The Problem of Democracy in Europe: Competing and converging conceptions of democracy in France, West Germany and Italy, 1945-1989

This dissertation is a comparative study of the contestation of conceptions, institutions and practices of democracy by political actors in Western Europe in the period 1945-1989. It is based upon a wide-ranging body of sources which represent the public interventions of leading politicians on the reform of democracy in this period.

After the end of the Second World War, political actors across the ideological spectrum agreed that only democracy could be the form of government of the future. But while everyone claimed to be a ‘democrat’, widely diverging and competing understandings of democracy prevailed. This study explores these conceptions of democracy and their relevance for political developments in this period in France, West-Germany and Italy.

The dissertation propounds that the first two decades after the War were not a time of consensus about the rules of the democratic game and broad political agreement on who could be considered a democrat. Political actors were deeply divided over the socioeconomic conditions for democracy, the compatibility between political parties and democracy, the question of the separation of powers, and the question of popular participation. Only from the 1960s onwards, political elites increasingly agreed on how democracy should be conceptualised and practiced. Economic growth and international circumstances contributed to these changes, which laid the groundwork for a broadening of political alliances among politicians who had previously denounced their each other’s democratic credentials. This consensus was strengthened by the challenges to political elites posed by the 1968 protests and the 1973 Oil Crisis and their respective aftermaths.

The dissertation thereby demonstrates that the eventual convergence of conceptions of democracy was the consequence of a long and problematic process in which also more moderate forces continuously contested each other’s democratic legitimacy. The study thereby enhances our understanding of the differences in democratic practices and institutions in Western Europe, provides insight into the historical development of democratic discourse and raises new perspectives on the recent questioning of the viability of the postwar models of democracy by looking at how these models were actually formed.