By FOIA Research on

David Engels (b. 1979) is a Belgian-German extreme right-wing, Catholic historian, journalist, and publicist, who has garnered a considerable media clout. Although previously Engels pursued an academic career, laundering his arch-reactionary views into a barrage of publications, in the recent years his focus has markedly shifted to political journalism and activism.

Specialized in Roman history, in 2008 Engels was appointed chair of Roman history at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in Belgium, and is attached to the ULB ever since. In 2018, he was released from his Brussels chair to follow a call to a research professorship at the right-wing Instytut Zachodni (“Western Institute”) in Poznań, Poland.

A staunch adept of the right-wing dystopian writer Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), in 2017, Engels co-founded the Oswald Spengler Society which has gained notoriety for giving its 10,000-euro award to celebrities of the Right, such as Jordan Peterson and Michel Houellebecq, a close affiliate of Engels. Engels has written various texts on Spengler, and references him throughout his work, transporting Spengler’s speculations about civilization facing the end of the world to the present. In Engels’ view, Western Europe has been almost destroyed by mass immigration, Islamization, materialism, individualism, hedonism and the disintegration of the traditional family. As antidote, Engels recommends what he calls “Hesperialism,” a dictatorial makeover of Europe and a “collective return to Christianity.”1

Around 2013, Engels started to appear frequently as interview guest and lecturer, often at far-right events, but also on mainstream media. Although originally from Belgium, he has close contacts to extreme right-wing circles in Germany, and has appeared at events organized by the far-right Alternative for Germany party. However, Engels has also managed to insert himself into other political contexts, having given lectures to the European Social Democrats or the European People's Party.2

Engels has come to work with an array of far-right organizations in the past years, including the Institut Iliade (France), Academia Christiana (France), the Centro de Estudios Universitarios - Centro de Estudios, Formación y Análisis (CEU-CEFAS) (Spain), and the Library of Conservatism (Bibliothek des Konservatismus) (Germany).

He has edited and contributed to a multitude of European right-wing to far-right journals, particularly in Germany and France, among them: the German Sezession; Cato; Cicero; Die Tagespost; Junge Freiheit; Die Achse des Guten; Tichy's Einblick; the French New Right atlantico.fr; the Belgian Latomus - Revue d'études latines; the weekly Le Vif/L’Express; the Polish online newspaper Tygodnik Solidarność; and the Spanish New Right Tribuna del País Vasco.

Since 2021, Engels is a contributing editor of The European Conservative (TEC), an influential right-wing journal sponsored by the Fidesz government in Hungary. Through TEC’s tacit connections to the right-wing to far-right European Conservatives and Reformists group and party in the European Parliament, Engels has taken part in discussions of the so-called Working Group on Conservatism in Europe in 2023, whose goals include the drafting of a “conservative” manifesto. Engels keeps detailed track of his activities on his website, including over 360 public lectures, over 700 interviews, and almost 200 articles in magazines and journals from 2002 onwards.3

Several political scientists have qualified Engels’ work as right-wing extremist. Armin Pfahl-Traughber names Engels in his book Intellectual right-wing extremists as one of the “functionaries of the contemporary New Right.4 According to the political scientist Markus Linden, Engels acts as a link between conservative, right-wing and far-right milieus. He appears as an “apologist for the dictatorship” and conjures up “an anti-democratic and anti-pluralistic order.”5 The theologist Harald Lamprecht delivers a similar verdict, stating that Engels’ “illusion of a rebirth of Christianity” would in fact lead to an authoritarian regime. Lamprecht attests Engels an “open commitment to dictatorship,” for example with his “rather blunt demand for the complete abolition of religious freedom,” besides a complete “lack of understanding of individualized human rights.”6

Timeline

Education

Engels comes from the German-speaking community of Belgium in the eastern province of Liège. In an interview he stated that the internal conflict between his German affiliation and his Wallonian heritage compelled him to actively prioritize his European over his national identity.7

After finishing high school in 1997 at the Pater Damian Secondary School in Eupen, Belgium, from 1997 to 2002, Engels studied history, philosophy and economics at the university Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen (RWTH Aachen), Germany. On March 28, 2002, he finished his master degree with the thesis The Epitaphios of the Platonic Menexenus and its authorship.8

At Aachen University, from 2002 to 2005, he wrote his dissertation under Raban von Haehling with the title The Roman omen (753-27 BC): sources, terminology, commentary, historical development. His dissertation was funded by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes). From 2005 onward, Engels worked as an assistant to von Haehling, Chair of Ancient History at RWTH Aachen from 1995 until his retirement in 2008. Engels defended his thesis in 2006, and in 2007 received his doctoral degree in philosophy.8

In 2007, he started his habilitation thesis, Studies on the Seleucid empire, finalized the following year. Until today, the Seleucid Empire (312 BC – 63 BC) has remained of interest to Engels, a Greek power in West Asia during the Hellenistic period carved out of the remains of Alexander the Great’s Macedonian empire until its annexation by the Roman Republic in 63 BC. Where Engels’ fascination with the Seleucids comes from may be speculated, whose brutal kings and aristocratic class brought Hellenic culture to West Asia, fought constant fights against Ptolemaic Egypt, and suppressed Judaism.

In 2008, the year he finished his habilitation thesis, Engels was appointed chair of Roman history at the Free University of Brussels (ULB), and, as of 2023, is still among the academic staff.9 In 2009, he became editor of the Roman history section of the ancient studies journal Latomus, which has its administrative seat at ULB. Editor and director from 1990 to 2012 was Carl Deroux, whom Engels succeeded from 2012 to 2017. Currently, the journal is directed by Philippe Desy.

Research projects (2007-present)

In the years following his habilitation, Engels pursued an academic career at first, and from 2007 onwards, participated in several research projects, which already show Engels’ arch-reactionary imprimatur. His commitment to academia was, however, short-lived, and Engels markedly shifted his focus to political journalism and activism in the mid-2010s.

From 2007 to 2008, he led a research projectt ogether with Carla Nicolaye titled Ille operum custos: cultural-historical contributions to the ancient bee symbolism and its reception at the RTWA Aachen, whose results were published in 2008, dedicated to Raban von Haehling.10 Although a benign sounding title, the bee represented power and rule in many ancient societies. And it is this political connotation that the authors seem to be most interested in, as mentioned in the first paragraph of the introduction: “because the bee was considered a symbol of power in the (Roman) republican system.”11

In 2008, Engels started another research project alongside Lioba Geis and Michael Kleu, Between ideal and reality: rule in Sicily from antiquity to the early modern period, resulting in a publication in 2010.12 Also this publication deals with the question of rule and power, as the summary reads:13

How did rule function in Sicily in antiquity and the Middle Ages? What ideas and ideals of rule were used to take possession of the Mediterranean island? To what extent could individual concepts of rule be realized in practice? What reasons were responsible for the success or failure of the implementation of ideal concepts of rule?

From 2009 to 2013, Engels supervised a research project at ULB about the cultural-historical phenomenon of destruction, together with Didier Martens and Alexis Wilkin, whose results were published (La destruction dans l'histoire. Pratiques et discours).

At the end of 2010, Engels took part in the first Belgian Workshop in Ancient History dealing with the competition between religions in antiquity, which culminated in an anthology of the individual conference papers edited by Engels and Peter Van Nuffelen in 2014.

2010s

Engels’ increasing political involvement in the early and mid-2010s is reflected in his literary output and his personal relationships. And it was in this period that he intensified his focus on the right-wing dystopian writer Oswald Spengler, who pertained that history plays out in cycles.

Engels’ interest in Spengler reaches back to his early days in academia, when in June 2006, he gave a lecture on “Spengler, Hegel and the problem of free will in historical determinism,” in the framework of a colloquium organized by the research group “Hegel’s Natural Philosophy” at the University of Lübeck.14

Le déclin

In 2013, Engels published The decline: the crisis of the European Union and the fall of the Roman Republic with the Paris-based Éditions du Toucan, in which he compared the coming fate of the European Union with the fall of the Roman Empire.15 Prophesying the demise of the European Union due to an alleged identity crisis, the work drew heavily on Spengler. The book appeared in several languages: German (Europa Verlag Berlin, 2014), Croatian (Litteris, 2017), Hungarian (L’Harmattan Kiadó, 2017), Dutch (Blauwe Tijger, 2020), and Polish (Instytut Zachodni, 2022).16

In The decline, Engels compared the political situation in Europe with that of the late Roman Republic at the brink of collapse: in both cases there was a system-endangering divide between impoverished masses and a no longer democratically controlled elite. As antidote, he proposed a return to dictatorship in the form of “Caesarism” and the establishment of an authoritarian European “civilization state,” which should be lead by “a strong president, a 1920s-style dictator, or a general.”17 Engels recommended that the 1st century B.C. principate of Augustus may serve as an example, arguing that “some openly displayed tyranny can be better for the mental and political health of a society in the long term than the daily humiliation of an oligarchy disguised as a democracy.”18

According to the political scientist José Pedro Zúquete:19

Engels further believes that, as happened at the end of the Roman Republic, a period of “war” will follow in the coming decades, not as militarized as in the times of the Republic but pitting ethnic groups with different cultural and religion models against each other, leading eventually to a full social and political reorganization of the European continent. In the very near future “with suburbs slipping from state control, with landscapes dominated by paramilitary, ethnic or religious groups, with overwhelming criminality, with economic bankruptcy and complete political immobility”—amid such context—“the citizens of Europe will then gladly throw themselves into the arms of the first ruler who gives the continent a functioning social state, peace and order. A leader just like Emperor Augustus.” At such time, then, Europe will fulfill its “imperial destiny,” Engels said to Alain de Benoist in an interview for éléments pour la civilisation européenne.

Max Otte

Through his interest in Spengler, Engels got to know the German right-wing political operative Max Otte (*1964). In April 2014, the two held a lecture at an Oswald Spengler conference hosted by the Institute for Ancient History and Ancient Orient Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria.20 Their common interest in Spengler would lead to the creation of an eponymous society in 2017.

Otte is an economist and author with a considerable media clout, who has made a fortune as a fund manager. From 1991 until 2022, he was a member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Within the CDU, Otte was the federal chairman of the WerteUnion (Values Union) from May 2021 to January 2022, the most right-wing faction of the party, today led by former head of domestic intelligence, Hans-Georg Maaßen, who transformed it into a party in early 2024.

When the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party emerged in 2013, Otte started to advertise the AfD, all the while staying in the CDU for nine more years. Otte was even chairman of the advisory board of the AfD-affiliated Desiderius- Erasmus Foundation while still in the CDU. He thus served as a nexus between the two parties, although the CDU had anchored a “firewall” in its official party program that disallowed party functionaries to collaborate with the AfD. The case made headlines when Otte became the AfD’s candidate for the German presidential election in 2022 while still being a CDU member,21 upon which he was excluded from the party.22

In 2015, Engels published From Plato to Fukuyama: biologistic and cyclical concepts in the philosophy of history in antiquity and the West, assembled from a lecture series organized by Engels at ULB.23 The publication serves as a showcase for Engels’ favorite reactionary writers, all the while paying tribute to Spengler’s apocalyptic concept of historic cycles.

Library of Conservatism

Traces of Engels’ connection to the Berlin-based Library of Conservatism (Bibliothek des Konservatismus, BdK) go back to at least 2015. On April 27 that year he held a lecture titled “On the way to empire - the crisis of the European Union and the downfall of the Roman Republic,”24 organized by Norman Gutschow, author and local politician for the CDU in Pankow, at the time responsible for the public events of the BdK.25

The BdK is a far-right library and think tank, which hosts a collection of more than 30,000 books.26 The library can be traced back to the right-wing writer and publicist Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing (1927–2009), the wealthy scion of an old Bavarian family, who founded the bimonthly journal Criticón in 1970, which became a focal point for the New Right in Germany. The BdK opened doors in 2013, after the Hamburg shipowner Folkard Edler had bought an office building in Berlin’s Fasanenstrasse for 3.6 million euros and then transferred the building to the library foundation.27 Edler and his wife are also major donors and lenders to the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) and supporters of the right-wing weekly Junge Freiheit, to which Engels contributes regularly since around 2019.

In autumn 2016, Engels started to contribute a monthly column the Belgian weekly Le Vif/L’Express.28 In 2017, Engels published the fruits of his previous research on the Seleucid Empire under the title Benefactors, Kings, Rulers series in the Studia Hellenistica; followed by a publication in 2019 edited by Engels and Altay Coskun, Rome and the Seleucid East published by Éditions Latomus in Brussels.

Cato

In 2017, the year that the German New Right Cato was founded, Engels started to contributed articles to the magazine, the first one being titled “Cato’s Tragedy.”29 The magazine belongs to the Junge Freiheit publishing house, whose major shareholder is the far-right publicist Dieter Stein. Its office is located in the same building as the Library of Conservatism.30

Oswald Spengler Society (2017-present)

In 2017, Engels co-founded the Oswald Spengler Society (OSS) together with the German Max Otte and the Austrian political scientist Michael Thöndl, registered at Engels' address in Belgium.31 Since 2018, the OSS awards the Oswald Spengler Prize, endowed by Otte and worth 10,000 euros, to celebrities of the Right, including the writer Michel Houellebecq and the culture warrior Jordan Peterson.32 Engels has praised and defended Houellebecq in numerous articles,33 who has been accused of racism, misogyny and Islamophobia in his work.34 In 2020, under the leadership of Engels, the OSS launched its own journal, The Oswald Spengler Online Journal.35

Robert W. Merry

On the OSS board there are three Germans, a Belgian-German (Engels) and an American (Robert W. Merry) - all with an ultra-reactionary academic background. Merry was a US Army intelligence officer deployed as language-qualified counterintelligence agent in Germany. He wrote for the National Review and was editor of The American Conservative.36 He still serves on “The American Ideas Institute Board of Directors” of The American Conservative.37 Merry now splits his time between Montana and Langley.

Engels’ continued admiration for Oswald Spengler found expression in the 2018 publication The long shadow of Oswald Spengler, together with his colleagues from the OSS, Max Otte and Michael Thöndl, commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Spengler’s The Decline of the West.38 The volume was the first publication of the OSS. Following the publication, in December 2018, Engels received an invitation to attend a discussion round directed by the French New Right ideologue Alain de Benoist in commemoration of The Decline of the West.39

Instytut Zachodni

Since 2018, Engels has been released from his Brussels chair to follow a call to a research professorship at the Instytut Zachodni (Western Institute) in Poznań as a chief analyst.40 Founded in 1945 by members of the Polish nationalist underground organization Ojczyzna (Homeland), the institute continued its activities throughout Poland’s Soviet-aligned period. According to the German historian Gregor Thum, in its early years, the Western Institute promoted the notion of an everlasting German-Polish conflict and was driven by explicit political goals, actively promoting Polish territorial claims.41 Although the institute saw some cutbacks during the Soviet period, it remained a stronghold of the anti-Soviet opposition, and seamlessly carried over into the post-Soviet period, currently being under the control of the Polish Prime Minister. After Engels’ accession to the Western Institute, his academic output has visibly decreased, and he changed his focus to political journalism.42

Erklärung 2008

In March 2018, Engels signed a joint declaration (Erklärung 2008) together with other far-right figureheads decrying the alleged damage that immigration does to Germany.43 The document first appeared on the internet with 34 signatories, and subsequently, it was formally transformed into a petition presented to the Bundestag.44 The declaration was notably signed by several of Engels’ affiliates: Karlheinz Weißman, co-founder and publisher of Cato; Dieter Stein, founder and managing director of Junge Freiheit, and involved in the Berlin-based Library of Conservatism; and last but not least, Max Otte, who in 2017 co-founded the Oswald Spengler Society with Engels.

Renovatio Europae & Que faire?

In early 2019, in his capacity at the Polish Instytut Zachodni, Engels edited an important pan-European right-wing publication called Renovatio Europae: for a Hesperialist renewal of Europe that subsequently appeared in several languages (German, English, French, Spanish and Italian).45 The co-authors include notable TEC’s editor-in-chief Alvino-Mario Fantini, as well as Max Otte.

Various translations of Renovatio Europae, edited by David Engels.

In Renovatio Europae, Engels coined the term “Hesperialism” which he defines as “patriotic commitment to a united Europe, which … should not only be based on universalist values, but also on conservative values.”46 The “term is derived from the Greek word for the far west of the known world and intended to be the opposite of ‘Europeanism,’ which is usually taken to mean uncritical support for the current European Union.”46 For Engels, the values on which a common identity could be based do not include democracy, separation of powers and pluralism, but instead require “a deep anchoring in the cultural, historical and spiritual subconscious of a past that has been divided for centuries.”47

Complementing Renovatio Europae, Engels published What to do? To live with the decline of Europe, whose title is based on the novel What is to be Done ’s by the Russian nihilist Nikolay Chernyshevsky (1828–1889), in which Engels provides another “decline of Europe” narrative.48 While Renovatio Europae was to outline the political response to that alleged decline, Que faire? is intended as “individual survival aid for Europe lovers” (“guide de survie à l'usage des amoureux de l’Europe”), as Engels explained to Le Figaro.49 The book was translated to Spanish (Editorial EAS, 2019), German (Renovamen-Verlag, 2020), Dutch (Blue Tiger Media, 2021), Bulgarian (Iztok-Zapad, 2021), Polish (Tygodnik Solidarność, 2022), and Italian (Il cerchio, 2023).50

The European Conservative

In 2019, Engels started to contribute to the prominent right-wing journal The European Conservative (TEC), when it was still published by the Center for European Renewal. An early article, “The Spengler Society and Michel Houellebecq,” is dated February 19, 2019.51 In May 2019, the article “Towards ‘Hesperialism’” followed, in which Engels notes:52 “as true Europeans, we … know that the real importance of the fight does not lie in achieving success but in being loyal to our beliefs and committed to our ideals until the bitter end — for the sake of the West.”

Article by David Engels in The European Conserative, no. 16 (Summer/Fall 2019).

TEC is tacitly associated with the European Conservative and Reformist group and party in the European Parliament, and its editorial board comprises influential individuals from the Right, particularly the Catholic orbit. TEC has a history that stretches back to 2008 when it served as the newsletter of the Center for European Renewal. However, it underwent a demerger, and since 2021 has been published as quarterly print journal in Hungary with the support of the Fidesz-funded Batthyány Lajos Foundation.53 After its relaunch in 2021, Engels became one of TEC’s contributing editors.54 TEC is published in collaboration with three other organizations, including the Berlin-based Library of Conservatism, to which Engels has close ties, and Nazione Futura, an Italian think tank and journal affiliated with the far-right Fratelli d’Italia party.55

Alternative for Germany

On May 14, 2019, held a lecture titled “Occident or European Union” as part of the “Citizen Talks” of the AfD parliamentary group of the German Bundestag, May 14, 2019, organized by Udo Hemmelgarn and Alice Weidel.14 A week later, on May 21, 2019, David Engels appeared as interviewee in a talkshow on the Russian state broadcasting network RT Deutsch, titled “Europe ahead of the big crisis.”56

2020s

In 2020, Engels wrote the foreword for Julien Rochedy’s Nietzsche the contemporary: introduction to the philosophy of Nietzsche (Nietzsche der Zeitgemäße: Einführung in die Philosophie Nietzsches), published by the German far-right Jungeuropa-Verlag. Rochedy tries to make Nietzsche cool again, as evident from the cover and the book summary, which reads:57

Hated by leftists and liberals for his aristocratic teachings and merciless honesty, right-wingers also have their problems with the prophet of the superman – too hostile to tradition, too individualistic, too unbourgeois. … This book is not only a knowledgeable, resolutely Right introduction to Nietzsche’s world of thought, but also a general attack on the “slave morality” of the “humanitarian society.”

Since 2020, Engels has also been writing a column in the Polish Tygodnik Solidarność, a Polish right-wing weekly magazine, started and published by the Solidarność movement on April 3, 1981.58 As of 2024, that collaboration is still ongoing. The publishing house of the weekly also sponsored a polish translation of Que Faire? in 2022.

Constitution to a Confederation of European Nations

In 2020, Engels authored a 14-point constitution for a new confederate Europe in the style of the American Constitution, published in English in The European Conservative. “A Document for our Age - Preamble for a Constitution to a Confederation of European Nations” starts out with a pledge before God, followed by an array of extreme right-wing mainstays: the protection of “spiritual and material heritage”; maintaining “the tradition to Judeo-Christian culture”; anti-abortion rhetoric (“to protect human life in all its stages of evolution”); pleas for more national sovereignty and subsidiarity; singling out the traditional family model as “fundamental basis of European Society” while taking into account the “natural constitution” of the sexes; an education “in the spirit of tradition”; the protection of property rights etc.59

“A Document for our Age - Preamble for a Constitution to a Confederation of European Nations” by David Engels, published in The European Conservative.

In January 2021, Engels penned another Spengler-themed volume, “Oswald Spengler: Work, Interpretation, Reception,” consisting of a collection of selected writings on his hero, published by the Kohlhammer-Verlag.60 That month, also a collection of Engels’ political essays published in the Spanish New Right La Tribuna del País Vasco appeared in book form by the journal’s publishing house under the title “The Last Westerner” (El último occidental).61

Academia Christiana

Academia Christian logo

On May 8, 2021, Engels recorded his first public talk for Academia Christiana (AC) in Germany, titled “What to do?.”14 AC, established in 2013, is a far-right and Catholic fundamentalist cadre organization that offers both ideological and militaristic training. It identifies itself as “Catholic and identitarian” as it aims to fuse monarchists, neofascists, and religious fundamentalists into a unified movement.

AC is supervised by a group of Catholic fundamentalist priests, primarily affiliated with the Institute of the Good Shepherd and the Priestly Society of St. Pierre, both of which are offshoots of the Catholic fundamentalist Society of St. Pius X. AC clerics and the fraternities they hail from belong to the far-right faction within the Catholic Church which opposes the Vatican II liturgical reforms. Instead, they continue to uphold the Latin (Tridentine) Mass, which is also practiced by AC.

The founder and leader of AC, Victor Aubert, a devotee to the Latin Rite who can often seen in military attire, embodies the new crusader that AC intends to form. AC’s vice-president, Julien Langella, was drawn to the far-right monarchist Action Française in his youth, and in 2011 played a pivotal role in establishing Génération Identitaire, the French division of the identitarian movement.

As pictures and posts on AC’s website and social media profiles show, almost every AC event includes priests—from summer camps to conferences; and that, under the auspices of priests, neo-Nazis are visiting shooting ranges or doing martial arts training.

Ever since 2021, Engels has appeared on numerous AC conferences and as interview partner:14

  • “Que faire? Vivre avec le déclin de l'Europe, colloque,” Academia Christiana,” Pierrefitte-en-Auge, August 16-22, 2021 (Org. C.-E. Gauer)
  • Academia Christiana, Angers, August 8, 2022 (Org. A. Le Morvan)
  • “Reconquérir les âmes et le territoire par la sécession,” Contribution to the Conference "Sécession ou reconquête?,” Academia Christiana, Paris, January 5, 2022 (Org. Victor Aubert)
  • “Transcender le politique. Interview avec David Engels,” Academia Christiana, May 17, 2023, https://youtu.be/MdnnpdvJkks.
  • “Pour une histoire comparée de l’art,” Académia Christiana, Angers, August 18, 2023.

Since autumn 2021, Engels is listed as contributing editor of The European Conservative (TEC), which moved its seat to Hungary that year, after it had institutionally decoupled from the Center for European Renewal. Since then, TEC receives funds from the Batthyány Lajos Foundation (BLF), one of the main channels through which the Fidesz government funnels money to sympathetic organizations.62 As of summer 2023, the European Conservative Nonprofit Ltd. has received around 4.6 million dollars (1.68 billion forints) by the BLF.63 64 With a considerably increased staff, TEC appears in a glossy and bibliophile edition four times a year. In his editorial role, Engels has contributed numerous articles to TEC ever since.

Europa Aeterna

As of 2022, Engels was a full professor at the University Academy of Gorzów in Poland.65 That year, he edited a follow-up publication to Renovatio Europae, the collective volume Europa Aeterna, outlining an Identitarian vision of Europe as an alternative to the universalist values formulated in the Treaty of Lisbon.66 The book also appeared in German in the Manuscript publishing house the same year.

CEU-CEFAS

In early March 2022, Engels spoke at an international congress titled “Towards a Christian Renewal of Europe” (Hacia unarenovación cristiana de Europa), organized by the Centro de Estudios Universitarios - Centro de Estudios, Formación y Análisis (CEU-CEFAS) in Madrid, Spain.67 Other TEC speakers included Alvino-Mario Fantini (editor-in-chief, TEC) and Francesco Giubilei (TEC, Fondazione Tatarella, Nazione Futura, Italy). Also TEC sympathizers from Budapest, Balázs Orban (Mathias Corvinus Collegium) and Rod Dreher (Danube Institute) were on the roster.

CEU-CEFAS is a think tank based at the Catholic San Pablo-CEU University, which was established by the Asociación Católica de Propagandistas (f. 1908), an influential arch-Catholic organization that had been operating throughout Spain’s fascist era. The think tank is directed by Elio A. Gallego, a law professor at CEU trying to leave his mark on Spanish family policy and legislation in line with Catholic doctrine.68

From March 23-24, 2022, Engels spoke at the National Conservatism Conference, organized by the American Edmund Burke Foundation, on “European Renewal Through National and Cultural Patriotism.”69

Institut Iliade

On April 2, 2022, Engels appeared as a speaker at a conference by the French far-right think tank Institut Iliade, titled “Restore Politics: Identity, Sovereignty and the Sacred.”70 Among the other speakers were notably Renaud Camus, an advocate of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, as well as Martin Sellner, the head of the Austrian Identitarian movement.

Program of the Colloquium Iliade in 2022.

The establishment of the Iliad Institute allegedly took place during the summer solstice of 2014 on Mount Olympus, fulfilling the final wishes of Dominique Venner.71 Venner, among the most influential far-right ideologues in France during recent decades, symbolically committed suicide in 2013 at the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris.72 Among the co-founders of the Iliad Institute are notably two former members of the influential New Right think tank and cadre organization GRECE, Jean-Yves le Gallou and Philippe Conrad. In 2022, Armand Berger published a book with the Iliad Institute and La Nouvelle Librairie titled “Tolkien, Europe and Tradition, Civilization in the Light of the Imagination,” which he dedicated it Engels.73

In May 2022, an important milestone in Engels’ career occurred. Since 2018, Engels had set his eyes at presenting his own system of “historical morphology” inspired by Hegel, Spengler, and the contemporary Italian-born German Hegelian Vittorio Hösle. The results of that project were presented for the first time in 2022 at the Institut de France to an invited audience.74

Italian Conservatism

From September 30 to October 2, 2022, Engels appeared at the Italian Conservatism conference, an Italian iteration of the National Conservatism Conference series. He was part of a panel discussion alongside the British John O'Sullivan and the Hungarian Miklos Szántho.

A former vice-president of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (2008–2012), John O'Sullivan, has made Budapest his home since the early 2010s. Once a speechwriter of Margaret Thatcher and until recently editor-at-large of the right-wing National Review, O’Sullivan created the influential Danube Institute in Budapest, funded by the Fidesz government through the Batthyány Lajos Foundation (f. 1991).63 He also serves as editor or editorial adviser to several journals, including The Hungarian Review (f. 2010), The Hungarian Conservative (f. 2021) and The European Conservative (f. 2021), all funded by the publishing house of the Batthyány Lajos Foundation.75

Miklos Szántho is the director of the Center for Fundamental Rights, which hosts the annual CPAC Hungary conference, the Hungarian iteration of the American CPAC conference. Szántho is also chairman of the board of the Central European Press and Media Foundation, which brought over 500 private media outlets under the control of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's allies. The European Conservative was a co-host of the conference at the Hotel Quirinale in Rome, alongside the Tatarella Foundation and Nazione Futura. Various TEC figures were featured on the roster besides Engels, including Alvino-Mario Fantini, John O'Sullivan, Francesco Giubilei, Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, and Hélène de Lauzun. Also present was Lorenzo Fontana of the Italian Lega party; Jorge Buxadé of the Spanish far-right Vox party; Fratelli d'Italia MEP Vincenzo Sofo; André Ventura of the Portuguese far-right Chega party; Italian Minister of Culture Gennaro Sangiuliano; and Balázs Orbán, Political Director of Viktor Orbán since 2021.76

On October 8, 2022, Engels took part in the 10-year anniversary of the Library of Conservatism (Bibliothek des Konservatismus, BdK).77 The event was headed off by Dieter Stein who recalled the history of the library, particularly the eminent role of Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing. BdK director and member of TEC’s editorial board, Wolfgang Fenske, then presented the current activities of the BdK. An éminence grise of the Vanenburg meetings and the CER, Andreas Kinneging, held the keynote speech, “Conservative and national? A necessary differentiation.” After that, two panel discussions took place, that included Engels, TEC editor-in-chief Alvino-Mario Fantini, and Gergely Pröhle, director of the Otto von Habsburg Foundation in Budapest.

Event commemorating the 10-year anniversary of the Library of Conservatism on October 8, 2022. From left to right: Andreas Kinneging, Egon Flaig, Wolfgang Fenske, Karlheinz Weißmann and David Engels.

Image Source
https://www.bdk-berlin.org/in-eigener-sache/der-k…

The connections between TEC and the BdK is not surprising, given that Schrenck-Notzing had taken part in the first Vanenburg meeting in 2006 that led to the creation of the Center for European Renewal, the first publisher of TEC, in which he subsequently was involved.78 The BdK’s current director, Wolfgang Fenske, sits on TEC’s editorial board since at least 2021.

In November 2022, TEC co-hosted an event together with the Catholic Identitarian youth organization Academia Christiana, alongside the Iliad Institute, La Nouvelle Librairie, Breizh.info, TVLibertés, and Le Nouveau Présent Hebdo. The event was advertised on Facebook as follows:79

The 2nd Academia Christiana conference will be held in Paris on Saturday, November 5th. An exciting event not to be missed! Secession or Reconquest? A central question that every conservative must keep in mind today. Should we run for elections or start a family? How to be in the world without being of the world?

Academia Christiana, founded in 2013, is a far-right and Catholic fundamentalist organization that offers both ideological and militaristic training. It identifies itself as “Catholic and identitarian” and aims to bring together individuals with monarchist, neofascist, and religious fundamentalist backgrounds, in order to create a unified christofascist movement. In December 2023, the French Interior Minister announced that he had submitted a list of far-right organizations to the government whose prohibition should be considered.80

In November 2022, Academia Christiana co-hosted an event together with The European Conservative, the Iliade Institute, La nouvelle Librairie, Breizh.info, TVLibertés, and Le Nouveau Présent Hebdo, titled "Secession or Reconquest?"

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https://www.facebook.com/TheEuroCon/photos/pb.100…
Working Group on Conservatism in Europe

In March 2023, David Engels and TEC’s Alvino-Mario Fantini and took part in the second workshop of the Working Group on Conservatism in Europe (WGCE), as reported on TEC’s Facebook page, which mentions that six organizations took part in the meeting.81 The WGCE is an informal subgroup of New Direction (ND), the think tank of the right-wing to far-right European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group and party in the European Parliament. The event was organized by ND in cooperation with Ofir Haivry (Herzl Institute, Edmund Burke Foundation) and the Hungary-based Danube Institute.

Founded by Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) in 2009, ND is a fiscally liberal, right-wing and Eurosceptic think tank, which lobbies and networks on behalf of ECR. Ties to ND had already been established by Alvino-Mario Fantini, who had appeared as a speaker at ND events in 2021 and 2022.82 WGCE’s goals include the drafting of a “conservative” manifesto, presumably ahead of the upcoming 2024 European elections83 —although the “conservative” tag is highly (and intentionally) misleading, since ECR consists mostly of far-right member parties by now.

Judging from the spotty data situation, WGCE gathers the inner core of a much larger network of organizations, think tanks, and journals, to cement the ideological reorientation of ECR, which has drifted further and further to the Right. Particularly ever since the UK’s Conservative Party ceased to be a dominating force due to the Brexit, parties, such as the Polish Law and Justice, the Spanish Vox party, and the Italian Fratelli d'Italia, are taking leading role.

WGCE participants hail predominantly from think tanks of national parties associated with ECR, such as Fundación Disenso (Spain) of the far-right Vox party; the Fratelli d'Italia-affiliated Nazione Futura and Fondazione Tatarella; or Oikos of the far-right Sweden Democrats. But they also include members of sympathizing non-European organizations, such as the US-based Edmund Burke Foundation or the Israeli Herzl Institute, both pro-Zionist organizations.

At the March 2023 WGCE event, among the approximately 17 attendees were, besides Engels: Alvino-Mario Fantini (Editor-in-chief, The European Conservative, USA & Austria); Ofir Haivry (President, Herzl Institute; distinguished senior fellow, Edmund Burke Foundation, Israel); Robert Tyler (New Direction, Senior Policy Adviser, United Kingdom); Gabriela Garibay Márin (Fundación Disenso, Spain)84 ; Gát Ákos Bence (Danube Institute, Hungary); David Martin Jones (Danube Institute, UK & Australia).85 Although some of the faces on the pictures available are not clearly discernible, there is a strong likelihood that the Vienna meeting also included: Francesco Giubilei (President, Tatarella Foundation, Nazione Futura, Italy) and Juan Ángel Soto Gómez (Director of Operations, Fundación Disenso, Spain).86

On May 17, 2023, Engels was interviewed by Academia Christiana, the French Catholic fundamentalist and Identitarian group.87 In July 2023, Engels took part in an Academia Christiana event as a speaker, with a lecture titled “Abandoning modernity.”88 When the French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin announced in mid-December that Academia Christiana was placed on a short list of organizations to be banned by the government, Engels wrote several articles in defense of the organization.89

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