A major new history of how democracy became the dominant political force in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century
What happened in the years following World War II to create a democratic revolution in the western half of Europe? In Western Europe''s Democratic Age, Martin Conway provides an innovative new account of how a stable, durable, and remarkably uniform model of parliamentary democracy emerged in Western Europe-and how this democratic ascendancy held fast until the latter decades of the twentieth century.
Drawing on a wide range of sources, Conway describes how Western Europe''s postwar democratic order was built by elite, intellectual, and popular forces. Much more than the consequence of the defeat of fascism and the rejection of Communism, this democratic order rested on universal male and female suffrage, but also on new forms of state authority and new political forces-primarily Christian and social democratic-that espouse
