The return of machismo geopolitics

Across Europe and the US, far-right movements, parties, and governments are changing the language and logic of international order. From Trump to Putin, Orban, or Salvini, zero-sum geopolitics and a fascination with the value-symbols of authority, masculinity and military grandeur are back.

In a new book edited by DIIS-researcher Vibeke Schou Tjalve, these dramatic shifts in contemporary American and European foreign policy are put into wider intellectual and historical context. Published by McGill Queens University Press this week, Geopolitical Amnesia: The Rise of the Right and the Crisis of Liberal Memory is a collection of essays on the conservative - and sometimes radically conservative - critiques of liberal order, which in various forms and shapes has emerged in recent years. Written by authors that span the fields of intellectual history, political psychology and historical journalism, the chapters of the book explore the ideas of this contemporary Right, zooming in on national, regional and thematic variations, yet unpacking their strikingly similar rejection of what we call liberal memory – that is, the ritual ways in which far-right thinkers and movements across the transatlantic now assault liberal ways of recalling and narrating the twentieth century.

Taking us from Washington to Warzaw, and from the Anglosphere to Southern, Western, and Eastern Europe, each chapter contributes to a deeper understanding of the memory wars, and revisionist histories, that lie beneath the new conservatism and its assault on liberal order. They also unpack how liberal memory itself is in crisis, out of touch with the twentieth century history of violence, war and trauma, which used to inform that order’s defense. In so doing, the chapters of the book explore not only the dynamic interplay between a revisionist Right and an exhausted liberalism, but the changing conditions of memory and nostalgia in an age of accelerated media and digital communication as such.

The book includes contributions from Manni Crone (DIIS), Jean-Francios Drolet (Queen Mary), Lisa Ginsborg (NYU), Matthew Hinds (DIIS), Minda Holm (NUPI), Louise Riis Andersen (DIIS), Johannes Lang (DIIS), Fabrizio Tassinari (EUI), and Jesper Vind (Weekendavisen), as well as a foreword by Michael C. Williams (UOttawa).