Since the turn of the millennium, all over the globe new forms of international collaboration have surfaced that explicitly position themselves against the liberal international order established after the fall of the Berlin Wall. These and other contemporary examples of antiliberalism across national boundaries are frequently explained as consequences of the recent cultural backlash, tendencies of authoritarianism and the populist zeitgeist against the backdrop of globalising societies. However, in hindsight, antiliberal internationalism is not necessarily a timely or new phenomenon – nor can current manifestations of it be understood or explained detached from historical precursors. In this project we aim to uncover the longer twentieth-century trajectories and genealogies of antiliberal internationalism: sentiments, outlooks, strategies, and ideologies. 

Concrete projects

• Book Publication: Antiliberal Internationalism in the Twentieth Century: Beyond Left and Right? Edited by Matthijs Lok, Marjet Brolsma, Robin de Bruin, Stefan Couperus and Rachel McElroy White. Routledge, 2025.

  Book description: This book shows how antiliberal discourse, thought, and mobilization have, in defiance of nationalist aims, been significantly shaped and determined in the international sphere, 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. This collection of essays charts the many-sided aspects of twentieth-century internationalism and its contemporary developments across the globe. Without excluding well-known European sources of antiliberal internationalism, it decentres the European experience by exploring specific case studies from South and East Asia, the Middle East, the Americas, Africa, and Oceania. Moreover, the volume abundantly demonstrates that “liberalism” and “anti-liberalism” cannot be considered as fixed entities as (anti)liberalism was, and is, as much defined by its enemies as by its advocates.

• Reading group

Team