The Politics of Democracy in Twentieth-Century Europe: Introduction

Abstract

The apparent triumph of democracy in Europe after 1989 was as exhilarating as it was unanticipated. A method of government that in the 1930s had seemed doomed to extinction had, by the end of the century, come to be seen as normative. In contrast to the 1930s, moreover, this modern democracy was now intimately associated with political stability and economic prosperity. Despite this late twentieth-century apotheosis of ‘democracy’, however, it is easy to forget that democracy had not only been made to work, but that it had also been tamed. Events since 1989 suggest that what Charles Maier has termed the struggle since the French Revolution to make democracy ‘safe for the world’1 had finally been won. Maier’s comment is an apt reminder of the importance of locating the ‘democracy’ of the late twentieth century within a proper historical context, and that conceptions of democracy cannot be taken as timeless or unchanging. The democracy that appeared to fail in the interwar years was not, therefore, necessarily the same as that which succeeded after 1945. Likewise, the triumph of a particular conception of democracy in the late twentieth century represented the failure not only of the alternatives to democracy, but also of alternative forms of democracy. The study of democracy in twentieth-century Europe has been dominated to a remarkable degree both by political scientists and by methodologies derived from political science. In particular, there has been a flowering of interest since the mid-1970s in processes of change from democratic to authoritarian regimes and, now overwhelmingly, from authoritarian regimes to democracies. These ‘transitions’ have been assiduously tracked, recorded, compared and contrasted by scholars such as Juan P. Linz, Alfred Stepan and Samuel P. Huntington. An entire sub-discipline Tom Buchanan and Martin Conway