Michael H. Bernhard. Institutions and the Fate of Democracy: Germany and Poland in the Twentieth Century. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. 310 S. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8229-5870-3.
Reviewed by Peter Polak-Springer (Department of History, Rutgers University)
Published on H-German (January, 2006)
Institutions, Circumstances, and the Story of Four Democracies
Bernhard's study compares the founding and fate of four different states in two nations, Germany and Poland: the Weimar Republic, the Second (interwar period) Polish Republic, the Federal Republic of (West) Germany (FRG), and the Third (post-communist) Republic of Poland. The work is based on a unique premise given western scholars' viewpoint on Europe: that the history of nations in the western and eastern part of the continent can be compared on equal footing with regard to their attempts to build democratic states, despite differing levels of modernization. According to the author, the extent of a nation's modernization does not necessarily determine whether it can establish and maintain a lasting, successful democracy. Indeed, many nations considered "less developed" by western standards, such as India, have been more successful in this regard than their thoroughly modern counterparts, including interwar Germany and Argentina. What makes efforts to establish democracy in Poland and Germany a valid and interesting subject to compare is that in both cases the first attempt failed. In each nation the initial effort undertaken after World War I resulted in dictatorship. In Germany, the second attempt came after total defeat in a war that the failure of its first experiment brought about. One of the prime victims of that war, Poland was subjected to a half-century of communist dictatorship and Soviet hegemony by the same peace that gave democracy in the Federal Republic its opportunity. For the Poles, the opportunity to build a successful counterpart first came in 1989.
Although Germany and Poland have profoundly influenced each other's history in the twentieth century, Bernhard for the most part treats them in isolation from one another. Except for the influence of the fate and legacy of the Weimar Republic on the establishment of the FRG, little connection is also drawn between each nation's own interwar and postwar democratic state. Rather, each experiment in democracy serves as an independent case study. Bernhard's work is not one on comparative histories of nation-states but a political science study on causes of the success and failure of democracies. He is mainly interested in the state institutions chosen during the founding of a democracy, and the pattern of choice that best promotes democracy's durability. But Bernhard has not written a straightforward guide to the building and maintenance of democracies. The author's stress on uncontrollable "external" or "contextual" factors, such as the Great Depression that brought down the Weimar Republic, or "good fortune" in the case of the post-communist Polish state's ability to successfully reform itself (p. 244), give the reader the sense that much of a democracy's fate cannot be controlled. However, such fatalistic undertones in Bernhard's study are balanced with more optimistic and confident ones. After all, it is people and political groups who choose the institutions of democracies. Who chooses, how they choose, and what they choose, are to Bernhard important factors in how well a democracy will function. As part of one aspect of his multifaceted thesis, he argues that there is indeed a best-case scenario that gives a system optimal strength in its interaction with unpredictable factors: a choice made by a "broad coalition" of forces that selects institutions based on "compromise and cooperation within the process of institutional choice" (p. 250). The system risks future problems to the extent that choosers of institutions impose their will on unwilling parties excluded from the selection process; or if agents aiming to overthrow the system are included in the selection process or the government that arises from it; or to the extent that the constitution-framing coalition that makes the choices loses power after the system has been put into function.
In addition to the dynamics of institutional choice and how chosen facets of government interact with supra-state conditions, Bernhard's study is also concerned with the motives behind the choice. His argument here--a second facet of his thesis--is that individual actors selecting institutions make their choice based on a number of factors, including "private interests" and "ideology." The stress Bernhard puts on considering both factors--which to a historian seems self-evident--reflects his reservations against "institutional choice," which, along with "crafting," are the two established theoretical frameworks that influence the structure and methodology of his study. He is particularly critical of "institutional choice models" for their assumption that actors' personal interests are almost always the main determinant of their choices. His response to this is that "interest needs to be conceptualized as a multifaceted notion" (p. 252). Most important to the author is the role played by the moral values of the actors in the selection process, but so is the context of decision-making (institutions and parties that influence decisions, the nature of the issues-at-hand and subsequent matters). All of these factors subject the interests of framing parties to change, promoted by the changing political situation, as well as vacillating "external" or supra-state social and economic factors, to which Bernhard also attaches importance. Yet despite his criticisms of "crafting" and "institutional choice," he is explicit about the fact that both theories shape the aspects of institutional selection to which he attaches the most importance: electoral laws and the distribution of powers between the executive and legislative branches.
To increase the number and complexity of factors considered, Bernhard chooses a methodological approach called "medium-level analysis": a reliance on "detailed case studies but focusing on specific elements within them, in order to capture the idiosyncrasies of the case studies and relate them to the general political phenomenon" (p. 16) His choice of this approach is in part influenced by his criticism of the alternative "Big-N cross-national studies" approach, which--he argues--stress levels of modernization to much and ignores some peculiarities fundamental to the fate of democracies. The author attempts to redress this matter by devoting a full chapter to a detailed historical narrative followed by an in-depth evaluation of the important issues of each of the four cases examined. Each narrative includes an account of the political events leading up to the constitutional framing process as well as a discussion of the process itself, which focuses on the major stance of each of the influential actors on the issues influencing the selection process. Each chapter concludes with an attempt to answer why the system failed or succeeded. The concluding chapter contains a section (pp. 250-259) discussing actors' motives for selected institutional choices at deeper length than they receive in some of the case-study chapters, including a categorization of each motive as resulting from either "self-interest," "value-orientation," or contextual situations.
Bernhard labels the first case-study, that of the Weimar Republic, as an episode in "defective institutional choice." He implies that the structural faults of the Weimar state are probably the most important, though certainly not the only, causes of the downfall. Presidential rule by emergency decree, along with the "double-cleavage structure of the Weimar polity," and growth of anti-system parties brought apart the Weimar coalition, creating a condition of "chronic instability" (p. 73). However, the necessary cause of collapse--the most important "external variable"--were the Great Depression and Brüning's faulty deflationary policy. Proportional representation and a poor choice of executive were the most significant mistakes of institutional choices made by the framing actors. The chapter takes into good account the political legacy of the Kaiserreich. For example, all the major framing actors favored proportional representation: the SPD, in order to call for electoral justice against the long-standing majoritarian system of Imperial Germany that favored conservatives; for conservaties, it was a matter of preventing a socialist majority in the National Assembly (p. 61). The framers believed that a powerful presidency could function as a sort of "Ersatz Kaiser," a neutralizing agency ruling above partisanship (p. 54). Ultimately the power invested in the presidency left too little for the Chancellor, who remained in "double-dependency" on the approval of the legislature and the president. Along with those established by the infamous Article 48, these powers worked against the maintenance of the republic.
Historical legacy also plays an important role in the fate of Poland's first experiment with democracy. More than a century of partitions created strong regional fragmentation and strong social divisions based on economic interests, all contributing to parliamentary fragmentation and unstable government. As in the Weimar case, economic factors played a key role in inducing the end of the republic: in this case, a major fiscal crisis that escalated into hyperinflation, and a land-reform campaign that polarized the electorate. However, the unique problem in the interwar Polish case was not just poor institutional choice but the choice of the center-right drafting coalition to exclude influential groups from the government. The prime target of exclusion was the charismatic general Pilsudski, who overthrew the system in 1926. Poland's minority groups, representing 30 percent of the population, were also not vested with political rights; the system was imposed on them without their consent. The framing coalition was thus a narrow one. As a result, it had a difficult time staying together and garnering support for the system among those it excluded, especially during economic crises. These difficulties were exacerbated by a poor selection of institutions, including proportional representation, a weak executive--meant to exclude Pilsudski--and an unreliable mechanism for dissolving deadlocked parliaments. According to Bernhard, "the design of the system taken as a whole made it easy to undermine governments but made it difficult to change the party configuration that produced deadlocked and weak governments" (p.109).
The chapter on the FRG leaves the reader with mixed feelings. On one hand there is the sense that prudent decisions control the building of a successful democracy, but on the other, that much of the success of democracies rests on circumstance. The FRG was blessed with both. The SPD, CDU, and FDP framing parties had the failed Weimar Republic to learn from, and the physical ruins of war to remind them of the consequences of governmental failure. The occupation forces were also prepared to use force to make sure the lessons of the past were learned. According to Bernhard, all this promoted the devotion of framers to building a durable democracy. Their commitment overshadowed partisan power interests, allowing the framing process to be one of compromise between "cooler heads" on various heatedly debated issues, the most controversial of which was federalism (p. 181). Compromise, negotiation, and concession on the part of the framers ensured that all parties shared influence on the founding process without exclusion or the need to impose measures on the unwilling. However, it also took favorable prospects for the creation of a democracy to keep the framing coalition from falling apart. These included an economic boom and decades of steady growth, which made the FRG prosperous enough to survive the first major downturn of the 1970s. The author even sees the social upheaval of the sixties in positive light, arguing that they helped create a citizenry "more active and civic in its orientation, marking the further normalization of Germany as the attitude of its citizens began to resemble those of the older European democracies" (p. 178). Bernhard also argues that part of the FRG's success was due to the loss of its economically problematic and socially conservative prewar east to Poland and the GDR. The right choice of state institutions--the correction of Weimar constitutional blunders--was a core contribution to the success of the system: these included a stronger chancellor and weaker president, an electoral system of combined majoritarian elements and proportional representation with a threshold clause to limit the number of political parties, and a ban on parties seeking to overthrow the system.
Bernhard portrays post-communist Poland's success with democracy in less optimistic light. Unlike the German case, Poland's road towards democracy in 1989 was an "evolutionary process." The Roundtable negotiations between Solidarity and the PZPR (Polish Communist Party) that formed the founding of a democratic state ironically did not begin with the intention of creating a democracy, nor of overthrowing communism. The institutions initially selected turned out to be not entirely the right ones: proportional representation was counter-productive to government stability once both the PZPR and Solidarity blocks began to splinter, promoting the proliferation of too many parties. The presidency was invested with "praetorian powers," including the ability to dismiss governments (p. 244). These excessive prerogatives enabled Lech Walesa to "use a range of tactics in an attempt to undermine the government" when faced with an opposition cabinet of former communist party activists, the peasant's party (PSL) and social democrats (SLD). As a result, government was unstable through the mid-1990s, and had to be reformed--described here, quoting of Jon Elster, as "rebuilding the boat at sea" (p. 244). The constitution was amended to curb proportional representation in 1993, and limit executive prerogatives by the adoption of the "constructive vote of non-confidence" in 1997. According to Bernhard, "the Poles had the good fortune to be able to navigate the crisis and make the reforms" (p. 244). Moreover, the parties formed out of the two framing blocks of Solidarity and the PZPR have in recent years established an essentially democratic and western course for the nation by promoting its membership in NATO and the EU. But the author also expresses concern with continued disintegration of the coalition, and the success of two anti-system parties, Self-Defense (Samoobrona) and the League of Polish Families (LPR). He attributes this success to continued institutional problems, especially the fluctuating Polish electoral laws, which promote splintering. He also stresses the importance of the constant economic problems the post-communist state has faced, including inflation and low productivity early on and, more recently, high unemployment.
Bernhard's study draws largely on secondary works, including those of classic scholars of Weimar, Hans Mommsen and Heinrich August Winkler, various Polish works, published memoirs of statesmen, published government documents, and materials on the "military government for Germany" at the Harvard University Archives. His diagrams help the reader follow his grasp of the factors interacting in each case. However, the author could have offered a stronger sense of which of the vast range of factors challenging state institutions in each case-study is the most significant. He also could have extended his account of "external" factors beyond the sphere of state politics and economics. In the Weimar case, cultural and ideology-related issues could have been addressed, such as the widespread appeal of nationalism, and the way that the welfare- and also populist-minded ideas of the SPD raised expectations and promoted a way of thinking that anti-system parties, the Nazis in particular, were able to mobilize in their favor.[1]
Overall, Bernhard successfully achieves his goal of demonstrating the complex process of institutional choice, the various factors that go into it, and--the optimistic undertone of his work--that there are better-choice patterns promoting successful democratic states despite the fact that "external" and "contextual" factors may weaken efforts towards generalizations. Next to students and scholars of political science, historians will find Bernhard's study a worthwhile read. For this audience the work offers a good, but also concise, overview of the debates and conditions behind constitutional framing in each case, which have received less attention in the more recent works emphasizing cultural and ideological issues. Bernhard's work is one of the few that treats the histories of Poland and the FRG in comparative perspective. Along with only one other recent study by Michael Esch taking this approach, it points out worthwhile and interesting commonalities between the two cases. Hopefully his work will stimulate more interest in this direction.[2]
Notes
[1]. A survey of some of this research appears in Peter Fritzsche, "Did Weimar Fail?" Journal of Modern History 68 (1996): pp. 629-656.
[2]. See Michael Esch, Gesunde Verhältnisse. Deutsche und Polnische Bevölkerungspolitik in Ostmitteleuropa, 1939-50 (Marburg: Herder-Institut, 1998).
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Citation:
Peter Polak-Springer. Review of Bernhard, Michael H., Institutions and the Fate of Democracy: Germany and Poland in the Twentieth Century.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
January, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11352
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