Parliament and Parliamentarism

A Comparative History of a European Concept

Pasi Ihalainen, Cornelia Ilie, Kari Palonen, Pasi Ihalainen, Cornelia Ilie, Kari Palonen

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781782389552
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Parliamentary theory, practices, discourses, and institutions constitute a distinctively European contribution to modern politics. Taking a broad historical perspective, this cross-disciplinary, innovative, and rigorous collection locates the essence of parliamentarism in four key aspects—deliberation, representation, responsibility, and sovereignty—and explores the different ways in which they have been contested, reshaped, and implemented in a series of representative national and regional case studies. As one of the first comparative studies in conceptual history, this volume focuses on debates about the nature of parliament and parliamentarism within and across different European countries, representative institutions, and genres of political discourse.

Part I

The Conceptual History of Parliaments

Chapter 1

European Parliamentary Experiences from a Conceptual Historical Perspective

Pasi Ihalainen

The chapters in Part I of this volume (Chapters 1 to 7) aim at a deeper historical understanding of the formation of parliamentarism as a key concept in modern European political cultures. Their starting point is that the common European tradition of parliamentary political cultures can be better understood through comparative diachronic analyses of parliamentary experiences and the uses of the vocabulary of parliamentarism in political argumentation in various national contexts and in various historical periods since the French Revolution. We aim at estimating the degree of parliamentarism in various historical contexts from the contemporaries’ point of view.

The plural form ‘parliamentarisms’ is used here because a singular form would be oversimplifying for the purposes of historical analysis, given the essentially national character of most parliaments, parliamentary experiences and applications of parliamentarism (cf. Ihalainen, Ilie and Palonen and Chapter 13 in this volume, where a different perspective to the history of parliament by means of the concept of ideal type is presented). Even if our cooperative comparative history in this part aims at generalizations about European parliamentary history based on several contextualized case studies focusing on national contexts, it is important to keep in mind the specificities of various national developments and the versions of ‘parliament’ and ‘parliamentarism’ experienced in various times and places. From the point of view of empirically rather than theoretically oriented conceptual history, parliamentarism is not a stable, definable and teleological phenomenon, but rather represents interconnected long-term and multisited discursive processes characterized by contestation. These processes have gradually led to the phenomenon we call parliamentarism today – though the political concept still remains contested and varied in meaning.

Historians – aware of the often unique nature of historical developments and of the context-related meanings of concepts as used in particular arguments in past political discourses – remain suspicious of excessive abstractions and attempts to formulate universal concepts (Haupt and Kocka 2004: 24–26). Hence, they also remain cautious when making generalizations about the history of parliamentarism. Educated and working within the paradigms of national history, they have usually studied the history of one parliamentary institution and may remain unwilling to compare it with others. Given the individualistic traditions of historiography, it is far from easy to integrate the research work and interpretations of even two historians dealing with the same parliament – let alone the analyses of two or more national representative institutions. The assumption of the exceptionalism of every national parliament has been a major hindrance to writing a joint European history of parliamentarisms thus far. Generalizations at the European level need to be based on national cases, to be sure, but it is timely to say something more about the long-term conceptual history of European parliamentarisms as well. Parliamentary history seems, indeed, to be moving more generally towards comparative studies – and hopefully also towards transnational parliamentary history (te Velde 2006; Ihalainen 2013a; Ihalainen and Saarinen 2015; the problems of generalizations and the potential, but in many ways limited, transnational influence of parliamentary models will also be discussed in a future volume on ‘The Ideal Parliament’, based on a EuParl.net conference held in The Hague in 2013.)

Even if empirically oriented conceptual history cannot be based on any supposedly universal concept of parliamentarism, the ideal typical approach in the theoretical part (Part III) of this work has encouraged us to formulate initial theses on parliamentarisms, the validity of which has then been tested in various national contexts. We do not apply any structural explanations of parliamentarism often favoured in earlier studies, especially in the field of law, or focus on parliamentary culture or communication in general as more recent parliamentary history in several countries has done, but distinctly focus on the linguistic aspects of past experiences of parliamentarisms. We aim at what Quentin Skinner has characterized as ‘seeing things their way’ (Skinner 2002: vii) – i.e., locating debates among parliamentarians and other participants in discourses concerning the key features of parliament in their proper intellectual and discursive contexts in order to conclude exactly what the speakers were doing in putting forward a certain argument that defined parliament or some of its key features in a particular way. Such a social constructivist point of departure emphasizes an awareness of the essentially contingent nature of the historical development of European representative institutions. However, it needs to be pointed out that parliamentary history as practised by many of the leading experts contributing to Part I has been institutional history and that these authors have been persuaded by the current editor to include conceptual aspects in their analyses. The intention has been to build on existing scholarship on parliaments as institutions and to create a bridge between more conventional parliamentary history and the linguistically conscious approaches used in this volume.

The fact that most present-day European political systems are based on parliamentary democracy should not allow us to presume that this state of affairs is somehow an unavoidable outcome of the development of the last two or three centuries, or that parliamentarisms are now finalized or established. Parliamentarisms should rather be seen as both diachronic and synchronic, discursive and competitive processes with transnational dimensions that have taken place in different times and places and also simultaneously in interconnected contexts: a variety of politicians and theorists have conceptualized parliament, constructing, reproducing and contesting parliamentarisms in interaction with each other and the discursive political process. Competing understandings of parliamentarisms can be seen in the conceptual struggles that are to be found in the primary sources (Skinner 2002: 125, 176–77; Halonen, Ihalainen and Saarinen 2015; Ihalainen and Saarinen 2015).

One way to avoid the application of teleologies and anachronistic terms and interpretations to parliamentary history – in other words, of writing a traditional ‘Whiggish’ history of the success story of parliamentarism – is to critically estimate in each national case when the past contributors to the debate actually started to use the concept of parliamentarism and related vocabulary – i.e., when they started to talk about representation, sovereignty, responsibility and deliberation in various national languages. Instead of identifying the exact timings of some ‘breakthroughs’ in national discourses on parliamentarism, however, our goal is to demonstrate general European trends, to compare the pace of change in various national contexts and to estimate influences and transfers between the national systems of parliamentarism. While this general history of the European concept of parliamentarism(s) is constituted by the separate histories of several essentially national institutions, these histories have been interconnected in multiple ways through often tendentious cross references and comparisons in parliamentary discourse and by the selective adaptation of parliamentary models borrowed from other countries.

The history part comprises six national or regional (combining the Low Countries and Scandinavia) case studies of discursive processes that have defined parliamentarisms in some formative historical periods. These cases demonstrate how the initial thesis of this volume, introduced in the introductory chapter, of parliamentarisms being constituted by representation, sovereignty, responsibility and deliberation seems to work in various national contexts, and they reveal which alternative converging or diverging themes and concepts have appeared in the historical debate on parliamentarisms.

Comparative and Transnational History on the Basis of National Case Studies

The comparisons presented here are based on contextualized nation-state-centred studies that provide representative examples of some major trends in the history of European parliamentary experiences. This approach admittedly represents a more traditional way of writing comparative history through collected works on national cases, rather than a project in which the same team explores exactly the same extensive comparative material transnationally. When national cases are analysed separately by individual authors there exists the risk of semantic confusion. We have tried to avoid this by focusing systematically on the features of parliamentarisms defined by the initial thesis of this volume and by discussing the preliminary results based on parallel sources, in a series of workshops and in the course of the editing process. The national cases represent long-term macro-level surveys rather than detailed micro analyses. The explored cases build on a combination of previous research and the use of extensive corpora of parliamentary debates, making it possible to point to specific features in national histories of parliamentary experiences and draw conclusions on the extent and limits of transnational elements of parliamentarisms.

The national cases discussed include the rather unique institution of the English/British parliament between the English and the French Revolutions. The development of the Westminster system is certainly the best-known case internationally, but it has not necessarily provided any dominant model for the formation of parliamentary government in the rest of Europe. British historians themselves have tended to emphasize the exceptional nature of the British form of parliamentarism and its linkage to their particular political culture (see Chapter 9 for the pre-revolutionary period). However, a conceptual analysis of the formation of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British conceptions of parliament, placed in a chronology of other parliamentarisms, helps to relate this exceptional institution to a broader European pattern.

The French version of parliamentarism has since the Revolution of 1789 offered an alternative to the British model, even if it has also adopted elements of the Westminster model. A further key national case of parliamentarism is provided by Germany as a relative latecomer. Germany is a country where the contestation of parliamentarism reached particularly high levels and many problems of parliamentarism were concretely felt. Turns in the history of German parliamentarism have, furthermore, also affected other latecomers in Northern and Eastern European countries.

Elsewhere in this volume, the formation of parliamentarisms in Spain, Italy and Central and Eastern Europe are discussed from an historical perspective that is relevant for this part of the book as well. In the rest of the historically oriented chapters we have chosen to focus, side by side with the three European great powers, on three comparisons of national cases that reveal interesting contrasts between culturally related smaller countries or between Western and Eastern European understandings of parliamentarism: the Low Countries, Scandinavia and Russia. The Netherlands and Belgium have experienced two varieties of parliamentarism, which, while interrelated through language, historical experiences and their selective application or rejection of foreign (mainly British and French) models have yet been interestingly different in terms of political culture. The Belgian case has also provided models for other parliamentary reformists to follow. Scandinavian histories of parliamentarism, largely unknown outside the Nordic countries despite their considerable length, deserve attention because of their historical originality and the centrality of the tradition of representative government in the formation of specifically Nordic political cultures. Russia, finally, has conventionally appeared as ‘the other’ in European political history, and even more so in parliamentary history. It is important to understand what kinds of differing meanings the concepts of parliamentarism have received in Russian political discourse in connection with early and late twentieth-century attempts to introduce elements of parliamentarism to Russia. Such a contrast, if anything, reflects the national nature of parliamentarism in the wider European context and helps to relativize any strictly defined concept of parliamentarism.

Empirical Starting Points

The authors of the historically oriented chapters of Part I (Chapters 1 to 7) analyse the concepts of parliament and parliamentarism on the basis of the political debate that has surrounded and taken place within parliaments. In most of these chapters, parliamentary debates themselves – side by side with other primary texts commenting on parliaments and secondary literature – have been used for reconstructing a variety of past experiences and conceptions of the institution. Some authors have been able to proceed to the analysis of a more multisited discourse on parliaments, but this has depended on the availability of digitized parliamentary and press sources in each national case. The chapters are meant to provide surveys of the current state of research and to illustrate the main trends in the history of parliamentarisms by means of a few representative examples. They test the potential of conceptual history for future parliamentary history; more extensive empirical analyses have been or will be presented elsewhere.

What distinguishes the approaches of the chapters of Part I from the other parts is that they are based on empirical historical research and written primarily by historians. The chapters build on traditional historical research on parliaments as institutions, although they also address questions that are of interest to linguists and political theorists as well; this is a result of the effect of the linguistic and discursive turns in the human sciences and of an awareness of ongoing theoretical debates on parliamentarism. The different parts of this work thus proceed from empirical research on parliamentary history to analyses of parliamentary discourse and finally to political theories of parliamentarism.

While the parliamentary concepts of sovereignty, responsibility, representation and deliberation have been the starting points for research for the chapters, other important concepts contributing to parliamentarisms – such as publicity – have emerged in the process of research on national parliaments. The authors have discussed these concepts insofar as they have turned out to be relevant for particular national cases. Whereas sovereignty, representation and responsibility have already been discussed to some extent in previous research on constitutional history, focusing on deliberation has given rise to some interesting findings that link the parts of this volume.

The authors were asked to concentrate their analyses on debates concerning more controversial, disputed aspects of parliamentary concepts rather than produce a more traditional constitutional history of the structures, practical functioning or rituals of parliaments, even though previous studies on such themes provide invaluable contexts for the more debate-focused analyses provided here. As far as the history of parliamentary events is concerned, only basic information with direct contextual relevance has been provided. By focusing on the often disputed nature of parliament and parliamentarism, we wish to provide fresh perspectives for future parliamentary and conceptual history. The discursive character of parliamentary processes has not previously been emphasized so much in parliamentary history – even though oratory and debate ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Parliament as a Conceptual Nexus
• Part I. The Conceptual History of Parliaments
• Part II. The Discourse and Rhetoric of Modern Parliaments
• Part III. Parliament and Parliamentarism in Political Theory
• Epilogue: Some Challenges to Parliamentarism
• Index