Opinion Garret FitzGeraldThe drama of Venezuela, where the radical President Chavez has survived the latest right-wing attempt to depose him - this time by constitutional means rather than by a coup - raises the question of why Europe and Latin America developed along such different social and political lines in the 19th and 20th centuries
Whereas by the end of the 19th century Europe had developed a powerful and sophisticated middle class, which in the early 20th century proved capable of handling the complex transition to democracy with universal suffrage, Latin American society seems to have remained polarised between a dominant post-colonial ruling class and a repressed majority of the people.
Even where, as in Argentina and Chile, the indigenous population had largely disappeared, and where for some decades in the 20th century stable and economically successful states appeared to have emerged, this eventually proved illusory. First in Argentina, and later, in 1973, in Chile, emerging democracy proved vulnerable to class tensions - admittedly in different ways in the two states, but in both cases with the same result: the emergence of repressive and cruel right-wing dictatorships. As in so many other parts of Latin America, an upper and middle class proved incapable of accepting the need for social reform.
Why did events in Europe in the 20th century take such a different course, albeit one that in mid-century was marred by a brief period of fascist dictatorships? Universal suffrage was an early 20th century development in Europe.
During the preceding century, and especially in the aftermath of that Year of Revolutions, 1848, Europe's almost exclusively monarchical system of government, (for at that period only post-revolutionary France and idiosyncratic federal Switzerland were not monarchies), had increasingly come to be constrained by elected parliaments.
During the course of the 19th century these bodies, elected by a limited suffrage that was largely restricted to members of the rapidly growing middle class, used their parliamentary role to exercise increasing restraint over taxation. But in many countries parliaments had little or no say in relation to foreign policy or issues of peace and war - matters that were left to governments, in conjunction with still influential monarchs, who in some cases worked closely with military leaders.
By the start of the 20th century pressure for an extension of the suffrage in Europe, at least in national elections, was becoming irresistible, at least for male voters in national elections, although in local elections universal suffrage on a "one man, one vote" basis was slower to emerge - being unwisely withheld in Northern Ireland, for example, until the early 1970s.
Women were slower to secure the right to vote. Although at the foundation of the new Irish State this was agreed without debate, younger women in the UK did not get the right to vote until 1928 - and in Switzerland not until the 1970s.
However difficult it may be for us today to understand the opposition to universal suffrage, it should not require too great an effort of historical empathy to grasp the fears of the aristocracy and the enfranchised middle class at the prospect of the under-privileged majority becoming empowered by universal suffrage to enact more or less confiscatory tax legislation that could have transferred massive resources to them at the expense of the privileged minority.
Indeed, the question we should be asking ourselves is not why universal suffrage was feared by the ruling class, but rather why in fact the introduction of universal suffrage throughout Europe in the early 20th century did not lead in any country to a democratic take-over of power by the majority under-privileged working-class - a development which the still-powerful aristocracy and bourgeoisie clearly deeply feared would happen.
Whatever about the Continent, we in Ireland know what happened in this respect in the UK, of which Ireland then formed part.
The emergence at Westminster of a new Labour Party, at a time when the powerful Liberal Party had itself become extremely radical, must have seemed hugely threatening to people of property. In fact the legislation introduced by the post-1906 British Liberal government was far more progressive than anything that most European governments - including governments in Ireland - would today dare to contemplate.
For the measures they adopted included steps to make income tax more progressive, as well as the introduction of new taxes on property, including land, and also inheritance taxes. And, of course, all this was accompanied by legislation effecting major transfers to the disadvantaged through old age pensions and unemployment assistance - legislation that incidentally had the effect of reversing what had been a persistent outflow of resources from Ireland to Britain throughout the 19th century.
All this was a kind of pre-emptive strike by middle class social reformers - men like Lloyd George and Winston Churchill - in advance of the introduction of full universal suffrage. As a result of their reforms, when the vote was eventually extended to the entire population, the Labour Party, representing the interests of the working class majority in Britain, continued to remain a minority in parliament until as late as 1945.
Thus, in this instance an early and very radical pre-emptive strike by Liberal reformers, combined, one may guess, with the survival of an element of class deference at least until the end of the second World War, helped to ensure that the advent of universal suffrage did not precipitate a democratic social revolution in Britain. But I suspect that both in Britain and elsewhere in Europe there was another factor at work, about which little has been said: the emergence, in parallel with universal suffrage, of a skilled working class that was beginning to aspire to becoming part of the middle class, at least to the extent of feeling that it had a stake in society - that in some measure it was becoming part of the "haves" rather than of the "have nots".
Some members of the working class were already starting to feel that, like the upper and middle classes, they too would have something to lose by a radical transformation of society.
In much of Latin America, by contrast, society has remained largely pyramidal in shape - with a fearful minority at the top still feeling threatened by the masses below. The persistence of this situation in most of South America explains the continued tensions between a very privileged upper and middle class and the still repressed mass of the population in countries like Venezuela.