Conservatives in postwar Western Europe were excellent networkers and frequent border crossers. This is the key insight of Johannes Großmann's major study of transnational networks of conservative politicians, businessmen, and intellectuals. Großmann has sifted through documents from more than thirty archives in eight countries to “reconstruct” a “comprehensive picture” (4, 13–14) of four conservative organisations: Comité International de Défense de la Civilisation Chrétienne (CIDCC), Centre Européen de Documentation et d'Information (CEDI), Institut d’Études Politiques Vaduz, and Le Cercle, a discussion forum initiated by the Parisian lawyer Jean Violet—and the subject of the book's strongest chapter. These organizations operated, to some extent, like secret societies: they were removed from public view, but they provided transnational spaces of communication for conservatives in Western Europe and beyond.

The geographical and chronological scope of the study is impressive, covering France, Spain, (West) Germany, and many other countries, and encompassing the entire period from 1945 to the post-Cold War era. Großmann offers a wealth of information about why these organizations were formed, how they were financed, who their leaders and members were, when and where they met, which topics were discussed at their meetings, as well as what functions they performed for their stakeholders. Over a nearly fifty-year timespan, more than 3,500 people were involved in their activities, with, for example, 15–20 per cent of CEDI members drawn from the aristocracy. Judging by the book's extensive index, well over a thousand individuals make an appearance here, some of them in the form of short, lexicon-style biographies. This does not always make for exciting reading—the exotic allure of some of the venues that hosted meetings, such as El Escorial in Madrid, notwithstanding. But the result of Großmann's painstaking research is a well-structured and clearly presented handbook that will surely be the standard reference work on these organizations for years to come.

In addition to providing encyclopedic information on the inner workings of transnational conservative networks, Großmann's book also illuminates certain facets of the evolution of conservative ideas, beliefs, and preoccupations in postwar Western Europe. The critical importance of anti-communism as a recurring theme and integrative ideology throughout the Cold War is highlighted here, but also perceptible are ideological shifts from an anti-liberal, aristocratic notion of a Catholic Abendland and civilisation chrétienne to a (grudging) acceptance of parliamentary democracy and an embrace of market economics. Meanwhile, conservative preoccupations shifted in geographic terms from East Central Europe to Latin America and Africa.

Großmann places much emphasis on the adoption of “neoconservative” beliefs in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which was accompanied by a rapprochement between Continental and Anglo-American conservatives. The former agenda of “rechristianization” gave way to libertarian attacks on the welfare state, and the goal of defending Christian civilization became increasingly overshadowed by a desire to defend individual freedom. But these shifts were neither linear nor universal among the conservatives upon whom Großmann focuses. Indeed, though conservatives increasingly reconciled themselves to an embrace of “Western values,” authoritarian inclinations had by no means been consigned to the past by the 1970s and 1980s, and boundaries to the far right remained porous.

What, then, was the significance of these elite groups? This question lurks in the background of the book. The author briefly addresses it at the end of the study and offers two answers. First, through their “private foreign policy” (a phrase from the book's subtitle), organizations such as the CEDI helped pave the way for Spain's integration into the European Economic Community (EEC); they also provided a forum for Gaullist politicians to advance their vision of a “Europe of Fatherlands.” The CEDI and the Vaduz Institute may also have facilitated Britain's negotiations to join the EEC, and members of Le Cercle may have helped establish the demand for a “freer movement of people and ideas” as an integral part of the “Western” agenda at the 1970s Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. The author is well aware, however, that it is difficult to locate hard evidence for these claims, and therefore places more emphasis on a second point: elite conservative circles such as the CEDI and Le Cercle acted as agencies of “socialization,” fostering cross-border contacts and intellectual exchange, thereby prompting intellectual change and the transformation of conservative thought. This is an interesting hypothesis, but, as an argument, it is not borne out by the more than five hundred pages of organizational history. In fact, readers may find themselves longing for more information about the webs of belief that manifested themselves at the numerous meetings and congresses that, it is suggested here, were of a “high intellectual standard” (167).

This is, admittedly, a tall order, given the scarcity of information available on what was exactly discussed at many of these intimate gatherings. Yet, the book does not quite illuminate either the effect that these meetings exerted on what conservatives subsequently thought and did. The main currency exchanged at these gatherings seems to have been information—information that could be used as political capital back home. But how was this capital used after conservatives returned from one of their retreats, whether at El Escorial or at Wildbad Kreuth? The answer to that question remains largely shadowed in mystery. Johannes Großmann has nevertheless written a meticulously researched and wide-ranging study that makes a major contribution to the history of transnational organizations during the Cold War and lays the groundwork on which future scholars can build.