There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Great book at a great price received timely. One person found this helpful. This is a well-written book, but it doesn't deserve all the accolades heaped upon it in the editorial reviews above. A writer claiming pan-European analysis has to find the right generalizations to portray ideas which influenced the entire continent. The author succeeds in doing so only in the first three chapters of the book leading up to In the post chapters he fails to find a focused perspective and mysteriously leaves the democratic state itself out of the picture.
The best part of the book is the analysis of political systems before and after the first world war. I also liked the portrayal of fascist ideology as a specifically anti-democratic movement. The author focuses on four or five representative thinkers in each chapter and mixes political thought with history instructively. I haven't read many other studies of fascism yet, but this one serves well as a brief introduction.
But what happened in European political thought after ? I became none the wiser on that subject from reading this book. The author discusses Stalin's communism and the Hungarian and Czech uprisings in reasonably interesting fashion, but he struggles to say anything about developments on the western side of the Iron Curtain.
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His main contention seems to be that "Christian democracy was the most important ideological innovation of the post-war period, and one of the most significant of the European twentieth century as a whole" p. I detect a strong German myopia in this absurd statement. I'm a European resident with many political interests but I had never heard of "Christian democracy" before reading this book. I had to use Wikipedia to discover what this "most important innovation" even means. But even so, Christian democracy could have provided one vantage point for pan-European analysis if properly elaborated.
But strangely enough the author lets go of this concept immediately after introducing it. Instead of discussing the roots of European democracy he focuses almost exclusively on left-wing thought and anti-state protest movements. He wastes a whole chapter on the student revolt of , a movement whose political thought was rudimentary and inconsequential at best.
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He even makes room for the repulsive idiocy of Baader-Meinhof terrorists. But what about the various hues of well-functioning liberal democracy in Europe from the s onward? Were no political ideas needed to make them work? And what about the European Union, to which the author devotes one! Is there really no political thought worth mentioning behind that project either?
The title "Contesting democracy" might seem to justify an exclusively anti-democratic emphasis throughout the book, but it doesn't make much sense to merely discuss opposing ideas without explaining what they opposed. In summary, the author is in his element when analysing the events that led to the World Wars and the political thought the wars spawned, especially fascist and communist ideology. He's unwilling to describe the positive development of democratic politics in Europe after the wars and this reduces the value of the latter half of this book to almost nil.
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How did totalitarian ideologies, such as fascism and communism gain support? These are the questions that Muller seeks to provide answers in the book. Like Social Democracy in Scandinavia, this was based on an accommodation of social forces. The resolution was most dramatic in France, Germany and Italy. None was a stable democracy before All had experienced Fascist rule. They then became the backbone of the European Economic Community and thus emblematic of the apotheosis European democracy experienced after the war.
The problem is that not every European democracy required this apotheosis.
Their systems had roots in the nineteenth century, and long had been growing and internalizing democratic values and practices. Liberalisation took place over decades or more: Radical rightist movements, strongest in Finland, had generally been suppressed before When it came to post-war reconstruction, democracy worked in these countries much as before. Unlike France, Germany, and Italy, their sources of democratic stability were largely sufficient to themselves.
The theme of new beginnings pervades the literature on democratization.
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Apotheosis, when politics becomes elevated to the religious sphere after a crisis that confirms the need for ethical principles, is another. Yet by understanding European democracy through its intellectuals, often at war with themselves , incremental change can be obscured.
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No doubt the war was decisive in geo-political terms, but the Christian Democratic formula applies to West Germany and Italy. The problem is that not every European democracy required this apotheosis. Their systems had roots in the nineteenth century, although Finland and Ireland had experienced civil war after independence. Despite the common experience of economic depression, a critical factor proved to be the sheer longevity of their democratic experience: Liberalisation took place over decades or more: Radical rightist movements, strongest in Finland, had generally been suppressed before When it came to post-war reconstruction democracy worked in these countries much as before.
Unlike France, Germany, and Italy, their sources of democratic stability were largely sufficient to themselves. The theme of new beginnings pervades the literature on democratization. Apotheosis, when politics becomes elevated to the religious sphere after a crisis that confirms the need for ethical principles, is another.
Yet by understanding European democracy through its intellectuals, often at war with themselves , incremental change can be obscured. No doubt the war was decisive in geo-political terms, but the Christian Democratic formula applies to West Germany and Italy. Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, were consociational democracies. The five Nordic countries were becoming social democracies. Britain and Ireland have intertwined histories.
Most of east-central Europe developed hybrid systems, just as many post-communist countries are now doing. Scholars like Arend Lijphart are ignored.
There is no discussion at all of the concept of neutrality. Contesting Democracy is the work of a good European, a vantage-point with its limitations. Further afield, democratic values did not just radiate outward from larger European states, and many breakthroughs took place on the periphery, changing in turn the core. This was also the case within Europe. Most of the states which became democratic after were post-imperial. Those most influenced by Fascism Germany, Italy, and Spain were not content to be so. The two most important powers after — the United States and the Soviet Union — were ideologically opposed to Empire.
France achieved democratic stability only as it left Algeria.