The history of Christian Democracy in twentieth-century Europe as a research field is currently in a profound crisis. This crisis is reflected in the increasingly marginal role of such research, and funded research on Christian Democracy in particular, in the larger historiography of modern and contemporary Europe.
In this chapter, I will suggest what I think are some of the structural and academic causes of this crisis. As this research field has been so heavily dominated in the past by institutions and authors affiliated to Christian churches, especially the Catholic Church, as well as Christian Democratic political parties and associated institutions, it seems appropriate to point out that this text has been written from the perspective of an outsider. I am not a member of a Christian Democratic party or, for that matter, any political party. I have not had a formal affiliation with any of the institutions—such as the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the KADOC (Documentation and Research Center for Religion, Culture and Society) at the Catholic University of Leuven or the Istituto Luigi Sturzo—which have fostered research on Christian Democracy in the past and are continuing to do so. I also work in a country, the United Kingdom, with a marginal intellectual tradition of Catholic social thought and no Christian Democratic party tradition at all.
I believe, however, that the situation is not entirely hopeless for the patient. I will therefore try in the second part of this chapter to suggest some structural reforms and a set of research themes that might facilitate a renaissance of research on the history of Christian Democracy and perhaps, more generally, of European political ideology and party history. This is precisely the task undertaken by this volume of essays.
Decline and Marginality in Modern History
Historical research is closely bound to, and influenced by, contemporary social, economic and political trends. One of these has been the first structural reason for the crisis of Christian Democracy as a research field: namely, the relative decline in many Western European countries of the parties belonging to that political family. 1 The erosion of the Catholic milieu and the decline in life-long party allegiance among voters hit political parties such as the Dutch Catholic People’s Party increasingly hard from the mid-1960s onwards. After the merger with two Protestant parties in the 1970s, the Netherlands’ Christian Democratic Appeal only received a meager 8.5% of the vote in the national elections of 2012, although it rebounded somewhat in the 2017 elections, gaining 12.4%. In France, the Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP)—a key centrist party and supporter of European integration—collapsed under pressure from Gaullism in the mid-1960s. Ever since, Christian Democracy has formed only one part of the highly volatile centrist and center-right political formations in France that were loosely allied to the newly elected French president Emmanuel Macron in the 2017 presidential and parliamentary elections. In Italy, the Democrazia Cristiana—highly fragmented internally into Catholic Action, liberal-conservatives and left Catholics—seemed the natural party of government until it disintegrated in the early 1990s. Successor parties have formed appendices to the right of the left or to the left of the right as new, similarly internally fragmented blocs in Italian politics have emerged.
The end of the Cold War facilitated the successful expansion of the European People’s Party (EPP), formed in 1976, into the future East-Central European member states of the European Union. 2 Despite the initial challenges of identifying appropriate partners in the volatile new party systems, this expansion has helped the EPP to consolidate its strong position in the European Parliament, where it has been the strongest parliamentary party since 1999. 3 As several chapters in this book highlight, some of the new European Union member states like Poland had traditions of Christian Democracy (of sorts) dating back to before World War II. 4 To some extent, these traditions persisted during the Cold War, when they provided one important focal point of criticism of, and opposition to, the Communist regime. 5 After the experience of forty-five years of Soviet occupation, strong anti-socialist attitudes initially prevailed, for the most part. Nevertheless, with few exceptions, distinctly Christian Democratic parties did not emerge. In Poland, the division into a pro-European centrist people’s party, the Civic Platform, and the nationalist Catholic right-wing party of Law and Justice, which once more gained political power in the 2015 national elections, has actually made the unification of Christian-inspired political groups in one political formation impossible. The result is a political minefield for researchers, especially those based at Catholic institutions like the Catholic University of Lublin, where a workshop held in 2015 became the inspiration for this book.
The decline of Christian Democratic parties, and of the Christian Democratic core in broad-based people’s parties, has naturally led to reduced academic interest in them and in their history. The economic and financial crisis in the European Union and the growth of populist Euroskeptic parties has aggravated the situation further. Research on Euroskepticism and Euroskeptic parties is mushrooming and often well-funded by European Union and national funding bodies. 6 They are keen to identify the sources of this phenomenon, which has potential to disrupt the European Union even further, to the point of undermining the membership of some of its countries, as in the case of the United Kingdom’s decision to opt for “Brexit” in the 2016 referendum.
At the same time, funding for research into the history of Christian Democracy by institutions affiliated with Christian Democratic parties has declined. The Catholic Documentation Center at Nijmegen is a case in point. With the university hosting it having deleted the “Catholic” denomination from its title, it has come under pressure to reinvent itself with sharply reduced funding. This, in turn, seems to have led to a broadening of the center’s previous focus on Catholicism, but with much less attention paid to party history and European connections than before. Research on European Christian Democracy, as a result, appears to depend even more on the institutions that in 2013 formed the European organization CIVITAS-Forum on Archives and Research on Christian Democracy. 7 The most important of these is the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, with its strong role, for historical reasons, as one of the major political foundations in Germany.
The second structural reason for the crisis is precisely that research on the history of Christian Democracy in the past was too closely affiliated with, and dependent on, institutions with close links to Christian Democratic parties. In postwar Western Europe, modern and contemporary history as a research field was much more highly party-politicized than it is now. Political parties and affiliated institutions began to organize research on their own history, normally entrusted to historians who were members of that party, or at least close to it politically. In some countries like Belgium, the Verzuiling, or pillarization of society along political and linguistic lines‚ extended to universities and academics working within them. In other countries, like West Germany, political preferences were closely associated with major historiographical schools. Thus, Gesellschaftsgeschichte, or social and “societal” history, became the domain of Social Democratic and left-liberal historians. Political and diplomatic history was largely done by historians affiliated with the Christian Democrats. Academic networks built on such pillars and schools dominated the recruitment of researchers and professors.
Much of the historical research on political Catholicism, Christian Democracy and Christian Democratic parties was, as a result, highly politicized. It was often characterized by much navel-gazing, deliberately marginalizing the critical outside-in perspectives of independent historians without some form of party affiliation—including British and American historians. In Germany, for example, Frank Bösch published a challenging book on the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), including the critical issue of its funding operations during the Adenauer era, but its reception was largely limited to more left-wing historians. 8 British contemporary historian Martin Conway, in turn, has felt marginalized in Belgium with his work on Belgian political Catholicism and the affiliation of its right wing with authoritarian and fascist groups and parties, as well as their continuities across World War II. 9
Some work by Christian Democrats on Christian Democracy has even had autobiographical traits, as in Helmut Kohl’s doctoral thesis on the origins of the CDU (and other political parties) in Rhineland-Palatinate after 1945. 10 More recently, at the crossroads of Christian Democracy, international cooperation and European integration, Roberto Papini’s work has been similarly characterized by a fusion of activist experience, attempts at historical reconstruction and the propagation of a singularly Christian Democratic vocation for Europe and the international order. 11
As a result, the dividing line between professional historical research and the preservation of party heritage has often blurred. The European vocation of Christian Democracy is a case in point. The lack of cooperation—for the moment, at least—of the Munich-based Hanns Seidel Foundation, affiliated with the Christian Social Union (CSU), with CIVITAS reflects traditional fault-lines in German politics. These fault-lines go back to, among others, the debate in Wildbad Kreuth in 1976 about the possible pan-German expansion of the CSU as a more Catholic-conservative party and the associated conflicts over the creation of the EPP and the European Democrat Union during the second half of the 1970s. 12 To some extent, at least, these conflicts have been, and still are, also about what kind of “Europe” Christian Democrats want, and how to use research as one—weak, but not irrelevant—factor to promote a particular identity and vision for Christian Democracy.
Fewer and fewer historians see their...