Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T02:54:25.787Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Democracy and Dictatorship in Interwar Western Europe Revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Thomas Ertman
Thomas Ertman
Affiliation:
Harvard University
Get access

Abstract

Almost none of the conditions that, according to the latest research, favor democratic durability were present in Western Europe between the world wars. Yet only four Western European states became dictatorships during this period, whereas the others remained democratic despite economic crisis, an unhelpful international system, and the lure of nondemocratic alternatives. Several recent works offer new explanations for this pattern of interwar outcomes. Insofar as these works analyze the entire universe of Western European cases, they represent an important methodological advance. However, they remain too wedded to a class-coalitional framework to provide both a parsimonious and a historically accurate account of why democracy collapsed in some states but not in others. This article proposes an alternative explanatory framework that focuses on how political parties can shape association life in such a way as to support or undermine democracy.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , April 1998 , pp. 475 - 505
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1998

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Huntington, , The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 14, 270Google Scholar–74.

2 Przeworski, and Limongi, , “Modernization: Theories and Facts,” World Politics 49 (January 1997CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

3 Lipset, , PoliticalMan, 2d ed. (London: Heinemann, 1983), 31Google Scholar.

4 Przeworski and Limongi (fn. 2), 167–69,177. See also Przeworski, Adam et al., Sustainable Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Western Europe lends itself especially well to the study of variation in the process of democratization. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries all of the states located there—with the exception of Finland, Ireland, and Austria—were autonomous polities with borders largely unchanged from 1815 through 1939, that is, throughout the whole period of liberalization and first-wave democratization. The states newly created after 1918, whether in Western, Central, or Eastern Europe, faced very different problems of democratization and democratic consolidation compared with the longer-established states of Western Europe and hence, in my view, should be treated as a separate universe of cases (on this issue, see also the discussion in fn. 7). In addition, those twelve longer-established Western European polities—Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Portugal—shared a common cultural, religious, and political heritage that set them apart from the Orthodox and Muslim lands to the east and southeast. Since it is important to hold as many factors constant as possible when attempting to explain divergent outcomes, the commonalities just mentioned speak in favor of analyzing together the fates of the twelve longer-established Western European states during the interwar period.

6 Przeworski and Limongi have found that “[t]he probability that a democracy will die during any particular year in a country with an income above $4,000 [in 1985 U.S. dollars at purchasing power parity] is practically zero,” yet the GDP per capita of all Western European countries throughout the in-terwar period appears to have been below this level, lying instead between about 11,500 and $3,500. See Przeworski and Limongi (fn. 2), 166, 173; and also Bairoch, Paul, “Europe's Gross National Product, 1800–1975,” Journal ofEuropean Economic History 5 (Fall 1976), 296Google Scholar–97.

7 To these four could be added interwar Austria, but the literature is divided on whether to assign it to “Western Europe” (as Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens and Rokkan do) or “Eastern Europe” (as does Luebbert). It seems to me that excluding the Austrian case from a comparative study of first-wave democratization and democratic durability in Western Europe before 1939 is the more reasonable option. I say this not because Austria is part of the “East” but because, like Ireland, Finland, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary (all of which arguably belonged to the West), it was essentially a new state created in the aftermath of World War I. It was very different in its borders, population, and form of government from prewar Austria-Hungary. In general, I find the argument convincing that such new post-1918 states faced very different pressures and challenges during the interwar years than did those states already in existence before the war and that therefore they should be examined separately. (See fn. 5.) Hence while the Austrian case will be mentioned in my discussion of Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens's and Rokkan's work, it will not be included in my concluding theoretical suggestions.

8 These and other views of Mann, Tilly, and Hintze on the development of the European state are examined critically in Ertman, Thomas, Birth ofthe Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modem Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997CrossRefGoogle Scholar), chap. 1.

9 Rokkan, , “Territories, Nations, Parties: Toward a Geoeconomic-Geopolitical Model for the Explanation of Variation within Western Europe,” in Merritt, Richard and Russett, Bruce, eds., From National Development to Global Community: Essays in Honor of Karl W. Deutsch (London: George and Unwin, 1981), 88Google Scholar.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid., 91.

12 Moore, Barrington Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Mak ing of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966Google Scholar).

13 Skocpol, “A Critical Review of Barrington Moore's Social Origins ofDictatorship and Democracy' in Skocpol, , Social Revolutions in the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

14 Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens do not include Portugal in their analysis because they do not consider it ever to have experienced full democracy during the interwar period (p. 153).

15 In a somewhat confusing way, the authors apply the term “bourgeoisie” only to industrial capitalists, using “middle classes” for white-collar employees, professionals, shopkeepers, and other groups that fall between the landed elite on the one hand and workers and peasants/farmers on the other.

16 Nor is this claim made more plausible by taking into account the four “advanced capitalist countries” from outside Europe also examined by the authors (the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), for their discussion of these cases mentions no working-class role in democratization except in Australia. Their subsequent analysis of evidence drawn from other areas of the world forces Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens to retreat ever further from their initial desire to assign the working class a vanguard role in first- and second-wave democratization. Thus they admit (p. 181) that “[i]f one analyzes the class forces behind successful and failed attempts to install democratic regimes [in Latin America], the middle classes emerge as the crucial forces behind the alliances effecting initial breakthroughs to restricted democracy and, in collaboration with the working class, to full democracy” (p.181). And the authors are forced to explain the “democratic exceptionalism” of Costa Rica and the English-speaking Caribbean, not by working-class strength or activism, but rather by, respectively, the presence of a prosperous agrarian middle class (p. 259) and the positive legacy of British colonialism, which allowed the emergence of a robust civil society (pp. 265–66,281).

The Therborn work referred to in the quote in the text is Therborn, Goran, “The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy,” New Lift Review 103 (May-June 1977Google Scholar).

17 I would like to thank John Zysman and David Collier for bringing this very significant working paper to my attention. Ruth Berins Collier has now developed the argument further in her forthcoming book, Between Elite Negotiation and Working-Class Triumph: Labor and Democratization in Europe and South America.

18 Przeworski and Limongi (fn. 2), 158.

19 This is even more true of their discussion of the Austrian case, a detailed evaluation of which has not been included here because it is not, in my view, strictly comparable to the instances of interwar breakdown among those Western European states that already existed before 1918 (see fn. 7). In several places on page 118, the authors admit the extent to which Austria presents problems for their general argument.

20 Milward, Alan and Saul, S. B., The Development of the Economies of Continental Europe, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Harvaid University Press, 1977), 57Google Scholar.

21 Blackbourn, David, The Fontana History of Germany, 1780–1918: The Long Nineteenth Century (London: Fontana, 1997), 426Google Scholar–32; Retallack, James, Germany in the Age of Kaiser Wilhelm II (London: Macmillan, 1996), 51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Kitschelt, , “Political Regime Change: Structure and Process-Driven Explanations?” American Political Science Review 86 (December 1992CrossRefGoogle Scholar), 1030, 1031.

23 Ibid., 1031.

24 Like Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens, Luebbert makes no mention of Portugal. As stated earlier, he briefly considers the Austrian case (pp. 263–65)-rightly in my view-together with those of other European states created after 1918 in the wake of the collapse of the great empires.

25 Kitschelt (fn. 22), 1029.

26 Lehmann, Hans Georg, Die Agrarfrage in der Theorie und Praxis der deutschen und internationalen Sozialdemokratie (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1970), 48Google Scholar, 267–69.

27 Koshar, Rudy, Social Life, Local Politics, and Nazism: Marburg, 1880–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 179–208Google Scholar, 298–99; idem, “Two 'Nazisms': The Social Context of Nazi Mobilization in Marburg and Tubingen,” Social History 7 (January 1982Google Scholar); Zofka, Zdenek, Die Aus-breitung des Nationalsozialismus aufdem Lande (Munich: Kommissionsbuchhandlung R. Wölfle, 1979), 37Google Scholar, 81. Sheri Berman has made a similar argument in Berman, , “Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic,” World Politics 49 (April 1997CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

28 Putnam, Robert, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 148Google Scholar–51; Corner, Paul, Fascism in Ferrara, 1915–1925 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 137Google Scholar–38. Paolo Farnetti also provides figures that indicate that more than 250,000 of the Fascist movement's 332,310 members in May 1922 were found in the North, over 130,000 of them in Lombardy and Emilia alone. See Farnetti, , “Social Conflict, Parliamentary Fragmentation, Institutional Shift, and the Rise of Fascism: Italy,” in Linz, Juan and Stepan, Alfred, eds., The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 22Google Scholar.

29 Lijphart, Arend, Tie Politics of Accommodation: Pluralism and Democracy in the Netherlands, 2d (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975Google Scholar); Eckstein, Harry, Division and Cohesion in Democracy: A Study of Norway (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966Google Scholar); Rokkan, Stein, “Geography, Religion and Social Class: Crosscutting Cleavages in Norwegian Politics,” in Lipset, Seymour Martin and Rokkan, Stein, eds., Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives (New York: Free 1967Google Scholar). See also a collection of Rokkan's essays, the majority of which are on Norway: Rokkan, , Stat, Nasjon, Klasse (Oslo: Univesitetsforlaget, 1987Google Scholar).

30 Examples of such works include Biagini, Eugenio and Reid, Alistair, eds., Currents ofRadicalism: Popular Radicalism, OrganisedLabour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Pugh, Martin, The Tories and the People, 1880–1935 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985Google Scholar); Huard, Raymond, Le mouvement républicain en Bas-Languedoc (Paris: Presses de la F.N.S.P., 1982Google Scholar); idem, La naissance dupartipolitique en France (Paris: Presses de la F.N.S.P., 1996Google Scholar); Righart, Hans, De Katholieke Zuil in Europe (Amsterdam: Boom Meppel, 1986Google Scholar); van Miert, Jan, Wars van Clubgeest Partijzucht: Liberalen, Natie en Verzuiling, Tielen Winschoten, 1850–1920 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, [1994Google Scholar]); Koshar (fh. 27,1986); Lundkvist, Sven, Folkrorelserna i det Svanska Samhal-let 1850–1920 (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1977Google Scholar); Weichlein, Siegfried, Sozialmilieus undpoli-tische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1996CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Walter, Franz, Dürr, Tobias, and Schmidtke, Klaus, Die SPD in Sachsen und Thuringen zwischen Hochburg und Diaspora (Bonn: Verlag J. H. W. Dietz Nachf., 1993Google Scholar); Cardoza, Anthony, Agrarian Elites and Italian Fascism: The Province of Bologna, 1901–1926 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982Google Scholar); Vincent, Mary, Catholicism in the Second Spanish Republic: Religion and Politics in Salamanca, 1930–1936 (Oxford: Press, 1996CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Tavares de Almeida, Pedro, Eleçōes e Caciquismo no Portugal Oitocentista, 1868–1890 Lisbon: Difiisao Editorial, 1991Google Scholar).

31 Christiane Eisenberg, “Arbeiter, Burger und der 'burgerliche Verein,' 1820–1870: Deutschland und England im Vergleich,” in Kocka, Jurgen, ed., Burgertum im 19, Jahrhundert: Deutschland im Europiis-chen Vergleich, 3 vols. (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988Google Scholar), 2: 195–208; Mayeur, Jean-Marie, La vie politique sous la Troisiime Republique, 1870–1940 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1984), 76–78Google Scholar; Righart (fn. 30), 100–119,147–68,209–37; Lundkvist (fn. 30), 66–86; Knudsen, Tim, Den Dansie Stati Europa (Copenhagen: Jurist- og okonomforbundets Forlag, 1993Google Scholar), 96–99,151–54; Eckstein (fn. 29), 102–3; Rokkan (fn. 29), 374.

32 Deny, T. K., History ofScandinavia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), 257Google Scholar–63, 266–68; Rustow, Dankwort, The Politics of Compromise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), 44CrossRefGoogle Scholar–54, 56–60, 65–78; Rokkan (fn. 29), 391,394–95.

33 Mayeur (fn. 31), 193–204.

34 Ibid.

35 Righart (fn. 30), 100–119,146–69,209–37.

36 Lijphart (fn. 29), 190–91.

37 Weber, Max, “Parliament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland,” in Weber, , Gesammdtt Politische Schriftm, 4th ed. (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1980), 311Google Scholar–21, 337–50.

38 Seton-Watson, Christopher, Italyfrom Liberalism to Fascism, 1870–1925 (London: Methuen, 1967), 51–52Google Scholar, 91–92 246–48, 390.

39 Koshar (fn. 27,1986), 6,45–90.

40 Seton-Watson (fn. 38), 91–92,390.

41 Tavares de Almeida (fn. 30), passim; Linz, Juan, “The Party System of Spain: Past and Future,” in Lipset, Seymour Martin and Rokkan, Stein, eds., Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives (New York: Free Press, 1967), 198Google Scholar–99, 202–8.

42 Pinto, Antonio Costa, Salazar's Dictatorship and European Fascism (Boulder, Colo.: Social Science Monographs, 1995), 92–106Google Scholar, 135–46; Linz (fn. 41), 200–201,259–64.