Since the turn of the millennium, new forms of international collaboration have surfaced all over the globe that explicitly position themselves against the liberal international order established after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In scholarship and the media, these and other contemporary examples of antiliberalism across national boundaries are frequently explained as consequences of the alleged recent cultural backlash, rising authoritarianism, and the populist zeitgeist against the backdrop of globalising societies. However, antiliberal internationalism is not a new phenomenon – nor can its current manifestations be understood without reference to historical precursors.
In this lecture, Lok will discuss the longer twentieth-century trajectories and genealogies of antiliberal internationalism. He will argue that antiliberal discourse, thought, and mobilization, in defiance of its often nationalist aims, have to a large extent been shaped and determined in the international sphere in the twentieth century. Moreover, he will put forward the question of whether the ideological left-right dichotomy is helpful in understanding antiliberal internationalism.
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Matthijs Lok is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the Department of History and European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He has published extensively on transnational antiliberalism, conservatism and Counter-Enlightenment, including The Politics of Moderation (Palgrave 2019), Eurocentrism (AUP 2019), Cosmopolitan Conservatisms (Brill 2021), Europe against Revolution (OUP 2023) and Antiliberal Internationalism in the twentieth century (forthcoming (2025): Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right).