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Financial Times Reviews Contesting Democracy
August 29, 2011
By: Carlos Aramayo | Printer Friendly

Jan-Werner Müller’s Contesting Democracy elucidates the ideas that shaped the period of ideological extremes before 1945 and the liberalization of West European politics after the Second World War. The book pays particular attention to ideas advanced to justify fascism and how they relate to the special kind of liberal democracy that was created in postwar Western Europe. Müller also explains the impact of the 1960s and neoliberalism, ending with a critical assessment of today's self-consciously post-ideological age.

In Barber’s view, one of the book’s strengths is Müller’s discussion of “French, German, Czech and Polish thinkers who might not be household names in English-speaking countries but who made great contributions to restoring the respectability of democratic ideals in Europe.” Barber goes on to name Jacques Maritain as one of the thinkers that Müller took into account. Maritain, a French right-wing Catholic in the 1920s, believed that there was an intimate connection between Christianity and democracy. Maritain’s ideas are attributed to having genuinely influenced the centre-right Christian Democratic parties that dominated politics in West Germany, Italy and other countries after 1945. According to Barber, “Christian Democracy saw an opportunity to fuse Christian values with a democratic political order founded on economic liberalism, generous welfare and an efficient bureaucratic state.”

Barber also notes how Müller describes European socialism, which “shed its Marxist skin in the 1950s and 1960s when co-operation between employers and trade unions for the sake of higher living standards seemed more desirable than the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Barber goes on to state that Müller devotes space to the events of 1968 in Western Europe and “wisely, does not dismiss them as mere student mischief.”

To conclude, Baber cites that the post-communist societies were only looking for “something rather dull and normal” after 1989. He states that they only cared about achieving “western European-style democracy, prosperity and membership of Nato and the European Union,” adding that, in this scenario “the post-1945 political settlement in western Europe worked well.” Barber also notes that in Müller’s view the resilience and elasticity of this arrangement “ought to give Europeans some confidence about their past achievements and future possibilities.”

Contesting Democracy  was previously lauded by the Yale University Press as the ”first major account of political thought in twentieth-century Europe, both West and East, to appear since the end of the Cold War.” 

Sources:
Financial Times – Contesting Democracy

Yale University Press – Contesting Democracy