Democracy consolidation in historical context

Review of Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day by Sheri Berman

There are plenty of books about what makes democracy work. What's new in this book is that it looks at democracy as an evolutionary phenomenon with a view to uncovering the factors that portend success or failure. Rather than a static view, Berman argues that we must look at the consolidation of democracy in Europe as a dynamic process that can take a number of paths and exists in a fragile balance of forces. The implications of her work are both optimistic and disturbing.

Berman starts with a description of the Ancien Régime, in which a dictatorial king organized the state around elite privilege, essentially sharing tasks of governance with aristocrats and Christian notables. These were powerful countervailing players, monopolizing land wealth and local economies in their favor and at the direct expense of the peasantry, which represented upwards of 95% of the general population.

To operate effectively, the king had to find a way to bring aristocrats into cooperation, either co-opting them, bypassing them, or smashing them. Only in these ways could a king begin to build a "nation" that could exploit the resources of a larger portion of the population. If the king failed at this, the state would be weak, hindering the development of a national economy, defensive capabilities, and most importantly, institutions to administer the territories under his jurisdiction.

In a democratic revolution, Berman says, there are a number of challenges to overcome if they are to function as building blocks to a consolidated democracy. The aristocracy (or moneyed oligarchy) must be forced to give up the lion's share of its power and privilege, which of course they would not be particularly enthusiastic to do.

In addition, the church (or, to define it widely, any exclusive ideological belief system) must be brought into the plan as active supporters, or at a minimum, subdued into not acting against the emerging political order.

In the same way, the wider population must be brought into this new order as direct and willing participants, which represents a significant way to overcome the elites of the old order.

Crucially, the state has to have reached a certain stage of effectiveness and competence so that it can maintain order and protect the nation from external threat; the economy should also be functional and hopefully growing.

Finally, there must be some kind of national plan or project or widely accepted "common good" that will occupy and engage the energies of virtually everyone, particularly in the service of economic development but also a strong army.

These five factors - aristocracy, church, the wider population, effective government, and a national project - must all be present in a kind of dynamic balance, even as they interact. In other words they must operate in a shared and self-reinforcing direction, at least as I have gleaned from Berman's argument. I have never seen this articulated in such a clear way.

If the balance is off kilter or cannot operate as a system in concert, that is when the trouble starts. The failure of the French Revolution, according to Berman, was the that state was not sufficiently unified to provide order and security, collapsing as it did into a quasi-religious republican fanaticism with Robespierre and then the dictatorship of Napoleon. For their parts, the revolutions of 1848 were predominantly urban and did not embrace the wider population, essentially enabling aristocrats to again seize power during the period of reaction by conservative peasants and others fearful of democracy.

1848 led directly to a re-installation of an aristocratic order, but with important differences: industrialization was liberating peasants from their autarkic isolation and bringing them into the cities, where they were exposed to new ideas and possibilities; countries were becoming unified by new communications networks (railroads and the telegraph); fealty was paid increasingly to democratic accountability, which developed even as it was manipulated by authoritarian powers. As a result, France's Third Republic emerged from Louis-Napoleon's defeat by Prussia, an early example of a functioning democracy that inspired a lot of cosmopolitan intellectuals to imagine they might do something similar elsewhere.

At the same time, a number of new anti-democratic forces emerged as alternatives to democracy, including Marxism but also inchoate fascist ideologies as well as right-wing authoritarian nationalism. Supporters of these movements and ideologies did not trust the notion of popular democracy, which they saw as threatening their power bases or ultimately weakening the nation under construction. In many cases, they were natural allies of the old aristocracy, but also of the industrial and mercantile bourgeoisie, which distrusted the masses.

The anti-democratic movements led to the dictatorships of Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler, whose excesses and failures were so catastrophic that they lent new legitimacy to popular democracy. Berman argues that democracy flourished in the post-war period from a combination of welfare statism and economic growth under American superstructures and protection. Now, she alarmingly concludes, we have forgotten what made democracy work, with neo-liberals blaming the state for economic slowdowns in such movements as Brexit as well as denouncing emigrants as responsible for other societal woes. Meanwhile, she notes, the US is withdrawing from its post-war role as manager of the international system. Notably, she mentions but does not predict what will happen after Trump, Putin, Brexit, and any number of disturbing developments we see today.

While Berman's analysis offers some hope that things can turn out well again if we are patient, what disturbed me in her ideas was her apparent endorsement of winnowing trends against undesirables: Hitler and others wiped out the old structures and elites standing in the way of democracy; ethnic cleansing helped to solidify national unity. In other words, violence works and may be a necessary intermediate phase. This is, of course, only implied in her work.

Though I agree the welfare state was an important unifying factor in the European Common Market's early development, many readers will not. Moreover, I was frustrated by the scope of the book: the US was never offered as a contrast to what was going on in Europe; Russia is barely mentioned. Berman had to set some limits, I know, but I still hungered for even thumbnails sketches of the differences. To her credit, she has long chapters on "English Exceptionalism" as well as the evolution of Spain and Italy, which were fascinating and highly relevant interludes.

This is an extremely dense book, I believe it will become a classic. If I am lucky, once every few years I come across a book like this that ties together a vast number of issues I have been wondering about into a synthesis that is clear, succinct, and definitive. This is one of the best books I've read in the last 10 years.