Christian Democracy and the Origins of European Union (review)

European integration is one of the key puzzles for political scientists and historians interested in the international relations of post-1945 Western Europe. How was it possible that within a mere decade after the end of World War II the former enemies joined forces to embark on a project of an “ever closer union” that has culminated in the European Union of today? Wolfram Kaiser’s important book offers a new perspective for answering this question. He argues that we should take more seriously the importance of “transnational networks of political and social groups that engaged with, and influenced, European integration while remaining embedded in national political and cultural contexts” (p. 8). Kaiser’s research in archives in Austria, Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States, as well as his mastery of the various national historiographies, puts most of the linguistically impoverished Anglo-American research on European integration to shame.

Kaiser’s book explores the Christian Democratic—that is, Catholic—roots of the European integration project. Through a detailed and nuanced analysis of Catholic cross-border networks since the middle of the nineteenth century, he also advances our understanding of the processes through which Christian Democrats were able to assert their influence. Kaiser’s account is structured chronologically. Its defining characteristic is its long-term perspective, spanning more than a century of European history but eschewing any kind of teleology. The book’s core chapters cover the period until the Treaty of Rome (1957), with the last chapter lucidly covering the development of cross-border cooperation among Christian Democratic parties until the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. Kaiser’s story begins with transnational connections in Catholic Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. He emphasizes Pope Pius IX’s role in centralizing the church as an institution and thus creating an organizational umbrella that might have allowed for greater networking across borders. As Kaiser shows, however, the level of organized cooperation among Catholic parties in Europe before the First World War was low. He is extremely good at discussing why formalized transnational cooperation failed to develop and why, even when it emerged, cooperation was often plagued by conflict. During the interwar years, Kaiser argues, the slowly emerging cooperation of Catholic parties from various countries only rarely overlapped with the nascent European movement. Catholic parties found agreeing on shared objectives difficult, and their agendas continued to be shaped nationally.

This changed after the Second World War. Although many of these networks remained in place, Kaiser stresses important discontinuities with earlier forms of cooperation. Even though Catholic parties had often endorsed either narrowly nationalist or overly universalist policies before, “Europe” now became a key reference point in Christian Democratic thought and action. At the same time, the regional scope of the networks shrank to the size of the later European Economic Community (EEC), as the Iron Curtain cut off links to Catholics in Eastern and Central Europe. Protestant Britain remained excluded from these networks, and their internal cohesion grew significantly. Kaiser is extremely good at demonstrating how the practice of transnational exchange bolstered trust across borders and thus worked toward strengthening cross-border ties even further.

By focusing on transnational networks in the longue durée, Kaiser’s account opens up a new vista in the literature on European integration. He rejects Walter Lipgens’s argument from the 1970s that European integration emerged as a response to the dysfunctional nation-state system of the interwar years. He is also dissatisfied with what he calls Alan Milward’s “cynical” argument (p. 6) from the 1980s and early 1990s that Europe witnessed the rebirth of the nation-state rather than the emergence of an evergrowing integration process. Likewise, he dismisses political science accounts such as Andrew Moravcsik’s path-breaking book The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998) because of their lack of historical sensitivity and their state-centric focus.

Although...