Journal of Modern European History

Historians have long been aware of the power of narratives; but they have been hesitant to analyse the production of national narratives of democracy, in which their own profession played an important role. This issue and introduction aims to insert and study the role of narratives in the history of democracy. It builds on the growing literature in both the conceptual and political history of democracy, which has stressed the importance of the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century in the coming of modern democracy, albeit in non-linear and highly contested ways and often in contrast to the retrospective teleology at work in most older histories of democracy. Therefore, from the 19th century onwards, languages and narratives of democracy developed in many countries, but it happened at different times, at different speeds, and in different forms. This issue encourages and exemplifies systematic and comparative historical analysis of how narratives of democracy were created in that context: What national narratives of democracy did, in fact, exist in specific periods and contexts? Where have these narratives come from? How were nations ‘narrated’ as democratic, what purposes did different narratives serve, and how did they change over time?

The Swiss narrative of democracy is a well-known and well-studied topic. Not only is it still used by current—mostly populist and xenophobic—political actors, but it has been explored by at least two generations of historians who have tracked its development before the French Revolution and, to a lesser extent, during the 19th century, a period during which Swiss democracy was undergoing dramatic changes. This literature shows that this narrative was first an account of Swiss liberty before focusing on democracy per se. It also demonstrates that the democracy it depicts has very little to do with its medieval counterpart. However, historians mostly overlook a crucial element, which is highlighted in this volume, as they fail to truly analyse the use of the narrative form—and the consequences of its use, per se. By focusing first on the emergence of this narrative and then by thoroughly exploring its development during the post-revolutionary period, along with the evolution of democracy itself, this article seeks to prove the importance of the narrative (form) for the evolution of Swiss modern democracy—even today.

This article investigates the formation and use of the notion of the ancient origins of Swedish democracy before the Second World War. A commonplace of the early rhetoric on the ancient origins of Swedish democracy was its reference to an anti-aristocratic tradition, despite the variety of political positions that the rhetoric served. It was the leitmotif of the first sporadic notions of a democratic past in the 18th century, it was the main topic of the romantic idealisation of a coalition between the monarch and the peasants, and it served as an argument in struggles over suffrage reforms and parliamentary government. When parliamentary democracy was institutionally established, the ‘aristocracy’ lost its central place in the rhetoric of a Swedish democratic tradition. At the same time, the notion of a coalition between the people and the monarch was revised to a more non-specific notion of the common interest between the people and the government. In the context of the rise of totalitarianism, a ‘Swedish’ and ‘Nordic’ democratic tradition was employed as a rhetorical means of defending existing political institutions in the country.

This contribution sketches the emergence of democratic self-definitions in the Netherlands, from the end of the 18th century until the post-war period, when it had become commonplace to define the country as democratic. Its point of departure is the use of the word and concept of democracy by contemporaries and Dutch and foreign historians, and it argues that the history of Dutch ‘democracy’ has been characterized by an emphasis on freedom, self-government by a broadly defined elite and a strong civil society, rather than by participation of the population at large. Democracy only became really popular after the Second World War when it could be defined as protection against dictatorship. The Dutch case shows that we should be careful about equating a strong civil society or even the rule of law with democracy in the sense of the power of the people at large. Democracy was definitely accepted as a label to characterize the Netherlands after it had been redefined as in essence the opposite of dictatorship instead of the opposite of aristocracy. The Dutch case also shows that a highly developed, civil society can even confine rather than promote the need for political democracy and for a vibrant independent political sphere.

Narratives of democracy have played an important part in Belgium’s self-understanding ever since the country gained its independence in the 1830–1831 revolution. In the more or less official historiography created by the Belgian political and intellectual élites, collective actors of lower and middle strata much rather than monarchs and aristocrats were presented as the forerunners of the Belgian nation. This situation stimulated a proliferation of alternative, and often dissident, democratic narratives among those who saw themselves as the true heirs of these collective actors. Left-wing Republicans and at a later stage Socialists used their narratives to criticize the oligarchic character of the existing political structures, but remained firmly within the Belgian framework. The democratic narratives fostered among Catholics in Flanders, on the contrary, were based on a more fundamental tension with the mainly Francophone and secular Belgian State. Since the First World War, this tension developed into a consistently anti-Belgian and anti-parliamentary narrative of democracy within the emerging Flemish Nationalist subculture and party. By analysing these divergent narratives, this essay thus shows how the initially democratic self-understanding of the Belgian state substantially mortgaged the creation in the long run of stable and unifying national discourses.

Over the ‘long’ 19th century, British politics underwent a quiet revolution: a revolution, not in its governing institutions, but in the ideas that underpinned them. In little more than a century, the idea of ‘democracy’—once a term of abuse, from which even radical politicians sought to disassociate themselves—established itself as the civic religion of British politics: the one authority against which there could be no court of appeal. Like other religions, democracy spawned a variety of sects and denominations, each of which sought to defend it against false democratic creeds: ranging from ‘social democracy’ and ‘industrial democracy’ to ‘Tory democracy’, ‘the property-owning democracy’, and ‘the democracy of the market’. The result, paradoxically, was to establish democracy both as the universal principle of British politics and as its central battlefield: an idea to which all paid tribute, but which seemed permanently under siege. This article explores the peculiar voyage of British democratic thought over the 19th and 20th centuries, focusing on its usage as an instrument of political warfare. The first section charts its emergence as the most potent challenge to the dominant narratives of the early-19th century: Whig constitutionalism and ‘reform’. A second section then charts the absorption of democracy into the core narratives of British political thought, while exploring the very different ends to which its authority could be put. A final section identifies three narrative battlegrounds for democracy in the 19th century, opening up fault lines that continue to structure British politics in the present.

This article examines the narratives of democracy in interwar Yugoslavia. It starts with the premise that the commitment to democracy in the immediate post-war period was deep and sincere as it was seen as an answer to domestic and international political challenges. The article focuses on how democracy was understood and narrated, and maintains that virtually every political actor engaged with the idea and/or practice of democracy, thereby making it a subject of an important debate. Thus, democracy was at the time as significant a concept and theme as was nationalism, which usually receives more attention in historical analysis. Such issues as national self-determination, the establishment of the state, and the symbolic place of Yugoslavia among well-established European nations impacted the way democracy was debated. At the same time, local political actors used claims to possess better expertise in democracy to back up specific ideological and national projects. Finally, socio-economic issues emerged in the later half of the period to complement the national considerations. A significant difference in the narratives of democracy as understood primarily in political terms and the narrative of democracy that emphasizes its social and economic dimension emerged towards the late 1930s.

Loyalists of France’s Third Republic presented the regime as heir to France’s revolutionary tradition and as such the bearer of a set of undying principles: liberty, equality, and fraternity. This narrative came under crippling pressure in the 20th century, and in the aftermath of the Second World War, a new set of narratives began to crystallize that rethought the meaning of republican democracy. Under the Third Republic, it was the venerable Parti Radical, dating back to Dreyfusard days, that had been the mainstay of the democratic idea, but in the Liberation era, the party was sidelined, and successors emerged, Socialist and Christian-democratic, which tendered new visions of democracy’s future. The place of the State in French life was also reconsidered. It ceased to be an object of democratic suspicion but came to be seen rather as an indispensable vehicle for effecting the nation’s reconstruction. France’s place in the world came in for a major rethinking at the same time. The nation remained as ever the bearer of the democratic idea, but it now expressed that commitment as a European power and not an imperial one, as a founding member of a brotherhood of democracies and not as a unilateral actor propelled by a self-appointed civilizing mission. In today’s post-colonial, post-industrial, and globalizing world, however, these narratives no longer have the same purchase as in decades past.

The gap between the narratives of democracy and the practices of power has been a significant source of delegitimation for the post-1945 Italian political system. The system was unable to achieve a solid and principled legitimation by meeting the requirements of a widely accepted and historically rooted notion of democracy, and had to resort to a fragile de facto legitimacy based on the absence of more desirable alternatives. This can partly account for the collapse of the Republican political system in 1992/1993 and the political instability of Italy in the last quarter century. The first section of the article presents the three most relevant narratives of democracy of the Republic’s early years: liberal, progressive, and participatory democracy. The second section argues that in the early 1960s, when the political system finally reached a reasonable level of stability, it was as an ‘Italian-style’ party democracy that did not fully meet the criteria of any of the three original narratives, which were in fact used to delegitimise it. By the late 1970s, all could see how dysfunctional party democracy was, and criticising it became a discursive resource that no political force could refrain from exploiting—including those who were in government. The third section considers how those critiques were inspired, yet again, by variations of the three original narratives. The epilogue throws a quick glance at the post-1994 period.

When war broke out in the summer of 1914, the Danish government responded by declaring the country neutral. This decision marked the beginning of a particular neutral Danish war experience. This article analyses how Danish politics and society were affected by and responded to the war. It explores four themes in particular: the relationship between neutrality, trade and economic warfare; internationalist and humanitarian practices; political and redistributive responses to the war and the particular ‘neutral’ cultural processing of the war in Denmark. It argues that while the material and human consequences of the war were negligent compared to those experienced by belligerent societies, the war did have substantial effect on the Danish state and society, creating new diplomatic and political practices, reshaping economic relations and shifting domestic power balances.