Peter H Merkl - Encounters With the Contemporary Radical Right

Series Editor

Peter H. Merkl

Encounters with the Contemporary Radical Right, edited by Peter H. Merkl and Leonard Weinberg

Two into One: The Politics and Processes of National Legislative Cameral Change, edited by Lawrence D. Longley and David M. Olson

The Rationality of Political Protest, Karl-Dieter Opp

New Politics in Western Europe: The Rise and Success of Green Parties and Alternative Lists, edited by Ferdinand Mller-Rommel

Pathways to Power: Selecting Rulers in Pluralist Democracies, edited by Mattei Dogan

Comparing Pluralist Democracies: Strains on Legitimacy, edited by Mattei Dogan

No Farewell to Arms ? Military Disengagement from Politics in Africa and Latin America, Claude E. Welch, Jr.

Edited by
Peter H. Merkl and Leonard Weinberg

First published 1993 by Westview Press, Inc.

Published 2018 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Encounters with the contemporary radical right / edited by Peter H.
Merkl and Leonard Weinberg.
p. cm.(New directions in comparative politics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8133-1445-3.ISBN 0-8133-1446-1 (pbk.)
1. Conservatism. 2. Right and Left (Political science).
3. Comparative government. I. Merkl, Peter H. II. Weinberg,
Leonard B. III. Series
JA83.E63 1993 92-31974
CIP

ISBN 13: 978-0-367-00454-5 (hbk)

Leonard Weinberg

Does the collapse of Communist rule in Eastern Europe and elsewhere bring an end to serious ideological conflict? Have the principles of liberal democracy become so widely accepted, at least among the politically articulate, that history has come to an end and no further challenges to democracy are likely to occur? As we approach the year 2000, do we also reach a new political millennium, one in which liberal democracy has triumphed over all its critics, left and right, past and future?

Perhaps, but if we use the recent past as our guide, positive responses to these questions seem both excessively optimistic and premature. It was not all that many decades ago when much of the world was gripped by a catastrophic depression. In the 1930s it did not appear as if liberal democracy, as practiced in the United States, Great Britain, and France, for example, was destined to triumph. Far from it: For many intellectuals, the future belonged to the dynamic Fascist, Nazi, and Communist movements that had come to rule Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union. Like the divine right of kings, constitutional democracy appeared to belong in another century and a different context when politicians wore powdered wigs not paramilitary uniforms. But the results of World War II changed the outlook considerably. Fascist and Nazi regimes collapsed after having brought massive physical destruction and international moral condemnation to the countries they had ruled. The democracies, the United States especially, did not prove to be anachronisms after all.