Overview

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.

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9780190638689

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"""The Panglossian account of the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights - that it was essentially uncontentious and genetically British - is the orthodox narrative that the Australian scholar Marco Duranti sets out to deconstruct. His copiously evidenced account, drawn from British, French, German, Italian, Dutch and US archives, is that the convention was an individualistic and conservative project, devised outside the offices of governments and the chambers of parliaments and designed to stem the postwar tide of socialism and statism.""--Stephen Sedley, The London Review of Books ""Marco Duranti offers a refreshingly different and compelling narrative...It is a rich account, substantiated by an impressive amount of archival research.""-- Stefan Salomon, Humans Rights Law Review ""The book is extremely well researched, and the writing is clear....Essential.""--D. P. Forsythe, CHOICE ""Marco Duranti's immense contribution is to get us to see that human rights cannot hover forever above history. His story of the origins of our human rights culture is as convincing as it is surprising. In questioning our assumptions about the European Convention on Human Rights, he pulls off that rare feat of getting us to think about what we know in a wholly fresh way.""--Conor Gearty, author of On Fantasy Island: Britain, Strasbourg, and Human Rights ""Human rights history at its best. Duranti's well-written analysis of twentieth-century European internationalism is of lasting value. The insights into Euroskepticism that he provides could not be more timely. Necessary reading.""--Lora Wildenthal, Rice University ""Marco Duranti's enthralling and meditative study of the origins of the European Convention on Human Rights is not merely a lesson in historical imagination, restoring Winston Churchill's role as the project's prime mover and detailing the importance of a fateful alliance of religious conservatives and free-market defenders in its origins. For The Conservative Human Rights Revolution appears at a moment when it is even more instructive and ironic, with the Tories Duranti shows were instrumental in the beginning in full revolt against their own creation. Students of the past and observers of the present will welcome Duranti's own creation with gratitude.""--Samuel Moyn, author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History ""Required reading for anyone interested in the ideological foundations of the European Union.""--Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, University of California, Berkeley ""In this masterful--and timely--book, Marco Duranti plunges deep into rarely used archives to tell us the conservative origins of the European Convention on Human Rights. A magisterial and innovative piece of history that reshapes our understanding of human rights.""--Patrick Weil, author of The Sovereign Citizen: Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic ""Ground-breaking...radically new, thought-provoking""--Patrick Pasture, History ""Marco Duranti has done outstanding work to present a nuanced picture of the origins of European integration...[T]he book is a must-read not only for historians of human rights, but also for those who are interested in the history of European conservatism and Christian Democracy as well as post-war European unification.""--Vilius Kubekas, European Review of History ""Duranti resolutely breaks with existing ideas about the emergence of Europe's greatest achievements: the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the European Court of Human Rights. In spite of the general opinion among historians, he shows that the European human rights project was mainly brought about by contributions from European conservatives, including French Catholics and British socialists.""--Boyd van Dirk, The Dutch Review of Books ""A masterpiece in the area of the history of the European Convention on Human Rights.""--Laurens Lavrysen, Flemish Journal of Human Rights ""Marco Duranti's powerful and provocative account...offers an analysis that is bound to be a key reference point in the field for years to come.""--Richard Toye, Imperial & Global Forum ""Duranti's book is highly recommended, and, in my view, deserves the accolades and great recognition which it will surely achieve. It should influence debates on how the ECHR is seen today.""--Ed Bates, Lawfare ""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.""--Udi Greenberg, Dissent"

Author Information

Marco Duranti is Senior 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.

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