WorkShop 06: Breakdowns of Democracy Revisited: Transitions from Liberal-Democratic to Authoritarian Regimes around the Mediterranean Littoral
Breakdowns of Democracy Revisited: Transitions from Liberal-Democratic to Authoritarian Regimes around the Mediterranean Littoral
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Abstract
Studies of democratization have matured greatly over the last two decades. Nevertheless, early expectations that new democracies would survive and flourish have run up against significant cases in which political reform has quickly stalled out or regressed to liberalized authoritarian rule. Furthermore, liberal democracies on occasion collapse and get replaced by highly illiberal regimes. Classic cases of democratic breakdown include Italy in the early 1920s and Germany a decade later. Completely ignored are countries whose brief liberal-democratic eras have been overlooked by political scientists and historians. Among these stand Egypt, Syria, Iraq and perhaps even Libya. Focused comparisons between well-studied episodes of the breakdown of liberal political orders along the northern shores of the Mediterranean and under-studied instances to the south and east are certain to enhance our understanding of the causal factors and processes that lead democracies to be supplanted by authoritarian regimes.
Workshop Description
Studies of democratization have matured greatly over the last two decades (Geddes 1999; Przeworski, Alvarez, Cheibub and Limogi 2000; Boix and Stokes 2003). So well-studied has the topic become that cutting-edge scholarship now concentrates almost exclusively on the consolidation, rather than the onset, of democratic systems (Linz and Stepan 1996). This trend, which is evident in the academic and policy literature alike, has effectively excluded Middle Eastern and North African cases from current conceptual debates, since few if any countries in the MENA region have experienced even the initiation of meaningful political reform.
Nevertheless, early expectations that new democracies would survive and flourish have run up against significant cases in which political reform has quickly stalled out or regressed to liberalized authoritarian rule. This development has opened the door to systematic investigations of the circumstances under which initial liberalization programs have failed to gain momentum, most notably in Tunisia and Jordan. Such studies raise the crucial question of whether democratization can be assumed to move in only one direction.
History suggests that liberal democracies on occasion collapse and get replaced by highly illiberal regimes. Classic cases of democratic breakdown include Italy in the early 1920s and Germany a decade later. Less fully investigated are parallel instances of democratic collapse in Spain, Greece and Turkey. Completely ignored are countries whose brief liberal-democratic eras have been overlooked by political scientists and historians. A number of important examples of the transition away from liberal democracy can be found in the MENA. Among these stand Egypt, Syria, Iraq and perhaps even Libya, not to mention the aborted transition to illiberal governance in Lebanon of the late 1950s.
Focused comparisons between well-studied episodes of the breakdown of liberal political orders along the northern shores of the Mediterranean and largely overlooked instances to the south and east are certain to enhance our understanding of the causal factors and processes that lead democracies to be supplanted by authoritarian regimes. Scholarship on the topic has lain virtually dormant since the late 1970s. Juan Linz (1978) offers a pioneering overview of the dynamics of the breakdown of democratic regimes that emphasizes the role of diminished legitimacy, persistent electoral polarization, escalating economic crises and heightened popular resentment in undermining democratic systems. This essay, which highlights the Spanish, Italian and German models, was written as an introduction to a collection of case studies of Latin American breakdowns. Yet the findings of the empirical cases remain entirely divorced from the conceptual overview. More tellingly, Linz's analysis ends up pointing readers in the direction of the ways in which collapsed democracies eventually become "re-equilibrated" or "re-instaurated." Thus liberal political systems are expected to prevail after all.
More enlightening is the massive corpus of single-country studies of the breakdown of liberal democratic regimes. Linz (1978, 4) credits the "special merit of Karl Bietrich Bracher's brilliant description of the fall of the Weimar Republic" as the inspiration for his own analysis. In addition to subsequent writings by Bracher (1970), more recent scholarship has elucidated the downfall of the Weimar Republic (Berman 1997; Smaldone 2007), liberal-democratic Italy (Snowden 1989; Tarchi 2000; Lyttelton 2004; Riley 2005) and other useful episodes (Wallerstein 1980; Luebbert 1991; Siaroff 1999; Payne 2006).
This workshop proposes not only to bring a wide range of additional, long-overlooked cases into the literature on democratic collapse but also to begin the crucial task of formulating well-structured comparisons across different empirical examples. Contributions which focus on countries that have so far been ignored in the academic literature, particularly ones situated in the MENA region, will be expected to make reference to analyses of better-studied examples. Given the peculiarities of the German model, the organizers anticipate that the experience of Italy during the first two decades of the twentieth century is likely to prove particularly thought-provoking, and would therefore welcome proposals from specialists in Italian history and politics. Contributions intended primarily to advance the theory of liberal-democratic breakdown are certainly encouraged, but will be expected to rest on a firm empirical foundation.
Liberal experiments in the MENA during the 1920s and 1930s are routinely dismissed as too imperfect to be included in discussions of the structure, workings and transformation of democratic governance. The workshop organizers firmly reject such dismissiveness toward the variety of party-based, electoral systems that one finds throughout the Arab world in the decades before the wave of military-led revolutions washed across the region. Instead, they hope that detailed explorations of the liberal-democratic moment in the MENA, unbiased by what E. P. Thompson might call "the enormous condescension of posterity," will offer new insight into the dynamics of politics in this part of the world, while at the same time reinvigoring conceptual debates about the dynamics of democratization on the basis of evidence drawn from all shores of the Mediterranean.
References:
Berman, Sheri (1997) Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic. World Politics 49: 401-429.
Boix, C. and S. Stokes (2003) Endogenous Democratization. World Politics 55: 517-549.
Bracher, Karl Dietrich (1970) The German Dictaorship. New York: Praeger.
Geddes, Barbara (1999) What Do We Know about Democratization after Twenty Years? Annual Review of Political Science 2: 115-144.
Linz, Juan J. (1978) The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown and Reequilibration. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Linz, Juan J. and Alfred Stepan, eds. (1978) The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Latin America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Linz, Juan J. and Alfred Stepan, eds. (1996) Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Luebbert, Gregory M. (1991) Liberalism, Fascism or Social Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lyttelton, Adrian (2004) The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy 1919-1929. London: Routledge.
Payne, Stanley G. (2006) The Collapse of the Spanish Republic 1933-1936. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
Przeworski, Adam, M. E. Alvarez, J.-A. Cheibub and F. Limongi (2000) Democracy and Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Riley, Dylan (2005) Civic Associations and Authoritarian Regimes in Interwar Europe: Italy and Spain in Comparative Perspective. American Sociological Review 70: 288-310.
Siaroff, Alan (1999) Democratic Breakdown and Democratic Stability: A Comparison of Interwar Estonia and Finland. Canadian Journal of Political Science 32: 103-124.
Smaldone, William (2007) Socialist Paths in a Capitalist Conundrum: Reconsidering the German Catastophe of 1933. Journal of World History 18: 297-323.
Snowden, Frank M. (1989) The Fascist Revolution in Tuscany 1919-1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tarchi, Marco (2000) Italy: Early Crisis and Fascist Takeover. In Dirk Berg-Schlosser, ed. Conditions of Democracy in Europe. New York: Palgrave.
Wallerstein, Michael (1980) The Collapse of Democracy in Brazil. Latin American Research Review 15: 3-40.
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