Giovanni Orsina Discussant
During the Seventies Italy has been frequently depicted as troubled by a deep political and institutional crisis. In that period, one of the main political actors which contributed to change Italian politics was the small Radical party (PR). This party tried to provide a response to this crisis by shaping a new relationship between citizens and institutions and anticipating many more recent political developments.
In 1967 the PR – born in 1955 from the Liberal Party– was re-founded by its young left wing. Since then the Radicals perceived the rising of a new society, more hedonistic, individualistic and “liquid”. This society called for a new relationship with politics. The Radicals were promoting the idea of a society able to directly express itself through institutional channels (such as referenda) without parties’ mediation. Moreover, they campaigned for “post-material” issues, conveyed in terms of “civil rights” (such as divorce, abortion, conscientious objection).
They conjugated these ideas with a British-style liberal notion of democratic institutions, based on constitutional rules as a framework for political competition, representative institutions and a crucial role for political alternation. On the Italian political scene, this meant the need to lay aside the so-called conventio ad excludendum against the Social Movement and the Communist party. Furthermore, the role of political parties ought to change radically. In a political scenario still dominated by mass organisations, the Radicals recommended a new kind of party: not ideological, not “above” society, but ancillary to it, open to single issues and to the new social movements.
LUISS University, Rome
The political party stands at the heart of the crisis affecting representative democracy in the West. Over the past few decades, parties are considered to have undergone a radical transformation: while originally societal organizations, scholars concur that they moved ever closer to the state. This has arguably enhanced the gap between political elites and citizens, fuelled populism and anti-politics and destabilized mass democracy.
This paper shifts this contemporary discussion on the causes and effects of the integration between parties and the state to mid-twentieth-century Germany and Italy. Both countries knew a strong anti-party-political tradition; experienced quick democratization after 1918 in which parties played a major but problematic role, and saw the advent of a one-party dictatorship. Yet in both countries, post-1945 democracies were built explicitly on the notion that parties should somehow be ‘integrated’ in the state to make democracy succeed. In other words, rather than the problem which is it widely considered to be today, this paper shows how the integration between parties and state was put forward as a solution to the crisis of mass democracy experienced in the Interwar era. More particularly, this paper a) investigates until what extent there existed ideological continuities in the way party-state relations were conceptualized before and after 1945; b) establishes how the notions of the democratic party-state translated into political revisions of party-state relations after 1945 c) compares how the integration of parties and the state related to the crisis of the political parties in both countries in recent decades.
Utrecht University
After Fascism, Italians and Germans had to accustom to their new sovereign power within a representative system of government. Being a voter sovereign was different from identifying with a Duce or a Führer, and the paper seeks to trace the ways in which Italians and Germans performed their new role in direct interaction with their elected representatives. Therefore, it investigates how voters, parties and politicians confronted each other during national election campaigns. Observing primarily on a local scale, it analyzes the images and self-understandings of the popular sovereign through voters’ actions and written correspondence that related to their political representatives, and vice versa. That way the paper offers a comparative view of how post-Fascist societies constructed images of a confident, self-assured democratic sovereign and identifies the communicative practices which could highlight a close relationship between the political elites and ‘the people‘ during and after the Trente glorieuses – and which practices failed to do so. To what extent political parties and deputies managed to reflect the voters’ self-perception in direct interaction could vary temporally and spatially and depended on fairly national notions of democracy, ‘the people’ and representative government, just as the self-perception of the sovereign was itself subject to change. By investigating such notions and developments in everyday political communication, the paper aims at introducing performative, praxeological perspectives on the (historical) study of liberal democracy and political legitimacy in postwar Europe.
University of Freiburg
The Uses of Sovereignty: Staging and Guiding Popular Sovereignty in Occupied Post-War Germany
With the end of the Second World War and the collapse of the Third Reich, Germany effectively ceased to operate as a sovereign state and ‘supreme authority’ passed into the hands of the Allied occupiers. This paper explores debates in occupied western Germany on the re-capture of sovereignty by analysing how different groups used the language of popular sovereignty to mobilise the population and strengthen their own socio-political influence. It seeks to demonstrate how popular sovereignty was visibly staged in occupied Germany through mass public demonstrations that protested material shortcomings in housing, coal, and food, and how such notions found their ultimate expression in a broader critique of the occupiers as oppressive, ‘colonial’ rulers devoid of real legitimacy. At the same time, the paper will show how different local elites, ranging from technocratic municipal officials to trade union leaders, seized the opportunities presented by these broader popular grievances to reclaim the moral high ground and present themselves as the protectors of the sovereign interests of the population, effectively taking control of social upheaval while limiting its socio-political impact. The paper argues that, paradoxically, it was ultimately the lack of sovereignty under occupation that enabled a particular post-war democratic elite to come to the fore, while shielding that very elite from being held responsible for unpopular policies at a time of acute material crisis. In doing so, the paper contends that the period of constrained sovereignty was integral to the development of a form of guided democracy that would have a decisive impact on the politics of the Federal Republic in the subsequent decades.
Maastricht University
Beyond Popular Sovereignty? The (Re-)invention of Democracy in Italy and Germany 1945-1975
Category
Paper Panel
Description
June 21
9:00 AM - 10:45 AM
0.A.01
Abstract: Since the democratic revolutions of the late 18th and 19th century, popular sovereignty and democracy have often been regarded as strongly interrelated and ultimately interdependent concepts. Their relationship in the age of mass politics has, however, been fraught and characterised by manifold ambiguities, alliances, and frictions. Recent scholarship has argued how democracy was built on a distrust of popular sovereignty in Western Europe after 1945. This panel applies this theoretical understanding to the two paradigmatic cases of the re-invention of democracy in that era: Germany and Italy. By looking comparatively at these cases, the papers seek to assess how political elites re-invented democracy in states that had to accommodate their recent experience with authoritarian conceptions of popular sovereignty and thus needed to re-frame the role of the ‘sovereign people’ within a novel democratic landscape that privileged socio-political stabilisation over large-scale popular mobilisation. By looking at the way in which political parties and social elites interacted with the population within a framework of mass politics, the panellists compare discourses and practices of democratic sovereignty from both a top-down and bottom-up perspective. They show how notions of sovereignty shifted from the 1940s to the 1970s, and analyse how conceptions and practices of the novel form of democracy were contested. In doing so, the panel seeks to establish how practices of sovereignty and specific conceptions of what constituted ‘sovereign power’ moulded the particular model of democracy that was in place in Western Europe during the post-war decades.
Disciplines: History
Political Science
Substantive Tags: Comparative Political Institutions, Political History, Political Parties and Party Systems, Western Europe
Research Networks: European Integration and Global Political Economy, None of the Above