ABSTRACT
England is nearly the oldest parliamentary country in the world. Parliament always means parties, seeking support for different policies and led by ambitious men. In Europe – apart from Soviet Russia where Stalin became an absolute dictator – this kind of ‘authoritarian’ rule appeared in the twenty years between the wars in every country except the constitutional monarchies of Britain, Scandinavia, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, and three Republics, France, Switzerland and Czechoslovakia. Most of the European countries in which there were dictatorships or ‘authoritarian’ rulers before the Second World War are now controlled by Communist Parties, no less arbitrarily. In the western world there are three countries, Turkey, Portugal and Spain, in which the parliamentary system was discarded between the wars. In Spain, unlike any other European country except Russia, the overthrow of the parliamentary system was the result of a terrible civil war. The civil war of 1936 – 1939 was the last phase of a long fever.
