European socialism between militant and parliamentary democracy: a pan-European debate, 1945–8

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes how the question of democracy divided the post-war European socialist parties. Contrary to conventional historiographical wisdom, it demonstrates that the socialist conversion to the classic liberal model of elections, parliaments and constitutions was hardly a self-evident or uncontested affair. To this end, it focuses on two sets of parties that adopted widely divergent attitudes to parliamentary democracy. On the one side, the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Party and the French Socialist Party considered free and fair elections, sovereign parliaments and constitutional checks and balances sacrosanct. On the other, the Italian Socialist Party and the Polish Socialist Party believed that elected parliaments did not necessarily reflect the popular will, meaning that constitutional boundaries could justifiably be overstepped in the struggle for socialism. With this pan-European approach, the article not only brings to light the many parallels across the two emerging geopolitical blocs but also suggests that socialist attitudes towards the concept of militant democracy were less straightforward than historians have assumed. In fact, it shows that the experience of dictatorship and war had seen the four parties move in opposite directions on the question of ‘democratic self-defence’ or the use of anti-democratic means against (supposed) enemies of democracy.