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The Conservative Human Rights Revolution radically reinterprets the origins of the European human rights system, arguing that its conservative inventors envisioned the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) not only as an instrument to contain communism and fascism in continental Europe, but to allow them to pursue a controversial political agenda at home and abroad. Just as the Supreme Court of the United States had sought to overturn Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, a European Court on Human Rights was meant to constrain the ability of democratically elected governments to implement left-wing policies that conservatives believed violated their basic liberties. Conservatives expected that a European judiciary would halt the expansion of bureaucratic authority over Britain's economy, safeguard the autonomy of Catholic institutions in France, and ensure respect for the fundamental freedoms of individuals charged with political crimes at the end of the Second World War. Human rights were also evoked in the hopes of reviving a nostalgic Christian vision of European identity long associated with Romanticism. All told, these efforts served as a basis for the reconciliation between Germany and the rest of Europe, while justifying the exclusion of communists and colonized peoples from the ambit of European human rights law. Marco Duranti illuminates the history of internationalism and international law--from the peace conferences and world's fairs of the early twentieth century to the grand pan-European congresses of the postwar period--and elucidates Winston Churchill's Europeanism, as well as his critical contribution to the genesis of the ECHR. Drawing on previously unpublished material from twenty archives in six countries,The Conservative Human Rights Revolution revisits the ethical foundations of European integration after WWII and offers a new perspective on the crisis in which the European Union finds itself today.