Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute.
Samuel Huntington, the Harvard professor famous for his “clash of civilizations” thesis, summarily declared shortly after 9/11 that “Osama bin Laden has given the West back its common identity.” His insight was that the assertion of incommensurate values by others entails a reaffirmation of one’s own.
With this in mind, three years ago I wrote in Noema that the challenge today which affirms the values that define open societies, no longer comes from scattered fanatics chasing a medieval mirage in the sands of Arabia. The clash this time is with fully consolidated, self-proclaimed “civilizational states,” as Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China push back against the universalist claims of a liberal world order. That pushback, in turn, is prompting the West, too, to conceive of its presence in the world in civilizational terms.
The remarkable twist by 2025 is that the pushback against open-society liberalism as a governing philosophy and guiding framework for global order is now coming from within the West, driven by those at the helm of its leading power, the United States.
Indeed, defining what our civilization is and what it stands for today divides vast constituencies who hold conflicting visions of the good life. How did we arrive at this gaping cleavage where a common worldview once prevailed, and what does it portend?
Deculturation Of The West
In his deeply insightful book, “The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics And The Empire of Norms,” the French political scientist Olivier Roy traces the origins of today’s pushback in the West to the ethos of the “desiring individual” that arose with the youth rebellion of the 1960s. That ethos, which sought liberation from the staid shackles of historically inherited and dominant traditions, coursed through all aspects of society over its long march through established norms.
More than transforming what could once still be called “mainstream culture,” argues Roy, what we have witnessed instead is wholesale “deculturation.”
Generalized norms considered “self-evident” and implicitly understood, he posits, have virtually vanished with the erosion of social authority deemed to be oppressive. In that decontextualized vacuum, the behavioral codes of diverse, often “self-chosen,” identities are explicitly and aggressively asserted in a bid for recognition. In short, norms without normality.
The cultural wars we are experiencing today, as Alexandre Lefebvre observed recently in Noema, are precisely a battle over who gets to normalize the norms for the whole of society.
The Pope Versus Madonna
Roy recounts the stumbling effort to define European culture when a new constitution for the European Union was considered in 2000. Was Europe a “secularized Christian culture” rooted in “natural law, family and gender complementarity?” Or were its principal cultural pillars “the liberal values that have become dominant since the 1960s: sexual freedom, feminism, gender fluidity, LGBTQ rights, etc.?”
When the conservative pontiff John Paul II weighed in on that European debate, I referred to this juxtaposition as “the Pope versus Madonna” (the pop singer).
In the end, the Christian reference was rejected, in Roy’s surmise, since “part and parcel of the liberal project is deculturation,” which rejects identity embedded in any holistic or organicist context bequeathed by the historical past. The default substitute was “the European way of life,” vaguely defined in lowest-common-denominator terms such as “freedom and democracy.”
It is clear now, however, that nothing fundamental was settled.
“Family, faith and nation,” as in earlier times, have all these years later emerged as the rallying cry of those re-ascendant constituencies across the West associated with “secularized Christian culture,” including the more dogmatic practicing faithful such as U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance. Their implicit claim, as Oswald Spengler famously put it in his 1918 classic, “The Decline of The West,” is that tradition is what gives a civilization its form. In the absence of form, moral disorder and nihilism take over.
This pushback, which has taken the shape of a “sovereigntist” and “nativist” revolt against liberalizing global elites, paradoxically, mirrors them by aligning with like-minded forces across national borders.
As U.S. President Donald Trump himself put it in a speech delivered in Poland in 2017, “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?”
Following up on what this means in practice, the current Trump administration’s senior advisor for the U.S. State Department’s Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, Samuel Samson, has called for “civilizational allies in Europe” to combat “an aggressive campaign against Western civilization itself” from within.
“The pushback against open-society liberalism … is now coming from within the West, driven by those at the helm of its leading power, the United States.”
This campaign, according to Samson, entails tolerating large inflows of immigrants, censoring what is considered hate speech and fake news on digital media, labeling far right traditionalist groups as “extremists,” banning political figures like France’s Marine Le Pen from running for office over financial scandals and arresting protestors outside abortion clinics in the U.K.
He goes on: “Americans are familiar with these tactics. Indeed, a similar strategy of censorship, demonization, and bureaucratic weaponization was utilized against President Trump and his supporters. What this reveals is that the global liberal project is not enabling the flourishing of democracy. Rather, it is trampling democracy, and Western heritage along with it, in the name of a decadent governing class afraid of its own people.
“… A Europe that replaces its spiritual and cultural roots, that treats traditional values as dangerous relics, and that centralizes power in unaccountable institutions is a Europe less capable of standing firm against external threats and internal decay.”
The Trump Revolution Comes To Europe
The political implications of this West-wide cleavage are now becoming manifest. A recent poll of 16,000 individuals in 12 European countries conducted by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) found that the victory of Trump’s MAGA movement has changed the nature of Europe’s domestic politics as well as its geopolitical standing.
As Mark Leonard and Ivan Krastev interpret the poll, “Almost overnight, the bloc’s far right has gone from passionate defenders of national sovereignty against the threat of a federalist EU to the vanguard of a transnational movement that advocates a sort of civilizational nationalism. Conversely, many mainstream parties — or, rather, the ex-globalists — have recast themselves as the new sovereigntists, defending national dignity against what they perceive to be ideological interference from Washington.”
They continue: “Countries that appear to be most skeptical of America today seem to be the ones that were the most Atlanticist yesterday, like the U.K., Germany and Denmark.”
According to the ECFR data, a majority of those supporting every one of the 10 far-right parties polled, “think Trump’s reelection will be good for the U.S., and view his actions with sympathy and excitement — much like the bloc’s far-right leaders, who are copying his policies on everything from immigration to blowing up national bureaucracies.
“The result of all this seems to be the emergence of an ideological transatlantic relationship, no longer dividing the continent into pro- and anti-U.S. countries but rather pro- and anti-Trump political parties.”
The long-standing cultural sympathies of Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Hungary’s Viktor Orban with MAGA are gaining further adherents with the rising fortunes of fellow travelers in the core nations of Europe — the AfD in Germany and the National Rally in France. Meloni explicitly speaks of defending Western civilization, the pillars of which she defines as “Greek philosophy, Roman Law and Christian humanism.”
Whether these attitudes will be sustainable in the face of American protectionist policies that would harm the bottom line of “family and nation” in Europe remains to be seen. “If people turn against Trump and his politics, these parties will be the biggest losers,” Leonard and Krastev caution. They draw this historical analogy: “Their support depends on the U.S. leader in the same way support for Western European Communist parties depended on how people viewed the Soviet Union and its policies during the Cold War.”
Putting Civility Back In Civilization
One can certainly hope that these crosscurrents upending the West’s sense of itself will find a level of civility in which cultural warriors on all sides shed the excesses that are driving social division to the breaking point.
In a recent Noema interview and Futurology podcast, Frank Fukuyama argued that the fervent reaction of illiberalism would be dampened by a return from so-called “woke” to “classical” liberalism. For him, that means treating all people as “universal rights bearers” instead of “members of particular identity groups — with special privileges carved out for them.”
Yet, when the stakes are as high as defining the values and norms to live by, one can all too easily imagine escalation into a debilitating clash within the West that is a post-modern version of The Thirty Years’ War between Protestants and Catholics in Europe that also raged across borders. This time, the chaos would be sown by viral social media rather than the movable type of the Gutenberg printing press.
When all that collective enmity finally exhausted itself, the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 sought to establish civil peace through a new order based on national sovereignty and tolerance of the differences between the two dominant religions.
Centuries on, that historical arrangement has proven too small to inhabit in an age of planetary awareness, global economic interdependence and the ever-greater diversity resulting from the positive freedom of self-realization cultivated in open societies — not to speak of the normative permutations that will appear with synthetic biology and the application of AI.
Just as in the 17th century, the only passage out of endless strife, should our societies head that way, would entail a novel constellation of sovereign political jurisdictions among which plural values and norms can be accommodated instead of pressed into singular conformity. Philosophers like Lefebvre or John Gray envision a kind of cultural federalism.
Whether such a modus vivendi can be achieved, or not, will determine what becomes of the West as a common civilizational presence in the world.
