5 Rethinking Party Politics after the War

On Easter Sunday 1945, Soviet troops entered the Austrian village of Gloggnitz, halfway between Graz and Vienna. Just a few hours earlier, the few final remaining Nazis and their local supporters fled the town on two trains that left the small station. Over the next couple of days, Soviet soldiers searched houses for weapons and hiding collaborators. Gloggnitz was the hometown of Karl Renner, who had been put under house arrest by the Nazis seven years before. Trying to see if there was anything he could do to alleviate the fate of his fellow villagers, Renner made his way to the local commander of the troops. But the Soviet troops had different plans. They organized a car escort to the local army headquarters. Here, an assembly of high-ranking officers on Stalin’s instructions asked Renner to form a provisional government. Although Renner doubted Stalin’s promise to allow the Austrians independence, he did not doubt that he was the right person for the job. ‘My mandate as last freely elected president of parliament gave me the right to speak for [the Austrians]’, he assured. And to those who were still not convinced, he added that ‘I wanted to revive their memory that I already took the country by its hands from war to peace once before from 1918 to 1920’. On his return to the capital, he was surprised to find out that ‘in many communities, most of all in Vienna, political parties have come together, installed provisional representatives, and contacted the occupying armies’. Although these parties had been badly hurt by persecution and repression, first by Dollfuss’s dictatorship and then by the Nazis, Renner believed that ‘they live on in the minds of the masses’, and that they were ready ‘to act themselves as the representatives of the people and form a government’.¹ Renner quickly invited the leaders of the newly established ÖVP to join the Socialists in a provisional government.

Renner’s experience was emblematic for that of many other political leaders in the twilight between war and peace. While the Allies provided food, shelter, and safety, politicians who had started their careers in the feeble and failed democracies of the pre-war era were unexpectedly offered a second chance. They were convinced that the parties to which they belonged, however small and disorganized they might be now, were the only real representatives of the people. Only they were able to give the people a much-needed antidote against fascism. Only they embodied democracy and political legitimacy. Nowhere was this spirit captured more forcefully than at the first free political congress of liberated Europe. This meeting was held in the small communal theatre of the southern Italian town of Bari in January 1944. Here, representatives of the main anti-Fascist political parties discussed Italy’s future. And while the Nazis and Fascists still ruled the centre and north of the country and no one was at the time sure how the war would end, they staked an unequivocal claim to all political legitimacy. They equated democracy and anti-fascism with parties. Indeed, assembled in the theatre, they claimed that ‘we completely represent the Italian people, inside the theatre there is antifascism and the people, outside there is fascism and the anti-people’.²

If democracy indeed emerged ‘transformed’ from the struggle with fascism,³ it was because parties not only reformed the institutions of democracy but also tried to take away the root causes of polarization and instability by investing in their capacities to build a broad social support base and endorse political compromises. This chapter traces these early efforts of party leaders across Europe to reform and re-invent democracy and their own organizations in the mid-1940s. It shows how the belief that parties were central to any attempt to reboot democracy after the War was firmly entrenched in party leaders’ minds and hearts. In this aspect, little changed in comparison with the previous postwar era. But inside these parties there were enormous changes. With the marginalization of the radical left and right came a new commitment of Socialists and Christian Democrats to compromise and consensus. Either implicitly or explicitly they rallied around the model of the people’s party, visible in their programmes, but also in new postwar constitutions such as that of Germany, in the institutionalization of social partnerships such as that of Austria, and ideas on the importance of uniting social rights with political democracy which circulated among Christian Democrats and Socialists alike. By the end of the 1940s, the model of the people’s party centring on compromise, consensus, and support that crossed social cleavages emerged as the winner of the postwar struggle for power, both ideologically and electorally.

The people who took the lead in the political reconstruction were men, indeed, almost always men, in their 50s and 60s, or, like Renner, Adenauer, and Blum, even in their 70s. They were scarred by the Fascist and Nazi regimes psychologically (and sometimes physically—Schumacher, for instance, lost a leg). They had often been displaced, interned, beaten, and silenced. But precisely because they had vivid memories of how democracy failed before and personally suffered the consequences, they were determined not to waste democracy’s second chance. United by their anti-fascism, they forged an unlikely alliance between the Socialist, nascent Christian Democrat, and initially often also Communist parties. This was the alliance that formed the backbone of governments of national unity in Austria, France, Italy, and Belgium. Their collaboration was often strained, but when things got rough, there was always ‘the common ground of the resistance…. We agree on liberty and social justice, even if the words we use to describe these are different’, a young Apulian lawyer by the name of Aldo Moro, later prime minister of Italy, stressed.⁴

As Allied forces fought their way across French forests, Dutch and Flemish plains, and Italian mountain ridges, these politicians almost overnight had to re-invent themselves from clandestine opposition leaders to occupying a place at the apex of government power. This was obviously the case in the countries that had been plain victims of Nazi aggression, like the Netherlands and Belgium. Here, national coalition governments quickly took over from Allied administrators. But it also counted for the former states of the Axis, where the Allies were nominally in control, but left day-to-day business to domestic politicians. While Austria was formally divided into four occupation zones, in practice Socialist-Christian Democrat government coalitions had much autonomy. In Italy, a protracted period of political transition followed the dismissal of Mussolini in July 1943. It took almost two years before the country was entirely liberated. In the meantime, Communist, Socialist, and Christian Democrat parties led the anti-Fascist resistance, slowly snatched power out of the hands of the king and his entourage, and governed liberated areas of the country. Their government of national unity regained full sovereignty by the end of 1945.⁵

Unlike in Italy, the resumption of party life in Germany was strictly controlled by the Allies. The Americans and British had fixed ideas on how the party-political landscape should look—and how not. The US State Department clearly let it be known in the summer of 1945 that ‘it is highly imperative that Weimar experience is avoided’.⁶ They therefore carefully balanced between the promise to encourage the founding of political parties and their own deeply rooted reluctance to trust the Germans with democracy. The British Foreign Office captured the dilemma in December 1945 by stating that ‘the greatest handicap to the development of the sort of political parties we should like to see in Germany is the fact that we are at present unable to give them power or responsibility…. We cannot expect political parties to work well unless they have a job to do, [but] nothing would be more fatal to political parties than to give them a job to do in present circumstances.’⁷

As a solution to this dilemma, the Allies built democracy bottom up. Parties were initially only allowed to become active at a local level and the geographical scope was gradually expanded. Moreover, the Allies fostered the development of the CDU and SPD, and, to a lesser extent that of the Communist and Liberal parties, to foster a compact party system with, ideally, two moderate parties that would alternate in office—very much, indeed, like in London or Washington. The CDU and SPD quickly dominated state legislatures that were elected across the Western zones in 1947 and often formed all-party coalition governments to underline political unity. This same spirit of unity was increasingly lacking, however, among the former Allies, as the division of Germany became a reality. The Western Allies merged the three Western zones and prepared to turn these into a separate West German state. Party politicians at state level were recruited to write its new constitution, or ‘Basic Law’, and also here SPD and CDU dominated the assembly.

There was, of course, resistance to this quick re-asserting of party-political dominance, and not only from the marginal far right. In Germany, the critique on parties was put forward among others by anti-Fascist committees and a group of engaged intellectuals who pled for a more radical democratization of society.⁸ In Italy, an movement called ‘The Common Man’s Front’ even captured about 5 per cent of the vote in the elections for the Constituent Assembly on a platform that contested what it called the partitocrazia.⁹ But only in France was Charles De Gaulle briefly able to provide a real counterweight to the quick resurgence of political parties. De Gaulle was an officer who had stood outside party politics, only becoming a junior minister when the War had already started. As the face of the French resistance against the Nazi occupation and head of the provisional government, he was forced to collaborate with the representatives of France’s leading parties in exile. Despite, or perhaps because of, his wartime collaborations with party leaders, he always fiercely detested party politics, opposing it with his own appeals to national unity and the general interest. As the nation’s resistor of the first hour, De Gaulle enjoyed a lot of popular support and trust. But even he was unable to prevent parties from controlling the political scene once the peace was made. He left the prime minister’s office disgruntled for his country house in Colombey in January 1946. The parties continued to write a new constitution for the Fourth Republic, a constitution that concentrated all power in the hands of parliament—and thus of them.

The quick return to power of veteran party politicians, in France and elsewhere, was helped by the fact that they could build on pre-war networks to take the political initiative. This gave them a crucial advantage over potential contenders wherever their rule was contested, such as happened to De Gaulle. But they also enjoyed a lot of moral authority. Party leaders were among the few political actors who re-emerged from the War with their prestige and credibility improved—even though this was largely by default. The status of other traditional elites was badly bruised. The trust in businessmen, industrialists, and other economic elites suffered from their close ties with dictatorial regimes and occupying powers. Representative institutions like the French parliament (that had voted to abolish itself in favour of Pétain) or the Italian Senate (that had stayed in power almost throughout Mussolini’s rule) also suffered a blow in their authority. The same counted for monarchies. The Belgian monarchy was shaken when the government held a referendum on whether King Leopold III should be allowed to return to Belgium and regain his constitutional powers (he had collaborated with the Nazis). The prestige of the Italian monarchy was even fatally damaged because of his collaboration with Mussolini—and because he fled Rome on the night before the Nazis captured the capital. Italians voted to become a republic in June 1946.

Except for the Allies and the Church—which were both, in their own way, international rather than national actors—no one could rival the parties’ claim to political legitimacy. There could therefore be no misunderstanding: parties were the real creators of postwar democracies, both spiritually and institutionally. Parties were, in the words of one German observer, the political scientist Dolf Sternberger (who later coined the notion ‘constitutional patriotism’), ‘founders of the state’. In the wake of the War parties were:

founded, built up, and approved, not only in the absence of a state embracing the nation, but precisely for the purpose of organizing such a state…. As far as I know, nobody since 1945 has found anything odd or striking in the fact that a state is built up or composed of parties, or that parties are created and established in the very place where once there was the state.¹⁰

This was obviously true of Germany, where the new West German state only emerged in full in 1949, long after the parties had started to leave their mark on the political scene. But as Renner’s return to power indicated pretty much the same counted for Austria, while also in Italy the parties were so fundamental in shaping the postwar state that it became known as the ‘republic of the parties’.¹¹ They emerged already in the summer of 1943, more than four years before the new Italian republic had its new constitution and the transition from fascism to democracy was nearing completion.¹² And even in France, after De Gaulle left the scene, he could lament with some justification that the régime des partis re-emerged quickly and perhaps even stronger than before: the Fourth Republic was very much ‘the creation of party machines’,¹³ while contemporary French legal scholars now also talked about an État partitaire.¹⁴

Party politicians realized this very well—and were proud of it too. They saw themselves as educators of a population that should be taught how to behave in a democratic fashion. This was especially the case in Italy and Germany, where authoritarian regimes had been established in semi-legal ways and had counted at least temporarily on broader public support. This showed that, as Schumacher put it, ‘democracy remains somewhat alien to a major part of our people’.¹⁵ And if anyone could remedy this perceived democratic deficit, it was party leaders—at least this was their conviction. Schumacher explained this in an extensive memorandum to the commander of the British zone in September 1945, arguing that the chance for success of German democracy depended ultimately not on the Allied contribution or on institutional reforms, but on ‘how many [sic] time the parties have for political and spiritual information of the German people’.¹⁶

Such emancipatory claims were not the monopoly of the left. In a similar fashion, just after having become chairman of the CDU in the British occupation zone, Adenauer made a speech on the regional radio in which he told listeners that ‘the German people must become politically involved, because only political maturity can lead to freedom and to the construction of a new, free Germany. And every political involvement goes through the parties.’ He believed it was the ‘essential duty of political parties to re-educate the German people in their entire thinking and feeling’.¹⁷ In even more dramatic expression of party paternalism, the DC’s newspaper Il Popolo stated that ‘educating the masses is the essential goal of the DC. To educate them means to make them aware of their dignity, to make them overcome their impulsive instincts, their gullibility that often leads them to fall for demagogy. Educating the masses means eliminating their spirit of intolerance and violence.’¹⁸

Parties were united in the conviction that only they could be the harbingers of hard-needed radical change. At least for the moment, there seemed to be endless opportunities for this. With fascism defeated and the Cold War not yet began in earnest, the aftermath of liberation was a moment of ‘openness’ in which ‘radical opportunities’ arose, and everything seemed possible.¹⁹ Not only political renewal but also radical economic reforms and social redistribution should ensure that the sacrifices of the War would not be in vain.

This window of postwar openness was the only moment in the twentieth century when Communist parties were allowed a place at the table of governments in Western Europe. They also enjoyed broad popular support, in particular in France and Italy. The Communist claim to political legitimacy was partly built on the large role of the Red Army in defeating the Nazis and the contribution of Communist forces at home to the anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi resistance. The PCI fielded thousands of partisans united in the Garibaldi Brigades. The PCF prided itself on being ‘the party of the 75,000 fusillés’, a number surely inflated, but which nonetheless pointed to real sacrifices that the Communist resistance made during the Nazi occupation. The French and especially Italian Communists were also emblematic mass parties, which was also a source of democratic pride. The PCI had counted little more than a few covert Communist cells in factories during the Fascist regime. But by 1947 its army of followers had swelled to almost two million. It organized a range of social and cultural activities that should reach out to all kinds of different groups to build what it called a ‘hegemony’ in society. The sub-organizations such as the million-strong Union of Italian Women, the ‘National Peasant Alliance’, and own sports organizations should all help. Sensing the opportunity, Communist leaders Palmiro Togliatti and Maurice Thorez tried to make clear that the Communists left the anti-system politics of the 1920s behind. The plans for revolution were postponed to an indefinite date in the future. Instead, they pled for patience and for gradual reforms within the framework of what they called a ‘progressive democracy’. Togliatti practised what he preached. As Justice minister in the Italian government of national unity, he initiated a sweeping amnesty of former Fascists in the name of national reconciliation. And a year later, he surprised friend and foe by conceding to the Christian Democrat demand to incorporate the Lateran Treaties signed between Mussolini and the Pope (and which granted the Church a few important privileges) in the new republican constitution.²⁰

The popularity of the French and Italian Communists—on a much smaller scale initially mirrored in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria—showed that even though a revolution Soviet-style was never attempted, the zest for far-reaching social reform was real and broadly shared. As the Socialists were also boosted by the War, just as after the First World War, the political initiative therefore seemed to belong to the left. In the first French elections in November ’45, the PCF polled 26 per cent and the SFIO 24 per cent of the vote, while the MRP reached 25 per cent. In the Italian elections for a Constituent Assembly in June 1946, the DC became the biggest party with over a third of the vote, but jointly the PSI (21 per cent) and PCI (19 per cent) were larger. The Swedish Socialists polled 46 per cent in elections of 1948, the Danish Socialists 40 per cent in the elections a year before, the Austrians 45 per cent in the first parliamentary elections in 1945.

Yet the most striking feature of these elections was not so much the success of the left, but rather the dwindling of all forces on the right. The conservative and nationalist right as well as free market liberals were the main victims of the shake-up of the political landscape. Everywhere, the experience with authoritarian rule made much of the political spectrum to the right of the Christian Democrats suspect. The same counted for free market liberalism which was held responsible for the bust of the Interwar economy. The Radical Party lost much of its support in France (although it was able, for the moment, to retain some of its influence). The German and especially Austrian Liberal parties for the moment did not manage to really become a third pole in the party system. The Italian Liberal Party, despite having roots into the nineteenth century and being a key player in the Italian political system before the advent of fascism, polled only 6 per cent in the 1946 elections. The Monarchists and neo-Fascist parties soon established there were also relegated to the margins with about 10 per cent of the vote.

The postwar marginalization of the right was not merely electoral, but also ideological. The resistance that matured under dictatorship and occupation was far from a coherent coalition. But it phrased its demands in often vague but always unmistakably revolutionary terms that firmly connected political democracy to social rights. This same spirit transpired into ideas of the largest parties after the War. Socialists and Christian Democrats now agreed that social and political freedoms could no longer be separated. This had traditionally been the credo of Socialists, but now also Christian Democrats nailed their progressive credentials firmly to the mast by emphasizing that they were, if anything, not of the right. Indeed, if anywhere, they started rather on the left. ‘The Marxists have absolutely no right to call themselves the only fighters against the excesses of capitalism’,²¹ the ÖVP stated in its first programme. The CDU’s Ahlener programme unmistakably stated that only ‘a foundation from scratch’ was the solution to Germany’s economic problems. The goal of the party ‘can no longer be capitalism, but the well-being of the entire people’.²² Social security should therefore be a fundamental aspect of the refoundation of democracy. The vice-secretary of the DC, Giuseppe Dossetti, a priest and former partisan, called this unity of political and social democracy ‘substantial democracy’. Without social rights, real democracy could not even exist. Indeed, he asked himself:

What is democracy? Is it perhaps the concept of freedom realized in political institutions? No: liberty is only a means; it is not the end…. We should make a distinction that liberalism does not make: between the formal and substantial aspects of democracy. The substance of democracy is not just about the political principle, but about the political and social principle together.

Dossetti added that viewed from this perspective, ‘the pre-fascist regimes were no democracies, because even though they had the formal appearance, they lacked the substance’.²³

There was thus a broad enthusiasm to make democracy count for more than a set of political rights and to make it about social rights too.²⁴ The main question was how. Many on the continent looked in awe to the Labour election victory in Britain. Despite the larger-than-life reputation of wartime premier Winston Churchill (and his warnings about Britain turning into a totalitarian state should Labour win) the Labour leader Clement Attlee managed to win a landslide victory with a programme promising far-reaching social change. If anything, he promised not to go back to the status-quo-ante, but to turn Britain into a welfare state, most visible in the establishment of the National Health Service (providing universal and free health care) and an expansion of social security insurances to cover basically anyone financially who fell ill, lost work, or retired. It also planned to nationalize train companies and to invest massively in public housing. The Labour victory was a huge inspiration for continental Socialists—the Dutch, for instance, not only mimicked the British name when they re-established themselves in 1946, but also copied its election campaign material to woe Dutch voters behind the idea of a labour rather than workers’ party. But it was welcomed by Christian Democrats too. Dossetti exalted that after hearing about Attlee’s victory he ‘spent the first hours in surprise, fervour, enthusiasm. The outcome of the English elections seems even better the victory of a new world that is emerging.’ In fact, Dossetti perceived ‘three victories’. Not only the victory of socialism and solidarity, but also ‘victory of democracy’, and now in its substantial form.²⁵

Given the dire straits of the continental European economy, the plans for such a substantial democracy could obviously only be aspirations for the future. But this meant also that the realization of a substantial democracy could only be successful if the state was willing to engage in large-scale public planning. Indeed, Attlee won the elections with his vision of ‘well-planned, well-built cities and parks and playing fields, homes and schools, factories, and shops’.²⁶ Also in this regard, politicians on the continent were inspired by what happened in Britain, and in particular the ideas of the economist John Maynard Keynes and his contemporary William Beveridge. Beveridge was the author of an influential report that carried his name, and which pled for the establishment of the welfare state, because a ‘revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching’. Going against the grain of laissez faire economics, Keynes argued that the state should play an active role in combatting economic crises and fostering employment. Postwar prosperity should be planned.

This belief in planning was obviously not completely new to European politicians. People like De Man and his followers in the Netherlands and France and the Swedish Socialists had advocated it before. But the enthusiasm for it was always rather confined to the margins of the left. Now, it became mainstream. Its precise application differed from country to country, but everywhere the notion that the government should play a leading role in managing the economy with the aim of promoting full employment and social stability became leading. The most famous planning agency of all was without doubt the French General Planning Commission, established in January 1946 by De Gaulle as one of his final acts as prime minister, and led by Jean Monnet. Monnet was already something of a mythical figure by then, with an eclectic career that included jobs as deputy secretary general of the League of Nations (the Interwar predecessor to the United Nations), reorganizer of the Chinese state railways, government negotiator of American material support for the French army, and manager of his family’s cognac business. Back in Paris after the War, Monnet assembled a small team and drew up a scheme to kickstart the ruined French economy which lacked trust and money for crucial investments. He proposed to pool the state’s resources and direct them into six key areas that required investments such as coal and steel, transport, and agricultural machinery. The state too should invest heavily in infrastructure, such as dams or the electrification of railways. The government should also negotiate labour conflicts which had often wrecked the economy before, by negotiating between employers and employees.²⁷

The Americans supported these aspirations to revitalize the European economy in the form of the Marshall Funds. The plan restored trust to Europeans weary of war and destitution, but also provided the hard-needed cash to realize some of the plans of European governments—half of the budget of Monnet’s plans were funded by the US. While the Communist parties opposed the Marshall plan, Christian Democrat politicians cleverly used American support for their own electoral advantage. ‘De Gasperi not only secured your spaghetti but also the sauce on it’, one DC-campaign slogan boasted in reference to the close ties between the DC and the Americans, implying that voting for Communists would have left Italians with empty hands—and stomachs. Marshall’s initiative to put Western Europe back on its feet and the political advantage that parties loyal to the US enjoyed signalled that the moment of radical open anti-Fascist unity was drawing to a close. By the spring of 1947, the major enemy of the West no longer was fascism in its various forms, but communism. Communist parties were ditched from government one after another in France, Italy, Austria, and Belgium. The position of Socialist parties in the new Cold War between the Soviets and the West was often not yet clear, but with the temporary exception of the PSI they certainly wanted to avoid the impression that they belonged to the Soviet camp at all costs.

As the Communists remained loyal to Stalin and clung on to their explicitly class-based notion of the party, the legitimate political spectrum narrowed further. It shows that the desire for change expressed so often in the wake of the War actually and paradoxically harboured a longing for security and stability after the feverish politics of the 1920s and 1930s. And just as the Socialist and Christian Democrat parties agreed that the economy functioned best in the form of a ‘mixed economy’ of state and market coordinated by the government and its special planning agencies, politics needed to be managed and ‘mixed’ in themselves as well. This effectively meant that Christian Democrats and Socialist jointly took responsibility for postwar reconstruction. Soon after the War ended, this search for consensus, rather than any quickly fading aspirations for revolutionary change, was a legacy of the dictatorships and the War for democracy. Indeed, the famous Danish political scientist Alf Ross observed in a pamphlet published in 1946 and subsequently translated in five languages that in Europe, ‘war and occupation provided the object lesson that forces the people of many European countries to reflect’ on what had gone wrong. And their conclusion could only be that in a democracy, the winner takes all principle on conflicts in interest, identity, and economy did not apply, because ‘the price of victory is the destruction of democracy’. Instead, leading parties should work to foster a consensus on the ground rules of democracy, to ‘work constantly at the integration of the various groups’ conceptions of right and justice’.²⁸

On the first of September 1948, the prime ministers of the West German states, politicians and high Allied officials gathered in the Museum of Natural History in Bonn. They were there to celebrate the founding of the Parliamentary Council that would write Germany’s new constitution. SPD-leader and hardliner Schumacher was seriously ill, so the Socialist delegation was led by the moderate Carlo Schmid. The day should have been the festive prelude to the revival of German democracy, but Schmid was far from impressed with the ambience. ‘Never before an official event that opened a new chapter in the history of a great people took place in such a funny environment’, he wrote later. ‘We were standing in the hall of this high building below the state flags surrounded by stuffed animals from all around the world. We felt quite lost among the bears, chimpanzees, and gorillas. And despite the Beethoven music that was being played, this bizarre environment failed to create a true atmosphere of festivity.’²⁹

Whether debating among dusty stuffed animals in a museum or in the more traditional environment of the seats of parliament, like the Italians or French, politicians in constitutional councils and assemblies were united in their view that power should be dispersed rather than concentrated. In a way, they all suffered from a ‘Weimar syndrome’ and sought to learn lessons from the past.³⁰ Executives should not become too powerful and charismatic leaders should not be able to appeal to the people on the streets to back up their claim to rule. Democratic institutions should hold each other in check and no single institution should take precedence. Apart from parliaments with two chambers and governments, many countries therefore created powerful constitutional courts, or ‘councils’ to check the constitutionality of laws that MPs passed. Governments did not rule alone but based their policies on nominally independent and powerful advisory bodies such as the Dutch Central Planning Agency or the French General Planning Commission. Also organized interests were officially recognized and got a seat at the table, for instance in Austria, where the Chambers of Agriculture, Commerce and the trade unions became legally recognized government partners in decision-making. There was also a tendency to decentralize government, as the federal constitutions of West Germany and Austria and the regionalization of a hitherto strongly centralized Italian government showed. In a way, the postwar order thus aimed to provide an antidote to the cheering of universal suffrage as the basis of all government power, as had happened in 1918. Power, as the new constitutions of Germany and Italy showed, should be constrained, and divided.³¹

However, precisely this division and dispersion of power meant that the postwar system required powerful mediators. Political parties considered themselves the centre of gravity in a system where power naturally sept away from the core. This unshaken faith in political parties of the post-1945 period echoed that of the previous postwar era. This similar spirit transpired into institutional continuity, for instance in the electoral system, parliamentary orders, and voting regulations. These continued to endorse political parties. Indeed, the same Catholic lawmaker, then of the PPI, now of the DC, who initiated proportional representation in Italy in 1919, again defended it twenty-seven years later, because ‘the organization of the country should above all be based on parties. The parties should take the responsibility to lead the country, just as they have done until now.’³²

In the view of the politicians who dominated constitutional councils and assemblies, the problem of Interwar democracy was therefore not that it was a party-state. Rather, the problem was that the party-state had been too weak and that it should be made clear once and for all that, as Schumacher put it, ‘democracy can only function in a party-state’.³³ The Italian and German constitutional assemblies adopted articles that celebrated the virtue of parties. Indeed, as one CDU-representative claimed at one of the final sessions of the Parliamentary Council: ‘We cheer above all that political parties are finally recognized in a constitution, and that we have had the courage to recognize and guarantee that political power belongs to them’.³⁴ And in Italy, one of the country’s leading postwar scholars observed that ‘essentially, our constitution, recognizing the right of anyone to associate in parties to determine national politics, has implicitly, but clearly, recognized that parties determine national politics’.³⁵

However, not every political movement was a ‘party’ in this sense. The Italian and especially German constitutions also ushered a stark warning against extremist parties.³⁶ The German constitution stated that parties’ ‘internal organisation must conform to democratic principles’, while parties that sought to ‘undermine or abolish the free democratic order’ would be outlawed (something that happened twice). In Italy, many politicians were in favour of a similar formulation. Moro argued that ‘it is evident that if [parties] are not organized democratically internally, they cannot lead the country in a democratic way’.³⁷ But the Communists saw such regulations as a threat. ‘Who is to say what counts as democratic?’, one Communist representative remarked.³⁸ What they did agree on, however, was that the constitution outlawed the establishment of the Fascist Party ‘in whatever form’ (an article that was applied later to outlaw a violent neo-Fascist movement—the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI) was nonetheless allowed to establish itself).

So, the narrowing of the acceptable political spectrum after 1945 was not merely ideological or electoral, it was also institutional.³⁹ Other than after 1918, the whole set of institutions that organized the place of parties in democracy now implicitly or explicitly endorsed the model of the people’s party. Wherever a constitution or law read ‘parties’, it intended ‘people’s parties’ and stressed that these parties were expected to overcome their bad habits of the past. The constitution of the German state of Baden captured best the spirit of the postwar era by obliging parties to ‘take responsibility for the formation of political life and the guidance of the state whether they are in government or in opposition’ and ‘to place the interests of the state before that of the party’.⁴⁰ In other words, it impelled them to become people’s parties.

However, such constitutional articles that praised the people’s party as a principle were in the end most of all of symbolic importance. They expressed the growing conviction that democracy required people’s parties of the centre rather than that they in themselves created such parties. What mattered much more than constitutional change was the change inside parties themselves. Indeed, in Austria, Renner and his government allies of the ÖVP quickly agreed that the country did not need a new constitution at all. It could simply re-adopt the one Renner had written back in 1919. That constitution had been the backdrop of, first, deepening political polarization, then political gridlock, and, finally, civil war and the demolition of democracy. After 1945 precisely the same document proved to be a blueprint for political stability and social peace, but only because the SPÖ and the ÖVP reformed themselves and their mutual relationship.

So while the ideal of the people’s party was now widely shared and sometimes even constitutionally codified, the main question was whether postwar politicians would be able to put its aspirations into practice. Could party politicians of the Socialist and Christian Democrat parties compromise and collaborate? Could they consider consensus a virtue rather than a flaw, and work, as Ross had specified, ‘constantly at the integration of the various groups’? Socialist parties, sometimes quickly, often more slowly, moved away from the model of the working-class party and welcomed new allies and support groups. However, the absolute pioneers of the people’s party in postwar Europe were not the forces usually called progressive, but those often labelled conservative. Christian Democrat politicians had thought early and hard about the practices, organization, and ideology of their predecessors as a cause for democratic failure. And as the programmes of CDU, DC, and MRP showed, they concluded that the problems of democracy could be resolved by superseding the implications of the word ‘party’ as much as possible. It is no coincidence that they all opted to omit the word ‘party’ from their name. They refused to be partisan, precisely to overcome the ills of party democracy and make it work. Indeed, ‘all sections of the people stand together’, the future Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger stated at the CDU’s first national congress, ‘big industry, employers, city dwellers and farmers, protestants, and Catholics. This is no longer a party in the old sense of the word!’⁴¹