Pressure Groups and Political Culture (Routledge Revivals): A Comparative Study by Francis Castles

Author:Francis Castles [Castles, Francis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781135195311
Google: 53mMAgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17510981
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

The value-oriented nature of politics

Before dealing with the prevalence of value-oriented attitude groups in these countries, it must be remarked that the phenomenon of colonization of groups by parties is, of course, a major aspect of the value-orientation of these political systems. It is precisely because parties are value-oriented and ideologically exclusive that they desire to build up ancillary groupings, and it is the exclusive nature of their belief systems that make inter-party or inter-group consensus impossible. Neither the Communist nor Fascist millennarian beliefs permit of any compromise with the system, there is no middle way between sell-out or takeover. This is not true of either parties or groups in the Anglo-American system. There is a consensus about values, and dispute is typically about the specific regulations used to realize these values. Thus the British peace movement, with the miniscule exception of the British Peace Committee, which is Communist controlled, has attempted to realize the aim of nuclear disarmament without ever trying to change the form of government. Moreover, the movement was very conscientious in trying to foster an anti-Communist image. On the other hand, as we have seen, the largest of the French peace organizations was Communist dominated, and expressed the same antagonism to the form of the state.

The dominance of the value-oriented approach to politics in this type of political culture is perhaps most classically illustrated by the French Army intervention in 1958. Until this time the armies of Western Europe had been regarded as traditionally politically neutral, indeed they are still not viewed by Anglo-American observers as pressure groups at all. After World War II a number of factors combined to make the army politically aware, and conscious of its alienation from the community at large. The conflicting demands for the army’s loyalty from Vichy, Algiers, and London itself had a part in this. The Indo-Chinese war and the Algerian conflict was to complete the process. The army blamed the politicians at home for stabbing it in the back in Indo-China. With these strains was developed a generalized belief, which explained how all the problems might be solved in a simplistic way. This belief was the theory of ‘revolutionary war’, the view that international Communism is waging a world-wide conflict by means of guerilla war, propaganda, insurrection and terrorism. The justification of the French army became the part it was playing in an ideological world crusade against Communism. In face of its enemies the army’s solution was to emulate the Communists’ tactics; to set up a rival ideology, a ‘myth’ in Sorel’s sense, which could capture the minds of the Algerian Muslim population, and with the ideology utilize such guerilla tactics as the development of ‘parallel hierarchies’ of authority, intensive propaganda and regrouping of population. The strain which forced the army into this set of beliefs was defeat at the hands of small terrorist forces; the only way to absolve the army from blame was to posit a world-wide conspiracy, and traitors at home. The simplistic nature

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