Matthijs Lok – författare

Contemporary Europe seems to be divided between progressive cosmopolitans sympathetic to the European Union and the ideals of the Enlightenment, and counter-enlightened conservative nationalists extolling the virtues of homelands threatened by globalised elites and mass migration. This study seeks to uncover the roots of historically informed ideas of Europe, while at the same time underlining the fundamental differences between the writings of the older counter-revolutionary Europeanists and their self-appointed successors and detractors in the twenty-first century. In the decades around 1800, the era of the French Revolution, counter-revolutionary authors from all over Europe defended European civilisation against the onslaught of nationalist revolutionaries, bent on the destruction of the existing order, or so they believed. In opposition to the new revolutionary world of universal and abstract principles, the counter-revolutionary publicists proclaimed the concept of a gradually developing European society and political order, founded on a set of historical and - ultimately divine - institutions that had guaranteed Europe's unique freedom, moderation, diversity, and progress since the fall of the Roman Empire. These counter-revolutionary Europeanists drew on the cosmopolitan Enlightenment and simultaneously criticized its alleged revolutionary legacy. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these ideas of European history and civilisation were rediscovered and adapted to new political contexts, shaping in manifold ways our contested idea of European history and memory until today.

This book shows how antiliberal discourse, thought, and mobilization have, in defiance of nationalist aims, been significantly shaped and determined in the international sphere, as new collaborations position themselves against the liberal order established after the fall of the Berlin Wall.Despite often drawing inspiration from nationalist movements and ideologies, antiliberalism is a phenomenon that transcends domestic contexts and settings in important ways. This collection of essays charts the many-sided aspects of twentieth-century internationalism and its contemporary developments across the globe. Without excluding well-known European sources of antiliberal internationalism, it decentres the European experience by exploring specific case studies from South and East Asia, the Middle East, the Americas, Africa, and Oceania. Moreover, the volume abundantly demonstrates that “liberalism” and “anti-liberalism” cannot be considered as fixed entities as (anti)liberalism was, and is, as much defined by its enemies as by its advocates.This book is intended for scholars and students of International Studies, Intellectual History, Political History, Political Science, European Studies, and Global Studies, as well as for journalists and policymakers interested in contemporary Europe, cosmopolitanism, political polarization, and the traditions of the right and far right.

Eurocentrism means seeing the world in Europe’s terms and through European eyes. This may not be unreasonable for Europeans, but there are unforeseen consequences. Eurocentric history implies that a scientific modernity has diffused out from Europe to benefit the rest of the world, through colonies and development aid. It involves the imposition of European norms on places and times where they are often quite inappropriate. In Eurocentrism in European History and Memory, well-known scholars explore and critically analyse manifestations of Eurocentrism in representations of the European past from different disciplines — history, literature, art, memory and cultural policy — as well as from different geographical perspectives. The book investigates the role imaginings of the European past since the eighteenth century played in the construction of a Europeanist worldview and the ways in which ‘Europe’ was constructed in literature and art.

This two-volume study sees contributors from the UK, the USA, Canada, Mexico, Singapore and ten countries from across mainland Europe analyse how monarchy has been theorized and implemented in the Atlantic world from the birth of conservatism during the French Revolution to the present day. Using monarchy as a lens, it also provides an original exploration of how conservatism, often branded as reactive, can be viewed as a continual response to, and reinterpretation of, pivotal social and political events over the longue durée.The Making of Modern Atlantic Monarchies shows that 1789, the Bourbons’ return, the 1848 revolutions, the US Civil War, World War I, the rise and fall of fascism and other events became catalysts that triggered conservative thought and waves of traditionalist renovations — often posing as restorations — which swept through both Europe and the United States. It argues that these renovations were themselves bound up with the transformation of monarchy, which was forced to reinvent itself, sometimes gradually and sometimes suddenly, following the steady destruction of its traditional forms of legitimation. The 33 chapters included, covering over 20 nations across the Atlantic world and extending to Asia, reveal that, by reflecting on monarchy as an institution, strands of monarchist conservatism developed what were often bold, innovative and even radical answers to modernity’s political dilemmas. The study breaks new ground by detailing how nationally and internationally significant events impelled political thinkers and movements across the Atlantic to reflect on European monarchy in order to articulate forms of conservatism whose legacies persist today, both consciously and unconsciously, as both constituents of, and provocations to, the democratic process. At the same time, The Making of Modern Atlantic Monarchies illustrates the unity and diversity of the Atlantic ideological landscape even while providing an overview and a reference for those interested in conservatism’s centuries-long history.

It explores the attempts to find a middle way between ideological extremes, from the nineteenth-century Juste Milieu and balance of power, via the Third Ways between capitalism and socialism, to the current calls for moderation beyond populism and religious radicalism.

It explores the attempts to find a middle way between ideological extremes, from the nineteenth-century Juste Milieu and balance of power, via the Third Ways between capitalism and socialism, to the current calls for moderation beyond populism and religious radicalism.

This volume presents a fresh picture of the historical development of “conservatism” from the late 17th to the early 20th century. The book explores the broader geographies and transnational dimensions of conservatism and counterrevolution. The contributions show how counterrevolutionary concepts did not emerge in isolation, but resulted from the interplay between ideas, media, networks, and institutions. Like 19th-century liberalism and socialism, conservatism was the product of traveling ideas and people. This study describes how exile, mobility, and international sociability shaped counterrevolutionary identities. The volume presents case studies on the intersection of political philosophy, scholarly practices, international politics, and governmental bureaucracies. Furthermore, Cosmopolitan Conservatisms offers new approaches to the study of conservatism, including the prisms of ecology, gender, and digital history.Contributors are: Alicia Montoya, Carolina Armenteros, Simon Burrows,Wyger Velema, Michiel van Dam, Glauco Schettini, Nigel Aston, Brian Vick, Lien Verpoest, Beatrice de Graaf, Jean-Philippe Luis, Joep Leerssen, Amerigo Caruso, Joris van Eijnatten, Emily Jones, Aymeric Xu, and Axel Schneider.