Konrad Adenauer

Critical Acclaim for ADENAUER "A gripping narrative . . . brings to life an intriguing historical figure . . . an enthralling perspective on the processes that shaped the postwar world." --Daily Telegraph (London) "Charts the ironies of Adenauer's complicated life. This is the story of a marathon man, but it is narrated at the pace of a sprinter and with the elegance of a hurdler."--The Times (London) "Lucid and engaging. This is a well-researched and elegantly written volume which deserves a wider readership than the purely political."--The Herald (Glasgow) "A highly readable, thoroughly reliable, intelligently critical life-and-times. . . . This portrait does justice to a man who is often invoked as a prophet of a United States of Europe, but who was in truth the greatest of German patriots."--Literary Review (London) "Well-researched and admirably written . . . reveals Adenauer the man--with all his authority and strength, his persistence and endurance, and his streak of ruthlessness and political cunning."--The Independent (London) THE LAST GREAT FRENCHMAN "Knowledgeable, lucid . . . the best English biography of de Gaulle."--The New York Times Book Review "Charles Williams has matched a great subject by something near to a great book."--Daily Telegraph (London)

From the time of Bismarck's great rival Ludwig Windthorst to that of the first post-World War II Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, the Catholic community in Germany took a distinctive historical path. Although it was by no means free of authoritarian components, it was at times the most democratic pathway taken by organized political Catholicism anywhere in Europe.

Challenging those who seek continuity in German history primarily in terms of its long march toward Nazism, this book crosses all the usual historical turning points from mid-nineteenth- to late-twentieth-century German history in search of the indigenous origins of postwar German democracy. Complementing recent studies of German Social Democracy, it links the postwar party system to the partisan traditions this new system transcended by documenting the attempts by reform-minded members of the old Catholic Center party to break out of the constraints of minority-group politics and form a democratic political party. The failure of those efforts before 1933 helped clear the way for Nazism, but their success after 1945 in founding the interdenominational Christian Democratic Union (CDU) helped tame political conservatism and allowed the emergence of the most stable democracy in contemporary Europe. Integrating those who needed to be integrated--the cultural and political conservatives--into a durable liberal order, this conservative yet democratic and interdenominational "catch-all" party broadened democratic sensibilities and softened the effect of religious tensions on the German polity and party system.

By crossing traditional chronological divides and exploring the links between earlier abortive Catholic initiatives and therange of competing postwar visions of the new party system, this book moves Catholic Germany from the periphery to the heart of the issue of continuity in modern German history.

With the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the unification of 1990 a new German state emerged - the fifth constitutional upheaval and the fourth change of frontiers in this century. This book aims to introduce the reader to the legacy that present-day Germany has inherited from both East and West and from the period before 1945. It looks at the way political life has evolved since the Second World War, tracing the way the political parties, the institutions of government, and social forces have shaped the Germany that we know - and frequently misunderstand - today.

In this stimulating book, a leading expert on German affairs provides an overview of German political development since 1945. The key to the well-being and prosperity of Europe after 1945 was the creation of a stable and democratic West Germany. Unification in 1990 not only transformed Germany's role in Europe and the world but brought new political, social and economic problems caused by the vast expense of unity and high labour costs. The author argues that these great changes provide a new and daunting challenge to the Bonn system by calling into question the Berlin Republic's ability to meet the needs of the German nation.The difficulties resulting from Germany's commitment to European integration are also addressed. Within Europe, German insistence on deeper integration is often seen as evidence of a German wish to dominate Europe, even though the stated aim of Kohl's government is to prevent this from happening. The author believes that Germany's new power is clearly visible, and must be carefully managed if future conflict is to be avoided.

Including all Europeans and not just the Western European ones, this edited collection assesses their role in the Cold War to find out if they aggravated the conflict, whether they achieved greater security by participating in the conflict and whether they were merely victims of a superpower game.

In the late 1950s, against the unfolding backdrop of the Cold War, American and European leaders began working to reshape Western Europe. They sought to adapt the region to a changing world in which European empires were rapidly disintegrating, Soviet influence was spreading, and the United States could no longer shoulder the entire political and economic burden of the West yet hesitated to share it with Europe. Focusing on the four largest Atlantic powers--Britain, France, Germany, and the United States--Jeffrey Giauque explores these early stages of European integration.

Giauque uses evidence from newly opened international archives to show how a mix of cooperation and collaboration shaped efforts to unify postwar Europe. He examines the "grand designs" each country developed to advance its own interests, specific plans for collaboration or accord, and the reactions of the other Atlantic powers to these proposals. Competing national interests not only derailed many otherwise sound plans for European unity, Giauque says, but also influenced such nascent European institutions as the Common Market, the antecedent of today's European Union. Indeed, beyond examining the origins of the European community, this comparative study provides insight into national attitudes and aspirations that continue to shape European and American policies today.

Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy Since 1945 is a path-breaking work that uses biographical techniques to test one of the most important and widely debated questions in international politics: Did the advent of the nuclear bomb prevent the Third World War? Many scholars and much conventional wisdom assumes that nuclear deterrence has prevented major power war since the end of the Second World War; this remains a principal tenet of US strategic policy today. Others challenge this assumption, and argue that major war would have been `obsolete' even without the bomb. This book tests these propositions by examining the careers of ten leading Cold War statesmen--Harry S Truman; John Foster Dulles; Dwight D. Eisenhower; John F. Kennedy; Josef Stalin; Nikita Krushchev; Mao Zedong; Winston Churchill; Charles De Gaulle; and Konrad Adenauer--and asking whether they viewed war, and its acceptability, differently after the advent of the bomb. The book's authors argue almost unanimously that nuclear weapons did have a significant effect on the thinking of these leading statesmen of the nuclear age, but a dissenting epilogue from John Mueller challenges this thesis.

This revised edition of Ethics and Statecraft has been reorganized to better situate chapters that play to one another thematically, on peacemaking, the ethics and statecraft of war, and the statecraft of major international reform, and two new chapters, on Theodore Roosevelt and the Vietnam War, respectively, have been added to this classic work. The contributions remain centrally concerned with moral reasoning about important decisions taken by key statesmen in times of war, peace, and transformation, arguing that national leaders--including "realists"--have always concerned themselves with normative constraints on power, both their own and that of others.

The negotiations for economic and monetary union in the European Union represented a massive change for Europe and for the world. This book identifies why the historical agreement at Maastricht in December 1991 was possible and how the agreement was made. It examines the motives that inspired EC political leaders, the strategies that they pursued, and the institutions of the EC which were used to achieve monetary union.