Preliminary Programme

The 1950s are often considered as the most consensual and stable decade of postwar Western European history. By looking from a comparative perspective to the political debate on the values, practices and functioning of democracy this article reconsiders this claim. Rightly because of the fact that virtually every political actor claimed to be a democrat in this decade, there was a heated debate on the conceptualisation and institutionalisation of this political ideal. All major political forces, government as well as opposition parties, claimed to embody ‘democracy’ and to save democratic government from falling into authoritarian hands and therefore questioned each other’s democratic credentials and suitability to govern. This article looks from a comparative perspective to the political debate on the values, functioning and practices of democracy in France, Italy and West-Germany and studies how ‘democracy’ was conceptualised and used as a rhetorical instrument in the political debate. (Show less)

The history of the European Parliament (EP) is typically told as a triumphalist story where this body has gained increasing powers in the European integration process. Much less attention has been paid to how we can study historically this representative body that was created in 1952 and, until 1979 when direct elections were installed, was populated by delegates appointed by the member parliaments, avoiding the shadow of presentism. The paper aims to contribute to this by studying how democratic representation has been performed in the context of the EP. Based on extensive research into the historical archives of the EP, several political parties and private collections, the paper examines and compares how Members of the EP (MEP) used two key committees – Legal Affairs and Agriculture – and how claims to representation were made in these contexts. In doing so, the paper draws upon recent research by political anthropologists into performance in politics and parliaments , and demonstrates how we can use a novel interdisciplinary approach to explore the changing landscape of democratic representation in post-war Europe. Moreover, this research adds new dimensions to how politics is typically studied in European integration history research, and it breaks with the strong tradition that exists in parliamentary history of studying democratic representation in a purely national context. (Show less)

Post-war narratives of the political reconstruction in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) have often concentrated on the pro-Western leadership of Konrad Adenauer, the desire for acceptance within the international community and the economic success of the Wirtschaftswunder. Such descriptions create the assumption that liberal, parliamentary democracy, a crucial component of all three of these aspects, was universally accepted in the FRG. While most West Germans enjoyed the benefits of rapid economic recovery and were eager to accept democratic institutions in order to put the past behind them, there was by no means overwhelmingly unanimous support for the FRG’s system. Throughout the immediate post-war decades, the FRG’s wehrhafte Demokratie was consistently challenged by parties from the extreme left and right that were openly critical of the established political order. These parties have received very little attention in the secondary literature covering post-war German politics even though they often articulated many of the undercurrents that were prevalent in West German society.

This analysis discusses discontent with liberal, parliamentary democracy in the FRG by evaluating the ideology of two parties located at opposite ends of the traditional left/right political spectrum: the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD) and the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD). By employing content analysis to assess party programs, the paper intends to distinguish individual and shared criticisms of the democratic order identified by both parties, as well as highlight their proposed alternatives. Whereas the NPD’s version of democracy consisted of a powerful executive branch and the reimplementation of plebiscites commonly used in the Weimar Republic, the KPD’s version of a democratic society was predicated on the Marxist-Leninist system of the Soviet Union. Despite their opposing ideological tenets, both parties’ rejected liberal, parliamentary democracy in the FRG due to the influence of the occupying powers, the lack of real participation and the inattention to German unification. (Show less)

In analysing the political landscape of post-war Western Europe, historians generally stress the unprecedented stability of its democratic regimes. They perceive the rise of a new political order, founded on consensus and concord, often achieved at the expense of parliaments. Illustrative of the diminished role of parliaments in European post-war politics was the parliament of the newly founded European Community. It was virtually powerless and its members were appointed, not elected. Some historians even argue that the European Parliament’s marginal role was a deliberate strain on popular sovereignty in the member states. Many members of the European Parliament realised that if they were to improve the European Parliament’s standing, they needed electoral backing from a European electorate.

For all its imperfections, the new European Parliament was a natural target of initiatives for democratisation, with European elections as its most tangible goal. Even before the Parliament’s first sitting, the six European Community member states set up an Ad Hoc Assembly to explore the possibilities of creating a European Political Community, equipped with a bicameral parliamentary system and a directly elected assembly. Although this plan was abandoned in 1954, the ambition of organising European elections resurfaced when the Treaty of Rome enabled the European Parliament to develop a proposal for European elections, which it did in 1960. The first European elections weren’t organised until 1979, however.

With their plans, European parliamentarians supposedly not only challenged the post-war political order, they also pioneered electoral democracy on a supranational level. This paper analyses the political debates on the aforementioned cases, asking what ideas the involved parliamentarians had about representative democracy. After all, their ideas went beyond mere electoral provisions, to cover the competences of the elected European Parliament, its relation with national parliaments and the relation between its members and its constituents.
(Show less)