Table Of ContentCHRISTIAN DEMOCRACY
ACROSS THE IRON CURTAIN
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EDITED BY
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Christian Democracy Across the Iron Curtain
Piotr H. Kosicki · Sławomir Łukasiewicz
Editors
Christian Democracy
Across the Iron
Curtain
Europe Redefined
Editors
Piotr H. Kosicki Sławomir Łukasiewicz
Department of History Institute of European Studies
University of Maryland John Paul II Catholic University of
College Park, MD, USA Lublin
Lublin, Poland
This publication has been made possible, in part, by the support of the Konrad-
Adenauer-Stiftung, Poland Office.
ISBN 978-3-319-64086-0 ISBN 978-3-319-64087-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64087-7
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E ’ P
ditors rEfacE
In a 2015 lecture at the Catholic University of Lublin, in Poland,
Wolfram Kaiser—perhaps Europe’s most incisive historian of Catholic
politics—declared, “the history of Christian Democracy in twentieth-
century Europe as a research field is currently in a profound crisis.”
Having neglected “research on the transfer of ideas and practices”—
Kaiser argued—mainstream scholarship on this influential political fam-
ily is producing work of increasingly marginal impact. On the other
hand, Kaiser suggested that the very audience that he was addressing—a
mix of scholars and practitioners from across Western and East-Central
Europe—had the opportunity to define a promising new direction for
the study of modern European politics. Poland, which played host to the
conference, has, after all, consistently been the most Catholic of the for-
mer Iron Curtain countries. In Kaiser’s words: “because Polish research
on Christian Democracy has been somewhat disconnected from the
friendly circles which have researched and propagated what I have called
‘pure’ Christian democracy, it may well be easier to develop and insert
innovative ideas and approaches into changing networks and research
themes.”
We, the editors of this book, organized that conference. We heard in
Wolfram Kaiser’s sobering assessment—which, in revised form, appears
as the introduction to this book—a call to gather scholars from across
the entire continent in order to define a genuinely European research
agenda.
v
vi EDITORS’ PREfACE
The purpose of the May 2015 gathering in Lublin was to establish
the state of the art of scholarship on Christian Democracy in twentieth-
century Europe. Having heard over thirty presentations, we chose to
invite eighteen authors to contribute to a multi-author volume propos-
ing a transnational, East-to-West understanding of Christian Democracy’s
many roles in the creation of a united Europe. We tasked these authors
with providing a fresh perspective based on their latest research.
Christian Democracy Across the Iron Curtain: Europe Redefined pre-
sents the results of that work. We have organized this book around three
thematic axes: the horizon lines of Christian Democracy as a political
force in twentieth-century Europe; the successes and failures of Christian
Democracy throughout the Cold War in permeating and penetrating
back and forth across the Iron Curtain; and the specific consequences
of how Christian Democracy in East-Central Europe (and especially in
Poland) has interacted with European Christian Democracy writ large.
The volume we offer here to the reader is the fruit of our collective
labors.
In the aftermath of World War II, the success of (Western) European
integration assured the ascendancy of a new flavor of political economy—
at once neoliberal and welfarist—predicated on the incorporation of
a peaceful federal Republic of Germany into a transnational system of
security guarantees. As historians from Tony Judt to Alan Milward have
argued, this was a moment of revolutionary rupture in the continent’s
history.
Sixty years later, this order is in danger of collapsing under pressure
from a whole host of threats: from the looming prospect of “Brexit”,
to an unprecedented migration crisis, to the rise of a populist, xenopho-
bic extreme right across the continent. In this context, it is essential for
scholars to re-examine the roots of European integration in order to
understand where things went wrong and, if possible, how to fix them.
Christian Democracy Across the Iron Curtain does precisely this,
through the lens of one transnational political force. Though its ori-
gins lay in late-nineteenth-century Catholic social thought and activ-
ism, Christian Democracy came into its own in the aftermath of World
War II as the lone political force of the right that, rather than collaborate
with fascism, distinguished itself by unrepentant resistance to the Third
Reich and its allies. With the Vatican’s enthusiastic support, Christian
Democrats then played a central role in laying the foundations of a
united Europe in the 1940s and 1950s.
EDITORS’ PREfACE vii
This, at least, is the story as traditionally told. Virtually absent from
this account, however, is what political scientist Jacques Rupnik has
called the “other Europe”: the East-Central European nations trapped
behind the Iron Curtain for four decades, until the annus mirabilis of
1989. East of the Rhine, too, Christian Democrats had once had an
important voice—until the ascendancy of Communist regimes either
halted, or coopted, their participation in national politics. Yet even then,
both at home and in exile, the Christian Democratic dissidents of East-
Central Europe played a crucial role in advancing a non-Communist
politics of social justice throughout the Cold War. They also helped to
launch transnational networks to lobby for this agenda across Europe—
and beyond the continent’s borders, as well.
East-Central European Christian Democrats benefited especially from
American support, establishing themselves as Cold Warriors delicately
balancing their own religious commitments with a subjective under-
standing of “national interest” on the one hand, and American geopoli-
tics on the other. Poles, in particular, played a central role in establishing
transnational Christian Democratic networks both within Europe, and
between Europe and Latin America.
And yet, since the Communist collapse in 1989, Christian Democracy
in Poland has arguably fared worse than while the Soviet Bloc still
existed. In fact, the whole of East-Central Europe has, since the fall of
the Iron Curtain, witnessed an ongoing tug of war between an integral
nationalism with roots predating World War II and a technocratic neo-
liberalism inspired by the American model. One of the most important
results of this contest has been the sidelining of social justice as a ral-
lying cry, with the result that Social and Christian Democratic move-
ments alike have largely failed as political forces in East-Central Europe.
While the former remains tainted by its roots in the Communist anciens
régimes, the latter lacks the kind of strong backing from the Catholic
Church that Western European Christian Democracy, for example,
received following World War II from Pope Pius XII.
There are many scholarly studies—especially in the french, German
and Italian languages—of the Christian Democratic politics of postwar
Western Europe, but there is not yet a single volume in any language
that examines the links between transnational Christian Democracy
and the nations of East-Central Europe. Moreover, existing histories of
Christian Democracy have tended to focus either on ideology (e.g. the
work of Philippe Chenaux) or party politics (e.g. the works of Michael
viii EDITORS’ PREfACE
Gehler and Wolfram Kaiser). Most of the studies produced in french and
Italian have emerged from within the Christian Democratic fold: these
studies make no pretense of objectivity, instead taking as one of the prin-
cipal tasks of their scholarship the dissemination of a glorious legend of
Christian Democracy.
While building on the foundations laid by previous generations of
scholars, we insist that understanding the trajectory of “Europe” in the
second half of the twentieth century requires looking beyond the conti-
nent’s western half. Our volume is distinctive in two respects: its spatial
geography, which looks east as well as west; and its conceptual vocabu-
lary, which goes beyond the tired confines of neofunctionalism, rational
choice theory and ideological confessionalism. Instead, this book under-
stands Christian Democracy—on both sides of the Iron Curtain—as a
mix of nationalism, transnationalism and Cold War geopolitics. Given the
dearth of scholarship highlighting the Central/Eastern European side
of European transnationalism, this book represents a major step toward
redefining the present agenda for research into transnational European
politics and ideology. We sincerely hope that it will inspire educators and
policymakers alike to seek new perspectives rooted in the most current
interdisciplinary research.
***
Christian Democracy Across the Iron Curtain is divided into three
parts. The first consists of six chapters, which broadly explore different
forms taken by Christian Democracy in post-World War II Europe, offer-
ing case studies at the crossroads of transnational politics and European
integration that challenge well-worn scholarly narratives of the European
community’s “founding fathers.” These chapters stand on their own as
an argument for reimagining Christian Democracy’s role in European
transnationalism, but they also provide a foil for understanding the role
of East-Central European Christian Democrats.
The book begins with a powerful introduction by Wolfram Kaiser,
who explains the central goal of our collective efforts: breaking through
the logjam of confessional and institutional agendas that have long fro-
zen the lion’s share of research into European Christian Democracy into
a positivist stasis. Kaiser proposes a broad-minded exploration of how
Christian Democracy has interacted with other political, cultural and reli-
gious forces in late-twentieth-century Europe—and how the continent’s
eastern half played a central role in crafting today’s Europe that, as yet,
remains almost entirely unexplored.
EDITORS’ PREfACE ix
Leading Belgian historian Patrick Pasture’s chapter explores how
Christian Democrats conceived of “Europe” in the 1940s and 1950s,
in the fledgling years of European integration. In particular, Pasture
reconstructs both continuities and discontinuities across the traditional
caesura in twentieth-century European history: World War II. Defining
the shifting trendlines for how Catholics and Christian Democrats imag-
ined Europe allows Patrick Pasture to lay the groundwork for a new
spatial geography of European Christian Democracy. The outcome de-
centers the confessional commitments of well-known Western European
Christian Democrats like Robert Schuman and Konrad Adenauer,
instead creating a space for a pluralistic understanding of Europe, with
varying confessional and ideological commitments. Pasture’s argument
offers a foundation for understanding how activists from across the Iron
Curtain, too, could play a serious role in forging a European identity
already in the first decades of the Cold War.
In the volume’s third chapter, Tiziana Di Maio offers a much-needed
reality check on the so-called “founding fathers” of European integra-
tion. She explores how the famous Christian Democratic statesmen
Konrad Adenauer and Alcide De Gasperi moved their nations beyond
the stain of fascism, to the point of making them motors of a new supra-
national order. By de-centering france in the story of European inte-
gration’s origins, Di Maio paints a portrait of two postwar European
peripheries—Germany and Italy—linked by a shared experience of defeat
in World War II, actively encouraging their Western European colleagues
to accept a project of European integration. Theirs is a lesson that speaks
volumes in the face of twenty-first-century European challenges con-
nected to “Brexit” and resurgent populism and xenophobia across the
continent.
In the fourth chapter, eminent international historian Antonio Varsori
offers a counter-history of European Christian Democracy from the
continent’s “southern” periphery, establishing a baseline for thinking
longitudinally about the limits of Christian Democracy as both a con-
cept and a political program. Tracing the slow death of Italian Christian
Democracy from fanfani through Berlusconi, ending with Italy’s most
recent former prime minister Matteo Renzi, Varsori presents a story of
weakening ideology and European commitments. This Italian story
becomes a crucial foil for the detailed stories of East-Central European
Christian Democracy—and the rise and fall of its commitment to
Europe—that occupy the rest of our volume.
x EDITORS’ PREfACE
In the fifth chapter, the Reverend Wiesław Bar pulls together the work
of Pasture, Di Maio and Varsori, offering an East-Central European per-
spective on the first postwar generation of Western European Christian
Democrats, among whom one finds the proverbial “founding fathers”
of a united Europe. By systematically reconstructing the criteria used by
the Catholic Church in determining whether or not to beatify Christian
Democratic politicians like Alcide De Gasperi and Robert Schuman, Rev.
Bar makes clear that Christian Democracy has been as much about faith
as about policy, and that, as such, its legacy has been substantially shaped
by the late Polish pope John Paul II. Moreover, Bar’s conclusions illu-
minate the well-honed criteria that today’s East-Central Europeans have
at their disposal for assessing how Europe has fared relative to the inten-
tions of its “founders.”
Beata Kosowska-Gąstoł closes the first part of Christian Democracy
Across the Iron Curtain by turning to a more traditional subject of schol-
arly inquiry into Christian Democracy: transnational party politics. Her
chapter, however, takes the unusual approach of locating the disconnect
between the traditional core of the European integration project (france,
Germany, Italy) and Europe’s East-Central periphery in how trans-
national political cooperation has evolved at the level of the European
Parliament. This chapter shows that, while the European People’s Party
has weakened—rather than strengthened—transnational Christian
Democratic ideology since the 1970s, East-Central European actors
nonetheless still look to it as an anchor for a potential European revival.
Part II of Christian Democracy Across the Iron Curtain shifts the focus
squarely to East-Central Europeans, covering activities both behind the
Iron Curtain and among Cold War political émigrés, as well as transfers
between the two. Eight chapters offer broad arguments about the role
played by East-Central Europe’s Christian Democrats—especially Poles—
in both the rise and fall of the region’s commitments to a “united Europe.”
Jarosław Rabiński’s chapter opens this part with a case study in how
the establishment of Communist regimes in East-Central Europe at
the close of World War II led to the elimination of political pluralism.
Rabiński recounts the dismantling of a Christian Democratic network
that had distinguished itself throughout the war both on Polish soil and
in the London-based state apparatus in exile. Within three years after the
war’s end, a party that had been actively encouraged by postwar Poland’s
nascent Communist establishment to rebuild its field organization and
stand for elections had been pushed either into exile, or into the Stalinist
