In a speech to the German Christian Democratic Party [CDU]’s annual conference in May 2024, its leader Friedrich Merz defined the party’s three main ideological foundations as “Christian-socialism,” “liberalism,” and “conservatism.” The emphasis on “conservatism” sparked a lot of debate among German commentators: while some saw it as a return to the CDU’s true conservative roots after decades of Merkel-style centrist politics, others regarded it as a dangerous rhetorical bow to the party’s challengers on the far right, namely the so-called Alternative für Deutschland [AfD]. Why did the self-description of a mainstream center-right party as “conservative” appear so controversial in twenty-first-century Germany, whereas it would have barely raised an eyebrow in many other European countries, such as the United Kingdom?

Martina Steber’s excellent book The Guardians of Concepts: Political Languages of Conservatism in Britain and West Germany, 1945–1980, originally published in German in 2017 and translated here by David Dichelle, offers much-needed historical background to such contemporary debates. The book traces the evolution of “conservatism” in Britain and West Germany from 1945 to 1980, which—building on the works of Michael Freeden—it interprets primarily as a semantic concept. It correspondingly defines conservatism as a “linguistic structure determined by characteristic structural principles, which provided conservative thought and action with constancy and ensured that it was recognizable” (p. 8). Conservatism lends itself particularly well to such an analysis, since it can be seen as a somewhat fluid political concept with no fixed, overarching doctrine or key canonical text (p. 434); rather, the meanings of conservatism are constantly being reworked and negotiated in historical semantics and thus, ultimately, through language. Following from this, the book identifies four “morphological structural principles” that shaped the political language of conservatism in the postwar decades: “temporality,” “balance and synthesis,” “repetition and application,” and “the formation of opposites” (pp. 8–9).

The first part of the book offers a comparative history of the debates over conservatism in Britain and West Germany, even if the analysis tilts quite heavily toward the latter. This, however, should come as no surprise and can in itself be seen as one of the book’s main findings: whereas conservatism was anchored firmly in the landscape of British politics throughout the period under investigation, the concept was much more controversial in West Germany, discredited by its pre-1945 anti-liberal and antidemocratic connotations. As a result, debates over conservatism within the United Kingdom were largely confined to the realm of the Conservative Party, which confidently embraced the label and was thus able to essentially monopolize the concept. The historical semantics of British conservatism therefore tended to follow the Conservative Party’s more general political trajectory quite closely—from the careful, consensus-oriented course under Macmillan to the failure of Heath’s modernization agenda, all the way to the full-on ideological onslaught of Thatcher and Thatcherism.

The book’s main originality can be found in its analysis of the West German case, to which it also devotes the majority of its pages. Here, the British case serves as a useful foil to highlight national particularities of “conservatism,” while also drawing out some broader characteristics that transcended national frameworks. In striking contrast to Britain, West Germany’s dominant center-right parties (the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union [CSU]) proved uneasy with the “conservatism” label after 1945 and thus initially tended to distance themselves as strongly as possible from it. Beyond the narrow realm of party politics, however, Steber uncovers a lively and vibrant West German debate over the manifold meaning(s) of conservatism already in the 1950s—but it was a debate that was fought as much by public intellectuals, churchmen, writers, or journalists as it was by party politicians. For the 1960s and 1970s, the book then identifies a gradual liberalization and increasingly confident appropriation of the term “conservatism” in West German politics, even if it remained heavily challenged by both the New Left and the New Right throughout the period under investigation. While the West German debate thus appears rather different to the British one at first sight, the book argues convincingly that British and West German conservatives nonetheless shared many similarities: above all, they seem to have felt “united in the vague sense of losing their language and relinquishing the interpretive authority of political concepts to the Left” (p. 362).

Perhaps most interesting to the general reader is the final part of the book, where Steber blends her comparative approach with an attempt at transnational history, looking at how conservative politicians in Britain and West Germany searched for, and at times wrestled over, a common language of conservatism in several bilateral as well as some wider European networks. Here, the book is able to show convincingly that there was indeed an on-going and vivid exchange between conservatives from both countries, driven by an honest desire to understand each other’s different national perspectives and trying to bridge conceptual and linguistic gaps. Yet, the extent of such transnational cooperation remained fairly limited even in its heyday during the 1970s and faded out quickly after both parties’ return to power in the early 1980s, which channeled bilateral contacts back to the governmental level.

Taken together, the book offers a highly sophisticated and erudite comparative history of conservatism in Britain and West Germany from 1945 to 1980, even if some of the complex and at times convoluted thoughts of its main protagonists—particularly on the German side—do not always make for light reading. While the book’s main contribution is undoubtedly its unprecedently thorough analysis of postwar conservatism in West Germany, it also uses the British case effectively to reveal the many layers and varieties of a key “concept in the political vocabulary of European modernity” (p. 426) that both transcended the nation-state and yet remained influenced by national peculiarities. It would have been interesting to take this story further into the 1980s and 1990s, where West German conservatives’ consensus-oriented policies increasingly came to stand at odds with the radical, at times almost revolutionary policies of the Thatcher government. But the book also raises some questions about today’s politics, at a time of rising neo-right populism all around the globe: With the British Conservatives thus far appearing quite ready to accommodate and embrace the changing discourse on the political right, are the German CDU/CSU parties eventually going to follow suit? And which role are notions of “conservatism” going to play in this much bigger reconfiguration of the political landscape?