The concluding chapter summarizes the book’s arguments and findings and discusses their implications. Whether we seek to understand the electoral viability of illiberal forces or their behavior in power, the legacies of critical junctures of market reform remain pivotal. Crucially, as institutional developments entail the interplay between historical legacy and human agency, illiberal outcomes unfold in the probabilistic shadow of prior neoliberal deepening. The chapter closes with a discussion of (1) the study’s contributions to research in the tradition of Karl Polanyi; (2) the social bases and neoliberal adaptations of illiberal incumbents; (3) the legacies of Eastern Europe’s transition to democracy and the market; and (4) the crisis of liberalism and the Left. Although intense market reforms have failed to produce democratic stability and illiberals have kept finding ways to opportunistically exploit neoliberalism to their own advantage, the book ends on an optimistic note. Far from inevitable, the illiberal challenge can be countered – and democracies strengthened – if forward-thinking political agents learn from past experiences and progressive examples, build parties around new ethical principles, and focus on delivering economic well-being to broad social coalitions.

This Introduction reviews the structuring significance of the Europe-wide constitution-making upheaval of the 1860s, whose consequences shaped Europe’s histories during the later nineteenth century. Unfolding beneath the impact of combined and uneven development, a new metropolitan modernity defined the possibilities for social, cultural, and political change across a series of major arenas: state-making and nationhood; capitalist industrialization and class formation; liberalism and the rise of socialism; societal change and conditions for democracy; empire, colonies, and global rivalries. Developments between the 1880s and 1914, in particular the gendered and racialized languages of people, personhood, and the mass, set the stage for the violent conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century.

The rise of the #MeToo movement has prompted a public reckoning with sexual consent, with public discourse now squarely focused on issues of sexual coercion and culpability. However, the principle of consent has a much longer history and wider significance beyond recent events. Bolstered by a social contract model that prioritises individual personhood and the protection of private property, consent has been central to the development of modern law and liberal societies (Munro, 2008). As feminist legal scholar Vanessa Munro argues, in Western legal settings, it ‘demarcate[s] the terrain between acceptable and unacceptable intrusions upon property / bodies’ (Munro, 2008, pp. 923–4) and accredits the liberal subject with its defining features of individuality, rationality and autonomy. In the specific context of sexual violence, consent is endowed with significant power (Hindes, 2022): it is used to arbitrate legal disputes over sexual assault and violence, and determine whether violation has occurred.

Mariano Otero (1817–1850) was born in Guadalajara, Mexico. A lawyer by training, Otero made early choices in favor of liberalism, advocating a return to the federalism embodied in the Constitution of 1824, although with some alterations, which included the separation of the clergy from politics. He was also concerned about the political instability of the post-independence period. He participated in the liberal revolt of 1846, was part of the Constituent Assembly of 1847, and was one of the members of Congress who opposed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on the grounds that the conflict was an illegitimate war of conquest. He became Minister of Foreign Relations in the government of José Joaquín de Herrera in 1848. His premature death was due to the cholera epidemic of 1850. In this selection, which he wrote during the Mexican–American War, he tried to explain the causes that led to defeat, tracing them back to the colonial and independence periods, but eloquently rejecting any justifications based on race.

The sale, twice, of a Medici cabinet ordered for an English estate introduces the modern idea of heritage, initiated by Edmund Burke. It covers Protestant narratives and customary laws, and concludes with Alasdair MacIntyre’s thesis about narrative and identity.

The final chapter opens with a hypothetical debate between cosmopolitan and particularist positions, which is then mapped onto contemporary political philosophy. It concludes with Joseph Raz’s pluralist and perfectionist liberal requirement that states should support culture.

The French imaginary is a Republican imaginary that is premised on political liberty. The red thread across the political thought and the various constitutions of France has been the pursuit of the ideal political regime that would best realise political liberty and the general interest. That approach stands in stark contrast with the civil-liberty-focused Anglo-American liberal tradition, according to which state power ought to be curtailed in order to maximise individual rights. Those two essentially different traditions could rather peacefully coexist in Europe at the Westphalian time of the nation-states. The clash has, however, become inevitable in a time where globalisation and the latter’s regional avatars act as vehicles of Anglo-American liberalism. This chapter introduces the French constitutional imaginary, relying on the tools provided by intellectual history and constitutional law. It contrasts it with the Anglo-American political thought and shows how the former has remained strong despite the erosion caused by the pervasiveness of the latter.

The project of constitutional democracy and the rule of law concept served as a powerful unifying platform for political compromise during the liberal democratic transformation after 1989. Today’s challenge to the liberal rule of law calls for re-evaluating our understanding of that period. To provide a deeper historical perspective, this chapter offers a tentative historical typology of the various rule of law understandings of the period of ‘liberal consensus’. First, it outlines the historical roots of the 1989 democratic and constitutional revolutions in ECE, pointing out their major sources, namely the import of Western constitutional theory, dissident human rights activism and the mostly neglected yet critical authoritarian socialist constitutionalism. Second, the chapter analyses the politics of liberal constitutionalism, in the 1990s, from the point of view of its internal diversity, depending on the different political ideas and ideologies behind it. The variety of constitutional imagination sets the stage for the final step, which is the exploration of different rule of law conceptions, namely neoliberal, substantive, positivist and non-liberal. Although transnational in its perspective, the last section, for the sake of concision and clarity, focuses primarily on the Czech context.

The afterword offers a coda to the volume, without addressing individual essays’ achievements individually. Rather, it reflects on how the essays reconceive the problem of Cold War liberalism as a category less in Atlantic intellectual history or political theory than in the history of the foreign relations of the American hegemon after World War II. The contemporary renaissance of Cold War liberalism suggests that pondering how it arose and dominated in the first place will continue to teach useful lessons about its senescent phase, which is unlikely to end soon. Someday geopolitical transformations will bring into being a different enough world than the Cold War liberal one that emerged in the middle of the twentieth century. Until then, the meanings and outcomes of Cold War liberalism will demand investigation, and this volume will play a pivotal role in an ongoing referendum on how contemporary politics came about, and on what should happen next.

This chapter examines the ideological origins and political impact of the American concept of the “free world.” From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, “free world leadership” served as the organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy. Although American officials imagined the “free world” as the self-evident expression of international liberalism, they defined it negatively as equivalent to the entire “non-communist world.” Cold War liberals’ persistent failure to fill the “free world” with positive content forced them to maintain a series of inflexible and ultimately counterproductive positions, including an intolerance of nonalignment, a commitment to global containment, and an axiomatic insistence on the enduring and existential nature of the Soviet threat. Although the “free world” mostly fell out of circulation after the 1960s, the logic of the concept has continued to underpin an American project of global “leadership” that derives its purpose and extent from the prior identification of a single extraordinary threat.

This introduction examines Cold War liberalism as a significant ideological and political force in U.S. history. It argues that Cold War liberalism was characterized by two core features: a deep skepticism of mass democracy and a commitment to American global hegemony. These traits emerged as the result of Cold War liberals’ encounter with perceived existential threats, particularly Soviet communism, which led them to embrace a politics of emergency that sacrificed liberalism for a broadly defined security. While Cold War liberals achieved some progressive domestic reforms, their actions both at home and abroad often undermined liberal democratic principles. In particular, Cold War liberalism’s emphasis on the necessity of U.S. empire had long-lasting consequences, establishing patterns of domestic governance and foreign military intervention that continue to shape the world today.

Chapter 3 moves to the global level, exploring the history of technology control and its historical links to geopolitics. It begins by considering control of technology in the context of the Cold War and technology as being explicitly considered a security issue in terms of the conflict between the US and the Soviet Union. It covers the CoCom technology restrictions imposed by the US, and Soviet Union attempts to gain access to critical technologies through Comecon, before considering how the approach to technology changed substantially with the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the belief in the triumph of the liberal international order and globalism as reflected by the World Trade Organization and ‘free trade’. It then explores the multifaceted crises impacting upon this conviction in the benefits and resilience of the global trade system, the increased economic conflict between the US and China as a rising technological power, and a move from multilateralism in a ‘unipolar’ system to increased nationalism and protectionism in a ‘multipolar’ system, and what this meant for the EU’s sense of insecurity and vulnerability in the context of geopolitical reordering.

This chapter explores how Richard Hofstadter’s scholarly work on populism in American history – and his broader theory of populism as a “paranoid style” – was received by his historical contemporaries and how it continues to shape popular and academic perceptions of populism and the American radical right. Hofstadter argued that disparate movements in American history, from the nineteenth-century Populist Party to McCarthyism during the 1950s, were driven by “status anxiety” and a conspiratorial mindset characteristic of populism. In so doing, Hofstadter introduced concepts such as “status anxiety,” “paranoid style,” and “populism” into the popular lexicon, popularizing a Cold War liberal critique of radical political movements as irrational and misguided. While contemporaries such as Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset supported his views, historians such as C. Vann Woodward and Lawrence Goodwyn criticized Hofstadter’s account of U.S. populism. By the late 1960s, Hofstadter himself moderated his stance, acknowledging the limitations of his psychosocial theory of populism. The chapter concludes by arguing that Hofstadter’s work, while offering valuable insights, has led to analytical blind spots in understanding the structural and ideological dynamics of the American radical right.