On the face of it, one might have expected the Christian Democratic (CD) parties of Europe to benefit mightily from the collapse of communist governments in the eastern half of the continent. After all, the 1989 revolutions reflected their peoples’ desire to escape state socialism, join western Europe and embrace the classical liberal freedoms, including freedom of worship—exactly what Christian Democrats preached. In fact, however, they did not come out of it especially well. The aim of this volume is to explain that disappointing result.
Some CD politicians and activists had been in touch with their dissident colleagues behind the Iron Curtain for years before 1989. In particular, leading members of the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP), such as Alois Mock and Erhard Busek, had made personal contacts with human rights movements in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. The European Democratic Union, a network of contacts with a distinctive CD orientation, seemed to promise the close cooperation of CD parties after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. In reality, only József Antall, as post-communist premier of Hungary, fulfilled the promise, and he died prematurely in 1993. The promise remained unfulfilled.
One problem in most of the ex-communist countries was that after 1989 political movements were numerous, protean, and unformed. They did not have the degree of organization that would enable stable relations to be established with them, let alone secure financial ties. German Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who was very anxious to find CD colleagues in the emerging democracies, had great difficulty, even in predominantly Catholic Poland, in identifying a reliable partner, likely to survive and attract a significant number of voters. In Czechoslovakia the Catholic Church was relatively weak, especially in the Czech lands, and the civic movements which rose to the fore after 1989 were mainly secular in their orientation and highly suspicious of the authoritarian tendencies of the Catholic Church in Slovakia. Catholics had to be content with a modest position within Czech civil society.
Another reason for the overall disappointment is that the first successful anti-communist movement in a Warsaw Pact country, Solidarnośċ (Solidarity), did not fit easily into the CD political spectrum: although many of its members were practicing Catholics, its declared political aims were focused on establishing the rights of labor as well as on human rights in general. They were closer therefore to the Social Democrats than the CDs of western Europe. Tadeusz Masowiecki, the first non-communist Warsaw Pact premier and a lifelong Catholic, turned out to be half-way to socialism in his political theory and practice, an apostle of the “third way” adumbrated in Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. As a co-founder of Solidarnośċ, he was on the side of the poor and disadvantaged, whereas most European CDs were part of the “establishment,” and had in practice become opposed not only to communism but also to socialism in general. When Kohl offered him support, Mazowiecki responded standoffishly “I am a Christian and a democrat, but not a Christian Democrat” (215).
The Italian CDs were especially nervous about the changes further east: would they enhance the popularity of the Italian Communist Party? Or would they unleash a geopolitical upheaval that would threaten the CDs as the status quo party? In any case, the CDs were already falling apart into factions fueled by corruption and would finally cease to be the dominant party in Italy a little later.
The new post-communist governments were resolutely national in their orientation, determined to assert their independence from outside forces. West European CD parties, however, were transnational in their beliefs and were in the process of merging much of their separate identity in the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which made the European Community into the European Union.
Besides, Western CDs were by now moving into the grip of a neo-liberal ideology which stressed the supreme importance of international markets. Some central European politicians, notably Leszek Balcerowicz in Poland and Václav Klaus in the Czech Republic, believed that opening their nations to free markets abroad while selling off obsolete factories cheaply was the best way to overcome the economic lag caused by Soviet socialism. This concept fitted ill with the Catholic social teaching embraced by most central and east European CDs, which still valued the workers now being impoverished.
As result, many former CD voters eventually gravitated towards the nationalist and illiberal movements of Jaroslaw Kaczyński and Viktor Orbán, who promised to defend their populations against the depredations of international finance. As Piotr Kosicki argues in his concluding article, western CDs tended to adopt towards their central European colleagues a neo-liberal attitude of superiority which smacked of Orientalism.
