great importance based on the principle of compulsory insurance. § The first in 1883 was for compulsory insurance against sickness by all industrial workers, the worker paying 2/3 (two-thirds) of the weekly contribution and the employer one-third. This scheme was later extended to other classes of workers. § The second scheme approved in 1884 was an accident insurance scheme to which employees had to contribute for nearly all their workers except the higher paid. § The third passed in 1889 was for pensions in old age or incapacity. This applied to most of the lower paid workers and was based on weekly contributions of one-half by the employer and one-half by the employee, with the state making an addition to the actual pension. The Socialists however were not appeased. They saw no real socialism in what they mockingly called this ‘state socialism’ of Bismarck’s, and increased their efforts to secure further social reforms (such as limitation of working hours, fixed minimum wages and increased powers for the trade unions all frustrated by the Chancellor. So they kept up their attacks on Bismarck and his attempts to weaken and silence them failed. By 1890 the Social Democrats polled nearly one and a half million votes (1,500,000) and with the relaxation of persecution following the retirement of the Chancellor in the same year, the figure rapidly mounted until 1914 when it was 4 ½ million votes. By that time the Social Democrats were the strongest single party in the Reichstag. Substantial progress was made in the organization of the Empire. Within five or six years of the proclamation of the Empire (1871) a common currency and banking system had been established, together with a Postal System for the whole Empire with the exception of Bavaria which had its own Railways though not state owned were constructed and co-ordinated in the state interest. New codes of commercial civil and criminal law were framed. Above all industry and trade flourished so that Germany soon became like Britain, one of the workshops of the world. If the 20 years before 1870 saw the foundation of Germany’s Industrial might, the two years after unification saw its full fruition. The economic unification of Germany embracing currency taxes, economic law and so on, which followed political unification certainly helped towrads this; as did the acquisition of the territories of Alsace and Lorraine, with their textile and engineering industries as well as rich deposits of iron ore which Germany had previously lacked.The reparations taken from France in 1871, totalling ₤200m also helped to put the German economy on the gold standard and the German banks on a solid financial basis. The German banking system played an important role in the growth of German Industry, after 1870, by making money available to industrial entrepreneurs. As industry became larger in scale so large amounts of capital and investment were needed to set up manufacturing plants. In their turn the Industrial magnates invested money in the banks and often took their seats on the board of management. Thus arose the inter-penetration of banks and industry in Germany which came to be described as Finance Capitalism. Gradually economic power became concentrated in the hands of the very powerful German banking system. C: KARTELS: Concentration in banking led to concentration in Industry itself and to the formation of Kartels (or Cartels). Businessmen faced with the huge risks involved in founding large scale enterprises wanted to be assured of a good profit. The way they did this was to combine among themselves to restrict competition and to fix a common agreed price in their final products. Kartels such as the Rhenish Steel Syndicate and the Ryhr Coal Syndicate were enormously powerful and helped keep industry in Germany highly profitable. Bismarck himself encouraged the formation of Kartels. D: PROTECTIONISM: This was another feature of Bismarck’s domestic policy. The general trend in economic legislation in Germany after 1850 was towards economic liberalism and the abolition of such things as import and export duties. The economic slump which hit Europe in 1873 led to a severe depression in the German heavy industries and agriculture and there were urgent calls for the protection of German Industry by import duties. In 1879 there occurred the first rise in tariff duties in Germany for three decades.

The Constitution of the German Empire adopted a certain number of democratic looking characteristics, but the effective control was in the hands of Prussia.

The Constitution established two assemblies, the Bundesrat and the Reichstag. The Bundesrat consisted of representatives of the different states. It consisted of 61 members, Prussia had 17, Bavaria 6, 17 small states had one member only. The number of members was according to the size of the state. It was this small body which had the main law-making functions. But even the powers of the Bundesrat were seriously limited; a vote of 14 against any measure meant its rejection. This gave a decisive veta in Prussian hands if they wished to exercise it, for there were 17 Prussian members in the Bundesrat. The Reichstag (picture) was the assembly elected by universal manhood suffrage. It contained 397 members, distributed according to the size of the state. Prussia had 236. Its powers were extremely limited, and it was mainly concerned with debating and suggesting amendments to the laws sent to it from the Bundesrat. Moreover the Ministers of the Government were in no way responsible for it. Their responsibility was to the Emperor alone.

The King of Prussia who was automatically German Emperor controlled the armed forces, and appointed all the principal officers including the Chancellor. Bismarck also compromised with the individual states by leaving them a great deal of local power in matters which did not affect the whole of Germany. But the Army, Navy, Foreign Affairs, taxation, trade and railways came under the control of the Central Government.

FRANCE

Moving from left to right, a previously governing Communist Party

which had seemingly survived the post-1990 collapse of many of its sister

parties clung on with 4.8 per cent of the first-round vote and 21 deputies

to form its own parliamentary group with little to spare. The previously

governing Socialist Party saw its vote drop only by a relatively small

margin, but the two-ballot system and relative absence of three-way

run-offs – the famous triangulaires of 1997 – returned a paltry number

of seats as a result. The Green Party remained on the fringes of the

mainstream and of electoral success, unable to provide a credible alternative

on its own, but hampered by its travelling on the Socialists’

coat-tails. The Union pour la Democratie Francaise (UDF), once the

presidential federation, had now been relegated to 5 per cent of the vote

and only just able to secure enough deputies for its own parliamentary

group.1 The Rassemblement pour la Republique (RPR) and Democratie

Liberale (DL) (plus two-thirds of the UDF), brought together under the

banner of the Union pour la Majorite Presidentielle (UMP), formed the

first right-wing party in France able to unite the right in a manner similar

to its Gaullist predecessors of forty years earlier. Finally, the extreme

right still loitered menacingly on the margins of the right with one in

ten votes, but was incapable of winning a single parliamentary seat, even

with the apparently immense political capital of its candidate having

reached the second round of the presidential elections.2

The presidential element had a larger effect than normal on the

legislative elections both for timetabling and constitutional reasons. Perhaps

most importantly, the inversion of the electoral calendar to put the

presidential elections first meant that no party wanting to run an effective

electoral campaign could avoid fielding a presidential candidate. Quite

simply, because of the presidential priority and its outcome, there was

no legislative campaign to speak of. Sixteen candidates in the presidential

first round indicated that few parties were ignorant of this logic, but in

the process so fragmented the vote that, at least for the left, the starting

line-up proved catastrophic.3 Second, the recent reduction of the presidential

term from seven years to five, partly as an obstacle to another period

of cohabitation deadlock and partly as a rationalisation of an excessively

long executive incumbency, has pulled the presidential candidates and

their respective parties closer together. The effect of the five-year simultaneous

mandates in terms of power distribution between president and

governing parties is as yet unclear – what is clear, however, is that the

tightening of the two executive branches helped to ensure the moderate

right’s effective unity and consequently its clear margin of victory.

However, despite the importance of these elections – indeed, all

elections – in providing a benchmark for assessing the systemic array,

the election results per se should not be looked at in isolation. Such

changes are to be regarded as at least partly the result of shifts which

have occurred in the French party system over recent years, and not

simply the outcome of a combination of conjunctural effects and mathematical

quirks. To address these, this book assesses the context to the

The French party system

current situation and the extent to which the array we find today is in

keeping with the changes in the system and the players within it in recent

years. The contributors concentrate principally on the period subsequent

to the quadrille bipolaire – the four-party, two-bloc array vaunted as the

French ideal type in the semi-presidential two-ballot majoritarian system

– which is largely held to have ‘peaked’ in 1978, and begun its ‘descent’

very soon afterwards.

The changes since 1978 have been principally conjunctural rather than

structural. The main feature at legislative elections since the final follow-on

victory of the right in that year has been alternation. Held up as a dynamic

to which to aspire by proponents of an Anglo-Saxon remodelling of the

system, this has been taken to extremes which had probably not been

envisaged. Simply, neither bloc has been able to retain incumbency since

that date – six changes of governing bloc in six elections over a little

under one-quarter of a century. At the mass level, this hyper-alternance

has had the greatest systemic effect, giving voters little to decide upon

when making their electoral choice. For many voters, each side having

had three periods in government and none having been seen as particularly

successful, all mainstream parties look as bad as each other. When

adding to this the periods of cohabitation where one has often been hard

pressed to tell the two sides apart, Le Pen’s parody of the left and right

as blanc bonnet, bonnet blanc seemingly has some foundation. However,

even a rapid succession of swings of the electoral pendulum does not

equate to party system change per se: re-equilibration has largely occurred

between two stable blocs, one each side of the centre. The unoccupied

centre and the floating voters of a Downsian logic have consequently

remained deciding elements to elections since 1978, conditioned by the

level of turnout and fragmentation within electoral blocs.

83) Role of the colonies in the early XX century.

The colonial map was redrawn following the defeat of the German and the Ottoman Empire after the first World War (1914–18). Colonies from the defeated empires were transferred to the newly founded League of Nations, which itself redistributed it to the victorious powers as "mandates".

The 20th century saw the era of the banana republics, in particular in Latin America, whereby corporations such as United Fruit or Standard Fruit dominated the economies and sometimes the politics of parts of Latin America. The United Fruit, nicknamed 'The Octopus' for its willingness to involve itself in politics, was present in most American countries and was involved in several coups, in Honduras and elsewhere. 1971 Nobel prize for literature winner Pablo Neruda would later denounce such neocolonialism in a poem titled La United Fruit Co.

Oil companies such as BP and Royal Dutch Shell held sway in "key" areas such as parts of Iran and of Nigeria, despite the preservation of de jure independence.

After World War I, the Arabs, who had revolted against the Ottomans in 1916-18, supported by the UK who sent them Captain T. E. Lawrence, found they had been doubly betrayed. For not only had the British and the French concluded the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement to partition the Middle East between them, but the British had also promised to the international Zionistmovement their support in creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine via the 1917 Balfour Declaration, although the former site of the ancient Kingdom of Israel had a largely Arab population for over a thousand years. When the Ottomans departed, the Arabs proclaimed an independent state in Damascus, but were too weak, militarily and economically, to resist the European powers for long, and Britain and France soon established control and re-arranged the Middle East to suit themselves.

Syria became a French protectorate (thinly disguised as a League of Nations Mandate), with the Christian coastal areas split off to become Lebanon. Iraq and Palestine became British mandated territories, with one of Sherif Hussein's sons, Faisal, installed as King of Iraq. Palestine was split in half, with the eastern half becoming Transjordan to provide a throne for another of Hussein's sons, Abdullah. The western half of Palestine was placed under direct British administration, and the already substantial Jewish population was allowed to increase, initially under British protection. Most of the Arabian peninsula fell to another British ally, Ibn Saud, who created the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1922.

Another turning point in the history of the Middle East came when oil was discovered, first in Persia in 1908 and later in Saudi Arabia (in 1938) and the other Persian Gulf states, and also in Libyaand Algeria. The Middle East, it turned out, possessed the world's largest easily accessible reserves of crude oil. Although Western oil companies pumped and exported nearly all of the oil to fuel the rapidly expanding automobile industry and other industrial developments, the emirs of the oil states became immensely rich, enabling them to consolidate their hold on power and giving them a stake in preserving Western hegemony over the region. Oil wealth also had the effect of stultifying whatever movement towards economic, political or social reform might have emerged in the Arab world under the influence of the Kemalist revolution, which had created the modern state of Turkey in 1923 out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.

During the 1920-30s Iraq, Syria and Egypt moved towards independence, although the British and French did not formally depart the region until they were forced to do so after World War II. But in Palestine the conflicting forces of Arab nationalism and Zionist colonisation created a situation which the British could neither resolve nor extricate themselves from. Although the Zionist movement was born in the 19th century, following various pogroms and the Dreyfus Affair, with Theodor Herzl's Der Judenstaat (1896), the rise of nazism created a new urgency in the quest to create a Jewish state in Palestine, and the evident intentions of the Zionists provoked increasingly fierce Arab resistance, with the Great Uprising in 1936-39.

This struggle culminated in the 1947 UN Partition Plan in favor of a Two-state solution instead of a Binational solution. The plan was accepted by the UN General Assembly, and the Jewish leadership, but rejected by the Arab population. ^[1] The State of Israel was proclaimed in 1948 as result, and lead to the first Arab-Israeli War and to the creation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. About 800,000 Palestinians fled from areas annexed by Israel, thus creating the "Palestinian problem" which has bedevilled the region ever since. The conflict also resulted in hundreds of thousands of Jews refugees who fled to Israel from Arab countries. The June 1967 Six Day War led to the occupation of various territories. In November 1967, UN Resolution 242 called for the "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict", something which has become a permanent revendication of the Fatah, founded by Yassir Arafat in 1959, and of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) founded in 1964 by the Arab League.

Pan-Arabism was a popular anti-imperialist ideology in the 1960s, and Nasserism favorized the merging of Egypt and Syria into the United Arab Republic (1958–61). The short term Arab Federation of Iraq and Jordan (1958) also attempted to bypass the 1920s artificial borders. Pan-Arabism was however defeated with the 1967 Six-Day War and the emergence of Islamism in the 1980s as a popular substitution to secular Arab nationalism, as represented for example by the Baath Party.

In France, the colonial empire was not used for massive emigration, as in the British Empire. In fact, until the Third Republic (1871–1940), apart from the colonization of Algeria, which had commenced in 1830, in the last days of the Bourbon Restoration, France did not have yet many colonies compared to the British, Spanish or Portuguese empires. The colonies of Martinique andGuadeloupe, in the Caribbean Sea, had been established during the first wave of colonialism. After the repression of the 1871 Paris Commune, French Guiana — as well as New Caledonia — was used for transportation of criminals and Communards. Following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, which had caused France to lose the Alsace-Lorraine region to the German Empire, many viewed the "colonial lobby" - a gathering of a few politicians, businessmen and geographers favorable to colonialism - with disdain, arguing that it distracted the country from other, more important goals. In the 1880s, a debate thus opposed those who opposed colonization, such as Georges Clemenceau (Radical), who declared that colonialism diverted France from the "blue line of theVosges" (referring to Alsace-Lorraine), Jean Jaurès (Socialist) and Maurice Barrès (nationalist), against the Jules Ferry (moderate republican), Léon Gambetta (republican) and Eugène Etienne, the president of the parliamentary colonial group.

Prime minister from 1880–1881 and again from 1883–1885, Republican Jules Ferry directed the negotiations which led to the establishment of a French protectorate in Tunis (1881) (the Bardo treaty), prepared the treaty of December 17, 1885 for the occupation of Madagascar; directed the exploration of the Congo and of the Niger region; and above all he organized the conquest ofIndochina. The excitement caused in Paris by the sudden retreat of the French troops from Lạng Sơn led to his violent denunciation by Clemenceau and other radicals, and his downfall on March 30, 1885. Although the 1885 treaty of peace with China, in which the Qing Dynasty ceded suzerainty of Annam and Tonkin to France, was the work of his ministry, he would never again serve as premier.

According to Sandrine Lemaire, only 1% of the French population actually visited its colonial empire. Because of this relative unpopularity, until at least World War I, the colonial lobby set up an intensive propaganda campaign in order to convince the French of the legitimacy of its Empire, which most thought costly and rather useless. Ethnological expositions — including human zoos, in which natives were displayed alongside apes, in an attempt to justify scientific racism and to popularize the colonial empire — had a crucial role in the popularisation of colonialism.^[2] Although in France these colonial exhibitions played a crucial propaganda role, they were common in all colonizing powers: the 1924 British Empire Exhibition was one notable example, as was the successful 1931 Exposition coloniale in Paris. Germany and Portugal also had such exhibitions, as well as Belgium's, which had a Foire coloniale as late as 1948. The political scientist Pierre-André Taguieff said about the French Third Republic that it was host to "racialism or an ideological racism that didn't perceive itself as such, and that called neither for hate, nor for stigmatisation, nor either for segregation, but which found its legitimity in colonial exploitation and domination, and its justification in its thesis of the future evolution of these inferior peoples".

Olivier LeCour Grandmaison has argued, for his part, that the techniques used for the French colonization of Algeria starting with the invasion on June 12, 1830, a few days before the end of theRestoration, were later extended to the whole of the French colonial empire: Indochina, New Caledonia, French West Africa (a federation created in 1895), and French Equatorial Africa, (created in 1910). LeCour Grandmaison argued that Algeria thus provided the laboratory for concepts later used during the Holocaust, such as "inferior races", "life without value" — Lebensunwertes Leben — and "vital space" (translated in German by "Lebensraum", a concept used by the Völkisch movement), as well as for repressive techniques: the 1881 Indigenous Code in Algeria, the principle of "collective responsibility", the "Scorched Earth" policy, which made of French colonial rule in Algeria a permanent state of exception. Internment camps were also first tested during the 1830 invasion of Algeria, before being used (under the official name of concentration camps) to receive the Spanish Republican refugees first, than to intern communists and, finally, Jews during Vichy France.^[3] Concentration camps were also used by the British Empire during the Second Boer War (1899–1902).

After World War I, the colonial people became frustrated at France's failure to recognize the effort provided by the French colonies (resources, but more importantly colonial troops - the famous tirailleurs). Although the Great Mosque of Paris was constructed in recognition of these efforts, the French state had no intention to allow self-rule, let alone independence, to the colonized people. Thus, nationalism in the colonies became stronger in between the two wars, leading to Abd el-Krim's Rif War in Morocco and to the creation of Messali Hadj's Star of North Africa in Algeria. However, these movements would gain full potential only after World War II. The October 27, 1946 Constitution creating the Fourth Republic substituted the French Union for the colonial empire. On the night of March 29, 1947, a nationalist uprising in Madagascar led the French government led by Paul Ramadier (Socialist) to violent repression: one year of bitter fighting, in which 90,000 to 100,000 Malagasy died. On May 8, 1945, the Sétif massacre took place in Algeria.

In 1946, the states of French Indochina withdrew from the Union, leading to the Indochina War (1946–54). In 1956, Morocco and Tunisia gained their independence, while the Algerian War was raging (1954–1962). With Charles de Gaulle's return to power in 1958 amidst turmoil and threats of a right-wing coup d'État to protect "French Algeria", the decolonization was completed with the independence of African's colonies in 1960 and the March 19, 1962 Evian Accords, which put an end to the Algerian war. To this day, the Algerian war — officially called until 1997 a "public order operation" — remains a traumatic memory for both France and Algeria. Philosopher Paul Ricœur has spoken of the necessity of a "decolonization of memory," starting with the recognition of the1961 Paris massacre during the Algerian war and the recognition of the decisive role of immigrated manpower in the Trente Glorieuses post-World War II economic growth period. In the 1960s, due to the necessity of reconstruction and of economic growth, French employers actively sought manpower in its ex-colonies, explaining today's multiethnic population. A February 23, 2005 law on colonialism voted by the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) conservative majority was finally repealed by president Jacques Chirac (UMP) in early 2006.

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