In 1962, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) faced an uncertain future. The governing party within the Federal Republic of Germany since the state's founding in 1949 (along with its Bavarian partner, the Christian Social Union, known collectively as the CDU/CSU or Union), the CDU had endured a bruising election campaign through the summer of 1961. The combination of a dynamic young Social Democratic challenger, Willy Brandt, and the building of the Berlin Wall had exposed frustration with the leadership style of octogenarian Chancellor and CDU Chair Konrad Adenauer, and cost the Union its absolute majority in the Bundestag. Electoral disappointment was followed by protracted coalition negotiations with the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), which nearly doubled its vote totals by promising voters a coalition “with the Union but without Adenauer.” The coalition negotiations dragged on well into late autumn and exposed internal divisions. Adenauer, the only chancellor the Federal Republic had ever known, had been forced to agree to retire before 1965 to allow his successor to prepare for the next campaign.

The selection of a successor promised to bring even more discord, as Adenauer tried to block the rise of his popular Minister of Economics, Ludwig Erhard. After relying so heavily on Adenauer's popularity and his dominant personality for more than a decade, often to the exclusion of organizational development (which had earned the party the derisive nickname of the “Chancellor Election Society” or Kanzlerwahlverein), many in the CDU and CSU feared that their parties were in danger of losing whatever identity they had in the face of both these internal crises and an increasingly strong challenge from a more centrist Social Democratic (SPD) opposition.

Some party leaders wanted to reinvigorate the Union by encouraging a public discussion of the party's ideological roots, what contemporaries referred to as the significance of the “C” in “CDU.” The CDU party board (Bundesvorstand) had agreed to pursue an internal review of the topic beginning in late 1961. The subsequent discussion, however, showed how hard it was to translate a renewed self-identification into practical politics.

The centerpiece of this effort was a study led by the up-and-coming Catholic CDU politician Rainer Barzel on “The Spiritual and Social Situation of the Present and the Future Tasks of the CDU.” Barzel spent weeks speaking to Protestant and Catholic clergy as well as to scholars and other political leaders, producing a volume of more than 200 pages. In his report to the Bundesvorstand, Barzel declared “our Union, if it is to have a future, needs a spiritual bond” to distinguish itself from an SPD “that takes its policies from the polls.” Barzel argued that such a spiritual bond could only be found by reemphasizing the connection between Christian Democracy and Christianity, and his definition of Christianity reflected his own roots in German Catholicism, with its rejection of liberal “materialism” in favor of communitarian conservatism based on religious ideals. As he emphasized in his original introduction to the work, “Politics also stands under the Word and command of God.”Footnote ¹

As much as some in the CDU leadership may have wanted to embrace such ideas, the response to Barzel's “concerto in C major” (as his critics dubbed it) was underwhelming. Pre-release leaks to the media inspired a flood of critical editorials denouncing the project as out of step with the times. Even Adenauer, with his professional politician's feel for the public mood, warned Barzel in a private discussion that the work “could make the impression that there was too close a connection between the party and the Christian churches,” and insisted that Barzel only publish the work with a clear statement that it was his “personal work … that should be the basis for future discussion.”Footnote ² At the meeting of the Bundesvorstand where Barzel made his report, Adenauer called it “too clerical,” concluding, “church-based thinking is rapidly shrinking among our people … we therefore have to realize that we need to win over the so-called liberals, and should avoid doing anything that would keep them from voting for us. Without liberal votes, we will never get a majority in Germany.”Footnote ³ Later that year, Adenauer returned to this topic, commenting, “the secularization of the German people—even our voters, who also are part of the German people—has progressed radically, and I fear that in 1965 appeals to our Christian foundations will not make the same impression on our voters that they once did.”Footnote ⁴

Ultimately, Adenauer did step down in 1963, and Erhard succeeded him. The CDU/CSU did manage to hold onto its position as the largest party in 1965 and remained in government in a coalition with the FDP. Far from sharpening the Union's profile, however, the campaign relied primarily on appeals to conservative stability and the personal popularity of Erhard as the father of the economic miracle. Instead of offering a return to first principles, the CDU/CSU promised the voters “security” in posters that were in many cases indistinguishable from the posters of the SPD.Footnote ⁵ This strategy was good enough to bring one more electoral victory, but the new Erhard government lasted a little more than a year before internal strife and conflict with the FDP brought it down in December 1966.

The fate of the Erhard government demonstrated that the concerns that inspired the Barzel report were not misplaced, even if Barzel's proposed solution failed to catch on. The Union's claim to dominance in West German politics was eroding, and the political consequences were not far to seek. Unable to develop a coherent response to the challenges of a changing domestic and international landscape, where secularization and détente undermined basic elements of their program, the CDU/CSU endured a slow retreat from the pinnacle of German politics during the 1960s, and by 1969 the Union was relegated to the opposition for the next thirteen years.

As significant as the Union's identity crisis was for German politics, however, the West German situation was not unique, but reflected a broader phenomenon. Across western Europe, after enjoying great success in the first postwar decade, Christian Democratic parties faced similar identity crises in the 1960s. Swimming against a political tide that ran toward secularism at home and détente abroad, Christian Democrats found themselves losing electoral ground and ideological coherence. The result was a growing sense that the age of Christian Democracy had passed. Of equal if not greater long-term significance, the malaise of Christian Democracy had implications for the future of European integration because of the mutually reinforcing relationship that had emerged in the 1950s between Christian Democratic ideology and European integration. Although neither Christian Democracy nor the European project disappeared, as Christian Democracy faltered, the European project faltered as well, and neither has been quite the same since. Both have lost much of their original idealistic élan in response to larger social and political trends, and that dilution of purpose has had wide implications for postwar European history. If scholars hope to understand both the development of European Christian Democracy and the uneven course of European integration since the 1960s, they need to appreciate the connection between the crisis of Christian Democracy in a secularizing Europe and the crisis of European identity that began at the same time.

This essay aims to stimulate further study of that connection by analyzing Christian Democratic reactions to the challenges of the 1960s and their implications for the European project, with particular attention to the CDU/CSU, whose internal struggles offer an especially instructive example of the challenges and temptations facing European Christian Democracy. Focusing on the CDU/CSU during this period also offers a chance to advance our understanding of West German politics. Although there has been an increasing amount of research into the origins of the CDU/CSU and its successes in the 1950sFootnote ⁶, work on the 1960s and 1970s has up to now been sparse. The emerging alliance between the CDU/CSU and the refugee and other nationalist organizations that were opposed to the Ostpolitik of the SPD and FDP has justifiably attracted a great deal of critical attention, but this is only part of the story.Footnote ⁷ This essay will attempt to place this foreign policy controversy within a broader international and domestic context by considering how the Union's identity crisis in the 1960s both reflected larger trends and helped to shape Christian Democratic policy in the decades to follow.

Christian Democracy in Postwar Germany

The emergence of Christian Democracy as a powerful electoral force was one of the most significant factors contributing to the stabilization of German and western European politics after 1945. Combining Catholic social thought, Christian Socialism, anticommunism, and cultural conservatism in various degrees, Christian Democracy reoriented the bourgeois center away from authoritarian nationalism and also provided a non-Marxist basis for welfare state capitalism. Christian Democrats played a crucial role in (re)constructing a democratic order in continental Europe, especially in those states where fascism and occupation had ravaged political culture and national substance. This was especially true of the “big three” parties of postwar western Europe: the Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP) in France, the Democrazia Christiana (DC) in Italy, and the CDU/CSU, each of which occupied central positions in national governments through the first postwar decade.

The domestic success of Christian Democratic parties in the 1950s was impressive though unevenly distributed, reflecting differing national political and social contexts. The intermittently influential MRP and the “born for government” but fractious DC contrasted sharply with each other and with the successful and stable CDU/CSU. In all cases, however, by offering a democratic alternative to socialism that unified different constituencies—such as Catholic trade unionists, middle-class urban churchgoers, rural voters, and, especially in the case of the Union, which we will discuss below, both Catholics and Protestants—that had often fragmented in the earlier decades of the century, Christian Democrats helped to guarantee stable competitive political systems in western Europe, and their commitment to cooperation with the United States in the first decade of the Cold War helped to reinforce the development of the Atlantic alliance.Footnote ⁸

Especially in West Germany and Italy, the Americans overcame initial concerns about supporting “clerical” parties and embraced Christian Democrats as their preferred partner. In Italy, this support extended even to Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) funding for the DC in its 1948 election campaign to help to forestall Communist advances, an investment that paid off in a Christian Democratic majority. In West Germany, the American-occupation authorities, after a period of skepticism, eventually embraced Adenauer and the CDU/CSU, whose policies emphasized moderate capitalism and anticommunist cooperation in the Atlantic alliance, as a reliable alternative to the socialism and apparent nationalism of the SPD and its chair, Kurt Schumacher.Footnote ⁹

Most significant for the future of Europe was Christian Democracy's connection to the movement for European integration.Footnote ¹⁰ At a time when socialists and liberals, as well as traditional nationalist conservatives, were unsure about the proper shape and scope of European integration and its relationship to the Cold War, Christian Democrats embraced the idea of supranational integration in western Europe, taking the lead in founding such organizations as the Council of Europe and the European Coal and Steel Community, and planned even more ambitious constructions as the European Defense Community (EDC) and European Political Community (EPC). Despite contemporary discomfort with the sentimental emphasis in Brussels on the “founding fathers,” any discussion of the origins of the European Union has to include Christian Democrats Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer, and Alcide De Gasperi. Their advocacy of European integration gave the technocratic/economic arguments associated with planners such as Jean Monnet a political and cultural attraction that encouraged broad-based popular support.Footnote ¹¹

There were a variety of reasons for Christian Democratic attachment to supranational European ideas. One was the connection between Christian Democracy and the Catholic Church. While far from totally harmonious, this connection encouraged a sense of Europe as a common cultural and political space, making it easier for Christian Democrats to overlook some of the impediments to European integration that made other political parties of the Right and Left more skeptical.Footnote ¹² Catholic Christian Democrats especially embraced the idea of Europe as das christliche Abendland, a culturally and politically unified space with a special historical mission that transcended individual nations.Footnote ¹³

References to the Abendland served a variety of purposes. For one they gave a philosophical cast to the growing anti-communist division between east and west. By positing the existence of a distinctly western European culture as separate from (not to mention superior to) the east, Abendländler could justify their focus on western Europe and their willingness to write off, for the immediate future at least, any possible rapprochement with “Asiatic communism.” At least as significantly, Abendland references provided an important conceptual bridge between pre-1945 cultural conservatism and the postwar world, allowing many conservatives to accept ties to the American-led west while continuing to use familiar rhetoric from the past.

Supranational visions of Europe also provided an ersatz for nationalism, which is one reason that Christian Democracy was so successful in states such as Germany and Italy, where traditional nationalism was (however temporarily) particularly discredited.Footnote ¹⁴ European integration also encouraged Christian pacifists to support Christian Democratic parties. Although later disagreements over Cold-War policy would eventually lead some pacifists away from Christian Democracy, the initial appeal to Europe as a way to guarantee peace was crucial to building a successful electoral coalition.Footnote ¹⁵

This European spirit influenced Christian Democrats in government. Although others supported European integration for a variety of reasons, Christian Democracy was the only movement that placed European integration so squarely in the center of its political identity. This orientation paid dividends in both directions: just as the party's political success at home lent its advocacy for Europe greater weight, its identification with Europe provided Christian Democrats with an issue they could claim for their own in domestic political campaigns. Christian Democratic visions of an integrated Europe as a cultural, even a moral, necessity, rather than simply an economic or political convenience, offered a way to link the practical advantages of European integration to the often inchoate desire of many Europeans for a fresh start after the horrors of war, occupation, and genocide.

For the Germans, the creation of the CDU/CSU also provided an opportunity to overcome the confessional divisions that had long bedeviled German politics. German political parties had in the past been built on narrow ideological or regional bases, producing a fragmented party system, and the religious divide had been particularly damaging. Catholics had established the Center Party in the nineteenth century as a rallying point for all Catholics irrespective of class or regional background, and it had maintained a stable hold on about one fifth of the national electorate through the last free elections of the Weimar Republic. Relations with other parties, however, especially bourgeois liberal parties, were complicated by the confessional divide and memories of the Kulturkampf, which had seen liberals and Catholics locked in a bitter political conflict. After seeing how the fragmentation of the political center-right contributed to the death of German democracy, however, the thought of returning to the “tower” (to use the most popular image of the Center) after 1945 made some of its old leadership uncomfortable.Footnote ¹⁶ Thus was born the idea of making the CDU/CSU a party that united Catholics and Protestants against “materialism,” a catch-all term that could be used to unite Christians against all other modern political movements, from liberalism to socialism to communism.Footnote ¹⁷

Emphasis on the contrast between materialism and Christian principles also allowed the Union to create, at least rhetorically, a political identity intended to separate it from the Nazi past. By claiming descent from traditional political Catholicism in particular and Christian teachings in general, the Union could both claim a historical pedigree as representative of the “other Germany,” distinct from Prussia and its Nazi stepchild. The connection of many founders of the Union to the resistance against Hitler, such as Eugen Gerstenmaier, a Protestant pastor who had belonged to the Confessing Church, and Jakob Kaiser, who had worked underground as an official with the Catholic trade unions, reinforced that image.Footnote ¹⁸

This strategy, of course, downplayed the complicity of the churches in the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the collaboration of many Christians with the Nazi regime. The Union came under direct criticism for this reason from one of the founders of the FDP, Thomas Dehler. Though a Catholic, Dehler was also a tireless opponent of “clericalism.” With an eye toward the conservative former leaders of the Bavarian People's Party who helped found the CSU, Dehler had argued as early as 1946 that it was a mistake for the German people to allow “the same people and at least the same forces that are so burdened with guilt” for their failure to stand up to Nazism to claim political legitimacy “just because they call themselves Christians” instead of following “the successful Anglo-Saxon example” and creating “a freedom-loving, progressive social, and truly democratic party” as an alternative to socialism.Footnote ¹⁹ Despite such criticisms, however, the Union's rhetorical strategy succeeded within a German society that eagerly embraced the popular notion that “good” Christians resisted Nazism.Footnote ²⁰

Although the attempt to lump all of the opponents of Christian Democracy under the heading “materialism” was historically problematic, it proved politically useful in the immediate postwar years in encouraging confessional solidarity. Of all the major Christian Democratic parties in postwar Europe, the CDU/CSU was alone in including a major Protestant element. That did not stop some Protestants from criticizing the apparent dominance of Catholics within the Union at times, and did encourage constant discussions of parity in top party posts. Nevertheless, even after the departure of the left-leaning group of Protestants supporting Gustav Heinemann in the early 1950s, conservative Protestant leaders such as Hermann Ehlers and his successor as Bundestag President Eugen Gerstenmaier helped to link much of the Protestant Bildungsbürgertum to the Union, beginning with the 1953 elections.Footnote ²¹ The ability to reach both major confessional groups was crucial to the Union's image as a Volkspartei that attracted support from the broad middle of the electorate. That commanding position helped the Union defeat or co-opt competing parties in the center and also offered a model that the SPD would seek to adopt for itself after 1959.

Christian Democracy and Pragmatic Politics

The Union's early success surprised even its founders, and in the early 1950s Christian Democrats in West Germany and its neighbors used their dominant position to seize the initiative in European policy. The first inklings of problems for European Christian Democracy, however, emerged in the mid 1950s. The death of De Gasperi in August 1954, followed at the end of that month by the collapse of the supranational European Defense Community (EDC), which also doomed embryonic plans for a European Political Community (EPC), heralded the end of the opening phase of European integration. These setbacks dealt a blow to hopes for a swift supranational political union. International failure coincided with domestic setbacks such as the decline of the MRP in France, the disappointing showing of the DC in 1953 Italian elections, and CSU defeat in the Bavarian elections of 1954 by a broad-based anticlerical coalition.Footnote ²²

Critics of Christian Democracy were as delighted by these developments as leading Christian Democrats were dismayed. Thomas Dehler called the defeat of the EDC a symbol for the failure of “Catholic thinking for Europe,” and demanded a renewed emphasis on traditional liberalism.Footnote ²³ Although the FDP was still formally part of the governing coalition, Dehler had become increasingly critical of what he considered the abandonment of German national interests by an Adenauer government too committed to European and Atlantic integration. Indeed, by January 1958, Dehler, along with Gustav Heinemann, would accuse Adenauer in Bundestag speeches of consciously sacrificing German reunification to his vision of cooperation with the west (Westbindung).Footnote ²⁴

Supporters of the EDC also saw its defeat as the end of a particular dream. One leading CDU advocate of united Europe, Eugen Gerstenmaier, wondered, “Whether the thirtieth of August [the day the French National Assembly voted down the EDC] … means the end of the idea of European political integration in our generation,” and added that if this were true, “there are more than one of us … who would prefer to retire from politics.” That this “period of Christian European policy” was “consciously liquidated” by the “liberal” French Prime Minister Pierre Mendes-France was a bitter fact whose significance was not lost on Christian Democrats such as Union Bundestag caucus leader Heinrich Krone, who saw their partisan enemies behind the destruction of their European vision. Indeed, though the Federal Republic was eventually invited to join NATO directly after the Paris and London conferences of October 1954 (the arrangement that the Americans and British preferred) and formal admission in May 1955 was celebrated as a step toward German acceptance into the west, prominent Christian Democrats, who had seen the EDC as the nucleus of a united Continent, only reluctantly accepted direct membership in the larger Atlantic alliance.Footnote ²⁵

The disappointments of the mid-1950s were surmountable, though they encouraged changes with serious consequences for the future, as pragmatic acceptance of the Atlantic alliance signaled a step away from supranational European integration. Domestically, the spread of postwar prosperity also undermined the critique of “materialism” that had been so important in Christian Democracy's original identity. In a sense, this problem was a product of success. Increasing stability and prosperity in the Federal Republic, largely the product of Christian Democratic-led governments, encouraged materialism, if by that we mean an increasing interest in consumption and leisure, and undermined the religious and cultural milieus that were the Christian Democratic electoral base.Footnote ²⁶ Once begun, this erosion was difficult to stop. Regular churchgoers have remained the most consistent Christian Democratic voters, and Church leaders have never been shy about encouraging their flocks to vote for candidates “who [offer] real guarantees for protection of God's justice, the rights of the family, and society according to God's law and Christian Social teaching.”Footnote ²⁷ The rapid decline of that segment of the population, however, made them an increasingly shaky foundation for electoral success.

In response, the Union altered its overall political strategy. Though still appealing to traditional religious constituencies at election time, the Union in government moved toward a more pragmatic approach to domestic politics and European integration. In Europe, the six members of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) responded to the failure of the EDC by meeting in Messina in 1955, signaling a move away from politics toward economic arguments. The resulting European Economic Community (EEC) fell short of earlier dreams of supranational political integration but represented the best that could be accomplished at the time. Similarly, although Adenauer and the Union won a huge electoral mandate in the 1957 Bundestag elections, becoming to date the only German party ever to win an absolute majority of votes cast in a free election, they did so by appealing not to grand visions of the future or to first principles, but to the pragmatic need for stability. Even though one could argue that their foreign policy of Westbindung had meant a break with the tradition of German Schaukelpolitik (see-saw policy between east and west) and the social market economy and a new pension system represented important innovations, Union rhetoric emphasized a generalized conservatism and painted the Social Democrats as dangerous dreamers who wanted to embrace socialism and desert the Atlantic alliance. Admonishing voters that they needed “No Experiments,” Union propaganda focused on growing material prosperity, reflected in the neoliberal economics of Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard, and the security and sovereignty gained through NATO, claiming that a vote for the Social Democrats would threaten what had been gained.Footnote ²⁸

The “No Experiments” slogan in 1957 was little different from other conservative slogans of the period, whether the 1952 and 1956 American version of “I Like Ike” or the British Tory declaration of 1959 that “You've never had it so good.” It brought a huge electoral success. It also meant, however, that Ludwig Erhard, a Protestant who had never been enthusiastic about the “Catholic” European program of supranational political coordination and who preferred broader free trade cooperation within the Atlantic Community, became the front-runner in the race to succeed Adenauer as chancellor. As much as they relied on Erhard's popularity to win elections, a substantial element within the Union feared that the liberalization he represented would undermine the party's identity even further. Adenauer in particular became determined to stop Erhard's rise, creating dissension within the CDU/CSU that overshadowed German politics in the last years of his chancellorship and beyond.Footnote ²⁹ His increasingly futile public feud with his most popular minister weakened Adenauer's public image, but it also showed the depth of his concern about Erhard and a growing uneasiness at the spreading dominance of economic interests within the Union.

Adenauer even lashed out at his fellow conservative Catholic and loyal Parliamentary Caucus chief, Heinrich Krone, after hearing that Krone and Erhard had met with the president of the League of German Industrialists (BDI), Fritz Berg, without consulting him. As long as he remained party chairman, Adenauer wrote, “the CDU is not an economics party [Wirtschaftspartei] and we do not want it to become one.” Adenauer promised to fight with all his strength against such a development.Footnote ³⁰ The quixotic anachronism of this letter, written at a time when the Union had indeed become the party of choice for powerful economic interests, reflects the growing ambivalence within the party about the relationship between Christian Democratic identity and the trend toward pragmatism, even if economic growth was part of the reason for the Union's electoral success.

As the Adenauer era ended in 1963 with the aged chancellor's retirement and Erhard's election, the Union continued to struggle to articulate what being a Christian Democratic Party meant in the modern world. Many viewed Erhard's victory in the succession struggle as a triumph for liberalism over clericalism. Whether this was a good or bad thing depended on one's vision of the future of the Union. The emphasis on Christian identity within a supranational Europe that had been essential to the formation of the Union and to the stabilization of German politics, however, had become a political liability in an increasingly secular world.

This was not just a German problem, nor did it only reflect on the Union, but the German case is especially illuminating. Prosperity encouraged what Daniel Bell famously called the “end of ideology” across the industrialized world, as Socialist parties abandoned their Marxist trappings and the differences between major democratic parties diminished.Footnote ³¹ The SPD's Bad Godesberg convention in 1959 marked the culmination of their move away from Marx and toward the center. Although the SPD under Kurt Schumacher had decisively rejected communism by 1946, the programmatic statements at Godesberg emphasized the SPD's break with Marxist economic models and its acceptance of the social market economy as it had developed in the Federal Republic, which offered the SPD a chance to escape its position of perpetual opposition, and also made it harder for Christian Democrats to argue that they alone stood against the threatening Red menace. Once the photogenic Willy Brandt emerged as the SPD's leader, the transformation of the SPD was visible to all. “Please remember,” Adenauer told the party inner circle on the eve of his retirement as chancellor in 1963, “that our old slogan from 1949, ‘strong ties to the West,’ cannot help us anymore … the Social Democrats have become more American than the Americans.” The Union had won the “long and hard struggle” to forge a consensus in favor of European integration, the Atlantic Alliance, and the Social Market Economy, but now had lost the exclusive claim to political virtue that had dominated its election campaigns.Footnote ³²

The internal problems of the Union, which had always been a heterogeneous combination of regional and institutional interests, were exacerbated by Erhard's weakness as a leader. Unable to command the same respect as Adenauer, and unwilling to wield his power with the ruthlessness of the old master, Erhard hoped that his own popularity would bring electoral success that would be a substitute for strong leadership. Instead, his relaxed style encouraged ever more intense competition among party leaders who hoped to succeed him.

German Christian Democracy also faced external challenges as formerly reliable partners began to liberalize in uncomfortable ways. On the one side, the United States, which had been such a steady source of support, began to alter its attitude toward both European integration and the Cold War, especially after the election of John Kennedy as president. Some Christian Democrats had been as skeptical about American society as Americans had been about Christian Democracy, but both sides had come to appreciate each other as defenders of the Atlantic alliance. The Kennedy Administration's encouragement of both flexible response and détente, however, reduced the significance of Europeans in world affairs by subordinating their economic and security policies to American preferences, and raised the specter of a Soviet-American “condominium” over world affairs.Footnote ³³ American policy alienated the French under Charles de Gaulle, but it also led to problems with the Germans, who feared American abandonment of traditional positions on Berlin, for example. American pressure in favor of British membership in the EEC after 1960 added to the worries of conservative Christian Democrats, who feared that the “Anglo-Saxons” were more interested in Europe as a free trade zone within the Atlantic community than as an autonomous political actor. That liberals such as Erhard enthusiastically embraced these free-trade visions only added to the problems of party unity.Footnote ³⁴

There was a deeper irony to this divergence in German and American priorities. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations had embraced Adenauer and the Union as preferred partners in Germany precisely because Adenauer and the Union's version of Westbindung privileged European and Atlantic integration over plans for German unification through neutrality. Adenauer's focus on forging ties with the western allies and reluctance to negotiate with the east had been one of the most important links between the Americans and the Union and had exposed him and the Union to sometimes withering criticism from the SPD and FDP, who had branded him “Chancellor of the Allies” or accused him of working against reunification. That the new administration in Washington, led by a president who had written in a 1957 Foreign Affairs article that “the Adenauer era is over,” now encouraged détente policies and criticized Adenauer for clinging to old verities, was as encouraging for the Union's critics as it was bitter for the Union leadership to accept.Footnote ³⁵ Adenauer's last months in office were marked by a conflict with Kennedy about West German willingness to sign the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which Adenauer feared would have symbolically recognized the legitimacy of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). This conflict became so intense that Adenauer later claimed, “I, who was labeled ‘Chancellor of the Allies’ at the beginning of my career, would have been ready to resign as Chancellor against the Allies.”Footnote ³⁶ Although Adenauer overreacted in the Test Ban debate, the controversy showed how strained the relationship between the Union and the Americans had become.Footnote ³⁷

The other source of external pressure on Christian Democracy, which has up to now received less scholarly attention than it deserves, is the sea change within the Catholic Church. The election to the papacy of John XXIII in 1959, succeeding the conservative Pius XII, is recognized as important in the history of church dogma, especially in relation to John's decision to convene the Second Vatican Council with its attendant modernization of Catholic teaching and practice. In addition to these doctrinal changes, however, John's new leadership also encouraged a reassessment of the Church's political role within the Cold War. John opened up the possibility of dialogue with the east from the start of his papacy, culminating in his 1963 encyclical Pacem in Terris, which appeared to abandon the traditional conflation of Catholicism and the Cold War.Footnote ³⁸ This especially worried the Germans. Pius XII had been greatly admired by conservative German Catholics. As former Nuncio in Germany, Pius was regarded as a friend of Germany, often to the detriment of his subsequent historical reputation.Footnote ³⁹ As pope, his firm anticommunism and encouragement for European integration had been exactly the sort of policies that Christian Democrats wanted to present as “Christian.” John's calls for internal change of the Church and his conciliatory statements about the east-west conflict, however, threatened to undermine key elements of the Christian Democratic agenda.

Adenauer, according to one of his closest foreign policy advisers, found the Vatican's “political naiveté” deeply disturbing.Footnote ⁴⁰ As he remarked on the occasion of John's death to the French ambassador, “I knew Pius XII and admired him very much. He was a very important man. But John was an absolute catastrophe.”Footnote ⁴¹ Adenauer blamed John and his staff, through their efforts at détente and their statements on Italian politics, for both the weakening of western moral anticommunism in general and the rising strength of the Italian communist party in particular. He visited John in the Vatican only once, in early 1960. After the pope refused either to mention the division of Germany or to criticize communism in his formal remarks, Adenauer vowed never to return. He considered writing a personal letter to John discussing the serious threat communism posed to the west and to the Church, in order to encourage a change in policy, but ultimately dropped that idea and decided to wait for the next pope.Footnote ⁴²

The criticism of John and the leftward drift in the Church also extended to Vatican invitations to prominent Soviet representatives. After John received Khrushchev's son-in-law Alexei Adjubei and gave him a gift for his father-in-law, Adenauer remarked to the CDU central committee, “when the Holy Spirit has so departed from Rome that Khrushchev himself is invited, that will naturally have an impact here in Germany.” Such actions by the Vatican also threatened to have domestic political repercussions. As Adenauer told the CDU leadership, “the Social Democrats have stolen everything from us that they could. They have stolen from our party program … and now they are going to see the pope and take him away from us as well.”Footnote ⁴³

Adenauer's nightmare came true when Pope Paul VI, continuing John's political line, received a delegation of German Social Democrats at the Vatican on March 5, 1964. This triumph for the new pragmatic SPD, which hoped to win votes among progressive Catholics, deeply unnerved German Christian Democrats. Heinrich Krone wrote sadly in his diary that no one in the Vatican had consulted with any German Catholic politicians or even members of the Church hierarchy in Germany before extending the invitation. “What is going on in the Vatican?” Krone asked. “Do they care about Christian parties, or only about Christians in all parties?” Krone worried, “the political struggle against the danger of world communism is weakened by this new direction in the Vatican. Communism is making a grand attempt to remove the Catholic Church from the struggle between east and west, to neutralize it.” Krone's reaction to Vatican policies revealed the insecurity felt by many Christian Democrats facing the new secular era. “Christianity as a force that shapes society is fading,” he reflected. “How would German history have gone after 1945 if we had not had the Christian Democratic Union? Other forces would have made policy. They should think about that in Rome.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Thus by the early 1960s, the Union found itself fighting a two-front war, against internal weakness and ideological convergence at home and the collapse of the Cold-War consensus abroad. As Krone noted sadly in his diary, summing up the problem from the Catholic Unionist's perspective, “The new world is north German, protestant, and American.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Whether there was any place in this new world for Christian Democracy was far from certain.

Politics in a New Key?Footnote ⁴⁶

How could the Union, and Christian Democratic parties in general, respond to these serious challenges to their identity and their place in the political order? The most obvious option was to seek some sort of revitalization of the “C,” by finding a way both to emphasize the importance of Christian ideas in their policies and to communicate this message to a younger generation. Adenauer's overreaction to Erhard and Krone's meeting with Fritz Berg in 1960 reflected the attitude of those who wanted to distinguish Christian politics from economic liberalism. Despite that disagreement, Krone shared Adenauer's concern, writing two years later in his diary, “we aren't a liberal party like the Free Democrats. We are the Christian Democratic Union, and the C is for us the force that moves and carries us.” Excluding religious ideas to conform to modern expectations would do no good, Krone reasoned, since a more secular Union would never win over the real liberals, who were more likely to vote for leftist parties. If non-Christians voted for the Union at all, they did so because of the Union's policies, and Christians built those policies. “We should not allow ourselves to be confused by the anti-Christian—or more precisely, a-Christian—voices in politics. We need to take up the questions and concerns of our times courageously and call on the people to follow us. He who acts, wins.”Footnote ⁴⁷

The CDU tried to put these words into action in 1962 by encouraging the public discussion of the role of the “C” in “CDU” that culminated in Barzel's report to the party leadership. Considering that the Union had itself downplayed the C in many ways since the mid-1950s, however, it should come as no surprise that Barzel's attempt to compose a new concerto in C major came to naught. Facing challenges that threatened both the electoral and ideological foundations of their approach to politics, and unwilling to risk marginalization if they did not adapt to new political realities, the Union had to figure out how to compose politics in C minor and experimented with alternative responses. Four possible approaches emerged from these considerations, pursued to different degrees at different times. They sometimes overlapped, sometimes contradicted each other. Each offered advantages and disadvantages for both domestic politics and the future of the Federal Republic within the European Community, but none could on its own solve the problems the Union faced. Sketching them here will show how each in its way highlighted the fundamental problems facing Christian Democracy and help us understand the direction the Union took in the 1970s.

Gaullism

The first possible response was Gaullism—a kind of Christian Democracy without Christ, or rather with General de Gaulle as the central figure (an image the General would certainly find appealing). De Gaulle himself tried to encourage this transformation by identifying himself with European independence, using his foreign policy conception as a secular version of earlier Christian Democratic visions of a distinct Europe within the west.Footnote ⁴⁸ With his strong appeal to Europe, de Gaulle capitalized on long-standing fears of Americanization among postwar Christian Democrats as well as conservatives. His appeal to traditional, even authoritarian, government above partisan politics resonated with conservative French Catholics who resented the fragmentation of the Fourth Republic and who considered the General the guarantor of social and political stability. Gaullism's growth in France thus hastened the decline of the MRP. The Gaullist message resonated with many Germans as well. Adenauer, for example, toyed with de Gaulle's model of presidential authority when he considered running for Federal President in 1959, though he had to drop the idea when he realized the incompatibility of the French and West German constitutions. In foreign affairs, Adenauer viewed de Gaulle as a vital ally against the unreliable “Anglo-Saxons,” concluding a special Franco-German Friendship treaty in January 1963. A large proportion of Adenauer's followers, especially in the CSU, viewed French Gaullists as natural political friends. Especially as the MRP began to dissolve, the CDU/CSU sought institutional ties to the Gaullist Union pour la nouvelle République (UNR), much to the chagrin of those who wanted to see continued cooperation between explicitly Christian Democratic parties.Footnote ⁴⁹

The Gaullist option had obvious appeal, but it also had its drawbacks. In West Germany, where the alliance with the United States retained an existential significance, de Gaulle's growing conflict with the Kennedy and Johnson administrations threatened to split the Union in two. Conflict between so-called Gaullists and Atlanticists over whether the Germans should place primary loyalty in Washington or Paris, which had emerged in Adenauer's last years, burst forth with great vehemence after Adenauer's retirement. Far from providing a way to renewed domestic strength, internal conflicts between these factions weakened the Union substantially, fatally undermining the government of Ludwig Erhard and strengthening the hands of the consistently Atlanticist FDP and SPD.Footnote ⁵⁰

Within the Union, the dispute between Gaullists and Atlanticists also threatened relations between Protestants and Catholics, with most Protestant members of the party siding with their coreligionists Erhard and Foreign Minister Gerhard Schröder, who had cultivated close relations with the Americans and British and were not comfortable with de Gaulle's European plans.Footnote ⁵¹ The high profile of Catholics such as Baron Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg of the CSU among the Gaullists, whose family traced its roots to the twelfth century and the Holy Roman Empire, was especially problematic for some German Protestants.Footnote ⁵² One active member of the Union's Protestant working group (Evangelischer Arbeitskreis, or EAK) warned EAK chair Schröder that these “integralist Catholics and Gaullists” wanted an authoritarian government on the Spanish model.Footnote ⁵³ Over the course of the decade, some Protestants in the Union resurrected old accusations that Catholics were opposed to the very idea of reunification, and toyed with the idea of creating a separate Protestant party.Footnote ⁵⁴

Some conservative Catholics, including Adenauer, deplored the term “German Gaullist” as a creation of an irresponsible “anti-Catholic” media.Footnote ⁵⁵ Even advocates of closer relations with France, however, feared the backlash that could come from too close an identification with the Gaullists as a political party. Baron Guttenberg, for example, contrary to the fears of his Protestant critics, told Adenauer that he “would consider it a mistake … if the public were to get the impression that the CDU/CSU's French partner was the [Gaullist] UNR, because that would lead to the charge that the CDU/CSU also shared the domestic, and especially constitutional ideas, of the French.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Faced with a broad Atlanticist consensus in the Federal Republic, Gaullism proved a domestic liability.

Gaullism proved to be a false hope in European affairs as well. Although German Gaullists, and the General himself, justified their criticism of Britain and the United States by claiming they were working toward a unified and autonomous Europe, the “Europe of the Fatherlands” that de Gaulle advocated, with its focus on the continuing role of the individual nation-states in policy making, left no more room for supranational integration than Atlanticist notions of a free trade zone. For de Gaulle, states were “the only entities that have the right to order, and the authority to act” and “[t]o imagine that something can be built that would be effective for action and that would be approved by the peoples outside and above the states—this is a dream.”Footnote ⁵⁷ It was also one thing to complain about American arrogance in general, but most in the Union did not want to see a permanent estrangement between Europe and Washington. Indeed, many critics of de Gaulle claimed his Europe combined the worst of both worlds: it would not bring real integration, and if his Europe were to speak with one voice, that voice would have an unmistakable French accent. Furthermore, his opposition to NATO military integration threatened to undermine an alliance that the Union had proclaimed to be essential to German security.

Nor was this all. After his efforts to create a special Franco-German alliance based on the 1963 treaty failed after Adenauer's retirement, the General began to torpedo the EEC itself in his pursuit of French grandeur. His opposition to further economic integration and majority voting led to the “Empty Chair Crisis” of 1965-66, in which France effectively crippled the EEC by refusing to send representatives to the meetings.Footnote ⁵⁸ By 1966, the General had clearly maneuvered himself into a corner, and many of his former German admirers began to criticize him openly. CSU Chair Franz Josef Strauß, once a leading German Gaullist, wrote that he could not agree with de Gaulle on the need to organize Europe on a national basis. A Europe of the fatherlands could only be “an intermediate stage” of European development toward a supranational community.Footnote ⁵⁹ Indeed, Strauß would develop an argument in favor of Europe that abandoned the idea of the nation-state altogether. Nation-states were for Strauß “anachronistic structures that can no longer fulfill their function as units that can maintain life and competitiveness thanks to the ‘technical revolution.’” For that reason it would be “not only unnecessary, but also a very dangerous waste of time for the well-being and long-term security of the European peoples” if Europeans were to continue to wrestle with “superseded problems of national organization and reorganization in central Europe instead of gearing their decisions primarily under consideration of the harmonization of the interests of all the people of this continent.”Footnote ⁶⁰ By this point Strauß was experimenting with ideas that took him well beyond where de Gaulle—let alone the Anglo-Saxons—would be willing to go.

Ultimately, Gaullism was never able to develop into a coherent ideology separate from the ambitions and politics of France, which was the only continental European state that could realistically expect to pursue a policy of individual national grandeur. To follow the General too closely was, as Atlanticists never wearied of repeating, to exchange supposed American hegemony for a much less reliable French hegemony. That limited its usefulness as an electoral strategy elsewhere in Europe. Furthermore, with its emphasis on the secular nation, Gaullism in practice had less to do with Christian European visions of Europe than first appeared. Subsequent events demonstrated that it was even possible for politicians of other political parties to apply de Gaulle's neo-nationalist vision in pursuit of very different European and foreign policies.Footnote ⁶¹ By the time de Gaulle resigned in 1969, he left behind much bitterness and disappointment among his former German admirers. Many who had high hopes in the early 1960s now felt Gaullism had been a mirage.

Opening to the Left

A contemporary pendant to Gaullism was the Opening to the Left, attempting to revitalize Christian Democracy (and secure its political power) by rekindling the concerns for social justice that had been part of its original inspiration and by seeking electoral alliances with the moderate Left. This is the solution most closely associated with the DC under Aldo Moro after 1962. Moro saw this move as a way to escape parliamentary stalemate by helping Christian Democracy distance itself from the secular market-based liberalism espoused by its coalition partners, and to emphasize its appeal to the broad political center. John XXIII played an important role in this process as well. By lifting the taboo against socialism, the Vatican encouraged this kind of solution at home as well as abroad.Footnote ⁶² Although it did not prove to be the panacea that Moro promised, opening to the Left did help the DC retain its power through the 1980s.

Christian Democratic parties across Europe had entered into coalitions with social democrats and socialists at various times through the 1950s, on both national and state levels. Most famous is the long-term Grand Coalition in Austria, where the Christian Democratic Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) and the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ), each unable to command a majority on its own, made the Proporz a fact of political life in Vienna (for good and ill) until 1999. The MRP also worked with French socialists throughout the Fourth Republic, and the CDU participated in multiple state-level Grand Coalitions, though Adenauer had rejected it as an option at the federal level. Whether the opening to the Left was a solution to the malaise of the early 1960s, however, was another matter.

Ironically, considering their sometimes-hysterical reactions to the Vatican's new soft line, and their consistent red baiting in every national election up to that point, the Union pursued the opening to the Left quite seriously in the mid-1960s, in order to gain a tactical electoral advantage. For economic and ideological reasons, Adenauer had preferred a “little coalition” with the FDP and other smaller parties after the first election in 1949, and the Union had attacked the SPD heavily in subsequent campaigns for its alleged irresponsibility in foreign and domestic policy. In 1957, Adenauer went so far as to say a Social Democratic victory would be “the end of Germany.”Footnote ⁶³ Despite friction between the Union and FDP over foreign and European policy, their coalition held together at least in part until 1957, when the Union's absolute majority made any coalition unnecessary. After losing the absolute majority in the 1961 Bundestag elections, however (a loss attributable both to public displeasure with Adenauer's handling of the Berlin Wall and to general dissatisfaction with his leadership), the Union faced a dramatically changed political landscape. The SPD, by virtue of both its Bad Godesberg conference in 1959 and a famous Bundestag speech by Herbert Wehner in June 1960, had abandoned both its programmatic/rhetorical commitment to Marxism and its opposition to NATO, which made the SPD a more appealing electoral option for moderate voters and therefore much more difficult to demonize. Meanwhile, the FDP hoped to force Adenauer to retire in favor of Erhard, and was determined to drive a hard bargain in return for its participation in government. As coalition negotiations with the FDP reached a stalemate, Adenauer considered seeking an alliance with the Social Democrats that would keep him in office and eliminate the FDP as a political force. The threat was enough to move the FDP to compromise, but relations between Adenauer (and the conservatives within the Union who opposed Erhard) and the FDP never completely recovered.Footnote ⁶⁴

Theoretical discussions about a Grand Coalition continued through 1962, as Baron Guttenberg, working with Adenauer's blessing, began a series of informal conversations with SPD éminence grise Herbert Wehner about the mutual advantages of cooperation.Footnote ⁶⁵ Wehner saw a chance to complete the SPD's transformation in the eyes of bourgeois voters from Marxist bogeyman to moderate governing party, while Guttenberg represented conservative hopes that a temporary Grand Coalition could create a new electoral system that would eliminate the FDP altogether in favor of a stable two-party system.Footnote ⁶⁶ Growing enthusiasm for a Grand Coalition also rested on an emerging alliance between labor-oriented Christian Democrats and cultural conservatives, both of whom feared the influence of market liberalism on German society.

Adenauer followed up on these preliminary conversations in November-December 1962, when a coalition crisis caused by the Spiegel Affair forced him to renegotiate the coalition with the liberals. The crisis had been touched off by the decision of Defense Minister Strauß, encouraged strongly by Adenauer, to order a police raid on the Hamburg offices of the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel, charging that their critical reports on West German defense policy were based on illegal access to classified material. The FDP and other liberal critics charged that Strauß was motivated less by national security concerns than by a desire to silence a journal that had become increasingly critical of him personally. Hoping to burnish their image as defenders of individual liberty (and to help to erase the embarrassing memory of their capitulation to Adenauer in the 1961 coalition talks), the FDP leadership demanded Strauß resign, and made their return to the coalition dependent on his permanent exclusion from the cabinet. The coalition talks dragged on for nearly a month, until Adenauer forced the FDP to compromise by inviting SPD leaders to meet with him and agreeing to part with Strauß. Scholars disagree about the degree to which Adenauer would have been willing to go with the SPD that he had spent so much of his career vilifying, but the issue did not go away.Footnote ⁶⁷

Pressure for a Grand Coalition also built alongside the tensions between Atlanticists and Gaullists within the Union. Erhard and the Atlanticists, true to their liberal leanings, wanted to stay with the FDP, while conservatives thought that a short-term coalition with the SPD would strengthen their hand within the Union and perhaps make the FDP irrelevant. Erhard's surprising electoral victory in 1965, in which the Union narrowly missed regaining the absolute majority, kept Erhard in power with the FDP, but only temporarily. By October 1966, the collapse of Erhard's government—the product of both continued conflict within the Union and disagreement with the FDP over the proper response to an economic slump—led to the formation of a Grand Coalition that lasted until the next elections in 1969.

Although its status as a temporary response to a crisis kept it from being held in high esteem by the public (a major reason that the first book-length historical analysis refers to it as the “forgotten government”), the Grand Coalition of 1966–1969 could boast a few notable accomplishments, from reorganizing national finances to laying the foundations for the new Ostpolitik of Willy Brandt.Footnote ⁶⁸ It also provided redemption for Strauß, who returned to the Cabinet as Finance Minister, where he impressed even long-time enemies with his creative Keynesian solutions for state finances and for his creative suggestions on foreign policy.Footnote ⁶⁹ In the end, however, the Grand Coalition did more to fulfill the dreams of Wehner and Brandt by making the SPD credible as a party of national government than those of Union conservatives who wanted to revitalize Christian Democracy. The 1969 elections demonstrated the limitations of the Union strategy. Although its campaign, focused on the personal popularity of Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, allowed the CDU/CSU to hold onto its spot as the single largest party (shaving only a bit more than one percentage point off their 1965 result), opening to the Left brought it no closer to an absolute majority.Footnote ⁷⁰ Union leaders, despite confident predictions that they would have to be part of any new government, found themselves squeezed out by a new alliance of SPD and FDP (which, led by its new chair Walther Scheel, underwent its own opening to the Left after 1967 and abandoned much of its earlier pro-business nationalist liberalism).Footnote ⁷¹ Outmaneuvered in the search for suitable partners, the Union was relegated to the opposition for the next thirteen years.

The opening to the Left had its advantages, but also its pitfalls. By allowing Christian Democratic parties to recapture some of the social elements of their original visions, and their claim to represent the broad middle, the opening to the Left offered a chance to escape from too close an identification with economic liberalism, which appealed both to labor constituencies and to social conservatives. It also offered the chance to make Christian politics relevant in a world where the connection between Christianity and Conservatism was weakening. The problem, though, as became especially clear in Bonn, was that the decision to abandon demonization of the Left worked more to the advantage of leftist parties. Opening to the Left did not necessarily bring leftists to vote for Christian Democrats, but rather encouraged Christian voters to see voting for the Left as a real possibility. Furthermore, opening to the Left did not offer any real chance to make advances with the European project, as the new constellations that emerged in West Germany (and elsewhere in western Europe) after 1969 placed more emphasis on east-west détente and convergence than on deepening the integration of western Europe. As a result, Christian Democrats would recoil from the Left in the 1970s.

Technocratic Conservatism

An intriguing third option, which combined something of both of these earlier choices, was technocratic conservatism, in which Christian Democrats tried to fit into the new secularized politics of the 1960s by positioning themselves as theorists of the modern state within a technologically efficient Europe. In this way, Christian Democrats could maintain their attachment to Europe as a distinct space, but do so by emphasizing the pragmatic (especially economic and technical) advantages of closer European cooperation. This type of conservative politics in the “absence of metaphysical legitimation” became increasingly common in the secular 1960s.Footnote ⁷² One can find echoes of technocratic conservatism across western Europe, in the modernism of Gaullist France or even the later years of Franco's Spain, where conservative Opus Dei activists pushed technocratic management reforms in hopes of linking economic progress with social and political stability.

Franz Josef Strauß, whose role as the intellectual inspiration behind much of the internal Christian Democratic policy debate in the 1960s deserves deeper analysis, became one of the foremost advocates of this position. After spending the years immediately after his 1962 resignation studying economics and toying with Gaullist visions of Europe, he reemerged onto the German and European scene in the mid-1960s as a technocrat and served as Finance Minister in the Grand Coalition. Strauß was an enthusiastic booster of Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber's 1967 best seller, The American Challenge, in which the liberal French journalist called for greater European cooperation to compete with American economic power. The central area of agreement for Strauß and Servan-Schreiber was their belief in the importance of technology and modern management techniques. This separated Strauß not only from de Gaulle but also from the more traditional conservative positions of many fellow Bavarian Christian Democrats, who still yearned for a return to pastoral virtues, and led some conservatives within the CSU to label him a “liberal.”Footnote ⁷³

Strauß wrote extensively on the future of Europe during the 1960s, looking for ways to combine the need for a common European defense policy with greater emphasis on transnational technological cooperation. This reflected his modification of Gaullism to embrace a broader idea of European cooperation. He repeatedly emphasized the difference between the “apparent” sovereignty of the European states and the “real” sovereignty of the superpowers, whose military power meant they could guarantee their own security. Since no European state could guarantee its security individually, a European political union should play that role. In a prescient letter to Erhard in July 1966, he warned of American hegemony and called for European technical cooperation: “I am, of course, convinced that no European nation alone could even come close to competing with the Americans in high technology, but a stronger European cooperation and coordination could give Europe a better chance to stand up to the Americans.”Footnote ⁷⁴ A European defense identity within a confederation would allow the Germans to escape these limitations once and for all, while also creating an autonomous European “pillar” to balance the U.S.A. within the Atlantic Alliance.

Strauß would fall short in this goal, and the idea of a specifically European defense identity remains controversial and incomplete to this day, but his focus on defense and security technology had important consequences for both Germany and Europe. Going back to his earliest political activities as Minister for Atomic Affairs (1955–56) and then as Defense Minister, Strauß developed close connections to German aircraft leaders such as Willi Messerschmitt and Manfred Bolkow that only intensified as he moved into position to dispense government contracts. Reflecting a practical understanding of the relationship between the state and industry, Strauß consciously pursued a policy of developing what he liked to call the “industries of the future” (Zukunftsindustrien) with heavy government subsidies and political support.Footnote ⁷⁵ In this way, Strauß showed both his desire for greater European activity in these technologies and his preference for the kind of large-scale government intervention in key industries that Servan-Schreiber had advocated.

A concrete result of Strauß's policies was the transformation of his home state of Bavaria. Once a sleepy agricultural backwater, butt of jokes from the more dynamic northern areas, postwar Bavaria became the fastest growing industrial region in the Federal Republic, home of the most successful high-tech corporations. Today Bavaria is known as the land of “laptops and Lederhosen,” where affection for tradition combines with the most advanced economy, and the Bavarians now joke about their lazy unimaginative northern neighbors. The industries that made Bavaria the state that it is today—aerospace, computers, automobiles, oil, and chemicals—were heavily dependent on government support for their start, and they received that support from CSU leaders such as Strauß.

Most important for the future of Europe, however, was Strauß's advocacy for a broader European aerospace industry. He was one of the architects of the Airbus consortium, the European aerospace project that, despite its current travails, has emerged as the strongest competitor to American firms. Elected chairman of the advisory board upon its creation, he maintained his connection to the industry long after he left national office.Footnote ⁷⁶ As with the contracts for the German defense industry, Airbus also accomplished a dual purpose: it secured further contracts, funding, and influence for the German aerospace firms that participated in the consortium, while also creating precisely the kind of European-wide economies of scale that would allow the Europeans to meet the American challenge. In this way, Strauß was able to put into practice the ideas that he and Servan-Schreiber had each advocated, and offered a vision of Europe based on technological cooperation.

Technocratic conservatism still has its adherents, and Airbus still stands as one monument to that approach in Europe, but it quickly showed its limitations as a political strategy. After the social upheavals of 1968, in which protestors focused attention on broader issues of equality and social justice, managerial solutions seemed like weak gruel compared to the New Left's calls for fundamental societal transformation, or even to Social Democratic calls to “dare more democracy.” Writing in the New York Times Book Review, David Caute surveyed the ruined barricades of the Latin Quarter and declared that the May events constituted “a massive mockery of the attitudes and objectives for which Mr. Servan-Schreiber pleads.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Furthermore, as with the opening to the Left, even where it was successful at attracting voters, technocracy opened the door to representatives of other parties and ideologies, such as Valery Giscard d'Estaing (himself a disaffected Gaullist) in France or Brandt's Social Democratic successor Helmut Schmidt (representative of a vibrant technocratic tradition within German Social Democracy), who were better positioned to make themselves modern managers of a secular society than any explicit Christian Democrat. In Europe, the spirit of technocracy continues to live and move in the corridors of Brussels, but the failure of that spirit to create real enthusiasm among Europeans for an “ever closer union” is all too apparent, demonstrating its unsuitability as a guiding ideology for a democratic political movement.

Politics in G Major: The Nationalist Option

The CDU/CSU wrestled with the three options of Gaullism, opening to the Left, and technocratic conservatism into the 1970s with diminishing success. Ultimately, none offered a clear opportunity either to regain a sense of purpose for Europe or to spark electoral success at home. Rather, they merely exposed the continuing weakness of Christian Democracy in a world increasingly secular and increasingly focused on superpower détente. An ideology tailor-made to profit from the immediate postwar ideological atmosphere withered as the atmosphere changed. It is with good reason that Martin Conway declared that by the mid-1970s, “the age of Christian Democracy [had] ended.”Footnote ⁷⁸

The sense of losing its appeals to the political center and fear that the leftward trend in government would encourage new radical parties of the Right led Christian Democrats such as Strauß himself to embrace a populist conservatism in the early 1970s. Strauß, who proclaimed that his Bavarians were prepared to be “the last Prussians” when it came to defending German national interests, advocated this policy partly to mobilize opposition to the Ostpolitik of the Brandt government, but also to head off the rise of the crypto-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD), which threatened to lure conservatives away from the CDU/CSU.

Strauß defended this strategy using a phrase that became a party mantra in Bavaria, that there should be no “democratically legitimate force to the right of the CSU.” Viewed in its most positive way, this slogan appeared to be a continuation of the original purpose of Christian Democracy in thwarting nationalism. This theory also justified Union ties to conservative lobbies such as the expellees, who opposed any concessions to Germany's eastern European neighbors on relations or boundaries.Footnote ⁷⁹ The increasingly nationalist tones of Strauß and CDU leaders such as Alfred Dregger, however, suggested that the Union parties were in danger of becoming what they claimed to be fighting. Ironically, Dregger had risen within the Union as a strong advocate of European integration along Gaullist lines, and continued to call for greater European defense cooperation, even as he sounded nationalist tones in dealing with questions of Ostpolitik.Footnote ⁸⁰ In the absence of greater progress on Europe, it was the national tones that dominated. The forces that Christian Democracy had emerged to defeat thus reemerged when Christian Democracy lost its way.

The attempt to play the nationalist card, however, did not help to return the Union to power. Instead, as much contemporary analysis and subsequent scholarship has emphasized, opposition to an Ostpolitik embraced by a majority of the German public and an even larger majority of the Federal Republic's neighbors and allies threatened to isolate the CDU/CSU both at home and abroad. More aggressive nationalist rhetoric also threatened to damage relations between the Union and other Christian Democratic groups in Europe. Dregger himself discovered to his dismay, for example, that many French Christian Democrats did not understand (and may not have even been aware of) the Union's reasons for rejecting the treaties negotiated by the Brandt government with the Soviets and eastern Europe.Footnote ⁸¹ There was also the irony that the Union had been itself attacked for being nationally unreliable in the 1950s when it placed a higher priority on compromise with its neighbors than on reunification in pursuit of Westbindung, a point critics were not shy about making. Christian Democrats such as Barzel, who became CDU chair in 1971, tried to avoid isolation by shifting to a more conciliatory rhetoric once ratification of the eastern treaties appeared inevitable, but his efforts only deepened disagreements within the Union.

After suffering a devastating electoral defeat in 1972, even the most extravagant critics of Ostpolitik within the Union had to accept that intransigence was not a viable strategy. Strauß conceded the long-term weakness of the nationalist argument with his oft-repeated quip, pacta sunt servanda (treaties must be respected), reassuring his audiences that a Union-led government would accept the treaties once they were ratified, even if Strauß and others promised to interpret them in a more critical spirit. The process of adjustment took time, however. As the Union learned to live with the new political landscape, leadership disputes, deepened by the bruising debate over Ostpolitik, damaged the party's national appeal for the entire decade, to the advantage of the pragmatic and technocratic SPD/FDP government of Helmut Schmidt.Footnote ⁸² By the mid-1970s it was clear that politics in G major was in harmony neither with the public mood nor with the Union's own traditions.

The Wende that did not Turn?

Recognizing how powerful memories of the Union's opposition to Ostpolitik have become, it is not surprising that discussions of that opposition dominate historical treatments of the Union in the 1960s and 1970s. The foregoing discussion, however, tried to place that nationalism within the larger context of the identity crisis that plagued the Union in particular and Christian Democracy in general since the 1960s. With that broader crisis in mind, it is worth asking whether that nationalism would have been as pronounced had the Union succeeded in holding onto or regaining power through the other options sketched above. By the time the Union did return to power in 1982, however, none of the four options dominated. Instead, the Union returned to a slightly updated Atlanticist conservatism, not unlike its positions in the late 1950s.

The return of Cold-War tensions and divisions on the Left between old-line Socialists and Greens after 1979 provided an opportunity for the Union to return to power. This success showed that predictions of the permanent demise of Christian Democracy were premature. By that time, however, a lot of conceptual ground had been lost, in Europe and within the party. Helmut Kohl promised a “spiritual turn” (geistig-moralische Wende) after becoming chancellor, but such professions of faith did not translate into any real revitalization of Christian Democratic ideological coherence. References to the founding principles, of course, continued. In practice, however, the Union had become virtually indistinguishable from other European or North American parties of the center-right, advocating lower taxes, budget cuts, and a close alliance with the United States. Kohl, who modernized the CDU's organizational structure, pursued a strategy that privileged centrist pragmatism and cooperation with the FDP over seeking a conservative majority. This led to friction with Strauß in matters of electoral strategy, even if it did ultimately bring success for Kohl, who remained in office for a record sixteen years.

Nowhere was this failure to come up with a new purpose clearer than in European policy. Christian Democrats tried to emphasize their traditional connection with European integration, but the lack of coherent ideology hindered revitalization of the European project, just as their renewed commitment to Atlanticism undermined discussions of European autonomy in the world. Symbolic successes, such as Christian Democratic strength in the first direct elections to the European Parliament in 1979, were watered down by CDU/CSU efforts to link the European People's Party (the Christian Democratic group in the European Parliament) with other moderate and conservative parties in Strasbourg, even the notoriously Euroskeptic British. This search for cooperation with European conservatives was an international reflection of the Union's desire to occupy as much of the center-right as possible. Its result, the European Democratic Union (EDU) formed in 1978, left the Union with a foot in two camps and divided European Christian Democratic parties at a time when advancing “Eurosclerosis” weakened public enthusiasm for the European project.Footnote ⁸³

Kohl's role as the restorer of Christian Democratic political power—he often referred to himself as “Adenauer's political grandson”—is both fascinating and ambiguous, fitting for a party and a movement that is still searching for a clear identity.Footnote ⁸⁴ His triumph over Strauß for control of the Union was the triumph of pragmatism over ideology, but in the end his pragmatism did not leave his successors a clear sense of their party's future. As the “chancellor of unity,” Kohl earned his place in the history books, though his image will be clouded by the financial scandals that followed him after his defeat in 1998. His laudable efforts to maintain the German commitment to Europe even after national reunification and to encourage further administrative reform, culminating in the Maastricht Treaty, are also historically significant, but they received a fatalistic shrug from an electorate that had lost its enthusiasm for Europe. The Union is in power again, in a Grand Coalition, still wrestling with the question of how to define itself and its vision for Germany and Europe.

The European project's fading élan, emphasizing the inclusion of ever more states into an economic community that is increasingly distant from the lives of its people over the development of a clear sense of European purpose, is one of the long-term consequences of the dilution of the Christian Democratic program for Europe.Footnote ⁸⁵ As belief in the historical and moral imperative for Europe to assert itself as a distinct political/cultural as well as economic space has faded, no new bold visions have yet emerged to replace it. Christian Democracy offered one, however imperfect, vision of Europe. For a variety of reasons, that vision proved incapable of satisfying the needs of an increasingly secular Europe. As we observe how Christian Democracy's heirs have struggled to define and redefine it since the 1960s, we cannot escape the suspicion that Christian Democracy, one of the most successful political projects of the twentieth century, may be ill equipped to handle the challenges of the twenty-first.