How Religious Conservatism is Redirecting the European Project

Paul Blokker

University of Bologna

Elections to the European Parliament (the European Union’s directly elected legislative body) were held in June 2024 and saw a clear shift towards the conservative-religious right; a shift that has been underway for at least a decade now. The observation is often made that the conservative and radical right are heterogeneous, divided and quarrelsome. What this observation papers over is a series of rather solidified linkages, relations and collaborations between various actors. These range from Christian-democratic to radical right-wing forces, where a collective, shared objective is the building of a stronger, Christian-conservative European right. The ultimate goal of such a transnational right network is a new European order, strongly grounded in national sovereignty.

Conservative, right-wing actors publicly engage in public claims-making and campaigning.  This was recently seen when such actors pushed back against the Parliamentary Assembly of the  Council of Europe’s proposal for “Protecting the human rights and improving the lives of sex workers and victims of sexual exploitation”. Perhaps more importantly, conservative actors equally engage in under-the-radar activities. These are hardly or not at all visible to the wider public, and include the usage of liberal-legal instruments, such as litigation and third-party interventions. Conservative, right-wing actors further attempt to influence legislation on matters such as abortion, same-sex marriage, surrogate maternity, or euthanasia.

Legal mobilization or ‘lawfare’ by conservative, religious right-wing forces, originally an American phenomenon, is on the increase in Europe. Relevant European conservative forces include right-wing conservative political parties, increasingly prominent in the European Parliament, and  conservative civil society actors, associations and think tanks –  some of which are referred to as uncivil society or backlash movements. The latter seek recourse to a wide variety of instruments that can be understood as relevant for forms of legal mobilization. These may include the following forms of action:

·       engagement with courts whereby individual and collective actors engage in forms of strategic litigation or third-party interventions (amicus curiae interventions);

·       advocacy campaigns, lobbying, and engaging political institutions; or

·       mobilization and claims-making, in terms of making public, political claims. An example of this is the promotion of an alternative convention to the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence. That alternative convention is the Convention on the Rights of the Family.

The increasingly evident legal mobilization and usage of liberal-legal tools by right-wing conservative actors ‘irritates’ a number of taken-for-granted conceptions of how liberal democracy is supposed to operate and what it is to achieve, in particular in legal and human rights terms. In fact, the political-scientific and legal understanding of civil society frequently tends to overlook crucial dimensions, not least the fact that civil society equally includes, and will always include, actors that are not dedicated to the liberal understanding of the rule of law.  Civil society cannot be reduced to societal forces that uphold liberal understandings of the rule of law. Rather, there is always the possibility of the ‘perversion of civil society fostering uncivil social relations’.  Hence, civil society should be grasped and analyzed in its entirety, fragility, and complexity, giving due attention to intense conflict within civil society.

One conspicuous form of legal engagement is that of third-party interventions, not least in relation to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Since the late 1990s, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and other societal actors (as well as states) increasingly engage with the ECtHR. Amongst the societal interventions, those of religious and conservatively oriented actors seem to be growing in number. Faith-based, conservative actors are still in the minority in terms of amicus curiae briefs submitted to the ECtHR, as the larger number of interventions is by liberal organizations, but conservative legal mobilization is on the rise.

In a recent piece in the International Journal of Law in Context, I analyze some of the submissions of the Polish conservative religious think-tank Ordo Iuris. There are roughly four main areas where conservative religious actors such as Ordo Iuris are active vis-à-vis the ECtHR: a) right to family and parental authority; b) sexual/gender identity; c) reproductive practices; and d) freedom of expression. These areas can be seen as informing deep ideological contestation and could be seen as ‘fields of tensions’, which indicate a division between liberal civil society actors on the one hand, and conservative-religious ones on the other. 

A further area that is to be added is that of euthanasia. The recent case involving Dániel Karsai is a case in point. The Hungarian human rights activist suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which caused a rapidly deteriorating situation in which Karsai felt ‘imprisoned in his own body without any prospect of release apart from death’. Karsai unfortunately and tragically passed away in September but had been campaigning very passionately and effectively for a right to euthanasia. In the case of Dániel Karsai v. Hungary, in which the ECtHR issued a judgment on 13 June 2024, various right-wing conservative actors contributed a third-party intervention – including the Italian government, the European Centre for Law and Justice, as well as the Alliance Defending Freedom International (ADFI) – all arguing against a right to euthanasia. ADFI is part of a broader American conservative, Christian, evangelical, right-wing movement (with long-standing interest in intervening in the European context). In the judgment, the Grand Chamber of the ECtHR did not endorse a right to euthanasia and did not recognize a violation of Karsai’s rights in relation to existing Hungarian law.

In the context of the European Union, while conservative right-wing actors such as the European Centre for Law and Justice or Ordo Iuris are very active in engaging in more strictly legal action, they equally mobilize in more political-legal ways. A striking campaign started in the run-up to the European elections in 2024 regarding the European Parliament’s resolution on EU Treaty reforms, adopted in November 2023. In a detailed report on various dimensions of these reforms that would lead to the ‘loss of sovereignty’ of EU Member States, Ordo Iuris stated that:

[w]hat emerges from the analysis of the whole package of changes is a concrete vision of a “European superstate” being pushed by the reform’s proponents, which projects an economically centralised organisation with top-down management and a level of centralisation significantly exceeding the United States’ federalisation. It is also a bloc striving, through a unified educational and cultural policy, to raise a “new European citizen” for whom a pan-European identity takes obvious precedence over ethnic and national affiliation.

What is particularly striking is a strong critique by Ordo Iuris of the Manifesto of Ventotene and of Altiero Spinelli, whose actions were aimed at the creation of a ‘European Empire’.

The affinities in orientation of the conservative right-wing groups in the European Parliament and of much less visible associations, think-tanks, movements, and NGOs – against supranationalism, pro-sovereigntism, and generally showing affinity in endorsing a broad conservative, religious agenda around a ‘natural order’ – are more than evident. Various investigations have revealed deep links that indicate a shared project of the Global Right that is increasingly specializing in political and legal mobilization vis-à-vis the European institutions. The liberal-legal European edifice is being steadily undermined by forces that utilize the very same instruments that are at the origins of that liberal-legal system.

This blog is part of the blog symposium Federal Coalitions and Subnational Democracy and hosted by the IACL Research Group on Constitutionalism and Societal Pluralism: Diversity Governance Compared.

Paul Blokker is a Full Professor at the Department of Sociology and Business Law at the University of Bologna.

Suggested citation: Paul Blokker, ‘How Religious Conservatism is Redirecting the European Project’ IACL-AIDC Blog (19 November 2024) How Religious Conservatism is Redirecting the European Project — IACL-IADC Blog