Shifting conceptions of social justice were intricately entangled with changing conceptions of the market in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Understanding this interwoven history requires an analysis of the anthropological, moral, social, and political implications constructions of a market order. This observation is the starting point for a sketch of three distinctive periods in Western European history of entanglements between conceptions of social justice and understandings of the market. In the first period, defined by the social question, a notion of property as entitlements to social security created the social basis for the recognition of political agency and the empowerment of precarious workers. In a second period, notions of social justice centred on the creation and maintenance of a productive workforce, with sufficient spending power to contribute to the efficiency of markets and the growth of national wealth. The third period was characterised by an understanding of social justice as a disturbance of the price mechanism resulting from the capture of the state by self-interested professionals and interest groups. Social justice is not an alternative to a market morality; they together contribute to shifting entanglements of ‘socially’ informed markets and ‘market’ informed constellations of social justice.

The concluding chapter of the book summarises the main findings of the present study and puts these in the conceptual and historiographical framework of the introduction of the book. This chapter reconnects to the central question of the present study and shows how and why the developments in the transatlantic management of economic and monetary affairs created decisive political momentum for bold Franco-German (supranational) initiatives in European integration, but also which transatlantic and European ideational and emotional undercurrents co-steered this development. Furthermore, this chapter highlights the increasingly central role of Western Germany in this history.

This chapter is the third and final building bloc of a wider reconstruction of the main economic, (geo)political, and ideational forces that enabled European integration to take off as of the spring of 1950, It describes the practical unfolding of European integration after the Second World War. This part of the book tries to uncover deeper layers (of psychology and belief) in this history through three crucial sub-histories. This chapter deals with the third of these sub-histories. It explains how—against the background of the beginnings of the Cold War and growing British aloofness in European affairs— ‘the (West) German re-entry’ became the driving force in the process of emerging European integration. This development crystallised first in the OEEC, subsequently through the EPU, and finally in the launch of the ECSC. This process was not only political and economic in nature, but also to a great extent intellectual via the deep influence of (German) ordoliberalism in the politics of the FRG and Christian Democracy in Western Europe.

Chapter 3 reconstruct how the (collective) emotions, the political and economic practices, and the geopolitical and societal circumstances of the war times guided Western Europe to a path of deeper international and regional cooperation focused on free trade and valuta convertibility. During exile and occupation, European governments fleshed out plans and schemes for post-war cooperation, primordially in the domains of socio-economic and the financial-economic planning, in greater (practical) detail. These exercises were emotionally charged and driven by the lessons of the war against the Nazis and the post-war period after the First World War—a learning from history in which the churches played a leading role and co-prepared the political ground for the popularity of a new and hugely influential conservative political family in Western Europe: Christian Democracy.

After the Second World War, countries across occupied Europe were faced with the challenge of restoring political stability at home and peace abroad. Although extremist sentiment had not disappeared, moderate elites resolved to choke it off at the source by building robust bureaucratic parties that could incorporate the masses. Christian democratic parties on the right and moderate social democratic parties on the left took power all across the continent, ushering in an unprecedent period of stability. Yet with the economic stagnation of the 1970s, this consensus began to unravel, giving rise to the emergence of populist alternatives. This chapter departs from existing explanations for this turnaround. It shows that the populist strategy was always most effective in the patronage-based party systems of southern Europe. In northwest Europe, in contrast, bureaucratic parties have adapted, substituting professionalized service provision for mass membership and participation.

Chapter 5 discusses how in the context of Germanys historically religion-friendly settlement of benevolent neutrality, the rise of the right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and its references to religion have represented a political and religious watershed moment. Specifically, Chapter 5 focuses on how the emergence of a new identity cleavage in German society has created the socio-demographic conditions and incentives for the AfD’s rise and the latter’s transformation from an anti-Euro ‘professors’ party’ into an identitarian right-wing populist party. It also explores how the AfDs re-politicisation of religion in the context of its right-wing populist identity politics has put into question Germany’s traditional settlement of benevolent neutrality.

Chapter 7 analyses the reactions of Christian voters and the extent to which they are determined by supply-side actors such as the mainstream parties and churches. Particular attention is paid to the empirical finding that irreligious voters in Germany were much more drawn to the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) than Christians. This ‘religious immunity’ of German Protestants and Catholics appeared to be partly the result of demand-side factors, such as attitudes or theological beliefs, but mainly dependent on supply-side factors such as the availability of a ‘Christian alterative’ in the German party system as well as the behaviour of the institutional churches, which through their clear and public condemnation of the AfD’s use of religion appear to have created a powerful social taboo surrounding the AfD.

Part II (Chapters 4-7) looks at the first empirical case study: Germany. To explore how religion, right-wing populism and identity politics interact in the German context, Chapter 4 begins with a review of the historical development of church–state relations in Germany and the ‘happy marriage of convenience’ between religion and liberal democracy in Germany after World War II. It examines the constitutional, institutional and political nature of Germany’s constitutional settlement of a benevolent neutrality of the state towards the churches and analyses its implications for the behaviour of church elites and modern-day politics. In so doing this chapter sets the social, political and institutional context in which to understand the rise of the AfD and its religiously laden right-wing identity politics.

The 2018 general elections marked a major defeat for the mainstream right in Italy. Scoring a mere 14 per cent, Forza Italia (Go Italy, FI) lost its primacy over the centre-right coalition. Excluded from the national government, the mainstream right finds itself – for the first time since 1994 – in a minority position within Italy’s political right. To understand whether this transformation reflects the tension faced by the mainstream right in coping with the silent revolution and counter-revolution, and with the migration policy challenge, this chapter reconstructs the relationship between the different components of the Italian centre-right over the past twenty-five years (1994-2018). Focusing on Berlusconi’s personalistic parties, its right-wing (populist) partners and Christian democratic allies, the chapter accounts for the demand-side and supply-side evolution of the Italian centre-right. The analyses point to the crucial role played by the issue of migration in shaping right-wing politics in Italy.

The German Christian Democrats are one of the most successful parties of the mainstream right in post-war Europe. They have held the Chancellor’s office for approximately forty-nine years, compared with just short of twenty years for the Social Democrats (SPD), their primary opponents on the mainstream left. Although the silent revolution eventually pulled the Christian Democrats to the left as the party followed public opinion, its primary contribution has been to cause fragmentation on the left. This fragmentation has meant that the left side of the political spectrum has been weaker overall. German unification also contributed to left-party fragmentation, helping the Christian Democrats to dominate politics. The silent counter-revolution, on the other hand, has been unusually weak in Germany. This weakness meant that the Christian Democrats did not face much of a threat from the right side of the political spectrum. The combination of a strong silent revolution fragmenting the political left and a weak counter silent-revolution minimizing a threat from the right has contributed to the long-term success of the German Christian Democrats.

Unlike most Western European countries, Spain’s landed elites and Church hierarchy remained politically and economically strong before the Great Depression. Spanish farm lobbies therefore continued to reflect the interests of large landowners and cereal farmers, whose demand for higher tariffs led to an expansion in wheat cultivation, despite the country’s weak competitive advantage. By contrast, family farmers, despite representing around a third of the electorate, were politically under-represented, which would have important consequences for the democratic experiment during the Second Republic. Neither the landed elites nor the Church hierarchy were required to participate in mass political parties before 1931, which limited their interest in organizing village-level cooperatives into federations, and at the same time helped them to preserve their traditional powers. Catalonia was the exception, as regional political demands required the landed elites to participate in mass politics, and explains the success of local farm cooperatives and rural associations.

Human rights would become instrumental in trying to resolve the tensions between religion and the modern state. Chapter 5 commences with the Irish Constitution, which illustrates how Catholic political thought would evolve as a cosmopolitan civil society project. The use of rights-based language within this Constitution was part of the trend to both restrain a newly forming nation state, while at the same time to acknowledge the limits of religion in such a new political polity. During the Cold War the Christian democratic parties consolidated and expanded European political and economic cooperation, and Section 5.2 of the chapter looks at how those who shaped that era began drawing human rights into the confrontation between Eastern and Western Europe by emphasising religious freedom. In Latin America, human rights became a distinctively different project, and Section 5.3 examines in what manner human rights was used against state authority and part of a programme of liberation and democratisation. In each of these many contexts, a cosmopolitan Catholicism presented the value of participating in the human rights project with varying degrees of success.

This chapter tests the main empirical hypothesis introduced at the end of Chapter 7. If it is true that the most significant mode of persistence of the Christian Democratic ideology in the contemporary political landscape is not as a partisan phenomenon, but rather as a feature of established institutional frameworks and political cultures in regimes where it previously held a dominant political position, then many of its distinctive features should still be visible in these institutional frameworks and political cultures. To see whether this is indeed the case, I will focus on one such regime in particular: the EU.

This book is a study of the political ideology of Christian Democracy, a set of principles and values that has, on the one hand, been extremely influential in the history of Western democratic regimes, but, on the other hand, remains severely understudied, especially when compared with its main ideological rivals: socialism, liberalism and conservatism. I begin by substantiating these two claims.