The Crisis of Conservative Institutions

Europe’s conservatives do not lack ideas; they lack institutions capable of giving those ideas life. For more than seventy years, the Left has controlled Europe’s cultural and intellectual high ground. What began as a project for the common good evolved into a moral monopoly that reshaped the language of public life while eroding the nation-state. When conservatives have governed, they have done so within structures built by their opponents. The legacy of the Third Way still defines European politics, creating a centrist consensus that leans left and protects the institutional status quo. Conservative victories rarely produce conservative outcomes. Even moderate center-right movements are treated as threats to democracy, while the Left’s dominance of culture and bureaucracy is accepted as the natural order.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Brussels. Built to depoliticize governance, the European bureaucracy has become the purest embodiment of managerial ideology. Its vocabulary of ‘shared values’ and ‘harmonization’ conceals a deep aversion to democratic choice. What was once sold as a project of peace and stability now functions as a mechanism of control, sustaining a technocratic class that rules without conviction or accountability. The managerial state that grew out of Brussels found its mirror in Washington, where administration has replaced politics and compliance has replaced conviction.

My earliest experience in politics came during George W. Bush’s first presidential campaign, when the memory of Reagan and Thatcher still gave the Atlantic Right moral direction. Even Tony Blair’s Third Way, for all its contradictions, seemed to promise a workable balance between market realism and social responsibility. I believed in that promise until it collapsed under the weight of events, first with the Iraq War and, later, the global financial crisis.

Barack Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia,’ encouraged by Silicon Valley’s utopianism and the illusions of the global technocracy, imagined a new century built around the Pacific Rim. In reality, it marked a retreat from the Atlantic world that had sustained democracy and liberty. This was not renewal but evasion, a symbolic politics that substituted aspiration for structure. In the United States, the legacies of both Democratic presidents now lie in tatters. Blairism, by contrast, endured. His Third Way remains the unwritten constitution of establishment governance. Even when conservatives hold power, they operate within systems he designed. Its durability is extraordinary, grounded in discipline, networks, and institutional coherence. It has outlasted both the idealism of Obama and the populism of Biden and has completely eclipsed George W. Bush’s administration. Blair’s political architecture survives because it is organized. The European Right must learn the same lesson.

The most visible symptom of institutional drift now appears in law. As Lord Sumption warned in his 2019 Reith Lectures, 

Law is not a substitute for politics. When the courts become the main forum for political controversy, the results are likely to be both bad law and bad politics.

His warning captures the predicament of both Britain and the United States, where the courtroom has replaced Parliament as the arena of national debate. Baroness Hale has made the same point, arguing that if Britain wishes to reform or limit the reach of the European Court of Human Rights, it must legislate directly. That could take several forms: repealing or replacing the Human Rights Act of 1998, narrowing the domestic authority of Strasbourg rulings, or even withdrawing from the Convention under Article 58. Each option would reassert parliamentary sovereignty and restore the primacy of national law, yet successive governments have preferred rhetoric to responsibility. The result is paralysis, endless talk of ‘reviews’ and ‘reforms’ without the courage to legislate. Britain’s relationship with the European Court of Human Rights may yet become a constitutional reckoning as profound as Brexit. Reform UK and elements within the Conservative Party have hinted at withdrawal, but without proper legislative foundation, such a move would provoke a legal crisis. As in 2016, the issue is not only sovereignty but legitimacy: who governs, Parliament or the permanent machinery of transnational law? The answer, quite obviously, is Parliament.

This pattern is not confined to common law. It extends across Europe. In France, the Conseil d’État and the Conseil Constitutionnel have become stages for political conflict over immigration and secularism. In Germany, the Federal Constitutional Court’s 2020 ruling on the European Central Bank’s bond-buying program challenged the primacy of EU law. In Italy, courts have repeatedly blocked government attempts to limit NGO rescue operations in the Mediterranean. These cases reveal how law, morality, and sovereignty have collided. They show the need for a new conservative legal scholarship rooted in realism and national responsibility.

So where do we go from here? The path forward is clear enough. Italy remains a rare example where the Right possesses a functional bench, thanks to Silvio Berlusconi’s ability to reform a system once paralyzed by corruption and post-communist inertia. France’s Marine Le Pen commands a vast base but lacks a technocratic class ready to govern. Hungary’s Fidesz has built a complete conservative ecosystem of media, universities, and cultural networks, yet Viktor Orbán is vilified by the same elites who excuse every progressive excess. Elsewhere, conservative parties perform well electorally but are constrained by deeply social-democratic bureaucracies.

What the Right requires is depth: a new generation of thinkers, administrators, and strategists who can turn popular support into durable governance. Every conservative victory is reframed by the commentariat as a mistake or an accident. Failure is magnified, success dismissed, and power remains concentrated in the hands of unelected managers. The Right remains strong in conviction but weak in structure. It shines in moments of crisis but struggles to sustain power. Conservatism survives because citizens still prefer order to chaos, responsibility to indulgence, and belonging to abstraction. Yet instinct cannot substitute for organization. What is needed now are institutions capable of thinking strategically, educating leaders, and linking movements across borders.

For too long, conservatives have fought in the language of values while surrendering the machinery of policy. The Left understood that systems matter: the committees, funding boards, and frameworks that decide what a nation permits and prohibits. The task now is to rebuild the architecture of influence in law, education, media, and culture. Without strategy at the institutional level, even moral victories dissolve into symbolism.

Europe has no shortage of talent, capital, or public sympathy. What it lacks is organization. The conservative revival will succeed only when it builds institutions that think clearly, act coherently, and endure across generations. The work ahead is not rhetorical but structural. Either the Right rebuilds, or it fades into memory, leaving Blairism to govern the century by default.