The term “democracy” has many different meanings and the future of peace has come greatly to depend upon its right interpretation. Parliamentary democracy is one of these meanings. Its highest embodiment is British democracy.1 What then is the meaning of French or American democracy? What of Russian? Or what for Russian? For Russia also claims to be a democracy? And how much reality should we attach to the clash of ideals in the threatening conflict on the international scene? Especially, how far does commitment to the ideals of British democracy involve insistence on a similar interpretation of democratic ideals in other countries? Let us first investigate into the meaning of democracy and then into its relation to the international scene.
How did Democracy come to have so different meanings? Modern democracy was everywhere the result of a revolt against royal absolutism. In England, the event happened in the seventeenth-century revolutions, in France in the revolution of 1789, in Russia in the revolution of 1917. American democracy also was the outcome of a struggle for constitutional freedom against royal prerogative. The Declaration of Independence of 1776 was directed against the semi-absolutism of George III.
Yet this change from royal to parliamentary government was accompanied in England by a great shift in the social balance of power. The royalist forces represented an overwhelming part of the older aristocracy and the Church supported the more backward rural strata, especially in the North and West. Capitalist development in agriculture – in the form of enclosures – was threatening the poor, and the Crown sided with the rural poverty against the wealthy graziers who, mostly belonged to the new aristocracy of merchants and county potentates. In Parliament, which now became sovereign, the City together with the new capitalism of the countryside held sway. No wonder that a long civil war, the domination of Parliament by one faction, the violent expulsion of the majority of members, the execution of the King, and dictatorship of the Army accompanies the course of the Revolution. Counter-Revolution, after 1660, produced an uneasy balance between the new classes and the old, until – only a quarter of a century later – in the Glorious Revolution, the principles of the Commonwealth prevailed. The ascendancy of the new capitalist classes in alliances with the Whig aristocracy was now firmly established. The Bill of Rights (1689) and a dozen years later the Act of Settlement established the Protestant Succession and completed the victory of the movement by the trading classes and the financial and commercial oligarchy.
Altogether the English revolutionary period lasted some 40 to 50 years, and not before that were the rules evolved under which England constitutionalism continued to function for another 140 years, without any further development towards popular democracy. Indeed, it was in the interim between the two revolutions that the two parties, or rather aristocratic cliques, of the Whigs and Tories, came into existence, the alternation of which in power became the fundamental rule of British constitutional government.
2. France. In France royal absolutism was overthrown in a revolution which started in 1789 and lasted altogether 25 years. The shift of the social balance in this case was even greater, for almost complete disestablishment of the landed aristocracy was involved and its replacement by the middle class, the Tiers État, which came to power through the Revolution, as it did later in England in 1832. The extension of the franchise to the middle classes in France under the new constitutions meant an enormous step in the direction of popular democracy and the introduction of an equalitarian principle into the constitution. For a long time the new balance was not consolidated. A bloody civil war continued to rage in which the King and Queen lost their lives and the balance swung far to the left. Robespierre called a halt to the further movement towards the Left, but was himself ousted by the Moderates who wished for a swing back to the Right. Many such swings from right to left and back occurred. As a rule this was accompanied by restrictions and extensions of the popular vote. Democracy, in France, had come to mean equality, while in England it meant liberty. In England no extension of the vote followed upon the overthrow of absolute government for almost another two centuries, and even then the franchise was completely denied to the working-class; in France, the fight for the ascendancy of the middle classes supported by the working class took the form of the establishment of popular democracy. In brief, the struggle for the abolition of absolutism which in seventeenth-century England led to a libertarian constitution under an aristocratic régime, led in eighteenth-century France to an equalitarian constitution under a popular regime.
3. America. At the same time, approximately, the American people also made a bid for ridding themselves of royal absolutism. For English government, fairly constitutional at home, was absolute in respect to the colonies. As in France, to achieve the necessary shift in the domestic balance of power the common people had to be brought into the constitution. Actually, within a few decades of the revolution popular regimes were established in all North American states. In Paris, as in Washington, democracy meant equality.
4. Russia. In Russia absolutism was overthrown in 1917. Tsar Nicholas II and his children were shot almost 270 years after Charles I was executed and 125 years after Louis XVI of France and Queen Marie Antoinette were guillotined. In Russia the shift in the social balance was very much greater than it had been in France, perhaps almost as much as the French Revolution had been more sanguinary and more dramatic than the English a century and a half before. For in Russia power passed from the hands of a feudal aristocracy under an absolute monarch of divine right and an ossified Orthodox Church into the hands of a small group of workers in modern large scale industry in an uneasy alliance with millions of peasants. Russia possessed no developed bourgeoisie, no wealthy commercial middle class or rural capitalists like the England of the seventeenth and France of the eighteenth centuries. Like the rural poverty of seventeenth-century England, the semi-servile peasantry was unenlightened and tended to side with their feudal superiors. Once Tsarism was abolished, no social balance was possible in Russia short of a complete change-over from the old social rule to a new social rule, by which power would be wrested from the former landowners and the reactionary bureaucracy to be handed to an entirely different strata, which would prevent the restoration of Tsarism and feudal landlordism. As in England and France civil war and dictatorship accompanied the change from divine right sovereignty to popular sovereignty. As in France a vast agrarian revolution swept the country, the old landowning class and the Church were expropriated. A long period of semi-anarchy ensued in which the industrial working class alone showed capacity for leadership and rule, and prevented the return of Tsarism and the victory of the Tsarist generals and landowners. Incidentally, here lie most probably the roots of the eventual turn of the Russian revolution towards socialism. But for the expropriation of the heavy industries and large manufacturing establishments as well as the banking system, the old owning class would have quickly starved the revolutionary government into submission and restored the Tsar. As in England and France, the new constitution could rely for its solidarity only on the stability of a new domestic balance of power, which could be established only in prolonged fierce civil struggles.
The inspiration of the Russian revolution was the same as that of the English, French, and American revolutions. As Parliament in Westminster fought the royal prerogative; as the French “states general” claimed to represent the nation against the King, and the American Declaration of Independence appealed to the inborn “rights of man” against foreign rule, the Russian revolution also sprang from the urge for self-determination. But revolutions are a lengthy and paradoxical process. In England, civil war passed into dictatorial forms of government only to lead to the restoration of the former rulers, who had to be ousted a second time in a second rising. In France, also liberty had to be defended in civil wars and foreign wars against military coalition of monarchs whose thrones were threatened and who banded together under the lead of French aristocratic émigrés. The French Convention ruled with an iron hand, and for a long time no shred of liberty emerged from the great battle for equality. Not before 1688, in England, and not before 1830, in France, was the social balance sufficiently consolidated to allow freedom to be based on rules freely observed. The reason for this is simple. At any period before that, freedom would have meant freedom for the counter-revolution to restore its lost power.
There is thus a striking similarity of general outline between all four great Revolutions of Western Europe: they were all directed against absolutism and divine right, and vindicated to varying extent the ideas of popular sovereignty; they all led to long and violent struggles in which dictatorial forms of government played a role and the former sovereign was put to death by the public authorities; they were all based on a great shifts in the balance of power as between social classes and everywhere the rule of law became possible only after the eventual establishment of the new balance on solid foundations. In Russia, however, this stage has not yet been reached.
Yet there is also a striking difference in the meanings attached to democracy. The English revolution was libertarian, and allowed no room to the concept of equality; the French revolution was equalitarian, and stressed ideals of individual liberty much less than the English; the American revolution was also equalitarian like the French, but liberty with the Americans meant liberal capitalism; the Russian revolution was essentially different, in that the revolution referred not to votes and civic liberties but to the forms of the daily life of the working people in town and country. It centered rather on the practice of co-operation and the ideal of human fraternity than on liberty and equality. Liberty, therefore, meant here socialism, not capitalism; and equality meant all-around opportunities for the labouring people; fraternity, its leading concept, demanded co-operation in everyday work and labour.
Apart from these differences of outlook there is the important difference that the Russian revolution has not yet reached the stage at which the new social balance is secure, so that the new condition of affairs could safely rest and develop.
In brief, not only is the meaning of democracy as understood by the Russians different from our own interpretation, but the Russians are moreover in a different phase of their revolution. They are still at a stage, when the Revolution is far from having reached final fruition, and the new balance of forces cannot be relied upon to permit government by freely followed formal rules. Most of our present difficulties with the Russian interpretation of democracy result from this fact.
This leads on to the international scene.
All the great revolutions were accompanied by international wars. The English Puritan revolution had to contend with the powerful counter-revolutionary forces headed by Catholic France. The restoration period especially the later years of Charles II and the reign of James II, were overshadowed by the danger from France. The French Revolution fought a long and embittered struggle against numerous foes, amongst whom Britain was outstanding. The American Revolution was born in an international struggle which was in the nature of a precursor of the subsequent Franco-British wars. The Russian Revolution was the target of a series of interventions, and even today its course may be complicated by international conflict.
This takes us right to the present. The tension between Great Britain and the USSR, as well as between the USA and the USSR, is unsettling the cooperation of the Great Powers. Into this tension of an international character, at the centres of which it is easy to discern grave issues of security and power, a clash of ideologies is being injected. The different interpretations of democracy and the different régimes set up by Russia and the Western Powers intensify the antagonism between the two groups. The question is what should be credited to a clash of national interests, what to ideological divergences?
In every case the true source of the discord lay in the national sphere, where safety and security are prime considerations, and whence they cannot be removed under a system of sovereign states. The ancient rivalry of Britain and France was brought to a head in the seventeenth century, when the decline of Spain raised France to the position of a key power on the continent. The Thirty Years’ War left Spain a secondary power, and made France supreme. For many generations France remained England's chief competitor. The Wars of the Austria Succession, of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Years’ Wars, the colonial wars, merged into the Napoleonic Wars. In this conflict of nations England fought to prevent the Channel coast from falling into the hands of another power, France. In the seventeenth-century phase of the struggle, the Puritan revolution was endangered by Catholic fifth columnists greatly reinforced by threats of French military intervention. In the eighteenth-century phase, the French revolution upset the balance much before Napoleon's inordinate ambitions fired the Paris government to imperial exploits. Originally, the French were attacked by the Austrian and Prussian forces instigated by French émigrés. In this early phase of the war (1792) France was clearly on the defensive. By 1793 France was holding her own; the new mass armies of the Revolution were getting the better of the enemy. France counter-attacked, invaded the Low Countries and thereby threatened British security interests, namely the safety of Channel ports. This happened before France had developed an aggressive policy. In other words the French Revolution had become a threat to British security even before France started out on a policy of national aggrandizement, Napoleon, of course, later launched out on a policy of imperial conquest and national domination. It was at this stage that the ideological conflict was injected from both sides into the struggle for national power between Britain and France. England denounced the French Revolution for its tyrannous and bloody acts as mere despotism. Yet at the same time French ideas of freedom and equality permeated the Continent and helped many backward people to gain their liberty from feudal lords, patrimonial dynasties and a bigoted Church. The ideas of the Revolution thus worked out as a political and even military asset for France while Britain relied on the political opponents of the Revolution everywhere for support in her military struggle against France as a Power.
Britain was victorious. Nelson defeated the French fleet at Trafalgar; Wellington defeated Napoleon himself at Waterloo. No doubt the freedom of many nations had been menaced by Napoleon's plans of Empire. On the other hand, the ideological warfare had cost England a high price in terms of domestic welfare. English historians are practically unanimous in deploring the effects of the so-called years of Repression on England's social and cultural development. England, in spite of her traditional classes, had been one nation; now it became two nations, one of the rich and another of the poor. The persecution of the friends of progress and reform during and after the Napoleonic Wars left its indelible stamp on national culture during the Victorian Age. The denial of the vote, the denial of the right to form Trade Unions, the denial of public education, the denial of the possibility of purchasing newspapers or pamphlets stunted the mental and moral development of the people and created permanent evils. Economic egotism gave support to national anxieties and allowed class-selfishness to pose as patriotism. But for this fateful conjunction of the inevitable French wars with panicky reaction against French ideas, England's national standards might have been greatly improved. The slums of the industrial towns, low standards in respect to culture, amusements, general interests and literary were due, above all, to the injection of an ideological struggle into what otherwise was merely a problem of national safety and security to be solved on the level of foreign policy.
Let us return to the present and especially, to Russia. As England in the seventeenth century was threatened by Catholic France which made use of religious and ideological difference to foment civil war in England; as France, in the eighteenth century, her national conflicts with England made use of her ideological influence in many countries, while England organized everywhere the counter-revolutionary forces in support of her own national policy; in the same manner today the serious conflict of interest with Russia is being complicated by the injection of ideological elements.
In the 17th century, the ideological differences were mainly religious. England was Protestant, Spain and France were Catholic. Both sides took advantage of the others’ divisions. In the 18th century, the ideological differences were political. France proclaimed equalitarian and revolutionary principles while England represented evolution and liberty; in the 20th century the clash of ideologies centres on the institutions and methods of democracy.
The Russians are using the term democracy in support of two different systems: First, their own Soviet system of socialism which implies much more fraternity and cooperation than freedom or equality; freedom and equality both gain a social and economic connotation, different from ours, and even much more from that of the Americans. Parliamentary democracy is unknown in Russia; their political system is totally different. This refers to Russia herself. But, secondly, the term democracy is also applied by the Russians to the very different system supported by them outside their own frontiers as in the liberated countries of Poland, Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia, or in a defeated country like Germany. This system does not comprise economic socialism, although it goes far in the direction of nationalisation; and it does not represent a Soviet system, but, on the contrary, it is a form of representative government based on political parties. Yet there is an important difference. A strong moral and even political pressure is exerted to induce the parties to form coalition governments; there is a tendency to avoid numerous small parties, and no opposition parties are allowed which are aimed at the undermining of democratic institutions. Clearly, such a system is nothing but a means of bringing about the social balance of power on which popular democracy can be based. Perhaps the main reason for this is that the western revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries jumped to Russia in the twentieth century, without first passing through Central Europe. The feudal character of the social system in Prussia, Poland, or in Hungary remained untouched. The Russian revolution in spreading to the West is actually bringing the social changes of the French Revolution with it. In this way, the Western revolutions are reaching these countries today from the East! Most of the measures taken by the Russians are merely the continuation of civil war in an attenuated form.
Thus the following overall picture emerges: The Americans fervently believe that freedom and liberty are identical with capitalism; in making the world safe for democracy Woodrow Wilson assumed that this involved private trading and the gold standard. Bretton Woods proclaimed the same principles; in insisting on the abolition of preferences in Empire trade the Americans are only consistent; they equally strongly insist on the restoration of liberal capitalism in Germany and on unplanned trade along the Danube. The Americans are everywhere equating democracy with capitalism. The Russians would obviously prefer to equate democracy with socialism of the Russian type. In fighting for the social balance required for this, they employ the outward forms of representative democracy mainly as a means of securing the foundations of their revolution, against fascist counter-revolution. Britain has not yet made up her mind, whether to support democratic socialism or American type capitalism; it is certainly not going to support socialism of a Russian type.
The international struggle is today as in the past the chief theme; the various interpretations of democracy are subordinating to it. The Russians are everywhere deliberately using the forms of cast iron democracy to secure their own influence; the British government is making no secret of its determination to support only governments which show no predilection for Russia. Inevitably, details of policy tend to become self-contradictory, as when the Russians show friendliness to the Argentine on account of its opposition to the USA, while Britain supports an unrepresentative government in Athens, while insisting on the inclusion of all opposition parties in the governments in Bucharest or Sophia.
An important consideration emerges. Whether it would not be preferable to openly accept the serious difficulties with Russia on the level of national safety and security, and desist from injecting ideological warfare into the matter? The advantage might be twofold: First, we could be sure that no chance of a reasonable settlement is missed merely on account of unnecessary ideological complications; secondly, we would not be in the danger of cramping Britain's own development at home, as this happened during the Napoleonic Wars, a hundred and forty years ago. Then England for a long time lost her chance of becoming a democratic country; today she might lose the chance of becoming a socialist country.
Nothing that I said should weaken our determination to uphold the way of life of this country; indeed, I believe that the national interest is mainly contained in that way of life. British Parliamentary democracy has proven its worth in this war so that even the blind must see; it is proving its worth in the peaceful transformation which the industrial and social system is undergoing at present. But the greatest of all British institutions in the political field and of all contributions this country ever made to the world of political thought, is the idea of tolerance. Above all, let us be tolerant; do not let us think that the British ideal of democracy must be forced upon all other countries. Parliamentary democracy is at its best when it is an embodiment of liberty and tolerance. Perhaps the world can be yet saved from its most dire perils, if British democracy proves itself not only the freest but also the most tolerant of all democracies!