DEMOCRATIC POLITICS GLOBALLY

Dialogue on political parties and global democratisation

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Background and justification
Katarina Sehm Patomäki and Marko Ulvila

During the past two decades of globalisation political parties have constituted one sphere of social action where the process of increasing international interaction has not been remarkable. While governments, corporations, social movements and non-governmental organisations have phenomenally increased global co-operation and networking, political parties have to a large extend remained limited to national or at most regional spheres.

Recently there has been increasing interest in the international interaction of political parties and more debates have emerged about transnational political parties. One triggering process has been the creation of pan-European parties in the European Union. People who work on issues of participatory democracy feel that the birth of these trans-national European parties is mainly a result of the European Commission's policy of funding only political parties that have a pan-EU character. Therefore, these parties are not a consequence of natural evolution from a national to a pan-European level in a bottom-up manner. The European process has influenced the thinking about political parties in trans-national setting and their role in all polities globally.

The hegemonic economic globalisation is creating a very peculiar and alarming consequence for political processes. This consequence is that whether we are a communist left, a democratic socialist, a green, a conservative or a centrist mainstream party workers, the mainstream political elite tends to think that there is no alternative (TINA) but to negotiate terms of surrender to corporate globalisation. This is not acceptable to the majority of the people on this planet. And the most painful paradox of our times is precisely this. Irrespective of what the majority of the people on this planet feel, the neo-liberal economic globalisers are able to co-opt/coax/coerce the 'mainstream' parties into succumbing to manipulations of the global capital. The voters' helplessness regarding issues of economic democracy is hampering their ability to contribute their might in influencing the party system nationally or globally.

In this political atmosphere, an un-nuanced debate on global parties can be very counterproductive. At this historical juncture a significant part of decision making on everyday governance is taking place in the trans-national institutions of global governance. There is an objective need for some form of political instrument that will articulate, represent, communicate and assert people's voices to these trans-national institutions of global governance. In the contemporary democracies this role has primarily been performed by political parties within the confines of national boundaries.

We need to reflect on the content as well as form of the political organisation from people's point of view to influence the existing and emerging institutions of global governance. Since we are most used to thinking about parties as the appropriate instrumentality we take the discussion on global parties only as a starting point and not as a dogmatic or fixed point of reference. We need to address the specificities of culture, economy, geography, identity, historical experience/memory while at the same time addressing the universality of the central urge for freedom and self-rule for all individuals on the planet. This is the inherent force of democracy and democratic parties.

With the realisation that the debate on global parties cannot ignore the debate on the health, possibilities and crisis of the existing parties within their national contexts, we have titled our dialogue 'Democratic Politics Globally'. The relationship of the party system with the various utopia and dreams for realising the goal of deepening democracy globally cannot be discussed in the abstract. We wish to debate on the proposals for global political parties from the concrete context of grassroot to national experience. We hope that we are able to bring the most relevant questions to the table.

The dialogue is organised by the Network Institute for Global Democratisation (NIGD) and is part of the project 'Elements for a Dialogue on Global Political Party Formations'. The project aims at identifying topics for further discussion on the party system and transnational political party formations. The first dialogue took place in Helsinki, Finland in September and second one in New Delhi in November. Further dialogues were held at the polycentric World Social Forums in Caracas and Bamako in January 2006 and Caracas in March 2006.


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