-

tain jobs and prices; it used monetary policy systematically, as a weapon in economic planning.
And throughout Scandinavia, social insurance schemes inherited from earlier years were
extended and rationalized during the Great Depression to cover the hazards of sickness,
invalidism, and old age for the entire population.
To observers from Britain, France, or the United Statesoppressed by the fumbling of
their own governments, by mounting class tension at home, and by the steady advance of
fascism and communism abroadScandinavia in the early 1930s seemed to offer a haven of
competence and good sense. Here governments ensured full employment and protected their
people against want; capital and labor composed their differences across a conference table
instead of fighting it out in bitter strikes; the economic and psychological barriers between
classes were losing their rigidity as the welfare state imposed ruinous taxes on the rich and
guaranteed a livelihood to the poor. Even the physical aspect of these countries seemed better.
The cities were clean and trim and amply provided with parks and public housing. Indeed, the
housing exhibition held at Stockholm in 1930 epitomized the whole trend; building after building
reflected the influence of the new International Style, which, like so many other twentiethcentury innovations, had been accepted by the Scandinavians in common-sense fashion as the
type of construction best suited to the requirements of contemporary life.
No wonder, then, that these observers hailed the Scandinavian course as the middle
way"the way of pragmatic flexibility, steering between doctrinaire socialism on the one side
and doctrinaire free enterprise on the other. It seemed to offer a new and heartening possibility
for saving democratic government throughout the Western world. And such a fresh look at
democracy was urgently needed. Nearly everywhere else in Europe, authoritarian government
was confidently advancing, and democratic parliamentarism revealing its pitiable inadequacy.

V. THE CRISIS OF PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY

By the mid-1930s, the Great Depression was beginning to lift. In all the major countries except
France, the national economy had turned the corner: Production was mounting; unemployment
was falling. But depression lifted only in the strictly economic sense. In political life and popular
morale, the depression psychology persisted. The great democracies of Western Europe
seemed sickand none knew what remedy would cure them. In Italy and Germany,
parliamentary democracy had disappeared. In Britain, it was functioning only lamely. In France,
it seemed to be wallowing in political squalor. How long, people asked, could such a system
maintain itself?
The parliaments of Europe had been caught unaware by problems of unprecedented
scope and had failed to deal with them. Before 1914, it was possible for representative bodies to
proceed in leisurely and amateurish fashion; the parliamentary practice of engulfing issues in
floods of oratory had sufficed when the issues themselves were still of a political or ideological
nature that demanded no special expert knowledge. But when the First World War, its
liquidation, and the Great Depression raised their acutely complex economic and financial
problems, the old political routines proved obsolete. Something else was needed to master a
situation in which the role of government itself had increased
The Great Depression, 19291935 209