Towards a European history of the discourse of democracy

discussing democracy in Western Europe, 1945–60

Martin Conway

Volker Depkat

pp. 132-156

in: Martin Conway, Kiran K. Patel (eds), Europeanization in the twentieth century, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

Democracy was everywhere in Western Europe after 1945. In contrast to the deep crisis experienced by parliamentary regimes during the preceding decades, the ideas and institutions of democracy gained a sudden and unexpected hegemony following the Second World War. With the discrediting of the authoritarian ideologies that had formed such a prominent element of Europe's political culture during the years since the First World War and the enforced marginalization of Communist political forces that occurred in Western Europe by the end of the 1940s, a new and rather broad centreground had emerged in European politics that enabled the construction of largely similar democratic political regimes in much of Western Europe.¹ As Raymond Aron noted in a perceptive comparative essay written at the end of the 1950s, the events of the Second World War had rather unpredictably brought about a 'stabilisation démocratique", whereby most of the regimes in Western Europe (he was cautious about the cases of France and Italy) had achieved a real stability based on their political legitimacy and their effective government.² At the same time, "parliamentary democracy" came to be presented by a great majority of political elites in Western Europe as one of the central elements of "European civilization" and a distinguishing feature of a common European identity.³

Cited authors

Aron Raymond