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A review by heathward
The Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational Politics, and the Origins of the European Convention by Marco Duranti
5.0
This is a fantastically researched and well written book. It argues that the foundations of the European Court of Human Rights (the court which presides in Strasbourg) lay in the desire of a conservative elite to protect their traditional freedoms in the face of the left-populist majorities which had assumed power in most postwar (West) European states.
Duranti argues that Conservative elites used the language of human rights to advance their ideas, yet these rights were individual rights (property) as opposed to social (healthcare). These rights reflected an older conservative tradition, a tradition under threat domestically. Conservatives from all over Western Europe could become untied behind the rights, strengthening the cause of European unity. The language they used was one of Western civilization, which excluded the communists and the colonised.
Overall, Duranti's book was a game-changer for the way in which I look at the issues of human rights and European integration. The biggest takeaway from this book was in helping to understand why it was that the right, rather than the left, was the driving force behind early European integration.
Quotes
Conservatives: “saw in the construction of a European judiciary a means of overcoming opposition at home to a number of hotly contested conservative policies. This was above all the case in Britain and France, where right-wing minorities feared for their basic liberties at the hand of left-wing majorities.”
“Conservatives enshrined human rights as European values in the service of a nostalgic Christian vision of the European legal order, not a cosmopolitan liberal one.”
“From the outset, the fate of the European Court of Human Rights was inseparable from that of the European project as a whole.” (3)
“Postwar European institutions were the product of an act of historical imagination.” (3-4)
“In contrast to the prominence of women at the UN Human Rights Commission, this was an overwhelmingly male affair.” (6)
“In domestic affairs, a European supreme court was widely regarded as a mechanism for realizing what socialists described as a discredited socialist agenda too unpopular to be enacted through democratic means.” (7)
Duranti argues that Conservative elites used the language of human rights to advance their ideas, yet these rights were individual rights (property) as opposed to social (healthcare). These rights reflected an older conservative tradition, a tradition under threat domestically. Conservatives from all over Western Europe could become untied behind the rights, strengthening the cause of European unity. The language they used was one of Western civilization, which excluded the communists and the colonised.
Overall, Duranti's book was a game-changer for the way in which I look at the issues of human rights and European integration. The biggest takeaway from this book was in helping to understand why it was that the right, rather than the left, was the driving force behind early European integration.
Quotes
Conservatives: “saw in the construction of a European judiciary a means of overcoming opposition at home to a number of hotly contested conservative policies. This was above all the case in Britain and France, where right-wing minorities feared for their basic liberties at the hand of left-wing majorities.”
“Conservatives enshrined human rights as European values in the service of a nostalgic Christian vision of the European legal order, not a cosmopolitan liberal one.”
“From the outset, the fate of the European Court of Human Rights was inseparable from that of the European project as a whole.” (3)
“Postwar European institutions were the product of an act of historical imagination.” (3-4)
“In contrast to the prominence of women at the UN Human Rights Commission, this was an overwhelmingly male affair.” (6)
“In domestic affairs, a European supreme court was widely regarded as a mechanism for realizing what socialists described as a discredited socialist agenda too unpopular to be enacted through democratic means.” (7)