Conservatism, Christian Democracy, and the Dynamics of Transformation compares the centre-right political traditions of Britain, the Nordic countries, France, West Germany, and Austria and looks for evidence of political cooperation and influence across borders during the period 1945-90. The book explores how a variety of intellectuals, politicians, and political parties transformed their politics in response to major economic, social, and political challenges and seeks to explain why conservatives and Christian democrats came to feel that they belonged to a wider centre-right political family by the end of this period. It also examines why these political traditions found it difficult to cooperate with each other after the Second World War and why they decided to invest more political capital in inter-party relations and wider transnational projects from the 1960s. As the book shows, these developments resulted in two new centre-right internationals: the European Democrat Union and the International Democrat Union.
Edited by:
Gary Love,
Christian Egander Skov
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 256mm,
Spine: 19mm
Weight: 612g
ISBN: 9781526176851
ISBN 10: 1526176858
Series: New Perspectives on the Right
Pages: 310
Publication Date: 02 September 2025
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
General/trade
,
Primary
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction – Gary Love and Christian Egander Skov 1 Christianity and party ideology. German Christian Democracy, British Conservatism and the problem of religion between the 1950s and 1980s – Martina Steber 2 From the valley of shadows to a glimpse of happiness: Høyre in the heydays of Norwegian post-war social democracy – Lars Fredrik Øksendal 3 Swedish Conservatism 1945–1991: from the defence of classic values to market liberalism – Torbjörn Nilsson 4 Transnationalism and the rethinking of Danish conservatism, 1945–1968 – Christian Egander Skov 5 The National Coalition Party and Finnish political culture – Vesa Vares 6 European construction as a factor of French internal politics, 1950–1972 – Marc Olivier Baruch 7 A cosmopolitan conservative. Arvid Fredborg, transnational networks and the reinvention of conservatism in post-war Europe – Johannes Großmann 8 Conservative and Christian Democratic student activism in the age of campus protest in Britain and West Germany – John Davis and Anna von der Goltz 9 Britain’s social market moment: the transnational centre-right and the construction of the Thatcherite coalition – Benjamin Thomas 10 Between ‘progressive realism’ and conservative internationalism: the transformation of Austrian and West German Christian Democracy in the 1970s – Fabio Wolkenstein 11 ‘The struggle is international’: Conservatives, Christian Democrats, and the International Democrat Union, 1978–90 – Gary Love 12 Thatcherism on a European scale? The lost world of British pro-European neoliberalism – Ben Jackson Afterword: The multiple political cultures of the centre-right – Martin Conway -- .
Gary Love is Professor of British History and Culture at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Christian Egander Skov is a scholar of Danish political history at the Danish think tank Prospekt and a former Postdoctoral Researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).
