Dark Continent, page 4
In his analysis of the Weimar party system, Sigmund Neumann argued that Germany’s political parties were confronting rather than communicating with one another. Each group of supporters, mobilized in increasingly militaristic party organizations with their banners and placards, looked on with hostility at other sections of society. Political dialogue and coalition government were increasingly intractable, for “discussion becomes meaningless where one’s partner has already decided on his position before the discussion has begun … As a result the intellectual foundations of liberalism and parliamentarism have been shaken.” Neumann predicted that “the breakdown of parliament will of necessity lead to the rise in importance of other political power factors, perhaps the Reich president [or] the Reich government.” Legislative paralysis, according to his colleague Moritz Bonn, “has produced the clamor for a dictator who is willing to do the things the nation wants to be done, but who is not subject to the rule of economic groups or even of a majority.” Hans Kelsen, one of Europe’s most eminent legal theorists, spoke of “the crisis of the parliamentary system” and discussed reinforcing the power of the government vis-à-vis the Reichstag. Neumann, Bonn and Kelsen were all committed democrats; but they were all conscious of living in societies split down the middle in an era of unprecedented economic and political polarization. Democracy was supposed to have unified the nation; instead it seemed to have divided it.25
As a result of the multiplicity of competing party interests, the formation of governments was becoming ever more difficult. There were hardly any countries in Europe after 1918 where the average Cabinet lasted more than a year; in Germany and Austria the average was eight months, in Italy five, in Spain after 1931 under four. In the French Third Republic—the ineffectual model for so many east European constitutions—the average Cabinet lifespan dropped from ten months in 1870–1914, to eight in 1914–32 and a mere four in 1932–40. This reflected the almost universal lack of stable bi-party legislatures, or of parties able to command absolute majorities. “Restoring the authority of the State in a democracy … will be … the first and most essential element of our intended programme,” announced Paul-Boncour in December 1932; his Cabinet fell a month later. Such governments naturally found it difficult to push through the socio-economic reforms which were promised in their constitutions and party programmes.26
Impasse in the legislature prompted calls for a strengthening of the executive. In Brussels the Centre d’Études pour la Réforme de l’État pushed hard for the modification of parliamentary procedure; “Réforme de l’État” became a popular slogan in Belgian politics. The Czech premier Beneš correctly predicted that following the resolution of the European crisis “there will certainly be a reinforcement and consolidation of the executive power as compared with the last phases of European liberal constitutional democracy.” Neither in Czechoslovakia nor anywhere else would this debate be forgotten after 1945.27
In fact, constitutional revisions to strengthen the executive did occur in Poland and Lithuania (1926 and 1935), Austria (1929), and Estonia (1933 and 1937). The 1931 Spanish constitution—the most modern in inter-war Europe—authorized the delegation of substantial legislative power to the executive. Many feared, however, that such moves would turn out—as occurred, for example, under Pilsudski in Poland—to be a step along the road to dictatorship rather than a safeguard for democracy. “We must defend democracy,” the leading French liberal Victor Basch warned the League of the Rights of Man in May 1934. “We will not accept Parliament being sent away, nor these decree-laws which may be constitutional but are contrary to the very principles of democracy.”28
It is just here that we can discern the clash between, on the one hand, liberal democrats who saw “in Power an enemy which can never be weakened enough,” and, on the other, those more pragmatic constitutionalists who argued that in a crisis the executive should use all available constitutional powers to preserve the substance of democracy. Nowhere did this clash have more profound implications than in Weimar Germany.
By the late 1920s, the right-wing legal theorist Carl Schmitt had already developed his analysis of the “state of exception”—in which constitutional emergency powers were to be employed to defend the constitution rather than to institute dictatorship. With the Reichstag paralysed, Schmitt promoted the idea of the president as defender of the constitution. Between March 1930 and January 1933, Weimar moved towards a presidential system of government through emergency decrees. In the disastrous elections of September 1930, the Nazis and the Communists emerged as the second and third largest parties, making a majority coalition impossible and giving credence to Schmitt’s arguments. Germany now appeared to be in a situation whereby decree-laws issued under article 48 of the constitution were essential if government was not to be turned over into the hands of parties dedicated to the complete overthrow of democracy.29
The growing use of article 48, however, made it difficult to determine at what point democracy slid into dictatorship. Between 1925 and 1931 only sixteen emergency decrees were issued; in 1931 there were forty-two as against thirty-five laws passed by the Reichstag; in 1932 there were fifty-nine as against five. On 20 July 1932, Chancellor Papen used an emergency decree to impose martial law in Prussia and remove the Social Democrat state government. Jurists started talking of the “dictatorial power of the Reich president”; conservative anti-parliamentarians offered “democratic dictatorship” as the alternative to parliamentary government. It was scarcely surprising that jurists like Schmitt were widely suspected of laying the groundwork for an authoritarian New State—perhaps under General Schleicher, who was known to favour such a solution as a means of keeping out Hitler. One Liberal paper subtitled a 1932 discussion of Schmitt’s views “A Constitutional Guide for Students of Dictatorship.”30
The German constitutional debate—paralleled, it must be said, by very similar discussions elsewhere—illuminates the complex relationship between authoritarianism and democracy in the crisis atmosphere of inter-war Europe. Weimar in the 1920s was clearly a democracy; under Chancellor Brüning it was less of one; under von Papen and Schleicher—Hitler’s immediate predecessor—it was already very close to being an authoritarian state. Most people felt that the liberal model of parliamentary democracy needed revision; the question was, first, to what extent to transfer powers from legislature to executive, and second, what function parliament should possess once the executive predominated. Parliaments, after all, were rarely abolished entirely or suspended indefinitely; they lingered on in a shadowy half-life in Hitler’s Germany, Fascist Italy and in many authoritarian states—a sign that these regimes still craved the kind of popular legitimacy which representative assemblies, however constituted, could offer.
THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY
Parliaments were not the only point of controversy; liberal democracy was under attack on a much wider front as well. To put it most simply: how democratically minded was inter-war Europe? Disillusioned jurists argued that the problem lay not in an excess of democratism in the constitutions but rather in a lack of democratic values among the public. Moritz Bonn echoed the views of many when he said that behind the crisis of parliaments lay “the crisis of European life.”31
Anti-liberal and anti-democratic creeds had been gaining ground since the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In the wake of the Great War, they spread fast, through a “gospel of violence” most visible in the fascist movement but common to many members of what a later historian was to call the “generation of 1914.” Reared on war, extremist ideologues preferred violence to reason, action to rhetoric: from Marinetti to Ernst Jünger, many young European males in the 1920s seemed ready to justify and even advocate the politics of confrontation. “Nothing is ever accomplished without bloodshed,” wrote the young right-wing Frenchman Drieu la Rochelle in Le Jeune Européen. “I look forward to a bloodbath.” Violence obsessed artists from the Expressionists to the Surrealists. Some saw the heritage of the war in the atmosphere of “internal war” which was polarizing most countries in Europe and which achieved its juridical expression in Lenin’s conception of internal civil war and in the Nazi “state of emergency.”32
Among the veterans of the front were thinkers like Jünger and politicians of the Right including Röhm, head of the SA (the Storm Troopers), Oswald Mosley, the Flemish nationalist Joris van Severen, the Hungarian Ferenc Szálasi (founder of the extremist Arrow Cross movement) and, of course, Hitler himself. They assailed democracy for being “bourgeois”: sluggish, materialistic, unexciting and incapable of arousing the sympathy of the masses, reflecting the aspirations of an older generation whose politicians dressed in frock coats and top hats. Bertrand de Jouvenel claimed young people found democracy unappealing; Henri de Montherlant contrasted the “haggard gaze” of the sedentary bourgeois with the physical vigour of the disciplined young authoritarian, beneficiary of the fascist “revolution of the body.” Young Romanian intellectuals like Emile Cioran and Mircea Eliade hailed Hitler’s assault on “democratic rationalism,” and the energy of messianic and spiritual totalitarianism. Against liberalism’s glorification of the selfish individual they proposed the spirit of self-sacrifice, obedience and communal duty.33
Nor was it only the confirmed anti-democrats who thought democracy effete and worn out. Robert Musil, author of The Man without Qualities, affirmed: “I do not fight against fascism, but in democracy for her future, thus also against democracy.” H. G. Wells urged Oxford summer-school students to transform themselves into “Liberal Fascisti” and “enlightened Nazis” who would compete in their enthusiasm and self-sacrifice with the ardent supporters of dictatorship. Unless democracy was able to mobilize such advocates, he saw little future for it. Liberalism seemed too individualistic to cope with the demands of a more collectivist age.34
In 1930 Weimar’s Chancellor Hermann Müller warned that “a democracy without democrats is an internal and external danger”; but the founders of post-war constitutionalism had not given this matter much thought. Kelsen, for instance, had proudly promoted his vision of a “legal theory purified of all political ideologies”; yet such a theory, by virtue of its detachment from politics, lacked supporters. Kelsen criticized Austria’s Christian Socials and Social Democrats for following different legal traditions, contaminated by political Catholicism or Marxism, but they at least had large party memberships and he did not. His position might have been intellectually unassailable; politically he was still living with the comfortable illusions of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture. Democracy in Europe had been shored up briefly after 1918 by an unstable coalition of international and domestic forces which was now breaking down across much of the continent. There were, simply, fewer and fewer committed democrats.
In the first place, democracy’s international backers were less supportive as time passed. Woodrow Wilson’s legacy of messianic liberalism was undermined by American isolationism, while the European victors—Britain and France—were concerned more about communism than dictatorship; so long as the new states of central-eastern Europe held communism at bay, they cared little about their domestic political arrangements. They made sure that the deposed monarchs and emperors of the Central Powers could not return to power, but were less concerned with other kinds of threat. They failed to realize that if democracy was identified with the peace imposed at Versailles, then the abolition of democracy implied an attack on the peace settlement as well. Back from Catalonia, Orwell chafed at the “deep, deep sleep of England,” which by the late 1930s was losing the battle of ideologies by default.
Unambiguous support for democracy was thin on the ground throughout Europe. Guglielmo Ferrero remarked in 1925 that democracy’s failure in Italy was chiefly due to the lack of a strong democratic party. But not only in Italy. The core group of old-time liberals were marginal figures in the inter-war years, their battles largely won with the defeat of monarchs and aristocracies. “The positive argument for being a Liberal,” according to John Maynard Keynes in 1925, was “very weak.” The decline of Britain’s Liberals had little impact upon the stability of the political system, but this was not true, for instance, of Weimar’s Democratic Party and other classic liberal parties. Mass suffrage threatened them with a marginal political role in the face of the great parties of the Left, of conservatism and nationalism, and of Catholicism. Fear of communism, in particular, drew many liberals towards authoritarian solutions. They were joined there by other kinds of elitists—the social engineers, business managers and technocrats, who wanted scientific, apolitical solutions to society’s ills and were impatient with the instability and incompetence of parliamentary rule.35
The European Left was seriously weakened by the split between Social Democrats and Communists, and was never again as strong as in 1918–19. The Communists opposed what they regarded as “bourgeois formalism”—parliamentary democracy—but could not destroy it, though they tried hard enough, at least before 1934. With the possible exception of 1930s France, they remained on the margins of politics and emerged—in the words of one recent historian—“on the losing side of all electoral battles of the inter-war years.” “By any reasoned judgement,” concludes Donald Sassoon, “the record of pre-war communism in Europe must be described as one of failure.” The Social Democrats did not want to destroy democracy, so long as it could be transformed into socialism. “Republic, that’s not much/Socialism is the goal” was the ditty which summed up SPD attitudes to Weimar. This was a very provisional kind of backing, based on Marxist premises and reservations, especially once it became clear that many of the social rights set out in the second part of the Weimar constitution would remain a dead letter. At least one percipient critic foresaw the consequences; Hermann Heller warned at the height of the depression that either Weimar would realize its promise to become a soziale Rechtsstaat—a state with social and economic justice as foreseen in the constitution—or else it would slide into dictatorship. Only where Social Democrats forged a secure alliance with rural populations—as most notably in Scandinavia—or with conservatives—as in Belgium and Britain—did democracy survive. Elsewhere, constitutional commitments to socio-economic rights and welfare benefits were undermined by the depression and mass unemployment. The healing of the breach on the Left through a Popular Front strategy came too late for Germany and Austria, failed to save the Republic in Spain and ultimately collapsed in its heartland, France, as well.36
Many conservatives, for their part, were no happier with inter-war democracy and were keen to see a return to more elitist, aristocratic and occasionally even monarchical modes of government. For them the problem with democracy lay in the power it gave the masses, in the supposed incompatibility of democracy and authority. They were prone to attack democracy on ethical grounds too. It placed too much stress on rights and not enough on duties. It had bred egotism and sectional self-interest and had thus contributed to its own downfall by failing to encourage a civic consciousness or a sense of community, or so many Catholic, Orthodox and nationalist critics of democracy in the 1920s argued. The Spaniard de Madariaga called for liberal democracy to be replaced with “unanimous organic democracy”; the French social Catholic Emmanuel Mounier greeted the fall of the Third Republic in 1940 by calling for “a struggle against individualism, a sense of responsibility, restoration of leadership, sense of community … [and] a sense of the whole man, flesh and spirit”; his readers were reminded that for years he had been calling for a rejection of the pernicious individualism of “liberal and popular democracy.”37
Such criticisms marked the failure of democracy to live up to its own boast to have embodied and given voice to the nation as a whole. Once it had sounded so confident: “We, the Czechoslovak Nation, in order to form a more perfect union of the nation …” began the preamble to the 1920 Czech constitution, yet it was an open question whether the country’s Slovaks, Jews, Hungarians and Germans regarded themselves as included in such a phrase. Hugo Preuss had drawn up his draft of the Weimar constitution noting that “there is neither a Prussian or Bavarian nation … there is only one German nation which is to shape its political organization in the German republic.” And yet facts proved the contrary: Austria was prohibited from joining the new Germany and Bavaria was prevented from seceding; the constitution itself was drafted in an atmosphere of civil war. The confident bourgeois claim that liberal constitutions would both acknowledge and nurture the Nation was belied almost everywhere by ethnic and class cleavages. As a result, those whose highest priority was national unity were increasingly tempted by more integral and authoritarian forms of government; liberal democracy had failed the Nation, and might have to be sacrificed if the Nation was to survive. “When a constitution proves itself to be useless,” Hitler wrote to Chancellor Brüning in 1931, “the nation does not die—the constitution is altered.”38
It is thus not surprising that by the 1930s many asked why it should ever have been expected that democracy would flower in Europe. This sort of attitude fitted neatly with the British pursuit of appeasement. “It may be that the system of parliamentary Government which suits Great Britain suits few other countries besides,” sniffed The Times, defending non-intervention in Spain: “Recent Spanish Governments have tried to conform to the parliamentary type of republican democracy, but with scant success.” From this perspective, the crisis of democracy in Europe simply proved Britain’s superiority.39
