DEMOCRACY

Charles Tilly

Even today, visibly viable democracies remain a minority among European forms of rule. Like tyranny and oligarchy, democracy is a kind of regime: a set of relations between a government and persons subject to that government's jurisdiction. (A government is any organization, at least partly independent of kinship, that controls the principal concentrated means of coercion within a delimited territory or set of territories.) The relations in question consist of mutual rights and obligations, government to subject and subject to government. A regime is democratic to the extent that:

1. regular and categorical, rather than intermittent and individualized, relations exist between the government and its subjects (for example, legal residence within the government's territories in itself establishes routine connections with governmental agents, regardless of relations to particular patrons);
2. those relations include most or all subjects (for example, no substantial sovereign enclaves exist within governmental perimeters);
3. those relations are equal across subjects and categories of subjects (for example, no legal exclusions from voting or officeholding based on property ownership prevail);
4. governmental personnel, resources, and performances change in response to binding collective consultation of subjects (for example, popular referenda make law);
5. subjects, especially members of minorities, receive protection from arbitrary action by governmental agents (for example, uniformly administered due process precedes incarceration of any individual regardless of social category).

Thus democratization means formation of a regime featuring relatively broad, equal, categorical, binding consultation and protection. Summing up variation in all these regards, we can block out a range from low to high protected consultation. Any move toward protected consultation constitutes democratization; any move away from protected consultation, de-democratization. These are obviously matters of degree: no polity anywhere has ever conformed fully to the five criteria. Hence to call any particular polity democratic means merely that it embodies more protected consultation than most other historical polities have.

PROBLEMS OF DEFINITION

Why stress such abstract standards when we might simply check for familiar constitutional arrangements, such as legislative assemblies, contested elections, broad franchise, and the like? Certainly any social historian of European democracy must pay close attention to the extensive constitutional innovations that occurred in these regards after 1750. Yet three facts speak against the adoption of straightforward constitutional tests for democracy: the origins of most democratic practices in undemocratic regimes; the frequency with which ostensibly democratic constitutions remain dead letters; and the contingent, erratic emergence of democratic regimes from struggle.

First, almost all major democratic institutions initially formed in oligarchic regimes, as means by which narrow circles of power holders exercised constraint on each other and on their rulers. To take the obvious example, Britain's Parliament combined a House of Lords assembling the realm's peers with a House of Commons in which the country's small landholding class held sway. That bicameral legislature eventually became a worldwide model for representative governments. In standard adaptations of that model, an upper house speaks for territories, self-reproducing elites, and/or powerful institutions, while a lower house more nearly speaks for the population at large. In Britain itself, however, the House of Lords never became a means of democratic consultation, and the House of Commons hardly qualified before the reform bills of 1832 and 1867 expanded the national electorate to include most male working-class householders.

Second, many constitutions that look quite democratic on paper remain dead letters. Rulers cook elections, jail opponents, restrict the press, disqualify voters, bypass legislatures, suborn judges, award contracts to cronies, and terrorize popular movements despite constitutional provisions forbidding all of these activities. For instance, when Louis Napoleon Bonaparte reacted to opposition following his popular election as French president in 1848 by executing a coup d'état in 1851, he did not dare to repeal the 1848 constitution's provision for general manhood suffrage, but his henchmen immediately set to work intimidating Louis Napoleon's opposition, cutting back voters' lists, restricting the press, and weakening the national assembly. With little change in its nominal constitution, France took giant steps away from protected consultation. Not the sheer existence of standard democratic forms of organization, but their integration into effective protected consultation, signals the presence of democracy. We must trace the history of democratic processes, not merely of their simulacra.

That injunction leads to the third reason for avoiding concentration on the enactment of constitutions: the erratic, contingent emergence of democracy from struggle. As we shall see abundantly, European democratization did not result mainly from cool contemplation of political alternatives. It always involved intense political struggle. It often resulted from international war, revolution, or violent domestic conflict. Rarely, furthermore, did the struggle simply align one well-defined bloc of democrats against another well-defined bloc of antidemocrats. People changed sides, third parties intervened, and democratic institutions often formed haphazardly as compromise settlements of otherwise intractable conflicts. To explain democratization, we must examine a wide range of political struggles and detect democracy-producing processes within them—even where participants themselves did not know they were advancing democracy.

CONDITIONS FOR DEMOCRACY

In principle, we could search for democratic processes within households, associations, firms, churches, and communities, just so long as each one contained something like a government—a distinctive position or organization controlling its principal concentrated means of coercion. Some analysts of democracy argue, indeed, that democracy originates in such smaller-scale settings before spreading to a national or international scale, while still others claim that robust democracy can only operate on a small scale, among people who know and care about each other personally. Here, however, we will concentrate on the larger scale, asking how, when, and why national regimes moved toward protected consultation in Europe since the Renaissance.

Governmental capacity. Part of the answer concerns changes in governmental capacity. Governments vary significantly in control by their agents over people, resources, information, and spaces within their jurisdiction. Capacity matters to democracy because below some threshold governmental agents lack the means of implementing protected consultation. Beneath the minimum, democracy gives way to anarchy. Anarchists and utopians, to be sure, have often taken the relative democracy of some crafts, shops, and local communities as warrants for the feasibility of stateless democracy on a large scale.

The historical record, however, suggests another conclusion: where governments collapse, other predators spring up. In the absence of effective governmental power, people who control substantial concentrations of capital, coercion, or commitment generally use them to forward their own ends, thus creating new forms of oppression and inequality. As the Soviet Union collapsed after 1989, for example, the dismantling of central authority did not release a liberating wave of democratization but gave a new set of tycoons, tyrants, and violent entrepreneurs (many of them, to be sure, former members of the Soviet state apparatus) room to ply their trades. If high governmental capacity does not define democracy, it looks like a nearly necessary condition for democracy on a large scale. In European experience on a national scale, extensive increases of governmental capacity always preceded and underlay the formation of democratic regimes.

We cannot, however, conclude that expansion of governmental capacity reliably fosters democracy. In fact, expanding governmental capacity promotes tyranny more often than it causes democracy to flower. In the abstract calculation that quantifies governmental experiences, the relationship between governmental capacity and democracy is no doubt curvilinear: more frequent democracy results from medium to medium-high governmental capacity, but beyond that threshold substantial cramping of democratic possibilities prevails as governmental agents come to control a very wide range of activities and resources.

Citizenship. Citizenship only forms on the higher slopes of protected consultation. Only where governmental capacity is relatively extensive, where established rights and obligations vis-à-vis governmental agents involve some significant share of a government's subject population, where some equality of access to government exists among subjects, where consultation of those persons makes a difference to governmental performance, and subjects enjoy some protection from arbitrary action can we reasonably begin to speak of citizenship. Although citizenship of a sort bound elite members of Greek city-states to their governments and elite members of many medieval European cities to their municipalities, on the whole citizenship on a national scale only became a strong, continuous presence during the nineteenth century. Understanding its emergence requires attention to political changes, including revolutions, but also to the social forces unleashed by industrialization, such as the rise of working-class movements.

Democracy builds on citizenship but does not exhaust it. Indeed, most Western states created some forms of citizenship after 1800, but over most of the nineteenth century the citizenship in question was too narrow, too unequal, too nonconsultative, and/or too unprotective to qualify their regimes as democratic. The regimes we loosely call "totalitarian," for example, typically combined high governmental capacity with relatively broad and equal citizenship, but afforded neither binding consultation nor extensive protection from arbitrary action by governmental agents. Some monarchies maintained narrow, unequal citizenship while consulting the happy few who enjoyed citizenship and protecting them from arbitrary action by governmental agents; those regimes thereby qualified as oligarchies.

In searching for democratic regimes, we can take relatively high governmental capacity for granted because it is a necessary condition for strong consultation and protection. We will recognize a high-capacity regime as democratic when it installs not only citizenship in general but broad citizenship, relatively equal citizenship, strong consultation of citizens, and significant protection of citizens from arbitrary action by governmental agents. By these criteria, Europe produced no national democratic regimes before the late eighteenth century. Then, by comparison with their predecessors, the (slave-holding but at least partly democratic) United States of the 1780s, the abortive Dutch Patriot regime later in the same decade, and the French revolutionary regimes of 1789 to 1793 all added significant increments to protected consultation.

Consultation and protection. Both consultation and protection require further stipulations. Although many rulers have claimed to embody their people's will, only governments that have created concrete preference-communicating institutions have also installed binding, effective consultation. In Europe, representative assemblies, contested elections, referenda, petitions, courts, and public meetings of the empowered figure most prominently among such institutions. Whether polls, discussions in mass media, or special-interest networks qualify in fact or in principle as valid and effective preference-communicating institutions remains highly controversial.

On the side of protection, democracies typically guarantee zones of toleration for speech, belief, assembly, association, and public identity, despite generally imposing some cultural standards for participation in the polity. A regime that prescribes certain forms of speech, belief, assembly, association, and public identity while banning all other forms may maintain broad, equal citizenship and a degree of consultation, but it slides away from democracy toward populist authoritarianism as it qualifies protection. Thus the five elements of democratization—categorical relations, breadth, equality, binding consultation, and protection—form and vary in partial independence of each other.

DEMOCRATIZATION

Yet in any particular era, available precedents make a difference. Previous historical experience has laid down a set of models, understandings, and practices concerning such matters as how to conduct a contested election. During the early nineteenth century, France's revolutionary innovations offered guidelines for democratic theory and practice. After World War II, similarly, existing regimes of Western Europe and North America provided models for dozens of new regimes, including those of former European colonies. This political culture of democracy limits options for newcomers both because it offers templates for the construction of new regimes and because it affects the likelihood that existing power holders—democratic or not—will recognize a new regime as democratic.

Historical development. Over the long run of human history, the vast majority of regimes have been undemocratic. Democratic regimes are rare, contingent, recent creations. Partial democracies have, it is true, formed intermittently at a local scale, for example in villages ruled by councils incorporating most heads of household. At the scale of a city-state, a warlord's domain, or a regional federation, forms of government have usually run from dynastic hegemony to oligarchy, with narrow, unequal citizenship or none at all, little or no binding consultation, and uncertain protection from arbitrary governmental action.

Before the nineteenth century, furthermore, large states and empires generally managed by means of indirect rule: systems in which the central power received tribute, cooperation, and guarantees of compliance on the part of subject populations from regional power holders who enjoyed great autonomy within their own domains. Seen from the bottom, such systems often imposed tyranny on ordinary people. Seen from the top, however, they lacked capacity: the intermediaries supplied resources, but they also set stringent limits to rulers' ability to govern or transform the world within their presumed jurisdictions.

Only the nineteenth century brought widespread adoption of direct rule, the creation of structures extending governmental communication and control continuously from central institutions to individual localities or even to households, and back again. Even then, direct rule ranged from the unitary hierarchies of centralized monarchy to the segmentation of federalism. On a large scale, direct rule made substantial citizenship, and therefore democracy, possible. Possible, but not likely, much less inevitable: instruments of direct rule have sustained many oligarchies, some autocracies, a number of party- and army-controlled states, and a few fascist tyrannies. Even in the era of direct rule most polities have remained far from democratic.

Varieties of democratization and paths to democracy. Figure 1 schematizes variation and change in regimes. Where low governmental capacity and little protected consultation prevail, political life goes on in fragmented tyranny: multiple coercive forces, small-scale despots, and competitors for larger-scale power are possible, but no effective central government. The diagram's opposite corner contains the zone of citizenship: mutual rights and obligations binding governmental agents to whole categories of people who are subject to the government's authority, those categories being defined chiefly or exclusively by relations to the government rather than by reference to particular ties with rulers or membership in categories based on imputed durable traits such as race, ethnicity, gender, or religion.

At point A of the diagram's triangular citizenship zone, a combination of little protected consultation and extremely high governmental capacity describes a regimented state. We might call such a state totalitarian; Nazi Germany illustrates political processes at that point. At point B, protected consultation has reached its maximum, but governmental capacity is so low the regime runs the risk of internal and external attack. Nineteenth-century Belgium never reached that point, but veered repeatedly toward it. Point C—maximum governmental capacity plus maximum protected consultation—is probably empty because of incompatibilities between extremely high capacity and consultation. This line of reasoning leads to sketching a zone of authoritarianism in the diagram's upper left, overlapping the zone of citizenship but by no means exhausting it. It also suggests an idealized path for effective democratization, giving roughly equal weight to increases in governmental capacity and protected consultation up to the point of entry into citizenship, but then turning to deceleration, and ultimately mild reduction, of capacity where protected consultation has settled in.

Figure 2 sets limits on real histories of democratization by sketching two extreme paths:

1. a strong-state path featuring early expansion of governmental capacity, entry into the zone of authoritarianism, expansion of protected consultation through a phase of authoritarian citizenship, and finally the emergence of a less authoritarian, more democratic, but still high-capacity regime. In European historical experience, Prussia from 1650 through 1925 came closer to such a trajectory than most other states
2. a weak-state path featuring early expansion of protected consultation followed only much later by increase in governmental capacity on a large scale, hence entry into the zone of effective citizenship from below. Although few European states followed this trajectory very far because most of them that started succumbed to conquest or disintegration, Switzerland—shielded from conquest by mountainous terrain, rivalries among adjacent powers, and a militarily skilled population—came closer to this extreme than most other European regimes.

All real European histories fell within the extremes. Most described much more erratic courses, with reversals and sudden shifts in both dimensions, and the vast majority entered or approached the zone of authoritarianism at one time or another. The schematic map simply makes it easier to describe the concrete paths of change we are trying to explain.

Elements of democratization. Democratization emerges from interacting changes in three analytically separable but interdependent sets of social relations: inequality, networks of trust, and public politics.

• Categorical Inequality: Categorical inequality—collective differences in advantage across boundaries such as gender, race, religion, and class—declines in those areas of social life that either constitute or immediately support participation in public politics. Buffers arise that reduce the representation and enactment of those inequalities in collective political life. For example, rich and poor alike perform military service, pay taxes, serve on juries, and gain access to courts.
• Trust Networks: A significant shift occurs in the locus of interpersonal networks on which people rely when undertaking risky long-term enterprises such as marriage, long-distance trade, membership in crafts, and investment of savings: such networks move from evasion of governmental detection and control to involvement of government agents and presumption that such agents will meet their long-term commitments. Subjects do not necessarily come to trust individual leaders, but they do make commitments on the presumption that the government will meet its own commitments. For example, people increasingly invest family funds in government securities, rely on governments for pensions, allow their children to serve in the military, and seek governmental protection for their religious organizations.
• Public Politics: Partly in response to changes in categorical inequality and trust networks, and partly as a consequence of alterations within the political arena itself, the bulk of a government's subject population acquires binding, protected, relatively equal claims on a government's agents, activities, and resources. For example, governmental agents quell rebellions against wartime conscription, taxation, and expropriation not only with threats and punishments but also with displays of fairness, acts of mercy, enactments of bargains, and articulations of rules for future conscription, taxation, and expropriation.

Only where the three sets of changes intersect does effective, durable democracy emerge.

Conquest, confrontation, colonization, and revolution. Most of the time, alterations in categorical inequality, trust networks, and public politics occur slowly and incrementally. Nevertheless, certain shocks sometimes accelerate these processes, producing surges of democratization. In European experience since 1500, the chief shocks have been conquest, confrontation, colonization, and revolution.

Conquest is the forcible reorganization of existing systems of government, inequality, and trust by an external power. In the history of European democratization, the most famous example is no doubt conquest by French revolutionary and Napoleonic armies outside of France, which left governments on a semidemocratic French model in place through much of western Europe after Napoleon's defeat. Reestablishment of France, Germany, Italy, and Japan on more or less democratic bases after World War II rivals French revolutionary exploits in this regard. Conquest sometimes promotes democratization because it destroys old trust networks, creates new ones, and provides external guarantees that the new government will meet its commitments.

Confrontation has provided the textbook cases of democratization, as existing oligarchies have responded to challenges by excluded political actors with broadening of citizenship, equalization of citizenship, increase of binding consultation, and/or expansion of protection for citizens. Nineteenth-century British rulers' responses to large mobilizations by Protestant Dissenters, Catholics, merchants, and skilled workers fit the pattern approximately in Great Britain, but by no means always—and certainly not in Ireland. Confrontation promotes democratization, when it does, not only because it expands and equalizes access to government but also because it generates new trust-bearing coalitions and weakens coercive controls supporting current inequalities.

Colonization, with wholesale transplantation of population from mother country to colony, has often promoted democratization, although frequently at the cost of destroying, expelling, or subordinating indigenous populations within the colonial territory. Thus Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand began European settlement with coercive, oligarchic regimes, but rapidly moved some distance toward broad citizenship, equal citizenship, binding consultation, and protection. (Let us never forget how far short of theoretically possible maximum values in these four regards all existing democracies have always fallen; by these demanding criteria, no near-democracy has ever existed on a large scale.) Colonization of this sort makes a difference not merely because it exports political institutions containing some rudiments of democracy but also because it promotes relative equality of material conditions and weakens patron-client networks tied closely to the government of the colonizing power.

As England's Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689 illustrates, revolutions do not universally promote moves toward broad, equal citizenship, binding consultation, and protection. Let us take revolutions to be large splits in control over means of government followed by substantial transfers of power over government. As compared with previous regimes, the net effect of most revolutions over the last few centuries has been at least a modicum of democratization, as here defined. Why so? Because they typically activate an even wider range of democracy-promoting processes than do conquest, colonization, and confrontation. Revolutions rarely or never occur, for example, without coalition formation between segments of ruling classes and constituted political actors that are currently excluded from power. But they also commonly dissolve or incorporate nongovernmental patron-client networks, contain previously autonomous military forces, equalize assets and/or well-being across the population at large, and attack existing trust networks. Revolutions sometimes sweep away old networks that block democratization, and they promote the formation of governing coalitions far more general than those that preceded them.

DEMOCRATIZATION IN SWITZERLAND

To watch the impact of revolution, conquest, and confrontation (if not of colonization) on categorical inequality, trust networks, and public politics from closer up, consider the remarkable experience of Switzerland from the late eighteenth century to 1848. Up to the eighteenth century's end, Switzerland operated as a loose, uneven confederation of largely independent cantons and their dependent territories. Although the Confederation had a Diet of its own, it operated essentially as a meeting place for strictly instructed ambassadors from sovereign cantons. Within each canton, furthermore, sharp inequalities typically separated comfortable burghers of the principal town, workers within the same town, members of constituted hinterland communities, and inhabitants of dependent territories who lacked any political representation. In Bern, for example, 3,600 qualified citizens ruled 400,000 people who lacked rights of citizenship, while in Zurich 5,700 official burghers governed 150,000 country dwellers. Within the ranks of citizens, furthermore, a small—and narrowing—number of families typically dominated public office from one generation to the next.

Both the countryside's great eighteenth-century expansion of cottage industry and the mechanized urban industrial concentration that took off after 1800 increased discrepancies among the distributions of population, wealth, and political privilege. Cantonal power holders controlled the press tightly and felt free to exile, imprison, or even execute their critics. From the outside, the confederation as a whole therefore resembled less a zone of freedom than a conglomerate of petty tyrannies. The majority of the population who lacked full citizenship, or any at all, smarted under the rule of proud oligarchs. Meanwhile, politically excluded intellectuals and bourgeois formed numerous associations—notably the Helvetic Society—to criticize existing regimes, promote Swiss national patriotism, revitalize rural economies, and prepare major reforms.

The French Revolution and democratic reforms. The French Revolution shook Switzerland's economic and political ties to its great neighbor while exposing Swiss people to new French models and doctrines. From 1789 onward, revolutionary movements formed in several parts of Switzerland. In 1793 Geneva (not a confederation member, but closely tied to Switzerland) underwent a revolution on the French model. As the threat of French invasion mounted in early 1798, Basel, Vaud, Lucerne, Zurich, and other cantons followed the revolutionary path. Basel, for example, turned from a constitution in which only citizens of the town were represented in the Senate to another giving equal representation to urban and rural populations.

Conquered by France in collaboration with Swiss revolutionaries in 1798, then receiving a new constitution that year, the Swiss confederation as a whole adopted a much more centralized form of government with significantly expanded citizenship. The central government remained fragile, however; four coups occurred between 1800 and 1802 alone. At the withdrawal of French troops in 1802, multiple rebellions broke out. Switzerland then rushed to the brink of civil war. Only Napoleon's intervention and imposition of a new constitution in 1803 kept the country together.

The 1803 regime, known in Swiss history as the Mediation, restored considerable powers to cantons, but by no means reestablished the old regime. Switzerland's recast confederation operated with a national assembly, official multilingualism, relative equality among cantons, and freedom for citizens to move from canton to canton. Despite some territorial adjustments, a weak central legislature, judiciary, and executive survived Napoleon's defeat after another close brush with civil war, this time averted by the intervention of the great powers in 1813–1815. In the war settlement of 1815, Austria, France, Great Britain, Portugal, Prussia, Russia, Spain, and Sweden accepted a treaty among twenty-two cantons called the Federal Pact as they guaranteed Switzerland's perpetual neutrality and the inviolability of its frontiers.

Switzerland of the Federal Pact operated without a permanent bureaucracy, a standing army, common coinage, standard measures, or a national flag, but with multiple internal customs barriers, a rotating capital, and incessant bickering among cantonal representatives who had no right to deviate from their home constituents' instructions. The Swiss lived with a national system better disposed to vetoes than to concerted change.

With France's July 1830 revolution, anticlericalism became more salient in Swiss radicalism. After 1830, Switzerland became a temporary home for many exiled revolutionaries (such as Giuseppe Mazzini, Wilhelm Weitling, and, more surprisingly, Louis Napoleon), who collaborated with Swiss radicals in calling for reform. Historians of Switzerland in the 1830s speak of a Regeneration Movement pursued by means of publicity, clubs, and mass marches. A great spurt of new periodicals accompanied the political turmoil of 1830–1831. Empowered liberals began enacting standard nineteenth-century reforms such as limitation of child labor and expansion of public schools. Nevertheless, the new cantonal constitutions enacted in that mobilization stressed liberty and fraternity much more than they did equality.

Protestant-Catholic divisions and civil war. With a Protestant majority concentrated in the richer, more industrial and urban cantons, an approximate political split between Protestant-liberal-radical and Catholic-conservative interests became salient in Swiss politics. In regions dominated by conservative cities such as Basel, the countryside (widely industrialized during the eighteenth century, but suffering a contraction in cottage industry during the early nineteenth) often supported liberal or radical programs. In centers of growing capital-intensive production such as Zurich, conflict pitted a bourgeoisie much attached to oligarchic political privilege against an expanding working class that bid increasingly for a voice in public politics and allied increasingly with dissident radicals among the bourgeoisie. In these regards, political divisions within Switzerland resembled those prevailing elsewhere in western Europe.

The political problem became acute because national alignments of the mid-1840s pitted twelve richer and predominantly liberal-Protestant cantons against ten poorer, predominantly conservative-Catholic cantons in a Diet where each canton had a single vote. (Strictly speaking, some units on each side, products themselves of earlier splits, qualified as half-cantons casting half a vote each, but the 12/10 balance of votes held.) Thus liberals deployed the rhetoric of national patriotism and majority rule while conservatives countered with cantonal rights and defense of religious traditions. Three levels of citizenship—municipal, cantonal, and national—competed with each other.

Contention occurred incessantly, and often with vitriolic violence, from 1830 to 1848. Although reform movements were already under way in Vaud and Ticino as 1830 began—indeed, Ticino preceded France by adopting a new constitution on 4 July 1830—France's July Revolution of 1830 and its Belgian echo later in the year encouraged Swiss reformers and revolutionaries. As the French and Belgian revolutions rolled on, smaller-scale revolutions took place in the Swiss towns and cantons of Aargau, Lucerne, St. Gallen, Schaffhausen, Solothurn, Thurgau, Vaud, and Zurich. Thereafter, republicans and radicals repeatedly formed military bands (often called free corps, or Freischärler) and attempted to take over particular cantonal capitals by force of arms. Such bands failed in Lucerne (1841), but succeeded in bringing new administrations to power in Lausanne (1847), Geneva (1847), and Neuchâtel (1848).

The largest military engagement took place in 1847. Switzerland's federal Diet ordered dissolution of the mutual defense league (Sonderbund) formed by Catholic cantons two years earlier. When the Catholic cantons refused, the Diet sent an army to Fribourg and Zug, whose forces capitulated without serious fighting, then Lucerne, where a short battle occurred. The Sonderbund had about 79,000 men under arms, the confederation some 99,000. The war ended with thirty-three dead among Catholic forces and sixty dead among the attackers. The defeat of the Sonderbund consolidated the dominance of liberals in Switzerland as a whole and led to the adoption of a cautiously liberal constitution, on something like an American model, in 1848.

A last ricochet of the 1847–1848 military struggles occurred in 1856. Forces loyal to the king of Prussia (effectively, but not formally, displaced from shared sovereignty in Neuchâtel by the republican coup of 1848) seized military control over part of Neuchâtel's cantonal capital, only to be defeated almost immediately by the cantonal militia. Prussia's threats to invade Switzerland incited other European powers to hold Prussia in check. From that point on, the liberal constitution applied to all of the Swiss Federation. Between 1849 and 1870, furthermore, all Swiss cantons terminated their profitable, centuries-old export of mercenary units for military service outside of Switzerland. Thereafter, only papal guards and a few ceremonial military units elsewhere represented Swiss soldiery outside of Switzerland itself.

Swiss democracy. Between 1830 and 1847, Swiss democracy receded into civil war. Only military victory of one side wrenched the confederation back toward a democratic settlement. As of 1848, we might call Switzerland as a whole either a weak democracy or a democratic oligarchy. Property owners prevailed and only males could vote, but the confederation transacted its business through elections, referenda, and parliamentary deliberations, as well as making citizenship transferable among cantons. Democratic institutions comparable to those that now prevail in western Europe still took a long time to form. Women could not vote in Swiss federal elections, for example, until 1971. By the middle of the nineteenth century, nevertheless, Switzerland had formed one of Europe's more durably representative regimes.

The Swiss experience is remarkable for its transition to representative government in the presence of consistent linguistic differences. Important distinctions have long existed between Switzerland's Germanic-speaking northern and eastern cantons, its French-speaking western border cantons, its Italian-speaking southern rim, and its Romansh-speaking enclaves in the southeast. Switzerland also features sharp town-to-town differences in the Alemannic dialects known generically as Schwyzerdütsch, which actually serve as languages of choice for spoken communication in nominally Germanophone Switzerland. With dominant cleavages based on religion and inherited from the Reformation, the Swiss have rarely fought over linguistic distinctions.

Switzerland is even more remarkable for the vitality of representative institutions in company with fairly weak state structures. Similar regimes elsewhere in Europe generally succumbed to conquest by higher-capacity (and much less democratic) neighbors. Switzerland's topography, its ability to summon up military defense when pressed, and rivalries among its powerful neighbors gave it breathing room similar to that enjoyed by Liechtenstein and Andorra. Switzerland's tough independence likewise inspired Europe's regional politicians, so much so that Basque nationalists of the nineteenth century proposed that their own land become the "Switzerland of the Pyrenees."

Whatever else we say about the Swiss itinerary toward democracy, it certainly passed through intense popular struggle, including extensive military action. The same process that produced a higher-capacity central government, furthermore, also created Switzerland's restricted but genuine democracy: as compared with what came before, relatively broad—if unequal—citizenship, binding consultation of citizens, and substantial protection of citizens from arbitrary action by governmental agents were established. As compared with late-nineteenth-century French or British models of democracy, however, the Swiss federal system looks extraordinarily heterogeneous: a distinctive constitution, dominant language, and citizenship for each canton; multiple authorities and compacts; and a remarkable combination of exclusiveness with the capacity to create particular niches for newly accepted political actors. Through all subsequent constitutional changes, those residues of Swiss political history have persisted. In all democratic polities, similar residues of past struggles and compromises remain.

DEMOCRATIZATION IN EUROPE

The Swiss experiences of 1798, 1830, and 1847–1848 should remind us of a very general principle. Rather than occurring randomly and separately country by country, shocks such as conquest, confrontation, colonization, and revolution bunch in time and space. They bunch partly because similar processes—for example, wars, depressions, and mass migrations—affect adjacent countries. They also bunch because a shock to one regime reverberates among its neighbors. As a consequence, democratization occurs in waves.

Europe's first important wave of democratization arrived with the French Revolution. Although the French themselves retreated rapidly from the radical democratic reforms of 1789 to 1793, French regimes from 1793 to 1815 all embodied broader and more equal citizenship (if not always binding consultation or effective protection) than their prerevolutionary predecessors. As French armies conquered other European territories, furthermore, they installed regimes on the French model, which means that in general they increased protected consultation by comparison with the regimes they displaced. Even after Napoleon's defeats between 1812 and 1815, both the French model and French-style constitutions left residues of democratic practice through much of western Europe.

Europe's next wave of democratization arose with the revolutions of 1847–1848 in Sicily, Naples, Piedmont, Lombardy, France, Austria, Hungary, Wallachia, and Prussia. By 1851, to be sure, counterrevolutionary movements and external invasions had reversed most democratic gains in all these regions. Still, from that point on at least the forms of protected consultation prevailed as benchmarks for European regimes. In different ways, furthermore, the revolutions of 1847–1848 promoted or enabled democratic reforms in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland as well. On balance, the struggles of 1847–1851 moved western and central European regimes significantly in the direction of broad, equal, categorical, binding consultation and protection—that is, toward democracy.

After 1848, revolution receded as a democratizing shock in Europe. Portugal, Spain, and the Balkan countries experienced repeated forcible seizures of power between 1848 and World War I, but protected consultation advanced little or not at all in those regions. In 1870 and 1871, France's revolutionary changes opened the path to a turbulent but broadly democratic Third Republic that survived to World War II. Precipitated by Russia's loss in the Russo-Japanese War, Russia's revolution of 1905–1906 temporarily introduced a radically democratic regime, but succumbed to tsarist counterforce soon thereafter. In the aftermath, the tsar instituted a series of political and economic reforms that, compared to pre-1905 regimes, moved Russia modestly in the direction of protected consultation.

Over Europe as a whole, nevertheless, confrontation took over from revolution as the chief promoter of democratization between 1849 and World War I. In western and central Europe, mass labor movements formed, making impressive gains in representation through strikes, demonstrations, electoral campaigns, and a wide array of organizational activities. In Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, for example, eligible voters reached 50 percent of adult males through hard-fought reforms at various dates from 1848 to 1912.

In those same countries, most workers acquired the right to strike—previously an illegal activity—through parallel struggles between 1848 and 1921. Legalization of labor unions, formation of labor parties, proliferation and reduced repression of popular media, regularization of nonmilitary policing, and expanded freedom to associate and assemble all constituted increases in protected consultation. They all rested, furthermore, on rising governmental capacity, the capacity both to deliver services and to enforce popular rights over the frequent opposition of landlords and capitalists.

With World War I, the pendulum swung back to conquest and revolution. Conquest, in fact, then promoted revolution; such wartime losers as Germany and Russia experienced deep democratizing revolutions. In Germany, a social democratic regime came to power, and after extensive struggle (contained by the victorious Allies) the country emerged from its war settlement with a broadly democratic regime. In 1917, Russia's March and October Revolutions brought in first a liberal and then a radical regime. Although many analysts of 1917 claim to detect in the Bolshevik seizure of power an irresistible impulse to totalitarianism, as compared with preceding regimes, the initial transformation installed breadth, equality, consultation, and protection to an almost unimaginable degree. What remains hotly debated is how much and how soon a vast civil war, the formation of the Red Army, creation of a centralized Communist Party, and management of economic disaster reversed those early democratic gains.

That was not all. Hungary (also on the losing side as part of the Austro-Hungarian empire) passed through a brief radical revolution only to see it terminated by separate attacks of monarchist and Romanian forces. Elsewhere in Europe, struggles that had begun with strike waves during the war's later years swelled to massive postwar mobilizations in nominal winners Italy, France, and Great Britain. In Ireland, resistance to British rule greatly accelerated with the Easter Rebellion of 1916 and culminated in the formation of an Irish Free State (1922), now a British dominion similar in status to Canada and Australia, with a similarly democratic constitution. (With severe costs for democratic practice in both parts of Ireland, Ulster remained attached to the United Kingdom.)

One outcome of these diverse struggles was widespread adoption of proportional representation, an electoral system that increased the chances of small parties—hence minority interests—to place spokespersons in national legislatures. Another was considerable expansion of the suffrage, including female suffrage. As of 1910, Finland alone granted full voting rights in national elections to women. By 1925, the roster had expanded to Iceland, the Irish Free State, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Soviet Union, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Czechoslovakia, and Austria. (By that time, most other regimes had made lesser concessions to female suffrage: while British men voted at twenty-one, for example, British women thirty and older had the vote.)

De-democratization occurred during the 1920s and 1930s. Fascist regimes seized power in Italy and Germany, the Salazar dictatorship displaced Portugal's weak parliamentary regime in 1932, and Spain slid from a half-dozen years of republican government (1931–1936) into civil war and an authoritarian regime that lasted until Generalissimo Francisco Franco's death in 1975. Dictatorial leaders came to power in Greece, Lithuania, and Latvia, while Stalin's rule grew increasingly despotic in the Soviet Union. Despite minor advancements of protected consultation in western Europe, by 1940 Europe as a whole had slid back considerably from the democratic heights it had reached in the aftermath of World War I. German conquests of Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Yugoslavia, the formation of a German puppet regime in Norway, and the alignment of Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria with the German-Italian-Japanese axis reduced European democracy even further.

Evaluation of the postwar settlement raises thorny issues. On NATO's side of the Cold War divide, the United States, Great Britain, and their allies used force and persuasion to establish extensively democratic regimes in most European areas outside Iberia and the Balkans. Impelled by popular mobilization and encouraged by Western Europeans and North Americans, Greece, Spain, and Portugal replaced authoritarian regimes with parliamentary democracies during the 1970s. That much looks like a great wave of deliberately promoted democratization.

On the Warsaw Pact side, however, newly installed socialist regimes of the 1940s generally promoted relatively broad, equal, and categorical citizenship while placing severe limits on both consultation and protection. Simultaneously, socialist states used their rising capacities both to equalize entitlements at the base and to increase repression of dissidents. Depending on the relative weight given to breadth, equality, consultation, and protection, then, we might rate Eastern European shifts in democracy between 1940 and 1950 as anything from minor losses to substantial gains.

In any case, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, beginning in 1989, introduced a new bifurcation into Eastern Europe. In Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine after 1989, mighty political transformations but little or no increase in protected consultation occurred despite the introduction of parties, oppositions, and contested elections. In those territories declines in state capacity undermined protection, equality, and even the breadth of political rights. In the former Yugoslavia and Albania, shattered by civil war, democracy declined from its already modest earlier levels except for the emergence of an independent and relatively democratic Slovenia. Elsewhere in the former Soviet bloc, the record varies but on balance shows increases in protected consultation. One more wave of democratization—this one just as vexed and incomplete as those of 1789–1815, 1847–1850, and 1914–1922—is rolling slowly across Europe.

See also other articles in this section.

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