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POLI212A
Government and Politics of the Developed World
September 5 2008
Reading Notes for Topic I: The Historical Stage
Readings and lectures on this topic are designed to provide some historical perspective on
European political development. As I mentioned in class this week, our focus is
contemporary Europe. But the political dynamics of contemporary Europe do have a
history, there are legacies of history which have consequences for the present.
To begin with, one conventional way of distinguishing past and present in European
politics is just to distinguish contemporary Europe from modern Europe. There is no hard
and fast date which marks the transition in history from ‘modern’ to ‘contemporary’
Europe but, for our purposes, a convenient point of demarcation is 1945. Most of the
course material deals with European politics from 1945 onwards, whether we are looking
at the political dynamics of capitalist democracies such as France, Britain, Germany or
Italy, the political meaning of the East-West divide in Europe or the evolution of
economic and political integration and the institutions of the European Union (EU). And,
of course, within this time period from 1945 to 2008, we pay particular attention to the
very contemporary period – to the dynamics of European politics today, whether we are
looking at particular states or regions of Europe or the pan-European institutions of the
EU.
But to do this -- to fully understand the present -- we need to understand the past, we
need to put the dynamics of contemporary Europe in historical perspective. The readings
on this topic are intended to provide some of this needed perspective.
To start with, I will discuss the first three readings by Mazower, Howard and Johnson.
The Mazower reading is a chapter from a larger book which Mazower has written on