Christian Democracy and the Fall of Communism PDF

The roleof Christian Democracy in the collapse of the Communist Bloc

Debates on the role of Christian Democracy in Centraland Eastern Europe too often remain strongly tied to national historiographies. With the edited collection the contributing authors aim to reconstructChristian Democracy’s role in the fall of Communism from a bird's-eyeperspective by covering the entire region and by taking “third-way” options inthe broader political imaginary of late-Cold War Europe into account. Thebook’s twelve chapters present the most recent insights on this topic and connectscholarship on the Iron Curtain’s collapse with scholarship on politicalCatholicism.

Christian Democracy and the Fall of Communism offers the reader a two-foldperspective. The first approach examines the efforts undertaken by WesternEuropean actors who wanted to foster or support Christian Democratic initiativesin Central and Eastern Europe. The second approach is devoted to the(re-)emergence of homegrown Christian Democratic formations in the 1980s and1990s. One of the volume’s seminal contributions lies in its documentation ofthe decisive role that Christian Democracy played in supporting the politicaland anti-political forces that engineered the collapse of Communism from withinbetween 1989 and 1991.

Contributors: Andrea Brait (University of Innsbruck), Alexander Brakel (Konrad Adenauer Foundation, Israel), Ladislav Cabada (Metropolitan University Prague), Giovanni Mario Ceci (Università degli Studi Roma Tre / IES-Rome), Kim Christiaens (KU Leuven), Michael Gehler (University of Hildesheim), Thomas Gronier (UMR SIRICE), Piotr H. Kosicki (University of Maryland), Slawomir Lukasiewicz (John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin), Anton Pelinka (Central European University in Budapest), Johannes Schönner (Karl von Vogelsang Institute), Arturas Svarauskas (Lithuanian University of Educational Science), Helmut Wohnout (Austrian Federal Chancellery / Karl von Vogelsang Institute)

This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).