Democracy in Modern Europe

A Conceptual History

Jussi Kurunmäki, Jeppe Nevers, Henk te Velde, Jussi Kurunmäki, Jeppe Nevers, Henk te Velde

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781785338489
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As one of the most influential ideas in modern European history, democracy has fundamentally reshaped not only the landscape of governance, but also social and political thought throughout the world. Democracy in Modern Europe surveys the conceptual history of democracy in modern Europe, from the Industrial Revolutions of the nineteenth century through both world wars and the rise of welfare states to the present era of the European Union. Exploring individual countries as well as regional dynamics, this volume comprises a tightly organized, comprehensive, and thoroughly up-to-date exploration of a foundational issue in European political and intellectual history.

Chapter 1

‘Democracy’ from Book to Life

The Emergence of the Term in Active Political Debate, to 1848

Joanna Innes and Mark Philp

Between the sixteenth and the mid nineteenth centuries, the Greek and subsequently medieval Latin word ‘democratia’ was naturalized in most European languages; the term came to be employed in domestic political debate and was increasingly avowed as an aspiration. In the revolutionary era of 1848–49 it was widely endorsed. Nevertheless, even then, it probably had little currency outside the circles of political activists. It remained, ironically, a rarefied word for a popular thing.

This chapter traces the word’s emergence in European political argument. It draws upon a wealth of single-language studies, welding them into a broad survey. It suggests that there were phases of development in the frequency and character of the word’s use, but also that it acquired different resonances in different national and local contexts, as it was adapted to differing institutional settings and deployed in particular debates. It was always open to a variety of appropriations: it could be used to describe, to analyse, to recommend, to disparage or as a badge of identity. However, its basic referents – popular government and equality – were sufficiently stable for diverse uses to be intelligible, shades of meaning being conveyed by context.

Contestation around ‘democracy’ was episodic. Most scholarly attention has focused on the word’s eruption into political debate in the late eighteenth century, but, following this surge in use (if often defamatory use), it lost currency. There were fewer phenomena to which it could be pinned, but also its association with French revolutionary excess made it hard to invoke to positive effect. After 1830, it regained favour; we try both to chart and to explain this shift by identifying the changes in political life that made ‘democracy’ and cognate words ones that people wanted and felt able to use. This phase climaxed during the mid nineteenth-century European revolutions, when these terms were unprecedentedly widely endorsed. Yet these events brought new complications in their wake, for not only did mid-century revolutions reinforce old doubts about the merits of giving the people a voice in government, but their medium-term outcomes also disappointed many who had once been proud to call themselves democrats. Such people were prompted to reconsider how to give their aspirations form and whether to continue to term them ‘democratic’.

‘Democracy’, in Ancien Régime Europe

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ‘democracy’ and cognate terms acquired diverse applications and associations in modern European languages, fitting them for a variety of political appropriations.

The ancient-world associations of ‘democracy’ coloured its early modern use. It was often used historically, to refer to Greek states or indeed to the Roman Republic. Following Aristotle and Polybius, it was also used analytically, to categorize possible forms of political order. Democracy was contrasted with monarchy and aristocracy – though all three elements could be combined in a ‘mixed government’ or ‘mixed constitution’. Democracy was believed to be a rarity in the modern world: even constitutions identified as mixed might (like the Holy Roman Empire) contain only monarchical and aristocratic elements; only a few Swiss cantons were consistently identified as democratic. But it was a standard category of analysis, deployed in both historical and geographical educational texts, and, as such, must have been familiar to many with a more than elementary education. As in the ancient world, these categories were sometimes applied to social groups: just as a nobility could be termed ‘the aristocracy’, so the common people could be termed ‘the democracy’. Ancient ideas about the political culture of democracies also affected usage: democracies were understood to be turbulent, characterized by crowd activity, demagoguery and popular violence, and in their relations with other polities, to be overweening, bellicose and unstable. They were also thought to be prone to degenerate into tyranny – of the majority, of a demagogue or of a strong man who might offer salvation from democracy.¹

The Greek-derived ‘democracy’ and the Latin-derived ‘republic’ – the latter the subject of much early modern theorizing – sometimes converged in use. Montesquieu, writing in the mid eighteenth century, divided contemporary European states into monarchies, headed by single, often but not necessarily hereditary, rulers, and republics, ruled by a corporate group. Republics, he said, could be aristocratic or democratic, depending on how many were admitted to the privileges of rule. He identified virtue as pre-eminently the principle of democratic republics, for without virtue, defined as ‘the love of one’s country, that is, the love of equality’, such republics were bound to fail. Yet virtue, he believed, was in scant supply in the modern world, and democratic republics were essentially vestiges of the past, of little relevance to modern conditions.² Attempts to renovate republican forms in Corsica in the 1750s and 1760s and in America in the 1770s and 1780s encouraged some observers to wonder if ‘democracy’ might yet find new niches for itself in the modern world, though it seemed unlikely that the experience of such marginal places could be generalized.³ If the essence of a republic was taken to be orientation to the common good, then even ‘patriotic monarchies’ could qualify as republics – and if they achieved that orientation by overcoming the self-interest of the nobility, then such a monarchy might be considered a species of democracy: so reasoned the Marquis d’Argenson, writing in mid eighteenth-century France, adumbrating a scheme that had more obvious potential.⁴ However, these were exceptional formulations. Rousseau said that such a perfect form of government was not fit for men.⁵

Overall, few suggested that democracy, however imagined, had much of a role to play in modern states. In an era of waxing historicism, it indeed became common to characterize it as a primitive form. The influential late seventeenth-century natural law theorist Pufendorf suggested that democracy was the natural form of first governments, established by agreement among previously ungoverned peoples.⁶

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, democracy figured in current debate mainly in mixed-constitutional and republican settings, since it was in those contexts that it had most obvious purchase. Reference was often to elements of the constitution that stood proxy for the people. In England, during the seventeenth-century Civil War, royal apologists argued that monarchy had an essential part to play balancing aristocratic and democratic elements. In the 1730s, opponents of the extremely powerful Prime Minister Robert Walpole argued that the independence of the House of Commons, the democratic part of the constitution, needed enhancement.⁷ In the city-republic of Geneva, an early eighteenth-century defender of its relatively oligarchical institutions claimed that they bore comparison with those of ‘the most eminent democracies in Europe’, notably England; the English example showed (he said) that it was perfectly proper in a democracy for the people’s power to be channelled through representatives.⁸ In Sweden in the 1760s, such talk about democracy as there was took place mainly in the noble house, nobles being most familiar with this erudite terminology: while most invoked democracy as a bogey, one speaker argued that it might be given workable form in plenary sessions of the Estates.⁹

‘Democracy’ was also sometimes identified with the people out of doors, challenging the oligarchic character of assemblies or forgetting their place. In mid and late seventeenth-century England, some troublemakers were termed ‘democratics’.¹⁰ In the 1750s and again in the 1780s, popular agitations against unpopular religious groups (Jews, Catholics) were described as ‘democratic/al’ (though it remained more common to attribute democratic leanings to political factions flirting with a wider public).¹¹ In Sweden in the 1770s, ‘democracy’ became associated with critical pressure on the estate system from without (in which context, members of the noble estate lost sympathy with the cause).¹² In the 1760s, Genevan (and in the 1780s Dutch) critics of republican oligarchies were termed democrats – though this was more a matter of abusive labelling than self-description: the Genevans called themselves représentants, while the Dutch used ‘patriots’; the Dutch affirmed the merits of ‘representative democracy’, but also expressed the hope that their programme would put an end to ‘democratic disorders’.¹³ In North America, when the founders set about establishing a republic, they represented themselves as establishing not democracy, but its modern analogue, representative government. The charge of being ‘democrats’ was levelled against those who took part in protests out of doors against fiscal and other policies of the new regime.¹⁴

‘Democracy’ during the French Revolution and its Aftermath

The French Revolution did more than any other single historical event to raise the profile of democracy and cognate terms in the European and indeed the American lexicon.¹⁵ This was in the first instance chiefly the achievement of its critics, pre-eminently the British politician and writer Edmund Burke, who claimed that what had been instituted, when the National Assembly voted away noble privilege on 4 August 1789, was ‘a pure democracy’: ‘Our present danger from the example of a people, whose character knows no medium, is … a danger of being led through an admiration of successful fraud and violence, to an imitation of the excesses of an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody, and tyrannical democracy.’¹⁶ Burke was alarmed more quickly than most, but events in France, culminating in the Terror, realized many observers’ worst fears. Both French revolutionaries and their sympathisers elsewhere were attacked as ‘democrats’, in polemic pitched at a variety of audiences. In England, the term was employed in songs aimed at tavern groups and ordinary villagers, though if it thereby gained any hold in popular consciousness, it does not seem to have stuck.¹⁷

Insofar as democracy was invoked positively in the early years of the Revolution, it was chiefly in relation to social status: democrats were contrasted to aristocrats. In this context, to be a democrat was to defend equality and to oppose privilege, feudal rights, corporate monopolies and perhaps also the hierarchies of gender, age or race. Satirical engravings produced early on in the French Revolution contrasted simple, plebeian democrats with bejewelled aristocrats.¹⁸ In England, those who came (in private if not in public) to avow a name originally pinned on them by their enemies used it among themselves to signify their hopes for the introduction of more equal manners. In the United States, where the Federal Constitution of 1787 formally barred the establishment of a nobility, opposition to aristocracy could be seen as expressing American values. This helps to explain why, from 1793, American sympathizers with France established societies formally titled ‘Democratic’ or ‘Democratic-Republican’, a practice not echoed in Europe. From the federal election of 1800, ‘democracy’ was more widely endorsed as an American value – with important if mixed consequences for European perceptions when, with the ending of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the United States drew more European visitors, curious to discover what democracy might look like in modern dress.¹⁹

Once France became a republic in 1792, as aristocracy was discredited through its associations with émigrés and counter-revolutionaries, and spontaneous popular action won acceptance as – at least sometimes – a legitimate exercise of power, new imaginative space opened for discussion of political options. But even then, though reactionaries depicted France as teeming with ‘democratic’ phenomena, the term was rarely deployed by revolutionaries. In the National Convention, Robespierre and his followers Billaud-Varennes and St Just were among the few occasionally to use it – perhaps because they knew that they were denigrated as democrats and wanted to appropriate the term for their own purposes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: ‘Democracy’ from Book to Life: The Emergence of the Term in Active Political Debate, to 1848
• Chapter 2: Democracy and the Strange Death of Mixed Government in the Nineteenth Century: Great Britain, France and the Netherlands
• Chapter 3: Another ‘Sonderweg’? The Historical Semantics of ‘Democracy’ in Germany
• Chapter 4: Birthplaces of Democracy: The Rhetoric of Democratic Tradition in Switzerland and Sweden
• Chapter 5: Concepts of Democracy from a Russian Perspective: Debates in the Late Imperial Period (1905–17)
• Chapter 6: A Conceptual History of Democracy in Spain since 1800
• Chapter 7: The First World War, the Russian Revolution and Varieties of Democracy in Northwest European Debates
• Chapter 8: The Edges of Democracy: German, British and American Debates on the Dictatorial Challenges to Democracy in the Interwar Years
• Chapter 9: A Nation Allied with History: Czech Ideas of Democracy, 1890–1948
• Chapter 10: Democracy in Western Europe after 1945
• Chapter 11: Political Participation and Democratization in the 1960s: The Concept of Participatory Democracy and its Repercussions
• Chapter 12: Democracy and European Integration: A Transnational History of the Danish Debate
• Index