The Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational Politics, and the Origins of the European Convention

ISBN-13: 9780199811380 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 528 str.

Marco Duranti

Opis

The European Court of Human Rights has long held unparalleled sway over questions of human rights violations across continental Europe, Britain, and beyond. Both its supporters and detractors accept the common view that the European human rights system was originally devised as a means of containing communism and fascism after World War II.

In The Conservative Human Rights Revolution, Marco Duranti radically reinterprets the origins of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), arguing that conservatives conceived of the treaty not only as a Cold War measure, but also as a vehicle for pursuing a controversial domestic political agenda on either side of the Channel. Just as the Supreme Court of the United States had sought to overturn Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, a European Court of Human Rights was meant to constrain the ability of democratically elected governments to implement left-wing policies that British and French conservatives believed violated their basic liberties.

Conservative human rights rhetoric, Duranti argues, evoked a romantic Christian vision of Europe. Rather than follow the model of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, conservatives such as Winston Churchill grounded their appeals for new human rights safeguards in the values of a bygone European civilization. All told, these efforts served as a basis for reconciliation between Germans and the "West," the exclusion of communists from the European project, and the denial of equal protection to colonized peoples.

Illuminating the history of internationalism and international law, and elucidating Churchill's Europeanism and critical contribution to the genesis of the ECHR, this book revisits the ethical foundations of European integration across the first half of the twentieth century and offers a new perspective on the crisis in which the European Union finds itself today.

Recenzje

Europe's integration and its broader postwar reconstruction, some scholars now claim, were conservative projects, geared toward bolstering traditional social, cultural, and economic hierarchies ... The most ambitious and powerful study in this new wave of scholarship is Marco Duranti's The Conservative Human Rights Revolution. Duranti's sweeping political and institutional history reconstructs a transnational movement of conservative politicians and thinkers, who established the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in the aftermath of the Second World War.

O autorze

Marco Duranti is Lecturer in Modern European and International History at the University of Sydney, where he directs the Nation Empire Globe Research Cluster. He has been a Fulbright Scholar at the European University Institute, a Fox Fellow at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Max Planck Research Group on History and Memory at the University of Konstanz.