Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (5 page)

Foreign reaction was largely positive. Outside observers were unimpressed by Italy’s experience of parliamentary government, and their approval of Mussolini’s achievement often carried undertones of a more general disquiet about the efficacy of parliamentary democracy in the modern world. Condescending English politicians like Churchill or Austen Chamberlain, who doubted whether the parliamentary
tradition was for export at all, congratulated the Italians on having liberated themselves from a form of government to which they had clearly been unsuited.

Similar doubts about the universality of the democratic model could be detected more widely. Some questioned whether “the Latin peoples” with their tradition of absolutism could make of democracy anything more than a “comedy.” In Portugal, for instance, there had been eight presidents, dozens of governments and innumerable attempted coups in the fifteen years which followed the creation of the republic. Perhaps certain specific historical traditions existed in the Anglo-Saxon world to explain the tenacity of democratic institutions—a long history of successful struggle against monarchy, a deep attachment to the liberties which had been slowly and painfully won during that struggle. The pre-war experience of Greece, Romania, Serbia and indeed Italy itself showed that parliaments were quite compatible with corruption, clientilism and continued backwardness.

At the same time post-war changes in the nature of government and the role of the state had made parliament itself less important as a locus of decision-making than its liberal advocates liked to admit. Now it had to share power with centres of business and union bargaining, and other kinds of interest groups. When one looked more closely at how parliaments actually functioned in the 1920s, the question remained: why bother with them at all?

THE CRITIQUE OF PARLIAMENTARISM

“The reason why ‘fascisms’ come into being,” wrote a French critic, “is the political and social failure of liberal democracy.” The authors of
Fascism for Whom?
(1938) put it more simply: “Fascism was the product of democratic decay.” This decay was located most obviously in the working of parliament itself. For many Europeans the roots of the post-war “flourishing of dictatorship” lay “in the crisis of parliamentary government as practised today.”
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Proportional representation—as some critics had warned at the outset—produced fragmented legislatures, with large numbers of parties. The very system designed to reflect the popular will revealed its absence amid a welter of class, ethnic or religious differences. Sixteen
parties secured seats in the 1930 Reichstag, for example, nineteen in the 1929 Czech elections, while in Latvia, Estonia and Poland there were sometimes even more. According to Cambo, “the greatest inefficiency of the Italian parliament coincided with the application of … proportional representation” which he described as “one of the most obvious reasons for the success of the Fascist revolution.”
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New electoral laws could discourage this fragmentation. France in 1924 and Greece in 1928 saw systems of proportional representation replaced by majority voting. Critics pointed to the example of Britain in support of their argument that majority voting would increase the stability of democracy. The problem, however, went beyond the electoral system itself. Political parties—highly organized, often with their own educational, cultural, welfare and paramilitary services—were frequently accused of acting as intermediaries for sectional interests rather than standing for the country as a whole. One conservative German theorist talked of the “egotism” of political parties and regarded their influence as the “symptom of an illness” and “a degeneration.” Belgians talked disparagingly of the “regime of parties” which held sway. There were Peasant Parties, Communist and Social Democratic Parties for the industrial working class, even a “Party of the Middle-Classes, Artisans and Merchants” (in Czechoslovakia). Parties formed on ethnic lines as well as class. A Party for Spiritual Renewal made a brief appearance in Weimar. Parliament seemed like a lens, magnifying rather than resolving the bitter social, national and economic tensions in society at large. To see deputies hurling chairs as well as insults at each other was not uncommon; in the extreme case, in the Belgrade Skupstina in 1928, a Serbian MP shot dead the Croat Peasant Party leader at point-blank range, leading King Alexander to suspend parliamentary business, to revoke the constitution, and, in an act of extreme hopefulness, to rename the land of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. But this did little good and in 1934 Alexander himself was assassinated by Croat nationalist extremists.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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