ABSTRACT

The end of World War Two signalled the beginning of a European era of constitution making that has been compared those at the end of the eighteenth century.1 From the onset, the alliance of antifascist parties that undertook this task was fragile, and the political debate on the reform of democracy revealed deep divisions. These rifts ran roughly along the lines between the Left and conservatives that had marked the 1920s and 1930s and were exacerbated by rising Cold War tensions and different explanations of democracy’s collapse in the interwar period. The divisions directly affected the way the political institutions of France, West Germany, and Italy were reformed after 1945. Thus, these countries’ new constitutions did not just reflect a fear of a repetition of the events of the 1920s and 1930s, but they also mirrored the competing democratic narratives put forward in this age of political reconstruction.