A comprehensive global study of the political ideology of Christian Democracy, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day.

First published in 1957, this book is a detailed analysis on Christian Democracy, a movement backed by Protestants as well as Catholics, which has become one of the great social forces of Western Europe. It is strong in eight countries. The first half of Fogarty’s book sets out what the many Christian-Democratic movements stand for. The second part of the book shows how these movements began, how they have grown, changed, and consolidated, and how they developed into the mid-20th century. This is a broad and useful survey which delves the history, nature and significance of the Christian Democratic movements in Europe. In Fogarty’s analysis, Christian Democracy may indeed bring about a renewed unity of the Christian tradition in Western society.

The authors investigate the influence of Christian Democratic parties on political institutions (parliamentary democracy and European integration) and socio-economic structures (the collective-bargaining economy and the welfare state).

The first comprehensive study of Italian Christian Democracy in English, Italy's Christian Democracy unravels the encounter between Catholicism and democracy from pre-unification Italy in the eighteenth century to the near-present. Forlenza and Thomassen put the triumphant emergence of the Christian Democratic political party that ruled Italy from 1948 to 1994 into historical perspective. With a focus on critical moments of modern Italian history - the Enlightenment and French Revolution, the Risorgimento, World War I, the fascist period, World War II, the post-war Republic - Italy's Christian Democracy demonstrates the often-dramatic ways in which Catholic thinkers, from laymen to priests and bishops, sought to interpret and direct democratic thought and practice in line with Catholic ethics. The Christian Democracy was much more than reactionary politics - namely a sincere attempt to integrate a religious worldview into modern politics. Contrary to a purely secular reading, the authors demonstrate that the Catholic embrace of political modernity and democracy emerged as a historically significant alternative to both fascism and socialism, liberalism and conservativism, attempting to re-anchor democracy, justice, and freedom in a religiously argued ethos. Italy's Christian Democracy contributes to existing scholarship by stressing two interrelated aspects crucial for a better understanding of the role that Catholicism and Christian Democracy have played in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the political dimension of transcendence and spirituality and the transformative power of historical experiences and events. The narrative considers the religious and spiritual impulse behind Christian democratic thought, framing Christian Democracy as a distinct form of "political spirituality". Offering a novel historical narrative, Italy's Christian Democracy stresses the contemporary relevance of the nexus between Christianity and modern politics: the current spread of identity politics and the increasing use of religion in political and public discourse, recently appropriated by new populist parties and movements, in Italy and beyond.

Christian Democracy swept across parts of Latin America, gaining influence in Venezuela in the 1940s, Chile in the 1950s, El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1960s, and Costa Rica and Mexico in the 1980s. This book offers an overview of Christian Democracy in the region— underscoring its remarkable diversity—and examines the Christian Democratic organizations of Chile and Mexico, which are still major parties today. The concluding section analyzes the demise of formerly significant Christian Democratic parties in El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru, and Venezuela. Christian Democracy in Latin America provides the definitive stufy of the nature, rise, and decline of Christian Democracy in Latin America. The book enriches the broader theoretical literature on political parties by highlighting the distinctive strategic dilemmas parties face, and the distinctive objectives they pursue, in contexts of fragile democracy or of authoritarian regimes.

Assesses the development of Christian democracy, on the most durable political movements in Europe

For the first time, this book reveals the actual roles of the Christian Democratic (CD) parties in postwar Europe from a pan-European perspective. It shows how Christian Democratic parties became the dominant political force in postwar Western Europe, and how the European People's Party is currently the largest group in the European Parliament. CD parties and political leaders like Adenauer, Schuman and De Gasperi played a particularly important role in the evolution of the 'core Europe' of the EEC/EC after 1945. Key chapters address the same questions about the parties' membership and social organization; their economic and social policies; and their European and international policies during the Cold War. The book also includes two survey chapters setting out the international political context for CD parties and comparing their postwar development, and two chapters on their transnational party cooperation after 1945. This is the companion volume to Political Catholicism in Europe 1918-1945.

A pioneering exploration of the origins of German Christian Democracy in the context of 19th- and 20th-century politics and religion

Debates on the role of Christian Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe too often remain strongly tied to national historiographies. With the edited collection the contributing authors aim to reconstruct Christian Democracy’s role in the fall of Communism from a bird's-eye perspective by covering the entire region and by taking “third-way” options in the broader political imaginary of late-Cold War Europe into account. The book’s twelve chapters present the most recent insights on this topic and connect scholarship on the Iron Curtain’s collapse with scholarship on political Catholicism. Christian Democracy and the Fall of Communism offers the reader a two-fold perspective. The first approach examines the efforts undertaken by Western European actors who wanted to foster or support Christian Democratic initiatives in Central and Eastern Europe. The second approach is devoted to the (re-)emergence of homegrown Christian Democratic formations in the 1980s and 1990s. One of the volume’s seminal contributions lies in its documentation of the decisive role that Christian Democracy played in supporting the political and anti-political forces that engineered the collapse of Communism from within between 1989 and 1991.

This book is the first scholarly exploration of how Christian Democracy kept Cold War Europe’s eastern and western halves connected after the creation of the Iron Curtain in the late 1940s. Christian Democrats led the transnational effort to rebuild the continent’s western half after World War II, but this is only one small part of the story of how the Christian Democratic political family transformed Europe and defied the nascent Cold War’s bipolar division of the world. The first section uses case studies from the origins of European integration to reimagine Christian Democracy’s long-term significance for a united Europe. The second shifts the focus to East-Central Europeans, some exiled to Western Europe, some to the USA, others remaining in the Soviet Bloc as dissidents. The transnational activism they pursued helped to ensure that, Iron Curtain or no, the boundary between Europe’s west and east remained permeable, that the Cold War would not last and that Soviet attempts to divide the continent permanently would fail. The book’s final section features the testimony of three key protagonists. This book appeals to a wide range of audiences: undergraduate and graduate students, established scholars, policymakers (in Europe and the Americas) and potentially also general readerships interested in the Cold War or in the future of Europe.