The European Conservative, No. 6

THE EUROPEAN

CONSERVATIVE Issue 6 • Spring 2012

The Political Impact of Utøya Dag Elfström One week after last summer’s Vanenburg Meeting in Leuven, one of the worst acts of domestic terrorism in modern European history took place in Norway. While the first thought on many people’s minds was that Islamic terrorists were to blame, the authorities soon revealed that a 32-year-old Norwegian, Anders Behring Breivik, was responsible. He had first detonated a fertilizer-based bomb in Oslo’s government district, killing eight people, and then had gone to a youth camp run by the Social Democrats on the island of Utøya where he shot and killed 69 people—the vast majority of them children and teenagers. In connection with the attack, Breivik published an on-line manifesto, which had been crudely cut-and-pasted from a variety

of sources—and which distorted the words of Winston Churchill, John Locke, and Mahatma Gandhi, among others. In it, Breivik called for an armed struggle against Islam and the European Left.

This heinous attack had a huge impact on the social, cultural, and political debate in northern Europe. Anyone thought to be critical of Islam or opposed to left-wing ideas was quickly seen as having contributed in some way to Breivik’s sick actions. Conservatives and conservative ideas were said to be responsible for creating a “milieu” in which a crime like Breivik’s could take place. In addition, the Scandinavian media soon went on a hunt for everyone and anyone who had initially speculated that radical Islamists had carried out the attack.

In the end, a lot of people had to Continued on p. 2

Hungary’s Easter Constitution Attila K. Molnar In Hungary’s sorry past, the country existed for many centuries without a written constitution, just like Great Britain. The “light,” so to speak, arrived from the East, and Hungary finally received its first written constitution in 1949—from the Soviet Union. Under that constitution, Hungary would enjoy one of the region’s harshest totalitarian regimes during the early 1950s.

When the entire Soviet Socialist experiment collapsed like a wet sock, jurists from Hungary’s opposition parties joined members of the stillruling Hungarian Socialist Party and heavily amended the existing constitution. In 1989, it was adopted by

Hungary’s last Socialist Parliament.

It was assumed that sooner or later, a new, more definitive constitution would need to be created. But at the time, none of the dominant political parties managed to draft one.

So, for two decades Hungary had the distinction of being the only former Eastern bloc nation that failed to adopt a new constitution after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The election of 2010 changed things. With the victory of the coalition of the Fidesz-Hungarian Civic Union (Magyar Polgári Szövetség) and the Christian Democrats (Keresztény Demokrata Néppárt), the centre-right gained a huge majority in parliament.

They immediately started to draft a new constitution in order to replace

Contents Political Impact of Utøya ...................... 1 Dag Elström Hungary’s Easter Constitution ............. 1 Attila K. Molnar Europe & Stem Cells .............................. 3 Sophia Kuby Reflections on ’68 .................................... 5 Chantal Delsol Western Suttee ......................................... 9 Diederik Boomsma & Jonathan Price Eric Voegelin & History ........................ 9 Harald Bergbauer Ideology in Politics ............................... 13 Frits Bolkestein Europe’s Populist Problem .................. 15 Andreas Kinneging Europe’s Soul & the Markets .............. 17 Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks Our Western Heritage .......................... 18 Interview with Robert P. George Otto the Great, R.I.P. ........................... 21 Stephan Baier The 2011 Vanenburg Meeting ............ 23

what many saw as the sole remnant of the country’s Communist past.

The first official step was taken on September 7, 2010, when an ad hoc parliamentary committee started to make preparations. After numerous debates on some matters of principle, the early drafts of the new constitution were written between January and March of 2011. The final Continued on p. 4

A publication of the Center for European Renewal

Elfström, cont’d.

apologize for conclusions they had drawn too hastily.

Meanwhile, established political commentators of the centre-left across Scandinavia did their best to exploit the situation, repeatedly blaming conservatives, free-market thinkers, and anyone opposed to socialism.

Since Breivik’s attack was directed against a Social Democratic youth organization, the Left in Scandinavia argued that conservative and centre-right polemicists had fostered hatred towards leftist groups, in general, and against social democracy, in particular.

“There must be an end to the simplistic criticism of social democracy,” wrote Aftonbladet, a large Swedish Social Democratic newspaper, on its editorial page.

The same backlash against conservatism was also noted in Denmark, where there was broad speculation about the role that the post-Utøya debate on the “dangers” of conservatism may have played in the defeat of the Danish centreright government by a coalition of Social Democrats, Social Liberals, and Socialists in the parliamentary elections of September 2011.

In Norway, understandably, people were—and many remain—in a collective state of shock after the attack. It is, therefore, much more difficult to evaluate the status of the debate over conservative ideas there. The Norwegian debate was mainly about mourning, not about pinning blame or finding fault.

Nevertheless, the Norwegian Labour Party certainly managed to improve its standing after the tragic events on Utøya, reflecting how public opinion had turned against conservative political parties in the aftermath of the attack.

Similarly, the public debate in northern Europe over the threat of radical Islam is still under the strong influence of the Utøya tragedy, particularly in the case of Sweden. The Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna), which holds some conservative ideas, was especially affected.

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The Sweden Democrats entered the Swedish parliament in the autumn of 2010. They have consistently argued that in order for the Swedish welfare system to survive in the long-run, tougher immigration policies are needed. They have retained other socially conservative views—such as the importance of the family—but, at the same time, have continued to oppose tax cuts and government down-sizing.

Today, very few—if any—of the main representatives of intellectual conservatism in Sweden say they support the Sweden Democrats. But the party has still had an important impact in parliament and on public debates. They brought the issue of Islam into the public square; and, because of them, the nature and size of the problem of radical Islam in Europe finally began to be discussed by Swedish think-tanks and on the editorial pages of centre-right newspapers.

Acceptance of the merits of the debate over Islam grew even more after a Muslim suicide bomber blew himself up in the middle of Stockholm in December 2010.

Leftist pundits in Sweden, however, have continued to maintain that the “problem” of radical Islam is non-existent. On its editorial page, Aftonbladet has told its readers that only “a negligible small per cent” of terrorism in Europe is jihadist in nature. This obscures the fact that jihadist terrorism is broader in scope and more extreme in its objectives than other sources of domestic terrorism (such as separatist movements like ETA in Spain’s Basque region or the IRA in Northern Ireland). It also ignores the fact that in 2009, 110 jihadist terrorists were arrested in eight different EU countries, thus foiling their attacks before they could be launched.

The leader of Sweden’s Young Greens, Maria Ferm, went even further in her attempt to downplay the question of jihadist violence. In an article on Newsmill, an on-line Swedish debate site, she compared

the suicide bomber in Stockholm to a lone gunman in Malmö who, in the fall of 2010, had spread fear in that Swedish town. She dismissed them both as “loonies” and said they only “represent[ed] their own madness.” But all this simply belied the fact that a vigorous debate on the threat of Muslim extremism was already taking place in Sweden.

In Denmark, the debate over Islam has been going on for many years, the result of the ongoing work of the sister party of the Sweden Democrats, the Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti). Its members have tried continually to point out the dangers of unrestricted immigration and radical Islam.

In general, however, the tragedy of Utøya has led to a decline in discussions over Islam. Since Breivik justified his murderous actions by pointing to the threat of Islam, any subsequent public discussions of the problem of radical Islam—or left-wing policies, for that matter—have become quite difficult.

Anyone who even raises questions about Islam can be accused of having an intellectual connection to Breivik. It is a form of guilt by the flimsiest of (intellectual) associations.

Recently, however, a series of events have occurred which have created apt conditions for a revival of the debate. In January, an Oslo court convicted two men who had been planning to blow up the offices of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which had published controversial cartoons about Islam in 2005. (The two men had also been accused of planning to murder cartoonist Kurt Westergaard.)

Similarly, repeated death threats have been made against Swedish artist Lars Vilks for his controversial drawings, which are also critical of Islam.

The long-term social and political consequences of the Utøya massacre are difficult to foresee.

In the short-term, however, it has certainly resulted in Scandinavian

www.europeanrenewal.org

Continued on p. 3

The EU & Stem Cells

In Brüstle v. Greenpeace, the German Federal Court (Bundesgerichtshof) had called upon the ECJ to clarify the concept of “human embryo,” something that is not defined in Directive 98/44/EC—the so-called Biopatent Directive—on the legal protection of biotechnological inventions. This was the result of an appeal of German researcher Oliver Brüstle following the judgment of the German Federal Patent Court, which had earlier ruled that Mr. Brüstle’s patent on neural precursor cells was invalid insofar as the obtaining of these cells presupposes the destruction of human embryos.

More precisely, the ECJ had to answer the question whether the exclusion from patentability of the human embryo expressed in the Biopatent Directive covered all stages of life—from fertilization of the ovum onwards—or whether other conditions needed to be met (such as, for example, whether a minimum stage of development is required).

The ECJ gave a clear and unequivocal response: the protections granted in the Biopatent Directive cover all stages of life. The Court said a human embryo is an organism “capable of commencing the process of development of a human being.”

With this judgment, a precise definition of a human embryo is now legally

Sophia Kuby

In October 2011, in Brüstle v.

Greenpeace (Case C-34/10), the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg unequivocally defined a human embryo as any fertilized ovum capable of developing into a human being. As a consequence, the ECJ established the non-patentability of any technique—such as embryonic stem cell research—that derives from or depends on the destruction of a human embryo. Nevertheless, despite the ECJ’s clear and unequivocal position, the EU plans to continue providing massive funding of embryonic stem cell research from 2014 to 2020.

One could argue—and the ECJ itself has done this—that the nonpatentability of human embryos is one thing, research another. True.

However, to affirm this position means giving up the principle of coherence, without which the EU itself would very quickly fall apart into a multitude of contradicting standards.

With its judgment, the ECJ upheld the March 2011 opinion of Advocate General Yves Bot: that cells that have the ability to develop into a human being (totipotent cells) are to be legally regarded as human beings and are, thus, excluded from any possible patentability. v

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Elfström, cont’d.

conservatism becoming a bit less strident, a bit more squeamish, and much more evasive on matters of principle. This is simply a survival tactic: it is what Scandinavian conservatives have to do so that their ideas are not immediately linked to Breivik.

Eventually, as reality catches up with the false worldview peddled by the centre-left, conservatism will regain its credibility and become politically relevant once again. This, in turn, should give renewed confidence to the conservative movement—both in Scandinavia and elsewhere in Europe. n

Mr. Elfström is a member of the board of Konservativt Forum, a Swedish organization dedicated to conservative education and networking. He has a degree in history and behavioural science from the University of Linköping and is active in the Christian Democrats (Kristdemokraterna).

The CER’s First Book

Platon na Wall Street: Konserwatywne refleksje o kryzysie ekonomicznym Jacek Kloczkowski & Jonathan Price, eds.

Krakow: Ośrodek Myśli Politycznej / CER, 2011 (480 pages) The Center for European Renewal’s first book, Plato on Wall Street: Conservative Reflections on the Economic Crisis, was published in Polish in December 2010 in collaboration with the Ośrodek Myśli Politycznej (Centre for Political Thought) of Krakow. The book is a collection of essays and includes contributions by members of the CER, including President András Lánczi, Advisory Board member Roger Scruton, and Founder and OMP President Milowit Kuninski. Other contributors include Harald Bergbauer, Diederik Boomsma, Emma Cohen de Lara, Alvino-Mario Fantini, Attila K. Molnár, Melvin Schut, Jakob E:son Söderbaum, and Agnieszka Wincewicz. The book was formally launched in February 2011 at a seminar at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford University.

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Molnar, cont’d.

Konservative Publizistik: Texte aus den Jahren 1961 bis 2008 Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing Berlin: Förderstiftung Konservative Bildung & Forschung, 2011

This anthology collects articles and essays written by the late Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing, a founder of the Center for European Renewal. Between 1970 and 2000, he published Criticón, the leading conservative journal in Germany.

Authentischer Konservatismus: Studien zu einer klassischen Strömung des polöitischen Denkens Felix Dirsch Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2012

A collection of essays published by a young German academic on the meaning of conservatism. The author, trained in political science and theology, examines the work of many political and social thinkers in an attempt to describe the essence of authentic conservatism.

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version of the constitution was then approved by the Hungarian parliament on April 18, 2011—in a 262-44 vote—and signed into law by President Pál Schmitt on April 25, 2011.

Controversy ensued almost immediately.

The ongoing storm around the “Easter Constitution”—so called because of its passing on Easter Monday—is based on two lines of argument. One of them concerns the legislative process; the other, its content.

The constitution’s critics say that its preparation, drafting, and adoption were insufficiently participatory.

They argue that the process did not involve all political parties, that there was no widespread social or civil debate about it, and that no public referendum was ever held. (Of course, it is worth noting that many of these elements were entirely absent in the case of the country’s previous constitutions—as well as in the case of the constitutions of many other countries.)

The other argument focuses on the constitution’s content. Practically speaking, the Easter Constitution changed the political framework of the country only slightly. It still considers Hungary a republic, and it has preserved the roles of the president, parliament, and the country’s other important political institutions. But opponents argue that the constitution has changed the broader, politico-cultural context of Hungarian political life in the long-run. In their assertions, critics have focused almost exclusively on the new constitution’s preamble, titled the “National Avowal of Faith.”

The politico-cultural world of the constitution as enshrined in its preamble can be summarized in three words: God, homeland, and family.

The preamble starts with a reference to the first line of Hungary’s old national anthem, which asks God to bless the Hungarian nation. It also recognizes the country’s various religious traditions, while also explicitly mentioning Christian Europe and the role of Christianity in the history

of the Hungarian nation. And even though the rest of the constitution clearly embodies the principle of separation of church and state, the preamble refers to their cooperation.

It is interesting to note that the most serious criticisms of the new constitution have not come from non-Christian religious groups in Hungary, but mainly from atheist intellectuals who have attacked its religious elements.

Another element that has been a frequent target of critics is the constitution’s support and defence of what we may call traditional family values.

The new constitution says that marriage is solely the union of a man and a woman. It further states that Hungary will strive to protect the institution of the family as the basis of the nation. Groups from Hungary and from across Europe have criticized these elements, arguing that they fail to include same-sex marriages—even though this is something that would not be in accord with Hungary’s own history and traditions.

Another rather problematic element in Hungary’s new constitution has to do with the dignity of human life: It includes references to the “inviolability of human dignity” and the protection of the foetus from the moment of conception. Although its critics are wrong to assert that this amounts to an overt prohibition of the “right” to abortion, it does open the door for anti-abortion legislation to be introduced in parliament—or, at least, to some limitations on government-funded abortion-on-demand, which is the status quo in Hungary.

Previously, under the Socialist regime headed by János Kádár from 1956 until 1988, abortions had been fully funded by the government’s social health agency. As a sad consequence, today there is a widespread abortion culture in Hungary.

In fact, in recent years, the number of abortions has often been close to the number of live births. In such a climate, even a modest anti-abortion campaign or pro-life argument may provoke a scandal. Despite what the

www.europeanrenewal.org

Continued on p. 5

A Father in the Home: Reflections on ’68 Chantal Delsol

“Your eyes would find in mine the help that can be drawn From this tall thing with a deep voice called a father in the home.”

— Jules Supervielle

If we do not believe at all in progress—in other words, if we think that improvements in human relations are but the “dreams of the enlightened”—then the mobilizations of May ’68 are nothing more than a farce put on by spoiled children. We can easily describe the mess they left behind; there is no lack of material from which to draw. Perhaps it is enough to say, it should not have occurred.

Improving human society is, in my opinion, both possible and, indeed, a fact. But it is not automatic. It is not free of new forms of corruption; one must always identify and combat these.

It will not be the Second Coming; I do not think the City of Man here below is perfect yet. Having received the legacy of Western culture and Christian tradition that underpins everything (whether we like it or not), we

can see man as a being who is devoted to constant improvement—not just of himself, through the acquisition of knowledge and/or holiness, but also of society.

Such improvement carries with it a specific meaning: the deployment and flourishing of human capacities, and the improvement of relationships. Of course, the Enlightenment so radicalized and damaged the idea of progress, that today we might want to toss it into oblivion. Our current droits-del’hommistes who constantly demonize the past in the name of progress seem to mimic the eighteenth-century historian Jules Michelet who, with great talent, rejected the darkness of the Middle Ages. However, even if an idea seems mad, it does not necessarily mean that it is wrong. The errors of the Enlightenment cannot destroy the Christian vocation to make the world a better place.

The question then is: What price are we willing to pay for progress? When a social model collapses to make way for another, chaos ensues. (Of course, I am not speaking of the collapses that v

Molnar, cont’d.

alarmist pro-abortion opponents of the Easter Constitution say, there is no legislative initiative today to change or repeal Hungary’s abortion laws. The constitution does, however, give abortion foes a chance to eventually change the country’s laws—and perhaps the culture—in the future.

The last contentious element in the new constitution is its concept of nationhood. A foreign observer might already know that Hungarian political life is rather historically-based. This means that despite the prevalence of well-known ideological issues in the country’s political debates—such as the role of the market and the state, the issue of human rights, and other well-known issues—the main political dividing lines are based on culture and history. Hungarian political life is, thus, seen only in relation to the country’s religious tradition and in the context of Hungary’s historical

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have generated only desolation, such as the Communist Revolution.) After the transformation of a society, one wonders about the ratio of benefits to costs: Was the subsequent development of the rule of law in France worth the initial Reign of Terror? We do not talk much about this today because to do so could generate many more of these kinds of questions— especially since most other European nations reached the same result without the need to, for example, exterminate more than 100,000 Vendeans and other royalist die-hards.

In the light of this, one might think that the benefits of May ’68 could have been achieved without going through the kind of social upheaval that still leaves us speechless today. The problem is that you cannot weigh the costs and benefits in advance of an event.

So you must proceed with caution.

However, such caution is entirely absent when a social rupture becomes inevitable—and when it is rejected by a movement’s activists. The storm of May ’68 reflects precisely this situation.

Continued on p. 7

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past—and mainly that of the twentieth century.

Consequently, the Easter Constitution proudly mentions Saint Stephen, the founder of the Hungarian state and the first King of Hungary (1000-1038 AD), and makes explicit reference to the nation’s other great forebears. It also recognizes the intellectual and spiritual unity of the nation, noting how the preservation of this unity is the responsibility of every Hungarian citizen. It was this unity that was torn apart by the ideological movements and foreign interventions of the twentieth century.

All this has been interpreted by critics as a hidden and dangerous reevaluation of the treaties of Trianon (1920) and Paris (1947), which are seen by many Hungarians as having subtly chipped away at the country’s former national unity. Thus, because it is rooted in historical traditions and is critical of such international

treaties, the Easter Constitution has been accused of being a serious threat to the European status quo.

Advancing this accusation is important for the constitution’s Hungarian opponents so that the entire debate may be “exported”—and eventually be taken up by the EU. Hungary’s new constitution also condemns the crimes committed under both the National Socialist and Communist dictatorships. It even specifies the date of Nazi occupation (March 19, 1944) as the day on which the country lost its liberty. These statements make it difficult for anyone to consider the later Communist regime as any less oppressive than the earlier Nazi regime—and point to the interwoven political, economic, and intellectual framework that the country has been trying to shed. Of course, linking the Communists to the Nazis in this way is rather unpleasant

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Kuby, cont’d.

binding for all 27 EU member states.

Accordingly, a human embryo is: • A human ovum as soon as it is fertilised—if that fertilisation is such as to commence the process of development of a human being.

• A non-fertilised human ovum into which the cell nucleus from a mature human cell has been transplanted.

• A non-fertilised human ovum whose division and further development have been stimulated by parthenogenesis.

The ECJ thus upheld the idea that a scientific invention cannot be patented if the process of implementation of said invention requires either the prior destruction of human embryos or their prior use as base material—even if, as in the Brüstle case, the description of that process in the original patent application does not explicitly refer to the use of human embryos.

According to the Court, the context and aim of the EU’s Biopatent Directive show that the European Parliament intended to exclude the possibility of patentability in any case where the respect for human dignity would thereby be affected.

The judgment of the ECJ quickly raised hopes that research would henceforth go into more ethicallyacceptable alternatives—such as the very successful research that has been seen with adult stem cells and induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. In fact, one would have thought, under the dictate of the principle of coherence, the Court’s clarification would have led to higher ethical standards in European research. But far from it.

On November 30, 2011, the European Commission presented to the European Parliament its next Framework Program for Research and Innovation for 2014 to 2020. The €80 billion program, called “Horizon 2020”, includes funding for embryonic stem cell research.

Discussions about Horizon 2020 are expected to be concluded before the summer of 2012. But the Commission’s unqualified support for the entire Horizon 2020 program suggests that it has completely ignored the ECJ’s Brüstle decision. Thus, instead

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of being consistent with the Court’s legally binding judgment, the Commission and the European Parliament continue to include controversial and unethical research in their scientific research budgets.

Surprisingly, the European Commission also wants to lower the ethical standards of its Horizon 2020 program by excluding a prior commitment (§12) that was part of the previous Framework Program for Research in 20072013. This prior commitment stated that the Commission “will not submit to the Regulatory Committee proposals for projects which include research activities which destroy human embryos, including for the procurement of stem cells.” This is now being reconsidered.

Besides the ECJ’s judgment and the European Commission’s own ethical guidelines from the previous Framework Program, there is also a consensus among many MEPs from across the political spectrum around the issue of unethical research. In fact, just before the European Commission presented Horizon 2020 to the European Parliament last year, MEPs from different countries and political groups got together and urged the Commission not to finance research involving embryos and embryonic stem cells.

They insisted that EU research funding should only concentrate on ethically unproblematic alternatives like adult stem cells and stem cells from umbilical cords. Unfortunately, they were ignored by the Commission.

In addition, the Commission has also ignored European taxpayers, who have an undeniably clear standpoint regarding research that requires the destruction of human embryos. The vast majority of the population in Europe considers the human embryo as nascent human life—and conducting research with embryos is seen as highly contentious, according to a recent Eurobarometer Survey.

With regard to ethical guidelines for research funding, the Commission seems blissfully unaware that it may be gambling away an ideal opportunity to demonstrate that the European project is truly for its citizens (and not just a self-justifying bureaucracy). It already

uses a great deal of taxpayer money to pay for marketing campaigns designed to make European citizens appreciate all the “blessings the EU has brought to their lives” and to feel “closer” to EU institutions. But if the Commission were to apply a higher ethical standard to EU-funded research programs, it might be able to improve its image among Europeans—a constant concern for Brussels.

From a practical standpoint, too, embryonic stem cell research has lost much of its potentially lucrative appeal. Biomedical companies have lost interest because of the lack of practical results and investment losses. Last fall, for example, the US company Geron Corporation gave up its long-standing hopes for embryonic stem cell research and stopped all funding in the field.

Thus, even those on the cutting edge of private sector biotechnology research are moving away from stem cell research.

It is clearer than ever before that embryonic stem cell research is unsafe, uncertain, impractical, and immoral.

With so many signs to the contrary, the European Commission and the European Parliament have a political and moral obligation to take into account the evidence—as well as the opinion of the overwhelming majority of European citizens—and strive to be coherent with European jurisdiction, and their own directives. n

Ms. Kuby is a founder and the Executive Director of European Dignity Watch (EDW) in Brussels. She is also a member of the board of Christian Democrats for Life, a German bio-ethics think-tank. She previously worked as a press officer and consultant with a media company in Germany. Ms. Kuby holds a Masters in philosophy from the Hochschule für Philosophie in Munich. For information about EDW please visit: www.europeandignitywatch.org.

www.europeanrenewal.org

Delsol, cont’d.

Behind all the nonsense, the mobilizations of May wanted to respond to a real question. And they did—by paying a high price. Those responsible for all the chaos brilliantly described something that was already broken.

I think the mobilizations of May produced historic improvements in many ways and in different areas. Of what? Education. Communication.

Autonomy. But we know that May ’68 also reflected a crisis of authority.

The activists of the May uprisings may have appeared simply as nihilists who rejected all authority. Some of them certainly reflected this, especially since so many relied on ideologies that, in the light of experience, have proven to be quite perverse. But what we instead see in them is an excess that eventually became the main substance of the matter by dint of its fanaticism.

Based on the conception of the inherent dignity of every human being, European culture developed a specific theory of “educational transmission.”

In the course of our history, the importance of the community—especially the family—gradually faded as the importance of the individual grew.

This is how the Catholic Church in the sixth century was able to repeal the right to life (and death) that fathers had asserted over their families since Roman times. In the West, educational transmission slowly moved from teacher-initiated to student-centered.

And educational approaches were sought that would help form an autonomous, independent human being.

Yet the student-centered approach—promoted by modernity and built on the Christian idea of individual dignity—struggled in the presence of the authoritarian father figure. We might say that the latter retained a “holistic” mind-set, while the surrounding culture abandoned the holistic for the individualistic. Thus, an immense gap arose between the need for personal autonomy and the unchanged role of the traditional figure of authority. It was this gap that formed the basis for the mobilizations of May ’68.

To see a concrete image of the father figure—the ultimate target of the events of May—one may refer to

Franz Kafka. Read his Letter to His Father: Kafka’s father based his family “government” on his supposed superiority. He used arguments based on authority. He devalued and diminished the child rather than trusting him. He held his own views as sacred, argued that his subjectivity held the rank of objectivity and took himself for a paragon.

The father figure thus prepared the child for a society in which the child never needed to become an adult (as long as those older than him survived); in which girls were incapable of autonomy (and required protection rather than freedom); and where traditional dogmas did not need to be validated (since history had already validated them). Modern society, however, awaited a new educational model—a new way to transmit knowledge—in which authority was based on evidence, experience, and persuasion, and where the development of a child’s autonomy was the ultimate goal.

We can interpret May ’68 in the light of Kafka. The patriarchy of the twentieth century pursued the teacherinitiated form of education, while the culture around us increasingly called for a student-centered approach.

When education was finally challenged by the strength of student emancipation, the patriarchal authorities preferred to pose as the moribund victims of nihilism, rather than transform themselves. One cannot convince Kafka’s father—who was convinced of his own certainty—to change his manner of seeing things. We can only choose to overcome such a system, or accept it as the fate of history.

The activists of May ’68 could not do with such niceties. They simply destroyed what could not be changed.

They then rejected the entire contents of the system of educational transmission. Of course, a more peaceful transformation of the educational system would have been preferable—one which would not have thrown out the baby with the bath water.

Would it have been possible? How can we know? The mobilizations of May forced people to ask what they Continued on p. 10

Lezioni di Politica, Vol. 1: Storia delle dottrine politiche Gianfranco Miglio Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011

Lezioni di Politica, Vol. 2: Scienza della politica Gianfranco Miglio Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011

The late Italian jurist Gianfranco Miglio was professor of political science at the Catholic University of Milan and a founder of the Italian Federalist Party. Published posthumously, these two volumes draw from his academic work: Volume I is a history of the development of political ideas—from Greek and Roman antiquity to the modern age; Volume II summarizes Miglio’s approach to the ‘science’ of politics, with an analysis of political structures, institutions, and actors. Miglio’s later work was increasingly sympathetic to decentralist and secessionist arguments, and he eventually represented the Lega Nord in the Italian Senate.

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Molnar, cont’d.

Así pensamos: Un ideario para la comunión tradicionalista Frederick D.Wilhelmsen Barcelona: Ediciones Scire, 2011

Number 7 in the “De regno” series of Catholic traditionalism, this reprints a 1977 classic of Spanish Carlism written by the late, great Frederick Wilhelmsen. It includes a new introduction by Spanish conservative intellectual Miguel Ayuso.

El Estado en su laberinto: Las transformaciones de la política contemporánea Miguel Ayuso Barcelona: Ediciones Scire, 2011

Written by Miguel Ayuso, professor of political science and constitutional law at the Pontifical University of Comillas, this monograph looks at the importance of values and identity in politics, and explores the challenges facing contemporary democracies. It is number 8 in the “De regno” series of Catholic traditionalism.

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for Europe’s Communist and Socialist parties. However, it is not unprecedented, especially given the work of Hannah Arendt, for example, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).

There is actually an historical-political debate taking place now over how to interpret the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1945 and the years thereafter. The Right in Hungary calls it an occupation, but the Left sees it as a “liberation.” In the imagination of the Left, the period between 1945 and 1948 is seen as a “honeymoon of democracy,” brought to Hungary courtesy of the Red Army.

This conflict of historical visions really reflects two quite distinct and conflicting political traditions. According to the Hungarian Left, the country has a robust Socialist tradition that began in 1945, while the pre-Socialist past before 1945 is all rubbish. The Easter Constitution considers the country’s Socialist period a continuation of tyranny and instead seeks to re-connect with healthy Hungarian traditions from before 1945.

With these “moral defeats” in mind, the conclusion of the new constitution’s preamble speaks about the abiding need for a spiritual and intellectual renewal in Hungary—something that participants of the Vanenburg Meetings have been discussing avidly in the broader European context since 2006.

Hungary’s Easter Constitution came into effect on January 1, 2012.

Almost immediately, it has attracted sympathetic interest—and attacks— from people in other countries. In fact, many critics of the constitution in Hungary have received support from left-wing organizations and media abroad—all in the name of defending the achievements of progressives in Hungary.

In the twentieth-century history of Hungary, there has long been a strange, highly stylized separation between “progressives” and “reactionaries” (never mind that at the beginning of the twentieth century, the latter group also included Hungarian classical liberals). The former group

has consistently presented itself as the only agent of progress in Hungary, fighting against local backwardness and the reactionary forces of the past. This is a flattering self-portrait, to be sure, but it is also a crude misrepresentation.

Unfortunately, the same people who have been attempting to redefine Hungary’s political spectrum between progressives and reactionaries have also been attacking the Easter Constitution. They know that the only way they can acquire and maintain a hold on power is with help from their foreign friends. This is true whether we speak of 1945, or 1918, or 2012.

So, in the same way that progressives facilitated the Communist takeover of Hungary in 1945, with the assistance and complicity of international organizations and foreign powers, today progressives are joining forces with the self-proclaimed “agents of progress” across Europe and within the EU’s administrative and bureaucratic structures. Their goal is to delegitimize Hungary’s Easter Constitution, the country’s most successful attempt to re-discover—and best hope for a renewal of—its historical traditions. For the constitution’s critics, there is nothing to be gained by preserving or restoring local traditions. In the political imagination of the Hungarian Left, the country’s difficulties—whether political, economic, or cultural—are always the result of backwardness.

And any Hungarian “reactionary” who defends the constitution should be forced to get out of the way—in order to make way for progress. n

Prof. Molnar teaches at Eötvös University in Budapest. He is the author of several books. This article is based on a presentation he gave at the 2011 Vanenburg Meeting.

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Western Suttee: Against a ‘Right’ to be Killed Diederik Boomsma & Jonathan Price On March 30, 2011, a team of doctors euthanized a Belgian couple at their request. The 83-year-old man suffered from terminal prostate cancer. His 78-year-old wife, although suffering from severe rheumatism, was not terminally ill.

But she did not want to live without her husband. This became the first official, public instance of coeuthanasia in Western Europe. The death announcement in the newspaper stated that they “choose to end it together.”

Euthanasia is legal in the Low Countries under two conditions: The request must be made by an adult of sound mind, and the patient must have an incurable disease that causes unbearable suffering.

Although there is no cure for rheumatism, the Belgian woman did not meet these conditions. However, she would have had to move to a nursing home after her husband was gone. So horrified was she by this prospect that, combined with her age-related ailments, it was deemed by doctors to constitute “unbearable suffering.”

One can empathize with her.

Apart from the wish not to be alone in one’s later years, credible stories abound of elderly people left unwashed in bed, as nursing homes fail to provide proper care. But, empathy notwith-standing, this de facto legalization of “euthanasia for love” shows us that another taboo has bitten the dust. A mere nine years after euthanasia was legalized, the strict conditions for its use are already showing major cracks.

Other taboos vanished earlier— some even before legalization. In a 1994 decision of the Dutch high court, “mental suffering” was accepted as a reason for allowing euthanasia. This followed a case in which a doctor gave a lethal overdose to a 50-year-old woman who had been chronically depressed after a difficult divorce and the death of her two sons. In 1998, a retired Dutch socialist senator claimed to be tired of life and, therefore, to have the right to die. His doctor agreed. Although the doctor was convicted of culpable assisted suicide, the Dutch high court took the view that clinical depression can be a sufficient justification for v

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euthanasia. Finally, the Dutch medical association stated last year that decline caused by age ought to be considered sufficient reason for euthanasia.

The Financial Times recently (and correctly) referred to the Netherlands as the “California of Europe”: where Holland goes, the rest of the Continent will follow.

A 2008 study of the Swiss death clinics Exit and Dignitas claimed that many of those who committed suicide there suffered from weariness of life rather than a terminal medical condition. Since its founding by a human-rights lawyer in 1998, Dignitas has become an important European centre for suicide tourism.

Across Europe, pressure groups are pushing for legalization of euthanasia and assisted suicide. In Spain, support for legalization was strengthened by an Academy Award-winning film about the assisted death of Ramon Sampedro, who was paralyzed from the neck down after diving into shallow water. In Britain last June, the BBC aired a documentary about Dignitas Continued on p. 11

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Eric Voegelin & the Divine in World History Harald Bergbauer

Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) was one of the greatest political theorists of the twentieth century. Along with Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) and Leo Strauss (1899-1973), he is usually named as one of the three most outstanding representatives of neoclassical political philosophy. Born in Cologne, Voegelin moved to Vienna in 1910 where he received his intellectual formation, especially during the 1920s. At the time, Vienna was a kind of intellectual center of the world, home to scholars like Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, Othmar Spann, Georg Simmel, Hans Kelsen, Sigmund Freud, and others. In his Autobiographical Reflections,

dictated and transcribed in 1973, Voegelin reflected on these early, formative influences.

The publication of in 1938 of Voegelin’s The Political Religions, which was critical of mass ideological movements like National Socialism, forced him to leave Austria—which, that same year, became part of the Third Reich after the Anschluss (or annexation). He settled in the United States and between 1942 and 1958 was professor of political science at the Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

It was during this period that some of Voegelin’s most important books were published: The New Science of Politics in 1952 and the first three volumes of his five-volume

Order and History between 1956 and 1957. Voegelin spent the next eleven years back in Europe, where he founded the Institute for Political Science at the University of Munich.

His inaugural lecture there was on “Science, Politics, and Gnosticism,” which took up his thesis from The New Science of Politics—namely, that large parts of modernity have been characterized by a Gnostic (gnosis = knowledge) trait. According to Voegelin, Gnosticism refers to the conviction of certain thinkers that having access to the “right” knowledge will permit them to transform the world through political action.

After retiring in 1969, Voegelin went back to the United States,

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Delsol, cont’d.

were willing to sacrifice in order to change a society. The violence of the rupture shattered the fragile societal framework of couples and families.

The relationships between men and women—and between parents and children—have since become staggering problems. The father of the family was cursed; and so, the father figure has virtually disappeared. Psychiatrists used to say that a child was depressed because he had too strong a father; today, a child is depressed because he lacks a father.

Everything in May ’68 was done to excess—undoubtedly because various ideologies were intertwined. Those who participated in the chaos wanted to remove all traditional authority inherited from the past—in order to establish their own oppressive and hegemonic authority.

Thus, in terms of education and the transmission of knowledge, we have had forty years of chaos. There is no need to dwell on what everyone already knows: Children have been abandoned on principle, motivated by the absurd thesis of the innate autonomy of the child. This has led to the creation of disastrous school programs and a derisive atmosphere in which no child can grow in knowledge.

The global revolt against authority not only produced uncivil children, it also resulted in parents in a state of perpetual adolescence, a disastrous generation of those who were twenty years old in May, my generation. My contemporaries—who now have white hair—experienced their youth as if it were the liberation of the world. They rejected the old certainties and the principles that constrained them, and they dismissed simple, everyday morality as something bourgeois. Having grown up during the post-war boom, they rapidly surpassed their parents in education and success. Having lived with the cult of irony and relativism, they denied the transmission of truth and knowledge, and had little interest in anything but their own egos. Later, having lost their ideological illusions, they held on to the only thing that was left: cynicism.

My generation is narcissistic,

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ill-bred, and pretentious. Its morality amounts merely to a demonization of the Nazi genocide (but not others). My generation cloaks itself in principles in which it no longer believes, while still playing its own personal, self-centered games. Its members have seen their youthful ideas discredited and their beliefs made ridiculous by their current social and economic circumstances.

But they have also retained the ideological mindset of their youth, which was marked by outrageous intolerance.

This is a generation that has been wrong in everything. Deep inside, they know it; but, of course, they will not admit it. And so, stripped of arguments to justify their past actions, they cannot do anything but register their hatred, confusion, and suspicions.

No matter. My generation will leave this world by playing the role of anti-hero. Their children are doing everything possible not to be like them, even while treating their parents with the respect that one must give to one’s elders and with the compassion that one must feel toward the perpetual adolescent, the self that does not want to grow up.

My generation functioned as a kind of explosive, indiscriminately destroying anything in its path, while refusing to change—and refusing to honour the promises of our ancestral culture.

Mine is a generation that mistook the means for the end, fanatically venerating the rupture itself. As a result, mine is now a generation of incomplete people—of hollow men and women—who are lost in their nihilism. Human society can never survive with such nihilism.

Nevertheless, we are already seeing the beginnings of a turn-around.

The children barbarized by a lack of restraint and their parents infantilized by the neglect of their duties are no longer amusing. The activists of ’68 have realised (when they are honest with themselves) that authority is necessary for education. Perhaps it would have sufficed for them to have helped make authority figures smarter—and more humble. But now it is too late: a whole generation has been sacrificed to change Kafka’s authoritarian father.

And the difficulty we have today is to convince society of the fundamental importance of fatherhood.

The mobilizations of May ’68 have left severe, lasting effects, but anthropological reality is having the last word.

We are learning from the consequences of this disaster that education and the transmission of knowledge cannot be achieved without authority, without the authority of the father. The tall, mysterious source of “help” of which Supervielle speaks symbolizes the unshakeable foundation of that educational transmission—at least, in free societies.

Today we stand on the wreckage of May ’68, but we are in the process of re-building a system of educational transmission that the young Kafka would not recognize. Human history moves forward by a succession of ruptures. But when everything around us seems broken, one must neither dance merrily on the ruins, nor weep over the loss. One must instead rely on society’s original foundations in order to rebuild anew that which humanity absolutely cannot do without. n

Dr. Delsol is professor of philosophy at the University of Marne-La-Vallée near Paris. She has written several novels, as well as books about the nature of authority, the principle of subsidiarity, European identity and twentieth-century political thought. Her first book to appear in English was Icarus Fallen: The Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World (2003). This was followed by The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century: An Essay on Late Modernity (2006) and Unjust Justice: Against the Tyranny of International Law (2008), all published by ISI Books. This essay has been translated and re-published with her permission.

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narrated by Sir Terry Pratchett, one of the world’s most successful fantasy writers. Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Pratchett has since announced his plan to complete the necessary forms for Britain’s assisted suicide waiting list. The BBC was criticized for airing what amounted to its fourth pro-euthanasia documentary. Yet in February 2011, the British director of public prosecutors said his office would be less likely to prosecute cases of assisted suicide in which the motive was compassion and not a desire for personal gain.

A slippery-slope argument is a fallacy—except when it is not. The gradual shedding of taboos is precisely what opponents of legal euthanasia have warned about. From first being recognized as a regrettable practice that should be allowed only in the most exceptional cases and under strict regulations, euthanasia is increasingly being presented as a human right.

Note that we are not talking merely about the right to die. Euthanasia involves others doctors, perhaps family, friends, or strangers—who must help you die. Of course, if you have a right to be killed, someone else may be given the duty to do the deed. And if you grant the right to the terminally ill, can you deny it to anyone else— given that rights are, by definition, universal?

In the Netherlands, this change of perception is giving rise to misgivings even among those who have been in the vanguard of the legalization movement. Els Borst, the minister originally responsible for introducing the 2002 law legalizing euthanasia now has some regrets.

She believes her country should have focused instead on palliative care: “We first listened to the political and societal demand in favour of euthanasia. Obviously, this was not the proper order.” A recent book

by Dutch anthropologist Anne-Mei The concluded that many patients ask to die “out of fear,” because of an absence of effective pain relief.

Many Dutch doctors are also changing their approach. Instead of informing patients about euthanasia, they first tell them about other forms of care. They have found that very ill patients will agree to whatever they suggest—whether death or treatment. But not all patients. As one doctor recently said: “Patients no longer request euthanasia, they demand it as a right. It’s as if we doctors are being pushed to cross borders.”

Last year, doctors in the Netherlands granted euthanasia requests to only 25 people suffering from dementia—a mere fraction of those requesting it for that reason. The reluctance of some medical professionals is prompting demands for a new clinic for assisted suicide, where patients can go if their doctors refuse to cooperate. But an opposite trend toward full legalization also exists and it involves not the sick but the healthy. A group of prominent people over age 70—including writers, artists, and politicians—are urging that the law allow anyone over 70 to be legally euthanized if he or she so chooses. Their demand is that euthanasia no longer be considered a medical decision and they want the right to die to be included in the Dutch Constitution. The idea is: I am the captain of my own ship.

Why can’t I sink it?

It is a theological truth that life is a gift and receiving it is a task. Ownership is not a correct metaphor for our lives. But even if it were, this would not free one from responsibility. If I own a Rembrandt, that doesn’t give me the right to use it to light my cigar. Permitting euthanasia or assisted suicide is a world away from making it a constitutionally guaranteed right. At the moment, the question arises mostly with the elderly and the severely ill. But is there really any reason to draw the line there? If 70, why not 50? If 50, why not 35? Creating a new constitutional right to die would render these questions illegitimate in public discourse.

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Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet Roger Scruton London: Atlantic Press, 2012

Roger Scruton’s latest book critically examines the ideas that animate the global environmental movement. He explores problems like climate change and environmental pollution, arguing that conservative approaches that put the emphasis on personal responsibility and local sovereignty are preferable to liberal approaches that rely on the state.

The Face of God

Roger Scruton London: Continuum, 2012 In this collection of essays, based on the author’s 2010 Gifford lectures at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, Scruton discusses the redemptive power of belief in the transcendent and the divine. He argues that respect for the sacred is increasingly important, especially as atheism continues to spread throughout our culture and the world.

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Boomsma & Price, cont’d.

How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying Too) David P. Goldman Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2011

Before becoming a contributor to First Things, Goldman wrote the famed “Spengler” column for the on-line Asia Times. In this, his first book, he expands his arguments, explaining why global demographic trends and the spread of secularism will result in a more shallow, increasingly barbaric world.

The recognition of an inalienable right to die undermines the foundation of a true community defined by mutual rights and duties. As citizenship is increasingly seen as a matter of rights without duties, the state becomes a slave to the wishes of the radically free individual who can turn in his passport—or, in this case, demand death—at will. Thus, the most basic duty to others—to remain alive—is rejected.

There are also curious practical consequences. If there is, in fact, a right to be killed, may the rapist avoid his term by requesting death?

Or imagine a friend comes to you and says that she is thinking of committing suicide. If that death is a right guaranteed by the state, what is then the appropriate response? As with abortion, the convention may become to treat suicide as a private matter—removed it from the realm of public morality and discourse.

The Hindu custom of suttee, in which the wife of a deceased husband immolates herself on his funeral pyre, was famously banned by the British in 1829. In the West, the Vikings had similar customs. Now, in the California of Europe, an appeal to human rights is being used as an argument to allow doctors to v

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kill wives who want to join their husbands in death.

It’s difficult to say whether Indian or Viking widows freely chose to die, but it’s quite possible that many of them did. Envisioning a culture in which couple-euthanasia becomes a social expectation rather than a purely individual choice takes some imagination. But it doesn’t take a whole lot.

A millennium after Christians converted the Vikings and banned the practice, it may be worth asking whether Western suttee is sneaking in through the back door. n

Mr. Boomsma is a member of the Amsterdam City Council and a doctoral student at the University of Leiden. Mr. Price is a Ph.D. Fellow at the University of Leiden.

Both are members of the Board of the Center for European Renewal. © 2011 by National Review, Inc. Reprinted by permission. v

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It’s Not the End of the World, It’s Just the End of You “Spengler” New York: RVP Publishers, 2011

This is a collection of some of Spengler’s most trenchant analyses and criticisms of modern life, drawn from his regular columns over the years in the Asia Times.

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this time to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California, where he remained until his death in 1985. His time there was spent researching and writing extensively.

Volumes IV and V of his Order and History were authored there, as well as parts of his eight-volume History of Political Ideas. In the past decade, the University of Missouri Press has published Voegelin’s Collected Works in 34 volumes.

The most crucial of Voegelin’s ideas are best introduced by referring to three of his principal works: The Political Religions, The New Science of Politics and Order and History. In The Political Religions, Voegelin strove to show that politics has a dimension

often neglected or ignored by politicians and scientists: a religious one.

That dimension has become increasingly apparent not only during the last several centuries, but especially during the twentieth century: Russian Communism, Italian Fascism, and German National Socialism were, in the end, nothing but expressions of distorted religious ideas turned into political ones.

In fact, Voegelin coined the term “political religions” in 1938 precisely in order to designate this new phenomenon (as did Raymond Aron, independently, that same year in France). The term “political religions” served to characterize the

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The Seductiveness of Ideology in Politics Frits Bolkestein

At the end of my studies, back in the fifties of the last century, I thought of writing a thesis on “the anti-democratic intellectual.” The Cold War was then still very much in full swing. Many intellectuals had gone to the Soviet Union. Instead I went to East Africa to sell oil. But the subject stayed with me.

After a life full of activity, I decided to write a book on “The Lure of Ideology in Politics” from which the fellow-travellers of communism seemed to have suffered. Usually this sort of subject is written about by intellectuals.

I am more of a politician, so my experience and perspective are different.

Intellectuals are people who are interested in abstract ideas. Some may be about the arts or sciences, religion or culture, others about politics. In the case of politics, such ideas are eventually communicated to the public.

Three elements—abstract ideas, politics, and communication—combine to form what is known as the “public intellectual.”

Not all ideas of public intellectuals are valuable. Far from it. For ideas to have value they must be based upon and capable of being tested by experience.

Experience is key. The people that promoted the Russian revolution did not have a clue as to what should happen afterwards. According to Sorel, Marx had once said that anyone who makes plans for after the revolution is a reactionary. “First we’ll destroy and then we’ll see,” was the slogan. Some of the wilder enthusiasts of the cultural revolution of 1968 thought the same.

With a few notable exceptions, the great political treatises were written after the authors had turned fifty.

Most young people—and nearly all young intellectuals—have not had the opportunity to acquire experience. It is therefore likely that their political ideas have little value, particularly if they are of a general nature.

Youth is naturally inclined to Romanticism, which has had a disastrous effect on politics. Rousseau was a romantic. His Social Contract

foreshadowed totalitarianism. He wrote: “Whoever refuses to obey the General Will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free.”

It is remarkable how much revolutionary movements have relied on youth. Gregor Strasser, leader of the left-wing Nazis, said: “Out of the way, old men” (Macht Platz, ihr Alten). The Italian Fascist movement appealed to giovinezza. In 1968 a slogan was: “Do not trust anyone over forty.”

But then look at the young people in revolt in Iran, Tunisia, and Egypt: Their ideas are of a general nature.

Are they valueless? No—precisely because these people have had a lot of experience of dictatorship (although it remains to be seen what those revolutions will bring).

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the state has intervened deeply in society. The domain of politics has thereby become much more extensive.

Also, the mass media now play a very important role. It is, in fact, difficult to think of public intellectuals apart from the media.

These two developments have caused a great increase in the numbers of public intellectuals. But words are like money. They often also suffer from inflation. Today, few individual public intellectuals are heard. But collectively, they make an incessant din, amplified by a barrage of opinion polls. And with whom do public intellectuals associate? Other public intellectuals. They often form an in-crowd susceptible to hype, captivated by appealing ideas rather than sound ones and with a predilection for trumpeting catastrophes.

The ideas of public intellectuals may be dangerous, particularly if they are of a general nature and untested by experience. I now want to illustrate this in three areas: the European Union, multiculturalism, and Europe’s vanishing self-confidence.

The European Union The European Union is of great importance to us all. Its proudest achievement is the internal market.

But now the EU is on the wrong track.

Its actions are excessive. If it does not stop this excess, it will come to serious harm.

A premonition was given by the Dutch public, which a few years ago voted with a two-thirds majority against the erroneously styled European constitution.

Let me turn to the European Parliament: It lives in a federal fantasy.

Everywhere it wants “more Europe.”

Sometimes that is necessary, but often it is not. The citizens of Europe, moreover, are sceptical. Parliament is legitimate since it has been elected by due process. But it is not representative because it is out of tune with the citizens of Europe.

The European Parliament wants more money at a time when every minister of finance has to scrape the bottoms of his coffers. This by itself makes clear how isolated from reality Parliament is. It forgets that it can find money in its present budget. Of the Regional Fund, only a small part is spent. The same thing goes for the Cohesion Fund. Also, a part of the Common Agricultural Fund may be repatriated. A critical evaluation of the EU’s budget will yield quite significant financial slack.

As for the European Commission, it consists of 27 members, one for each member state. This is too many. Some commissioners have only half a day’s work, if that. But all want to become famous. Their only way to stardom is to take initiatives, needed or not.

The only remedy for this excess of initiatives is to reduce the Commission to the number needed to run the daily executive of the EU—to no more than twelve.

Where should they come from?

The EU has large member states and small ones. The large member states are Germany, the UK, and France, followed by Italy, Spain, and Poland. They all deserve a permanent seat. That leaves six seats for the smaller member states. How to distribute these is then up for discussion.

Now, about Monetary Union. It was born because France and Germany

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Bolkestein, cont’d.

wanted it. But these two countries pursued different aims. France wanted political influence on the European Central Bank. That will always remain its aim. Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl wanted a European political union and was prepared to offer the D-Mark in order to achieve that. Both aims were frustrated.

But these different aims have left a residue in the views of France and Germany. France wants important economic decisions to be taken by politicians with the practical consequence that fiscal imbalances would be distributed over surplus and deficit countries, and that the ECB would facilitate this.

Germany wants fundamental economic decisions to be laid down in the Treaty itself: an independent ECB, priority for price stability, budgets in equilibrium, and no bail-outs.

These different views have been papered over but not reconciled. Nor is it likely that they ever will be. It is a congenital defect. It is thus to be expected that after this crisis has disappeared, further crises may well occupy the minds of our successors.

Multiculturalism Prime Minister David Cameron recently declared multiculturalism bankrupt. He is far from the first to say so.

In October of last year, Germany’s Prime Minister Angela Merkel said the same thing. In fact, some years ago, Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, pleaded against multiculturalism since it no longer stood for diversity but rather for segregation. So yes, the doctrine of multiculturalism is on the way out.

But what precisely does it mean?

Let me distinguish two aspects: essential values and group-differentiated rights.

The matter of essential values is relatively easy. I wrote about this in a leading Dutch newspaper in September 1991. I said that in the Netherlands we live in a free society in which people could behave as they pleased but that there were certain essential values which all should observe and which were non-negotiable. I mentioned freedom of speech and religion,

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equality between men and women and before the law, and the separation of church and state. This means that certain immigrant practices are unacceptable, such as the sexual mutilation of girls and honour killings.

The second aspect is group-differentiated rights. Listen to Bikhu Parekh, professor of political philosophy at the University of Westminster, who wrote the following in an article on multiculturalism in 1999: “The political community must value all its members equally and reflect this in its policies: group-differentiated rights, culturally differentiated application of laws, state support for minority institutions and a judicious programme of affirmative action.”

The crucial term here is “groupdifferentiated rights.” These have also been advocated by Jutta Limbach, who presided over the German federal constitutional court from 1994 to 2002.

She says the German Basic Law makes no mention of a duty to “protect and foster the cultural identity of an ethnic or religious minority.” Yet this is what should happen, she asserts.

These views must be firmly resisted because they oppose integration and foster apartheid. As Prime Minister Cameron has said: “Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives. … We’ve even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values.” So no groupdifferentiated rights. The individual who becomes a citizen owes allegiance to his new country and should not be entitled to a separate status as member of a community.

Europe’s self-confidence It seems Western Europe has lost confidence in its own civilization. In its modern form, the noble Western tradition of self-assessment and selfcriticism has often corrupted into sentimental self-flagellation. Let me mention some examples.

Many people appear to think that Africa’s underdevelopment has been caused by the West. It is one of the sentiments that underlies development

aid. But the question to ask is not: Why are poor countries poor? The right question is: Why are wealthy countries rich? After all, in the beginning we were all poor.

Whoever wants to study the rise of the West should go back to the Renaissance, if not to classical antiquity.

Colonialism has nothing to do with it.

European colonizers came late to the Middle East, which for centuries was ruled by the Ottomans. The interior of most of Africa was inaccessible until late in the nineteenth century. Europe is no more responsible for the underdevelopment of Africa than Rome was for the underdevelopment of Gaul.

Many people also have sympathy with the predicament of the Palestinian people. That is understandable, because their situation is indeed pitiful. But who bothers about the lot of Christians in the Middle East? Their situation is equally pitiful, if not more so. The Christian minorities in Syria, Iraq, and Pakistan are discriminated against, often violently. In Somalia the Islamists hunt down anyone in possession of a Bible. No one seems to get excited about these crimes. These minorities rightly feel deserted.

Another example concerns public holidays. The European Commission recently had three million school agendas published. They mention Islamic, Jewish, Hindu, and Buddhist holidays—but not Christian ones.

The nineteenth century saw the high tide of imperialism. Europe was then brimming with self-confidence.

What has happened since then? The last century witnessed the cataclysm of the First World War, the rise of collectivist dictatorships during the interwar years, the Second World War and the Shoa, Stalinism, and the cultural confusion of ’68. These events—and the doctrine of multiculturalism— have eroded all certainties. But there is more.

We live in a civilization that has been deeply marked by Christianity. Consider the Gospel of Saint Matthew: “Whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.” According to

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Europe’s Populist Problem

rhetorician can make the truth appear to be false, and the bad appear to be good.

Hence, it is well-advised to be suspicious of rhetorical claims such as the ones above—and to ask oneself critically whether they should be accepted at face value. There may be something fishy going on.

For one thing, the rhetorical claim that the new political parties on the rise in Europe are populist presupposes that the established parties are not populist.

Yet, the older political parties seem to be just as populist as the new parties—at least if populism means “presenting easy solutions to difficult problems.” In fact, it is obvious that most politicians have little idea what they are talking about most of the time, irrespective of their political background. They come up with

Andreas Kinneging

“Populism is on the rise in Europe!”

That is what the mainstream media and the politicians from the established parties tell us, and they consider it to be a very worrying development. “Populist parties offer easy solutions to difficult problems,” they also say. In other words: populist politicians seek to fool the people. “Their solutions are not real solutions at all. On the contrary, they will only aggravate our social and economic problems.” Such is the rhetoric one encounters, with little or no variation, in all European countries where a growing portion of the electorate has been casting its vote for the new, anti-establishment parties.

Rhetoric is a very powerful weapon.

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Nietzsche, this characterized a slave mentality. These sayings, along with others such as “turn the other cheek” from the Sermon on the Mount, do not exactly stimulate the wish to stick up for one’s own.

Feelings of guilt are pervasive among us, particularly in Protestant countries. Listen to Bach’s “Saint Matthew Passion.” The chorus sings: “I shall be punished for what you (i.e., Christ) have suffered.” The mote in Europe’s eye was thought heavier than the beam abroad. This might not be a problem if there were atonement, forgiveness, confession, expiation, or any of the other theological or liturgical forms for purging guilt. Formerly, Catholicism and Lutheranism provided this. But they no longer seem to have credibility in Europe.

It is these matters which explain Europe’s lack of self-confidence and its desire to avoid troubling Islamic sensitivities. Also, intimidation.

When Utrecht University theologian Pieter van der Horst wanted to devote his 2009 valedictory address to “the Islamisation of European antiSemitism,” the university forbade it due to its fear of Islamic displeasure.

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Who actually shares in this lack of self-confidence? Is it shared by all or just by an intellectual elite? Probably it started with the elite but has by now trickled down into general bourgeois culture. After all, it was the intelligentsia that encouraged secularization and invented multiculturalism. They were the first to be what we are all rapidly becoming. n

Mr. Bolkestein is an author and former Dutch politician. He served as Minister for Foreign Trade (1982–86), Minister of Defence (1986–88) and Chairman of the VVD Parliamentary Group. He also served as the European Commissioner for the Internal Market, Taxation and the Customs Union (1999– 2004). This article is an abridged version of a lecture given at All Souls College, Oxford University, on May 27, 2011. It has been reprinted with the author’s kind permission.

Catholicism & Democracy: An Essay in the History of Political Thought Emile Perreau-Saussine Princeton: University Press, 2012

Posthumously published, this is the English-language edition of Perreau-Saussine’s 2011 examination of the Catholic Church’s responses to modernity. It follows the author’s award-winning 2005 intellectual biography of Alisdair MacIntyre. The author’s untimely death in 2010, at the age of 38, is a tremendous loss.

Vendée—Du génocide au mémoricide: Mécanique d‘un crime légal contre l‘humanité Reynald Secher Paris: CERF, 2011

An extensively researched book about the 18th century massacre of Catholics, counter-revolutionaries and royalists in the Vendée region of western France, where more than 170,000 people, including peasants loyal to the Church and defenders of the ancién regime, lost their lives.

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Kinneging, cont’d.

Augusto del Noce: La legitimazione critica del moderno Massimo Borghesi Genoa-Milan: Marietti, 2011

This is a long overdue study of the work of Italian political philosopher Augusto Del Noce who was a mentor to several of Italy’s leading thinkers, including Senator Rocco Buttiglione and historian Roberto de Mattei. Borghesi explains the principal themes in the del Nocean oeuvre: from Gnosticism and secular humanism, to relativism and the crises of the modern world.

Conservatism

Kieron O’Hara London: Reaktion Press, 2011 O’Hara, a research fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies in London, here attempts to define conservatism. He surveys the development of conservative thought, beginning with Edmund Burke, and argues that it is still a relevant political philosophy today.

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“solutions” that are, at best, ineffective and, thus, not solutions at all.

The problem is that today most politicians across the political spectrum lack seriousness—or rather gravitas, an excellent Roman term meaning, literally, “heaviness” or “weight.” Today’s politicians are light-weights, not heavyweights.

But perhaps populism needs to be defined differently? Perhaps it should be defined as a type of politics in which the will of the people is the ultimate criterion? In that case, a populist politician would be one who considers himself the executor of the people’s will. There is some truth in this definition. But it raises the question: How do the other politicians—those of the older parties—consider themselves?

After all, as democratic politicians they, too, must surely consider themselves the executors of the people’s will.

The answer to this riddle appears to be as follows: The mainstream media and politicians claim to appeal to the higher will of the people—the reasonable and universal will—whereas populist parties are said to appeal to the lower and irrational will, to particularistic and immediate desires. In other words, the establishment parties claim to represent what is best in human nature, whereas their populist opponents are said to appeal to what is worst in human nature. The establishment parties claim to favour true, reasonable democracy; whereas the populists supposedly favour unreasonable mob rule.

This is a strong claim. If true, we should unconditionally support the establishment, since few things in politics are worse than mob-rule.

But is it true? I don’t think so. In fact, I think it’s nonsense. The so-called populist parties are neither more nor less populist than the establishment parties. Both are populist in the sense that they cater to the particularistic and immediate desires of their voters. The only difference between them is that they cater to the desires of different voters. They pay attention to different parts of the electorate.

The so-called populist parties also tend to be more nationalistic. Hence, they are sceptical of the European Union, the Council of Europe, and other international organizations. And they are also

extremely distrustful of the rising numbers of Muslims in their countries. The establishment parties depict these “Eurosceptical” and “Islamophobic” views as reprehensible. This may or may not be the case. We have no way of finding out, since both the establishment politicians and the so-called populists are incapable of a serious discussion of these weighty issues. They remain stuck at the level of slogans. All of them really haven’t a clue what they are talking about when they say that European unification is good or bad, or that a Muslim presence in Europe is a harmless or dangerous development.

Populism really is a huge problem in Europe, much more so than most people are aware of, since the old, mainstream political parties are as populist as the new parties. The simple fact is that populism is always a bad idea: Every serious political thinker—from Plato to James Madison and beyond—can enlighten us on this.

What Europe needs is truly non-populist politicians, politician who represent what is best in human nature, leaders who are genuinely on the lookout for what is reasonable and universal. What Europe lacks today are people who think and act in the way Edmund Burke promised he would in his speech to the electors of Bristol.

I wonder if the present electorate would ever even vote for such a politician? n

Dr. Kinneging is a professor at the Law School of the University of Leiden in The Netherlands.

His book, The Geography of Good and Evil, was translated into English and published in 2009 by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

His doctoral dissertation, in English titled Aristocracy, Antiquity and History: Classicism in Political Thought, was published by Transaction Publishers in 1997. He is a founder of the Center for European Renewal and former President of the Vanenburg Meeting.

www.europeanrenewal.org

Has Europe Lost its Soul to the Markets?

Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks

As the political leaders of Europe come together to save the euro and European Union itself, I believe the time has come for religious leaders to do likewise. The task ahead of us is not between Jews and Catholics, or even Jews and Christians, but between Jews and Christians on the one hand and the increasingly, even aggressively secularising forces at work in Europe today on the other, challenging and even ridiculing our faith. When a civilisation loses its faith, it loses its future. When it recovers its faith, it recovers its future. For the sake of our children, and their children not yet born, we—Jews and Christians, side by side—must renew our faith and its prophetic voice. We must help Europe to recover its soul.

The idea of religious leaders saving the euro and the EU sounds absurd. What has religion to do with economics, or spirituality with financial institutions? The answer is that the market economy has religious roots. It emerged in a Europe saturated with Judeo-Christian values. In the Hebrew Bible, for instance, material prosperity is a divine blessing. Poverty crushes the human spirit as well as the body, and its alleviation is a sacred task.

The first financial instruments of modern capitalism were developed by fourteenth century banks in Christian Florence, Pisa, Genoa, and Venice. Max Weber traced the connections between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Michael Novak has done likewise for Catholicism.

Jews, numbering one-fifth of 1% of the population of the world, have won more than 30% of Nobel Prizes in economics.

When I asked the developmental economist Jeffrey Sachs what drove him in his work, he replied without hesitation, tikkun olam, the Jewish imperative of “healing a fractured world.” The birth of the modern economy is inseparable from its JudeoChristian roots.

But this is not a stable equilibrium. Capitalism is a sustained process of creative destruction. The market undermines the very values that gave rise to it in the first place.

The consumer culture is profoundly antithetical to human dignity. It inflames desire, undermines happiness, weakens the capacity to defer instinctual gratification and blinds us to the vital distinction between the

price of things and their value. Instead of seeing the system as Adam Smith did, as a means of directing self-interest to the common good, it can become a means of empowering self-interest to the detriment of the common good. Instead of the market being framed by moral principles, it comes to substitute for moral principle. If you can buy it, negotiate it, earn it and afford it, then you are entitled to it—as the advertisers say—because you’re worth it. The market ceases to be merely a system and becomes an ideology in its own right.

The market gives us choices; so morality itself becomes just a set of choices in which right or wrong have no meaning beyond the satisfaction or frustration of desire. The phenomenon that characterises the human person, the capacity to make second-order evaluations, not just to feel desire but also to ask whether this desire should be satisfied, becomes redundant. We find it increasingly hard to understand why there might be things we want to do, can afford to do and have a legal right to do, that none the less we should not do because they are unjust, or dishonourable, or disloyal, or demeaning.

When homo economicus displaces homo sapiens, market fundamentalism rules.

There is a wise American saying: never waste a crisis. And the current financial and economic crisis affords us a rare opportunity to pause and reflect on where we have been going and where it leads. The financial instruments at the heart of the current crisis, subprime mortgages and the securitisation of risk, were so complex that governments, regulatory authorities and sometimes even bankers themselves failed to understand them and their extreme vulnerability. Those who encouraged people to take out mortgages they could not repay were guilty of what the Bible calls “putting a stumbling block before the blind.”

The build-up of personal and collective debt in America and Europe should have sent warning signals to anyone familiar with the biblical institutions of the Sabbatical and Jubilee years, created specifically because of the danger of people being trapped by debt.

Those who encouraged this recklessness protected themselves but not others from the consequences. Ultimately, financial failure is the result of moral failure: a failure of long-term responsibility to the societies of which we are a part, and to future generations who will bear the cost of our

mistakes. It is a symptom of a wider failure: to see the market as a means not an end.

The Bible paints a graphic picture of what happens when people cease to see gold as a medium of exchange and start seeing it as an object of worship. It calls it the Golden Calf. Its antidote is the Sabbath: one day in seven in which we neither work nor employ, shop, or spend. It is time dedicated to things that have a value, not a price: family, community, and thanksgiving to God for what we have, instead of worrying about what we lack. It is no coincidence that in Britain, Sunday and financial markets were deregulated at about the same time.

Markets need morals. We tend to forget that the keywords of a market economy are deeply religious. Credit comes from the Latin credo, meaning “I believe.” Confidence comes from the Latin for “shared faith.” Trust is a religious and moral concept. Try running an economy without confidence or trust and you will soon see that it cannot be done. It was a breakdown of trust that led to the banking crisis. And trust cannot be created by systems. It depends on an ethic of honour and responsibility internalised by those who run the systems.

Stabilising the euro is one thing, healing the culture that surrounds it is another.

A world in which material values are everything and spiritual values nothing is neither a stable state nor a good society. The time has come for us to recover the Judeo-Christian ethic of human dignity in the image of God. Humanity was not created to serve markets. Markets were created to serve humankind. n

Sir Jonathan Sacks is the Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth. This article—an edited version of a lecture delivered at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome—first appeared in The Times on December 12, 2011, and has been reprinted with the kind permission of the Office of the Chief Rabbi.

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Our Western Heritage: An Interview with Robert P. George The following is an abridgement of a recent interview conducted by Carol Iannone.

Why is Western civilization worth studying?

By any standard, the intellectual, moral, religious, political, economic, scientific, technological, artistic, architectural and literary achievements of the West are extraordinary. It would be foolish not to study them, examine their roots and explore the complex relationships among them. [S]tudents are … inheritors of these achievements. Their culture—and, thus, their lives—have been shaped by them. They deserve to understand them. And if they are to maintain all that is worth maintaining … and pass along to their own children a vibrant and healthy culture, they need to understand them.

What about Western civilization is unique?

Science as we know it could not have developed outside the West.

It is a great gift of the West to the entire world. Moreover, ideas of natural law, republican government, civil rights and liberties, and the dignity, inviolability, and fundamental freedom of the individual are fundamentally Western insights. These, too, are gifts to the world. Many of these insights were hard-won. Some might yet be lost. Certainly, they have not always been honoured or fully respected by the people of the West. Still, they are exceptional achievements.

How important are Judaism and Christianity to the maintenance of Western civilization?

If there were no Judaism, there would be no Christianity. There is a profound sense in which Christianity is the “other” Jewish religion emerging from the transformations in Jewish faith and practice that resulted from the destruction of the second Temple in Jerusalem.

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If there were no Christianity, there would be no Western civilization. Most of the great achievements of the modern West were underwritten by Christian—and therefore also by Jewish—religious and philosophical, and moral ideas.

Of course, pre-Christian Greek and Roman thought, many of the aspects of which were taken up into Christian thought, were also profoundly important.

Can these achievements be maintained if Jewish and Christian faith collapses in the West? Can Western ideals and institutions flourish when utterly severed from their religious roots? Frankly, I doubt it.

We will know for sure before too long. Much of Europe today is engaged in a vast experiment that will tell us whether cultural and political achievements whose historical roots are in religion can be sustained and nurtured in a cultural and political milieu of extreme secularism.

secularism as an anti-religious ideology that seeks to drive religion from the public sphere and, in its more radical forms, to eliminate religious faith altogether. Christianity does not, however, oppose the idea of the secular or the idea of a legitimate secular domain. Moreover, classic Christianity is not fideistic. It holds, rather, that faith and reason are mutually supportive, and equally necessary to a rich and accurate understanding of our condition as human persons.

In our own time, this conviction was reaffirmed by Pope John Paul II in the opening sentence of his great encyclical on the relationship of faith and reason, Fides et Ratio.

There, the late pontiff said that “faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit ascends to contemplation of truth.” This is entirely compatible with what is noblest and best in Enlightenment thought.

How do the more secular ideas of the Enlightenment fit into the foundations of the West?

You have written of the liberal arts as enabling the student to gain self-mastery.

Why is that important?

Certainly, Enlightenment thinkers made important contributions to the Western tradition, particularly in the advancement of personal and political liberty. The “secularism” of the Enlightenment is, however, frequently exaggerated.

First, it is worth noting that there was no single Enlightenment, but several different Enlightenments.

Some Enlightenment, or protoEnlightenment thinkers—especially among the French—were hostile to Christianity and religion generally; others were not. Some Enlightenments were infected with anti-religious zealotry—again, the French Enlightenment especially—others, such as the Scottish Enlightenment, much less so.

Second, there were important Enlightenment figures who developed and built on the classic Christian understanding of a legitimate realm of the secular. Of course, Christianity is opposed to

Self-mastery is important because it is a basic, irreducible dimension of the well-being and fulfilment of rational creatures—and, as Aristotle taught, we human beings are just that: creatures whose nature is rational. Moreover, self-mastery—the capacity to exercise rational control over one’s emotions, passions, and desires and direct them toward good and upright ends—is indispensable to the project of self-government.

If we believe in the ideal of free persons who participate as equal citizens in the project of self-government, if we believe in the dignity and rights of the individual in a regime of ordered liberty, then we must dedicate ourselves to educating young people for self-mastery.

A political regime of self-government can only be sustained among people who are capable of governing themselves. People incapable of self-mastery will quickly prove to be unfit for self-government.

www.europeanrenewal.org

The idea of self-mastery seems opposite from everything that is promulgated today.

Do you think self-mastery has any appeal for today’s students?

As a teacher, I have faith in our young people. They are capable of rising to meet great challenges, if only we, their elders, are willing to issue those challenges and point the way. Fundamentally, the problem is not with their generation, it is with ours. It was our generation [the “Generation of ’68”] that lost faith, not only faith in God, in any meaningful sense, but faith in man—in reason, in beauty, in truth, in moral, aesthetic and intellectual standards of any type, in the very ideas of good and evil, right and wrong. We are the generation that produced widespread slavery to “recreational” drugs, a sexual revolution that has had devastating consequences for millions of children—especially in the poorest and most vulnerable sectors of our society—and the collapse of intellectual standards.

True, the result is a culture in which young people have been cultivated to identify “authenticity” with acting on one’s feelings and desires, whatever they happen to be.

But that is not set in stone. We really can challenge our children and our students to have higher aspirations and to lead richer, nobler lives.

traditions or denigrate their achievements? No. That would be a decidedly un-Western thing to do, since a cardinal tenet of Western philosophy is to embrace truth and value wherever they are to be found. We mustn’t fear teaching our young people about other cultures, but we should not disdain to teach them about their own.

What would you say are the flaws or shortcomings in Western thought that might benefit from the study of other cultures?

It is a tenet of Western thought that the whole world—indeed, the whole of reality—is to be explored, investigated, reflected about, and to the maximum possible extent understood. Furthermore, wisdom is to be cherished, no matter its source. That is why ethnocentrism and chauvinism are antithetical to the Western tradition. And so, there is much to be gained from engagement with Islam, for example, and the great religions of the East, such as Hinduism and Buddhism. The West is truer to itself when it is open to such engagement. n

La envidia igualitaria—El mal de nuestro tiempo: rechazar mérito y excelencia Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora Madrid: Altera, 2011

This is a new edition of the late Fernández de la Mora’s 1984 classic essay on envy and egalitarianism. The author, a Spanish diplomat, politician, and writer, fought his entire life against the egalitarian spirit that he saw accompanying mass democracy, calling it the “evil of our day.”

Do you see the study of Western civilization enabling students to realize what is at stake?

In my experience as a teacher— and as a student myself—I find that the more deeply people understand Western civilization and its achievements, the more profoundly they appreciate them. So, it seems to me, in the face of contemporary challenges to Western ideals and institutions, there is nothing more urgent than deepening the understanding of our people of the traditions of faith, thought, and social and political life that made the West.

Does this mean that we should neglect the study of non-Western

Dr. George teaches at Princeton University and is the founding director of the James Madison Program. His publications include In Defense of Natural Law (1999), Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality (2001), and The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion and Morality in Crisis (2002). Ms. Iannone is editor-at-large of Academic Questions.

This article first appeared on-line in Academic Questions, January 27, 2012, at Springerlink.com. It has been abridged and reprinted under the Open Access terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.

Why We Should Call Ourselves Christians: The Religious Roots of Free Societies

Marcello Pera New York: Encounter Books, 2011 In this English-language edition of his 2008 book, Italian Senator Pera reminds readers of the core Christian identity of the West and urges us to acknowledge the religious roots of European culture—lest we forsake our civilization’s heritage.

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Bergbauer, cont’d.

The State in the Third Millennium

Hans-Adam II, The Reigning Prince of Liechtenstein Schaan, Liechtenstein: Van Eck Publishers, 2009 HIIH Hans-Adam has written a concise essay on the virtues of small states. He argues for a return to local economies, local administrative control, and local politics, and explains why Liechtenstein and other small nation-states tend to have less intrusive governments, more efficient and vibrant economies, and happier citizens.

The Geography of Good & Evil: Philosophical Investigations Andreas Kinneging Delaware: ISI, 2009

Originally published in Dutch in 2010, this is a re-examination of moral realism in the Ancient and Christian traditions, and a vigorous defence of the objectively true concepts of good and evil.

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religious dimension of current political developments; in other words, politics does not only deal with earthly matters but has to consider religious ones as well. In the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century, political religions evolved into dominant political forces.

With regard to such forces, Voegelin stated that “there is evil in the world and…that evil is not only a deficient mode of being…but also a real substance and force.” Thus, the desire of Communist, Fascist, or National Socialist leaders to “redeem” the world revealed an evil—and sick—understanding of God, man, and society.

Much like today, the world at the time that Voegelin wrote was experiencing a serious crisis. He thought it was important to acknowledge “that recovery [could] only be achieved through religious renewal.” He wrote that since “[h]umans live in political society with all traits of their being, from the physical to the spiritual and religious [ones],” neglecting, ignoring, or even eradicating any one of these traits could have disastrous consequences.

In The New Science of Politics, Voegelin made the strong and provocative assertion that modernity is essentially characterized by Gnosticism. He did this in a sweeping analysis of human history. In contrast to antiquity, where the world was experienced as being full of gods, Christianity reduced this multiplicity of gods to one single God and transferred this one God from the sphere of immanence—of the here and now—to the sphere of transcendence—the beyond. The consequence of this was the “de-divinization of the temporal sphere of power.”

Although the world was thus seen as having been emptied of gods, people continued to strive for meaning and acquire a deeper understanding of their earthly existence. In the course of the development of the modern world, thinkers began to fill that “divine emptiness” or void by declaring earthly beings— like man, society, or even history itself—absolutes. In this

way, spatio-temporal things were effectively extracted out of their time and space, and made into absolutes.

Voegelin therefore designated modernity as a process of the “redivinization of man and society.”

In other words, the world, formerly emptied of gods during the Middle Ages, was again filled with gods— human-made ones (which humans know how to create and venerate).

In his Order and History, Voegelin further elaborated the manner in which man articulates his own nature in history. He differentiated between three insights gained by humanity.

First, in the Ancient Near East (Israel), man discovered his existence as determined by the rhythm and the secrets of the all-encompassing cosmos (i.e., “cosmological truth”).

Second, in antiquity (Greece), man detected the central position of himself in the cosmos and realized his intellectual and spiritual qualities. The human soul was identified as a “sensorium of transcendence,” which allowed man to escape the narrow confines of his bodily existence and advance to areas far beyond it (the so-called “anthropological truth”).

The third step was taken by discovering the close connection between man and God in Christendom.

Unlike the anthropological truth, which maintained that men lived in accordance with a higher power (the Greek nous), Christendom accentuated the experience of “mutuality” in the relation between God and man.

In other words, man turns to God in a similar way that God reveals himself to man. Voegelin designated this insight as the “soteriological truth” and stressed that beyond the pure mutuality between God and man, there was also the aspect of man’s salvation through man’s belief in God. The centrepiece of Voegelin’s thought, however, consisted in his philosophy of history. The three types of truth mentioned—cosmological, anthropological, soteriological—are all of fundamental importance in this

www.europeanrenewal.org

Continued on p. 23

Otto the Great (1912-2011) Stephan Baier It is impossible to describe European history without mentioning the Habsburgs. From this family there came German, Spanish, Bohemian, and Hungarian Kings, as well as Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire and Austria-Hungary. Many of the qualities and virtues of the great Habsburg personalities of old were recognisable in Otto von Habsburg: the piety of Emperor Karl V, the enthusiasm for work and sense of duty of Emperor Franz Joseph, the love of different European peoples and ethnic groups of his father, Emperor Karl (beatified in 2004). But another blessing was given to him by God: longevity. Like his ancestor Emperor Friedrich III, Otto von Habsburg defeated his enemies by outliving them.

Archduke Otto also had the ability to rise above defeat, to continue working diligently regardless of obstacles, and to follow his ideals to the end. He may have been born with these qualities, but they were certainly strengthened during the trials of his adventurous and eventful life.

Adolf Hitler and Erich Honecker, Edvard Benés and Willy Brandt, Slobodan Milošević and Bruno Pittermann all hated Otto von Habsburg.

Persecuted and defamed by “red” and “brown” ideologues alike, the Archduke’s life was shaped by a common theme: duty. He had inherited neither Empire nor crown, neither kingdom nor throne; however, he was painfully aware that he bore a responsibility that could not be delegated.

Originally born to be the Emperor of many peoples, he instead became a selfless defender of human rights, an incorruptible lawyer arguing on behalf of oppressed people everywhere, and an advocate for a free, peaceful and united Europe.

The Austrian writer William S. Schlamm, who was a passionate Communist as a young man and later became a great conservative writer, had already written in 1977 to Otto

von Habsburg: “If you had become what you were destined for, the West would have had the most important Emperor since Charlemagne. But since the West came apart in 1918, Europe today has in you the only private statesman whom it can trust.”

When Archduchess Zita bore her first-born child on November 20, 1912, in Villa Wartholz in Reichenau, Austria, the European continent was coming to the end of a long era of peace. The Habsburg Empire, which had 52 million inhabitants and was multinational as well as multilingual, seemed indestructible.

But death was already passing “its bony hands over the goblets from which we drank cheerfully and childishly,” as the writer Joseph Roth later wrote.

The Galician Roth—who went from being a sceptical Socialist to a mourning Monarchist after the fall of the monarchy—saw that nationalism was becoming the religion of that epoch. And the multi-ethnic AustroHungarian Empire at the heart of Europe, personally held together by the aging patriarch Franz-Joseph, soon became its victim. The shots of the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo not only killed the heir to the throne; they also mortally wounded

the Habsburg Empire, which then staggered into the First World War. Archduke Otto was just four years old when Franz Joseph died and his father became Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary. Otto was six when his family was dispossessed of its lands and banned from Austria. He had not yet reached the age of ten when his father died in exile on the Atlantic island of Madeira. Empress Zita, left destitute and without influence, but blessed with great discipline and a sense of responsibility toward the people of the Danube, educated young Otto and his seven brothers and sisters.

He learned quickly and acquired a knowledge of languages, history, geography, and literature; he also learned about the duties, responsibilities—and, to a lesser extent, the rights—of an Emperor.

From Madeira, the Archduke’s family moved to Madrid, later to the Spanish Basque region, then to Luxembourg, Belgium, and Paris. While he was still working on his doctoral thesis at the University of Leuven, Otto entered politics. He was living in Berlin when the Nazis came to power. In fact, Hitler twice tried to meet the young man in order to use him and the Habsburg family name for his own purposes. This was probably the only interesting conversation he ever refused, the Archduke later recalled. But Otto had read Hitler’s writings and had no illusions whatsoever about the Nazi leader’s aims and objectives.

Otto tried everything to prevent the Anschluss, the Nazi annexation of Austria. But when he realised that Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg would not offer any resistance to Hitler, he asked him to cede the chancellorship to him— “because if Austria is in danger, then the heritage of the House of Austria has to stand or fall with the country.”

Otto was convinced that the country needed to defend itself militarily, and he was prepared to risk his life in its defence.

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Baier, cont’d.

Hitler promptly had the sons of Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrested and taken to Dachau concentration camp. He also persecuted Archduke Otto by posting “wanted” posters.

The Gestapo tried to kidnap Otto and Rudolf Hess even gave the command to assassinate him. Incredibly, although he lived in constant mortal danger himself, Otto saved the lives of thousands of people, mostly Jews from Austria and neighbouring countries, by obtaining visas for them so they could flee to Spain, Portugal, or South America. When he himself was forced to leave Europe for Washington, DC, he continued to fight for the recognition of Austria as a victim of Hitler.

Later, Otto von Habsburg’s influence on US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill helped to prevent Austria from disappearing completely behind the Iron Curtain.

The Austrian Republic, however, was not grateful at all. Returning to the Tyrol in 1945, Otto had to leave Austria again at the urging of Soviet occupying forces and their Austrian marionette, President Karl Renner.

In 1961, Otto fought for five long years for his right to re-enter his native Austria as an Austrian citizen, an effort resisted by the panicked left-wing parties who thought he might endanger the republic.

These were unjustified concerns.

During his American exile, Otto von Habsburg had matured from being a European by origin and experience to a European driven by conviction.

His objectives were not the crowns of his ancestors but the liberation of Europe from Communism, and the unification of the continent under the banner of peace and freedom.

As a statesman without a state, the spoken and written word became his weapons—sharp weapons, apparently, as illustrated by the number of his opponents and the vehemence of their attacks. In 1978, Otto obtained German citizenship in order to run for the first-ever elections of the first European Parliament. After a life filled with trials

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and tribulations, and a career as a columnist and writer of non-fiction, he began parliamentary work at the age of 66. He was a Bavarian Member of Parliament in both Strasbourg and Brussels. But he was also the first representative of people unable to participate in the European Project—those living under the Iron Fist of Communism.

Statesmen like Charles de Gaulle, Robert Schumann, and Konrad Adenauer had often taken his political advice. But Otto also rapidly became an authority beyond national

borders and beyond parliamentary groups. For two decades, he worked as a lawyer for victims of Communism; he was also a champion of a Christian Europe. His diligence, intelligence and his many skills commanded the respect even of his ideological opponents.

With his increasing age, the extent of his appreciation grew. In the 1970s, even though he was criticized as a “cold warrior,” his vision of a more united Europe began to come true—especially when, in 1989, the “prison societies” of the Soviet Union and the countries of the Eastern bloc collapsed, just as Otto von Habsburg had predicted. Then, with the great eastward enlargement of the European Union, the dream for which the Archduke had long been

ridiculed finally began to come true.

Otto von Habsburg did not intend to restore the shattered and broken shapes of the old Empire; he intended to preserve its most precious and valuable contents within a more modern form. Just as the Holy Roman Empire and, later on, Austria-Hungary had been organised, supra-national communities characterized by diversity and tolerance, so the Archduke wished for an organised, supra-national European Union that also respected diversity and tolerance. “Europe has to grow like a tree; it does not have to be put up like skyscraper,” he often said.

A united Europe was not a new invention or construction for him but simply a rediscovery of something long-forgotten. The multi-lingual and well-travelled Otto, whose family roots could be traced in so many European countries, knew from experience that it had been the poison of nationalism which had destroyed the Empire of his Fathers and shattered the continent. He thus regarded the European Union as a sanctuary, as a peaceful power, as a roof under which people of all ethnic groups could develop freely.

As International President of the Pan-Europa Union, Otto von Habsburg had intended to garner the commitment of his admirers and supporters to this grand European vision. It is a vision that is definitely not congruent with the ideas of current high-ranking EU politicians. At the same time, Archduke Otto’s true heirs are not the nostalgic types who, to the annoyance of the Imperial family, continue to promote bizarre candidatures in front of Vienna’s Capuchin Church (Kapuzinerkirche), but rather the visionaries of the PanEuropean movement. n Mr. Baier was personal assistant to Otto von Habsburg and served as his spokesman while in the European Parliament (19941999). He is the co-author (along with Eva Demmerle) of Otto von Habsburg: Die autorisierte Biografie (2007). For more information about the Pan-Europa Movement, please visit: www.epaneurope.eu.

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The 2011 Vanenburg Meeting

The 6th Annual Vanenburg Meeting took place last year, from July 7 to 10, at La Foresta Monastery outside of Leuven. Under the auspices of the Center for European Renewal, the Vanenburg Meeting once again brought together academics, lawyers, writers, philosophers, and students for three days of discussions about the cultural and political challenges facing Europe.

Two Swedish participants offer their views on European populism during one of the weekend sessions.

The theme of the Meeting was “Democracy, Secularism and the Conservative Argument,” which inspired many of the lectures, presentations, and evening discussions.

Welcome remarks were given on Friday by local host Frank Judo, followed by a formal introduction to the theme of the Meeting given by current CER President, András Lánczi.

Philosopher Roger Scruton, conservative scholar Mark Henrie, and Polish parliamentarian Ryszard Legutko were just a few of the other main speakers attending the Meeting.

There were several opportunities to listen to Country Reports given by European participants and members of the CER. Recent political and legislative developments in Belgium, Hungary, and Sweden, for example, were discussed. And a

Andreas Kinneging speaks on democracy, populism, and the importance of virtue.

look ahead at the 2012 US presidential election was also featured.

There were also presentations on theoretical aspects of conservative political thought. Italian journalist and scholar Marco Respinti spoke Continued on p. 24

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Bergbauer, cont’d.

context. For Voegelin, the comprehensive picture of history displayed a “civilizational cycle of world-historic proportions.” He wrote: “The acme of this cycle would be marked by the appearance of Christ; the pre-Christian high civilizations would form its ascending branch; modern, Gnostic civilization would form its descending branch.

The pre-Christian high civilizations advanced from the compactness of experience to the differentiation of the soul as the sensorium of transcendence; and, in the Mediterranean civilizational area, this evolution culminated in the maximum of differentiation, through the revelation of the Logos in history.”

Voegelin thought man had descended in various guises from the high level of insight and self-realization obtained in ancient times, and had attempted—through access to allegedly secret or higher knowledge (Gnosticism)—to rescue himself and redeem society. Gnosticism had thus distorted and destroyed the

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relationship between God and man; and, in this way, it had prompted man to take destructive actions. Thus, it was Voegelin’s firm conviction that human life and human history can only evolve in a natural (and sound) way on the basis of the profound insights obtained in antiquity and early Christendom, and that man needs to develop a balanced life which encompasses the physical as well as the spiritual and religious spheres of life.

Over the years, Voegelin’s thought developed into a very comprehensive and detailed philosophy of history. The very kernel of his thought was the thesis that, after achieving the three decisive leaps of insight into the nature of God, man, and society during the various preChristian “high” civilizations, the path of humankind was “derailed” from this high intellectual and spiritual level.

The spread of Christianity in the Middle Ages had helped people lead a more genuine life; but with the advent of modernity, new worldly philosophers had laid the basis for

societies to move increasingly toward political ideologies—and, in the twentieth century, toward mass political movements. Only by acknowledging the insights of classical and Christian civilizations, Voegelin admonished, could people once again lead a genuine human life. n

Dr. Bergbauer is assistant professor of political theory at the School of Political Science and the University of Armed Forces, both in Munich. Between 2004 and 2008, he worked at the Foundation of Conservative Education and Research with the late Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing.

THE EUROPEAN CONSERVATIVE

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Meeting, cont’d.

about the concept of the human person, while Dutch academic Melvin Schut expounded on democracy and populism in the work of Alexis de Tocqueville.

German political philosopher Harald Bergbauer gave an overview about the work of Eric Voegelin and Hungarian academic Attila

Molnar described the main features of Hungary’s new constitution.

Both of these presentations have been summarized in this issue of The European Conservative.

The final dinner was held in central Leuven, after a walking tour of the historic city.

There was one final session on

Group photo of some participants of the 2011 Vanenburg Meeting.

the morning of the last day, with Dutch legal philosopher and ethicist Andreas Kinneging speaking about democracy, populism, and the importance of virtues.

Concluding comments and plans for the 2012 Meeting were then outlined by Jonathan Price, Secretary of the Vanenburg Meeting. n

Last year’s venue: La Foresta Monastery near Leuven.

ANNOUNCEMENT The 7th Annual Vanenburg Meeting The 2012 Vanenburg Meeting will be held Friday, June 29, to Sunday, July 1, at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester in Gloucestershire, England. The theme is “Will Europe Survive?

The New European Conservatives Confront a Continent in Crisis.”

We have assembled an outstanding group of speakers to examine the current situation in Europe from a variety of perspectives—and offer a conservative vision of what a European future could look like. The papers delivered at the meeting will be published later in what will be the CER’s second book, the first being Plato on Wall Street (released last year in Polish; see p. 3).

The conference registration fees will be €125 for participants without a regular income, and €225 for those with regular income. Regional differences in income will also be taken into account. (For example, those from countries in Eastern Europe would qualify for the lower fee, if they cannot pay the higher fee.) Vanenburg Society members who have paid their annual dues of €55 will receive a reduction of €50 from their registration fee. There is a 10% discount for full payment at the time of RSVP, rather than at the conference itself. Payment information is provided in the masthead below.

The fee includes lodging in a double room and all meals. Single rooms are available at a surcharge.

If you wish to provide additional funds to help offset the costs for a student, someone without regular income or a person from a specific country or institution, this would be greatly appreciated.

Published by the Center for European Renewal • P.O. Box 85633 • 2508CH The Hague • The Netherlands Editor-in-Chief: Alvino-Mario Fantini Editorial Board: Diederik Boomsma • Mark C. Henrie • Jonathan D. Price Donations to: ABN/AMRO Account Nr. 0601773993 • IBAN: NL71ABNA0601773993 • BIC/SWIFT: ABNANL2A. Contact: editor@europeanconservative.com / info@europeanrenewal.org

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