Political Order and Political Decay (67 page)

As noted in the preface, while the French Revolution brought the Code Napoléon to much of Europe and secured a modern administrative state in France itself, it did not establish democracy. Napoleon's defeat ushered in a prolonged period of authoritarian reversion under the aegis of the Austrian-Prussian-Russian Holy Alliance, in which conservative monarchical regimes tried to turn back the clock to the period before 1789. There was a gradient of absolutism stretching from west to east. Republican government existed only in some Swiss cantons and German city-states. France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, and some of the other German states (as well as, of course, Britain) had constitutional monarchies in which the king's formal powers were limited by law. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Prussia, Italy, and Russia, monarchs faced far fewer checks on their power, though most ruled through bureaucracies that were grounded in some form of civil law.
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The second great surge toward democracy occurred with the Revolutions of 1848, raising hopes that were just as quickly dashed. In the words of historian Eric Hobsbawm, “1848 appears as the one revolution in the modern history of Europe which combines the greatest promise, the widest scope, and the most immediate initial success, with the most unqualified and rapid failure.”
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The “Springtime of Peoples,” to which the Arab Spring has been compared, affected virtually every country in the core of Europe. It started in France with the downfall of the July Monarchy and proclamation of a Second Republic in February, and then spread to Bavaria, Prussia, Austria, Hungary, and Italy the following month. The only countries not destabilized were at the periphery of the continent: Sweden, Britain, Greece, Spain, and Russia. The revolutions were then rapidly suppressed, beginning with the Habsburg recovery in May and continuing through the rest of the continent by the end of the year. The brisk spread of revolutionary ideas demonstrates that the “contagion effect” of democratic awakenings was not the by-product of the Internet and social media but could occur in an age of newspapers as well.
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Both the outbreak of these revolutions as well as their ultimate failure reflected the incomplete nature of the social transformations that were occurring in Europe. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the greater part of Europe was still agrarian, with landowners and peasants as the major actors. Only in Britain and the Netherlands were there middle-class groups of any significant size or political weight. But by the middle of the century, a small commercial and industrial bourgeoisie had emerged virtually everywhere, and with the spread of education and literacy, newspapers and public discussions became much more common. The decade of the 1840s saw the organization of what today we would call “civil society” throughout continental Europe: voluntary private associations, often organized around banqueting or public festivals, in which like-minded people could gather, exchange views, and express opinions critical of governments. (Such organizations had existed in Britain at a much earlier point.) Political parties, however, were in most places illegal. In the more repressive territories, activists had to organize secret societies, like the Young Italy of Giuseppe Mazzini. It was these middle-class groups, legal and illegal, that would spearhead the Revolutions of 1848.
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The social transformation was at this point very incomplete, however; even in the most economically advanced European societies, the middle class still constituted a minority of the population. These middle classes were themselves split between those who wanted strong legal protections for their persons and property rights, and those interested in broader democratic participation. The majority of European populations remained peasants, artisans and tradesmen, and an incipient working class that was at this point largely unorganized. The European situation was thus comparable to that of emerging market countries like Thailand and China today. The conservatives in 1848 were able to break the revolutionary momentum by splitting the ranks of the middle class through appeals to nationalism, and by playing on its fears of disorder.

The decades immediately following the restoration of the conservative order post-1848 would prove to be the most economically and socially transformative in European history, as they were in the history of the United States. The more advanced countries—Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands—went from being majority agrarian societies to urban-industrial ones on the eve of World War I. This led to an enormous change in social classes and created the basis for a new mass democratic politics.

Hobsbawm's judgment about the completeness of the failure of the Revolutions of 1848 is therefore too severe. The outbreak of revolution and fear that it might recur lay in the back of the minds of all authoritarian leaders in the second half of the nineteenth century, and set an agenda for political changes that would unfold in the succeeding two generations. Prussia, for example, put in place a universal franchise between 1847 and 1867, albeit with an open ballot and tiered voting. The newly unified Germany after 1871 adopted a formal constitution that for the first time created a role for an elected Reichstag. The legalization of political parties provided an opening for the Social Democratic Party to organize; despite the arch-conservative Chancellor Bismarck's attempts to suppress it, the Social Democrats became the largest group within the Reichstag by the eve of World War I. Bismarck implemented Europe's first social security and health insurance systems in the 1880s in an effort to steal the thunder of the new working-class parties.

Similarly in France, Louis Napoleon, who came to power via a coup in 1851 and declared himself the Emperor Napoleon III, nonetheless felt he had to legitimate his rule by staging a plebiscite (having been once elected president of the republic that emerged in the wake of the 1848 revolution). The French had gotten used to the idea of voting, even if under highly managed conditions. The Second Empire was, moreover, a liberal one in which diverse political views could be openly expressed. The economic expansion that took place under it paved the way for the more genuinely democratic Third Republic that was declared after defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune. Many of the moves toward more liberal societies and greater democracy were thus the work of conservative leaders who lived through 1848 and were conscious of the fact that they faced societies mobilized in ways they had not been earlier in the century.

The middle-class supporters of constitutional government at midcentury would turn out to be inconsistent democrats, however, because the democratic impulse was hijacked, in many countries, by nationalism. The German liberals sitting in the Frankfurt and Berlin parliaments were often more interested in the creation of a united Germany than they were in the democratization of the existing German states. As elites, they were willing to let themselves “represent” the nation without actually wanting to give their fellow citizens the right to vote. Many of them ended up supporting Bismarck and his authoritarian Reich when he proved to be the one individual capable of creating a united Germany. As leaders and beneficiaries of German capitalism, they did not hesitate to abandon economic liberalism when the state offered tariff protections to their industries. Similarly, many of the liberals in the component territories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were more interested in securing their own privileges as national elites than in expansion of the franchise. In Britain, opposition to Irish Home Rule and support for the empire allowed the conservatives to attract support not just from the middle class but also from the working class in the late nineteenth century. This would not be the last time that nationalism would trump class interest in Europe.

ARGUMENTS AGAINST DEMOCRACY

Resistance to the spread of democracy lay in the realm of ideas as well as in the material interests of Europe's existing elites. In the nineteenth century, many serious intellectuals were willing to make thoughtful arguments against a universal franchise, or the principle of one man, one vote. It is worth reviewing some of those arguments, since a number of them remain salient even if few people are willing to articulate them openly today.

One of the most sustained critiques of democracy was provided by the philosopher John Stuart Mill, whose
On Liberty
has been a foundational text for liberals since its publication in 1859. In
Thoughts on Parliamentary Government
, published in 1861 before the Second Reform Act, Mill made several arguments against a universal and equal franchise. He began with the classic Whig argument that “the assembly which votes the taxes, either general or local, should be elected exclusively by those who pay something towards the taxes imposed.”
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The idea that only taxpayers should vote was the flip side of the principle “no taxation without representation” that was the motto of both the English and American Revolutions. Mill therefore believed it was better to impose direct rather than indirect taxes, since that would remind citizens of their obligations to be vigilant about how the government spent their money. This implied further that the “receipt of parish relief should be a peremptory disqualification for the franchise.” In other words, people on welfare should not have the right to vote, since they were essentially freeloading off of taxpayers.

Mill's second argument against an equal franchise had to do with the qualifications and sense of responsibility of voters. He did not contest the principle of universal franchise, since “the possession and the exercise of political, and among others of electoral, rights, is one of the chief instruments both of moral and of intellectual training for the popular mind.” He did, however, contest one man, one vote. In an argument that sounds particularly foreign to contemporary ears, he noted that “if it is asserted that all persons ought to be equal in every description of right recognised by society, I answer, not until all are equal in worth as human beings.”
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This led to a conclusion that different classes of people should have different numbers of votes based on their level of education: an unskilled laborer, one vote; a foreman, three; and a lawyer, physician, or clergyman, five or six. He noted that Louis Napoleon had just been elected president of France by millions of “peasants who could neither read nor write, and whose knowledge of public men, even by name, was limited to oral tradition.”
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Very similar arguments would be used by whites in the American South to restrict or take away voting rights from African Americans in the decades following the Civil War as Jim Crow laws spread.

Other thinkers made the argument that only elites were capable of objective guardianship of the public interest and should therefore be trusted to represent those who did not have the right to vote. Back in the eighteenth century, for example, Edmund Burke suggested that members of the House of Commons elected from rotten boroughs or otherwise unequal franchises did not enjoy better roads, prisons, or police than those who were underrepresented, since that privileged class of people were able to “stand clearer of local interests, passions, prejudices and cabals, than the others” and therefore to produce “a more general view.”
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The working classes in themselves were not qualified to rule: “The occupation of a hairdresser, or of a working tallow-chandler cannot be a matter of honor to any person … The state suffers oppression if such as they … are permitted to rule.”
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This perspective was taken up by Walter Bagehot's classic work
The English Constitution
, published in 1866 just before the introduction of the Second Reform Bill, in which he asserted: “I do not consider the exclusion of the working classes from effectual representation a defect in
this
aspect of our parliamentary representation. The working classes contribute almost nothing to our corporate public opinion, and therefore, the fact of their want of influence in Parliament does not impair the coincidence of Parliament with public opinion. They are left out in the representation, and also in the thing represented.”
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What Bagehot called the “dignified” parts of the government—the monarchy and the House of Lords—actually attracted considerable public support and therefore sufficed as a basis for legitimacy in the absence of the active participation of the working classes and poor in government.
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A different sort of argument was made against democracy by a series of conservative Italian thinkers, who asserted that it was pointless to open up the franchise since true democracy was impossible to achieve. This view was first articulated by Gaetano Mosca, who stated that the different regime types—monarchy, aristocracy, democracy—made little difference to actual life because all were in the end controlled by elites. The “political class” maintains itself in power under a wide variety of institutions and will simply use democratic ones to do the same. Even “Communist and collectivist societies would beyond any doubt be managed by officials.” The economist Vilfredo Pareto (familiar to economics students as the inventor of the Pareto optimum) made a similar case for continuing elite domination regardless of the type of regime. Based on his statistical studies of income distribution, he formulated a “Pareto's law,” which argued that 80 percent of wealth was held by 20 percent of the population across time and space. Since this was akin to a natural law, efforts to remedy it through political measures like expansion of the franchise or income redistribution were pointless.
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These conservative Italian thinkers were making a variant of the argument put forward by Marx himself, namely, that the advent of formal democracy and an expanded franchise would not improve the lives of the mass of the population but would simply preserve elite dominance in a different form. Mosca and Pareto believed that different institutions would not change this situation, and therefore they argued in favor of a continuation of the status quo. Marx believed, of course, that a solution existed in the form of a proletarian revolution. His followers would go on to try to engineer a truly egalitarian society following the Bolshevik and other Communist Revolutions of the twentieth century. In one sense, the Italians were proved right: communism did not eliminate the distinction between rulers and ruled, or end oppression by elites; it merely changed the identity of those in charge.