Political Parties in Africa: Challenges for Sustained Multiparty

3.2 The external context
Political Parties in Africa: Challenges for Sustained Multiparty Democracy
Globalization as an omnipotent driver of the external context. This report will not deal
with economic globalization as such, but rather with the impact of globalization on
political party development and programmes. On the whole, the strong presence of
global financial institutions and the development policy of donors and external actors
have meant that most countries (and by extension the political parties which form
the governments of those countries) design their national socio-economic policies
in response to globally designed and agreed agendas. From this perspective, it could
be argued that the new global context of development poses both opportunities and
challenges to African political parties.
In his seminal work on globalizing party-based democracy, Burnell (2006: 25)
explains the pressures political parties in both industrially advanced and developing
countries have to face up to. He laments that if even the European Union (EU)
political parties, with their long history of democracy, cannot claim the emergence
of transnational political parties or the actualization of the political party agenda,
then what hope is there for African parties and networks to respond to these global
forces?
The current tendency of African political parties to operate simultaneously in
national, regional and global party-to-party networks and partnerships (Mohamed
Salih 2006)—although still relatively weak at the regional and global levels—could
also be seen as cause for celebration. It signals the emergence of polycentricity at best,
or at least an increased tendency towards Western-style democratic institutions and
party structures.
However, according to Scholte (2005), the counter-argument in respect to the role of
global governance institutions and party-to-party global networks is that
These democratic inputs from political parties are sorely needed in contemporary
governance of global affairs. The shift from statism to polycentrism has
generated enormous deficits of public participation in and public control of
regulatory processes in society, particularly as they concern global issues.
Shortfalls in democracy have produced some of the greatest public unease with
contemporary globalisation, as witnessed most dramatically in large street
protests as well as more pervasively in the casual conversations of everyday life
(Scholte 2005: 59).
In the particular context of Africa, free, non-state sponsored accession of African
political parties to global-party-to-party networks is a new phenomenon dating back