The West: Unique or Universal?
Further thoughts on the new National Security Strategy.
The reverberations from the new National Security Strategy (NSS)—published only a week ago—continue to echo throughout the trans-Atlantic national security establishment, not least due to the President’s explosive (is he capable of any other kind?) Politico interview, during which he took European leaders to task for not living up to the lofty example he, our Janus-faced Warlord and Prince of Peace, has set before them.
A quick and easy measure of just how threatening the foreign policy establishment takes one or another policy can be taken by merely observing how strenuously the media attempts to link said policy to the Kremlin. And, as night follows day, attempts to portray the NSS as a Kremlin-friendly strategy commenced immediately.
The Guardian’s Shaun Walker, always a reliable purveyor of the mainstream consensus, informed readers that the Kremlin “heaped praise” on the new strategy document. The Washington Post’s foreign affairs columnist Ishaan Tharoor wrote that, “Instead of focusing on the geopolitical challenge of Russia and China (as Trump’s first term NSS did), it took aim at Europe itself, warning against the “civilizational erasure” of the continent thanks to unfettered migration and a feckless liberal establishment.” A Politico report likewise described the NSS as being “largely in line with Russia’s view of the world.” According to Politico, Moscow’s approving comments about the NSS “underlines how much cozier their relationship has become since Trump returned to office earlier this year.”
European leaders took much offense at the document’s claims that Europe faces the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure,” noting that,
The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence. Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.
This is an unusually intrusive tack to take toward our longstanding European allies and it has naturally caused alarm in Brussels and other European capitals. But, since they are the core components of what we often refer to as The West, the health of Europe’s nation-states seems a reasonable concern for US policymakers. The ideas which animate the NSS are not new. They only seem new because in Washington’s rush to construct a post-Cold War imperium (and Europe’s rush to construct a post-democratic supra-national bureaucracy in Brussels) we stopped thinking seriously about just how fundamental nation-states are to the health and vitality of our civilization.
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The modern nation state joins aspects of ancient Greek political theory—to which we owe the concept of the State—with the post-Enlightenment Romanticism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which averred that a common culture—shared myths, monuments, history, literature, music, art—is needed to cohere and sustain the Greek ideal of a politically-active community. Following the Napoleonic Wars, European revolutionaries and thinkers—Giuseppe Mazzini in Italy, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich List in Germany, Bernard Bosanquet in Britain—promoted the idea, as the late Europeanist David Calleo has written, that “a state, to sustain the consensus that made its sovereignty legitimate, had to be congruent with a cultural nation.” According to Calleo, the late 18th century German clergyman and literary critic Johann Gottfried von Herder “believed that everyone shared a common humanity but that history had divided mankind into separate peoples.” Herder’s concepts of Volk and Kultur formed the basis for the post-Napoleonic European nationalisms—Kultur was the product of a distinct peoples (Volk) collective historical experience. Herder’s vision was not supremacist—as later German (and other) nationalist pathologies became. “No nationality has been totally designated by God as the chosen people of the earth; above all, we must seek the truth and cultivate the garden of the common good,” wrote Herder. The implications of this line of thinking for US foreign relations are plain enough.
Such ideas were to inform Charles de Gaulle’s understanding of the nation-state. The philosopher Regis Debray was of the opinion that de Gaulle “knew that deep down, a state is a memory, a spiritual reality.” This corresponds with the ideas of the mid-20th century mystic and philosopher Simone Weil who believed that “the degree of respect owing to human collectivities is a very high one,” due to, among other reasons, the fact that a collectivity “constitutes the sole agency for preserving the spiritual treasures accumulated by the dead, the sole transmitting agency by means of which the dead can speak to the living.”
As with Herder, Weil rejected (quite naturally, given that she was writing in the aftermath of the Nazi onslaught) any nation’s claim to superior virtue: “To posit one’s country as an absolute value that cannot be defiled by evil is manifestly absurd.” Like de Gaulle, to whom she was writing, Weil believed France was “unique,” but “each of the others, considered by itself and with affection, is unique in the same degree.” Such understandings of the role of the nation-state are what makes the West unique. Nearly 40 years ago, the Nobel-prize winning author Saul Bellow got embroiled in controversy when, during an interview, he asked, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read him.” Here we might venture to also ask who is their Herder, their Burke, their Lincoln, their Weil?
Almost exactly thirty years ago, in November 1996, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote in the pages of Foreign Affairs, that:
The principal responsibility of Western leaders is not to attempt to reshape other civilizations in the image of the West—which is increasingly beyond their ability—but to preserve and renew the unique qualities of Western civilization. That responsibility falls overwhelmingly on the most powerful Western country, the United States of America. Neither globalism nor isolationism, neither multilateralism nor unilateralism will best serve American interests. Its interests will be most effectively advanced if the United States eschews those extremes and instead adopts an Atlanticist policy of close cooperation with its European partners, one that will protect and promote the interests, values, and culture of the precious and unique civilization they share.
Whether Trump and his authors understand it or not, the NSS’s preoccupation with the preservation of the European nation-state is an argument (a very good argument) against Washington’s own universalist pretensions which have served as a handy go-to justification for military intervention in parts of the world in which we rightfully have no business. The West is unique, not universal—we should stop pretending otherwise.
James W. Carden is the editor of TRR.