Mark Mazower: "Dark Continent: Europe Twentieth Century"

"... a time when one hears talk on all sides of a crisis--and sometimes

even a catastrophe--of democracy.

                   --HANS KELSEN, 1932

Freedom? Many people smile at the word. Democracy? Parliaments?

There are few who do not speak ill of Parliaments ...

                   --FRANCESCO NITTI, 1927

[...]

    Following the wholly unforeseen collapse of the great autocratic empires of Russia, Austria-Hungary, Hohenzollern Germany and Ottoman Turkey, the Paris peace settlement saw parliamentary democracy enthroned across Europe. A belt of democracies--stretching from the Baltic Sea down through Germany and Poland to the Balkans--was equipped with new constitutions drawn up according to the most up-to-date liberal principles. British scholar James Bryce, in his 1921 classic Modern Democracies, talked about the "universal acceptance of democracy as the normal and natural form of government."

    Yet liberalism's triumph proved short-lived. The Russian Revolution and the spectre of communist subversion cast their shadows westwards across the continent. Democratic values disappeared as political polarization brought much of Europe to the verge of civil war. Ruling elites in many countries soon showed themselves to be anti-communists first, democrats second. This became clear as early as 1919 in Hungary with the suppression of the Béla Kun revolutionary government and the installation of Admiral Horthy's regime. In Italy Liberal elites supported the formation of a Fascist government in 1922. Primo de Rivera seized power in Spain; Portugal's republic succumbed to the dictatorship of Professor Salazar. Poland took a sharp turn away from parliamentary rule in 1926, following a period of hyperinflation and political instability. With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, one government after another moved rightwards. The trend seemed inexorable. "When one examines the contemporary problem of European dictatorships," noted an acute Spanish commentator, "one of the facts which immediately strikes one is the ease with which they have been established and the even greater ease with which they stay in power."

    By the 1930s, parliaments seemed to be going the way of kings. The Left had been vanquished or forced onto the defensive nearly everywhere west of the Soviet Union, and all the key political debates were taking place on the Right. Only on the continent's northern fringes did effective parliamentary rule survive. "We are living in a period when the most courageous face moments of profound discouragement, when the hopes for social and international appeasement salvaged from the wreckage of the World War, seem sadly illusory," wrote an analyst of the "current reaction against democracy" in 1934. As early as 1925 the German legal scholar Moritz Bonn had talked of "the crisis of European democracy"; Eustace Percy in 1931 saw "Democracy on Trial" while H. G. Wells looked forward to "After Democracy." "Is this the end of liberty?" asked Salvador de Madariaga in the midst of the Spanish civil war. Professor William Rappard wrote from Geneva that the "crisis of democracy" had taken "civilized mankind completely unawares, following the apparent triumph of democracy in the modern world."

    Sitting in Paris in the summer of 1940 as the Germans marched in, the anti-liberal Bertrand de Jouvenel wrote off the "stream of jurists" who had created "a mass of parliaments" after the "bourgeois triumph" of 1918; only gradually, he went on, did people realize that "the great tide of bourgeois parliamentarism of 1919-1920 had retreated" and that "in place of that current which had seemed irresistible there appeared another, an authoritarian one." To de Jouvenel, faced with what seemed to be the definitive collapse of parliamentary democracy in Europe, such institutions as the Presidency of the Republic, the Senate and the Chamber now appeared mere "fantasies of the Faculty of Law."

    Today, it is hard to see the inter-war experiment with democracy for the novelty it was: yet we should certainly not assume that democracy is suited to Europe. Though we may like to think democracy's victory in the Cold War proves its deep roots in Europe's soil, history tells us otherwise. Triumphant in 1918, it was virtually extinct twenty years on. Maybe it was bound to collapse in a time of political crisis and economic turmoil, for its defenders were too utopian, too ambitious, too few. In its focus upon constitutional rights and its neglect of social responsibilities, it often seemed more fitted to the nineteenth than to the twentieth century. By the 1930s the signs were that most Europeans no longer wished to fight for it; there were dynamic nondemocratic alternatives to meet the challenges of modernity. Europe found other, authoritarian, forms of political order no more foreign to its traditions, and no less efficient as organizers of society, industry and technology."