Preliminary Programme

This paper utilizes the transformation and ultimate demise of the Italian Socialist Party between the 1970s and 1990s to shed a new light on the crisis of traditional parties that sweeps across the West. Party scholars generally agree that parties have undergone a radical transformation: from civil society organizations, they have transformed into semi-state organs. This has created a vacuum in which populism and anti-politics thrive.
Despite decades of research into this phenomenon, the causal chain that contributes to this development is far from clear or agreed upon, largely because of the a-historical approach in most political science literature on the topic.
Based on an empirical study of internal party documents, this paper demonstrates that party agency plays an often overlooked, but crucial role in the transformation of traditional parties in Europe. Parties were not passive in the face of the erosion of their societal support base and merely became ‘dependent’ on the state as a consequence. Rather, from the second half of the 1970s, they re-invented themselves in three ways: ideologically, they ‘securalized’ being less geared towards the ideological traditions of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century; representationally, they moved from the representation of pre-existing societal cleavages to ‘statal’ representation in which they identified with the interests and institutions of the state in times of a widely-felt democratic and economic crisis and represented those to society; organizationally, parties reformed their organizations in a less-centralized, ‘lighter’ and more personalized direction, in which their emphasis was no longer on acting as a social-integrative force.
Jointly, these reforms transformed parties from ‘mass parties’ to ‘state-centered parties’ that were preoccupied with governing the state rather than articulating societal concerns. This means that parties were not subject to structural social development, but actively aimed to reform themselves in the face of social changes.
The paper takes the transformation of the Italian Socialist Party as a paradigmatic case to illustrate this transformation. The PSI started as a social integrative traditional mass party strongly embedded in Marxism, but transformed from the second half of the 1970s into a state-centered party. Its transformation played a major role in the crisis of party democracy in Italy in the 1990s. As such, the transformation of the party sheds a light on the transformation of traditional European parties at large. (Show less)

Isère is a French département, often called the « bastion of the Resistance » during the Second World War. Indeed, former soldiers and the civilian population fought for Liberty through real structures named « maquis », groups, committees, or political parties. In 1945, this general coalition disappeared to reintroduce the classical opposition between parties and political behaviours. Simultaneously, the national administration decreed that there should be an assessment of the suffering and casualties. These demands were heard by the Résistants and survivors of Nazi camps and prisons who wanted to tell their stories.
The stories were heard by the population through extremely violent descriptive speeches. The horror became a part of citizen education. Consequently, the “pedagogy of horror” was born. During fall, in the name of a patriotic ideal, teachers developed this situation opened by words, but with another work: investigations. It contributed to new stories, with a different entry, the one made by the number and the posting of the battles of the Second World War in France.
But, in that context, a specific group battled for something else: the communist militants through the first associations in Isère. They entered with another logic, the one of the Cold War, and tended to make their battles appear as specific and in the name of the French Communist Party (PCF). At that moment, they called themselves the “75.000 executed Party”, seeming to be the one, which counted the highest rate of loss during the war. If there were victims, there had to be justice. The French purge ended in 1946. But, in Isère, the Résistants said no. The local collaborators were not all judged. The communist voices brought it back to people’s mind it in a special way, a political one in the name of Stalin, against the French Government, which oscillated between politics and trials. An axis distinguished itself: the references to the Soviet politics in the patriotic war, which explained the militant speeches of the ex-fighters and surviving communists in Isère, based on all investigations about suffering memories, here for making justice. In these speeches, they imposed their ideology and decisions as much as the others, in the local States structures, by different means as such as commemorations, meetings, leaflets.
This paper will expose the research of an ideal justice, through the evolution of the communist militancy and their different political ways, in the name of the Nation. Three periods must be envisioned. From 1946 to 1948, the communist Résistants and survivors tried to define a political way to prove their role in the local martyrdom as a patriotic war memory. This stage led from 1961, to a focus on militancy by the suffering but for serving the PCF in a moral axis based on the fight of Good against Evil, the PCF against the government, by the local councils. The last period was characterized by the opening trials with communist militants becoming the accusers, serving the interests of the Nation. (Show less)

In the 1920s, the British Trades Union Congress (TUC), struggled with the idea of Communism. The idea that Communist influences would creep into the trade union movement at grassroots level, did not appeal at all to the TUCs General Council and the place which they identified as being most vulnerable to this infiltration, was through the often ignored, Trades Union Councils. These were grassroots bodies of trades union delegates meeting in a town, city or in a regional federation and the TUC tried to tackle the influence of ‘disruptive bodies,’ by setting up the Trades Union Congress Joint Consultative Committee (TUCJCC) made up of the TUC and Trades Council representatives. They also issued several circulars instructing trades councils not to allow Communist Party members to sit as delegates. This struggle between the TUC and Communism, went on for fifty years and this paper examines the relationship between a case study trades council (Peterborough) and Communism through that time. (Show less)

This paper is part of a PhD thesis on British Socialists and Australia between 1880 and 1914 (Australian National University, 2018 - present).This paper presents some of the material and evidence contained in the PhD thesis.

This paper is a study of British Socialist thought on Australia between 1880 and 1914. Contributing to British labour history, Australian labour history, and the history of British Socialism, this paper aims to explore under-studied intellectual influences in the history of British Socialism – that is, the contribution of Australia and the Australian labour movement. It will investigate the impact of Australia on the British labour movement by examining British Socialist perceptions and experiences of Australia in this period. The paper is informed by political history and intellectual history, supported by the insights of British labour history, Australian labour history and the social history of political thought. The paper uses both British material and Australian material, relating to both British labour history and Australian labour history prior to the Great War, particularly labour newspapers, Socialist newspapers, labour movement records, and the private papers of British Socialists who visited Australia before 1914. This paper uses labour history sources, to build a picture of British Socialist interests in Australia between 1880 and 1914 – especially in the areas of the Australian Labor Party, the Australian labour movement, the Australian Socialist movement, Australian politics, and Australian society. The paper uses the methods of intellectual history, political history, labour history, and the social history of political thought to identify and interpret sources - to place them in the social context of the late nineteenth-century and the context of nineteenth-century Socialist thought in Britain. The specific historical questions guiding the paper are: What influence did Australia and Australian labour experience have on British Socialists and the British labour movement? In what ways did Australian labour experience contribute to developing the political thought of British Socialists and the British labour movement before the Great War? (Show less)