Christian Democracy and the Fall of Communism

Debates on the role of Christian Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe too often remain strongly tied to national historiographies. With this edited collection the contributing authors aim to reconstruct Christian Democracy's role in the fall of Communism from a bird's-eye perspective by covering the entire region and by taking "third-way" options in the broader political imaginary of late Cold War Europe into account. The book's twelve chapters present the most recent insights on this topic and connect scholarship on the Iron Curtain's collapse with scholarship on political Catholicism.

Christian Democracy and the Fall of Communism offers the reader a twofold perspective. The first approach examines the efforts undertaken by Western European actors who wanted to foster or support Christian Democratic initiatives in Central and Eastern Europe. The second approach is devoted to the (re-)emergence of homegrown Christian Democratic formations in the 1980s and 1990s. One of the volume's seminal contributions lies in its documentation of the decisive role that Christian Democracy played in supporting the political and anti-political forces that engineered the collapse of Communism from within between 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), Sławomir Łukasiewicz (John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin), Anton Pelinka (Central European University in Budapest), Johannes Schönner (Karl von Vogelsang Institute), Artūras Svarauskas (Lithuanian University of Educational Science), Helmut Wohnout (Austrian Federal Chancellery / Karl von Vogelsang Institute)

Michael Gehler is professor of Modern German and European History at the Institute of History at the University of Hildesheim.

Piotr H. Kosicki is associate professor of History at the University of Maryland.

Helmut Wohnout is department head in the Austrian Federal Chancellery, and since 1993 director of the Karl von Vogelsang Institute Vienna.