European Democratization Since 1800: Past and Present

European Democratization since 1800 Edited by

John Garrard, Vera Tolz and Ralph White

European Democratization since 1800

Also by John Garrard LEADERSHIP AND POWER IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TOWNS THE ENGLISH AND IMMIGRATION: English Reaction to Jewish Emigration

Also by Vera Tolz * RUSSIAN ACADEMICIANS AND THE REVOLUTION * THE DEMISE OF THE USSR: From Communism to Interdependence (editor with Iain Elliot) THE USSR’S EMERGING MULTIPARTY SYSTEM

Also by Ralph White RESISTANCE IN EUROPE, 1939–1945 (editor)

* From the same publishers

European Democratization since 1800 Edited by John Garrard Senior Lecturer in British History and Politics University of Salford

Vera Tolz Reader in Russian History and Politics University of Salford

and Ralph White Senior Fellow Department of Politics and Contemporary History University of Salford

First published in Great Britain 2000 by

MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0–333–73894–2 First published in the United States of America 2000 by ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 0–312–22383–8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data European democratization since 1800 / edited by John Garrard, Vera Tolz and Ralph White. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–312–22383–8 1. Democracy—Europe—History. 2. Democratization—Europe– –History. I. Garrard, John. II. Tolz, Vera. III. White, Ralph, 1935– . JN9.E87 1999 321.8’094'09034—dc21 99–15592 CIP Selection, editorial matter and Chapters 1 and 14 © John Garrard, Vera Tolz and Ralph White 2000 Chapter 3 © John Garrard 2000 Chapter 5 © Ralph White 2000 Chapter 10 © Vera Tolz 2000 Chapters 2, 4, 6–9, 11–13 © Macmillan Press Ltd 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 09

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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Contents Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors

vii ix

1

Introduction John Garrard, Vera Tolz and Ralph White

2

Liberal Democratic Theory: Some Reflections on Its History and Its Present Adrian Oldfield

Part 1

6

The Nineteenth Century

3

Democratization in Britain John Garrard

4

Bearing the Stamp of History: The Elitist Route to Democracy in the Netherlands Robert van der Laarse

Part 2

1

27

50

Between the World Wars

5

Democracy and War Ralph White

77

6

The Attempt at Democratization under Weimar Stefan Berger

96

7

The Corporatist Threat and the Overthrow of the Spanish Second Republic Angel Smith

Part 3 8

116

Post-1945

Restoration and Stability: The Creation of a Stable Democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany Mark Roseman

v

141

vi Contents

Part 4 9

Post-Communist Eastern Europe

Post-Communist East-Central Europe: Dilemmas of Democratization Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone

10

Russia’s Democratic Transition and Its Challenges Vera Tolz

11

Insiders, Mafiosi and Stationary Bandits: Some Stories about Russian Capitalism Philip Hanson

163 191

206

12

Citizenship and Democracy Elizabeth Teague

225

13

Democratic Destination: The Examples of Britain and Italy James Newell

243

14

Conclusions John Garrard, Vera Tolz and Ralph White

264

Index

275

Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank David Garrard and Judy White for their generous help in preparing the manuscript for publication, and Keith Povey and Elaine Towns for their splendid copy-editing. For all sins and omissions, we are entirely responsible. JOHN GARRARD VERA TOLZ RALPH WHITE

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Notes on the Contributors Stefan Berger is Senior Lecturer at the School of European Studies, University of Wales, Cardiff. His most recent publications include The Search for Normality: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany since 1800 (1997) and Ungleiche Schwestern? Die britische Labour Party und die deutsche SPD, 1900–1931 (1997; English, 1994). John Garrard is Senior Lecturer in British History at the University of Salford. His publications include The English and Immigration: English Reaction to Jewish Emigration 1880–1910 (1970); and Leadership and Power in the Nineteenth’ Century Towns (1983). Philip Hanson is Professor of Political Economy of Russia and Eastern Europe at the University of Birmingham, UK. He is the author of a number of books and journal articles on the Soviet and Russian economies. Rob Van der Laarse is Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Regional Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Bevoogding and Bevinding (1989) (‘Paternalism and Pietism’), which was awarded the Erasmus Study Prize in 1990. He has also published widely on various aspects of European cultural history and Dutch religious and political culture. James Newell is Lecturer in Politics and Contemporary History at the University of Salford. He has published articles on various aspects of British and Italian Politics. Adrian Oldfield is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at Salford University. His publications include Citizenship and Community: Civic Republicanism and the Modern World (1990). Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Carleton University (Canada) and Associate of Davis Center of Russian Studies and Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University. Her books include Perspective for Change in Communist Societies (1979); ix

x Notes to Contributors

Communism in Eastern Europe (1984); and Russia and Nationalism in Central Asia: The Case of Tadzhikistan (1970). Mark Roseman is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Keele University. His publications include Recasting the Ruhr 1945–1958: Manpower, Economic Recovery and Labour Relations (1992) and Generations in Conflict. Youth Revolt and Generation Formation in Germany 1770–1968 (1995). Angel Smith is Lecturer in Modern Spanish History at the University of Leeds. He has published An Historical Dictionary of Spain (1996) and co-edited Nationalism and the Nation in the Iberian Peninsula: Competing and Conflicting Identities (1996), The Crisis of 1898: Colonial Redistribution and Nationalism Mobilization (1998), and Nationalism, Labour and Ethnicity, 1870–1939 (1998). Elizabeth Teague is Senior Analyst with the Jamestown Foundation, USA. She has published widely on various aspects of Soviet and Russian politics. Vera Tolz is Reader in Russian History and Politics at the University of Salford. Her publications include The USSR’s Emerging Multiparty System (1990); and Russian Academicians and the Revolution (1997). Ralph White is Senior Fellow in the Department of Politics and Contemporary History, University of Salford. He edited a volume on Resistance in Europe 1939–1945 (1973) and has published chapters and articles on inter-war Europeanism.

1 Introduction John Garrard, Vera Tolz and Ralph White

The new wave of democratization in Southern Europe in the 1970s and in Latin America in the 1980s made democratic transition a highly fashionable subject for academic research. The collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 further increased scholars’ interest in democratization. Compared with the vast body of literature on the topic this book differs by its focus on Europe and its truly historical approach. It begins by discussing successful democratizations in Britain and the Netherlands in the nineteenth century and concludes with the analysis of post-Communist transitions in East Europe and Russia. Although discussing the earlier periods to some extent, most recent works concentrate on the latest wave of democratization. Their historical background is very limited. This is because transitions in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are usually compared only with processes in Latin-American countries. 1 But ‘the design’ of a future polity and economic system has been imported by post-Communist countries from Western Europe and the United States of America, not from Latin America. From the outset, it is essential to define our terminology. Democratization, is first of all, about establishing popular access to elections and to policy. Some observers even regard electoral access as a minimum definition of democracy. This entails not merely allowing elections to take place, but tolerating whatever changes of government follow in their wake. But are free and fair elections sufficient as the sole test of democracy? We wish to argue that, alongside open access to the electoral process, democratization is also about establishing access to policy-making for all groups who decide they require it. Access here is not used synonymously with influence, though it does imply the notion of opportunity. In fact, even in this form, it represents something of an 1

2 Introduction

ideal model against which the real democracy-claiming world can be judged. It also implies that democratization may still have some way to go even in those Western European polities that East European political systems perceive as standing by the winning post. Democratization is also about liberalization: that is to say, it is about establishing the liberal freedoms of speech, association, media, the rule of law and, more generally, the freedom of individuals to pursue their lives and do as they wish so long as their actions do not constrict the freedom of others to do the same. The only freedom that seems separable from democratization, at least so far as contemporary dictatorial regimes are concerned, and for many only latterly, is economic freedom. In fact, the relationship between this freedom and liberal democracy is complex, contradictory and unresolved. Many authoritarian polities in Europe and beyond have been prepared to privatize and capitalize while resolutely refusing to democratize, or even very seriously to liberalize in anything but an economic sense. Yet, in the West, capitalism has tended to be seen as an essential underpinning of liberal democracy. The development of liberal-democratic theory from the seventeenth century onwards, and tensions between democratic practices and liberal values, are explored in this volume in the introductory chapter by Adrian Oldfield. Democratization has not only a theory but also a geography and history, and it is our understanding of these that gives the present work its purpose and shape. First, the book is informed by the concept of Europe as a distinct entity whose foundation is primarily cultural in a sense that transcends the political, economic and geographical. Within this framework, Eastern Europe and Russia have always belonged to Europe, even during the Cold War, when its political and economic systems were profoundly different from those in the West. Today, former Communist countries of the East cherish the hope of integrating into Western political and economic structures. Therefore, we must explore how Western European countries have evolved to become what they are today. Second, the chapters assume a concept of democratization as an intermittent process concentrated, at least in the European and North American context, into four periods since the eighteenth century. The essays are grouped within those periods. The first ‘successful’ phase of democratization occurred in the nineteenth century in Western and Northern Europe, and is examined in John Garrard’s chapter on Great Britain and Robert van den Laarse’s on the Netherlands. Garrard argues that most of the preconditions for successful democratization (political

John Garrard, Vera Tolz and Ralph White 3

elites who shared liberal values, a vibrant civil society and a relatively high level of economic prosperity, among others) were firmly in place in Britain during democratization. According to Garrard, it helped Britain that the process of democratization was unconscious. As there was no model for the elites and society to follow, democratization could be gradual and staged. Similarly, in the Netherlands, the ruling elites could allow the working class gradual access to the electoral process and at no point did its demands destabilize the system. As van den Laarse argues, the reason for the success of democratization in the Netherlands can be found in a businesslike manner of negotiations on the distribution of the means of political control among key groups in society, none of which aspired to govern on its own. The second phase, that of inter-war Europe, is introduced by Ralph White’s linking chapter on the elevation of democratization (in theory and practice) as a result of the First World War. From that point onwards, democratic values become widely valued and many governments, justifiably or not, start calling themselves democratic. The postVersailles stage of advance and retreat in both old-established and newly-created states is considered in two well-known cases of failure: Stefan Berger’s chapter on Weimar Germany and Angel Smith’s on the Spanish Second Republic. 2 Despite the existence of some preconditions for successful democratization in Weimar, the traditional elites were largely hostile to democracy. Moreover, despite the fact that, in US President Woodrow Wilson’s words, the post-1918 world was supposed to become ‘safe for democracy’, consolidated democracies did little to support democratization processes elsewhere. Therefore the democratic experiment failed in Weimar: Berger pointedly describes Weimar as ‘the republic without republicans’. In interwar Spain, where over 60 per cent of people were illiterate, large segments of the population simply could not be incorporated into a newly-emerging democratic order, Smith maintains. The third, post-1945 wave among states and societies defeated in the Second World War, distinguished by having democratic constitutions imposed upon them, is analyzed by Mark Roseman in the case of West Germany. Roseman provides a fascinating continuation to Berger’s analysis. Roseman shows, how in a different international environment and with different popular expectations and views on Germany’s place in the world, similar political institutions and similar elites produced entirely different results from those in the Weimar Republic. The processes and prospects of the fourth phase of democratization – still problematic in Eastern Europe and even more so in Russia – are

4 Introduction

considered by Theresa Rakowska-Harmstone and Vera Tolz, respectively. Political democratization in post-Communist Europe is especially thorny because it must proceed simultaneously with two other major adjustments. First, governments in post-Communist countries believe that political changes have to be accompanied by economic reform aimed at replacing centrally-planned economies with a free market. The impact of capitalist developments on Russian politics is discussed in this volume by Philip Hanson. Another issue is the presence of numerous ethnic minority groups in the newly-independent states of the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe. Accommodation of their rights is difficult for polities where ethnic nationalism has traditionally prevailed over a civic one. In a country aspiring to be democratic, citizenship laws, which define membership of a nation, have to address carefully the question of the relationship between core and minority ethnic groups. How the newly-independent states and East European countries deal with this problem is discussed in Elizabeth Teague’s chapter on citizenship and democracy. The volume concludes with a comparative analysis of the democratic strengths and deficits in contemporary Britain and Italy, and with the editors’ observations about the conditions that facilitate successful democratization. The evidence of this overview suggests that the history of European democratization is both erratic and problematic. The democratic destination of recent changes in Russia and Eastern Europe is far from clear, and the interest of the inter-war period arises from the way in which the widespread and genuine democratic aspirations of these years were confounded as deeply illiberal and undemocratic values and structures asserted themselves. Our views of this subject are not Whig: as scholars we are not committed to any view of either the inevitability or desirability of democratization, or that, culturally or ideologically, ‘Europe’ can only be defined in liberal-democratic terms. What also emerges is that, in the second inter-war phase, democratic values and processes had become explicit in character and potentially universal in application. This gives the subject a distinctive political geography, as democratization now presented itself as an exportable commodity whose appeal is rooted in the apparent success, in the first phase, of the role models of the USA and certain more advanced societies of Northern and Western Europe. Thus the history of democratization involved a characteristic movement from West to East Central and Eastern Europe in the inter-war years, and since 1945 to Southern and Iberian Europe, the Far East, South Africa and Latin America. A fundamental dimension that arises, therefore, is the relevance and

John Garrard, Vera Tolz and Ralph White 5

applicability of democratic values and processes that developed characteristically in North America and North Western Europe to the rest of the continent, and indeed the world.

Notes and references 1. Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reform in Eastern Europe and Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); David Potter, David Goldblatt, Margaret Kiloh, Paul Lewis (eds), Democratization (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997) covers democratization processes everywhere from the nineteenth century onwards. Because of the breadth of the coverage, this book does not provide such a comprehensive survey of European democratization as does our volume. 2. Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, O: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), p. 16 of which describes this period as the first phase of retreat of democracy. We think, however, that the seriousness with which attempts at democratization were undertaken by governments in Germany and other countries in this period justifies our description of this period as the second wave of democratization.

2 Liberal Democratic Theory: Some Reflections on Its History and Its Present Adrian Oldfield

What this chapter seeks to do is to trace some of the lineages of liberal democratic theory from the point where it originated in liberal, constitutionalist opposition to the royal absolutism of the late seventeenth century. It seeks, further, to account for the threat posed to liberal theory by the imminence of democratic politics in the nineteenth century, and for the disillusionment with liberal democratic theory, as a normative enterprise, that resulted from the experience of the mass politics of radical right nationalism of the inter-war years of the twentieth century. Finally, it suggests that much, though by no means all, of the thrust of liberal democratic theory in recent years has been with how to make the theory more democratic, with a view to the reform and restructuring of existing liberal democracies. Liberal theory came first, though it had no name initially, and emerged particularly in seventeenth-century England. One of its preoccupations was to provide a compelling account of political obligation for a post-Reformation age that had lost the certainties of medieval Christendom. In the context of discussing the genesis and development of liberal democratic theory, however, it is not this aspect of liberal theory that is of major concern. Rather, and in the thinking of a person such as John Locke, what is of interest is the attempt to place moral limits on the realm of politics and government. The context, within which Locke wrote his Two Treatises of Government (1690)1 was of course resistance to the perceived absolutist and arbitrary pretensions of the restored Stuart monarchy. ‘Civil’ government was to be limited in two ways: it was to be limited by being subject to, and not above, the law; and it was to be limited concerning the extent of human affairs over which its authority could legitimately be exercised. 6

Adrian Oldfield 7

This latter consideration was given expression in a doctrine of natural rights, which, for Locke, were men’s [sic] rights to their ‘Lives, Liberties and Estates, which I call by the general name, Property.’2 The function of civil government was thus solely to secure and protect these rights, and if it persistently and deliberately failed to do this, for whatever reason, or strayed beyond its bounds, then a right of resistance could be invoked, because the relationship between people and government was a contractual one, based on trust in performance of the terms of the contract. What was emphasized by employing a doctrine of natural rights was that individuals needed protection against government as much as against each other. Civil government itself was to ensure the latter, and the terms of the contract were designed to secure the former. This limitation of government to the protection of individual natural rights has had an implication for liberal theory, and later for liberal democratic theory, that has lasted until the present day, even though we now seldom talk of natural rights. A sharp separation was created between the domain of human affairs that was properly the subject of political determination, and the domain that was not properly so subject – the realm of what would later be called ‘civil society’. There are a number of points to make here. First, the separation of the political realm from that of civil society has often been presented in terms of a distinction between the public and the private, with the public being coterminous with the political. This, of course, is a mistake, for much that takes place in civil society is highly public in character, especially those aspects of civil society having to do with economic matters – the business of carrying on economic enterprises and earning a living. Within liberal theory, even one in which the prime, perhaps the sole, purpose of politics is to protect the natural rights of individuals, intervention in civil society is justified only if it serves that overriding purpose – to ensure, for example, that the law of contract is honoured, and that economic enterprises are carried on without fraud or deceit. A second point that emerges from the separation of the political realm from civil society – and it follows from the public/private distinction – is that liberal theory regarded the family as being firmly within the private domain, and sanctioned a thoroughly patriarchal view of the exercise of authority – some would say power – within the family. We must not be anachronistic here, but the idea of authority being exercised in the family by the father, or male head of household, is only very slowly beginning to yield, even in the last days of the

8 Liberal Democratic Theory

twentieth century. The point is that a liberal theory concerned with the protection of individuals’ natural rights, and in which the individuals are, or were originally, men, has found it extremely difficult to incorporate women in anything other than a formal, legal sense. In practice, the sexual division of labour within civil society and the family remains relatively untouched. There is, finally, the way in which liberal theory has approached the political realm itself. Within liberal theory, even if one discards the device of the contract, individuals come to politics with antecedently given ends, purposes and desires, and it is their fulfilment for which the political realm exists, if not to ensure, then at least to make possible. The political realm has instrumental value: it is necessary, because without it few human ends or aspirations are attainable. Nowhere has this function of the political realm been more starkly and dramatically advanced than in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), with his description of the natural condition of mankind. 3 Except for the energetic, the ambitious, the well-favoured, human beings find their fulfilment outside the political realm, in civil society. For some, this fulfilment will be divinely inspired, as it was for Locke, and will consist in doing their duty by God; for others, it will consist in learning a trade or craft, and practising it to a degree of excellence; for still others, it will consist in caring for and tending a family, bringing children to the point of responsible adulthood; for many, it will consist of all of these, and many more. For few, however, will it consist in taking part, except in a most remote and indirect way, in creating and maintaining the political arrangements that make such fulfilments possible. It is in this sense that liberal theory is not democratic. Leaving aside early Christian communities, certain Catholic orders – for example, the Dominicans4 – and movements such as the Levellers of the seventeenth-century English Revolution, democracy had few advocates between fifth- and fourth-century Athens and the latter part of the eighteenth century. Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote within the same social contract tradition as Hobbes and Locke, but there the similarity ends. His critique of earlier contract thinkers in part concerned their account of political obligation: they had not taken seriously enough the Hobbesian idea that no obligation can arise upon a person who has not taken it upon her/himself – in short, who has not consented.5 In his critique, Rousseau echoed Sir Robert Filmer’s thinking that all people are born into existing political arrangements, which they had had no part in choosing.6 Rousseau made the social contract a constantly renewable one, and not a one-off event in some perhaps remote past which bound

Adrian Oldfield 9

all subsequent generations. The legitimacy of any set of political arrangements depended not on passive acquiescence, but on active and repeatedly-given consent – this consent to be given by every person. The first question which Rousseau’s citizen assembly was to ask itself every time it met was whether it was satisfied with the political arrangements already in place.7 Rousseau made social contract theory radically democratic in the level of participation it demanded of citizens. It was not, however, Rousseau’s radical democracy that contributed most to a theory of liberal democracy, when that eventually emerged. Whereas in liberal theory the term ‘private citizen’ made perfect sense, as it still does (for some, unfortunately) in the late twentieth century, in Rousseau’s thinking that expression was an oxymoron – the word ‘citizen’ defined a public, and even more a political, person and role. Here, Rousseau parted company with liberal theory, for nothing was to be excluded from consideration by the citizen assembly which genuinely concerned the shared interests of its members as equal political actors. More than this was involved, though. In liberal theory, the arena of human fulfilment was that of civil society; for Rousseau, it was in the individual’s role as citizen. Politics was not just necessary, because of the frailties of human nature, it was the realm where that nature could be ennobled. We shall find echoes of Rousseau in both Tocqueville and J. S. Mill, though not of his endorsement of radical democracy. Thomas Paine met with a similar reception. His support for both the American and French revolutionaries was vigorously democratic, and demotic in style and tone. 8 In speaking directly to the people, rather than to a coterie of elevated philosophers, he reminded them not just of their natural rights to liberty and property, but also of the political right they had to determine the form of their government. Rejecting all forms of hereditary privilege, he put in their place a radical egalitarian democracy. While his thinking found some reflection in the demands of the Chartist movement of the 1830s and 1840s in Britain, his contribution to a developing theory of liberal democracy was slight, because democracy as an ideal did not, as we shall see, receive much support within liberal frames of thinking. The kind of democratic thinking that contributed more directly to a theory of liberal democracy is found in the thinking of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, particularly the latter. In his Essay on Government (1820),9 Mill argued for a wide, though middle-class, franchise. His argument was that people were self-interested, and that if some were, as they must be, entrusted with political power, then we should expect them to use that power for their own advantage. The only way to prevent this,

10 Liberal Democratic Theory

Mill thought, was to bring about a coincidence of interest between those who held political power and those over whom it was exercised. Hence the need for a reasonably wide franchise – and Mill thought the interests of the working classes could be subsumed under those of the middle classes – and, in the British context, for fairly short Parliaments, in order that politicians could not abuse their power.10 If this was an argument for democracy, however, it was an argument out of necessity – that was the extent of the merit of democratic arrangements. For others, who both preceded and succeeded James Mill, there was a certain inevitability about democracy, explicit in the cases of Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill, implicit in the thinking contained in The Federalist Papers (1788),11 where the principal figure is James Madison. If, for Locke, the main threat to limited, civil government came from the abuse by monarchs of executive and prerogative power, for Madison, the threat came from what, in Federalist Paper 10, he called ‘faction’.12 The powerful democratic rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence (1776), with its uncompromising opening words, ‘We, the people …,’ had been seen under the Articles of Confederation, by those who were to frame the US Constitution, to lead to an orgy of almost populist legislative initiatives in the individual states, such that significant, and valuable, minority interests either had already been, or would be, swamped by majority power.13 The phenomenon of ‘faction’ – any organized interest that would, if permitted, use political power to further its own advantage – could not, Madison thought, be eliminated; its causes were too deep-rooted in human nature. But something could be done to mitigate its effects. Madison’s answer, reflected in the US Constitution, was to fragment political power so that it would be difficult for a majority faction to establish itself. It was safe to entrust political power to those who had not previously possessed it, so long as they were compelled, by the institutional structure within which it was exercised, to negotiate, compromise and bargain with others who had independent sources of authority. Hence the principles of federalism and of the separation of powers, and the system of checks and balances, contained in the working of the US Constitution. When Madison used the term ‘democracy’, he did so to refer to what we would call the ‘direct democracies’ of the ancient world. His fear, in the late 1780s, was of what he called ‘popular government’, if, within it, a majority faction should arise.14 The explicit use of the word ‘democracy’ to refer to something corresponding to the latter comes with de Tocqueville and J. S. Mill, but Madison is their precursor in identifying the tension between liberal values and democratic practices.

Adrian Oldfield 11

The first volume of de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America appeared in 1835,15 to be rapidly translated into English, and immediately and enthusiastically reviewed by J. S. Mill. What de Tocqueville explicitly recognized was that democracy was one of the inevitable tendencies of the age, and it was, for him, a great leveller and equalizer. He interpreted the term in much more than a political sense. It involved the obliteration of all those groups, associations and institutions that stood as intermediaries between individuals and the state. In twentieth-century language, he valued a ‘plural’ society. As he was later to write, in The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856),16 it was this aspect of the French Revolution that had most disturbed him. He and his friend, Gustave de Beaumont, visited the USA in the early 1830s, ostensibly to examine the country’s penal institutions. In reality, however, what interested de Tocqueville about the USA was that it was the place where democracy was furthest advanced, and he wished to discover whether anything could be learnt from American political practices that could be of service to Europeans. For, if democracy was, as he believed, one of the inevitable tendencies of the age, it would, if unchecked, sweep all before it. The danger of democracy was that it made possible the ‘tyranny of the majority’.17 If there were no institutional checks on the exercise of political power by the people, then minorities would be submerged under majority will. More than this was the power of public opinion. Without intermediary bodies offering alternative opinions, everybody would be reduced to a stultifying conformity – individualism would replace individuality: the former passive and acquiescent, the latter active and vital. People would retreat into their private worlds, finding no support or stimulus to cultivate their individuality, leaving the political realm to others with energy and ambition. What encouraged de Tocqueville about the American political practices he observed – and most of his observations were of American politics in the north-eastern states – was the limited and fragmented nature of political power. Not only did federalism mean that political responsibilities were split between the states and the national government, and, within the states, between the state itself and the township, but de Tocqueville also found that Americans were far more likely to turn to a variety of voluntary associations than they were to government at any level to deal with matters of common concern. The dangers of democracy, in the sense of the tyranny of the majority politically and through public opinion, could be averted through the existence of a multiplicity of opportunities for active participation, or, as he put it, for the exercise of political liberty. It is here that there is

12 Liberal Democratic Theory

some resonance with James Mill, for what de Tocqueville did was to make democracy work on behalf of liberty and individuality. The task was to make the political realm one of human fulfilment, which was open to all. Many of de Tocqueville’s insights and hopes were echoed and developed by J. S. Mill. In his justly famous essay, On Liberty (1859),18 Mill argued for the least possible interference by either society or the state in the lives of individuals. Their thoughts and opinions should be free to roam the limits of the thinkable, in the service of truth and moral rectitude; and their actions should be limited only to the extent that they might be calculated to cause ‘harm to others’.19 For what was important was the mental and moral improvement of mankind. Much has been written since about what exactly constituted ‘harm to others’ for Mill, 20 but what he emphasized was that this improvement had, to the greatest extent, to be self-generated. People learnt much more deeply and actively from experience than they did from being told, didactically, what to think, or from having decisions made for them. They learnt by taking responsibility for their thoughts and actions, being prepared to defend them, and to challenge those of others. In thinking of a person as ‘a progressive being’,21 Mill thus endorsed de Tocqueville’s idea of individuality. Different life-styles should be, not just tolerated, but positively encouraged, for they celebrate the diversity of human life. In the context of the time he was writing, however, Mill feared precisely what de Tocqueville feared: the tyranny of the majority. Like de Tocqueville, he believed that the people would eventually come to political power – electoral reform and the extension of the franchise had already taken place in Britain in 1832, and movements for further reform abounded at the time On Liberty was published. What concerned Mill was that the working classes were not yet ready, mentally or morally, for the exercise of political power. In part, the tyranny of which he wrote was a future danger it was necessary to guard against. But there was another tyranny that Mill perceived in the deadening conformity of opinion in mid-Victorian England, which threatened both the cultivation of individuality and the idea of man as a progressive being. The remedy for the former was to educate the working classes to bring them to the point of political maturity; for the latter, it was perhaps more difficult, but the lead had to be taken by the intellectual and moral elite – what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the ‘clerisy’22 – in challenging as forcefully as possible the prevalent conformity, and demonstrating that thinking and living differently did not threaten the social order, but rather contributed to its vitality.

Adrian Oldfield 13

If the working classes came to political power too precipitately, Mill feared, they would use that power to attack justifiable privilege and valuable difference. A major part of their political education had to consist of a broadening of their horizons. They had to be brought to see the legitimacy of interests and concerns other than their own, and to be made aware that political issues could be approached from a variety of perspectives, not all of which were necessarily misguided. In a state such as the Britain of the time of Mill’s writing, it was not to be expected that the majority could take part in political deliberation at the highest level, but many opportunities could be created at levels below this. In Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Mill argued that the test of good government was whether it promoted ‘the virtue and intelligence of the people themselves’.23 The working classes needed to be given some role in public affairs, because only by exercising political power could they learn to exercise it wisely and for the common good. Participation in public affairs is morally instructive, even if it is only intermittent. Mill had in mind what he called ‘parish offices’24 and service on juries. In performing such services a person – and Mill included both men and women – is made to feel ‘one of the public’:25 thus public spirit is generated. All should participate, in however lowly a capacity, and for however limited a time, for only if they did so could the kind of energetic, active citizenry that Mill valued be expected to emerge. Where such a public spirit did not exist, nor could be brought to exist, then the only hope of the lawgiver was ‘to make the bulk of the community a flock of sheep innocently nibbling the grass side by side’.26 Like de Tocqueville, Mill recognized the inevitability of democracy; in turning it to advantage, he hoped it would provide an arena for human fulfilment. In the arguments of On Liberty and of Considerations on Representative Government, Mill sought to preserve the distinction between the political realm and that of civil society. It was this distinction that was threatened by a particularly powerful nineteenthcentury development: nationalism. Nationalism is a multi-faceted and elusive phenomenon. Indeed, it is perhaps better to talk of ‘nationalisms’, rather than ‘nationalism’ (as if each variety were a particular exemplification of certain core characteristics). Not all forms of nationalism are, or have been, inimical to liberal democracy, however, either as practice or as theory. Some express legitimate aspirations for separate statehood – for example, different nations within the former Austro-Hungarian empire – or for the overthrow of colonial rule. There is nothing intrinsically antithetical to liberal democracy here, and such movements have often subscribed to

14 Liberal Democratic Theory

liberal democratic values. There is one form of nationalism, however, that has been threatening to such values, which has been called ‘radical right nationalism’,27 or Fascism, especially the form it took in Italy and Germany in the inter-war years. This is not the place to explore the origins of Italian and German Fascism, nor to analyze the threat they posed to the liberal democracies of the time. It is important, though, to assess their impact on liberal democratic theory. Among other things, Fascism, following the Italian and German models is, first, specifically anti-liberal; and, second, offers a radical reinterpretation of democracy. The two are linked. In liberal democratic theory, it has been argued, the existence of a large, relatively autonomous, civil society is acknowledged as being both legitimate and necessary. Within civil society there are a myriad institutions and associations which are intermediate between the state and the individual – churches, trade unions, professional associations, business organizations, cultural groups, and so on. While operating within the overall framework of the state, which sanctions their legitimacy, such institutions, though sometimes transcending state boundaries, remain otherwise immune from political influence and control. This is important, as such intermediate bodies provide individuals with both alternative forms and senses of identity from those provided by the state, and with opportunities for their moral, political and intellectual development, each of which is an integral part of liberal democratic theory. Without such bodies, individuals lead stunted and isolated lives. This is simply to emphasize how crucial to liberal democratic theory is the separation of civil society from the state. It is this separation that Italian and German Fascism sought, with a high degree of success, to destroy. But they, or particularly German Fascism, went further than this. Not only did Nazism thoroughly politicize civil society, it extended political control into the private realm of the family as well.28 What Nazism put in the place of the autonomous civil society of liberal democratic theory was the nation, or people, which expressed itself in a national will, defined and articulated by the Nazi leadership. This constituted its radical reinterpretation of democracy, because what was considered democratic, was whatever was in accordance with the national will so expressed. Since all subordinate organizations within Nazi Germany had been refashioned as arms of the Nazi Party, this will became the only focus of identity and loyalty for the German people. Nazism could be successful there, because, for some decades, the politics of the West had become mass politics. The press and radio,

Adrian Oldfield 15

the marches, demonstrations and rallies, were able either to mobilize enthusiastic support for the regime, or to intimidate those who might have had doubts. In these circumstances, there were none of the constitutional limits upon the exercise of political power that are such an essential feature of liberal democratic theory. Arbitrariness was enthroned. If the thorough rejection by Fascism of liberal democratic theory was clear, what was the impact of this rejection on the theory, and what the response? Mill and de Tocqueville might be described as cautious democrats, in the sense that they believed democracy to be inevitable, but they also believed that, with judicious guidance and experience, the demos could be brought to exercise political power wisely and responsibly. They would have been appalled by this twentieth-century development. It would, for them, have been the apotheosis of the ‘tyranny of the majority’. One of the first to comment, somewhat ruefully, on the mass politics of inter-war Europe was Joseph Schumpeter, himself a former Austrian finance minister, who emigrated to the USA just before the Nazis came to power in Germany. In his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1943),29 he elaborated a rather contrived ‘classical doctrine of democracy’, in which the democratic arrangement for arriving at political decisions is one ‘which realizes the common good by making the people itself decide issues through the election of individuals who are to assemble in order to carry out its will’.30 He then proceeded to demolish this doctrine as an accurate reflection of the role of the people in actual political regimes. Drawing on theories of crowd psychology first developed by Gustave le Bon in the late 1890s, he pointed to the increasing irrationality of people as they are caught up in mass movements, where all former moral or civil constraints seem to be in abeyance. Further, he suggested that, as the individual is asked to consider activities, events, policies in realms of ever-increasing distance from his or her immediate family and workplace, however much accurate information or informed judgment is made available to him/her, s/he will increasingly be prey to ‘irrational prejudice and impulse’.31 The conclusion Schumpeter drew from these observations was that it was dangerous – both for individual liberty and for rational politics – for the people to be too closely involved in politics. In place, therefore, of the role assigned to the people in his version of the ‘classical doctrine of democracy’, Schumpeter proposed that democracy be defined as ‘that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by

16 Liberal Democratic Theory

means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote’. 32 Therefore the only role the people have is to vote; they are asked to do nothing more than choose between competing political elites because, despite expanding education and increasing exposure to political matters, the people do not, pace de Tocqueville and Mill, learn. Two things should be clear from this discussion. The first is that, in most of what have come to be called ‘Western liberal democracies’, this does seem to be all that the people are called upon to do. The second is that the whole normative thrust of liberal democratic theory has simply been cast aside as, at best, unrealistic and, at worst, pernicious. From this point on, political theory took two directions, the second of which was certainly inimical to further development of liberal democratic theory. One direction, which drew on linguistic philosophy, was to regard the role of political theory as the sophisticated philosophical analysis of political concepts and of the relationships between them. The other direction was to see political theory as an exercise in the empirical analysis of the actual functioning of democratic polities, much after the manner of Schumpeter. To oversimplify, perhaps to caricature, so-called Western liberal democracies were taken as given; that is, it was assumed that they were liberal democracies. Their practices were then subjected to rigorous empirical analysis, and the conclusion was drawn that this was what liberal democracy was:33 the argument is, of course, circular. What was masquerading as a thoroughly objective empirical analysis of the practices of ‘liberaldemocratic’ polities was in fact a resounding normative endorsement of the status quo. Further, a series of studies of voting behaviour revealed both the political apathy of voters and their political ignorance, seeming to endorse the analysis of Schumpeter of a generation earlier.34 Normative theory, of which liberal democratic theory has been just one example, seemed to have nothing to contribute, such that in 1956 Peter Laslett could sadly say that ‘For the moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead.’35 Two developments in the twentieth century thus seem to have discredited the liberal democratic theory bequeathed by de Tocqueville and Mill: first, the mass politics of inter-war Fascist Europe; and second, the disparity between the hopes contained in liberal-democratic theory and the actuality of ‘liberal-democratic’ regimes. But this latter, of course, was to mistake what liberal-democratic theory was all about. It had never purported to be any form of accurate analysis of the actual practices of existing regimes. On the contrary, taking these practices as its starting point – and this is what de Tocqueville and Mill did – liberal

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democratic theory attempted to articulate human possibilities as yet unrealized. Judgements, of course, could be made about the realism of such articulations; but the realism that matters is not that which reflects existing practices or attitudes (which are acknowledged), but that which reasonable reflection could endorse as humanly possible, despite any difficulties lying in the way of achievement. Human beings have, after all, advanced beyond the cave. A renewed optimism about liberal democratic theory, if not about the practices of ‘liberal-democratic’ regimes, began to emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Developments since then have taken many directions, but the focus here will be on only one: namely, the democratic aspect of liberal-democratic theory36 (the existence of a thriving civil society will be taken for granted as a crucial feature of liberal democratic theory). The problem to be addressed is what liberal democratic theory can say about making the practices of ‘liberal-democratic’ regimes more democratic, in the sense of increasing the scope for popular deliberation about and control of matters of public concern. The pessimistic analysis of human nature – by a Schumpeter, or by empirical theorists – as being in some way fixed and immutable, is rejected, not as an article of faith, but simply as a reflection of the fact that the conditions for people to exercise political power wisely and responsibly have never been sufficiently created and realized. The central concept is citizenship,37 and here it becomes necessary to separate liberal theory from democratic theory. In much of liberal theory, citizenship is regarded as a status to which rights are attached. People become citizens by birth or naturalization, and the rights they have give them a protected realm where they can make their choices about what kind of life they wish to live, and with whom, subject only to the proviso that they respect the rights of others – this is the realm of civil society. It is no doubt the case that, if they take these rights seriously, then they will be prepared to defend them when they are under threat. This will inevitably involve some form of collective action. So, a liberal theory of citizenship is not just concerned with the private individual enjoyment of rights, but also with their public, collective protection.38 In terms of democratic theory, however, this conception of citizenship, while being recognized, does not go far enough. It has very little to say about popular involvement in politics, in terms of either deliberation or control; still less does it have anything to say about how such involvement can contribute to

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the moral and intellectual development of individuals, which, as has already been argued, was one of the principal concerns of de Tocqueville and Mill. There are three aspects of a democratic theory of citizenship that need consideration: empowerment, opportunity and motivation. The remainder of this chapter will consider each of these very briefly in turn. It will be suggested that while the first two of these aspects – empowerment and opportunity – sit easily within a framework of liberal-democratic theory, the third aspect – motivation – does not. Within any theory of liberal democracy, therefore, there will remain a tension between the liberal and democratic conceptions of citizenship. The charge against liberalism (and at the same time against existing ‘liberal democracies’) is that it is nowhere sufficiently democratic. This charge is not new; it had, after all, been made by Karl Marx – the republics of the mid-nineteenth century were ‘bourgeois republics’.39 But it re-emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and has not yet gone away. Benjamin Barber, for example, characterized liberal democracies as ‘thin democracies’,40 and Philip Green as ‘pseudodemocracies’.41 One of the first contributors, however, was Carole Pateman. In Participation and Democratic Theory (1969), she revived the arguments of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and J. S. Mill – as well as of the English Guild Socialist, G. D. H. Cole – concerning the educative effects of participation, drawing also on the experience of the economic collectives of post-war Yugoslavia.42 In doing this, she was one of those who put down a marker for the view, pace Schumpeter, that no normative theory is necessarily invalidated because it fails to conform to some analysis of reality. Much democratic theory, in the late 1990s, is decidedly normative, and its recommendations are the mirror of its critique of existing liberal democracies. Citizenship, within democratic theory, is regarded less as a status to which rights are attached than as a practice and an experience – a practice in which one participates in the deliberations and control of a polity, and an experience by which one escapes from the confines of narrow self-preoccupation to a new and heightened sense of one’s worth and dignity. But a number of preconditions have to be met before such a practice can become widespread, because citizenship as a practice is not one that human beings engage in naturally and spontaneously.43 The first condition may be called that of empowerment. By this is meant that citizens need to be provided with resources before they can be expected to engage in the practice, and the crucial resource here is knowledge. Citizens need to know both the nature of their political

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system and how it operates, and about the many alternative political doctrines and ideologies that jostle for attention within its framework. Much of this can be done at school and college level, first in terms of formal instruction, but perhaps more effectively by involving students in the governing of their institutions, as this awakens them to other perspectives that may be just as legitimate as their own.44 Education is therefore not limited by formal instruction, neither is it limited by attendance at schools or colleges. The experience gained outside and after school and college is just as educative; unfortunately, most of the institutions or organizations in which people find themselves as adults provide the wrong kind of experience for democratic politics. Politically, human beings are expected to act as adults (that is, responsibly), they are expected, when they are called upon to be active, to be responsive to interests and concerns other than their own personal ones, and to reflect generally on what is for the best, having considered all aspects. Such an expectation is vitiated by the fact that most human beings either earn their livings in environments that are hierarchic, if not authoritarian – for example, factories, workshops, banks, supermarkets – or live their lives in families in which the roles of men and women are unequal. There is, in other words, an incongruence between the nominally democratic political realm and the actually highly undemocratic nature of work and family. To the extent, therefore, that the workplace remains hierarchic and unreconstructed,45 and that the position of women in the family,46 at least in relation to the up bringing of children, remains only marginally recognized – then, to that extent, both the workplace and the family render genuinely democratic politics less viable, as democratic practices rule in neither domain. If knowledge and experience are necessary for the practice of citizenship, then so too is opportunity. Too often, in liberal democracies, and particularly in unitary ones such as the UK, the extent of political apathy can be traced to the idea that politics is a remote activity, and that an individual’s contribution is unlikely to make much difference. A more active participation than simply voting requires a sense that it does make a difference, even if participants are more often than not frustrated. This is not an argument for a plebiscitary democracy, nor for a politics conducted by referendum, though the latter may well have a place. It is rather an argument for decentralization – or perhaps a better word is ‘devolution’. The problems that crowd the political agenda of the modern state are various, and the solution to many of them is beyond the competence of any one state in isolation – problems connected with environmental pollution, with terrorism or

20 Liberal Democratic Theory

drug-trafficking, or with defence, for example. Further, the modern state inhabits a world which is increasingly international and interdependent, both economically and financially. In such circumstances, the state can either passively respond to the pressures from outside that impinge on it, or take the initiative by joining with other states in an attempt to curb or redirect such pressures. There is, then, a range of political issues that the state is competent to deal with – its health care, education, transport system, and the preservation of its cultural heritage, to name but a few. A tendency of modern times, however – perhaps a result of the experience of war, or of excessively doctrinaire politics – has been to seek to centralize authoritative decision-making in the state. The more this happens, the more does politics seem a distant activity, conducted by elites with seemingly scant regard for those who suffer the consequences, and the fewer the opportunities for citizens to gain the experience vital to a practice of citizenship. As de Tocqueville wrote more than a century and half ago, such a practice depends on a vibrant local politics. Mill put the same point slightly differently: it was valuable, even with some loss of efficiency, that public issues be dealt with at the lowest level possible, as this served to involve more people in their deliberation and control, thereby contributing to that broadening of horizons that makes citizens of them. So, devolution operates in two directions away from the state: first, to international or supranational organizations; and second, to subordinate units within the state. While liberaldemocratic theory has begun to address what, in another context, has been called this ‘democratic deficit’, there are only a few signs that liberal democratic states have begun to do the same. There remains the consideration of the condition of motivation. This condition is perhaps the most difficult for liberal democratic theory to accommodate, for one of the central tenets of that theory has been, and is, that individuals should be allowed to choose what kind of life they wish to lead. What underlies this tenet is that in societies which are irreducibly heterogeneous, morally and socially, such as those of modern times, there will exist different versions of what constitutes a good life. Between these versions, with only a few exceptions, it is impossible to conclude, pace Mill, that any one life is necessarily better or more worthwhile than any other. Even if it were possible to reach such a conclusion, that, in itself, would be no warrant for insisting upon it, because the moral, social and intellectual development of individuals depends on their making the choice for themselves. This is why liberal-democratic theory and practice insist on the priority of the

Adrian Oldfield 21

right over the good.47 This implies two things: first, that questions concerning the protection of individuals in the pursuit of their chosen paths – essentially their rights – take priority over questions concerning the nature of ‘the good life’; and second, that no state through its activity should privilege one form of life-style over another. In terms of the practice of citizenship, as a form of ‘the good life’, this argument leads to the conclusion that individuals must be allowed, if they wish, to choose not to engage in the practice. A number of points may be made. First, it is the case that modern liberal-democratic states do proscribe certain ways of life, especially those based on certain forms of intolerance, whether of race, ethnicity or religion, and sometimes of gender. No doubt, here, legal proscriptions are often breached, but nevertheless they exist. Second, liberal-democratic states do insist on certain procedural norms being followed: there are permissible ways of doing things, and hence nonpermissible ones as well. At a most general level, then, the political culture of liberal-democratic states privileges the values of toleration and constitutionalism. The converse of this is that, where the values of toleration and constitutionalism are not entrenched, then liberaldemocratic theory may be of little relevance. Finally, much can be done by way of persuasion to motivate individuals to take on the role of citizen. One avenue, however, would seem to be ruled out. Until well into the nineteenth century, Western political thought relied on a solid underpinning of religion to bolster whatever recommendations about political order were made. Thus, even as late as the 1830s, de Tocqueville argued that political liberty – what is here being called the practice of citizenship – depended on religious faith for its sustenance and survival, as such a faith acted as a constraint on the licentious use of liberty. 48 Today, the world, with some exceptions such as fundamentalist Islam, is a secular one; while some help might be expected from religion, it would be folly to rely upon it. Some forms of persuasion may, however, work to motivate individuals towards the practice of citizenship, and most of them have already been mentioned. To list them here may be appropriate: the education of students in the variety of political systems, especially perhaps their own, and in the multiplicity of political doctrines and ideologies; the involvement of students in the governance of their schools and colleges; the democratization of the workplace and the restructuring of the position of women in the family; and the decentralization, wherever possible, of political tasks to the lowest level

22 Liberal Democratic Theory

consistent with a tolerable level of efficiency. If the knowledge, the experience, and the opportunities are there, there is some reason to hope. Ultimately, however, while one can make water available to the horse, and lead the horse to the water, one must accept that the horse may not be thirsty.

Notes and references 1. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1690) ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Though the Two Treatises were not published until after the Revolution of 1688, it is generally accepted now that they were, for the most part, written in the early 1680s. 2. Ibid, p. 350. 3. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994) ch. xiii. 4. I owe this reference to Father Herbert McCabe, OP. 5. Hobbes, Leviathan., p. 150. 6. Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha (1680), ed. Peter Laslett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949). Published posthumously, Filmer’s work was a stimulus to Locke’s Two Treatises. 7. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762), ed. Maurice Cranston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) p. 148. 8. Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776) and The Rights of Man (1791–2) in Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick (eds), The Thomas Paine Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), pp. 65–115, 201–364. 9. James Mill, Essay on Government (1820), ed. Currin V. Shields (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1955). 10. Ibid, chs vii and viii. 11. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (1788), ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987). 12. Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers, pp. 122–3. 13. For an extended discussion of the perceived deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation, see Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969) ch. x, especially pp. 403–13. 14. Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers, pp. 125–6. 15. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols (1835 and 1840), ed. Daniel J. Boorstin (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). 16. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856), ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Anchor, 1955). 17. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, chs x and xvi. 18. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), in John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government, ed. Geraint Williams (London: Everyman, 1993).

Adrian Oldfield 23 19. Mill, On Liberty, p. 78. 20. See, for example, the discussion in John C. Rees, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, ed. Geraint Williams (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), and the comments on Rees’s book by C. L. Ten, ‘Mill’s Defence of Liberty’, in John Gray and G. W. Smith (eds) J. S. Mill, On Liberty in Focus (London: Routledge, 1991) pp. 130–4. 21. Mill, On Liberty, p. 79. 22. Quoted in John M. Robson, The Improvement of Mankind: The Social and Political Thought of John Stuart Mill (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press and Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968) p. 231; for Coleridge, the ‘clerisy’ was the Church of England; Mill secularized the idea. 23. John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (1861), in John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government, ed. Geraint Williams (London, Everyman, 1993), p. 207. 24. Mill, Considerations, p. 233. 25. Ibid, p. 234. 26. Ibid, p. 234. 27. John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, 2nd edn (Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 288. Much of the following two paragraphs is based on this source. 28. Much the same could, of course, be said of the totalitarianism of Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union, but consideration of this experience would largely duplicate what can be said about Nazism, though it would also heighten the predicament in which liberal democratic theory thereafter found itself. 29. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 5th edn (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976). Schumpeter’s thinking had, in many respects, been prefigured by elite theorists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries – Gaetano Mosca, Robert Michels and Vilfredo Pareto; see Geraint Parry, Political Elites (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969). 30. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 250. 31. Ibid, p. 262. 32. Ibid, p. 269. 33. See, for instance, Robert Dahl, Preface to Democratic Theory (University of Chicago Press, 1956), and Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (New York: Doubleday, 1960). To be fair to Dahl, he has since substantially modified his early analysis; but for a critique of empirical democratic theory, see Graeme Duncan and Steven Lukes, ‘The New Democracy’, Political Studies, vol. 11 (1963) pp. 156–77; Peter Bachrach, The Theory of Democratic Elitism, (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1967); Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, (London: Macmillan, 1974); and David Miller, ‘The Competitive Model of Democracy’, in Graeme Duncan (ed.), Democratic Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 1983) pp. 133–55. 34. See Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965); and David Butler and Donald Stokes, Political Change in Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). 35. Peter Laslett (ed.), Philosophy, Politics and Society, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967) p. vii.

24 Liberal Democratic Theory 36. Thus I omit any discussion of the critical and stimulating literature to which the publication of John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford University Press, 1973) gave rise. Rawls periodically responded to this literature, and much of his subsequent thinking is presented in John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Also not considered is the vigorous debate between liberals and communitarians, for which Rawls himself was partly responsible. Useful sources here are Shlomo Avineri and Avner de-Shalit (eds), Communitarianism and Individualism, (Oxford University Press, 1992); Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, 2nd edn (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996); and Daniel Bell, Communitarianism and Its Critics, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). 37. An earlier attempt to furnish liberal theory with a robust conception of citizenship can be found in the thinking of the late-nineteenth-century English Idealist, T. H. Green; see Melvin Richter, The Politics of Conscience: T. H. Green and His Age (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), ch. 11; and Andrew Vincent and Raymond Plant, Philosophy, Politics and Citizenship (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984) ch. 9. 38. See, for example, Loren E. Lomasky, Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community (Oxford University Press, 1987); and Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). 39. See the analyses presented by Karl Marx in The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850 (1850) and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), in Robert C. Tucker (ed.) The Marx–Engels Reader, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 1978) pp. 586–617. 40. Benjamin R. Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1984) ch. 1. 41. Philip Green, Retrieving Democracy (London: Methuen, 1985) ch. 2. 42. Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1970). 43. See Adrian Oldfield, ‘Citizenship: An Unnatural Practice?’, Political Quarterly, vol. 61 (1990) pp. 177–87. 44. See the discussion of these issues in Bernard Crick, ‘The Introducing of Politics in Schools’, in his Political Theory and Practice (London: Allen Lane, 1971) and ‘Education and the Polity’, in his Political Thoughts and Polemics (Edinburgh University Press, 1990); see also the discussion of Crick’s ideas on political education in Adrian Oldfield, ‘Political Education’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Defending Politics: Bernard Crick and Pluralism (London: British Academic Press, 1993) pp. 129–43. 45. How economic structures may be democratized is too large a subject for this chapter, but a thorough examination of the issues is contained in Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Democracy and Capitalism: Property, Community, and the Contradictions of Modern Social Thought (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986); also, Peter Bachrach and Aryeh Botwinick, Power and Empowerment: A Radical Theory of Participatory Democracy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).

Adrian Oldfield 25 46. Again, this is too large a subject to be considered here, but a useful introduction to the range of literature on the position of women in polity and society is Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) ch. 7. 47. The case for the priority of the right is put by Rawls, A Theory of Justice, and the opposite case by Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue , 2nd edn (Notre Dame Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). 48. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, pp. 20–8.

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Part 1

The Nineteenth Century

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3 Democratization in Britain John Garrard

I want here to explore the character of British democratization, and try to explain its success. The term is rarely used to describe a process that lasted, in a formal sense, from 1832 to 1928. Clearly, there is some danger of anachronistic Whig history here, particularly given the implied comparison with more recent examples of democratization, where the label has been in place from the start. Thus the point should be made from the start that there is no implication that this early British version was a conscious process: few of the political elite seriously envisaged progress towards even manhood suffrage before the 1860s at the earliest. It can only be termed ‘democratization’ if viewed retrospectively. Indeed, as wiil be suggested later, the very unconsciousness of the process was itself a source of success. For similar reasons, though also for other evidential ones, there is no suggestion that what happened in Britain was smooth, uninterrupted, or even necessarily unidirectional. One need not embrace James Vernon’s recent interesting argument1 to concede that there were significant events and even trends – in the developing legal framework, particularly its local adaptations, in Britain’s social structure and attitudes, and perhaps even in contemporary language – pushing parts of the political system in narrower, less popular directions. These were evident in both the short and medium terms. There was, for example, the steady decay of the ‘open boroughs’ resulting from the decision in 1832 to restrict the borough franchise to £10 householders. This abolished the qualifications of the ‘scot and lot’ and ‘pot-walloper’ voters – even though existing qualifiers remained in possession of their votes. It is also evident that one motive, often one effect, of local elites seeking to incorporate their town under the Municipal Corporations Act might be the desire to close the local system against radical incursions.2 Equally, National Health 29

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Insurance introduced in 1911, while greatly benefiting many working people, also robbed them of the fine control over aspects of their lives hitherto available through friendly societies – and was often sadly so perceived.3 Thus, while democratization was the predominant trend, it was not uncontested. Before moving on, we should establish some assumptions about what democratization entails, particularly in the British context. I take it to involve a series of moves towards what we in the West call ‘liberal representative democracy’, involving steadily widening access to political decision-making while at the same time maintaining liberal freedom. It is an ongoing process, and even in the West it may still be incomplete. It is partly a legal process that, in Western Europe, North America and Australasia, and probably unlike democratizations after 1945, primarily involved steadily widening access to the vote. However, to be successful and complete, democratization must also be far more than just legal. It must also entail a series of flexibly political responses both by elites and by incoming social groups. To be successful and deep-rooted, political democratization must probably also be underpinned by similar processes in other sectors of life. Finally, as this implies, successful democratization probably requires a number of preconditions and infrastructural support to be present before (or while) it is happening. With this in mind, we can now try to understand why the process was successful in Britain. Given what happened elsewhere and at other times, this involves asking what it was about the process, and the society in which it happened, that enabled it to occur without the sort of systemdestroying stresses widely evident outside the favoured areas above (and, indeed, evident even in some of those), and observable at times more recent than the period up to around 1920. In fact, the enquiry probably resolves itself into three interrelated questions as far as Britain is concerned. First, why did the political system retain stability and high levels of legitimacy? Second, how was it that large and increasing numbers of people were able to cope with a system assuming widely spread, if not necessarily intense, political levels of participation? Third, why did such participation not, in turn, overload the system with demands that it, and the economy, could not absorb? The perhaps unsurprising argument will be that, particularly compared with Russia and Eastern Europe after 1989, and even important parts of inter-war Western Europe, British democratization occurred under a set of immensely favourable and interconnected circumstances. What might be deemed necessary preconditions, useful variables and infrastructural

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support were generously present before, and during, the process as it was happening. This was partly because of the political skill of key segments of the salient elites, partly to actions taken by those elites for reasons unconnected with the process, and partly to the fortunate and functional character of British society. Let us start by stating the fairly obvious. It was undoubtedly important that widening popular access was happening in a political system and culture, where notions of constitutionalism, limited government and liberal values were already deeply established. Thus the democratizing state was unlikely to be seriously threatened by groups already within it who felt that developments were too rapid – as did many Tories in the 1830s – or by those outside who felt that their admission was proceeding too slowly. Nor would the system be seriously threatened by those who were simply dissatisfied with the results of admission. This, perhaps, was not just an internal matter. Britain was doubly fortunate in undergoing the process in a century, and on a subcontinent, where the main remedies for popular dissatisfaction, particularly after the famed excesses of 1789, were liberal rather than right- or left-wing authoritarian. Indeed, right-wing popular radicalism had not yet been invented. This undoubtedly identifies this writer as being among those British social historians (the majority) who are unconvinced by arguments about mass revolutionary enthusiasm, even before 1850. While perhaps briefly being evident after 1815, and again in 1830–1, the danger was hardly serious thereafter. Significantly, what even working class (and, still more, middle-class) radicals primarily demanded from the late eighteenth century onwards was admission to the electoral and parliamentary process. This might have involved social and economic transformation once admission was obtained in, say, the 1840s – though, given my later argument, and actual developments after 1867, even this seems doubtful. However, few radicals of any class or gender overtly envisaged the destruction of the system to which they desired access. One consequence, or perhaps a cause, of this overall situation was that Britain possessed a system able to generate institutions, symbols and rituals with powerful incorporating effects on groups seeking entry. These derived from the aura they commanded, and the access and status they could offer – both individually to group leaders and collectively to their members. One such institution was obviously the monarchy. However, those institutions offering direct participation were equally important. Access and entry to Parliament were central to most nineteenth-century radical programmes – as, indeed, of many

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turn-of-the-century feminist demands. Furthermore, while Ralph Miliband undoubtedly exaggerated the importance of the ‘parliamentary embrace’4 in explaining the Labour Party’s enduring moderation, he produced convincing evidence of the magical effect that entry and acceptance exercised over many Labour MPs. Local urban institutions and rituals were probably even more important, because their status rewards were far more widely available, and because so much nineteenth-century popular attention and pride was locally focused. Included here are the massive local celebrations of national events such as coronations and jubilees, the more parochial openings of town halls, parks, libraries and charitable hospitals, and council anniversaries. Eagerly participating in the long, colourful processions were generously embannered delegations from the town’s main working class organizations – initially friendly societies (always the most safely respectable for local elites and thus processionally evident from the 1830s); then increasingly co-operatives and trade unions. Municipal councils are important generators of inclusive ritual, partly because at their heads stood what became one of the most important incorporative institutions of all – the mayoralty. This office exercised powerful effects on respectable working class imaginations. Its rituals commanded great popular attention, particularly as, from the 1880s, mayoral garden parties and so on increasingly became the means of conferring public recognition on working class groups and institutions – along with many others. Eventually, the mayoral incumbency itself became an increasingly central aspiration for Labour councillors – with rejection inducing insensate fury about the ‘insult’ done, and acceptance producing popular celebration of the status and respectability conferred.5 Although some, like the mayoralty, are now far less visible, British institutions still possess considerable incorporative potential. Witness the significance assigned to the emergence of women from 1907, or racial minority representatives from much later, as councillors, mayors or MPs. This is partly about access to power but, as will be argued later, it partly relates to the system’s ability to confer desired marks of status and arrival. Put another way, successful democratization is greatly helped if it occurs at more than just a political level. Thus far, we have argued that the British political system had the means of reinforcing its own legitimacy during democratization. As implied above, this partly derived from the relative flexibility of its national and local elites. However, good fortune also contributed. In particular, Britain was fortunate in having resolved the central disputes

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about nationality before democratization started. Apart, obviously, from situation in Ireland, these disputes were largely settled by the early nineteenth century. 6 This created a ‘national community’ possessing some conception of common purpose. The disruptive potential for democratizing polities of the political expression of disputes about national identity are evident in inter-war states such as Czechoslovakia, and in much of East Central Europe and the former Soviet Union since 1989. Their potential for turmoil and even erosion of legitimacy is also suggested by Britain’s one serious nationality conflict before 1914. Ireland’s impact on British politics was admittedly ambiguous. In some respects it assisted democratization, since, unexpectedly for a largely rural society, it proved to be a potent source of democratic innovation – providing the English working class with a surprising number of leaders and, in the Irish National League, an early model of the mass party.7 However, Ireland also proved to be the one problem capable of significantly eroding legitimacy. The very presence of numerous alienated Irish Catholics testifies to this, though its effect was limited by the insulating impact of the Irish Sea. However, more dangerous and immediate difficulties arose after 1912, when Liberal attempts to resolve the problem via Home Rule produced passionate hostility not just from Ulster Protestants, but also from the Conservative (Unionist) Party and the political right more generally. This carried opposition well outside recognizable constitutional channels. Only total war drew things back again. Such dysfunctional bitterness was partly produced by party competition. However, British parties rarely carried rivalry to such lengths. Normally, the results were far more functional for a system in which political access was being widened. In under-developed form, parties pre-dated the start of democratization8. Indeed, their existence resulted partly from the equally functional fact that, as we have already noted, British politics exhibited significant popular elements well before the process started. These included most obviously the ‘open boroughs’ with electorates close to manhood suffrage. Equally important were town vestries and improvement commissioners, elected by varying levels of ratepayers, who often played an important part in the business of local administration. Such bodies, in themselves, were tempting targets for competing parties. Controlling them often also gave crucial access to the composition of the parliamentary electoral roll, and thus the constituency. 9 Furthermore, all this meant that democratization took place within a society, large segments of whose elites – both nationally and at the equally crucial local level – were

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used to thinking politically; to seeing politics in terms of gaining advantage over opponents through competitively appeasing key social groups. This they did either by offering those groups desired advantages, or playing on their grievances and emotions. At crucial points of confrontation, such as in 1832, these political reflexes also enabled the elites partially to give way, thus protecting themselves and the broad outlines of the system. The point requires caution, since there were clear exceptions to this behaviour pattern. One example is Tory diehard attitudes to franchise reform in the decades leading up to 1832. Meanwhile, the demise of party competition after the 1846 Conservative split helped to cause the ruling Whig/Peelite aristocrats to see themselves primarily as administrators and barely as politicians at all. The mid-century was distinguished by parliamentary government, in some respects hostile to popular influence. Similarly, the parliamentarians, who almost accidentally produced the 1867 Franchise Reform Act, were arguably less concerned about responding to public demands for reform than with complex games against each other in an atmosphere largely insulated from outside opinion.10 Nevertheless, one cannot avoid being impressed by how many politicians of the more flexible sort there were; how accommodating even the inflexible ones could become once exposed to the needs of political survival; and how politically skilful many traditional figures became. The trend was clear among national politicians and, for reasons already outlined, it emerged early. It was widely evident in the years just before 1832 as local candidates adapted to tides of reform opinion sweeping even through narrowly-franchised and singlemindedly venal constituencies.11 Meanwhile, in responding to reform demands in ways many saw as alarmingly radical, the Whig elite of 1831–2 was clearly operating on system-preserving grounds – excising the disreputable parts (the ‘rotten’, and some ‘pocket’, boroughs) in the hope of safeguarding the key ramparts of continued aristocratic power. Many believed or pretended such ‘radicalism’ was warranted so as to produce a ‘final’ settlement. Such self-preserving behaviour extended beyond 1832, and well beyond the Whigs, Liberals and radicals. Most indicative is the rapidity with which Conservatives, after bitterly opposing reform, adapted to the sort of electoral calculations required by the Act – and how readily they began to see the urban middle classes, and even parts of the non-voting, but still sometimes electorally salient, working class, as fair political game.12 This is most obviously evident

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in Peel’s appointment of Francis Bonham as party agent and in his own Tamworth Manifesto. The Liberals were always more willing to see popular responsiveness as being legitimate. Thus it was unsurprising that they should produce politically skilful individuals in greater numbers; nor that they provided a home for the man who arguably became the most politically adept of his generation – William Gladstone. Although originally a Peelite Conservative, a modest landowner, and until the 1860s largely indifferent to the politician’s craft, he came to have a remarkable hold upon public, and particularly working class, opinion. Significantly, this began to emerge in the early 1860s, and thus before the Reform Act that enfranchised so many of his emerging political disciples. 13 Thereafter, Gladstone’s prophet-like command over working class loyalties was remarkable: doubly so because it tapped into traditional interests, values and emotions, dating back to early popular radicalism – independence, freedom, respectability, the moral superiority of ‘the people’ against ‘the idle classes’, and democracy itself. Well before the twentieth century, in common with many fellow Liberals, he realised the electoral importance of ‘the great binding issue’ (the ‘big issue’ in our terminology), capable of popularly encapsulating everything they stood for, and galvanising Liberalism’s competing sections into common action.14 In another sense, such flexibility had long been evident on a wider scale. Much electoral behaviour both before and after 1832 was based on deference and dependency rather than opinion. Yet, as Frank O’Gorman has convincingly argued, this was rarely unconditional. Even electors who were not overtly corrupt often had clear, if unstated, expectations of patronage, at least in terms of civic improvements, in return for obedience. It was the satisfaction of these expectations, rather than unconditional torpor, that produced uncontested elections, even in the long term. Equally, the emergence of a challenge might signify dissatisfaction about the terms of deference available from an existing patron. The subsequent contest might constitute a renegotiation – either with the patron or with his aspirant successor.15 Such conditional deference continued long after 1832, and was a means whereby some of what is in the twentieth century electorally negotiated from the state was then obtained through private channels. As this suggests, the ability of national leaders to adjust to electoral needs had been enduringly reinforced and preceded by similarly competitive flexibility from local elites. Moreover, this extended far beyond deference and ‘market’ politics into those of opinion. Indeed,

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hardly surprising in such an uncentralized society and political system, the localities were the places where initiatives in political flexibility and responsiveness began, and indeed were most needed. This was evident in two interrelated areas – the constituency, and local government. The constituency was the forum wherein implicit and explicit negotiation about the terms of election mainly occurred – whether these were deference-based, market-based, or, increasingly, opinion-based. Again, at least in industrial towns, such responsiveness began remarkably early. This was clear not just in relation to the many middle-class groups emerging after 1832, but also to actual and potential working class electors. Such responsiveness began substantially before 1867. This was partly because working men could become politically highly salient in arenas of local government to which constituency politics were invariably related;16 partly because, in open voting, non-electors could significantly, and even legitimately, pressurize qualified voters; partly because many local leaders saw working men as potential voters rather earlier than did national politicians; and partly because local leaders often sensed that an alienated working class could produce system-endangering trouble if not at least minimally appeased. Whatever the reason, many competing parliamentary candidates in Lancashire, for example, were holding enthusiastic ‘meetings of the non-electors’ as early as the 1830s and 1840s; the Tories in particular were cheerfully exploiting working-class grievances about factory reform and the New Poor Law; they were also combining the politics of conditional deference with those of opinion, and indeed respectability, via the widespread formation of local ‘Conservative Workingmen’s Friendly and Burial Societies’. Here, in return for canvassing and other support, workers were assisted in safeguarding themselves against sickness and the shame of pauper burial.17 Local Conservative elites proved particularly adept at these early forms of political responsiveness. This was one reason, aside from their enthusiastic exploitation of working class grievances about Irish immigrants in the 1860s and 1870s,18 for Tory strength in Lancashire towns after 1867. Yet Liberals were also skilful, partly because in industrial towns so many of them, like the Tories, could manipulate factory-based dependency. Such skills ensured that rudimentary mass parties emerged in some places several years before 1867 19 and, beginning particularly in Birmingham, altogether more mature ones in the 1870s. Urban local government provided another location where elites competitively appeased and flattered multiple social and political groups

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– from shopkeepers, publicans and slum landlords to temperance crusaders; from nonconformists, Catholics and Anglicans to respectable working men, ratepayers of many sorts, and eventually women. Local autonomy was strong. Moreover, laissez faire did not inhibit municipalities as it did national government. Thus, local politics provided arenas wherein demands for governmental provision were framed, satisfied – and, of course, vetoed – in ways quite inconceivable nationally. In the deeply disturbed 1830s and 1840s, overseers and boards of guardians were persuaded or terrorized into less punitive poor relief than central government envisaged. Over the years, increasing numbers of local authorities municipalized gas and water undertakings – and eventually public transport. Thus issues, aspirations and demands about the scope and cost of these commodities became matters for local debate and decision. None of this implies equally distributed pluralism: nevertheless, most groups received at least minimum satisfaction for what expectations they had. In these ways, the essentially political character of much urban leadership was combined with the latitude provided by vibrant local autonomy, and the relative openness of municipal politics, to make urban localities the primary locations where the disputes liberated by democratization were negotiated. Such flexibility by local and, as we noted, national elites obviously contained dangers of overloading the political and economic systems with demands they could not digest. However, these were counter-weighted by two further fortunate accompaniments to democratization – both distinguishing Britain from more recent examples of the process, and making the path decidedly less bumpy. These were an expanding economy, and the enduringly low expectations of the state entertained by most emergently salient social groups. Britain was fortunate in that the expansion of political access occurred within the context of an expanding industrial economy. Admittedly, enfranchisement campaigns were partly fuelled by deprivation. Indeed, in the 1830s and 1840s, ‘Hunger Chartism’ was crucial to creating a mass movement. Nevertheless, this was an economy capable of spreading significant benefits to major social groups. This crucially affected the respectable industrial working-class. Most historians now date the enduring start of working class improvement to the early 1860s.20 Certainly, confident perceptions that spreading economic benefits had rendered working men politically ‘safe’ crucially underpinned elite consent to the unexpectedly generous inclusion of 1867. Equally important, these benefits continued even more certainly after enfranchisement.

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They did so in spite of frequent bouts of unemployment for around thirty years from 1870, thus also embracing the even greater expansion and crucial redistribution of 1884–5. Furthermore, and here good fortune becomes still more apparent, what were operative were not just the benefits of expansion but also the strange fruits of contraction. One important factor fuelling rising working class real incomes was not so much actual wage rises but rather steadily declining food prices resulting from the agricultural depression and competition from foreign imports.21 The luck arguably continued into the economically precarious inter-war years, when similar factors produced similar effects on food prices in the crucial decades in which the final and most generous franchise expansions were occurring and being absorbed. Moreover, very significant among those being absorbed were two groups who might be deemed to be most sensitive to this factor – women; and the geographically unstable working class.22 All this compares very favourably with circumstances in Russia and East Central Europe since the 1970s, when the capitalist economy was being established, and democratization occurring, well before anything but the acute pain of economic modernization could become evident. Similar contrasts are evident with regard to mass expectations. British democratization, undeniably before the late 1880s, and arguably until around 1920, was happening within a fortunate context set by the fact that these were enduring low, at least in relation to central government. Thus, and quite contrary to the fearful assumptions of many elite figures, the process was unlikely to involve loading the developing industrial economy directly or rapidly with burdens that it might find hard to bear. Wage expectations were rising, but were negotiated through the economic sector, and enfranchisement had little impact outside the important area of trade-union legal protection. None of the social groups seeking political inclusion, from the early nineteenth century to 1918, linked pressure for formal entry to demands for increased state-aid or redistribution. Some wanted government action, but little of the sort likely to involve much expense or taxation. For the middle classes enduringly, and for the working class in at least the medium term, this also continued after enfranchisement. These trends were clear among the middle classes. Urban entrepreneurs, in so far as they wanted central government action, desired only internal and external free trade, or that government should hold the economic ring. More surprising is the equally fervent and enduring attachment to minimal government by the lower middle classes. In their fervency, even in the face of increasing hardship from the 1880s, and

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their willingness to ally themselves in the quest for minimal government to the interests of large property, they seem almost unique, at least in Western Europe. Elsewhere, lower-middle-class representative bodies showed an increasing, and arguably more rational, willingness to press for state protection from market competition.23 In so far as British shopkeepers, for example, expected aid from anyone, it was as small town voters demanding bribes from political patrons. Given their numbers, poverty and potential capacity to create political and economic indigestion, it was even more significant and functional that these attitudes should be enduringly evident among the working-class and their franchise activists. Admittedly, working class radicals before 1850 sought to change class control over the political system – away from ‘the idle classes’ and towards ‘the people’, by which they mainly meant working class people. However, many desired this not because they wanted economic redistribution, but rather because they thought working-class miseries were rooted in maldistributed political power. They often appeared to believe that matters would right themselves with little further state intervention once this was remedied. Certainly, few even of the Chartists – Bronterre O’Brien is the greatest exception – desired anything approaching state aid or ownership.24 Historians have long argued about the extent of mid-century trade union attachment to ‘political economy’, and even more about the implications of such attachment for theories about ‘bourgeoisification’ and middle-class hegemony. However, there has been little argument about union hostility to state intervention. Indeed, it has recently been suggested that trade unions could see very tangible benefits for their bargaining position in a theory justifying minimum government intervention in industrial relations. What they sought, and fairly generously received in instalments from successive Liberal and Conservative administrations, was legal immunity from actions by employers and the courts. Freedom from the state for trade unionists entailed freedom from legal interference with their activities. 25 This was equally evident among the other working-class bodies of the period – the friendly societies and retail co-ops. Again, what they wanted from the state, and what laissez-faire politicians were happy to grant, were legal frameworks very similar to those provided for banks. Such indifference to state aid, moreover, has been persuasively widely argued as persisting until 1914, 26 the emergence of socialism and Labour notwithstanding. In many respects, the real pressure for state aid for the underprivileged before 1914, particularly in areas such as

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housing and public health, came less from working-class spokespersons, and less still from their followers, than from various sorts of middle-class humanitarian and intellectuals troubled by national inefficiency. Given such persistent indifference towards at least central-state intervention, it is unsurprising that working-class agitators for enfranchisement should prove to be similarly uninterested. What they, and their followers, mainly wanted in 1867 and 1884 – what they consistently seemed to celebrate at many late-nineteenth-century elections – was the formal recognition of ‘political fitness’, their right to full citizenship, political respectability, and perhaps a visible mark of their separation from the disreputable ‘residuum’. In so far as determined class feeling went beyond this, it was about ‘direct working-class representation’ in Parliament and local government. In some respects, this extended what was being granted to them nationally through royal commissions, and locally via the likes of charity hospital committees, which many constituency parties were ‘insultingly’ to refuse after 1867. Beyond this, working men wanted the system to work in their favour, but not in ways involving state expansion. This pattern of expectations was finally evident, though for partially different reasons, among most women’s-suffrage campaigners. Given the middle- and upper-class character of most leaders and followers of both suffrage movements (the National Union Womens Suffrage Societies and the Womens Social and Political Union), and the indifference of most working-class women outside Lancashire,27 and perhaps East London, this was hardly surprising. Class also helps to explain the heightened outrage of suffrage campaigners about political exclusion, particularly after the admission of so many working men. This, in turn, explains why women’s franchise agitation was just as closely linked as was working men’s to demands for their recognition as full citizens. This was one reason why they insisted on enfranchisement on the same basis as the existing male suffrage. On recent evidence, the agitation was also, admittedly, linked to broader issues. Yet very few of these before the First World War, particularly after the expulsion of Sylvia Pankhurst’s East London Federation, involved demands for state aid. As Susan Kingsley Kent has argued, the suffragette prescription was highly radical, concerned with the wholesale reordering of gender relations to overturn the trappings of patriarchy. However, rather like many Chartists before them, and aside from crucial legal changes (for example, in divorce law), these campaigners seemed to assume their revolution could proceed non-politically through reprogramming male sexual mores.28 Only after

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1918, with emerging ‘welfare feminism’, was it clearly possible to think women’s enfranchisement might lead to pressure to expand the central state’s supportive role. As suggested earlier, this highly functional mass-indifference to the state was partly self-generated, a natural response to circumstances in which people found themselves. In this sense, it had much to do with good fortune. However, we need not embrace theories about bourgeoisification, still less ‘the genius’ of the aristocratic elite, to conclude that such responses were also linked to some successful agenda-setting by Britain’s rulers – some precisely directed, some only semi-intentional. There are several factors to consider here. One is linked to this chapter’s starting-point – the fact that British democratization, unlike many recent examples, occurred in stages: where the facilitating elites believed they were only including people as and when they became ‘politically fit’. Groups were admitted after evidence of education, rationality, respectability, and the acceptance of predominant social and economic values. This was why the permanent abandonment of Chartism, the rapid expansion of collective self-help in the form of coops and friendly societies, and the muteness of working-class suffering during the Cotton Famine, were all taken as persuasive markers of political readiness. Moreover, these definitions of fitness were accepted by working-class spokespersons themselves. It was, after all, the Chartist’s ‘moral reform’ wing that survived into the 1850s and 1860s, and ultimately slipped into Liberalism’s welcoming embrace. These were radicals who largely accepted the need of working men to prove their fitness before successful political entry. They also accepted that, while they and their respectable followers were ready for admission, there were many below who were neither fit, nor ‘safe’, nor digestible. The Reform League had, after all, abandoned the Chartists’ demands for manhood suffrage in favour of household suffrage – and discovered few problems with the limits of what was granted in 1867. Furthermore, the acceptance of the minimum state, and the accompanying cultivation of individualistic virtues, may have been reinforced by both political parties in the years before 1867, and even more in the decades following that year. We have noted the success of politicians such as Gladstone in capturing the popular imagination. The Gladstonian message of retrenchment probably did more than just tap into existing predilections. Given the undoubted charisma and attraction of other populist messages linked to the cry relating to governmental economy, it also surely reinforced those predispositions.

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Equally important may be the fervent efforts of the local organizations of both parties not merely to capture the support of working people, but also to educate them for political fitness.29 However, popular attitudes were also reinforced by other marginally less deliberate actions by the political elites – particularly the numerous ways in which the state was made to seem baleful, and contact with it shaming. This was truer the further down the social scale one was, and was evident in much governmental activity – for example, sanitary inspection, law and order, licensing legislation, and slum clearance. 30 However, it was most dramatically evident in the New Poor Law. This has always seemed to me to be a much underestimated attempt at social engineering. Admittedly, it did not work as its framers originally intended. Most relief applicants were not, (and at times of high unemployment could not be) automatically confined within punitive and degrading workhouses. Nevertheless, sufficient numbers of people were committed, and out-relief, particularly when subjected to the ‘labour test’, was sufficiently demeaning, to make most contact with Poor Law authorities profoundly unpleasant. This was doubly so because an individual’s dependent status was made so public – immensely serious in introspective urban communities. It was rendered worse still by the fact that any form of poor relief automatically robbed recipients of an important and hard-won symbol of respectability – the parliamentary and municipal vote. The deeply shaming effect of all this is substantiated by much respectable working-class testimony up to 1914 and beyond. Moreover, not merely did the spectre of parochial relief make the state seem hostile; it also took the recipient out of the political loop at his or her point of greatest need. The Poor Law had one other highly relevant effect: for respectable working men, it significantly reinforced the attractions of friendly society and burial society membership and participation. Membership provided a reasonably dependable way of avoiding its clutches during hard times, and its even more odious embrace in death. (Alongside pauper burial, the 1832 Anatomy Act specified that unclaimed corpses of hospitalized paupers, like those of criminals, were available for dissection.) Friendly societies were the most vibrant, popular and absorbing of the organizations of working-class self-defence throughout the nineteenth century. They were also most fervently attached to ideals of self-help. As such, they became powerful positive reasons for resisting ideas about state-aid.31 In these various ways, and only partly intentionally, the baleful state allowed elites considerable influence over the political agenda, while

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political inclusion was in progress, and its results being absorbed. Seen through late-twentieth-century eyes, this state seems appalling, particularly in its Poor Law expression. However, if we give credence to industrial economies needing to be nurtured during their developmental phases, we must grant the state’s unforgiving face significant functionality for a polity undergoing democratization during the later stages of industrial take-off. The case can be exaggerated. Not all state actions were so hostile to the recipients. Some, especially those of the municipal utilities, could be positively user-friendly. There seems evidence of mass-attachment to the widening services of municipal gas, water and (in particular) transport undertakings. The same is probably true of more marginal utilities such as municipal baths and wash-houses. However, at least until the emergence of mass public transport in the 1890s, these utilities were fairly cost-free, and therefore placed few burdens upon local economies. Indeed, gas undertakings normally made profits sufficiently handsome to relieve local taxation substantially. For this reason, and because of the services they provided at cut-price rates to large consumers, they were not merely popular with small ratepayers, but also attracted enthusiastic support from local industry. Interestingly, only when rates burdens accelerated in the 1890s do we see consistent evidence of business hostility to local state expansion. As was already perhaps evident with friendly societies, the minimal and hostile state also partly underlay another highly functional feature of British society during democratization. This is arguably a valuable prerequisite of success, which many observers see as being in distinctly short supply in many states democratizing since 1989. It is the vibrant, widespread, overlapping and steadily expanding network of voluntary organization evident among groups being enfranchised. To understand how impressive this is, one need only examine the range of pressure groups operating by around 1870 nationally and municipally, a range – separated spheres notwithstanding – already beginning to include women. There also existed a substantial, and proliferating, range of professional organizations. The middle classes, and particularly middle-class women, were also eager participants in rapidly expanding charitable and religious organizations. Meanwhile, 1 857 896 respectable workers were members of friendly societies making returns to the Royal Commission in 1872 – and possibly another two million in societies not making such returns.32 Significant numbers of these also belonged to the expanding trade unions, co-ops and working men’s clubs.

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What we see here, of course, are the thriving manifestations of ‘civil society’. This had at least four highly functional consequences for Britain’s democratizing polity. First, it meant that many people, particularly within urban areas, had at least partial autonomy from the state and, in particular, its elites. Thus the extent of dependency and deference amongst actual and potential citizens, although clearly evident, was limited. Second – and important at least for students of more recent democratizations – such vibrant voluntary association reinforced the state’s self-imposed limitations on its impingement on social and economic life. This helped to ensure that the system remained liberal while being democratized. Third, and even more important, this vast and increasing organizational network indicated that combination for common ends, both politically and nonpolitically, was widely established from an early stage. Fourth, and equally early, there were strong and widespread traditions of selfgovernance and self-direction. This was considerably reinforced by the habit of government by town meetings from at least the late eighteenth century. By these means, democratic norms, expectations and experience became widespread among the population, often substantially before enfranchisement. Most civil organizations were internally democratic from the start – probably increasingly so the further one went down the social scale, judging by co-ops, friendly societies and trade unions, and the working-class sectors of nonconformity such as Primitive Methodism. For the purposes of self-governance, working-class organizations from the start developed models of both direct and representative democracy. The first was the more popular, to judge by union33 and friendly society experience. Yet habits connected with the second also rapidly became almost reflexive for respectable working men; significantly, they became increasingly evident in the decades after enfranchisement. Such democratic attachment is strongly evident among their first genuinely political organizations, the Corresponding Societies in the 1790s.34 Furthermore, according to E. P. Thompson, even the pathetic Cato Street revolutionaries of 1820, ‘found it necessary to appoint one of their number as chairman … and take the question of beheading Castlereagh and firing the Tower of London in proper form, with a vote upon the substantive motion’.35 Meanwhile, connectedly, and sometimes seen as part of civil society, further aid to the democratizing process flowed from Britain’s expanding mass-communication networks – newspapers in the nineteenth century, and newspapers and broadcasting in the twentieth. It is important

John Garrard 45

that this developed early and was very widely accessible. Though the independence of some of this network is questionable, even the most determined censorship was never effective or dedicated enough to prevent newspapers from developing several roles, highly functional to a developing liberal democracy. The battle over press freedom, and stamp and paper duties before 1837, reinforced the attachment of politicized working people to liberal values. In the longer term, newspapers facilitated communication within social groups, and the articulation of common consciousness, interest and demand for those being enfranchised. Newspapers also provided channels of upward – and more certainly downward – communication between the elites and the masses. Furthermore, although this function’s effective performance was always liable to erosion by steadily intensifying commercial considerations,36 the press, particularly before 1914, was sufficiently diverse and circulation sufficiently large, to enable it to have an important, if diminishing, part in facilitating democratic debate. Finally, it is arguable that important advantages flowed from Britain’s undergoing democratization so early. These advantages seem selfevident, at least retrospectively – and in the light of the experiences of countries that have undergone the process more recently and more rapidly. Being among the first meant that there were few acceptable models against which advances could be measured and found wanting by those demanding entry. This made it easier to complete the process step-by-step over many decades. The elite hardly needed to see democracy as a conscious end-product of what was happening. Rather each step, particularly in the crucial early stages, was perceivable in once-andfor-all terms. A further advantage of slowness, certainly for the elite, and perhaps also for the system’s long-term stability, was that each group could be absorbed, politically assimilated and socialized before demands for entry by the next group became irresistible. In these processes, as we have argued, existing political parties and their leaders, partly from considerations of competitive advantage, and partly from a desire to preserve the system, proved to be eager and generally skilful participants. Nevertheless, the slow character of democratization gave parties and other institutions time to experiment and adapt to the new political situations that emerged.

Conclusions Near this chapter’s start, I posed three questions to try to understand the success of Britain’s version of democratization. These concerned

46 Democratization in Britian

the system’s continued stability and legitimacy while democratization was happening, and society’s crucial ability to generate both participatory attitudes and manageable levels of demand among those being enfranchised. The answers now seem clear, particularly if what is argued here is contrasted with more recent and less fortunate democratizing polities. The factors highlighted are interlinked and mutually reinforcing. The system proved to be powerfully capable of generating its own legitimizing symbols and institutions – including, crucially, the vote itself. Along with the elites’ own flexibility, these became important in ensuring that groups being included were also incorporated politically and socially. Meanwhile, and connectedly, neither of the divisions most likely to undermine legitimacy proved to be genuinely problematic in Britain – nationality questions had mainly been resolved before democratization began; and class was continuously cross-cut by religion, assuaged by various sorts of inclusive populism37 and contained by the desire for political inclusion itself. Furthermore, Britain’s version of civil society helped to ensure that those being enfranchised did not find political participation too odd an experience, and indeed had come to regard it as their most important demand. Meanwhile, the particular character of civil society, along with the baleful state that helped to develop it, ensured that the demands produced through participation were of a sort the political system could absorb and the still-developing economy could sustain. It is tempting to ascribe some of this to collective national talent. As in other countries, the role of the elites, local as much as national, and social as well as political (if these were separable in the nineteenth century), was important. Some of it – such as the staging of enfranchisement, the competitive flexibility of the elites, the attempt (via political parties) to procure political training for those being enfranchised, or the willingness to encourage incorporation as well as political inclusion – was at least semi-intentional. Some, like the agenda-influencing creation of a baleful state, was the result of deliberate action, albeit aimed at something else: creating the attitudinal infrastructure of laissez faire rather than inhibiting political demand. However, we have already moved beyond the point where explanations in terms of design can take us. Rather more of the responsibility for successful democratization, including some factors already highlighted as being semi-intentional, must be ascribed to sheer good fortune. Here, the most important among many are the

John Garrard 47

facts that Britain, first, was very fortunate to undertake democratization from a pre-existing condition that was respectably liberal; and second, was among the first polities to undergo the process.

Notes and references 1. James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge University Press, 1993). 2. For example, Salford in 1843–4. See John Garrard, Leaders and Politics in Nineteenth Century Salford: A Historical Analysis of Urban Political Power, Occasional Papers in Sociological and Political Studies (University of Salford, 1972). 3. John Garrard, Friendly Societies, the Poor Law and Democratization in Britain, European Studies Research Institute Occasional Paper (Salford University forthcoming), pp. 38ff. 4. Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism (London: Merlin, 1972). 5. John Garrard, ‘The Mayoralty Since 1835’ in Alan O’Day (ed.), Government and Institutions in the Post-1832 United Kingdom (Lampeter: Edward Mellen, 1995), pp. 1–30. For a similar argument, see Neville Kirk, The Growth of Working Class Reformism in Mid-Victorian England (London: Croom Helm, 1985). 6. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1992). 7. Erich Strauss, Irish Nationalism and British Democracy (London: Methuen, 1951). 8. Frank O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties: the Unreformed Electoral System (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 9. Derek Fraser, Urban Politics in Victorian England (Leicester University Press, 1978). 10. Maurice Cowling, 1867: Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 1967). Not an uncontested argument. 11. John Phillips, The Great Reform Bill in the Boroughs: English Electoral Behaviour 1818–1841 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 12. For example, David Walsh, Working Class Political Integration and the Conservative Party: A Study in Class Relations and Party Political Development in the North West, 1800–70 (Unpublished PhD. thesis University of Salford, 1991). 13. John Vincent, The Formation of the British Liberal Party 1857–68 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). 14. Eugenio G. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone (Cambridge University Press, 1992); D. A. Hamer, Liberal Politics in the Age of Gladstone and Disraeli (Oxford University Press, 1972).

48 Democratization in Britian 15. O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties; for Irish evidence, see Lindsay J. Proudfoot, Urban Patronage and Social Authority: The Management of the Duke of Devonshire’s Towns in Ireland 1764–1891) (Washington DC: Catholic University of America, 1995). 16. John Garrard, Leadership and Power in Victorian Industrial Towns, 1830–80 (Manchester University Press, 1983). 17. Walsh, Working Class Political Integration. 18. D. N. Kirk, The Growth of Working Class Reformism; R. L. Greenall, ‘Popular Conservatism in Salford 1868–86’, in Northern History, vol. IX (1974), pp. 123–38. 19. Vincent, The Formation of the British Liberal Party., ch. 2. 20. J. H. Treble, Urban Poverty in Britain 1830–1914 (London: Batsford, 1979); see also Kirk, The Growth of Working Class Reformism. 21. Treble, Urban Poverty in Britain. 22. Also mobile professionals, hitherto disenfranchised by residential requirements. See Duncan Tanner, ‘The Parliamentary System, the “Fourth” Reform Act and the Rise of Labour in England and Wales’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, vol. 56 (1983) pp. 205–19. 23. Geoffrey Crossick, The Lower Middle Class in Britain 1870–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1977); Geoffrey Crossick and Conrad Haupt, Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in Nineteenth Century Europe (London: Methuen, 1984). 24. G. Stedman Jones, ‘The Language of Chartism’, in James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson (eds), The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830–60 (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 3–58. 25. E. G. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform.; also ‘British Trade Unions and Popular Political Economy 1860–1880’, Historical Journal, vol. 30. no. 4 (1987) pp. 811–40. 26. Henry Pelling, Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian England (London: Macmillan, 1979) ch. 1. For counter-argument, not really undermining the argument here, see Pat Thane, ‘The Working Class and State Welfare in Britain 1880–1914’, Historical Journal, vol. 27 (1984) pp. 877–900. 27. On suffrage organizations, see Andrew Rosen, Rise up Women: The Militant Campaign of the WSPU (London: Routledge, 1974); on working class interest in Lancashire and the reason for it, see Jill Liddington, One Hand Tied Behind Us: The Rise of the Women’s Suffrage Movement (London: Virago, 1978). 28. Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain 1860–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). 29. John Garrard, ‘Parties, Members and Voters after 1867’, in T. R. Gourvish and Alan O’Day (eds), Later Victorian Britain 1867–1900 (London: Macmillan, 1988). 30. On housing regulations’ disastrous impact on slum dwellers, see Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study of the Relationship Between the Classes in Victorian Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976). 31. For these arguments, see John Garrard, ‘Friendly Societies, the Poor Law and Democratization in Britain’. 32. P. H. J. H. Gosden, Self-Help: Voluntary Associations in Nineteenth Century Britain (London: Batsford, 1973) p. 74.

John Garrard 49 33. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Industrial Democracy, vol. 1. (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1897). 34. Mary Thale (ed). The Autobiography of Francis Place (Cambridge University Press, 1972) pp. 121 and 141. 35. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1964) p. 673. 36. Alan J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press 1855–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1976). 37. This, rather than his arguments about the unimportance of class, seems to be the most important implication from Patrick Joyce’s Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class 1848–1918 (Cambridge University Press 1991). For earlier arguments about the inclusive nature of the politics of British class relations, see Kirk, The Growth of Working Class Reformism.

4 Bearing the Stamp of History: the Elitist Route to Democracy in the Netherlands Robert van der Laarse

This chapter sees the Netherlands as a unique case of democratization. In countries such as France, democracy developed after some sort of revolutionary break from the ancien régime; in others, such as Britain, the transition from absolutism to democracy occured more gradually. Dutch history, however, shows that the Netherlands’ route to democracy was a combination of both and, as I shall suggest at the end, its success requires a particular sort of explanation. The national state itself dates only from the Batavian Revolution of 1795, pre-dated by the Patriot Revolt of the 1780s and completed by the Orangist Restoration of 1813. But there is no vestige in the nation’s memory of this revolutionary episode, since nineteenthcentury civic ritual and national iconography sanctified the ‘heroic age’ of the Eighty Years’ War against Habsburg Spain (1566–1648) and the liberation from French occupation in 1813; in the same way, the German occupation of 1940–5 enjoyed such a high public profile that most people divide modern history simply in terms of before or after ‘the war’. Among scholars, too, there is a strong tendency to present Dutch history from the perspective of continuity and conciliation, instead of breaks and conflicts. Even the introduction of mass politics at the end of the nineteenth century has been interpreted from a Whig perspective as a rather peaceful process of segmented emancipation, known as ‘pillarization’.1 It has become a stereotyped idea that the liberal elites agreed to accommodate the Calvinists, Catholics and socialists by accepting at the local level an almost complete subcultural segmentation, while maintaining narrow political relations between the elites of the ‘pillars’ at the top. According to political scientists, the Netherlands has experienced a unique political 50

Robert van der Laarse 51

system of ‘consociational democracy’ ever since the so-called ‘Pacification’ of 1917. This settled the religious conflict over education, and the social struggle for universal suffrage, by accepting certain political ‘rules of the game’, transforming politics into a proportional distribution of public influence and spending. Hence the paradox of subcultural pluralism and political stability is ascribed to the ‘conflict management’ of ‘prudent elites’, who took responsibility when faced with the danger of national disintegration in a traditionally segmented society undergoing modernization.2 From this conciliatory perspective, the emergence of the new pillarized mass parties appears as a one-way integration of the political periphery into an age-old ‘accommodationist elite culture’, reaching back to the urban elite of the old Republic.3 Strangely, considering the assumption of historical continuity, political developments before the emergence of pillarized mass politics have not attracted much scholarly attention from the perspective of democratization. Yet by exploring the features of Dutch political culture from the end of the Republic until the Pacification, I will show that parliamentary democracy in the Netherlands had initially proceeded from a mixture of aristocratic and populist strategies, initiated by competing local elites, long before pillarized democracy took definite shape. For that reason the process of democratization will not be approached from the perspective of social emancipation, but be viewed in the light of liberal dissension. I shall draw attention to the way Dutch liberalism had to cope with an internal contradiction between the old-republican language of ‘particularism’ and a newrepublican language of national unity, born during the revolution of 1795 but appropriated by the ‘enlightened’ monarchy of 1813. This conceptual flexibility could explain both the liberals’ accommodation to revolutionary situations, and their close affiliation with the language of political conservatism. Viewed from this angle, it was the relationship between religion and politics, linked to the liberals’ failure to win the popular vote, that produced the decline of the nineteenthcentury ruling class and subsequently favoured the rise of a new arrangement of pillarized politics.

Invented restoration The United Kingdom of William I was essentially a product of European diplomacy. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815 the introduction of the monarchic principle was regarded as a restorative

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guarantee of internal stability, while the containment of imperialist France required a political union between the former Dutch Republic and the Austrian Netherlands. But apart from the temporary link-up of the Low Countries, which in its anachronistic throwback to the old Burgundian heritage lasted only until the Belgian Revolt of 1830, the new Dutch state completely broke with the past. For William’s kingdom, as far as it was not created at the Viennese negotiating table, was strongly influenced by the spirit of the Enlightenment, and greatly indebted to the project of Bonapartist unification. Though originally formulated by radical printers, journalists and Freemasons during the Patriot Revolt of 1785–7, the demand for political centralization was only realized with French political aid after the Batavian Revolution of 1795. Patriotism then was a highly confusing political label for a temporary coalition of at least two sorts of ‘patriots’: a militant underworld of clubs and societies, in favour of social equality and national unity, and a second, aristocratic group who adhered as ‘good regents’ to the old federalist or particularist principle of ‘true freedom’. Their protest, drawn up carefully in the anonymously published Grondwettige Herstelling van Nederlands Staatswezen (1785–6), was directed against the old corruption of the Orangist system of patronage.4 What these aristocrats in revolt demanded was a restoration of the privileges of the provincial estates, embedded in the Union of Utrecht of 1579, regarded as the Dutch Republic’s constitution. In contrast, the radicals found final expression in the Batavian Revolution of 1795, when the Batavian National Assembly demanded the dismantling of the old regime, and proclaimed the national sovereignty of the people, legitimized by natural law instead of historical arguments. This unitary idea of the nation was embodied in the radical (or Jacobin) constitution of 1798, which determined the framework of the modern Dutch state.5 Recent research into the character of Dutch elites has revealed a remarkable change in personnel during the first phase of the Revolution, when the estates were broken up, the Church and nobility lost their privileges, and new revolutionary administrations were purged of Orangists and federalists. Except for a minority of former patriot noblemen and aristocratic regents, most Batavian representatives and administrators were homines novi, recruited from the landed gentry and commercial classes.6 But the Revolution could also be mapped by religion. The language of patriotism found its main support among the ‘enlightened’ latitudinarians within the Dutch Reformed Church, as well as Catholics and Protestant dissenters; the non-Calvinist part of the

Robert van der Laarse 53

population that had formerly been excluded from government.7 Otherwise, the Calvinist orthodoxy in the old centre of the Republic (that is, Holland, Utrecht and Zeeland) edged away from radicalism. Here, as local research suggests, the Revolution lost support among the Protestant majority, who feared the dismantling of the Reformed Church and the nationalization of its funds and buildings on behalf of the Catholic minority.8 In fact this geographical and religious imbalance was already reflected in the radical referendum of 1798, when in Holland the unitarian constitution was rejected by three-quarters of the voters, whereas in the Catholic province of Brabant it was accepted by two-thirds.9 The radicalization of the Revolution produced a wave of antiCatholicism, pointing to a future in which all Dutch reform movements in the nineteenth century would be defeated by Protestant intransigence. From 1800, most Catholic representatives in the revolutionary municipalities in Holland and the northern provinces were replaced by former Orangist regents.10 This process of consolidation by the Protestant elites signalled the decay of ecumenical egalitarianism. The revolution from below, which started as a dynamic complex of municipal and regional revolts, became a revolution from above. In 1806 this hierarchical process of statebuilding resulted in Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s Kingdom of Holland, which was annexed in 1810 by Napoleon’s French Empire. Thus the radical demand for national unification found final expression in a long-term bureaucratic centralization, pushed forward by Bonapartism, and completed after the Restoration of 1813 by King William I’s programme of reconciliation. After 1800 the Protestant amalgamation of former regents and patriot newcomers produced a new ruling class of ‘notables’, who dominated social life and politics until the end of the nineteenth century. Crucial to William’s state-building was a policy of ennoblement.11 During the Republic the nobility had been restricted to the old noble families, raised to the peerage before the Dutch revolt and recognized in their titles by the regional estates on the principle of ancestry and seigniorial status. This was even though most of the regents had changed from merchants into landlords, and at least a tenth had succeeded in buying titles and seigniories. From 1815, however, the Dutch nobility became a national elite taking its official recognition from the Crown. Following Napoleon’s example, hereditary titles in the Netherlands were not bestowed on the principle of birth, but conferred as a reward for merit, defined in bourgeois terms of wealth and money. As a result, the old nobility had to accept in the

54 Route to Democracy in the Netherlands

restored Ridderschappen (the provincial noble estates) the presence of a new nobility, composed of descendants of the former regent aristocracy, and a remarkable number of nouveaux riches. The invented character of the ‘restored’ nobility was, however, accentuated even more by the corresponding invention of a new patrician estate. This non-titled part of the political class of notables incorporated not only the rising class of manufacturers and administrators, but also some prominent members of the landed gentry and some of the richest Amsterdam merchant bankers, who refused to buy their dignity from the king.12 Although the constitutional commission of 1815 had adopted the English model of a Lower and Upper House, it feared a concentration of land and power among the hereditary peerage. For that reason it accepted the French law of partial succession (favouring a division of the legacy among the relatives) instead of the British principle of primogeniture. Hence the Dutch Senate became a royal instrument composed of notables appointed by the king. Only the Lower House or Second Chamber of the States General functioned as a kind of assembly, although representatives were chosen by a very complicated electoral system in which town councils, regional estates and provincial councillors all functioned as electoral bodies, but at two (or more) removes from the voters. Moreover, the franchise restrictions strongly favoured the highest and most prominent taxpayers, notably noblemen and patricians.13 Power, then, was concentrated at the national level, and delegated by the government in The Hague to provincial governors (Lord Lieutenants), burgomasters and court presidents, all of whom were appointed by the king. An immense amount of correspondence between these various authorities bears testimony to their function as royal eyes and ears, although this material also demonstrates that the early-nineteenth-century government was far from monolithic. 14 The electoral complexity helped to produce a great deal of corruption and government control, in particular within the provincial administrations, where the old nobility and regent aristocracy still played a prominent role. Yet the king’s most powerful administrators were recruited from the patrician bourgeoisie, such as the Lord Chancellor, C. F. van Maanen, who started his career as a radical unitarian (Jacobin) under Louis Napoleon and stayed in office until 1842. 15 Together, the centralized administration, the royal policy of patronage and the local elite’s tendency to particularism produced a kind of a political hybrid.

Robert van der Laarse 55

Considering the above, it is not surprising that William I has been considered the first and only Dutch ‘enlightened despot’, marked by a Bonapartist presidential style of government as well as a patriarchal self-image, adopted from his relative, Frederick the Great, and his brother-in-law, the Prussian king, Frederick William III.16 For that reason a Belgian historian recently spoke rather polemically of a Dutch ‘Germanic Sonderweg’.17 According to the German historian Horst Lademacher, however, William’s kingdom possessed Europe’s most ‘liberal’ constitution before the Belgian revolution of 1830, one rooted in a long tradition of freedom and tolerance. 18 Yet, in my opinion, these contradictory characteristics only confirm the essentially dualist nature of the nation. Because, if the king followed the example of the great European monarchs and governed increasingly by royal decree, beneath the surface of bureaucratic order many local and regional authorities still clung to the federalist tradition. So, paradoxically, the restorative element in the new monarchy was responsible for its ‘early liberal’ appearance. Instead of the privileges favoured by the king, liberties were regarded as established rights – rights defended by the urban regents and regional estates against, consecutively, the King of Spain, the stadholders, the French emperor and finally the king of the Netherlands. This federalist reflex was even expressed symbolically in the legitimation of royal sovereignty. In 1813 the Prince of Orange had been proclaimed ‘sovereign’ by some prominent lords, acting as representatives of the Dutch notables, on the condition that he reigned under a ‘wise constitution’.19 Though William would soon regard the constitution as his gift to the people, the ruling elite never accepted the monarchic principle. In fact, the question of the legitimation of power was central to political opposition until the end of the nineteenth century. But the defence of liberty would also present itself in a religious form. Together this contributed to the specific outcome of the Dutch process of democratization.

The rise and fall of an opposition How could one guarantee the stability of a nation that by tradition was infected with the virus of particularism, without catching the ‘French disease’ of bureaucracy? This question of the balance between federalism and national unity had been crucial to the founding fathers of the Dutch constitution. Yet by the 1820s its main architect, Count G. K. van Hogendorp, concluded in his ‘letters to the nation’ that the social contract had been violated by royal despotism. To fight the corruption of

56 Route to Democracy in the Netherlands

autocracy, grand seigneurs such as Hogendorp, and many aristocratic governors and burgomasters, proposed reforms that surpassed even their ‘own’ constitution. As the embodiment of the old regency and court nobility, these moderates were now prepared to join hands with bourgeois radicals. Confronted by censure and repression, they closed ranks around what was known as the British model of parliamentary monism and the French doctrine of the separation of Church and state.20 In reaction to these liberal demands, however, the monarchy affirmed its desire for centralization and unity. Thus, in 1829, William’s son, Prince Frederick, was appointed head of a ‘royal government’, while the state’s officials were forced by royal proclamation to promote the unity of language, education and religion as being crucial to the survival of the nation.21 It is these politics of Enlightenment that would soon become the main source of ideological segmentation. The Belgian Revolution of 1830 was the first and most fundamental reaction to this kind of official nationalism. In the north, however, the attack on the honour of the House of Orange weakened the call for reform, and united (at least temporarily) the ‘Protestant nation’ behind the king. The atmosphere of romantic, popular nationalism in both parts of the Low Countries came to a head a year later, when, under the command of the Princes William and Frederick, the ‘mutinous’ Belgians were defeated in a military campaign, supported by civic guards and student militias. The European powers, however, would not intervene, and within ten years the financial costs of William’s ‘policy of perseverance’ bankrupted the state. Coupled with the economic crisis in the Netherlands’ East Indies – brought about by the government misusing the profits of the Dutch Trading Company and the so-called Cultuurstelsel (the state’s exploitative cultivation system in Java) – this completely isolated the monarchy from the world of finance. Ironically, however, William had to abdicate in 1840 because he wanted to marry a half-Belgian Catholic countess. Worried about the state’s repayment of government bonds, the Amsterdam merchant bankers then called for financial reforms. Appointed prime minister by King William II under a new constitution that at least officially recognized the principle of ministerial responsibility, their political spokesman, F. A. van Hall, was able to restore confidence in the money market.22 Strengthening its support among the moneyed aristocracy, however, the government’s main concern soon became the ideological legitimation of its policy in the nation at large. Calvinism had been the Republic’s official religion until 1795, and even the patriots were initially inspired by the seventeenth-century

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‘Batavian myth’ of the Republic as a New Israel. Yet, from the late eighteenth century, religion was changed in form and meaning. As in politics, the Restoration of 1813 only continued this Enlightenment project. By tradition, the Calvinists were staunch adherents to the House of Orange, but the orthodox creed was incompatible with the king’s policy of religious unification. From both his Batavian predecessors and his own experience with Prussian Staatskirchentum, William had inherited a strong belief in Christian unity as being crucial to the policy of state-building. Therefore, the Dutch Reformed Church was reorganized in 1816 under state supervision, as a hierarchic ecclesiastical association headed by the king, while the doctrines of Calvinism were sacrificed for a more intimate, humanist religion of reason, under the latitudinarian device of ‘belief, hope, and peace’.23 As such, this new set-up of religion and politics contributed to new forms of dissent. The ardent critics of this religion of Enlightenment were to be found in the so-called Reveil, composed of groups of high-bred romantics, accompanied by a ‘grass-roots’ pietist movement. In contrast to aristocratic revivalism, this was expelled systematically from the Dutch Reformed Church, providing a Presbyterian alternative to the ‘hierarchical’ order of 1816 after the Secession of 1834.24 Thus we can observe around 1830 a defence of liberty in religion as well as politics against ‘enlightened despotism’, legitimized by revivalist doctrines and inspired by romantic imagination. It can be argued that this interesting interweaving of political radicalism and religious opposition was itself a product of a political climate that neglected every form of organized dissent, and even made the word ‘party’ taboo. In fact, the government itself raised the spectre of factionism by creating a register of potential ‘separatists’ involved in the Church and politics: liberal aristocrats, radical democrats, Catholic ultramontanists and orthodox Calvinists. The paradox of this self-fulfilling fear of segmentation was made clear by the Amsterdam editor of the moderate newspaper Algemeen Handelsblad in a confidential recommendation made to King William II in 1840.25 According to this political insider, it was William I’s policy of repression that was responsible for the regime’s loss of confidence. Government intervention against the Belgians, the religious ‘fanatics’ and the radical press allied moderates and even former ‘king’s men’ with the liberal opposition. Taken all together, it shows us the making of an opposition.26 Without going into further detail, it is clear that the crisis of 1830 only ended with the liberal changeover in March 1848. Perhaps this explains the ‘velvet’ character of the whole event, which happened

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peacefully, not least because some radical ‘gentlemen leaders’ gained the new king’s confidence as spokesmen of the people. While most of these romantic aristocrats – such as the impoverished noblemanjournalist Adriaan van Bevervoorde, who took part in the formation in Brussels of Karl Marx’ Association Démocratique (1847) – had only their personal antipathy against Van Hall in common, they gathered strength from the local tax riots of 1844 (against Van Hall’s financial reforms), and the food riots of 1845–7 (as a result of the potato blight).27 Impressed by the March revolts in Paris, Vienna and Berlin and popular demonstrations in The Hague and Amsterdam, William II changed overnight from being conservative to liberal, as he himself admitted. In fact, even this can be seen as a dialectic proof of kingcraft. After Van Hall’s resignation some months earlier, the king was able to split the liberal opposition by permitting the Leiden jurist J. R. Thorbecke to create a liberal constitution that in its scope went much further than the ‘early liberal’ proposals. Though considered ‘un-Dutch’ for its German ‘organic’ orientation and French doctrinaire argumentation, this constitution has survived all political changes up to the time of writing.28 It seems to me that the significance of the ‘Thorbeckian momentum’ of 1848 emerged from a kind of epistemological jump from the discourse of Restoration to the discourse of Revolution, marked by Thorbecke’s own conversion from legalistic monarchism to a doctrinaire liberalism. Passing over the old republican and Anglophile orientation of early aristocratic liberalism, this established an imaginary link with democratic patriotism. As head of government from 1849, he completely changed the franchise, and introduced periodic elections by direct vote. Yet, if this electoral reform weakened the king’s power, Thorbecke’s constitutional system was generally weighted more towards centralism than federalism, preferring strong government to parliamentary monism, a Bonapartist nationalization of the taxation system, and strengthening state control over education and poor-relief. Precisely because of this break with particularism, however, the Thorbeckian revolution from above lacked the necessary support from below. The liberal abolition of the estates, seigniorial rights and urban excise duties was particularly favourable to the rising commercial bourgeoisie and industrial manufacturers in the Outer Provinces, but not to the Amsterdam merchant-aristocracy and the landed interest, who endorsed Van Hall’s ‘conservative liberal’ policy of moderate reform. Moreover, the Thorbeckian separation of Church from state alienated the Protestant majority from the government, because they

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feared increased influence by Catholic elites on local schools and charity institutions. Finally, Thorbecke’s laissez-faire policy was opposed to the social demands of the ‘people’s leaders’, who still hoped for an intervention from the king and opted for a sort of radical royalism.29 What these three groups had in common was not a longing for the old regime, but rather an aversion to doctrinaire liberalism, personified by Thorbecke’s intellectual hauteur and legalism. So it was religious and class identities as well as political style that explained the estrangement of the ‘new liberals’ from the mood of the nation. 30 While Dutch liberal culture bore for years the legalistic stamp of Thorbecke’s personality, ‘old liberal’ conservatism longed for the Burkian virtues of tradition, prudence and ‘Protestant tolerance’. Incapable of philosophical systematizing, its moral language was utterly remote from the scientific attitude and stiff sense of duty of Thorbeckian liberalism and was probably more akin to the evangelical spirit of English Gladstonian liberalism (although lacking the latter’s immense popular appeal). The complexity of this new differentiation of liberalism and conservatism may explain the anti-Catholic anger of the Protestant nation during the so-called April Movement of 1853. Rallying against Thorbecke’s consent to a restoration of Catholic ecclesiastical organization, sanctioned by the constitutional separation of Church and state, the Protestants lost confidence in reform from the moment the Catholics began to profit from it – just as the radicals and Catholic patriots had been expelled from office half a century earlier. Though the national organization of this ‘no-Popery’ movement is still shrouded in mist, local research suggests that it was the combined attack of Thorbecke’s government on the vested interests of economy, state and Church that created a ‘big Protestant’ rapprochement of nonconformist radicals, ‘early liberal’ conservatives, and Calvinist ‘Anti-Revolutionaries’.31 Most important from the perspective of democratization, however, was its combination of populist strategy and royalist political orientation. Using the instrument of a nationwide people’s petition, framed by the Dutch Reformed Church and presented to the king, the April Movement was able to mobilize ‘the people behind the electorate’ against the liberal government. The petitions – signed by the vast majority of the Protestant adult male population (roughly 200 000 signatures) – were ritually handed over to the king in two ceremonies in the old centre of the Reformation, Utrecht, and the new capital, Amsterdam. This confrontation between two models of democracy (populist and representational) resulted in a conservative victory, after which Van

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Hall took over. Yet, it was not the strength of this anti-parliamentary opposition but rather the king’s unconstitutional behaviour that had forced Thorbecke to resign.32 King William III, who had come to the throne in 1849, passionately denounced his father’s consent to the idea of constitutional government. Opposed to the former king’s liberal revolution, his royalist coup symbolically confirmed the mythical alliance between the House of Orange and the ‘Protestant nation’, as well as the ‘social contract’ of 1813 between sovereign and notables. Yet, it was only a brief moment of hope and glory for the last nineteenth-century king of Orange, who, after his finest hour, soon found history passing him by.

The geography of politics After Thorbecke stepped down in 1853, the old regime seemed to be restored in practice. Indeed, William I’s class of notables would govern the nation for at least another thirty years. Although the franchise of 1848 was no longer composed of voters and electives, suffrage still depended on income, while a new differentiation between local and national voters restricted politics, as before, to the upper classes, at least when national issues were at stake. Before 1848 a relatively large group (roughly 90 000) of urban voters could only elect members from a select category of people in the highest tax bracket, restricted to roughly 1 per cent of adult males. From 1848, the franchise was extended to 18–19 per cent for municipal elections, but restricted to 10–11 per cent of adult males for parliamentary and provincial elections (roughly 75 000 voters, or 6–7 per cent of heads of households).33 Moreover, chosen by indirect vote by the provincial councillors, the Upper House continued to be almost exclusively noble and patrician, while in the Lower House (now chosen by direct vote) at least two-thirds of the seats were taken by noblemen and their untitled relatives, most of whom were burgomasters, court presidents or provincial governors. Before the 1880s only a few members of parliament belonged to the industrial bourgeoisie, and the middle and lower classes were not represented at all.34 To explain this aristocratic continuity after the ‘bourgeois revolution’ of 1848, Dutch historians have generally assumed that Thorbecke’s reforms came too early. It has even been argued, though without much evidence, that the franchise of 1848 was of ample dimensions, since elections had a poor turnout, at least until the denominational politicization of the middle classes from the 1870s. 35 Indeed, politics

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were characterized during this transition period from enlightened royalism to pillarized mass politics by an almost complete lack of formal party organization, and, accordingly, an individualist voting behaviour in parliament that puzzled even well-informed contemporaries, such as the English ambassador, Lord Napier. In fact, even the ideological colour of the cabinets is hard to classify, as their creation and reshuffling was completely independent of parliamentary influence.36 But does this really mean that the nation adapted itself to the prudent leadership of its moderate elites? An examination of local elections polls reveals an interesting pattern, which makes it possible to understand the political indifference from a more rational perspective. Both the constituency voting system and the formal rules of the election system of 1848 favoured the majority party through the principle of ‘winner takes all’.37 To have a chance of representation, political minorities had either to co-operate or take electoral meetings by surprise. As long as the political factions in the constituencies balanced each other, the polls were generally high. But the turnout lowered as soon as a majority party became firmly entrenched, as voting could hardly be interesting when nothing was at stake. Therefore, the electorate was highly politicized during the political crisis of 1848–53, when in many boroughs old and new liberals were fighting for votes and power. Things changed, however, after the ‘April Storm’ of 1853, when the ‘Thorbeckians’ and their Catholic allies were thrown out by majority vote. For at least a decade, elections became ritual confirmations of the conservative hegemony of the Protestant elites. Of course, the office-holders still had to offer themselves as politicians for election by direct vote, and in the aftermath of 1853 some Protestant newcomers from the upper middle class were admitted to office. But the system’s complexity promoted the periodic re-election of sitting administrators over new candidates, which means that, for practical purposes, they were chosen for life. These general observations of the electoral mechanism help us to understand why radical changes in many constituencies often got bogged down in religious strife, which favoured political stability in the end. Yet, they do not explain the significant geographical differentiation in Dutch political culture. The social historian Th. Van Tijn has argued that political opposition in the Netherlands, from the Patriot Revolt of the 1780s to the rise of pillarization in the 1870s, must be interpreted in terms of provincial movements for emancipation, opposed to the economic and political dominance of ‘the Amsterdam – The Hague axis’.38 Although there is little empirical proof

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for such a long-term geographic continuity of patriotism and liberalism, the election results from 1848 support the idea of an ideological contradistinction between Holland and the Outer Provinces. Up to 1870 the central Randstad-area between Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam and The Hague was a bulwark of conservatism, whereas the liberals were mainly returned to Parliament by votes from the provincial periphery. This is an interesting contrast to the current cliché of the backward Province as compared to the progressive Randstad. The evidence suggests, however, that here religion rather than regionalism was at stake. The electoral basis of conservatism was primarily situated in the Protestant strongholds of the public Church, while the liberals won the polls in some latitudinarian areas in the northern provinces and in the Catholic provinces of Brabant and Limburg.39 Of course, this does not mean that liberalism was weak in Holland; early liberalism, as we saw, had firm roots, especially in Amsterdam, while many Protestant conservatives or ‘conservative liberals’ were of liberal or even radical descent. For years after the April Movement, though, liberalism in this western part of the country was mainly restricted to the Catholic minority, which comprised 30–40 per cent of urban voters. Thus it seems that ‘religiography’ explains the fundamental weakness of the liberals in the aftermath of ‘their’ revolution of 1848, as the patriot dependence on the Catholic periphery could have caused the defeat of radicalism in around 1800. One of the strategies used by those controlling government after 1848 was gerrymandering: that is, moving constituency boundaries to include desired religious groups. The crucial variable, however, was the balance of power within the centre. Things would only change if some of the Protestant majority were to link up with the Catholic periphery. Such a reshaping of political loyalties took place in the 1860s, the decade that has been called the pivot on which the whole period of 1850–90 hinged.40 Repeating the pattern of the 1840s, different religious and social minorities then closed ranks against the established elites by supporting each other’s candidates. In fact, all parties from 1848 onwards had been ad hoc coalitions. So too was the ‘Big Protestant Party’ of 1853, which split up around 1860, when a group of enlightened Protestants tried to win the votes of the Protestant orthodoxy by outbidding the liberals with a mixture of royalism and educational reform. This would possibly have resulted in a Dutch variant of Disraeli’s Tory Party, had not another group of Calvinist anti-revolutionaries exchanged the old-Protestant idea of one Church and one nation for a new concept of a free church and a free school, both liberated from government control. This opened up a new

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field of coalitions, and the immediate outcome was a liberal victory at the polls. In 1862, Thorbecke formed a second government, which was able to complete the law-making programme of his first administration. And when, in 1866, the conservatives returned to power, the king had to appeal to the country for support for ‘his’ cabinet against the liberal majority in Parliament. At first this constitutional crisis strengthened the conservative party, as it had in 1853. Yet, eventually, party politics eroded the royalists’ right to power.41 The conservatives suffered an electoral defeat after a second dissolution of Parliament in 1868, when public opinion learned of secret deals between the government and the ‘ultramontanists’ to join forces against the liberals. At that crucial moment, the heirs of the April Movement of 1853 lost not only the battle but also the Protestant nation. This remarkable ideological volte-face resulted from the separation of Church and state. This undermined the influence of the notability in Church affairs. In the Dutch Reformed Church, the ‘liberal’ patricians (both old and new liberals) lost their ecclesiastical hegemony after the introduction of an electoral system for Church offices in 1869, enabling the reveil aristocrats to mobilize the orthodox parishioners against the exponents of the ‘theology of Enlightenment’. 42 Equally, after the Episcopal restoration of the Roman Catholic Church in 1853, the notable liberal laity lost influence to a new elite of ultramontanists, who – solidly backed by the clergy – exchanged their allegiance to the democratic parties of 1795 and 1848 for an anti-modernist policy, inspired by the encyclical Quanta Cura (1864).43 Around 1870, these ecclesiastical changes produced political change. The ‘big Protestant’ coalition of conservatives and anti-revolutionaries and the ‘Papo-Thorbeckian’ alliance of liberals and Catholics both disintegrated. In 1860, liberals and conservatives each had 34 out of 72 seats in Parliament. In 1877 the liberals occupied 45 seats, while the conservatives dropped to 7 seats (out of 80); the rest was divided among the new clerical parties: Catholic ultramontanists and Calvinist antirevolutionaries.44 Within a few years this reversal of alliances was responsible for the complete transformation of the geography of politics. Liberalism after 1870 lost its hold on the Catholic south and took its main strength from the latitudinarian north and the old stronghold of conservatism: the cities of Holland. The anti-revolutionaries conquered the orthodox ‘Bible Belt’ in the middle of the country, and the Catholics were politically organized on ultramontanist foundations from the southern province of Brabant.45 In mixed areas of Protestants and Catholics, the meeting of forces took the form of anti-Papist charivaris,

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just as it had during the earlier breaks in political culture around 1800, 1830 and 1850.46 But, again, these rituals of identity only accentuated the essentially pluralist character of the nation, which since 1795 had never seriously been questioned.

Politics in a new key In the 1870s, the separation of religion and politics, generated by the 1848 disestablishment, culminated in a Kulturkampf. On the one hand, a new generation of ‘young liberals’ tried to cleanse politics of religion; and on the other, a new generation of clerical politicians transferred religious revivalism to politics. Thus, in 1878, the liberal prime minister, J. Kappeyne van de Coppello, initiated a civilizing offensive to ‘enlighten’ the nation through the state’s primary-school system, while both the ultramontanists and anti-revolutionaries petitioned the king for state aid for denominational education. 47 Significantly, though, the ‘School Act agitation’, aimed at the withdrawal of the liberal Education Bill, mobilized an even larger part of the nation against the government than the no-Popery agitation of 1853. Yet, the instrument of a people’s petition proved to be outdated, since the monarchy had lost its political power as a result of the constitutional crisis of 1866–8. Although clerical constituency associations dated from the 1860s, the ‘school struggle’ stimulated their national integration along party lines. In 1879, the Calvinist preacher-politician, Abraham Kuyper, founded the Anti-Revolutionary Party (ARP), held to be the first modern political party in the Netherlands; and in 1883 the priestpolitician, H. J. A. M. Schaepman, published his ultramontanist ‘Manifesto for a Roman Catholic Party’. Interestingly, their new strategy of political centralization and ideological isolation was accompanied by a more ‘politicised’ theological orientation. Kuyper distanced himself from the ethical-pietism of the conservative reveil aristocracy, while Schaepman, though distrusted by the episcopate for his ‘open’ Catholicism, initiated an ideological break with the ‘Papo Thorbeckian’ elites. Together, this opened up the prospect of a ‘monstrous coalition’ of the adherents of Rome and Calvin. This ideological bridging of the cleavage of the Reformation, which until then had prevented the conservatives from winning the Catholic vote, goes by the name of ‘the Antithesis’: the dichotomy of Christianity and ‘Paganism’, or, in Dutch terms, the dichotomy of right and left.

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Thus, just as the conservatives in the 1850s had initiated the electoral instrument of local constituency associations, so the clerics in the 1870s introduced modern party organization – featuring a party manifesto, voting discipline and a cult of leadership. This pattern was followed by the socialists in the 1880s, but never perfectly imitated by the liberals. Moulded by the agitation for laissez faire and public spirit in the 1840s and 1860s, liberal culture would adhere for more than a century to the respectable sociability of the Masonic club and the genteel style of the debating society. 48 Still, the education issue contributed not only to the strength of the clerical coalition but also to a ‘Protestantization’ of liberalism. The conservatives left the stage only because the clerics monopolized the interests of Church and religion, and the liberals took over carrying the torch of anti-clericalism, as defenders of the unitarian principles of 1795. As such, this ideological polarization marked a decisive division between the secular and the religious. The result was a new political arrangement, in which the secular ‘left’ (the socialists included) became identified with the autonomy of the state’s public sphere as an endangered remnant of William I’s enlightened nation, whereas the clerical ‘right’ demanded denominational ‘particularism’, as a corporatist translation of the old republican fear of centralism. Thus, paradoxically, the nationalization of the masses took place in the Netherlands by way of pillarized segmentation. Yet this segmented integration should not blind us to the fact that, at least until the end of the century, at the local level the political machinery was still controlled by ‘local bosses’, functioning as power brokers between the state and their own communities. In most boroughs, a new generation of Catholic ultramontanists and anti-revolutionary officials simply continued the ‘family government’ of their conservative or liberal fathers and uncles.49 The clerical ‘emancipators’ were drawn from the patrician class, not from ‘the people’, and often formed a paternalistic elite par excellence. Besides, even the liberal notables in Parliament could often survive for years by crossing the poles of the antithesis in their own constituencies, as active members of consistories and Christian school boards. Thus within the ARP, as within the Liberal Union (1885) and the Catholic party organizations, the regional notable elites played prominent roles until the 1890s. This aristocratic continuity suggests that parliamentary democracy in the Netherlands did not imply a process of social democratization: it was the political dynamic itself that determined the rules of the game and the number of players. Thus, in 1887, the liberal majority party

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initiated electoral reform, seeking new voters to outvote the more conservative clerical parties at the polls and win over the radical adherents of the ‘League for Universal Suffrage’ (1879). The discrimination between local and national voters disappeared, after which the electorate increased from 122 000 to 292 000 (25–26 per cent of the adult male population, 13 or 14 per cent of the adult population at that time). Yet these franchise extensions proved to be more favourable to the right than the left. The clerical minorities succeeded for the first time in mobilizing the popular vote ‘against liberalism’ by combining their lists of candidates. The liberals were not only defeated at the elections; they also had to face the holy music of a Christian cabinet (1888–92) being played within the old humanist nation of Erasmus and Spinoza. Yet the reforms of 1887 showed not only the fragility of the liberal order, they also pointed at the weak spot of ‘the Coalition’. Only two of the eight ministers were Catholics: yet polling evidence suggests that Catholics crossvoted for anti-revolutionaries but Calvinists hardly cast a vote for ultramontanists. Thus after the Christian coalition (1888–1892) altered the liberal Education Act and reached consensus on the possibility of state-aided denominational education, it broke apart as an old-fashioned alliance of interest groups: there simply was no ‘clerical policy’ apart from the education issue.50 Between 1891 and 1901 the liberals operated again (but for the last time) as a majority party. But behind the liberal–clerical scheme, a new segmentation was taking place. The 1890s were a decade of political radicalization, fostered by the agrarian depression as well as the take-off of modern industrialization and the consequential drift from the land to the cities. All parties were then confronted with their own democratic opposition, demanding an extension of the franchise and a change of personnel. For a while this seemed to result in a new, dualist party structure along the lines of class instead of religion. In opposition to the notable elites of their own clerical parties, Kuyper and Schaepman – the latter now backed by the social encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891 – allied themselves with the young liberal prime minister, J.P.R. Tak van Poortvliet, in support of his radical bill to extend suffrage to the working classes. Though the liberals in 1894 occupied no fewer than 60 out of 100 seats, overall the ‘Takkians’ were defeated in the election. Yet, in the longer run, the democratic element in Parliament was strengthened by the moderate electoral law of 1896, which enfranchised tradesmen, shopkeepers and craftsman. In all parties, this helped to produce a break with the notable elites. In 1896 the reveil aristocracy, opposed to electoral reform and Kuyper’s

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coalition with Rome, broke away from the ARP and virtually allied themselves with the ‘national liberals’. This had seceded from the ‘Takkian’ Union, which also lost its left wing of social liberals in 1901. Only the Catholic Party did not split during the radical 1890s. It was reorganized by the clergy along corporatist lines as a league of upper, middle and lower class representatives, in response to popular demand for a progressive Christian Democratic Party.51 In 1896, the connection between suffrage and taxpaying was exchanged for a broader definition of electoral capability, which extended the franchise to some 50 per cent of the adult male population (581 000 voters in 1897). But again, as in 1887, electoral reform proved most favourable to the right. However, the second cabinet of the clerical coalition (1901–5) headed by Kuyper, contrasted strongly with the first coalition government, presided over by a moderate, Baron Aeneas Mackay, a descendant of Scottish nobility. Though royalist and nationalist at heart, Kuyper’s populist appearance raised hopes for democratic reform. Yet, after the ‘men with the double names’ had lost their hold on politics, he exchanged his social policy for one of stabilization. On the threshold of the twentieth century, the antithesis was introduced once again, though it was no longer directed against liberalism, but this time against socialism. Kuyper lost his democratic reputation after the railway strike of 1903, when the government introduced its notorious anti-socialist ‘strangle laws’. In fact, this new identification with law and order contributed to his overthrow in 1905. Yet the Social Democratic Labour Party (the SDAP, founded in 1894) played into the clerics’ hands in 1913, by rejecting a liberal proposal for government participation. After the SDAP further isolated themselves by their so-called Operetta Revolution of 1918 – ‘the revolution that did not come off’, as the Marxists put it – the confessional parties were able to monopolize political power up to the Second World War.52 After the Pacification of 1917, and the introduction of universal suffrage and proportional representation in subsequent years, the liberals changed from a majority party into one of the smallest political minorities. But the process of democratization was also at the expense of the socialists. Increased from two parliamentary seats in 1898 to twentytwo in 1918, the socialist vote stagnated until the 1960s at around 20–25 per cent. Again this was a case of ‘religiography’, since socialism (like social liberalism) was almost entirely a latitudinarian phenomenon, restricted to the radical sociability of nonconformists, freethinkers and Jews in the Randstad area, and the agrarian proletariat of the northeastern Outer Provinces. In opposition to the old paternalism of the

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‘liberal elites’ as well as the growing influence of the orthodoxy in and outside the Dutch Reformed Church, both regions functioned from the late nineteenth century as the geographical nucleus of atheism in the Netherlands.53 Therefore, rather than being a vehicle of democratization, socialism was one of de-Christianization. Thus it was hardly accidental that a former Lutheran clergyman, Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, founder of the ‘old socialist movement’ in the 1880s, was hailed by his followers as ‘Our Saviour’ and titled his autobiography ‘From Christian to Anarchist’.54 In the Netherlands it was not the socialists but the ultramontanists who held the key to social democratization. Except for the hinterland of the great port towns of Amsterdam and Rotterdam, modern industrialization was concentrated in those areas where for centuries Catholics had been the majority among the working classes: from the mining industry in Limburg and the tanneries in Brabant, to the cotton belt of Twente and the breweries of Holland. Yet the political significance of the working classes also contributed to a remarkable volte-face in the clerical balance of power. The first Christian cabinets of Mackay and Kuyper had been no more than a try-out of the impending politics of pillarization, since they relied on the Catholic vote but reflected a Protestant hegemony. In fact, as we have seen, this had been a structural feature of Dutch politics ever since the Batavian Revolution. But this changed after the railway strike of 1903, when the episcopate started an antisocialist offensive to organize the Catholic workers into corporatist ‘estates’.55 The strength of these pillarized, mass organizations contributed to the defeat of the Reds in 1918 (as later of the Fascist movement). After this the Roman Catholic State Party (RKSP) controlled the popular vote. Yet, to underline the importance of class to Catholic policy, it was also at the insistence of the clergy that, on the eve of the Second World War (following the economic crisis of the 1930s), the social democrats were invited to join the government. Far from being a socialist victory, however, this so-called Second Pacification (in 1939) marked the Catholics’ pivotal political role. Socialist participation in national politics was made possible only by its symbolic integration with the nation. In fact, the SDAP came to play a vanguard role in the European-wide ‘bourgeoisification’ of the socialists; but the price of its political success was the loss of its ideological soul: republicanism, Marxist ideology and trade unionism were replaced by a policy of appeasement towards ‘Crown, Church and capital’. 56 Instead of a class ideology, socialism came to be seen as a moral stance against

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materialism and individualism. This ‘personalist’ socialism – or ‘ethical socialism’ in British terms – was, in fact, so akin to Catholic corporatism that, in the aftermath of the Second World War, a political fusion of Catholics and socialists seemed to be likely. Yet, episcopal fear of de-Christianization frustrated this ‘Breakthrough Movement’, though for almost two decades the country was ruled by a ‘Red Roman Coalition’.57 The great transformation had to wait until the so-called depillarization of the 1960s and 1970s. Only then did the Roman Catholic Church experience a similar process of internal crisis, which the Dutch Reformed Church had experienced almost a century before.58 And it was only after this that the liberal and socialist parties were able to penetrate the Catholic Outer Provinces, and govern without clerical consent; a political secularization that contributed strongly to a last swing of the political pendulum: the so-called purple coalition of liberals and socialists of the 1990s.

Conclusions At the beginning of this chapter I questioned the idea of Dutch democratization as a gradual, straightforward evolution. In contrast to this conciliatory leitmotiv of both the political and scholarly community, I argued that political development experienced some fundamental discontinuities. But these breaks did not seriously endanger political stability. The argument we have developed suggests that political loyalties were moulded within an age-old culture of particularism, and were based primarily on kinship and ‘religiography’ rather than class and ideology. Moreover, the time-lag between the establishment of parliamentary democracy and the take-off of modern industrialization prevented a fundamental politicization of the lower classes. Until the end of the nineteenth century, political culture was controlled by a relatively small class of notables, mainly landlords and merchant bankers, who gained power at the time of the Batavian Revolt of 1795 and the democratic reforms of the 1830s and 1840s. Political debate during this period centred on the constitutional legitimacy of kingship. After the constitution of 1848 and the constitutional crisis around 1870 had reshaped the political landscape, the new political parties would never again question the legitimacy of the system. What they asked for was access to the primary schools and the parliamentary system; in other words, admission to the nation. But even entry to public culture was controlled by the notable elites, whose politics of accommodation was based on the assumption that a gradual

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incorporation of the lower classes would strengthen their position. If, in the end, this proved to be a miscalculation, it was not because the masses were putting through their own demands, but rather because new political elites, backed by the Churches, were seeking a confrontation with the old establishment by creating segmented routes to national integration. This process of pillarized democratization reflected a fundamental economic transformation, that undermined the position of the old notability as a reasonably cohesive political, economic and cultural elite. Pillarization can therefore be seen as a new mechanism of social integration, balancing the interests of employers, tradesmen and workers; a vertical, religious integration that promoted social stability by cutting across the boundaries of class. Moreover, the national pillars also integrated regional interests after the old elites had disappeared. It was because of this that they led to the rise of new mediating elites, which, in spite of their ideologies of antithesis and class struggle, were ready to identify with the symbols and rituals of the nation as soon as they were allowed to participate in the political process. It is here that we should look for the origin of the conciliatory myth of political development, because this late-nineteenth-century process of accommodation enabled the new elites to identify themselves with the legalist culture of liberal politics, combining a respect for judicial rules with an emphasis on moral integrity.59 However, to understand the dynamic of this accommodationist elite culture, we cannot content ourselves with the historical myth of an age-old patrician culture of religious toleration. Faced with the politization of religious subcultures generated by the 1848 disestablishment, it was liberal dissension, and not the preference of the elites’ for moderation and compromise, that produced this ruling behaviour. By accommodating potential opposition movements, or even initiating reforms themselves, the ‘prudent leaders’ suceeded in engaging the loyalty of their voters. This was a lasting strategy, that according to some, even survived the radical 1960s.60 Yet, having demonstrated discontinuity in the process of democratization, what explains Dutch society’s long-term stability? The answer, I would suggest, has much to do with the dualist origin of the political culture of the Netherlands’ as traced above. If politicians, even today, successfully mask their recruitment from the upper classes by appealing to the common interest, they are merely heirs of the nineteenth-century notables. The political elite is considered to represent the moral authority of what is called the overheid: an idea of government

Robert van der Laarse 71

that – in contrast to the Prussian concept of Obrigkeit – is not associated with the state, but with the nation. Thus, democracy in the Netherlands is legitimated in terms of a defence of freedom. Rather than a game for popular influence, the crux of political power is a business-like play of negotiations on the distribution of means among the key groups of society, who are not expected to govern on their own. Bearing the stamp of history, this frozen system has never been seriously opposed from outside since it was democratized by the elites from above, and, is menaced only by the indifference of the masses below.

Notes and references 1. J. C. H. Blom, ‘Onderzoek naar verzuiling in Nederland. Status quaestionis en wenselijke ontwikkeling’, in J. C. H. Blom and C. J. Misset (eds), ‘Broeders sluit U aan’. Aspecten van verzuiling in zeven Hollandse gemeenten (Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1985) pp. 10–29. 2. Arend Lijphart, The Politics of Accommodation: Pluralism and Democracy in the Netherlands (Berkeley, Calif. University of California Press, 1968). 3. Hans Daalder, ‘The Netherlands, Opposition in a Segmented Society’, in R. A. Dahl (ed.), Political Oppositions in Western Democracies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966) pp. 188–237, and Hans Daalder, ‘Consociationalism, Center and Periphery in the Netherlands’, in P. Torsvik (ed.), Mobilization, Center-Periphery Structures and Nation-building. A Volume in Commemoration of Stein Rokkan (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1981) pp. 181–240. 4. Simon Shama, Patriots and Liberators. Revolution in the Netherlands 1780–1813 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977); and Wayne Ph. te Brake, Regents and Rebels. The Revolutionary World of an Eighteenth-century Dutch City (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). 5. C. H. E. de Wit, De strijd tussen aristocratie en democratie in Nederland, 1780–1848. Herwaardering van een periode (Heerlen: Winants, 1965), which is, however, sharply criticized for its radical reinterpretation of this revolutionary episode by S. R. E. Klein, in Patriots republikanisme. Politieke cultuur in Nederland (1766–1787) (Amsterdam University Press, 1995) esp. pp. 291–3. 6. P. Brood, P. Nieuwland, L. Zoodsma (eds.), Homines Novi. De eerste volksvertegenwoordigers van 1795 (Amsterdam: Schiphouwer en Brinkman, 1993). 7. Robert van der Laarse, ‘Christo Sacrum. Verlichte sociabiliteit te Delft, 1797–1838’, in J. C. Okkema, G. N. M. Vis, F.A. van Lieburg, B. J. Spruyt (eds), Heidenen, Papen, Libertijnen en Fijnen. Zesde verzameling bijdragen van de Vereniging voor Nederlandse Kerkgeschiedenis (Delft: Eburon, 1994) pp. 221–48; and J. P. de Valk, ‘Nederlandse katholieken in een

72 Route to Democracy in the Netherlands

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

overgangstijdperk: omslag en terugkeer in de jaren 1780–1830’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, vol 112, no. 4 (1997) pp. 487–501. G. J. Schutte, Een Hollandse dorpssamenleving in de late achttiende eeuw. De banne Graft, 1770–1810 (Franeker: Van Wijnen, 1989); Robert van der Laarse, Bevoogding en Bevinding. Heren en kerkvolk in een Hollandse provinciestad, Woerden 1780–1930 (Amsterdam: Stichting Hollandse Historische Reeks, vol VII, 1989), pp. 57–60 and 78–83. E. H. Kossmann, ‘The Crisis of the Dutch State 1780–1813: Nationalism, Federalism, Unitarism’, in J. S. Bromley and E. H. Kossmann (ed.), Metropolis, Dominion and Province: Britain and the Netherlands Vol IV (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971). Th. Clemens, ‘De terugdringing van de rooms-katholieken uit de verlichtprotestantse natie’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen van de Geschiedenis betreffende de Nederlanden, vol. 110, no. 1, (1995) pp. 27–39. P. Janssens, ‘De politieke invloed van de adel in het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden’, in C. A. Tamse and E. Witte (eds) Staats- en natievorming in Willem I’s koninkrijk (1815–1830) (Brussels: VUB Press, 1992) pp. 98–121. Yme Kuiper, Adel in Friesland 1780–1880 (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1993), pp. 139–160 and 228-303; Nick Bos, Notabele ingezetenen. Historische studies over Nederlandse elites in de negentiende eeuw (Brunssum: privately published, 1995) pp. 171–222; and Robert van der Laarse, ‘Welstand, macht en aanzien. Delfts patriciaat in de negentiende eeuw’, in J. W. L. Hilkhuijsen (ed.), De stad Delft. Cultuur en maatschappij van 1813 tot 1914 (Delft: Stedelijk Museum Het Prinsenhof, 1992) pp. 11–28. Lodewijk Blok, Stemmen en kiezen. Het kiesstelsel in Nederland in de periode 1814–1850 (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1987). A. J. C. Rüter, Rapporten van de gouverneurs in de provinciën, 1840–1849, 3 vols, Werken uitgegeven door het Historisch Genootschap, 3e serie no. 78, (Utrecht: Kemink en Zoon, 1941–50). L. François, ‘De verlichte ambtenaren onder Willem I. Kritische pijlers van een bewind’, Documentatieblad Werkgroep 18de eeuw, no. 49/50, (1981) pp.135–147. M. Chappin and J. P. de Valk, ‘Koning Willem I; een verlicht despoot?’, Documentatieblad Werkgroep 18e Eeuw, no. 49/50, (1981) pp. 84–109. Lode Wils, ‘Het Verenigd Koninkrijk van Koning Willem I (1815–1830) en de natievorming’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, vol. 112, no. 4, (1997) pp. 514–5. Horst Lademacher, ‘Modernisering en emancipatie. Enkele opmerkingen over de Nederlandse negentiende eeuw’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, vol. 104 (1989) pp. 1–16. I. J. H. Worst, ‘Het begin van “ons grondwettig volksbestaan”, in C. A. Tamse and E. Witte (eds), Staats- en natievorming, pp. 56–75. N. C. F. van Sas, ‘Het politiek bestel onder koning Willem I’, Documentatieblad Werkgroep 18e Eeuw, no. 49/50, (1981) pp. 110–33; Siep Stuurman, Wacht op onze daden. Het liberalisme en de vernieuwing van de Nederlandse staat (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1992) pp. 95–135. N. C. F. van Sas, ‘Het politiek klimaat in Noord-Nederland tijdens de crisis van het Verenigd Koninkrijk, 1828–1830’, Colloquium over de Geschiedenis van de Belgisch-Nederlandse Betrekkingen. Acta (Gent: Erasmus, 1982) pp. 103–27.

Robert van der Laarse 73 22. J. A. Bornewasser, ‘Ministeriële verantwoordelijkheid onder koning Willem II’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, vol. 75 (1962) pp. 436–458 23. J. A. Bornewasser, ‘The Authority of the Dutch State over the Churches, 1795–1853’, in A. C. Duke and C. A. Tamse (eds), Britain and the Netherlands, vol. VII: Church and State since the Reformation (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981) pp. 154–175. 24. Michael Wintle, Pillars of Piety. Religion in the Netherlands in the Nineteenth Century (Hull University Press, 1987). 25. J. P. de Valk, ‘Een politiek tableau van Nederland in het voorjaar van 1840. Twee memories van J.W. van den Biesen, hoofdredacteur van het Algemeen Handelsblad, bestemd voor de Prins van Oranje’, in Nederlandse Historische Bronnen (Nederlands Historisch Genootschap) vol III, (Hilversum: Verloren, 1983) pp. 209–10. 26. Robert van der Laarse, ‘“Het zaad der partijschap”. Orthodoxe sociabiliteit te Delft (1834–1848)’, in D. Th. Kuiper (ed.), Jaarboek voor de geschiedenis van het Nederlandse Protestantisme na 1800 (Kampen: Kok, 1994) pp. 17–49. 27. M. J. F. Robijns, Radicalen in Nederland (1840–1851) (Leiden University Press, 1967) pp. 194 ff. 28. F. L. van Holthoon, ‘Thorbecke and Dutch Liberalism’, in Simon Groenveld and Michael Wintle (eds), Britain and the Netherlands, vol. XII: Under the Sign of Liberalism. Varieties of Liberalism in Past and Present (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1997) pp. 46–61. 29. J. C. Boogman, Rondom 1848. De politieke ontwikkeling van Nederland 1840–1858 (Haarlem: Fibula-Van Dishoeck/Unieboek, 1983); J. J. Giele, ‘De oppositie der “volksmannen” (1850–1869)’, Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis, vol. 1 no. 2 (1975) pp. 171–218. 30. Henk te Velde, ‘Liberalism and Bourgeois Culture in the Netherlands, from the 1840s to the 1880s’, and J. P. de Valk, ‘Caught between Modernism, Pillarization, and Nationalism: Dutch Liberals and Religion in the Nineteenth Century’, both in Simon Groenveld and Michael Wintle, Under the Sign of Liberalism, op. cit. pp. 62–77, and 102-15. 31. J. H. von Santen, ‘Politiek leven in de stad Utrecht rond het midden van de negentiende eeuw (1840–1860)’, Jaarboek Oud-Utrecht 1985, vol. 15 (Utrecht, 1985), pp. 110–165. 32. G. J. Hooykaas (ed.), ‘Herinneringen van J. P. P. baron van Zuylen van Nijevelt, kamerlid en minister, 1849–1853’, in Nederlandse Historische Bronnen (Nederlands Historisch Genootschap, vol I (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979) pp. 238–75. 33. Blok, Stemmen en kiezen. 34. J. Th. van den Berg, De toegang tot het Binnenhof. De maatschappelijke herkomst van Tweede Kamerleden tussen 1849 en 1970 (Weesp: Holkema & Warendorf, 1983). 35. J. C. Boogman, ‘De periode 1840–1848’ and ‘De “revolutie” van 1848 en haar nasleep’, Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, vol. XII (Haarlem: Fibula-Van Dishoeck/Unieboek, 1977) pp. 318–21, 346. 36. J. C. Boogman (ed.), ‘De Britse gezant Lord Napier over de Nederlandse vertegenwoordiging in 1860’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen van het Historisch Genootschap, vol. 71 (1957) pp. 186–211.

74 Route to Democracy in the Netherlands 37. Robert van der Laarse and Jaap Talsma, Accommodatiegedrag van lokale politieke elites bij gemeenteraadsverkiezingen in de tweede helft van de 19de eeuw (Report of the ‘Research group to local processes of pillarization, 1850–1920’, University of Amsterdam, 1986, 40 pp.) 38. Th. van Tijn, ‘The Party Structure of Holland and the Outer Provinces in the Nineteenth Century’, in G. A. M. Beekelaar, J. J. Woltjer (eds)Vaderlands Verleden in Veelvoud, in particular pp. 564–7, 572. 39. Hans Knippenberg, De religieuze kaart van Nederland. Omvang en geografische spreiding van de godsdienstige gezindten vanaf de Reformatie tot heden (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1992). 40. E. H. Kossmann, De Lage Landen 1780–1940. Anderhalve eeuw Nederland en België (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1979) p. 145 (originally published as The Low Countries, 1780–1940 (Oxford University Press, 1978); this notion is, however, restricted to political discourse, for the decline of political conservatism did not reflect a social transformation, as Kossmann suggests. 41. J. T. Minderaa, ‘De macht des konings en de parlementaire democratie. De discussie van 1866’, in E. Jonkers and M. van Rossem (eds), Geschiedenis en Cultuur. Achttien opstellen. Festschrift voor Herman von der Dunk (The Hague: SDU, 1990) pp. 97–106. 42. A detailed analysis of this process at the local level can be found in Van der Laarse, Bevoogding en Bevinding, pp. 140–62, 214–34. 43. J. P. de Valk, ‘Meer Hollands dan Paaps? De Nederlandse kerkprovincie en Rome in de tweede helft van de negentiende eeuw’, in Archief voor de Geschiedenis van de Katholieke Kerk in Nederland vol. 27 (1985) pp. 140–56; Robert van der Laarse, ‘Verzwolgen door den ultramontaanschen vloed. Leken en clerus in katholiek Delft in de negentiende eeuw’, in Blom and Misset, Broeders sluit U aan, pp. 68–109. 44. C. A. Tamse, ‘De politieke ontwikkeling in Nederland, 1874–1887’, in Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, vol. XIII (Haarlem/Bussum: Fibula-Van Dishoeck/Unieboek, 1978) p. 219. 45. Even as late as 1986 the polls for the elections of the Second Chamber reflect this pillarized political geography: Hans Knippenberg and Ben de Pater, De eenwording van Nederland Schaalvergroting en integratie sinds 1800. (Nijmegen: SUN, 1988) p. 193. 46. Frans Groot, ‘Papists and Beggars. National Festivals and Nation Building in the Netherlands during the 19th Century’, in Peter van der Veer and Hartmut Lehmann (eds), The Religious Morality of the Nation State (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 47. G. Taal, Liberalen en radicalen in Nederland, 1872–1901 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980) pp. 43–81. 48. Remieg Aerts, De letterheren. Liberale cultuur in de negentiende eeuw: het tijdschrift De Gids (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1997); Ido de Haan and Henk te Velde, ‘Vormen van politiek. Veranderingen van de openbaarheid in Nederland, 1850–1900’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, vol. 111 (1996) pp. 167–200. 49. The following is mainly based on the publications and reports of the ‘Research group on local processes of pillarization, 1850–1920’ at the Department of History of the University of Amsterdam. The results of the research will be published in 1999.

Robert van der Laarse 75 50. Paul Luyckx and Hans Righart (eds), Van de pastorie naar het torentje; een eeuw confessionele politiek (The Hague: SDU, 1991) pp. 176–9. 51. Taal, Liberalen en Radicalen, pp. 230–318; J. A. Bornewasser, ‘De katholieke partijvorming tot de Eerste Wereldoorlog’, in L. W. G. Scholten, J. A. Bornewasser, I. Schöffer et al., De confessionelen, ontstaan en ontwikkeling van de christelijke partijen (Utrecht: Ambo, 1968) pp. 23–40; R. Kuiper, Herenmuiterij. Vernieuwing en sociaal conflict in de antirevolutionaire partij 1871–1894 (Leiden: J. J. Groen, 1994). 52. A. J. C. Rüter, De spoorwegstakingen van 1903. Een spiegel der arbeidersbeweging in Nederland (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1935); and H. J. Scheffer, November 1918. Journaal van een revolutie die niet doorging (Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers, 1971). 53. Knippenberg, Religieuze kaart, ch. 7, pp. 227–43. 54. Bert Altena (ed.), ‘En al beschouwen alle broeders mij als den verloren broeder’. De familiecorrespondentie van en over Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, 1846–1932 (Amsterdam: IISG, 1997). 55. Siep Stuurman, Verzuiling, kapitalisme en patriarchaat. Aspecten van de ontwikkeling van de moderne staat in Nederland (Nijmegen: SUN, 1983) pp. 148 ff. 56. Dietrich Orlow, ‘The Paradox of Success. Dutch Social Democracy and its Historiography’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden vol. 110, no. 1 (1995) pp. 40–51. 57. Jan Bank, Opkomst en ondergang van de Nederlandse Volksbeweging (Deventer: Kluwer, 1978); J. A. Bornewasser, Katholieke Volkspartij 1945–1980, Vol. I, Herkomst en groei (tot 1963), KDC Bronnen en Studies XXVI, (Nijmegen: Valkhof pers, 1995). 58. J. M. G. Thurlings, De wankele zuil. Nederlands katholicisme tussen assimulatie en pluralisme (Nijmegen/Amersfoort: Dekker & Van de Vegt/De Horstink, 1971); Jan Bank, “Verzuiling”: A Confessional Road to Secularization. Emancipation and the Decline of Political Catholicism’, in Duke and Tamse, Church and State, pp. 207–30. 59. Henk te Velde, Gemeenschapszin en plichtsbesef. Liberalisme en nationalisme in Nederland 1870–1918 (The Hague: SDU, 1992); Stefan Dudink, Deugdzaam liberalisme. Sociaal-liberalisme in Nederland 1870–1901 (Amsterdam: IISG, 1997); Robert van der Laarse, ‘Een morele natie: religie en politieke cultuur’, in H. Schmall Leo Lucassen, Jolanda E. Heemskerk et al. Nederland in de twintigste eeuw (Utrecht: Teleac, 1995) pp. 68–89. 60. James C. Kennedy, Nieuw Babylon in aanbouw. Nederland in de jaren zestig (Meppel: Boom, 1995).

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Part 2

Between the World Wars

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5 Democracy and War Ralph White

The purpose of this chapter is to link the processes of democratization that developed in nineteenth-century Britain and Europe with those of the twentieth-century’s inter-war period. The point of intersection is, of course, the First World War, by the end of which democracy as a cause had been ‘outed’ as never before as part of the heightened politicization of European life in the post-war era. The problem that arises is why the experience of the war sensitised issues concerning the form of government and society as it did, and in particular how it had an impact on the values and processes of democratization. The answer I want to consider is a simple one: that the raison d’être of the war was ‘to make the world safe for democracy’. The phrase was US President Woodrow Wilson’s, and was at the heart of his justification of US intervention in April 1917;1 but was it at the heart of the involvement of other belligerent governments during the war? The question I want to grapple with is, therefore, the extent to which the elevation of political and ideological values – and particularly democracy – by 1918 can be attributed to state advocacy during the war, in the shape of war aims and propaganda. One must allow immediately that state advocacy was not the only, or even the major, factor in play: there were other kinds of state policy, such as the strategic and diplomatic to consider, to say nothing of explanations other than deliberate state policy. Many crucial aspects of the impact of the war were unforeseen: one can cite a familiar raft of factors – the destructiveness, economic disruption, and suffering of the war, and the need for massive reconstruction; the unprecedented degree of public involvement and mass participation in the war effort; the expanded role of the state; and the pressure on the values and structures within each combatant society – all of which had their 79

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profound, yet unintended, political and ideological effects. 2 Again, there was nothing pre-planned about the positions that the USA and Bolshevik Russia found themselves in by the end of the war – each proclaiming their deeply ideological and opposed view of a preferred world order. War aims and propaganda were only part of a much larger process by which liberal democracy, along with a range of values and systems (some profoundly anti-democratic) were promoted as a result of the war. Nor, of course, was there any question, whatever the intent, that the war did make the world ‘safe for democracy’. But what was this intent? We must examine the way in which official definitions of war aims and propaganda come to involve moral, political and ideological values – including democracy – to an unprecedented degree. Generally speaking, we can say that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries European states had usually fought wars for more limited, specific and pragmatic reasons, for influence or territory, and for strategic, political or economic self-interest. They did not fight, let alone claim to fight, to preserve or establish a particular value system or way of life, at the expense of others – just as, generally, states did not fight for total victory or a total peace that could not be negotiated between victor and vanquished. Further, the greater among these European states dominated an international system based on the preservation of a balance of power between them, and characterized, by the late nineteenth century, by secret diplomacy, armaments and alliances. This undemocratic and secretive conduct of foreign affairs – known as the Old Diplomacy – was implemented as vigorously and skilfully by the foreign offices of republican France and liberal Britain as by the authoritarian regimes of Germany, Austro-Hungary and Russia. At the heart of the Old Diplomacy was the assumption that national self-interest was the only criterion of a state’s foreign policy; further, that the definition and pursuit of this interest was the preserve of an élite and not a matter for public, democratic concern. The problem with the First World War was that the issue at stake between the Entente and the Central powers – at the heart of which was the position of Germany in Europe – was so serious, and the nature of the warfare so destructive, that perceptions of what was being contested were themselves transformed. Initially, the war aim of each of the combatants was survival, through victory, on the assumption on all sides of a short and victorious war. In a sense, all other war aims were rationalizations of what each major combatant would do with victory, to ensure their survival as great powers and preserve their national interests. In public, each state proclaimed it was fighting an

Ralph White 81

honourable, patriotic war of national defence, imposed on it by the aggressive intent of the other side: in the very early stages this was taken to be sufficient – war aims of a more specific kind than survival and victory remained largely implicit. Governments were inhibited from being more precise partly because this was not believed to be necessary, partly because it would be counter-productive: hostages might be given to fortune, allies and neutral powers embarrassed or alienated, and the remarkable mood of national unity provoked by the outbreak of the war in each combatant state endangered. Underpinning this approach was the old diplomatic tradition of secrecy and unaccountability about the making of foreign policy. What, then, changed this situation? The pressures that impelled belligerent governments to provide public explanations of their war efforts and to develop their propaganda activity are well known. In the short term the war reached a stalemate on the Western Front within weeks: the boys were not going to be home by Christmas, and the vision of a short, victorious war requiring little public justification quickly evaporated. Further, by the end of 1915, the war had developed as an incomparably more destructive phenomenon than governments had ever bargained for in August 1914, and the demands and sacrifices involved for each combatant society required explanation as never before. The need to sustain public morale among both service and civilian populations, as a component of an effective war effort in a longer-drawn-out conflict, provided the impetus to the expansion of propaganda activity. Finally, by the end of 1916, and despite the prodigious efforts and sacrifices on both sides – indeed, because of them – no decisive breakthrough had been achieved. Victory for either side seemed no closer than at the end of 1914: in this state of massive stalemate, the question was provoked and discussed far more urgently within all combatant societies than at any time since the outbreak of the war: was total victory the only conceivable war aim? Could not a compromise peace be negotiated? Debate on this issue, and the need to account for the terrible losses and sufferings on both the military and civilian fronts placed ever more pressure on combatant governments in 1917 and 1918 to justify their war efforts by defining their war aims more precisely and sharpening their propaganda. These pressures were mobilized by parties and groupings within each belligerent state becoming increasingly critical of their government’s war policies, and in particular their unwillingness to discuss war aims. After 1916, the cross-party pattern of national unity weakened as mainly

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radical–liberal and left-wing groups pressed their demands for a revision of war aims policy as part of a rejection of the Old Diplomacy. Central to the New Diplomacy campaign that strengthened in this period was that there should be democratic control of foreign policy, open diplomacy and a redefinition of war aims in accord with principle, not simply national self-interest – although it is notable that this case had been made out by groups such as the Union for Democratic Control in Britain from 1914 onwards. It is Arno Mayer’s thesis that the elevation of ideology late in the war, and particularly the conversion of the war in allied policy into a crusade for democracy has to be explained, at least in part, in terms of changes in the domestic power structure of the Entente states. These changes saw the control of government policy by right-wing groups committed to the Old Diplomacy weakening in face of ‘the forces of movement’ – radical, progressive left-wing parties and interests – who supported the New Diplomacy and a radical redefinition of war aims.3 It was therefore as a response to both domestic and external pressures that governments found themselves having recourse to public justifications of their war efforts of a different kind. In the later stages of the war, the war aims and propaganda of the belligerents became increasingly moralized, encompassing a range of political and ideological values, including democracy, and portraying the conflict, ultimately, as one between good and evil. This did not mean, of course, that the belligerents were no longer fighting for motives of national self-interest: and it raises the question of how seriously the moral and ideological dimension of war aims – including any commitment to democracy – was taken at the time, and can be taken in the late twentieth century. This characteristic mixture of self-interested and principled motives involved in framing war aims, especially in the later stage of the war, is exposed when we contrast their formal public expressions with the private debates of ministers and officials.4 These tensions were further sharpened in response to the development of ‘political warfare’. After 1916 in particular, each side was looking for new means to break the deadlock and gain the upper hand: any measure, whether strategic or political, that would strengthen one side or weaken the other, was considered. Thus policies of gaining the support of a hitherto neutral or non-aligned power or interest (as in the case of the Entente powers and the USA), or alternatively, of weakening the enemy side by destabilizing its (and its allies’) position, were pursued – and some of these strategies had a clear political and ideological thrust. Political warfare strengthened

Ralph White 83

as both sides appealed to various powers, interests and groups in a way that involved moral, political and ideological principles – and were expressed in war aims and propaganda – and yet were palpably motivated by increasingly desperate efforts to win the war. It is in the light of these general considerations that I wish to consider examples of state advocacy of democracy in the First World War. Most of this advocacy was the work of the Entente powers. Official and public opinion in Britain and France, and, after April 1917, the USA, was acutely conscious of the more liberal, ‘democratic’ character of their states and societies, in contrast to the authoritarian and reactionary regimes of the Central Powers, but the symmetry of this political–ideological divide was undermined by the participation on the allied side of Russia as a Tsarist state, until the March revolution of 1917 resulted in the more democratic Provisional Government. Before that date, the presentation of the Entente cause as a distinctively or coherently democratic one was implausible – but this did not prevent Britain and France attempting to play the democratic card if they thought it expedient. At least the position of the Central Powers in this respect was clear-cut. One of the domestic motives for the German and Austro-Hungarian regimes’ willingness positively to contemplate war in 1914 was in order to preserve their existing autocratic structures from democratic or socialist change.5 But this, in turn, did not preclude the Central Powers from playing a democratic card – or something that could be mistaken for one – in certain circumstances. This is illustrated in the case of German political warfare. The Germans sought to exploit discontented ethnic, religious and social groups within the British, French and Russian empires – partly on the principle that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. For example, emigrés from Russian Poland, Finland, the Ukraine, Georgia and Armenia were supported, as were their national liberation groups. Funds were supplied to anti-Tsarist revolutionary groups in Switzerland and Scandinavia; most famously, V. I. Lenin and his Social Democratic partners were helped to return to Russia in April 1917 in a sealed train. The objects of this German policy were clear: to destabilize and divert the Entente regimes and, more relevantly from our angle, to promote an image, especially among neutral powers such as the USA and ‘progressive’ forces in enemy states, that Germany was the protector of oppressed peoples, opponent of imperialism and colonialism, and a champion of national self-determination. Some, but not all, of this activity was secret, yet it came into German war propaganda; and while it did not involve an advocacy of democracy per se, it contributed

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to the political and ideological dimension of the war in general and to the promotion of values such as national self determination, which in turn had profoundly democratic aspects for many of its supporters.6 In other words, state support of democracy varied in its form and specificity, and was often indirect or implicit. On the Entente side, there are several examples of wartime policies that had political and ideological implications, some of which were indirectly or potentially ‘democratic’. There was the British pledge of support for the independence of most of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman empire in exchange for an Arab revolt against Turkish rule. However, this was complicated, to say the least, by the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, in which the British government endorsed the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine; a policy remarkable for the mixture of pragmatic and idealistic motives behind it. The French focused political warfare efforts on national groups under Austro-Hungarian rule, especially Poles, Czechs and southern Slavs. The Russians advocated self-determination (under their protection) to Poles at that time under Austrian or German rule. Thus the ‘nationality question’ – the right of national groups to selfdetermination – became, as we shall see, an important part of allied war aims and propaganda, and extended far beyond what, for Britain and France, was the original casus belli of Belgium. But was this necessarily a commitment to democratic forms of national independence, and was not the motive expedient, advocating any cause that would maximize the chances of defeating the enemy? And if so, was the official allied line that the war did involve ‘good causes’ such as democracy diminished? These questions remain, and lead to a closer inspection of allied war aims and propaganda policy. The most significant of the earliest British statements came in a speech by Prime Minister Asquith on 9 November 1914 in which he identified four main issues as conditions of peace: the restoration of Belgium; the security of France against any future German aggression; the recognition of the rights of small states; and the end of Prussian militarism.7 This remained the stated British position until 1917, and also provided the framework within which British propaganda developed. By implication these aims can all be seen as endorsing liberal democratic systems or principles – but this was not the primary or necessary intention. It was not because Belgium had a democratic constitution that the demand was made for its independence, and the same applied to the rights of small states, and the security of France. The thrust of Asquith’s demands was essentially for a restoration of a

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traditional, stable European balance of power, which Germany, in the British view, was threatening. Yet the phraseology used lent these demands an air of quasi-democratic principle. The citing of Prussian militarism remains. Although it continued as a prime element in allied war aims and propaganda attack throughout the war, it was the extension of German power that was the real enemy. Yet many allied ministers and officials did believe that the responsibility for Germany’s expansionist policies, which they held were responsible for the war and necessitated the country’s defeat, lay with the dominant role of the militarist Prussian autocracy within Germany. If this could be changed, and a democratic Germany emerge, then the unacceptable aspect of Germany’s position as a major power would be exorcised – an opinion held by many official sources in Britain and the USA. Yet the British and French governments could never bring themselves to specify the democratization of Germany as an explicit war aim, although its desirability was notably clear in a speech by David Lloyd George in January 1918, to which we shall return. An early statement of French war aims by Premier Remé Viviani in December 1914 specified the breaking of Prussian militarism, the regaining of ‘the provinces taken … by conquest’ (meaning AlsaceLorraine), the restoration of Belgian prosperity and independence, and the exaction of ‘indemnities’ to reconstruct devastated areas. 8 President Raymond Poincaré defined ‘breaking Prussian militarism’ as meaning that the ‘only peace the Republic can accept is one which will guarantee European security … and effectively protect us against any renewed offensive by German ambition. 9 The incoming Briand ministry sustained this notably French agenda of security, Belgian independence, Alsace-Lorraine and reparations with the hint of a more general principle: the notion of a Europe in which ‘tyrannical domination’ would yield to ‘the liberties of peoples enjoying full autonomy’.10 Apart from this vague reference to self-determination, official French war aims were – and continued to be – driven by an even sharper sense of self-interest than Britain’s, reflecting their distinctive experience and perceptions of the war. The world had to wait until January 1917 for further Entente declarations, and these came only in response to American pressure, as the US government in its pursuit of a compromise peace in 1916 requested the belligerents to define their war aims. This first joint statement by the British and French governments specified, first, the evacuation of Belgian, French, Russian, Serbian and Romanian territory at that time

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under the occupation of the Central Powers; second, an explicit commitment – albeit general – to the principle of a stable regime in Europe based on guarantees for the independence of small nations and the principle of nationality, as applied to the liberation of the subject nationalities of the Austro-Hungarian empire; and third, ‘the need for the setting free of the populations subject to the bloody tyranny of the Turks, and the turning out of Europe of the Ottoman Empire as decidedly foreign to western civilisation’.11 If our grasp of allied war aims was based exclusively on documents such as this, an impression would be gained of allied states fighting a war of principle, concerned with the disinterested pursuit of a stable post-war order based on national self-determination and the rights of small nations – if not democracy per se. This is, of course, what these statements were intended to convey, but the question of their credibility and motive remains. It is true that some, though not all, individual ministers and officials certainly believed in ‘the nationality principle’, and more particularly the self-determination and, if possible, the democratic selfdetermination of the subject peoples of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Wilhelmine empires. (For example, Auther James Balfour, the British foreign secretary, wrote to a colleague in early 1917, ‘It is in the interests of future peace that territorial arrangements after the war should take account of the principle of nationality’.12 But even for these more principled sympathisers, other considerations were more important: above all, Germany’s defeat and the achievement of a post-war order in which the interests of the Allied Powers would be preserved. Thus, in practice, and in statements of war aims, the causes of nationality and self-determination were embraced for the sake of expediency, or at least for a mixture of motives; the overriding priority being to weaken the position of the Central Powers by promoting their defeat and disintegration. So, while official allied statements of war aims became more ideological and idealistic as the war continued, and ostensibly committed allied governments to the pursuit of such good causes as national, and even democratic, self-determination, their actual policies (particularly those which pre-dated US entry) complicated and compromised these goals. The territorial gains secretly offered to Italy to gain its adherence to the allied cause in the Treaty of London of June 1915 went far beyond what could ever be justified by Italian self-determination;13 the allied support for Arab independence from Turkish rule was compromised not only by the British commitment to support a Jewish

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homeland in Palestine (as noted earlier) but also by an Anglo-French agreement to divide much of the Middle East into their spheres of influence;14 finally, support for the subject nationalities of the AustroHungarian Empire was always qualified by the need (as the British and French governments saw it) to come to terms with the interest of Russia (in the case of Polish aspirations), Italy (in the case of Yugoslav hopes) and indeed Austria itself (as long as a possibility of enticing the country from allegiance to the Alliance existed). Much of the diplomacy involved in these territorial deals remained secret, but the possibility that behind British and French statements of war aims lay national and imperial self-interest was not lost on either the American or Soviet governments, as we shall see. Nevertheless, this is not to deny that, taken at face value, allied war aims did elevate the values of selfdetermination and democracy. Yet the question also remains: how far can the support for ‘the nationality principle’ be taken as support for democracy? The answer is ambiguous. Many members of the various national liberation groups, such as the Poles and Czechs, were democrats, had a vision of a democratic and independent nationality, and were working in London and Paris to persuade the British and French governments to support them. Individual members of these governments and their bureaucracies supported the liberation groups’ claims, on the grounds of principle as well as practice. These questions regarding the motivation and coherence of war aims policy came to their climax in the final phases of the war in 1917 and 1918, as allied governments were under ever greater pressure to explain their policy of pushing for victory. The prospect of a clear defeat of the Central Powers, and in particular Germany, seemed much less likely until the late summer of 1918. War weariness increased, and with it opposition to the war, and to the allied governments’ commitment to outright victory. Calls for a compromise peace multiplied in 1917. The remarkable early-war mood of national unity was by then deeply fractured. In these circumstances, the need to sustain national morale and effort, and to encourage greater sacrifice led governments to intensify the moral and ideological elements of their war aims. In this process, the cause of democracy was elevated as never before. Two major events early in 1917 contributed powerfully. In March, the Tsarist regime was overthrown and replaced by the parliamentary Provisional Government, which for the first time enabled the Allies to say more plausibly that their cause was a genuinely ‘democratic’ one. Second, on 2 April 1917 the United States entered the war on the

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Allies’ side, with President Woodrow Wilson claiming that democracy was America’s greatest aim: we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest to our hearts – for democracy, for the rights of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free….15 America’s role in promoting democracy as the war’s great cause was crucial, but Wilson had no monopoly of democratic rhetoric. Spurred on both by the pressures just described and by the example – and in a sense rivalry – of the United States’ claim to be fighting a just war, the British prime minister, Lloyd George, fired his most idealistic shot in the British war aims armoury in a remarkable address to the Trade Union Congress (TUC) on 5 January 1918, in which purely national concerns were concealed beneath a carefully crafted discourse of disinterested internationalism. The speech was motivated by the government’s need to justify further sacrifices in the cause of victory and to persuade the TUC to release more men for the army. We, the Allies, were fighting only ‘in self defence, defence of the violated public law of Europe … and [of] solemn treaty obligations … on which Germany had ruthlessly trampled in her invasion of Belgium’. We accepted Germany’s ‘great position’ in the world and were fighting to destroy neither Austro-Hungary nor Turkey. There followed a notable expression of sympathy for democracy in Germany, coupled with an explanation of why it was not a war aim: nor did we enter this war merely to alter or destroy the Imperial constitution of Germany, much as we consider that military autocratic constitution a dangerous anachronism in the twentieth century. Our point of view is that the adoption of a really democratic constitution by Germany would be the most convincing evidence that in her the old spirit of military domination had indeed died in this war, and would make it much easier for us to conclude a broad democratic peace with her. But, after all that is a question for the German people to decide…. The recent embracing of self-determination by the Central Powers in their peace negotiations with the Bolsheviks was quickly rejected: ‘we

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feel that government with the consent of the governed must be the basis of any territorial settlement in the war’. Hence the predictable priority Lloyd George attached to the restoration of Belgium, of Serbia, Montenegro and the occupied parts of France, Italy and Romania. Further, the demand for the return of Alsace-Lorraine was couched in fierce, quasi-democratic and unspecific terms: We mean to stand by the French democracy to the death in the demand they make for a reconsideration of the great wrong of 1871 … without any regard for the wishes of the population. The ideologically loaded rhetoric continued as the Prime Minister declaimed: The democracy of this country means to stand to the last by the democracies of France and Italy and all our other allies. We shall be proud to fight to the end side by side with the new democracy of Russia…. This embrace of the Soviet cause as democratic had a sting in its tail, as Lloyd George made it clear that the Allies would not help Russia ‘if the present rulers … take action which is independent of their Allies’ – a reference to the Bolsheviks’ negotiations with the Central Powers. An independent Poland ‘comprising all those genuinely Polish elements who desire to form part of it’ was proclaimed as an ‘urgent necessity’ for the stability of Western Europe. And while agreeing with the American president that the break-up of Austro-Hungary had no part in allied war aims, a threat to European peace would remain unless ‘genuine self-government on true democratic principles is granted to those Austro-Hungarian nationalities who have long desired it’. The legitimate claims of Italians and Romanians for union with their own race and tongue should also be satisfied. The same principles should apply to the Turkish Empire: its continuation ‘in the homelands of the Turkish race’ is not challenged, but ‘Arabia, Armenia, Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine are … entitled to a recognition of their separate national conditions’. The fate of the German colonies should be decided with ‘primary regard to the wishes and interest of the native inhabitants of such colonies’. Thus ‘the general principle of national self determination is applicable in their cases as in those of occupied European territories’.

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The prime minister concluded by specifying the three conditions which must be fulfilled to achieve the just and lasting peace for which the Allies were fighting: the sanctity of treaties must be reestablished … a territorial settlement must be secured based on the right to self determination or the consent of the governed and lastly, we must seek by the creation of some international organisation to limit the burden of armaments and diminish the probability of war.16 These passages have been quoted at length to illustrate how far the British government had gone by this time in defining its war aims in explicitly democratic terms. A brief comparison with British propaganda illustrates that its political-ideological character also developed significantly late in the war, though its espousal of democracy was perhaps less explicit. The theme of this propaganda can be subsumed in one image, a personification of what the Allies were fighting against: the Hun (or for the French, the Boche). This was the stereotype of the German as a brutal soldier of enormous girth, crucifying his enemies, violating women, mutilating babies and desecrating churches. This was a personification of the Prussian militarism that had caused the war and was responsible for its inhuman excesses; enormous mileage was made from atrocity stories. This provided an Allied propaganda target upon which was focused a moral offensive against the enemy, both at home and abroad, among both civilian and military audiences. On the positive side, this was accompanied by a patriotic appeal to man a volunteer army before conscription was begun in 1916 (‘Your country needs you’), laced with powerful moral and personal pressures (‘Women of Britain say go/What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?’). It was in the period after 1916 that the basis of British propaganda broadened as the case was made, in the face of pacifist and compromise peace campaigning, for a policy of continuing to seek total victory. This involved discrediting current German peace proposals and projecting a much more politicized image of Germany, as not just being militaristic but being a police state bent on European, or even world, domination. Thus the question of the German state and society became more central – although not always consistently so. So British propaganda did develop a moral and political onslaught on both Prussian militarism and (later) the autocratic, despotic and expansionist character of the German state, and played its part in generating the fierce anti-German feelings that prevailed by 1918. So the commitment to democratic values took the

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form of an emphatic endorsement of a moral and ideological divide between the Entente and the Central Powers, and an attack on the presumed militarism and autocracy of the latter.17 It was the American intervention, nevertheless, that really ignited the democratic cause, with Wilson fanning the flames with his immediate and unequivocal claim that the American war aim was to make the world safe for democracy. It is arguable that the Americans in general, and the Wilson administration in particular, took a far more moral and ideological view of the war than did European governments. Neutrality and, underpinning it, isolation, made sense on both pragmatic and principled grounds, as did the decision to intervene. This fusion of motives was less ambiguous, or suspect, than in the case of the European Allies, and while Wilson chose to ignore in his public utterances, and even perhaps to deny to himself, the role of self-interested factors in American policy, it was not because his democratic rhetoric was not genuine. Wilson had to persuade himself, and try to persuade American and world opinion, that the intervention of the USA in the war was justified for moral, idealistic reasons, and this is abundantly clear from the string of statements of war aims he produced in and after April 1917. Best known are the celebrated fourteen points in his speech of 8 January 1918 (just three days after Lloyd George’s) in which were spelt out the goals of American policy in fighting, including, inter alia, open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, freedom of trade, disarmament, self-determination and a League of Nations.18 It was clear that the Wilson administration had a vision of a new world order – including, crucially, a world of self-governing democratic states, as only if the world was safe for democracy would it be safe from war. Wilson needed this vision to justify intervention. His attempt to act as broker in a compromise peace in 1916 had failed, and he had come to believe that both American interests of security, economic well-being and pride, and this vision of a post-war order necessitated an Allied victory; this, in turn, required American participation, both on the battlefield and as a major player in a post-war settlement.19 Wilson and his colleagues were conscious that their view of the war, and of war aims, was not really shared by their European allies. Wilson wrote to Colonel House on 21 July 1917, ‘England and France have not the same views with regard to peace that we have by any means. When the war is over, we can force them to our way of thinking.’20 Thus the USA did not define itself as an ‘ally’ of the Entente powers: the country entered the war only as an ‘associated power’. America’s scepticism about the war aims of its partners was reciprocated: the Entente

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governments had all sorts of misgivings about the American war – and peace – offensive, but their need for American intervention meant that they had little choice but to acquiesce, at least in public. American policy also made its impact on the German government. One reason for the German willingness to negotiate an armistice in 1918 was precisely because they believed that American terms would be different from, and less severe than, those of Britain and France. Again, a primary reason for the German change of government in the last days of the war, as the old imperial order gave way to an ostensibly more parliamentary regime, was to appease American pressure to negotiate with a more representative system. Finally, European public opinion was much more responsive to the American definition of war aims than that of their own governments, despite speeches like Lloyd George’s of 5 January 1918. The idea that the war had been fought to create a democratic and peaceful world order, and that this provided some justification for the years of sacrifice and suffering, had effectively been appropriated by the American president. Wilson was a revered and fêted figure when he arrived in Europe for the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. The Wilsonian war and peace aims offensive can also be seen as a riposte to a rival campaign mounted by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who had come to power in the November Revolution of 1917. One of Lenin’s first moves was to issue an invitation to all peoples and governments to conclude a general peace without annexations or indemnities, and on the basis of full respect for the rights of peoples to self-determination. This was a central element in the Bolsheviks’ Decree on Peace, promulgated on 8 November 1917, which launched an offensive for a ‘just and democratic peace’. It was intended to exploit the war-weariness of the European combatant societies and to appeal beyond governments to working-class, socialist and liberal opinion. The Bolsheviks committed themselves to abolish secret diplomacy, publish the details of secret treaties, conduct diplomacy openly, pursue peace without victory, and promote national self-determination, a notably Wilsonian agenda.21 Lenin too had his vision of a new order, dressed up in quasi-democratic language which was itself an expression of the way democratic values – however vaguely defined – had moved to centre-stage late in the war. Wilson’s Fourteen Points were intended to reassure progressives everywhere that the liberal-democratic cause was back ‘under the patronage of its real friends’.22 Nevertheless, both Wilson and Lenin shared a distrust of what they saw as the unprincipled pursuit of national self-interest as

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the real goal of the French and British governments in their commitment to victory. Lenin gleefully published evidence of the secret treaties agreed by the European allies during the war as evidence of their hypocrisy about war aims.23 Yet, by the end of the war, ‘democracy’ had emerged as one of the buzz-words of the twentieth century, whatever the motives of its advocates, and however confused and contradictory its definition. In one sense or another, ‘democracy’ had become sanctified as a key to the proper structure of both domestic and international society – even to the conduct of international relations themselves. The war aims and propaganda of the combatant powers had played their part in this process, especially those of the Allies. Differences in motive and definition must be acknowledged – yet they can be seen as a backhanded compliment to the appeal of the democratic label in which these were subsumed. The scene was set for one of the great themes of inter-war history – the struggle between competing interests and ideologies to appropriate the banner of democracy as their own. So the war had acted as a catalyst for the nineteenth-century processes of democratization, in three crucial ways. First, it had accelerated patterns of social change in combatant societies, whereby hitherto marginalized groups – such as women and the working classes – found themselves more integrated into mainstream political life, most obviously by extensions of the franchise in and after 1918. Second, it had precipitated the demise of four great autocratic structures in Europe – Hohenzollern Germany; Romanov Russia; Hapsburg Austro-Hungary; and Ottoman Turkey – and the emergence of alternative systems, which provided an unprecedented opportunity for political experiment. Finally, as this chapter has explored, the war confirmed that the direction of political change should be ‘democratic’. In the short term, it was the liberal version of the democratic cause that appeared to be in the ascendant. The liberal-democratic allies had won the war, with whatever the legitimization of their political systems, values and war aims this implied; in a number of existing nation-states, the extension of suffrage strengthened their democratic credentials; and at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the right of national self-determination was recognized in the creation of the ‘Successor States’ of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, and the granting of independence to the Baltic States of Finland, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. In these new or newly-independent nationstates, liberal-democratic constitutions were adopted – for the moment.

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But war aims rhetoric was not translated into reality for long: the world was not, in fact, safe for liberal democracy. Other legacies of the war – economic and social crisis and the intensifying of nationalist identity not least – quickly threw up problems that proved too much for all but the most deep-rooted liberal-democratic structures to contain. Interwar history in Europe was shot through with the attempt to realize the hopes articulated in the Allies’ war aims for a new order and a better world – but in the main these hopes were not realized on liberaldemocratic terms, as the rise of Communism, Fascism and anarchism, and the survival of authoritarianism all attest.

Notes and references 1. R. S. Baker and W. E. Dodd (eds), The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 5 (New York: Harper, 1925–27) pp. 6–16. Wilson used the phrase in his Message to Congress, 2 April 1917, in which he announced America’s declaration of war. 2. This theme is explored by Arthur Marwick, and is well summarized in his War and Social Change in the Twentieth Century (London: Macmillan , 1974). 3. A. J. Mayer, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy 1917–1918 (New York: Vintage Books, 1970). 4. This contrast is brought out clearly in the case of Britain, with which this chapter is especially concerned, in V. H. Rothwell, British War Aims and Peace Diplomacy 1914–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). 5. Arno Mayer, in his The Persistence of the Old Regime (London: Croom Helm, 1981), nevertheless argues that for all the belligerent powers of Europe, ‘The Great War was an expression of the decline and fall of the old order fighting to preserve its life rather than of the explosive rise of industrial capitalism bent on imposing its primacy’ p. 4. 6. For an analysis of German political warfare, see F. Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (London: Chatto and Windus, 1977) ch. 4: ‘The Promotion of Revolution: Means and Ends’, pp. 120–54. 7. H. H. Asquith, The Times, 14 November 1914. 8. D. Stevenson, French War Aims against Germany 1914–1919 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982) p. 17, citing Viviani speech, 22 December 1914 JO (Chambre) 1914, pp. 3124–5. 9. Ibid., citing Poincaré message, 5 August 1915 JO(Chambre)1915, p. 1227. 10. Ibid., p.18, citing Briand speech, 3 November 1915 JO(Chambre) 1915, pp. 1681–2 and 1690–1. 11. J. B. Scott, (ed.), Official Statements of War Aims and Peace Proposals December 1916–November 1918 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1921) p. 224. 12. Balfour to Buchanan, 3 January 1917, FO 371/3075 no. 2031. Quoted in Rothwell, British Was Aims p. 65.

Ralph White 95 13. Italy was granted Trentino, Cisalpine Tyrol to the Brenner frontier, Trieste, Gorizia, all of Istria as far as Quarnero, North Dalmatia, and part of Albania; it was also promised a share of Asia Minor. 14. In the Sykes–Picot agreement of January 1916, the British and French governments agreed their respective spheres of influence in Asia Minor, with French interest in Syria, and British interest in Transjordan, Palestine and Arabia being confirmed. Russia and Italy were also beneficiaries of similar secret Entente deals to extend their influence in Asia Minor. 15. Baker and Dodds (eds) The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 5, p. 16. 16. War Memoirs of David Lloyd George, vol. II London: Odhams Press, [n.d.]) app. II, pp. 1510–17. 17. This account is based on M. Sanders and P. M. Taylor, British Propaganda during the First World War 1914–1918 (London: Macmillan, 1982). 18. The Fourteen Points were contained in Wilson’s Address to Congress, 8 January 1918 and can be found in Baker and Dodd, The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson pp. 155–62 19. For Wilson’s war and peace policies see (as well as other works cited in these footnotes): C. Bartlett, The Rise and Fall of Pax Americana (London: Elek, 1974); P. Devlin, Too Proud to Fight: Woodrow Wilson’s Neutrality (London: Oxford University Press, 1974); A. S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era 1910–1917 (New York: Harper & Row, 1954); and E. R. May, The World War and American Isolation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959). 20. Cited in C. Seymour, American Diplomacy during the World War (Baltimore; Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1942) pp. 269–70. 21. The impact of this peace offensive, associated Soviet diplomacy and propaganda, and the Brest – Litovsk negotiations in radicalizing allied war aims, is emphasized by Mayer in Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, especially chs 5–9 and the Epilogue. 22. Baker and Dodd, The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson vol. 5, p. 130. 23. Leon Trotsky announced the publication of the secret treaties on 22 November 1917. A summary of these documents can be found in R. S. Baker, Woodrow Wilson and the World Settlement (3 vols) (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1922), vol. 1, chs 3 and 4.

6 The Attempt at Democratization under Weimar1 Stefan Berger

Introduction The establishment of the first parliamentary republic in the midst of military defeat and social revolution at the end of the First World War was in many ways a remarkable triumph for German democrats. And yet, after just fourteen years, the Weimar Republic was replaced by National Socialist dictatorship. Ever since, historians have vigorously debated why German democratization failed in the 1920s. In the 1940s and 1950s conservative assumptions held sway. These saw the failure of the Weimar Republic rooted in the destruction of the constitutional monarchy and elite power, and in the victory of irresponsible and immature ‘mass politics’. According to authors such as Gerhard Ritter and Hans Rothfels, modern democratic mass society, in line with the nihilism and cultural destruction of modern industrial society and the collapse of traditional religious and moral standards, paved the way for the victory of National Socialism.2 From the 1960s, historians such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka argued that the failure of the republic was rooted in long-term political and social developments which set Germany apart from an alleged ‘normal’ path of modernization followed by Western European countries, notably Britain.3 Historians who did not adhere to this ‘special path’ (Sonderweg) theory could, by contrast, point to more than enough post-1918 shortterm factors that overburdened the republic and led to its downfall. Whether long-term or short-term factors proved more decisive, Sonderweg historians and their adversaries were often able to agree about one thing: the cards had been firmly stacked against the 96

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republic. For Gerald Feldman, Weimar was a ‘gamble which stood virtually no chance of success’, 4 while for Richard Bessel ‘perhaps the remarkable thing about the Weimar Republic is not that it collapsed but that it lasted as long as it did’.5 More recently, historians have tended to stress more contingent factors in the demise of parliamentary democracy, stressing the failure of high politics, weaknesses of leading personalities, and a range of specific political crises whose outcome was by no means predetermined by either long-term or short-term structures.6 In an altogether separate reinterpretation of the history of the Weimar Republic, Detlev Peukert has argued that the crisis which ultimately engulfed Weimar was not one of democracy but one of modernity, or rather modernity gone wrong, and even pathological modernity.7 According to Peukert, Weimar should best be seen as a huge laboratory of classical modernity in which a variety of new paths were explored, including democracy. Yet democracy was not the central aspect of Peukert’s story. Drawing particularly on the growing body of research by historians of everyday life, Peukert could argue that a majority of Germans were not too bothered about the fate of a parliamentary democracy which was seen as being incapable of delivering the promises of modernity. In this perspective, democracy failed because Nazism, at the end of the day, offered all-too-many Germans a way out of the crisis which promised radical renewal and reform. One of the victims of that promise was democratization. In the light of such debates, this chapter explores factors and circumstances, both long- and short-term, which stood in the way of successful democratization under Weimar. In particular, it will first expose the consequences of military defeat, revolution and prolonged de facto civil war for the survival chances of the republic. Second, it will discuss the failures and shortcomings of the constitutional settlement and the political system in the Weimar Republic. Third, it will consider the, at best lukewarm, attachment of elites, particularly industrialists, the military, the judiciary and the media, to the Republic. Fourth, it will examine the impact of major economic crises on the fate of the Republic. Fifth, it will consider not only the reasons behind the demise of Weimar but also the reasons behind the success of National Socialism. While, for analytical reasons, these two should best be kept apart, the Nazi Party was not merely the contingent beneficiary of the failure of Weimar democracy. It was also a major factor in its demise and hence has to be considered among the various factors blocking successful democratization. Finally, all these factors concerning the

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history of the Weimar Republic itself must be considered in the light of more long-term explanations of Weimar’s failure.

Democratization under the conditions of military defeat, revolution and civil war The First World War had brought a near total mobilization of German society. Thirteen million men, roughly a fifth of the total German population, served in the army. At the home front, the remaining men, and especially the women who were drafted into the factories, experienced long working hours and the effects of the Allied blockade. Food shortages brought malnourishment. Workers, in particular, suffered from a shortage of clothing, declining real wages and poor hygiene standards. Firmer factory rules were introduced and the workforce regimented in a hitherto unprecedented way. German war debts rose and, at the end of the war, reparations payments and the costs of demobilization put further strains on public finances. The blockade disrupted Germany’s external trading links and the war brought havoc to the country’s productivity rates. By 1919, industrial and agricultural production was more than halved compared to 1913. The war impoverished Germany, produced lower living standards and decisively weakened the German currency. Subsequent German governments used the printing presses to deal with the state’s rising demand for more money: to finance the war effort and then demobilization, to honour the obligations to Germany’s war victims, and to pay the reparations. Yet the political forces in favour of establishing a liberal democracy in Germany managed to deal quite successfully with the legacy of the lost war. Six million soldiers had to be demobilized very quickly. They had to be given jobs and reintegrated into German society. Democratic governments could only do this by subsidizing industries and distributing welfare to those who, for whatever reason, found reintegration difficult. Thus, the young democracy could virtually guarantee full employment and ameliorate the massive social protests threatening to engulf it. However, these policies could only be financed by printing more money, and inflation finally spiralled out of control in 1923, when broad sections of the German middle classes faced ruin. The stabilization of the German currency in 1923 caused particular hardship among the country’s working classes. Memories of this inflation produced widespread long-term resentment against the republic. Recently, Niall Ferguson has argued that the republic missed

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a golden opportunity in 1920 to stop inflation and put its finances on a more healthy basis.8 However, the likelihood, as Ferguson admits, was that if such a deflationary policy were to have been pursued in 1920, the republic would have given way to an authoritarian regime much earlier and the democratic experiment would have ended around 1920. With hindsight, such a solution might have been preferable to the rise of Adolf Hitler, but one can hardly blame the democrats for trying to keep democracy afloat in the early 1920s. While conditions on the home front during the First World War had nourished the dissatisfaction that fed the flames of revolution in 1918/19, trench warfare at the front had bred its own rather curious myths. The ‘ideas of 1914’ came to symbolize the German people’s unity in adversity. Many on the political right argued that such unity was woefully absent amid the political bickering that characterized the Weimar Republic. The idealism of the young German soldiers was glorified and their senseless death became a purposeful self-sacrifice for the nation9 – nowhere more so than in the memory of the Battle of Langemarck in France in October 1914. Regiment after regiment of young volunteers, many of whom were university students, were mowed down by machine gun fire in an unsuccessful attempt to break through Allied lines. The result was 80 000 dead soldiers. They could not have fallen in vain. A cult of the dead soldier combined with visions of ‘hereditary enemies’ (the French, but equally ‘perfidious Albion’ and internal enemies such as Jews and Bolsheviks) to produce a longing for revenge for the humiliating defeat. Such sentiments were fuelled by the Versailles peace treaty, which Germans widely regarded as a ‘treaty of shame’. The economic burdens imposed on Germany in the form of reparations would, it was argued, enslave the nation for generations to come. Its guilt-clause, which placed sole responsibility for the outbreak of war on German shoulders, produced outrage in Germany and, from the Communists on the left to the Nazis on the right, an anti-Versailles consensus emerged. The republican parties signed the treaty only under protest and, as they emphasized, out of a sense of national responsibility. The Allies had threatened them with invasion should German representatives refuse to sign. For the political right in Weimar, these signatures nevertheless amounted to treason. The Right succeeded in rallying nationalist sentiments against the willingness of republican politicians to comply with the treaty’s provisions, and put the blame for the lost war on the political left which, by encouraging social revolution on the home front, had undermined morale in the trenches

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and stabbed the allegedly undefeated German army in the back. Such right-wing myths could not be effectively countered by the republican forces, as the latter were unwilling to confront the German people with the bitter truth about the responsibility of Imperial German elites for the outbreak of war in 1914 and for subsequently impoverishing the country during the war. The nationalist spectacles of Germany’s democrats instead led them to defend the German nation without distinguishing between the illiberal and undemocratic Imperial nationstate and its Weimar successor. Many historians subsequently argued that Versailles undermined the republic right from the start and was responsible for Weimar’s ultimate demise. However, such arguments could barely hide their apologetic function, for it was obviously convenient for German historians to lay the blame for Hitler’s rise at the door of the victorious Allies of the First World War. Undoubtedly, the Allies’ unwillingness to make distinctions between the old Imperial Germany and the new republic was extremely cynical, given that Allied governments had supposedly fought this war as a ‘crusade for democracy’ and against ‘Prussianism’.10 Yet the very real hostility of the British and French political elites still did not produce a peace treaty which could be described as Carthagian. In effect, it left Germany’s economic potential for Great Power status intact and, particularly given the small amount of reparations actually made in the 1920s, its economic impact on the republic should not be overemphasized. However, its impact on Germany’s political elite was considerable. Every move of German foreign policy was geared singlemindedly towards the ultimate revision of Versailles. Even during Europe’s worst economic slump of the twentieth century, that foreign policy rationale took precedence over attempts to alleviate the domestic economic situation. In the early 1930s Chancellor Heinrich Brüning argued that his deflationary measures not only made sense economically: they would also force the Allies to recognise Germany’s inability to pay reparations. Brüning was right. In June 1932, the Allies first postponed reparations payments and then scrapped them altogether. But by that time Brüning had fallen as chancellor and the appointment of Hitler as his successor was only months away. While military defeat, together with the Versailles treaty, produced significant collective traumas with adverse effects on the acceptance of democratization after 1918, other traumas were produced by the legacy of revolution. Between 1918 and 1923, Germany witnessed de facto civil war. German soldiers’ mutinies in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven in October 1918 ignited the German revolution, immediately raising the hopes and

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aspirations of millions of working-class Germans, and striking fear into the hearts of their middle-class fellow countrymen, who feared a radicalization of the revolution and a victory for German Bolshevism. That middle-class nationalist sentiments could mobilize the masses just as much as working-class revolutionary attitudes was demonstrated by the success of the short-lived Fatherland Party, which quickly became the biggest mass organization in Germany in 1918. Yet it was the image of revolutionary workers and the left which dominated the republic’s early years. Left-wing attempts to build another kind of republic found expression in the Spartacus rising of January 1919, the short-lived Bavarian and Bremen council republics in 1919/20, and the formation of armed workers’ militias in the Ruhr as well as in Saxony and Thuringia in 1920. The final, equally unsuccessful attempt to bring about a ‘German October’ was made by the Communist Party in 1923, with the Hamburg rising. Furthermore, a massive strike wave rolled over Germany between December 1918 and April 1919. It focused on a popular demand for the socialization of the mines. Subsequent republican governments used the regular army extensively, as well as right-wing paramilitary formations (the so-called Freikorps) to crush these left-wing insurrections and rebellions. Significantly, the army stayed in barracks when the right-wing Kapp–Lüttwitz putsch attempted to topple the republican government in March 1920. This time, the attempt to halt democratization was only prevented by a general strike and the courageous defence of the republic by working-class organizations. The socialist unions that had formed the vanguard in the republic’s defence demanded a greater influence on government, democratization of the economic and social sphere, and the cleansing of reactionary elements from public administration. Yet, as the aftermath of 1920 was to demonstrate, they were not powerful enough to achieve any of these aims. Instead, the Hitler putsch of 1923 and widespread rumours in the same year that the head of the army’s general staff, General Hans von Seekt, had political ambitions and was considering toppling the democratically elected government, posed further threats to the democratization process from the right. The question has often been asked whether the republic was not doomed from the start because the democratic transformation of Germany in the democratic revolution of 1918 did not go far enough. Was the revolution, as Sebastian Haffner has argued, betrayed by a Social Democratic leadership who misread the true intentions of the revolutionary masses?11 Social Democrats such as Friedrich Ebert, Philipp Scheidemann and Gustav Noske had achieved all they wanted before the revolution hit Berlin on 9 November 1918. They had been

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handed power by the last Imperial chancellor, Max von Baden, on that same day, and they were intent on continuing to democratize Germany’s political system, a process that had started before and coninued during the First World War, and which had been driven by a coalition of Liberals, Social Democrats and Centre Party politicians in the Reichstag. In November 1918, as far as the Social Democrats were concerned, the logical next step was to hold elections for a Constitutional Assembly. The revolution just seemed to be an obstacle on that path. That the institutions of that revolution, particularly the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, could have been used to democratize German society more effectively did not enter the heads of those who took control of the revolution to extinguish its flames as quickly as possible. Thus an opportunity to implement a more democratic ethos and more democratic structures in the economy, the military and the administration was missed, and the revolution remained incomplete. It would doubtless have been difficult to democratize German society more thoroughly amid the instability and turmoil at the end of the war. Furthermore, whether the councils could have acted as instruments for such a democratization must remain debatable. 12 Yet the point is that the Social Democrats did not even try. Content with bringing about a new political system (in itself no small achievement given the conditions of 1918/19), they restored a social and economic order that would undermine political democracy in the late 1920s and early 1930s. As it was, the republic survived the first four years of utter turmoil. Permanent crisis then gave way to four years of relative tranquillity, often described as the Golden Years of the Republic. Between 1924 and 1928 things seemed to be improving. However, as I will argue in the next two sections, any closer look at both the political system and Germany’s economic performance reveals underlying structural weaknesses that were not overcome during the middle years of the republic.

Democratization, the constitutional settlement and the party-political system The Weimar Constitution has often been criticized for incorporating features that would ultimately help to undermine democracy: an overly powerful president; proportional representation; plebiscites; and the enfranchisement of women. The wide-ranging powers of the president (sometimes described as substitute emperor) were introduced

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because of widespread fears of ‘parliamentary absolutism’, and particularly fears of a Parliament dominated by the parties of the left. After all, the combined vote of the Majority Social Democratic Party (MSPD) and the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) in the January 1919 elections had been 45.5 per cent. The Communist Party (KPD) had refused to participate in the elections. For many on the centreright, an absolute majority for the working-class parties seemed to be a distinct and much-feared possibility. The president’s emergency powers meant that he could dissolve Parliament and support a government and a chancellor who would rule by presidential decree. The first president of the republic, Friedrich Ebert, used these powers in 1923 to protect the Republic from its enemies. Yet, in the early 1930s, under President Paul von Hindenburg, they were used to undermine the republic and bring about a more authoritarian regime. Hence it was not the constitutional powers of the presidency as such that undermined the republic, but rather the willingness of Hindenburg and his entourage to use these powers so as to find alternatives to parliamentary democracy. It needed democrats to make the Weimar Constitution work. In the hands of anti-democrats, constitutional mechanisms were employed to hasten the demise of the democratic republic. The introduction of proportional representation has often been blamed for the fragmentation of the party political system and the proliferation of small parties which managed to gain seats in Parliament. In 1930, for example, fifteen parties were represented in the Reichstag, and in 1932, three members of the Deutsche Bauernpartei were represented in Parliament, although the party received just 149 000 votes, equal to 0.4 per cent. Yet in 1930, six of the fifteen parties had a total of only eleven seats. At that time, the real problem was that the democratic parties had lost their majority. While all democratic parties taken together commanded over 274 deputies, the combined deputies of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) and the KPD could marshal 319 votes. Given the Nazis’ strong electoral performance in the early 1930s, a voting system in which a plurality of the vote suffices would probably have let the Nazis in even earlier. It is sometimes argued that the Weimar constitution’s plebiscitary elements contributed to a radicalization and militarization of street politics dominated by the paramilitary formations of the political parties and associations. While none of the seven plebiscites held under Weimar was successful, they managed to mobilize considerable

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sentiment and contributed towards undermining rational political discourse in favour of political demagogy and propaganda. Once again, a constitutional mechanism gets blamed which, in itself, is perfectly democratic. In mature democracies plebiscites can contribute to a more active involvement of citizens in the political process and prevent politics from becoming a mere elite affair. Yet Weimar’s problem was that its extraordinarily democratic constitution with a strong commitment to individual rights and social justice lacked a reliable popular base of support. Finally, it was also the constitution that enfranchised women for the first time in German history. Such an emancipatory step did not, however, prevent many women from supporting anti-democratic politics and parties in the 1920s. So, for example, women played a crucial role in the conservative mobilization of the countryside. The Agricultural Housewives’ Association (RLHV) was one among many voluntary associations in Weimar with impeccable anti-democratic credentials.13 For many women, the Republic represented a threat to their traditional gender roles. Bourgeois women’s groups such as the Federation of German Women’s Associations (BdF) propagated the ideal of ‘social motherliness’ to counter the threat to women’s traditional place in the home as wife and mother. Under the economic conditions of the 1920s many middle-class women who, before 1914, would have stayed at home, were now forced to seek gainful employment. This was something that most working-class women were used to, but their lot was not greatly improved by being able to vote in elections. Hence many women from different social backgrounds, and often for very different reasons, found the republican parties wanting and turned away from democratic politics altogether. The performance of the political parties in Weimar Germany was hampered by their remarkable inexperience in forming government coalitions. The absence of parliamentary government in Imperial Germany meant that the Reichstag parties learned how to debate politics but not how to make politics. Ill at ease with political compromise and coalition-building, most parties found it easier to opt for opposition than for government. Hence they lacked the necessary appetite for power that ensures the healthy alternation of governments in democratic systems. Germany’s peculiar social structure made coalition governments and compromise even more difficult. Germany was divided into relatively tight social milieux with different and often antagonistic interests. In the 1920s a deep gulf separated Socialist/ Communist (with the working-class milieu of the left itself deeply

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divided!), Catholic, Protestant bourgeois and East Elbian/agrarian milieux; and the parties representing these milieux found it difficult to bridge the divide. Hence the question arises: was democracy in fact destroyed by its enemies, or surrendered by the republican forces themselves? Each of the parties committed to democratization contained sections that were ambivalent about parliamentary democracy. The Social Democrats were in many respects the only true ‘champions of the Republic’.14 No other party combated National Socialism as energetically and persistently. Yet a vociferous left wing of the party, strengthened after the USPD rejoined the MSPD in 1922, argued against forging coalitions with any bourgeois parties which would only compromise the party’s ambitions and disappoint its supporters. The Social Democrats’ room for manoeuvre was further limited by the existence of a mass Communist party to their left competing for the support of a working-class electorate declining in its numerical importance.15 While the KPD was never strong enough seriously to threaten the republic, it was always willing to portray Social Democrats as traitors to ‘true’ working-class interests. After 1928 it denounced Social Democrats as social Fascists, arguing that, de facto, they served the interests of capital, just as much as did Fascism, by preventing workers from developing ‘true’ class consciousness. At the same time, Communists did in places forge tactical alliances with National Socialists (most notoriously in the strike of the Berlin transport workers of 1932) and, by the early 1930s, contributed to the demise of the republic in the illusory hope that ‘after Hitler it will be our turn’. Possibly the most fateful decision of the KPD was made in the presidential elections of 1925, when it decided to field its own candidate, thereby helping Hindenburg into office. Among the bourgeois centre parties, the left-liberal German Democratic Party (DDP) was most committed to the democratization process under Weimar, while the right-liberal German People’s Party (DVP) began as a monarchist party and developed more positive attitudes towards the republic only under Gustav Stresemann. In the early 1930s, the traditional constituencies of both liberal parties, the Protestant middle classes, particularly civil servants and white-collar professionals, abandoned Liberalism for National Socialism. Yet both liberal parties were already crisis-ridden by 1928, and they began to lurch to the right in an unavailing attempt to prevent total collapse. Liberalism had been unable to protect the status of professional groups; it had alienated the younger generation, and had been unsuccessful in

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formulating its vision for a democratic Germany in a political language appealing to wide sections of the German population.16 In 1932 only 1 per cent still opted for the DDP, while 1.9 per cent chose the DVP. The conservative German National People’s Party (DNVP) was dominated by monarchist and anti-republican sentiments at the beginning of the Weimar Republic. While it participated in centre-right coalition governments in the mid-1920s, the party renounced democratic politics altogether after 1928. Its new chairman, Alfred Hugenberg, steered it towards a coalition with the National Socialists which became reality in the Harzburg front of October 1931. This leaves only the Centre Party, which successfully mobilized the Catholic milieu under Weimar. No left-of-centre (including the Social Democrats) or right-of-centre (including the DVP and DNVP) coalition could be founded without Centre Party support, making it an almost permanent party of government. At the beginning of the republic, under the left-of-centre leadership of Mathias Erzberger, it was a staunch ally of the MSPD in the latter’s attempt to establish and defend a democratic republic. Yet, during the 1920s, it moved further to the right, as the influence of the Catholic hierarchy became more marked and ideas of an anti-democratic corporate state (Ständestaat) dominated the party’s outlook. Overall, there is very strong evidence that the democratic political parties were not mature enough for successful democratization to take place, especially given that they were threatened with mass antidemocratic parties on both left and right. The lack of democratic sentiment not only encompassed important sections of the German electorate, it was also widespread among some key elites, whose makeup had not significantly changed following the 1918 revolution. The same old men dominated the legal system, the military, industry and agriculture as before 1918, and their attitudes had changed very little. Furthermore, the media as well as the cultural scene more generally were overwhelmingly anti-republican in character.

A republic without republicans? Anti-republican sentiments among Weimar’s elites Throughout the years of the Weimar Republic, the law courts ignored right-wing political terrorism, while ferociously persecuting the political left.17 Between 1918 and 1921, German judges passed eight death sentences and, for the rest of the accused, an average of fourteen years’ imprisonment in fifteen murder trials of left-wing terrorists. During the

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same period, 314 political murders were committed by the political right. The law courts did not pass a single death sentence and the accused got away with an average of two months’ imprisonment. The countless murders by the Freikorps during the early years of the republic were mostly not even investigated. Whereas the Communist press was constantly censored and Communist journalists imprisoned for the most petty offences, the anti-Semitic and hyper-nationalist press could basically publish without any legal interference. The German military felt humiliated by the stipulations of Versailles, which reduced the German army to a token 100 000 men and prohibited possession or development of certain weapons such as tanks, aeroplanes and chemical weapons. Most leading officers never accepted this treaty and sought to restore the high reputation and influence that the army had enjoyed in Imperial Germany. The Reichswehr in Weimar continued to espouse the Prussian virtues of blind loyalty and obedience; and army leaders continued to believe in strict social hierarchies and celebrated the great traditions of the Prusso-German army. For example, the annual commemorations of the victory over France in the 1870/71 war on the so-called ‘Sedan Day’ were continued throughout the Weimar years. Without effective democratic control over the army, the Reichswehr developed into a ‘state within a state’. From the mid-1920s, leading generals, particularly Wilhelm Groener and Kurt von Schleicher, developed plans to establish a militarized state (Wehrstaat): industrial production, civilian values and the whole functioning of society had to be geared towards the military. A remilitarized Germany was seen as the precondition for the revision of Versailles. Yet the military elites feared that their specific interests would be represented inadequately within the pluralist democratic policy process of Weimar. Hence, generals such as von Schleicher were influential in undermining the republic from within President Hindenburg’s entourage. Nevertheless, the generals were reluctant to let the army take direct control, largely for fear of being drawn into renewed civil war. Among the agricultural and industrial elites, few found anything to praise in the new republic. The aristocratic Junkers still dominated life on the East-Elbian estates. They were extremely successful in extracting huge state subsidies for their ailing agricultural ventures; yet they could not retain the support of the suffering small farmers who received little, if any, financial support. Small farmers were at the heart of the agrarian radicalism of the Weimar Republic, which benefited the National Socialists in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

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Under the pressures of social revolution, the industrial elites had reluctantly entered into an agreement with the socialist trade unions in 1918. The pact between Hugo Stinnes and Carl Legien leading to the formation of the Central Working Community (Zentrale Arbeitsgemeinschaft – ZAG) averted widespread socialization and held out the promise of social partnership. However, too many employers did not want such partnership with the unions and, after the direct revolutionary threat had receded into the background, sought instead to reinstate the authoritarian ‘master-in-one’s-own house’ attitude that dominated industrial relations before 1914.18 The unions’ declared aim of supplementing political democracy with economic democracy (working-class representation on management boards) was rejected by the employers’ federations. The employers successfully undermined the eight-hour day, perceived by most workers as the central achievement of the 1918 revolution. They argued that wages were too high and that the binding state arbitration procedures in cases of industrial conflict tended to work in favour of the unions. The lock-out in the Ruhr heavy industry of 1928 demonstrated that the industrialists were willing to mobilize all necessary resources in the defence of what they saw as their vital interests against the perceived ‘trade union state’ of Weimar. Overall, Germany’s industrial elites were not early supporters of Nazism. Only a few German industrialists, such as August Thyssen and Friedrich Karl Flick, were committed Nazis from its early days. 19 But industrialists, like other German elites, were, at best, only lukewarm in defending the democratic constitution. Most neither held nor developed democratic convictions in or after 1918, and a clear majority was glad to see the hated Weimar system gone after 1930. As the attempts of Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher in particular demonstrated, the old elites commanded insufficient popular support to replace Weimar democracy with an authoritarian government of their own, but they were still powerful enough to undermine the basis for successful democratization. Anti-democratic sentiments were, of course, not only the preserve of the old elites. They were also highly visible in the mass media and parts of the cultural establishment of Weimar. It was not only that the nationalist press baron Alfred Hugenberg controlled a large section of the German newspaper market and much of the German film industry. State film censorship and control over radio broadcasting tended to stifle pluralist democratic debate and worked in favour of right-wing antirepublican forces. Particularly in the Republic’s final years, the cultural scene became increasingly polarized. It was chic to be either völkisch or

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Communist, but few eminent representatives of German culture wholeheartedly identified with the republic. Willi Münzenberg’s press empire and leading writers such as Bert Brecht criticized the parliamentary democracy from the left, whereas conservative publications such as Deutsche Rundschau or Die Tat and writers such as Ernst Jünger identitifed the Weimar Republic with cultural and moral decadence. A group of writers, including Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Max Hildebert Boehm and Eduard Stadtler, began to argue for a Conservative Revolution which did not idealize Wilhelmine Germany. Instead, they looked forward to an entirely new political order based on the political rebirth of the nation. Such ideas were to have a particular resonance among the crisisridden Protestant middle classes of Weimar Germany.

The impact of economic crisis on democratization The economic depression that hit Germany after 1929 was the most severe in the whole of the twentieth century and has often been held responsible for the ultimate failure of the first German democracy. Unemployment figures spiralled out of control and reached seven million in 1932. Such levels of unemployment produced hitherto unprecedented social misery. This, in turn, contributed to the unpopularity of the democratic republic among wide sections of the German population. Weimar had produced Europe’s most elaborate welfare state, with the 1927 unemployment insurance, new pension schemes and massive housing programmes particularly celebrated among its innovations. Yet, under the economic conditions of the late 1920s and early 1930s, this could not be sustained. Significantly, Weimar’s last democratically legitimated government fell in 1930, over the question of how best to reform unemployment insurance. For Social Democrats in particular, it was the welfare state that gave parliamentary democracy its legitimacy after 1918. The dismantling of the welfare state after 1930 did indeed produce frustration and dissent, especially among Weimar’s working classes. The German economy’s underlying structural weaknesses in the 1920s have led some historians, notably Knut Borchardt, to argue that the republic was doomed economically from the start.20 Major internal weaknesses meant that, once the depression hit Germany, the economy collapsed. In Borchardt’s view, there were no alternatives. Any statesponsored economic programmes would have depended on either domestic or foreign credits which, for various reasons, were not forthcoming. Such fatalism has not remained uncountered. Carl-Ludwig

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Holtfrerich, in particular, has argued that alternative policies had been available to Brüning. According to Holtfrerich, it was largely because of the failure of politicians such as Brüning to try out those alternatives that Weimar ultimately had little chance of survival.21 Yet even if Brüning had not followed a rigidly deflationary economic policy, and even if deficit-spending had been successful, the restitution of parliamentary democracy under Brüning was a rather distant possibility. Brüning, Reich chancellor between 1930 and 1932, did not, as some historians have argued, want to save the republic. He wanted another political system, possibly a restored monarchy, and certainly a return to a constitutional system in which the government would not depend on volatile party-political majorities. In other words, Brüning wanted to revert to a kind of Bismarckian constitutional settlement.22 If the republic had failed with the onset of the presidential cabinets in 1930, the question of which political system would replace Weimar democracy was still wide open. Yet the suggestion that, without the depression, Weimar democracy might well have prospered and eventually won new converts, seems at least doubtful.23

The Nazi party’s part in the failure of democratization The Nazis promised all things to all people and drew support from all social milieux, although the Protestant middle classes formed the backbone. Whether one follows Peter Fritzsche’s argument that Hitler’s success was already prefigured by the formation of a right-wing, antiMarxist, anti-republican, anti-Semitic and nationalist milieu by Protestant burghers in the middle years of the republic, 24 or whether one attributes more weight to Jürgen Falter’s suggestions that the NSDAP was the first genuine catch-all party in German history, 25 the Nazis clearly appealed to millions of Germans as a party offering a radically new vision of politics in which democracy did not figure. National Socialists could ally themselves with traditional Conservatives in Eastern Pomerania,26 but equally they could exploit the democratic mass mobilization of peasants and workers for their own purposes. 27 Certainly, many leading Nazis came from the fringes of respectable middle-class German society, and their propaganda was directed as much against traditional German elites as against Marxists, Socialists and democrats. National Socialists skilfully used political images and symbolic gestures to aestheticize politics 28 and capitalize on the dissatisfaction of very diverse constituencies with the balance sheet of

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democratic politics under Weimar. Crucial to this was the party’s reorganization after Hitler’s early release from prison in 1925. Hitler was not only the charismatic leader of the NSDAP; without him the party in the late 1920s would have been ill-prepared organizationally, because it was Hitler who decided to diversify the party organization and make the party and its ancillary organizations his personal instrument for the effective mobilization of very diverse sectional interests. What might have happened to the Nazi Party had Hitler served his full five-year sentence for his part in the 1923 Munich Putsch remains an interesting question.

The impact of long-term structural factors on the failure of democratization So far, it seems there is more than enough in the immediate history of the 1920s to explain the demise of the first German parliamentary democracy. And yet, too many Wilhelmine traditions lived on in the Weimar Republic and made the success of the democratic experiment rather doubtful from the start. Nostalgia for the pre-war period gripped wide sections of the German middle classes, alienating them from the new and unwanted republic that was regarded as a foreign import, forced on Germany in a period of military defeat and social revolution. Both before and after 1918, German historians stressed the German special path (Sonderweg), setting it apart from shallow Western civilization (including Western-style parliamentary democracy). 29 The belief in German cultural superiority remained largely unquestioned after 1918. The traditions that burdened the republic included, in particular, the widespread belief in strong above-party government based on an efficient and reputable civil service. Furthermore, the delayed process of German nation-building was accompanied by an aggressive inward and outward nationalism which, in turn, strengthened the illiberal, antipluralist elements in German political culture. The influence of pre-industrial elites, norms and mentalities has already been noted, and reference has also been made to the pillarized social structure and party politics (that is, different social milieux forming distinct vertical pillars in society which had little in common). Additionally, the politicization of the masses that got under way in the last third of the nineteenth century left Germany’s traditional elites fragmented, weak and indecisive. Under the specific conditions of economic crisis in the early 1930s, such long-term factors contributed vitally to the republic’s failure. It was not mere coincidence that the more established

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democracies in Britain and the USA remained politically stable under similar, if not worse, economic conditions in the 1930s.30 Yet ultimately too much in Germany’s political culture was too similar to that of other Western European states for it to be reasonable to uphold notions of a Sonderweg. Germany was an advanced capitalist country with a developed civil society. The country’s middle classes dominated municipal government well before the advent of Weimar. Imperial German society was characterized by a modern education system that contributed towards making Germany the leading country in the sciences, humanities and architecture. Its middle classes, far from being feudalized, dominated not only the educational and cultural sphere, but also the press and the legal system. Politically, middle-class Liberalism was not a straightforward story of decline and failure but rather one of major triumphs interspersed with setbacks, fragmentation and destruction. The period of German unification might not have amounted to a ‘silent bourgeois revolution’ 31 but, in certain regions and at particular times, the German middle classes clearly dominated vast sections of political, social and economic life in the Kaiserreich.

Conclusion While long-term factors cannot be ignored altogether in Weimar’s demise, it seems they only really come into their own when seen in conjunction with those in the short term: the specific impact of the First World War; the incomplete revolution following it; the relative failure of democratic political parties; and, above all, the hostility of traditional German elites towards democratization, as well as the impact of almost permanent economic crisis. More recently, much historical writing has highlighted the continuities between Weimar and Nazi Germany.32 The years after 1918 witnessed the accelerated modernization of German society, transforming the Weimar Republic into a laboratory of social transformation and experimentation. The feeling that wide sections of the German population had of living in a state of flux increased their unease and disorientation. When several crises resulting from the sudden and uncompromising manner of modernization converged with the massive economic depression it was enough to erode the basic social compromise on which the Weimar Republic had been built. Modernization became pathological and a ‘reactionary modernism’33 came to the fore and found a home in National Socialism – alongside an agglomeration of backward-looking

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opinions, mentalities and policies. The Nazis claimed to have a solution to the multiple crises gripping Germany in the 1920s. It amounted to a ‘pseudo-modernization’ without democratization.34 The parliamentary republic had lost most of its legitimacy well before the 1929 economic depression. The lost war and its dire economic consequences, the anti-Versailles consensus just as much as the Versailles treaty itself, the hyperinflation of 1923, and the constant bickering and fighting among weak and unstable coalition partners in subsequent national governments all undermined the existence of a popular base for democratic politics. The NSDAP presented itself as a modern and radical alternative. Power was finally delivered to it by members of the traditional German elite, who could see no other alternative – caught, as they were, between their desire to see democratization halted and the perceived need to legitimate a new authoritarian political order with some form of mass support.

Notes and references 1. I would like to thank Peter Lambert for his useful suggestions and comments on a draft of this chapter. 2. G. Ritter, ‘The Fault of Mass Democracy’, in J. L. Snell (ed.), The Nazi Revolution. Germany’s Guilt or Germany’s Fate (New York: Knopf, 1959); H. Rothfels, German Opposition to Hitler (London: Oswald Wolff, 1970, first publ. in German, 1949). 3. On the Sonderweg, see in particular H. Grebing, Der ‘deutsche Sonderweg’ in Europa 1806–1945. Eine Kritik (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1986). The most powerful critique is still D. Blackbourn and G. Eley, The Peculiarities of German History. Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford University Press, 1984). 4. G. D. Feldman, ‘Weimar from Inflation to Depression: Experiment or Gamble?’ in idem, (ed.), Die Nachwirkungen der Inflation auf die deutsche Geschichte, 1924–1933 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1985) p. 385. 5. R. Bessel, ‘Why did the Weimar Republic Collapse?’ in I. Kershaw, (ed.), Weimar: Why Did German Democracy Fail? (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990) p. 148. 6. Representative of this trend are Larry Eugene Jones, German Liberalism and the Dissolution of the Weimar Party System, 1918–1933 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); and Dietrich Orlow, Weimar Prussia, 1918–1925 (Pittsburgh Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991). 7. D. J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic (London: Penguin, 1991). For a thoughtful critique of Peukert’s work, see D. F. Crew, ‘The Pathologies of Modernity: Detlev Peukert on Germany’s Twentieth Century’, Social History, 17 (1992) pp. 319–28.

114 Democratization under Weimar 8. N. Ferguson, Paper and Iron. Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation (Cambridge University Press, 1995) esp. ch. 5. 9. R. Koselleck and M. Jeisman (eds), Kriegerdenkmäler in der Moderne (Munich: Fink, 1994). 10. The cynicism of the British political elite has been investigated in detail by D. J. Newton, British Policy and the Weimar Republic 1918–1919 (Oxford University Press, 1997). 11. S. Haffner, 1918/19. Eine deutsche Revolution (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1981). 12. For different views on that question, compare P. von Oertzen, Betriebsräte in der Novemberrevolution, 2nd edn (Bonn: J. W. H. Dietz, 1976) and W. J. Mommsen, ‘The German Revolution 1918–1920: Political Revolution and Social Protest Movement’, in R. Bessel and E. J. Feuchtwanger (eds), Social Change and Political Development in Weimar Germany (London: Croom Helm, 1981). 13. R. Bridenthal, ‘Organised Rural Women and the Conservative Mobilisation of the German Countryside in the Weimar Republic’, in L. E. Jones and J. Retallack (eds), Between Reform, Reaction, and Resistance. Studies in the History of German Conservatism from 1789 to 1945 (Oxford: Berg, 1993), 375–406. 14. W. H. Maehl, The German Socialist Party. Champion of the First Republic 1918–1933 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1986). 15. Weimar’s social structure was characterized by a massive increase in the number of white-collar employees traditionally hostile to the parties of the political left. 16. K. H. Jarausch and L. E. Jones, ‘German Liberalism Reconsidered: Inevitable Decline, Bourgeois Hegemony, or Partial Achievement?’ in Jarausch and Jones (eds), In Search of a Liberal Germany. Studies in the History of German Liberalism from 1789 to the Present (Oxford: Berg, 1990) p. 17 and chas 10–12. 17. H. Hannover and E. Hannover-Drück, Politische Justiz 1919–1933 (Frankfurtam-Main: Fischer, 1966); G. Jasper, ‘Justiz und Politik in der Weimarer Republik’, Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte, vol. 30 (1982) pp. 176 ff. 18. B. Weisbrod, Die Schwerindustrie in der Weimarer Republik (Wuppertal: Hammer, 1976). 19. H. A. Turner, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (Oxford University Press, 1985). 20. For a good analysis and commentary of the Borchardt debate, see Joseph Lee, ‘Policy and Performance in the German Economy, 1925–1935: A Comment on the Borchardt Thesis’, in M. Laffan (ed.), The Burden of German History (London: Methuen, 1988). Borchardt’s most important essays have been translated into English under the title Perspectives on Modern German Economic History and Policy (Cambridge University Press, 1991). 21. C.-L. Holtfrerich, ‘Economic Policy Options and the End of the Weimar Republic’ in Kershaw (ed.), Weimar, pp. 58–91. 22. Brüning’s anti-democratic aims and motives were first analyzed by K. D. Bracher, Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik. Eine Studie zum Machtverfall in der Demokratie (Villingen: Ring Verlag, 1955). 23. This is one of the main arguments in H. A. Winkler, Weimar 1918–1933: Die Geschichte der ersten deutschen Demokratie (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1993).

Stefan Berger 115 24. P. Fritzsche, Rehearsals for Fascism. Populism and Political Mobilisation in Weimar Germany (Oxford University Press, 1990). 25. J. Falter, Hitler’s Wähler (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1991). The differences between Fritzsche and Falter should, however, not be overemphasized. Falter readily admits that an already established attachment to a right-wing political culture was the major determinant influencing Nazi voters. 26. S. Baranowski, The Sanctity of Rural Life: Nobility, Protestantism and Nazism in Weimar Prussia (Oxford University Press, 1995). 27. J. Osmond, Rural Protest in the Weimar Republic: The Free Peasantry in the Rhineland and Bavaria (London: Macmillan, 1993); and for working-class support for the Nazi party, see C. Fischer, The Rise of the Nazis (Manchester University Press, 1995) pp. 105–21. 28. G. Paul, Aufstand der Bilder. Die NS-Propaganda vor 1933 (Bonn: J. W. H. Dietz, 1990); and A. Lüdtke, Eigen-Sinn: Fabrikalltag, Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis in den Faschismus (Hamburg: Ergebnisse, 1993). 29. H. Schleier, Die bürgerliche deutsche Geschichtsschreibung der Weimarer Republik (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1975); B. Faulenbach, Ideologie des deutschen Weges. Die deutsche Geschichte in der Historiographie zwischen Kaiserreich und Nationalsozialismus (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1980). 30. J. Kocka, ‘German History before Hitler: The Debate about the German Sonderweg’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 23 (1988) pp. 3–16. 31. Blackbourn and Eley, Peculiarities, p. 175. 32. P. Fritzsche, ‘Did Weimar Fail?’, The Journal of Modern History, vol. 68 (1996) pp. 629–56. 33. J. Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge University Press, 1984). 34. H. Mommsen, ‘Noch einmal: Nationalsozialismus und Modernisierung’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, vol. 21 (1995) pp. 391–402.

7 The Corporatist Threat and the Overthrow of the Spanish Second Republic Angel Smith

For many European leftists and liberals, Republican resistance to General Francisco Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9 encapsulated the inter-war democratic struggle against the forces of ‘Fascism’. There was much to recommend this view. The Spanish Second Republic was, on paper at least, Spain’s first fully democratic regime, and its proclamation on 14 April 1931 was met by wild jubilation on the streets. Yet at a social, cultural and political level, deep fractures soon appeared, precipitating fierce political divisions between workers and employers; peasants and landowners; revolutionary leftists, moderate Socialists and liberal republicans; between peripheral nationalists and centralists; and between defenders of the Republic and a vociferous and violent right wing. There are plenty of parallels between this experience and many other continental European countries in inter-war Europe. As in their case, it is only through longterm analysis of major trends in Spanish history that the causes behind the polarization of Spanish society, and the undermining of the Republic, can be understood. This must be analyzed at several levels. First, we must examine the growing divisions within Spanish society. These were to become readily visible in the context of the social and political mobilization of parts of the population during and in the aftermath of the loss of the country’s last major colonies in 1898. Second, we shall focus on the inability of the Spanish Restoration state (1874–1923) to channel and defuse discontent. This could be seen in the case of both labour agitation and nationalist protest in Catalonia and the Basque Country. Finally, and in relation to the previous two factors, attention must be paid to the weakness of a conciliatory, democratic culture in Spain. This manifested itself in the scepticism, if not outright hostility, with 116

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which liberal politicians were often viewed, and in the rise of left- and right-wing movements which rejected liberal-democratic political structures. The starting point is the introduction of liberal, parliamentary state and governmental structures in the nineteenth century. The Spanish liberal state grew up from the 1830s. As has often been noted, the dominant conservative–liberal tendency reached an understanding with the Crown and much of the old aristocratic elite. The result was the structuring of a regime which, at a social level, benefited both old and new elites, allowing the well-to-do to purchase Church and municipal lands sold on the open market following the early- and midnineteenth century disentailment laws. In the political sphere it restricted participation to a tiny minority of the population. Culturally, conservative liberalism took on many trappings of the old aristocratic society (indeed, the concession of aristocratic titles to nouveaux riches landowners, politicians and military men grew rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century). It tried to reconvert the Catholic Church, still under the sway of ancien régime doctrines and mentalities, into its ideological mouthpiece, and turned to military power (creating the militarized Civil Guard in 1844) in order to maintain social control. The new liberal authorities based their political control on relations established with local elites (caciques). Essentially, rather than creating a bureaucratic administration, through which a professional civil servant class reached into the localities and ran the affairs of state, Spanish liberalism reached a modus vivendi with the provincial landholding class. The most fundamental aspect of this was that, in return for political support, liberal politicians provided favours to the local bigwigs, who in turn used their economic and social power in the locality – laced, on occasion, with inducements – to secure support, or at least acquiesence. The system was formalized and reached its apogee during the Restoration, when, although universal manhood suffrage was introduced in 1890, the two major parties, the Conservatives and Liberals, agreed to alternate in power (the so-called turno pacífico), using their contacts with the local caciques to ensure victory before elections actually took place.1 It has been argued that this arrangement allowed considerable stability, particularly when it worked smoothly in the form of the turno during the Restoration. However, the cost was inefficiency and corruption in the state machine. Moreover, it had additional longterm cultural, political and ideological consequences, which would

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hinder any future transition to a fully operational liberal-democratic nation state. First, the aim of conservative liberalism was to marginalize rather than integrate the majority of the population into political life. Though liberal elites might proclaim the apogee of the Spanish nation and its people following the demise of the ancien régime and the establishment of constitutional government, in reality they were referring only to the property-owning elite and prosperous middle classes. Second, and relatedly, the poverty of the state and its inability to reach into the localities ensured that what has been called the ‘nationalization of the masses’ was only very imperfectly carried through. (This was the process by which, over much of Europe and from the late nineteenth century in particular, the state began to educate and socialize the population in the language of patriotism, in order to prepare it for the new industrial state and bind it to the new regimes.) This was reflected in the country’s appalling state education system. In 1887, 67 per cent of adults were illiterate, with much of the Spanish peasantry never having darkened the door of a school. Similarly, military service has been seen as a powerful means in the hands of the state to socialize the lower classes. In Spain, however, this was hampered by the fact that compulsory military service was not even partially introduced until 1912 (until that date the well-to-do could buy their way out, and even afterwards they enjoyed a shorter period of service), by increasingly unpopular colonial campaigns, and by the army operating as an instrument of oppression.2 Third, the corruption and patronage inherent in the system insinuated itself into much of Spain’s political life, and encouraged criticism of liberal parliamentary institutions tout court. Supposedly democratic political parties were not immune to the influence of clientalist networks. The most dramatic and serious example was that of the Republican Radical Party which, during the Second Republic, though claiming to represent a stabilizing centrist alternative to the extremes of right and left, in reality seemed more interested in the spoils of office.3 As we shall see, this atmosphere doubtless boosted the growth of an anti-liberal left and right. However, it was not only these ideological currents that were affected. Thus, probably Spain’s greatest earlytwentieth-century reformer, Joaquín Costa, talked of the need for an ‘iron surgeon’ to cut out the country’s gangrenous caciquista infection. He maintained that he should be democratically elected. But in 1923, Spain’s first military dictator, General Miguel Primo de Rivera, claimed to be such a ‘surgeon’.

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The Spanish variant of oligarchic liberalism was therefore nonparticipatory. Rather than democratic inclusion, its objective was depoliticized exclusion. However, from early in the nineteenth century, conservatives were opposed by a more radical brand of liberalism. These liberals demanded wider suffrage, greater civil liberties, a clear division of powers, and greater legislative power for Parliament. Part of this liberal tradition was able to come to terms with the ruling order. After the agitated Democratic Six Years (1868–73), many so-called Constitutionists integrated within the Restoration under the Liberal Party banner. Between 1883 and 1890 they introduced a series of important democratizing reforms, including a press and associations law, trial by jury, and, finally, re-established universal manhood suffrage (originally introduced in 1868 and abolished, after fraudulent elections, in 1878). Yet the price to be paid was their becoming totally bound up in the caciquista political system, and themselves participating in the adulteration of elections. However, many refused to accept the Restoration and converged within the republican movement. All republicans demanded a fully democratic system of government, while left-wingers went further to demand wide-ranging social legislation. The radical liberals’ focus of activity was very much the larger towns and cities, though they also attracted support in smaller towns along the commercially-orientated Mediterranean littoral and within the peasant villages of the south. In the cities, the Restoration’s identification with the upper classes, and, I would argue, the weakness and lack of conviction of any attempt to establish a broad cultural hegemony, left the field open to radical liberalism. The republicans gained support among a heterogeneous mix of professionals, petty bourgeois, and white and blue-collar workers. Their growth was stimulated by the development of an urban public sphere in which athenaeums (ateneos), free-thinking and debating societies, clubs, informal discussion groups in local cafés (tertulias), along with public leisure pursuits, mushroomed, and in which the various leftist groupings opened their own centres. As well as providing a focus for political activity, the latter also offered entertainment, and sometimes included consumer co-operatives and mutual aid funds. Meanwhile, the late nineteenth century saw the rapid expansion of a popular press. Spain’s illiteracy rates might have been high, but the middle classes were regular newspaper readers, and it was common for the minority of educated workers to read aloud to less literate colleagues. Indeed, journalists and aspiring literati were at the forefront of radical protest movements. Educated and vociferous, they often

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found that, despite their talents, lack of connections barred their way to high office. Also, as outsiders, they often showed contempt for hypocritical and conservative bourgeois society, and when, particularly during the 1890s, the ‘social question’ became central to public debate throughout Western Europe, many moved left and expressed sympathy for labour. Many workers became more or less integrated into this milieu. The republicans appeared to be their principal political friends, and could, moreover, offer significant benefits in return for support. Anarchist and Socialist unions had begun to grow from the 1870s, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries most workers who voted (admittedly only a minority) tended to vote republican.4 The early significance of this urban public sphere in Spanish political life has perhaps been underestimated. In the early twentieth century, Spain was still substantially agrarian. However, Spain’s urban population (considered as dwellers in municipalities with over 10 000 inhabitants) represented 32 per cent of the population in 1900, and 42 per cent by 1930.5 And, of course, it was the actions of the urban populace that usually had most political impact. The proof of this is that the Restoration regime twinned urban with rural areas in electoral constituencies in order to drown the urban vote. Thus Spain was able to develop a vibrant democratic culture, a prerequisite for the establishment of formal liberal-democratic institutions. Yet, in the Restoration, republicans faced a well-entrenched foe. There is controversy over the extent to which the Restoration was willing and able to democratize. The late-nineteenth-century Liberal reforms certainly made free political expression and agitation far easier. From 1898 it became increasingly difficult to justify caciquismo in open political debate, and Raymond Carr has argued that in 1923 the Liberal government finally accepted that it would have to enter into the open political fray. Yet most recent research has tended to emphasise that attempts to reform and democratize the system from within (enact a ‘revolution from above’ in the language of the day) failed, and that, to the end, the Restoration remained wedded to its caciquista networks.6 What is clear is that an abyss separated the reform timescale that Restoration politicians would accept from what most republicans demanded, and this helped entrench ideologically and culturally antithetical cosmographies. The governmental liberal position, as already noted, must be seen within the context of the need it felt to reconcile powerful conservative ideological currents. These continued to argue that the Catholic Church should play a central role in the state, and

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were highly suspicious of both liberalism and democracy. For radicals, on the other hand, continuous human ‘progress’ – realized through scientific and technological advance, economic liberalism and political democratization – was predestined to sweep away the old obscurantist Spain, embodied in the dead hand of the Catholic Church and, for republicans, the monarchy. For these groups, it was precisely these institutions that had held Spain back, precipitating the country’s decadence and forcing it to the rear in the onward march of European civilization. The divide was most dramatically brought home in the left’s fervent anticlericalism, manifested not only through political demands for the separation of Church and state and a lay state education system, but also in constant satirization of the religious for their avarice, hypocrisy, and even unnatural sexual desires and practices. And behind this fracture one could begin to see what the Andalusian poet, Antonio Machado, referred to as the ‘two Spains’, socially divided and ideologically incompatible. On the one hand, the Spain of the ‘oligarchy’: landowning and business elites, much of the wealthy urban middle classes, and Catholic–conservative opinion in small-town northern and central Spain. On the other, the urban intelligentsia and lower classes; and the southern peasantry. Sectors of the Liberal Party, which, as we have seen, had adhered to the Restoration (and tried, rather unsuccessfully, to introduce legislation cutting back the power of the religious orders in the early years of the twentieth century) might deplore this polarization and try to find some middle ground. So did more moderate republicans (some of whom declared themselves ‘accidentalists’ and were persuaded to accept a monarchy in 1913). However, neither group would make much impact. This must be seen in a context in which left-wing stridency was not only verbal, but often violent. Throughout the nineteenth century, radical liberals, unable to dislodge the conservatives through peaceful means, sought the aid of sectors of the military, who launched a series of attempted coups (pronunciamientos). They could, moreover, count on the active support of the lower-class urban ‘people’ (pueblo), who, between the 1810s and 1860s, rose in revolt, built barricades, formed their own militias and proclaimed new, and more democratic, constitutions. The apogee of this first period of effervescence was represented by the Democratic Six Years of 1868–73. To an important degree the Restoration was able to hold at bay this combination of social ferment and political mobilization for the following twenty years. Yet the rise of mass politics could not be postponed indefinitely within a liberal-constitutional framework.

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The precipitator was the crisis of 1898, which saw Spain sink to ignominious defeat in its war with the USA, and lose its three remaining major colonies: Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The years 1895–8 provided republicans with the opportunity to mobilize against the government, accused of jeopardizing Spain’s colonies through ineptitude. Only a modern European-style republican regime, most argued, could redeem the Spanish nation from decrepitude. However, it was after the defeat that opposition became more broadly based. Among the intelligentsia the cry went up for the ‘regeneration’ of what were seen as Spain’s corrupt and antiquated institutions. New political movements were formed, calling for constitutional reform and economic modernization (the National Union) and autonomy (the Catalanists), while, in an atmosphere of wide-ranging politicization, the republicans also greatly strengthed their position. More moderate republicans might hope that the Restoration could be worn down gradually through their electoral advances, but the continued operation of caciquismo made this unlikely, and leftist firebrands such as Alejandro Lerroux continued to plot in favour of military intervention, while also adopting highly charged demagogic pseudo-anarchistic rhetoric aimed at attracting workingclass support.7 The years after 1898 also saw working-class left-wing organizations, the Socialists and the anarchists, increase their support and begin challenging republican domination of radical politics. Partly under their influence and partly independently, unions began to grow and strike action escalated, along with other forms of workingclass protest. Concomitantly, more directly political campaigns were led by republicans, anarchists and Socialists. Like the republicans, the working-class left could contemplate no reconciliation with the Restoration regime, and after 1898 agitation centred on the desperately unpopular colonial war in Morocco. Indeed, in July 1909 in Catalonia the regional labour federation successfully called a general strike against fighting in Morocco, which then degenerated into several days of street fighting and church burning. Workers’ grievances were in many respects similar to those of other Western countries. Nevertheless, they were probably given a particularly bitter edge by the low level of real wages, related partly to high food prices provoked by high import tariffs on foreign wheat, and by inflation, which accelerated massively after 1916. Some workers established collective bargaining with employers. The Socialists in particular, between 1910 and 1918, entered relatively stable bargaining

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relations with employers in the steel, coal and railway industries. Yet, overall, labour relations in Spain were characterized by the employers’ reluctance to accept unions. This was most dramatically demonstrated in much of Catalan industry and in the agrarian south, where, moreover, employers could rely on considerable state support to try to keep unionism at bay. Significantly, the Restoration found it difficult to absorb and channel left-wing agitation successfully, and much of the protest was to a greater or lesser degree aimed at the system itself. Of course, this was arguably inevitable – indeed necessary – in order to undermine what was still, in many respects, an undemocratic regime. Yet, at the same time, it stimulated recourse to drastic measures. Thus the working-class left adopted the radical republican tradition of urban revolt, to which was added recourse to the general strike. This would in future make it harder to establish the ground rules for the operation of liberal democracy. In addition, as we shall see, radical left-wing protest was also to precipitate a right-wing reaction. From 1914 in particular, labour movements became increasingly central to Spanish political and social life, and their ideologies and political strategies became crucial to the country’s political future. It has generally been argued that, in order for labour to contribute forcefully to establishing liberal-democratic institutions, it must in some way become ‘integrated’ into state and nation; and reach a compromise with the state and other social groupings. This facilitates, in return for social reforms and the acceptance of workers’ political rights, a commitment to work within the polity and pursue what are perceived as broader national rather than exclusively class interests.8 The fierce social and ideological conflicts shaking early-twentiethcentury western Europe made this difficult, and Spain was certainly one of the countries in which reaching an interclass modus vivendi was most problematic. As noted, like the republicans, the working-class left considered compromise with the Restoration impossible. However, evolutionary ideologies could still develop inside Spanish socialism. Within the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), from the turn of the century, short-term revolutionism was increasingly replaced by a belief that, because of Spain’s economic and social backwardness, the country would have to go though a democratic-bourgeois revolution before socialism was attainable, and that the Socialists should assist in the process. In reality, this meant aligning with the republicans, who were seen as the most ‘advanced’ section of the bourgeoisie. A pact known as the

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Conjunción was signed in late 1910, which committed both republicans and Socialists to working towards the overthrow of the Restoration. Indeed, the Socialists staged a revolutionary general strike in August 1917 to try to precipitate the Restoration’s collapse. There are parallels between this evolutionary stance and that of other Second International Socialist parties. In Spain, Socialists could pursue this line because the growth of a broader democratic public sphere seemed to indicate the space for liberal-democratic politics existed. It was also possible because, despite the operation of caciquismo, both locally and nationally the Socialists could (especially allied to the republicans) capture new political spaces. This was further assisted by the fact that the Socialist trade union, the UGT, had begun to build its own bureaucratic organization, and, as we have noted, from 1910 particularly, develop collective bargaining with groups of employers. In these circumstances, rather than risk the destruction of party and union through a desperate working-class revolution, a more congenial strategy would be to support a democratic regime in which they might flourish. This alliance offered Spain its best hope of establishing a democratic parliamentary regime before the 1970s. The general strike in 1917 failed. However, as we shall see, during the Second Republic (1931–6) an attempt was made to enact a wideranging democratization of Spanish political life on the basis of a republican–Socialist entente. Yet, though evolutionary in intent, as we have noted, the project required some kind of revolutionary movement against the old order. And the need to fight tooth and nail against ‘reaction’ became deeply embedded in Socialist and, indeed, in broader working-class culture. Moreover, this inevitably meant that elite and conservative sectors of Spanish society would be excluded from the new settlement, and, as we shall see, would quickly strike back. In addition, within the labour movement, interclass democratizing politics were not unchallenged. Even before the Second Republic, many of the difficulties this alliance would face were discernible. Employer intransigence made it difficult to establish stable collective bargaining structures, and tended to radicalize class discourses. Meanwhile, as has already been noted, the operation of caciquismo, the corruption of official political life, and the limited electoral gains made by the Socialist party, led involvement in politics to be viewed in many quarters with suspicion, if not downright hostility. Opposition to Socialist ‘reformism’ was mainly channelled through the anarchists. Spain was the only country in Western Europe where

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anarchism survived as a mass movement up to the 1930s. This has to be understood in a context in which difficulties in establishing collective bargaining structures and stable unions gave impetus to ‘direct action’ tactics, through which workers were mobilized into taking generalized strike action and mass protest, backed if necessary by strong-arm tactics, intended to intimidate employers into making concessions. Furthermore, disdain for the ‘political pig trough’ (muñidero político) could produce a core of fervently ‘anti-political’ working-class autodidacts, expecting little from elections and parliamentary government. Yet even among Socialists there was hostility to reformism. Tough Socialist union militants, themselves involved in hard-fought labour conflicts, complained at the electoralism of the PSOE. Additionally, there was scepticism that the republicans were reliable political allies. This seemed to be confirmed when, in the August 1917 general strike, the Socialists suffered heavy casualties, and the republicans did little actively to support the movement. Both discontents became intertwined in the leftist opposition to the Socialist leadership, which was further fuelled by the bitter social conflicts accompanying the post-1919 economic recession, and by the Bolshevik Revolution and revolutionary crisis in Central Europe. These left-wing pressures led the leadership to break off the Conjuncíon, and then precipitated the formation of the breakaway Spanish Communist Party (PCE).9 However, the Restoration state did not only face serious left-wing challenges. The first decade of the twentieth century also saw the rise of Catalan and Basque nationalism. The causes are the subject of considerable historiographical debate. What, however, is clear is that the nineteenth and early-twentieth-century liberal state partially failed in these territories to construct a sense of Spanish ethnicity. This was partly the result of the failings of the education system, particularly important in areas such as Catalonia and the Basque Country, where the native tongues were not Castilian Spanish. Moreover, the attempt to structure a modern national identity among the populace was based on the administrative capital, Madrid. It gave primacy to Castilian–Andalusian identity markers, while conservative–liberal regimes to an important degree based their patronage networks on central and southern Spain. This could easily alienate territories whose traditions were excluded from the materials used in the attempted ethnic construction of Spanish nationhood, especially as sections of their population felt discriminated against by the state.

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Both Catalan and Basque nationalist organizations had considerable success in constructing alternative ethnic-national identities from the first decade of the century. 10 Again, these were pressures with which the Restoration found it impossible to contend. Much of the Liberal Party was deeply schooled in the traditions of Jacobin centralism, and though the Conservative Party was, because of the infiltration of ancien régime values, somewhat more flexible, all it would offer was some limited administrative decentralization. So far we have argued that the Restoration was challenged on several fronts, and very quickly proved itself to be wanting, being unable to address the demands of either labour and the democratizing left, or of the new nationalist movements. However, after 1900 it faced a further threat, and this, as we shall see, was to make the creation of a liberaldemocratic polity far more difficult. The years after 1898, it has been stressed, were to see not only the rise of mass politics in urban Spain, but also an accompanying growth of social and political agitation, often of a threatening, violent nature. This led to an ideological and political counter-reaction among the wealthy and conservative sectors of Spanish society. It was based on the increasing concern that ‘order’ and ‘stability’ could not be preserved within the bounds of liberal institutions, and, in central and southern Spain, a growing fear that the unity of the nation was in peril. Authoritarian political structures were seen as the solution to these problems. The ‘fear of the masses’ could first be discerned at a psychological level. It was visible, for example, in the quite general shift of the generation of young writers, who had invariably adopted a radical, and sometimes an outright Socialist or anarchist stance, to more conservative positions after 1900.11 At the level of doctrine, the conservative reaction very much drew on Catholic–corporatist thought. Despite being partially integrated into the Restoration, the Catholic hierarchy rejected liberalism, which was viewed as leading to fratricidal conflict between Spaniards, and gravely obstructing the Church’s vital role of saving souls. Meanwhile groups of integrationist Catholics continued to refuse to have any truck with any form of liberal government. The alternative offered was a vision of reconstructed ancien-régime institutions, with the Church and monarchy at their head, and a system of representation based on society’s venerable corporations. In reality, this meant replacing universal manhood suffrage with indirect elections through established corporate bodies in which conservative opinion would be overwhelmingly dominant.12

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Furthermore, after 1900, sections of the military became increasingly critical of the liberal state. This was ironic, since young army officers, often from modest family backgrounds, had been instrumental in launching a series of liberal-inspired pronunciamientos between the 1810s and 1860s. But during the Restoration the officer corps had become increasingly self-recruiting, cut off from civilian life in selfenclosed barracks, and its principles of order, hierarchy and patriotism were challenged by the new social and political movements. The military’s disgust at liberalism was fuelled by colonial military defeat and the belief that politicians had not given it the wherewithal to fight effectively, and then tried to blame it for the loss of the colonies. Politically, this was of paramount importance. The military remained extremely powerful because liberal institutions had never been able to subordinate it effectively to civilian rule. It therefore retained almost total autonomy and the capacity to intervene in the political process as it saw fit.13 The failings of liberalism allowed the elaboration of a Catholic– conservative myth in opposition to the radical liberal and leftist myth of the inevitable onward march of science and ‘progress’. Liberal regimes and politicians, so the right-wing story went, by bowing to pernicious foreign influences, had presided over Spanish decadence, as encapsulated by the 1898 defeat. Only a rediscovery of Spain’s true Catholic self would once again restore the country to greatness. From the turn of the century, the influence of corporatist thought was observable in programmes elaborated by Catalan-dominated employers’ federations to replace independent unions – feared as the harbingers of social strife – with joint worker–employer associations, or state-sponsored unions, from which anarchists would be excluded.14 This influence was also evident in the right-wing political movements that grew up after 1898. As we have stressed, the new century witnessed the crisis of the dynastic parties, combined with growing political mobilization. On the right, some groups for the first time began to realize that to defend their position they would need to mobilize support. The most important of these was the Maurista movement, which took off after 1914. Very similar was the conservative Catalanist party, the Lliga Regionalista, which understood that to promote the interests of the Catalan industrial elite and middle classes it had to create a modern, mass organization. The ideological backbone of these formations was somewhat contradictory: they participated in the regenerationist rhetoric that emphasized the need to ‘extirpate the

128 The Spanish Second Republic

caciques’; yet a corporatist hue tinged their liberal parliamentary discourse. This came to the fore after 1918, as social conflict soared and the Restoration went into total crisis. In this context the dominant wing of the Maurista movement began to call overtly for authoritarian solutions to the crisis of the regime, while praising Benito Mussolini’s Fascist movement in Italy. In addition, as Catalanist agitation grew following the end of the war and the elaboration of US President Wilson’s fourteen points, a shrill, violently anti-Catalanist Spanish nationalism also made itself heard. From 1919 in Catalonia, much of the Lliga went one step further, overtly collaborating with the local military garrison in crushing the CNT.15 The need to guard against social disorder and the possible break-up of the Spanish nation would from that time become the rallying cry of the right. This underpinned the military coup against the Restoration. Significantly, Spain’s first authoritarian state was ushered in by Miguel Primo de Rivera, the captain-general of Barcelona, who hailed from an aristocratic Andalusian family, and who had the support of most conservative opinion (including the king). The coup was tremendously important, confirming the crystallization of anti-democratic sentiments on the Spanish right. It also confirmed the weakness of Spanish liberalism, undermined by its inability, in the eyes of the right, to maintain order, while its caciquista political foundations and attempt to reconcile conservative opinion lost it left-wing sympathy. Spain’s first dictatorship lasted only seven years. Nevertheless, for the first time, an aggressively nationalist regime was established. While inspired by Spain’s Catholic-corporatist heritage, it was not slow to borrow from, and praise, Mussolini’s Italy.16 In the future much of the right looked back to this regime, partly for political and ideological inspiration, but also to learn from its mistakes in order that any future dictatorship would entrench itself in power far more effectively. In the meantime, with the onset of the Second Republic, the Socialists and republicans attempted, for the first time, a thoroughgoing democratic overhaul of Spain’s political structures. Given the antecedents, however, this could hardly lead to anything but a rapid social and political polarization. It was undertaken very much in opposition to elite and conservative opinion. There was some attempt to integrate liberal Restoration figures within the régime, and a leading member of the old Liberal Party, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, was president of the Republic between December 1931 and May 1936. Yet this did not prevent a powerful right-wing reaction, spurred on by the ideological, cultural and social implications of Republican reforms, and by

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fear at the rapid growth of the left and the consequences of the mobilization and politicization of much of the working class. This reaction was a response to a number of reforms. First, given their anti-clerical world view, Republicans attempted to reduce drastically the weight of the Church with state and society. This was particularly divisive because it both reflected and reinforced the sense of incompatible and antagonistic world outlooks and cultural modes of expression. Significantly, the approval of Article 26 of the new constitution, separating Church and state, produced the resignation from the government of the only two members who had been integrated within the old Restoration system, Miguel Maura and Niceto Alcalá Zamora. Second, in attempting to reorder the state, the new government antagonized powerful interests, which the Restoration had not dared to cross. Fundamental here was the indignation produced by Republican reforms aimed at greater army efficiency. Third, the new Republic accepted that the only way to deal with Spain’s ‘national problem’ was to give those territories who so wished the opportunity to establish their own autonomous governments. This was eminently sensible, and represented the only way territories in which distinct ethnic identities were crystallizing could be integrated into an overarching democratic framework, but was bound to antagonize the increasingly vociferous right. Finally, Socialists within government now saw the opportunity to undertake fundamental social reform. It should be stressed that, particularly for the UGT leadership, it was through the capture of the state, and implementation of wide-ranging social and economic reform, that the socialist-collectivistic society of the future would slowly mature within the womb of capitalism. The opportunity presented itself when the UGT’s strongman, Francisco Largo Caballero, was appointed minister of labour. Reforms took two forms. Measures were enacted aiming to improve working conditions. These included the Mixed Juries to arbitrate industrial disputes (modelled, in fact, on the Parity Committees set up by the Primo de Rivera regime, but now extended to rural areas and much more likely to be favourable to labour), and a series of decrees aiming to assist the southern landless labourers. In addition, there were measures that would have a long-term impact on Spanish social structure, most significantly an agrarian reform law that led to a distribution of land from the big landowners, or terratenientes, to the peasantry. Several points should be made here. In the two years following the proclamation of the Republic there was a great burst of strike activity

130 The Spanish Second Republic

and union organization as workers, freed from the straitjacket imposed by the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, looked rapidly to improve working conditions. Moreover, this was accompanied by other forms of protest, such as rent strikes. The reforms, to the extent that they were implemented, and the workers’ demands, imposed considerable burdens on the Spanish economy. This was particularly true because the Republic was unfortunately proclaimed precisely at the time when the first repercussions of the Great Depression were felt in Spain. The key pressure-point was in southern Spain, where landlords had relied on a half-starved agrarian proletariat to operate their under-capitalized great estates profitably. The new conjuncture shocked and angered Spain’s conservative classes. At one level they feared the rise of labour and the implications of Socialist participation in government. The Largo Caballero wing of the UGT had often been described as ‘reformist’, but both it and its opponents saw its aim as legislating socialism into being. 17 Thus, on the right, liberal democracy was very much seen as the anteroom of Communism, particularly given the example of the new Soviet regime. In this respect, parallels which both the right and sections of the left drew between the Kerensky regime in Russia and the Second Republic cast a long shadow. More generally, conservative opinion loathed the cultural and moral implications of the Republic, epitomized by the moves to downgrade the role of the Church within society. It was not just economic privilege which was seen as endangered but a whole way of life. Socially and politically, the results were dramatic. Sections of the middle class clearly shifted to the right. This predisposed the most conservative of the republican parties, the Radicals, to refuse to ally with the Socialists, and then to govern with the support of the rightwing Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA) between November 1933 and February 1936.18 Meanwhile, faced with the challenge of the Republic, the right began rapidly to organize and mobilize. They already had the experience of the Maurista movement and the Primo de Rivera dictatorship behind them, and quickly began to structure new bodies. Smaller right-wing groups aimed from the start to overthrow the Republic violently. The major right-wing association – called the CEDA from February 1933 – followed a more legalistic path. Yet, as has been argued convincingly by both Paul Preston and José Ramón Montero, its long-term goal was to set up some form of undemocratic corporatist state. Its ideological roots were located in Catholic anti-liberalism, though it also adopted Fascistic

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trappings. The CEDA also quickly showed it had a broad social base, centred on small-town Catholic central and northern Spain, on rural and urban elites, and on the conservative middle classes.19 While the Republican coalition had by 1933 to contend with a resurgent right, from the start it was heavily weighed down by the burden of expectation. Despite the fact that much of the working class had switched its allegiance to the labour left, the Republic was still widely viewed, in semi-mythical terms, as the embodiment of freedom and social justice. This was apparent in the great rejoicing which greeted its proclamation in urban Spain. Yet it soon became clear that dreams and reality were very different. The new Republican state was left with a huge budget deficit incurred by the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, and state finances were further hit by economic recession. Furthermore, Republican politicians were reluctant to pursue anything but orthodox balanced-budget policies. The result could be seen, for example, in the agonizingly slow implementation of agrarian reform. Concomitantly, right-wing attempts to block reforms, both in Parliament and on the ground, led to anger and frustration. Within civil society the combination of raised worker and peasants expectations, and employer opposition, exacerbated by the recession, also produced increasingly protracted strikes and conflict. Moreover, this occurred within a context in which, in left-wing circles, the rise of Fascism and authoritarian government abroad, and the organization of the right at home, stimulated deep-seated fears that a ‘Fascist’ take-over might be just around the corner. The combination of historic suspicion within at least parts of the left at collaboration with ‘bourgeois’ politicians and institutions, and the economic and political disappointments of the early 1930s, led to growing divisions in the Republican camp, and to the radicalization of sectors of the working-class left. 20 From the start the Republic had to cope with the outright opposition of much of the anarchist movement, which launched several insurrections against the new regime. In this way, the inability of the Restoration to integrate in any way sectors of labour returned to haunt the Republic, though it should also be admitted that, through their harsh treatment of the CNT, the Republican authorities did little to build bridges. But growing hostility towards the Republic could also be seen within sectors of the Socialist movement. The leading figure in the radicalization of part of the Socialist movement was, significantly, Largo Caballero. As we have seen, he tried to implement state reforms between 1931–3, but by the latter year he was also voicing his doubts about whether Spain could be reformed

132 The Spanish Second Republic

through liberal-democratic compromise and whether it was not time for the proletariat (that is, the PSOE) to take power. The Socialist left’s radical rhetoric was intensified after the electoral defeat of the PSOE and the left-wing republicans in the November 1933 elections. After that, the rise of the ‘Fascist’ threat seemed increasingly to invalidate hope of reform through liberal democracy. Furthermore, the Soviet Union emerged rapidly as an alternative route to modernity and socialism (the two taken as being synonymous). This must be seen on both a cultural and an ideological plane. On the left, the 1930s saw increasingly glowing accounts of the Soviet regime and Soviet life, while Russian literature and cinema also grew rapidly in popularity. As a result, particularly for a new generation of left-wing agitators, liberal democracy appeared to belong to the past. The only alternatives were now either Fascist reaction or proletarian revolution. In Socialist and Communist circles, the new atmosphere and class enmities were manifested in a more overtly revolutionary labour movement subculture. This was expressed through the growing use of the term ‘proletarian’ and the adoption of the ‘Internationale’ as the anthem of the Marxist left. It could also be seen in the militaristic uniforms worn by the Socialist and Communist youth, and the pseudo-militarization of parades with a proliferation of red banners and spread of the clenched-fist salute. Moreover, this was replicated on the right, in the military-style parades of the reactionary Carlist militia and the CEDA youth movement.21 Thus, by 1934, both left and right faced each other across a culturally constructed battlefield, but bellicosity was not just verbal or symbolic. The years 1934–6 saw an escalation of clashes between left- and rightwing youth. More dramatically, in October 1934, with the entry of three members of the CEDA into the government, the Socialists launched a general strike. These has been intense debate amongst historians regarding the aims and consequences of the strike. It has been viewed by some as an attempt to defend Republican democracy against a right-wing threat, and by others as an attack on the democratically constituted Republic. In reality, it was complex and ambiguous. Fear of the right’s anti-democratic potential was real enough, and the examples of Nazi Germany and Austria under Engelbert Dollfuss showed that parties elected democratically could undermine parliamentary institutions. Moreover, as we have seen, the use of the general strike weapon against ‘reaction’ was deeply embedded within Socialist culture. Thus even liberal Socialists such as Indalecio Prieto supported the strike, even though it could be argued (naturally, with the benefit of hindsight) that the threat

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to democracy was not as great as the Socialists imagined, and they would have been best advised to sit tight. Added to this, however, was the growing sense, particularly among the Socialist Youth, that revolutionary action was needed to establish ‘socialism’. As a result, the strike’s aims were rather confused. It was, admittedly, officially called simply to block the right’s accession to power, but the rhetoric of previous months, and the military preparations, meant that for many participants it was viewed as being far more revolutionary. Nowhere was this clearer than in Asturias, where the coal-miners launched a full-scale proletarian uprising. The October Revolution illustrates the multiple levels at which hope and frustration were experienced. At the country-wide level, anti-Fascist rhetoric predominated. However, for the miners, revolutionary sentiment was also rooted in the struggle against wage cuts and lay-offs in the crisis-ridden Asturian mining industry, and in the bitter disappointment at the Republic’s inability to bolster the industry and the workers’ position. Only a workers’ state, it seemed, could accomplish that task.22 The October Revolution provoked the first major direct physical confrontation between the right and working-class left. General Francisco Franco was brought to Madrid to oversee the bloody repression of the revolt. As has often been observed, the battle-lines etched in at the outbreak of the Civil War were already starkly drawn, and the loathing and hatred generated was almost impossible to overcome. However, over the following eighteen months, the inter-class reformist project was to have one last lease of life. This resulted partly from the CEDA’s inability – unforseen by the Socialists – to impose itself on the new Republican institutions. The Radical Party, which still dominated government, contained the CEDA’s call for wide-ranging repression of the left. Finally, the president of the Republic, Alcalá Zamora, suspicious of the CEDA’s democratic credentials, decided to call elections rather than to allow them to form the next government. Meanwhile, the rebellion’s failure strengthened the position of republicans such as the former prime minister, Manuel Azaña, and the moderate Socialist, Indalecio Prieto, who looked to reform the alliance of 1931–3. Support for a coalition was also boosted from an unexpected quarter after the elaboration of the Comintern’s antiFascist, popular front strategy in 1934. The PCE was still small but, given the Soviet Union’s prestige, its opinions could expect wide resonance. Finally, with the February 1936 general election approaching, sheer electoral mathematics meant that left-wing victory would only be possible if leftist republicans and working-class left-wingers were united. This favoured the structuring of a wide-ranging alliance.23

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This was enough to ensure victory. Yet the republican – Socialist entente did not survive the election. Largo Caballero and the Socialist left refused to allow Prieto and the moderates to participate in government, arguing that the republicans should continue in power until they were ‘exhausted’. Then the Socialists would step in to enact their programme.24 Hence weak republican governments were left to face the gathering military plot to overthrow the Republic itself. This political polarization had its social counterpart. The months before the military revolt saw a new wave of strikes while, in the southern region of Extremadura, peasants began to take over the landed estates. Meanwhile, conservatives flocked to the far right, and waited for military insurrection. Sections of the military had indeed been in contact with the political right, and from early 1936 began to conspire. The attempted coup, and the two-and-a-half-year-long Civil War that followed, confirmed that the bitter tensions and conflicts that had racked the Second Republic could not be contained within liberal-democratic political structures. Early-twentieth-century Spain therefore represents a case where a strong impulse towards democratization was stymied. Several aspects of Spain’s political culture seemed to favour democratization. In urban areas at least, a strong civic culture developed from the nineteenth century onwards, and a powerful republican tradition arose that advocated democratic reform. Furthermore, for much of the early twentieth century, Socialists supported alliance with republicanism in order to modernize Spain. Yet from the early nineteenth century, Spain’s liberal institutions proved unable to accommodate democratic reform, at least at the pace demanded. It was this that encouraged the rise of a virulent anti-clerical, anti-monarchist rhetoric. At the same time, caciquismo encouraged scepticism about elections and the political process, and this would later be grist to the mill of the far left and far right. Institutional blockage in particular, together with, at a social level, employer intransigence and economic hardship, made any incorporation of labour into the system a distant prospect. The paradigm of an anti-state revolutionary movement was represented by the anarchists or anarcho-syndicalists, and even though some anarcho-syndicalists proved willing to reach an understanding with republicanism, hard liners maintained, through to the 1930s, a violent anti statism. The alliance between Socialists and republicans during the Second Republic was, it has been argued, Spain’s best opportunity to forge a liberal-democratic polity. Yet compared to much of Western Europe, it is

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notable that in Spain the working-class left had little opportunity to build a party that could play a key reforming role in local and central government. Only in the turbulent years of 1931–3 were the Socialists briefly thrust into office, but they had neither the time nor the opportunity to consolidate themselves within the machinery of state. In the absence of an effective party of reform, it is perhaps not surprising that, within sections of the labour movement, the prospect of collaborating with the ‘bourgeoisie’ was viewed with scepticism, if not outright hostility, and more radical alternatives were envisaged. However, all this must be viewed within the context of what, in the final analysis, was the major factor in Spain’s failure to consolidate liberal democracy: the rise of a powerful anti-democratic right. Its ideological origins are to be found in the anti-liberalism of the Catholic Church. With the onset of the era of mass politics and mass labour agitation from the turn of the century it could secure the adhesion of elites and parts of the middle class, and mobilize much of the conservative northern and central peasantry. These groups were fearful at a cultural and psychological level of the eruption of ‘the masses’ into the political sphere, of ‘disorder’ and ‘anarchy’ and, more prosaically, of perceived challenges to their social and economic position.

Notes and references 1. A. Robles Egea (ed.), Política en penumbra. Patronazgo y clientelismo en la España contemporánea (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1996). 2. Spanish nation-building has recently become a focus of considerable debate. B. de Riquer i Permanyer, ‘La débil nacionalización española del siglo XIX’, Historia Social, no. 20 (1994), pp. 97–114; J. Alvarez Junco, ‘The Nation-Building Process in Nineteenth-Century Spain’, in C. Mar-Molinero and A. Smith (eds), Nationalism and the Nation in the Iberian Peninsula: Competing and Conflicting Identities (Berg: Oxford, 1996) pp. 89–106; J. Pablo Fusi Aizpurúa, ‘Centralismo y localismo: la formación del estado español’, in G. Cortázar (ed.), Natión y estado en la España liberal (Madrid: Noesis, 1994) pp. 77–104. 3. N. Townson, The Crisis of Democracy in Spain: The Radical Republican Party and the Collapse of the Centre under the Second Republic (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1996). 4. See, for example, J. Alvarez Junco, El emperador del paralelo. Lerroux y la demagogia populista (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1990) pp. 89–90 and 172–3; J. María Jover Zamora, ‘Aspectos de la civilización española en la crisis de fin de siglo’, in J. Pablo Fusi and A. Niño (eds), Vísperas del 98. Orígenes y antecendentes de la crisis del 98 (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1997) pp. 15–46.

136 The Spanish Second Republic 5. M. Martínez Cuadrado, La burguesía conservadora, 1874–1931 (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1973) pp. 118–19. 6. R. Carr, Spain, 1808–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966) p. 523; M. J. González Hernández, Ciudadanía y acción. El conservadurismo maurista, 1907–1923 (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1990); M. Suárez Cortina, El reformismo en España. Republicanos y reformistas bajo la monarquía de Alfonso XIII (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1986); F. J. Romero, ‘Spain and the First World War: The Structural Crisis and the Liberal Monarchy’, European History Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 4 (1995), pp. 529–54. 7. For the republicans and 1898 see my contribution, ‘The People and the Nation: Nationalist Mobilization and the Crisis of 1895–98 in Spain’, in A. Smith and E. Dávila-Cox (eds), The Crisis of 1898: Colonial Redistribution and Nationalist Mobilization (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 152–79. An excellent recent overview of the consequences of colonial defeat is S. Balfour, End of Spanish Empire (Oxford University Press, 1997). 8. For a recent analysis focused on the question of labour and nation-building, see S. Berger and A. Smith (eds), Nationalism, Labour and Ethnicity (Manchester University Press, 1999). 9. On the working-class left during the crisis of the Restoration regime the standard work remains that of G. H. Meaker, The Revolutionary Left in Spain, 1914–1923 (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974). An analysis of the crisis of the PSOE which stresses political scepticism in its ranks can be found in L. Arranz, ‘La aversión a la política en la crisis socialista de finales de la Restauración’, in Homenaje a José Antonio Maravall (Madrid: CSIC, 1985) pp. 193–210. 10. J. L. Marfany, La cultura del catalanisme (Barcelona: Empúries, 1995); L. Mees, Nacionalismo vasco, movimiento obrero y cuestión social, 1903–1923 (Bilbao: Fundación Sabino Arana, 1992). 11. S. Balfour, ‘The Solitary Peak and the Dense Valley. Intellectuals and Masses in Fin-de-Siècle Spain’, Tesserae, no. 1 (1994) pp. 1–19. 12. F. Lannon, Privilege, Persecution and Prophecy. The Catholic Church in Spain, 1875–1975 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) esp. pp. 119–30. 13. J. Lleixà, Cien años de militarismo en España (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1986). 14. S. Bengoechea, Organització patronal i conflictivitat social a Catalunya, (Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1994). 15. González Hernández, Ciudadanía, pp. 80–125.; S. Bengoechea, ‘1919: La Barcelona colpista. L’aliança de patrons i militars contra el sistema liberal’, Afers, nos. 23/34 (1996) pp. 309–27. 16. S. Ben-Ami, Fascism from Above, The Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera in Spain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). 17. Santos Juliá, ‘Corporativistas obreros y reformadores políticos: crisis y escisión del PSOE en la Segunda República’, Studio Histórica, vol. 1, no. 4 (1983) pp. 41–52. 18. S. Juliá, ‘La experiencia del poder: la izquierda republicana, 1931–1933’, in N. Townson (ed), El republicanismo en España, 1830–1977 (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1994), pp. 165–92. 19. P. Preston, The Coming of the Spanish Civil War, 2nd edn (London: Methuen, 1983); J. Ramón Montero, La CEDA. El catolicismo social y político en la Segunda República, 2 vols (Madrid: Ediciones de la Revista del Trabajo, 1977).

Angel Smith 137 20. On the social and cultural roots of this radicalization, see S. Juliá, Madrid, 1931–34: de la fiesta popular a la lucha de clases (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1984); A. Shubert, The Road to Revolution in Spain: The Coal Miners in Asturias, 1860–1934 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987); P. B. Radcliff, From Mobilization to Civil War. The Politics of Polarization in the Spanish City of Gijón, 1900–1937 (Cambridge University Press, 1996). 21. S. Juliá, M. Bizcarrondo and M. Aznar Soler in J. Maurice, B. Magnien and D. Bussy Genevois (eds), Peuple, mouvement ouvrier, culture dans l’Espagne contemporaine (Paris: Presses Universitaries de Vincennes, 1990); Preston, The Coming, pp. 110–11 and 161–3. 22. Shubert, The Road to Revolution, passim. 23. H. Graham and M. Alexander, The French and Spanish Popular Fronts: Comparative Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 1989). 24. S. Juliá, La izquierda del PSOE, 1935–1936 (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1977).

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Part 3

Post-1945

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8 Restoration and Stability: The Creation of a Stable Democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany Mark Roseman

The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) has come to be as indelibly associated with stability as Weimar was with crisis, and its government coalitions have been some of the most stable and enduring in Europe. Until 1966 every government lasted its full term. In stark contrast to the inter-war period, the occasions where coalitions have spent their life clinging to survival by a hair’s breadth have been few indeed. Even when governments changed – as in 1966/69 and 1982 – the political agenda evinced remarkable continuity. This is partly because the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) has been in government for almost three-quarters of the FRG’s existence, but also because after 1949 the polarization of Weimar politics gave way very rapidly to a different scenario: extreme parties disappeared from the political scene, and constitutional parties came increasingly to share the same centre ground. Politics itself had moved off the street; the tumult and protests of Weimar were replaced by orderly parliamentary politics. Class conflict was regulated within the institutional confines of the new state, and after 1951 neither employers nor unions attempted seriously to challenge that framework. From the FRG’s inception the number of strikes remained low. In the era of full employment in the late 1950s and 1960s strikes were generally well below even the depressed level to which union activity had sunk in the 1930s as a result of the massive demoralization and unemployment produced by the slump. Germany’s relations with its neighbours have also changed dramatically, from tension and conflict to ever-closer links and European integration. Nationalism, or any internal political movement likely to challenge the peaceful evolution of better relations between Germany and its neighbours, has been virtually absent from the political stage since the inception of the new Republic. Even the massive recent challenges of unification have done little to challenge the fundamental equilibrium. 141

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In terms of performance, historians are all agreed: Bonn was not Weimar. But how far did these different outcomes reflect deep-seated changes in the structure and fabric of German society? Here historians are very far from being in agreement. Indeed, one of the principal debates accompanying the FRG’s development has been the argument about the degree of continuity and change between Weimar, the Third Reich and Bonn. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, many left-wing critics of the new Republic argued there had been far too much restoration of the old institutions, ideas and elites. 1 Then, during the 1950s, as it became clear that Bonn was not going down the same disastrous road as its predecessor, many political analysts and social scientists in both Germany and abroad concluded that some fundamental structural break with the past must have occurred. 2 For many, the decisive discontinuity was institutional, particularly in the constitution 3 but also in the way the economy was regulated. 4 Others argued that a sociological transformation had taken place, either the erosion of class society,5 or the removal of those pre-modern attributes that had ostensibly continued to characterize Germany until the 1930s and helped to account for the creation of the ‘Third Reich’.6 From the late 1960s, however, the historiography in the FRG took another turn. When in the late 1970s or early 1980s, I and other British colleagues began increasingly to explore post-war German history, we were apt to find the German literature on the subject rather surprising. Searching weighty German tomes for an explanation of the ‘miracle’ of post-war West German democratic stability, we encountered instead lengthy and highly critical analyses of the German ‘restoration’.7 The radical and positive contrast between Weimar’s polarization and instability and the calm waters of Bonn had disappeared; instead, since the end of the 1960s, young German historians chose to highlight a series of negative continuities or restorations – of the capitalist system, Nazi élites and pre-Nazi traditions. They showed how the intense hopes in the post-1945 period of creating a ‘third way’, a new kind of society, were soon buried by an anti-Communist consensus and a desire not to ask awkward questions about the past. Because the motivation of this critical generation of scholars was rather to rebel against what they experienced as a surfeit of stability than to seek to explain it, they did not ask the question uppermost in our minds: namely, how could a republic ostensibly characterized by so much continuity or restoration in fact fare so differently? This question poses itself all the more forcefully because there was and is a respectable view that holds that Weimar collapsed because of its failure to carry out thoroughgoing democratization. If only the moderate

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Independent Democrats, so the argument runs, had realized their programme of public ownership, purging the civil service and democratizing the army, Weimar would have been spared the plunge into anti-democracy that characterized its final years. 8 Those who in 1945 aspired to create a ‘third way’ certainly argued that it was only through fundamental change that democracy could be founded securely. As they registered the many signs of what they took to be ‘restoration’ and the absence of reform, they did so with dismay, expecting the worst. Yet the worst did not happen. Why? Was Bonn simply lucky? Or had some rather insignificant institutional and personnel changes been sufficient to establish a qualitative change from Weimar? Was the difference between a descent into Nazism, on the one hand, and becoming one of the most stable and successful democracies in the world, on the other, just a matter of a few institutional tweaks here and there? Or were the restoration theorists simply wrong, having failed to register that profound changes had indeed taken place? The argument in this chapter is that there was a paradoxical linkage between restoration and continuity, on the one hand, and stability on the other, requiring us to rethink the whole process by which stable democracy was created after 1945. What worked in Bonn was not innovation, but rather a peculiar set of circumstances shaping the transition from war to peace. In other words, it was not what was created, but how it came about, that was so important. In some ways it was the very weakness of the search for radical change, the ‘restorativeness’ of West Germany, that was Bonn’s secret compared with Weimar. This chapter, then, seeks to establish and explore the paradoxical relationship between restoration and stability.

First, though, we must examine a little more closely the view that some kind of structural break had taken place. The instinct of many political analysts has been, as noted, to ‘reach for the institutions’. Was the institutional framework of the new Republic the key to success? Certainly, Bonn’s federal system was not burdened by the presence of an overweening Prussia, as Weimar’s had been.9 Bonn’s system of proportional representation was complemented by a first-past-the-post first vote and a 5 per cent electoral hurdle, both designed to trip up small extremist parties before they could gain the light and sustenance that Weimar had so naively allowed them. Not only the radicals, but also the people themselves were prevented from disturbing the reasoned deliberations of the parliamentarians: Weimar’s panoply of plebiscites, referendums and

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presidential elections had no place in Bonn’s Basic Law. The president was to be largely ceremonial, splendidly visible on the prow of the ship – but a long way from the tiller. And Parliament itself had responsibility enjoined upon it – no votes of no confidence unless a new government could be formed. But while Bonn’s constitution-makers had indeed lasting cause to be prouder of their handiwork than had their Weimar forbears, in fact they had restored as much or more than they had changed. Both were capitalist democracies with a federal structure based (largely) on proportional representation. Large parts of Weimar’s constitution and legal code were readopted or remained in force in Bonn. It seems unlikely that the modifications, valuable though they were, could really account for Bonn’s triumph and Weimar’s tragic demise. No politician would ever again dare draw up a constitution, if so much were to hinge on a paragraph or two! And in institution after institution, where the Allies had attempted to impose reforms – be it in the civil service, in schools, the universities or in local government – most of their changes were never enacted, or were reversed once the Federal Republic regained sovereignty. The universities were particularly successful at blocking reform; in 1949 the spirit of nationalism was visible again in Munich as in Göttingen.10 It was against this background that Walter Dirks and others raised the alarm cry of ‘restoration’.11 Perhaps, though, it was in the economy that institutional innovations held the key? Some analysts have argued that, by introducing something called the ‘social market economy’, Ludwig Erhard created the institutional basis for the economic miracle12 and underwrote political stability. Doubtless some positive modifications were introduced to the economic and financial system. The creation of a central bank independent of political control helped to ensure public confidence in currency stability. Following the introduction of the Deutsche Mark (DM) in June 1948, Ludwig Erhard, soon to become the FRG’s first economics minister, not only rapidly dismantled much of the control apparatus that had hitherto administered the post-war economy, but also went further towards a market economy than the framework of the inter-war period: cartels were outlawed and the inter-war protectionist trend was replaced by a more consistently free trade approach. However, it is doubtful whether it could really account for the difference in the two Republics’ economic fortunes.13 And the ‘social’ element of the social market economy was initially just an ideological fig-leaf. Moreover, while, in the medium to long term, confidence in the Bonn republic was enormously enhanced by its economic success, and while one may wonder whether it could have avoided Weimar’s fate had it encountered ten years after its creation an

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economic crisis on the scale of the slump, the fact is that Bonn looked far less polarized than Weimar even before the economic miracle had really made itself apparent. Indeed, from 1948 until the early 1950s, there was widespread unemployment, economic hardship and great uncertainty among the population at large about the development of the economy. In 1951 Erhard was most unpopular. It was only in 1953 that the majority showed any confidence in the market economy and only at the end of the 1950s that real prosperity began to change the lives of Germany’s working class.14 Thus the story of the introduction of the ‘social’ market economy begs more questions about Bonn’s early stability than it answers. What is particularly interesting is how a fairly naked capitalist order could be introduced, despite backing by only a minority among Germany’s political leaders, let alone its population, and how it could be sustained without causing the sort of political fall-out that might have weakened democracy, forced the political parties further apart, and reduced investor confidence. The idea that some kind of social transformation was the basis for Bonn’s stability is even less convincing. Helmut Schelsky advanced the famous dictum of the levelled-out ‘Mittelstand’ society: that is, a society in which the class differences of the past had largely been evened out.15 While important in 1950s ideology, this view was a poor guide to the real and persisting differences in power and wealth in German society. In 1950, Germany’s workers were little better off than in 1913. The idea advanced by Ralf Dahrendorf and others that the Nazis had succeeded in ‘defeudalizing’ German society is also not very convincing.16 Certainly, the Nazis’ assaults on the established bastions of power and the Red Army’s occupation of East Prussia in 1945 had together eradicated much of the aristocracy’s power and standing. But it is doubtful whether the Junkers’ continued presence and power or ‘feudal values’ had really been Weimar’s problem in any case. 17 However, at the level of individual personnel, the continuities between Weimar and Bonn were overwhelming. True, a handful of Nazis were executed at Nuremberg, committed suicide, or slipped away to South America, but most stayed on, enduring the denazification panels but in many cases returning to their old positions. Even where Bonn’s bureaucrats had not been employed at the same high level in the Third Reich, they had undoubtedly been so in Weimar – part of that very cast of players who had brought down Germany’s first republic. In every walk of life (save that of the army, which was not reconstituted until the mid-1950s), the continuity or restoration after 1945 was striking.18

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Of course, Dahrendorf’s sophisticated thesis of social revolution was really as much about mentalities and attitudes as actual social groupings. Doubtless, significant changes in perception and outlook do play a central role in understanding what went right in Bonn and wrong in Weimar. But even in the sphere of attitudes, there is no easy and obvious ‘break’ from undemocratic culture to democratic one. On the contrary, the many opinion polls of the 1940s and 1950s saw great continuities in authoritarian attitudes, in popular suspicion of democracy, or the willingness to see Otto von Bismarck and Adolf Hitler as the greatest statesmen of all time.19 In fact, when it comes to social discontinuities, the one really obvious contrast between the pre- and post-war social structure and expectations seemed in the late 1940s to weigh heavily against Bonn and in Weimar’s favour: after 1945 the millions of refugees and expellees from lost Eastern territories on West German soil seemed destined to provide a source of revisionist protest and resentment for decades to come.

So how did Bonn pull it off? To answer this question we must return to the immediate post-war period. At first sight, the years 1945–9 seem a doubtful place to seek the origins of Bonn’s enduring stability. After all, the conditions from which the FRG emerged were often worse than those faced by Weimar. In the standard account of Weimar’s downfall, top of the hit list is our old friend the ‘Versailles’ treaty, which imposed on Weimar territorial losses, demands for substantial reparations and, for most Germans, a loss of status and honour. As well as fostering bitter resentment against their former enemies, the Allies also helped to alienate many Germans from their own Republic. Weimar appeared dishonourable, not just because its statesmen had, by signing, made themselves party to the Versailles peace treaty; but also because for many the domestic political system itself bore the taint of Allied imposition. After all, the pressure to depose the kaiser became unstoppable only following President Wilson’s hint of better treatment if the kaiser went. Yet the demands made by the Versailles peace treaty on Germany were as nothing compared to the territorial loss and division of the post-1945 period. There was certainly no huge reparations bill – except in the Soviet Zone. Yet even in the western Zones reparations – in the form of dismantling, under-priced coal exports, stolen patents and so on – were substantial.20 In the hunger years after 1945, the potential for an explosive interaction between Germans and occupiers seemed even greater than in 1923, when the French occupation of the Ruhr met such

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determined opposition from the government, employers and miners alike.21 In addition, the many refugees and expellees on German soil seemed to offer a festering sore that – as in the inter-war period, but far worse – would undermine permanently any chance of political normalization. And if, after the First World War, democracy was tainted by being imposed by the Allies, how much stronger in 1949 must the awareness have been of a link between Allied pressure and the adopted form of government. As the above remarks suggest, another obvious parallel between the two post-war situations was provided by the very serious economic and financial consequences of the war. The costs of war in 1945 were even greater than in 1918. Apart from the destruction and erosion of plant and capacity (soon compounded by dismantling) and the loss of overseas assets, the massive shortages and the millions of refugees to be supported, there was the burden of occupation costs to be carried (though admittedly the British and Americans bore a considerable part of that themselves).22 The mortgage on future growth prospects thus seemed all the greater in 1945. Moreover, the same problem of wartime inflation applied. In the immediate post-war years there was certainly no hyperinflation but the vast prices of the black market accurately reflected the imbalance between available cash and supplies of real goods. The 1948 currency reform, when it came, inflicted the same painful expropriation of millions of savings accounts as had the inflation and subsequent currency stabilization of the early 1920s. And, as in Weimar, the deflation was followed by sustained mass unemployment. On the other hand, a few key elements of the situation in 1945 were more propitious, both for establishing a stable relationship between the Germans and the Allies, and for creating more social cohesion (both crucial prerequisites of creating a functioning democracy) than in 1918. First, the Allies were in a far better position to impose their blueprints on to post-war Germany. This was partly because the objective imbalance of power was now so much greater. In 1918, the Allied superiority of forces had begun to tell only in the closing months of the war, and the German army remained largely intact even at the Armistice. In 1945, the Wehrmacht was in tatters, while the Allies controlled armies of millions of troops with equipment replenished by the massive resources of the USA. Germany itself was overrun, with Allied tanks on every street corner. In 1918 it had not been occupied. Moreover, there was in 1945 no organization or movement to speak for Germany and articulate a counter-position. In November 1918, admittedly, there was a brief period when the old Germany had

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faltered, and for a few weeks the established apparatus of power was sidelined by the élan of a revolutionary movement. But there was only a relatively short period in which the confused power situation meant that there was no one to speak for Germany to the Allies. In 1945, however, Allied insistence on unconditional surrender had denied any chance that vestiges of the old regime might preserve themselves in office. Even with such Allied prohibitions, an alternative national voice might have emerged had there been any successful national resistance movement against Hitler analogous to the popular fronts of France or Italy. But in Germany such movements had not gained any momentum before the regime’s final collapse. The Nazis had murdered many of their potential leaders; and the failure to achieve anything undermined the moral claim the resistance might have had. The left, admittedly, did move quickly after the defeat to create workers’ committees in many towns and just possibly these might have formed a new kind of public representation – but the Allies moved in to squash them before they could do so.23 The elites that did emerge in the occupation years were ones whose composition the Allies heavily influenced. With the exception of the Church, it was two years before German institutions emerged that could operate at a level high enough to supply a leadership role – and they operated in circumstances very much dictated by the Allies. Thus, while the Allies could not control it completely, the whole process of opinion formation was far more subject to their decree than in 1918. Germany lay open to the invaders also in a psychological sense. Whereas in 1918 the nationalist spirit was often unbroken or only temporarily dented, and resentment against the peace terms very rapidly reached fever pitch, in 1945 it remained only in the persistence of the widespread belief that somewhere Germany had been wronged and that the whole mess went in some way back to Versailles. There were also plenty still sympathetic to National Socialism, or who believed that the Jews were somehow Germany’s misfortune. This apart, the massive destruction and the overwhelming Allied superiority ended any plausibility that nationalist politics might have had. If in 1918 it had been possible to believe the undefeated army had been stabbed in the back, in 1945, as the wretched ragged remains of German units plodded desperately homewards, it was clear that the country had been defeated monumentally. The scale of defeat was written everywhere, both in the small details and the larger picture; and the German people were drained of energy, and largely without hope. It is only this spiritual exhaustion that can explain, for example, how in its zone the Soviet Union could so

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easily carry out the Communization of an advanced industrial society. In this context, even if underlying opinions about the Jews or Versailles persisted, nationalist politics made little sense. The realities of power were against it.24 But even with Germany so weak, a stable settlement would require some common ground between victors and vanquished. In 1945 there was some basis to hope that such common ground could be found. In Tehran the Allies had adopted the positive goal of democratizing German society. True, the decision to define positive war aims was taken for largely tactical reasons. In 1945, security ranked higher for all the Allies, with reparations also a top priority for France and the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the Allies presented themselves to the Germans as coming with positive as well as punitive intentions, an important prerequisite for German initiatives. Moreover, however vague or tactical the intentions at Tehran, they revealed that Allied planning staff had learned a lot from the inter-war débâcle. It was unlikely that a stable Europe could be built around a disgruntled Germany. One of the distinctive features of wartime thinking in Britain and the USA, and to a certain extent among Charles de Gaulle’s advisers later to make up the staff in the Quai d’Orsay, was also the degree to which they understood that a stable post-war settlement could be built only on sound economic foundations. It was hard to imagine a stable Europe that was not reasonably prosperous, or a prosperous Europe without a functioning German economy in its midst. The British foreign office was particularly aware of the danger of starving the Germans. Despite signing up briefly to the ludicrous Morgenthau plan, Churchill too declared he wanted to see the Germans ‘fat but impotent’. Many French experts too were conscious of the need to establish a more productive relationship between the Ruhr and the Lorraine, though these insights were initially unable to assert themselves in general French policy.25 On the German side, too, several important groups saw in the Allies a favourable opportunity for change, or at least a force with which they could co-operate. This was partly simple opportunism, as leading German figures trimmed their sails to the new wind. In the war’s closing years even a leading SS figure such as Otto Ohlendorf encouraged economic experts to plan what Germany’s policies would have to look like in an American-dominated world.26 But there were also other groups with more principled reasons for working with the Allies. The willingness of bourgeois democrats such as Konrad Adenauer to co-operate with the Allies reflected, apart from simple realism, three major insights. The first was that the experience of Fascism had vastly

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upgraded the priority of establishing the rule of law and a sober political system as against, say, articulating national interests against the former enemy. Thus the common ground they shared with the Western Allies seemed far greater than it had in the inter-war period. Second, as early as 1945, observers such as Adenauer saw the threat of Communism, and believed that only close co-operation with the West could halt its spread. But third, and more unexpectedly, the turn to the Allies also reflected some politicians’ fears of what Germany itself was capable of – in Adenauer’s case this was expressed as a fear of Prussia. The Allies’ involvement and close ties to the West, could help rescue Germany from itself.27 From the German left’s viewpoint, the greater potential for cooperation in 1945 than 1918 rested partly on the fact that the former enemy was – in the British and Soviet cases – now governed by representatives of organized labour. Moreover, like their bourgeois counterparts, many labour leaders now laid far greater emphasis than hitherto on re-establishing and protecting civil liberties and the rule of law – giving them a basis to co-operate with the capitalist Americans as well as with the British. Many had spent years of exile in Britain and the USA and had developed considerable sympathy with the host societies to whom they owed their personal survival. When they returned from exile to rebuild the labour movement in 1945, they often felt profoundly out of step with a workforce that had so docilely, and sometimes enthusiastically, sustained the Hitler regime to its bitter end. In particular, the returning leaders did not understand the younger generation of workers, with whom they had had no contact, and to whom they had provided no schooling. With such an uncertain mass basis, military government support looked set to play a vital role in carrying out major structural change.28 The other crucial contrast between the two immediate post-war periods related to the inner divisions within German society. After the First World War, Germany experienced a revolution and in its aftermath had been plunged into civil war. The fears and antipathies aroused on the right by the revolutionary overthrow of the state in the November days, and on the left by the sight of the SPD using ruthless and ill-disciplined Freikorps to crush the revolution, and by the disappointment of many of the hopes of 1918, created a chasm in the heart of Germany society that no subsequent Weimar government could heal. One reason this did not happen in 1945 was, of course, that Allied troops prevented a power vacuum from emerging. A revolution was simply impossible. Yet there is reason to imagine that, even without

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Allied troops, German society would not have plunged into the conflicts of 1918. The only clearly positive outcome of the Second World War (apart from the public acknowledgement of defeat) compared with 1918, was that it had blurred rather than reinforced class divisions. The relative ‘success’ of the rationing system (that is, the privileging on racial lines of the ‘Aryan’ German population at the expense of other ‘racial’ groups), the fact that every class grouping had been hit almost equally by bombing and expulsions, and that all classes felt in some way implicated in the crimes, which they at least half knew had been carried out in their name, had created the sense of Schicksalsgemeinschaft, or community of fate, that the Nazis had invoked so fervently. That fact, together with popular exhaustion, was to help secure the post-war settlement when it emerged.29 Moreover, just as in France and Italy in 1944–5, the right was in disarray. And, as in those countries, the left was committed to a broad popular-front strategy, concentrating by that time on reconstruction with the hope of future structural reform, rather than revolution. Germany’s Social Democratic leadership had in reality long advocated a cautious, pragmatic approach, but unlike Weimar they were not now outflanked by the Communists. In line with the Soviet popular front strategy adopted in the 1920s, the Communists were keen to work within the framework of a broad, anti-Fascist alliance, embracing bourgeois elements without precipitately pushing forward to revolution. As in other countries, the notion that some sort of front might be created, or at least that different groups might co-operate in certain shared aims, was reinforced by the fact that among many bourgeois political leaders, too, there existed a strong sense in 1945 of the need to create a more socially-minded and caring society. The economic collapse and the level of destruction inclined many Christian Democrat politicians, for example, to call for the nationalization of basic industries and the introduction of other forms of public control into the economy. The CDU’s 1947 Ahlen programme is the most famous expression of this line. Of course, there were many factors in the immediate post-war period less propitious for the creation of stability. The biggest problem of the opening years was the way the struggle between the Allies to find a common line undermined attempts to restore democracy and prosperity in Germany. Soviet reparations demands, French security fears, the punitive and restrictive climate of early US policy-making, and British worries about over-burdening the exchequer could not, despite almost two years of trying, be fitted together to create a common

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policy. As a result, the years 1945–48 were immensely testing for German society. Food availability fell for many to near starvation levels; the black market thrived as normal channels of distribution failed; and there was a massive increase in criminality, particularly youth criminality and prostitution. In the face of this chaos, opinion polls revealed that a growing proportion of the population were prepared to look back on National Socialism favourably, as ‘a good idea that had been badly executed’.30 The left too was growing disillusioned at the failure of the British to engage in constructive rebuilding or the hoped-for structural change. For the left, there were disturbing signs that the employers were regrouping and regaining influence. By some obvious yardsticks, the immediate post-war years were thus years of disintegration rather than stabilization, leaving many people frustrated or yearning for the ordered certainties of 1930s Nazism. Many British observers certainly felt in early 1947 that they were repeating the struggles between victors and vanquished that had so poisoned the post-1918 settlement.31

By then, however, Britain and the USA had realized they could no longer allow policy to drift while awaiting some kind of accommodation with the Soviet Union. For the USA, it was the failure of the Moscow Conference in April 1947 to reach any positive conclusions that ushered in a very rapid shift of policy. America committed itself to rapid German economic revival within the context of an integrated European economic recovery programme (the Marshall Plan was announced in June) and the creation of a West German state. The logic to these moves was initially more economic than political, but the Marshall Plan’s introduction produced such a rapid worsening of East–West relations that the Cold War soon became the principal factor shaping both Allied policy towards western Germany and German responses to the Allies. In Allied eyes, the Cold War lent strategic value to Germany and to West German public opinion.32 Over the period 1947–9 increasing pressure came from the USA for the rapid creation of a West German capitalist democracy. At the London conference in May 1948, they finally induced the French to agree to the creation of a separate West German state, though more slowly than Britain and the USA had originally envisaged. Western German politicians were induced to accept the necessity of a West German state at that time, in the hope of attaining unity later. For German conservative and pro-nationalist opinion, fear of the Soviet Union was undoubtedly crucial in acceding to this request. They

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accepted the need to give rapid reconstruction of capitalist democracy in western Germany priority over the struggle to ensure the unity of Germany. This relationship between Cold War and co-operation was apparent at all levels. It was heightened by the Berlin blockade in 1948, which brought home the potential threat posed by the Soviet Union. The level of anti-Soviet sentiment among the general public reached new heights.33 Even so, given the demands being made of Germany, it is initially surprising that there was not more tension between the Germans and the Allies over the terms of the new German state’s formation. When Germany’s leaders were presented in July 1948 with the Frankfurt documents that were to be the basis of deliberations of the future state, they learned that an enormous list of prerogatives was to be retained by the Allies; that foreign control of Ruhr production was to continue indefinitely; that industrial dismantling would continue and so on – a series of demands against which those of Versailles pale into insignificance. To understand the process by which they came to be accepted and how a system that in many ways was so clearly imposed from outside came to seem democratically legitimated, we must look more closely at the relationship between the Allies and the German political elites. In one key respect, the Federal Republic’s inception presented an ironic mirror-image of the demise of Weimar. Weimar democracy had collapsed because a democratic vote willed it so: in the summer of 1932 the two extremist parties polled over 50 per cent of the vote. The people had been allowed to decide, and had voted away their own power of decision. In post-war West Germany, on the other hand, the outlines of a democratic capitalist system were established with virtually no popular involvement. In Weimar, the people had voted themselves out of power; in Bonn, they were not to be involved in granting themselves back in power. The curiously undemocratic process of creating Germany’s second democracy began in 1948 with far reaching decisions about the introduction of a market economy taken by a bizonal administration, in co-ordination with the Allied authorities. The bizonal administration was not directly elected, but was nominated by the Bizonal Economic Committee, which itself had been elected from the regional Länder Parliaments. Those Parliaments remained the only directly elected bodies above municipal level until the election of the first Federal government in September 1949. (Incidentally, where the directly elected Länder Parliaments tried to carry out fundamental economic reforms – for example, by nationalizing key industries – they were prevented by the military government with the argument that only a future national Parliament could take such

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decisions. And this while indirectly or non-elected bodies were taking the most far-reaching decisions about the future.) After the London conference of 1948, when the Allies started to create a West German state, two German bodies were decisive in creating the new constitution. The body formally entrusted with the task was the so-called Parliamentary Council, again only indirectly elected by the regional Parliaments. The Parliamentary Council was, however, heavily influenced by the draft presented by a committee appointed by the minister presidents of the Länder, and many committee members were administrative and technical experts rather than party political figures. To underline the remoteness of the process from popular involvement, the deliberate decision was taken not to put the proposed constitution to popular vote. Instead, it was to be ratified by the regional Parliaments. Why did the Western Allies find indigenous elites willing to cooperate, despite the very narrow room for manoeuvre that they left? The principal reasons were undoubtedly fear of the Soviet Union and a general feeling of there being little alternative. But German political elites were also constrained in how much they wished to, or could appeal directly to, the German people. For one thing, the fact that the bizonal representatives had no direct mandate made it harder for them to speak in the name of the people. Yet many bizonal politicians did not want the more directly elected Länder politicians to gain too much profile either – keen as they were to prevent the Länder from gaining too much independence – particularly in view of the known federalist views of both the French and the Americans. Certainly, the SPD pushed hard and with some success for the strongly Federalist ideas advanced by some quarters to be replaced by greater emphasis on the authority of the Bund.34 A crucial motive for limiting public involvement in constitutionmaking was the desire to avoid making the new West German state seem anything other than temporary and provisional. That is why it was decided not to call the parliamentary council a constituent assembly (which is what it was), nor to choose its members by national election nor even to put its final deliberations to a referendum. An equally important motive for limiting public involvement was the fact that many West German leaders remained rather fearful of the instincts of the German people. Konrad Adenauer favoured the creation of strong ties between Germany and the West, not least because he feared the revival of Prussianism and desired his Germany, Rheinish Germany, the Germany that looked west, to triumph over the other Germany with its autocracy and eastern ambitions. For other

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politicians, too, the attitudes of ordinary Germans were unknown territory. There was therefore considerable reluctance to exploit even the limited opportunities offered by the occupation regime to rouse popular nationalist sentiment against the allies. Not surprisingly, then, the Basic Law that emerged from the parliamentary council’s deliberations abolished many of the popular prerogatives enshrined in Weimar’s constitution: the president was to be elected only indirectly and the extensive powers to hold plebiscites and referendums were largely removed.35 Once Germany’s political elite were set on a course of co-operation with the Allies, the interplay between the two sides brought several bonuses for the emerging Federal Republic. Above all, it blurred many of those fronts of confrontation that had arisen between government and people, or left and right, in the post-1918 period. Consider the relationship between labour and capital. On the one hand, until the early 1950s, the Allied presence gave labour leaders considerable leverage in economic policy-making that was not dependent on the unions’ ability to get labour on to the streets. The employers’ need to get union support in opposing Allied plans for deconcentration, the government’s desire to enlist their involvement in plans for the European Coal and Steel Community or, at a more local level, the employer wish to get labour leaders to endorse them before a denazification panel, all gave labour a voice. This encouraged union leaders not to indulge in strike activity that might compromise their claim to be part of responsible policy-making (and perhaps also misled them about the amount of power they would enjoy in the new system). On the other hand, the frustrations with the ‘uncontrolled’ economy of the immediate post-war years, when collisions with the Allies were just as likely as conflict with employers, and when many workers had become small-scale capitalists on the black market, led many workers to give plans to create a socialist or mixed economy less priority than getting the factories working in something like an efficient economic order. But perhaps the most important example of Allied involvement defusing confrontation was the 1948 currency reform. The potentially explosive decision to expropriate millions of small Reichsmark holders was seen largely as an Allied fiat. The deflation was thus in political terms relatively harmless for the German system – a development reinforced by the way the hardships of the war and immediate post-war period had vastly suppressed popular expectations: a modest stability was all that was demanded.36 Another virtue of the relationship between the Allies and the political class was that, because of the Allies’ role in suppressing and

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containing the disorder of the post-war period, the new government, unlike those of Weimar, did not emerge as the prisoner of army and administration. Admittedly, the enormous centralization of power under the Nazis had already substantially weakened the informal power that the civil service, army and other groups such as the industrialists had wrested from central government under Wilhelm II and Weimar. But the occupation framework reinforced the trend. There was no cartel of big industry and big labour calling the shots on wage and pricing policy; nor were the civil service and army offering Groener-style deals as the precondition for co-operating with the government. And, of course, the Christian Democratic achievement in creating a large broad based party of the centre ground reinforced the government’s pre-eminence. Thus, by dint of the shock effect of war and defeat, the role and function of the Allies, and the pro-Western elites who had managed to position themselves as makers of public opinion, neither public behaviour and attitudes, nor the results of the first Federal elections in September 1949 pointed to the public alienation, disaffection or radicalization that had been such a feature of the Weimar period. The radical right had been so discredited (and, it must be said, discriminated against by Allied electoral practices) and the Communists so marginalized that the politicians of the centre had emerged at least as strong as they had ever been. True, there were no simple majorities – the proliferation of parties (twelve were represented in the first Federal Parliament) showed that the new constitutional provisions had not succeeded in ending the problem of political fragmentation. But Germany in 1949 seemed a far less openly embittered or divided society than at the end of its post-First World War stabilisation in 1924.

But how far had attitudes and values really changed within the new Republic? Many critical observers felt that Germans had learned little from the past. Opinion polls from the early 1950s suggested that the population was not much more influenced by democratic ideas than it had been a generation earlier.37 It was understandable that a critical observer such as Erich Kuby should write bitterly in 1957 that ‘With the flag of freedom in his hand, the German who as a Nazi had disappeared from the stage of history now returns to the stage unchanged’.38 And yet the political and ideological climate in Bonn was very far from replicating Weimar. The biggest break was, of course, the marginalization of aggressive nationalism and the emergence of new attitudes towards Germany’s place in the wider world. The sense of the new realities of world power

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penetrated every aspect of German life.39 When it came to attitudes on more domestic matters there were certainly many continuities – in middle-class anti-Communism, for example, and the strong desire for order. Yet whereas in Weimar, the bourgeoisie had shown itself willing to embrace a culture of violence in order to crush the left, restore order and re-establish Germany’s place in the world, after 1949 there was a very conscious effort to return to old niceties. Guides to etiquette and good behaviour, to ‘guten ton’, sold in hundreds of thousands.40 While for leftwing critics this emphasis on decency and order was both stifling and hypocritical, and was often not particularly democratic (aiming to produce the decent, loyal state citizen rather than the active democrat), it gave the bourgeoisie’s old civic virtues a place they had not enjoyed in Weimar.41 In Weimar, many on the right had sought to unify society by crushing the organized left. In post-1949 Germany, a strong, antipluralistic yearning for unity remained. But instead of aspiring to create unity by force there was an almost wilful desire to believe that German society was already unified. The popular sociologists of the time – Geiger, Schelsky and others – reflected and reinforced the desire to believe that class divisions had disappeared. As a result, even when the rhetoric of political leaders still had a strident Weimar tone, contemporaries often experienced this rhetoric as being out of keeping with the times, a ‘ghost-like’ reminder of social divisions that ostensibly no longer existed.42 Overstating the case, one could argue that it was precisely the restorativeness, the return to bourgeois values of decency and civility, that distinguished Bonn from Weimar. What was new, too, was that conservatism was so successful. In 1957 the CDU gained an absolute majority of the votes, achieving something that Hitler had been unable to do even in the unfree elections of March 1933. The CDU slogan in 1957 was, revealingly, ‘no experiments’. It was precisely the widespread sense of not experimenting, of sticking to tried and tested values and institutions that was so central to giving the Federal Republic its newfound stability.

Explanations that attribute Bonn’s superior stability to some kind of structural break with Weimar – be it in the institutions or in society – tend to assume that what had hindered the creation of stable democracy in inter-war Germany were some enduring structural defects. It is then only logical to look for the modification or removal of such

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defects after 1945. Recent research suggests, however, that Weimar’s principal problem was not its constitution, the society or geopolitical situation it inherited, but the enormous crisis of adjustment (political, economic, social and psychological) thrust upon it by losing a major war. Certainly, there were features of its underlying structure rendering that crisis harder to solve, but as Richard Bessel, among others, has shown, it was the scale and simultaneity of the post-war challenges that was the primary problem.43 The argument here, then, is that neither institutions nor society in Bonn were initially very different from those of Weimar. What was new was the process of managing the transition from war to peace, from the old regime to the new, and from defeat to reintegration into the international community. In other words, the apparent dichotomy in existing interpretations of the Federal Republic –’restoration’ or new beginnings – rather misses the point. This was that the terms under which Weimar’s institutions and elites were re-established and reconstituted after 1945 was very different from the process by which Weimar had originally been established. As a result, similar institutions, largely unchanged elites, and a population initially far from persuaded of the virtues of democracy nevertheless provided the foundations for a stable democratic system.

Notes and references 1. The classic statement was Walter Dirks, ‘Der restaurative Charakter der Epoche’, Frankfurter Hefte vol. 5 (1950) pp. 952–4. 2. Again, the classical statement was Fritz Allermann, Bonn ist nicht Weimar (Cologne: Kiepenhauer & Witsch, 1956), trans. Fleur Donecker. 3. Kurt Sontheimer, The Government and Politics of West Germany (London: Hutchinson,1972). 4. Ludwig Erhard, The Economics of Success (London: Thames & Hudson, 1963), trans. J. A. Arengo-Jones and D. J. S. Thompson. 5. Helmut Schelsky, Auf der Suche nach Wirklichkeit (Düsseldorf/Cologne: E. Diderichs, 1965). 6. Ralf Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany (New York: Norton, 1969). 7. Eberhardt Schmidt, Die verhinderte Neuordnung (Frankfurt/M: Europäsische Verlags-Anstalt, 1970); Ernst-Ulrich Huster, Gerhard Kraiker et al., Determinanten der westdeutschen Restauration 1945–1949 (Frankfurtam-Main: Suhrkamp, 1972).

Mark Roseman 159 8. See Stefan Berger’s chapter, p 9 and see the discussion in Eberhard Kolb, The Weimar Republic (London, Unwin Hyman, 1988), trans. P. S. Falla, pp. 138ff. 9. On all this, see Sontheimer, The Goverment and Politics of West Germany 10. Christoph reßmann, Die doppelte Staatsgründung (Bonn: Bündeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 1991) p. 98. 11. Dirks, ‘Der restaurative Charackter der Epoche’. 12. The best statement of this view in English is A. J. Nicholls, Freedom with Responsibility. The Social Market Economy in Germany (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1994). 13. Not least because success stories were achieved in post-war Western Europe with such a rich and varied array of policies. Doubtless currency stabilization and some relaxation of price controls were crucial, but in themselves they hardly constituted an institutional revolution. For a critical view of Erhard, see Alan Kramer, The West German Economy 1945–1955 (New York: Berg, 1991). 14. Thomas W. Neumann, ‘Kompensieren und Kaufen – die Währungsreform zwischen Alltagsereignis und identitätsstiftender Legende’, in Thomas W. Neumann (ed.), ‘Da ist der Aufschwung hochgekommen…’ 50 Jahre Deutsche Mark (Lüdenscheid, 1998) pp. 41–54; Axel Schildt, Moderne Zeiten (Hamburg: Chistians 1995) esp. pp. 310–1; Michael Wildt, Am Beginn der ‘Konsumgesellschaft’ (Hamburg: Ergebnisse Verlag, 1994). 15. Helmut Schelsky, ‘Die Bedeutung des Klassenbegriffes für die Analyse unsere Gesellschaft’ and ‘Die Bedeutung des Schichtungsbegriffes für die Analyse der gegenwärtigen deutschen Gesellschaft’, both in Schelsky, Auf der Suche nach Wirk Lichket pp. 331–6 and 352–88. 16. See Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany and Mark Roseman, ‘National Socialism and Modernisation’, in Richard Bessel (ed.), Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 197–229. 17. See Michael Geyer, ‘Professionals and Junkers: German Rearmament and Politics in the Weimar Republic’, in Richard Bessel and E. J. Feuchtwanger (eds), Social Change and Political Development in Weimar Germany (London: Croom Helm, 1981) pp. 77–133. 18. Kleßmann, Die doppelte Staatsgründung., pp. 251 ff.; Volker Berghahn, The Americanisation of West German Industry (Leamington Spa: Berg 1986) pp. 40 ff. 19. Schildt, Moderne Zeiten, pp. 306 ff; Anna J. Merritt and Richard L. Merritt, Public Opinion in Semi-sovereign Germany. The HICOG-Surveys 1949–1955 (Urbana, Ill. :University of Illinois Press 1980). 20. Werner Abelshauser, ‘American Aid and West German Economic Recovery: A Macro-economic Perspective’, in Charles S.Maier (ed.), The Marshall Plan and Germany (New York: Berg, 1991) pp. 367–409. 21. Barbara Marshall, ‘German Attitudes to British Military Government 1945–1947’, Journal of Contemporary History vol. 15 no. 4 (1980) pp. 655–84; Barbara Marshall, The Origins of Post-war German Politics (New York: Croom Helm, 1988). 22. Abelshauser, ‘American Aid’.

160 Restoration and Stability in the FDR 23. On the absence of any kind of national voice in Germany, see Lutz Niethammer, ‘War die bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland 1945 am Ende oder am Anfang’, in Lutz Niethammer et al., Bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland (Frankfurt-am-Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 1990) pp. 515– 32. 24. On the immediate post-war period, see Kleßmann, Die doppelte Staatsgründung., pp. 53 ff. 25. For an English-language discussion of recent literature on Allied aims, see Mark Roseman, ‘Division and Stability. Recent Writing on Post-war German History’, in German History, vol. 11, no. 3 (September 1993) pp. 363–90; and Mark Roseman, Neither Punitive nor Powerless. Western Europe and the Division of Germany (Birmingham :University Birmingham Press 1993). 26. Ludolf Herbst, Der totale krieg und die Ordnung der Wirtschaft (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1982). 27. On Adenauer, see Hans-Peter Schwarz, Konrad Adenauer. Vo1. 1 (Providence, R. I. and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995). 28. See Lutz Niethammer, ‘Rekonstruktion und Desintegration. Zum Verständnis der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung zwischen Krieg und kaltem Krieg’, in Heinrich August Winkler, Politische Weichenstellungen im Nachkriegsdeutschland 1945–1953 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1979) pp. 26–43. 29. Wolfgang Werner, ‘Bleib Übrig’. Deutsche Arbeiter in der nationalsozialistischen Kriegswirtschaft (Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1983); Ulrich Herbert, Fremdarbeiter. Politik und Praxis des ‘Ausländer-Einsatzes’ in der Kriegswirtschaf des Dritten Reiches (Berlin/Bonn: Dietz, 1985); on the widespread knowledge of the Holocaust, see David Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution. Popular Opinion under Nazism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992). 30. Kleßmann, Die doppelte Staatsgründunge. 31. Marshall, German Attitudes to British Military Goverment. op. cit. 32. Michael Hogan, The Marshall Plan (Cambridge University Press, 1987). 33. Wilfried Loth, The Division of the World (London: Routledge, 1988). 34. H. J. Grabbe, ‘Die Alliierten und das Grundgesetz’, Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte ,vol. 26 (1978) pp. 393–418. 35. This suspicion of the people remained a remarkably consistent feature in German politics. See Ian Buruma, Wages of Guilt. Memories of War in Germany and Japan (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1994) p. 28. 36. Lutz Niethammer, ‘Privat-Wirtschaft. Erinnerungsfragmente einer anderen Umerziehung’, in Lutz Niethammer (ed.), Hinterher merkt man, daß es richtig war, daß es schiefgegangen ist. Nachkriegserfahrungen im Ruhrgebiet (Berlin/Bonn: Dietz, 1983) pp. 17–107; Mark Roseman, Recasting the Ruhr 1945–1958 (New York: Berg, 1992) p. 315. 37. See the detailed discussion in Schildt, Moderne Zeiten pp. 314ff. 38. Cited in Ibid., p. 316. 39. Even German cookery books from the 1950s showed a new receptivity to international influences (albeit with a Germanified touch), see Wildt, Am Beginn der ‘Kosumgesellschaft’. 40. Schildt, Moderne Zeiten. 41. On the bourgeosie’s embrace of violence in Weimar, see Bernd Weisbrod’s excellent essay in Richard Bessel (ed.), Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany

Mark Roseman 161 42. On the discussion in the 1950s, see Birgit Mahnkopf, Verbürgerlichung. Die Legende vom Ende des Proletariats (Frankfurt: Campus 1985) pp. 124 ff; on the continuities between Volksgemeinschaft ideology and post-war sociology, see Willi Oberkrone, Volksgeschichte: Methodische Innovation und Volkische Ideologisierung in der Deutschen Geschichts-Wissenschaft 1918–1945, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1993). 43. Richard Bessel, ‘Why Did the Weimar Republic Collapse?’, in Ian Kershaw (ed.), Weimar: Why Did German Democracy Fail? (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990); Richard Bessel, Germany After the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1993).

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Part 4 Post-Communist Eastern Europe

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9 Post-Communist East-Central Europe: Dilemmas of Democratization* Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone

There is nothing more difficult to execute, no more dubious of success, nor more dangerous to administer than to introduce a new system of things: for he who introduces it has all those who profit from the old system as his enemies and he has only a lukewarm allies in all those who might profit from the new system. (Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, VI)1 The collapse in 1989–91 of Communist regimes in East-Central Europe2 and the Soviet Union greatly surprised supporters and critics of the system alike, both at home and abroad, even though it was generally known that Communist polities were in progressive crisis. Party and state institutions were eroded by prevalent stagnation, corruption and ‘privatization’.3 Planned economies were hobbled by centralized controls, their resources siphoned off by ‘grey’ and ‘black’ second economies, and their performance was inadequate to maintain the growth levels required to support Soviet superpower status. The elites’ pursuit of particular interests had replaced any ideological commitment to the ‘building of socialism’ and was viewed by the populace with weary cynicism. Democratic ideas seeped into the ideological void and nationalism emerged once more as the fountainhead of legitimacy. Social pressures for political and economic change were gathering strength at the grassroots, and autonomous groups, associations and movements, proscribed by the regime, began proliferating outside the *

This chapter focuses on all the countries of the former WTO–CMEA regional state system, except East Germany, treated here only marginally, because after German reunification, the process of transition there was different. 165

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party-controlled framework. By the 1980s the crisis and social ferment were widespread, but their manifestations were differentiated: highly visible in Poland, Hungary and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), but largely inchoate and barely noticeable elsewhere. There was no perception of imminent collapse. Reform was much discussed within ruling Communist parties, while most Western observers assumed that internal pressures could be curbed indefinitely by a combination of coercion and incremental reforms that would eventually result in the needed changes within the systemic status quo.4 Few East Europeans openly agitated for a change in the system – the Hungarians and the Poles being notable exceptions – and none had developed specific alternative blueprints. In domestic politics, dissidents defined themselves through rejection of the Communist monopoly of power. In the international context they rejected Soviet tutelage and demanded restoration of national sovereignty. In economic thinking there was a consensus that some marketization was essential to improve economic performance. Dissidents developed an idea of a ‘Third Way’ combining the best features of capitalist and socialist economies so that the evils of exploitation might be avoided. Communist reformers spoke of a ‘socialist market’. Actual reform impulses fizzled into cosmetic changes, because the system would not tolerate the party’s exclusion. None the less, Hungary’s New Economic Mechanism (NEM), careful not to breach formal party controls, was successful in bringing in elements of marketization. The Prague Spring, on the other hand, failed in a similar endeavour because the reform’s political implications were unacceptable to Moscow, and intervention followed. But the idea and market elements survived and, in the popular mind, the market became identified with instant Western-type prosperity. Clearly, no meaningful reform could begin without Soviet approval. Octogenarian Soviet leaders realized painfully the need to jump-start the stagnant economy when US President Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ confronted them with a dilemma of either matching the American effort or forfeiting superpower status. But change was delayed until 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev initiated a series of basic reforms. Perestroika and glasnost’ released latent political and national forces across the Communist domain. Designed to restore political and economic viability to the Soviet system, the reforms, in fact, undercut its very foundations, and the consequences were felt first in East-Central Europe. Only two parties there were prepared to respond to Gorbachev’s reform initiatives. Polish leaders had little choice, given the standing challenge

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by the mass-based Solidarity movement, which survived the 1981 military suppression and rose again demanding basic political and economic change. In Hungary, Janos Kadar’s successors were committed to genuine reform, inclusive of pluralism. All other leaders – East Germany’s Erich Honecker, Husak and his successor Milos Jakes in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria’s Todor Zhivkov, and Romania’s Nicholae Ceausescu – resisted reforms, fearing for their own and the system’s survival. The sequential collapse of the Communist regimes began with the legalization of political opposition, first in Hungary, then in Poland. In February 1989, the Hungarian Communist party invited the opposition to form political parties. In April 1989, Solidarity leaders and Poland’s Communist leaders negotiated constitutional changes that created space for political participation by the opposition. Polish elections occurred in the summer of 1989, and Solidarity swept all but one seat in the newly-created Upper Chamber of the Parliament, and all the seats in the Lower Chamber open to it under the April agreement, which had reserved 65 per cent of seats for Communists and their allies. No restrictions were placed on the Hungarian elections of March–April 1990, and the Communists lost unconditionally. The Solidarity-led coalition government in Poland was recognized by the Soviet Union in September 1989. The date was crucial, because it signified that Soviet intervention days were over. The signal was received in the rest of East-Central Europe and sent people to the streets and across borders to the West. It took two months for the East German opposition to organize itself and the Communist government to collapse (in October), but only weeks for the spontaneous mass demonstrations to sweep away the Czechoslovak and Bulgarian regimes (in November). Violence occurred only in Romania, where a spark lit by the harassment of a Hungarian pastor in Transylvania produced a popular revolt, a conflict between Securitate and the army, and the execution by the latter of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu (in December). Thus, in East-Central Europe, the bloodless revolution was over by the end of 1989, whence the momentum spread to Yugoslavia and Albania, and on to the Soviet Union. This chapter examines the ‘aftermath’: the transition from Communism to democracy, and from ‘socialist’ to market economies. Mass social mobilization against Communism clearly signified that people wanted a change: ‘democracy’, and a ‘return to Europe’. But the practical implications of democracy were poorly understood, and few realized that introducing the market meant destroying socioeconomic structures that supported large segments of society. Early euphoria

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accompanying Communism’s collapse eroded almost immediately, when it became clear that prospects for general prosperity and stable democracy were neither immediate nor easy. In fact, the obstacles appeared insurmountable. First, effective political leadership was generally lacking. The political spectrum was fragmented, and leaders effective in opposition did not necessarily have the qualities needed to produce real transformation. This opened the door to Communist incumbents who retained and/or moved into positions of political and economic power under new labels. Second, structural and psychological legacies from forty years of Communism proved to be more deeply rooted than anyone had suspected. Last, but not least, the simultaneous introduction of democratic institutions and economic reforms created its own dysfunctional dynamics. The social costs of market reforms were disastrous for the majorities that had depended on the state-run economy. Inevitably, their unhappiness was reflected in the ballot box. An astute local observer noted: as institutional transformation proceeds, social support depends less and less on values and more and more on group interests, most of which had been shaped by the previous system.5 The feedback loop is at the heart of working democracies but, in conditions of simultaneous political and economic change, it has been a major brake on marketization. This ‘dualism’ has been central to the paradox of post-Communist transition. Even countries with successful reform records have yet to reach a benchmark of a social majority that depends on and benefits from the operation of the market.

What paradigm? A typology of transition from an authoritarian to a democratic regime was developed in the wake of political change in Latin America and Iberia, and it became fashionable to apply it to the post-Communist process of transition.6 But, as some specialists noted,7 the conditions that obtained in post-Communist societies were unique in several crucial aspects and thus created unique sequences and problems. This does not preclude comparisons of other aspects of the ‘Southern’ and the ‘Eastern’ variants of democratization, but the core of the process was different.

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First, Communist regimes were totalitarian, and not authoritarian, a matter not of semantics but rather of important practical implications.8 Implementing V. I. Lenin’s concept of its role as the vanguard of the working class, and thus the leading force in society, the Communist Party appropriated the monopoly of power. In practice, this meant that it stood above the law and, having destroyed all pre-existing autonomous social institutions (civil society), had penetrated society through new subordinate structures run from the top. The system’s corruption, noted above, did nothing to remove the structural or psychological features of the party’s leading role, though it did substitute the goals of system maintenance and the pursuit of particular/private interests by the leaders and their clients throughout the hierarchy, for the original commitment to build a new and better society. Atomization of society and the elaborate mechanisms required to exert party control over all social activities were absent from authoritarian regimes, as were the psychological effects of what the Czech president, Vaclav Havel, called a ‘post-Communist debilitation syndrome’. He added that ‘we can only remain perplexed at … how profoundly the era of totalitarianism has seeped into our souls’.9 Second, even the most reform-minded Communist regimes had staterun command economies. Thus a market economy had to be created ‘from scratch’. This required the dismantling state economic bureaucracies and privatizing the all-embracing public sector, as well as radical change in the attitudes and behaviour of economic personnel and the public at large. Legacies of the command economy were massive and the scope of change enormous. In contrast, post-authoritarian regimes already had market economies. Moreover, they did not have to enact simultaneous political and economic change. Leszek Balcerowicz, the author of the Polish reforms, believes that the legacies of Communism made the ‘Eastern’ experience unique in three ways: in the scale of change and its political and economic ‘simultaneity’; in its revolutionary character; and in its unusual sequence. The transition to capitalism happened under a democratic system instead of the other way around. 10 Philippe Schmitter, a leading ‘transitologist’, acknowledges that ‘the peculiar monopolistic fusion of political and economic power into a party-state apparatus’ was a ‘distinctive feature’ of the ‘Eastern’ systems, which left ‘amorphous’ socio-occupational structures dysfunctional to the building of democracy.11 The two unique characteristics noted above are of systemic origin. A third important variable – the role of nationalism and ethnicity in

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exploding multi-ethnic Communist states as well as the Soviet bloc – is the product of history. It differentiates the ‘Eastern’ from the ‘Southern’ variant, primarily in the frequency and scope of the phenomenon. One major consequence has been the need by new breakaway states – such as the Czech Republic and Slovakia (and Yugoslav and Soviet succession states) – to contend with the problem of national identity. Another has been the resurgence of ethnic conflict within and between post-Communist polities. Other anomalies of the ‘Eastern’ experience include the totality and speed of the disintegration of Communist regimes, the ‘dualism’ of simultaneous political and economic change as noted earlier, and the role of external actors. Moscow reforms and the decision not to use the still largely intact Soviet military power in East-Central Europe were crucial to the collapse of Communist regimes. External actors have also played major roles in the post-Communist period because of Western re-entry into the region, and its imposition of rigorous political and economic criteria on potential candidates for membership in the new Europe.12

Political change Problems of change were assessed realistically from the inside. Edmund Wnuk-Lipinski, a leading Polish social scientist, observed that the region experienced two radical changes of political system in the twentieth century: first, when Communism was established after the Second World War; and, second, when it collapsed. 13 One could argue there were effectively three radical changes, the first following the First World War, when the states of the region emerged as sovereign entities from the rubble of the fallen imperial systems, before the establishment of Communism. All the changes required the destruction of the old system and establishment of new institutions and/or a transformation of the existing ones. Wnuk-Lipinski argues that Communists had a much easier task than have present-day reformers. First, the region had been devastated: pre-war institutions and elites were destroyed, and in some cases the population was uprooted by war-time involuntary migrations.14 Second, the change was directed from above and supported by the military might of a foreign power. Thus new institutions did not have, or need, a social base, and their maintenance did not depend on public approval either at the beginning or later, even though social promotion of disadvantaged social strata did create a support base for the regime.15

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Creating a democratic system was harder, despite initially overwhelming popular support. Several processes needed to be initiated simultaneously. Democratic procedures had to be restored in public life and political space had to be opened for an opposition. Resources had to be decentralized and a market created for their free allocation. The state’s directing role had to be reduced to mere regulation. Arbitrary repression had to be abolished and restrictions removed on freedom of expression. Meanwhile, new governments were held hostage to majority approval by the paradox of ‘dualism’. The establishment of conditions for the development of a civil society and entrepreneurial activities was the great social gain of the transformation. The social loss sustained was the loss of security and a rapid growth of social inequalities.16 Tensions emerged along lines of new social cleavages in relations between the state and the new civil society, between employers and employees, and between government and opposition. In Poland, a new major cleavage also appeared in relations between the Catholic Church and civil society.17 In multi-ethnic societies, ethnic cleavage emerged in relations between minority communities and government, with tensions focused on the minorities’ political, social and cultural rights. The cleavage between state and society was rooted in Communist legacies. Privatization benefited minorities, while majorities blamed governments, both for new policies and for perceived failures to meet their responsibilities for social welfare. Another area of tension related to taxation, with governments unable to collect taxes on large segments of entrepreneurial activities run outside official frameworks, a hangover from the former ‘black’ economy. The cleavage in industrial relations resulted from tensions generated by group interests formed under the ancien régime and centred on the issue of state subsidies for inefficient enterprises. There was also resentment at the growing gap between wages for similar work in the depressed public sector compared with the thriving private sector, as well as ‘normal’ tensions between workers and management over wages and benefits in individual firms. The government–opposition cleavage is integral to democratic politics. However, in transition politics, it first reflected the early confrontation between Communists and opposition, and later the confrontation between proponents (potential beneficiaries) and opponents (potential losers) of economic reforms. Losers, unfortunately, have been more numerous. So far – Wnuk-Lipinski notes – no government has been able to devise reform

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strategy that would benefit groups whose interests were rooted in the previous system. Thus, if democracy really works, minorities are bound to emerge to stop the transformation.18

Patterns of development Communist legacies imposed common features on the ‘Eastern’ transition that, while being modified by inputs from traditional cultures and differences in conditions, have dominated the period of consolidation. The first stage played itself out in late 1989. It was characterized by mass politicization, broad social consensus on democracy, prosperity and independence. There also emerged broadly-based umbrella movements. These either pre-dated and channelled mass manifestations (for example, Poland’s Solidarity); appeared simultaneously (for example, Bulgaria’s United Democratic Front, and Czechoslovakia’s Civic Forum/Public Against Violence); or emerged at their heels (for example, Romania’s crypto-Communist National Salvation Front). Hungary, where transition was Communist-initiated, needed neither mass mobilization nor an umbrella movement. The next stage began when new leaders faced the tasks of transformation. Broad consensus held on ‘what’ should be done. But it became clear that the price of victory was an emergence of difference about ‘how’ and ‘by whom’. Broad coalitions broke into original diverse components, which splintered further on personalities, issues and policies, with reform Communists joining the contest. Subsequent patterns of development followed two basic scenarios. Four countries – Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia (Czechoslovakia broke up in 1993) – started under opposition-led governments. All undertook democratization along with deep economic reforms. Despite inevitable social and political backlashes (neo-Communists won elections in Poland in 1993, and in Hungary in 1994) and continuing economic problems, all four appear to have rounded the corner on marketization; all, with lapses in Slovakia, have established working democracies. The second scenario, seen in Romania and Bulgaria, started with (elected) neo-Communist governments undertaking ‘slow’ marketization, but being unwilling and/or unable to tackle basic components of Communist economies. The politics of both have been unstable – marked by social unrest and government changes – and their economies were in crisis by 1995. But new democratic structures proved sufficiently strong to throw neo-Communists out of office in 1996–7, with new

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governments embarking on delayed radical reforms. The path of the ‘stragglers’ may be harder than that of the early ‘reformers’, and require a longer time scale and greater outside assistance, but there are hopeful signs.19

Elections and parliaments Democratization and political pluralism appeared to be easier to achieve than marketization. Democratic institutions were established immediately, beginning with restorations of civil and human freedoms, and establishing legal frameworks for free elections. The elections, held throughout the region in 1989–90, instituted new legislative assemblies charged with the task of forming new governments, developing new constitutions, approving new policies and establishing new legal frameworks for their implementation. Few countries in the region could draw on recent memories of a participatory political culture, and all had to overcome totalitarian legacies. Thus it was difficult initially to follow democratic ‘rules of the game’. These emerged slowly, while floodgates were opened to pluralism and political anarchy. In the context of recent history, the peoples of East-Central Europe developed traditions of getting what they wanted, quite literally, by marching onto the streets and/or organizing mass strike actions.20 Meanwhile, a culture of negotiation, bargaining, compromise, and seeking and accepting the lowest common denominator, were largely non-existent in the region. New constitutions were speedily adopted, with two exceptions: Czechoslovakia, where no agreement was possible until the split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993 and the Czech Republic adopted new constitutions, and Poland, where constitution-making was caught in the conflict between the president and Parliament until 1996. The systems established were either parliamentary with indirectly-elected presidents (for example, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia), or mixed parliamentary-presidential with popularly elected presidents. Ill-defined relationships between legislature and presidency produced struggles over jurisdiction, reflecting ambitions of particular leaders as well as party configurations. In Poland, the president fought for greater powers and lost.21 In Slovakia it is the prime minister, Vladimir Meciar (thrice elected but twice forced from office), who has tried to usurp the president’s powers.22 Romania’s constitution was modelled on the 1958 French (Gaullist) constitution, and its politics were dominated by President Iliescu until 1996. The personal ambitions of some leaders

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produced authoritarian behaviour, but this has been resisted vigorously, and in the main successfully, by the legislatures, assisted by newlyindependent judiciaries.23 Electoral provisions differed widely, but most provided for complex proportional representation (PR), or combined PR–majoritarian systems; the PR preference reflects traditional and common European legacies. Voter turnout was high or very high in the early elections or at critical junctures, as in the l996–7 Bulgarian and Romanian elections. As people became disappointed with the results of change, turnout declined, sometimes catastrophically. But an upward trend seems to have re-emerged, more within a ‘normal’ democratic range, a sign perhaps of voters’ growing maturity. The PR system produced a multitude of parties, grouped along the traditional left–Centre–right political spectrum, and fractious Parliaments. Only the establishment of an electoral entry threshold (3 to 5 per cent of the vote) prevented total fragmentation. The threshold, admittedly, disenfranchised voters supporting extreme minority parties. But the proportion of such voters declined, indicating that they were learning not to waste their ballots. Only rarely could an electoral coalition win a parliamentary majority. Most coalitions were either mutating spin-offs of the original movements, or alliances of former Communists and their allies. Most coalition governments were unstable and had difficulty governing effectively.

Political parties and civil society Party proliferation characterized the political landscape. Two basic political orientations emerged from the umbrella movements: right-ofcentre Christian democrats and left-of-centre liberal democrats. The first represent a broad traditional, nationalist, clerical constituency, far more numerous than that of the liberal democrats, who represent middleclass, professional intelligentsia, entrepreneurial and secular elements. Each has spawned several competing parties. A third major orientation were former Communists, benefiting from their pre-fall infrastructure of local organizations and resources. These also factionalized. Their ‘reform’ mainstream was either able to maintain power (Romania and Bulgaria) or to recoup initial losses (Poland and Hungary), representing the ‘losers’ under a ‘social-democratic’ banner. But their constituency was shrinking as the reforms progressed. Other parties were historic parties and former Communist satellites. Agrarian-based parties were strongest among historic parties. But

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efforts to revive social-democratic parties proved futile. Lacking resources and effective leadership, and compromised by their association with Communism, social democrats were hopelessly divided, leaderless and unable to compete with Communists for working-class constituencies. Ex-satellite parties, in contrast, fared relatively well. Some turned against Communists at strategically important moments, while others joined Communist-led coalitions. Having retained much of their property and organizational infrastructure, they competed successfully with poorly organized and resourced ‘new’ parties and their inexperienced leaders. The emergence of ethnically based parties was a new and important phenomenon. The break-up of Czechoslovakia was spearheaded by parties based, respectively, in Czech and Slovak constituencies. Parties representing Hungarian minorities were formed in Slovakia and Romania. In Romania, there were parties representing German and Roma (gypsy) communities; Bulgaria had three Turkish, as well as Roma and Macedonian, parties. Party proliferation meant that political life was fragmented and ‘personalized’. Although big political battles were fought over major issues such as the pace of the reform, the personalities of contestants were highly important. Most garden-variety political contests centred on leaders and factions competing for turf, benefits, perks and privileges, much to the disgust of the watching populace. An active civil society is a precondition for democratic politics, giving social substance to party politics and enforcing social norms. The lack of autonomous social infrastructure in the public sphere between individual citizens and the government has been felt keenly in post-Communist countries. In 1997, President Havel described civil society as ‘the richest possible self-structuring and … participation in public life’ because ‘it functions as a genuine guarantee of political stability’. Thus, ‘it was no accident that Communism’s most brutal attack was aimed precisely against this civil society’. But, he admitted, ‘we have not yet created the foundations of a genuinely evolved civil society, which lives on a thousand different levels and thus need not feel that its existence depends on one government or another or on one political party or another’. 24 In the last decades of Communism, only Poland and Hungary were able to develop a nucleus of a civil society, a network of autonomous social organizations parallel to, but outside, the ‘official’ system, which gradually came to influence the political process.25 In Poland, the focus was on political freedoms; in Hungary, on economic freedoms – and both were the first buildingblocks of free political processes.

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Autonomous socio-economic groups were still in statu nascendi in post-Communist societies. There was much confusion regarding the proper roles and characteristics of pressure groups and parties, and the division of labour between them, as understood in the West. Pressure groups were not seen at that time as articulators of specific social interests, and parties did not then seek to aggregate such interests in formulating policy options for the electorate. The one exception, which perpetuated past socio-economic structures, were groups dependent on state support. Their interests were aggregated by ‘neoCommunists’. Another exception were ethnic parties. Hungary apart, where autonomous economic interests emerged under NEM, special interests were perceived as being selfish and irrelevant to party programmes. Only ethnic parties were assumed ‘naturally’ to represent the interests of their communities. For the rest, a scene described in 1991 by a Polish observer appeared to be typical: Present-day Poland not only does not have but cannot have a (classbased) party system, because contemporary Polish society is not – or is not yet aware that it is not – a class-based society in the same way that pre-war Polish society was. The forty years old … process of social advancement and mixing of social classes lowered a perception of their own interests among specific social levels. People still expect some kind of a ‘general good’ and do not understand that such a concept is both unclear and doubtful in a class society. Overall, the observer concluded, there was little connection between the voters’ social class in current Polish elections and their choice of party. Consequently, Parties do not represent interests of specific social groups, only the interests of their leaders and activists; thus they easily enter into most diverse configurations, and form most peculiar alliances … because choices of this type are decided by preferences and emotions of the leaders rather than on the basis of interaction between interests of social groups. This discrepancy represents perhaps the greatest danger to the Polish democracy and its greatest weakness.26 The situation undoubtedly represented the most obvious weakness of the new democracies at the time. Communists may well have succeeded in propaganda where they failed in practice: namely, in

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creating a popular image of equality in a classless society. Much has been done since in the ‘reformer’ countries to stimulate development of autonomous subsystems and link then to parties and government. Unfortunately, these have included pathologies, such as criminal networks (rooted in Communist-era corruption), with direct links to politicians and bureaucrats.

Economic change As noted earlier, a consensus existed on the need to introduce market economies, but there was no agreement on how it should be done. The task has proved enormously difficult because it affected literally the entire economy originally run by the state, as well as economic thinking and the behaviour of management personnel and workforce. A private sector barely existed, except in Hungary under the NEM mechanism, and Poland with its de-collectivized agriculture. Yet the public at large regarded the market as an instant prescription for all the benefits of a ‘good life’, including the social benefits enjoyed under the old regime. Political elites were committed to capitalism, abandoning the concept of the ‘Third Way’, once dominant among the dissidents.

Tasks and policies The magnitude of the transformation required and its associated problems are lucidly explained by Leszek Balcerowicz, the man responsible for the success of the Polish reform, and the inventor – with Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard – of the ‘shock treatment’.27 Balcerowicz reviews the initial conditions faced by the reformers and outlines the policies needed to achieve the transformation. The initial conditions, he argues, were shaped by a two-fold ‘ballast’ of Communist legacies – structural and psychological. The structural ballast was the result of the forty years of investment policies directed towards the production of goods without a market. The measure of this ballast was the proportion of the value of production at the starting-point (of reforms), which could not be maintained under free market conditions. The proportion was very high across the region, especially in countries with huge industrial conglomerates and armaments industries.28 The measure of success in marketization was the speed with which this ballast was eliminated, the elimination

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forming the core of the so-called ‘big’ privatization. Its social costs were inevitably very high, but privatization was, in Balcerowicz’s judgement, essential. The psychological ballast consisted of prevalent attitudes towards work (passivity and lack of initiative), distrust of entrepreneurial activities, and ignorance of how to act economically under market conditions: how to manage enterprises for profit, calculate costs, and sell the products.29 Balcerowicz notes that ignorance was widespread across the region, compared with any other society where the economic system had been changed. The reformers faced the situation where personnel with old skills were abundant but useless, while those with new skills were non-existent and had to be trained. Another important initial weakness was an absence of what Balcerowicz calls ‘engines of economic growth’ – institutional and legal frameworks of economic relations, such as fiscal and monetary systems, property structures and property rights, trade regulations that were needed to transmit economic inputs into market outputs. Such frameworks had to be built simultaneously with the implementation of reforms. Summarizing the initial conditions, Balcerowicz concludes that, overall in East-Central Europe, the ballast was very heavy while the engines of growth were very weak. The situation dictated three sets of basic policies: (i) macroeconomic stabilization to establish new institutional and legal framework; (ii) microeconomic stabilization to remove restraints on entrepreneurial activities; and (iii) privatization and other deep institutional changes, such as reform of the tax system, of social insurance and welfare, of self-government, and so on. ‘Given the political will’ the first two could rapidly be accomplished; but privatization and other deep changes required a longer time-span. The correct strategy, according to Balcerowicz, was to pursue all three simultaneously. This strategy became known as ‘shock therapy’. Implementation Full-blown shock therapy programmes were adopted, first by Poland in January 1990 (the so-called Balcerowicz Plan), and then Czechoslovakia in mid-1991. 30 Hungary, already advanced on the

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reform path, proceeded with a ‘gradual’ version. 31 Romanian and Bulgarian Communist governments opted for what may be called a ‘fake gradual’ reform, which half-heartedly attempted small privatization but did not tackle state controls, or state ownership and subsidization of otherwise non-viable industries.32 In Poland, shock therapy had immediate and spectacular successes with currency convertibility, removal of trade barriers, promotion of small businesses, small privatization and the removal of state subsidies, accompanied by tight fiscal and monetary policies which kept down the level of incomes. Beneficial initial effects were also noted in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The IMF and other international agencies monitoring progress were satisfied, but there was concern over the delay in ‘big’ privatization.33 Privatization proceeded slowly because of an absence of local capital and an initial unwillingness of foreign capital to move into Czechoslovakia and Poland. Hungary was more attractive because of early progress and a smaller share of heavy industry, the advantage also enjoyed by the Czech Republic after the break. ‘Big’ privatization was hardest: there were no buyers for inefficient, obsolete conglomerates producing non-marketable goods and employing thousands of workers. Lack of capital led to state banks acquiring state credits to buy valuable state industrial property cheaply, and siphoning off profits rather than stimulating production, a pathology based on collusion between politicians, bureaucrats and newly-minted financiers.34 Reforming economies were also affected negatively by factors outside local control. The collapse of the CMEA market and the USSR meant a loss of their export markets and of the main source of fuels and raw materials. Fluctuations in Western oil prices disrupted the balance of payments, and exports were hindered by the European Community’s (EC) restrictions on key East European export commodities – food products, textiles and steel – while flooding Eastern markets with Western food products – many of them, ironically, being state subsidized. Social costs Adverse effects of the reforms were unavoidable. Price decontrols resulted in declining real wages and living standards, and growing inflation, especially where fiscal controls were weak. Bankruptcies of inefficient firms increased unemployment, as did cut-backs in subsidies for ‘dinosaur’ industries. Social services were reduced; and industrial

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output dropped, as did domestic demand. Productivity and output in the private sector increased, but its growth was too slow and its share in the economy too small to reverse overall negative indicators during the initial period. These hardships affected the great majority of people, while relatively few gained. Most severely affected were the poor: retirees, old and disabled welfare recipients, and the unemployed. Typically, the ranks of the latter were dominated by heavy industrial workers – the former ‘aristocracy of labour’. ‘Losers’ suffered increasingly, because the quality and scope of social and health services declined, as did the educational systems. The resulting unhappiness was compounded by non-material factors, such as reactions against high early expectation and persistence of Communist-nurtured myths about egalitarianism and social entitlements. Balcerowicz lists four main reasons for discontent: the decline of living standards; unequal access to the new riches because of age, education, or regional differences; loss of social prestige by previously privileged social groups; and loss of security.35 The reform process has generated intensive internal debate across the region, focused on the relative merits of ‘shock treatment’ versus ‘gradual approach’, with there being vociferous ‘gradualists’ even in the ‘reform’ countries. The state’s role was particularly at issue. Arguments for shock therapy stressed unrestricted market operation and minimal regulatory roles for the state. ‘Gradualists’ advocated a strong interventionist role for the state, and gradual privatization, arguing that slow approaches would minimize inevitable social costs. They also contended that efficient state enterprises should be maintained, pointing out that state-managed industries existed in Western Europe, and that the state has had important regulatory powers in all capitalist economies, many of which used subsidies and protectionist policies, and maintained social support networks. The debate has been continuing since 1989, but, in practical terms, a consensus seems to have emerged on a gradual approach to ‘big’ privatization – to minimize social costs and pathologies – and on continued strong regulatory economic role for the state, at least for a time. There is no question that ‘shock therapy’ has been successful, judging by economic indicators.36 It has also had extremely painful social consequences. The resulting backlash contributed to a slow-down in ‘big’ privatization and in restructuring of the welfare, health and other social systems. But, for all their various problems, the four countries that adopted deep reforms (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia) have now all turned the economic corner.

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Meanwhile, Romania’s and Bulgaria’s failure to adopt deep reforms undoubtedly produced the 1996–7 economic crisis. With continued state control of the industrial sector and an absence of Balcerowicz’s ‘engines of growth’, both ‘stragglers’ faced enormous foreign debts, catastrophic declines in currency exchange rates, falls in living standards, high and growing inflation, falls in the GDP, declines in exports, and virtual breakdowns of their social support systems. Corruption thrived and both economies were partly criminalized, with ties extending to Russia, the Ukraine and the former Yugoslavia. Both countries also faced popular anger, which finally brought to power new reform leaderships. As Petar Stoyanov, newly-elected President of Bulgaria, stated, ‘a factory for illusions must now be closed’.37

Legacies Values Communist legacies, structural and psychological, were noted earlier. But we need to re-examine their psychological dimensions. A study of the evolution of the value system by two Polish social psychologists illuminates the formation and survival of psychological legacies.38 Koralewicz and Ziolkowski distinguish two levels of consciousness: surface values, which are consciously adopted, fully articulated and are easy to change; and a subsurface ‘mentality’, which is neither fully conscious nor fully articulated. This ‘mentality’ is the product of life-experiences; it changes slowly in response to changing environments, and governs social behaviour. Of the four social sources of the value system formed in the forty years of Communist rule, only political culture was unique to a particular society. The other three – direct life-experiences; official socialization and propaganda; and outside influences – were shared by people across the region. Up to 1970s, the dominant value system was a mixture. Communist political systems were rejected (the denial of national sovereignty was a major component in rejection), but their socioeconomic features were accepted. The economic crisis of the 1980s cancelled out support for the command economy, but there was continuing approval of the system’s social features: its egalitarian values (the corruption that made a mockery of egalitarianism was another component in rejection), and social entitlements that gave the people a sense of security. Meanwhile, the

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seepage of Western ideas and images produced a general acceptance of the concepts of democracy and market; but social entitlements remained part of the new image. The change was articulated at the level of surface values and was largely perceived in instrumental terms. The new system was looked on as a path towards freedom and a ‘good life’ that would guarantee not only prosperity but also social protection. Few people saw their new democratic role in participatory terms. Most saw themselves being ‘consulted’: ‘we elect the leaders and then they’ll take care of us’, and expected the results to come automatically without further inputs from them. These attitudes reflected the existence, at the ‘mentality’ level, of the ‘subject’ political culture, defined by Koralewicz and Ziolkowski as the culture of ‘passivity’ and ‘responsibility avoidance’, ‘learnt helplessness’ and ‘primitive egalitarianism’, fostered by the years of Communist experience. It produced three basic types of social mentality: ‘a good and obedient worker’, politically inert and economically routinized; a ‘thieving–begging’ mentality of seekers after personal profit, an embodiment of adaptation; and an ‘autonomous– enterprising’ mentality, socially productive individualism combining autonomy with enterpreneurship. The first was promoted by the ancien régime, the second was inadvertently created by it, and the third was marginalized and combated.39 The first and second types of mentality were dominant when Communism collapsed, and both have been dysfunctional to participatory democracy and the market. It is the third type of mentality, the share of which has been growing under the impact of new experiences that will assure the democratic and economic future of East-Central Europe. But the surviving subject culture has remained as a posthumous vengeance de système, an ironic reminder that Karl Marx had a point in assuming that a social superstructure survives the destruction of its economic basis. It may take a generation to escape this particular legacy, considering that aspects of a subject culture could be found in traditional political cultures of the region as well. Rule of law and social alienation The rule of law was not necessarily the strongest feature of the region’s inter-war cultures, although it had strong historical roots in some countries. Under Communism, the view of law was purely instrumental; a tool in the hands of the party: changeable, adjustable or ignored at will. This perception differs radically from the Western concept of the ‘rule of law’ that imposes restraints on the ruler and the ruled alike.40 The

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Western concept has become an integral part of the new democratic order, but in practice the old ‘mentality’ is still alive and kicking. The region’s politicians have expressed commitments, undoubtedly genuine in most cases, to the ‘rule of law’. But in practice many have ignored constitutional and legal restraints if these obstruct what is seen as the country’s (or one’s own) ‘best interests’. They usually either by-pass the law, bend or change it, or rule by decree. Prevalence of corruption has also been the function of the old ‘mentality’. Disregard for the law goes hand-in-hand with ignorance of the ‘rules of the game’ as practised in democratic politics. At their most basic level, the latter imply bargaining and negotiation via institutionalized mechanisms for conflict resolution. They also imply tolerance by majorities for the rights of a minority as well as the acquiescence of minorities to majority rule. Post-Communist political arenas have been characterized instead by stalemates over the inability to bargain and to compromise, predilections to suppress opposing views and activities, and temptations by losers to resort to violence. An instrumental view of the law has also deeply penetrated popular culture and social behaviour. For many years, the sole goal in life of managers was to fulfil production targets, a task that usually could not be accomplished (or rewarded) without breaking the law. The workforce, on the other hand, learned to adhere to formal requirements, but had little incentive to innovate, take pride in their work, or increase productivity. Pay was low but jobs were secure – by definition there was no unemployment under Communism – and living expenses were subsidized under a system-specific ‘social contract’ that traded security for abstention from political action. General attitudes were expressed by a cynical slogan: ‘they pretend to pay us, while we pretend to work’. Cheating and theft, absenteeism, drinking on the job and working to rule were widespread. The unions were there to encourage workers to fulfil the plan and administer whatever social benefits were available. But they were not for bargaining. Thus, at conversion, not only was there a shortage of managerial know-how and bargaining skills, but also no motivation to work well, take initiative, or improve themselves. Another aspect of the old ‘mentality’ has been mutual distrust and lack of communication between the populace and its leaders. The region’s political, bureaucratic and intellectual elites tend to share condescending attitudes towards the people, derived as much from the concept of the ‘vanguard’ party as from traditional attitudes of East European intelligentsia. Voices were heard in Poland and Hungary that

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many transition problems might have been eased had there been better communication between policy-makers and the people, and better popular understanding of what was being done, and why. Popular thinking and behaviour reflected alienation from and distrust of the government. A ‘them/us’ perception was widespread under Communist rule. The citizens felt no responsibility for what ‘they’ were doing, yet at the same time citizens felt that ‘they’ owed the people all the things the rhetoric promised. People depended on government, but withdrew from all but required formal participation in political life and did not identify with the party-run political and social infrastructure. Both attitudes are characteristic of subject political culture. Polish sociologists, able to do research after 1956, were amazed to discover that Polish citizens identified only with family and nation, by-passing the numerous party-run groups, organizations, institutions and associations in between.41 Criteria of social success and prestige still reflected old subjective/political values – connections to important people and loyalty to political patrons – more than new objective/merit characteristics such as professional training and job performance. Old patterns of patronage and extra-legal or illegal activities survived in the operations of criminal networks acting together with strategically-placed officials, as noted earlier. These attitudes have been slow to die. The general perception of the loss of security and the need to cope with new uncertainties has served to reinforce the residual mentality. Ethnic conflict and xenophobia Ethnic conflict and xenophobia have historical roots in the region. Paradoxically, the war-time upheavals such as forced population transfers and ethnic cleansing carried out by the Nazi and Soviet regimes, as well as the post-war arbitrary redrawing of boundaries, reduced the potential for ethnic conflicts. But old antagonisms remained and it is a sign both of growing maturity of the new leaders and of Western influence that, unlike ethnic conflicts in the former Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia, these antagonisms have been significantly reduced since 1989. Some long-standing conflicts over territory and minorities’ treatment seem to have been resolved permanently: for example, Polish–Ukrainian, Polish–Lithuanian, Polish–German, Polish–Czech and Czech–German relations, even though residual local resentments may occasionally flare up. The long-standing Slovak demand for independent statehood was accommodated by the peaceful break-up of Czechoslovakia. Some

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conflicts have been scaled down: for example, Bulgaria’s conflicts with Turkey and Macedonia over the rights of Muslim and Macedonian minorities. Hungary’s quest to regain the lands lost in two world wars was replaced by a search for guarantees of equal treatment and national cultural rights for Hungarian minorities. Such treaties were concluded with the Ukraine, Croatia and Slovenia. But negotiations proved difficult over Hungarian rights in Romania’s Transylvania – one of the most explosive regional issues – and in Slovakia. Hungary signed treaties with both countries, although both granted their Hungarians individual rights only, refusing to acknowledge group minority rights. While relations with Romania’s new government promise improvement, the Meciar government denies Hungarians the use of their national symbols and national language. Meanwhile, Hungarian ethnic parties in Slovakia are de facto excluded from the political process. Serbia also ended the autonomy of the Voivodina province, where the Hungarian minority is located. Overall, however, there are no outstanding territorial issues between the post-Communist states of EastCentral Europe, and the treatment of minorities – apart from the exceptions noted – conforms to international regulations. Yet, popular xenophobia remains. It is evident in attitudes towards minorities and in still-surviving anti-Semitism and gypsybaiting, both reinforced by Nazi and Communist experience and years of living in closed societies. National prejudices were manipulated by Moscow and the ruling elites, and scapegoating was a frequent ploy. Another reason, as Vaclav Havel has pointed out, was that after the liberation, people transferred their own inadequacies on to easy-toblame targets: people need to find someone who is guilty. They are in a state of shock, caused by freedom; they lost all guarantees, they lost the hierarchy of values. It is a situation often compared to that faced by a newly released prisoner. When you are imprisoned, you look forward to the moment of freedom, but when they let you out you are suddenly helpless. You do not know what to do, and you even want to go back inside because you know what is there, whereas you do not know what awaits you outside. It is the same in the case of a society frustrated because it cannot cope with new freedoms and thus seeks an enemy who can be blamed for everything. It is obvious that an enemy that is easiest to find is someone who is different, at first glance, from the rest of us: a person speaking another language or with a different skin color. This is why they say it is the Vietnamese,

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or Gypsies, or some other ‘Others’, whose fault everything is. People … need an enemy to blame for … all their own frustrations, in order to escape from hell which is in themselves. Because it is much easier to point a finger at someone and to call him a devil, than it is to admit to one’s own weaknesses.42 Havel applies the simile of a suddenly-freed prisoner also to the general malaise of ‘debilitation syndrome’.43

A résumé This chapter’s emphasis on problems and legacies may seem to have left readers with a grim picture. In fact, it is grim, but only as a picture of the past. The future appears hopeful, testifying to the vitality, resilience and capabilities of the peoples of East-Central Europe. Notwithstanding the overwhelming problems and difficulties they have had to face since the collapse of Communism, in a short time the foundations have been laid for working democracies and market economies. The ballot box is there to stay and begins to be used to good advantage. None of the political incumbents, not even the former Communists, have tried to avert their impending political doom by tampering with free elections. The electorate, moreover, is jealous of the privilege and has shown growing maturity in exercising their democratic powers. The economic transition to capitalism, however painful and short of the final goal, has been successful in the four countries, which took the path of radical reform. The remaining two, deep in crisis caused by trying to avoid the pain, have now decided to follow suit, and it is hoped that they will eventually succeed. Two other points must be made in assessing the prospects for a better future. Seen in historical perspective, the international environment has been exceptionally favourable to the transformation. The two powers that traditionally divided the region, Germany and Russia, are no longer a threat. Germany is at the heart of an integrated Europe; Russia has withdrawn and may succeed in transforming from an imperial into a democratic identity. The success of West-European integration has created conditions that have made progress in East-Central Europe possible. Not the least of these has been the imposition, by the International Monetary Fund, the EU, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and other agencies, of rigorous

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parameters for economic change and rigorous criteria for democratization as the price of Western assistance and future integration into Europe. Finally, for all its persistence, the post-Communist ‘debilitation syndrome’, alias ‘old mentality’, did not prevent progress; moreover it will survive no more than a generation. Already, young people entering the labour market and becoming socially active have only the vaguest idea of the Communist past and do not share in their elders’ memories.

Notes and references 1. Quoted in P. C. Schmitter with T. L. Karl, ‘The Conceptual Travels of Transitologists and Consolidologists: How Far to the East Should They Attempt to Go?’, Slavic Review, vol. 53, no. 1, (Spring 1994) pp. 173–185. 2. The name of the region has been the cause of much confusion. Since l945 the term ‘Eastern Europe’ has commonly been used to describe the countries of East-Central Europe and the Balkans who came under the influence of the Soviet Union, including Yugoslavia and Albania which subsequently broke away. Since l989 the use of the original term, ‘East-Central Europe’, has largely been restored. At the same time some Russian and even Western sources now tend to apply the term ‘Eastern Europe’ to Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and the Baltic countries. ‘East-Central Europe’ will be used here. 3. ‘Privatization of state’ in Communist system is the term used to describe a process whereby the negation of the public sphere required by the system leads to informal institutionalization of the system of corruption into patronage networks dominated by interests of the ruling elites, and a system of privileges for selected social groups in exchange for political loyalty and withdrawal from autonomous political action. 4. Chalmers Johnson (ed), Change in Communist Systems (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1970). For a view of basic non-reformability of the system see T. Rakowska-Harmstone, ‘Aspects of Political Change’, T. Rakowska-Harmstone (ed),Perspectives for Change in Communist Societies (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1979) pp. 1–27. 5. E. Wnuk-Lipinski ‘Ksztaltowanie sie nowego ladu instytucyjnego’ (The formation of new institutional order), in M. Grabowska, K. Pankowski and E. Wnuk-Lipinski (eds), Spoleczne Konsekwencje Transformacji Ustrojowej (Social consequences of systemic transformation) (Warsaw: ISP PAN, 1994) 9–2 3.14.; see also J. Koralewicz and M. Ziolkowski, ‘Changing Value System’, Sisyphus. Social Studies, 1(IX) (1993) pp. 123–39. 6. G. O’Donnell, P. C. Schmitter and L. Whitehead (eds), Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins

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7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

University Press, 1986) was a pioneering contribution. J. J. Linz and A. Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) is a most comprehensive treatment of a typology that attempts to cover all cases. See S. M. Terry, ‘Thinking About Post-Communist Transitions: How Different Are They?’, Slavic Review, vol. 52, no. 2, (Summer 1993) pp. 333–7; A. C. Janos, ‘Social Science, Communism and the Dynamics of Political Change’, World Politics, vol. 44, no. 1. (October 1991), and others. For an extreme view rejecting comparisons see K. Jowitt, ‘Weber, Trotsky and Holmes on the Study of Leninist Regimes’, Journal of International Affairs (Summer 1991) pp. 31–50. Sovietology has been divided over the question of whether or not the system ceased to be totalitarian with Stalin’s demise. To this author, the totalitarian school (as represented by proponents rather than as described by critics intent on proving their thesis) was vindicated by events, and its perceptions validated by the scholars who were brought up under the system and have now finally become free to analyze it. Vaclav Havel, ‘The State of the Republic’, the translation of the address to the Parliament and Senate of the Czech Republic on 9 December 1997, The New York Review of Books, vol. XLV, no. 4 (5 March 1998) pp. 42–6. L. Balcerowicz, ‘Przeksztalcenia gospodarcze w Europie Srodkowej i Wschodniej – proba bilansu’ (Economic transformations in Central and Eastern Europe – An attempt at a balance sheet), Grabowska et al. Ksztaltowanie, pp. 24–30. Leszek Balcerowicz was minister of finance in the first two Polish governments, but was dropped in October 1991 because of the political backlash to his economic policies, the so-called ‘Balcerowicz Plan’. He returned to the government as the deputy premier in charge of the economy in the elections of November 1997. Schmitter with Karl ‘Conceptual Travels’, pp. 179. Among the factors affecting differentially the outcomes of regime changes in the East as opposed to the South, Schmitter includes: the point of departure, the extent of the collapse of ancien régimes, the role of external actors, and the sequence of transformation processes. Ibid. pp. 179–85. Wnuk-Lipinski, ‘Ksztaltowanie’; Grabowska et al. Spoleczne Konsekwencje, pp. 9–14. The scope of war destruction and elimination of the elites differed from country to country. Apart from what was then Western USSR, Poland was most devastated by both occupants (Nazi Germany and the USSR) in terms of human losses and population transfers. Former Axis satellites suffered few losses, except near the end of the war. Their elites were also destroyed, but mainly under Stalin. Wnuk-Lipinski, ‘Ksztaltowanie’; Grabowska et al., Spoleczne Konsekwencje, pp. 11–13. Ibid., pp. 9–10. Ibid., p. 12. The statement was prophetic given the victory of former Communists in subsequent Polish elections. The transformation was not stopped, only slowed down, because the new government also supported marketization.

Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone 189

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

The statement remains generally valid despite the return to power in Poland of the Solidarity-based coalition in 1997. This and the preceding paragraph are based on Ibid., pp. 14–22. The two patterns apply broadly to other post-Communist countries. There have been fewer ‘reformers’ and fewer success stories: Slovenia and the three Baltic republics. Polish workers have had effective veto power over political leadership since 1956. Riots and strikes changed the position of the Polish party’s first secretary in 1956, 1970 and 1980. Strikes in l988 forced the PUWP to negotiate with Solidarity. Mass demonstrations in other countries were instrumental in bringing down Communist regimes and, in the post-Communist period, were also used, notably in Bulgaria and Romania. The April 1989 Agreement gave substantial powers to the new office of the president (the incumbent then was the former First Communist Party Secretary, General Jaruzelski). Lech Walesa of Solidarity was the first popularly elected president, and he attempted to increase presidential powers in a battle with his former Solidarity colleagues who dominated Parliament. The battle continued when neo-Communists won the 1993 elections, but ceased when their former leader, Aleksander Kwasniewski, was elected president (1995). Parliamentary victory was consolidated in the 1996 Constitution: the still-extensive presidential powers can be exercised only with parliamentary approval. In March 1998, Meciar’s government defied the ruling of the Constitutional Court and cancelled a planned referendum on direct presidential elections. The incumbent president’s term of office was finished, no successor was designated, and presidential powers were to be absorbed by the prime minister: Boston Globe, ‘World Briefs’, 3 March 1998. The role played by Bulgaria’s Constitutional Court is particularly interesting. See V. E. Ganev, ‘Bulgaria’s Symphony of Hope’, Journal of Democracy, vol. 8, no. 4, (October 1997). Unfortunately, authoritarian temptation proved to be much stronger elsewhere in post-Communist area. Havel, ‘The State of the Republic’, p. 45. See J. Frentzel-Zagorska ‘Civil Society in Poland and Hungary’, Soviet Studies, vol. 42, no. 4, (1990) pp. 759–77. ‘Politics and Manners’, Polityka (Warsaw) 7 December 1991. The following analysis is based on Balcerowicz, Przeksztalcenia gospodarcze, Grabowska et al., Spoleczne Konsekwencje , pp. 24–39. It was low in Hungary and high in Poland and Slovakia. In the GDR, the proportion was 80 per cent at the time of the merger of the two Germanys. Under command economies the sole criterion of managerial success was plan fulfilment. The supply and distribution networks were controlled by the state, as were the wages. Sponsored by the then minister of finance, Vaclav Klaus, who subsequently became prime minister and remained in power until his forced resignation in December 1997 over financial scandals. In Czechoslovakia, most of the new mega-industries were in Slovakia which eased the Czech situation after the break-up, in contrast to Slovakia, where this made the reform more painful, with high unemployment rates.

190 Post-Communist East-Central Europe 32. In Bulgaria, the non-Communist UDF government was in power for eleven months (1991–2) and started radical reforms that were subsequently reversed. 33. Jeffrey Sachs, adviser to the Polish government, criticized the slow pace of privatization in East-Central Europe at a 1992 meeting of the American Economics Association: ‘Privatization in Eastern Europe has been a debacle. Every Eastern European country has failed, and failed significantly, to find new owners for state-owned enterprises.’ The point, especially criticized, was the failure to distribute shares to workers and increase the value of a company: New York Times, 6 January 1992. 34. The 1997 Czech banking crisis, which erupted in the wake of a string of investment funds swindles, caused the resignation of Prime Minister Klaus. State banks played a major role in the transfer of state money to subsidize money-loosing industrial behemoths (and lining directors’ and middlemen’s pockets) which led to the crises in Bulgaria and Romania. The Economist, 19 October 1996, 3 May 1997, and passim. 35. Balcerowicz, ‘Przeksztalcenia gospodarcze’, Grabowska et al., Spoleczne Konsekwencje, pp. 37–38. 36. Since 1994, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary have shown positive GDP indicators, and in all three the share of the private sector in the GDP has passed the 50 per cent mark. 37. Quoted in ‘Bulgaria’s Best and Worst of Times’, Meeting Report, no. 133, The Woodrow Wilson Center for East European Studies (May–June 1997). 38. J. Koralewicz and M. Ziolkowski, ‘Changing Value System’. 39. Ibid., pp. 132–3. 40. For a discussion of the instrumental view of the law under Communism see T. Rakowska-Harmstone, ‘Communist Constitutions and Constitutional Change’, in K. G. Banting and R. Simeon (eds), The Politics of Constitutional Change in Industrial Nations:Redesigning the State (London: Macmillan, 1985) pp. 203–31. 41. S. Nowak, ‘Values and Attitudes of the Polish People’, Scientific American, vol. 245 (July 1981) pp. 45–53. 42. In conversation with Adam Michnik, Gazeta Wyborcza, 30 November 1991. 43. Havel, ‘The State of the Republic’, pp. 42.

10 Russia’s Democratic Transition and Its Challenges Vera Tolz

This chapter will discuss democratic achievements and challenges to democratization in Russia since 1985. It will then examine the prospects for democratic development in the context of Russia’s ability to learn from its own past experience and from the West. However, we shall look first at the relevant history. The first attempt at democratization before the present phase was undertaken by the Provisional government, which was in power between March 1917 (when the tsar abdicated) and the Bolshevik takeover in October of that year. It was the first time in Russian history that free competitive elections, the outcome of which would determine who governed, were planned. However, liberally-minded intellectuals, who sought to work out a more democratic electoral law than existed elsewhere in Europe at the time, turned out to be inexperienced in matters of state and therefore failed to cope with the pressures of the war and economic crisis. So, in a matter of months, before the elections to the Constituent Assembly could take place, they had lost power to the party that eventually established a dictatorial regime. Attempts to liberalize this dictatorial regime in the late 1950s – early 1960s by Nikita Khrushchev could not be described as democratization, because he had no intention of relinquishing the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s (CPSU’s) monopoly of power or introducing free and fair elections. It was his distant successor in the leadership of the CPSU, Mikhail Gorbachev who, probably unintentionally, moved Russia in the mid-1980s on the road towards democratization by allowing partially free parliamentary elections, legalizing non-Communist political groups and abolishing press censorship. Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan argue that ‘Gorbachev never at any time from 1985 to 1991 unequivocally committed himself … to democratization in the strict sense. That is, 191

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freely contested, all-union, multi-party elections whose winners would form a government at the center.’1 This is indeed the case. However, the 1990 elections to the Parliaments of the USSR’s fifteen Union republics did produce new popularly elected governments in such areas as the Baltic republics, Georgia, Armenia, Moldova and, arguably, even in the Russian Federation, the Ukraine and Belarus. The policies of these new governments facilitated the break-up of the Soviet Union in December 1991. The governments of the fifteen successor states which emerged from the disintegrated USSR, including the Russian Federation, all pledged their commitment to democracy. At the time of the USSR’s disintegration, many internal and foreign observers expressed optimism over Russia’s chances to build a viable democratic system, as they were inspired by the rapid success of Moscow’s liberalizing policies in the late 1980s. The developments since late 1992 not only toned down the initial optimism, but even led to fears that, as had always been the case in the past, democratic reform was again being followed by authoritarian retreat. Elections in a new post-Communist Parliament as well as the adoption of a new constitution were postponed until December 1993. Instead, the first two years of post-Communism were marked by the president’s and the old Parliament’s (Congress of People’s Deputies) attempts to amend the 1979 constitution with the aim of increasing their respective powers. This struggle ended by means indicating that Russian politicians were still unable to solve problems by peaceful methods, let alone democratic ones. President Boris Yeltsin disbanded the Congress of People’s Deputies by decree, despite the fact that he was not permitted to do so by the then existing legislation, and used military force to make the deputies obey his orders. The new, subsequently adopted constitution vests the president with powers that far exceed those of any head of state in an established democracy. Despite the proliferation of organizations with political goals under Mikhail Gorbachev, real political parties have been slow to emerge, and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) remains the largest and best-organized political group in Russia. Some may even argue that financial dependence on the government makes the media less free than they were in 1990–1, when the Soviet press law abolishing censorship was in force. Finally, the war in Chechnya in 1994–7 re-emphasized the Russian government’s usage of unconstitutional methods to deal with severe challenges to its powers: even optimists agree that elements of democracy and authoritarianism, oligarchy and anarchy co-exist. Many would argue that democratic

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elements are the weakest, being constantly challenged by other ‘facets’ of the Russia of the late 1990s.2

Democratic elements If compared with the period prior to Gorbachev’s perestroika, Russia has gone a long way towards breaking with its authoritarian past. The use of free, multi-candidate elections as the means of selecting leaders to a number of top offices, toleration of political opposition, which now dominates the Parliament; the creation of the Constitutional Court to monitor politicians’ compliance with the constitution; the abolition of political censorship of the media; freedom to travel and to set up political parties; and the legalization of private ownership – all these are democratic achievements of considerable importance in the Russian context. The abolition of political censorship, the freedom to travel abroad, the toleration of political opposition and legalization of nonCommunist political groups were the achievements of Gorbachev’s reforms in 1985–90. Continuing what Gorbachev had begun, Yeltsin’s leadership created the Constitutional Court in 1991 and fully legalized the private ownership of the means of production the following year. In 1989–90, Gorbachev liberalized the procedure for parliamentary elections. In 1991 Yeltsin abolished the remaining privileges enjoyed by the Communist Party during elections and opened a range of other offices (most notably those of the president and regional leaders) to a popular vote.3 However, all these achievements have their limitations, which can be demonstrated effectively by using elections as an example. The procedural definition of democracy currently accepted by the majority of students of democratization stipulates as a minimum requirement ‘the selection of leaders through competitive elections by the people they govern’.4 Elections of the president, Parliament and leaders of Russia’s constituent units are now firmly in place. Despite speculation that Yeltsin would annul the results of the 1993 and 1995 parliamentary elections, the president refrained from doing so and on a number of occasions chose instead to negotiate compromises with his opponents in Parliament. Predictions that he would postpone the 1996 presidential elections, in view of the high chances for the victory of the CPRF leader Gennadii Ziuganov, also turned out to be false, and elections took place as scheduled. Similarly, gubernatorial elections in Russian regions in December 1996 meant that all top leaders of Russia’s

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constituent units are now elected by voting, rather than appointed by the president. International observers, who were present at all those elections, deemed them to be free. As yet, however, Russia does not meet even the minimum definition of a consolidated democracy. Samuel Huntington argues that the main criteria for measuring democratic consolidation is ‘the two-turn over test’. ‘By this test, a democracy may be viewed as consolidated if the party or group that takes power in the initial election at the time of transition loses a subsequent election and turns over power to those election winners, and if those election winners then peacefully turn over power to the winners of a later election.’ 5 In 1996, Yeltsin was re-elected for the second term as president and, according to the Russian press reports, various electoral irregularities were at least partly accountable for this outcome. Whereas elections in Russia are free, there is evidence to suggest that they are not necessarily fair. During election campaigns, incumbent politicians enjoy advantages in access to funds and the media. For example, according to the estimates by Komsomolskaia pravda, during the 1996 presidential election campaign, Yeltsin accounted for 75 per cent of the election coverage in print media and 90 per cent of TV coverage.6 To cite another example, in the absence of the federal legislation on the formation of organs of state power in Russia’s constituent units, and of the law on governors, incumbent governors were permitted to determine electoral rules. Many reportedly used the opportunity to draft laws that helped them to filter out potentially strong rivals.7 After each round of elections, the Russian press carries stories by volunteer workers at polling stations about the alleged falsification of results.8 (How accurate these stories are is hard to assess, as the results of the elections do not always meet the expectations of the incumbents.)9 Another shortcoming of the Russian system is that many important offices are still filled with appointed officials. This is particularly noticeable at the regional level, where governors try to keep the number of regional and local offices open for elections as low as possible. But even at the federal level, unelected members of the executive branch, whose functions are not specified by the constitution, have very broad powers, which exceed those of elected officials. Thus, the chief of presidential staff, Anatolii Chubais, was a key figure in governmental decision-making during Yeltsin’s protracted illness in 1996. Finally, elections have not necessarily made elected officials accountable to their constituencies. The overwhelming majority of promises made by politicians at all levels during their election campaigns are safely

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forgotten as soon as the victory has been achieved.10 The best example of this is the payment of salaries and wages to citizens who work for the state. The irregularity of those payments is arguably the most difficult part of Russian life today. During election campaigns, federal and local governments pay all their debts to state employees and promise the continuation of regular payments in the future. As soon as the elections are over, the payment again becomes sporadic.

Impediments to democratization The two greatest challenges to democratic developments in Russia are the authoritarian tendencies of government and the rent-seeking activities of Russia’s economic oligarchs. Authoritarian tendencies are manifested in the government’s prime concern with self-preservation, even if it means a blatant violation of existing legislation by leaders. According to Adam Przeworski: The process of establishing a democracy is a process of institutionalizing uncertainty … In an authoritarian regime, some groups have a high degree of control over the situation in the sense that they are not forced to accept undesirable outcomes … Democracy means that all groups must subject their interests to uncertainty.11 This is precisely what the current Russian political elite, the majority of whose members belong to the old Communist nomenklatura, are trying to avoid.12 After many candidates supported by the opposition won gubernatorial elections in December 1996, various schemes were instigated among the presidential apparatus aimed at the continued control of governors, who no longer depended on the president for their posts.13 The manipulation of elections helps to exclude newcomers from entering the now well-established circle of the Russian ruling elite. Furthermore, the way Russian industry was privatized largely entrenched the power of top politicians and economic managers by making them the legal owners of property which they had controlled in the Soviet period. To a large extent, the new Russian constitution was written with a view to safeguarding President Yeltsin from the sort of challenges to which he had been subjected by the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1991–3. First, the constitution limited the ability of the Constitutional Court to monitor the legality of politicians’ (especially presidential) actions. The constitution is also marked by the great imbalance of power in favour of the president; it

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makes the new legislature (Federal Assembly) considerably weaker than a Parliament in a democratic country is expected to be. Although the Parliament’s Lower Chamber, the State Duma, is at the heart of the legislative process, other bodies, including the government and the president, are also allowed to initiate legislation. Most importantly, the president can issue decrees that have the status of law. The constitution does not enumerate the subjects on which the president can issue his or her decrees; neither is it clear whether presidential decrees or laws passed by Parliament should take precedence in instances of contradiction. The practice so far has been to allow presidential decrees to have the upper hand.14 Moreover, some of Yeltsin’s decrees violate the constitution itself. For example, in December 1994, Yeltsin failed to consult the Upper Chamber of the parliament, the Federation Council, when issuing his decree on the use of the army in Chechnya, despite the fact that the constitution required him to do so. In March 1998, the president violated the constitution when he dismissed the entire cabinet of ministers, including the prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin. According to the constitution, in the event of the dismissal of the entire cabinet by the president, the ministers are to continue working until a completely new cabinet is formed. In March 1998, this did not happen. If a prime minister is dismissed, only a deputy premier can be appointed as acting head of government until a new prime minister is selected. Sergei Kirienko, who was appointed by Yeltsin as acting prime minister, had previously been minister of fuel and energy.15 Laws initiated by Parliament come into force after the president signs them. His veto can be overcome only if two-thirds of the deputies in both chapters of the Federal Assembly vote again in favour of the legislation, and it is difficult to reach such a consensus among deputies. The president also enjoys the power to interpret law. He or she can suspend acts issued by ruling bodies in Russia’s constituent units, if in his/her opinion, they contradict the constitution, federal laws, or international treaties on human or civil rights. (In 1991–3, that was the prerogative of the Constitutional Court.) The president may also act as final arbiter in conflicts between federal and regional bodies and in interregional disputes, thus violating one of the main principles of a federal system – namely, that the federal authorities may not unilaterally define the powers of regional governments. The Federal Assembly has very limited influence on the formation of the government. The government, in turn, also enjoys little independence from the president. The president nominates the prime minister

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and can chair cabinet meetings. The State Duma has to confirm the president’s nominee for the premier’s post. However, if the Duma turns down the nominee(s) three times, the president has the right to dissolve the Duma and call new elections. The 1993 constitution also granted the president direct control over four key ministries: those of security, defence, internal affairs; and foreign affairs. The office of prime minister therefore exercises only partial control over its own ministers. Many sweeping powers accorded to the Russian president (the right to appoint leading members of the government, to dominate foreign policy, and to dissolve Parliament, for example) are similar to those of the president of the French Fifth Republic, especially as interpreted by Charles de Gaulle. A number of Russian and Western observers have expressed the hope that Yeltsin will use his position to build a more stable political system in Russia, as de Gaulle did in France. As will be shown later, the current political order in Russia is far more stable than was the case prior to the adoption of the new constitution. Yet the French National Assembly retained the essential parliamentary function in a democracy – the right to monitor the activities of the government. The Russian Federal Assembly, by contrast, can do little more than adopt legislation. Moreover, its ability to do so in matters directly affecting the executive branch is limited, since such legislation (for example, on the matter of taxation and budgetary policy) becomes valid only with the government’s consent.16 An even greater challenge to democratic development seems to come from the symbiotic relationship between rent-seeking and rent-giving, which unites Russian political leaders and economic oligarchs (owners and managers of big industrial monopolies). 17 Commenting on this relationship, Stephen Holmes observed that ‘The social contract in Russia today can be described as an exchange of unaccountable power for untaxable wealth … This is a contract between political and economic elites. The rest of society, the great mass of citizens, are left out’.18 Under this ‘contract’, legally-run private and state institutions seek from the government the right to become politically-backed monopolies through tax exemptions, state subsidies, and farm or import quotas or licenses. The benefits that government officials gain from these relationships range from financial dividends to the invaluable support provided by these businesses during election campaigns. While the Russian government complains about huge tax evasion, its members simultaneously grant tax exemptions to the biggest and richest companies. In most instances, representatives of the government who act as patrons of

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powerful businesses have a direct financial interest in their proliferation. Commenting on this situation, Grigorii Yavlinsky, the leader of the reformist YABLOKO faction in the State Duma, observed: How odd that we are striving to collect revenue from little old ladies while Russia’s nickel reserves (which represent 36 per cent of the world’s known total) are given a presidentially decreed tax exemption worth $1.2 billion. Then again, perhaps it is not so odd, especially when you consider that the prime minister owns this nickel enterprise.19 Yavlinsky and others argue that the fact that, on assuming government office, people do not have to relinquish their private business interests leads to open corruption. The latter is more threatening to democracy than the hidden activities of organized crime, although the mafia controls fully or partially almost all small and medium-sized Russian businesses. Indeed, the oligarchs now finance and therefore control the most influential media outlets, including the largest private TV company (NTV) – a situation, that undermines popular trust in the media. In turn, the oligarchs’ heavy financial involvement in election campaigns makes many Russians believe that anyone with the right financial backing can win elections.20

Stability instead of democracy Despite the shortcomings of the 1993 Russian constitution, the flourishing corruption and burgeoning economic problems, the post-Communist Russian government has achievements to its credit. The most important of these is the stabilization of political life. The war in Chechnya notwithstanding, since 1993 most political battles have been waged roughly within the framework of the new constitution. Moreover, predictions of huge social upheavals in response to economic hardship, and even of a civil war between reformers and Communist supporters, have not yet come true, at least not by the time of writing this chapter. The most important reason for relative calm is to be found outside the area of the government’s control: it is the political apathy of the population. The high politicization of society in the last years of perestroika simply could not be sustained indefinitely. The beginning of economic reforms turned the majority of the population away from

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politics: the more fortunate have been busy taking advantage of new opportunities, and those less fortunate have been preoccupied with day-to-day problem of making ends meet. In addition, the increased decentralization of the country has made the majority of people almost indifferent to what is going on in Moscow or anywhere else outside their own localities. Political mobilization of the population is currently difficult to achieve for any party or leader. Yet the government’s contribution to stability is also significant. Despite the absence of major social upheavals, the leadership is well aware that it still needs to achieve a consensus over its reforms. The 1996 presidential elections demonstrated that the country is still divided into two camps – those who, while not necessarily supporting Yeltsin’s policies, do not see any alternative to them, and those who oppose what has happened in Russia since 1991 so strongly that they are prepared to vote for the leader of the Communist opposition. In 1994, in the wake of the violent clashes of October 1993 and the December 1993 constitutional referendum and parliamentary elections, which showed the unpopularity of the government’s economic policies, the Yeltsin leadership first started adopting measures aimed at consolidating Russia’s polarized society. The Civic Accord, signed in April 1994 by Yeltsin, other top government and state officials, politicians (including many from opposition parties) and representatives of Russia’s constituent regions, was widely compared in the pro-Yeltsin Russian media to Spain’s Moncloa Pact of 1977, which produced a broad consensus on socioeconomic policies.21 Those signing the Civic Accord, above all, promised to refrain from employing unconstitutional methods in pursuing their political goals and to seek access to power only though elections. The Russian pact has not been as successful as the Spanish one, but the initiative illustrated the leadership’s determination to substitute consolidation for confrontation. This was a very significant change in the behaviour of the Russian political elite. It was the first time since the beginning of Russia’s transition in 1985 that representatives of the country’s political elite had attempted to forge a consensus.22 The Civic Accord’s stabilizing effect seemed to be short lived, but other factors that have enhanced stability should not be overlooked. For all its shortcomings, the new constitution is at least more difficult to change than its predecessor. That is a significant improvement: most of the clashes between the president and the old Parliament stemmed from the politicians’ attempts to amend the constitution to

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increase their own powers. The separation of power between the executive, legislature and judiciary is also defined more clearly. Between 1994 and 1997, the Federal Assembly was more willing to co-operate with the executive than was the Congress of People’s Deputies. This is partly because the new constitution gives the president the power to disband the Federal Assembly, and the deputies were keen to avoid the fate of their predecessors. The restricted powers of the new Parliament to influence the decisions of the executive, and the departure from the government of most radical reformers in 1994 (who would have found it difficult to work with the hard-liners in the State Duma) also reduced confrontation. Furthermore, the Parliaments elected in 1993 and 1995 were themselves better organized and more efficient: there were by then established factions whose members observed internal party discipline. Between 1994 and 1997, on several occasions, deputies worked together with representatives of the president and the government in joint commissions to find mutually acceptable solutions. All the federal budgets in this period were adopted after such negotiations. So did other important pieces of legislation, such as the first part of the Civic Code, the law on localself-government and the law on elections to the State Duma. On several occasions the president accepted parliamentary decisions he had initially opposed. For example, this was the case with the 1994 amnesty, which the Duma wanted to grant to all insurgents who resisted the disbandment of the old Parliament in October 1993, and with the law on the Duma elections. Between December 1992 and March 1998, Prime Minister Chernomyrdin’s talent for working with a variety of political groups also had a stabilizing influence. Chernomyrdin was able to establish much better working relations with the leaders of Russia’s constituent units than Yegor Gaidar, the previous acting head of the government, had been able to do. Chernomyrdin has largely been responsible for the policy of neutralizing the militant anti-Yeltsin opposition, by co-opting its representatives into the government. Finally, the war in Chechnya notwithstanding, there is an overall stability in centre-periphery relations, as a consensus now exists between the federal government and the leaders of Russia’s constituent units over the delineation of authority. In 1994–6, a series of bilateral treaties were signed between Moscow and the majority of Russia’s regions, specifying the regions’ political and economic prerogatives.23 On most occasions, the treaties were a result of protracted negotiations, in which both sides had to make compromises.

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Prospects It is hard to speculate about the outcome of Russia’s current transition. Even moderate optimists agree that ‘one cannot be sure what the end point of this new Russian ‘time of troubles’ will be, liberalism, democracy, a new authoritarianism or worse’.24 There are genuine obstacles on the way to Russia’s democratization: in particular, a weak tradition of private property, an underdeveloped middle class, and difficulties in restructuring the economic system. Even the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation is contested by those politicians who campaign for the restoration of the Soviet Union and by leaders of the non-Russian autonomous republics, especially Chechnya, who seek independence from Moscow. Yet, the Russia of the 1990s, an urbanized, industrialized country with a highly educated population, meets the prerequisites for democracy to a much greater extent than it did in 1917, when almost 80 per cent of the population lived in the countryside and the majority were illiterate. Despite the economic hardships of the post-Communist period, rising crime and widespread corruption, the majority of Russians are still in favour of democratic changes. Surveys conducted by the New Russia Barometer (NRB) indicate that ‘Russians are very positive about the personal freedoms that the new regime gives them, and half prefer “windowshopping” market economy (lots of goods at high prices) to a planned economy with low prices but empty shelves.’ 25 Yet, according to an NRB survey in 1996, even when the popularity of Yeltsin’s regime increased following his electoral success, the majority of Russians were to varying degrees pessimistic: 39 per cent were complete pessimists – they were negative about the current government and were not expecting improvements after the millennium; 23 per cent were critical of the government’s current performance, but expected improvements in future. Only a minority (38 per cent) had a positive response to the new regime and feelings about the future.26 The performance of a country’s leadership during democratization is highly important. In the 1960s, the assumption prevailed that prerequisites regarding culture, modernization and the economy were of utmost importance for a country to succeed in its democratization. The pattern of a new wave of democratization in the 1970s and 1980s led scholars to believe that choices made by political elites, their ability to learn from their own mistakes, and the design of new political institutions could play a more important role in the success of democratization than the existence of the prerequisites for democracy.

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As for the design of new political institutions, Russia’s case encourages pessimism. As mentioned earlier, the Russian constitution establishes a strong presidential system and a weak Parliament, where no political group is holding a working majority at the time of writing. (In the Duma, elected in 1995, the pro-Communist bloc, the largest single group of deputies, holds only 45 per cent of the seats.) According to the study of 135 countries that attempted democratization between 1950 and 1990, conducted by Przeworski et al., democracies have much better chances of survival in parliamentary rather than presidential systems: ‘Combining presidentialism with a legislature where no single party has majority status is a kiss of death.’27 This is precisely the arrangement that is currently in place in Russia. So the State Duma’s attempts to introduce constitutional arrangements aimed at increasing Parliament’s powers should be seen as positive steps towards democratization regardless of the political orientation of deputies. As for the behaviour of the political elites, behind the rhetoric of democratization, the Russian government has often relied on traditional (that is, undemocratic) methods in its attempts to retain some degree of control over the situation in the country. The current stability is tied to a large extent to the personality of the president, who takes the role of arbiter and mediator between various political and economic interest groups. At the same time, the president, with all his powers, relies less on the government than on parallel and largely unconstitutional bodies within the office of the president. Various members of the presidential administration, whose functions are not covered by any law, duplicate the duties of government ministers. This arrangement is similar to the one existing under the Communist regime, when the duties of Communist Party Central Committee secretaries and those of members of the council of ministers overlapped significantly. At the regional level, governors find it difficult to tolerate the free press and, like their colleagues in Moscow, use the office to pursue their private business interests. The behaviour of Russian politicians confirm the observations of Victor M. Perez-Diaz about the elite behaviour during the period of transition. Using Spain in the 1970s and 1980s as an example, he concluded: The fact is that only very rarely do these people [political leaders] face problem situations as rational choice makers, weighing the costs, benefits, risks, and probabilities of success of several alternatives, in the short, medium, and long run. More often they simply react to the

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situation at hand and to others’ responses to it in the framework of previously existing traditions that shape their preferences and their definitions of the situation.28 At the same time, some learning is taking place among Russia’s ruling elite, and the model for imitation is still Western democracies. In the late 1990s all political leaders in post-Communist countries have to recognize the compelling power of the idea of democracy. In the months following the break-up of the Soviet Union, Yeltsin and members of his government were united in the view that they would be able to abandon Russia’s past practices and accept the West (and especially the USA) as the unquestionable model for imitation. Simultaneously, there was hope for Russia’s speedy integration into European structures. Since 1993, the shortage of immediate positive results from the change and the feeling that Russia yet again had been excluded from Europe, has led to an increase in anti-Western sentiments. Even liberal intellectuals and – politicians began to talk about Russia’s unique path of development, as had their predecessors in the nineteenth century.29 Nevertheless, in the late 1990s Russia there is a widespread belief among the political elite that, in order to survive, Russia needs Western co-operation and thus has to behave as a responsible member of the international community.30 That is why the most basic democratic procedures in Russia are observed. In 1996, Yeltsin went ahead with presidential elections, the outcome of which he could not fully control, and permitted gubernatorial elections, which diminished his power over regional leaders. There are other factors making the return to the authoritarian regime as it had existed prior to Gorbachev’s perestroika unlikely. Regional leaders will strongly resist the reimposition of centralized control from Moscow. Most people are now so used to finding a variety of viewpoints in the media, and to enjoying the right to express their dissatisfaction with the government openly (for example, through strikes), that a new wave of terror will be needed to make them agree to lose this freedom. Currently, the government is too weak, and cannot rely on the support of the armed forces to reinstate tight control over society. Such a situation may be expected to continue in the foreseeable future. In other words, even the Communist opposition cannot offer a real alternative to democratization. The continuation of relative stability, when major political players seem to be accepting the existing rules of the game, gives some hope that Russia will be able, however slowly, to consolidate its democratic achievements.

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Notes and references 1. Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) p. 378. 2. Vladimir Shlapentokh, ‘The Four Faces of Mother Russia’, Transitions, vol. 4, no. 5, (October 1997), pp. 59–65; Michael Urban, The Rebirth of Politics in Russia (Cambridge University Press, 1997) p. 92; Lilia Shevtsova and Scott A. Bruckner, ‘Where is Russia Headed? Toward Stablity or Crisis?’, Journal of Democracy, vol. 8, no. 1,(1997) pp. 12–26. 3. The first-ever presidential elections in Russia were held in 1991, and by December 1996 the majority of regional leaders were also elected. 4. Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave. Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, OK.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991) p. 6. 5. Huntington, The Third Wave, pp. 266–7. 6. Komsomolskaia pravda, 30 April 1996. 7. Nezavisimaya gazeta, 5 March 1996, p. 2 and Izvestiia, 9 December 1995, p. 2. 8. A. A. Sobianin and B. G. Sukhovolskii, Demokratiia ogranichennaia falsifikatsiiami: vybory i referendumy v Rossii v 1991–1993 gg. (Moscow: Proektnaia gruppa po pravam cheloveka, 1995). 9. In the 1996 gubernatorial elections, almost half of the incumbents did not win. See Vera Tolz and Irina Busygina, ‘Regional Governors and the Kremlin: The Ongoing Battle for Power’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, vol. 30, no. 4 (1997) pp. 401–26. 10. Shevtsova and Bruckner, ‘Toward Stability or Crisis’, p. 14. 11. Adam Przeworski, ‘Some Problems in the Study of the Transition to Democracy’, in G. O’Donnell (et al. (eds), Transitions from Authoritarian Rule. Comparative Perspective (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), p. 58. 12. On the composition of the post-Communist ruling elite, see Steven White and Olga Kryshtanovskaya, ‘From Soviet Nomenklatura to Russian Elite’, Europe–Asia Studies, vol. 48, no. 5 (1996) pp. 728–99. 13. Kommersant-daily, 26 October 1996. 14. Alexey Alyushin, ‘Russia’, East European Constitutional Review, vol. 4, no. 2 (Spring 1995) pp. 65–6. 15. Konstantin Katanyan, Nezavisimaya gazeta, 24 March 1998. 16. Richard Sakwa, Russian Politics and Society (London: Routledge, 1996) pp. 147–8. 17. Shlapentokh, ‘The Four Faces of Mother Russia’, pp. 60–2. 18. Stephen Holmes, ‘When Less State Means Less Freedom’, Transitions, vol. 4, no. 4 (September, 1997) pp. 74. 19. Grigorii Yavlinsky, ‘Where Is Russia Headed? An Uncertain Prognosis’, Journal of Democracy, vol. 8, no. 1 (1997) pp. 6. 20. Shlapentokh, ‘The Four Faces of Mother Russia’, p. 64. 21. Vera Tolz, ‘The Civic Accord: Contributing to Russia’s Stablitiy?’ RFE/RL Research Report, vol. 3, no. 19 (May 1994) pp. 1–5.

Vera Tolz 205 22. The ability to reach a broad consensus between various political groups on political and economic reforms and on the redistribution of power usually contributes to the success of democratization. See Huntington, The Third Wave, p. 165. 23. S. L. Solnik, ‘Federal Bargaining in Russia’, East European Constitutional Review, vol. 4, no. 4, (1995) pp. 52–9. 24. Sakwa, Russian Politics and Society, p. 393. 25. Richard Rose, ‘Where Are Post-Communist Countries Going?’, Journal of Democracy, vol. 8, no. 3, (1997) p. 102. 26. Ibid., p. 105. 27. A. Przeworski et al., ‘What Makes Democracies Endure?’, Journal of Democracy, vol. 7, no. 1, (1996) p. 46. 28. Victor Perez-Diaz, The Return of Civil Society. The Emergence of Democratic Spain (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993) p. 39. 29. See, for example, V. M. Mezhuev, ‘Rossiiskii put tsivilizovannogo razvitiia’, in V. M. Mezhuev, Mezhdu proshlym i budushchim (Moscow: Rossiiskaia Akademiia Nauk, Institut filosofii, 1996) pp. 128–50. 30. Shevtsova and Bruckner, ‘Toward Stability or Crisis?’, p. 24.

11 Insiders, Mafiosi and Stationary Bandits: Some Stories about Russian Capitalism Philip Hanson

Introduction: Is Russia different? The character of post-Soviet Russian capitalism has, I believe, much to do with the character of the new Russian democracy. A capitalist economic order may well be, as Milton Friedman and others have argued, a necessary condition of the existence of a democratic political order. Certainly, the historical evidence is, on this issue, entirely Friedmanite. But it would be hard to contend that capitalist economic arrangements are a sufficient condition. It would be equally hard to maintain that all versions of a capitalist economic order infallibly produce widespread prosperity. More to the present point: political and economic institutions are so intimately connected that defects in one of them may well have their counterparts in the other. It will be argued here that there are some serious weaknesses in the emerging Russian capitalist order, and that they have their origins in patterns of social behaviour that may also present obstacles to effective, fair and open government. The emerging Russian version of capitalism is puzzling. What has happened so far can be interpreted in two ways. One is that we are simply witnessing a transformation from central administration to the market more protracted and difficult than that seen in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic; but once things settle down Russia will be, so to speak, one of us. The other interpretation, which I think is quite plausible, is that Russian capitalism is already exhibiting a very special character of its own, and that this may be quite durable. If there is something in the second interpretation, an obvious question arises: is the special institutional shape that is being 206

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asserted one that conforms to all the best Russian traditions? In other words, does it mean there is more trouble ahead? These are the rather speculative thoughts that prompted the writing of this chapter. Of course, a settled Russian capitalism, such as that of Germany, France or Japan, will necessarily display some national institutional quirks thus making it something other than an organizational clone of somewhere else. But some economies are more different than others, and some that are undeniably members of the capitalist family of economic systems have institutional features that seem to hamper long-run economic performance. In particular, there are countries and regions of countries that seem to be dogged by levels of crime and corruption that show up, apparently, in a combination of poor government and poor corporate governance that is inimical to strong economic performance. Not all such countries or regions are in the less-developed world: southern Italy, by some accounts, fits this picture.1 Are there signs that Russia is transforming itself into a new kind of basket-case? Certain unusual features of the new Russian economy have led Western economists to advance rather novel ideas about what is happening there. These characteristics lend some credibility to the view that Russian society is mutating into a special sort of capitalism, with no close parallels. A common feature of these accounts is that they assign great weight to crime and corruption as impediments to Russian economic development. In general, these stories about the emerging Russian capitalist order are not encouraging. But are the stories convincing? It makes sense to begin by describing, in broad terms, the present state of the Russian attempt at economic transformation. After that, I shall summarize and discuss three recent stories about the supposed peculiarity of Russian capitalism, and conclude with a story of my own that is somewhat less gloomy. I shall argue that a focus on organized crime and corruption is too narrow, and more to do with symptoms than causes. The alternative view put forward is that institutional weaknesses in the emerging Russian version of capitalism are more usefully traced to a weak rule of law, weak public administration and a lack of contestable markets for corporate control; and these, in turn, may perhaps be best understood with the help of ideas about social capital and norms of civic engagement – features of a society that have generally changed very slowly. This view is expounded more fully elsewhere.2

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The transformation scorecard On any common-sense reckoning, Russia is now a capitalist country, with 70 per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP), in late 1997, was coming from the private sector, according to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.3 It is not, so far, a successful capitalist country. It appears still to be hovering somewhere around the starting-point for a long-term catching-up to the developed economies, but by the end of 1997 there was still no clear sign of strong and sustained growth. Macroeconomic stabilization, in the sense of arrival at an annual inflation rate below 20 per cent, has occurred. Officially-measured total output was approximately flat in 1997, but this was after it had fallen for seven years. Output recovery, after an output decline far deeper and longerlasting than that experienced in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovenia or the Baltic states, is still out of sight. Meanwhile, political instability, a very high crime rate and what is widely seen as an especially pervasive problem of corruption and a weak rule of law have given the new Russian capitalism a poor business reputation. Sovereign risk is considered by Western bankers and creditrating agencies to be substantially higher than in East–Central Europe. Foreign investment therefore remains small. True, there was a surge in portfolio investment and foreign buying of Russian-government Treasury bills in the first half of 1997, but the longer-term commitment of foreign companies that would be indicated by foreign direct investment has remained modest; and the collapse of Asian financial markets in the autumn of 1997 triggered a retreat of foreign money from the Russian market. Certain features of the Russian economy’s recent development are obvious, and rather striking. The first is that real GDP has fallen a remarkably long way: by perhaps 43 per cent between 1989 and 1997. Those (including myself) who believe the decline is overstated still have to explain an even more remarkable misery indicator: a steep decline in life expectancy, especially for males (average male life expectancy is now said to be 58 years). The second is that inflation remained very high for a long time. The consumer price index at the end of 1995 was about 130 per cent above the end of the 1994 level. The outcome in 1996 (December–December) was 22 per cent, and in 1997 was around 12 per cent. But it has taken a long time to get to this point, and the reduction of inflation in 1996–7 was achieved partly by cutting government spending below budget

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commitments and partly by a switch from financing the deficit by printing money to financing by borrowing (chiefly from abroad). The former has amounted to the imposition of involuntary lending by households and firms, in the form of arrears of government payments to state suppliers and state employees. The latter has led to a rapid rise in government debt, and none of this inspires confidence in the government. Meanwhile, wealthy Russians continue to place funds offshore on a scale that has generated a net outflow of capital from the country: despite large loans from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and latterly the successful issue of Eurobonds on world markets by the Russian government, more money has been going out than has been coming in. The third is that large-scale privatization has been extraordinarily fast. By the end of 1994, 83 per cent of industrial employment was in enterprises in which the state had either a minority stake or no stake at all.4 This privatization has been mainly a transfer of property rights from the state to what we might call sitting tenants: in most privatized medium- and large-scale firms, at the end of 1994, managers and workers had more than 50 per cent of the equity.5 Fourth, the sectoral composition of economic activity changed drastically between 1990 and 1995. So far, at least, as recorded employment is concerned, the share of the industrial sector in total employment fell from 30.3 to 25.9 per cent, while the combined share of the two quintessentially ‘suppressed’ sectors under the old order – trade and catering, and financial services – rose from 8.3 to 11.3 per cent.6 The increase in the latter was likely to be understated in the official figures, while many people, still nominally on the payrolls of industrial enterprises in 1995, were in fact idle. Fifth, given the output decline, the structural change and the rate of divestment of state assets, unemployment has remained relatively low. As a matter of arithmetic, that was necessarily associated with another distinctive feature: a great downward compression of statistical real wages, chiefly in 1992. Finally, there is a boom in crime, particularly economic, but entailing a murder rate that is now well above that of the USA, and it is generally believed that corruption among officials is endemic. Apart from these well-known features of the late 1990s Russian economic mutation, there are four less obvious, but possibly important, structural and organizational developments. The marked change already noted in the sectoral composition of output has been achieved with very little net investment since the late 1980s. Indeed, given

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the heightened rate of obsolescence of capital that must follow from the profound changes in the economy, it is likely that aggregate net investment in the mid-1990s has been negative. Some comparatively sophisticated, if small and thin, markets have developed: in foreign currency, government bonds and foreign exchange. These Russian financial markets are probably more developed than their Polish counterparts, though the real economy is in much better shape in Poland. Financial markets channelling funds to the real economy, however, are barely visible. There is strong evidence from regional price differences that regional markets are still a long way from being integrated (in other words, there are strong interregional market barriers). At the same time, however, there is evidence from a detailed microeconomic study of markets in twenty-five cities in the Central and Volga regions that even in 1992–3 a substantial process of market integration was under way, at any rate within those two macro-regions.7 Finally, Russia seems to suffer from an unusual amount of incoherence in government. This affects both the formulation and the carrying out of economic policy.8 In short, the Russian transformation has been highly problematic. All the trouble and strife should none the less be put into context. Of the twenty-six ‘economies in transition’ that are in the portfolio of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Russia cannot count as being among the worst ‘basket-cases’. Admittedly its transformation attempt is unimpressive seen beside those of the Visegrad countries, Slovenia, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Compared with these countries, Russia looks unsuccessful. Compared, however, with Bulgaria, the Ukraine, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Georgia and the Central Asian CIS states, Russia looks better: its leadership has made more progress in stabilization and privatization. If we find the messy state of affairs in Russia surprising, our surprise may betray an ethnic bias. Now, as throughout modern history, Russia stands out as the only large white backward country. The perennial musing of the Russian intelligentsia about whether Russia is really ‘European’ or ‘Asiatic’ reflects this. The question is: does the disorderly conduct of the transformation attempt in Russia really provide evidence that Russia is heading for an unusually defective capitalist order? If so, does this mean that the country’s undoubted growth potential is unlikely to be realised? That potential can be seen in the disparity between 1990s Russian per capita GDP (on a par with that of Turkey) and the levels of education and training among Russia’s population. We would need powerful grounds to argue that, if inflation is kept at manageable levels, this potential will

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not produce a long period of growth at rates above the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average.

What the academics say Many writings about the contemporary Russian economy touch on some unusual element in its institutions. I shall begin with a paper by Daniel Cohen that is particularly ambitious. It derives far-reaching conclusions about the Russian economy from an analysis of the role of economic crime.9 Cohen offers a theoretical account linking two Russian economic successes (rapid privatization and low unemployment) with two especially acute problems: the mafiya and liquidity constraints.10 I shall concentrate here on his mafiya story. Cohen suggests that the relatively low unemployment rates and striking downward flexibility of wages may be produced by barriers to entry of new firms and workers into the most remunerative lines of economic activity, and that those barriers may be attributed to mafiya rentseeking and (less critically) to liquidity constraints. The gist of Cohen’s argument is as follows. There is an array of more and less productive activities, into and from which labour might flow. If market entry were unimpeded, the reshuffling of resources would tend to equalize wages for a given type of labour, draining workers from low-productivity activities. In Russian practice, however, rentseeking by mafiyas (protection rackets, for example, the exaction of bribes by officials for registering new companies, and so on) restrict the efficient reallocation of labour resources. One result is that there is an inflow into intermediate-productivity activities rather than a concentrated inflow into highest-productivity activities. Another is that more labour is retained in its original, lowproductivity activities than would otherwise have been the case. These outcomes follow from a plausible assumption made by Cohen: that mafiyas raise the costs of market entry by amounts that are more than proportional to the potential benefits from entry. In other words, there is a mafiya equivalent of a progressive rate of tax on business profits. The supply-price of labour to less productive uses is thus kept down. Low and high wages for a given type of labour continue to coexist, and an efficient reallocation of resources is impeded; many activities with modest levels of productivity can continue to employ workers who are impeded from moving to (potentially) higherproductivity jobs.

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Permanent and strong mafiyas, Cohen argues, can preserve a relatively inefficient allocation of resources and a relatively unequal distribution of incomes. Liquidity constraints (connected with an underdeveloped financial services sector and a flawed capital market) have similar consequences, but can be shown only to slow, not to block indefinitely, an efficient reallocation of resources. The mafiyablocking of resource reallocation is more damaging. Rapid privatization can take place without altering this situation. Mancur Olson has also put forward an account of relationships between organized crime and Russian economic development. 11 He suggests a solution to the Cohen problem: the emergence of a unified national mafia whose interests lead it into providing effective government. But that, I think, is more a social-contract fable than a plausible prediction. On the whole, Olson’s story does not seem to be heading towards a happy ending. Olson’s earlier writings on the logic of collective action and distributional coalitions12 might have been expected to lead him now towards quite different conjectures about Russia’s prospects. Here, he has interpreted major social upheavals as a source of long-run economic rejuvenation in several nations’ economic history, ascribing this effect to the breaking-up of ‘distributional coalitions’ that hinder growth. That would seem prima facie to strengthen the more conventional arguments for expecting a great release of economic energy after the collapse of Communism. If distributional coalitions restricting growth were broken up in the Southern states of the USA after the American Civil War, and if the defeats of Germany and Japan in the Second World War had similar effects, would not the collapse of an entire political and economic order, ushering in competitive politics and private enterprise, have much the same benign effects on Russian growth in the medium term? Olson argues, to the contrary, that distributional coalitions have not been broken up; they have emerged from the closet and gained greater freedom of manoeuvre. That view is also taken by E. Colombatto and J. R. Macey,13 though they use this quasi-observation for other purposes. Olson offers a plausible account of the particular disposition of modern Russia to lawlessness in economic behaviour. The gist of his argument is as follows. In a centrally administered economy, where the state sets both prices and output levels, many households and enterprise managers have a strong interest in breaking the law. If the state-set price and quantity for any (planned) transaction produce an

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outcome that is off the contract curve for buyer and seller, both parties share an interest in evading the law, and perhaps bribing officials in order to do so. By contrast, in a private enterprise economy, most economic agents most of the time have an interest in the state’s enforcing the law, and especially in supporting property rights as ‘a governmentally protected claim on an asset’. After Communism, Olson argues, previously covert interest coalitions (say, of steel producers, the officials in steel-making regions and steel ministry officials) can in fact lobby more forcefully than before. The continued existence of many state enterprises (whose profits, he assumes, continue to revert to the state) weakens incentives to raise output, and also weakens the incentive to have contracts enforced. Olson goes on to the closely-linked matter of organized crime. He distinguishes between nomadic and stationary bandits – a distinction related to that in his earlier writings between narrow and encompassing interests on the part of distributional coalitions. If mafiya protection rackets, for example, come to be run by a single strong mafiya in a single city, with all competitors seen off, that mafiya is then a stationary bandit whose economic interests encompass those of the whole city. The bandit will, if behaving rationally, limit the take. This will be done in such a way that the businesses paying up are able to continue to trade and make at least minimum acceptable profits in the future. The mafiya share will need to be such that it does not cut total economic activity in the city by an amount that reduces the value of the mafiya take. If the mafiya share of net revenue is s, that share is optimised when any further increase in it would reduce total net revenue by a factor greater than 1/s. In general, the secure stationary bandit will find it worthwhile to take on the minimum role of the state, not merely by taxing but also by providing public goods. Olson mentions flood control, quarantine and defence. A functioning state, in other words, is a successful stationary bandit whose turf is the whole nation. In an article written for Izvestiya, Olson suggested that one possible eventual outcome is that a successful mafiya becomes, or merges with, the state. If it then limits its take appropriately, it could even become Newt Gingrich’s kind of state. Olson offers a plausible story about the emergence after Communism of powerful distributional coalitions in a generally lawless environment. One implication of his bandit story is that a sufficiently allencompassing mafiya would cease to constitute the blockage to resource reallocation that Cohen has described. It is possible that the recent

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reduction in turf wars in Moscow and St Petersburg (which are now low down in the regional ranking of crime rates) may result from some such consolidation in particular regions. As a route to efficient national government, however, this looks only a shade more plausible than the prospect of Brezhnev’s Soviet Union achieving full Communism and the end of scarcity. Colombatto and Macey also focus on what they consider to be strong distributional coalitions in post-Communist Russia. They consider, however, the process of creating legislation and, more generally, the rules of the future economic game. Their thesis is that the present ‘constitution-building moment’ is unlikely to be used to create rules that strongly restrain rent-seeking behaviour. They argue that this is only partly, because nomenklatura officials continue to hold a great deal of political and economic power. In their view, this tendency towards politics-as-usual is reinforced by the circumstances in which the Russian state was formed in 1991. They read the break-up of the USSR as a grab for power by a particular group of the nomenklatura, headed by Boris Yeltsin. Any bargaining over new rules therefore gets off to a bad start. They believe this distinguishes Russia from, say, Poland or the Czech Republic. There, they suggest, the change of elites, and thus the break-up of distributional coalitions, was more radical. What should be made of these gloomy tales? Are there other stories about Russian capitalism that fit the facts as well, or better? And if there are, are they any less gloomy?

Russia and the mafiya stories Daniel Cohen and Mancur Olson both consider organized crime to be an important feature of the modern Russian economic scene. That seems indeed to be the case. True, Russia already had high levels of violence in the late Soviet period. Richard Layard and John Parker14 draw attention to World Health Organization data for 1991 showing the rate of male deaths by homicide per 10 000 male population to have been higher in Russia than the USA; this was before the collapse of Communist power. But violence has been growing fast since the collapse of Communism – and especially so in Russia. Between 1991 and 1994 the annual rate of murder and attempted murder in Russia per 10 000 population grew from 1.08 to 2.18, a steeper rise and to a much higher level than is recorded for any other CIS country.15 Whether such numbers have any direct relationship to the sort of economy that is developing, is another matter. The recent annual murder rate in Moscow (2500 a year) is high

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by any standards, but it is an entirely different, and higher, order of magnitude from the number of reported contract killings organized by the mafiya: 96 in 1994,16 with 560 in Russia as a whole in 1995, and 450 in January–October 1996.17 Still, it does seem likely that business-related contract killings are numerous by international standards. And they appear very often to be contract killings in a double sense: carried out by contract to enforce another contract. One more statistic may give the flavour: 46 prominent Russian businessmen were murdered in the twelve months to August 1995; a large proportion of these were bankers.18 Several studies purporting to show a high incidence of mafiya control of businesses tend to support this view. A 1995 study by the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences concludes, reportedly, that 40 per cent of the economy is controlled by ‘the mafiya’, often in collusion with corrupt officials.19 One could also cite the extreme measures taken by the beleaguered state: on 17 October 1995 armed brigades, comprising a mixture of Procuracy, Interior Ministry, Federal Security Service, Federal Tax Service and the Tax Police personnel, were due to set off to collect tax arrears said to amount to 28 trillion roubles. 20 In 1996 a special commission with ‘extraordinary powers’ was formed to pursue tax debtors but, by the end of 1996, arrears to federal and regional budgets combined were 140.2 trillion roubles, equivalent to 5.7 per cent of 1996 GDP.21 Can we really be sure, however, that economic crime is especially high in Russia? Criminals do not arrange for their activities to be measured easily, and international comparisons of lawlessness are even trickier than international comparisons of GDP. If quantitative comparisons are problematic, qualitative judgements are no better. It is possible to depict any society with organized crime and secret security services as ‘really run’ by collusion and skulduggery among crooked politicos and underworld types. The world of protection rackets, gang warfare and bent officials described in V. Barkovskii’s Chechenskii tranzit differs only in its lower technology level from that of James Ellroy’s American Tabloid.22 Nevertheless, there should be some limit to scholarly caution: it really is pretty safe to say that present-day Russian capitalism is wilder and more lawless than present-day capitalism in the developed West. But is it also more lawless than the emerging capitalism of East Central Europe? Measures of the ex-Communist countries’ black economies would be useful. So would information on property insurance premiums, for

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example. In the absence of that sort of general information, one can at least point to a striking small study by A. Shleifer and R. Vishny, comparing shopkeepers in Warsaw and Moscow. The amount of bribe-taking by local officials from Moscow shopkeepers was much greater than that experienced by their Warsaw counterparts.23 At all events, Russia in the last decade of the twentieth century is almost certainly towards the lawless end of a spectrum of law-abidingness among countries. That by itself, however, does not guarantee acute economic problems in transformation. Estonia has also had very high crime rates in the post-Soviet period (no doubt in part because of its location as a trade gateway on the Russian border), but that has not prevented it achieving considerable success in financial stabilization and output recovery. Russia’s special problems (if they exist) may not, however, be reducible simply to organized crime; they may be more to do with close links between organized crime, the nomenklatura class inherited from the old order, and the new business class. Such links are particularly emphasised by Olson and by Colombatto and Macey. Again, there is not much doubt that strong links of this sort exist. In the Brezhnev era, if not before, many members of the political and economic establishment developed close relationships with organized crime. The criminals provided their patrons with goods otherwise not readily obtainable even by the privileged; in return, they were protected by their patrons.24 The importance of corruption in this sense, and of the routine bribery of officials, has probably grown since Communism. The increase in regional autonomy (within Russia) and the greater confusion about administrative lines of command within the state mean that there are now more separate gatekeepers whom those in business need to pay off, and they are less subject to hierarchical control than before. Meanwhile, the increased uncertainty surrounding the exercise of administrative power by any one official has probably prompted a shortening of the time-horizon over which profits are maximized: do not charge what you think the traffic will bear over the next few years; charge what you can get away with this month, while you can. 25 There is certainly some continuity between Soviet-era and post-Soviet elites, as both Olson, and Colombatto and Macey, assume. One recent study contains estimates of the proportions of various contemporary elite groups made up by members of the former nomenklatura: 61 per cent of the business elite, 74 per cent of the government elite and 75 per cent of the President’s entourage.26 But in what sense, if any, are these numbers ‘large’? The interesting comparison, if we want to decide whether Russia’s

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transformation may be subject to influences fundamentally different from those in the Visegrad countries, is with Central Europe. And the preliminary indications are that the continuity of elites is indeed greater in Russia than in the most successful transforming economies. To begin with, there is the informed judgement of a team of researchers who have been studying privatization across the ex-Communist countries: ‘In no other country was the nomenklatura’s grab for new property as successful as in Russia.’27 Second, O. Kryshtanovskaya and S. White note that studies of elite continuity in Poland and the Czech Republic show ex-nomenklatura members occupying fewer of the elite positions there than is the case in Russia.1 So, in Russia at least, mafiyas and corrupt officials are part of an economic game in which nomenklatura interest groups continue to try to control both the rules and the outcome. In this situation, how convincing, and how important, is Cohen’s thesis about mafiya blockages to an efficient reallocation of resources? It seems, in fact, to fit the evidence less well than might at first appear to be the case. The first point to be made is that the direct effects on resource allocation of any such systematic blockage are not obvious. The redistribution of employment and output among sectors and branches since the end of Communism has, as noted above, been substantial. Cohen would probably say that this is not at issue (he notes that there is a high rate of job-changing); his contention would be, not that there has been no reallocation of labour resources, but that the reallocation has been heavily suboptimal. And he appeals particularly to the evidence of downwards real-wage flexibility (and a lack of visible wage equalization) to support this. Still, the prima facie evidence is that there is much structural change going on in employment, and that it is not of an obviously perverse kind. In 1994, for example, total officially recorded employment fell by 2.1 per cent, while employment in the financial services sector rose by almost 15 per cent and that in textiles, clothing and footwear (a sector hard-hit by both falls in real incomes and import competition) fell by about 18 per cent.29 Some key ingredients in sectoral change between 1990 and 1995 have been noted earlier: the decline of industrial employment and the growth of employment in trade and financial services are certainly a shift from ‘over-developed’ to ‘under-developed’ activities Second, the notion that there is something especially noteworthy about the compression of statistical real wages since 1991 is also questionable. The obvious point has already been made that this is the

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arithmetical consequence of (reported) output falling more than (reported) employment. Something similar also happened in Central– Eastern Europe, though admittedly the fall in output was smaller and the rise in unemployment somewhat larger. In addition, there are several rather problematical features of the Russian statistics that muddy the Russian picture. The apparently enormous compression of real wages at the start of the transformation in Russia (effectively, in January 1992) is misleading. It has been pointed out by Gros and Steinherr 30 that price liberalization in Russia occurred in a setting where the monetary overhang was exceptionally large; a corollary of this is that much of the immediately preceding growth of money wages bore little relation to real wages because shortages were worsening (indicated by a steep decline in the velocity of circulation of cash). Gros and Steinherr argue for treating 1987 statistical real wages as an appropriate departure point; on that basis, the decline in real wages in January 1992 was about 20 per cent – comparable to the immediate impact of liberalization in Poland, where much of the monetary overhang had been destroyed by high inflation in the preceding year. Moreover, the measurement of changes in real wages in Russia is problematic for other reasons as well. This is partly because of problems affecting the relevant price measurements, and partly because of problems with the money wage data. Prices vary substantially across regions, making regional money wage differences misleading so far as real wage differences are concerned. In addition, the reported nominal incomes apparently exclude convertible-currency income,31 incomes from second and third jobs, and payments in kind. Furthermore, employers have been reducing their liability for wage tax by under-reporting labour payments and presenting what are de facto labour payments as payments for services supplied under contract – apparently on a large scale. And benefits in kind have long been especially important in Russia. In general, wage data are now very problematic. This might be inferred from the curious Goskomstat data on personal incomes for 1994 and 1995, which show wages and salaries accounting for less than half the total. There is a large and growing element called ‘entrepreneurial income’. No doubt genuine entrepreneurial income has been growing; but it appears that this income category is a statistical device: it is the gap between reported household expenditure plus recorded savings, on the one hand; and reported wage and benefit income, on the other.32

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The total material benefits associated with being on the payroll of a given enterprise, X, typically exceed wage remuneration. Enterprise housing (though by no means all of it is occupied by the enterprise’s own employees), cheap food supplied at the workplace, clinics and sanatoria, and the provision of land on which to grow your own food – all are enterprise perks. It is true that the provision of these benefits is a cost to the enterprise, and that financially strapped enterprises should be under pressure to cut them. Quite often, it seems, they do; but the supply price to the enterprise of some of the assets yielding these benefits can be very low. The local authorities are seldom able to take on the ‘social provision’ amenities, and there is no functioning land market through which the enterprise can sell off its farm plots. Still, if workers have less reason to leave weak enterprises than recent changes in their statistical real wages might suggest, it is still not obvious why enterprises do not dismiss workers more often. In an economy where many privatized firms are making losses, the number of enforced redundancies is strikingly low: 1.7 per cent of the workforce in 1994,33 even though labour turnover is not low (21 per cent, according to the same source). One plausible explanation is that enterprises ease workers out by keeping wages low and/or not paying them, rather than declaring redundancies. This saves them the obligatory six months’ pay to workers declared redundant. Since, none the less, reported unemployment, even on a labour-force survey basis, has stayed relatively low, it is hard to resist the conclusion that many people are moving into presumptively better-paid jobs. So much for the problems with the data on wages and redundancies. There is another element present in the Russian labour market which must inhibit the declaration of redundancies, with or without barriers to movement to new jobs. Perhaps the most important deterrent to enterprises sacking staff at present is the role of workers, along with managers, as shareholders in their own workplaces. Notoriously, large-scale privatization in Russia has so far been mainly a transfer of assets to insiders. Managers are widely perceived as being in control, but their combined equity stake, according to recent sample surveys of firms, is usually less than 20 per cent, while that of workers was typically (in late 1994) above 40 per cent. 34 The workers do not normally seem to be using their equity stake in an active and co-ordinated way. But managers are likely to fear a loss of control if they initiate mass lay-offs. Instead of the implicit social contract often

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ascribed to the Soviet era: ‘You pretend to pay us and we pretend to work’, a new one may well have taken shape: ‘You pretend to employ us and we pretend to be happy shareholders’. To sum up: there are other ways of accounting for low levels of enforced redundancies and a strong compression of statistical real wages, without positing substantial mafiya barriers to market entry; and ‘new’, previously-suppressed sectors have in any case not been prevented from expanding substantially. One more point should be made about the implications of various institutional weaknesses for future growth prospects. Even if the mafiya barriers story were, in fact, quite realistic, we should remember that it need not by itself preclude strong economic growth in the long run. That is because, of course, improvements in the efficiency of resource allocation are only one of several sources of long-run growth. Even if there was no reallocation of resources among industries, other growth sources, apart from input growth, would remain. First, as budget constraints harden, pressures to raise operating efficiency within any given line of production should be increasing. Second, a better exploitation of existing skills and know-how, and a faster rate of introduction and diffusion of new products and processes can also reasonably be expected. In short, mafiya barriers to market entry reduce the strength of one of several sources of growth, but not of all. The question, then, is whether mafiyas and strong nomenklatura distributional coalitions – whose existence and potential importance Cohen, Olson, and Colombatto and Macey all stress – amount to strong reasons for taking a gloomy view of Russia’s long-term economic prospects. The entry barrier story may be a bit too neat for the facts, but lawlessness and strong organized interest groups are certainly there, and are certainly not encouraging features of Russia’s new economic order. They suggest an element of rent-seeking behaviour in the Russian economy that would, if it were large enough, be a strong constraint on growth. There are, however, some strong grounds for thinking that rentseeking may have been declining in importance over time. Anders Aslund has pointed out that, since 1992, price liberalization, the shift to positive real interest rates and the cuts in subsidies have reduced gross rents from arbitrage between controlled and free prices, from privileged access to credit at negative real interest rates, and from import and other subsidies. 35 He estimates those rents to have been very large relative to GDP in 1991–2. In contrast, he quotes an estimate of ‘corruption’ (presumably, bribes and favours to officials, in the

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main) at about 3 per cent of GDP, and protection rackets operating in the distribution sector also at about 3 per cent. Rents derived from insider privatization and privileged control of real estate he judges to be impossible to estimate at the time of writing. His contention is that liberalization and stabilization have slashed total rents, and the forms of rent-seeking behaviour that still pay off may be of modest importance to the economy. This is quite persuasive. But there is probably still a great deal wrong with Russia’s emerging capitalist institutions, all the same. The most obvious institutional weaknesses are: an unusually ineffective state administration; a weak rule of law; and a lack of contestability in markets for corporate control (in other words, a possibly durable control of major assets – gas, oil and metals reserves and processing facilities, especially – by insiders who resist restructuring and efficiency gains). I have considered the evidence about these, and possible ways in which Russian society might cope with them, in a 1997 paper. 36 Here I shall merely point to possible connections with Russia’s broader social and political prospects. What I now want to suggest is that these defects may be linked to some very deep-seated features of Russian society.

Is civility the crux? One of the best accounts of the social foundations of more and less effective government and more and less corruption is Robert Putnam’s study of Italian regional government.37 On the basis of work conducted over twenty years by an Italian and American team of researchers, he provides a wealth of empirical evidence about the differences in effectiveness of public institutions between Northern and Southern Italy. He and his colleagues also tested hypotheses about differences in political culture as the source of these differences, and related these to the history of what is now Italy. Much of what he has to say is compatible with Fukuyama’s more speculative and unempirical 1995 book on Trust.38 Putnam draws a sharp distinction between Italian regions on the basis of their ‘norms of reciprocity and networks of civic engagement’ which support their ‘social capital’. In the North there had been a stronger development, over many centuries, of norms of reciprocity in social behaviour, which facilitate good-neighbourliness and social trust, lowering transaction costs and facilitating co-operation. The existence of extensive horizontal networks of formal and informal

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co-operation can be detected in the numbers of grass-roots organizations, from choral societies and sports clubs to membership of political parties. In societies where civic engagement historically has been low, norms that limit opportunistic behaviour will be weak, and trust will tend to be confined to the family and to vertical patron–client relationships of a quasi-feudal kind. Putnam traces the differences in these patterns of social organization within Italy to differences in historical experience that go back to the Middle Ages. This rapid summary does not do justice to the systematic deployment of evidence and testing of hypotheses that Putnam and his colleagues have undertaken. The point here is simply this: a Russiawatcher reading Putnam’s work is reminded, time and again, in his characterization of Southern Italian society, of Russia. In this sense, the enthusiastic Russian adoption of the word mafia for Russian organized crime is entirely apposite. The Russian mafiyas are not an off-shoot of the original Sicilian mafia; but the background of low civic engagement, a lack of social trust and strong patron–client relationships is similar. One of Putnam’s contentions, for which he provides some evidence, is that the economic development of Southern Italy since the late nineteenth century has not produced a convergence of prosperity levels with the North. In the light of the strong evidence of long-run interregional convergence in the economic history of many other capitalist countries, this is striking. What Putnam’s research may suggest about Russia’s economic future is this: the development of more effective and cleaner government and of open and transparent capital markets may be hindered seriously by the inheritance of norms and patterns of social behaviour that are closer to those of Sicily than to those of Milan. If this is so, it is a consequence, not of seventy-four years of Communism (though they will not have helped) but of longer-standing characteristics of Russian society. The background of at least forty-plus years of Communism is shared, after all, by countries whose post-Communist economic transformation has been more promising. If this, admittedly speculative, diagnosis is somewhere near the truth, it would make for a rather doleful Russian future: Palermo without the weather. But if Russia does have the handicap of a weak inheritance of civic engagement, there is nothing uniquely Russian about this disability. The impediment can with equal plausibility be imputed to other CIS states.

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Notes and references The author is grateful for helpful comments on earlier drafts from Jose Palacin, Douglas Sutherland and Elizabeth Teague, and from participants in seminars at the London School of Economics, the University of Birmingham Economics Department and at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies Annual Conference. The usual caveats apply. 1. Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work. Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 2. Philip Hanson, ‘What Kind of Capitalism is Emerging in Russia?’ Communist Economies and Economic Transformation, vol. 9 no. 1,(1997) pp. 27–43. 3. European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Transition Report 1997 (London: EBRD, 1997). 4. Rossiya v tsifrakh 1995 (Moscow: Goskomstat, 1995). 5. See, particularly, Joseph Blasi, Kremlin Capitalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); J. S. Earle and S. Estrin, ‘After Voucher Privatization: The Structure of Corporate Ownership in Russian Manufacturing Industry,’ (draft) June 1997. 6. OECD Economic Surveys. The Russian Federation 1997 (Paris: OECD, December 1997). 7. D. Berkowitz and S. Husted, ‘Market Integration Against the Odds: Evidence from Russia’s Big Bang’, (Washington DC: NCSEER, 1995). 8. Eugene Huskey, ‘The Making of Economic Policy in Russia: Changing Relations between Presidency and Government’, Paper presented at the Fifth World Congress of Central and East European Countries, Warsaw, 1995. 9. Daniel Cohen, ‘The Transition in Russia: Successes (Privatization, Low Unemployment …) and Failures (Mafia, Liquidity Constraints …): A Theoretical Analysis,’ Centre for Economic Policy Research, Discussion Paper no. 1224, August 1995. 10. I follow the New York Police Department in distinguishing between the Italian-origin word mafia and the current Russian mafiya. Russians appropriated the Italian word for their own, initially quite independent form of organized crime. Transliteration back from the Cyrillic spelling produces ‘mafiya’. 11. Mancur Olson, ‘Russian Reforms: Established Interests and Practical Alternatives’, in R. Skidelsky (ed.), Russia’s Stormy Path to Market Reform (London: Social Market Foundation, 1995), pp. 9–42. 12. Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982). 13. E. Colombatto and J. R. Macey, ‘Path-dependence, Public Choice and Transition in Russia: A Bargaining Approach’, Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy, vol. 4, no. 8 (Spring 1995) pp. 379–414. 14. Richard Layard and John Parker, The Coming Russian Boom (New York: The Free Press 1996). 15. I am indebted to Jose Palacin for these data from CIS Goskomstat. 16. Oxford Analytica, East European Daily Brief, 28 September 1995. 17. Economist, 16 November 1996, p. 55.

224 Some Stories about Russian Capitalism 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

Compilation of information by Mark Galeotti. Jamestown Foundation Monitor, 26 September 1995. Mikhail Berger in Izvestiya, 14 October 1995, p. 1 Arrears data from the November 1997 update on the website of Russian Economic Trends (http://cep.lse.ac.uk/datalib/ret). GDP from the Central Bank of Russia’s website (http://www.cbr.ru). V. Barkovskii, Chechenskii tranzit (St Petersburg: Norma-Press, 1995); James Elroy, American Tabloid (New York: Random House, 1995). T. Frye and A. Shleifer, ‘The Invisible Hand and the Grabbing Hand’, American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, vol. 87, no. 2 (1997). A. Vaksberg, The Soviet Mafia (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991). See also P. Reddaway, ‘A Note on the Mafia and Russian Politics’, (Washington, DC: NCSEER, 1994). For an extended analysis of these characteristics of corruption, see A. Shleifer and R. Vishny, ‘Corruption’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 58 no. 3 (1993) pp. 599–617. O. Kryshtanovskaya and S. White, ‘From Soviet nomenklatura to Russian elite’, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 48 no. 5 (1996), pp. 728–99. R. Frydman, K. Murphy and A. Rapacynski, ‘Capitalism With a Comrade’s Face’, Transition vol. 2 no. 2 (January 1996) pp. 5–12. This is not quite conclusive, however, since the studies are not closely comparable in method – personal communication from Stephen White. OECD Economic Surveys, The Russian Federation 1995, (Paris: OECD, 1995). D. Gross and A. Steinherr, Winds of Change (Harlow: Longman, 1995) pp. 413–4. Personal communication from former First Deputy Minister of Finance, Sergei Aleksashenko. Personal communication from leading Russian economist, Sergei Vasilev. R. Layard and J. Parker, The Coming Russian Boom (New York: The Free Press 1996). Sources as Note 5 above. A. Aslund, ‘Reform vs. ‘Rent-Seeking’ in Russia’s Economic Transformation’, Transition vol. 2 no. 2 (January 1996) pp. 12–17. Hanson, ‘What Kind of Capitalism?’ Putnam, Making Democracy Work. Francis Fukuyama, Trust: the Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (London: Penguin, 1996).

12 Citizenship and Democracy Elizabeth Teague

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) makes an uncompromising commitment to democratic government: ‘The will of the people,’ it states, ‘shall be the basis of the authority of government.’ The popular will ‘shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures’.1 Democracy is not just about voting, important though that is. Regular elections are necessary to determine the will of the majority, but they cannot always be sufficient to ensure that minorities have a say in how they are governed. Democracy also requires, as other chapters make plain, a complex system of institutions guaranteeing freedom from arbitrary rule. In the words of the Polish writer, Adam Michnik, democratization denotes the process whereby that freedom is institutionalized. If this is to be true freedom, and not just extended privilege, it must be universal. Citizenship guarantees equality before the law for all the members of a given political community. A democratic state is one that guarantees its citizens the power to control national policy, a claim to the community’s resources, and entitlement to protection by the state. It follows that, for a democracy, nothing is more important than the nature of its relations with its citizens. Citizenship is the legal bond linking the individual to the state, and the individual, through the state and the constitution, to the rest of the community. It confers rights and imposes duties on both citizen and state. As a citizen of a sovereign state, the individual is a full member of a community and enjoys specific legal, political and social rights. These rights – and the associated duties – are shared equally by all citizens on the basis of common nationality. The nature of these rights and duties varies from state to state and is 225

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governed by no universal standard or prescription. Civil and political rights customarily include rights to vote, hold public office, take up permanent residence, or own land. Social rights typically include the right to education, housing, health care or employment. T. H. Marshall’s classic typology is based on the proposition that, over the centuries, modern societies evolved by gradually expanding and institutionalizing citizenship rights, extending those rights to ever-wider strata of society, and broadening the rights themselves to encompass first legal,then political and finally social rights.2 ‘Citizenship’ is often used synonymously with ‘nationality’. This can produce confusion in countries with significant national (that is, ethnic) minorities. Gerard Delanty makes a useful distinction, arguing that citizenship is about inclusion (sharing the same civil and political rights as other members of a political community), while nationality is about exclusion (determining the social and cultural criteria by which some individuals are admitted to citizenship while others are not). According to Delanty, ‘citizenship defines the internal relationship of the individual to the state and nationality defines the external relationship between states with respect to their citizens’.3 In practice, the two terms tend to be used interchangeably.

A legal vacuum States cherish their sovereignty as the apple of their eye. This applies to newly independent states as much as, if not more than, older, more established ones. Nowhere is it truer than with citizenship. 4 Because the relationship between state and citizen is so fundamental, touching on the nature of the state itself, states demand almost total latitude regarding how and to whom they will give citizenship. There is no legally enforceable right to citizenship, and there are few internationally recognized norms governing the way citizenship may be acquired or lost. The 1945 United Nations (UN) Charter committed member-states to protect the individual human rights of every person within their territory or under their jurisdiction. These rights were separately codified in 1948 in the UDHR and elaborated in 1966 in the International Conventions on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The fact that these rights are held to be universal, the property of every human being independent of his or her relationship to a specific state, has encouraged scholars to posit the idea of an embryonic universal citizenship based on human rights.5 The late Hedley

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Bull discerned the dawn of ‘a new mediaevalism’, an era in which the sovereign state would lose its cherished monopoly over jurisdiction and increasingly share its powers with supranational and subnational levels of authority.6 Though the outlines of such an inclusive citizenship may dimly be glimpsed, it seems still a long way off. The 1993 Maastricht Treaty, founding the European Union (EU), formally established a European citizenship based on place of residence. However, the treaty only modestly extended the rights already enjoyed by citizens of the EU’s member states. Only recently has a body of international standards begun to develop impinging in any way on the state’s jealously protected prerogatives over citizenship. The UDHR went no further than to assert that ‘Everyone has the right to a nationality’ and ‘No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.’ The UDHR did not attempt to define nationality or reinforce an individual’s right by imposing any obligation on any particular state to confer its nationality on a specific individual. On the individual level, therefore, the provision was weak and difficult to enforce. The UN’s 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness obliged contracting states to grant their nationality to any person born in their territory who would otherwise be stateless, but the convention has been ratified by relatively few states and did not envisage or make provision for the issues of state-succession arising in Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War and following the collapse of the USSR. The 1966 International Convention on Civil and Political Rights specified that ‘Every child has the right to acquire a nationality.’ The UN’s 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child went further, stating ‘The child shall be registered immediately after birth and shall have the right from birth to a name, [and] the right to acquire a nationality.’ States party to this, the UN’s most highly ratified convention, must ensure the implementation ‘in accordance with their national law and their obligations under the relevant international instruments in this field, in particular where the child would otherwise be stateless’. The 1997 European Convention on Nationality further refined this provision, specifying that a child who would otherwise remain stateless should have the right to acquire citizenship of the country in which he or she was born ‘upon an application being lodged with the appropriate authority, by or on behalf of the child concerned, in the manner prescribed by the internal law of the State Party … subject to the lawful

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and habitual residence on its territory for a period not exceeding five years immediately preceding the lodging of the application’. The specification of a five-year period may be interpreted as prohibiting the imposition of a language or other test in these cases since, it is argued, it would be unrealistic to require a child of only five to take such a test. The international community has a vital interest in establishing and maintaining democratic forms of government. There is consensus that democracies are more stable than dictatorships, less likely to declare war on one another, and less prone to the kind of internal unrest that spills across borders and provokes conflict with neighbouring states. This view is persuasive even if one doubts the common assertion that no democracy will ever start a war against another. (Democracy is, after all, as Winston Churchill famously remarked, only the best form of government by comparison with all the others.)

Competing norms As the dust settled after the Cold War, it became clear that very few of the newly independent states of Central and Eastern Europe and the former USSR were homogeneous nation-states as traditionally defined.7 Most were highly complex, containing significant numbers of people of different ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic backgrounds. In addition to the 25 million ethnic Russians who in 1991 suddenly found themselves outside the borders of the Russian Federation, there were large Hungarian minorities in Romania and Slovakia, many Albanians in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Serbia (Kosovo), and a Greek community in southern Albania. The Abkhaz declared themselves independent of Georgia, and the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh fought for independence from Azerbaijan, while the Gagauz in southern Moldova peacefully secured extensive rights to cultural autonomy and self-government. Inside the Russian Federation, the Chechens fought for independence, while groups like the Volga Tatars set about attaining high degrees of economic and cultural autonomy short of actual independence. Fears of an explosion of nationalist and inter-ethnic conflict focused the international community’s attention on the issue of citizenship within the newly independent states. The way was led by the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) – which became the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in 1993 – and the Council of Europe. Under the aegis of these

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two intergovernmental organizations, a body of international norms and standards relating to citizenship has begun to emerge. The adoption of the European Convention on Nationality in 1997 was an important step towards creating a transnational framework governing citizenship. The convention builds on the rights to citizenship sketched out in the UDHR and the Convention on the Rights of the Child but also tries quite deliberately to take account of the enormous changes in Europe since the end of the Cold War. It seeks particularly to respond to the sharp rise in the number of stateless persons and cases of dual citizenship occurring since 1989. The convention defines nationality so as to make it clear that it is synonymous with ‘citizenship’. ‘Nationality,’ Article 2 states, ‘is the legal bond between a person and a State and does not indicate the person’s ethnic origin’. Prohibiting discrimination on grounds of sex, religion, race, colour or national or ethnic origin, the convention indicates that nationality/citizenship is to be understood as a civil, and not an ethnic category. This distinction between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ identity is often made. The absence of international norms on citizenship permits a variety of ways in which citizenship may be acquired. Though there are few pure types in reality, there are two basic models: citizenship inherited through parentage (ius sanguinis), and citizenship based on birthplace (ius soli). The effect of the former is to confine citizenship to those of a common ethnic origin, while the latter is generally considered to create a civic nationality based on a shared cultural values. Citizenship in Germany is governed by traditions pre-dating Germany’s creation as a nation-state, codified in laws that are based on blood (ius sanguinis). The nationality of the parent is the decisive factor, not the child’s place of birth or residence. This principle has come under increasing strain in recent years. In the mid-1950s, Germany welcomed many foreign ‘guest workers’ as cheap and supposedly temporary additions to the labour force. As a result of this influx, Germany’s ‘foreigner’ population – mainly Turks and Slavs – had by 1997 swollen to nearly 9 per cent of the population.8 Many are the children of immigrants, born in Germany, who feel themselves to be culturally German but whose chances of obtaining German citizenship are slim. Despite some liberalization of naturalization regulations in the early 1990s, Germany has not diluted the principle of ius sanguiris. Acquiring German citizenship other than by descent is still a lengthy and difficult process. However the new German government elected at the end of 1998 promised to make liberalising reform.9

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At the other extreme, ius soli requires a country such as the United States of America, which consciously defines itself as a nation of immigrants, to grant citizenship to anyone born on its territory. France was for centuries governed by ius soli in its pure form, and anyone born in France automatically acquired French nationality regardless of parental origin. The law was amended in 1993 to prevent those born in France of non-French parents from applying for citizenship before the age of sixteen or after twenty-one, and requiring them to pass a test in French culture. The law was amended again in 1998, eliminating the test and providing automatic citizenship at age sixteen to a child of non-French parents born in France. While continuing to emphasise ius soli, therefore, France has followed Britain’s example and combined the two principles. The British Nationality Act of 1981 stipulates that, to qualify for automatic British citizenship, a person must be born in the United Kingdom to a parent who at the time is either a British citizen or settled in the United Kingdom. A child born in the United Kingdom to non-British parents may apply for citizenship at any time after the age of ten. Citizenship is not always seen as a boon, of course. Turkey asserts that anyone born in Turkey is a Turk, that Turkey has no national minorities, and the Kurds, an Iranian people who comprise around 20 per cent of the population, do not have the right to cultural, and still less political, autonomy. To an outside observer, it seems clear that the Kurds’ sense of alienation and exclusion from Turkish society fuels their demand for self-determination and is exacerbated by Turkey’s denial of their aspirations to a separate national identity. But the customary response of a state facing demands for self-determination by a minority on its territory is to crack down and nip those aspirations in the bud. Generally, this makes things worse rather than better. The existence of such differing norms meant that the fifteen newly independent states that emerged from the rubble of the USSR had a wide range of approaches from which to choose. According to Lowell Barrington, the citizenship policies they chose would prove ‘as important to the lives of the residents in the former Soviet Union and to regional stability as any other policy decision of the governments of the newly independent states’. Specifically, citizenship policy has been crucial in shaping national identities in these states. 10 Some of the fifteen, such as the three Baltic states, already had strong national identities and had long been demanding restoration of the independence they lost when they were occupied by the Soviet Union during

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the Second World War. Others, like the Soviet Central Asian republics, had statehood and independence thrust upon them. Kazakhstan, for example, did not declare itself independent until after the Soviet Union had broken up and independence could no longer be avoided. Most of them had large ethnic minorities on their territory. Most, but not all, of these minorities were composed of ethnic Russians or ‘Russian-speakers’ (so called by virtue of their primary language). The newly independent states were accordingly under strong pressure to avoid ethnic friction by choosing non-ethnic strategies for nation-building: that is, to opt for civic rather than ethnic or cultural definitions of citizenship.

The zero option With the exception of Estonia and Latvia, all post-Soviet states adopted the ‘zero option’. That is to say, they offered citizenship to any citizen of the USSR officially registered as resident on the territory of the state in question when the USSR disintegrated, and who chose to take it. (This did not happen automatically; people were generally allowed a few years to consider what they wanted to do.) Russia chose the zero option when it adopted its citizenship law in November 1991.11 In June 1993, Russia amended the law, expanding its application to the entire population of the former USSR, specifically including those already having citizenship of the other independent countries.12 The offer has been extended several times and is not due to expire until December 2000. It has been seen by most of Russia’s neighbours as an unwelcome attempt to entice their citizens into taking dual citizenship and thereby restore Moscow’s influence over what Russian politicians still insist on calling ‘the near abroad’. Russian legislation does not bar Russian citizens from holding dual citizenship; indeed, Russia’s 1993 Constitution specifically states ‘possession of the citizenship of a foreign state does not reduce the rights and freedoms of a citizen of the Russian Federation, unless otherwise stated by federal law’. Russia tried hard to persuade its neighbours to sign bilateral treaties on dual citizenship with Russia. It was keen to conclude these because of the large number of ethnic Russians living outside its borders in other newly independent states. The Russian government claimed it had a legitimate interest in protecting the interests of its co-ethnics, but neighbouring governments saw Russia’s interest as a threat to their security. Almost all of them strongly resisted the idea of dual

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citizenship. Memories of the way Adolf Hitler manipulated German minorities outside Germany in the period leading up the Second World War put many members of the international community on their guard. A ‘kin-state’, it was pointed out, might grant citizenship to its co-ethnics abroad and then offer to protect them against the state on whose territory they resided and whose citizenship they also held. Dual citizenship meant divided loyalties and was, where possible, to be avoided.13 In 1993, Turkmenistan agreed to Russia’s demand and signed a bilateral treaty with Russia, allowing its citizens to hold dual citizenship.14 Turkmenistan could afford this step since it had a relatively small Russian community (9.5 per cent of the population at the time of the 1989 USSR census). Turkmenistan’s government was keen to keep them, since many were industrial workers whose skills the country needed. The offer of dual citizenship seems to have calmed the fears of the minority: Turkmenistan’s Russian community has since stabilized at about 7 per cent of the population. The treaty was unlike most comparable treaties, however, in recognizing Russia’s right to protect Russian citizens on Turkmenistan’s territory even if they were also citizens of Turkmenistan. Observers warned that this was creating a dangerous precedent. It was not seen as particularly threatening to Turkmenistan, which has no common border with Russia, but it could be dangerous for a country with a large ethnic Russian community living close to Russia’s border, such as northern Kazakhstan, the Ukraine (the Donbass) or Estonia (Narva). In 1995, Tajikistan also signed a bilateral treaty allowing dual citizenship with Russia.15 Like Turkmenistan, Tajikistan has no common border with Russia, and its Russian community comprised only 7.6 per cent of the population at the time of the 1989 census. Tajikistan’s government was as keen as Turkmenistan’s for them to stay, and for the same reason, but the civil war that broke out in Tajikistan in 1992 prompted all those who could leave to do so. The promise of dual citizenship did not persuade the remainder to stay: today, ethnic Russians comprise only about 1.5 per cent of Tajikistan’s population. Moscow clearly hoped its treaties with Turkmenistan and Tajikistan would lead to similar accords with states with larger ethnic Russian populations. But Russia’s neighbours were very wary about permitting dual citizenship with the former colonial power. Some, such as Armenia, Moldova and the Ukraine, were so alarmed that they amended their legislation to ban dual citizenship altogether.

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The Ukraine’s position was very understandable, since 22 per cent of its population identified themselves as ethnic Russians at the time of the 1989 census. Russians are heavily concentrated in eastern Ukraine, close to the Russian border, and form a majority of the population in the strategically situated Republic of Crimea. Since the Ukraine also has significant Hungarian and Romanian communities, minority issues were especially sensitive for the newly-independent state. From the start, the Ukraine’s leaders rejected a ‘Ukraine for Ukrainians’ approach and pursued an inclusive policy toward national minorities based on liberal legislation on citizenship, language and minority rights. As a result, Ukraine has avoided most of the open conflicts and ethnic tensions that have troubled several other post-Soviet states. In October 1991, the Ukrainian Parliament adopted a citizenship law offering automatic citizenship to all those legally resident in the country at the time, regardless of ethnic background, provided only that they were not citizens of another state. The law permitted dual citizenship only if a bilateral treaty existed between the Ukraine and the country in question.16 After coming under strong pressure from Russia to sign a bilateral treaty on dual citizenship, in October 1996 the Ukraine adopted a new citizenship law explicitly barring dual citizenship and requiring anyone seeking Ukrainian citizenship to relinquish any other.17 The new law upset the ethnic Russian majority in the Crimea, who had lobbied hard not only for dual Ukrainian/Russian citizenship, but also for the right to create their own, Crimean citizenship. The law had unforeseen but highly detrimental effects for the Crimea’s Tatar minority. After the USSR collapsed, the Crimean Tatars were at last free to return from Central Asia to the homeland from which they had been forcibly deported by Josef Stalin in 1944. But those who returned to the Crimea after October 1991 missed the opportunity to acquire automatic citizenship and were obliged to undergo the more cumbersome method of naturalization. As with any other would-be citizens, the Tatars had to provide official documents from their country of previous residence confirming that they were no longer its citizens. The government of Uzbekistan (from which most Tatars arrived) showed no sign of co-operating by providing documentation.18 Thus many Tatars found themselves excluded from Ukrainian citizenship and unable to vote in local or national elections. Russian pressure to establish dual citizenship was also strongly resisted in Moldova, where ethnic Russians comprised 13 per cent of the population in 1989. As for Belarus, it banned dual citizenship, adopting its citizenship law in October 1991, thus forcing ethnic

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Russians (who made up 13 per cent of the population in 1989) and others in the country to choose a single allegiance.19 Even Kyrgyzstan, whose government was prepared to make considerable concessions to keep the estimated 18 per cent of its population who were ethnic Russians, refused to sign a dual citizenship treaty with Russia. Armenia’s objections were equally strong, though its Russian population is scarcely 1 per cent of the population. Kazakhstan adopted the zero option, but with a twist. That is, Kazakhstani citizenship was initially offered not only to any Soviet citizen resident in the country in December 1991, but also to ethnic Kazakhs anywhere in the world who wanted to take it. To that end, Kazakhstan’s 1993 constitution awarded the right to dual citizenship to expatriate Kazakhs. President Nursultan Nazarbaev was in two minds about keeping the 37.8 per cent of the republic’s population who were ethnic Russians. They were concentrated in the north, on the border with Russia, and Nazarbaev was afraid that if they left they would want to take their land with them. Both Kazakhs and Russians feel they have first claim to the steppe in the north of present-day Kazakhstan. The nomadic Kazakhs criss-crossed the territory for centuries, herding their sheep in search of pasture. They were still living a nomadic life when they first came into contact with Russian Cossacks, sent by Moscow in the early 1700s to establish outposts and protect Russia’s trade routes with Asia. Russian rule was established in the region in 1731 and was followed by a massive influx of landless Russian and Ukrainian peasants. Since the early eighteenth century, therefore, when the Kazakhs were still nomads, there has been a more or less permanent Slav settlement in the territory. This explains why Russians have proved much more willing to leave southern Kazakhstan and other regions of Central Asia than northern Kazakhstan. It also explains why Nazarbaev refused to grant the right to dual citizenship that many members of Kazakhstan’s Russian community demanded. Kazakhstan’s 1995 constitution ruled out dual citizenship. Instead, Nazarbaev and the Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, in 1995 signed a treaty calling for the introduction of a simplified manner of obtaining citizenship by nationals of one country wanting to move permanently to the other. The aim was to provide Kazakhstan’s ethnic Russian population with ‘sleeping’ Russian citizenship. Russians were assured they could obtain virtually automatic Russian citizenship if they ever decided to move to Russia. The idea was that they would then be more likely to remain in Kazakhstan and see how things went

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there, rather than rush to emigrate immediately to Russia (or, even less desirable from Kazakhstan’s point of view, secretly obtain Russian citizenship).20 Soon after, the Russian government concluded a similar agreement with Kyrgyzstan. As for Uzbekistan, where 8.3 per cent of the population were ethnic Russians in 1989, the government put up strong resistance when, in 1993–4, the Russian government tried to persuade Uzbekistan’s leaders to grant dual citizenship to members of the ethnic Russian community. Tashkent rejected the idea outright, contending that dual citizenship would give Russians a privilege that would only exacerbate relations with other ethnic minorities in the country.21 The result was said to be a large number of applications for Russian citizenship and a stream of ethnic Russians leaving Uzbekistan for Russia.22

The exceptions Between the First and Second World Wars, the three Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were independent states. They were occupied by the USSR in 1940 and did not regain their independence until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. During the occupation years, Estonia and Latvia (and Lithuania to a much lesser extent) experienced a massive influx of settlers from other parts of the USSR. (The fact that immigration was lower into less-developed, more rural Lithuania suggests that the contention that settlement amounted to a politically-driven russification, designed primarily to consolidate Moscow’s control, does not tell the whole story.) Enforced settlement produced major demographic changes in Estonia and Latvia. By the 1989 census, 48 per cent of Latvia’s population were non-Latvians; in Estonia, non-Estonians comprised 33 per cent of the population. In Lithuania, the share of the non-Lithuanian population in 1989 was just over 20 per cent. Lithuania in 1991 chose the zero option, offering citizenship to all those legally resident in the country. In Estonia and Latvia, by contrast, the titular nationalities felt that, unless urgent measures were taken, they would become minorities in their own countries and be unable to preserve their languages and national identities. Both countries accordingly decided to restrict automatic citizenship to the former citizens of the inter-war republics and their direct descendants. Most of these people were ethnic Estonians and Latvians, though some were Slavs. The rest of the population, predominantly Russian Soviet-era settlers and their offspring, then found themselves

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stateless. In Latvia, they numbered an estimated 650 000; and in Estonia, the figure was 400 000.23 Some of these people had been living in the Baltic states for decades and had put down roots; a substantial number had been born in Estonia and Latvia and, while not ethnically Estonian or Latvian, wanted to stay. Their desire was heightened by the fact that the Baltic states soon began to make such a success of their economic reforms that living standards not only remained higher than those of most of the Russian Federation but began to move even further ahead. Some people left the Baltic states during the early years of independence, but most were determined to stay. In February 1992, the Estonian Parliament reinstituted the country’s pre-war citizenship law, which had been in force before the Soviet occupation. Only those living in the country prior to 1940, or their descendants, became eligible automatically to receive Estonian citizenship; with a few exceptions for special services to the Estonian state, Soviet-era settlers and their children were disenfranchised. Though most of these people were not ethnic Estonians, the authorities insisted that the criterion for citizenship was not ethnic. In 1993, the Estonian Parliament passed a law on aliens requiring all those who were not Estonian citizens to apply for temporary residence permits. The original draft provoked a widespread fear of expulsion among non-citizens. There was also strong international concern, not only about the aliens law but also about Estonia’s 1993 law on local elections, which precluded non-citizens from being elected as city councillors. Particular concern was expressed by the CSCE/OSCE, the Council of Europe and the European Union (EU). These intergovernmental organizations were anxious to avoid creating anywhere in Europe pockets of disenfranchised people who might in the present or later become sources of instability. The precedent set by Hitler’s exploitation of the Sudeten Germans’ discontent lurked at the back of everyone’s mind. Commentators warned that Russia would not always be weakened and demoralized, and that the presence on the territory of the countries on Russia’s borders of large groups of stateless people constituted a potential danger not only for Russia’s immediate neighbours but for European security as a whole. The Estonian and Latvian authorities were initially unwilling to change their stance. They appeared in the early 1990s to believe that the Russian Federation would soon implode, just as the USSR had done, and that they therefore had no need to do business with the Russian government. However, as time wore on, they abandoned this stance. The intervention of the OSCE

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and the Council of Europe helped lead to the adoption of amendments simplifying the registration process and relaxing other restrictions on the non-citizen populations in both Estonia and Latvia. Estonia has since tried to reassure its non-citizens. In 1993, President Lennart Meri set up a presidential round table, which included representatives of political parties and ethnic minorities. Its regular meetings increased dialogue and encouraged the integration of the Russianspeaking population into the political process. At the end of 1997, the Estonian government approved guidelines for integrating the non-citizen population, estimated at 350 000 (23 per cent) out of a total population of 1.5 million. The guidelines included such measures as improving training for Estonian-language teachers in Russian-language schools, and publishing history textbooks for Russian-language schools similar to those used in Estonian-speaking ones, instead of the Soviet-era or modern Russian books used by most Russian-speaking pupils.24 The situation in Latvia was more complicated. The Latvian Parliament did not adopt a citizenship law until 1994. That law restricted automatic citizenship to those who had been citizens of the country at the time of the 1940 Soviet occupation, and their descendants. As a result, 72 per cent of Latvia’s 2.5 million inhabitants received automatic citizenship, but 28 per cent did not. Unknown numbers of people in both Estonia and Latvia are believed to have taken Russian citizenship, but the overwhelming majority are still stateless. In its original draft, Latvia’s citizenship law would have established annual naturalization quotas, restricting naturalization to 0.1 per cent of the total citizenry annually. Opposition inside the country and pressure from intergovernmental organizations prompted the government to intervene, and the quotas were dropped when the law was finally adopted. But, while the law in its final form offered noncitizens the opportunity to apply for naturalization, it did not permit them all to apply immediately. Instead, a ‘window’ system gave priority to those born in Latvia over those born outside, and to the younger age group in each category over older ones. The right to apply for naturalization was spread over seven years beginning in 1996. The most numerous categories came last, meaning that nearly half a million non-citizens would have to wait until after the year 2000 before acquiring the right to apply. The fact that, in 1995, only about 700 non-citizens succeeded in qualifying for naturalization indicated how formidable the hurdles were. The Latvian Parliament repeatedly rejected proposals to amend its citizenship law to grant automatic citizenship to children who had been

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born in Latvia since its independence in August 1991. In so doing, Parliament ignored the recommendations of Max van der Stoel, the OSCE’s High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM), who urged that all those born in Latvia to non-citizens since August 1991 should be granted automatic citizenship, regardless of language skills.25 The HCNM acknowledged the importance of preserving and strengthening Estonian and Latvian national identity, but also stressed the importance of ensuring harmonious inter-ethnic relations. These two goals could best be attained, he suggested, by adopting an open policy of dialogue and integration that would require an effort not only by the governments concerned but also by the members of the non-citizen populations. He agreed that those wishing to become Estonian or Latvian citizens should demonstrate their willingness to integrate by learning to conduct a simple conversation in the national language. But he also urged the Baltic governments not to set requirements for citizenship so stringent that few applicants could meet them. He argued particularly that keeping the number of non-citizen residents high would not promote long-term stability. By making it hard for non-citizens to meet the standards, he felt, the authorities risked deterring them from trying to integrate. In these circumstances, the authorities were creating a potentially dangerous situation and risked bringing about the precise opposite of what they desired, the HCNM warned. The HCNM expressed his desire for Estonia and Latvia to flourish as free and independent states. But he also argued that, for this to be achieved, some kind of modus vivendi had to be worked out with the Russian-speaking population. This conviction assumed that most of the non-citizen population wanted to stay where they were. In light of this reality, the HCNM argued, it would be preferable for them to be integrated into Estonian and Latvian society than to be excluded and alienated. Accordingly, the HCNM urged the Baltic authorities to adopt the kind of legislation on citizenship and naturalization most likely to ensure the loyalty of those who were not ethnically Estonian or Latvian toward their countries of residence.

Citizenship and national minorities Everything said so far points to the importance of issues relating to citizenship, community and equality for national minorities. To prevent the outbreak of conflict, people belonging to national minorities need to be sure of equal treatment with the members of the majority. This includes the right to practise their culture, religion and language,

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participate in the society in which they live, and be consulted over matters affecting them. States are often nervous of ethnic minorities on their territories, seeing them as a potential fifth column who may place allegiance to their national identity above loyalty to the state where they live. States are especially wary where an ethnic minority is concentrated on one side of an international border while members of the same nationality make up the majority of the population in a ‘kin-state’ on the other side. The aim of minority rights standards is, therefore, to ensure that minorities can be integrated into the societies in which they live and that they are not alienated, excluded or aggrieved. They have a right to be treated in the same way – no better and no worse – as the members of the majority. This does not mean everyone has to be the same: human rights are universal, but they are not uniform, so there is room for flexibility. It is important, moreover, to see minority rights as part of universally recognized human rights. They are individual rights, not collective rights, even though some rights, like the right to speak one’s mother tongue, have an obvious collective dimension. But the aim of minority rights is equality of treatment for all members of society. The right not to be discriminated against is a fundamental human right, applicable to all individuals. But it is particularly relevant to members of minorities who may find themselves the butt of discrimination on grounds of religion, language or culture. Because states tend to be so wary of minorities on their territory, international norms and standards have developed only slowly. As Hugh Miall of London’s Royal Institute of International Affairs, notes, ‘a transnational regime for minority rights does exist in the 1990s, but it is still relatively weak’.26 There was no mention of minority rights in the United Nations Charter. The UDHR outlawed discrimination on racial, ethnic, religious or other grounds, but made no specific mention of minorities. Some attention was paid to minority rights in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, but it was weak, defining minority rights negatively: ‘persons belonging to [ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities] shall not be denied the right … to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practise their own religion, or to use their own language’. Only gradually, says Patrick Thornberry, did states become aware that outlawing discrimination was not enough.27 The strongest assertion of minority rights so far adopted is the CSCE’s 1990 Copenhagen Document, ch. IV of which contains a detailed enumeration of the rights of people belonging to national minorities.28 The Copenhagen Document is vague in many respects: it does not, for

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example, attempt to define what a national minority is, and it leaves much to the discretion of governments. It says nothing about citizenship. Yet it contains the most comprehensive standards adopted so far on minority languages, minority education, and the right of members of minorities to political participation (including their right to their own local or autonomous administrations). What it omits is as important as what it includes. The Copenhagen Document does not define a national minority directly: para. 32 states simply that ‘To belong to a national minority is a matter of a person’s individual choice and no disadvantage may arise from the exercise of such choice.’ The Council of Europe’s 1995 Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities set out deliberately to codify the rights contained in the Copenhagen Document, but did not, in the end, go as far as some of the CSCE’s formulations. As in the Copenhagen Document, the Framework Convention did not attempt to define a national minority. Unlike the Copenhagen Document, however, the Framework Convention fudged the issue of whether, to qualify for the description of member of a national minority, a person must be a citizen of the state in question. Thus, Art. 3 states that ‘Every person belonging to a national minority shall have the right freely to choose to be treated or not to be treated as such and no disadvantage shall result from this choice or from the exercise of the rights which are connected to that choice.’ This formulation reopens the question of what a national minority is. It is a step backwards from the Copenhagen Document, whose categorical insistence that membership of a national minority is a matter purely of individual choice may be taken to mean that no preconditions may be placed on that choice. This is an important issue, since some legal experts have maintained that, to qualify for protection as a member of a national minority, a person must be a citizen of the state on whose territory he or she lives. That interpretation was not upheld by the Copenhagen Document. The HCNM declines to be drawn on the issue, saying merely that he knows a national minority when he sees one. It is arguable, however, that the practice of the HCNM, who has occupied himself not only with the Russian-speaking minorities in Estonia and Latvia, but also with the plight of the Roma throughout Europe and the Crimean Tatars in the Ukraine, many of whom lack citizenship, suggests that the definition of a national minority is evolving to include people with or without citizenship. As the twentieth century draws to a close, citizenship has emerged as a key issue shaping the newly independent states of Central and

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Eastern Europe. Anxious to find ways of preventing future conflicts, European organizations have sketched a framework of norms and standards governing this sensitive issue. It is a framework that places a high value on democratic institutions, the rule of law, tolerance, human rights and respect for the individual.

Notes and references 1. UDHR, art. 21. 2. T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge University Press, 1950). 3. G. Delanty, ‘Models of Citizenship’, Citizenship Studies, vol. 1, no. 3 (1997) pp. 285–303. 4. ‘Each State shall determine under its own law who are its nationals. This law shall be accepted by other States in so far as it is consistent with applicable international conventions, customary international law and the principles of law generally recognized with regard to nationality’, European Convention on Nationality, art. 3. 5. See, for example, A. Linklater, ‘Cosmopolitan Citizenship’, Citizenship Studies, vol. 2, no. 1 (1998) pp. 23–41. 6. H. Bull, The Anarchical Society (London: Macmillan, 1977), quoted in H. Miall (ed.), Minority Rights in Europe: The Scope for a Transnational Regime (London: Pinter, for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1994) pp. 8 and 113. 7. Only Albania, Armenia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia can be described as being nationally homogeneous. 8. ‘Citizenship – One of Us, or One of Them?’, The Economist, 31 July 1993; Andrew Nagorksi, ‘The German Melting Pot’, Time Magazine, 21 April 1997, pp. 14–19; ‘Pleas to Ease German Citizen Law Fails’, The Daily Telegraph, 28 March 1998. 9. R. Brubaker, ‘Civic and Ethnic Nations in France and Germany,’ in J. Hutchinson and A. D. Smith (eds), Ethnicity (Oxford University Press, 1996) pp. 168–73. 10. L. Barrington, ‘The Domestic and International Consequences of Citizenship in the Soviet Successor States’, Europe–Asia Studies, vol. 47, no. 5 (1995) pp. 731–63. 11. Rossiiskaya gazeta, 6 February 1992. 12. Zakonodatel’nye akty RF po voprosam grazhdanstva (Moscow: Kommissiya po voprosam grazhdanstva pri Presidente RF; 1994). 13. R. Brubaker, ‘Citizenship Struggle in Soviet Successor States’, International Migration Review, vol. XXVI no. 2 (Summer 1992) pp. 269–91. 14. Agence France Presse, 13 December 1993; Financial Times, 24 December 1993; Izvestiya, 4 January 1994. 15. Interfax, 7 September 1995.

242 Citizenship and Democracy 16. Pravda Ukrainy, 2 November 1991. See also, L. Jackson and K. Wolczuk, ‘Defining Citizenship and Political Community in Ukraine’, The Ukrainian Review, vol. 44, no. 2 (1997) pp. 16–27. 17. OMRI Daily Digest, 4 November 1996. 18. Forced Migration Alert, no. 31, 2 June 1997. See also J. Packer, ‘Autonomy Within the OSCE: The Case of Crimea’, in M. Suksi (ed.), Autonomy: Applications and Implications (Dordrecht: Kluwer Law International 1998), pp. 295–316. 19. Itar-Tass, 30 October 1991. 20. Kazakhstanskaya pravda, 21 January 1995. See also S. Cummings, ‘The Kazakhs: Diasporas, Demographics and the Kazakhstani State’, in C. King and N. Melvin (eds.), Nations Abroad: Diaspora Politics and International Relations in the Former Soviet Union (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1998). 21. Rossiiskaya gazeta, 13 January 1994. 22. Karavan-Blits (Almaty), 1 February 1996. 23. Estonia and Latvia: Citizenship, Language and Conflict Prevention (New York: Forced Migration Projects of the Open Society Institute, 1997). 24. Interfax, 30 December 1997. 25. On the role of the OSCE HCNM, see K. Birmingham, The OSCE and Minority Issues (The Hague: Foundation on Inter-Ethnic Relations, 1995); E. Koehler, ‘The OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities – A Legal Perspective’, Thesis presented for the degree of Master of Laws, University of Utrecht, 1996; Foundation on Inter-Ethnic Relations, ‘The Role of the High Commissioner on National Minorities in OSCE Conflict Prevention: An Introduction’ (The Hague: Foundation on Inter-Ethnic Relations, 1997). 26. H. Miall (ed.), Minority Rights in Europe: The Scope for a Transnational Regime (London: Pinter, for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1994) p. 3. 27. P. Thornberry, ‘International and European Standards on Minority Rights’, in Miall, Minority Rights in Europe, pp. 14–21. 28. Document of the Copenhagen Meeting of the Conference on the Human Dimension of the CSCE, 1990.

13 Democratic Destination: The Examples of Britain and Italy James Newell

Introduction How do political arrangements in ‘liberal democracies’ enable citizens, who do little beyond voting, to influence public policy? To answer this question for such contrasting ‘democracies’ as Britain and Italy may be to offer a description of the ‘democratic destination’. I take it that, though terms such as ‘democracy’ and ‘democratization’ cannot be used innocently – as Adrian Oldfield made clear in Chapter 1 of this volume, because of the (essentially hidden) evaluative load they carry – systems that are widely called ‘democratic’ are ones in which the authorities respond in some way to the demands of citizens on terms approaching equality. It is often thought that systems are democratic to the extent that they display at least the following five features (in addition to the usual constitutional guarantees). First, their political arrangements are stable (if instability leads to collapse they will not be able to act as mechanisms for popular influence at all). Second, their electoral systems function so as to ensure, as nearly as possible, that all votes carry equal weight. Third, they ensure that the impact on government formation of factors other than vote distributions is kept to a minimum. Fourth, if they are parliamentary systems they ensure that there is effective accountability of the executive to the legislature. Finally, they ensure that government is sufficiently close to the people: through the provision of decentralized forms of government, the potential influence of each citizen is maximized. How, and to what degree, then, are these conditions fulfilled in Britain and Italy? We should begin by explaining the choice of two countries often considered as lying at opposite ends of the spectrum of democratic governance – the one supposedly characterized by stable, single-party 243

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government, alternation in office and the doctrine of the mandate; the other, until recently, by unstable, multi-party government, permanence in office of one party and hence (so the argument went) weakened mechanisms of popular accountability. Perhaps not surprisingly, given such beliefs, the decade or so since the mid-1980s has seen intense debate in Italy on institutional reform,1 during which there has been a reconfirmation of the long-standing tradition of looking to foreign models as guides. Yet it is equally clear that in so far as reformers have looked to the British model, what they have often perceived, as we shall see, is a somewhat idealized version. It is also true that the recent period has witnessed the emergence of a revisionist view of Italian democracy, stemming largely from the work of Joseph LaPalombara2 who has argued that the political system which emerged in post-war Italy was stable, highly participatory and underpinned by a deep-seated commitment to democracy by the citizenry.3 Significantly, this work was based on a fuller appreciation than had been apparent in much comparative political science until then, of how important it is to take account of context if phenomena are to be understood correctly. This raises the interesting possibility that, although the British and Italian systems function differently, their effects, in terms of the amount of citizen influence they provide for, are rather similar. If this can be shown to be the case, one might hope to contribute to understanding the nature of the ‘democratic destination’ and to questioning the dominant tendency among political scientists to portray Britain and Italy as offering radically contrasting examples of ‘democratic effectiveness’.

A ‘civic culture’? If we begin, then, by considering the first feature of ‘effective democracies’ – political stability – we may note that a major requirement of stability has long been thought to be the existence of an ‘appropriate’ political culture, and that Britain has traditionally been seen as having a culture rather more conducive to stability than has Italy. According to Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba,4 for example, Britain’s was the epitome of the ‘civic culture’, ‘in which political activity, involvement and rationality [existed] but [were] balanced by passivity, traditionality, and commitment to parochial values’.5 Such a culture was conducive to democratic stability because it enabled the political system to reconcile responsiveness to citizen demands with the need to produce authoritative decisions – this, in turn, because it allowed citizens to be sufficiently involved as to enforce elite

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responsiveness, while at the same time limiting that involvement such as to allow elites to make decisions free of popular pressures. And while it became fashionable in the 1970s and 1980s – with their themes of ‘post-material values’, new politics issues, partisan dealignment, economic crisis and resurgence – to talk of a decline of civic culture, and especially of the deference that was part of it, the basic qualities of trust, tolerance, pragmatism and moderation were still regarded as being central features of the political culture in Britain. Political culture in Italy apparently provided about as radical a contrast as one could get. For the authors of The Civic Culture, Italy’s was a culture of relatively unrelieved political alienation and of social isolation and distrust. The Italians are particularly low … in the acknowledgement of the obligation to take an active part in local community affairs, in the sense of competence to join with others in situations of political stress … and in their confidence in the social environment.6 Such a culture was incompatible with political stability, since widespread rejection of the country’s political institutions and structures combined with low levels of trust made it difficult for citizens to co-operate for purposes of influencing the government or entering into political bargains; the result was that society was divided up ‘into closed and relatively hostile camps’. 7 And, as in the British case, The Civic Culture took its place in a long line of scholarship emphasizing essentially the same theme. Thirty years after it was published, Paul Ginsborg8 – following Edward Banfield, 9 Robert Putnam10 and many more – could be found writing that: there are good reasons for asserting, with all due caution, that in Italy there exist the elements of a political culture which it shares with the rest of Mediterranean Europe, and that such elements … act as a fetter on democracy, on relations between citizens and the State, and on the development of a civic awareness.11 To suggest, however, that the wider incidence of expressions of alienation and political dissatisfaction produces higher levels of political instability in Italy seems to be mistaken. First, there is a sense in which the characteristics of a political culture cannot be a condition of democratic

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stability, because the two have a logical, and not a casual, relationship. If by ‘democratic stability’ one means the degree of legitimacy enjoyed by a political system then, since political culture consists of attitudes and beliefs about that system, the connection between the two is necessary rather than contingent. If, on the other hand, one conceives of ‘stability’ as a property genuinely independent of mass attitudes, then, as long as political culture is merely the aggregate of beliefs, values and emotions towards political objects, the latter’s importance for political stability is, to put it in the most circumspect terms possible, uncertain. For one thing, the views of ordinary people (who almost by definition have little political influence), may simply not matter much. For another, even if they do matter, the views may not be deeply held – something that is likely when, compared to other domains such as work or family life, people fail to attach much importance to politics. This is part of the more general problem of how to interpret survey data, given the notorious ease with which these data allow researchers, possibly quite unwittingly, to impose their own frames of reference on the reality they choose to study (with a resulting likelihood that their findings are heavily influenced by what they expect to find). However this may be, the raw differences remain and demand an interpretation. I offer the following. While there is a stronger tendency among ordinary Italians than among the British to experience the state as an alien, exploitative force, the consequence is not to increase the availability of citizens for ‘involvement in destabilizing mass movements’,12 but to produce responses akin to resignation along with others of an essentially individualistic kind. Examples include clientelism (especially in the South) and the apparently greater willingness of people in Italy than in Britain to evade taxes or to engage in other activities that involve defrauding the state. Analysts have tended to take such behaviour as indicators of the state’s ineffectiveness (this, because many ordinary citizens’ encounters with the state, especially the bureaucracy, frequently are the source of unhappiness and frustration) and therefore of instability of Italy’s political arrangements; yet many of them, in fact, betoken stability and sometimes a very deep-seated commitment to democratic methods. For example, if clientelism has undemocratic implications (representing the negation of universalistic criteria for the distribution of resources), political analysts have long recognized it as an essentially conservative (and therefore stabilizing) phenomenon – since it represents an alternative to the search for collective solutions to common problems, and strengthens those already occupying positions of power within the

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political system. Tax evasion too may betoken stability rather than its opposite. In Italian culture ‘only an oafish stickler will insist on being provided with the “fiscal receipt” of commercial transactions required by law, if he does not really need it’.13 If such attitudes are potentially destructive of democracy (by being subversive of confidence in the efficacy of public authority), nevertheless there is something quintessentially democratic about the collusion involved in overlooking fiscal receipts, based as it is on the understanding that ‘if the tax laws are rigorously enforced against you today, they may equally be enforced against me tomorrow’.14 Moreover, such attitudes suggest keen awareness of the divergence between the formal and the actual rules of the system that leads, not to moral outrage (which would indeed sharpen conflict and instability), but rather to the art of making do and the search for creative accommodations. The law and its enforcement is assumed to be negotiable, something that in turn is rooted in precisely that high degree of tolerance, also of an official kind, that is so essential to democracy.15

The electoral systems: equal votes for everyone? If, then, ‘the democratic destination’ is a place where political stability serves to ensure that popular influence will have continuity, the most obvious mechanism by which this influence is exercised is, of course, through voting. This highlights the second feature of ‘effective democracies’ – that they ensure, as nearly as possible, that all votes carry equal weight – something that is determined by the electoral system. Until 1993, when Italy changed its system, it was possible to think of the electoral systems of Britain and Italy as being polar opposites. Italy’s was a highly proportional system based on large, multi-member, constituencies; and Britain’s a highly disproportional system based on the plurality formula and single-member constituencies. It can be argued that proportional representation is essential if votes are to carry equal weight: if, by definition, proportional systems minimize the impact on seat distributions of factors other than vote distributions, then this is true to a far lesser degree, if at all, with other types of system. With the single-member, simple plurality system, for example, the weight carried by any given vote depends on how other votes are cast and therefore on where they are cast. The disjuncture between vote and seat distributions resulting from the operation of a given electoral system can be measured quite precisely in terms of the Loosemore-Hanby16 index, D, which is calculated as being

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half the sum of the absolute percentage differences between votes and seats received by each party at a given election: D = 1/2 Σi |vi – Si |. If the figures in Table 13.1 make a rather familiar point, they make it rather graphically. Disproportion is much higher in Britain than in Italy, especially from the early 1970s onwards, a period that saw a dramatic increase in voting for the Liberals and other ‘third parties’, something that was, in turn, partly consequent on an increase in the number of third-party candidates who were fielded in the first place. Italy also witnessed an increase in numbers of candidates from the early 1970s, but because of the nature of the electoral system this had no effect on disproportionality. Its proportionality notwithstanding, Italy’s electoral system was presumed to have several consequences thought to render popular accountability less than perfect, and it was these that provided the most fundamental rationale for the change of electoral system that took place in 1993. Among them were: the perpetuation of a multiparty system (in which, 1948 aside, no single party won an absolute

Table 13.1 Disproportion in the distribution of votes and seats at general elections in Britain and Italy, 1945–92 (Loosemore-Hanby index) Britain Election 1945 1950 1951 1955 1959 1964 1966 1970 1974 (Feb) 1974 (Oct) 1979 1983 1987 1992

Italy Disproportion 13.6 8.3 3.3 4.2 8.6 11.1 9.7 8.6 19.2 18.9 15.0 23.3 12.2 16.9

Election

Disproportion

1948

5.6

1953

6.2

1958 1963 1968 1972

4.3 4.6 4.4 5.2

1976 1979 1983 1987 1992

4.7 5.0 4.7 4.9 5.0

Sources: Figures calculated on the basis of data drawn from Caciagli and Spreafico,17 Bull and Newell,18 and White and Kimber.19

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majority of seats); a consequent loss of popular influence over the partisan composition of government (which would be decided behind closed doors after the votes had been counted); and an absence of responsible government (since small-percentage electoral changes were unable to produce large changes in seat distributions, with the result that the Christian Democrats (DC), as the party of relative majority, could remain in office permanently merely through occasional changes of alliance partners).20 Thus there was a widespread feeling that, ‘whatever the electoral outcome, the DC is always in office’ and that Italy was, consequently, a ‘blocked’ democracy. In line with the tradition of admiration of an idealized version of the British model of government, electoral-law reformers in Italy anticipated that a move towards something more nearly approximating ‘first past the post’ (FPTP) of the kind actually made in 1993 would produce what was considered to be the cornerstone of that model: alternation in government. This sine qua non of a healthy democracy would be almost assured by an electoral system whose effect would reduce voters’ realistic choices to the two front-runners in each constituency, thus minimizing the number of parties winning parliamentary representation and hence maximizing the chances of the emergence of single-party government. This, in turn, would increase popular influence over the partisan composition of government and thus the likelihood of a successful implantation of responsible government. However, to argue that the electoral system was responsible for the presence of multiple parliamentary parties is doubtful, since proportional representation is, by definition, a ‘no effects’ system: 21 it translates into a distribution of seats a given distribution of the vote with minimum distortion. Therefore, while it minimizes disincentives to candidatures, this does not say that it is a cause of the presence of multiple parties in Parliament. Depending on the political and social context in which it operates, FPTP might also coexist with large numbers of parliamentary parties. Second, to suggest that the electoral system was responsible for the DC’s permanence in office is also doubtful, since the fundamental determinant of coalition formation in the post-war period was the so-called conventio ad excludendum: the tacit understanding between the DC and the smaller parties in its orbit that the second-largest party – the Italian Communist Party (PCI) which consistently obtained at least a quarter of the vote – should never be admitted to government, thus leaving the DC permanently in office. The conventio ad excludendum and DC hegemony were fundamentally a product of the Cold War and indeed, given the Cold War, perhaps the

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proportional system in fact helped to ensure that DC hegemony was less strong than it might otherwise have been.22 However, believing that the effects of an electoral system in one national context could be reproduced in another simply by ‘transporting’ it, Italian reformers succeeded in engineering a reform for elections to the two Chambers of Parliament ensuring that in the future, 75 per cent of the members of each Chamber would be elected by FPTP. Yet, far from declining as a consequence of the new law, the number of parties achieving parliamentary representation actually rose – from 16 to 20 at the 1994 election. This was because the party configuration was at the same time undergoing a process of recomposition for reasons unconnected with the electoral system. The result, in a context of mergers and splits in which few could foresee what the precise effects of the new system would be, was that the parties simply divided the constituencies between them by means of stand-down arrangements – a phenomenon that became known as the ‘proportionalisation of the plurality system’.23 It is clear, therefore, that the only prerequisite of ‘democratic effectiveness’ anywhere near guaranteed by an electoral system is the faithful translation of vote distributions into seat distributions. Prior to 1993, Italy met this prerequisite, while Britain did not. It is surely ironic that, precisely at the time when the Italian electoral reform movement was reaching its culmination, British electoral-reform campaigners were pointing to four consecutive Conservative governments despite the party’s continual minority status, as evidence that Britain was also a ‘blocked democracy’ – and suggesting that the remedy lay in a change in the electoral system that was in precisely the opposite direction to that being advocated in Italy! If many Italian reformers were unaware of this, they also probably did not know that the vote–seat translations performed by Britain’s electoral system could often have absurd consequences: after the 1951 and 1974 elections, for example, the party coming second in terms of vote shares formed the government, while the party coming first formed the Opposition!

The impact of electoral outcomes on government formation Yet, however little the electoral system might have been responsible, in Italy the DC’s permanent place at the head of unstable coalitions was clear proof for many of the inability of electoral outcomes to affect government formation – the presumed consequences (in terms of policy paralysis and the spread of clientelism) clearly establishing the political

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system’s inability to respond effectively to popular demands. All this was thought to contrast strongly with Britain, where the alternation of strong, single-party governments, indicated the political system’s ability to respond to the signals of the ballot and meet popular demands efficiently and effectively through governments’ dominance of the House of Commons. However, four observations suggest the contrast between the two political systems is nowhere near as clear as it seems. First, if the DC was in office throughout the period between 1945 and 1994, nine of the fourteen general elections that took place in Britain during the same period failed to change the partisan composition of government. One could even say that ‘alternation’ in Britain is largely a myth: since 1920, there have been roughly five years of Conservative government for every two of Labour government, and in the almost one hundred years since its formation, the Labour party has taken office with convincing majorities only three times (1945, 1966 and 1997). It is also untrue that the DC’s permanence in office implied that electoral outcomes in Italy had no influence on government formation. Amongst many examples, the 1972 election, which saw considerable growth in the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI). In response, the rightwing Liberal Party was brought back into the governing coalition after several years out in the cold, the hope among DC leaders being that by doing this they could stop the erosion of DC electoral support to the right which the growth of the MSI seemed to represent. Again, the 1976 election saw dramatic growth in PCI support and was the prelude to the ‘National Solidarity’ governments of the period up to 1979, a period which, between March 1978 and March 1979, saw the PCI involved in a legislative coalition with the DC. Second, the frequent government ‘crises’ and changes of government elections in Italy, while democratically respectable,24 were, as Percy Allum25 points out, akin to Cabinet re-shuffles in Britain. Thus they did not betoken as much political instability as surface appearances might suggest. In fact, since cabinet instability was a continuous game of ‘musical chairs’ between the same partners, frequent changes of Cabinet coexisted with less frequent changes of office and rarer changes of personnel. Hence the ministerial and cabinet experience of individuals was comparable to that in Britain, and there is little evidence that governing was turned over to permanent civil servants.26 Third, what did seem to be ruled out was alternation of government – even though electoral support might shift – a ‘pendulum swing’ from government based on the DC to an alternative coalition centred around the main party of opposition. The view one takes of this largely depends

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on one’s view of the nature of the PCI itself. If the latter was to be understood as an ‘anti-system’ party of dubious democratic credentials, then, given its size and status as Italy’s principal left-wing party, its permanent exclusion had to be seen as evidence of the country’s ‘incompleteness’ as a democracy, the price that political stability and system continuity exacted from popular representativeness. But there is an alternative view according to which the PCI’s exclusion indicated less a defect of Italian democracy than a continuing tradition of foreign, mainly American, interference in Italian electoral politics as a consequence of the Cold War.27 This meant that the conventio could not betoken instability, or even a failure of government-formation to reflect electoral realities, as it was underpinned by strong popular acceptance of antiCommunist attitudes.28 Of course, whether the Communist Party constituted a genuine ‘threat to democracy’ is unprovable either way because, almost regardless of the programmatic changes the party made during its history,29 these could always be portrayed by opponents as mere accommodations to necessity rather than changes of principle.30 What is less uncertain is that, whatever the nature of its aspirations, in practice, the PCI found itself in a strategic position little different from the one in which the British Labour Party, or indeed any reforming party hoping to win power by electoral majorities, found itself. That is, if from the beginning Labour sought an acknowledged place for working people within a society whose fundamental contours would remain unchanged while the PCI sought a ‘parliamentary road to socialism’, once the two parties decided to seek their aims by electoral means, they became subject to Adam Preworski’s31 ‘dilemma of electoral socialism’. This required them to moderate their appeals to win votes beyond the ranks of manual workers. By the same token, this prevented them from using extra-parliamentary or unconstitutional means to achieve their ends if the electoral road proved to be a dead end. Finally, one-party dominance in Italy is often said to have undermined the capacity of government to respond positively to popular demands by facilitating the spread of clientelism. The relative absence of competition made it unnecessary to compete for votes on the basis of issue positions while helping to create that power disjunction necessary for clientelism to arise at all; and clientelism, in turn, made it difficult for the system to respond to popular demands by virtue of its tendency to create a large number of vested interests, each of which had a power of veto whenever policy change was considered. 32

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However, through clientelistic networks founded on their ‘colonization’ of public institutions (enabling them to construct within themselves stable vertical relationships between national and local elites), the post-war governing parties had available to them a powerful means of integrating centre and periphery 33 – not unimportant given the localism and economic disequilibria (most readily apparent in the North–South disparities) that have always been salient features of Italian society. And if, through the public-sector mismanagement to which it inevitably gave rise, clientele politics was eventually an important factor in the rise of the secessionist Northern League, 34 the politics of ‘Thatcherism’ in Britain – as much the product of ‘one-party dominance’ as the politics of clientelism in Italy – have had no less significance for centre–periphery relations in that country. One of the principal factors responsible for the resurgence of Scottish nationalism from the early 1980s was the awareness that Conservative governments were implementing policies with anti-Scottish implications.35 Further, this was at a time when two of the conditions underpinning the existing constitutional relationship between Scotland and the rest of the UK – that the party-system should transcend the border so that the party winning power at UK-level also enjoys support in Scotland; and second, that both parties should have an equal chance of winning power36 – patently no longer held. And it may well be that with the establishment of the Scottish Parliament, the almost certain increase in the transparency of the processes whereby the distribution of public expenditure between Scotland and the rest of the UK is determined will be a source of friction, especially if the spending choices of Westminster and Edinburgh differ significantly.37

Executive accountability? If responsiveness to popular demands requires that the partisan composition of governments reflects electoral pressures, it also requires – in a parliamentary system – that there are effective mechanisms in place for ensuring the accountability of the executive to the legislature. In Britain, it has now become a commonplace to point to the infrequency of ministerial resignations; to observe how the Cabinet is able to protect ministers with ‘the mantle of its collective responsibility’,38 and on this basis to suggest that the constitutional doctrine of ministerial responsibility has largely fallen into desuetude in recent years. 39 This probably overstates the case, however; for, while it would seem universally recognized that ministers cannot know about more than a

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small fraction of what happens in their departments, the fact is that the obligation to account to Parliament when required to do so (for example through Question Time) remains very much in place. And though forced resignation may now be an unlikely consequence of revealed acts of omission or commission, the effectiveness of the doctrine may not, for all that, have been especially weakened. For the mere fact of having to wade publicly into the manure, as someone once put it, with all the implications that this has for one’s reputation and therefore one’s career prospects, may be at least as effective as the threat of losing one’s position altogether. This means that the minister is in a similar position to the individual who is contemplating a homicide: what is likely to deter him or her is not whether murderers can be hanged or not, but the likelihood of getting caught. What is crucial, then, to executive accountability is the mechanism of Parliamentary scrutiny – an issue rightly considered to be vital in a system such as the British one, where the executive is strong vis-à-vis the legislature. The causes of this strength are well known. They lie not only in the patronage which the prime minister at the head of a singleparty government can deploy to retain the loyalty of backbenchers, and thus ensure that government controls all the decisions of the House. They also lie in the electoral system. If backbenchers did not give their ministers whole-hearted support the government would lose its majority, the next largest party would be called upon to take over the government as a minority, a general election would follow and this governing party would now face the two competing factions of the former majority; which, given our present arrangements, would almost certainly guarantee the united government party an overwhelming majority of seats in the next Parliament.40 How effective the mechanisms of scrutiny are would appear to be impossible to measure. Their effectiveness will depend as much on how successfully they prevent certain actions in the first place – with ministers shrinking ‘from the prospect of having to justify an unjustifiable policy in public (and nowadays, often in front of television cameras)’41 – as on the number of acts of commission or omission they actually succeed in uncovering. Notwithstanding this problem, one might be tempted to conclude that mechanisms of scrutiny are weaker in the Italian Parliament than the British one. In Britain, of the various mechanisms available,

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Question Time is one of the ways in which ambitious backbenchers attempt to bring themselves to the notice of the party leadership, while membership of one of the departmental Select Committees brings the opportunity to acquire expertise in a given policy area. Indeed, an incentive to effective scrutiny, with an Opposition ready to pounce at the first whiff of government blood, might be seen as being inherent in the modus operandi of the ‘adversary system’42 itself. In the Italian case, by contrast, it has been argued that the structure of incentives operating on individual legislators does not induce them to give oversight a particularly high priority; for ‘vigorous participation in formal Parliament business is likely to preclude the kind of network-building … required for junior members if they wish to ensure their re-election and to place themselves well in a strong faction’.43 Moreover, it has been written that although the work of Italian parliamentary committees ‘was competent and they were led by respected and specialised individuals, their recommendations were ignored by the Parliament’.44 They are also seen as being handicapped by a lack of resources45 (although both these charges have also been levelled at the House of Commons’ departmental Select Committees). On the other hand, if British executive accountability is weakened by executive dominance, then, in Italy, periodic breakdowns in coalition solidarity (allowing non-governing parties to bargain over the content of legislation), secret voting (until 1988) and other features of Parliament, ensure a weakness of executive dominance which arguably mitigates what would otherwise be the (more) serious consequences of weak mechanisms of executive accountability.

Government at sub-national level Finally, the issue of democratic stability raised in the first section highlights decentralized government as a vehicle for citizen influence. If democratic stability is a function, not only of political culture, but also, arguably, of the integration of centre and periphery, decentralization is often resorted to as a means of making this integration effective. Meanwhile, the value of decentralization from the viewpoint of enabling citizens to influence public policy is three-fold. First, it mitigates the effects of the majority decision-making rule. That is, if in the normal course of events, political decisions gain their authority by virtue of being backed by majorities, then the larger the units in which such decisions are taken, the more numerous will the dissatisfied minorities necessarily have to be. If similar decisions can

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be taken in, by and for, smaller sub-units, it is likely, but not inevitable, that more people will get more of their preferences met more of the time. Second, it is important simply because so much of an individual’s involvement with the state comes through his or her utilization of services – for example, education, housing, social welfare and recreational services – typically provided at the subnational or local level. Third, even if local authorities’ formal autonomy is limited to the implementation of policies decided elsewhere, implementation will often require local-level initiatives designed to win resources for the local community. Under these circumstances, locally elected politicians become intermediaries: they interact with the large state bureaucracies on the one hand, and, on the other, with their constituents for whom they seek to win the funds and administrative decisions necessary to meet their needs. Sidney Tarrow’s study, Grassroots Politicians in Italy and France,46 showed that, in performing their mediating role, Italian local politicians were obliged to operate within and through party networks rather than via direct contacts with the administration. This was partly because political contacts were often necessary to overcome bureaucratic inefficiency, but more generally because of partitocrazia (literally, ‘partitocracy’) – that considerable overlap between party personnel on the one hand, and interest groups and administrative positions on the other, making it difficult to draw clear boundaries between these entities, and to know in any given case in what capacity individuals were acting. Partitocrazia, and the personal clientele networks organized through it, facilitated local autonomy by helping local politicians to deal with the bureaucracy; more particularly, its role as a ‘transmission belt’ for the allocation of state resources to the periphery helped such politicians deal with the consequences of unstable governments. Government instability meant that the system found it very difficult to take major programmatic decisions and in these circumstances, demands for change became ‘transformed into appeals for the distribution of resources through existing mechanisms and procedures’.47 But, precisely because it was so pervasive, partitocrazia also ensured there could be nothing resembling ‘subnational political systems’ whose operations (processes of coalition formation, influences on voting) could be independent of the processes of inter- and intra-party power-brokering at the national level. For, in a context where interand intra-party relations were characterized by practices of lotizzazione (‘sharing out’) and in which subnational authorities (especially the

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regions) had policy-making powers, the latter, in effect, became part of the overall power apparatus to be bargained over – with parties seeking to enhance their prospects of entering government, or of gaining control of this or that ministry by offering, for example, to exclude another party or parties from office in regions, provinces or local councils where it was in a position of strength.48 The disintegration of the old governing parties between 1992 and 1994 apparently brought considerable improvements, both in the efficiency of subnational authorities, and in their ability to respond to local demands in a non-clientelistic way. The collapse of the old parties, and the consequent breaking of the vertical clientele networks linking national to local-level politicians within party factions probably freed the latter from de facto control from above in terms of how they exercise their competences. This is so because the political system now hosts more smaller parties than before, while a relative lack of organizational and power resources in smaller parties makes central control more difficult than in larger ones. On the other hand, the crisis of the old party-system and the emergence of the new have produced a series of local government reforms designed to improve the nature of the relationship between citizens and the state. This should not come as much of a surprise. G. Pitruzzella49 argues that laws governing local-level competences are effectively the laws that govern the interface between society and the state. Thus it is natural that, as soon as a new regime begins to establish itself, new legislation concerning local competences comes into force as a consequence of the relationship the regime intends to establish with the surrounding community. Together, the reforms can fairly be described as a transformation that ‘has, generally speaking, been welcomed by the Italian public’.50 British local government has also been reformed in recent years. Indeed, its role and status have been revolutionized, principally as the result of measures inspired by ‘New Right’ thinking, and introduced mainly during the 1980s. But the British measures, in contrast to those in Italy, have shifted the political system as a whole towards greater centralization, thus arguably weakening the responsiveness of subnational authorities to local demands. To some degree, the shift reflects an altogether different local government tradition in Britain compared to Italy: in the Italian case, the existence of local authorities is guaranteed constitutionally: they are presumed to have general competence within the law, and are regarded as an organic part of the community. In Britain, local authorities do not have protected status;

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they have no general competence in law (meaning that the onus is on them to find their powers in specific Acts of Parliament, rather than on Parliament to show that they have acted in ways that are ultra vires); and they are regarded almost exclusively as utilitarian institutions for the delivery of services.51 It is highly likely, incidentally, that the very limited nature of these powers explains the heavy reliance traditionally placed on local government to perform the function described by John Garrard in Chapter 3 of this volume, namely, to act as a working-class incorporative mechanism. It was possible to argue that, far from decreasing responsiveness, many of the 1980s reforms – especially compulsory competitive tendering and the ill-fated poll tax – were, in fact, about increasing efficiency, accountability and choice. The first change obliged local authorities to contractout the provision of services such as refuse collection and school catering, and was designed to cut costs; the second replaced the property-based rating system with a ‘flat-rate’ charge on every member of the community, something which, it was thought, would increase local authority accountability by ensuring (as the rating system had not), that those voting for high-spending programmes were the same people who were required to pay for them. Finally, several measures – such as the 1988 Housing Act and the 1988 Education Reform Act – which contributed to the development of what Desmond King52 calls a new, informal, system of local government – were designed to increase choice by, for example, allowing local authority tenants to replace the council with a landlord of their choice, and parents to remove schools from local authority control. But if the reforms increased choice and responsiveness to people as consumers, as citizens, people inevitably found that local-authority responsiveness was reduced simply because their policy discretion was diminished. In effect, responsiveness to service-users as individuals was bought at the expense of accountability to the electorate at large for the policy under which services were provided. Moreover, many of the new institutions of the informal local government system were not, in fact, accountable to people in any guise. Accountability involves those who exercise power over a group of people giving an account (to those people) of their actions, and that there are mechanisms in place for holding them to account. 53 Yet, since many of the local bodies that have taken over local authority functions are government-appointed, these criteria do not apply. This remains true even if one argues that the bodies are accountable to the relevant minister, and he or she in turn, to Parliament.

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Conclusion This chapter has sought to assess the effectiveness, in post-war Britain and Italy, of voting and other political institutions, as mechanisms enabling ordinary citizens to influence the nature of public policy. This has assumed that ‘the democratic destination’ is a place where the expression of demands, and government responsiveness to such demands, underlie the organization of political life. Given this breadth of focus – the entire political systems of two countries – our discussion has inevitably had to be selective in terms of the features discussed, while analysis of these features has inevitably been superficial. One is also faced with the difficulty, in the Italian case, that since the early 1990s, the pace of political change has speeded up greatly, so that the validity of any assertions will be heavily time-dependent. Within these rather severe limitations, conclusions to be drawn from our analysis in some respects concur with received wisdom about the quality of democracy in the two countries. Thus both, to a degree, suffer from a democratic deficit. Italy’s democracy makes it harder than it might otherwise be for the ordinary citizen to influence the nature of public policy, because the distribution of power is excessively fragmented. The British citizen encounters similar problems, but for the opposite reason: that is, because power is too concentrated. At the same time, however, our analysis questions the conventional wisdom, particularly the part of it that would see Italian government as a fundamentally less effective and less stable type of democracy than the British form. While one must not overlook significant differences between the two countries, where – to paraphrase LaPalombara54 – the underlying issue is the effects of participation on public policies, ‘there are as many ways to it as there may be dead ends or blind alleys. We must be careful not to rule out the Italian way by mere fiat of definition’ (or the British way either).

Notes and references 1. Gianfranco Pasquino, ‘No Longer a “Party State”? Institutions, Power and the Problems of Italian Reform’, in Martin Bull and Martin Rhodes (eds), Crisis and Transition in Italian Politics (London: Frank Cass, 1997). 2. Joseph LaPalombara, Democracy Italian Style (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987).

260 Democratic Destination: Britain and Italy 3. Martin J. Bull and James L. Newell, ‘Italian Politics and the 1992 Elections: Form Stable Instability to Instability and Change’, Parliamentary Affairs, vol. 46, no. 2 (1993) pp. 204–5. 4. Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963). 5. Ibid., p. 32. 6. Ibid., pp. 402–3. 7. Ibid., p. 494. 8. Paul Ginsborg, ‘L’Italia, l’Europa, il Mediterraneo’ in Paul Ginsborg (ed.) Stato dell’Italia (Milan: il Saggiatore, 1994) p. 647. 9. Edward C. Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (New York: The Free Press, 1958). 10. Robert Putnam, The Beliefs of Politicians: Ideology, Democracy and Conflict in Britain and Italy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973). 11. Ginsborg, ‘L’Italia, l’Europa, il Mediterraneo’, p. 647. 12. Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture, p. 490. 13. LaPalombara, Democracy Italian Style, p. 50. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. J. Loosemore and V. J. Hanby, ‘The Theoretical Limits of Maximum Distortion: Some Analytic Expressions for Electoral Systems’, British Journal of Political Science, vol. 1 (1971) pp. 467–77. 17. Mario Caciagli and Alberto Spreafico, Vent’anni di Elezioni in Italia. 1968–1987 (Padova: Liviana, 1990). 18. Bull and Newell, ‘Italian Politics and the 1992 Elections’. 19. Julian White and Richard Kimber, ‘British Government and Elections since 1945’, e-mail address http://www.keele.ac.uk/depts/po/table/ uktable.htm. 20. Martin J. Bull and James L. Newell, ‘Electoral Reform in Italy: When Consequences Fail to Meet Expectations’, Representation, vol. 34, no. 1 (Winter 1996/7) pp. 53–61. 21. Giovani Sartori, ‘The Influence of Electoral Systems: Faulty Laws or Faulty Method?’ in Bernard Grofman and Arend Lijphart )eds) Electoral Laws and their Political Consequences (New York, Agathon Press, 1986) 22. Steven Warner and Diego Gambetta, La Retorica della Riforma: Fine del Sistema Proporzionale in Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 1994) p. 11. 23. Roberto D’Alimonte, ‘L’uninominale incompiuto’, Il Mulino, vol. 48 1994, 55–62; Aldo Di Virgilio, ‘Dai Partiti ai Poli: LaPolitico delle Allenanze, Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica, vol. 24.3, December 1994, 493–547. 24. As Geoffrey Pridham (‘Party Politics and Coalition Government in Italy’, in Vernon Bogdanor (ed), Coalition Government in Western Europe (London: Heinemann, 1983) p. 224) points out, ‘It is a truism to say that electoral pressures affect coalitional behaviour, for clearly they must do in a parliamentary democracy’. This being the case, though, coalitions might change frequently during inter-election periods, not surprisingly, the possible electoral repercussions of the choice of

James Newell 261

25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

possible alternative courses of action were foremost among politicians’ considerations. It became a commonplace, for example, that the public did not take kindly to parties being seen as responsible for bringing down governments and that it was necessary to be very wary if there was any risk that such action might precipitate early elections (Ibid. p. 226). Percy Allum, Italy – Republic Without Government? (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973) p. 119. Ibid. For details, see, for example, Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–1988 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990); Pridham, ‘Party Politics and Coalition Government’ As Gianfranco Pasquino, in ‘Pesi internazionali e contrappesi nazionali’, pp. 163–82 in Fabio Luca Cavazzo and Stephen R. Graubard (eds), Il caso italiano (Milan: Garzanti, 1974), points out, the existence of external constraints suggests that interpretations of political phenomena are likely to be wide of the mark if theories and models treat the international environment as a given, as if national systems were immune to external influences and had full control over their own destinies. As late as 1985, surveys were still finding as many as 39 per cent of the Italian electorate saying that they would never vote for the Communist Party (a figure that rose to 57 per cent if ‘don’t knows’ and refusals were included). These proportions are slightly lower than those that had been revealed by surveys carried out in the 1960s and 1970s although comparison is difficult because of changes in the way the question was asked. For details, see Renato Mannheimer and Giacomo Sani, Il mercato elettorale: Identikit dell’elettore italiano (Bologna: il Mulino, 1987). Not surprisingly, given that it was the largest Communist party in the West, there is a large literature on the history of the PCI. A pioneering work is Donald L. M. Blackmer and Sidney Tarrow’s Communism in Italy and France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). On the period of the party’s change of name and its transformation into a non-Communist party, see Picro Ignazi, Dal PCI al PDS (Bologna: il Mulino, 1992). Certainly, the PCI, prior to its change of name in 1990, was liable to be perceived as presenting two contradictory faces to the world. On the one hand, there was its defence of the post-war constitution it had helped to draw up, its refusal to engage in acts of illegality, and its insistence that the changes it wanted would only be sought through the winning of electoral majorities. On the other hand, there was its fundamental identity as a Communist party, carrying with it the implication that the sort of change it would introduce, if and when it won office, would be both structural and irreversible. Adam Przeworski, ‘Social Democracy as an Historical Phenomenon’, New Left Review, vol. 122 (1980) pp. 27–58, and Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 1985). Sidney Tarrow, Between Center and Periphery: Grassroots Politicians in Italy and France (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977) p. 197.

262 Democratic Destination: Britain and Italy 33. Dwayne Woods, ‘The Centre No Longer Holds: The Rise of Regional Leagues in Italian Politics’, West European Politics, vol. 15, no. 2 (1992) pp. 56–76. 34. James L. Newell, ‘The Scottish National Party and the Italian Lega Nord: A Lesson for their Rivals?’, European Journal of Political Research, vol. 26, no. 2 (1994) pp. 135–53. 35. R. McCreadie, ‘Scottish Identity and the Constitution’, in Bernard Crick (ed.), National Identities: The Constitution of the United Kingdom (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991); L. Paterson, A. Brown and D. McCrone, ‘Constitutional Crisis: the Causes and Consequences of the 1992 Scottish General Election’, Parliamentary Affairs, vol. 45, no. 4 (1992) pp. 627–39; James L. Newell, ‘The Scottish National Party: Development and Change’, pp. 105–24, in Lieven De Winter and Huri Türsan, Regionalist Parties in Western Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1998). 36. Constitution Unit, Scotland’s Parliament: Fundamentals for a New Scotland Act, London: Constitution Unit University of London, 1996). 37. Newell, ‘The Scottish National Party’, p. 120. 38. S. E. Finer, (ed.), Adversary Politics and Electoral Reform (London: Anthony Wigram, 1975) p. 4. 39. B. C. Smith, Decentralization: The Territorial Dimension of the State (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985) p. 76. 40. Finer, Adversary Politics and Electoral Reform, pp. 3–4. 41. Gavin Drewry, ‘Parliament’, pp. 154–74 in: Patrick Dunleavy et al. (eds), Developments in British Politics, vol. 4, (London: Macmillan, 1993) p. 155. 42. Finer, Adversary Politics and Electoral Reform. 43. Paul Furlong, ‘Parliament in Italian Politics’, West European Politics, vol. 13, no. 3 (1990) p. 62. 44. Michael Mezey, Comparative Legislatures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1979) pp. 82–3. 45. Giuseppe Di Palma, Surviving Without Governing: The Italian Parties in Parliament (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1977). 46. Tarrow, Between Center and Peniphery. 47. Tarrow, ibid., p. 194. 48 Luigi Graziano, Fiorenzo Girotti and Luciano Bonet, ‘Coalition Politics at the Regional Level and Centre–Periphery Relationships’, International Political Science Review, vol. 5, no. 4 ((1984) p. 437. 49. G. Pitruzzella, ‘I poteri locali: Tra autonomia e federalismo’, pp. 472–6 in Paul Ginsborg (ed), Stato dell’Italia (Milan: il Saggiatore, 1994). 50. Bruno Dente, ‘Sub-national Governments in the Long Italian Transition’, pp. 176–93 in Martin Bull and Martin Rhodes (eds), Crisis and Transition in Italian Politics, (London: Frank Cass, 1997) p. 186; and Newell, ‘The Scottish National Party’. 51. Alan Norton, ‘Western European Local Government in Comparative Perspective’, pp. 21–40 in: Richard Batley and Gerry Stoker (eds), Local Government in Europe: Trends and Developments (London: Macmillan, 1991) p. 27.

James Newell 263 52. Desmond King, ‘Government Beyond Whitehall’, pp. 194–220 in Patrick Dunleavy et al. (eds), Developments in British Politics vol. 4 (London: Macmillan, 1993). 53. John Stewart, ‘Appointed Boards and Local Government’, Parliamentary Affairs, vol. 48, no. 2 (1995) p. 232. 54. LaPalombara, Democracy Italian Style., p. 20.

14 Conclusions John Garrard, Vera Tolz and Ralph White

Most of the chapters in this book have been concerned, at one level or another, with explaining the success or failure of particular attempts at democratization, so it is appropriate that the conclusion should try to locate some of the preconditions that might need to be in place before success can be attained. The notion of preconditions poses an immediate and interesting problem because it implies that democratization cannot successfully take place without them. Yet the lesson available from some of the writers on the two phases after 1945 suggests that, even if the favourable variables are not present at the start, then some of them can (and tend to) emerge once democratization gets under way. The articulation of interest – a highly important aspect of civil society – may be hesitant and clumsy, and it may have to fight an uphill battle against traditions of passivity and dependence. This is hardly surprising – totalitarian regimes hardly provide an encouraging environment for the development of political expertise and articulacy among the mass of the population outside the ruling elite. None the less, after reading some of the later chapters, it may be hard to know which is the more appropriate response for the democrat: gloom at how far these polities still have to travel, or surprise at what can emerge in a short space of time, even in unpromising environments. None the less, the book overall leaves little doubt that some historical, economic, social, political and international environments are more favourable than others; and that some features are highly positive indicators for democratization, even if they are sometimes capable of being invented with surprising speed once the process is underway. Given that these factors each has a reverse and negative side as well as a positive one, it is more appropriate to talk about variables than preconditions. We suggest that these can be divided roughly into 264

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two groups: variables that are historical and contingent; and those of a structural kind. The most obvious of the historical and contingent variables is the speed with which the process takes place. The chapters by John Garrard and Robert van der Laarse imply that, in an ideal world, democratization should take place slowly, in a staged – and preferably unconscious – way. This helps to ensure that each new group can be absorbed and incorporated politically; it gives the political system, and those groups already included within it, time to accommodate and adapt to the new demands and conflicts likely to find political expression; and it avoids the dangers of overload. This might be particularly useful in a society, such as that of the Netherlands, where there are religious, social and geographical divisions, which may coincide dangerously, and which may threaten or disrupt the institutional structure of the system itself. Saying all this, however, draws one into a fierce argument within the literature about democratization.1 Not all scholars would admit that gradualism in this area is necessarily functional. Certainly, Mark Roseman’s essay on Germany after 1945, suggests that, in some circumstances – where the society has been defeated militarily, the outgoing totalitarian elite humiliated and largely delegitimized, and where the democratic victors enjoy high levels of control – the short, sharp democratic shock may be appropriate. This points to a second possible contingent variable – the balance of internal and external forces driving the democratization process. There is not the slightest doubt from the essays that internal factors are massively important in determining the fate of the process, and these will be reviewed later. Nevertheless, the external international environment is also capable of playing a very important part, either positively or negatively. Its impact is most obvious where the democratizing polity has been defeated militarily, or is dependent on other states for other reasons – for example, the late 1990s economic relationship between Russia and East Central Europe on the one hand, and the West on the other. One obvious key factor here is what those states want. In the relevant cases concerning our contributors – after 1918, 1945 and 1989, the character and aims of external nations have been, in the main, democratic. Democracy has been seen as a clear good – partly because of the belief (particularly evident in US President Wilson’s case, but also seen in later phases) – that wars rarely break out between democratic polities. After 1945, German, Austrian, Italian and Japanese democratization had the clear additional attraction for Western strategists of neutralizing

266 Conclusions

Soviet international influence. One can, of course, envisage victors and dominant powers with very different intentions, and far less favourable to the introduction and stabilization of democratic systems. The international behaviour of Nazi Germany in inter-war Spain and East-Central Europe was highly destructive of democracy. So too was the Soviet Union’s intervention in the same locations before 1939 and after 1945. More covertly, the behaviour even of the USA during the Cold War period was often anything but democratically encouraging in areas outside Europe, where American strategic interests were perceived to be threatened by Soviet infiltration. Dictatorships often seemed a better guarantee of anti-Communist stability. However, what is equally important is not just what external powers want but also how skilfully they pursue those aims, and how much control they can exert. The contrasting examples of Weimar and the Federal Republic of Germany, and more recently of Russia and EastCentral Europe, point to the importance of both factors. The victorious allies in 1918 and 1945, and the West after 1989, clearly all gave democratization a high priority in their policies towards those they had vanquished, or whose (Communist) system they had helped to destroy. Two things, however, varied. First, the Allies after 1945 in West Germany (as in Italy and Japan) clearly had more control than they did after 1918, by virtue of the fact that the vanquished had not only been defeated but also invaded, devastated and comprehensively occupied. Second, and a factor applying this time both after 1945 and 1989, there had clearly been a significant learning curve, derived from perceptions of the mistakes made after 1918, and perhaps, and much more recently, from academic writing about democratization. In the two latter periods, some care was taken to avoid triumphalism and humiliation. The new democratic regimes also emerged after defeat had clearly taken place. This was better than having to take humiliating responsibility for accepting defeat, in the way that Weimar’s leaders were obliged to do. In the years after 1945, there was also more care to try to co-operate (although, as Mark Roseman makes clear, hardly to negotiate) with democratically committed politicians in democratizing the defeated societies than there had been after 1918. There was more concern after 1945 and 1989 to ensure that democratic developments were underpinned by what were perceived to be favourable economic developments – helping to produce the Marshall Plan, help from the International Monetary Fund and Western investment in East-Central European capitalist enterprises. This may point to a greater awareness of the perceived preconditions of successful democratization. There has

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been more discussion of the emergence or otherwise of things such as civil society, though whether this has produced policies capable of influencing former Communist countries is uncertain. This all highlights the importance of a third contingent variable – the role played by leadership in democratization. Obviously, except in the post-1945 circumstances outlined above, leadership for good or ill in democratic terms has come from inside rather than outside the countries concerned. This has constituted a highly important area of academic argument – centring particularly on the relative importance of elites in engineering democratization, as compared with some of what we have chosen to call the structural factors, especially the health or otherwise of civil society in the relevant polities. Some of the most recent work on the subject has tended to discount the importance of leadership, arguing that politicians can only respond to, and in a limited way take the opportunities provided by, the characteristics of the society in which they arise.2 In fact, the supposed choice may be inappropriate. Certainly, important though civil society manifestly is, it seems clear from the contributions to this book that leadership is an important variable, significantly independent of its social and economic context. This was very clearly the case in nineteenth-century Britain and the Netherlands. In Britain, it could hardly be otherwise, given widespread social and political deference, and the consequently enduring supremacy of the aristocratic political elite throughout most of the democratization period. The flexibility of aristocratic politicians in the face of demands for inclusion, their skilful insistence on managing the process to maintain their control, the willingness and ability of some of them to respond politically to the demands released by enfranchisement while maintaining significant control over the political agenda, all point in this direction. As societies become more complex under the impact of industrialization and urbanization, the role played independently by internal leadership might be deemed likely to diminish. Some of the academic critique of its importance seems to have rested on this perception. Yet it seems hard to discount leadership as a factor determining the success or failure of democratization in a world where so many of the twentieth-century polities undergoing the process have been emerging from a previously authoritarian, and indeed totalitarian, past. In such a situation, however complex the society, the level of habitual deference, and the likely poverty of an independent participatory culture among the masses, seem likely to render the role and capacity of post-authoritarian elites highly crucial to success or failure in

268 Conclusions

initiating and initially managing democratization. Vera Tolz’s contribution points at this conclusion: much clearly depends on the emergence of a democratic and constitutionalist culture among Russia’s post-Communist elite. Fortunately for liberal democrats, the indicators seem to be moderately favourable on this evidence. Here, it is worth making a point in passing about a contingent variable more important in shaping the process in any given location, rather than determining success or failure. What has underpinned some of the foregoing discussion is the existence or otherwise of democratic models, of both theoretical and actual types, as targets for the entire process. These are clearly highly important, though their significance has varied over time. They had some significance for nineteenth-century experiments in democratization. Indeed, the ideas of Thomas Paine and the services he performed for older notions about the ‘free-born Englishman’, along with the later arguments of J. S. Mill, added powerful fuel to much of British working-class agitation for enfranchisement. Mill’s ideas also probably helped to legitimize the inclusion of the politically fit working man in the minds of those groups already admitted. On the other hand, as John Garrard makes clear, one factor easing the process for the political elite, particularly in the early stages of British democratization, was precisely the fact that few felt the need to contemplate a democratic end product. Furthermore, what the British case makes clear is the importance of much more pragmatic considerations – pointing to something about all such exercises: the fact that, whatever the importance of blueprints, democratization is not a detached process conducted by academics or bureaucrats, but is always undertaken by people or groups with various sorts of advantage or disadvantage for themselves in mind. British aristocratic politicians desired preservation for their class, and advantage for their party – and this shaped who was included and on what terms. Dutch politicians were clearly similarly calculative as they contemplated particular types of popular inclusion. This interaction between an often idealized model and pragmatism has undoubtedly shaped democratization in all countries in all periods. What has changed, not surprisingly, is the fact that the model has been supplied increasingly less by theory and more by actual working examples derived from images of varying accuracy about the West, particularly the USA. Given President Wilson’s influence on Versailles, American-derived idealism was clearly a factor shaping inter-war democratization in East-Central Europe, including Germany. With the victors, particularly the USA, firmly in charge, it also influenced post-

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1945 democratization in occupied Europe (and, indeed, in Japan). Perceptions derived from the same place – this time those held mainly by Russian and East-Central-European politicians, but also by their Western advisers – contributed to the shaping of constitution-making after 1989. At the same time, more pragmatic considerations of advantage have also interacted with the foregoing ideals, and have been one of the factors making the international climate for democratization increasingly favourable. As Ralph White argues, the need to combat war weariness in the midst of carnage, to wrongfoot the enemy, and to curry favour with the subject peoples of the pre-1914 empires, played a major part in forcing democracy, or at least national self-determination, to the fore in the war aims of both sides between 1914 and 1918. Similarly, the need of the West to neutralize Soviet influence was important in shaping the priority given to democratization after 1945. Considerations about minimizing Russian influence have also helped to shape the aid given to countries in East-Central Europe since 1989. Beliefs that a democratic Russia was likely to be less aggressive than an authoritarian one have also influenced Western policy in that quarter. Finally, Vera Tolz’s essay makes clear that calculations about advantage and self-preservation have, in turn, shaped politicians’ behaviour in democratizing Russia. Alongside these contingent variables, several structural variables also emerge from the foregoing chapters as being potentially important in determining success or failure. The first is the relationship between liberalization and democratization. In particular, given the criteria of democratization that was established in the introduction – free and fair elections and reasonably equal access to the policy process – it is hard to think that democratization can happen successfully without most of the classic liberal freedoms also being in place. Indeed, the enduring success of democratization in Britain and the Netherlands, and the precarious character of the process in nineteenth-century Spain, suggest that, ideally, liberal values need to be established widely and deeply before democratization begins. Here, democrats might find cause for comfort in the fact that most Communist regimes in EastCentral Europe, and indeed in the Soviet Union, were liberalizing prior to 1989. Indeed, part of what has been called democratization even after 1989 might more appropriately be called liberalization. One of the most central liberal freedoms is, of course, economic. It has been widely suggested, and is assumed by Teresa RakowskaHarmstone and Philip Hanson, that successful democratization must rest upon successful capitalization. Much Western policy in East-Central

270 Conclusions

Europe assumes the same. One writer has even argued that the widespread triumph of capitalism across the world in the last decades of the twentieth presages a liberal-democratic ‘end of history’. 3 The assumed linkage rests partly on the fact that Britain, Holland and other countries successfully democratizing in the nineteenth century were all havens of successful, even rampant, capitalism. It is certainly arguable that capitalism, particularly in its urban and industrial forms, is likely to produce pressure for at least some liberal freedoms by virtue of the individualism with which it is associated, and the multiplicity of competing interests that it naturally breeds. Consumer capitalism may be seen as enhancing those pressures further, because of its emphasis on consumer choice It has even been argued that the impact of this choice on the price, type and quality of goods manufactured by businesses eager to sell their products – in short, the consumer market – is a far more potent vehicle for popular influence than is mere political democracy.4 None of this can be taken to suggest capitalization automatically leads to democratization, or even liberalization, in any sense other than the purely economic. Many authoritarian, even totalitarian, polities – in Europe and beyond – have been prepared to privatize and capitalize while resolutely refusing to democratize or liberalize. In inter-war Germany, post-war Latin America and elsewhere, national and international businesses have cheerfully supported dictatorial regimes in the quest for stability, malleable workforces, and special favours. It must also be noted that, even in the West, some developments of capitalism as visited upon the media are hardly a source of comfort for liberal democrats. The ever-intensifying search for profit among, and increasing ownership concentration by, media businesses can be seen as potential threats to at least two of the classic liberal freedoms – of the press/media and, through them, of speech. One press historian has argued that the emergence of mass-circulation newspapers has placed proprietors and editors at the mercy of advertisers’ preferences for news and views that are safely unthreatening to potential consumers – thus undermining the media’s role as purveyors of political variety and debate, and narrowing the political agenda.5 More generally, it is clear that capital concentration, and the emergence of very large international media combines potentially threaten liberal freedoms by constricting the range of choice and enhancing the power of small groups of owners. If it is correct to assume that liberalization is an essential underpinning for genuine democratization, then not all developments within capitalism are democratically user-friendly.

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On the other hand, capitalism, through the social diversity it arguably produces, can also be seen as an important underpinning of another structural variable frequently cited as being essential to successful democratization – the emergence of a vibrant civil society. This has been much canvassed as a precondition in academic discussion. The existence of a complex and widely-spread network of autonomous voluntary associations of a social, economic and political kind is viewed as being essential by virtue of producing both a source of in-built resistance to the power of the state, and large numbers of natural democrats among the mass of the population. Participation in voluntary organizations is seen as spreading democratic values; training people as participating citizens; and enabling them to articulate effectively and negotiate their interests. This all connects with another supposed precondition – the existence of a large and democratically-inclined middle class. The evidence provided by our essayists on this theme is varied. Civil society is an important part (though notably only one part) of John Garrard’s explanation of the success of British democratization. Indeed, one of the points he makes is that association for common purpose was not just a middle-class habit, but was central to working-class culture as well. It is even arguable that it was stronger among the latter than the former: internal popular self-governance was a more pronounced feature of trade unions, friendly societies, co-ops, working men’s’ clubs and so on than it was of limited-liability businesses, charities or even middle-class pressure groups. Manual organizations also figured as important points of working-class resistance during the periods of half-hearted repression from the British state. In the Netherlands, civil organization seems to have been important in resisting encroachment by the Dutch monarchy. However, this also takes us back to the important point that the British and Dutch states became liberal substantially before they became democratic. Alongside the associated attachment to laissez-faire, this meant that their ambitions were always deeply circumscribed, and mostly hardly needed to be resisted. Indeed, part of Garrard’s contention is that the British state, in its anxiety to promote self-help, played an important, if only half-intentional, part in nurturing working-class civil organization. This, in turn, helped to keep popular expectations of the state enduringly low – highly functional in a polity industrializing at the same time as it was democratizing. This represents a major difference from the problems faced by democratizing polities in the twentieth century. They emerged in the main

272 Conclusions

from more authoritarian situations, where the state was by definition far more ambitious. While in no sense discounting its role in democratic training, the resisting role of civil organization has thus been potentially far more crucial than it was in nineteenth-century north-west Europe. The evidence seems to suggest that its record in this respect has been patchy. It is clear from Angel Smith’s chapter that much of civil organization in Spain – the Catholic Church and its auxiliary associations, and important sectors of working-class organization, for example – were in no sense automatic supporters of liberal-democratic trends. Nor were they automatic sources of resistance against an overweening state, even though in the working-class case they might resist repression because the wrong people were in charge of the state. This may point to the fact that civil organization is no guarantee of liberal democracy if it is not itself democratic. Moreover, authoritarian regimes may well help to breed civil organizations – even resisting ones – that are themselves authoritarian in both internal procedures and external aims. Indeed, such regimes are quite likely to do so among the ranks of those who resist them, because democratic behaviour opens one up to security surveillance. Alternatively, liberal states may well reinforce themselves by producing liberally- and democratically-inclined civil organizations. (Note that the determined democracy of working-class organizations, even the revolutionary ones, while repression was going on in the 1820s may well be an important tribute to the strength of democratic culture among British working men.) It is important to note that the bulk of civil organization, at least until the 1920s, was primarily male – both in membership and in control. This is hardly surprising, because the widespread reflex that has confined women to the private and domestic sphere has also confined them to precisely the location – the family – that most theories of civil society tend definitionally to exclude from their field of view (civil society being the network of organization between the state and the family). Families, moreover, have not generally been internally democratic entities. The separation of spheres also excluded women from the public sphere where democratic training was most likely to take place. Given this, it may be unsurprising that, to judge from our essayists, women have not necessarily been natural sources of democratic impulses. Indeed, as both Angel Smith and Stefan Berger make clear, female behaviour in inter-war Spain and Germany tended to be democratically negative. A further important variable with an effect on success or failure is the nature of the link between democratization and national identity. There are two points here. One concerns the type of nationalism.

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Nineteenth-century nationalism – which was exhibited most dramatically in the 1848 revolutions – has tended to be seen as inherently liberal and civic minded, and thus not inherently hostile to democracy. Even where it was mainly ethnic, its impact was still liberal, because it embraced peoples (such as the Italians or the Irish) who were fighting for their freedom against an authoritarian and/or imperial system. The characteristic nationalism of the twentieth century, on the other hand, has been seen as much more collectivist (volkish), more anti-individualist, more intolerant of ‘outsiders’, and thus more prone to authoritarian or totalitarian remedies for its grievances. Inter-war German nationalism is the most obvious example; and post-1989 Balkan national identity is another. In fact, the proposed historical dichotomy oversimplifies the situation, since the revolt against Soviet/Russian hegemony in the 1980s and 1990s in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland has been notably democratic in its overtones, and liberal in at least its aspirations. The second point concerns the historic relationship between democratization and the solution of national identity problems. Ideally, these require solutions before democratization takes place – as in the case of Britain (Ireland apart) and the Netherlands, from which Belgium broke free in 1830. Where this is not the case, as Elizabeth Teague’s chapter demonstrates, democratization allows and encourages the articulation of competing ethnic interests. Because of their nature, these involve questioning the fundamental outlines of the political system – as was the case in inter-war East-Central Europe – in spite of, and even because of, the Versailles settlement; and as has been the case in post-Communist Yugoslavia, and indeed Russia itself. The final structural variable evident from the arguments of our contributors is the relationship between democratization and modernization. There is perhaps an automatic tendency to assume that democracy provides the most appropriate framework for modernization. However, the example of inter-war Germany and Spain, as explored by Angel Smith and Stefan Berger, suggests that democracy can infact be eroded and even superseded by the process of modernization. Indeed, national socialism and Communism seemed to many Germans, Spaniards and Russians capable of providing more appropriate frameworks. It is appropriate to end a book concerned to throw light on democratization via a historical perspective with a comment about vantage points. Historians cannot help being aware of the way generalization is affected by the observer’s location in time, and by the ever-changing present that affects what he or she writes. It is clear that, had this

274 Conclusions

book been written in the late 1970s, its assumptions and conclusions would have been very different. This was an era deeply affected by Marxist thought, by the contemplation of a Third World emancipating itself from colonialism, and by the widespread collapse of the liberaldemocratic political systems bequeathed by the imperial powers. In this context, there was much talk about societies needing to find the system (normally thought to be decently radical) most appropriate to their needs and culture, and very little faith in the exportability of liberal democracy. Our vantage point at the end of the 1990s is very different. The collapse of the Soviet empire, the even more widespread triumph of capitalism, and the return of at least some Third-World polities to something approaching liberal democracy, have produced far more optimism about democratization as a solution to the problems of complex, and even rather simple, societies. In this sense, liberal democracy seems suddenly to be the flavour of the millennium. For all their insistence on detachment, academic books about democratization, written as they normally are by democrats, are likely to be affected by this new optimism. We do not believe this points to the inevitable subjectivity and unreliability of all historically-based generalization. It does, however, suggest the need for caution.

Notes and references 1. Claus Offe, ‘Cultural Aspects of Consolidation’, East European Constitutional Review, vol. 6, no. 4 (Fall 1997) pp. 64–8. 2. Victor Perez-Diaz, The Return of Civil Society. The Emergence of Democratic Spain (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993) p. 39. 3. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992). 4. Enoch Powell quoted in Brian Harrison, The Transformation of British Politics 1860–1995 (Oxford University Press, 1996). 5. Alan J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press 1855–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1976).

Index Notes: page numbers in bold type refer to illustrative material; entries relating only to a particular country (including legislation, national organizations and events) are entered under that country – however, names of people are entered independently, as are entries of general application.

Adenauer, K. 149–50, 154 Alexander, M. 137 Allerman, F. 158 Allum, P. 251 Almond, G. A. 23, 244, 260 Alsace-Lorraine 85 anti-Semitism as communist legacy 185 Arab provinces, British support for independence of 84 Armenia 83 elections (1990) in 192 Aslund, A. 220 Asquith, Prime Minister H. H. 84 Association Démocratique 58 Athens (4th and 5th century), democracy in 8 Australia 30 Austro-Hungary 13 demise of 93 foreign affairs conduct of 80 preservation of autocratic structures in First World War 83 self-determination of subject peoples of 86, 89 authoritarian polities and capitalization 2 Avineri, S. 24 Azaña, M. 133 Bachrach, P. 23, 24 Baker, R. S. 95 balance of power 80 Balcerowicz, Leszek 169, 177, 188, 190 Balfour, Auther James 86 Balfour Declaration 84, 86–7

Balfour, S. 136 Banfield, Edward C. 245, 260 Bank, Jan 75 Baranowski, S. 115 Barber, Benjamin R. 18, 24 Barkovskii, V. 215, 224 Barrington, L. 241 Bartlett, C. 95 Belarus elections (1990) in 192 Belgian Revolt (1830) 52, 56 Belgium, evacuation of, as condition of peace 85–6 Bell, Daniel 24 Ben-Ami, S. 136 Bengoechea, S. 136 Bentham, J. 9 Berger, M. 224 Berger, S. 158 Berkowitz, D. 223 Bessel, R. 97, 158, 160 Biagini, E. G. 47, 48 Blackbourn, D. 113 Blasi, J. 223 Blok, L. 72 Blom, J. C. H. 71 Bonaparte, Louis Napoleon 53 Bonham, F. 35 Boogman, J. C. 73 Borchardt, K. 109–10 Bornewasser, J. A. 73 Botwinick, A. 24 Bowles, S. 24 Bracher, K. D. 114 Brecht, B. 109 Breuilly, J. 23 Brezhnev era, links with organized crime during 216

275

276 Index bribe-taking in Warsaw and Moscow 216 Bridenthal, R. 114 Britain agricultural depression in 38 Anatomy Act (1832) 42 banks in, legal protection for 39 burial society 42 Cato Street revolutionaries 44 charity hospital committees 40 Chartism in 39: abandonment of 41 Conservatives: focus on middle and working classes (post-1832) 34; split in (1846) 34; strength in Lancashire towns after 1867 36 Conservative (Unionist) Party 33; impact on British politics 33 Conservative and Working Men’s Friendly and Burial Societies 36 co-operatives 44; expansion of 41; as incorporative institutions 32, 39 Corresponding Societies (1790s) 44 democratization in 29–47; advantages of early 45; characteristics of 30–1; context for 38; expectations before enfranchisement in 44; stages of 41; unconsciousness of 29 devolution in 252 divorce laws, changes to 40 East London Federation 40 Education Reform Act (1988) in 258 electoral access as key demand (19th century) 31 electoral behaviour and deference (1832) 35 foreign affairs conduct of 80 foreign imports, competition from 38 Franchise Reform Act (1867) 34

friendly societies 44; expansion of 41; as incorporative institutions 32, 39; and Poor Law 42, 43 gas services, municipalization of 37, 43 governments in 251 government by town meetings in 44 housing in 40 Housing Act (1988) in 258 ‘Hunger Chartism’ in 37; see also Chartists influence of ‘New Right’ in 257–8 and Italy, democratic natures of 243–59 Labour Party 32, 252 laissez-faire in 37 liberal values in 31 limited government in 31 local government: for delivery of service in 257–8; responsiveness and accountability in 258 mayoralty as incorporative institution 32 middle class: attachment to minimal government by 38–9; Conservative focus on 34; constituency involvement of 36 municipal baths and wash-houses 43 Municipal Corporations Act 29 municipalization of services in 37 National Health Insurance (1911) 30 nationality, resolution of disputes about 32–3, 46 National Union of Womens Suffrage Societies 40 New Poor Law 42 ‘open boroughs’, decay of 29, 33 paper duty 44 parliament, access to: in 19th century radicalism 31; in feminist demands 32

Index 277 parliamentary monism, model of 56 political access within expanding industrial economy 37; see also electoral access political elites flattering social groups 36–7 poor relief and voting rights 42 press freedom 45 pressure groups in 43 Primitive Methodism 44 professional organizations in 43 public health 40 racial minorities as councillors, mayors and MPs 32 rates in 43 Reform League in 41 royal commissions in 40, 43 ‘scot and lot’ voters (19th century) 29 stability in 112 stamp duty 44 state aid for underprivileged in 39–41 suffrage 40, 41 Tamworth Manifesto 35 trade unions 44 transport, municipalization of 37, 43 Union for Democratic Control 82 urban entrepreneurs in (early 20th century) 38 voluntary organizations in 43–4 water services, municipalization of 37, 43 Whig government (1831–2) 34 women: as councillors, mayors and MPs 32; suffrage campaigners 40; and ‘welfare feminism’ 41 workhouses in 42 working class: agitators, objectives of 40; Conservative focus on 34; constituency involvement of 36; First World War, democratic models 44; start of improvements in conditions of 37 British Nationality Act (1981) 230 Brood, P. 71

Brubaker, R. 241 Bruckner, A. 204 Brüning, Chancellor H. 100, 110 Bulgaria corruption in 181 economic crisis in 181 ethnic conflicts as communist legacy in 185 pattern of post-Communist development in 172 United Democratic Front in 172 Bull, H. 226–7 Bullo, M. J. 260 Caballero, F. L. 129, 130, 131 capitalism and prosperity 206 Russian version of 206 triumph of 274 Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (Schumpeter) 15 Carr, Raymond 120, 136 Catholic church encyclical Quanta Cura (1864) 63 encyclical Rerum Novarum 66 ultramontanists (Holland) 63 Catholics, Irish 33 celebrations, local 32 Chartist movement 9 Chechenskii tranzit (Barkovskii) 215 checks and balances (US Constitution) 10 Chernomyrdin, V. 196, 200 Chubais, A. 194 church and state, separation of 56, 63 citizen individuals taking on role of 21 and nationality 226 participation in social contract 9 ‘citizen, private’ as oxymoron 9 citizenship 17–22 based on birthplace (ius soli) 229–30 and democracy 225–41 European 227 full, agitation for 40 and national minorities 238–41

278 Index citizenship (cont.) through parentage (ius sanguinis) 229–30 rights and duties of 225–6 and sovereignty 226 unwanted 230 ‘zero option’ in 231–5 civic culture and democratic stability 244–7 in Britain and Italy 245 civil government, limitations of (Locke) 6–7 civil society in Britain 44 as locus of human fulfilment 8 separation of, from state 14 Clemens, T. 72 ‘clerisy’ (Coleridge) 12 clientelism as conservative phenomenon 246 Cohen, D. 211–12, 217, 220, 223 Cole, G. D. H. 18 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 12, 23 collectives, economic, of post-war Yugoslavia 18 Colley, Linda 47 Colombatto, E. 223 colonial rule, overthrow of 13 Communist Parties 169 see also post-Communist regimes Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) 191 Communist regimes social mentalities produced by 182 as totalitarian 169 legacies of 181–6 conformity of mid-Victorian opinion 12 Congress of Vienna (1815) 51 Considerations on a Representative Government (J. S. Mill) 13 Constitution (US) 10 constitutionalism in Britain 31 in liberal-democratic states 21 Costa, J. 118 Cotton Famine 41 Council of Europe 236

Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities 240 Cowling, M. 47 crime, international comparisons of 215 Crimea, citizenship in 235 Crossick, G. 48 crowd psychology 15 CSCE Copenhagen Document (1990) 239–40 Cuadrado, M. 136 Czechoslovakia Civic Forum in 172 economic shock treatment in 177–81 in First World War 87 national identity disputes in 3 new constitution in 173 Czech Republic ethnic conflicts as communist legacy in 184–6 new constitution in 173 pattern of post-Communist development in 172 political parties in 175 Prague Spring in 166 success of economic reforms in 180 as ‘successor state’ 93 Daalder, H. 71 Dahl, R. 23 Dahrendorf, R. 145, 158, 159 de Beaumont, G. 11 Declaration of Independence (American) 10 decentralization in opportunity for citizenship 19 of political tasks 21 decision-making, centralization of 20 Delanty, G. 226 democracy classical doctrine of (Schumpeter) 15 definitions of (Madison) 10, 193 features of 243 in First World War aims 79–94

Index 279 as key to proper social structure 93 in liberalism 18 and ‘nationality principle’ 87 as ‘tyranny of the majority’ (de Tocqueville) 11 and war aims 79–94 Western liberal 16 Democracy in America (de Tocqueville) 11 democratic values, applicability of 5 democratization 19th century 2–3 balance of internal and external forces driving 265 in Britain 29–47 and capitalization 269–71 under conditions of defeat in Germany 98–102 and constitutional settlement in Germany 102–4 definitions 1–2 in inter-war Europe 3 leadership in 267 and liberalization 269 models of 268 and national identity 272–3 and party-political system in Germany 104–6 political 30 post-1945 3–4 in Russia and Eastern Europe 4 speed of 265 variables affecting 264–9 under Weimar 96–113 and war 79–94 women in 272 see also Britain; Germany; liberal democratic theory; Weimar Republic Dente, B. 262 de Rivera, General M. P. 118, 128, 129, 130 de-Shalit, A. 24 de Tocqueville, A. 9, 10–12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 22, 25 Deutsche Rundschau 109 de Valk, J. P. 71, 73, 74 Devlin, P. 95

devolution in opportunity for citizenship 19 de Wit, C. H. E. 71 Die Tat 109 Di Palma, G. 262 Dirks, W. 144, 158 disproportion in distribution of votes and seats see Loosemore–Hanby index Dollfuss, Engelbert 132 Duncan, Graeme 23 East-Central Europe, post-communist 38 Christian democrats in 174 civil societies in 174 class and choice of party in 176 collapse of Communist regimes in 165 communist legacy in 177–8 Communists in 174 comparisons with transition in Latin America and Iberia 168 corruption as communist legacy 183 democratization in 165–87, 265 distrust as communist legacy 183 domestic demand in 180 economic change in 177 economic ‘shock treatment’ in 177–81 economic ‘Third Way’ in 166 electoral provisions in 174 ethnic conflict and xenophobia as communist legacies 184–6 ethnic parties in 176 industrial output in 180 inflation in 179 instrumental view of law as communist legacy 183 lack of experience in participatory cultures 173 liberal democrats in 174 living standards in 179 loss of exports: through collapse of CMEA markets 179: through EC restrictions 179 market economy introduction in 169

280 Index East-Central Europe (cont.) nationalism as fountainhead of legitimacy 3, 165 new constitutions in 173 parliaments in 173–4 patterns of development in 172–3 political change in 170–2 political leadership in 168 political parties in 174–5 rule of law as communist legacy 182–3 social alienation as communist legacy 183–4 social costs of market reforms in 168, 179–81 ‘socialist market’ in 166 social services in 179 tasks and policies in 177–8 value systems as communist legacies 181–2 wages in 179, 218 Western investment in 266 see also Bulgaria; communist regimes; Czech Republic; Hungary; planned economies; Poland; Romania; Slovakia; Soviet Union Eastern Europe 30 East Germany see German Democratic Republic Ebert, F. 101, 103 economic freedom separable from democratization 2 economic ‘shock treatment’ in post-communist countries 177–81 education 20 in political systems 21 Egea, A. R. 135 Eighty Years War (1566–1648) 50 electoral access as democratization 1 electoral outcomes and government formation 250–3 electoral system in Britain and Italy 247–50 elites, political choosing between competing 16 influence over political agenda 42–3 role of 46

empowerment in citizenship 18–19 English Guild Socialists 18 Erhard, L. 144–5, 158 Erzberger, M. 106 Essay on Government (James Mill) 9 Estonia citizenship in 235, 236, 237, 238 crime rates in 216 independence of 93 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development 208, 210, 223 European Coal and Steel Community 155 European Convention on Nationality 227, 229 European Union (EU) 186, 227, 236 executive accountability in Britain and Italy 253–5

Falter, J. 110 family as within private domain 7–8 Far East, democratization in 4 Fascism 14–15, 16 federalism (US) 10 Federalist Papers, The (Alexander Hamilton et al.) 10 Feldman, Gerald D. 97, 113 Ferguson, Niall 98–9, 114 Filmer, Sir Robert 8, 22 Finer, S. E. 262 Finland 83 independence of 93 First past the post (FPTP) system in Britain and Italy 249–53 First World War 79–94 American policy in 91–2 British war aims 84–7 as catalyst for democratization 93 as crusade for democracy 82–3, 88, 91 food shortages in Germany during 98 French war aims 85–7 general impact of 79–80 impact on Weimar Republic 98–100 Langemark, Battle of 99

Index 281 opposition to 87 preservation of German autocratic structures as motive for 83 propaganda in 80–2, 90 public expressions and private debates in 82–3 stereotypes of Germans in propaganda of 90 sustaining public morale in 81 total mobilization of German society in 98 total victory as war aim in 83, 90 US intervention in 79–80, 82, 83, 87–8, 91 war aims of 79–94 war debts from 98 see also Versailles Peace Treaty; Wilson Fischer, F. 94 Flick, F. K. 108 foreign affairs and Old Diplomacy 80–2 France, 148 democratization in 50 foreign affairs conduct of 80 occupation of the Ruhr (1923) 146 see also First World War franchise, middle-class 9 Franco, General F. 116 Franÿois, L. 72 Fraser, D. 47 Frederick the Great 55 Frederick William III 55 Frentzel-Zagorska, J. 189 Friedman, M. 206 Fritsche, P. 110, 114 Fukuyama, F. 221, 274

Ganev, V. E. 189 Garrard, J. 47, 48 Georgia 83; elections (1990) in 192 German colonies, self-determination for 89 German Democratic Republic (GDR) 148–9, 166

Germany 5 Allies and political elites of 153 ambivalence of parties on democracy 105 Bavarian and Bremen council republics 101 Central Working Community (Zentrale Arbeitsgemeinschaft – ZAG) 108 Centre Party 106 citizenship in 229 civil war in (1918–23) 100 Communist Party (KPD) in 101, 103, 105 comparison of 1918 and 1945 147–58, 266 consequences of First World War on 98–100 democratization in 88, 96–113, 265 Deutsche Bauernpartei 103 fascism in 14 Fatherland Party 101 foreign affairs conduct of 80 Freikorps in 101, 150 German Democratic Party (DDP) 105–6 German National People’s Party (DNVP) 106 German People’s Party (DVP) 105–6 Hitler putsch 101 Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) 103, 105 industrial dismantling 153 Kapp–Lüttwits putsch 101 Majority Social Democratic Party in (MSPD) 103, 105, 106 maturity of political parties and democracy 106 mutinies in 100–1 National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) 103, 105, 106 pillarized social structure in 111 politicization of masses in 111 Ruhr production, foreign control of 153 social milieux in 104–5

282 Index Germany (cont.) special path (Sonderweg) of 111 see also Germany, Federal Republic of; Nazism; Versailles Peace Treaty; Weimar Republic Germany, Federal Republic of Ahlen programme 151 attitudes and values, changes in 156 Basic Law of 144, 155 Berlin blockade, effect of 153 Bizonal Economic Committee and 153 black market in 147, 152 bourgeois values of 157 Christian Democratic Union (CDU) 141, 151, 156 class conflict, regulation of 141, 151 comparison with 1918 147–58 creation of stable democracy in 141–58 criminality in 152 deflation in 155 democratization as goal of Allies 149 Deutsche Mark introduction 144 divisions in society in 150 economic character of 144 economic consequences of the war in 147 economic foundations for post-war settlement in 149 electoral system 143 employment in 141 exiles from Nazism in 150 fear of Soviet Union in 154 Independent Democrats in 143 inflation in 147 informal powers weakened by Nazi centralization in 156 institutional framework of 143 Länder Parliaments 153, 154 market economy in 153 Marshall Plan and 152 middle-class anti-Communism in 157 ‘mittelstand’ society in 145 Morgenthau plan and 149

Moscow Conference (1947) and 152 nationalism in 141, 144: marginalization of 156 nationalization in 151 National Socialism, sympathy for 145, 148, 152 opinion-forming subject to Allies 148 political fragmentation in 156 post-war ‘economic miracle’ of 142, 144–5 post-war reparations 146, 149 Prussia, fear of, in 150, 154 public involvement, limitations on 154 restoration and stability, relationship between 143–4 right in disarray in 151 rule of law, priority for 150 Social Democrats in 151 social market economy in 144–5 Soviet reparation demands 151 strikes in 141 temporary nature of 154 unconditional surrender, political consequences of 148 unemployment in 145 unification, challenges of 141–2 universities in 144 US pressure for capitalist democracy in 152–3 Weimar politics, comparisons with 141–2, 143, 144 workers’ committees 148 see also Germany; Nazism; Versailles Peace Treaty; Weimar Republic Ginsborg, P. 245, 260 Gintis, H. 24 Gladstone, W. 35 command over working-class loyalties 35 message of retrenchment 41 Goldblatt, D. 5 good life, constituents of 20 Gorbachev, M. 166, 191, 192, 193, 203

Index 283 Gosden, P. H. J. H. 48 governance, student involvement in 21 government decentralization of (Britain and Italy) 255–8 restricted to protection of individual rights (Locke) 7 at sub-national level (Britain and Italy) 255–8 see also democracy; Parliament Graham, H. 137 Grassroots Politicians in Italy and France (Tarrow) 256 Gray, J. 23 Graziano, L. 262 Great Depression 130 Grebing, H. 113 Green, P. 18, 24 Green, T. H. 24 Groener, W. 107 Groot, F. 74 gypsy-baiting as communist legacy 185

Haffner, S. 101, 114 Hamilton, A. 22 Hannover, H. 114 Hanson, P. 223 Harrison, B. 274 Havel, President V. 175, 185, 188, 189, 190 health care 20 Herf, J. 115 Hindenburg, President P. von 103, 105 Hitler, Adolf 99 rise assisted by Versailles Treaty 100 Hobbes, T. 8, 22 Holmes, S. 204 Home Rule (Ireland) 33 Honecker, E. 167 Hotfrerich, C.-L. 109–10 housing 40 Hugenberg, A. 106 humanitarians, pressure by, for underprivileged 40

Hungary, post-communist 166 civil society in 175 economic shock treatment in 177–81 ethnic conflicts as communist legacy in 181 new constitution in 173 New Economic Mechanism (NEM) in 166, 177 pattern of post-Communist development in 172 political parties in 174–5 success of economic reforms in 180 Huntington, S. P. 5, 194, 204 Huskey, E. 223 Husted, S. 223

Iberian Europe, democratization in 4 institutions with incorporating effect 33 local urban 32 International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (1966) 226, 239 International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) 226 internationalism 88 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 179, 186, 209, 266 inter-war years 6, 79–94 Irish National League 33 Islam, fundamentalist 21 Italy, 148 and Britain, democratic natures of 243–59 Christian Democrats in 249 democratization in 265 disintegration of old governing parties in 257 executive accountability in 253–5 fascism in 14 in First World War 87, 89 government at sub-national level in 255–8 governments in 251

284 Index Italy (cont.) Italian Communist Party (PCI) 249, 251, 252 Italian Social Movement (MSI) 251 National Solidarity governments in 251 Northern League 253 partitocrazia in government of 256 regional government in 221–2 southern, similarities to Russia 207 Jakes, M. 167 Janos, A. C. 188 Japan, democratization in Jarausch, K. H. 114 Jay, J. 22 Jones, L. Eugene 113 Juliá, S. 136, 137 Jünger, E. 109

265

Kadar, J. 167 Karl, T. L. 187, 188 Katanyan, K. 204 Kazakhstan, citizenship in 234 Kennedy, J. C. 75 Kent, S. K. 40, 48 Kiloh, M. 5 King, D. 262 Klaus, V. 189 Kleßmann, C. 159, 160 Knippenberg, H. 74 knowledge in empowerment for citizenship 18–19 Kocka, J. 96, 115 Komsomolskaia pravda 194 Koralewicz, J. 181–2, 187, 190 Kossmann, E. H. 72, 74 Khrushchev, N. 191 Kuby, E. 156 Kuiper, Y. 72 Kuyper, A. 64, 65, 66, 67. 68 Kymlicka, W. 25 Kyrgyzstan, citizenship in 234 labour, sexual division of 8 Lademacher, H. 55 LaPalombara, J. 244, 259, 263 Laslett, P. 23

Latin America, democratization in 4 Latvia citizenship in 235, 237–8 independence of 93 Layard, R. 214, 223 League of Nations 91 le Bon, G. 15 Lee, A. J. 49, 274 left-wing groups, demands on First World War aims 82 legitimacy of political arrangements dependent on consent 9 Lenin, V. I. 83, 169 Lerroux, A. 122 Leviathan (Hobbes) 8 Lewis, P. 5 liberal-democratic theory 6–22 19th century 6 democratic aspect of 17 and fascism 14–15, 16 and nationalism 13 see also liberal theory liberalism insufficiently democratic 18 liberalization 2 liberal representative democracy 30 liberal theory 17th century 6–8 and democratic theory, distinctions between 17–18 and political realm 8 Lijphart, A. 71 linguistic philosophy 16 Link, A. S. 95 Linklater, A. 241 Linz, J. J. 5, 188, 191–2, 204 Lipset, S. M. 23 Lithuania citizenship in 235–6 independence of 93 Lloyd George, D. 88 local government 36–7 Locke, J. 6, 7, 8, 22 Lomasky, L. E. 24 Loosemore–Hanby index (votes and seats distributions) 247–8 Loosemore, J. 260 Loth, Wilfried 160 Lukes, Steven 23

Index 285 Maastricht Treaty (1993) 227 Macedo, S. 24 Macey, J. R. 223 Machado, A. 121 MacIntyre, A. 25 Mackay, Baron A. 67, 68 Madison, J. 10, 22 Mahnkopf, B. 160 Marshall, B. 159, 160 Marshall Plan 266 Marshall, T. H. 226, 241 Marwick, A. 94 Marx, K. 18, 24, 58 Maura, M. 129 May, E. R. 95 Mayer, A. 82, 94 McCreadle, R. 262 Meciar, V. 173 Miall, H. 239 Michnik, A. 190 Middle East in First World War 86–7 Miliband, R. 32, 47 Mill, J. 9–10, 22 Mill, J. S. 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23 Miller, D. 23 Minderaa, J. T. 74 Moldova citizenship in 233 elections (1990) in 192 Mommsen, H. 115 monarchic principle in Netherlands 51–2 monarchy abuse of power by 10 incorporating effect of 31 see also royal absolutism Montero, J. R. 130 moral limits on politics and government 6 motivation in citizenship 18, 20–1 Mulhall, S. 24 Münzenberg, W. 109 Mussolini, B. 128 Nagorski, A. 241 Napier, Lord 61 national identity, disputes about, in inter-war states 33

nationalism 19th and 20th century compared 273 and liberal democracy 13 radical right see fascism national will in place of autonomous civil society 14 natural rights, doctrine of (Locke) 7 Nazism 14–15, 97, 98 broad appeal of 110–11 in failure of democratization 110–11 international behaviour of, destructive of democracy 266 Munich Putsch of 111 Netherlands abolition of estates and seigniorial rights 58 anti-Catholicism in 59 Anti-Revolutionary Party (ARP) 64, 65 April Movement (1853) 59 ‘April Storm’ (1853) 61, 63 atheism in 68 Batavian National Assembly 52 Batavian Revolution (1795) 50, 52, 68, 69 Brabant 53 Calvinism 56, 63 Catholic ultramontanists 63, 68 conservatives returned to parliament 62–3, 65 ‘consociational democracy’ in 51 constituency associations: clerical 64; local 65 constitution (radical/Jacobin) (1798) 52 democratization in 50–71, 265 dissenters, Catholic and Protestant, in 52 Dutch Reformed Church in 52, 59, 68; reorganization of 57 Dutch Trading Company in 56 East Indies 56 Education Bill (1878) 64, 66 education: denominational 66; religion and 51 elites, character of 52 enoblement, policy of 53

286 Index Netherlands (cont.) franchise, extension of (1848) 60 French occupation, liberation from (1813) 50 German occupation 50 gerrymandering 62 Grondwettige Herstelling van Nederlands Staatswezen 52 House of Orange in 57 industrialization in 68 Kingdom of Holland 53 League for Universal Suffrage 66 liberals: elites 68; returned to parliament 50, 62–3 Liberal Union (1885) 65 local election polls 61 Lower and Upper House: English model of 54; composition of 60 mass politics in 50 nobility as national elite 53, 66 notables, class of 60 Operetta Revolution (1918) 67 Orangist Restoration (1813) 50 Pacification (1917) 51, 67 Pacification, Second (1939) 68 partial succession, law of 54 Patriot Revolt (1785–7) 50, 52, 61 ‘pillarization’ in 50–1, 61, 65, 70 proportional representation 67 Protestant elites 61 railway strike (1903) 67 Randstad area as conservative bulwark 62 Restoration (1813) 53 Roman Catholic State Party (RKSP) 68 Senate 54 ‘social contract’ (1813) 60 Social Democratic Labour Party (SDAP) 67 socialism 68–9 social stability in 70–1 suffrage in 51 tax riots (1844) in 58 Union of Utrecht (1579) 52 universal suffrage 67 Neumann, T. W. 159

Newell, J. L. 262 New Russian Barometer (NRB) 201 Newton, D. J. 114 Niethammer, L. 159, 160 Nieuwenhuis, F. D. 68 Nieuwland, P. 71 North America 30 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 186 Norton, Alan 262 Noske, Gustav 101 Nowak, S. 190

O’Brien, B. 39 O’Donnell, G. 187 Offe, Claus 274 O’Gorman, Frank 35, 47, 48 Ohlendorf, O. 149 Oldfield, A. 24 Old Regime and the Revolution, The (de Tocqueville) 11 Olson, M. 212–21, 223 On Liberty (J. S. Mill) 12, 13 opportunity as condition of citizenship 18, 19–20 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 211 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) 236 High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM) 238, 240 Osmond, J. 115 Ottoman Empire as alien to Europe 86 demise of 93 self-determination in 89

Paine, T. 9, 22 Palestine 84 Pankhurst, Sylvia 40 Paris Peace Conference (1919) 93 Parker, John 214, 223

92,

Index 287 parliament executive accountability in (Britain and Italy) 253–5 Parliamentary scrutiny (Britain and Italy) 254–5 Question Time in 254, 255 short 10 Participation and Democratic Theory (Pateman) 18 Pasquino, G. 259 Pateman, C. 18, 24 patronage, expectations of, in electorate 35 Paul, G. 115 Peel, R. 35 Pelling, H. 48 Perez-Diaz, V. 274 Peukert, Detlev J. K. 97, 113 Phillips, John 47 planned economies 165 plebiscites undermining democracy 102, 103–4 plural society 11 Poincaré, President Raymond 85 Poland, post-communist 83, 166 Balcerowicz Plan in 178 civil society in 175 economic shock treatment in 177–80 ethnic conflicts as communist legacy in 184–6 in First World War 87, 89 new constitutions in 173 pattern of post-Communist development in 172 political parties in 174–5 Solidarity movement in 167, 172 success of economic reforms in 180 as ‘successor state’ 93 see also communist regimes; East-Central Europe political fitness: education for 42; recognition of 40 political flexibility originating in localities 36 political power, fragmented nature of 11 political realm and ‘civil society’, distinction between 7, 13

politics as appeasing key social groups 34 local 20 and religion, separation of 64 remoteness of 19 popular government (Madison) 10 post-Communist regimes change in 170 cleavages in industrial relations in 171 problems of creating a democratic system in 171 Potter, D. 5 ‘pot-waller’ voters (19th century) 29 Powell, E. 274 preservation of cultural heritage 20 presidency, power of, undermining democracy 102–3 press freedom 45 Preston, P. 130, 136 prices of food 38, 122 Protestants, Ulster 33 Przeworski, A. 5, 204, 205, 261 property rights (Locke) 7 proportional representation 67 and FPTP in Italy and Britain 247–51 and multiple parties 249 in post-Communist East European states 174 undermining democracy 102, 103 public health 40 public opinion leading to conformity (de Tocqueville) 11 public and private, distinction between, in liberal theory 7 Putnam, R. 221, 223, 245, 260 radical-liberals, demands on First World War aims 82 radical right nationalism (inter-war years) 6 Rakowska-Harmstone, T. 190 Rawls, J. 24, 25 Reagan, President R. 166 redistribution 38 Rees, J. C. 23

288 Index religion and class 46 underpinning political order 21 Remieg, A. 74 rent-seeking 220–1 republics, bourgeois (19th century) 18 revolutionaries American 9 Cato Street 44 French 9 right over the good, priority of 21 Ritter, G. 96, 113 Robijns, M. J. F. 73 Robson, J. M. 23 Romania, post-communist corruption in 181 economic crisis in 181 evacuation of, as condition of peace 85–6 in First World War 85–6, 89 National Salvation Front in 172 new constitution in 173 pattern of post-Communist development in 172 political parties in 174–5 Rose, R. 205 Roseman, M. 160 Rothfels, H. 96, 113 Rousseau, J.-J. 8–9, 18, 22 royal absolutism, constitutionalist opposition to 6 Royal Institute of International Affairs 239 Russia (Russian Federation) 30, 38 academic views of economy of 211–12 accountability of officials in 194 bilateral treaties on dual citizenship with 231–5 Bolshevik 80 bribe-taking in 216 capitalism in 206–22 capital outflow from 209 citizenship in 231 Civic Accord (1994) 199 Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) in 192

comparison with Southern Italy 222 Congress of People’s Deputies 200; dismissal by Yeltsin 192, 196 continuity between Soviet and post-Soviet elite in 216 crime and corruption in 207, 209, 211 Decree on Peace (1917) 92 democratic transition in 191–203, 265 economic performance of 208 education and training in 210 elections (1990) in 192, 193–5 employment in, structural change in 217 fairness of elections in 194 Federal Assembly in 200 foreign investment in 208 freedom of speech and press in 192 freedom to travel in 193 government incoherence 210 growth potential of 210 gubernatorial elections in 193–4 impediments to democratization in 195–8 Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences 215 investment in 209–10 life expectancy in 208 macro-economic stabilization in 208–9 mafiya in 211–21 murder rate in 214–15 nomenklatura interest groups in 216–17 overthrow of Romanov 87 presidential elections in 199 presidential powers in 192, 196–7 privatization in, rate of 209, 211 prospects for 201–3 Provisional Government in 87, 191 reallocation of resources in 211–12, 217

Index 289 sectoral composition of economic activity in 209 stability instead of democracy 198–200 tax collection in 215 toleration of political opposition in 193 Tsarist 83 unemployment in 209, 211 wages in 217–18; and material benefits 219 and war in Chechnya 192, 198, 200, 203 Western democracies as model for elite of 203 workers as shareholders 219–20 see also Eastern Europe; Soviet Union Rüter, A. J. C. 72

Sachs, G. 177, 190 Sanders, M. 95 Schaepman, H. J. A. M. 64 Scheidemann, P. 101 Schelsky, H. 145, 158, 159 Schmidt, E. 158 Schmitter, P. C. 187, 188 Schumpeter, J. A. 15, 17, 18, 23 Schutte, G. J. 72 Scott, J. B. 94 Second World War 67 separation of powers (US) 10 Serbia, evacuation of, as condition of peace 85–6 Seymour, C. 95 Shama, Simon 71 Shlapentokh, V. 204 ‘shock treatment’ see economic ‘shock treatment’ Shubert, A. 137 Slovakia new constitution in 173 pattern of post-Communist development in 172 political parties in 174–5 success of economic reforms in 180 as successor state 170

Smith, B. C. 262 Smith, G. W. 23 Soblanin, A. A. 204 social contract (Rousseau) 9 Solnik, S. L. 205 Sontheimer, Kurt 158 South Africa, democratization in 4 Soviet Union 23 glasnost in 166 national identity disputes in 3 perestroika in 166 Spain agrarian reform in 129, 131 alternation of power (turno pacifico) in Restoration 117 anarchists in 120, 122, 124–5 athenaeums (ateneos) (debating societies) 119 budget deficit 131 Catalanists 122 Catholic conservatives 126–7 Catholic hierarchy: reduction of role by Republicans 129; rejection of liberalism by 126 Civil War 134 colonial war in Morocco 122 Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA) 130–1, 132 conservative liberals: and Catholic church 120; and political marginalization of population 118 corruption, official 124 demise of the ancien régime 118 democratic parties and clientelism 118 Democratic Six Years (1868–74) 119, 121 education in patriotism in Restoration state 118 elites, urban and rural 131 general strike (1934) 132–3 influence of Soviet Russia 132 labour movements in 123 Liberal Party in 119–20 liberal regimes, 19th century 117, 119

290 Index Spain (cont.) Lliga Regionalista 127–8 local elites (caciques) 117, 119, 120, 122, 124, 128 loss of colonies by 116, 122 Maurista movement 127–8 middle class in Republic 130 military: coups (pronunciamientos) against Restoration 121, 128; antagonism to liberal state 127 nationalism: anti-Catalan 128; Catalan and Basque 125–6 National Union 122 October Revolution in 133 pact (Conjunción), republicansocialist 124, 125 popular press in 19th century 119 purchase of Church and municipal land by elites 117 radical liberals in 119; anticlericalism of 121; violence of 121 reformism, hostility to 125 Republican constitution 129 republicans in 122, 128 Restoration state (1874–1923) 116, 117–23; challenges to 120–6; identification with upper classes 119 Second International Socialist parties 124 Second Republic (1931–6) 124, 128; social reform in 129 socially divided 121 Spanish Communist Party (PCE) 125 Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) in 121, 123, 128 trade unions, anarchist and socialist 120; replacement by joint worker–employer associations; strikes by 129–30; UGT 124, 129 war with USA 122 working-class left, radicalization of 131 working conditions, improvement in 129

Spanish Civil War 116 Spanish Second republic, overthrow of 116–35 Stalin, J. 23 state aid 38 see also welfare state state, attitudes to (Britain and Italy) 246–7 Steadman J., G. 48 Stepan, A. 5, 188, 191–2, 204 Stevenson, D. 94 Strauss, E. 47 Stresemann, G. 105 Stuurman, S. 75 suffrage in Britain 40, 41 in Netherlands 51 Sukhovolskii, B. G. 204 survey data, problems of interpreting 246 Swift, Adam 24 Tanner, D. 48 Tarrow, S. 256, 261 tax evasion and democratic stability 247 Taylor, P. M. 95 Teague, E. 4 Ten, C. L. 23 Terry, S. M. 188 te Velde, H. 75 Thale, M. 49 Thompson, E. P. 44, 49 Thorbecke, J. R. 58–9, 60 Thornberry, P. 242 Thyssen, A. 108 toleration in liberal-democratic states 21 Tolz, V. 204 Townson, N. 135 trade unions democracy in 44 hostility to trade intervention 39 as incorporative institutions 32 legal protection of, against employers 38, 39 and political economy 39 transport 20 Treaty of London (1915) 86

Index 291 Treble, J. H. 48 Turkish Empire see Ottoman Empire Two Treatises of Government (Locke) 6 ‘two-turn over test’ 194 ‘tyranny of the majority’ 15–16 Ukraine 83 citizenship in 235 elections (1990) in 192 unemployment in Germany 109 United Nations (UN) Charter (1945) 226, 239 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness (1961) 227 Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) 227, 229 see also European Convention; International Convention United States and First World War 79–80, 82, 83, 87–8 and post-Second World War Germany 152 ‘Star Wars’ programme of 166 see also American revolutionaries; checks and balances; Constitution; Declaration of Independence; Federalism; North America; separation of powers Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 225, 226, 229, 239 Uzbekistan, citizenship in 235 van Bevervoorde, A. 58 van de Coppello, J. K. 64 van den Berg, J. T. 73 van den Bruck, A. M. 109 van der Laarse, R. 71, 72 van der Stoel, M. 238 van Hall, F. A. 56, 58 van Hogendorp, G. K. 55–6 van Maanen, C. F. 54 van Sas, N. C. F. 72 van Tijn, T. 74 Verba, S. 23, 244

Vernon, J. 29, 47 Versailles Peace Treaty 99, 268 economic consequences of 100 effect on German political elite 100 guilt-clause 99 humiliating effect of 107 reaction in Germany to 99–100 remilitarized Germany as precondition for revision of 107 undermining Weimar Republic 100, 146 Vincent, John 47, 48 Visegrad countries (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia) 210 Viviani, President R. 85 voluntary organizations in democratization 43–4, 271 von Baden, Chancellor M. 102 von Papen, F. 108 von Santen, J. H. 73 von Schleicher, K. 107, 108 von Seekt, General H. 101 vote and seat distributions see Loosemore–Hanby index

wages 38, 122 Walsh, D. 47, 48 war aims (First World War) 79–94 war and democracy 79–94 see also inter-war period Webb, S. and B. 48 Wehler, H.-U. 96 Weimar Republic anti-republican sentiments in 106–9 anti-Semitism in 107 censorship in 107 comparison with post-1945 Germany 147–58 Constitution of 102 democratization in 96–113 Freikorps in 101, 107 impact of economic crisis on 109–10 impact of war on 98–100

292 Index Weimar Republic (cont.) Junkers in 145 long-term structural factors in failure of democracy in 111–12 media in 108–9 perceived lack of unity in 99 political parties in 104–6 reasons for failure of 96–7 Reichswehr in 107 replacement by dictatorship 96 right-wing political terrorism in 106–7 Sonderweg theory of failure 96–7 summary of reasons for demise of 112–13 trade union aims in 108 see also Germany; Nazism Weisbrod, B. 114 welfare state 109 Western Europe 30 White, J. 260 Whitehead, L. 187 William I (Holland): abdication of 56; as enlightened despot 55; programme of reconciliation of 53; United Kingdom of 51 William II (Holland) 56, 58 William III (Holland) 60 Wils, L. 72 Wilson, President T. W. 79, 88, 265 attitude of allies to aims of 91 Fourteen Points 91–2, 128, 268 and German Kaiser 146

Wnuk-Lipinsky, E. 170, 187, 188 women in the economy 38 enfranchisement of, and democracy 102, 104 in the family, place of 19 restructuring of place of 21 suffrage of 40 Wood, G. S. 22 Woods, Dwayne 262 working class readiness for political power (J. S. Mill) 12–13 role in public affairs for 13 workplace democratization of 21 as hierarchic and unreconstructed 19 World Bank 209 Worst, I. J. H. 72

Yavlinsky, G. 198 Yeltsin, B. 192–3, 194, 199, 203 Yugoslavia in First World War 87 ‘successor states’ of 93, 170

Zamora, N. A. 128, 129, 133 Ziolkowski, M. 181–2, 187, 190 Ziuganov, G. 193 Zoodsma, L. 71