Dan Snow's History Hit - Western Europe’s Age of Democracy

Episode Date: June 28, 2020

In the second half of the twentieth century, western Europe was shaped by a revolutionary political force: democracy. Or at least that's what Professor Martin Conway has argued in his major new history. On this podcast, Martin - a teacher from my university days - interrogated the years following the Second World War. What provoked democratic revolution in the western half of Europe? How did this stable, durable, and remarkably uniform model of parliamentary democracy change society? And why did this democratic ascendancy drop away in the latter decades of the twentieth century? Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. It's a very special episode of the podcast because I'm interviewing one of my professors who taught me when I went to university all those years ago, 20 years ago

now. I think that's pretty alarming. 20 years ago, Martin Conway had the enormous misfortune to be Professor of History at Oxford University, Balliol College, Oxford. He was my teacher, a tutor, and he was as kind on a personal level to his students as he was a wise and gifted teacher. So I feel enormously lucky to have had Martin Conway at that point in my life. And I feel enormously lucky to have him now on the podcast. He's written the gigantic and impactful book that all of his students knew was brewing inside him. And that is a huge book about the democratic age of Western Europe, a book that could not be more important as we see democratic norms, assumptions, practices on retreat across a number of countries in the world at the moment. It's fascinating and sobering stuff, a reminder that democracy requires a lot

more than just codification on a piece of paper. It requires education, mindset. It's full and total embrace by the people that live within democratic systems. After you listen to this podcast, if you want to go to History Hit TV, we can watch some of our documentaries. We've got hundreds of documentaries on there. We've got hundreds of audio podcasts. Please head over to History Hit TV, use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, and you will get a month for free, 30 days free. And then you get the second month, which is one pound, euro or dollar. So you can watch the whole thing. You can binge for two months, you'll only be paid a pound or a euro or dollar. That's pretty cheap, to be honest. So I would definitely go and do that. So please head over to History Hit TV and do that.

But first of all, here is Professor Martin Conway. Martin, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. A pleasure. This book feels like a big book at an important time. Well, I hope so. I think that, you know, the accidents of history, so to speak, have worked out for me in the sense that I've been working and thinking about the theme of democracy in modern Europe for a good 15 years or so. And yet, as this book has developed along with other writing projects on democracy, I've discovered that actually, in some sense, I've been joining a mainstream of debate and discussion about quite where democracy has gone and is going in contemporary Europe. Is it useful after the Second World War to think of Europe, to talk about Europe? What is striking about Western Europe in the years after the Second World War to think of Europe, to talk about Europe? What is striking about Western Europe in the years after the Second World War is the real

sense of convergence, not at the institutional level, but at the political level, between the regimes of Western Europe. Think that in the 1950s and 60s, essentially, from the top of Norway down to Sicily in the south, Western Europe is run by regimes which are essentially very similar. There are minor variants, greater devolution in Germany, a more presidential regime in France after 1958 and the girls' rescue of the French state from the collapse in Algeria. But in other respects, these are very similar regimes and they are democratic regimes. Never had Europe been so united and so democratic. What is the reason for that? Who are they looking to? Who are those post-war planners and policymakers looking to for inspiration?

They have various inspirations, but most of the inspirations come out of their own heads, because democracy has a rather bad reputation in Europe in 1945. It's associated with the failure of regimes in France in 1940 and so on, and indeed the collapse, of course, as we know, of many parliamentary regimes in interwar Europe at the hands of fascists and others. So, no, they're coming out of their own heads. They're not looking to history. They're looking to some extent to the United States,

but they're primarily looking within themselves and thinking, how do we build a stable and viable form of democracy in post-war Europe, which will actually respond to the wishes of the people. And that, I think, is a big change of heart on the part of ruling elites. So the first change that happens in Europe after 1945 is a change of ruling elites in that they actually come to accept that democracy might be the best way of running a country and probably best for their own interests because it creates a much more stable world in which they're able to actually

do things that they want to do in terms of bringing about a more technocratic regime. So that's the first change. The second change is clearly a change among populations that takes place over the course of say 15 years after the World War, when I like to argue that there's essentially a conversion of West Europeans to democracy, that they actually come to think that other ways that they had had of trying to bring about their personal and collective ambitions no longer really applied in the post-1945 world. A turn away from fascism, obviously, but also a sense that communism is something deeply

different. And instead, they want a democracy that will work for them. But as you say, that is interesting, because democracy, versions of it proved so fragile before the Second World War. Why do you think those elites, I suppose it's just because the alternatives seem to be more flawed, but why did those elites come around to democracy so decisively? Yes, well, I think it's a learning experience on their part that they see the collapse of other ways of trying to run countries. But I think it's also a change of generation among them. Let's speak up for the middle-aged.

The people who end up running Western Europe after 1945 are people on the whole in their 40s. They're people about as old as a century. And they are people who have had experiences of world wars, of economic depression, and so on. And they tend to planners who got involved in the Vichy regime in 1940, 1941, by 1943, 1944, they're in the Gaullist camp. And that's not because the great de Gaulle is somehow such a figure of charisma. It's more that they actually see that that sort of parliamentary managed democracy is the way forward. And it is always for them a managed democracy. It's not about giving the people power.

It's about bringing the people into a controlled process of political discussion and decision-making. Yes, I was going to ask that. It's the trickiest of all questions. What is democracy? What do we mean by democracy? Around things like franchise, who participates, whether it should be representative.

As you say, they fix upon quite similar models. There must have been some kind of platonic ideal form they're thinking about. Was it the US Constitution? Did Britain at all, dare I ask? Not Britain. It's quite interesting that, of course, liberated Europe looks instinctively to Britain as a place that somehow must have got things right. And yet they quite quickly decide that the sort of Buhar politics of the House of Commons is not the sort of democracy they want at all. They want multi-party politics, they want a politics based around proportional representation, and they want to make sure that there is no dictatorship of the majority, and that instead you're going to have coalition governments that will actually do things

in a coherent and rather stable way. And all the words I'm using surely indicate that this wasn't the greatest democracy ever. This was actually, in some respects, less democratic than some regimes that had existed in interwar Europe. And what mattered more for them was that it was a democracy that worked and a democracy that could actually keep going through the various bumps along the road. And they got lucky in terms of economic growth and the like, but they actually also managed to develop what they thought was a rather stable model of democracy involving as many people as possible, rather than actually trying to have winners and losers. It's fascinating, though, is that the victorious allies, the US and Britain,

have actually got first-past-the-post, quite powerful majoritarian systems. And somehow the Europeans thought, we want the stability, we want that, but we don't want that particular aspect of it isn't hugely attractive. Yes, because they also had a sense that they were conquered in 45. We talk about liberated Europe. I think most Europeans thought about imperial rule in East and West, by Americans and by the Soviet Union. And instead, there's this reaction, especially perhaps among elites and intellectuals and so on, to try to assert a European pedigree of democracy and to go back to various places in European past and actually say, this is our European model of democracy. Adenauer in West Germany starts talking about the Abendland, the evening land,

this idea that somehow Western Germany around the Rhine had always been a deeply democratic place, whatever the previous 500 years had shown. You know, and so he's kind of trying to copyright democracy as European, as distinctive from American democracy, about which they never really had a good thing to say. They like the kind of technocratic managerialism of the Democrats and Roosevelt and all that. But they thought that Congress was, you know, a den of corruption and of extremist politics, as people like Joe McCarthy sort of proved to them it was. Did this reinvention of Western Europe as democracies pose profound problems for them as imperial powers? Belgium, France, Netherlands, Britain?

They didn't really think that there was any contradiction between establishing a system of universal democracy, including folks for women, within Europe, and denying those same rights to people outside of Europe. And they had various kind of manoeuvres to get them to resolving that contradiction, especially for the French in Algeria, about how they were going to expand the electorate gradually to bring the majority of the population into the system.

And the British with a rather patronising, shall we say say even rather Oxford mentality of saying that they would gradually educate the peoples of these other parts of the world in the virtues of a European democracy but that contradiction was very much at the heart of it and of course the contradiction also became a bloody one because it was about you know these European powers going out and fighting in all sorts of corners of the world. There was no peace for European powers after 1945. The Dutch were fighting a horrible war in Indonesia, the French in Indochina, the British in Palestine and elsewhere.

And, you know, it's only in the 1960s that you can begin to talk of a demobilization of these West European powers. And that came about because of defeat, because of the fact that they had to abandon these colonial possessions. So yes, there is a huge contradiction. But let me emphasise, it's one that they didn't really feel at the time. They thought that this project of democracy was a rather fragile European thing, which would then be gradually extended to their imperial territories. It's what strikes you looking at this extraordinary experiment, that it was an exercise in top-down imposition of democracy, of constitutional conventions, of written codified constitutions.

Or is this a more cultural thing? Is there a culture of democracy that has to take an idea around freedom of press, a behaviour, an embrace by quite a wide section of the public? What embeds democracy? Yeah, that has to be a medium or even long-term process. And people talked about this after the war. They said that we won't be the real Democrats. It will be our children. So we have to focus on education. We have to focus on welfare. We have to focus on creating a spirit of civic culture within European society. And there is, quite obviously in Germany, in particular in West Germany, you know, rather determined to a slightly sort of funny looking attempt to try and teach

themselves how to be Democrats. Don't stand up when the professor comes into the room in universities. These sort of new habits were consciously brought in to European life. And that is a gradual and medium term process. But your question is entirely the right one. These people may have been thinking that they wanted to bring about a cultural change. But why did it happen in the 20 years after the Second World War? And, you know, I think that is the interesting thing. And that's why I dare to use words like conversion and say that I think somewhere along the road in those 20 years, most Europeans came to think of themselves as Democrats in their heads. They thought it was part of what their identity was

and it was part of what their society was, as indicated by welfare, by elections and so on. And that's a very interesting form of bonding, in a way, between populations, not everybody, but between significant majorities of populations and a notion of democracy. I don't want to drag you to the present, but I just can't help thinking about it. It strikes me that we're in a bit of a post-Fukuyama world of just assuming that democracy was a natural state. And that idea of teaching people, of cultivating, of evangelising

democracy across all kinds of, you know, civic, both education in politics, but also throughout culture. It feels like that project needs to be an ongoing process of being tended to. Is that the lesson of the decades you write about in the book? Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows,

where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity.

Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Yes, I talk about Western Europe in the 25 years or so after the Second World War as being a democratic age. And that implies that what happened after around the early 1970s is that it ceased to be a clearly democratic age. And I think phrases like post-democracy, which are thrown around by some political scientists to describe what happens from the 1970s onwards are actually rather apazite. It's at least post-democracy in terms of the political system created after the Second World War no longer working. From the 1970s, 80s onwards, you get the emergence of new forms of democracy, more radical forms of democracy emerging out of 68, but also more market-led, shall we call it, forms of democracy emerging out of new neoliberal ideologies and market forces and so on. And, you know, I think at the moment we're rather stuck

between models of democracy. We know that a rather old-fashioned model of democracy, which I've been writing about, doesn't really fit the 21st century society. And yet, at the same time, we also can see that the new forms of democracy that have emerged in Europe since 1989 haven't entirely worked. In particular, there's an evident retreat from the power of market forces. And there is an evident recognition, even in the last few weeks, by people who don't feel represented in the system that some new form of democracy has to come into existence. And there's also an authoritarian strain, isn't there? I mean, there's also a lack of democratic behaviour among some of the rulers of Europe.

Yes. Some of the taboos which we might have regarded as established after 1945 are clearly declined with the passage of time. There's a new Europe. There's a new Europe in the East and in the South, which doesn't really have 1945 as the greatest watershed in contemporary history. And there are certainly rulers in Eastern Europe, in places like Poland and Hungary, who probably have a much less deep understanding of democracy than those in more Western Europe. But let's not be the arrogant West Europeans about this. You know, the really interesting thing is the way that actually perhaps what we're seeing at the moment is the emergence of rather competing versions of democracy. You know, take the word

populism, which is used endlessly by political scientists generally in a rather dismissive way about people like Le Pen and so on in France at the moment. I mean, actually what's going on there is new notions of direct democracy and about the will of the people and us versus some alien them, which we don't need to like. But I think we have to recognise that that's part of a continuing discussion about how democracy changes. What about the European understanding that there'll be this experiment within Europe decades following the Second World War that would spread around the world? To some extent, that did happen. Although, do you think Europe's example was important as the idea of democracy spread through the rest of the world?

Yes. I mean, when you see the elites who come to power in newly decolonised states in the 1960s and 70s in Africa, Asia, etc., then these are, on the whole, people who tend to think in rather European political ways. But it's also obvious by the 1970s and 80s that most of those states have moved beyond any particular allegiance to West European models of democracy and, as is healthy, are developing their own forms of African democracy or Asian democracy. And it's a bit sad when Europeans somehow begin to judge these other democratic regimes by some sort of yardstick which is based around the Rhine and the Alps or something. You know, these are different societies

which are going to have their own forms of democracy. So I think the moment when Europe could kind of claim some sort of ownership of democracy and could say that it was inspiring democratic experiments elsewhere in the world, that really has gone. It was probably replaced around 1989 and the 90s by a confidence that America had some sort of democratic model it could sell to the rest of the world. Well, I think that too has gone, hasn't it? And what we're seeing in the last 10, 20 years is various experiments in what you might call non-liberal democracy

in different parts of the non-European world, which are probably much more influential. And the way in which regimes like China and Iran and Russia and Turkey and so on, are in some sense learning from each other, and not looking to Europe or indeed to America. It's one of the sort of conclusions of this book, I don't know if it's worrying or not, but there needs to be some kind of cataclysm from which this sort of energy of reimagining societies can emerge. I mean, there are senior vice of the British government who allegedly are fond of this view.

But I mean, do you see the regeneration, this hugely exciting milieu that you describe, is it impossible to imagine without the giant discontinuity of the Second World War preceding it? Yeah, what I describe, I think could not have come about without some sort of cataclysm like the Second World War, which acted as a catalyst for various medium term forces towards the emergence of democracy in Europe actually coming together. And let's remember, and I've not said it enough in our conversation, this was only half of Europe, because after all, in the eastern half of Europe, that same path towards democracy didn't happen. that same path towards democracy didn't happen. But your more present day question, you know, can we imagine a refounding of democracy in Britain or in Europe or in the West more generally without some form of cataclysm? Well, perhaps we're living through some version of that. I've certainly been conscious in the last few years, and I suspect you have been too, that the politics of Europe and of Britain has come to look more 19th century. It's come to look more like the sort of 1848 era of regimes being toppled, of

pressures from below, of the emergence of rather unmanaged social forces of democracy. And what we're still trying to do is to try and find some way of putting those elements together in the form of a political regime which people can respond to and can identify with, but which also actually manages to deliver stable government. And the catastrophe in many ways of the pandemic in Britain, as opposed to many other European countries, has been about the way in which the state has rather fallen over

and has not been able to mobilise the resources of the people. And surely that's one of the real tests of democracy. My worrying thought is, especially someone who was educated in the 90s, I mentioned Fukuyama before, there was a perhaps now looks rather extraordinarily naive view that in the 90s we'd reached some sort of Hegelian consensus on how history didn't matter anymore, it all stopped, liberal democracy had won. When you were writing this book, did you have an unpleasant, nagging feeling at any time that perhaps democracy suited the conditions that post-war Western Europe found itself in? And actually, it is far from being as secure as we all thought it was.

Oh, more than a nagging feeling, a pretty much a developing conviction that this was the case. One of the reasons I got into writing this book was I felt that people always took democracy for granted, and particularly they took the content of democracy for granted. They thought that somehow democracy was a single thing that had perhaps got rather larger during the 20th century by letting in women and immigrant groups and so on. Instead, my book is an attempt to try and talk about the historicisation of democracy and that there is a democracy for particular eras, and I tried to describe why the democracy that emerged in Western Europe after 1945 was a democracy that suited the shape of that society. I do for example put quite a lot of emphasis on middle class power. It was a democracy that worked in middle class interest.

Now our society is not that society anymore. Class relations are different. State power is different. We have a much more integrated Europe through the European Union. But we haven't managed to find the new model of democracy that matches that sort of new reality. And although you and I are talking with a great consciousness of the political difficulties of Britain in the present day, we could have this same conversation in a French context or a German context, because they too are struggling with many of those problems. And as for the poor people who are supposed to be running Europe in the European Union, I think they very much sense the ebbing of the democratic tide, which had carried the legitimacy of their project forward. Martin, I was once told by a physicist that you should never

ask them if mass is in fact truly constant in all dimensions. And I think the equivalent question to you, did you attempt to define democracy? Or is it like the famous quote, you know, I don't know what civilisation is, but I know when I see it or something. What struck you when you looked at the 20 years before the Second War as something

that the nation was able to call itself a democracy? What was the minimum condition that had to be met? Well, historians never like definitions, and we always want to argue that really what matters is the way in which particular regimes suit particular societies, be it France in the 1790s or Britain in the 1960s. But look, I'll play your game. What made the regimes of post-war Western Europe look and feel democratic to the people who inhabited them was three things. One, that there were some sort of rules of the game,

that they could understand how rulers were going to behave and how they were expected to behave. Secondly, that there was some sort of transmission belt between what they were calling for and the actions of rulers. And this could be straightforward, as a community, a village getting a new school, or it could be as complicated as people who were running particular small businesses having some form of tax exemption. But the sense that there was some sort of transmission belt between their grievances or aspirations and what happened. And the third element must surely be that they actually

recognised that democracy wasn't just about the politics. In fact, it wasn't even primarily about the politics. It was about discovering new codes of conduct towards each other. And for a Europe where most citizens had seen somebody killed in a violent way, you know, through political violence or military violence, the sense that this was actually going to create some slightly more, as they put it in their grandiose way, civilised society, actually struck people as being a lot of what democracy was about. It was about being able to disagree with people without collapsing into those cycles of violence. That's powerful stuff. I mean, it's such a reminder that democracy is more than about

counting stacks of paper with X's powerful stuff. I mean, it's such a reminder that democracy is more than about counting stacks of paper with X's on them. Yes, and for heaven's sake, you know, as soon as we think that democracy is simply about enfranchisement and going to vote, then we don't understand democracy. And that's very clear also in the fact that women are enfranchised in France and Italy and Belgium after the Second World War, but that doesn't change anything in itself. What needs to happen is a much more medium and long term process of introducing women into the social processes as equal citizens. And

that's taken much longer and is still, of course, deeply incomplete. Martin Conway, thank you so much. Your book is Western Europe's Democratic Age, a provocative title. I thank you so much indeed for coming on. It's a great honour for me as my former teacher at university. Yes, well, you've learned some things and i hope i hope the book could teach you some more certainly well it's been a great pleasure dan thank you for having me on i hope you enjoyed the podcast just before you go bit of a favor to ask i totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money, makes sense.

But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review. I'd really appreciate that.

It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you. Douglas Adams, the genius behind the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy,

was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams, the ends of the earth, explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.