Understanding Political Ideologies
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1914 to the fall of communism in 1989–91), and particularly during the Cold War period (1945–90), international politics was structured along ideological lines, as the capitalist West confronted the communist East. However, since around the 1960s, the ideological landscape has been transformed. Not only have major changes occurred within established or classical ideologies (for instance, in the rise of the New Left (see p. 94) and the New Right (see p. 62), but a series of so-called ‘new’ political ideologies have also emerged. The most significant of these are set out in Figure 1.3. The designation of these ideologies as ‘new’ can nevertheless be misleading, as each of them has roots that stretch back to the nineteenth century, if not beyond. New ideologies typically have a complex and ambiguous relationship with classical ideologies. This stems from the fact that these ideologies evolved both by applying established ideological thinking to new or more modern issues or concerns, or by opening up fresh ideological terrain that in some ways goes beyond the parameters of established ideological thinking (as in the case of radical feminism (see pp. 197–8) or deep ecology (see pp. 221–2)). New ideologies are thus new in the sense that they have given particular areas of ideological debate – gender equality, environmental sustainability, cultural diversity and so on – a prominence they never previously enjoyed. In the process, they have altered the focus and sometimes the terms of ideological debate. This has happened in at least three ways:
‘Classical’ ideologies
‘New’ ideologies
Liberalism Conservatism Socialism Nationalism Anarchism Fascism (?)
Feminism Green ideology Multiculturalism Fundamentalism Populism (?) Postcolonialism
Figure 1.3 ‘Classical’ and ‘new’ ideologies
z z First, there has been a shift away from economics and towards culture. Liberalism, conservatism and socialism were primarily concerned with issues of economic organization, or at least their moral vision was grounded in a particular economic model. By contrast, and in their various ways, new ideologies are more interested in culture than in economics: their primary concerns tend to be orientated around people’s values, beliefs and ways of life, rather than economic well-being or even social justice. This has happened, in part, because the ideological gulf between capitalism and socialism has narrowed markedly, market-based economic arrangements (of one kind or another) having become almost universal. z z Second, fuelled by the general trend towards diversity, there has been a shift from social politics to identity politics (see p. 232). Identity links the personal to the
social, in seeing the individual as ‘embedded’ in a particular cultural, social, institutional and ideological context, but it also highlights the scope for personal choice and self-definition, reflecting a general social trend towards individualization . In this sense, new ideologies such as feminism, green ideology and fundamentalism provide individuals with a range of ideological options rather than offering worked-out sets of
Individualization: The process through which people are encouraged to see themselves as individuals, possibly at the expense of their sense of social/moral responsibility.
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