Page 249 - DPOL202_COMPARATIVE_POLITICS_AND_GOVERNMENT_ENGLISH

Comparative Politics and Government

Notes With the emergence of a communist state in Russia in 1917 under the leadership of Lenin, one-party
system came into being. The Bolsheviks became the Communist Party that established a new kind of
political order called ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. The Stalin Constitution of 1936 frankly prohibited
formation of any other political party. It had its own form in Italy when Mussolini gradually finished
all other parties by 1925 and then established the dictatorship of his Fascist Party. So it happened in
Germany under Hitler after 1934. He finished all other parties and on 9 July, 1939 claimed: “The
political parties have now been fully abolished. The National Socialist Party (NAZI) has now become
the state.”
The model of one-partyism covered other countries of the world as well. Spain, Portugal, Mexico and
a large number of Central and East European states (like Yugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary,
Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia and East Germany) had the same experiment. After the second
World War, it had its expression in China under the leadership of Mao. We may also take note of the
fact that military dictators followed the same pattern as Egypt under Arab Socialist Union of Col.
Nasser, Burma under Socialist Party of Gen. Ne Win Indonesia under Golkar Party of Gen. Suharto
and Iraq under Baath Party of Saddam Hussain..
Some cogent arguments are given in favour of one-party system so as to remove the stigma of its
being ‘undemocratic’. These are:
1. It is urged that the single party is the reflection of national unity. Democratic pluralism sacrifices
the general interest of the nation for private and sectional interests in the cracked mirror of
parties with the result that the country no longer recognises its own image. The single party
preserves the unity of the nation and looks at all problems from the national point of view.
2. This model is said to reflect the social unity of the people. As contended by the Marxists, each
party is an expression of the social class. Since a communist society has a singular character, it
is a ‘state of the toilers, it must have only one political party. Different political parties may exist
only in a bourgeois country where different social classes exist.
3. A single-party state is ‘a bearer of ideals’, ‘an incarnation of faith’, ‘a moral or an ethical system’,
‘ a new religion’. As such, a single party can alone function in its defence. “The development of
the single party coincides with the rebirth of the state religions in the new forms they have
assumed in the contemporary world; we have a religious state rather than a State religion.”
But all such arguments are unconvincing in view of the fact that this one-party model is antithetical
to the working of a democratic system. It is another name of a totalitarian system whether of the right
(fascism) or of the left (communism). “The one-party state is founded on the assumption that the
sovereign will of the state reposes in the leader and his political elite. This authoritarian principle
found expression first in monarchies and more recently in dictatorships. Needing a monopoly of
power to survive, the dictatorship abolishes all opposition parties. In order to stifle recurring resistance,
it is driven to adopt techniques of physical coercion such as purge and liquidation, and to employ
measures of psychological coercion through extensive and vigorous propaganda campaigns.”

What do you mean by ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’?

Then, we may take up the case of bi-party system. Here power alternates between two major parties.
There may be some more parties in the country, but they are of no consequence in the struggle for
power. Britain is its leading instance where power alternates between the Conservative and the Labour
parties. The Liberal and the Communist parties are there, but they have hardly any place of significance.
Some regional parties are also there as Irish Nationalists and Plaid Cymru of Scotland, but their
position is almost negligible. So in the United States, the Democratic and the Republican parties
dominate the scene. Though Britain and the United States are the two leading cases in this direction,
one important point may be stressed here that while the two parties of Britain may be distinguished
on the basis of the policies and programmes, the lines of distinction between the two American
parties are not clear in view of the fact that they have ‘ideological similarity and issue conflict.’

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