Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (3 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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 non-democratic 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.

MAKING CONSTITUTIONS

“Constitution is such a wonderful thing that he who does not know what it is is a donkey,” exclaimed an inhabitant of Ottoman Salonika in 1908. During the nineteenth century the demand for constitutional government had been a centrepiece of middle-class demands for political reform, and this demand gathered pace in the decade before the outbreak of the First World War, spreading through the empires of Europe and infiltrating St. Petersburg, Istanbul and the monarchies of the Balkans.

With the victory of Entente forces and the USA in 1918, the demand for constitutional reform swept central-eastern Europe. Poland and the Baltic states lost no time once Germany was defeated in affirming their liberal ambitions, and drawing up appropriately democratic constitutions. Territories wrested from the former Habsburg empire underwent a similar transformation. In November 1918, a provisional constitution declared Austria to be a “democratic republic.” The Czech nationalist leaders issued the Declaration of Independence of the Czechoslovak State in October 1918 in Paris. “We accept and shall adhere to the ideals of modern democracy, as they have been the ideals of our nation for centuries,” they proclaimed. “We accept the American principles as laid down by President Wilson: the principles of liberated mankind—of the actual equality of nations—and of governments deriving their just power from the consent of the governed.” Early in 1920, the Czech National Assembly adopted the constitution of a democratic republic.”
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Of course, the key to the future of democracy in Europe—as it would be through the century—was Germany. The Kaiser was forced into exile, and a transitional liberal regime under the constitutionalist Prince Max of Baden soon made way for a sweeping democratization of the entire political system under the chancellorship of the Social Democratic leader, Friedrich Ebert. In January 1919 a National Constituent Assembly was elected by universal suffrage; six months later it voted for a constitution whose first article affirmed: “The Reich is a
republic. All political authority is derived from the people.” The workers’ and soldiers’ councils which had been set up at the same time, inspired by the Bolshevik example, were forced to accept the primacy of parliamentary rule.

In this way, amid the chaos and confusion of post-war central Europe, where nationalist paramilitaries, bandits, peasant radicals and pro-Bolsheviks were all seeking to exploit the collapse of the old regime, middle-class lawyers and politicians tried to lay down the bases of a new, democratic, constitutional order. The Russo-French scholar Mirkine-Guetzevitch, in his 1929 survey
Les Constitutions de l’Europe nouvelle
, found no fewer than twenty-two separate cases to discuss, including the constitutions of the Free City of Danzig, of the Vatican, Prussia and Bavaria. In that heady first post-war decade the jurist was king. University professors wielded extraordinary influence and experts like Hugo Preuss in Germany and Hans Kelsen in Austria put their theories into practice in the constitutions of their respective countries.

For inspiration—often taken verbatim—they scoured established liberal polities such as France, the USA, England and Switzerland. But they outdid even these in their zeal to build truly representative and comprehensive democracies. Their handiwork reflected the most modern doctrines of public law and its relationship to politics and society. Their fundamental aim was—in the words of a leading commentator—to subordinate politics to law, to “rationalize” power and sweep away the inconsistencies and irrational residues of the old feudal order, considering every aspect of social and political life in specific constitutional provisions.
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Later, of course, it was the lawyers themselves who would be blamed for the collapse of democratic institutions. They had been naive, unrealistic and too inclined to seek “juridical perfection” rather than “political expediency.” Replacing politics with law was a rather quixotic aspiration in the bitterly polarized climate of post-1918 central Europe. Critics charged that such grandiose and ultimately utopian schemes only produced political structures that were unworkable in the real world. These accusations ignored the many other factors that contributed to inter-war political instability—economic crisis, social turmoil, the inequities of the Paris peace settlement. But
they did at least recognize the genuine importance and novelty of post-war constitutional arrangements.
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Most of the new constitutions began by stressing their democratic, national and republican character. Thus, article 1 of the 1920 Austrian constitution asserted that “Austria is a democratic republic. Sovereignty is vested in the people.” The Lithuanian constitution opened: “The state of Lithuania is an independent democratic republic.” Sovereignty was usually stated to reside in “the people”; in some, however, such as Poland, the Irish Free State (in the 1921 constitution) and Greece, it emanated from the “nation.” The 1921 constitution of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes insisted hopefully that “there is only one nationality for all the subjects of the Kingdom”; the Czechoslovak wording was almost identical. The Weimar constitution declared similarly its belief in “the national self-consciousness of a self-organizing people.”

Because so much of bourgeois political life had revolved in the nineteenth century around the struggle with autocratic monarchs and their personalized systems of rule, the new constitutions naturally expressed an overwhelming mistrust of executive authority. Power was heavily concentrated in the legislature. The new constitutions authorized the setting up of parliamentary committees to oversee the workings of the executive and spelled out the circumstances in which a vote of confidence in the government might be called. In some cases, it was stipulated that government ministers were to be nominated by parliament rather than by the prime minister or president. This pre-eminence of parliament was to become, as we shall see, one of the main points of criticism by opponents of the new democratic arrangements.
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The same desire for a highly modern, open democracy led often to the adoption of proportional representation in order to produce a legislature which would most closely express the popular will; referendums were also popular for this reason. In order to “rationalize” the tangled mass of regional legal codes and conventions and create a national body of law, several constitutions tried explicitly to define and restrict the power of local authorities and enhanced the power of
the central state. Draft proposals by Polish and Croatian jurists to safeguard the autonomy of local government were rejected. Wilson’s legacy, after all, encompassed not just democracy but national self-determination as well, and a strong central authority appealed to Czechs faced with a powerful German minority, to Poles with their Ukrainians, to the Serbs in Yugoslavia. Only in Germany and Austria was the new state constructed on a federal rather than unitary basis, and in those cases not until after a long struggle, nor for very many years. Indeed even before Hitler and Dollfuss centralized power in an unmistakable fashion, the central governments of Germany and Austria had begun to use their special powers in fiscal and welfare legislation.

Where the new constitutions departed sharply and most controversially from nineteenth-century liberal values was in their extension of rights from political and civil liberties to areas of health, welfare, the family and social security. The goals of social policy—new in their ambition and promise—were set out in constitutional provisions, not only in countries like Germany and Austria where the Social Democrats held power at the end of the war, but even in Romania, which talked about the “social rights of man” and in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes which mentioned land reform and the need for social and economic legislation. The Spanish constitution declared the country “a democratic republic of workers of all classes” and laid down that property might be expropriated “for social uses.”
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In these as in other respects, the new constitutions reflected the very diverse political preoccupations of their makers. On the one hand, they were expressions of classic nineteenth-century liberalism; on the other, they attempted to meet popular demands reinforced by the impact of the First World War for a “genuine social democracy.” This social democratic agenda was clearly a response to events in Russia, and reflected a desire to win the masses away from Bolshevism and over to parliamentarism. “Either Wilson or Lenin,” wrote Hugo Preuss, who drafted the Weimar constitution and saw it as a bulwark against the Bolshevization of Germany. Thus the new constitutions tried to reconcile old-fashioned parliamentarism with the contemporary pressures of a modern mass society emerging from the devastation of war. A mixture of forward-looking optimism and a new
anxiety, they mirrored the ambiguous post-war situation of democracy’s defenders—the European bourgeoisie.
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EUROPE’S CIVIL WAR

“The soul of the Russian people,” declared Prince Lvov, Prime Minister of the Provisional Government in March 1917, “turned out by its very nature to be a universal democratic soul. It is prepared not only to merge with the democracy of the whole world, but to stand at the head of it and to lead it along the path of human progress according to the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity.”
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For much of 1917 it seemed that Russia would be the site of the first triumph of Europe’s democratic revolution. All the parties involved in the overthrow of the old autocracy were committed to preserving their gains from the monarchy’s return: liberal democracy was all the rage in early 1917, and if there was an apparent enemy, it lay in the form of the Romanov loyalists, not the Bolsheviks. The Left, including Lenin, was pressing for a Constituent Assembly in order to usher in the period of “bourgeois rule” which according to Marxist theory was now needed. As late as October, when the Bolsheviks seized power, they could not decide whether the revolution they were making was “bourgeois democratic” or “proletarian socialist.”