This article was originally published in Vol. 5 No. 4 of our print edition.

The Present and Future of Conservative Politics in Europe

I.

What does ‘Europe’ mean from a conservative perspective?¹ The answer to this question is a single sentence. That sentence is the following: ‘Europe is freedom!’ For every European and for everyone who comes to Europe from afar and wants to live in Europe, freedom is the vital foundation of human existence and the reason for the evolution of a creative personality. Freedom is fundamentally the ‘European essence’.² It is the foundation of European self-awareness. In this form, it is only present in Europe and in the regions of the world influenced by Europe.

Even the first Greek annalist Herodotus knew that.³ In the fourth century BC, he contrasted the freedom of the individual from oppression and coercion, as dominated by the Athenian polis, with the despotic rule of the great kings of Persia. Later, in Republican Rome, this idea of an individual’s personal freedom from despotic oppression expanded into a political demand, a demand for free citizens to participate in the public life of their community—co-determination by selected elites of the people instead of the arbitrary rule of a single tyrant.

If the principle of freedom is the European essence, it is also the essence of Christianity. For the Christian view of humanity attributes personality and dignity to the individual. It commits one to a life of freedom, self-respect, and personal responsibility, and directs one toward solidarity with one’s fellow human beings. The Christian understanding of freedom therefore does not refer to living life according to one’s own rules. Christian personal freedom always comes with certain duties. The liberation of humankind through Christ’s act of salvation corresponds to the task of individuals to serve their fellow human beings.⁴ Freedom and service belong together. Personal freedom and suprapersonal bonds are always interrelated. For every Christian knows that only limited freedom can guarantee harmonious social coexistence.

This, however, is a deeply conservative principle. Conservative politics in and for Europe are the politics of freedom. However, this freedom does not come with unrestrained arbitrariness. Rather, it is a policy of freedom within the constraints of service.⁵ For freedom that is not based on real social responsibility is an illusion. Those who can do whatever they want give in to their own urges. They fall into slavery, because they are led by a never-ending urge to satisfy subjective interests. According to conservative beliefs, individuals are only truly free if they fit into an order that is recognized as meaningful and legally legitimate, if they commit themselves to a way of life whose bonds they respect and within which they can develop according to their abilities. Not everyone should be allowed to do anything. As a matter of fact, not everything should be possible at all times. Freedom is not only freedom from something, like the simple absence of state coercion or social conventions. For a conservative, freedom is rather a freedom towards something—meaning a decision in favour of a higher value and a transpersonal institution that credibly embody this value.⁶

Such a conservative view of freedom was particularly deeply rooted in German political thinking.⁷ However, it now stands in stark contrast to a more liberal conception of freedom, which largely prevails in contemporary European political discourse, and which often advocates the unrestricted realization of individual aspirations for emancipation. However, there are now some indications that this could change. The latest developments, for example in view of the looming climate crisis, impending environmental disasters, or worldwide pandemics, have pushed an overly liberal understanding of freedom to its limits in many places. They have brought the tension between the desire for individual fulfilment and the suprapersonal orientation toward the common good into sharper focus. Remarkably, at least in Germany, the arguments put forward in favour of pandemic-related restrictions on personal freedoms for the sake of the common good did not primarily come from representatives on the conservative side of the political spectrum. Rather, they came primarily from the left and left-green camp. This points to the increasing relevance of conservative thinking beyond traditional party-political right–left classifications.⁸

II.

From a conservative perspective, what else holds Europe together besides the Christian view of humanity bound by freedom? A second point of conservative politics in and for Europe opens up regarding the issue of social security and social upheaval, which is equally relevant or has become relevant again in every European country.

Nowadays, it is often forgotten that the welfare state’s concern for the wellbeing of the less fortunate, as well as assistance for the burdened and oppressed, is deeply rooted in conservative thinking and has always been one of the objectives of conservative political action. Leftist parties and groups, social democrats as well as post-communists, eagerly cultivate—usually without opposition—the legend of their supposedly exclusive claims in all matters of social conscience. However, social policies, understood as systematic care or at least assistance provided by the state to the elderly, sick, and unemployed, is by no means an achievement of socialism. Still less can it be attributed to liberalism. Social politics was and is rather, on the contrary, a basic concern of conservatism.

‘Europe is defined by a distinct understanding of freedom that is inseparable from responsibility, social bonds, and the Christian view of human dignity’

As early as the 1820s and 1830s—long before the appearance of Karl Marx—conservative authors such as Adam Müller, Franz von Baader, and Joseph Maria von Radowitz were passionately criticizing capitalism in Germany.⁹ In the revolutionary year of 1848, when Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto was published, a conservative visionary in Prussia, Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach, appealed to the social conscience of his fellow professionals with powerful words: ‘Only in conjunction with the duties attached to it,’ he said at the time, ‘is property sacred; as a mere means of enjoyment, it is not sacred, but dirty. Communism is right to oppose property without duties…Property is sacred only in the hands of those who do not possess it for themselves, who therefore fully recognize the social duties attached to it.’¹⁰ With this, von Gerlach expressed the genuine conservative conviction that personal property does not represent arbitrarily available manoeuvring room for individual economic activity. Personal property is rather a socially bound material good. Its handling includes the responsibility of the owners towards those who do not own it.

It was, as is well known, the conservative Prussian–German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck who launched the German social security system in 1883. At the time, this was met with fierce resistance from German social democrats and representatives of German liberalism. Conservative social thinking follows the conviction that individuals can only thrive if the community that supports and surrounds them is also thriving, while a community can only be fully balanced when the individuals who live within it and can develop freely within it are also thriving. These two basic premises are fundamental to any conservative social policy in and for Europe. In contrast to corresponding guidelines of socialist origin, it emphasizes the freedom to shape the scope of social engagement. This also means social justice, but not social egalitarianism. It also means graduated social benefits according to rank and need, but not the undifferentiated, top-down reallocation of wealth and property at the expense of property owners. Altogether this means a moderate allocation of state social welfare funds while preserving the individual freedoms of each person—but not the forced collection of taxes imposed on citizens through rules and prohibitions, as has increasingly become typical of left-wing green politics in Germany.

III.

Nonetheless, in addition to insisting on social responsibility of ownership and the Christian view of humanity bound by freedom, there is a third fundamental element of conservative political self-image in and for Europe. This fundamental element is closely connected to the commitment to one’s own nation. In this regard, it should first be noted that, from a historical perspective, conservatism and nationalism initially had nothing whatsoever to do with each other. Even today, they are by no means logically related. In Germany, nationalism was a domain of left-wing groups well into the nineteenth century. One of its earliest and most radical republican spokesmen, the Giessen student Karl Follen, presented his fellow students in the winter semester of 1817–1818 with a draft for a unitary German imperial constitution that was not based on regional traditions and sensitivities, and ignored the interests of Germany’s neighbours in Europe: Switzerland, Alsace, and the Netherlands were to be incorporated without further ado into a ‘Greater German Reich’ that was to be established—by force of arms if necessary.¹¹ Similar voices were heard three decades later from the parliamentary left in the National Assembly of the Paulskirche in Frankfurt.¹²

Conservative authors and statesmen strongly rejected such nationalist visions. They were among the most determined opponents of all efforts toward nation-state consolidation. This did not apply only to the representatives of the political right in Germany. In other regions of Europe, most notably in France during the revolution, but also on the Italian Peninsula, conservatives started to see—and not without reason—the pursuit of nationhood as a revolutionary principle that was disrupting the traditional order of states in Europe. European conservatives wanted to maintain federal structures. They were hoping for a strengthening of regional powers. They promoted the cohesiveness of Europe in the sense of a universal order of peace that should include all countries of the continent. In doing so, they emphasized the pre-state and supranational levels of political action, deliberately excluding all nation states, and especially all nationalist demands. Once again, reference may be made here to the conservative Prussian politician von Gerlach. His criticism was directed at the predominance of nationalist perspectives in the thinking and actions of his contemporaries. In 1850, he even spoke of the ‘vice of patriotism’ and ‘nationalist fraud’,¹³ for which a Prussian conservative could feel only mistrust and contempt. Conservatism and nationalism only came together in Germany and elsewhere in Europe in the last third of the nineteenth century, after the unification of the German and Italian empires. In doing so, they succumbed to the fatal temptation of conservative nationalism, which was so characteristic of almost all European states in the decades before the outbreak of the First World War. However, neither at that time nor later did the two movements ever achieve complete congruence.

However, anyone today who believes they must attack European nation states with cheaply calculated attacks would quickly be disabused by a glance at the world of historical facts. This applies, for example, to a German political scientist obviously not well read in history, Ulrike Guerot,¹⁴ who has since been dismissed from her university post due to allegations of plagiarism. She advocates replacing the nation states of Europe with the chimera of a digital, post-national European republic. Why? Because, in her view, nations have always been the source of disaster and calamity. Robert Menasse, a writer equally ignorant of history, goes so far as to blame the nation state for the crimes of Auschwitz.¹⁵ Unfortunately, in issuing such uninformed judgements, he seems to have lost sight of an insight that Hannah Arendt clearly articulated back in 1955,¹⁶ namely, that the terms ‘nation’ and ‘race’ refer to two mutually exclusive concepts, because racism is fundamentally a force opposed to nationalism, and indeed undermines it, and that Adolf Hitler’s infernal hatred of Jews was fuelled not by nationalist but by racist resentment.

‘Conservatism in Europe emphasizes socially responsible ownership, a welfare tradition rooted in communal duty’

Hasty judgments presented without expertise, such as those made by Guerot or Menasse, do not withstand the test of political reality. For it is well known that the principle of the nation state, since its historic emergence following the French Revolution, has everywhere been linked to the pursuit of political emancipation. It was fuelled by the hope for civic participation, and it was inseparably permeated by the principle of popular sovereignty and the democratic self-determination of peoples. This remains true to this day. Even now, only the European nation states—not supranational or global institutions—guarantee the fundamental living conditions of Europe’s citizens: legal protection, social security, and basic education are realized exclusively within a national framework, as is the health and wellbeing of the population—something that became especially clear during the 2020 COVID pandemic. And until the urgently needed formation of an effective European army takes place, it is only the national armed forces of the individual European countries that, together with NATO, protect their citizens from the threat of attacks by unscrupulous tyrants like the current Russian leader.

Conservative politics in and for Europe therefore always includes an appreciation of the achievements and merits of nation states. One does not necessarily have to love the nation state—especially not the German one. But one should keep in mind that all contemporary European nation states, including Germany, are democratically legitimized. They are all enlightened nation states.¹⁷ As such, they are the bearers of the idea of a European democracy committed to the rule of law and the pursuit of justice. They provide their citizens with a sense of emotional security and they are the primary reference points for collective self-awareness. They remain so even as they are embedded in the supranational institutions of the European Union. From a conservative perspective, there is no alternative to the existence of these institutions. Also, at least so far, there is also no unified European community of memory and no single European nation state that places Europe at the centre of its historical identity formation.¹⁸ Rather, Europeans’ engagement with memory culture is shaped by a diversity of national historical myths, which compete with one another and reflect the differing mental imprints of Europe’s historical landscapes.

IV.

Whoever, in this sense, points to the diversity of nation state orientations, whoever emphasizes a right to difference within the European order, a pluralism within the framework of the EU, is following a well-established thread of conservative thought. This thread is rooted in the appreciation of an order characterized by layered diversity. Such a conception of order stands in opposition to all the uniformizing, levelling, and equalizing tendencies of the postmodern world, which are perceived as the impoverishment and withering of the genuine diversity of existence. In this, it sees itself in harmony with the historical foundations of efforts at European integration, which have always been marked by a commitment to diversity. And it follows the guiding principles of the EU, which is intended to create a space for the realization of freedom for all its members—all 450 million citizens who identify with it.

Such a commitment to diversity also corresponds to the historical internal structure of the continent. Europe is indeed a coherent historical space in the sense that all its nations refer to common foundational values. Despite these unshakable commonalities, equally unshakable cultural and regional differences exist. These are expressions and reflections of Europe’s richly differentiated stratification, which cannot be eliminated by any pressure to standardize. For the European historical space has been divided for more than a millennium into three distinct greater regions: Eastern Europe, Central Europe, and Western Europe.¹⁹

Each of these three greater regions follows its own historical rhythm of development. Eastern Europe, including Serbia and Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, and the realm of Kievan Rus, was Christianized in the Byzantine–Orthodox tradition starting in the ninth century. Since then, it has formed its own cultural sphere with the Cyrillic or Greek alphabet, a special church structure and a living environment that is greatly influenced by it. Central Europe, including Bohemia and Moravia, Poland, Hungary, and Croatia, was Christianized and started to follow the Latin Catholic Church in the tenth century. Western Europe, on the other hand, has historically been dominated by the Latin Church, but was Christianized half a millennium earlier than the eastern and central parts of the continent—above all the Mediterranean world, including Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and France, large parts of Britain, and the western parts of Germania controlled by the Roman Empire.

This historical, and not merely geographical, tripartite division of the continent into the major regions of the East, the Centre, and the West²⁰ has unleashed cultural, mental and political forces of a highly diverse character in the three European historical landscapes, the consequences of which continue to impact the societies of the respective countries to this day. In the twentieth century, such differences were significantly reinforced by the forced separation of Central and Eastern Europe from the free world of the West by the Soviets. However, there had already been significant deviations in previous centuries, not least in political culture.

Thus, in the countries of Central Europe, above all in Poland and Hungary, the model of the absolute princely state with early-modern characteristics, which had been successfully established in Western Europe, with a national ruling dynasty and the bureaucratic consolidation of power it pursued, was unable to fully develop. By contrast, it was precisely those mechanisms and modalities of participatory negotiation that flourished in the sphere of these non-absolutist, estate-dominated regions of Central Europe. These processes had long remained untested in this form in Western Europe.

In Eastern Europe, on the other hand, due to shifting foreign domination, and unlike in large parts of Western and Central Europe, there was a lack of regionally rooted corporative or communal intermediate powers that could, as independent societal actors, claim a role in political participation and advisory involvement in governance. This was true not only for those areas of Russia that lay under Mongol rule for almost a quarter of a millennium, but also to a large extent for Southeastern Europe, which was part of the Ottoman civilizational sphere from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries and thereby came to be perceived as clearly distinct and distant from the culture of Western and Central Europe.

V.

But what do such historical references, which point to different developmental paths of European societies, mean for the current agenda of conservative politics in and for Europe? And how can they be related to the triad of bounded freedom, social responsibility, and nation-state sovereignty, which were identified as hallmarks of a conservative European self-understanding?

An agenda that takes all of this into account should first and foremost acknowledge the significantly differing attitudes and mentalities among the members of the EU, and grant individual countries broad freedoms in shaping their internal affairs, provided that the adherence to the rule of law is guaranteed. The desire for such freedoms fundamentally underlies the sovereignty claims, particularly of the Central European nations.²¹ Countries such as Poland and Hungary may still find it difficult to relinquish the national sovereignty they happily regained after 1989 to the supranational authority of EU-compliant regulations. Well-intentioned attempts to align their country-specific characteristics with the guidelines of the Brussels bureaucracy are often seen as unnecessary restrictions on proven discretionary powers, or even interpreted as attacks on the traditional values that prevail in the societies of these countries. Among other things, this set of values is still strongly influenced by an image of the family that finds little favour with the ideology of gender-equitable politics propagated by the Western mainstream.²²

Externally, however, all countries of the EU must commit to unconditional cohesion in a united front against Europe’s enemies. Every European now knows who these enemies are, where they are located, and what their intentions are. Europe’s enemies, the irreconcilable enemies of any kind of conservative politics in and for Europe, are all those who resent the tried and tested European way of life, which is also the dream destination for all those seeking protection in Europe. They are all those who rarely miss an opportunity to denounce this liberal Western way of life, all those who despise the European ideal of autonomous personal development and want to see it replaced by totalitarian counter-models. Not one of these totalitarian alternatives is compatible with the values of conservative politics in and for Europe, for none of them grants the individual any autonomous rights. Without exception, they aim to destroy individual civic existence and dissolve responsible action into the arbitrarily manipulable monotony of faceless collectives.

It is not only Russia, driven by an unbridled frenzy of conquest, that is currently an enemy of Europe.²³ Russia’s helpers in the war against Ukraine are now also among them: China, North Korea, and Iran, reinforced by the terrorist hordes of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. These countries and groups, led by power-hungry tyrants and ruthless warlords, are closing ranks with Moscow. They are all intent on expanding their sphere of influence. And without exception, they all despise the free world of the West.

However, this free world is not only threatened by its external enemies. Internally, too, forces and movements are gaining ground and resonance that attach little importance to pluralistic opinion-forming processes and discursive cultures of argumentation. These are forces that instead seek to narrow the scope of political debate, thereby placing themselves in dangerous proximity to Europe’s external enemies. All enemies of Europe are enemies of freedom. Standing up for the preservation of European freedom and defending it in solidarity against enemies from without and within is therefore probably the most important task of conservative politics in and for Europe at present.

NOTES

1 The text is a slightly expanded and modified version of a lecture given by the author during a guest visit to the German–Hungarian Institute for European Cooperation on 7 February 2024 in Veszprém and on 23 May 2024 in Békéscsaba.

2 Jürgen Schlumbohm, Freiheitsbegriff und Emanzipationsprozeß. Zur Geschichte eines politischen Wortes (The Concept of Freedom and the Process of Emancipation. On the History of a Political Term) (Göttingen, 1973), 23.

3 See Max Pohlenz, Herodotus. The First Historian of the Western World (Leipzig–Berlin, 1937), esp. 202 ff.

4 An authoritative account of the Christian understanding of freedom can be found in Rudolf Bultmann, ‘Die Bedeutung des Gedankens der Freiheit für die abendländische Kultur’ (The Significance of the Idea of Freedom for Western Culture). In Rudolf Bultmann, Glauben und Verstehen, Band II (Faith and Understanding, vol. 2) (Tübingen, 1968), 281.

5 Frank-Lothar Kroll, ‘Die konservative Position’ (The Conservative Position), in Peter Nitschke, ed., Konservativismus heute.Über die Bestimmung einer politischen Geisteshaltung (Conservatism Today. On the Definition of a Political Mindset) (Paderborn, 2022), 47–71.

6 Frank-Lothar Kroll, ‘Die europäische Freiheit’ (European Freedom), in Milan Hlavačka et al., eds, ‘Die Heimstatt des Historikers sind die Archive’ (The Historian’s Home Is the Archive). Commemorative publication for Lothar Höbelt (Vienna–Cologne, 2022), 425–431.

7 See also Leonard Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom. History of a Political Tradition (Boston, 1957), 384 ff.

8 Peter Hoeres, Rechts und links. Zur Karriere einer folgenreichen Unterscheidung in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Right and Left. On the Career of a Momentous Distinction in History and the Present) (Springer, 2025).

9 See Klaus Hornung, ‘Die sozialkonservative Tradition im deutschen Staats- und Gesellschaftsdenken’ (The Social Conservative Tradition in German Political and Social Thought), in Jörg Dieter Gauger and KlausWeigelt, eds, Soziales Denken in Deutschland zwischen Tradition und Innovation (Social Thought in Germany between Tradition and Innovation) (Bonn, 1990), 30–68; also see the summary overview in Hermann Beck, ‘Die Rolle des Sozial-konservatismus in der preußisch-deutschen Geschichte als Forschungsproblem’ (The Role of Social Conservatism in Prussian-German History as a Research Problem), in Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands, 43 (1995), 59–91.

10 Quoted from Hans-Joachim Schoeps, ‘Preußentum und Gegenwart’ (Prussianism and the Present), in Hans-Joachim Schoeps, Konservative Erneuerung. Ideen zur deutschen Politik (Conservative Renewal. Ideas on German Politics) (Berlin, 1963), 94 f.

11 See Frank-Lothar Kroll, ‘Föderalismus und Unitarismus im deutschen Staatsleben des 19. Jahrhunderts (Federalism and Unitarianism in German Political Life in the Nineteenth Century), in Zeitschrift für politische Bildung und Information-Eichholzbrief, 4 (Journal for Political Education and Information-Eichholzbrief) (1990), 11–20.

12 See Günter Wollstein, Das‘Großdeutschland’ der Paulskirche. Nationale Ziele in der bürgerlichen Revolution 1848/49 (The ‘Greater Germany’ of the St Paul’s Church. National Goals in the Bourgeois Revolution of 1848/49) (Düsseldorf, 1977).

13 Both quotations are from Hans-Joachim Schoeps, Das andere Preußen. Konservative Gestalten und Probleme im Zeitalter Friedrich Wilhelms IV (The Other Prussia: Conservative Figures and Problems in the Age of Frederick William IV) (Berlin, 1981), 66, 65.

14 Ulrike Guerot, Warum Europa eine Republik werden muss. Eine politische Utopie (Why Europe Must Become a Republic: A Political Utopia) (Munich, 2017).

15 Robert Menasse, Die Hauptstadt (The Capital) (Berlin, 2017) 228.

16 Hannah Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft (The Origins of Totalitarianism) (Frankfurt am Main–Berlin–Vienna, 1975).

17 Otfried Höffe, ‘Europa – eine aufgeklärte Heimat?’ (Europe—an Enlightened Homeland?), in Martin W. Ramb, and Holger Zaborowski, eds, Homeland Europe? (Göttingen, 2019), 56–82.

18 Frank-Lothar Kroll, ‘Das europäische Gedächtnis’ (European Memory), in Hendrik Hansen, Tim Kraski, and Verena Vortisch, eds, Erinnerungskultur in Mittel- und Osteuropa. Die Auseinandersetzungen mit Nationalsozialismus und Kommunismus im Vergleich (Culture of Remembrance in Central and Eastern Europe: A Comparison of Approaches to National Socialism and Communism) (Baden-Baden, 2020), 215–226.

19 Frank-Lothar Kroll, Identität und Differenz. Das Problem einer integralen europäischen Geschichte (Identity and Difference. The Problem of an Integral European History) (Berlin, 2023), 19 ff.

20 See Oskar Halaecki, Europa, Grenzen und Gliederung seiner Geschichte (Europe, Borders, and Structure of Its History) (Darmstadt, 1964).

21 Frank-Lothar Kroll, ‘Das größere Europa’ (Greater Europe), in In Europa zu Hause (At Home in Europe). Commemorative publication for Michael Gehler on his 60th birthday (Hildesheim, 2022), 113–119.

22 For Hungary, see Bence Bauer, ‘Konservative Peiler in Gesellschaft und Politik’ (Conservative Beacons in Society and Politics), in Bence Bauer, Hungary Is Different (Budapest, 2023), 193–201; Alexander Rasthofer, Sozialpolitik (Social Policy), in Bence Bauer, and Frank-Lothar Kroll, eds, Ungarische Wegmarken (Hungarian Milestones) (Budapest, 2024), 117–144.

23 Frank-Lothar Kroll, Das Schattenreich. Russlands langer Abschied von Europa (The Shadow Empire: Russia’s Long Farewell to Europe) (Berlin, 2025).

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