A review of Ruling Oneself Out: A Theory of Collective Abdications, Ivan Ermakoff, Duke University Press, 2008.
How can a majority of parliamentarians vote to renounce democracy? Why would a group accept its own debasement and, in doing so, abdicate its capacity for self-preservation? What induces them not only to surrender power, but also to legitimize this surrender by a vote? Which conjuncture allowed democratically elected officials to rule themselves out and allow authoritarian leaders to take full control? This sad reversal of fortune happened on two occasions in the twentieth century. On 23 March 1933, less than one month after the burning of the Reichstag, German parliamentarians gathered at the Kroll Opera House in Berlin passed a bill enabling Hitler to concentrate all powers in his own hands by a majority of 444 to 94, meeting the two-third majority required for any constitutional change. On the afternoon of 10 July 1940, at the Grand Casino in Vichy, a great majority of French deputies and senators—569 parliamentarians, about 85 percent of those who took part in the vote—endorsed a bill that vested Marshal Pétain with full powers, including authorization to draft a new constitution. In these two cases, abdication was sanctioned by an explicit decision—a vote. Both cases gave authoritarian leaders all powers to sideline parliament, suspend the republican constitution, and rule by decree. Both 23 March 1933 and 10 July 1940 are dates which live on in infamy in Germany and in France. As soon as the events occurred, they were to haunt the elected officials who took part in the decision. To borrow Ivan Ermakoff’s words, these were “decisions that people make in a mist of darkness, the darkness of their own motivations, the darkness of those who confront and challenge them, and the darkness of what the future has in store.” Can we shed light on this darkness?
History and context
History is the discipline of context, and it explains an event by putting it into a broader frame. But how much context does a historian need, and how far back is one to investigate to put an historical event into a proper frame? In Ruling Oneself Out, Ermakoff chose to explain the handing over of state powers to Hitler and to Pétain by staying as close to the event as possible. He takes as chronological points of departure the German presidential election of 1932 and the French declaration of war in September 1939, giving a short summary of Germany’s descent into political chaos and France’s ignominious defeat. He concentrates on the moment of decision within the two national parliaments by making a blow-by-blow narrative of those two fateful days, trying to enter the minds of rank-and-file parliamentarians and to account for their every motions and expressions. This is different from the historian’s point of view which usually goes farther back in time and tries to put an event into a causal chain of explaining variables and historical determinants. For instance, in a historical essay written on the spur of the moment, Marc Bloch explained France’s “Strange Defeat” (L’Étrange Défaite) by listing all the personal failings and strategic mistakes made by political and military leaders during the interwar period. German historians have interpreted the rise of Nazism as a “belated post-scriptum” (ein spätes Postskriptum) to the cultural conflict (Kulturkampf) between German Catholics and the central state inaugurated by Bismark’s antichurch policies in 1871, or as the expression of a Sonderweg some see going as far back as Luther’s Reformation. Ermakoff’s goal is not to provide a historical account of the two events but to build a theoretical model, a “theory of collective abdications” that may apply, beyond the two cases of parliamentary suicide, to a broad class of collective situations and outcomes.
In the empirical sciences, and especially for the formal lenses of decision theory, context should be reduced to a minimum. The scientist builds a theoretical model and tests it on a constructed dataset, keeping as close as possible to a controlled experiment. Ermakoff’s study is context-rich and steeped in empirical detail. For him, abstracting the event from its historical context is a crucial mistake. The sources he uses for his enquiry are narrative accounts produced by the actors themselves. These testimonies are either contemporary or retrospective, spontaneous or in response to a request, public stances or private accounts. Especially letters and diaries written immediately after the facts are very helpful to debunk ex post rationalizations. They allow to reconstruct actors’ subjective states as they made their decisions. But all testimonies include a form of self-justification and self-deception. The actors rationalized their decision by portraying it as the only viable and acceptable course of action. The tactical reasons the delegates invoke for themselves are self-serving and often betray a willingness to deceive oneself. As Jean-Paul Sartre has shown, the consciousness with which we generally consider our surroundings is different from our reflecting on this consciousness. The historian has to dig deeper if he wants to examine actors in the process of making their decisions. He has to rely on a range of analytical tools—formal, quantitative, and hermeneutic— and apply them to a variety of historical sources. The theory he offers is primarily a theory of the case. Its scope is limited to the confines of the two historical events. No single determination or macrocausal explanation can account for the result of the two parliamentary votes. The outcome was not predetermined; events could have turned differently. The parliamentary votes of abdication were the end result of a process by which parliamentarians based their opinions on the behavior and declarations of their peers. The collective understanding of a situation is dependent on a series of interactions. In confining the analysis to the moment of decision, both theory and history gain in intelligibility and leverage.
Fear of retaliation, misjudgment, ideological contamination
Ermakoff starts by rejecting the three standard explanations for political acquiescence during these two fateful days: fear, blindness, or treason. Delegates who participated in the decision, and historians after them, argued that they made their choice because they were coerced; because they were deceived; or because they were complicit. The coercion thesis portrays abdication as a forced choice. Miscalculation calls into question the assumption that target actors correctly assess the implications and significance of their decision. Collusion lifts the hypothesis that the challenger and the target actors have conflicting interests. Each explanation holds a degree of validity. Threats and intimidation were certainly present in the context of 1933 Germany. Nazi thugs harassed their opponents with seeming impunity. On the day of the vote, several thousand Nazi activists demonstrated outside the Kroll Opera House, where the parliamentarian session took place. In the meeting room they filled the banks reserved for external observers. In France, the country was under the direct threat of an occupying army, and rumors of latent menaces also suffused the political climate. A vote of no confidence would have entailed Pétain’s resignation and a leap into the abyss. But when so much is at stake, actors can always choose to disregard the threats that are deployed against them. As Ermakoff underscores, they can decide to challenge the odds. At the final moment, the decision is theirs. Likewise, the explanation that abdication was based on misjudgement takes actors’ most common retrospective justification at face value. But Hitler’s intentions were clear for all people to see, and in France Pétain’s mouthpiece Pierre Laval had made it clear that a “yes” vote would mean an end to democracy and the republican regime. Besides, the coercion and the misjudgment arguments miss the fact that the two votes were by no means unanimous. Some parliamentarians took a stand and opposed the delegation of full powers to a single man. In Germany, the Social Democratic delegation unanimously voted against the bill. Despite all appearances in retrospect, acquiescence in March 1933 and July 1940 was not a foregone conclusion.
The third scenario, ideological collusion, takes the deterministic argument to its extreme. Nazism’s rise to power is sometimes interpreted as a result of a class alliance between the ruling elite and Hitler’s party in order to thwart communism and secure the interests of the capitalist owners of production. Similarly, the Vichy vote is seen as a conservative revenge against the Front Populaire that had won the elections and implemented labor-friendly policies in 1936. More generally, the period saw the commitment to democratic institutions dwindle, becoming either tenuous or dubious. German Catholic leaders, it is argued, surrendered to Hitler because they were not entirely immune to an antiliberal frame of mind and an organicist conception of the nation. In France, class-based motivations for a political revenge went along with a rejection of the political regime that had made military defeat possible. According to historian Robert Paxton, “there was no resistance simply because no one wanted to resist.” There is a degree of truth in this argument. Parliamentarians who voted “yes” to Hitler and to Pétain failed in their role to uphold the constitution and maintain democratic institutions. They gave the transition to an authoritarian regime the appearance of legality because they abdicated their political capacity. From a legal perspective, they had no right to give a constitutional blank check to Hitler and to Pétain. Lack of personal courage was ultimately the reason for the delegates’ acquiescence. But accusing a majority of parliamentarians of treason or dereliction of duty misses the point. The social scientist’s role is to interpret and to explain, not to judge or to vindicate. A more fine-grained approach to the mechanics of decision is needed.
Decision under stress
Another line of argument points to the irrational forces at play during the decision process. Delegates were under maximum pressure. Wild rumors were circulating. Fear and anguish spread like a disease. On February 28, the day after the burning of the Reichstag, Hitler had issued an emergency decree “for the protection of the people and the state” that abolished basic civil rights conferred by the Constitution. Germany was veering toward total chaos and civil war. Likewise, France after the defeat was totally disorganized. In Vichy, where authorities had gathered after a chaotic escape away from the advancing German troops, everything had to be improvised. The breakdown of parliamentary groups made interactions more random, more hectic, more informal, less structured, and less predictable than in routine times. In such circumstances, social scientists often emphasize the irrationality of crowds, herd behavior, panic movements, and contagion effects. The collective behavior of a disorganized group can influence people to act a certain way or lose their responsibility. Ermakoff agrees that the explanatory key to the outcome is to be found in the collective dimension of the decision. The focus should be on a collective process of decision making. Diffusion effects and the modeling of interactions should take centerstage, for in situations of radical uncertainty people tend to turn toward their peers to shape their own expectations. Yet what gets diffused is less an emotional state than a strategic assessment of the situation. Contagion, the diffusion of an affective state, is a misleading representation of group behavior, for it implies that the process is purely emotional, affective, and mechanical. Even if the process is nonlinear and the result suboptimal, there is no need to resort to the irrationality of crowds and to abandon the hypothesis of rational behavior.
The crucial factor underlying collective abdications were not threats, blindness, or ideological propensities but the dynamics of expectation formation that took shape among delegates in a context of radical uncertainty and as traditional coordination mechanisms had broken down. Witnessing their world crumbling, delegates turned their eyes to their peers. But they did not know where these peers stood. This situation is a classical setting in game theory, decision science, or empirical finance. And indeed, Ermakoff mobilizes many concepts from these disciplines. His theory of collective abdication builds on the three notions of sequential alignment, local knowledge, and tacit coordination, and uses concepts such as reference groups, prominent actors, action thresholds, tipping points, and common knowledge. Traditional historians may shy away at the evocation of these abstract notions, and may even recoil in horror at the sight of a book’s appendix full of equations and graphs. But Ruling Oneself Out is not a book written for theory’s sake, and its narrational structure remains faithful to disciplinary standards in historiography. It refers to many books written by historians on the two events, and particularly to Robert Paxton’s Vichy France. Historians will be on familiar ground, as game theory or decision science are only mobilized to interpret the historical narrative and analyze data. This sociology to the event stands in stark contrast to the cumbersome constructions of social scientists who only use empirical evidence to advance their theoretical claims. Sociology remains a historical science and cannot abstract itself from its temporal condition in order to offer an abstract modeling of social systems. Here, formal tools and abstract theories remain at the service of explaining the facts.
When democracies fail
Ruling Oneself Out offers many valuable lessons for today’s social scientists and committed citizens. The choice to concentrate on two episodes when democracies surrendered on their own free will is significant: it shows in particular that the failure of democracies was not a preordained conclusion. Things could have turned differently. Historical outcomes are not the result of deterministic forces and collective interests: individual decisions matter. And so does politics. In particular, parliamentarians are bestowed with a great burden of responsibility and accountability. Their decisions can make or break a constitutional order. They are the guardians of the democratic temple, and their failure in protecting the sacred treasure that they have in charge can have dramatic consequences. Ermakoff also offers a lesson in applied social science, or historical sociology. He used the best conceptual tools available at his time, without falling into the trap of theory fetishism of math graph envy. His book combines various methods of analysis, both qualitative and quantitative, which are rarely used together. It remains an historical account of two significant events, in which the lay reader will learn a lot. In this perspective, theory and evidence should go hand in hand. Being faithful to “how things actually happened,” to take Leopold von Ranke’s definition of history, does not imply a rejection of formal models or theoretical constructions. The role of parliaments offer a particularly rich material for theoretically inclined social scientists. Parliaments’ archives contain a trove of empirical data, both textual and statistical. They are open to the public, and easily lend themselves to participant observation or ethnographic work. A young French sociologist, Etienne Ollion, has recently published a book on the functioning of the French National Assembly using state-of-the-art narrative techniques and quantitative tools, including statistical techniques derived from artificial intelligence. I hope his book, Les candidats, gets translated into English.
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