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Posts Tagged ‘Antiparliamentarism’

The new volume in the series Parlamente in Europa, edited by Marie-Luise Recker and Andreas Schulz, both of the German Commission for the History of Parliamentarism and Political Parties, includes a chapter I wrote:

Der Feind im eigenen Hause.
Antiparlamentarismus im Reichstag 1867-1918
(The Enemy Within: Antiparliamentarism in the Reichstag 1867-1918)

Abstract
Taking the German imperial Reichstag as a case study, the chapter studies the behavior of parliamentarians critical of the institution in which they were themselves members. Combining some famous individual cases (Wilhelm Liebknecht, Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau) with a statistical analysis of the debates’ minutes, it argues that in most cases, even the most ardent anti-parliamentarians were much more integrated into the House’s common practices and culture than their aggressive utterances would suggest.

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Last week (May 7-8), I participated in an international conference titled “Parlamentarismuskritik und Antiparlamentarismus in Europa” [Criticism of Parliamentarism and Anti-Parliamentarism], organized by the German Kommission für Geschichte des Parlamentarismus and EuParl.net, a European research network on the history of parliaments.

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Besides a keynote speech by Dr. Norbert Lammert, speaker of the German Bundestag, I had the opportunity to discuss the varieties and modes of criticism of parliament and parliamentarism with a number of renowned experts in the field. My own presentation focussed on the question to what extent antiparliamentary sentiments and discourses current in the German Empire found their way into the ‘lion’s den’, the Reichstag itself. Combining qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis, I attempted to shed some new light on a few famous cases of antiparliamentary discourse in the imperial parliament as well as on their wider relevance for its political culture and modes of communication.

The conference’s program may be found here. A publication of the proceedings is planned.

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