Repository | Book | Chapter

Accounts of the Western European twentieth century often take the following shape: an "Age of Extremes' (Eric Hobsbawm) or an "Age of Ideologies' (Karl-Dietrich Bracher) up until 1945 or so, followed by a period of "de-radicalization" or "liberalization" that runs until the late 1960s (or possibly up until the present).¹ Historians have been struck by the relative homogeneity of the Western European political experience during the latter period in contrast with earlier eras of European history; but they have also found it difficult to formulate conceptual frameworks to make sense of this experience (Conway, 2004). Should the post-war period be thought of as a "return of democracy" or a "return of lib-eralism", as is sometimes suggested? Should the politics that emerged after 1945 be understood as, above all, a reaction to the totalitarian aspirations and the attempts at establishing self-consciously post-liberal orders in Fascist Italy, in Nazi Germany, in the Soviet Union and in interwar authoritarian regimes? Were they a matter of "Westernization" or even more narrowly "Americanization", or, more abstractly, "modern-ization under conservative auspices", as many students of post-war West Germany have suggested? Does such an approach necessarily obliterate the moment of social hope — based on antifascist unity — which many historians have identified for the immediate post-war period (a hope that was soon lost)?

DOI: 10.1057/9781137315113_10

Full citation: