Anti-Liberal Europe: A Neglected Story of Europeanization, ed. Dieter Gosewinkel

Abstract

This collection of essays, edited by Dieter Gosewinkel, is a stimulating contribution to the study of discourses about Europe from the 1920s to the 1970s. Its main aim is to shed light on visions and practices that clash with liberal visions of Europe and with those values that are usually considered to be at the heart of the integration project. Calling attention to the history of the ‘darker’ conceptions of Europe and to the unintended effects of ‘forced Europeanization’ (p. 12), the volume seeks to uncover anti-liberal and non-liberal visions that, far from being anti-European, not only advocated or led to a greater European unity but, importantly, were an integral part of Europe’s political, cultural and intellectual history. Stemming from a conference held in Oxford in 2011, the book includes a long introduction by the editor, a theoretical chapter by Michael Freeden and six chapters divided into a section on ‘Colonial and conservative concepts of Europe’ and another on ‘Dictatorships and their aftermath’. The volume ends with an afterword by Martin Conway. The six historical chapters making up the main body of the work raise many interesting points and touch on several important aspects of twentieth-century intellectual and cultural history. Fabian Klose examines the struggle for independence of French and British colonial subjects and their censure levelled against the anti-liberal practices that their rulers carried out while boasting of their support for individual rights and liberty. An important contention made by Klose is that the diplomatic and military co-operation between the colonial powers fuelled the perception of colonialism as a common European project, shaping an image much at odds with liberal discourses about Europe. In her contribution, Vanessa Conze looks at the shifting meaning of Abendland from the First World War to the 1960s, relating it to the changing perceptions of a particularly enduring conservative vision of Europe, one based on a shared Catholic heritage. It is a topic that has recently received attention in the English-speaking word, especially thanks to the volume edited by Riccardo Bavaj and Martina Steber, Germany and the West: The History of a Modern Concept (2015). Undine Ruge considers the ‘non-conformists of the 1930s’, focusing on the lives and works of Alexandre Marc and Denis de Rougemont, two of the main advocates of ‘integral federalism’. The emphasis is placed on the relationship between their ‘personalism’ and their visions of European federalism, and how this led to views that deeply contrasted liberal as well as totalitarian conceptions of Europe. Jürgen Elvert analyses how the meaning of the notions of Mitteleuropa and Reich changed during the Third Reich in connection with the vicissitudes of war and how they were used by Nazi ideologues and politicians to imagine Europe’s future. Particularly absorbing is the chapter by Peter Schöttler, who retraces the biography of his grandfather, SS-Brigadeführer Gustav Krukenberg. Having worked as a lobbyist for German firms in Paris in the 1920s, Krukenberg joined the Nazi party and then the Wehrmacht, and was promoted in 1944 to brigadier-general and attached, at his own wish, to the French SS division ‘Charlemagne’. Released from a Soviet prisoner camp in 1956, he then became an active supporter of Adenauer’s Franco-German reconciliation policies. Schöttler uses Krukenberg’s life to illustrate an unduly neglected way in which the Franco-German collaboration could serve as a basis for projects of European unification. In the last of the historical chapters, Jana Wuestenhagen focuses on the GDR to investigate the way in which Europe was imagined from behind the Iron Curtain. The most important sections of the book are the introduction, where the aims of the volume are spelled out (though often in unnecessarily convoluted language) and the chapter by Michael Freeden, where some of the methodological issues relating to Gosewinkel’s approach are considered—first and foremost that of properly defining liberal and anti-liberal principles and ideologies in relation to their changing cultural contexts.