Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (48 page)

NINE

Democracy Transformed:
Western Europe, 1950–75

The number of communist voters in European countries stands in inverse proportion to the number of housing units per thousand inhabitants
.

—EBERHARD WILDERMUTH (WEST GERMAN FEDERAL HOUSING MINISTER)
¹

High employment, fast economic growth and stability are now considered normal in western capitalism
.

—MICHAEL KIDRON, 1968
²

The vastness of their desires paralysed them
.

—GEORGES PEREC
³

REVIVING DEMOCRACY

After 1945 western Europe rediscovered democracy. The remnants of the inter-war authoritarian Right—Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal—were shunned as hangovers from an unwelcome past, excluded from the new international organizations—the United Nations, the European Economic Community, even the Marshall Plan—at least until the Cold War turned them once more into ambiguous allies of the Free World. In the UK, Eire, Sweden and Switzerland wartime restrictions were lifted and the normal functioning of parliament resumed. The anti-democratic strongholds of the New Order—France, Germany and Italy—put the past behind them and built new constitutional systems. In Greece, the authoritarian legacy of the
1930s was abandoned, despite a civil war, and parliamentary rule shakily re-established.

But this rebirth of democracy was no simple return to 1919; on the contrary, what emerged after 1945 was profoundly altered as a result of the region’s memories both of war and of the pre-war democratic crisis. The role of parliament, the nature of political parties and of politics itself all emerged transformed from the struggle with fascism. Democracy now encompassed both a fuller suffrage—as women acquired voting rights where they had previously lacked them (except in socially backward Switzerland and Liechtenstein)—and a greater degree of commitment across the political spectrum to real social and economic rights as well.
⁴

As after 1918, the change in attitudes could be charted through constitutional reforms. These displayed a concern for human rights born of bitter wartime experience, and an awareness of the need to defend the individual against the power of the state. According to article 2 of the 1948 Italian constitution: “The Republic recognizes and guarantees the inviolable rights of man.” “The German people … acknowledge inviolable and inalienable human rights to be the basis of every human community,” ran article 1 of the new German Basic Law, which provided a tighter safeguard on arbitrary state power, and especially the police, than had been delivered by the Weimar Constitution.
⁵

Given the strong feeling that in the inter-war years democracy had been undermined by over-powerful or disputatious assemblies, it is hardly surprising that many people also wanted a stronger executive. West Germany created what some came to call a “Chancellor democracy,” and others—more pointedly—“Demokratur” (a combination of democracy and dictatorship). But France illustrated the difficulties involved in asking parliamentarians to divest themselves voluntarily of power. The Fourth Republic looked little different from this point of view to its predecessor: if anything it handed over
more
power into the hands of parliament, and it was not until 1958 that a disgusted de Gaulle, backed by an exasperated public, managed to create a more presidential regime. In Italy, too, the new 1946 referendum ousted the monarchy but otherwise altered little of the forms of pre-Fascist parliamentary procedure.

Moderation was the new virtue: explicitly in the Italian and German cases (where the Allies anticipated serious right-wing opposition after the war), implicitly elsewhere, governments committed themselves to the suppression of anti-democratic political movements. West Germany’s Basic Law, for example, laid down conditions governing the role of a political party, its democratic structure and the need for it to comply with the constitution. In some cases this led to neo-Nazi parties being banned by the Federal Constitutional Court. But such measures were probably not the main reason for the relatively poor performance of the extreme Right in post-war elections. More significant, apart from public disaffection, was the success of the mainstream Right in diverting the extremists’ natural constituency into their own ranks. The leniency shown by Adenauer and Italian Christian Democrats helped keep the extreme Right at bay.

In the long run, for all the disgust such tactics now excite, it is not obvious that a total marginalization of the Right would have offered the very fragile new democracies greater security. We should recall how far the anti-democratic Right had predominated in Europe in the 1930s. There seemed a real prospect of its popularity reviving immediately after the end of the war: Allied opinion polls indicated no great commitment to democracy in the German public. Nationalistically minded refugees from East Prussia, Silesia and the Sudetenland in particular were reluctant to give up their dreams of
Heimat
. “To a demagogue,” warned
The Times
in December 1950—with an eye to the past—“refugees are what blood in the water is to a shark and the refugee problem is large enough to create a revolutionary situation.” Adenauer may have given jobs and protection to a scandalously large number of former Nazis (some 34 per cent of Foreign Ministry officials in 1952 had been Party members); but his defusing of the potentially explosive refugee vote in the fifties and early sixties was masterly. Had he not brought about the decline of the nationalist Refugee Party, by breaking it up and bringing one faction into his CDU, the millions of German refugees from eastern Europe might have jeopardized the very foundations of the new Federal Republic.
⁶

Fewer compromises, of course, were made with the extreme Left: conservatively inclined governments in the first decade of the Cold War felt a lot more comfortable excluding the Left than the Right.
The Communist Party was outlawed in West Germany and Greece, tolerated but harassed elsewhere. Across western Europe, domestic custodians of anti-communism—especially in the police and security services—worked together with American Cold War warriors, whose centre, the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination, saw its budget mushroom from $4.7 million in early 1949 to $200 million by 1953. Anticommunism was a growth industry.
⁷

European governments helped the youthful CIA try out its latest theories of psychological warfare against the Left, attacking communism through advertising, cultural publishing, travelling exhibitions and film. Socialist and Labour parties were supported in their struggle with communists over control of trades unions. At the height of the Cold War, the Americans anticipated a possible Russian invasion of the West, and provided a few reliable anti-communists with weapons to organize armed resistance, just as had been done during Nazi occupation. Only in the late 1980s and early 1990s did the afterlife of these bizarre cells—their links with the secret services in Italy and Belgium, and their involvement in right-wing terrorism—become public knowledge.
⁸

Although such paranoia evaporated with the ending of the Korean War, many of the institutions of the new “national security” state became permanent: West European spy services expanded enormously, and vetting public-sector jobs became standard practice. In the UK, for example, the Attlee government rejected proposals from a Tory MP to form a parliamentary Committee on Un-British Activities, but did set up a secret cabinet committee on subversive activities and began regular “negative vetting” of civil servants. The much more intrusive “positive vetting” into applicants’ views and past activities began in 1950 at the urging of the Americans: a process originally forecast to apply to some 1,000 posts encompassed 68,000 by 1982.
⁹

The public showed only limited concern at the consequent infringements of civil liberties. Partly there was a general suspicion of Soviet intentions towards western Europe. More fundamentally, though, there was a widespread feeling that “all -isms are now wasms.” The war had left people with a deep antipathy to ideological politics. And the reflection of this could be seen in the changed attitudes of mainstream political parties, which moved away from the
polarized attitudes of the past in favour of compromise. Both Left and Right were coming to terms with parliamentary democracy, and losing their earlier reservations.
¹⁰

On the Left, the ending of the war had originally been seen—in the words of Léon Blum—as ushering in socialism’s “triumphant period.” “After Hitler, us!” proclaimed the German Social Democrat Rudolf Breitscheid. It was not to be. The new era of social reconstruction would not take place on the basis of socialist principles, as Blum had thought. Fascism might have been defeated, but the menace of communism posed socialists serious problems in its turn; outside the UK, Marxism was the umbilical cord which bound them together, and even anti-communist socialists—an increasingly common breed—found it hard to cut it. Moreover, both capitalism and conservatism proved more tenacious and indeed more popular in western Europe than had seemed possible in the dark days of Nazi occupation, and socialists were forced to come to terms with these realities. Thus, the Left’s initial euphoria gave way to a protracted rethinking of the relationship between socialism, capitalism and class.
¹¹

The retreat from Marxism began in some countries almost immediately after the war. In the Netherlands, for example, the Social Democratic Workers Party changed its name to the Dutch Labour Party in an effort to broaden its appeal and downplay its class character. In West Germany, Sweden and Austria, the process took social democrats into the late 1950s or even 1960s. Opposition to reform was even more prolonged in France and Italy, with their strong Marxist traditions, and above all in that bastion of non-Marxism, the British Labour Party. Nevertheless, even in these countries socialists were forced one way or another to recognize electoral and economic truth: the only way to avoid gradual extinction was to escape the ghetto of class politics and undergo the transformation into a broader-based type of party. Gaitskell, for instance, warned that Labour was doomed to defeat unless it took account of “the changing character of labour, full employment, new housing, the new way of life based on the television, the fridge, the car and the glossy magazines.” Opposing him, Richard Crossman tried arguing that managed capitalism would not be able to match the achievements of Soviet-style
planning in eastern Europe; but in fact neither the British Labour Party nor any other mainstream socialist movement made any radical attempt on the virtues of post-war capitalism.
¹²

The Right exploited the Cold War far more effectively. Less encumbered than the Left by theory and dogma, able to embrace anti-communism with greater ease, and more attuned to the widespread desire in the 1950s for political quiescence, family stability and domesticity, pragmatic right-wing politicians rethought their earlier authoritarian impulses and built up new, powerful movements committed to democracy and sharing many of the social concerns of the Left. A former bastion of fiscal caution like the inter-war British Conservative Party succumbed to “One Nation” Toryism: Tory governments in the 1950s were as committed as Labour to a national housing policy, for example. Where economic liberalism survived, as it did in West Germany and Italy, it competed and compromised with very different traditions: Catholic paternalism, social concern and anti-materialism. The rise of Catholic democratic parties was a key here. Germany’s CDU, for example, offered a “socially committed market economy” as a third way between laissez-faire and state planning.
¹³

In this way the old polarization and class antagonism between Left and Right slowly yielded to a new emphasis on consensus. In the extreme case, as in Austria, the outcome was a grand coalition of Left and Right (1945–66) whose durability reflected the two partners’ determined avoidance of ideological conflict after their civil war in the 1930s: Vienna’s two-party state, in fact, turned out to be far more impregnable than the older one-party version. Coalition became the norm in Western parliaments, a source of instability in France but not in countries like Italy or Denmark where frequent changes of government hid the continued hold on power of at least one of the major parties. Though on average west European governments were not particularly durable for much of the post-war period, this does not seem to have bred dissatisfaction with democratic politics, and there was relatively little civil protest or public violence. The chief reason for this public tolerance—so striking a contrast with the unsupportive stance of the inter-war years—was surely that the revival of democracy
coincided with the most remarkable period of sustained economic growth in history. As people’s lives became more comfortable and prosperous, the political system reaped the rewards.
¹⁴