Christian Democracy and the Origins of European Union (review)

In an extensive historical study of the Catholic Church and Christian Democratic parties in Europe Wolfram Kaiser argues that most of the European integration project is the outgrowth of the liberation of the Catholic social project. Kaiser traces the idea of a united Europe back to Pope Pius IX. Pius IX played “a crucial role” in transnationalization of the church by strengthening the internal organization, encouraging political participation among Catholics, and positioning the Church in cultural matters in Europe. Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) enabled a political answer to industrialized Europe’s social problems. Through Rerum Novarum, Catholic workers’ organizations and trade unions could engage in political matters with a religious endorsement. Kaiser perceives the integration project as the product of efforts by political parties and a struggle between different ideological positions inside a democratic movement. The book is impressive both for the research that lies behind the results and for the detailed reconstruction of the process that led to a common European union. Kaiser has considered much that is available in archives, memoirs and biographies, and the secondary literature on the subject. The study is both sharp and deep in its use of historical sources and known facts.

The most interesting part of the book is Kaiser’s discussion of how the resistance movement during World War II affected the postwar work of the Christian democratic movement. Christian democracy stood out as an actor that was excluded from the conservative collaboration during the war. According to Kaiser, Christian Democracy in this period can be understood as the outcome of a battle between Catholics in exile and Catholics who joined the resistance in Europe. The latter favored a federal solution for a postwar, united Europe while the former referred regional integration and feared the role of Germany and the Soviet Union in postwar Europe. Kaiser reveals a clear knowledge of the problems of joining diaspora groups and domestic oppositions. It is a fact in international and comparative politics that an opposition in exile, often over a long period, loses touch with the discourse and therefore offers more principled, expertise-driven, and theoretically anchored solutions while the domestic groups are keener on negotiations and reconciliation.

Although this book offers much high-quality material, some weak points exist. Kaiser argues with passion that the pope and the transnationalism of the Catholic Church enabled the participation of Christian Democracy in European integration. But, as noted in the study, World War II was a period where these ideas were profoundly reformulated. Thus it is not persuasive that the pope’s actions in 1860s affected the postwar era, but rather the war created conditions conducive to an integration project.

Kaiser also states that he reconceptualizes the European integration as the outcome of partisan competition and ideological battles. But this argument is not a guiding perspective in the book. Instead Kaiser has chosen to focus on individual actors and formative moments, a perspective that would have been of interest in a framework of historic institutionalism. Christian Democracy is discussed in recent studies by, for example, David Hanley, Simon Hix, and Karl-Magnus Johansson. Two of these researchers are referenced, but the study would have benefited by a more extensive treatment of their theoretical framework for studying parties, states, and organizations.