Parties as Governments in Eurasia, 1913-1991

This book examines the political parties which emerged on the territories of the former Ottoman, Qing, Russian, and Habsburg empires and not only took over government power but merged with government itself. It discusses how these parties, disillusioned with previous constitutional and parliamentary reforms, justified their takeovers with programs of controlled or supervised economic and social development, including acting as the mediators between the various social and ethnic groups in the respective territories. It pays special attention to nation-building through the party, to institutions (both constitutional and de facto), and to the global and comparative aspects of one-party regimes. It explores the origins of one-party regimes in China, Czechoslovakia, Korea, the Soviet Union, Turkey, Yugoslavia, and beyond, the roles of socialism and nationalism in the parties' approaches to development and state-building, as well the pedagogical aspirations of the ruling elites. Hence, by revisiting the dynamics of the transition from the earlier imperial formations via constitutionalism to one-party governments, and by assessing the internal and external dynamics of one-party regimes after their establishment, the book more precisely locates this type of regime within the contemporary world's political landscape. Moreover, it emphasises that one-party regimes thrived on both sides of the Cold War and in some of the non-aligned states, and that although some state socialist one-party regimes collapsed in 1989-1991, in other places historically dominant parties and new parties have continued to monopolize political power.
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Ivan Sablin is a research group leader in the Department of History at Heidelberg University, Germany. Egas Moniz Bandeira is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Introduction Ivan Sablin and Egas Moniz Bandeira 1. The birth of Anfu China, East Asia's first party-state: Towards a constitutional dictatorship of the gentry, 1916-1918 Ernest Ming-tak Leung 2. The Communist International: A party of parties confronting interwar internationalisms, 1920-1925 Vsevolod Kritskiy 3. The Left Opposition and the practices of parliamentarianism within the Bolshevik Party, 1923-1924 Alexander V. Reznik 4. Importing and exporting ideas of nationalism and state-building: The experience of Turkey's Republican People's Party, 1923-1950 Paul Kubicek 5. Competing with the marketplace: The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)'s Department of Propaganda and its political publishing program, 1924-1937 Christopher A. Reed 6. Aspirations for a mass political party in prewar imperial Japan: Bureaucracy, the reformist right, and the creation of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association Bruce Grover and Egas Moniz Bandeira 7. Constitution-making in the informal Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, East Asia, and Inner Asia, 1945-1955 Ivan Sablin 8. Work teams, leading small groups, and the making of modern Chinese bureaucracy, 1929-1966 Long Yang 9. From revolutionary comrades to "mothers of the nation": The Workers' Party of Korea's approach to the role of women in the 1950s-1960s Natalia Matveeva 10. The dawn before one-party dominance: South Korea's road to party politics under the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction, 1961-1963 Kyonghee Lee 11. The Yugoslav federation and the concept of one ruling party in its final hour Jure Gašpari- 12. The vanguard's changing tempo: Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and government institutions, 1921-1990 Adéla Gjuri-ová