Between stability and democracy dominant coalitions and their radical challengers in interwar Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Finland and Hungary

The dissertation argues that three key processes that shaped relations between dominant coalitions and their challengers strongly contributed to democratization or its reversals in Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Finland, and Hungary during the interwar period. These three processes: coalition formation in order to stabilize the center; subjugating armed groups under state control; and including and excluding radical extremes, determined who were insiders and outsiders within the system, and set the frame of interactions between institutional and non-institutional politics in the countries. Domestic interpretations concerning international pressures further shaped the relations between groups and provoked reactions that either contributed to democratization or to a move away from democracy. Arguing against the dominant view of classifying the successor states as undemocracies or authoritarian regimes plain and simple, the dissertation claims that like new and consolidating democracies today, the new states created after WWI struggled constantly between crisis and stability, democratization or the reversal of the process. The main enemy of democracy in the successor states was not authoritarianism or dictatorship, but a situation of bipolar extremism where radical groups in both left and right extremes fought each other and the centrist establishment on one hand. On the other hand tolerance towards certain non-democratic groups from the part of the dominant coalitions, and exclusion and repression of opposition forces threatened democracy equally. Democratization from this perspective was a long-term process which was contested and international, and a sum of interactions between institutional and non-institutional actors.