Zwischen katholischem Milieu und bürgerlicher Mittepartei: Das Historische Dilemma der CVP by Urs Altermatt (review)

Abstract

Zwischen katholischem Milieu und burgerlicher Mittepartei: Das Historische Dilemma der CVP. By Urs Altermatt. (Baden: hier + jetzt, Verlag fur Kultur und Geschichte. 2012. Pp. 263. euro39,00. ISBN 978-303919-254-0.)With this compilation of updated publications interspersed with previously unpublished essays, leading Swiss intellectual and Catholic historian Urs Altermatt offers a sweeping yet substantial assessment of the Christian Democratic People's Party of Switzerland (Christlichdemokratische Volkspartei der Schweiz, or CVP). In honor of the party's centenary, this volume collects the work of a scholar who has spent more than four decades studying Europe's second oldest Christian Democratic party. By casting the intricacies of Swiss party development into a broader European context, Altermatt has produced a valuable primer for students of political Catholicism and Switzerland.A defender of the theory of social-moral milieus (advanced by, among others, Seymour Martin Lipset), Altermatt locates his treatment of the CVP explicitly within a framework of the evolution and ultimate decline of the Swiss Catholic milieu. As throughout Western Europe, Swiss political Catholicism took hold amidst nineteenth-century confrontations between liberalism and Catholicism fueled by industrialism and nationalism. Rooted in the Catholic People's Party of 1894, the CVP was founded in 1912 as the Conservative People's Party, a name it retained until 1957, when it became the Conservative Christian Social People's Party. (It was in 1970 that the party changed its name to the Christian Democratic People's Party.) Even as Altermatt traces the integration of Catholics into national life, he consistently stresses the party's ties to its milieu. Following the interwar golden years of milieu Catholicism and having suffered nothing like the horrors of the Third Reich, Swiss Catholics were less inclined than their German compatriots to dismantle confessional barriers. Catholic support nevertheless remained sufficiently broad and deep that, like other Christian Democratic parties, the CVP enjoyed its greatest electoral successes in the two decades following World War II. But as Switzerland secularized, the CVP soon joined fellow European Christian Democrats in eschewing an explicit commitment to Christianity to embrace a moderate bourgeois conservatism. Not surprisingly, the deconfessionalization of Christian politics looked different depending on the party system.Indeed, even as its history reflects broader European trends, the CVP has traveled a distinctly Swiss path, especially as architect of the so-called magic formula of party politics that governed Switzerland from 1959 to 2003. …