ABSTRACT
Social policy after the Second World War focused on improving the condition of organized workers, especially adult males and their families, groups particularly hurt during the interwar period. At the same time, political repression after the Second World War marginalized those ethnic minorities who had protested so stridently in the interwar years. For at least thirty years, this political consensus dominated European politics. Beginning in 1974 with the end of three decades of rapid European economic growth and accelerating after 1989 with the collapse of the Eastern European Peoples’ Democracies, this postwar European force-labor unions-that had been brought into the political order after 1945, was on the brink of exclusion from political power centers in 2001 and a newly emerging social group-non-white immigrants-arose on the margins. At the same time, nationalist minorities, an older social force that had been marginalized in 1945, returned to the foreground in 2001, while a whole series of single-issue movements, some new, some old, including feminists, ecologists, and gay rights movements, mobilized to demand greater political recognition.
