ABSTRACT
Much of this book is devoted to the individual Christian democratic movements of the various European states in their domestic developments after 1945. That is both inevitable and understandable. The parties we are talking about were founded at different times, in different places, to meet domestic needs or challenges. They depended for their success on their ability to satisfy mass electorates that were more concerned with day-today problems than with the future of Western civilization. Even the founders and leaders of the different parties were probably concerned with short-term as much as long-term problems, and if with the longer term, then in the context of Church-state relations, the control of education or the maintenance of the social structure, rather than the reshaping of Europe.
