and Belgium. Wilhelminian and Weimar Germany had a Catholic Center Party and the conservative wing of Austrian politics has long been closely bound up with the (Catholic) People’s Party. Even ‘Christian Democracy’ itself was not an altogether new idea—its origins lay in early-twentieth-century Catholic reformism and Catholic movements of the political center that tried without success to make their way in the turbulent years following World War One. But after 1945 the situation was quite different and wholly to their advantage.
