Fabio Wolkenstein Die dunkle Seite der Christdemokratie. Geschichte einer autoritären Versuchung
[The Dark Side of Christian Democracy. The History of an Authoritarian Temptation]

Author Fabio Wolkenstein is well aware that his book The Dark Side of Christian Democracy, which is subtitled The History of an Authoritarian Temptation, could well become the object of political conflict itself. Any critical analysis of Christian democracy’s relationship to liberal democracy is bound to be suspected of being politically motivated. For that reason, Wolkenstein, a professor at the University of Vienna specializing in the historical transformations of democracy, assures us in his preface that he’s more interested in “understanding this phenomenon than pillorying or justifying it.” To that end, Wolkenstein traces the history of political Catholicism in Europe from the French Revolution to the present, focusing on the rise of Catholic and Christian democratic parties and movements in the narrow sense since the nineteenth century.

Wolkenstein demonstrates how a popular current of Catholic party politics up until the Second World War regarded not democracy, but monarchism, aristocracy and even dictatorship as the optimum form of state. Skeptical and sometimes directly hostile to democracy, this current of thought made the anti-modernism of the Roman Catholic Church its own. At the same time, Wolkenstain concludes, “From the historical perspective, conservative parties have often played a leading role in stabilizing democracy.” Christian democracy thus unites contradictory programmatic and ideological tendencies, among other things, in order to bring together different segments of society in big-tent parties.

This is immediately apparent in the relationship of political Catholicism to the Catholic Church. Wolkenstein explicates how ideas and formulations from various papal encyclicals recurred in the policy statements of many Catholic intellectuals and politicians. Conversely, numerous self-appointed Catholic parties took great pains to remain politically independent from the pope and curia.

Western European Christian democracy of the sort we have known since the Second World War in the form of a impeccably democratic political parties cannot claim to be the only “true Christian democracy.” Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister and chairman of the originally liberal Fidesz party, who nowadays styles himself as the defender of Christian democratic values, could claim with equal justification that Western Christian Democrats “have for quite some time no longer pursued Christian democratic policies.”

Since the nineteenth century, political Catholicism has been heavily influenced by Christian social teachings, which for their part are an answer to the rapid development of capitalist societies and the political self-organization of the working classes into socialist parties. Christian- or, more precisely, Catholic-inspired politics was always directed equally against liberalism and socialism. Even today we can detect in the policies of Germany’s CDU and CSU, which as a quasi-ecumenical enterprise represent an exceptional case of Christian democracy, a distant echo of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical “Rerum Novarum”, his response to the class conflicts of his day. “The papal answer to the social question was not eradicating inequality, but managing it harmoniously,” writes Wolkenstein.

But social harmony doesn’t presuppose democracy. It’s less surprising that there are many undemocratic tendencies in political Catholicism, Wolkenstein concludes, than “that are also democratic currents.” Only the experience of Stalinism and National Socialism allowed democracy to appear in a more positive light to modern-day popes and many Catholics. Yet the Christian democratic social position of harmonizing class relations remains by no means dependent on a democratic constitutional framework, as Wolkenstein illustrates in the histories of various political parties. “Even long after the Second world War, Europe still had decidedly authoritarian Catholic regimes that subscribed to social integration, class compromise, accommodation of competing interests and, implicitly, pluralism.” Wolkenstein cites as an example the “Estado Novo” of the ascetic, pious Portuguese technocrat Salazar, with whom many Christian democratic politicians elsewhere in Europe maintained excellent relations. Even after the Second World War, many of the protagonists of political Catholicism found that an authoritarian caste society was perfectly compatible with a harmonious compromise of interests.

Wolkenstein sees the current reawakening of Christian authoritarianism in Hungary and Poland as an “especially vivid example of the cyclical surges of traditionalist and in part anti-democratic forces within political parties that claim to defend Christian values.” To conclude his persuasive, intellectually rigorous and readable work of intellectual history, Wolkenstein discusses the fact that many Christian democrats today find the policies of Orban both tenable and in keeping with the Christian democratic outlook. The author largely refrains from handing out advice to the Christian democratic camp, but he does ultimately propose that Christian democrats would do well to spend less time “scratching around for ideas from previous centuries” and to remember instead the words of Bavarian Christian democrat Franz Josef Strauss and “march on at the vanguard of progress.”