Sociology of Democracy: Social Division without Civil War

Since the days of its classics, sociology has known the apparently paradoxical thesis that a differentiated society can be integrated precisely through its conflicts. This is always to be expected when the conflict behavior is also captured by social differentiation. Religious conflicts then organize other “fronts” than political ones and these in turn other than economic conflicts. In such a situation it is normal for alternating alliances to be formed. Beliefs may differ, but that does not rule out the fact that in every party one also cooperates with people of different faiths - and in the churches being adjusted to different political views. And the contrast between the social classes is not simply copied politically and religiously.A society of this kind knows many “divisions” - and yet it is not torn apart by any of them.

In some developing countries it is different. There are ethnic groups there who are both ethnically and religiously different and who avoid each other as much as possible. If these groups then also form their own political parties, problems arise for democracy. The larger group is sure to win all elections, and the smaller has no motive to recognize it. It can easily lead to a civil war - or a dictatorship designed to suppress it.

Against this background, Dutch sociologists received a lot of attention when they began to describe the social and political situation in their own country in the 1950s.

Because here too it seemed to be a divided society - but now with electoral democracy and without endangering inner peace.

Catholics and Protestants, socialists and liberals had withdrawn to their own schools, trade unions, leisure clubs and hospitals, read their own newspapers and supported their own parties.

How was such a “columnar” of the population possible without a civil war?

When do proportional systems fail ...

The sociologist Staf Hellemans has now traced the scientific history of this question. At first, sociologists came from other European countries such as Belgium or Austria and said that it was very similar at home. Then came political scientists who first demonstrated to the Netherlands and then to those other states that they all practiced a special form of democracy, namely so-called consensus democracy, which guaranteed every social group a share of power regardless of the outcome of the election. Where the group contradictions are too strong to be suppressed by majority decisions, systems of proportional representation are recommended. Each party then enjoys a right of veto, which it refrains from making use of,because it fears the revenge of those blocked by it at the earliest opportunity. As a result, this boils down to the need for unanimity, which sharply limits the number of possible decisions. A compensation for this lies in distributing important administrative offices strictly according to proportional representation.

This was followed by a rapid dismantling of the group split, which began in the Netherlands as early as the 1960s. In accordance with a general trend towards the relativization of religious and ideological identifications, the organizations, whether it is church or political, could less and less rely on their “own people” wanting to participate in sufficient numbers. Some of them had to give up as a result, others joined forces with their opponents to form non-denominational newspapers, hospitals or leisure clubs “for all Christians”, and still others defined their audience in such a way that belief or unbelief was no longer important. The change from a class and confessional party to a people's party, which had already taken place elsewhere, was also made up for.

In Europe, this type of divided society seemed to be a thing of the past.

It is different in some countries on the periphery of modernity.

Given the expectation that they could only choose between civil war and dictatorship, interest in consensus democracy remained lively in many of them - with varying degrees of success, as Hellemans adds, referring to Lebanon or Bosnia-Herzegovina, where consensus democracy either even wages civil war can not avert it or can only avert it through external intervention.