The Cypriot Paradox: The Communist Way towards Political Liberalism

Abstract

AKEL, the communist party of Cyprus, displays a divergent pattern of social and political activity within the Cypriot socio-political spectrum and manifests a specific mode of reaction towards political events. This article, through the use of a recurring paradox, aims to analyse the ontological and the political meaning underlying the historical importance of AKEL’s activity within the Cypriot world. It is argued that AKEL is an authentic formation of the Cypriot environment. As such, it condenses a collective historical and synthetic response to the accumulation of mental and social places within a specific historical era. Despite its own declared intentions, in the long-term it works, among many other social and political forces, as an institutional bridge towards applying upon the Cypriot land basic values of social and political liberalism. Of course, this assumption creates a paradox as far as both the way AKEL understands itself and the way outsiders have conceptualised it. And it is this paradox that contributes to the blocking of nomadic liberalism which throughout history is inherent in the structures of the political party itself and in divergent political movements within the Greek Cypriot society as well. Yet, a paradox accumulates distortions, it spells out its own solution and it therefore calls for a deconstructive process. Such distortions have appeared in the modern history of the island, creating “zones of lost time”. These are the zones whereby historicity as a progressive rupture with the reified and the ontological world, and the institutional infrastructures as well, is cancelled or is kept at a slow pace.