This chapter discusses why sexuality has become the site of a new “Cold War” and what are its new elements. Now, a fully-fledged illiberal program is offering an alternative to liberal cultural, social, and political politics. The new political actors fighting for redefining sexuality are capturing states using democratic or quasi-democratic methods to introduce new forms of governance as alternatives to liberal values. The chapter analyses the roots of and actors in these attacks. The example of Russia shows how the recent and ongoing war against Ukraine has changed previous assumptions and made alliances and allegiances very clear. The soft power of Putin”s Russia has been instrumental in the fight for “traditional values” as an inexpensive and effective political tool to undermine liberal values and the European Union. This matters not only because Russia has created an alternative, illiberal political order to liberal human rights over the past decade, but also because it has become an international actor, financing local and international NGOs to disrupt and undermine liberal states” values and activities around the world. The chapter closes with discussing how the appropriation of liberal values combined with emptying their meanings to legitimize a new war of Russia shows that we are really facing a turning point in our history.

There is not a single populism but diverse populisms which respond to different local concerns. However, most populisms are configured around at least two of the following societal concerns: (1) a sense of economic insecurity and status anxiety; (2) xenophobic attitudes toward ‘Others’, in particular migrants and refugees; (3) disenchantment with incumbent political elites, combined with the perception that the establishment is arrogant, remote and insensitive to the needs of “real people”; (4) resentment against globalization, internationalism, and renewed support for nationalism (economic and other); (5) cultural and religious resentment, expressed in anti-modernist, anti-Enlightenment and anti-secularist views; and (6) impatience with liberal constraints upon government, and frustration with checks and balances that are viewed as institutional obstacles to “getting things done”. It is emphasized that in exploring the causes of successful populism one must focus not only on the "demand side" but also on the "supply side" of political populism.

This chapter surveys how Decadent writers engaged with contemporary politics. It defines the Decadents as anti-modernists drawn to modernity in literary form but deeply resistant to modernity in social and political life. Like other anti-modernists they channelled their frustrations into dreams of idealized pasts or utopian futures and like them they fulminated loudly against the prevailing order. The chapter considers Decadent engagements with politics in terms of three key examples: the use by writers in the movement of tropes from the tradition of republican political theory; their enthusiasm for elite, underground and countercultural communities like the eighteenth-century libertines that provide historical alternatives to contemporary politics; and recurrent images of crowds, political protest and political forms of writing (like the manifesto) in their works, which comment more directly on the age. The chapter argues that Decadent writing arose from and responded to the politics of its historical moment, one rife with real and imagined political disorder and one that demanded the imagination of alternative possibilities for expression and association.

This chapter offers a basic survey of the role of the popes and their administrations in the early twentieth century. We start by outlining the pontificate of Pius X; next we consider the evolution of the papacy in an era marked by the two World Wars, the global economic recession, the rise of secularism, and the threat of totalitarian regimes in the decades before Vatican II. Our emphasis throughout is on the central and universal leadership of Catholicism in its capacity as the doctrinal, pastoral, juridical, and diplomatic center of the Roman church.