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Catholic Political Movements in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands: Notes for a Comparative Approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Ellen L. Evans
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In the second half of the nineteenth century, Catholic political parties and affiliated organizations were formed in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. These movements, variously referred to as “subcultures,” “ghettos,” the Dutch Catholic “pillar,” and the German “tower,” have only begun to break down and become integrated into national society within the last thirty or forty years. The best known of these parties, the German Center, has been called “a strange product of German history and … of conditions in Europe around 1870,” an ill-assorted alliance of interest groups who, if not actually the “mobilization against the state” of Bismarck's rhetoric, were opposed to the way in which the Bismarckian Reich was created: an alliance which was given an extension of life by Bismarck's decision to wage war against the party and the Catholic Church in the Kulturkampf. Several recent interpretations have seen the Center as a byproduct of Germany's transition from a precapitalist agrarian society to a modern capitalistic society, representing those peasants, artisans, shopkeepers, and traditional preindustrial bourgeoisie whose interests were being injured by liberal economic and social policies introduced after 1867. According to these interpretations, the party is defined primarily by its anticapitalism and antiliberalism, rather than by ethnic allegiance. Any satisfactory analysis of the Center's place in the German political spectrum, however, must account for the striking parallel provided by the history of similar Catholic parties in Switzerland and the Netherlands.

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Articles
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Central European History , Volume 17 , Issue 2-3 , June 1984 , pp. 91 - 119
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1984

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69. The subjects of recent research in Gall, Blackbourn, and Möckl respectively.