Debating Democracy

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.