Visiting assistant professor of foreign languages Daniel Villanueva says his love of Germany began when he went abroad as a high school exchange student. Although he has nary a drop of German blood in his family, he says he loves everything about the country, including its history, culture, language, and politics.
It was this passion that fueled an eight-year labor of love that resulted in the publication of Europe as Political Project in the CDU: Precedents and Programs, a book that traces the cultural and historical roots of Germany’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) from its origins in pre-war Germany to present day.
The CDU, which was founded after the Second World War in 1945, is Germany’s largest political party; it is nondenominational but Christian-based. Villanueva’s interest in the party focuses on its commitment to the integration of Germany into the European Union.
“The CDU was very pro-European integration, but the parties from which it was formed – prior to the Hitler years – were very anti-Europe, or at least anti-Europe in the sense that they believed that Germany should be the dominant country,” explains Villanueva, who also serves as the director of the Summer Advanced Gifted Education program. “So how was it that this idea, which was present in all these conservative parties before the war, suddenly changed 180 degrees after the war?”
To answer this question, Villanueva spent three years in Germany visiting various archives and poring over letters, philosophical treatises, party platforms, and speeches from party officials dating as far back as the mid-1800s.
Villanueva uses this background to examine the history of pro-European policies in the CDU – from Germany joining the European Economic Community in 1957, all the way through 1998 when the CDU was defeated in national elections for the first time in some 20 years.
Villanueva describes German conservative thought prior to 1945 as “essentially anti-French, anti-cosmopolitan, pre-democratic, and certainly anti-internationalist.” This philosophy ran counter to pro-European integration sentiment. After the war, however, the CDU shifted under the leadership of Konrad Adenauer, CDU chairman and chancellor. Villanueva says Adenauer recognized that West Germany had to become a part of the larger European Union in the 1950s as the Cold War era took shape.
“Of course, the average post-war West German was not completely enamored of France, and many conservative intellectuals were still suspicious of other countries whose intellectual traditions they believed to be inferior to their own,” Villanueva says. “But they made the pragmatic decision to enter the Union even though this is not what their pre-1945 ideology would have predicted.”
Villanueva says tensions between previous and current ideologies became apparent when the CDU opposed attempts to normalize relations with East Germany. Although the CDU had been in power from 1949, the party was defeated in 1969 by the Social Democrats, under the leadership of Willy Brandt.
“Brandt was anti-communist and pro-Westerner like Konrad Adenauer, but he proposed that West Germany reach out to East Germany. The CDU was dead set against recognizing the existence of East Germany, even though their historical roots – all Germans under one roof – would lead one to think otherwise,” Villanueva says. “Of course, less than a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, West Germany, led by the CDU, engineered a political unification between East and West. The former East Germany thus ‘joined the EU’ by virtue of political union with West Germany on October 3, 1990, with solid CDU support.”
According to Villanueva, a third critical juncture occurred with the introduction of the Euro. He explains that when Germany unified in 1989, the five East German states didn’t enter the arrangement as equals. The West German constitution was in force, West German politicians and parties were dominant, and West Germany’s social and historical traditions – with few exceptions – became the normative in unified Germany.
Because of the war, neither side could be proud of their flag or their military, so West Germans transferred their pride to the German Deutsche Mark, the official currency of West Germany (and then Germany after unification).
“Then Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the leader of the CDU, said Germans must join their Europeans partners and adopt the Euro. This caught a lot of people off guard. Here they were, a unified Germany, proud of their economy and proud of the Deutsche Mark, but they were being asked to give that up and put their economic strength behind the Euro. This was not something a conservative German party would have said before 1945 and only reluctantly after 1990,” Villanueva says.
“Indeed, Kohl expended a significant amount of political capital to ensure that Germany adopted the Euro. His statement during the Euro debate – that ‘German unification and European unification are two sides of the same coin’ – is one of the best examples of this major sea change in conservative thought on Europe post-1945.”
The book ends when the CDU is voted out of office after 20 years in power. “No one expected Helmut Kohl to be defeated, and the CDU was not prepared for the loss,” Villanueva says. “So there was an immediate need for recalibration; a power vacuum was created, and a lot of new, often competing ideas came to the fore.”
Thus, Villanueva says his next book will focus on these opposition years and what effect Kohl’s defeat in 1998 had on the priority of European-related themes within the CDU.
“Charting the process by which the CDU answered new challenges for Europe and Germany – terrorism, economic crises, and immigration issues, to name a few – makes for a fascinating research project indeed,” Villanueva says.
