Herrick Chapman

The social construction of democracy, 1870-1990

Acknowledgements - Notes on the Contributors - PART 1: INDUSTRIALIZATION, URBANIZATION, AND NATION-BUILDING FROM THE 1870s TO THE GREAT DEPRESSION - The Origins of the Third Republic in France, 1860-1885 P.Nord - Uncertain Legitimacy: The Social and Political Restraints Underlying the Emergence of Democracy in Argentina, 1890-1930 D.James - Japans First Experiment with Democracy, 1868-1940 R.J.Smethurst - The Social Construction of Democracy in Germany, 1871-1933 G.Eley - The Two Souls of American Democracy R.Oestreicher - PART 2: CREATING SINGLE-PARTY DOMINANCE, 1930-1960 - From Bureaucratic Imperium to Guardian Democracy: The Shifting Social Bases of Japanese Political Power, 1930-1960 G.D.Allinson - Uncommon Democracy in Mexico: Middle Classes and the Military in the Consolidation of One-Party Rule, 1936-1946 D.E.Davis - PART 3: DEMOCRATIC MOVEMENTS, 1945-1990 - Race, Equity and Democracy: African Americans and the Struggle for Civil Rights E.Lewis - Black Political Mobilization in Brazil, 1975-1990 G.R.Andrews - Modes of Opposition Leading to Revolution in Eastern Europe G.Stokes - PART 4: DEMOCRACY AND THE WELFARE STATE, 1930-1990 - The Welfare State and Democratic Practice in the United States since the Second World War S.P.Hays - French Democracy and the Welfare State H.Chapman - Industrialists, the State, and the Limits of Democratization in Brazil, 1930-1964 B.Weinstein - Constituting Political Bodies in the Adenauer Era R.G.Moeller - PART 5: COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES - Democracy is a Lake C.Tilly - Index

The Social Construction of Democracy, 1870-1990: An Introduction

The decade of the 1980s was ushered in by two seemingly unrelated events in two small, relatively obscure countries. In August 1980, Polish workers, organized under the banner of the Solidarity movement, launched a general strike demanding the creation of trade unions independent of the Communist regime. Three months later, in Uruguay, voters overwhelmingly rejected a draft constitution which would have formalized the military regime in power in that country since 1973.

France’s Liberation Era, 1944–47: a Social and Economic Settlement?

In popular memory and in textbooks, the Liberation (1944–47) was a founding moment for France’s economy and social order. The first post-war governments launched a nationwide social security system and nationalised utilities, transport, and financial and industrial firms. Economic modernisation was driven by Monnet-style planning and by high-powered civil servants from the new Ecole Nationale d’Administration, assisted by new tools such as INSEE (the national statistical institute) and INED (the demographic institute). To this list could be added economic and social democratisation. Article 1 of the Constitution of the Fourth Republic declared that ‘the law guarantees to women equal rights to men in all domains’. Articles 22 to 39 proclaimed a range of new rights, including a worker’s right to strike and to join (or not join) a union (Article 30), and even to ‘participate, though the intermediary of his delegates, in the collective determination of working conditions and the management of enterprises’ (Article 31); this last provision found practical expression in the establishment of comites d’entreprise in large and medium-sized firms. Contemporary protagonists from the Communists to de Gaulle viewed this as an era of bold beginnings. Even 40 years later, as governments began to sell off nationalised firms or struggled to bring social security costs under control, the image of the Liberation as a founding moment was shared both by neo-liberals who sought to reform or dismantle the post-1944 settlement and by those on the Left who struggled to preserve it.