In Fear of Fragmenting Stability: Limiting the Splinter Parties

Abstract

When one’s goal is to overcome the tragedy of a recent past, then the more distant past not only instructs, it also haunts. National Socialist Germany had departed from the mainstream of Western civilization since the Enlightenment and subordinated all individual Germans’ needs, desires and rights to the demands of Nazi ideology. The Nazi state had conquered land in the name of racial survival. It had exterminated millions so that such a conquest would, in the end, prove meaningful for an Aryan race for whose sake any measures were legitimate. For the Western Allies, and for the Germans themselves, German surrender in 1945 meant the chance both to build a new society and polity and to reflect on how to avoid basing them on foundations that could lead to troubles similar to those from which the Nazis had benefitted in the early 1930s.

Most students of German history have agreed that the number of small, so-called splinter parties which existed under the Weimar Republic was a contributing factor to the weakness of the democratic regime.

(Robert Murphy, 1945)¹

No sound democracy can be established if there are too many parties in a state.

(Noel Annan, 1945)²

The growth of these political parties indicates to me that there is considerable vigor left in German political life. It is regrettable that there are so many.

(Lucius Clay, 1950)³