The Conservative Human
Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational Politics, and the Origins
of the European Convention
by Marco Duranti (Author)
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.
