ABSTRACT
The creation of national political cultures is a long process of collective historical experiences that are framed and selected in order to provide a sense of belonging to a particular community. Eric Voegelin describes this process as political religions replacing the dominance of the Catholic and later Protestant churches since the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Voegelin 1938). The French Revolution was the innovative element in the rise of civil or political religion, which Benedict Anderson refers to as the taken-for-granted ‘imagined community’ that in reality is made and invented by political elites in a context of advancing capitalism. The nation-state is based on ideology, and it is merely a historical phenomenon (Anderson 1991: 6-7). The West Central European democracies are no exception to the rule in this regard. None of the countries existed before the Vienna Congress of 1815, and it was the French Revolution and the Napoleonic invasion of these territories that contributed to the rise of nationalism (Hobsbawn 2000). In this chapter, we seek first to briefly delineate the development of these political spaces prior to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The subsequent period from the modern foundation of the West Central European nation-states up until 1945 is discussed in a comparative perspective. The third section concentrates on the golden age of the welfare state, which lasted until the end of the 1970s. This is followed by a description of the transformation of this golden age welfare state to the present competition state in the context of global and European governance.
