Abstract
Accounts of the Western European twentieth century often take the following shape: an ‘Age of Extremes’ (Eric Hobsbawm) or an ‘Age of Ideologies’ (Karl-Dietrich Bracher) up until 1945 or so, followed by a period of ‘de-radicalization’ or ‘liberalization’ that runs until the late 1960s (or possibly up until the present).1 Historians have been struck by the relative homogeneity of the Western European political experience during the latter period in contrast with earlier eras of European history; but they have also found it difficult to formulate conceptual frameworks to make sense of this experience (Conway, 2004). Should the post-war period be thought of as a ‘return of democracy’ or a ‘return of lib-eralism’, as is sometimes suggested? Should the politics that emerged after 1945 be understood as, above all, a reaction to the totalitarian aspirations and the attempts at establishing self-consciously post-liberal orders in Fascist Italy, in Nazi Germany, in the Soviet Union and in interwar authoritarian regimes? Were they a matter of ‘Westernization’ or even more narrowly ‘Americanization’, or, more abstractly, ‘modern-ization under conservative auspices’, as many students of post-war West Germany have suggested? Does such an approach necessarily obliterate the moment of social hope — based on antifascist unity — which many historians have identified for the immediate post-war period (a hope that was soon lost)?
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Müller, JW. (2013). A Post-Post-Liberal Order: How Western Europe Emerged from Its Thirty-Year Crisis. In: Bruun, L.K., Lammers, K.C., Sørensen, G. (eds) European Self-Reflection between Politics and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137315113_10
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