The Problem of Democracy in Postwar Europe

Political Actors and the Formation of the Postwar Model of Democracy in France, West Germany and Italy

Pepijn Corduwener

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134996339
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The current perception of democratic crisis in Western Europe gives a renewed urgency to a new perspective on the way democracy was reconstructed after World War II and the principles that underpinned its postwar transformation. This study accounts for the formation of the postwar democratic order in Western Europe by studying how the main political actors in France, West Germany and Italy conceptualized democracy and strove over its meaning. Based upon a wide range of librarian and archival sources from these countries, it tracks changing conceptions of democracy among leading politicians, political parties, and leaders of social movements, and unveils how they were deeply divided over key principles of postwar democracy – such as the political party, the free market economy, representation, and civic participation. By comparing three national debates on the question what democracy meant and how it should be institutionalized and practiced, this study argues that only in the 1970s conceptions of democracy converged and key political actors accepted each other as democrats with similar conceptions of democracy. This study thereby deconstructs the myth of the quick emergence of one consensual Western European model of democracy after 1945, demonstrates that its formation was a long and contentious process in which national differences were often of crucial importance, and contributes to an enhanced understanding of the historical roots of the current sentiment of democratic crisis.

1 Transforming Democracy After the Second World War

The end of World War Two signalled the beginning of a European era of constitution making that has been compared those at the end of the eighteenth century.¹ From the onset, the alliance of antifascist parties that undertook this task was fragile, and the political debate on the reform of democracy revealed deep divisions. These rifts ran roughly along the lines between the Left and conservatives that had marked the 1920s and 1930s and were exacerbated by rising Cold War tensions and different explanations of democracy’s collapse in the interwar period. The divisions directly affected the way the political institutions of France, West Germany, and Italy were reformed after 1945. Thus, these countries’ new constitutions did not just reflect a fear of a repetition of the events of the 1920s and 1930s, but they also mirrored the competing democratic narratives put forward in this age of political reconstruction.

At first glance, the postwar debates might not seem so divisive, thanks to the universal tribute politicians paid to the notion of democracy. As the future West German President Theodor Heuss noted in 1947, ‘all the world is talking about democracy’.² However, whereas all forces claimed to be democratic, their visions on what this entailed were far apart. The communists enjoyed a unique moment of political legitimacy,³ thanks to which Maurice Thorez could claim that they embodied a ‘renewed democracy’ while also asserting that the Soviet Union was ‘the most complete form of democracy’.⁴ The communists sat side by side in the provisional government with De Gaulle, who proclaimed before the consultative assembly that he would ‘return democracy’ to France.⁵ Likewise, the Italian National Liberation Committee (CLN) was composed of parties whose discourse was permeated with references to democracy. Italy’s Christian Democratic Party still had within its ranks many of the same people who had belonged to its predecessor, the Popular Party, but it too explicitly expressed an aspiration to mark a new, democratic beginning for Catholic-inspired politics.⁶ The Italian Communist Party, like its French counterpart, claimed to stand for a new and ‘progressive democracy’,⁷ whereas the socialists called upon their supporters to go ‘from the palace revolution of 25 July to the popular democratic revolution, struggle for a socialist republic of workers, affirming the postulates of liberty, of democracy and of social equality’.⁸ Even in Germany, where in contrast to France and Italy, the Allies took complete control of political reconstruction, the liberation coincided with a surge in tributes to democracy. SPD leader Kurt Schumacher reacted with some scepticism to this sudden dedication to the democratic ideal. ‘For the rest of the world it is both astonishing and bitter that in this country of hostility against democracy, suddenly all people want to be democrats’, he remarked.⁹

The tendency to invoke democracy was universal; it came not only from the antifascist parties but also from those who questioned the equation between antifascism and democracy. The CLN’s attempts to democratize Italy, for instance, were contested by forces that were anti-antifascist but still claimed to be democratic. The Common Man’s Front, founded in Naples in 1945, rejected the CLN as an elitist clique acting in authoritarian fashion and argued that the Front proposed a democratic solution for postwar Italy.¹⁰ With their objective of ‘inculcating genuine democratic values’ in the average Italian,¹¹ the parties in the CLN were accused of having a steeply hierarchical and therefore anti-democratic conception of political leadership.¹² So universal was the appeal to democracy that even the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), the main heir to the fascist party, claimed ‘to represent the forces of law and order and thus of unity, and thus of democracy’.¹³

The imperative felt by every political party to assert its democratic credentials was arguably one of the major consequences of the Second World War. This turned ‘democracy’ into a contested term; in the immediate aftermath of the war, crucial political divisions emerged between the Left and conservatives on the transition to democracy. Their clashes centred on four main issues: the disputed lessons of interwar democracy; the reform of party democracy; the reform of representative institutions; and the relationship between capitalism and democracy. The different views on these issues were reflected in the postwar constitutions, mirroring the preoccupations of the postwar reformers. Therefore it can be said that the debates in this time of constitution signing had a lasting influence on the shape of postwar democracy.

The Disputed Lessons of Interwar Democracy

The different conclusions politicians drew from the failures of interwar democracy informed their debates about the kinds of institutions and socioeconomic conditions needed to make the transition to democracy. These politicians displayed an instrumentalist conception of the past, using history to contest others’ current democratic legitimacy and assert their own. Based on their past behaviour, Kurt Schumacher, for one, stated that ‘all enemies of democracy are sitting in the dock’.¹⁴ The communists ‘should plead guilty’, he argued, because ‘without their obstruction the death of parliamentarianism in Germany would have been impossible’.¹⁵ The same held for the ‘bourgeois’ parties, which as protectors of German capitalism were also responsible for Weimar’s failure. Konrad Adenauer, leader of the nascent Christlich Demokratische Union (CDU), responded to Schumacher, arguing that Hitler was able to rise to power because the SPD prime minister of Prussia and the SPD interior minister had ‘refused to do anything’.¹⁶ Such direct accusations were obviously political rhetoric, but they show how politicians used the past to delegitimize their opponents’ democratic credentials. At the same time, the recriminations revealed more fundamental disagreements about the conclusions to be drawn from the troubles of interwar democracy. The Left on the one hand, and Christian Democrats and Gaullists on the other, often adopted diametrically opposed positions on the lessons of the past and how these should be applied to the present.

For the major left-wing parties, the roots of democracy’s troubles lay partially in the failed integration of the masses into the state. Especially in Germany and Italy, the Left argued that the average citizen lacked sufficient political development to enable such integration. The Italian resistance hero Ferrucio Parri stated that fascism had exacerbated the average Italian’s lack of civic education.¹⁷ Similarly, Schumacher wrote that Germans had remained subjects and not become citizens.¹⁸ He believed that ‘the longing for democracy’ was ‘alive in large parts of the population’¹⁹ but that the ‘problem for democracy currently is that the masses should first be taught the ability to judge’.²⁰ In the Left’s view, the absence of a democratic spirit had offered elites the opportunity to mobilize against the people and thwart democratic government. This suggests that progressives were suspicious of the elites’ intentions and reveals their latent confidence in the political abilities of the people—once they had been taught how to behave like democrats.

Obviously, the lessons drawn by the Left from interwar events were not the same everywhere, especially when it came to the relationship between communism and democracy. For the Italian Left, the biennio rosso and the rise of fascism were ‘proof’ that it would be impossible to secure democracy ‘without the unity of the working class’.²¹ This resulted in the formation of the Popular Front, an alliance that existed until the mid-1950s.²² The communists quickly gained the upper hand in the Popular Front, leading to a rupture with those who mistrusted them. Giuseppe Saragat founded his own social democratic party.²³ In France, the strained collaboration between socialists and communists continued for several years. Their eventual break up occurred in 1947, and even though the gap between them was large, the rupture was less definitive than in Germany. There, the antagonism between the SPD and the communist KPD, inherited from the 1930s, proved impossible to resolve in the war’s aftermath. Any attempt by the SPD and KPD to work together met with resistance from the Allies, Schumacher, and rank-and-file members, whereas the Communist Party in the Soviet occupation zone quickly established dominance over the KPD.²⁴

Notwithstanding these differences, left-wing parties universally blamed the capitalist system for the problems of democracy in the interwar years. Togliatti expressed the concerns of many on the Left when he stated that ‘the roots of fascism still exist. If we do not eradicate these roots, fascism can return’.²⁵ The KPD stated in its first major postwar declaration that the German ‘catastrophe’ had been caused by ‘big capital such as Krupp and Siemens’.²⁶ The communists were not the only ones to reject capitalism; this position was broadly shared in progressive circles. Italian socialist leader Pietro Nenni claimed that the working class could have come to power after the Great War, ‘[b]ut then [fascism] turned to the bourgeoisie and started to gain support. Under the mask of nationalists and imperialists, fascism has always been a movement of the most corrupt and most reactionary guardians of capitalism’.²⁷ Schumacher, too, felt that ‘big capital had been an enemy of democracy’.²⁸ Capitalism and democracy were incompatible, they argued, because to capitalists democracy had merely instrumental value. Ultimately, capitalism wanted ‘democracy out of this world’.²⁹ Ideas like these also sowed doubt about the democratic credentials of their political rivals, the bourgeois parties. When Schumacher stated that the Catholic Zentrum party had displayed an ‘authoritarian capitalism’ that paved the way for Nazism,³⁰ he also launched an assault on the Christian Democrats because ‘the leaders of the bourgeois parties still live in the pre-1932 world’.³¹

The ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Transforming Democracy After the Second World War
• 2 Contesting Democratic Legitimacy During the Cold War
• 3 Converging Conceptions of Democracy at the Turn of the 1960s
• 4 Political Elites and the Challenge to the Parliamentary Model
• 5 Democracy Between Crisis and Consensus After the 1973 Oil Crisis
• Conclusion
• References
• Index