Responsible Government and Capitalism’s Cycles

Abstract

This article explores the tensions Peter Mair identified between responsible and responsive government in relation to the constraints and opportunities of an internationally integrated and instituted economy. Drawing on the example of the short period of democratic stability and its subsequent breakdown in the Weimar Republic, the article argues that in Weimar Germany’s ‘golden twenties’, governments could bridge the gap between responsibility – defined as a commitment to deep international integration – and responsiveness to its citizens mainly through the availability of cheap credits. With the onset of the Great Depression, responsible government became tantamount to increasingly drastic austerity policies. These policies were not only an economic failure, they also made the gap between responsible and responsive government unbridgeable. The article also shows how a similar cycle of good and bad times, with similar consequences with regard to the tensions between responsible and responsive government seem to have occurred in the crisis that has been affecting the Eurozone since 2009.

Acknowledgements

The idea for this paper grew out of many long conversations that I had with Peter Mair when I was a Braudel Fellow at EUI in 2008–10. At that time, the unfolding crisis of the Eurozone deepened his concern with the growing gap between representative and responsible government. Peter’s views about the ways in which parties and governments could cope with the challenges of the euro crisis left a deep impression on me. We also shared a bewilderment about the strange parallel universe Germans were living in when it came to interpreting the crisis. I am grateful to the editors of this special issue for the opportunity to continue the conversation, as it were, and for their comments on an earlier draft of the paper. I am also indebted to Julián Casanova, Laura von Daniels, Béla Greskovits and two anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Notes

1. In this essay, I follow Tooze (2006), who defined Weimar Germany as a peripheral country.

2. For recent accounts of European integration through the lens of the globalisation trilemma, see Wolf (2012) and O’Rourke (2011).

3. My account below draws heavily on Balderston (2002), James (1986a, 1986b, 2009), Kershaw (1986) and Tooze (2006).

4. For Weimar Germany, this issue has been debated under the heading of a ‘crisis before the crisis’ (Borchardt 1982).