What conditions make democracy possible?

Political scientist Sheri Berman has gone big and wide in Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day . She's applied a schematic analysis of modern European history to most of the continent's states, tracking their various system evolutions toward -- and away from -- stable liberal democratic governance. The result offers intriguing details that both bolster and sometimes seem more insightful than her grand frame. I appreciated the ambition of this book, but reading it sometimes felt as if I were being herded along a prescribed track that had more reality in the author's brain than in the lives of these societies.

So what's Berman's framing premise? She posits that for states to become (relatively) stable democracies, they need to 1) clear away old regimes in which authoritarian monarchs tussled with privileged aristocrats and localities, excluding most popular ferment; 2) define and achieve broad legitimacy for national boundaries, both geographical and usually ethnic; and 3) then create popular democratic institutions which deliver enough widely shared well-being to defuse insurgent challenges from either a populist left or a conservative right. She describes the evolution of governments in a series of case studies, beginning with Britain which took a very early path toward democratic state legitimacy, through France, Italy, Germany, Spain, moving on to the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian and post-World War II Soviet Russian empires.

Some of Berman's generalizations:

... Often forgotten is that at some point all states were “new,” even those currently viewed as “natural” or “inevitable,” and building national identities and strong states has always been a lengthy and difficult process.

... democracy is considered consolidated when citizens believe in its inherent superiority or suitability for their society, separate from the particular outcomes it produces or the leaders and governments in power at particular times.

... [a] pattern that emerges clearly from the European past and a crucial lesson for the contemporary period is that achieving consolidated liberal democracy easily or quickly is extremely unusual.

... liberal democracy is so rare and difficult to achieve because it requires transforming not merely the political procedures and institutions of dictatorship, but societies and economies as well.

... there was no easy or peaceful path to liberal democracy.

If you bring to this book a moderate familiarity with modern European political history (what I have), there's a lot here that can enlarge an understanding of that past. I found Berman's expansive account of the evolution of the French Second Republic, especially during the anti-Semitic Dreyfus episode, particularly enlightening; it had been too easy just to dismiss the stumbling French republic as evidence of national frivolousness, an Anglo-Saxon bias. Her exposition of Spain's torments on the road to its present state is chilling; when democracy formation went fully off the rails, the result was devastating.

Overall, the [1936-39] civil war brought to a violent culmination the growing tendency of left and right to deny the legitimacy or even basic humanity of the other: “political rather than ethnic cleansing” was the consequence of democracy’s collapse in Spain.

Berman's concluding note about the relevance of this schematic discussion to the United States seems worth quoting at length:

Americans have particular difficulty grappling with the chaotic and circuitous nature of democratic development, and here too a better understanding of the past can help. We commonly think of our country as having always been a liberal democracy and thus assume democracy is “natural” or at least fairly easy to achieve.

But using common political science standards, the United States was not, in fact, a fully liberal democracy until the second half of the twentieth century. Before the Civil War an entire section of the United States—the South—was a tyrannical oligarchy and it took the bloodiest conflict in our history—the Civil War—to begin changing this, and another century before the political and legal infrastructure of liberal democracy was fully in place. It was only in the 1960s that the national government was able, or willing, to ensure that democratic and liberal rights were enjoyed by all citizens, including African Americans.

Moreover, even though the political and legal infrastructure of liberal democracy was finally in place by the 1960s, the economic and social legacies of our old regime—in the form of racial inequalities and animosities and a national identity that while inclusive in theory had long been exclusionary in practice—remained, and continue to mar the functioning of American liberal democracy up through the present day.

This political scientist brings us a warning.