Yaroslav Butakov. Indian version

Indian version
Single-party multi-party system as a possible future of the Russian political system

Yaroslav Butakov

Publication date: August 17, 2004

A party, as a group of people fighting for power with other similar groups, is a phenomenon as ancient as politics itself. In a form more familiar to us - as a legal public association competing with its own kind in parliamentary and presidential elections - parties have existed in the world only for the last one and a half to two centuries. It can be said that representative democracy of modern and modern times, in a certain sense, has civilized the ancient struggle of parties inherent in humanity, legalizing it, introducing it into a cultural framework and subordinating it to the norms of constitutional law. The notorious PR, no matter how “black” they sometimes are, is still better than poison, a dagger or rebellion.

The historical process of the formation of party-political systems is parallel to the process of establishing capitalism. Parliamentary parties arose at the end of the 17th century. in England. During the Great French Revolution of the late 18th century. political parties began to be created on the European continent. There they existed in the form of legal public clubs (for example, the Cordelier Club) or secret conspiratorial societies (for example, Babeuf’s “Union of Equals”). At the end of the 19th century. European socialists begin to create mass parties with clearly fixed membership. Some bourgeois politicians follow their example. Currently, mass parties are becoming a thing of the past; they are being replaced by cadre parties, created mainly to promote certain candidates in elections, practically indistinguishable from each other in ideological terms.

Each stage in the evolution of party systems was associated with major shifts in the system of world capitalism. Each new bourgeois-democratic revolution opened up new opportunities for the legal struggle of parties and strengthened their role in the political system. This was due to the fact that the latter was increasingly exposed to the laws of the market. The tendency of modern political science to consider democracy through the prism of market mechanisms is quite justified. A democratic state is, in essence, simply a political market.

There are many types of classification of political regimes, but most of them separate democratic regimes from the so-called. undemocratic. At the same time, different criteria of difference are set, but one of them sticks out very clearly - a democratic regime, in the understanding of modern political science, is one in which there is free competition of parties in the struggle for the possession of state power. In short, a democratic regime is the dominance of market mechanics in politics, along with “political relativism” (a term introduced at the beginning of the twentieth century by P.I. Novgorodtsev), i.e. the absence of a single universally binding value professed by the state.

Modern democracy is the element of the market in everything, incl. in politics. Specific concepts that have entered our lives over the past 15 years clearly reflect this nature of current politics. “Political technologies”, “political management”, “political marketing”, “PR” - all these terms, borrowed from economics, emphasize not only the complete dependence of modern politics on the laws of economic life, but also the nature of politics as a type of business (by the way, another a value concept that reflects the fundamental difference between capitalism and historically previous forms of market economies).

Definitions of party functions given in political science are, as a rule, based precisely on the model of the political market. However, the modern Western pluralist model is not the only party system today, much less in history. The division of party-political systems into pluralistic and mono-party is based on formal characteristics. In the socialist GDR, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Bulgaria, two or more parties officially existed. Even in China during the Cultural Revolution, in addition to the CPC, 8 more parties remained. But, since in all these countries the monopoly (“leading role”) of one party was ensured, if not always de-jure, then certainly de-facto, and there was no competition in elections, these party systems cannot be combined into one group with pluralistic democracies of the USA, Western Europe and post-war Japan.

So, the main criterion for the “democratic” nature of a regime is the presence of a political market in which there is an open, legal struggle of parties for voters within the framework of the law. Party promises are a product that is offered to the mass buyer at a huge fair called general elections. Whoever managed to sell this product to the largest number of buyers succeeded in this business. In net profit - participation in power.

A necessary condition for the political market, like any other, is precisely the variability and stochasticity of the processes occurring on it. If deputies of a representative assembly, even from different parties, are elected according to the order, then there can be no talk of any variability. The same can be said about a pluralistic system, in which the outcome of the choice can be predicted in advance with great accuracy. Forms of restriction of the political market, i.e. establishing a predetermined result of the political process, different ones are known in history. The monopoly of one party on power enshrined in the constitution is only one of these methods, the crudest and therefore the least effective. The very presence of a party as a subject of power logically presupposes an alternative, because the party, as part of the whole, cannot be alone.

The history of the last two centuries has presented various examples of party-political systems, both market and non-market, and mixed. Numerous forms of limiting or completely eliminating the market element in politics have been tried. One of these forms was mono-party regimes (USSR and most countries of the socialist camp, fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany, as well as a number of developing countries in Asia and Africa, for example Iraq).

Many military dictatorships in Latin America also represented a form of restriction of the political market. Unlike single-party regimes, general juntas did not monopolize the political market; they simply “closed” it for a time to all parties. Here we can also see similarities with economic systems. If the CPSU acted as a monopoly in the “market of political services”, just as in the economy the socialist state was the only employer, then Pinochet and others like him temporarily closed the “political fair”, similar to how in an emergency the authorities sometimes close large public markets. But Latin American dictators never intended to become monopolists in the political market forever, much less to abolish it forever. The same Pinochet declared a “sanitary day” at the political “bazaar” of Chile, so that when the market opened again, it would no longer offer low-quality goods (i.e., socialism) at bargain prices.

One of the most durable of these authoritarian non-party regimes was the dictatorship of General Franco in Spain, which lasted 36 years. All such authoritarian systems, as a rule, more or less peacefully gave way to pluralistic systems - as soon as the authorities allowed the resumption of political “bargaining”.

Mixed forms, i.e. regimes with a limited political market have been encountered much more often in history, especially during the period of establishment of modern democracy. The most indicative model here is the Second Empire in France (1852-70), where the legislative corps was elected on the basis of general elections, but had very little power, and there were also great restrictions on the creation and activities of parties. In principle, a similar model was created in Russia during the period of the Duma monarchy (1906-17), but in our country, on the contrary, the class-based electoral law of 1907 was designed to create a numerical superiority of well-known parties in the Duma, despite the fact that the then Duma had almost powers as broad as the current one.

Characteristic features of such mixed systems are the presence of competing political parties in the state (pluralism) and at the same time their lack of powerful levers of influence on the highest state power. This situation is achieved by the fact that the executive branch is responsible not to the legislative branch, but to the head of state . This important point was once well expressed by the statesman of the Russian Diaspora I.A. Ilyin, formulating the state ideal of the future Russia: “The supreme power should be thought of... as an independent legal creative reality , residing at the head of the state”; and also: “No party as such can or should expect to seize power by majority vote.”

For such a system, it does not matter whether the head of state is a hereditary monarch, a plebiscitary monarch (like Napoleon I or Napoleon III) or an elected president. The latter is more consistent with the idea of ​​politics as a market. And yet, the presence of a head of state , even an elected one, heading not one, but all branches of government, poses a significant obstacle to the complete transformation of state policy into the elements of market competition.

It is worth thinking about the question: can market pluralism in politics be an end in itself? In general, a positive or negative attitude towards politics as a market or business is the main criterion for the ideological difference between parties. The complete assimilation of politics to economic elements is the litmus test of a liberal. On opposite sides of liberalism there begins a desire to limit the political market. At the same time, traditional European conservatism (in contrast to Anglo-Saxon conservatism, which is liberalism taken to the extreme) strives to subordinate the political market to the highest state interests. On the other hand, the communists, coming to power, curtailed the political market in order to implement their utopian programs.

If politics is really, as defined by I.A. Ilyin, “solidarity activity in the name of a common goal,” and the state is, in fact, “built not on the principle of self-interest, but on the principle of rightness,” then the political market, in essence, is a tolerable (involuntarily) evil for the state. And we see that in reality, the political market in its pure form does not exist in any state. All standard modern democracies limit competition in politics to one degree or another, and also strive to place the highest state power outside the fickle sympathies of voters. This feature was noticed by another political scientist of the Russian Diaspora, N.N. Alekseev. According to his judgment, “if a system of disorganized and unstabilized “public opinion” dominated state life without any restrictions, any state would disintegrate and cease to exist.

If the Western democracies are not falling apart, it means that there is some correction in them to the vast dynamics of unorganized public opinion... Its existence explains why, for example, despite the constant change of governments, Great Britain pursued the same foreign policy; or why, despite the jump in ministries in France, the foundations of the French Republic remained very conservative... In every state, even the most democratic one, there is some political constant, although its presence is now obscured by the pompous decorations of a democratic regime and the phraseology of parliamentarism." Modern political scientists write about a stable layer of the US government apparatus, which remains under any president and, to a certain extent, serves as the custodian of “American values" in the politics of this state. It is impossible not to notice the presence of a layer that ensures the continuity of state policy in today's Russia.

Freedom of political competition, from the point of view of common state sense, can only be a value of a lower order in relation to the stability and security of the state. The state here should be understood not as something separate from society, but including it within itself, i.e., according to the definition of the same N.N. Alekseev, “the most developed, most established and most prominent social individual in human history.”

One apparent paradox should also be noted. The principle of freedom of political competition, taken to its logical conclusion, actually denies many of the values ​​of personal freedom associated with the concept of democracy. By subordinating the social life of the individual to self-sufficient political struggle, he leaves little room for autonomous self-realization of the individual in non-political spheres. Meanwhile, as I.A. wrote. Ilyin, “people live not to engage in politics, but to create culture.” The dominance of the political market in the most developed democratic regimes can be compared, in terms of its impact on the individual, to its complete absence in totalitarian regimes: both of them result in the imposition of one specific model of political behavior on a person.

The political market, like any other, in its development strives to free itself from government intervention, thereby denying the state as an institution of legal domination. The absolute dominance of market mechanisms in politics reduces law from the level of an ethically justified regulator of relations to the level of simple rules of the game, morally justifying the winner solely by the fact of his success.

It follows that the optimal level of human and civil liberties in a rule-of-law state can only be ensured by the optimal relationship in politics between the market element and (do not shy away from these words!) the command and administrative resource of the state. It is clear that this ratio should be different for countries and eras with different forms and levels of political and legal culture and political consciousness, with different historical pasts. Politicians should take a particularly balanced approach to resolving this issue in Russia.

The stochasticity of the political process took place in our presidential elections of 1991 and 1996, became significantly less in 2000 and was almost completely absent in 2004. Obviously, such an important part of the political process as the formation of the supreme power of the state is becoming increasingly (already practically left) from the laws of the political market. This should probably be considered the main trend in the development of the Russian political system. In the future, one of two scenarios seems possible.

First. For an indefinite period (several decades), the Mexican or Indian version will be established in Russia. In the presence of legal opposition parties and electoral competition, one party (like the Institutional Revolutionary Party in Mexico in 1917-1989 or the Indian National Congress in 1947-1977), largely fused with the state apparatus, will have a predominant influence on the levers of power. A more liberal modification of this option is possible, akin to the long-term rule of the Liberal Democratic Party in post-war Japan. The transfer of supreme power from one president to another will depend not so much on the choice of the people as on the early selection of a successor. In this case, the elections take on the character of a formal plebiscite to confirm the head of state in office.

Second. The authorities will artificially create the appearance of a political market and free competition. In this case, even before 2008, an initiated split of United Russia into two parties is possible, differing from one another no more than the Republican Party from the Democratic Party in the United States. Elections, formally alternative, take on the character of a competitive show. Candidates for the post of head of state, despite all the similarities in their programs, will diligently and artificially advertise the differences between themselves. This is a more Western option. It will probably help establish the image of Russia as a democratic country in the world (if such a thing is possible!), but the fact that it will serve to strengthen the foundations of statehood and real democracy (which is only, according to M. Ostrogorsky’s definition in the early twentieth century) c., “a legal mechanism for intimidating managers by the governed”) in Russia is very doubtful.

Although consistent liberalism leans towards the second option, it is difficult not to notice that the first option would be more consistent with both the traditions of Russian statehood and the real state of modern Russian society.