Zwischen katholischem Milieu und bürgerlicher Mittepartei: Das Historische Dilemma der CVP by Urs Altermatt (review)

With this compilation of updated publications interspersed with previously unpublished essays, leading Swiss intellectual and Catholic historian Urs Altermatt offers a sweeping yet substantial assessment of the Christian Democratic People's Party of Switzerland (Christlichdemokratische Volkspartei der Schweiz, or CVP). In honor of the party's centenary, this volume collects the work of a scholar who has spent more than four decades studying Europe's second oldest Christian Democratic party. By casting the intricacies of Swiss party development into a broader European context, Altermatt has produced a valuable primer for students of political Catholicism and Switzerland.

A defender of the theory of social-moral milieus (advanced by, among others, Seymour Martin Lipset), Altermatt locates his treatment of the CVP explicitly within a framework of the evolution and ultimate decline of the Swiss Catholic milieu. As throughout Western Europe, Swiss political Catholicism took hold amidst nineteenth-century confrontations between liberalism and Catholicism fueled by industrialism and nationalism. Rooted in the Catholic People's Party of 1894, the CVP was founded in 1912 as the Conservative People's Party, a name it retained until 1957, when it became the Conservative Christian Social People's Party. (It was in 1970 that the party changed its name to the Christian Democratic People's Party.) Even as Altermatt traces the integration of Catholics into national life, he consistently stresses the party's ties to its milieu. Following the interwar "golden years" of milieu Catholicism and having suffered nothing like the horrors of the Third Reich, Swiss Catholics were less inclined than their German compatriots to dismantle confessional barriers. Catholic support nevertheless remained sufficiently broad and deep that, like other Christian Democratic parties, the CVP enjoyed its greatest electoral successes in the two decades following World War II. But as Switzerland secularized, the CVP soon joined fellow European Christian Democrats in eschewing an explicit commitment to Christianity to embrace a moderate bourgeois conservatism. Not surprisingly, the deconfessionalization of Christian politics looked different depending on the party system.

Indeed, even as its history reflects broader European trends, the CVP has traveled a distinctly Swiss path, especially as architect of the so-called "magic formula" of party politics that governed Switzerland from 1959 to 2003. Altermatt suggests that the CVP's descent into the "second league" of national parties—occasioned by the loss of more than one-third of its voters between 1983 and 2011—was evident already in the early 1970s, when, following the Second Vatican Council, socially mobile and urban Catholics abandoned the party. But it was the rise of the right-wing, anti-immigrant Swiss People's Party (SVP) in the 1990s that dealt the CVP its greatest blow. By transcending its Protestant origins to become Switzerland's first truly interconfessional conservative party, the SVP succeeded where the CVP had not. At its hundred-year anniversary, the CVP remains a disproportionately Catholic party absent a powerful and loyal Catholic milieu. Ideologically, Altermatt fears the CVP's commitment to Christian-inspired values risks becoming an empty formula or simple marketing tool. Politically, he argues only a merger or alliance with the Conservative Democratic Party of Switzerland (Bürgerlich-Demokratische Partei Schweiz, or BDP) can save the CVP from devolving to a regional party.

Altermatt's survey is as learned, lucid, and accessible as his other influential works. Even as he demonstrates a fundamental sympathy with his subject, his nuanced mastery of the CVP's longue durée provides readers unparalleled insights. In light of the close attention he pays to regional and confessional differences, it is perhaps surprising that ethnicity and gender play no role in his analysis. How did the belated enfranchisement of Swiss women in 1971 affect the CVP's electoral fortunes? What effect has female leadership had on the party? How has the CVP responded to controversies surrounding guest workers, immigration, and Muslim residents in...