Writing the History of Postwar European Democracy

Abstract

In 1998, Mark Mazower concluded his Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century with the thought that Europeans rest content to be no longer at the centre of history and politics. They should enjoy the economic and political stability they had gained instead. ‘If Europeans can give up their desperate desire to find a single workable definition of themselves and if they can accept a more modest place in the world, they may come to terms more easily with the diversity and dissension which will be as much their future as their past’.1 As the title of Mazower's book suggested, this scholar of southeastern Europe writing in the wake of the Yugoslav civil war was not sanguine about the history of democracy on the continent. Contested and weak in the first half of the twentieth century, its liberal parliamentary kind continued to find a strong challenger in the people's democracy of the Eastern Bloc, which at least gave it a mission. Post 1990, Mazower saw disorientation about the continent's future political direction, and predicted instead the victory of capitalism. Indeed, to him the European Union was more a concession by its constituent states in order to maintain or regain prosperous national economies than a bold democratic endeavour.2