Catholic and Christian Democratic Views on Europe Before and After WW II: Continuities and Disontinuities

© The Author(s) 2018. Pasture explores how Christian Democrats conceived of “Europe” in the 1940s and 1950s, in the fledgling years of European integration. In particular, he reconstructs both continuities and discontinuities across the traditional caesura in twentieth-century European history: World War II. Pasture defines shifting trends in how Catholics and Christian Democrats imagined “Europe” this allows him to map a new spatial geography of European Christian Democracy. The outcome de-centers the confessional commitments of well-known Western Europeans 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 forge a European identity in the first decades of the Cold War.

ISBN:9783319640860

Publication year:2017

Accessibility:Closed