The political science of 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 unearthing the factors that portend success and 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 between 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 this way could a king begin to build a "nation" that can 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. First, the aristocracy (or moneyed oligarchy) must be forced to give up the lion's share of its power and privilege, which of course they are not enthusiastic to do.
Second, the church (or, to define it widely, any exclusive ideological belief system) must be with the plan or at least subdued into not acting against the emerging political order.
Third, the wider population must be brought into this new order as direct and willing participants, which represents one way to overcome the elites of the old order.
Fourth, 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.
Fifth, 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 must all be present in a kind of dynamic balance, even as they interact, 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 possibility; 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 got a lot of cosmopolitan intellectuals thinking 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 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 forces led to the dictatorships of Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler, whose excesses and failures were so catastrophic that they lent new legitimacy to popular democracy, which Berman believes flourished in the post-war period from a combination of welfare statism and economic growth under American superstructures. Now, she 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, 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 much to recommend patience that things can turn out well again, 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.