accepted ideology that, whether planned or not, whether violent or not,
revolution seems the only term. Thus it was common to talk about the
revolutions in Eastern Europe between 1989 and 1991 which swept away
communist regimes which had, only months before, seemed unmovable. It is
interesting that such language seems to have been dropped in favour of the
more technical idea of a ‘democratic transition’, largely because of the
continued presence of the old ruling parties within the politics of the new
nations, and the lack of mass violence involved in the changes.
Right
Right, or right-wing, likeleft, derives as a term of political description from
the French Estates General which sat immediately before the French Revolu-
tion. Those who were neither aristocratic nor clerical, and therefore most
prone to beradical, were traditionally seated on the left of the chamber, the
others on the right. Hence right-wing has come to stand for forces of privilege
and traditional authority. The term has absolutely no fixed semantic content,
and can only ever be used relatively. It would be a mistake to see ‘right’ as a
synonym forconservative, and, indeed, in many contexts conservatives
themselves will protest against the label. The nearest one can come to a
definition is that the ‘right’ are those least in favour of socio-political change
in any context, unless that change be regressive to an (often imaginary) past age
(seereactionary) Even this minimalist definition can be problematic. The
changes desired by the Berlusconi government elected in Italy in 2001 are far-
reaching, and are not a return to a past, imagined or otherwise. Nevertheless,
the changes involve undoing policies precious to previous left-wing parties,
and will have the consequence of producing a society nearer to an overall
image of a conservative free-market system. In that sense then they are right-
wing, somewhat in the sense that it has always been possible to talk of the
‘radical right’.
Further aspects of being right-wing, which really follow from that defini-
tion, are that the right tends to believe in authority and obedience rather than
participation and liberty, to stick to values that fit well with their contemporary
societies and to defend whatever system of privilege exists in their society.
(Sociologically, it is of course also the case that the more one benefits from the
existing system, the more likely one is to be right-wing.) It is not at all
uncommon, for example, to hear analysts of communist politics talk of the
‘right wing’ of the party, by which they have not meant those whose ideology
is more pro-Western, but rather those who wished to retain the pertaining
Soviet or other communist system, rather than risk experiments with a more
liberal socialism. During the revolutions against communism in the Soviet
Union and its eastern bloc in the period 1989–91 right-wing invariably meant
Right