Introduction: Social Mobility, Meritocracy and Dictatorship
Presented with Alexander Mayer at an international workshop on ‘Social Mobility, Meritocracy, and Dictatorship in 20th-Century Europe’, Bundeswehr-Universität München, 21 July 2025.
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This workshop deals with the role of meritocratic ideas in the history of political ideologies and with the political effects of social mobility. It aims to establish a comparative perspective by bringing together scholars who work on right-wing and socialist regimes in the 20th century.
In current research on the rise of populist far-right parties, disappointed expectations of socio-economic status and perceived deprivation have emerged as important factors in explaining why voters are attracted to these parties. Earlier approaches to the history of fascism also focused on the experience or the perceived threat of downward social mobility in order to explain why certain social groups supported fascist movements. However, such explanations proved inadequate. As a result, more recent scholarship has focused on ideology and social practice rather than social class and social mobility to explain the success of fascist movements.
However, it can also be fruitful to bring social mobility and meritocratic ideas back into the discussion. Recent research on the German case shows how the Nazi regime propagated a specific version of meritocracy. Nazism promised more equal opportunities of upward social mobility to those who were not excluded from the national community for political, anti-Semitic or racist reasons. At the same time, the regime sought to redefine notions of merit. It aimed to counter intellectualist notions of merit and emphasised the contribution to the alleged goals of the national community instead of individual striving.
State socialist regimes also utilised social mobility and meritocratic ideas for their own purposes. Initially, they attempted to eliminate middle-class privileges through educational reforms and the targeted promotion of people from working-class and peasant families. The forced exchange of elites generated a surge in social mobility. In the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, however, the chances of social advancement fell significantly again from the 1960s onwards, with cultural capital and political loyalty gaining in importance. What is more, state socialism pursued a largely egalitarian policy on both a symbolic and material level. This raises the question of how important the category of social mobility was in the experience of people under state socialism.
Hoping that both fields of research can profit from an exchange, we are particularly interested in the following aspects:
1) Social mobility and political support:
Did socialist and right-wing regimes use the promise of meritocracy and upward social mobility to gain support? How did propaganda of this kind relate to barriers against social mobility that existed in European societies in the first half of the 20th century?
2) Political ideologies and conceptions of merit:
How did right-wing and socialist regimes deal with pre-existing ideas of merit? Did they try to redefine notions of merit in order to promote different values? How successful were such attempts in the long run?
3) Social mobility and the stability of authoritarian regimes:
Did policies that aimed at promoting social mobility create political loyalties? How did political favouritism impact on popular attitudes towards these regimes? Did disappointed expectations of social mobility undermine support for these regimes?
4) The experience of social mobility under dictatorships:
How did upward social mobility shape individuals’ attitudes towards authoritarian regimes? How did socially mobile men and women narrate their biographies? Did notions of social mobility remain relevant for people in the socialist states? How did those who had profited from dictatorships deal with their past after regime changes?