Italy, Europe, The Left

Italy, Europe, The Left PDF Author: Vassilis Fouskas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429836686
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Published in 1998. Was the Italian Communist Party (PCI) a typical Social Democratic party in tune with the programmatic principles of the Second International? What is the appropriate context within which the strategies of 'historic compromise' and Eurocommunism in the 1970s can be analyzed and understood? In what form and to what extent has the process of European integration and the crisis of Keynesianism contributed to the transformation of the party in 1989-91? What caused the collapse of the ruling political class of the First Italian Republic? Why did the transformed PCI, the PDS (Democratic Party of the Left), fail to lead the transition to the Second Italian Republic between 1992 and 1996? Is there any link between the party’s historical factions and the current divisions in the Italian Left? Is it possible to theorize and speculate upon these divisions? Italy, Europe, the Left seeks to answer these questions, debating conventional views and examining the extent to which the end of the Cold War has contributed to a redefinition of the Left’s identity in Italy and Europe. The exemplary methodological framework and the wider European perspective adopted throughout, make the book an indispensable reading in the field of Italian and European politics.

Italy, Europe, The Left

Italy, Europe, The Left PDF Author: Vassilis Fouskas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429836686
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book Here

Book Description
Published in 1998. Was the Italian Communist Party (PCI) a typical Social Democratic party in tune with the programmatic principles of the Second International? What is the appropriate context within which the strategies of 'historic compromise' and Eurocommunism in the 1970s can be analyzed and understood? In what form and to what extent has the process of European integration and the crisis of Keynesianism contributed to the transformation of the party in 1989-91? What caused the collapse of the ruling political class of the First Italian Republic? Why did the transformed PCI, the PDS (Democratic Party of the Left), fail to lead the transition to the Second Italian Republic between 1992 and 1996? Is there any link between the party’s historical factions and the current divisions in the Italian Left? Is it possible to theorize and speculate upon these divisions? Italy, Europe, the Left seeks to answer these questions, debating conventional views and examining the extent to which the end of the Cold War has contributed to a redefinition of the Left’s identity in Italy and Europe. The exemplary methodological framework and the wider European perspective adopted throughout, make the book an indispensable reading in the field of Italian and European politics.

The Left Case Against the EU

The Left Case Against the EU PDF Author: Costas Lapavitsas
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509531084
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Many on the Left see the European Union as a fundamentally benign project with the potential to underpin ever greater cooperation and progress. If it has drifted rightward, the answer is to fight for reform from within. In this iconoclastic polemic, economist Costas Lapavitsas demolishes this view. He contends that the EU’s response to the Eurozone crisis represents the ultimate transformation of the union into a neoliberal citadel that institutionally embeds austerity, privatization, and wage cuts. Concurrently, the rise of German hegemony has divided the EU into an unstable core and dependent peripheries. These related developments make the EU impervious to meaningful reform. The solution is therefore a direct challenge to the EU project that stresses popular and national sovereignty as preconditions for true internationalist socialism. Lapavitsas’s powerful manifesto for a left opposition to the EU upends the wishful thinking that often characterizes the debate and will be a challenging read for all on the Left interested in the future of Europe.

First They Took Rome

First They Took Rome PDF Author: David Broder
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1786637618
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Italy’s political disaster under a microscope There is little that hasn’t gone wrong for Italy in the last three decades. Economic growth has flatlined, infrastructure has crumbled, and out-of-work youth find their futures stuck on hold. These woes have been reflected in the country’s politics, from Silvio Berlusconi’s scandals to the rise of the far right. Many commentators blame Italy’s malaise on cultural ills—pointing to the corruption of public life or a supposedly endemic backwardness. In this reading, Italy has failed to converge with the neoliberal reforms mounted by other European countries, leaving it to trail behind the rest of the world. First They Took Rome offers a different perspective: Italy isn’t failing to keep up with its international peers but farther along the same path of decline they are following. In the 1980s, Italy boasted the West’s strongest Communist Party; today, social solidarity is collapsing, working people feel ever more atomized, and democratic institutions grow increasingly hollow. Studying the rise of forces like Matteo Salvini’s Lega, this book shows how the populist right drew on a deep well of social despair, ignored by the liberal centre. Italy’s recent history is a warning from the future—the story of a collapse of public life that risks spreading across the West.

Mapping the West European Left

Mapping the West European Left PDF Author: Patrick Camiller
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1789606934
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Organized as a series of tightly linked, comparative assessments, Mapping the West European Left provides a guide to the state of the left in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Spain. While all the essays are detailed historical compositions-setting recent crises and dilemmas in a longer perspective reaching back into the postwar settlement-they articulate original insights into the contemporary political conjuncture. Why did Swedish social democracy lose hegemony and direction while its Norwegian counterpart showed unexpected resilience? What was the background to the Danish rebellion against Maastricht? What are the prospects for the SPD and the Greens in post-unification Germany? Should the British Labour Party embrace electoral reform? What propelled the French Socialist Party from triumph to disaster? And why did the Italian left fail to fill the vacuum created by the collapse of the Christian Democrats? Behind the questions explored by the contributors to Mapping the West European Left lie deeper issues concerning the future of radical politics in Europe after the repudiation of Keynesianism and the end of communism. With the individual country analyses synthesized by the editors in a concise and comprehensive introductory essay, this book provides key pointers to the social forces and ideological platforms that offer lines of advance to the left today.

Technopopulism

Technopopulism PDF Author: Christopher J. Bickerton
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198807767
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Contemporary democracies face a crisis of political representation. In understanding this crisis, scholars and commentators often frame it as the 'end' or the 'collapse' of democracy. This book takes a very different path. It argues that we are witnessing a transformation in the nature and practice of political competition within existing democratic regimes. This transformation consists in the rise of a new political field, techno-populism. Within this field, appeals to the people and appeals to expertise are the new structuring logic of democratic politics. Populist appeals to a unitary 'people' combine in multiple ways with technocratic claims about efficient policy-making and policy implementation. These multiple combinations form the basis for the varieties of techno-populism outlined in detail in this book. We focus in particular on British, French, and Italian cases. The concept of technopopulism helps us to make sense of new and idiosyncratic political movements such as En Marche! and the Five Star Movement. Technopopulism is also the conceptual key to understanding the significance of Blairism for British politics and its legacy in the profound transformations underway in the contemporary Conservative Party. The transition from an ideological struggle between left and right to this technopopulist political field where populist and technocratic appeals are fused together into novel forms of political organization is having a significant impact on the quality of democratic political competition. This book analyses the origins and consequences of the rise of technopopulism, as well as considering the remedies available to us to tackle its negative effects.

Europe's Radical Left

Europe's Radical Left PDF Author: Luke March
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 178348537X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 467

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Book Description
Although the most pernicious consequences of the crisis have apparently abated, the long-term political repercussions remain unclear. Whereas most attention has focused on the right-wing populist parties, the rejuvenation of the left is an unwritten story of post-crisis politics. This volume addresses this story, with three principal aims: to examine the radical left intellectual response to the crisis, i.e. how actors conceptualise the causes of crisis and its consequences; to examine the radical left electoral response to the crisis, i.e. how the crisis has aided or weakened the electoral success of radical left parties and movements; to examine organisational responses, i.e. whether the crisis has resulted in new party structures, methods of organising, and internal party tendencies. The result is a comprehensive compendium, drawing on cutting-edge research from leading European experts to present the first comparative analysis of how the far left of the political spectrum has responded to the crisis. It furthers our understanding both of the dynamics of European party systems and the wider consequences of the Great Recession.

The Political Mobilization of the European Left, 1860-1980

The Political Mobilization of the European Left, 1860-1980 PDF Author: Stefano Bartolini
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521650216
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 665

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Book Description
In an in-depth comparative analysis, Stefano Bartolini studies the history of socialism and working-class politics in Western Europe. While examining the social contexts, organizational structures, and political developments of thirteen socialist experiences from the 1860s to the 1980s, he reconstructs the steps through which social conflict was translated and structured into an opposition, as well as how it developed its different organizational and ideological forms, and how it managed more or less successfully to mobilize its reference groups politically.

The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Left Parties in Europe

The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Left Parties in Europe PDF Author: Fabien Escalona
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 1137562641
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 783

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Book Description
This profound and insightful handbook aims to promote critical reflection on the way we conceptualise and study the radical left and to advance research by asking new questions. Radical left parties in Europe have been the subjects of significant study in the last decade, aided by the demonstrable success of newer parties like the Greek Syriza and Spanish Podemos, as well as the persistence of more established actors like the German Die Linke. Nevertheless, the emergent literature remains patchy and many elements of the party family still poorly understood. This handbook brings together a range of leading analysts to provide a definitive compendium, one that provides both students and scholars with an informative and easy-to-use guide to the radical left in Europe. Through utilising a common analytical framework to analyse the radical left in 19 European countries (within and outside the EU), the Palgrave Handbook of Radical Left Parties in Europe provides a wealth of comparable data on a wide number of cases to provide a sound basis for future studies. This rigorous comparative framework, allied with the unprecedented in-depth overview of the development of the European radical left over the past two decades, makes this handbook an essential starting place for those interested in all aspects of the radical left as a party family.

Left Parties in National Governments

Left Parties in National Governments PDF Author: J. Olsen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230282709
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Analyzes why Left Parties enter national government, what they do when they get there and what effect this has on them. Alongside two comparative chapters, this book features detailed case-studies of European Left Parties in government.

Crossing European Boundaries

Crossing European Boundaries PDF Author: Jaro Stacul
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845451509
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
At the turn of the millennium the state of Europe is fluid and contested, yet how this affects the everyday lives of European peoples and the ways they experience the social world they live in remains largely unexplored. Drawing upon ethnographic information from diverse European settings, this volume points to the contradictions that the project of a "Europe without boundaries" involves. In illustrating how the removal of political boundaries can create other boundaries, the articles in this volume provide alternatives to recent theorising on complexity, which takes little account of human agency.