Why ‘The West’?

“The West” owes its existence to Russia.

By the late eighteenth century, Latin Christendom had become “Europe.” Europe, since Peter the Great, extended to St. Petersburg, but most Europeans did not think of Russia as a peer. “The West,” according to Georgios Varouxakis’s “history of an idea,” proved a suitable solution.

After the Roman Empire and the Christian church split into “Western” and “Eastern” halves, the terms were occasionally used as political and ecclesiastic shorthand but not as collective labels. Byzantines called themselves “Romans,” were known to most outsiders as “Greeks,” and called Roman Catholics “Latins” and sometimes “Franks.” Western Christians did not mind being Latins and sometimes Franks but were less certain about the best name for themselves. There was a West (imperial, geographical, Christian) but no “Westerners.” Europe was commonly divided into North and South.

Things began to change after Russia defeated the Grande Armée in 1812, moved farther west by acquiring Finland and the Duchy of Warsaw, built the continent’s largest army, and became the linchpin and eventually the “policeman” of the European state system. “The Russians,” wrote Madame de Staël after traveling to Moscow and St. Petersburg, “have, in my opinion, much greater resemblance to the people of the South, or rather of the East, than to those of the North.” Henri de Saint-Simon proposed a “West European” federation without Russia; Abbé de Pradt proposed one against it. The Marquis de Custine, in his Russia in 1839, warned of the tsar’s plans to subdue the “West.” But it was the inventor of sociology, positivism, altruism, and the “religion of Humanity,” Auguste Comte, who made a point—and eventually a habit—of referring to “the West” as a cultural community with a common history.

“Christendom” might be interpreted to include Russia and to focus on only one of the many elements that shaped what he called the “vanguard of humanity”: “the Five Advanced Nations, the French, Italian, Spanish, British and German, which, since the time of Charlemagne, have always constituted a political whole.” “Europe” had its own Russia problem while excluding the vanguard’s overseas outposts. The only name that pointed to relevant shared roots without leaving itself open to unwelcome encroachments was l’Occident—“the West.” A future “Western Republic” with the capital in Paris would form the core of a united humanity and help overcome “the Western disease,” which stemmed from Protestantism, deism, and skepticism and consisted “in a continuous revolt of individual reason against the totality of human antecedents [tradition broadly understood].”

Comte’s disciples helped spread the word. Britain’s leading positivist, Richard Congreve, argued in 1866 that the European order based on the 1815 Treaty of Vienna had outlived its usefulness. “The elimination of Russia from the system is the first great rectification,” he wrote. “She is an Eastern, not a Western power,” insofar as she had not participated in the “intellectual cultivation of Greece,” the social life of the Roman Empire, “the Catholic-Feudal organisation of medieval Europe,” and the revolutionary convulsions of recent centuries.

Most German authors who embraced “the West” assumed that their job was to control the eastern frontier. As Gustav Diezel, Germany’s main expert on “the Eastern Question,” put it in 1853, the Russian state was growing “more threatening to the independent development of the Western nations, and particularly of Germany.” The Social Democrats August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht argued that, in opposing Germany’s annexation of Alsace and Lorraine, the German workers were acting “in the interest of Western civilization against Cossack barbarism.” Friedrich Nietzsche preferred to talk about “Europeans” but switched to the less inclusive term when comparing the weakness and self-doubt of a society that has no backbone with “that brave, unrebellious fatalism that still gives the Russians, for example, an advantage over us Westerners in the way they handle life.” “The whole of the West,” he wrote, had lost its

will to tradition, to authority, to centuries of responsibility to come, the will to solidarity of generational chains stretching forwards and backwards in infinitum. If this will is there, then something like the imperium Romanum is founded: or like Russia, the only power nowadays which has endurance, which can wait, which still has promise—Russia, the conceptual opposite of Europe’s pitiful petty-statery and nervousness.

Americans had their doubts about the Old World and had their own West to colonize and mythologize, but some scholars with European ties welcomed the idea of an Atlantic West standing up to barbarism. Benjamin Ide Wheeler, a professor of Greek and comparative philology at Cornell and later the president of the University of California (immortalized in his lifetime by Wheeler Hall, a massive Classical Revival building on the Berkeley campus), spent four years in German universities and brought back the prophecy of a final showdown between the Orient and “the Occidental idea.” That idea, he wrote in an article published in 1897, included individual rights and equal justice; the main obstacle to its realization was Oriental Russia in Occidental (post-Petrine) clothing and the “awful consistency” of her foreign policy: “ruthless of right, reckless of truth, framed on a plan that spans generations, conceived in terms of world-empire.” Three years later Wheeler’s thesis was endorsed by the University of Wisconsin professor Paul Samuel Reinsch, the son of German American parents, student of Frederick Jackson Turner, and future US minister to China. “Russia, the chief Western exponent of Orientalism,” he wrote, “has loomed larger and larger in men’s minds, and the strange fascination which her power exercises in modern political life is due in no small measure to the anti-individualistic tendencies of her civilization.” If Russia’s expansion were allowed to proceed unchecked, “England in opposing her would have the unfortunate position of Carthage.”

By the end of the twentieth century the idea of “the West” as European civilization minus Russia plus British (and, arguably, Iberian) settler colonies had become well established. Most people agreed that it had grown out of classical antiquity and Latin Christianity, owed something to the Renaissance, the Reformation, and perhaps the Enlightenment, and stood for some version of liberalism. The opposite of “the West” was “the East” (including most of Eastern Europe) and the rest of the world not settled by Western Europeans, irrespective of cardinal direction. Different non-Wests presented different challenges and opportunities, but none compared to Russia, which happened to be the closest, largest, mightiest, and least obviously non-Western, requiring repeated acts of estrangement and boundary marking. Russians did not object. Some considered themselves Europeans, but no one, not even the “Westernizers,” claimed to belong to the West.

The Great War threatened to split the West. French and British writers exposed the industrial barbarism of the “Huns”; pro-Entente Americans equated “Western” with “Atlantic” and urged the defense of a common cause (because, as Walter Lippmann put it, “the war against Britain, France, and Belgium is a war against the civilization of which we are a part”); and some German intellectuals, most scandalously Thomas Mann, followed the Slavophiles in making a virtue of not being “Western” (in the sense of artificial, superficial, and pragmatically commercial). The Bolshevik Revolution restored Russia to the rank of barbarian-in-chief, but the shock of the war and the crisis of liberalism generated a steady stream of doomsday prophecies, none more popular or portentous than Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918), which argued, at great length, that the once vigorous “West-European-American” culture, falsely linked to Russia as a result of the promiscuous use of the word “Europe,” had reached the age of sterile senescence.

The conservative Catholic French journalist Henri Massis countered by publishing Defense of the West (1927), in which he suggested that the Germans were keen to predict the end of Western civilization (and to take up one Orientalist fad after another) because they were strangers to the Greco-Latin heritage, had absorbed it incompletely and incompetently, and failed repeatedly in their attempts to subdue its heirs. In the quarrel that followed, Comte’s West survived thanks to the efforts of two outliers: American universities instituted “Western civ” courses (“first crafted,” according to the historian William H. McNeill, in support of “US belligerence in 1917”), while the Russians (never mind the “Soviets”) continued to serve as the nearest and eeriest “East.” According to the German jurist Carl Schmitt, the Bolshevik takeover had made the Russians doubly barbarian by bringing together

two great masses to whom the traditions and culture of Western Europe are absolutely foreign…the proletariat of the great cities with their class antagonism, and the Russian element turning its back more and more on Europe.

As the German literary historian Ernst Robert Curtius put it, in reference to Massis’s book, “If the West (das Abendland) is to be defended today, that must happen with Germany, not against Germany.” Mann had come around to the same conclusion. Russian intellectuals, he wrote in 1922, were suffering the kind of persecution “we in the West can hardly imagine.”

The rise of Nazism meant that the West had to be defended from Germany after all. The Nazi–Soviet Pact removed all doubt by unmasking both interlopers. It “may have complicated the diplomatic and military problems of the world,” wrote Lippmann, but “it has enormously simplified and clarified the spiritual problem.” The spiritual problem got complicated again when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. Both claimed to be fighting barbarism: the Nazis on behalf of a “New Europe,” the Soviets on behalf of “world civilization.” Simone Weil responded by advocating a reinvigorated West enriched by “the age-old civilizations of the East”; Alexandre Kojève, a Latin West centered on France; and Raymond Aron, an Anglo-French alliance in defense of “liberal civilization.” But it was Lippmann who won the day by equating the West with the “Atlantic community” headed by Washington. “In the lifetime of the generation to which we belong,” he wrote in 1939, “there has occurred one of the greatest events in the history of mankind. The controlling power in western civilization has crossed the Atlantic.”

The cold war helped consolidate “the West” by placing Western Europe under US military protection and associating it more consistently with political and economic liberalism. The admission of Turkey into NATO in 1952 was seen as an act of geopolitical opportunism, the detachment of Central Europe as a strategic setback from without and a national tragedy from within. For Hungarians, Czechs, or Poles, wrote Milan Kundera, “the word ‘Europe’ does not represent a phenomenon of geography but a spiritual notion synonymous with the word ‘West.’” The “deep meaning of their resistance [to Russia] is the struggle to preserve their identity—or, to put it another way, to preserve their Westernness” in an empire “seen not just as one more European power but as a singular civilization, an other civilization.”¹

The job of refining and defending the concept of the West appealed to the Jewish émigrés keen on keeping “the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down” (as the first secretary-general of NATO, Lord Ismay, is supposed to have described the treaty’s purpose). Henry Kissinger helped organize the Harvard Summer School Foreign Student Project, which included a course on Western civilization whose purpose was to demonstrate that American and Western European civilizations were “but branches off the same tree.” Hannah Arendt located the origins of the West’s “totalitarian” enemy in its own history and associated the hope for a less calamitous future with the United States (aided by a Europe disabused of reflexive anti-Americanism). Leo Strauss believed that the best guarantee against modern barbarism was a return to Western civilization as a stormy but fruitful marriage of Athens and Jerusalem. On a more practical plane, Melvin Lasky and Michael Josselson helped organize the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom, which mobilized prominent intellectuals, many of them former Communists, in opposition to the Soviet Union. As the sociologist Edward Shils, himself the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, put it many years later, “These two Russian Jews decided to save Western civilization.”

Their stand was, at least in one sense, quixotic. The Soviets never attacked “Western civilization” (as distinct from capitalism and imperialism) and prided themselves on championing “the greatest achievements of world culture,” by which they meant the Western literary and artistic canon, with Russia as a dues-paying participant. While Lasky and Josselson were saving Western civilization, the most visited art museum in the Soviet Union was the Hermitage (founded by Catherine the Great and dedicated to the celebration of Western European art), and some of the most popular writers were Ernest Hemingway, J.D. Salinger, and Erich Maria Remarque.

It did not matter much. Most writers, including Arendt and Strauss, agreed that the greatest danger to Western civilization came not from the East but from within—not so much from its domestic detractors, whose numbers swelled in the 1960s, as from a fatal flaw in its own makeup. “The West” was born sick (Comte’s proposed federation was meant to cure it of its peculiar contempt for its own past) and had been ailing ever since. Spengler had diagnosed its condition (with half a nod to Edward Gibbon), and as Strauss put it, “Whatever may be wrong with Spengler,” his book’s title had proved accurate. The “barbarization” of Europe in the twentieth century had been the result of “a gradual corrosion and destruction of the heritage of Western civilization,” Strauss wrote. The distinction between good and evil had been replaced by the distinction between progressive and reactionary. Progress was a function of history; history was too elusive to serve as a standard; hence “no standard whatever was left.” In Suicide of the West, published in 1964, James Burnham attributed the physical “contraction of the West” to a spiritual failing associated with “the decay of religion” and marveled at the “dazzling ingenuity” with which the “ideology of liberalism” managed to represent “defeat as victory, abandonment as loyalty, timidity as courage, withdrawal as advance.”

In the end, it was the Soviet Union that expired first. The West’s peacetime Drang nach Osten was based on the maximalist interpretation of its domain: Europe, and therefore the West, was everything minus Russia. Most of Eastern Europe became Central, most Orthodox and Muslim Europeans found themselves in the West, and the “captive nations” of the Baltic coast moved from serving as Westerners in the East to saving the West from Easterners (and serving as labor migrants in Western Europe).² In the US two latter-day Blooms followed their Dublin predecessor by rising in defense of bardic succession. Harold extolled the unrivaled sublimity of the Western canon centered on Shakespeare, the “inventor of the human”; Allan argued that the West had invented the human by discovering reason. One believed that the canon was universal by being unique, the other that it was unique by being universal. Blooms set the terms and served as signposts. Francis Fukuyama claimed that the West’s present was everyone’s future (describing the itinerary as “getting to Denmark” and leaving no choice to those who’d rather stay where they are or go somewhere else). Samuel P. Huntington insisted that the West was “unique, not universal,” that it ended where Islam and Orthodoxy began, and that NATO should limit itself accordingly (with regard to Ukraine in particular). Both associated the West with liberal democracy and approved of the connection.

Many people disagreed: some assumed that Western values were universal but not Western (“natural” rights having become “human”), others that the West was unique but not liberal or that Western liberalism was uniquely predatory. German liberals, led by Jürgen Habermas and Heinrich August Winkler, congratulated Germany on being Western but not unique (attempts to chart a separate path known as a Sonderweg having led to Auschwitz). Huntington’s former student James Kurth argued that the West had abandoned Christianity and liberalism, adopted an eclectic mix of human rights, multiculturalism, expressive individualism, and popular culture, and turned into a global anticivilization waging war on all traditional cultures, especially its own. Michel Houellebecq described one possible outcome in his novel Submission:³ “Islam” means submission to God; “the West” means nothing in particular; the West’s future is submission to Islam.

In The West: The History of an Idea, Georgios Varouxakis tells this story with wit, insight, and erudition. It is our great fortune that the first comprehensive history of the idea of the West is also, for the foreseeable future, the best.⁴ Anyone with ideas on the subject will be well advised to read it closely and keep it within reach. The author is careful to warn the reader that his book is a history of the term, not the essence of the thing, and that no all-purpose definition of “the West” is possible or desirable, but he obviously believes that some interpretations are more convincing than others and cautions, in the book’s conclusion, that the existence of different views “should not be taken to imply that there is in fact no such thing as ‘the West.’” Humanity, he writes, consists of

cultures or societies, broader than the nation or nation state, that differ recognisably from each other; whether one wishes to call them “civilisations” or by another term, one cannot deny the existence of such transnational units that share within themselves things that they do not share with the others.

Shared things change, but at any given time “there are factors that reliably differentiate the civilisations or cultures of transnational societies such as ‘the West’ from those outside them.”

Varouxakis does not explain how to identify such factors and only occasionally hints at “essences,” but thirty-five years ago, when I was teaching two sections of Western civ every semester (not knowing I might be doing something unwholesome), the textbook I liked best was McNeill’s The Rise of the West, which defined civilization as—“probably”—the largest community united by “a shared literary canon and expectations about human behavior framed by that canon.” The advantage of this definition is that it introduces clear criteria; the problem is that “the West” no longer fits it.

It used to, of course. For about a thousand years, Western Christians shared a single sacred language, a supranational intellectual elite, and a stable Christian-cum-classical canon, thus clearly constituting a civilization comparable to the Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and other “transnational units” to which the term, as defined by McNeill and implied by Varouxakis, is usually applied. (None of the above applies to the Orthodox world, which had a core empire—first Byzantine, then Russian—but no unity as a civilization.)

That shared order began to break down in the sixteenth century. Europe’s colonial expansion created millions of new converts who were taught bowdlerized Christianity in Spanish, Portuguese, and their own vernaculars standardized for the purpose. The combined efforts of Protestants, humanists, and the printing press undermined the position of the Latin Bible in Europe and allowed some former “Latins” to catch up with the Mayans, Georgians, Slavs, and Copts, among others, in having their national languages sacralized. In France neoclassicists prevailed over the classics, the language of the French king became the language of French poetry, and the language of French poetry became the “Latin of the moderns.”

But it was France’s main rivals, united in 1707 to form the Kingdom of Great Britain, that responded to Paris’s claims of universalism by charting the shortest route to national vernacular revolutions and the eventual breakup of Latin Christendom. James Macpherson’s invention of a Scottish Homer, Ossian, in the 1760s became an international literary sensation, a source of inspiration for the Romantic revolution, and a model for countless imitations. The Icelandic sagas, the Nibelungenlied, The Song of Roland, The Poem of the Cid, and Beowulf, among others, were promoted and celebrated as national treasures, previously unknown medieval manuscripts were unearthed or forged outright, and still-circulating oral tales were collected and published, more or less faithfully or in greatly expanded epic form (as in Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala in Finland).

But most newly Homeric nations, including Scotland, followed the example of England by canonizing not a particular text but a modern writer equal to his creations. The creeping sanctification of Shakespeare reached full-blown “bardolatry” (as George Bernard Shaw put it) at the Stratford Jubilee of 1769. Over the course of the next century and a half, most European nations acquired their own immortal bards to preside over their own golden ages. Or rather, most Europeans became members of nations by accepting certain writers as their saviors. Italians and Georgians reached back into the Middle Ages by choosing Dante and Shota Rustaveli. Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands became Renaissance nations (and brought back their imperial past) by adopting Cervantes, Luís de Camões, and Joost van den Vondel. Most of the rest scrambled to select candidates from among the living or the recently martyred. Goethe and Schiller in Germany, Hans Christian Andersen in Denmark, Robert Burns in Scotland, Alexander Pushkin in Russia, Adam Mickiewicz in Poland, Sándor Petőfi in Hungary, Mihai Eminescu in Romania, Taras Shevchenko in Ukraine, Karel Hynek Mácha in the Czech lands, Hristo Botev in Bulgaria, France Prešeren in Slovenia, Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav in Slovakia, and Jónas Hallgrímsson in Iceland, among others, were crowned in their lifetimes or shortly thereafter. If Virgil could become Rome’s Homer and Camões could—quite deliberately, too—become Portugal’s Virgil, and if Shakespeare could be recruited posthumously, with such spectacular results, then anybody could do it. And so they did.

The greatest exception was to be found at the center. France is unique in Europe in not having produced a clear winner—the only “pantheon” on a continent of cultural monotheisms. Most new canon building was directed against French cultural hegemony; much of Romanticism was a response to French classicism. France itself was under less pressure to prove its worth by baptizing a new Homer. There were special celebrations devoted to Rabelais, who never became the French Cervantes, Molière, who never became the French Shakespeare, and Hugo, who never became the French Pushkin. The French Revolution was Great but not Glorious: it failed to establish a lasting nouveau régime sanctified by an infallible bard.

The pan-European revolution of cultural nationalization had been largely completed by the second decade of the twentieth century. “Christendom” had become “Europe,” with colonial outposts and uncertain eastern boundaries; “Europe” had split into nation-states, each with its own Homer and its own education system built on the vernacular curriculum. The Western Christian canon had once united believers living in a politically fragmented region; the revolution of nationalization fragmented the cultural to fit the political. It also put an end to the Latin/Orthodox divide within European Christianity. The official canonization of Pushkin in Moscow and Camões in Lisbon happened at the same time, in the same way, in June 1880, at opposite ends of Europe. Both poets were proclaimed to have been universal by being national and national by being universal, acknowledged as the progenitors of national literary languages and golden ages, and revered publicly and privately, at home and in school.

There emerged a new post-Christian Europe from the Atlantic to the Pacific and, after the spread of colonial settlements, from San Francisco and Buenos Aires to Cape Town and Melbourne. It was a thin and fragile civilization but, by McNeill’s definition, a civilization nevertheless, insofar as national elites were expected to be familiar with the pantheons of the largest European states and a number of Greek and Latin texts in translation. Few people outside Slovenia read Prešeren, but being educated—in Slovenia, Romania, or anywhere else in this new civilization—meant reading “classics” translated from French, English, German, Italian, and Russian, with a few marginal additions.

Hence “the West.” The story Varouxakis tells suggests that Russia provoked anxiety by being big, ugly, and culturally (and racially) proximate at the same time. The new post-Christian canon, such as it was, threatened to dissolve the boundary established by sacred rites and scripts. War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov may have been “loose, baggy monsters,” but they had become part of a common civilizational repertoire (Henry James, who coined the phrase, felt the same way about the great Victorians). A new magic spell was needed. “The West” was born with two congenital conditions, both diagnosed by Comte on day one: chronic aversion to Russia and the “continuous revolt of individual reason against the totality of human antecedents.” The first has to do with space, the second with time; the first with the limits of its domain, the second with the mystery of its origins. “The West” makes no sense without an antagonist in the East, and there is no better (worse) enemy than a false friend. Because its name emerged amid the ruins of a collapsed civilization as a code for its fractious heirs, the West appears to be in perennial decline. “Christendom” has a content, “Europe” has a shape, both had a past. The West remained to be defined.

America to the rescue. The US imported certain elements of the mother country’s bardolatry and made some strides in the creation of its own (Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha was written in the meter of the Kalevala, and serious efforts were made on behalf of Mark Twain, not least by Twain himself), but the only sacred texts seen as a proper foundation for a messianic culture that was no longer wholly Protestant were legal-political. American universities abandoned the Christian-cum-classical curriculum at about the same time as the Europeans, but instead of replacing it with a national literary pantheon (one imagines Longfellow in the place of Pushkin and Twain and Melville in the places of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky), they introduced Western civilization courses (represented as the prehistory of American liberalism) and lists of “great books,” which included the King James Bible, a few Greek and Roman texts, and selections from major European pantheons, all in English translations. The problem of Russian presence (Russia is not part of the West, but Chekhov is) was solved by silence. In The Western Canon Harold Bloom defined “canon” but not “the West” (and included Tolstoy as “the most canonical of all nineteenth-century writers”), in The Rise of the West McNeill defined “civilization” but not “the West” (and included Russia as “Europe’s outlier,” neither part of the West nor a separate civilization), and in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order Huntington listed five existing civilizations universally recognized as such (Sinic, Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, and Western) and added that in the contemporary world it would be “useful” to include the Orthodox, Latin American, “and, possibly, African” ones (presumably so as not to leave much of the world unaccounted for).

After World War II the former Latin Christendom acquired its first core state and common army since the fall of Rome, but “the West” remained a ghost. NATO was an extension of American power into Europe posing as a mutual defense alliance (with no mention of the West in its founding treaty); Western civ made few inroads into a Europe that continued to divide history into national and universal. The realm the United States pledged to defend and represent was the “Free World,” which went far beyond the West to embrace the entire planet, with the temporary exception of the Evil Empire. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union stood for “progressive humanity” as the vanguard of everyone’s future. The name of Yuri Gagarin’s spacecraft, Vostok 1 (East 1), referred to sunrise, not a part of the globe.

In the late 1960s both landed in the cuckoo’s nest. The Soviet Union died after a protracted battle with dementia; the West lost its way. The “Free World” largely disappeared from official pronouncements; “the West” entered them less frequently. Countercultural rebellion became educational orthodoxy, and both the Western European national pantheons and transatlantic Western civ curricula went into gradual decline. The age of redoubled self-doubt was bolstered by the ideology of national guilt, pioneered in Germany and built on a combination of Christian and Freudian confessionalism. For the first time in recorded history, human societies were ritually asserting their cohesion not by celebrating victories and lamenting defeats but by admiring themselves in the mirror of collective remorse.

The collapse of communism coincided with the triumph of West-as-universal over West-as-unique. The US and its allies turned into “the international community.” The Free World became the World. Most Western civ courses were replaced by world history. Western liberalism was extended to the rest of humanity as global human rights. Western European states dropped their Romantic raison d’être (Sweden is a state of the Swedish nation) in favor of universal “values” (Eastern Europeans pretended not to notice). Western individualism, examined and deplored by Comte and his countless successors, gained new ground as liberated selves set about crafting ever more novel, pliable, and elaborately customized ways of being human. For the first time in recorded history, some formal institutions (including schools, corporations, and government agencies) committed themselves to transcending the division of humanity into men and women.

Western civilization as a community “united by a shared literary canon” had ceased to exist because it no longer shared one. “Western civilization” as a cultural and political concept had ceased to exist because it had disappeared from political rhetoric, college curricula, and, in most quarters, cultural imagination. The West was still there, but its civilization was not (Huntington’s efforts notwithstanding). It was at this moment that NATO, a military institution Western in membership, anti-Soviet in design, and suddenly bereft of a mission, set about fulfilling its foundational prophecy. What mattered was not the nature of the engagement (war on terror, democracy promotion, humanitarian intervention, and struggle against autocracies are universal, not Western-specific campaigns) but whom it was directed against. The West was ready to reassert itself as post-Christian Christendom fearful of Russia. NATO, as the West’s military arm (the US empire’s European branch), needed the Russian threat to keep fear alive.

Opposing Western universalism are nationalists, firmly in power in most of Eastern Europe (regarded as worthy or unworthy depending on how they position themselves vis-à-vis Brussels) and shunned as “far-right populists” west of the Oder. Their appeals range from a common “Christian heritage” that implies Western unity to vernacular revolutions that imperil it, with a general preference for the latter. The word “West” is used sporadically and inconsistently. The only states that claim to be defending Western civilization are Israel and Ukraine, and before them the National Party’s South Africa, all radical ethnocracies strongly at odds with the liberal values most Western governments profess.⁵

Margins can be managed. Israel and Ukraine may be bracketed as not covered by most definitions of “the West,” Baltic ethnonationalists might be ignored because of their small size or praised because of their exemplary loathing for Russia, and Orbán’s Hungary or Meloni’s Italy could be tamed or contained, with varying degrees of success—but what happens to “the West,” however defined, when nationalists take over the empire’s capital? The second coming of Trump has revealed the historical anomaly of NATO’s status. Protection from threats, real or fictitious, has a price, be it fealty to feudal lords, tribute to Viking raiders, taxes to modern states, or payments to Tony Soprano. If protection providers believe the threat is genuine and involves their own security, the price may remain relatively low; if they believe it’s limited to the client or entirely fictitious, the price goes up. The EU has invested so much in inflating the threat and so little in confronting it that the choice may be to pay more for US protection, pay even more for its own war machine, or admit (as I believe) that the threat is bogus.

US nationalism did not grow out of the revolution of nationalization. It has always been programmatically universalist and has nothing analogous to the Hungarian nation to go back to. The New World looked down on the Old World for much of its history and quietly dropped “Western civilization” after about eighty years of moderate cultivation. Neither Trump’s great America nor Orbán’s “Europe of nations” has much use for “the West.” In his speech at the Munich Security Conference in February, J.D. Vance asked the question Varouxakis’s subjects had been asking one another for almost two centuries:

I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course that’s important. But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for. What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?

Public pronouncements by European politicians suggest two answers. The first—the more urgent and deeply felt by far—is that defending “for” is the same as defending “from” because Russia is always a threat. The second is “values,” which the EU treaty equates with liberal democracy. Vance’s argument in Munich was that the outside threat had been overblown and liberal democracy given up in pursuit of new dogmas. His bigger point, which he spared his dazed listeners, was that the West stood for something much more fundamental than “values.” Speaking at the Heritage Foundation a month and a half later, he called for a return to “some of the very founding ideas of the West, the Christian faith on which all Western nations were…really based.” He did not say what that might mean politically or institutionally, and it seems safe to assume that nothing along those lines is in the offing or even conceivable. His recommendation, which he attributed to Rod Dreher’s “prophetic” “manual for Christian dissidents,” was to “live not by lies.” In Dreher’s account, Solzhenitsyn’s 1974 appeal to captive Soviets was timely again because the West was under siege from a new “social justice” totalitarianism.

As Varouxakis shows, the idea of the West as a cultural community appeared amid the scattered remains of that community. It may refer to any number of “essences,” some of them (such as liberty and Christianity) in poor agreement with one another, but two things have remained constant: the threat from Russia on the outside and the fear of decay on the inside. They do their best work together but can cover for each other if need be. The previous US administration focused on the former, the current one on the latter. “Peace through strength” rests on strength through weakness.