Testing the Taxonomies of European Politics: Conservatism, Nationalism, Populism, and the Challenges to Liberal Europe

There's a captivating photograph in the collection of the Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz of the chemist Otto Hahn and the physicist Lise Meitner in their lab at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin in 1913. Meitner looks on while Hahn records something with pen and paper. Behind them is a row of glass jars, neatly labelled. Many things are implicit in this image: the research partnership that would lead to the discovery of nuclear fission, Meitner's ground-breaking career and the belated recognition of her contributions to physics, as well as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute itself, which sponsored their research, as it did the research at the Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, founded in 1927, which helped lay groundwork for some of the greatest horrors of the Nazi regime. But the bottles in the photo's background are equally captivating. Pristine, carefully ordered and labelled, they suggest the impetus at the heart of all research—the desire to identify, categorize, classify, and name in order to understand. This taxonomic impulse, to distil things down to their core characteristics, or 'essence,' and then relate them to each other by classifying them in groups, resonates in revealing ways in the three edited collections under review. In all three books certain political taxonomies—the right, fascism, and liberalism and its antitheses—form the point of departure, and all three volumes probe and challenge the categories that have structured historical analyses of European politics of the mid-twentieth century.

These three books appeared in 2014 and 2015 and share a further link with the 1913 photograph: they emerged on the eve of world events that would make their research deeply relevant—the photo on the eve of the Great War, during which Hahn was recruited to work on chemical weapons and Meitner in radiology, and the books just before the tumultuous year from June 2016 to May 2017 that saw Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in the United States, as well the historic second round of the French elections, in which no traditional parties of the left or right were represented.

Each of these political events underscores the pressing need to understand the roots, causes, and various shades and constellations of populism, demagoguery, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, ultra-nationalism, isolationism, and conservatism that have launched a fresh assault on liberal democracy, the European project, and the international order. These are precisely the phenomena that Kalman and Kennedy, Jones, and Gosewinkel contour and deconstruct in the name of a more nuanced historical understanding of mid-twentieth-century Europe, but their work also offers valuable insights for the present. Indeed, in the current cultural and political climate of obfuscation and euphemism—of "alternative facts"—the kind of fine-grained work in these books and their emphasis on accuracy, clarity, subtlety, and nuance is now, more than ever, vital.

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As their titles suggest, Samuel Kalman and Sean Kennedy's The French Right between the Wars, Larry Eugene Jones's The German Right in the Weimar Republic, and Dieter Gosewinkel's Anti-liberal Europe all treat European politics in the tempestuous period between 1918 and 1945, though Gosewinkel's scope extends well into the Cold War. Kalman and Kennedy and Jones's books deal exclusively with the political right (albeit in its broadest conception), while Gosewinkel's lens makes room for communism and other anti-paliamentary or anti-democratic movements. In addition to mapping out the taxonomic terrain, these three collections ask a set of common, and crucial, questions: How is prejudice mobilized? How is violence normalized? And...