The Neo-Tories and Europe: A Transnational Historyof British Radical Conservatism in the 1930s

Abstract

The Neo-Tories and Europe: A Transnational History of British Radical Conservatism in the 1930s

This article analyses the British Neo-Tories of the 1930s as part of a pan-European counter-movement against political modernity. This network of right-wing intellectuals and allied Conservative politicians saw democracy, liberalism and capitalism in a state of degeneration and aimed at the establishment of a corporate state in Great Britain through a «revolution from above». The article concentrates on the importance on the transnational implications of this discourse and in particular of the exchange with their German intellectual counterparts. It emphasises how this exchange of ideas was affected by National Socialism on the British side and explores what the possibilities and limits of right-wing exchange between Germany and England were after Hitler's rise to power. The article argues that for the Neo-Tories, the European exchange of ideas was a source of inspiration, reassurance and hope; however, it also eventually meant their downfall, as the beginning of the Second World War marked the end of British participation in transnational radical conservatism.