the rise and fall of western europe's democratic age, 1945 ... · to be published as the death...

The Rise and Fall of Western Europe's Democratic Age, 1945-1973Author(s): Martin ConwaySource: Contemporary European History, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Feb., 2004), pp. 67-88Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20081192 .

Accessed: 08/12/2014 10:43

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Cambridge University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toContemporary European History.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 163.1.208.155 on Mon, 8 Dec 2014 10:43:57 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/20081192?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


The Rise and Fall of Western

Europe's Democratic Age,

1945-1973

MARTIN CONWAY

Postwar western Europe has long been le plat pays of the historiography of Europe in the twentieth century. Survey histories of Europe's evolution during the twentieth

century tend to pass over almost in embarrassed silence the history of this least

remarkable period of Europe's twentieth century, preferring to dwell instead on

periods both more murderous and more interesting.1 There was indeed something almost unnaturally calm about the history of much of western Europe from the

terminus of the conflicts produced within and around the Second World War in

1948-9 to the re-emergence of socioeconomic conflict and political contestation in

the late 1960s and the early 1970s. There were of course many exceptions to this rule:

the demise of the French Fourth Republic amidst the disintegration of state authority in Algeria, the artificially glacial character of politics in the Iberian peninsula and the

persistent undercurrents of sociopolitical violence in Italy. Nevertheless, they do not, I believe, detract significantly from what should be the primary focus of historians of

postwar western Europe. This must be to explain the particular muted character of

western Europe in the roughly twenty-five year period from the end of the 1940s to

the early 1970s.

This essay is therefore intended to explore in a highly schematic form some of the

ways in which historians might choose to approach this period. My own approach arises from the archival work that I have been undertaking for a forthcoming study of

Belgian politics in the immediate postwar era.2 It also reflects, however, my evolving

interest in the broader nature of postwar western Europe, which I have explored in

I am grateful to Tom Buchanan for his comments on this paper, as well as to all those who responded to it at the workshop organised by Gy?rgy P?teri and Contemporary European History at the Collegium

Budapest in March 2003. 1

See, for example, Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (London: Allen Lane,

1998); Richard Vinen, A History in Fragments. Europe in the Twentieth Century (London: Little, Brown and

Company, 2000). Others, notably William Hitchcock's recent book, seem to eschew any interpretation in favour of a predominantly diplomatic history of the age, enlivened by occasional vignettes of social and

cultural change in European daily life: William Hitchcock, The Struggle for Europe: the Turbulent History of a Divided Continent, 1945-2002 (New York: Doubleday, 2003).

2 To be published as The Death of Belgium. The Normalization of Politics in a West European State 1944-47

(2004).

Contemporary European History, 13, 1 (2004), pp. 67-88 ? 2004 Cambridge University Press

DOI: 10.1017/S0960777303001474 Printed in the United Kingdom



68 Contemporary European History

a number of recent articles. This work arises at least in part from my dissatisfaction

with the way in which the history of this period has been conceptualised in much

recent historiography, which seems to me to be characterised by two somewhat

contradictory trends.

On the one hand, historians have sought to

explain, or even excuse, what they

regard as the 'strange' stability of postwar western Europe in terms of the absence

of the forces that otherwise serve to make the history of twentieth-century Europe

interesting. In particular, there is an inevitable tendency on the part of those many

historians who arrive at their study of the postwar era from a much greater familiarity

with the preceding era to emphasise the absence of the social and ideological dialectics

that had generated extremist movements of left and right in much of Europe between

1900 and 1945. Fascism and the other forms of authoritarianism which had become

caught up in its tentacles had imploded in the war years, leaving only vague and often

subterranean traces in the history of postwar Europe, while communism was forced

into a pro-Soviet ghetto, partly

as a consequence of the Cold War and partly as a

consequence of the success with which the Soviet leadership recaptured control of

the disparate European communist parties in the late 1940s. With the marginalisation of these forces, Europe collapsed, partly from exhaustion and partly even from a lack

of ideological imagination, into a conformist politics of the centre ground.4 On the other hand, historians have also emphasised the hegemonic power of

certain other forces, which it is suggested forced west European politics into a

new and by implication somewhat artificial mould. Foremost among these was the

sudden and unexpected impact of the Cold War, which resulted in the imposition on

non-communist Europe of a US overlordship and a concomitant politics of liberal

democracy and anti-communism.5 The straitjacket of the Cold War was reinforced

by the no less unpredictable force of postwar economic prosperity. The sudden and

sustained impact on the populations of western Europe of the new

conquering forces

of consumerism and welfare capitalism served to create, in the dismissive phrase of the

3 'Legacies of Exile: The Exile Governments in London and the Politics of Post-War Europe', in

Martin Conway and Jos? Gotovitch, eds., Europe in Exile: Refugee Communities in Great Britain, 1940

1945 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2001), 255?74; 'Democracy in Postwar Western Europe. The

Triumph of a Political Model', European History Quarterly, 32 (2002), 59-84; 'The Age of Christian

Democracy. The Frontiers of Success and Failure', in Tom Kselman and Joseph Buttigieg, eds., Christian

Democracy: Historical Legacies and Comparative Perspectives (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,

2003), 43-67; 'The Greek Civil War: Greek Exceptionalism or Mirror of a European Civil War?', in Philip Carabott and Thanasis Sfikas, eds., Domestic and International Aspects of the Greek Civil War (forthcoming,

2004). 4

This shadow effect of the conflicts of the preceding era is, I think, particularly evident in the

approach adopted by Mazower, Dark Continent, and Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth

Century 1914-1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994) to post-1945 Europe. 5

This is particularly prominent in the 'failed revolution' approach adopted in much work on southern

Europe during the 1940s, whereby a presumed victory of the left was prevented in, for example, Greece

and Italy by external intervention and the internal mobilisation of the post-fascist forces of counter

revolution. See, for example, Tony Judt, ed., Resistance and Revolution in Mediterranean Europe 1939?1948

(London and New York: Routledge, 1989). Emphasis on the repressive weight of the Francoist regime in

Spain mirrors this approach: Michael Richards, A Time of Silence: Civil War and the Culture of Repression in Franco's Spain, 1936-1943 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).



The Rise and Fall of Western Europe's Democratic Age, 1945-1973 69

French communist poet Louis Aragon, 'une civilisation de frigidaires'.6 Enthralled

(in both senses of the term) by the new consumer wonderland (which formed such a

startling contrast to the situation east of the Iron Curtain and south of the Pyrenees),

west Europeans found themselves unable to conceive of a return to radical politics,

until their children woke themselves from this Marcusian slumber through the street

demonstrations and cultural conflicts of the late 1960s.

To explore here the shortcomings of these interpretations is probably unnecessary. As encapsulations of the broader narrative of the postwar era, they oscillate between

statements of the obvious and a rather too visible scorn for the temper of postwar

west European politics. Nobody would, for example, seek to deny the impact of Cold

War diplomacy on postwar western Europe, but it is similarly obvious that to regard it as an external phenomenon visited upon Europe by the global conflict between

the United States and the Soviet Union is an inadequate framework long rejected

by historians of international relations. Indeed, the causality could be reversed, to

the extent that the Cold War (or at least its initial genesis) can be seen equally well

as a process 'made in Europe' and imposed on the no more than semi-conscious

superpowers.7 These problems suggest that much work remains to be done. Europe 'after 1945'

- to employ the revealing phrase used in many books - has for too long remained part of a continuous present. After the changes of 1989?90, the western

Europe of the post-1945 period passed in some sense into history. But, as Europe

during 2001-4 experiences a second fundamental change in its shape and structures,

so there is an enhanced need not merely to 'confine' the postwar decades to history but to understand them.

What, then, might be the elements of a better approach? A good starting point

might be to define a little more closely what we are seeking to explain. Put briefly, the

phenomenon that historians need to address is the uniformity and stability of western

Europe in the period 1948?73. This bland statement contains three assumptions on

which it is worth dwelling a little. Uniformity is the most obvious and probably the least controversial of these. If one leaves on one side certain micro-sovereignties,

fifteen states in western Europe8 possessed largely similar political structures and

ruling parties within this period. Never since at least 1914 had Europe looked so

much alike, or seemed so bland.9 Stability is the second of these assumptions and is

of course more relative. But it is worth noting that the collapse of the French Fourth

Republic in 1958 provides a

unique example of what we are now doomed to term

6 Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1993), 38. 7

See, for example, Anne Deighton, The Impossible Peace. Britain, the Division of Germany and the Origins

of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); William Hitchcock, France Restored: Cold War

Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944-1934 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

Press, 1998), 7-9. 8

In no particular order, these were France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Belgium, the

Netherlands, Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Finland, Austria and Switzerland. I exclude Greece and Cyprus as distinctive cases.

9 For an interesting contemporary reflection on this phenomenon, see Theodore White, Fire in the

Ashes. Europe in Mid-century (London: Cassell, 1954), 19-27.




'regime change' in this period. Other states came close, notably Belgium in the royal

crisis of 1950, but they never quite achieved meltdown.10

The third assumption is that this is a period that one can define in terms of

a necessarily approximate beginning and end. The beginning is perhaps obvious:

European states exited from the conflicts of the Second World War at different times

and in very different ways. The politics of liberation Europe is a fascinating and as

yet still under-researched field in which military, political and social dynamics criss

crossed each other in complex and unexpected ways, but which culminated in the

re-establishment of state power, the avoidance of revolution (except in the strictly

legal dimension of the creation of new constitutions) and the setting of the molten

politics of the mid-1940s into formal frameworks and informal hierarchies.11 The

end is, however, distinctly less obvious. If historians have now begun to farm the

virgin lands of the 1960s, the 1970s remain as yet largely over the historiographical horizon. This is unsurprising. Apart from the obvious paucity of available sources

(except in the field of interstate relations), there is the broader problem of how one

should conceptualise a decade of bitter social conflicts, new ideological dynamics, and obstinate political stasis. To write about it is very difficult, and it is only to my

mind Paul Ginsborg who has so far provided us with an account of politics in Italy in that decade which succeeds in adopting a genuinely historical approach.12 My

own terminus date of 1973 is of course little more than arbitrary. It reflects, however,

a wish to emphasise the socioeconomic dynamics set in course by the oil crisis of

that year,13 rather than the more common tendency among historians to focus on

the events of 1968. The studies that we now possess of the protests of 1968 have

served to demonstrate that the events ofthat year had a significance that went further

than their rather limited political and social impact.14 But they also, I think, serve to

show that the forces that emerged in that year only acquired a real importance in the

early 1970s. Indeed, the common theme that emerged from a recent interdisciplinary

seminar on the 1960s in Oxford was principally that, to put it at its most simplistic, much ofthat which we think happened in the 1960s in fact occurred in the 1970s.15

10 Re Belgium in 1950, see Jules G?rard-Libois and Jos? Gotovitch, Leopold III. De l'an 40 ? l'effacement

(Brussels: Pol-His, 1991), and Paul Theunissen, 1930, Le d?nouement de la question royale (Brussels: Editions

Complexe, 1986). 11

These themes are implicit in the essays contained in Istvan Deak, Jan Gross and Tony Judt, eds.,

The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and its Aftermath (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

2000). 12

Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943?1988 (London: Penguin,

1990). 13

Nick Crafts and Gianni Toniolo similarly adopt the terminus year of 1973 in their study of postwar economic growth: Nick Crafts and Gianni Toniolo, 'Postwar growth: an overview', in Nick Crafts and

Gianni Toniolo, eds., Economic Growth in Europe since 1943 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1996), 7. 14

Carole Fink and Philipp Gassert, eds., 1968: The World Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1998); Kristin Ross, May '68 and its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2002). 15

This is of course to disagree with what one might term the maximalist account of the changes which occurred during the 1960s as presented in Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in

Britain, France, Italy and the United States c. 1938?c. 1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).



The Rise and Fall of Western Europe's Democratic Age, 1945?1973 71

If therefore one chooses to adopt these three assumptions of uniformity, stability

and terminus dates at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1970s, the

historians' agenda is perhaps a little clearer. Unlike political scientists, for whom the

principal goal is to construct a typology of the criteria that must be fulfilled for

democratic stability to be achieved,16 the task of historians is a finite and historically

specific one. What we are confronted by is one of those peculiar, and exceptional,

periods in European history when interstate conflict and political revolution are

largely absent from the map. As a rough comparison, one might think of the era

that followed the establishment of the Italian and German states and the repression of the Paris Commune. Around 1870-1, European politics took a new

shape, which

in turn reached some form of conclusion in the 'politics in a new key' that Carl

Schorske famously located in the 1890s.17 That period of the mid- to late nineteenth

century lacks, perhaps significantly, any generally accepted historical label, though in a British context I have always found Michael Bentley 's concept of 'politics

without democracy' not entirely inappropriate.18 In the same spirit, perhaps the best

approximation that one might offer to encapsulate the stability of western Europe between the late 1940s and the early 1970s would be 'western Europe's democratic

age'. Several major shortcomings of this phrase are of course

immediately apparent.

By focusing on a

particular form of politics, it fails to embrace the socioeconomic

changes of the era. Moreover, by privileging the democratic character of postwar

politics, it risks emphasising the strengths rather than the limitations of the rather

constrained form of democracy established after the Second World War. Perhaps most

seriously it might be seen to imply a return to the western and northern bias of much

historical writing on Europe. The Mediterranean is (partly) dismissed as an exception to a northern rule, while the east is excluded on the arbitrary basis of the imposition of Soviet-led communist regime. These are serious problems. Nevertheless, the label

does have the compensatory benefit that it focuses our attention on the political

character of the era when, compared with periods before and since, the spectrum of

possible politics in western Europe appeared to have been narrowed to a particular

model of predominantly parliamentary democracy19 Confronted by this reality of the dull rotation of coalition governments populated

by nationally and ideologically indistinguishable 'men in suits',20 the instinct of

historians is to think first in terms of origins. Just as we are accustomed to search for

16 See the list provided in Dirk Berg-Schlosser and Jeremy Mitchell, 'Conclusions and Perspectives',

in Dirk Berg-Schlosser and Jeremy Mitchell, eds., Conditions of Democracy in Europe 1919-39. Systematic Case Studies (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan, 2000), 464-5.

17 Carl Schorske, 'Politics in a New Key: An Austrian Trio', Journal of Modern History, 39 (1967),

343-86. 18

Michael Bentley, Politics without Democracy 1813-1914 (London: Fontana, 1984). 19

The Gaullist republic of the 1960s is of course a partial exception to this rule. But it is now being

recognised that the Gaullist party and, consequently, the French Parliament had a much greater impact on the politics of the era than it has been customary to assume: Jonathan Watson, 'The Internal Dynamics of Gaullism, 195 8-1969', DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2001.

20 Conway, 'Democracy in Postwar Western Europe', 60. 'A common greyness suffused all the men

elevated to power in postwar Europe - drab prime ministers, cold, little police chiefs, pickle-faced




the origins of wars, revolutions and genocides in twentieth-century Europe, so we

need to look for how the stability and uniformity of postwar Europe emerged out of

the almost twenty-year crisis that preceded it. This has many merits. Too much of the

historical writing on Europe during the Second World War has been preoccupied with agendas that tacitly

see the war years either as a self-contained phenomenon or as

the culmination of the conflicts of the preceding decades. This has resulted in much

excellent historical work, but even in some of the finest (notably Rod Kedward's

remarkable studies of wartime France),21 there seems to be a tendency

to neglect the

rather prosaic issue of outcome. The largely redundant debates about a Stunde Null in

Germany, and indeed elsewhere in Europe in 1945, are indicative of this problem.22 That the outcome of the various crises that had swept across

Europe since the early

1930s should not have been an implausible ahistorical caesura but a complex amalgam of restoration and renewal should surprise no historian. What is more challenging is

to analyse the nature of the forms of continuity and change evident in Europe after

1945.23 The multiple shadows of the war, and indeed of interwar conflicts, did of

course have a strong influence on subsequent events. Much energy, for example, has

recently been devoted to exploring the complex ways in which the populations and

states of postwar Europe remembered and forgot about different aspects of the war

years. This analysis of Europe's 'undigested past'24 does, however, tend to privilege the particularly 'postwar' character of the subsequent decades, as if the history of

western Europe after 1945 was little more than the after-shocks of the cataclysm

which had preceded it. This is no more than a partial truth, and we also need to

recognise that the contested struggle for postwar memory was often a mechanism by

which the political forces of Europe in the 1950s and 1960s competed for the present and the future by instrumentalising an increasingly distant past.25

To move the agenda of wartime history towards a greater preoccupation with

outcomes is therefore to go further than a one-directional preoccupation with seeking

out the legacies of the war in the postwar. It is also necessary to search for the postwar

in the wartime. To do so runs the obvious risk of teleology. Twenty-five years ago,

economists with their dry statistics and bulging brief cases have mumbled where once great men

thundered': White, Fire, 19-20. 21

Roderick Kedward, Resistance in Vichy France. A Study of the Ideas and Motivation in the Southern

Zone 1940-1942 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), and In Search of the Maquis. Rural Resistance in

Southern France 1942?1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 22

Writing about the Stunde Null rarely fails to convey an impression of regret that a more radical

rupture was not achieved in 1945. See, for example, Rebecca Boehling, A Question of Priorities. Democratic

Reform and Recovery in Postwar Germany (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 1996). 23

See the perceptive comments in Els Witte, 'Tussen restauratie en vernieuwing. Een introductie op de Belgische politieke evolutie tussen 1944 en 1950', in Els Witte, Jean-Claude Burgelman and Patrick

Stouthuysen, eds., Tussen restauratie en vernieuwing (Brussels: VUB Press, 1990), 51?2. 24

Luc Huyse and Steven Dhondt, Onverwerkt verleden. Collaboratie en repressie in Belgi?, 1942-1932

(Leuven: Kritak, 1991). 25 An excellent exploration of the postwar instrumentalisation of memory in western Europe is

provided in Pieter Lagrou, Patriotic Memory and National Recovery. The Legacy of Nazi Occupation in

Belgium, France and the Netherlands 1943?1963 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). See also

his 'Victims of Genocide and National Memory: Belgium, France and the Netherlands, 1945?1965', Past

and Present, 154 (1997), 181-222.




Paul Addison wrote a book on wartime Britain entitled The Road to 1945, which

now seems highly inadequate in its over-eager determination to 'read' the wartime

history of Britain in terms of a process leading to the Labour Party's electoral victory in 1945.26 Such an

interpretation neglects the often contradictory forces provoked

by the war years. Political radicalism and conservatism were both products of the

war; so too were a dramatic extension of state ambitions and a simultaneous erosion

of state authority. No search for the origins of post-1945 political stability within

wartime Europe can therefore ignore the powerful factors that made other outcomes

simultaneously possible. But, in acknowledging these, it would also be wrong to

throw the entire responsibility for the nature of the postwar political order onto

the accidents of the US military occupation of western Europe and the subsequent Cold War. The particular character of European democracy in the postwar decades, with its combination of parliamentary representation, corporatist negotiation and

a somewhat depoliticised individual freedom, had roots that can be found in the

events of the preceding decades and more especially of the war years. To search

for these requires, however, a reorientation of historiographical attention away from

highly visible phenomena such as collaboration and resistance towards less dramatic

processes of social and institutional evolution which ran through the 1930s and 1940s.

Any attempt at analysing these processes would clearly be beyond the scope of this

brief article. Three somewhat random and very brief examples may, however, suffice

to indicate the potential and also the limits of this search for the wartime origins of the postwar order. First, one

might take the case of the industrial working class.

Though it is customary to emphasise the important role that social conflicts played in European politics around the period of the liberation, it is remarkable how little

historical work has been done on the working class in this period. Moreover, that

which has been done has tended to be dominated by either Labourist or Marxist

agendas which alternately celebrate the good sense of trade unions in participating in

new structures of corporatist negotiation or bemoan the betrayal of the revolutionary

spirit of the proletariat by their reformist or Stalinist leaderships.27 Both approaches suffer from placing the political ahead of the social, and seem to me to be based on the

empirically dubious assumption that the war years had strengthened and radicalised

the European working class.

If one examines the social history of the working class in wartime Europe,

a rather different picture emerges.28 Though national experiences clearly varied,

the starting point almost everywhere must be that the working class, and more

26 Paul Addison, The Road to 1943: British Politics and the Second World War (London and New York:

Quartet, 1977). F?r a critique of Addison's argument, see Kevin Jeffreys, 'British Politics and Social Policy

during the Second World War', The Historical four nal, 30 (1987), 123?44. 27

Characteristic examples of these approaches are Stefan Berger, 'European Labour Movements and

the European Working Class in Comparative Perspective', in Stefan Berger and David Broughton,

eds., The Western European Labour Movement and the Working Class in the Twentieth Century (Oxford and

Washington, DC: Berg, 1995), 247, and Tom Behan, The Long-Awaited Moment. The Working Class and

the Italian Communist Party in Milan, 1943-1948 (New York: Peter Lang, 1997). 28

Some of the best work on the working class has been done on central Europe in the early communist

period. See, for example, Mark Pittaway, 'The Reproduction of Hierarchy: Skill, Working-Class Culture




especially the working-class communities of major industrial and urban centres, had

been hit disproportionately hard by the war. The heart of such communities was

often ripped out by policies of repression and exploitation. In the case of Belgium,

conscription in 1939?40, detention in prisoner-of-war camps after 1940, deportation

to German factories from 1942 onwards and aerial bombing from 1943, as well as

the enforced demobilisation of trade unions and the simple difficulty of acquiring sufficient access to food within urban communities, were all factors which destroyed

much of the internal coherence of the industrial working class.29 Far from emerging with a newfound confidence into the postwar era, the Belgian working class was

therefore a diminished and inchoate presence in postwar politics. The strike waves

that surged unpredictably across the major industrial centres throughout the 1940s were

expressions not of empowerment but of an often desperate wish to recover not

merely their prewar living standards but also a voice in the decision-making of the

postwar years. Trade unions were an inadequate mechanism for voicing working

class interests. In Belgium, as in many other areas of western Europe, they

were

fiercely divided between communist, socialist and Catholic organisations, and the

non-communist unions became embroiled in a prolonged and ultimately somewhat

fruitless pursuit of influence through state-encouraged structures of corporatist

negotiation.30 The consequence was a diminishing of the visibility and power of the working class in the politics of postwar Europe. Historians have often

pointed to the success with which notable elites succeeded in regaining control

of the political process, especially at a local level, after liberation.31 This, however, becomes more

comprehensible if one recognises how the war years had simultane

ously strengthened the power and profile of such notables while demobilising and

weakening the working class.

Second, let us consider the issue of localism. It has long been a common theme of

work on wartime Europe, notably on France and Italy, that the war years narrowed

horizons and gave a new importance to the local community. This was made manifest

at the liberation in the new-found municipalism, the rediscovery of communal

traditions and the emphasis on the purging

or cleansing of the local community.32

and the State in early Socialist Hungary', fournal of Modern History, 74 (2002), 737-69; Padraic Kenney,

Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists 1943-1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 29

Rik Hemmerijckx, 'La CMB dans la clandestinit?: un syndicat entre la contestation et l'int?gration', in Chauff?s au rouge. Histoires de la Centrale des M?tallurgistes de Belgique (Gent: CMB-AMSAB, 1990),

363-420; Dirk Luyten and Rik Hemmerijckx, 'Belgian Labour in World War II: Strategies of Survival,

Organisations and Labour Relations', European Review of History, 7 (2000), 207?27. See also Lynne Taylor, Between Resistance and Collaboration. Popular Protest in Northern France, 1940-43 (Basingstoke: Macmillan,

2000). 30

Dirk Luyten, Sociaal-economisch overleg in Belgi? sedert 1918 (Brussels: VUB Press, 1995), 97-156; Rik

Hemmerijckx, 'De socialistische vakbeweging en het sociaal pact', in Dirk Luyten and Guy Vanthemsche,

eds., Het Sociaal Pact van 1944 (Brussels: VUB Press, 1995), 227-45. See also the important study on the

1947 strikes in France: Robert Mencherini, Guerre froide, gr?ves rouges (Paris: Editions Syllepse, 1998). 31

See the illuminating case studies provided for Germany in Boehling, Question of Priorities. 32

Robert Gildea, Marianne in Chains. In Search of the German Occupation, 1940?1943 (London:

Macmillan, 2002), 421; Roderick Kedward, 'Introduction', in Roderick Kedward, and Nancy Wood,

eds., The Liberation of France: Image and Event (Oxford and Herndon, VA: Berg, 1995), 1-9; Martin




Only gradually, and rather imperfectly, did the national regain precedence over

the local, leaving behind a contested bundle of local memories (and often intense

divisions) as well as a pervasive

sense of loss as the normality of national rule was

reimposed.33 In many respects, the localism of the war years can be regarded as no

more than circumstantial. With the collapse of national bureaucracies and political

systems, local communities were thrown back on their own resources, and were

obliged to negotiate forms of coexistence with a variety of invading, occupying and

liberating authorities. The reworking of the local community, be it an urban quartier or a rural village, which this brought about was, however, a

phenomenon that had

important legacies. It was evident, for example, in the new passion that was

brought

to local politics (of which national politics were often merely the pale reflection), which remained a focus for political energies long after national politics had subsided

into a disciplined and predictable game.34 There was also perhaps a larger legacy. Just as, say, in Spain during the mid-1930s,

the disappearance of many of the explicit and implicit structures of government in wartime and liberation Europe (be it an Auvergnat village in 1943, a factory in Turin in 1944-5, or a Tyrolean village in 1945) had the effect of breaking the

link between the individual and the authority of the state, which had gradually

strengthened since the late nineteenth century. Memoirs and novelised accounts of

the war years are replete with examples of the strange sense of individual freedom

and personal uncertainty to which this hiatus gave rise.35 The increased importance of family networks and of informal social hierarchies was one of the consequences of

this new world. So too was the predictable increase in petty crime as Europeans

were

obliged to confront not a Manichean struggle of black and white but one of manifold

shades of grey. This unheroic mentality of'getting by' is now becoming the theme of

much recent work on the Alltagsgeschichte of the occupation years in Europe.36 Once

again, however, there is a tendency not to think through the implications of this

phenomenon for the character of postwar Europe. Yet its social legacies were surely

evident in the exuberant consumerism of the postwar era, as Europeans indulged

repressed appetites, and in the less disciplined and deferential character of the postwar

Conway, 'Justice in Postwar Belgium: Popular Pressures and Political Realities' in Deak, Gross and Judt, Politics of Retribution, 133-56.

33 Megan Ko reman, The Expectation of fustice. France 1944-46 (Durham, NC, and London: Duke

University Press, 1999), 260; R. Damiani and J.-P. Thuillier, 'Introduction ? l'histoire orale de la region du Nord (1936-1946)', Revue du Nord, 57 (1975), 315, 326-8.

34 E.g. Yves Le Maner, 'Town Councils of the Nord and Pas-de-Calais region: local power, French

power, German power', in Tim Kirk and Anthony McElligott, eds., Opposing Fascism. Community,

Authority and Resistance in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 97-119; Koreman,

Expectation of fustice, 230-43; Mencherini, Guerre froide, 206 and 213. 35

To cite four examples almost at random: Ren? Henoumont, Au bonheur des belges (Monaco: Editions

du Rocher, 1992), Janet Teissier du Cros, Divided Loyalties: A Scotswoman in occupied France (republished

Edinburgh: Canongate, 1992), ?talo Calvino, The Path to the Spiders' Nests (London: Jonathan Cape,

1998), and Elsa Morante, History: A Novel (London: Penguin, 2001). 36

Gildea, Marianne in Chains, exemplifies this trend.




years.37 In political terms too, its legacies were also perhaps apparent in a subtle

change in the political culture of western Europe. The surviving Europeans who

re-entered the structures of national politics at the end of the 1940s were relieved to

be alive but also newly reluctant to accept constraints on their individual freedom.

Once the rush of liberation had passed, Europeans seemed all too eager to disengage from wider political and ideological agendas, in order to 'return' (as it is always somewhat inaccurately expressed) to the private sphere. 'All we hoped for from the

liberation was to live normally again', as one woman from Toulouse commented to

an oral-history enquirer in the 1980s.38 The pursuit of normality took many forms, but its most striking manifestation in the political sphere was perhaps the more

circumspect and demanding attitude which Europeans adopted towards all forms

of political mobilisation.39 That there was some form of re-engagement by most

Europeans with democratic values during the war years has long been recognised.40

But this went hand in hand with a heightened sense of the potential costs and benefits

of any form of engagement. To parody the words of John F. Kennedy, citizens tended

to ask not what they could do for their rulers, but what their rulers could do for

them.

Finally, in terms of these examples, one

might consider state bureaucracies. Here

the lines of continuity are more visible. Historians have been at pains in recent decades

to break down the paper walls that divide prewar, wartime and postwar. Thus, for

example, we can see how much the initiatives of the Vichy regime owed to the

policies and personnel of the late Third Republic and how the shadow of Fascist

bureaucracies and mentalities extended into the postwar Italian Republic.41 If this

point is not to become simply a fin-de-si?cle polemic about the illusory revolutionary dawns of the 1940s, however, such continuity needs to be complemented by

an

awareness of the broader ways in which the state cultures of the 1940s were changing.

Thanks in part to the work of Jose Harris, Britain stands out as the historical example about which we are best informed. It is also, alas, among the least typical. The

very particular conjuncture of the prominence of a small group of reformers such

as William Beveridge, of the British wartime mood of national solidarity and of

37 Mark Mazower makes much of Alessandro Pizzorno's 1954 description of 'the individualistic

mobilization of Europe': Mazower, Dark Continent, 306?13. 38

Hanna Diamond, 'Women's Aspirations 1943-47: an Oral Enquiry in Toulouse', in Kedward and

Wood, Liberation of France, 93. See also Barbara Marshall, 'The Democratization of Local Politics in the

British Zone of Germany: Hanover 1945-47', Journal of Contemporary History, 21 (1986), 413-51. 39

See the perceptive reflections in Peter Brandt, 'Germany after 1945: Revolution by Defeat?', in

Reinhard R?rup, ed., The Problem of Revolution in Germany, 1789?1989 (Oxford and New York: Berg,

2000), 141-5. 40

See the comments of Fran?ois B?darida in his 'Vichy et la crise de la conscience fran?aise', in

Jean-Pierre Az?ma and Fran?ois B?darida, eds., Le r?gime de Vichy et les Fran?ais (Paris: Fayard, 1992),

89-90. 41

Julian Jackson, France. The Dark Years 1940-1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 102?11;

Maria Quine, Italy's Social Revolution. Charity and Welfare from Liberalism to Fascism (Basingstoke: Palgrave,

2002), 128; Christopher Duggan, 'Italy in the Cold War Years and the Legacy of Fascism', in Christopher

Duggan and Christopher Wagstaff, eds., Italy in the Cold War. Politics, Culture and Society, 1948-38 (Oxford and Washington, DC: Berg, 1995), 3-6.




the temporary abeyance of the customary influence of interest groups created the

space for a jump forward in state responsibility for large areas of welfare during the latter war years.42 It was a window of opportunity which closed rapidly, and

which, for all of the subsequent praise of Beveridge's principles, was not replicated

elsewhere. Outside Britain, the war years led to a deepening and a self-limiting of

the pretensions of state power. The ideological ambitions of left and right during the

preceding decades, as well as the dictates of wartime and occupation, had led to a

vast increase in the scale and ambitions of regimes. Much of this was improvised and

largely ineffective. Even in the case of Germany, state bureaucracies were unable to

respond sufficiently effectively to the tasks imposed upon them, obliging Hitler to

turn to ad hoc structures based around the SS. Similarly, studies of the efforts of the

United States and Britain to impose a viable form of occupation rule on the liberated

territories of Europe convey the impression of a highly improvised structure which

succeeded in exercising only the most transient and inefficient authority.43

Yet there were undoubtedly forms of progress. State bureaucrats became more

experienced in forms of social planning; structures of taxation and public finance

finally left the nineteenth century; and, above all, state management of the economy

underwent a rapid revolution in terms of methods and mentalities. At the same

time, however, the state became more conscious of the tasks that it could not

accomplish. The dismantling of state controls of the wartime economies occurred

very rapidly after 1945, and the Monnet model of a neo-capitalist revolution in

production rapidly replaced state-oriented planning.44 In France, the ambitions of

state bureaucrats to institute a system of structured industrial relations were broken

on the rocks of determined employer opposition.45 Most strikingly, the goal (often formulated in wartime exile in London) of state-controlled and universal systems of

welfare remained unfulfilled outside Britain and Scandinavia. Elsewhere, especially in Catholic Europe, a mixed and often incomplete system emerged in which state

legislation was accompanied by the devolution of much executive responsibility to

pre-existing confessional and sectoral social insurance organisations.46 The influence

42 Jose Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography (Revised edition Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1997), 480-95 and 'Some Aspects of Social Policy in Britain during the Second World War', in Wolfgang Mommsen, ed., The Emergence of the Welfare State in Britain and Germany 1830?1930 (London: Croom

Helm, 1981), 259-60. 43

This is the principal theme of Alice Hills, Britain and the Occupation of Austria, 1943?43 (Basingstoke:

Macmillan, 2000), but its conclusions could easily be extended to, for example, the cases of Italy and

Greece. 44

Philippe Mioche, Le plan Monnet. Gen?se et ?laboration 1941-1947 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne,

1987). 45

Adam Steinhouse, Workers' Participation in Post-Liberation France (Lanham, MD, and Oxford:

Lexington, 2001). 46

Peter Flora and Arnold Heidenheimer, 'The Historical Core and Changing Boundaries of the

Welfare State', in Peter Flora and Arnold Heidenheimer, eds., The Development of Welfare States in Europe and America (New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 1981), 21-8; Edward Ross Dickinson, The Politics

of German Child Welfare from the Empire to the Federal Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1996), 245?51; Conway 'Legacies of Exile', 264?5; Paul Dutton, Origins of the French Welfare State. The

Struggle for Social Reform in France 1914-1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 208-24;




of the state was thus more pervasive in postwar Europe, but also less obviously

coercive or ambitious. State bureaucracies were better resourced, better staffed and

more efficient than their predecessors of the 1930s; but they were also more willing to

recognise the limits of state power and to share responsibility with social organisations and with an

advisory cohort of technocratic experts.47

Origins are therefore important. The three examples I have presented indicate in

very approximate terms how one can draw lines of continuity from the experiences

of the war years to the realities of the postwar world. They are, of course, no more

than sketches, but they do perhaps suggest that if one changes the agenda of study of wartime Europe to focus less on causes or events and more on outcomes, the

broad current of political developments in western Europe after 1945 does not seem

so arbitrary

or accidental. If the process whereby democracy became the 'regime of

choice' of postwar Europeans was not preordained,48 it is difficult to imagine how

things could have been radically otherwise. Although it is clearly possible to think

of alternative scenarios, such as the establishment of a communist-led regime in a

major west European state, it is much less easy to imagine those alternative scenarios

sustaining themselves over a prolonged period of time. This is not an argument that

one can extend indefinitely across

Europe. The experiences of the war years in the

Balkans, the killing fields of Poland and those points further east in Europe were

different, indeed radically different, and the political and social processes to which

they gave rise, for example in the Greek civil war, were similarly different.49 But in

the reduced territory of western Europe there was a logic to the particular model of

representative politics which emerged from the war, with its combination of more

efficient but less invasive government, more inclusive but unequal welfare provision

and the channelling of socioeconomic negotiation into more complex and frequently

opaque structures of corporatist negotiation.

Historical explanations that dwell on origins do, however, also have their natural

limits. Revolution was not made in 1789 but was sustained by the social forces,

political discourses and forms of cultural practice which carried the revolutionary

process through the 1790s. Similarly, the democratic order that endured for twenty

five years after the Second World War in the walled garden of western Europe derived much of its power from realities that were internal to the postwar history of Europe. The strangely non-revolutionary character of western Europe during

the 1950s and much of the 1960s cannot be explained merely by the events of the

preceding years or by the coercive framework imposed by the Cold War. It was

Guy Vanthemsche, La s?curit? sociale. Les origines du syst?me belge (Brussels: De Boeck Universit?, 1994),

69-74. 47

See, for example, Hitchcock, France Restored, 1?2. 48

Alexander Groth, Democracies against Hitler. Myth, Reality and Prologue (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999),

352. 49

John Coutouvidis and Jaime Reynolds, Poland 1939-1947 (Leicester: Leicester University Press,

1986); Conway, 'Greek Civil War'. The cases of Czechoslovakia and Hungary were of course distinctly more ambiguous.




also reinforced by political and social processes that were emphatically postwar in

character.

Social class would seem to be a good vantage point from which to approach these

realities. Interpretations of almost any other period of modern European history

accord considerable importance to conflicts of social class.50 Yet, once the threshold

of 1945 is passed, historians seem inclined to abandon social class in favour of a

dizzying digest of statistics of social change, implying that class lost much if not

all of its former importance.51 Yet Europe did not stop being a class society in

either the 1940s or the 1960s. Indeed, the conclusion of much sociological work

on postwar Europe has been that the opportunities for social mobility (especially out of the industrial working class) were lower, the reduction in income differentials

slower and the 'invisible' cultural barriers to social mobility more resilient in western

Europe than in the United States during the same period.52 Of course, class cannot

become a catch-all framework for analysis. One of the most arresting (and to secular

minded historians surprising) features of the electoral dynamics of postwar Europe is that religious practice remained a much more reliable determinant of electoral

behaviour than social class until circa the 1980s in much of western Europe.53 But

class remains an important and necessary means of approaching the history of the

era. In particular, much of the solidity of the postwar political order can be explained

(outside Scandinavia)54 in terms of the durability of the class alliance which emerged at the end of the 1940s between a broad swathe of Europe's rural producers and

the professional, public-sector and business sections of the middle class. Expressed in

these terms, such a generalisation risks sounding like so much post-Trotskyist rhetoric.

However, it does perhaps capture something of the sense in which postwar democracy

was structured in such a way that not all were equal participants in the game. In the

new political culture, power lay not so much in numbers as in proximity to power

through the channels of influence and lobbying. Those who found themselves on

the margins of the system, such as the industrial strikers in France in 1947, Belgium

50 For a stimulating example of such an approach to the history of interwar Europe, see Gregory

Luebbert, Liberalism, Fascism or Social Democracy. Social Classes and the Political Origins of Regimes in Interwar

Europe (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 51

Robert Wegs and Robert Ladrech, Europe since 1943: A Concise History, 4th edn (New York:

St. Martin's Press, and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 158-80, is a good example of such an approach. 52

Hartmut Kaelble, A Social History of Western Europe 1880-1980 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1989),

39-59- There were of course manifold differences between the west European states. 53

Karl Schmitt, Konfession und Wahlverhalten in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Berlin: Duncker &

Humblot, 1989); Jaak Billiet, 'Les ?lecteurs du PSC et du CVP', in Wilfried Dewachter et ah, eds., Un

parti dans l'histoire 1943-1993. 30 ans d'action du Parti Social Chr?tien (Louvain-la-Neuve: Editions Duculot,

1996), 297-325; John Whyte, Catholics in Western Democracies. A Study in Political Behaviour (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1981).

54 In Scandinavia, the red - green alliances of socialists and small farmers that emerged in the mid-1930s

remained the dominant political reality. See, for example, Sheri Berman, The Social Democratic Moment:

Ideas and Politics in the Making of Interwar Europe (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press,

1998), 170?4; Alice Bourneuf, Norway. The Planned Revival (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1958), 17-22.



8o Contemporary European History

during the winter of i960? 1 and Italy in the autumn of 1969, were obliged to resort

to more direct but generally less effective forms of action.55

The winners on the other hand were the farmers and much of the middle class.

The reversal in the political and, subsequently, economic fortunes of agricultural

producers was

particularly dramatic. During the interwar years, rural populations had

generally been a disadvantaged and discontented group, capable of being mobilised

behind the various populist and authoritarian movements of the era. In the postwar

years, pitchfork revolts disappeared almost completely from Europe's politics. Only

Poujadism in France in the 1950s (provoked by the Fourth Republic's intermittent

neglect of rural interests) offered some sort of return to the rural protest movements

of the 1930s.56 Elsewhere, rural producers (and more especially organisations of

commercial farmers) acquired prominent and influential roles in the decision-making

processes of nation-states and, subsequently, of European institutions.57 This influence

could not, of course, prevent the rapid decline in the numbers employed in European

agriculture, but it did ensure that those who remained tended to be more prosperous than in the past. The other beneficiaries were undoubtedly much of the middle class.

The term 'bourgeois' fits so naturally with our sense of the dynamics of the postwar era

that it has perhaps prevented us from noticing the remarkable extent of the bourgeois

recapture, or conquest, of political, economic and cultural power in western Europe

in the later 1940s.58 This was not the nineteenth-century liberal bourgeoisie of top hats and frock coats but a much broader grouping, which reached out to incorporate

new strata such as the technical professions and white-collar employees of the new

industries and parastatal bureaucracies. Their economic interests flourished through the new trading and technology capitalism of the postwar years, but so too did their

social interests through the construction of systems of welfare, pensions and higher education which worked disproportionately to the benefit of the middle-class nuclear

families of postwar Europe.59 This was, especially in contrast with what was to follow, the golden age of a mid-twentieth-century middle class, which had finally come of

age.60 Politically, it no longer needed to rely on false saviours to protect it from the

largely defunct spectre of revolution. Instead, it was the middle class who staffed the

new political and state structures, and who set the tone of the culture of the era. These

55 Mencherini, Guerre froide; Valmy F?aux, Cinq semaines de lutte sociale. La gr?ve de l'hiver 1960-1961

(Brussels: Institut de sociologie de l'Universit? Libre de Bruxelles, 1963); Ginsborg, Contemporary Italy,

309-22. 56

Jean-Pierre Rioux, The Fourth Republic 1944-1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987),

218-23. 57

Anthony Nicholls, The Bonn Republic. West German Democracy, 1943-1990 (London and New York:

Longman, 1997), 107?8; Leen Van Molle, 'Le monde agricole belge et la concurrence europ?enne', in

Michel Dumoulin, ed., La Belgique et les d?buts de la construction europ?enne (Louvain-la-Neuve: Ciaco,

1987), 119?43; Gilbert No?l, France, Allemagne et 'Europe verte' (Berne and New York: P. Lang, 1995). 58

This point is well made in Richard Vinen, Bourgeois Politics in France, 1943?1931 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1?11. 59

On the historic victory of the small nuclear family within western Europe see Kaelble, Social History,

15 60 Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times. A Twentieth Century Life (London: Allen Lane, 2002), 222-32.




were, in the words of the British Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan at

the end of the 1950s, the Europeans who 'ha[d] never had it so good'.61 The political expression of these social realities was the remarkable hegemony of

centre-right politics. This took different forms in different European states. In Britain

Conservatism was again the implausible survivor, while in France the inclusive and less

doctrinaire Gaullism of the 1960s ultimately emerged as its particular expression.62 But

undoubtedly its most successful and durable manifestation between the Adriatic and

the North Sea was Christian Democracy. Christian Democrats ruled more Europeans for more of the time than did fascists in twentieth-century Europe, yet it is remarkable

that, in comparison with the enormous historical literature on fascism, socialism and

communism, there is still little serious literature on Christian Democracy.63 Moreover,

much of that which does exist remains rooted in the mentality of the movement,

privileging its long-term and spiritual origins at the expense of more circumstantial

and material factors.64 It is therefore worth stating the perhaps obvious point that

Christian Democracy did not suddenly become the most successful political force in

western Europe because various largely minority currents of European Catholics had

long been seeking to construct a pluralist form of Catholic politics which engaged with modern society.65 Religion was indeed an important factor, but less in terms of

its ideological content than in terms of the way in which it provided the collective

identity and organisational basis upon which the largely Catholic Christian Democrat

parties could be built. Issues of religion mattered to many postwar Europeans, partly no doubt because of the prominence that religious faith and the Catholic Church

had acquired in local and personal life during the war years. The moral leadership offered by some clergy, the physical sanctuary provided by churches and religious communities and the structures of welfare and solidarity that clustered around the

61 The social history of the postwar bourgeoisie has yet to attract a substantial historiography. See,

however, J?rgen Kocka, 'The Middle Classes in Europe', republished in J?rgen Kocka, Industrial Culture

and Bourgeois Society. Business, Labour and Bureaucracy in Modern Germany (New York and Oxford: Berghahn,

?999), 248-50; Serge Berstein, La France de l'expansion, I, La R?publique gaullienne 1938-1969 (Paris: Seuil,

1989), 207-10. 62

Ewen Green, Ideologies of Conservatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 12?13. We badly need more research on the Gaullism of the 1960s. See, however, Watson, 'Internal Dynamics of Gaullism', and Berstein, R?publique gaullienne, 114?8, 126?33.

63 I explore this issue in Conway, 'The Age of Christian Democracy', 43-67. See also Tom Buchanan

and Martin Conway, eds., Political Catholicism in Europe 1918-1963 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1996); Emiel Lamberts, ed., Christian Democracy in the European Union (Leuven: Leuven University Press,

1997); and Michael Gehler, Wolfram Kaiser and Helmut Wohnout, eds., Christdemokratie in Europa im

20.fahrhundert (Vienna: Bohlau, 2001). 64

Michael Fogarty remains the classic statement of this position: Michael Fogarty, Christian Democracy in Europe 1820-1933 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957). But it is also evident in much more

recent studies such as Stathis Kalyvas, The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe (Ithaca, NY, and London:

Cornell University Press, 1996); Noel Cary, The Path to Christian Democracy. German Catholics and the Party

System from Windthorst to Adenauer (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1996); and

Jean-Dominique Durand, 'La m?moire de la d?mocratie chr?tienne en 1945. Ant?c?dents, exp?riences et combats', in Lamberts, Christian Democracy, 13-26.

65 Martin Conway, 'Left Catholicism in Europe in the 1940s. Elements of an Interpretation', in Gerd

Rainer Horn and Emmanuel Gerard, eds., Left Catholicism 1943?1933. Catholics and Society in Western

Europe at the Point of Liberation (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2001), 270?8.




churches brought religion back towards the centre of local life in all but the most

dechristianised areas of wartime Europe.66 Moreover, amidst so much political and

physical destruction, the Catholic Church and its imposing archipelago of allied social

organisations loomed large in the landscape of liberation Europe. The Christian

Democrat parties that emerged so rapidly in much of Europe during 1945 and

1946 were the political beneficiaries of this circumstantial but tangible process of

'reconfessionalisation'. In much of Catholic Europe, the Church proved able to

capture the political initiative and to generate a seemingly inexhaustible supply of

new elites, possessed of the sense of purpose that came from membership of the

'imagined community' of Catholicism.67

But, for all that, the durability of Christian Democracy also had a more material

basis. As many of the predominantly intellectual founders of the postwar parties soon

discovered, the social and political visions fostered in interwar youth movements or

wartime resistance were less important than taxation rates for small businesses, child

allowances and the price of sugar beet. The most successful Christian Democrat

parties of the postwar decades, notably those in the Federal Republic of Germany,

Austria, Italy and Belgium, were those that succeeded in marrying the idealism of a

younger generation of Catholic militants with the social texture of the new Europe.

They gave voice to an unambiguously Catholic world-view, based on a fundamental

(and largely unattenuated) antipathy towards liberal and socialist values.68 But, at the

same time, they were attentive to the more secular interests and aspirations of their

electors. This was made much easier by the internal structures of the parties. Again

with the notable exception of the Popular Republican Movement (MRP) in France,

the Christian Democrat parties were not predominantly individual membership

parties but composed of what in Dutch are termed standen organisations. These

Catholic sociopolitical organisations, notably the trade unions, farmers' organisations

and middle-class interest groups, played a major role within the Christian Democrat

parties, carving out their share of offices and competing for influence over the policies

66 Vesna Drapac, War and Religion. Catholics in the Churches of Occupied Paris (Washington, DC: Catholic

University of America Press, 1998); Fabrice Maerten, Frans Selleslagh and Mark Van den Wijngaert,

eds., Entre la peste et le chol?ra. Vie et attitudes des catholiques sous l'occupation (Brussels and Gerpinnes:

Quorum, 1999); Jean-Dominique Durand, L'?glise catholique dans la crise de l'Italie (1943-1948) (Rome: Ecole Fran?aise de Rome, 1991); Werner Blessing, '"Deutschland in Not, Wir im Glauben. .. ". Kirche

und Kirchenvolk in einer katholischen Region, 1933-1949', in Martin Broszat, Klaus-Dietmar Henke

and Hans Woller, eds., Von Stalingrad zur W?hrungsreform. Zur Sozialgeschichte des Umbruchs in Deutschland

(Munich: Oldenbourg, 1988), 3-111. 67

Margaret Anderson, 'The Limits of Secularization. On the Problem of the Catholic Revival

in Nineteenth-century Germany', The Historical Journal, 38 (1995), 670. See the case studies in Urs

Altermatt, 'Die Stimmlungslage im politischen Katholizismus der Schweiz von 1945: "Wir lassen uns

nicht ausman?vrieren'", in Victor Conzemius, Martin Greschat and Hermann Kocher, eds., Die Zeit

nach 1945 als Thema kirchlicher Zeitgeschichte (G?ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), 72-96, Mark

Van den Wijngaert, Onstaan en stichting van de CVP-PSC. De lange weg naar het kerstprogramma (Brussels: De Nederlandse Boekhandel, 1976), John Pollard, 'Italy', in Buchanan and Conway, Political Catholicism,

84?8, and David Allen Harvey, Constructing Class and Nationality in Alsace 1830?1943 (Dekalb, IL: Northern

Illinois University Press, 2001), 201-2. 68

E.g. Maria Mitchell, 'Materialism and Secularism: CDU Politicians and National Socialism, 1945?

1949', Journal of Modern History, 67 (1995), 278-308.




of the party.69 This internal coalitionism ensured that the parties remained tied to

the concerns of their electors but also enabled the Christian Democrats to develop

a

cross-class image of which, for example, the distinctly hesitant efforts of the postwar

socialist parties to reach out to non-working-class groups and producer organisations

were only

a very pale imitation.70

There was no single magic factor that explained the rapid success of Christian

Democracy and, apart from the decline of the MRP in France, its remarkable staying

power in the politics of postwar western Europe. But at its heart lay the way in which

it constructed an inclusive politics of limited and largely collective participation. Part of the disdain with which some historians seem to regard Europe during the

postwar decades lies in the relative absence of crowds and other forms of popular

protest. Noisy and unstructured mass action had largely left Europe for the more

distant and romantic revolutions of decolonisation. Yet, this absence was not the

simple product of the distractions of cars and refrigerators, still less the sedative of

television.71 It reflected the mundane fact that the rules of the democratic game had

changed. In place of noisy elections and turbulent parliaments, there had developed a less glamorous but more

predictable means of conducting business. Parliaments

remained the public face of democracy, but, again with the partial exception of

Fourth Republic France, their activities were less important than what happened behind the scenes in the complex world of intra- and inter-party negotiations and

corporatist institutions. Policy-making had become a much more specialist business

in which civil servants, technical experts and representatives of interest groups met

far from the disruptive noise of public debate. This new form of polity, of which the

institutions of the European Union might be regarded as the greatest illustration and

memorial,72 was one in which citizens participated not as activist individuals but as

members of collective interest groups seeking to ensure that they received at least

69 E.g. Patrick Pasture, 'Entre ?glise et citoyen', in Un parti dans l'histoire, 265-95; Antonio Parisella,

'La base sociale della Democrazia Cristiana italiana. Elettorato, iscritti e organizzazione', in Lamberts, Christian Democracy, 189-209; Wolfgang M?ller, Fritz Plasser and Peter Ulram, 'W?hler und Mitgleider der ?VP 1945-1994', in Robert Kreichbaumer and Franz Schausberger, eds., Volkspartei: Anspruch und

Realit?t (Vienna: Bohlau, 1995), 163-200; Herman Bakvis, Catholic Power in the Netherlands (Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1981); Geoffrey Pridham, Christian Democracy in Western

Germany (London: Croom Helm, 1977). On the differentness of the MRP as a more political and

intellectual party, see Pierre Letamendia, Le mouvement r?publicain populaire. Histoire d'un grand parti fran?ais

(Paris: Beauchesne, 1995); and Carolyn Warner, 'Getting Out the Vote with Patronage and Threat: The

French and Italian Christian Democratic Parties, 1944?1958', Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 28 (1998),

553-82. 70

Bruce Desmond Graham, Choice and Democratic Order. The French Socialist Party, 1937?1950

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 271-6, 296-7; Sarah Timperman, '1945-1954: le PSB

s'ouvre aux classes moyennes', Revue belge d'histoire contemporaine, 28 (1998), 445-98; Diane Parness, The

SPD and the Challenge of Mass Politics. The Dilemma of the German Volkspartei (Boulder: Westview, 1991),

49-53 71

Vinen, A History in Fragments, 372-5. 72

Larry Siedentop, Democracy in Europe (London: Allen Lane, 2000) provides an interesting but

somewhat ahistorical approach to this phenomenon. See, for example, his misplaced determination

to locate the origins of the European Union's bureaucratic culture in a distinctively French model of the

state: 102-21.




their fair share of the political offices, bureaucratic posts and material benefits that lay within the gift of the state.73 At the political level, multi-party coalition governments

constructed what political scientists have come to term 'consociational democracy',74

while at the economic level increasingly elaborate corporatist institutions embedded

employers and labour in a culture of reciprocal compromises.75 The shortcomings of

this form of democracy in terms of bureaucratic inefficiency, a lack of transparency and the withering of active citizenship were considerable. But, after Europe's previous

experiments with democratic politics, it also had the not insignificant advantages of

predictability and inclusiveness.

It was also a model of politics that, though it did not empower women, certainly involved them. Assessing the place of women in postwar European life is a problem

which seems to trouble many historians. Especially among those who remain wedded

to mapping a process of progressive emancipation during the twentieth century, the

postwar decades are problematic. The absence of any surge in the rhetoric and

aspiration of gender equality in the years that followed the war seems peculiar,76 and

is all too often explained in terms of a resurgent masculinity evident in the now

obligatory references to the head shavings that occurred in some areas of liberation

Europe.77 Yet, at the same time, it is an obvious fact that it was in the post-1945 era

that the majority of European adults who were women voted, either after a lengthy

hiatus or for the first time. This dramatic enfranchisement cannot be ignored simply

because, as has been exhaustively demonstrated, its implementation was a

product of

factors almost entirely independent of women.78 Instead, it is perhaps necessary to

adopt a new

approach to the gender politics of postwar western Europe that, in place

73 Kurt Richard Luther, 'From Accommodation to Competition: The "Normalization" of the Second

Republic's Party System', in Kurt Richard Luther and Peter Pulzer, eds., Austria 1943?1993. Fifty Years of the Second Republic (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 126-30.

74 Liesbet Hooghe, A Leap in the Dark. Nationalist Conflict and Federal Reform in Belgium (Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press, 1991) provides a succinct introduction to political-science perspectives. 75

Patrick Pasture, 'The April 1944 "Social Pact" in Belgium and its Significance for the Post-war

Welfare State', Journal of Contemporary History, 28 (1993), 702-10; Hans Blom, 'The Second World War

and Dutch Society: Continuity and Change', in Alastair C. Duke and Coenraad A. Tamse, eds., Britain

and the Netherlands, Vol. 6 (1977), 228-48; Melanie Sully, A Contemporary History of Austria (London and

New York: Routledge, 1990), 6-7. 76

Miranda Pollard, Reign of Virtue. Mobilizing Gender in Vichy France (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 200-3; Hanna Diamond, Women and the Second World War in France, 1939-48. Choices and Constraints (Harlow: Longman, 1999), 178-203.

77 The issue of head shaving has been the focus of many studies in recent years. See, for example,

Fabrice Virgili, La France 'virile'. Des femmes tondues ? la Lib?ration (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2000), and

Claire Duchen, 'Opening Pandora's Box: The Case of the femmes tondues', in Martyn Cornick and Ceri

Crossley, eds., Problems in French History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 213-32. In contrast, the study of

masculinity in liberation Europe remains in its infancy. See, nevertheless, the observations in Michael

Kelly, 'The Reconstruction of Masculinity at the Liberation', in Kedward and Wood, Liberation of France,

117-28, Luc Capdevila, 'The Quest for Masculinity in a Defeated France, 1940-1945', Contemporary

European History, 10 (2001), 423-45; and Elizabeth Heineman, 'The Hour of the Woman: Memories of

Germany's "Crisis Years" and West German National Identity', American Historical Review, 101 (1996),

354-95 78

Sylvie Chaperon, '"Feminism is dead. Long live Feminism!" The Women's Movement in France at

the Liberation, 1944?1946', and Anna Rossi-Doria, 'Italian Women enter Polities', in Claire Duchen and




of bemoaning the relative absence of discourses of liberation, seeks out the ways in

which a female presence can be identified in politics and policy-making.79 These

took largely gendered forms. The new agenda of politics in the postwar era, with its

emphasis on

family, welfare and education, might have lacked some of the passion

of preceding political conflicts, but it offered new opportunities for women in terms

of participation and implementation. Women, for example, were the beneficiaries of

many of the new welfare structures;80 in the postwar decades women's organisations

acquired a new influence as lobbyists in the corridors of power; and women entered

in unprecedented numbers the bureaucracies of parastatal social institutions and local

government. Little or none of this prepared, except in the most subterranean manner,

the gender changes of subsequent decades. Indeed, these were often implemented

by women, such as those active in the powerful Catholic women's organisations,

who repeatedly emphasised the language of separate spheres. But it was indicative

of a new assertiveness on the part of women, who participated in the new culture

of consumerism and welfare not so much as the victims of capitalist advertising and

male-constructed rhetoric but as self-conscious citizens.81

Of course, none of this was the simple achievement of Christian Democrat

politicians, even if, as in the case of the process of European integration, the extent

of their influence was remarkable.82 The broader success was the construction of an

apparatus of state -

society mediation, which lasted for roughly twenty-five years. This

operated, as has been famously argued by Alan Milward, through the framework of the

nation-state.83 The 'European rescue of the nation-state' was indeed one of the most

remarkable features of the post-1945 era, and the influence of Milward s argument

is rightly evident in the way in which processes of limited European integration now have a much more modest place in general narratives of the history of postwar

Europe.84 But it also needs to be recognised that the national framework within which

Irene Bandhauer-Sch?fFmann, eds., When the War was Over. Women, War and Peace in Europe, 1940?1936

(London and New York: Leicester University Press, 2000), 146-60 and 89-102. 79

Si?n Reynolds, 'Lateness, Amnesia and Unfinished Business. Gender and Democracy in Twentieth

Century Europe', European History Quarterly, 32 (2002), 91-4. 80

This applied of course to the particularly controversial issue of benefits paid to war widows. See, for

example, Elizabeth Heineman, 'Gender, Public Policy and Memory: Waiting Wives and War Widows in

the Postwar Germanys', in Al?n Confino and Peter Fritzsche, eds., The Work of Memory. New Directions in

the Study of German Society and Culture (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 220?25. 81 Erica Carter, How German is She? Postwar German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman (Michigan:

University of Michigan Press, 1997); Victoria De Grazia, 'Mass Culture and Sovereignty: The American

Challenge to European Cinemas, 1920-1960', Journal of Modern History, 61 (1989), 84-6. 82

Philippe Chenaux, Une Europe vaticane? (Brussels: Editions Ciaco, 1990); Michael Gehler

and Wolfram Kaiser, 'Transnationalism and Early European Integration: The Nouvelles Equipes Internationales and the Geneva Circle 1947-1957', The Historical Journal, 44 (2001), 773-98.

83 Alan Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State (London: Routledge, 1992).

84 For a rather extreme example of this new-found scepticism about the emergence of a European

polity, see Mary Fulbrook, 'Conclusion', in Mary Fulbrook, ed., Europe since 1943 (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2001), 278: 'What is perhaps distinctive about the latter half of the twentieth century is that, for many Europeans, the existence of sovereign nation states seemed so utterly natural, so

utterly taken for granted, that wider patterns of interdependence and interaction over centuries almost

disappeared from their mental horizons.'




postwar policy-making occurred was perhaps less important than the nature of the

policy-making itself. The real success in the postwar decades was the construction of a

form of policy-making that combined more technocratic mechanisms of government with the involvement of the representatives of the principal social forces.

Success was not universal. The enduring problems of the Italian Republic and the

Belgian nation-state demonstrate the limitations of the postwar democratic model.

Much the most dramatic case of failure was, however, that of the Fourth Republic in

France. In the context of an essay on the success of postwar democracy, it is tempting

to explain away the crisis of 1958 as (yet another) French exception, brought on

by the specific crisis in Algiers and the more general legacies of the war and of

longer-term Franco-French ideological conflicts. Such explanations obviously have

their place. But the inglorious demise of the Fourth Republic and its replacement

by a regime that, it should be recalled, deviated less than its founder claimed from its

predecessor, does also serve to throw into relief certain factors general to the history

of postwar democracy. The structural problems of the Fourth Republic could perhaps be defined as threefold: the electoral fracturing of the non-socialist centre and centre

right of the political spectrum; the difficulties in constructing a sufficiently responsive 'transmission belt' between the grievances of certain social constituencies, notably

the middle class and farmers, and the policies of the successive governments; and the

collapse of state authority under the pressure of the challenges of decolonisation and

the insurgency in Algeria. These problems were not unique: decolonisation was a

major challenge to the postwar regimes in the Netherlands and Belgium, while the

alienation of certain interest groups from the political process occurred intermittently in many of the postwar states. What was distinctive about the French case was the

conjuncture of these factors to create a situation in which the viability of the regime came into

question.85

What happened in France could have been replicated elsewhere. That it was

not, however, would seem to be more than the product of the accidents of good

fortune. In general the virtuous circle of participation and provision, supported of

course by the tax revenues

generated by unprecedented economic growth, created

a new culture of political stability. West Europeans grew accustomed to the ways

in which postwar politics worked and internalised the norms on which they were

based.86 Attacks on invasive governmental power were far less vocal than they had

been in the 1930s or would become in the 1970s, and for perhaps the first time

most Europeans felt themselves to be net beneficiaries of the taxation - -

provision

equation. West Europeans were not, contrary to what some

superficial descriptions

of postwar prosperity seem to suggest, uniformly contented. But the appetite for

fundamental change had diminished (and continued to diminish) in ways that were

not merely the product of political repression or cultural indoctrination. The regimes

85 Richard Vinen, France 1934-1970 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 100-110, provides an admirably

succinct analysis of the problems of the Fourth Republic. 86

The development of a culture of democracy is of course an amorphous process. It is explored for

an earlier but comparable period in Margaret Anderson, Practicing Democracy. Elections and Political Culture

in Imperial Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).




of postwar western Europe were accepted not merely

as efficient or preferable to

their alternatives. They also connected, at least in much of northern Europe, with

more long-standing and embedded notions of political legitimacy.87 This sense of postwar west European democracy

as the victory of a particular

model of mass politics seems to me to be the best way of approaching the problem

posed at the beginning of this paper by the stability and uniformity of European

politics in the postwar era. It also, in conclusion, has two further implications. The

first is that, even if we understand very imperfectly the dynamics of what happened in Europe from the late 1960s and early 1970s onwards, we can perhaps grasp that

the realities which had provided the basis for the postwar model no longer held

true. The interests of rural Europe (at least in the west and the north) no longer had the same weight in the political process. The protected world of the European

bourgeoisie was eroded, if it did not entirely collapse, during the economic crises of

the 1970s. Working-class demands, so long marginalised, returned centre stage with

the strike waves of the early 1970s in states such as Italy. The postwar narrowing

of the spectrum of permissible politics was reversed with the emergence of New

Leftist movements, liberated from the yoke of loyalty to Brezhnevian communism, and of a new and often violent politics of the right. Christian Democracy, already

weakened by the sudden decline in religious practice during the 1960s and the changes

inaugurated by the Second Vatican Council, lost votes, office and its privileged role

as the mediating space of Europe's postwar social compromises. The consequence of

all of these changes was not a

collapse of western Europe's democratic norms. Indeed,

one of the more remarkable features of the 1970s is how democratic structures were

preserved (albeit not without some damage) even as the realities on which those

structures had been based disappeared. More than that, the decade saw the extension

of the postwar model of democracy to Portugal, Greece and Spain. Nevertheless, the

basis of parliamentary democracy in the 1970s and 1980s was clearly different, and

both less emphatic and less consensual than it had been in the preceding decades.

The contest between different definitions of democracy had returned. Nation-states

were less viable, the mechanisms of government less effective and the populations less

contented than in the preceding era.

Europeans had not come to the end of their

experience of democracy, but western Europe's Democratic Age had come to a close.

The second implication concerns the history of democracy itself. Perhaps the

most substantial work to appear on this subject in the last couple of decades is the

imposing study by Geoff Eley of the struggle for democracy in Europe from the

nineteenth century to the present day.88 For all of its impressive breadth and forceful

argument, it seems to me to be a book that is posited upon a mistaken assumption.

To assert that a central thread of European history during the twentieth century was the struggle (accomplished, it should be noted in passing, almost exclusively

87 Legitimacy is emerging as a new theme in the history of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. See the

comments of Peter Romijn, 'Boosaardig bestuur' (Amsterdam: Vossiuspers, 2003), 18?21. 88

Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy. The History of the Left in Europe, 1830-2000 (Oxford and New York:

Oxford University Press, 2002).




by the left) for an evolving but essentially homogenous democratic model89 risks

occulting the extent to which twentieth-century European politics was a

struggle

between contesting models of democracy, including ideologies of the left and the right which one

might not automatically associate now with the practice of democracy.90

Democracy was therefore a contested term, and one that rarely achieved any single

definition. The postwar era from the late 1940s to the early 1970s was perhaps one of those exceptional periods,

at least in the restricted territories of western

Europe. But the character of the democracy of that era, and more especially its

obvious shortcomings in terms of limited participation, enduring social and regional

inequality and the absence of a culture of active citizenship, demonstrates also that

democracy is not a gradually perfectible political model. Its history is one not of

progress but of a series of discontinuous paradigms.

89 Eley writes of 'a century of democratic struggle' during which 'the frontier of democracy' was

moved steadily forward under the agency of the political left: Eley, Forging Democracy, 12, 503-4. 90 Tom Buchanan and I have explored these issues in Tom Buchanan and Martin Conway, 'The Politics

of Democracy in Twentieth-Century Europe: Introduction', European History Quarterly, 32 (2002), 9?12.



the rise and fall of western europe's democratic age, 1945 ... · to be published as the death...

Documents