ABSTRACT: Interview, during which Professor Quagliarello outlines the differences between the "Anglo-Saxon" democracies and the "continental" ones. The "Anglo-Saxon" democracies have an empirical, not ideological, basis: therefore they "adapt better to social and historical changes". There are differences between the American democracy and the British one that can be explained historically, in the sense that the American model is an attempt to adapt the British model to the new reality of America. At any rate, faced to the challenge of totalitarianism, the two Anglo-Saxon models reacted better than the continental societies. Also, the two political systems are not dominated by the party of "social integration", which is typical instead of the continent.

(1994 - IL QUOTIDIANO RADICALE, 23 November 1993)

Why has democracy worked better historically and has proven to be more solid with respect to the challenges of history in the Anglo-Saxon countries and in North America, compared to the nations of continental Europe? Do the Anglo-Saxon people have different "genes" by any chance?

"The Anglo-Saxon democracy, the North American one in particular", explains Gaetano Quagliarello, professor of history of contemporary Europe at the University of L'Aquila, "is much more empirical; the democracy of the continental countries is, by contrast, ideological. The Anglo-Saxon institutions are therefore much more adaptable to social and historical changes than those of continental Europe".

So is there a North American model of democracy?

Obviously. It is a form of democracy that is the direct offspring of the Anglo-Saxon democracy, namely of the British model.

What relationship is there between the British model and the North American model?

The fundamental difference between the two models consists in the presidentialism of the American system. The British model envisions a cabinet government. In Great Britain there is a direction relationship between the executive and the legislative branches; in the U.S. instead there is a separation between the two powers. On the other hand, the North American presidential system is an offspring og the British one. The American constitutionalists - the group of the "Federalist" - those who drafted the Constitution of the United States of America, kept in mind the British model. Theirs was an attempt to apply that system to a reality that originated as a mass democracy, and that did not possess the historical sedimentation in which the Westminster model had formed itself.

In other words, the North American model is nothing but an attempt to adapt the Anglo-Saxon democracy to the concrete reality of the United States.

Yes. The British model was the great political myth of the liberal classes of the entire world between the nineteenth and the twentieth century. There are dozens of books that prove the impossibility of reproducing artificially the British system. It is not simply the fruit of institutional choices: it is the result of the historical sedimentation I mentioned before. The intuition of the Founding Fathers of America was that, to maintain the empirical character of the British model it was necessary to switch to a presidentialist system. This allowed them to reintroduce, in a different context, i.e. outside of the British historical context, the empirical characteristics of that system.

But what does "empirical" system mean?

It is an institutional system that manages to provide valid answers to strongly variable situations. It is a strongly flexible system. That is why (but obviously not only for this reason) while continental Europe was in serious trouble in the face of the challenge of totalitarianism, the British Model, both in its British and North American version, succeeded in confronting this challenge.

But what are the institutional characteristics that allow this empirical tendency, this strong adaptability?

The system of parties of the Anglo-Saxon countries is much more simplified, and tends to be based on two parties only. But the key feature is another one: the political systems of continental Europe are dominated by the so-called party of social integration; the political forces of the Anglo-Saxon and North American model are, instead, much more empirical.

What does "party of social integration" mean exactly?

It is that party that aimed to integrate citizens in a counter-society, providing a total answer to their needs, including existential ones. The prototype of this model is the Spd, the German social democratic party.