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Writing the History of Postwar European Democracy
Review products
Rita Chin, The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), £20 (hb), ISBN 978-0691164267.
Sheri Berman, Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), £13 (hb), ISBN 978-0199373192.
Peter Gatrell, Unsettling Europe: How Migration Reshaped a Continent (New York: Basic Books, 2019), £27 (hb), ISBN 978-0465093618.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 July 2022
Extract
In 1998, Mark Mazower concluded his Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century with the thought that Europeans rest content to be no longer at the centre of history and politics. They should enjoy the economic and political stability they had gained instead. ‘If Europeans can give up their desperate desire to find a single workable definition of themselves and if they can accept a more modest place in the world, they may come to terms more easily with the diversity and dissension which will be as much their future as their past’.1 As the title of Mazower's book suggested, this scholar of southeastern Europe writing in the wake of the Yugoslav civil war was not sanguine about the history of democracy on the continent. Contested and weak in the first half of the twentieth century, its liberal parliamentary kind continued to find a strong challenger in the people's democracy of the Eastern Bloc, which at least gave it a mission. Post 1990, Mazower saw disorientation about the continent's future political direction, and predicted instead the victory of capitalism. Indeed, to him the European Union was more a concession by its constituent states in order to maintain or regain prosperous national economies than a bold democratic endeavour.2
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
1 Mazower, Mark, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf, 1998), 402Google Scholar.
2 Ibid., 401–2.
3 Judt, Tony, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 800Google Scholar.
4 Ibid., 798.
5 Mazower, Dark Continent, 397.
6 Middelaar, Luuk van, The Passage to Europe: How a Continent Became a Union (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 131Google Scholar.
7 See Rahden, Till van, Demokratie: Eine gefährdete Lebensform (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 2019)Google Scholar.
8 Conway, Martin, Western Europe's Democratic Age: 1945–1968 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 11–12Google Scholar.
9 Jobs, Richard Ivan, ‘Youth Movements: Travel, Protest, and Europe in 1968’, The American Historical Review, 114, 2 (2009), 376–404Google Scholar, here 399.
10 Berman, Sheri, Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 6Google Scholar.
11 Ibid., 5–6
12 Ibid., 380
13 Conway, Western Europe's Democratic Age, 264–5
14 Berman, Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe, 392.
15 Böckenförde, Ernst-Wolfgang, ‘The Rise of the State as a Process of Secularization (1967)’, in Künkler, Mirjam and Stein, Tine, eds., Böckenförde: Religion, Law, and Democracy: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 152–67Google Scholar, here 167. Emphasis in the original.
16 Berman, Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe, 387.
17 Chin, Rita, The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 3Google Scholar.
18 Ibid., 29.
19 Ibid., 90.
20 Ibid., 12.
21 Gatrell, Peter, Unsettling Europe: How Migration Reshaped a Continent (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 239Google Scholar.
22 Chin, The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe, 17.
23 Gatrell, Unsettling Europe, 455.
24 Ibid., 2–3.
25 Ibid., 236–7, 262–3.
26 Walzer, Michael, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 61–2Google Scholar.
27 Chin, The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe, 251.