The Transformation of the World (131 page)

Local Democracy and Socialism

Outside England, with its old parliamentary tradition, the homogeneous representation of the nation in a central assembly was a new idea in the nineteenth century. Also without precedent was the idea that practices of representation might reflect existing hierarchies, and that social conditions might themselves be changed through electoral legislation. Of course, the importance of such issues should not distract attention from events at subnational level; for most people the political regulation of their everyday world is more important than high politics in a remote capital city. Local administration was even more multifarious than national political systems: it could lie in the hands of justices of the peace drawn from the local upper classes (the English model), be carried out by appointees of central government (the Napoleonic model), or be inserted into a form of grassroots democracy (the American model that was so admired by Tocqueville). In places where the central state refrained from direct intervention or lacked sufficient resources, space repeatedly opened up for limited consensus building of a deliberative, democratic nature. This might, as in Russia, occur within a peasant commune that had to agree on the allocation and use of common land. The same happened in local elite groups with little internal hierarchy, whether Hanseatic senates, consultation sessions (neither recognized as legitimate nor persecuted as illegitimate) among Syrian notables in the Ottoman Empire, or the city council in the Chinese part of Shanghai (which in 1905 became the first formally democratic working institution in the history of China).
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Politics in the early United States also had an elitist, patrician character, especially in the eastern cities, but a new conception of democracy broke through with the Jacksonian Revolution of the 1830s. The propertied classes, until then mostly large landowners, no longer made up the totality of politically responsible citizens as America abandoned the old idea, taken over from European republicanism, that only property ownership guaranteed independence and qualified
people for rational political judgment. Now the autonomy of citizens rested upon ownership of their own person; property qualifications largely ceased to apply. Unusually high rates of electoral participation (often over 80 percent) were signs of the energy now invested in politics. As the young French lawyer Alexis de Tocqueville noted during his study trip to America, this kind of politics no longer had Washington, DC, as its principal stage; it gained its strength from local self-governing communities that elected their own officeholders (judges, sheriffs, etc.)—a radical alternative to the Western European model of authoritarian centralism going back to Napoleon. This kind of democracy involved far more than the right to vote. It meant a new kind of society in which the principle of equality, abstractly and negatively formulated by the French Revolution as the abolition of estate privileges, acquired the positive sense of self-empowerment of a citizenry enjoying equal personal rights. The tension between liberty and equality, which Tocqueville diagnosed with the eyes of a liberal European aristocrat, was not a problem for most (white) Americans of his time. What Europe would later call “mass democracy” arose in the United States as early as the 1820s and 1830s.
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But its democratic efficiency was partly weakened by the characteristic federalism of the United States, the territorial side of its constitution. For how representative was Congress? Sectional interests stood opposed to one another: slave states against free states. And almost until the Civil War the slave states dominated national politics, to an extent that made the United States as a whole a slave-owners' republic. Their will prevailed again and again: from the “gag rule” that between 1836 and 1844 precluded any debate on slavery in the House of Representatives to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. The slave states enjoyed a structural majority by virtue of the Three-Fifths Clause: three-fifths of slaves were added to free persons for the purposes of direct taxation and the allocation of seats in the House of Representatives.
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With Jacksonian democracy, the United States struck out in a novel political direction for the second time since 1776. “Mass democracy” of this kind, overlaid with a competitive and sometimes violent rhetoric of freedom, did not exist before the last third of the nineteenth century anywhere in Europe—not even in France, where the local power of prefects remained unbroken through several regime changes and even after the introduction of universal manhood suffrage. Once again the British way and the American way parted company. In Britain, the supremacy of an elite group of gentlemen landowners, financiers, and industrialists reached its zenith in the period between the two reform acts of 1832 and 1867. Though tightly knit and homogeneous in its cultural perception of itself, this oligarchy did not operate as a caste: it was open at the margins to outsiders and developed a highly integrative understanding of politics. After 1832 it proved capable in principle of acting under the conditions of “modern” parliamentarianism, once the Crown was no longer in a position to keep a prime minister in office against the majority will of Parliament. From the 1830s on, Britain was not merely a constitutional monarchy but a parliamentary monarchy, in which the church, too,
began to play a lesser political role than in many continental European countries. At the same time, politicians at Westminster scarcely had to take into account a socially and culturally remote mass electorate, since the Reform Act of 1832 expanded the electorate only from 14 percent to 18 percent of adult males. In Britain the middle decades of the century were thus a period of democratic procedures without broad democratic legitimation, but also of a widespread conviction that the middle classes would henceforth have to play an important role in politics.
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Even the most progressive countries of Europe would close America's democratic lead, at both local and national levels, only with a delay of nearly half a century.

The vast majority of women stood outside active citizenship. Female suffrage made its American debut in Wyoming in 1869 (and more generally in the United States only after 1920). The first de facto sovereign country to adopt it, arousing worldwide attention and widespread celebrations, was New Zealand, initially (in 1893) as a right to vote but from 1919 also as a right to stand for office. Finland—then still part of the Tsarist Empire—led the way in Europe by introducing female suffrage in 1906, followed by Norway in 1913. In both cases, women were needed for their potential to enhance nationalist legitimacy.
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Female suffrage movements grew strongly and at an early date in places where there had also been struggles for male voting rights. In Germany, where these were bestowed in 1867–71 as a “gift from above,” the suffragette movement was weaker than in countries such as Britain.
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Democracy was in varying degrees built from the bottom up. The basic process of transforming customs into rights at the local level is not unique to postrevolutionary societies such as the United States; nor is it a Western peculiarity. In the late Tokugawa period, when hardly anyone in Japan could imagine the establishment of a national assembly, the scope for local participation gradually increased without being linked to a political revolution or a tradition of municipal self-government. Long-established families had to recognize the claims of rising “new families.”
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After the Meiji Renovation brought a degree of administrative decentralization from 1868 onwards, the boundaries between national and local government had to be redrawn. At first demands for village assemblies rang out on all sides, and these were established in many prefectures after 1880. At the same time, however, the central government began to sound a retreat by introducing controls on public activities, press freedoms, and new political parties, and in 1883 it banned the election of village and city mayors and insisted on their appointment from above. This called forth stormy protests. In 1888 legislation was introduced to regulate relations between the central state and the villages, so that mayors could be elected but only under close supervision by the relevant authorities.
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What remained was a much greater scope for participation than under the pre-1868 ancien régime. In 1890 the first general election in Japanese history confirmed this by filling Parliament with representatives of the upper middle stratum, bringing a new class without a samurai background to the center stage of politics.
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But it took another quarter of a century before Parliament, under constant
threat of dissolution by the Emperor's government, could assert itself as a counterweight to the executive. The first-ever elections held in China in the winter 1912–13, relatively free and honest, did not usher in stable democratic development. By 1933, all traces of democracy had been obliterated in China, Japan, and Korea.

It was not only in the United States and Britain that political movements and civic associations became schools of democracy, offering in their internal functioning a learning space not determined by status considerations. At first equality claims were often raised, and practiced at the level of social intercourse, among milieux, groups, and organizations made up of objective equals, capable of pursuing their interests all the more successfully in broader political arenas marked by intense conflict. This was the political kernel of socialism and related grassroots movements. There is much to be said, for example, for regarding early German Social Democracy less as a political party in today's sense than as an associative movement.
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Socialism was a new language of solidarity among the nonprivileged layers of society, which came into being when corporate certainties had disappeared and a need was felt to move beyond the politically amorphous existence of unorganized poverty. In institutional terms, before its bolshevization into a conspiratorial vanguard party, the socialist movement not only asserted collective interests in the struggle between classes but also involved the exercise of democracy. European socialism was a force for democratization. It combined the pre-Marxist or “utopian” early socialism represented by figures such as Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, or Pierre-Joseph Proudhon with the nonviolent variant of anarchism (especially in the Russian prince and later émigré to Switzerland Pyotr Kropotkin)
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and a majority of the parties (most of them explicitly Marxist) that came together in 1889 in the Second International.

The original ideals of economic decentralization, mutual aid, cooperative production, and sometimes even communal living outside the framework of bourgeois private property had become weaker by the turn of the century. But the memberships still aspired to express their individual wishes or ideas in parties and unions that represented their interests in the outside world yet were productive of mutual trust internally. Although no party of the labor movement came to power in Europe before the First World War, the formation of a democratic mentality in the numerous currents of European socialism played no small part in preparing the democratization process that would follow the war. Before its outbreak, Europe and the British dominions had already experienced a constant strengthening of social democracy, in which sizable tendencies had shaken off Marxist expectations of revolution. In Germany these operated as the “Revisionism” of Eduard Bernstein and his comrades, while in Britain they were close to the New Liberalism that, unlike the Old, no longer saw the social question as a necessary evil but placed it at the fore of politics. Social liberalism and democratic socialism converged in a reformist conception of politics, but only in certain countries of central, western, and northern Europe, not under the conditions of Russian autocracy, which forced its opponents to take
the revolutionary road, and not in the United States, where organized socialism remained insignificant and where an intellectual rapprochement between liberal and moderate socialist thinking would have political consequences only in the New Deal of the 1930s.
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4 Bureaucracies

Even on the eve of the First World War, genuine democracy existed as a constitutional order in very few places in the world, and these did not include large republics such as China or Mexico. The state was much more widespread as an agency of rule than as an arena of participation.
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“State” may be defined quite differently in either a broad or a narrow sense. Many small societies were “stateless,” if this is understood to mean that they lacked even a staff in the ruler's household. In other cases, where the staff was unstable and poorly differentiated in institutional terms, the chances were often slight that something like “the functions of state” would be put on a regular footing. The state was weak not only in societies considered “primitive” in the normal parlance of the late nineteenth century. In the United States too, an emphatically modern polity in many ways, people did not want to hear of the state in the European sense of an authority commanding obedience. In the eyes of American citizens, any authority not legitimated by the informed will of the electorate was very much a thing of the past. Government, unlike the state in the old European sense, had an obligation to give an account of itself. Around the turn of the century, only a few political theorists ventured to speak of a US “state” as an abstract category.
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It is another matter that the prevailing ideology of statelessness, which in many ways harked back to old English conceptions of law, conflicted with reality on a number of points. At the US frontier, and especially in the newly incorporated territories in the West, the federal government and the local authorities (often with weak democratic legitimacy) fulfilled the classical political tasks of regional planning.

A narrower definition emphasizes the conceptual distinction between state and society. Breaking with older European political theory and similar conceptions elsewhere in the world, this moves away from the idea—or rather, image—of the state as a household or a body governed by its head. If state and society are taken as separate spheres, it is no longer true that the whole country can be regarded as one big family. The caring and punishing ruler worthy of respect: this view, violently attacked in John Locke's
First Treatise on Government
and eventually discredited, was already in retreat in eighteenth-century Europe, but it lingered on, for example, in the official rhetoric of late imperial China.