This roundtable will discuss how antiliberal discourse, thought, and mobilization have, in defiance of nationalist aims, been significantly shaped and determined in the international sphere. The history of this phenomenon will be discussed, as well as the contemporary situation, 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. Participants will discuss why “liberalism” and “anti-liberalism” cannot be considered fixed entities, how (anti)liberalism was, and is, as much defined by its enemies as by its advocates, and more.

Speakers:

Matthijs Lok is Senior Lecturer in European History in the Department of History and European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He has published extensively on transnational antiliberalism, conservatism, and counter‑Enlightenment, including Cosmopolitan Conservatisms (2021) and Europe against Revolution (2023).

Marjet Brolsma is Senior Lecturer in European Intellectual, Cultural, and Literary History in the European Studies Department of the University of Amsterdam. She works on critiques of modernity, transnational history, propaganda in the First and Second World Wars, national identity discourses, and ideas of Europe.

Robin de Bruin is Senior Lecturer in the Political History of European Integration in the European Studies Department of the University of Amsterdam. He has published on topics such as Euroscepticism, political exemplarity, and the entanglement of processes of decolonization and European integration.

Jessica Reinisch is Professor of Modern European History at Birkbeck, University of London, Director of Birkbeck's Centre for the Study of Internationalism, and co-editor of the Bloomsbury Histories of Internationalism book series. Prof. Reinisch works on competing conceptions of internationalism; international organizations and networks; the history of international conferences; humanitarianism; migration and displacement; science and expertise; the world wars and post-war reconstruction.

Giuliana Chamedes is Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She investigates how European internationalist movements sought to grow their global reach, even as they remained ensconced within exclusionary understandings of social justice and solidarity. Her work is centrally concerned with European imperialism and its legacies. Her monograph is titled A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe.

Anne-Isabelle Richard is University Lecturer at Leiden University, co-editor-in-chief of Itinerario, and part of the editorial board of Monde(s). She is the co-chair of the steering committee of the European Network in Universal and Global History (ENIUGH). Her research interests are European and world history from a transnational and trans-imperial perspective.

Discussant:

Marlene Laruelle is Research Professor of International Affairs and Political Science at The George Washington University and Director of GW's Illiberalism Studies Program. She is the author of numerous books and, recently, the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism.