Against Conservative Internationalism

Europe’s integration and its broader postwar reconstruction, some scholars now claim, were conservative projects, geared toward bolstering traditional social, cultural, and economic hierarchies. Marco Duranti’s The Conservative Human Rights Revolution is a sweeping political and institutional history that 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. In Samuel Moyn’s narrative, Christian Human Rights, the postwar popularity of human rights signals the triumph of conservatism. Udi Greenberg reviews Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational Politics, and the Origins of the European Convention by Marco Duranti and Christian Human Rights by Samuel Moyn.