Keeping Down the Demos

It is always problematic to describe a century as the 'age of'. Yet one should be grateful when people stick their neck out and declare what the zeitgeist was, how it arose, and why it could not have been different. Jan-Werner Müller bravely attempts this and provides us with a tour de force. His Contesting Democracy is a classic thought-provoking book of the kind that makes the brain cells tingle, even among those who disagree with it.

Müller's central argument is that the short twentieth century (the century that begins in 1918) is the century of democracy, not in the sense that it was 'democratic' (which would have been a foolish claim in the century of Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini) but because political players of all hues looked to the demos as the force on whose behalf political decisions were to be taken, or said to be taken. Yet the idea that the people would be in charge, unconstrained, was a cause of great anxiety among political elites of all types.

The book divides neatly into two parts. The first deals with the interwar period, which is described as a time of disappointments for all. The revolutionary left failed to import the Russian Revolution (Germany, Italy, Hungary); liberals lamented that the war had destroyed Liberal Europe; reactionaries realized that the old regimes had gone forever. The second half deals with the post-1945 period when those responsible for the reconstruction of Europe worked hard to keep at bay the kind of populism that had produced communism and fascism. Democracy was contested because the people could not be trusted to be democratic.

Before 1918 Europe was still dominated, although only just, by dynastic empires with monarchs and emperors who were no longer absolute but not quite figureheads either. By 1918 four empires had bitten the dust: the Ottoman, the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian and the German. A proliferation of states emerged which called themselves nation-states although not one of them was ethnically coherent even by the standards of such a dubious concept, and some, such as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, were so obviously 'invented states' that today they no longer exist. Elsewhere savage ethnic cleansing did the trick (as in Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey). An allegedly ethnically coherent 'people' was finally in charge, at least formally, even though each still had minorities to be kept at bay. New and old states reconstructed themselves as embodying the national-popular will. Republics became the prevalent form of government - in nineteenth-century Europe there had been only France and Switzerland. Those who yielded power did so in the name of the people, as long as the people did not rule directly. The Bolsheviks kept repeating that they were involving the masses while building up an authoritarian Party-state. Max Weber advocated the parliamentarization of politics not because he believed in the popular will but to keep bureaucrats in check and to select charismatic leaders. People should vote and then go home. Carl Schmitt disagreed: parliaments were not even efficient at checking power. Later he would support Hitler in part because the racially homogenous Volk could be embodied in the Führer. Müller points out that even the Nazis, or at least some of their ideologues such as Alfred Rosenberg, while dismissing democracy as a concept that would weaken the nation, felt obliged to employ the rhetoric of the popular will.

The left intelligentsia was better, but only just. György Lukács, almost dismissed as a dandy by Müller, articulated the 'most sophisticated justification of the vanguard-party'. Others, such as Harold Laski, G. D. H. Cole or the early Gramsci, advocated various schemes of decentralization, autogestione, workers' control - anything, it seemed, to constrain parliaments and the masses that elected them.

So far so good. Democracy may have been the culmination of several centuries of reflection on the kind of social arrangement which might 'work' when other sources of legitimacy, such as the belief in...