Introduction: Cultures of Conservatism in Western Europe since the 1960s

Abstract

IntroductionCultures of Conservatism in Western Europe since the 1960s Martina Steber, Tobias Becker, and Anna von der Goltz Translated by Sinéad Crowe The hair trends for men presented by the Central Association of the German Hairdressing Trade in spring 1983 were strikingly reminiscent of men's hairstyles from a bygone era.1 "With their pompadours, the young men on view resembled none other than the seventy-year-old man who had become president of the United States of America in 1981: [they sported] an oiled, tightly combed structure that no gust of wind could knock out of shape," remarked Michael Rutschky. The sociologist and journalist saw the Reaganesque hairstyle, by then to be spotted on a stroll through any "mid-sized city," as indicative of a return to the styles of the 1950s. This was significant, he argued, because hair and fashion were more than fads; they communicated attitudes and group identities to the outside world: When, dressed in a suit and vest, I enter one of the establishments frequented by our teacher and his ilk, people who live by the code "emancipation" (positive) and "repression" (negative), people gape at me with amazement, if not hostility. It is as if a Seminole has entered Iroquois territory without following the rituals prescribed for such a border crossing. And our teacher encounters no less hostility when he enters one of those elegantly stylized cafés where these kids with Ronald Reagan haircuts hang out. The young men's attire and the "code" associated with it was "extremely conservative, immunized against the passage of time in many respects," and, most importantly, a rebellion against the 1968 generation, Rutschky was convinced.2 It was not only 1980s fashion that led observers to note that the German zeitgeist had taken a conservative turn. Depending on their political position, this diagnosis—which was almost always framed in political terms—was tinged with either regret or satisfaction. Conservative affinities in culture, [End Page 1] many argued, testified to the success of the so-called "reversal of tendencies" and the reality of "spiritual-moral change" since the Christian Democrats' return to power with Helmut Kohl's election as German chancellor in 1982.3 Commentators were quick to point out the international dimension of this putative conservative turn, whereby the changes of government in the UK and the US in 1979 and 1981, respectively, were seen as pivotal moments, and Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan as harbingers of a new conservative hegemony. Jürgen Habermas brought this reading into philosophical discourse when, in his 1980 Adorno Prize acceptance speech in Frankfurt, he described the "conservative" inclinations of the day—including postmodernism—as enemies of the Enlightenment project of modernity.4 Culture had become a key concept again, a "major principle for social cohesion," and therefore the subject of political debate.5 This edition of the German Yearbook of Contemporary History focuses on cultures of conservatism in Western Europe, particularly the United Kingdom, and is especially interested in the transnational and transatlantic traffic in ideas, culture, and lifestyles between Europe and the United States in the final decades of the twentieth century. All the articles in the yearbook and parts of this introduction were first published in German in the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte in 2022/23.6 In adopting this focus, the yearbook interrogates the relationship between political and cultural change in this period. It asks how we should, in fact, interpret the sudden penchant for Reagan haircuts and the revival of suits and vests. Were these mere cultural manifestations of political ideology—aesthetic reflections of political beliefs, in other words? Or did they signify a more subtle shift that was not necessarily in sync with people's political preferences—or that perhaps actually shaped such preferences? How should we interpret the connections between cultures of conservatism and organized politics in an era of conservative political dominance? In addressing these questions, the volume seeks to move beyond the sphere of organized politics to excavate deeper layers of conservatism's appeal and to offer a more nuanced understanding of the major political and cultural transformations of the final decades of the twentieth century. Contemporary observers have often noted...