The Postwar Bargain
The post-1945 Christian Democratic agendas manifested slight differences in accordance with national situations. There were nonetheless common tenets:
- Resistance to communism and Soviet takeover, then the major totalitarian threat in Europe. This meant strengthening alliances with America and supporting NATO. Christian Democrats were staunch Atlanticists.
- Free enterprise mitigated by regulation and welfare programs. The Germans described this approach as the “social market economy.” It worked in concert with American-controlled Keynesian organizations, above all the Marshall Plan. Eventually, these policies translated into a series of “economic miracles”—the German Wirtschaftswunder, the Italian Miracle, and the French Trente Glorieuses.
- Pro-family policies, which included direct government subsidies for parents, subsidized housing, support for family businesses, support for religious school networks, a conservative stand on sexual norms, policies curtailing birth control, and prohibition of abortion and even divorce.
- Reconciliation among European nations, cooperation, and federalism. The Soviet menace and the American security umbrella meant that the major Western European powers were not fully independent anymore, and they could not nurture hostile designs against one another. With greater Germany reduced to West Germany, there was greater parity of size and power in Europe. Moreover, American economic support—the key to recovery, full employment, the rise of living standards, and domestic peace—was provided on the condition of European integration.
- Rule of law and support for traditional institutions (including the monarchy, where it still existed). The widespread desire to return to “normalcy” reinforced the conservative platforms of Christian Democratic parties.
Yet early in the postwar era, a new political dynamic emerged. It would at first qualify the ascendancy of Christian-dominated parties and eventually hollow them out. The Christian Democrats found themselves often joining forces with the Social Democrats, their historic adversaries. They had agreed on some issues in the past and had joined forces during the Resistance. After 1945, cooperation increased dramatically. At times, Christian Democrats and Social Democrats looked like the two wings of one single movement committed to prosperity and stability.
Social Democratic parties emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, organized along the assumption that the laboring class was in conflict with the capitalist class. These parties sought a new, “post-capitalist” social order, and in that sense they were revolutionary in the tradition of the French Revolution. But they distinguished themselves from communists and other radicals by pledging to work within liberal democratic institutions—hence their name, Social Democrats.
The postwar situation moderated the ideological differences of earlier decades. The Social Democrats moved toward the Christian Democrats on the question of communism and Soviet expansion. They were affected by the dissolution of their movement by the communists in the so-called “People’s Democracies” in Eastern Europe, often accompanied by assassinations and imprisonments of Social Democratic leaders. (The Prague coup in 1948 was a particular shock to the left in Western Europe.) As a result, Social Democrats embraced Atlanticism too, and with it an American-dominated foreign policy.
This resulted in a broad national consensus in countries like Germany, where CDU/CSU and SPD contended for power. In Italy, where communists dominated the left, small socialist parties had no choice but to ally themselves with DC. In France, MRP-Socialist cooperation was necessary against an informal but effective coalition of the Gaullists, the communists, and several small right-of-center or left-of-center groups, cemented together by a common distrust of Atlanticism. Unlike its Italian and German counterparts, the French center-left/center-right cooperation failed: The coalition that worried about American dominance derailed a NATO-sponsored European Defense Community project in 1954. As was so often the case, de Gaulle remained difficult to categorize in postwar politics.
Wartime destruction united the interests of labor and capital. Both had an overriding interest in rebuilding shattered economies. Thus, when it came to economic policies, Christian Democrats and Social Democrats had similar agendas. Both groups were influenced by American patrons who believed in a regulated market and welfare programs: New Deal Democrats, Eisenhower Republicans, and the AFL-CIO, which actively supported non-communist unions in Western Europe, Christian Democratic and Social Democratic alike. This convergence was sealed when Germany’s SPD, the strongest European Socialist party, disclaimed any vestigial allegiance to Marxism at its 1959 party convention in Bad Godesberg.
When it came to European integration, the convergence was even more complete. Among its leading proponents were the so-called Vatican triumvirate of De Gasperi, Schuman, and Adenauer, to which the godfather of European federalism himself, the international banker Jean Monnet, should perhaps be added, since he always remained close to his family’s Catholic tradition. This group was paralleled by a Social Democratic triumvirate: the Belgian prime minister Paul-Henri Spaak, the Dutch Minister of Agriculture and then Minister of Economy Sicco Mansholt, the Italian Socialist and Eurofederalist Altiero Spinelli. Without the Christian Democratic–Social Democratic compact, it is unlikely that the European Coal and Steel Community would have been created in 1951, or that the Treaty of Rome, the cornerstone of political Europe, would have been signed in 1957.
Christian Democrats and Social Democrats also shared many views on family policy, as long as it involved increasing economic or financial aid. They were ready to compromise at times on politically risky matters such as education. But there were still marked differences on family values as such. Christian Democrats prioritized the family over the individual; Social Democrats did the opposite. As long as the baby boom lasted, this was not really a matter of consequence, because family values were dominant within both groups. But the boom slowed by the mid-1960s, and the parents’ generation yielded to that of the children, for whom family was not the first priority.