Martin Conway

The Rise and Fall of Western Europe's Democratic Age, 1945–1973

Why did western Europe become so suddenly democratic after 1945? After the upheavals of the previous decade the rather placid politics that follows the war is at first sight difficult to explain. This article seeks to go beyond the tendency of much historical writing to see the hegemonic parliamentary democracy of the roughly twenty-five years after 1945 as the product of exhaustion, economic prosperity or the constraints imposed by the Cold War. Instead, it argues that a path towards democracy can be detected within the events of the war years which then came to fruition in the rather conservative and limited democratic structures of the postwar decades. This Democratic Age then came to a conclusion in the renewed contestation of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Democracy in Postwar Western Europe: The Triumph of a Political Model

The most striking feature of the history of postwar Western Europe is the remarkable uniformity of its political structures. From Italy in the south to the Scandinavian countries in the north, parliamentary democracy became the standard model of political organization. There were of course manifold and substantial points of difference between the fifteen or so states that constituted the somewhat truncated territories of Cold War Western Europe. Some were monarchies, others were or, in the case of Italy, became republics; most were centralized regimes, while the Federal Republic of Germany emphatically was not. Some such as France and Germany acquired new regimes, while the Low Countries and Switzerland remained loyal to their preexisting constitutions or, in the case of the United Kingdom, failed to acquire a constitution at all. Above all, there remained the very different regimes of the Iberian peninsula and of Greece, where the limited and often Potemkinite structures of parliamentarism could not disguise the fact that real power lay elsewhere. Yet, even taking into account all of these differences, it is the sameness of the political regimes of postwar Western Europe which constitutes their most striking feature. Never perhaps since the ancien régime monarchies of Europe in the eighteenth century had a single political model acquired, and more importantly maintained, such a dominance. Viewed from the end of the twentieth century, the political landscape of Europe from the end of the 1940s to the social and political changes of the 1960s appears neat, controlled and ever so slightly boring. A Europe which in the previous generation had seemed to possess an inexhaustible ability to generate fierce Martin Conway

Catholic politics in Europe 1918–1945

The history of Catholic political movements has long been a missing dimension of the history of Europe during the twentieth century. Martin Conway explores the fascinating history of Catholic political movements in Europe between 1918 and 1945, demonstrating the crucial role which Catholics played in the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, the events of the Spanish Civil War and of the Second World War. Drawing on the findings of recent research, Conway shows how Catholic political movements formed a vital element of the political life of Europe during the inter-war years. In countries as diverse as France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Austria, as well as further east in Poland, Slovakia, Croatia, and Lithuania, Catholic political parties flourished. Inspired by the values of Catholicism, these movements fought for their own political ideals; hostile to both liberal democracy and totalitarian fascism, Catholics were a third force in European politics. During the Second World War, Catholic political movements continued to pursue their own goals; some chose to fight alongside the German armies, other groups joined Resistance movements to fight against German oppression and for a new social and political order based on Catholic principles. Catholic Politics in Europe will provide an original key point of reference for twentieth century history, for comparison with fascist and communist movements of the period, and will give insight into the present-day character of Catholicism.

Europe in Exile: European Exile Communities in Britain 1940-1945

During the Second World War London was transformed into a European city, as it unexpectedly became a place of refuge for many thousands of European citizens who through choice or the accidents of war found themselves seeking refuge in Britain from the military campaigns on the Continent of Europe. Soldiers, prime ministers, monarchs, bureaucrats, women and children all found themselves thrust into the uncertainties and perils of existence in an unfamiliar culture. This phenomenon of European exile in Britain has hitherto been a neglected feature of historical research on the Second World War. In this innovative volume, an international team of historians consider the exile groups from Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Poland, Norway and Czechoslovakia.

The Extreme Right in Inter-War Francophone Belgium: Explanations of a Failure

Few aspects of the troubled history of inter-war Europe have attracted such exhaustive attention from historians as the development of the extreme Right. Initial explanations by contemporaries have long since given way to a scholarly industry of monographs, articles and sociological and electoral analyses which have done much to enrich our understanding of the complex factors which lay behind the growth, success and ultimate failure of ’fascism’.’ It is not difficult to comprehend the reasons for this interest. Europe did indeed witness in the 1920s and 1930s a remarkable upsurge in movements of the extreme Right in places as diverse as Spain and Slovakia or Norway and Greece. It was the Right, and more especially its more extreme and unpleasant variants, which ’set the agenda’ of European politics in the inter-war years. While the Left remained, for much of the period, caught somewhat awkwardly between nineteenthcentury Marxist determinism and social democratic reformism

The Politics of Democracy in Twentieth-Century Europe: Introduction

The apparent triumph of democracy in Europe after 1989 was as exhilarating as it was unanticipated. A method of government that in the 1930s had seemed doomed to extinction had, by the end of the century, come to be seen as normative. In contrast to the 1930s, moreover, this modern democracy was now intimately associated with political stability and economic prosperity. Despite this late twentieth-century apotheosis of ‘democracy’, however, it is easy to forget that democracy had not only been made to work, but that it had also been tamed. Events since 1989 suggest that what Charles Maier has termed the struggle since the French Revolution to make democracy ‘safe for the world’1 had finally been won. Maier’s comment is an apt reminder of the importance of locating the ‘democracy’ of the late twentieth century within a proper historical context, and that conceptions of democracy cannot be taken as timeless or unchanging. The democracy that appeared to fail in the interwar years was not, therefore, necessarily the same as that which succeeded after 1945. Likewise, the triumph of a particular conception of democracy in the late twentieth century represented the failure not only of the alternatives to democracy, but also of alternative forms of democracy. The study of democracy in twentieth-century Europe has been dominated to a remarkable degree both by political scientists and by methodologies derived from political science. In particular, there has been a flowering of interest since the mid-1970s in processes of change from democratic to authoritarian regimes and, now overwhelmingly, from authoritarian regimes to democracies. These ‘transitions’ have been assiduously tracked, recorded, compared and contrasted by scholars such as Juan P. Linz, Alfred Stepan and Samuel P. Huntington. An entire sub-discipline Tom Buchanan and Martin Conway

The Christian churches and politics in Europe, 1914–1939

Any survey of the power and influence of the Christian churches in Europe undertaken in the summer of 1939 would have been largely pessimistic. Be it in the few remaining parliamentary regimes of Europe or the heterogeneous and increasing number of authoritarian, quasi-authoritarian or simply dictatorial regimes that were becoming the new European norm, the influence of the Christian churches, political parties and values appeared to have receded considerably over the twenty-five years since the outbreak of the First World War. Socialism, still rooted in much of Europe in the anti-clerical culture of its nineteenth-century origins, had become a major electoral force and an intermittent party of government in many states. In addition, its fission after the First World War had given rise to a militantly atheist communism which, despite its repeated failure to extend its power in Europe beyond the frontiers of the Soviet Union, had established itself by the 1930s as a durable and, in some areas, important presence in European politics. Undoubtedly the most dramatic trend, however, was the emergence of forms of right-wing politics separate from or even emphatically hostile to Christian ideas. Though elements of this ‘dechristianisation’ of the political right had been evident since at least themiddle decades of the nineteenth century, it acquired emphatic importance after the First World War. Italian Fascism and German-Austrian Nazism were dissimilar and profoundly unstable amalgams of diverse ideological influences, within which Christian ideas, both Catholic and (in the case of Germany) Protestant in origin, had a significant presence.

Reply to Jones

Historians are from Mars and political scientists are from Venus (or was it the other way round?). The most striking feature of Erik Joness stimulating and generous response to my article is the way in which it highlights the divergent approaches to the postwar era adopted by historians and political scientists. In many respects, this is a very good thing. We need the stimuli provided by those rooted in different traditions bringing their distinctive approaches to the same subject matter, just as, for the early medieval period, historians, archaeologists and literary scholars confront the fragmentary evidence of post-Roman Europe in contrasting but often mutually enriching ways.1 It is nevertheless remarkable, and also depressing, how little communication there has hitherto been between political science and history in the field of post-1945 Europe. There are familiar general reasons for this situation, notably the pillarised structures of academe in which practitioners of the two disciplines pursue different careers, attend different conferences and occupy different buildings or simply different floors within the same building. But there are also reasons particular to the study of postwar Europe. The ascendancy of a model-based approach to political science in which history was absent or reduced to the status of an evidential mine was reinforced by the slowness of historians to regard Europe after 1945 as anything more than the period after the war was over. Much, on both sides, has now changed, and there is clearly space for an approach that draws on both disciplines. In this respect, I can only echo the powerful plea of Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann in their introduction to the excellent volume Life After Death, published after I wrote my initial article: