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Author: Pepijn Corduwener
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134996330
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 173
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Book Description
The current perception of democratic crisis in Western Europe gives a renewed urgency to a new perspective on the way democracy was reconstructed after World War II and the principles that underpinned its postwar transformation. This study accounts for the formation of the postwar democratic order in Western Europe by studying how the main political actors in France, West Germany and Italy conceptualized democracy and strove over its meaning. Based upon a wide range of librarian and archival sources from these countries, it tracks changing conceptions of democracy among leading politicians, political parties, and leaders of social movements, and unveils how they were deeply divided over key principles of postwar democracy – such as the political party, the free market economy, representation, and civic participation. By comparing three national debates on the question what democracy meant and how it should be institutionalized and practiced, this study argues that only in the 1970s conceptions of democracy converged and key political actors accepted each other as democrats with similar conceptions of democracy. This study thereby deconstructs the myth of the quick emergence of one consensual Western European model of democracy after 1945, demonstrates that its formation was a long and contentious process in which national differences were often of crucial importance, and contributes to an enhanced understanding of the historical roots of the current sentiment of democratic crisis.
Author: Pepijn Corduwener
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134996330
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 173
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Book Description
The current perception of democratic crisis in Western Europe gives a renewed urgency to a new perspective on the way democracy was reconstructed after World War II and the principles that underpinned its postwar transformation. This study accounts for the formation of the postwar democratic order in Western Europe by studying how the main political actors in France, West Germany and Italy conceptualized democracy and strove over its meaning. Based upon a wide range of librarian and archival sources from these countries, it tracks changing conceptions of democracy among leading politicians, political parties, and leaders of social movements, and unveils how they were deeply divided over key principles of postwar democracy – such as the political party, the free market economy, representation, and civic participation. By comparing three national debates on the question what democracy meant and how it should be institutionalized and practiced, this study argues that only in the 1970s conceptions of democracy converged and key political actors accepted each other as democrats with similar conceptions of democracy. This study thereby deconstructs the myth of the quick emergence of one consensual Western European model of democracy after 1945, demonstrates that its formation was a long and contentious process in which national differences were often of crucial importance, and contributes to an enhanced understanding of the historical roots of the current sentiment of democratic crisis.
Author: Tony Judt
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780143037750
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1000
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Book Description
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award • One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century “Impressive . . . Mr. Judt writes with enormous authority.” —The Wall Street Journal “Magisterial . . . It is, without a doubt, the most comprehensive, authoritative, and yes, readable postwar history.” —The Boston Globe Almost a decade in the making, this much-anticipated grand history of postwar Europe from one of the world's most esteemed historians and intellectuals is a singular achievement. Postwar is the first modern history that covers all of Europe, both east and west, drawing on research in six languages to sweep readers through thirty-four nations and sixty years of political and cultural change-all in one integrated, enthralling narrative. Both intellectually ambitious and compelling to read, thrilling in its scope and delightful in its small details, Postwar is a rare joy.
Author: Martin Conway
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691204594
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
A major new history of how democracy became the dominant political force in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century What happened in the years following World War II to create a democratic revolution in the western half of Europe? In Western Europe's Democratic Age, Martin Conway provides an innovative new account of how a stable, durable, and remarkably uniform model of parliamentary democracy emerged in Western Europe—and how this democratic ascendancy held fast until the latter decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Conway describes how Western Europe's postwar democratic order was built by elite, intellectual, and popular forces. Much more than the consequence of the defeat of fascism and the rejection of Communism, this democratic order rested on universal male and female suffrage, but also on new forms of state authority and new political forces—primarily Christian and social democratic—that espoused democratic values. Above all, it gained the support of the people, for whom democracy provided a new model of citizenship that reflected the aspirations of a more prosperous society. This democratic order did not, however, endure. Its hierarchies of class, gender, and race, which initially gave it its strength, as well as the strains of decolonization and social change, led to an explosion of demands for greater democratic freedoms in the 1960s, and to the much more contested democratic politics of Europe in the late twentieth century. Western Europe's Democratic Age is a compelling history that sheds new light not only on the past of European democracy but also on the unresolved question of its future.
Author: Agnes Headlam-Morley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Constitutions
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
Author: Peter C. Caldwell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192570536
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Democracy, Capitalism, and the Welfare State investigates political thought under the conditions of the postwar welfare state, focusing on the Federal Republic of Germany (1949-1989). The volume argues that the welfare state informed and altered basic questions of democracy and its relationship to capitalism. These questions were especially important for West Germany, given its recent experience with the collapse of capitalism, the disintegration of democracy, and National Socialist dictatorship after 1930. Three central issues emerged. First, the development of a nearly all-embracing set of social services and payments recast the problem of how social groups and interests related to the state, as state agencies and affected groups generated their own clientele, their own advocacy groups, and their own expert information. Second, the welfare state blurred the line between state and society that is constitutive of basic rights and the classic world of liberal freedom; rights became claims on the state, and social groups became integral parts of state administration. Third, the welfare state potentially reshaped the individual citizen, who became wrapped up with mandatory social insurance systems, provisioning of money and services related to social needs, and the regulation of everyday life. Peter C. Caldwell describes how West German experts sought to make sense of this vast array of state programs, expenditures, and bureaucracies aimed at solving social problems. Coming from backgrounds in politics, economics, law, social policy, sociology, and philosophy, they sought to conceptualize their state, which was now social (one German word for the welfare state is indeed Sozialstaat), and their society, which was permeated by state policies.
Author: Sheri Berman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199373205
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 561
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Book Description
At the end of the twentieth century, many believed the story of European political development had come to an end. Modern democracy began in Europe, but for hundreds of years it competed with various forms of dictatorship. Now, though, the entire continent was in the democratic camp for the first time in history. But within a decade, this story had already begun to unravel. Some of the continent's newer democracies slid back towards dictatorship, while citizens in many of its older democracies began questioning democracy's functioning and even its legitimacy. And of course it is not merely in Europe where democracy is under siege. Across the globe the immense optimism accompanying the post-Cold War democratic wave has been replaced by pessimism. Many new democracies in Latin America, Africa, and Asia began "backsliding," while the Arab Spring quickly turned into the Arab winter. The victory of Donald Trump led many to wonder if it represented a threat to the future of liberal democracy in the United States. Indeed, it is increasingly common today for leaders, intellectuals, commentators and others to claim that rather than democracy, some form dictatorship or illiberal democracy is the wave of the future. In Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe, Sheri Berman traces the long history of democracy in its cradle, Europe. She explains that in fact, just about every democratic wave in Europe initially failed, either collapsing in upon itself or succumbing to the forces of reaction. Yet even when democratic waves failed, there were always some achievements that lasted. Even the most virulently reactionary regimes could not suppress every element of democratic progress. Panoramic in scope, Berman takes readers through two centuries of turmoil: revolution, fascism, civil war, and - -finally -- the emergence of liberal democratic Europe in the postwar era. A magisterial retelling of modern European political history, Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe not explains how democracy actually develops, but how we should interpret the current wave of illiberalism sweeping Europe and the rest of the world.
Author: Jan-Werner Muller
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030018090X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 473
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Book Description
DIVThis book is the first major account of political thought in twentieth-century Europe, both West and East, to appear since the end of the Cold War. Skillfully blending intellectual, political, and cultural history, Jan-Werner Müller elucidates the ideas that shaped the period of ideological extremes before 1945 and the liberalization of West European politics after the Second World War. He also offers vivid portraits of famous as well as unjustly forgotten political thinkers and the movements and institutions they inspired. Müller pays particular attention to ideas advanced to justify fascism and how they relate to the special kind of liberal democracy that was created in postwar Western Europe. He also explains the impact of the 1960s and neoliberalism, ending with a critical assessment of today's self-consciously post-ideological age./div
Author: Molly Tambor
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199378231
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
The first women entered national government in Italy in 1946, and represented a "lost wave" of feminist action. They used a specific electoral and legislative strategy, "constitutional rights feminism," to construct an image of the female citizen as a bulwark of democracy. Mining existing tropes of femininity such as the Resistance heroine, the working mother, the sacrificial Catholic, and the "mamma Italiana," they searched for social consensus for women's equality that could reach across religious, ideological, and gender divides. The political biographies of woman politicians intertwine throughout the book with the legislative history of the women's rights law they created and helped pass: a Communist who passed the first law guaranteeing paid maternity leave in 1950, a Socialist whose law closed state-run brothels in 1958, and a Christian Democrat who passed the 1963 law guaranteeing women's right to become judges. Women politicians navigated gendered political identity as they picked and chose among competing models of femininity in Cold War Italy. In so doing, they forged a political legacy that in turn affected the rights and opportunities of all Italian women. Their work is compared throughout The Lost Wave to the constitutional rights of women in other parts of postwar Europe.
Author: OECD
Publisher: OECD Publishing
ISBN: 9264044256
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 139
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Book Description
This book examines the historical, diplomatic, economic, and strategic aspects of the European Recovery Program (ERP) - popularly known as the Marshall Plan.
Author: Dean Vuletic
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474276288
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291
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Book Description
Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest examines how the Eurovision Song Contest has reflected and become intertwined with the history of postwar Europe from a political perspective. Established in 1956, the Eurovision Song Contest is the world's largest popular music event and one of the most popular television programmes in Europe, currently attracting a global audience of around 200 million people. Eurovision is often mocked as cultural kitsch because of its over-the-top performances and frivolous song lyrics. Yet there is no cultural medium that connects Europeans more than popular music, the development of which has always been tied to cultural, economic, political, social and technological change – making Eurovision the ideal tool to explain the history of Europe in the last sixty years. This book uses Eurovision as a vehicle to address topics ranging from the Cold War, liberal democracy and communism to nationalism, European integration, economic prosperity and human rights. It analyses these subjects through their cultural, political and social relationships with Eurovision entries as expressed through lyrics and music, as well as by examining public debates that have accompanied the selection of the entries and the organisation of the contest itself. Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest also considers how states have used Eurovision to define their identities in a European context, be it to assert their national distinctiveness, highlight political issues or affirm their Europeanism or Euroscepticism in the context of European integration. Based on original sources, including hitherto unpublished archival documents from international broadcasting organisations, this is a novel historical study of interest to anyone keen to know more about the postwar history of Europe and its cultural history in particular.
