In 2005, I published a small book entitled The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God. It had a fair sale in the U.S. and was translated into French, Spanish, Polish, Italian, Portuguese, and Hungarian.
British historian Niall Ferguson got one key part of my argument right by describing the book as “an elegy for a vulnerable culture that is being effaced by a vacuous secularism.” Europe, I suggested, was hollowing itself out, befogged in a post-biblical, world-weary ennui that was expressed in the continent’s self-induced demographic winter and its political subservience to a gargantuan bureaucracy in Brussels. The former center of world historical initiative was becoming something of a spiritual no-man’s-land where elite nihilism was having grave effects on Europe’s willingness to defend itself—or to imagine itself worth defending.
It was not all bad news. I hoped that the new democracies of central and eastern Europe, auto-liberated in 1989 from the unwanted embrace of the Soviet Union, would breathe new spiritual and political life into the European project. That new vitality, I thought, might strengthen an expanded NATO (which the new democracies were eager to join, for reasons underscored when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022). And the accession of countries like Poland, Lithuania, and Slovakia to the European Union might, I thought, remind the 21st-century EU of its Catholic roots.
For the European Union we know today began as the brainchild of three great Catholic statesmen, intellectually formed by mid-20th century Catholic social doctrine: Germany’s Konrad Adenauer, Robert Schuman of France, and Italy’s Alcide De Gasperi. A key tenet of that social doctrine was the anti-totalitarian, indeed anti-statist, principle of “subsidiarity.” Reclaimed, that principle might help rescue the European project from the dangers of a vast over-bureaucratization symbolized by EU regulations on the acceptable circumference of tomatoes (to take one absurd example).
Or so I hoped in 2005.
Thanks to Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, and his manifest determination to claw back into the Russian orbit countries that have no desire to live under Muscovite suzerainty, there has been a welcome, if still insufficient, stiffening of European spines, politically and militarily. Yet wokery—an ersatz religion filling the spiritual void left by the demise of Christian conviction—continues to warp European high culture and erode European civil liberties. And a vast immigration from North Africa and the Middle East has created immense social problems that feckless politicians seem incapable of addressing.
Little good, however, is going to be achieved by the Vice President of the United States heaping scorn on Europe, echoed by the U.S. Secretary of Defense declaring Europe “PATHETIC” (his caps, not mine). Old allies may respond to thoughtful challenge; they are not impressed by temper tantrums.
In The Cube and the Cathedral, I suggested three reasons why Americans cannot write Europe off. Those reasons remain valid today.
The first touches on the Roman virtue of pietas: the respect owed those on whose shoulders we stand. As I wrote, “Americans learned about the dignity of the human person, about limited and constitutional government, about the principle of consent, and about the transcendent standards of justice to which the state is accountable…[from] Europe.” To contemptuously dismiss Europe in a spasm of pique is not just an exercise in ingratitude; it is a self-mutilating rejection of our civilizational roots.
The second involves national security. A Europe dominated by a vengeful, imperialistic, autocratic Russia or a Europe under Chinese economic hegemony is not going to make America great; quite the contrary. Nor is a Europe drawn into the orbit of radical Islam by powerful demographic undertows. 9/11 was hatched in no small part in Europe by jihadis who had moved there. To such minds, the Great Satan remains the Great Satan, and Europe would be a convenient base from which to wreak havoc in the United States again.
The third reason why we should care was articulated by the great English Catholic historian Christopher Dawson, who, in a 1960 essay on Europe, wrote that “a secular society that has no end beyond its own satisfaction is a monstrosity—a cancerous growth that will ultimately destroy itself.” Common efforts to treat the nihilist malignancy that threatens democracy on both sides of the Atlantic can help rebuild the cultural foundations of freedom here and in Europe.
American public officials are more likely to be heard if they call on our parent civilization to reclaim the nobility that defeated fascism, Nazism, and communism: a defense of human dignity in which Americans and Europeans contested for the future shoulder to shoulder.
As we still can. As we still must.
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Haven’t read this article yet but I will.
And will be comparing it to Solene Tadie’s take in the Register.
While I agree that the US just cannot step away from Europe, Europe now is a basket case of their own making. Maybe Trumps realistic tough talk on their need to pay for their own defense and no more free lunch from the US might wake them up. In the end Europeans must wake up, and realize they have a war going on, whether they know it or not.
Europe yes, but what about the rest?- Africa, South America? Places where the Church is stronger and moral decadence less entrenched. We must look beyond caucasian dominance.
There’s no such thing as a “Caucasian” Mr. Connor unless one actually hails from that particular region. I wish we’d move forward from Darwin’s era & stop using these outdated & unscientific classifications. We don’t say “Negroid” or “Mongloid” anymore either.
The main difference between VP J. D. Vance and Mr. Weigel is that Vance sees the European Union and the European political establishments for what they are, which are krypto-Marxist-globalist-tyrants, and has courageously called them to task. Mr. Weigel is not facing the hard truth about the enemies of freedom that rule in Brussels, London, Paris and Berlin, etc.
VP Vance is confronting the reality of Europe, which is run by people who are anti-western, anti-freedom, anti-human bureaucrats.
Mr. Weigel is offering advice about dealing with a make-believe Europe.
“krypto-Marxist-globalist-tyrants”
Do you think there might be a reason for Weigel’s blind spot when it comes to European leaders?
Well, the EU is about one thing only: them on charge with all the cash, forever.
Why GE persists in the fictional narrative above is a mystery, perhaps just ivory tower nostalgia for a time long past.
I think that most Americans think that the U.S. needs to leave other countries alone and work on our own issues. The Viet Nam war is still in the minds of many of us who felt that our young men and women were dying for pretty much nothing. Viet Nam fell anyway, and all those deaths and injuries (including the cancers probably caused by Agent Orange) are still too fresh in our minds.
I don’t think this “isolation thinking” is wise, but…we have to try to understand why Americans feel this way. We’re all about “individualism” here, including in many of our Christian circles. We’re willing to help our fellow man in our own neighborhood, town, city, state, and often, in our own country. But I think many of us are hesitant to send too much of our money out of the country.
I don’t believe this concentration on ourselves and our own little piece of the world is what God intends. But weariness has a way of deadening our senses to the rest of the world. And the constant tug of various ads and media urging us to create our own happiness by buying their product is difficult to ignore.
Apologies for my gloomy outlook.
Sharon, excellent letter. You are so correct. Is the weariness caused by these constant wars of attrition? Was nothing learned from World War I?
A recent example (some 2 years ago) illustrates the utter detachment from reality that animates Mr. Weigel’s view of the world.
A conference was given, I believe it was at Oxford, and the guest lecturer giving his narrative to students snd answering questions was a high ranking member of the British establishment, a man who had served in various positions in the UK government, and was now on the Board of Directors at British Petroleum. The lecturer’s main theme was the “real-politique” of how the UK must navigate its geopolitical position with Vladimir Putin, now that putin had invaded Ukraine.
A student posed a question challenging the guest lecturer’s narrative about the rectitude of the British government and British Petroleum, stating the the UK and BP were complicit in the strengthening of Putin’s hand, by voluntarily cutting their own oil production in the North Sea, and cutting a deal with Putin who offered them discounts on Russian oil, in exchange for UK and BP ceasing their own energy production. The student candidly noted that the UK government and BP were in no position to be lecturing anyone about the rectitude of their position, or their posturing against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, because they had sold themselves over to Putin.
The UK political establishment lecturer and BP board member simply reminded the student that the decision to cut their oil deal with Putin was “in the best interest of BP shareholders.”
Mr. Weigel’s detachment from the reality and his failure to recognize the utter hypocritical emptiness of the European establishment ideology is fully illustrated by that exchange.
Okay but I’ll go with Solene Tadie, a not-to-be-missed and fresh voice on Europe in today’s Church.
What even IS Europe right now? It seems that most European countries lack a clear sense of their national boundaries and culture. They are being overrun by mass immigration. They are not presenting a strong, unified front against tyranny on either economic or military levels. Then there is the spiritual rot and decay that has sapped the life and strength from the respective cultures. What exactly are we supporting and defending in Europe in its present form, and should we continue to do so? I’m not sure.
Athanasius, you’re exactly right. European culture (what’s left of it) is in free-fall. The next loud thump you hear will signal its final demise.
I love history in general and European history particularly. What’s happening there is genuinely tragic. It’s as if Europe is falling into a new dark age.
Looking beyond Europe, or maybe what used to be Europe, in 2005 Weigel also commented on the alternative universe of non-European Islam:
“Islam abhors the Christian notion of the Trinitarian God, judging the Christian doctrine of the Trinity to be polytheism [….] Similarly, the Christian doctrine of Creation, which stresses God’s ongoing creative action in history, helped set the cultural stage for the emergence of a politics of persuasion in Christian-influenced societies. Islam, by contrast, is radically voluntaristic and will-centered, a theological optic on reality that tends to underwrite a politics of coercion” (“The Cube and the Cathedral,” 2005, p. 141).
Where Western secularism takes God out of the public forum, Islam also takes the public forum out of Man. Islam which, according to Bernard Lewis, is now engaged in its third invasion of Europe (earlier 732 at Tours in the West, and 1683 in the East as far as Vienna).
In principle Weigel is correct that our vice president’s scolding of an apparently feckless Europe was to use the aphorism counterproductive. Although, as things stand, perhaps a scolding by a long standing ally with strong ties with Britain was effective. Rubbing salt in wounds came from the naval practice of whiplashing the incorrigible. Salt the healing remedy. The wounds are there, the liberal policies that were accelerated by German PM Angela Merkel’s open border policy, the likely reason why the outcry.
France had a long relationship with its African, Middle East colonies and protectorates and legal immigration. The flood as said accelerated causing enormous problems for a Europe that lost its soul in the abandonment of Christianity.
Weigel is entirely correct in the US assuming the role of a benevolent friend reminding Europe of its noble past, as recent as WWII, with great political leaders Schuman, Adenauer, de Gasperi. I would add the great German chancellor Helmut Kohl who warned Angela Merkel, her mentor, to avoid the disaster of open borders and the influx of peoples whose religion and life practices are antithetical to European culture.
Angela Merkel became chancellor of Germany 2005. Born in Hamburg of Polish German parentage was taken to socialist ideology when family moved to E Germany then under Soviet control. Her policy was more in favor of Russian alliance than with German interests. She initiated the Nordstar pipeline to Russia, downsized German military, seemingly with pacifist socialist leanings. That and her open border policy for Germany made her suspect. Nonetheless, she favored strong ties with the US supported US war with Iraq. Certainly a complex personality whose agenda was a form of socialist liberal pacifism. During her tenure as German chancellor 2005-21 she’s credited with having a highly significant role in forming the European political philosophy that exists today.
Correction: She initiated the Nord Stream 2 pipelines for natural gas from Russia.