Pathways of Conservative Europeanism after the 'Social Market Moment'
19 October 2025
I am thrilled to see Gary Love and Christian Egander Skov’s edited volume Conservatism, Christian Democracy and the dynamics of transformation published, including a physical copy currently in my hands. There’s a self-interest here, I have a chapter in the volume entitled ‘Britain’s social market moment’ that I am very proud of, but it’s also a project I have been a part of for quite a while now (my personal records show I was approached to participate 6 years ago) and I’m really excited to see how other scholars engage with the contributions – of which there are so many good ones.
In this post, I want to share something from the cutting room floor that didn’t really work with my chapter and probably doesn’t work as a standalone article but is a) fairly interesting and b) reflects some of the bigger narratives in the volume – and might encourage you to get your hands on a copy.
One of the threads across chapters in the volume concerns the rise and fall of a Europeanist orientation within the Conservative Party and its relationship to institutional developments in North-West Europe and globally. This can be seen in two comparative chapters on the UK and West Germany. Martina Steber’s chapter explores how from the 1950s, British Conservative thought grew closer to that of continental Christian democrats, and the Christian democrats growing closer to conservatism both as an ideology and a specific for associated with the Conservative Party. Apprehension and hostility to collaboration started to thaw. The chapter from John Davis and Anna von der Goltz is really interesting on the student movements of the parties in the 1960s and into the 1970s, the Federation of Conservative Students (FCS) and its West German equivalent the Ring Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten (RCDS) [these are distinct entities from the Young Conservatives and its equivalent the Junge Union].
The West Germans weren’t unique here. One interesting thing that comes out of the edited volume, and Gary Love’s associated journal article, is an odd moment of fascination of the Conservatives and the Europeans. We see in chapters from Christian Egander Skov and Torbjörn Nilsson, how a certain form of British conservatism fascinated the centre-right in Scandinavia who lacked the Catholic base for Christian democracy and found nationalist conservatism both unpopular and tainted by fascism. British conservative ideological resources like the property owning democracy and consensualism were very inspiring and they actively consumed works on Conservative philosophy and styled themselves on Conservatives like Harold Macmillan. Martina Steber has also written on a similar fascination with British conservatism from elements of the German right light Armin Mohler, but this was less associated with Macmillan and Middle Way Conservatism but rather that Conservatism offered an ideology with a history and a ‘real philosophy’. As Heath looked to the continent, the continent was starting to look back, creating an opportunity for bridge-building.
Although the Conservative Party and the FCS remained rather parochial and isolated, figures within them were interested in internationalisation and engaging with like-minded parties in Europe. For the FCS this usually meant sending their International Officer (with support from the central party) to delegations of student groups. These officers were really pro-European and excited to engage with and learn from their fellows. Whilst tensions remained between conservative and Christian democratic blocs, these students were organising including through the European Conservative and Christian Democrat Students (ECCS). Collaborations from students, who would go on to be politicians or work for their parties, build private networks among these parties and provided a useful back-channel for coordination and learning. Actors might not be driving the parties public face or rhetoric but they could shape position and diplomacy. The Conservatives were very active in the ECCS with multiple delegates holding leadership positions. Tom Spencer, one of these Conservative representatives, Vice Chairman 1971-72 and Chairman 1972-74, was very well liked and influential within the ECCS and built much goodwill within these cohorts.
The most obvious influence of this Europeanist turn from Conservative students and their superiors at the party is both campaigns for European accession and Heath’s vocal leadership on this front. Let us not forget, and I’ll come back to this, that the Conservatives were the pro-European party and Labour were much more apprehensive.
As I’ve written elsewhere, European accession was not the key to unlocking centre-right collaboration that might have been hoped for. Although the CDU-CSU and the Conservatives were now interested in more formal collaboration as the centre-right, other Christian democrats remained apprehensive and kept the Conservatives (and other conservative parties) out of the European People’s Party (EPP) when it began to form with the advent of direct elections to the European Parliament.
Again, the student backchannels tried to resolve this blockage. The ECCS renamed in 1975 to the European Democrat Students (EDS) which continued to bring together students from across the centre-right including Christian democrats (from ‘Carolingian’ ‘core Europe’), conservatives and libertarians (from the Nordics). This trinodal dynamic avoided binary opposition and allowed conservatives and Christian democrats to collaborate. There is an official history of the EDS which is good context and a helpful resource, but lacks some critical distance from the subject.
Here we meet a key British figure in European integration, Scott Hamilton. Hamilton was most significant, serving as International Secretary of the FCS and acting as a Vice Chairman of the EDS in 1975-76 and Chairman from 1976-78. Hamilton publishes The Foundations of Alignment (of the European centre-right) with the Conservative Political Centre (on behalf of the FCS) in 1975 which presents a shared political platform from EDS contributors in Germany, Ireland, Norway, France, and Sweden (a reflection on the geographies of contributions – the CDU-CSU is the only traditional Christian democratic party involved) and looking at collaboration across the parties themselves.
From the organising and networks of the EDS came the European Democrat Union (EDU) in 1978 and the International Democrat Union (IDU) in 1983 – which are subjects of Gary Love and Fabio Wolkenstein’s chapters. With this move from student politics to full-fat party politics, Scott Hamilton remained involved. He had moved from International Secretary of the FCS to the Conservative International Office, which he would head. Hamilton was a lynchpin in the EDU and IDU (founding Executive Secretary of the IDU) in this crucial period of the late 1970s and early 1980s when it offered a tangible opportunity to reshape the European and international centre-right. They developed a distinctive language – with the awkwardly named socially-oriented market economy – and a politics focussing on human rights, economic freedom and anti-socialism. Here triangulation between the three poles presented a new ideological coalition. The centrality of Britain and Hamilton, in this moment is visible from the front cover of Love and Skov’s book, from the first conference of the IDU, with Hamilton visible on the back row at the fair left (pictures of Hamilton past and present are hard to trace) and Thatcher sitting next to the Chairman.
The most famous figure to emerge from the early years of the EDS is Carl Bildt, who was chairman from 1974-76, between Tom Spencer and Scott Hamilton. Like Hamilton, Bildt remained active in the EDU and IDU. Bildt was Prime Minister of Sweden from 1991 to 1994 and led his party from 1986 to 1999.
And yet the EDU failed. This is discussed and Gary Love and Ben Jackson’s chapters, but I also think should look here not just at Scott Hamilton but also at Nigel Ashford. Ashford was Hamilton’s junior partner, acting as Secretary General of the EDS from 1976-78. However, where members of the EDS characterise Hamilton for his diplomacy and attempts to build coalitions and bridge ideological divides, Ashford is remembered for a more distinctive ideological orientation. As such he was more combative and challenging to the Christian democrats at meetings - remembered as neither confrontational nor crass but less than consensual and foreign to expected ideological traditions. Ashford associated himself with the St Andrews libertarians, who we might associate with the Adam Smith Institute, who were engaged with the rise of neoliberalism but also coalitional changes in the FCS. This doesn’t mean Ashford was not interested in Europe and Europeanisation, I don’t doubt he was, but he was engaging with politics from a different position from Hamilton, one that was transforming the FCS and the Conservative Party.
One thing I have been trying to hammer home in these blogs, my writing and conversations is the significance of the FCS transformations from the 1970s to the 1990s as they went from led by people who might associate with the SDP to being shut down by the central party due to their racism and links to the National Front. It’s a precursor and reflection of Thatcherism but also the rise of Euroscepticism we still work with today – and important political education for many Conservative actors in the 21st century. The libertarians were critical of what they saw as the concessions from the wets to the left and open to working with authoritarians on the right to build a new politics. The libertarianism of this group in the 1970s and into the 1980s is worth exploring because it parallels the coalitional politics of neoliberals - and neoliberals cultivated links with neoliberals like Chris Tame - but libertarians had a different ideological position to both the neoliberals and the broader New Right. Like the neoliberals, they decided it was politically sensible to try and ride this wave. These ideological politics are well captured in an story Ashford told me when I interviewed him, where he told of a dinner they held for Thatcher, where she attended and expected to be received as a hero. Instead, she was challenged for her Government’s homophobic policies, which were inconsistent with commitments to freedom. The libertarians could be radically progressive but they could also be massive supporters of apartheid and vocally racist.
We end up at a bit of an impasse. The EDU had been brought together by ideological coalition building as an organisation consciously of the centre-right, interested in a Conservatism they associated with Macmillan and Heath. However, with Thatcher, the Conservatives and the FCS moving to an orientation of the right and away from the consensus of the centre ground. If some of the libertarians and the conservatives were now collaborating, the Christian democrats, and those they had built networks with, began to withdraw.
As such we can see how EDU becomes the namesake for the Conservative’s rival to the EPP, the European Democrat Group from 1980. The EDG, now ECPA, has had many far-right members, including United Russia and very much tests any categorisation of centre-right. That Christian democrats did not leave for the EDG and stayed with the EPP reflects the limits of the ideological coalition building on the centre-right and the return of Britain to relative isolation at the European level. [In fairness, the EPP as exclusively Christian democrat or centre-right should also be challenged – it was home and protector of Fidesz for years – the subject of a blog I’ve been holding off on publishing/publicising]
This one of the central narratives tying together Conservatism, Christian Democracy and the dynamics of transformation and I think should tempt you into reading more, the question of neoliberalism and how it links with these dynamics is well worth tracing through the chapters and well dealt with by Love and Jackson – and I think my chapter adds something to this as well.
In this post, I want to stay a bit longer looking at these students and to explore what they did with their careers after this moment with the EDS/EDU/IDU, what happened after the early 1980s and the end of what I characterise as ‘the social market moment’. I think staying with them a little further can be instructive on the subsequent trajectories of conservatism and centre-right networks.
I’ll start with Tom Spencer, the popular Brit who builds networks and is well liked. Spencer stays with the Conservative Party and is elected at the first direct elections to the European Parliament in 1979. He serves as MEP for Derbyshire from 1979 to 1984 and Sussex 1989 to 1999, becoming Leader of the Conservative group and Chairman of the EP’s Foreign Affairs Committee from 1997. However, his career ends with disgrace after being caught at Heathrow Airport with marijuana and gay pornography, fined and then losing the whip and resigning from the Tory electoral list (there’s some legal liability thing about international import into the UK but both seem to have been for private use – he also claimed to have had some cocaine in the bag). He’s interesting for thinking about the clear pathway that existed from student politics to European politics as well the history of homosexuality and Conservatism – especially as his wife (a Conservative activist herself) stood by him and they insisted that she had known of his homosexuality before their marriage. Spencer died in 2023.
Scott Hamilton eventually leaves the Conservative International Office and goes into the private sector, working as a lobbyist, primarily in Brussels. He becomes CEO and then Chairman of the EPPA Group an influential government affairs company. He then is a partner in two lobbying firms, The Westminster Connection and The European Connection. Here he remained active within British Conservative politics and in European politics and Europeanisation. This trajectory feels a bit of a time capsule to me, of a period from the 90s to the early 2000s where Brussels and Westminster had considerable professional overlap and lobbying both locales was part of the same operation. It also may speak to changing pathways into elected office (although Spencer as an MEP also lacked the status of MP) and career prospects for party functionaries.
Hamilton’s career also seemingly ends with scandal. In 2017 Priti Patel was compelled to resign as Secretary of State for International Development it was revealed that she had been meeting with Israeli politicians in Israel without informing the Foreign Office. These meetings had been arranged by Conservative Friends of Israel through The Westminster Connection, when the firm was already facing scrutiny for acting as an official lobbying arm for Israel firms like Elbit Systems. The Westminster Connection and Hamilton’s other firms all abruptly shut, and Hamilton seems to have disappeared from professional life.
Nigel Ashford, by contrast, initially went from his time with the EDS into academia. He completed a PhD in Politics at the University of Warwick in 1983, on The Conservative Party and European Integration, 1945-1975, supervised by Willie Paterson. While working on the thesis, he contributed a chapter to Zig Layton-Henry’s Conservative Party Politics (1980). It is amusing to see this ardent libertarian in the volume as Chris Patten and with a foreword from Ian Gilmour. After the PhD he was an academic at Staffordshire University. At some point he left the universities for the think tanks, working for the Jarl Hjalmarson Foundation in Sweden (which associated with Carl Bildt’s Moderate Party) and then to the US for the Heritage Foundation and Social and Philosophy Policy Center. He ended up at the Institute for Humane Studies a ‘classical liberal’ think tank at George Mason University funded by the Koch Foundation.
Ashford’s role as senior program officer seems to have been network building for the think tank and its network of scholars on the libertarian/right. This well-funded network building is often identified as a key relative strength of the political right over the political left in the USA. It is interesting how Ashford’s career in some ways begins with the political student movement and coalition building in the UK and Europe and ends up contributing to similar movements in the USA where the dry-shit alliance of his earlier career can be read alongside ‘fusionism’. Ashford does not seem to be listed as employed by the IHS anymore and it is unclear if he retired or the institute moved on from him. The IHS, like many intellectual right institutions, is in a tricky situation under Trump as their old attacks on the right for infringements on liberty and bad economics are difficult to square with the contemporary administration, which has also attacked George Mason University. This is a general challenge Koch-funded institutions seem to be facing – and worth keeping an eye on. Ashford was a vocal critic of Brexit, which is in keeping with his career but awkward with his allies, and he seems to have been a good-faith actor, just committed to his politics.
Hamilton and Ashford seem to me to reflect two different trajectories in internationalisation that were possible in the moment explored in Love and Skov’s edited volume. Hamilton leant into the opportunities with Europe and a cosmopolitan and centre-right vision for the Conservative Party – the Conservative-Christian democratic coalition. His career reflects the rise and fall of this vision and opportunity and where Europe-minded Conservatives have gone since. Ashford is reflective of opportunities with the USA and the advent of Thatcherism. Here he reflects the IDU and Nordic coalition of conservatives and libertarians against Christian democracy and moderation. Both pathways are difficult to see for the contemporary Conservative Party which has turned its back on Europe and whose embrace of National Conservative (NatCon) networks are very different from the libertarianism that characterised Ashford’s allies in his early and late career. As the edited volume’s title suggests, we should be sensitive to the dynamics of transformation.
As a closing note, Gary Love will be presenting about the book and his research projects at the IHR Contemporary British History seminar on the 19th of November. I’ll try to make it and I encourage you to come along as well. Gary and his research are both great!