Parliamentarism in the Swedish debate and the political use of history up until the Second World War

Abstract

In many studies in the field of the history of ideas and the history of political thought, the history of parliamentarism begins in the eighteenth century. However, the word parliamentarism was not used before the latter part of the nineteenth century. Since that time, parliamentarism has been a controversial concept, and struggles over its meaning and value make an important part of the history of democratisation. Thus, it is important to consider a conceptual history perspective when using “parliamentarism” as an analytical concept.

In Sweden, struggles over the meaning of “parliamentarism” played a particularly important role in the half-century preceding the Second World War. This was a period of parliamentary democratisation in Sweden. This article presents a conceptual history analysis focusing on how historical actors viewed the system of government they described as based on parliamentarism. We show that the struggle over “parliamentarism” largely involved different interpretations of the national political tradition, even concerning periods before the term existed. Past political actors used history-political arguments to strengthen their own arguments, thus making them appear to be in line with historical tradition.

We highlight the brief history of “parliamentarism” as an -ism and discuss several key points: how the so-called dualism of the 1809 Instrument of Government was interpreted in the early twentieth century as a Swedish version of parliamentarism; how the age of parliamentarism was retroactively extended to the Age of Liberty; how the emergence of parliamentarism was linked to the practical reforms in the nineteenth century and the idea of the so-called living constitution; how the minority governments in the 1920s were seen as part of the contemporary theories of parliamentarism; and how parliamentarism, during the debates in the 1930s on the crisis of democracy, was presented as an integral part of Sweden’s imagined old democratic tradition. Foreign political systems were used when constructing this national tradition, serving both as models and as warning examples. Thus, the shaping of Swedish parliamentarism was a highly transnational rhetorical process.