{"title":"Contesting Democracy","authors":"M. Conway","doi":"10.23943/PRINCETON/9780691203485.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23943/PRINCETON/9780691203485.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter assesses the different discourses about Western European democracy that developed during the 1960s—some of which contributed to the radicalism of 1968, while others emphatically did not. The dissenting voices of the 1960s focused on the perceived failings of the existing political structures, questioning whether the vertical hierarchies of representation through parliaments, parties, and interest groups were the best means of achieving the goals of individual freedom, social justice, and a participatory democratic culture. But debates about means also became debates about ends. In particular, a radical cultural and political critique emerged that questioned the forms of authority—explicit and implicit—within modern societies. This also challenged the nature of the post-war settlement. Far from creating a new democratic culture, the changes after 1945, these critics argued, had dismantled the authoritarian regimes while retaining the edifice of state power, and a society of regimented and limited freedoms.","PeriodicalId":236814,"journal":{"name":"Western Europe's Democratic Age","volume":"163 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132791339","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Debating Democracy","authors":"M. Conway","doi":"10.23943/PRINCETON/9780691203485.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23943/PRINCETON/9780691203485.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter details how the Socialist and Christian Democratic movements competed and collaborated in the process of democracy-building. Much of the historical writing about both Christian Democracy and Socialism in the post-1945 era has had a somewhat teleological (and occasionally self-congratulatory) character, dominated by self-contained narratives of the path that each political movement followed into democracy, and the ways that these movements in turn enriched the content of that democracy. This approach reflects the way in which these accounts have often been written from within their respective political traditions, with the consequence that they have been primarily concerned with reconstructing the trajectories of their political traditions, rather than the democracy that they made together. In contrast, the chapter explores the understandings of democracy advanced by Socialists and Christian Democrats through the prisms of their past history, their ideological declarations, and—perhaps most importantly—their programmes for the future construction of democracy. These threefold claims regarding past, present, and future could at times be convergent and complementary, especially when directed against Communism, but they were more frequently dialectical as Socialists and Christian Democrats defined their positions against each other, and thereby advanced their claims to ownership of democracy.","PeriodicalId":236814,"journal":{"name":"Western Europe's Democratic Age","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117129378","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}