NETWORK STRATEGY AND CONFIGURATION OF THE PARTY SPACE
Abstract
We put country before party”—this post-election statement by Al Gore can be fully applied to the general mood in the Central Asian countries now busy strengthening their national security and transforming civil institutions. All of them have already acquired party constructs but have so far failed to create an adequate opposition to them. The local democracies’ strong sides are better seen in the context of the difficulties they are coping with and will probably overcome.
There is a commonly shared opinion that the 2005 events in Kyrgyzstan delivered a heavy blow to the parties born in the 1990s: the majority of them are in an obvious crisis. Their ideas have lost their attractiveness,1 while they can no longer enlist new allies. “Network structures”2 or “metaaction,” “professional structures”—terms borrowed from specialists—are offered as an alternative to the “troubled political waters.”
Sympathies with the network strategy have become synonymous with the complexity of the structure of relations among political actors (prominent public figures, heads of state structures, parties and other civil institutions, etc.), efficient means of human resources management, etc. This explains why the people in power, the strengthening business circles, and society, now aware of its integrity, are showing an ever-growing interest in this topic. It may be said without exaggeration that the network tradition is experiencing another period of high popularity.
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More often than not the regional parties, which are parties of the old, pyramidal type, become a sort of an appendage to the political system. Most of them are either conglomerates of marginal bureaucrats or charismatic public movements. They simulate and imitate political actions, thus being engaged in political profanation without any signs of progress, philosophies, ideas, platforms, or positions. They lack social groups able to invest their po-litical expectations in such parties—and this is their worst failure. This is typical of all Soviet successor states in which the “party brands are moved to the regions as franchises, while political delimitation into parties is purely theoretical” (“Levyi povorot,” Russkiy zhurnal, 19 September, 2006).
It is commonly believed that developed “network "terminology is a relatively recent phenomenon authored by the Rand Corporation in its famous paper Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy (see:
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1382/
ndex.html], 8 November 2006).
One tends to agree with Alexander Bard and Jan Soderquist, two Swedish academics, who have pointed out that 11 September, 2001 will develop some time in the future into a symbol of how “the information society replaced capital-ism as the dominant paradigm” (A. Bard, J. Soderquist, Netokratia. Novaia praviashchaia elita i zhizn’ posle kapitalizma,The Stockholm School of Economics in St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg, 2004, 256 pp.).
When talking about the importance of defining the methodology of network party-genesis, we agree with Vladis-lav Surkov, President Putin’s aide, who has pointed out that today competitive ideology has become much more important than competitive commodities or services.
[www.asar.kz], 8 November, 2006.
Significantly, in Nicaragua the Sandinistas (a network structure) pulled village quack-doctors to their side.
[www.asar.kz], 8 November, 2006.
Ibidem.
Swedish academics A. Bard and J. Soderquist have described the community of “virtual entities” (or, better still,
“people of the Network”) as a “plurarchy.” Its population is guided by its own system of values—the netiquette designed to ensure the Network’s uninterrupted functioning (see: A. Bard, J, Soderquist, op. cit.).
I.A. Karimov, Mirnaia zhizn’ i bezopasnost’ strany zavisiat ot edinstva i tverdoy voli nashego naroda, Uzbekis-ton Publishers, Tashkent, 2004, p. 31.
[www.asar.kz], 8 November, 2006.
“The slogan ‘the country needs more parties, good and varied’ is deeply erroneous,” according to what S. Mark-ov has to say. We do not need many parties; the country needs several strong political parties able to compete among them-selves and able to fulfill their functions in the common political system” [www.kreml.org].
The situation in Uzbekistan is somewhat different from the rest of the region’s countries: the media form an interest group, while the criminal community has not yet developed an interest in party-building at the current stage of political modernization.
See: G. Jordan, “Gruppy davlenia, partii i sotsial’nye dvizhenia: est’ li potrebnost’ v novykh razgranicheniiakh?”Mirovaia ekonomika i mezhdunarodnye otnoshenia, No. 1, 1997.
The term is an apt description of subtle interference (see documents of Otan’s Ninth special congress [www.otan.kz]).
Its party-building experience is interesting not only because there is a religious party—the Party of Islamic Revival of Tajikistan. According to official statistics, there are 8 political parties and 2,700 NGOs there. The so-called Public Council is another important feature.
This occurs when party members call for the party not to be turned into a bulky bureaucratic structure and avoid duplication of functions of the ruling bodies.
The never-ending discussions between the political opponents and E. Ertysbaev, a former presidential aide who now serves as minister of the Republic of Kazakhstan, are fairly interesting. Seen from abroad, however, they are regarded as a way for “letting off steam.”
We can obviously not object to those who say that “without feedback between the government and civil society,without public control over power, and without raising the role of local self-administration, it will be impossible to raise the standard of living to any acceptable level” (Materialy Mezhdunarodnoy konferentsii “Dinamika politicheskikh protsessov v Tsentral’noy Azii,” 15 November, 2005 [www.asar.kz]).
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