Human Rights and Conservative Politics
Human Rights and Conservative Politics
This chapter reviews the neoliberal, neomedieval, and Christian democratic origins of the European human rights system. The origins of European human rights law offer a lens through which to arrive at a new perspective on postwar conservatism. If we limit our frame of analysis to domestic politics, then the story of the years immediately following the Second World War is one of conservative accommodation to much of the socialist agenda. If we extend this frame to transnational politics, however, we see a reverse image of developments in the national sphere. Free-market conservatives and social Catholics shared an anxiety regarding the accumulation of powers in a central state apparatus subject to the whims of a majority-rule democracy. This expressed itself in the human rights projects of the European unity movements under the direction of conservatives immediately after the war.
Keywords: Britain, Christian democracy, conservatism, ECHR, European Convention on Human Rights, European politics, France, human rights, neoliberalism, Vichy
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