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 espoused democratic values. Above all it gained the support of the
people for whom democracy provided a new model of citizenship that reflected the aspirations
of a more prosperous society. This democratic order did not however endure. Its hierarchies
of class gender and race which initially gave it its strength as well as the strains of
decolonization and social change led to an explosion of demands for greater democratic
freedoms in the 1960s and to the much more contested democratic politics of Europe in the late
twentieth century. Western Europe's Democratic Age is a compelling history that sheds new light
not only on the past of European democracy but also on the unresolved question of its future.
