Oxford University Press, USA
The Sorrows of Belgium: Liberation and Political Reconstruction, 1944-1947
Key Metrics
- Martin Conway
- Oxford University Press, USA
- Hardcover
- 9780199694341
- 9.3 X 6 X 1.2 inches
- 1.75 pounds
- History > Western Europe - General
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
In this substantial contribution to the history of the liberation era in Europe, Martin Conway provides the first account, based on substantial new archival material, of this process of political normalisation, which provided the basis for the integration of Belgium into the post-war West European political order. That success, however, came at a cost: the absence of any substantial political reform after the Second World War exacerbated the tensions between the different social classes, linguistic communities, and regions within Belgium, providing the basis for the gradual unravelling of the Belgian nation-state which occurred over the second half of the twentieth century.
Author Bio
My research has been principally concerned with European history from the 1930s to the final decades of the twentieth century. Like many others, I was initially interested in the inter-war years, and my doctoral thesis explored the history of the extreme-right movement in Belgium, the Rexist movement, during the Second World War.
Published in 1993 as Collaboration in Belgium: Léon Degrelle and the Rexist Movement 1940-1944, it was subsequently published in French and Dutch translations. The Catholic origins of the Rexist movement led me on to develop a wider interest in Catholic politics, and I have published a number of books and articles which have looked more generally at the shape of Catholic politics in Europe.
I have also continued my interest in Belgium, and wrote a large-scale study of Belgium after its liberation in 1944. This was published in 2012 as The Sorrows of Belgium: Liberation and Political Reconstruction 1944-47. It too has come out in a French translation.
In the last few years, much of my work has concerned the history of Democracy in twentieth-century Europe. I have published a number of articles on the nature of democracy in post-war Europe, and published a large book entitled Europe's Democratic Age: Western Europe 1945-68, with Princeton University Press in the spring of 2020.
I am continuing to write about democracy, and am completing a collaborative project on the history of Social Justice in twentieth-century Europe. I have also begun a new project on Political Men, which seeks to problematize the forms of male political citizenship which have developed in Europe across the twentieth century. Its focus is consciously comparative, embracing a variety of political regimes and periods. Its underlying thesis is that we need to understand how male forms of political action have been a significant influence on the evolution of both democratic and non-democratic regimes.
I also have a strong interest in the concept of the History of the Present, as a distinct era separate from the more familiar span of the twentieth century. I am one of the editors (with Celia Donert and Kiran Patel) of a new book series published by Cambridge University Press, entitled European Histories of the Present.
Source: University of Oxford Faculty of History
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