European liberalism is the wellspring of American liberalism, but Europe has - for obvious, historical reasons - much better organised reactionary elites. The equilibrium between the European publics and elites does indeed wax and wane.
In the 1990s a whole bunch of elite shibboleths were encoded into supranational law (so that no elected government is able to repeal them) as incredibly vaguely defined "human rights", which in turn have given rise to a vast bureaucratic apparatus to administer them (often staffed by the children of elite families). This apparatus is used as a cudgel to chip away at basic liberties - abstract, ill-defined communitarian rights (eg "safety") are used to sweep aside actual, tangible individual rights (eg speech, privacy).
(As an aside, the Soviet Union did effectively the same thing with their emphasis on "social rights" - such as those in the ICESCR - as opposed to "bourgeois" individual rights - such as those in the ICCPR. Didn't work out great for Soviet citizens.)
Since the 1990s, as a result of misgovernance by its chronically incompetent elites, Europe has been in decline by almost every metric. In the past ten years or so, the European publics have been in increasingly open revolt about this. A bunch of populist opportunists have seized on this revolt to offer various alleged alternatives, but been unable to deliver any sort of tangible change. (There is no reason to believe any change will come from this group, since they are basically just the second-rate members of the existing elite who have bet on populism as their ticket to the top.)
Europe tells itself stories about being a "human rights superpower" as an adaptive mechanism for its clear decline in prosperity, freedom, and relevance.
IMHO, Europeans deserve much better than this sad, managed decline. But given the deep structural barriers to protect the elites and prevent change, I just cannot see how this gets better.
Will the last European please turn out the lights?
The ECHR was signed in the 1950s, not 1990s. 1998 happened to be the point the UK actually made it national law too. It's complicated, I'm not going into it here. I was simply using it as an example of EU governments passing pro-liberty legislation in the 90s.
Hard to take the rest of your post seriously as that is EU history 101. Pre-101 really, they teach it to teenagers.
By your logic, the 1950s should then have been a high point of human freedom and flourishing, no? Yup, those famously progressive *checks notes* nineteen-fifties.
In reality, the ECHR was effectively toothless before the 1990s. It's no coincidence you single out dates in the 1990s in both this and your earlier post. It's no coincidence virtually every major bit of leading European human rights jurisprudence is dated from the 90s onwards. It's no coincidence that there was a marked growth in state- and quasi-state institutions in the 1990s. There is an obvious pre-90s and 90s-onwards era of European human rights jurisprudence.
But you already knew this. You yourself correctly singled out the 1990s! You're just trying to hand-wave points you don't like with an argument to authority (and a very strange one, given the authority appears to be... children? And their understanding of the periodisation of human rights jurisprudence? Maybe we should consult European toddlers for their take on the œuvre of Montesquieu, just to make sure we're not missing anything?)
It's kind of striking to observe you reject my point that the human rights narrative is just a story that Europeans tell themselves, on the apparent grounds that that criticism doesn't jibe with the story that Europeans tell their children about Europe. This kind of makes my point.
So long as Europeans cling to fictitious narratives about their having transcended history into some kind of human rights nirvana, they will remain unable to push back on the actual, real decay of their freedoms and societies. Which is the desired outcome as far as elite institutions are concerned, so expect that narrative to be roundly enforced within Europe.
Hashtag celebrating seventy years of the ECHR! So much freedom - insert face here, thank you!
European liberalism is the wellspring of American liberalism, but Europe has - for obvious, historical reasons - much better organised reactionary elites. The equilibrium between the European publics and elites does indeed wax and wane.
In the 1990s a whole bunch of elite shibboleths were encoded into supranational law (so that no elected government is able to repeal them) as incredibly vaguely defined "human rights", which in turn have given rise to a vast bureaucratic apparatus to administer them (often staffed by the children of elite families). This apparatus is used as a cudgel to chip away at basic liberties - abstract, ill-defined communitarian rights (eg "safety") are used to sweep aside actual, tangible individual rights (eg speech, privacy).
(As an aside, the Soviet Union did effectively the same thing with their emphasis on "social rights" - such as those in the ICESCR - as opposed to "bourgeois" individual rights - such as those in the ICCPR. Didn't work out great for Soviet citizens.)
Since the 1990s, as a result of misgovernance by its chronically incompetent elites, Europe has been in decline by almost every metric. In the past ten years or so, the European publics have been in increasingly open revolt about this. A bunch of populist opportunists have seized on this revolt to offer various alleged alternatives, but been unable to deliver any sort of tangible change. (There is no reason to believe any change will come from this group, since they are basically just the second-rate members of the existing elite who have bet on populism as their ticket to the top.)
Europe tells itself stories about being a "human rights superpower" as an adaptive mechanism for its clear decline in prosperity, freedom, and relevance.
IMHO, Europeans deserve much better than this sad, managed decline. But given the deep structural barriers to protect the elites and prevent change, I just cannot see how this gets better.
Will the last European please turn out the lights?