has never been the sole dimension of political life. In Europe, for
instance, cleavages between Catholics and Protestants, and between
urban and rural areas have played a distinctive role alongside the
dominant class cleavages that fueled the debate between socialist and
conservative parties.^71 The existence of other cleavages, however, did
not imply that the left–right division was not operative. It simply
made its translation into discourse and institutions more complex,
giving rise to hybrid species such as Christian-democratic or agrarian
parties. The same is true today. The issues and cleavages of the day
tend to be incorporated into the core left–right dichotomy, by voters
who read them through familiar lenses, and by candidates and parties
who have good strategic reasons to integrate rising preoccupations
into their programs.^72 Even scholars who speak of emerging political
cleavages around new values acknowledge that these “new” cleavages
remain deeply anchored in the left–right division, and sometimes slip
into calling the “new” social forces at work the “new left” and the
“new right.”^73
Fourth, many internationalists would counter that world politics is
a distinct realm, a system where power rules and in which ideological
debates about equality play little role. For realism, the dominant
school of thought in international relations, domestic politics and
ideologies have less importance than systemic factors, and the pre-
vailing balance of power best explains the behavior of states. Countries
go to war because of security interests, not because they are motivated
by ideas from the left or from the right. Classical in the study of
international relations, this standpoint has been a subject of debate for
years, and these debates cannot be addressed, let alone settled, here.
Two arguments can nevertheless be advanced. The first is that even
(^71) Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, “Cleavage Structures, Party Systems,
and Voter Alignments: An Introduction,” in Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein
Rokkan (eds.),Party Systems and Voter Alignments, New York, Free Press,
72 1967, pp. 1–64.
Jacques Thomassen and Hermann Schmitt, “Policy Representation,”European
Journal of Political Research, vol. 32, no. 2, October 1997, 165–84; Herbert
Kitschelt,The Transformation of European Social Democracy, Cambridge
73 University Press, 1994.
Ronald Inglehart,Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society, pp. 292–300;
Russell J. Dalton,Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices: The Erosion of
Political Support in Advanced Industrial Democracies, Oxford University
Press, 2004, p. 144.
28 Left and Right in Global Politics