The legacies of 1945: The evolutions of European civic morality

ABSTRACT

This article explores the widespread use of the ‘lessons’ of the era of the Second World War in Europe since 1945. This usage proved to be a resilient element of European cultural values, especially in Western Europe during the era of the Cold War. However, with the emergence of a more diverse and pluralist Europe since 1989, so this form of civic morality has been replaced by new narratives of the war years, and of the twentieth century as a whole. These indicate changes not only in historical perspectives but also in the structures of civic morality.

KEYWORDS:

• Morality
• Europe after 1945
• religion
• legitimacy
• European integration

Acknowledgement

I am most grateful to Jim Conroy and all those who took part in the workshop in Rome in September 2019 at which the original version of this paper was initially presented.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Martin Conway

Martin Conway is Professor of Contemporary European History at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Balliol College. He is the author of a number of books on different aspects of European history of the twentieth century, including The Sorrows of Belgium: Liberation and Political Reconstruction, 1944–1947 (OUP, 2012) and most recently Western Europe’s Democratic Age, 1945–1968 (Princeton University Press, 2020). He is currently writing about masculinity in twentieth-century Europe.