Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ivan Ermakoff is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

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""Ruling Oneself Out" is a tour de force, a compelling contribution to our understanding of two of the most troubling moments of the past century and the more general phenomenon of democratic representation and its retention."--David D. Laitin, Stanford University

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Ruling Oneself Out

Duke University Press

Contents

List of Tables...................................................viiList of Figures..................................................ixPreface..........................................................xiAcknowledgments..................................................xxxiA Note on Citations..............................................xxxvPART I: The Stage and the Problem................................11 Actors and Events.............................................32 Constitutional Abdication.....................................37PART II: Subservience, Common Sense..............................593 Coercion......................................................614 Miscalculation................................................925 Ideological Collusion.........................................131PART III: The Terms of the Challenge.............................1796 Collective Alignment: Three Processes.........................1817 Diffusion.....................................................211PART IV: Collective Stances......................................2438 The Production of Consent.....................................2459 Vacillations, Convergence.....................................277PART V: Coda: Judgments of Significance..........................30510 The Consistency of Inconsistency.............................30711 The Event as Statement.......................................323Appendix A: Counts and Accounts..................................333Appendix B: A Two-Pronged Model of Alignment.....................346Bibliography.....................................................369Index............................................................393

Chapter One

When shall we start? Events are nominal constructs. Their referents are bundles of actions and decisions that analysts and commentators abstract from the flow of historical time. This abstraction is based on a variety of criteria-temporal contiguity, causal density, and significance for subsequent happenings-routinely mobilized by synthetic judgments about the past. Because events are temporal constructs, their temporal boundaries can never be taken for granted. They take on different values depending on whether we derive these boundaries from the subjective statements left by contemporary actors (Bearman et al. 1999) or construct them in light of an analytical relevance criterion derived from the problem at hand (Sewell 1996, 877).

This last point-causal time has different temporalities depending on our analytical agenda-comes out with particular force in the present case. If we approach March 1933 and July 1940 as instances of regime breakdown, a plausible option is to take the chronology of the political regimes as temporal referents. If we construct them as parliamentary events, the temporal setting of legislatures provides a lead. If we define them primarily as collective decisions, causal time is likely to be harnessed to the interactive processes underlying the decision. Different conceptual definitions induce different empirical foci and different temporalities. The narrower the focus, the narrower the scope that we might impute to the temporal frame.

This correlation is only indicative. Depending on which aspect of collective interactions we conceptualize as causally relevant, this temporal scope can substantially shrink or expand. Consider the appraisal by Maier (1972, 193) of the vote by the Center parliamentary delegation on 23 March 1933 as a "belated post-scriptum" (ein sptes Postskriptum) to the cultural conflict between German Catholics and the central state inaugurated by Bismarck's antichurch policies in 1871 (Kulturkampf). If we endorse this appraisal, the adequate historical chronology, which allows us to comprehend March 1933, overflows the political context of the 1930s and more broadly the temporal setting of Weimar. Historical analyses that place primary emphasis on actors' belief systems in the reconstruction of political developments often adopt such a grand scale as they unfold their explanatory narrative (Sontheimer 1962; Mosse 1964; Sternhell 1996).

In the following chronological exposition I leave open the choice of a temporal frame. My points of departure are arbitrary: the presidential election of 1932 and the outbreak of war in September 1939. These starting points do not prejudge the definition of an adequate temporality; I will discuss this issue subsequently, in chapter 11, after having explored the collective and structural facets of the events under consideration. In this chapter these chronological points of entry serve expositional purposes. I introduce the actors and the stage. Some of those introduced are collective actors (parties, unions, social groups). Others hold key state positions (presidents, chancellors, premiers, ministers).

This chapter also tackles the significance of these events. In the present case, significance can be assessed from different, and not necessarily complementary, standpoints. One is heuristic. The event lays bare processes and causal mechanisms that we usually do not observe with such distinctive clarity. It has a revealing or magnifying quality. The other standpoint is historical. Here "significant" equates to "having consequences." This definition builds on an insight by Sewell (1996, 262): events transform structures. Herein lies their specificity as temporal happenings and their sub specie quality as historical events. From this perspective, the significance of an event is commensurate with its impact on structures and subsequent historical developments.

THE GERMAN CATASTROPHE

I consider groups involved in processes of political contention as well as actors who because of their position in the state apparatus have substantial decisional power and influence. Some groups-political parties, unions, and duly organized interest groups-can be formally constituted. The organizational emergence of these groups can be traced to a founding act. Others do not have this organizational visibility. They are not regulated by explicit charters and formal rules of membership. Yet actors constantly use them as referential categories to make sense of their political interactions and social relations. These groups define principles of collective and motivational identities. Actors identify themselves and others in light of this classification scheme. The imputation of group identities onto others goes along with assumptions of shared interests, common understandings, and group solidarity.

The landed aristocracy in Germany in the 1930s is a case in point. Since the last third of the nineteenth century, this social group had been breeding a class of high-ranked civil servants (Carsten 1990, 120). Although their worldview was closer to bourgeois and modern values than their social background would suggest (Steinmetz 1993, 104-7), these actors often defined themselves by reference to the landowning aristocracy, and members of other classes defined them in these terms. Marshall Hindenburg, the president of the Republic since 1925, was the Junker par excellence. He was Prussian, a landowner, full of the social prejudices of his class, and a great soldier, the hero of the battle of Tannenberg. In 1932 Hindenburg stood for a second presidential mandate. The election was scheduled for March (first round) and April (second...