“Barricades Across the Road to Democracy”: The Referendum and the Crisis of Parliamentarism in Europe, 1890–1930

During the first decades of the twentieth century, the word “democracy” was rarely used to describe existing political systems. Rather, it was usually employed polemically to criticize European parliamentary regimes for their incapacity to actualize the principle of popular power. Critiques of parliamentarism in the name of democracy were numerous and came from all sides of the political spectrum. This paper analyses them through the lens offered by debates about the use of the referendum. The “direct appeal to the people” was widely discussed at the turn between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: It was the lowest common denominator of otherwise highly divergent political projects, all of which appealed to democracy to overcome the failures of parliamentarism. Yet their diagnoses of what was wrong with parliamentary regimes differed widely, as did their interpretations of the democratic nature of the referendum. In what follows, I will analyze three different critiques of parliamentarism, and their corresponding theories of democracy, as outlined through debates about the referendum in Europe from 1890 to 1935.