Norman analyzes Swedish social democratic thinking in the 1930s and the form that Weimar lessons took there. Focusing on the writings of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, both enormously influential intellectual figures for social democracy during this period, it traces how the re-evaluation of democratic politics informed by Weimar’s collapse that occurred elsewhere shaped Swedish social democracy. From the analysis of social democratic thought in Sweden emerges a more general point regarding analogical reasoning and lesson-drawing in politics. The Swedish self-image as an avant-garde in rational social reform provided a degree of blindness that reduced the scope for critical self-reflection. Its unique position in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s allowed social democracy to play out unbounded in its self-perceived rationality in what could be achieved through state intervention, allowing for both highly progressive reforms and more troubling and intrusive aspects of social programs.

In this concluding chapter, the authors summarize the findings of the volume’s contributions and further develop the notion of the Weimar analogy as providing central clues about conceptions of modernity in the postwar era. It further emphasizes the multiple ways in which Weimar has been mobilized in different contexts, how it has worked as a cultural symbol, and why it has had such a profound impact on postwar political thinking in the West. The chapter, finally, expands on what we may take away from the studies in this volume for a more general understanding of the role of analogies and historical lessons for political thought.

In this introductory chapter, Lebow and Norman identify the Weimar Republic and its collapse as the paradigmatic historical example shaping political thinking about fragility and robustness in the postwar world. It spells out the volume’s analytical focus on Weimar lessons in comparative perspective and identifies its theoretical starting points in a broader scholarly field concerned with the role of historical analogies in politics.

We started off this volume by highlighting the European political order's ambivalent relationship with democracy. This ambivalence is also mirrored in the scholarly debates that study democratic challenges, shortcomings and possible solutions. Questions arise at every turn about how best to transpose democratic principles beyond the nation-state. The book's contributions have shed light on the previously less explored trade-offs we face when contemplating democracy in the European political order, characterised by advanced economic and legal integration with the European Union (EU) at its core. We have taken an open-ended approach to these discussions, asking the contributors to engage with different aspects of European democracy, current and past, using the exploration of particular dilemmas related to these aspects as the common thread for discussions.

The volume's focus on democratic dilemmas veers away from the grand theories of democracy and European integration as exemplified by the supranational versus intergovernmental perspectives that informed debates on the EU's democratic deficit in the 1990s and early 2000s. Several of the book's contributions venture beyond these debates to highlight other salient tensions in the emergent political order in Europe. The grand theory debates were in some sense necessary to identify the key dividing lines in early discussions on European democracy. However, they ultimately drew these lines between fundamentally different conceptions of what characterised the European political order, conceptions which then came with implications for how they understood the conditions for democracy in Europe – within as well as beyond states. The intergovernmental perspective focused on European states and the ways in which they coordinated themselves within the framework of international cooperative arrangements. Democratic representation and accountability were consequently seen as exclusively tied to the level of EU member states and focused on the representatives who negotiated the shape and form of cooperative arrangements in the EU. Thinking about European democracy beyond the state was deemed superfluous. The supranational perspective, in contrast, conceived of an emerging legal and political order centred on the EU that fundamentally challenged the system of sovereign states.

The European political order has an ambivalent relationship with democracy. Democratic concerns have been part of the discussions on European cooperation since its inception in the aftermath of the Second World War. In the early days of postwar reconstruction, however, transnational cooperation built around democratic principles was often viewed with suspicion by Western European political elites (Holland 1996). Lessons from the breakdown in democracy and fascist rule in the interwar years as well as the looming threat of Soviet communism, made them wary of the weaknesses they perceived to be inherent to democracy (Berman 2019; Müller 2013). Democratic concerns re-emerged later on as political elites, and gradually European citizens, found themselves in a setting where the institutions of the European Community and later the European Union (EU) had gained considerable influence over politics in the member states. This triggered wide-ranging debates – both academic and non-academic, especially after the end of the Cold War – regarding the genuine possibility that the European political order might operate according to something resembling robust democratic principles. How such principles can and should be applied beyond the nation-state remains an issue of key concern for citizens, politicians and academics.

Our volume adds to long-standing discussions on how democracy might be transposed to a European political order with the EU at its centre. We take a previously less explored perspective on these issues by placing the multi-dimensional character of democracy front and centre. The democratic dilemmas in plural referred to in the book's title signifies a shift in analytical perspective from discussions on democracy as a unified concept, where the main dilemma has been identified as one between democracy realised at the national level or at the supranational level. We instead choose a disaggregated view on European democracy, taking a step back to consider different dimensions of democratic politics and the tensions and trade-offs that the application of these aspects to the European political order entails. The contributors to this volume engage in focused discussions on democracy's different dimensions such as representation, democratic contestation and the notion of citizenship in relation to the EU.

This chapter defines robustness and fragility, argues that they can only be determined confidently in retrospect, but that assessments made by political actors, whilst subjective, have important political implications. We suggest some of the consideration that may shape these assessment. They include ideology, historical lessons, and the Zeitgeist. We go on to describe the following chapters, providing an outline of the book.