Political Catholicism in Europe 1918-1945

Volume 1

Wolfram Kaiser, Helmut Wohnout, Wolfram Kaiser, Helmut Wohnout

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135766726
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the role of Catholic parties in inter-war Europe in a systematically pan-European comparative perspective.

Specific country chapters address key questions about the parties' membership and social organization; their economic and social policies; and their European and international policies at a time of increasing national and ethnic conflict, and the book includes two survey chapters explaining the origins of political catholicism in 19th century Europe and comparing the parties' interwar development, and two chapters on
transnational party contacts.

Along with its companion volume, Christian Democracy in Europe Since 1945, also published in 2004, students will have an abundandce of information to guide them through their studies on this fascinating subject.

1
Catholics, Christians and the Challenges of
Democracy: The Heritage of the Nineteenth
Century

John W.Boyer

The country chapters in this book address the ways in which Catholic religious and political movements, mobilized from below and competing in the arena of electoral and associational politics, developed in inter-war Europe, later contributing to the formation of generally stable political societies in Western Europe after 1945. This chapter involves an equally challenging, although slightly different question, which is how we can connect the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. There is broad agreement that the traditions of political and social Catholicism that emerged with force and authority in the late nineteenth century, especially those associated with the idea of Christian democracy in its many forms, had important implications for the successful reinvention of European politics after 1945. Scholarly literature is certainly replete with variations of this argument. To take examples from American scholarship on Europe published in the last few years, Noel Cary, in a recent book on German political Catholicism, argues that the Centre Party (Zentrum) was a ‘model among Catholics for what was fully achieved only after 1945…a broad party that could integrate conservatives into a liberal democratic system’. Cary believes that ‘the Center Party, the civic agent of the German Catholic Sonderweg, was, for better or worse, the closest example in the German past of a political culture that offered an ideal of tolerance’.¹ In a brilliant essay on Germany in the late twentieth century Michael Geyer has argued, in turn, that the history of Germany after 1945 is the history of two ‘pariah nations’—Catholicism and socialism—both of which before 1914 were ‘the foremost antistate, and, indeed, antisystem movements [that] had managed to check their respective particularist proclivities in order to generate programmatic national movements and cultural agendas with their own universal appeal’, and which finally ‘came to govern Germany for the “better”, second half of the century’.² Finally, Raymond Grew has offered a similar assessment in a recent essay on liberty and Catholicism: ‘Europe’s Catholics can be said to have laid the groundwork before World War I for the parties of Christian democracy that would blossom after World War II and for the Catholic contribution to a European community.’³

One could duplicate these observations with parallel statements from many German, French, Austrian and other European historians. Yet the claims that scholars routinely make about links between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are more often posited than demonstrated. Both Martin Conway and Stathis N.Kalyvas have recently cautioned against constructing cheerful, progressive narratives involving the history of Christian democracy that fail to explain the simultaneous existence of Catholic movements opposed to liberal values.⁴ Kalyvas has rightly observed that ‘[l]ooking today at the benign Christian Democratic parties, one can easily forget the aliberal and often intolerant nature of the Catholic movement from which they emerged’,⁵ Michael Geyer himself has put the issue in a different light by warning against retrospective infatuations with ‘the certainties of a nineteenth-century imagination’ at the end of the twentieth century, infatuations that might lead historians to ‘loop back to (and possibly renew) the hopes and expectations of the nineteenth century’ and thus reaffirm the ‘good intentions of the nineteenth century and their prospective fulfillment in the twenty-first’.⁶

Granted, the political and moral formations of ‘Christian democracy’, which were anchored in a corresponding Catholic civilizational milieu powerfully shaped by the nineteenth century and which blossomed so successfully in the late 1940s and early 1950s, were in many respects endangered, if not outmoded, by the later 1970s and early 1980s. Still, there is considerable irony if one stands at the vantage point of the logical end of the nineteenth century, namely 1914, and imagines the Catholics (or socialists) of that world having an opportunity to play the role of a post-1945 catch-all political movement responsible for broad-based regime stability. After all, in France, Catholics found themselves both embattled politically and still reeling from the consequences of the Separation Law of 1905. In Germany, three decades after the repudiation of the Kulturkampf, Catholics found themselves again dogged by militant Protestants seeking to engineer a second reformation, and in their own milieu were profoundly uncertain about how much of modernity they could or should assimilate. In neighbouring Austria, Catholics were trying to recover from the massive losses suffered in the 1911 national elections by the Christian Social Party. Nor were the German and Austrian cases all that dissimilar, for Catholics in both nations were having obvious trouble maintaining the political loyalties of workingclass citizens living in large cities: Christian Social losses in Vienna in June 1911 were followed by the Centre Party’s losses in Cologne, Düsseldorf, Würzburg and elsewhere in January 1912.⁷ The German Catholic Labour leader, August Pieper, would warn his colleagues in 1912 that ‘we will have to organize ourselves and explain our cause completely differently among those who work in industry and commerce than we have previously been accustomed to do in a Germany that was primarily peasant-based’.⁸

We therefore confront a puzzle: the traditions of nineteenth-century political Catholicism, and, where they overlap, of social Catholicism, have been seen by many scholars to have great moment for the third and even the fourth quarters of the twentieth century; but standing at the beginning of the twentieth century, one might not have predicted these optimistic and fortuitous outcomes. Indeed, there are parts of the nineteenth-century narrative that are eminently unattractive, and difficult to fit into some imaginary Catholic or even Christian vision of the Whig theory of history. Christoph Weber has argued that many late-nineteenth-century Catholics greatly feared modernity and suffered from what he calls ‘a feeling of loss and of catastrophe’.⁹ True, Julius Bachem may have invited German Catholics to exit from ‘the Tower’ into a broader regime of interconfessional modernity, but this had costs as well as gains. As Marshall Berman once observed: To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world— and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.’¹⁰

It will be helpful in exploring this puzzle if we first consider the different and often conflicting histories of several of the major national sites of political Catholic action in Europe, and if we then examine some general cultural and intellectual processes that linked these sites together into a single Catholicism, all the while highlighting their differences. I conclude with some thoughts on what Catholics had learned from the nineteenth century, and on the unfinished business that they had before them in 1914. My narrative is not limited to parliamentary political history or to traditional issues of Church and state, moving as it does to encompass also mass political organizations, social theory and considerations of what might be characterized as the history of mentalities. Indeed, much of the most fascinating research in the last 20 years by European and American scholars on modern European Catholicism has resulted from the willingness of historians to move beyond the locus of a strict ‘Church-State’ lens to observe the many and varied ways that religion profoundly influenced the civic culture of modern European societies.¹¹ Rather, the story that I tell is that of a third way between the totalities of liberalism and collectivism, a way that I shall characterize as the politics of corporate modernity, a modernity that had a powerful effect on later twentieth-century European history.

CATHOLIC POLITICAL TRADITIONS, 1870–1914: THE CASE OF GERMANY

Three of the most prominent national sites for social and political Catholicism were Germany, France and Austria. The experience of Catholics in these states depended on the characteristics of their broader civic cultures, and especially their eighteenth-century antecedents. The seven decades between 1848 and 1914 saw tremendous institutional and political developments across Europe, and nowhere was this more evident than in Germany. Abandoning regimes of royal-bureaucratic absolutism, and overcoming centuries-long regional particularism, Germany not only became a nationally integrated state, but melded political absolutism into a constitutionally grounded regime of liberal law and representational procedure based on equality, certainty and uniformity before the law.¹² The zenith of this process of liberal and national institution-building came between 1870 and 1900.

By the beginning of the twentieth century German Catholics possessed what the distinguished French Catholic historian, Jean-Marie Mayeur, has characterized as a ‘model’ Catholic political party.¹³ How did this come about? The Kulturkampf lies at the heart of German Catholic political experience, and it has had wide ramifications. That confessional identity became, and has remained, a major variable in modern German electoral politics is a testimony to the power of the impulses set off by Bismarck’s attack on the Catholic Church from 1871 to 1878, and the resulting mass mobilization of German Catholics that endured long after his fall from power. The Kulturkampf defined Catholicism’s future relationship not only to the German state, but to the majority Protestant community as well, since many of the most forceful proponents of anti-Catholic legislation were liberals intent on creating a community of values that were ‘largely synonymous with those of enlightened Protestantism’.¹⁴

The founding of the Centre Party predated the onset of the Kulturkampf by several years, reflecting an already emergent political consciousness among Catholic voters during national institution-building of the later 1860s. Indeed, many historians believe that it was the Centre Party, rather than the Catholic Church as a confessional culture, that was the real object of Bismarck’s scorn.¹⁵ But the hard years of the mid-1870s forged a sturdy matrix of political relationships between the lower clergy and the Centre Party’s lay cadres that endured long after 1890. Programmatically, the early 1870s saw the creation of a dense network of Catholic political and social organizations superior in scope to those enjoyed by liberals. This capacity for effective associational organization was revived after 1890 with a wave of new associations, of which the Volksverein für das katholische Deutschland was perhaps the most impressive.¹⁶ In this movement, German Catholics did not lack determined, and even courageous, leadership from their bishops.¹⁷

These formative years resulted in what Margaret Anderson has called ‘a massive political realignment of Catholics’.¹⁸ The Centre Party that emerged under Ludwig Windthorst’s resolute leadership was both confessional and interdenominational; rural and urban; aristocratic, clerical, and bourgeois; and, as Bismarck once put it, ‘encompassing seven intellectual directions reflecting all the colours of the political rainbow, from the extreme Right to the most radical Left’.¹⁹ The Centre Party did a superb job of coalescing Catholic support from many divergent social and cultural milieux into an impressive record of electoral support.²⁰ Between 1874 and 1912 the Centre’s share of the total pool of eligible Catholic voters remained generally stable: 49 per cent between 1871 and 1878, rising to 52 per cent between 1881 and 1887, sinking to 46 per cent between 1890 and 1898, and returning again to 49 per cent between 1903 and 1912. Paradoxically, after 1900 the Centre began to lose more Catholic voters to the Social Democrats and National Liberals, but these losses balanced themselves out as it recruited more new voters and former non-voters.²¹

Recent research on the Centre Party and the confessional culture that it represents suggests, however, that Catholics faced a series of challenges after 1890 that were directly tied to new trends in the broader political milieu. The years after 1890 saw difficult, but powerful, transformations in the organization of parties and the associational structures that undergirded them, including the rise of a vast array of new special interest groups. Jonathan Sperber has recently argued that the Centre made the transition to an even more aggressive voter recruitment and mobilization quite effectively: The party accomplishing this [transformation] on the most massive scale and with the greatest effect was the Center.’²² At the same time Wilfried Loth has made a robust argument that the Centre Party faced a process of upheaval after 1890 in which three very different electoral and cultural constituencies found voice and vote: a growing Catholic proletariat insistent on its rights, an agrarian and urban Mittelstand more and more defensive and fearful of change, and an emerging Catholic Bürgertum eager to profit from the high capitalism and new industrial culture that was enriching German society. In their diversity, these groups left the Centre Party witho...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. CATHOLICS, CHRISTIANS AND THE CHALLENGES OF DEMOCRACY: THE HERITAGE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
• 2. A MICROCOSM OF SOCIETY OR THE KEY TO A MAJORITY IN THE REICHSTAG? THE CENTRE PARTY IN GERMANY
• 3. CATHOLICS BETWEEN EMANCIPATION AND INTEGRATION: THE CONSERVATIVE PEOPLE’S PARTY IN SWITZERLAND
• 4. A HISTORICAL DETOUR: THE ROMAN CATHOLIC STATE PARTY IN THE NETHERLANDS
• 5. RELIGION, CLASS AND LANGUAGE: THE CATHOLIC PARTY IN BELGIUM
• 6. CHRISTIAN DEMOCRACY AND CENTRISM: THE POPULAR DEMOCRATIC PARTY IN FRANCE
• 7. BETWEEN THE CRISIS OF THE LIBERAL STATE, FASCISM AND A DEMOCRATIC PERSPECTIVE: THE POPULAR PARTY IN ITALY
• 8. A POWERFUL CATHOLIC CHURCH, UNSTABLE STATE AND AUTHORITARIAN POLITICAL REGIME: THE CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATIC PARTY IN POLAND
• 9. MIDDLE-CLASS GOVERNMENTAL PARTY AND SECULAR ARM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH: THE CHRISTIAN SOCIALS IN AUSTRIA
• 10. COLLABORATING WITH HORTHY: POLITICAL CATHOLICISM AND CHRISTIAN POLITICAL ORGANIZATIONS IN HUNGARY
• 11. CATHOLIC PEOPLE’S PARTIES IN EAST CENTRAL EUROPE: THE BOHEMIAN LANDS AND SLOVAKIA
• 12. CATHOLIC POLITICS OR CHRISTIAN DEMOCRACY? THE EVOLUTION OF INTER–WAR POLITICAL CATHOLICISM
• 13. ANTICIPATED EXILE OF CATHOLIC DEMOCRATS: THE SECRÉTARIAT INTERNATIONAL DES PARTIS DÉMOCRATIQUES D’INSPIRATION CHRÉTIENNE
• 14. TRANSNATIONAL NETWORKS OF CATHOLIC POLITICIANS IN EXILE