Defending Democracy: Reactions to Extremism in Interwar Europe

2 The Challenges: Antisystem Parties

c h a p t e r t w o The Challenges Antisystem Parties Virtually every interwar European democracy had to endure an extremist challenge to its legitimacy, but in some of the cases the nature of the challenge was such that it encouraged defection from the political center at the same time. The extremist challenge was di√erent in each country, and each acted in a di√erent political and institutional system. Conceptualizing those challenges as examples of ‘‘antisystem parties’’ allows us to analyze them comparatively as instances of the same phenomenon. In order to do so, though, it is necessary to clarify the meaning of the concept first. The concept of ‘‘antisystem party’’ constitutes one of the most important elements of Sartori’s theory of party systems. The label, however, has also been used as a synonym for ‘‘antidemocratic’’ or ‘‘secessionist’’ in studies having little to do with party systems but rather with democracy as such (its legitimacy, stability, crisis, etc.). As explained in chapter 1, both levels of analysis are important to investigate the responses of incumbent elites to emerging extremist actors during the regime crises in Europe during the 1920s and the 1930s. Strong and aggressive antisystem parties, in fact, pose a twofold challenge to the democratic system: they not only attack the legitimacy of the regime, but also 28 The Theoretical Framework impair—via their impact on the party interplay—the very possibility of reaction by the incumbents. Clarifying what an antisystem party is, therefore, is of particular interest, the concept being relevant for both realms of analysis, the regime and the party system. Yet such clarification is very elusive. ‘‘Antisystemness ,’’ in fact, is a concept that has su√ered from considerable ‘‘stretching ’’ (Sartori 1970, 1984a), not least precisely because of its undi√erentiated application across the study of party systems and in the empirical analysis of broader aspects of the life of democratic regimes.∞ The problem is that the concept of the antisystem party refers to logically di√erent (if, from an empirical perspective, partially overlapping) realities in both fields. In party system analysis, the concept points to the ideological di√erence of one or more parties from the others in the system—a relational criterion—while within the more general analysis of democratic regimes the primary reference is to a party’s inherent ideological character—a substantive ideological criterion. The former is the original meaning of the concept in Sartori’s theory of party systems: in that field, the dimension of comparison of ‘‘party anti-systemness’’ is the ideological distance of one party from the others with respect to issues of crucial importance for the regime in which these parties operate (Sartori 1966, 1976, 1982). Often, however, the property of anti-systemness has been assigned to a party on the exclusive basis of the objective content of its ideology with no reference to either its ‘‘distance’’ from the other parties in the system or to the e√ects on the mechanics of that party system that the presence of such a party is likely to have. In these cases, an antisystem party is simply seen as a threat to that regime, and often as a threat to democracy tout court (e.g., Nettl 1968, 571). In what follows, I disentangle the two di√erent meanings of the concept and the relevant empirical referents, and I use them to select the parties in Czechoslovakia , Finland, and Belgium that qualify for this analysis. In particular, I distinguish between ‘‘relational’’ anti-systemness, which is relevant for the analysis of the dynamics of party interplay, and ‘‘ideological’’ anti-systemness, which is relevant for the empirical analysis of democratic regimes. Parties characterized by the latter trait challenge the existing democratic system; parties displaying the former impair the coordination game of the democratic parties and make defense more di≈cult. Parties possessing both characteristics are those whose destructive potential for democracy qualifies them for analysis in this book.≤ The Challenges: Antisystem Parties 29 The Concept in the Analysis of Party Systems: Relational Anti-systemness Relational anti-systemness is a party’s capability to destabilize the political center (Capoccia 2002a). This is a consequence of a party’s extreme ideological di√erence from the other parties of the system. But let us proceed in order. Sartori o√ers two definitions of antisystem party, one broad and one narrow. The broad definition is conceived as...