The European Conservative, No. 7

THE EUROPEAN

CONSERVATIVE Issue 7 • Winter 2013

The Defeat of the French Right Charles Adhémar On the eve of François Hollande’s 2012 election as President of France, thousands of jubilant people gathered at Place de la Bastille in Paris. This gave observers an overview of the Socialist Party’s clientele. Indeed, images of the event showed many people brandishing the flags of other countries, perhaps their “countries of origin,” as the phrase goes. It brings a few questions to mind: Might it have been a prodrome of an ethno-nationalist conflict? Whose election were they celebrating? And who is Hollande?

A victory by default Hollande is nothing more than a symbol of French technocratic incompetence. Even though he is a graduate of three of the best schools in France, and has a sly and calculating personality, until recently his political career had been rather insignificant. He was always seen as the technocrat that no one ever really wanted as a Minister; so, almost by default, he wound up as President.

With no significant experience, Hollande has almost no international stature and remains undecided on all important policy issues. In short, he is arguably the worst President elected in the history of the Fifth Republic.

Hollande’s victory was wholly unexpected and was the result of numerous accidents, including the fall of Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Only 40% of all registered voters supported Hollande and he received nearly 49% of all votes cast. About 1 million votes separated him from Nicolas Sarkozy (while more than 2 million voters chose to cast blank ballots).

In addition, the massive mobilization of France’s Muslim electorate virtually assured Hollande’s victory, with 93% of them supporting him, according to a survey by market research firm OpinionWay. In the French Overseas Departments, where many locals live off of state subsidies and yet are qualified to vote in French elections, citizens voted en masse for the left.

Continued on p. 2

Reflections on Italy’s Tea Party Saba Zecchi The term “Tea Party,” which refers to the 1773 Boston revolt against taxation by the British, doesn’t have the same historical resonance in Italy as it does in the United States. Nevertheless, the American political tradition often provides a useful model for public debates in Italy—and Europe more generally. In this context, America’s contemporary Tea Party

movement has provided a significant contribution.

The American founding principles of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” continue to inspire American patriotism. Liberty— and, more specifically, economic liberty—was at the center of the American political debate when the Bush and Obama Administrations approved government intervention in the economic crisis (in 2008, with the Bush Administration, and in

Contents

Defeat of the French Right ................... 1 Charles Adhémar Italy’s Tea Party ....................................... 1 Saba Zecchi Against Barroso’s Federalism ............... 6 Sara Skyttedal Europe’s Missing Constitution ............. 7 Jerome di Costanzo Economics of Liberty ............................ 9 Robin Harris Conservatives are not Liberals ............ 13 Elio A. Gallego More Populism—Please! ..................... 16 Melvin Schut A View from Down Under ................. 18 Alexander Burton Cultural Renewal in Croatia ................ 20 Stephen Bartulica th 6 World Congress of Families ........... 23 Ignacio Arsuaga Islam & the West .................................. 25 Interview with Robert R. Reilly The 2012 Vanenburg Meeting ............ 29

early 2009, after President Obama’s stimulus package).

For many Americans, these policies were seen as a version of “European-style statism.” President Obama’s policies therefore prompted the mobilization of a large, grassroots counter-movement that has become influential in many elections: the Tea Party. Reacting to the state-heavy responses to Continued on p. 4

A publication of the Center for European Renewal

Adhémar, cont’d.

In contrast, more traditional conservative voters on the French right had been demobilized; many of them were disenchanted with the French political right and simply preferred to abstain from voting (perhaps accounting for the blank ballots).

Hollande’s victory is also the outcome of two other phenomena: the gradual conquest of all local authorities in France by the left and the loss of the Senate in 2011 (which had been in conservative hands since the first senatorial election of the Fifth Republic in 1959).

Now, after less than a year in office, Hollande seems adrift. He remains unable to manage his colaition of Communists, Socialists, and environmentalists, and his popularity is at its lowest. The French had learned to hate Nicolas Sarkozy so much that now, despite having a new President, they can find no esteem for Hollande.

Like François Mitterrand thirty years ago, Hollande was elected on a promise of “change.” Even his slogan was similar: Hollande’s “Change Now” (Le changement c’est maintenant) echoed Mitterrand’s “Change Lives” (Changer la vie) from the 1981 election.

In office, Hollande even acts like Mitterrand: He began by distributing money he didn’t have in the name of equality and justice.

Hollande is now in full “denialof-crisis mode,” as described by The Economist just before the election. But despite all the problems currently facing France, Hollande and his coalition of the left continue to use two typical tactics: First, they blame rich people—and the right—for all of France’s problems; second, they divert attention away from the country’s real problems and attempt to seduce progressives with social policy reforms—focusing on gay marriage, euthanasia, and granting the right to vote to all immigrants.

Hollande’s electoral victory was really a victory by default. He won not because he was the best candidate or the candidate with the best ideas but because his opponents on the right were demobilized (and, to a certain extent, demoralized). His victory

2

symbolizes above all the defeat of the French right.

Autopsy of a defeat In the beginning of the presidential elections, incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy and his conservative Union for a Popular Movement (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire or UMP) achieved a tremendous rise in popularity by reaching out to the “invisible people” (i.e. middle-class whites not living in Paris). They had long been neglected

by French politicians and the media.

Indeed, Sarkozy tried to stay in touch with his party’s popular, working-class base by breaking taboos and changing the usual political rhetoric.

Although as President Sarkozy had been very unpopular, he managed a great political comeback during the elections and received a little more than 48% of the votes during the second round of voting in June. To achieve this, Sarkozy ran an aggressive campaign that many liberal political commentators dismissively called fascisant (fascist). This contributed to an increasingly negative and unpleasant political climate. But many other observers have argued that the defeat of the French right can simply be attributed to the economic crisis.

Sarkozy’s greatest mistake, however, was displaying his bravado and expressing what was perceived as disrespect for the status quo—his “desacralization” of power. Long steeped in a kind of inertia, the French establishment was not ready to accept the zealous reformist spirit exhibited by Sarkozy.

In addition, it must be recognized that there is, lamentably, a considerable distance between Sarkozy’s words and actions. He argued for more border controls but then said “yes” to the treaties that are now dismantling them.

He promised growth and employment but then ratified the treaty transferring budgetary control from the French state to unelected bodies (such as the Brussels Commission and the Court of Luxembourg). And on immigration, Sarkozy was anything but conservative: In ten short years, France naturalized more than one million foreigners (in a country of 65 million inhabitants).

However, to be fair, the French right may not have had sufficient control of the levers of power to truly reform the country during Sarkozy’s presidency. The Minister of Education, for example, Xavier Darcos, had a clear vision of the educational reforms needed to end the dominance of the ideology of 1968, and his cabinet was composed of competent and well-intentioned counselors. But all their reform attempts were doomed to failure because they clashed fundamentally with the corporatist interests of the powerful Ministry of National Education (Ministère de l’Education Nationale) and its one million employees.

Across the public sphere, the French right is ideologically subjugated by the left, a result of its own cowardice and conformism (a sentiment echoed by many, including Marine Le Pen, President of the National (Front National or FN). For example, although the UMP is the largest political party on the right, even it dares not go against current taboos and the ideology of political correctness. As such, it cannot really be said to embody any of the heroic ideals expected by conservative voters. Even back in 2007, then President-elect Sarkozy had made surprising ministerial appointments as signs of his government’s ‘openness.’ These included Bernard Kouchner (a strong symbol of the Mitterrand era) as Minister of Foreign Affairs and Rachida Dati, a notorious incompetent, as Minister of Justice.

In the end, conservative politicians like Sarkozy betrayed the French right in order to please the dictatorship of the French political left and assuage the collective, politically-correct mind.

In France, the right has always apologized for being “the Right.”

Philosopher Chantal Delsol even speaks of “the crime of being on the right.” But there is a huge discrepancy between the political ambitions of party leaders on the right and the will of the right’s grassroots—that is, those most directly affected by the country’s problems.

www.europeanrenewal.org

If any of this is to change, there must be a radical change in strategy in order to build a conservative majority.

Politics does not consist of simply sending signals to an electorate on the eve of an election but of embodying principled politics founded on facts, rather than faddish ideologies.

The self-destruction of France The social and economic consequences of ten years of a socalled ‘right-wing’ government have been catastrophic. The state redistributes €600 billion per year through social spending and the tax burden in France is now among the highest in Europe (56%).

Increasingly, French economic policy is subject to the requirements of trade unions and pressure groups concerned solely with the defense of corporatist interests. “Egalitarianism, interventionism, and protectionism” could well be the motto of France today.

But there are numerous other social challenges. Immigration costs France nearly €80 billion every year, including €59 billion in social costs.

Immigrant unemployment is double the national rate and nearly 300,000 illegal immigrants receive state medical assistance. And, according to some studies, 60-70% of all criminal offenders are of foreign origin.

While France’s immigrant population continues to grow, antiracist activists and the socialist majority in government successfully prevent any debate on the issue.

Furthermore, proponents of “open borders” have shifted the entire debate from the sphere of politics to morality. Nobody dares to challenge this moral dictatorship.

France is clearly self-destructing.

The traditional requirement of “republican assimilation” has been forgotten, replaced by the vague concept of “integration” and the utopian ideal of a multicultural society, in which French national identity is diluted. Eric Besson, Sarkozy’s Minister of Immigration and National Identity, once even controversially asserted that there are “no native French.” But few people seem concerned.

Reconstructing the right In order to stage a recovery, the French right must take a clear political line on many issues. More importantly, ideologically, it must be more attuned to the concerns of its conservative base. In the end, the rebuilding of the French right will depend on whether or not it defends the nation against those who threaten it: the unelected, power-hungry bodies outside of France (such as the EU), as well as the “communityorganizing” forces undermining the country from within (such as special interest groups, minority organizations, LGBT lobbies, Islamist groups, etc.).

A true conservative political majority can still be found in France, a country whose culture remains a product of Western civilization and which is populated, at its roots, by people who are not of the left.

Politicians of the right should reach out to these long-forgotten French constituencies and embrace their local culture, their regional traditions, and their traditional customs.

It is also necessary to talk to the “suffering France”—the working France—long ignored by the media and ostracized by France’s middle class. Unfortunately, for a lack of sensible options, this huge electoral reservoir has preferred to turn to Marine Le Pen—or to simply abstain from voting.

An authentic French right could rely on the people’s residual common sense, which is resistant to media pressure. Polls show that French voters want the opposite of the politically correct: They want less immigration, more punishment of criminal offenders, fewer taxes, and schools that reward merit.

However, the French right is handicapped by its total lack of credibility. To win back the hearts and minds of the French electorate, the right will have to be courageous. The “moral fence” erected around the FN by the entire political class, in an attempt to marginalize it, is a political stupidity. Under these circumstances, the French right seems to face a Continued on p. 4

La gauche contre le réel Élisabeth Lévy Paris: Fayard, 2012 Written by the editor of the French magazine, Causeur, this is an examination of how the French left seeks to prevent journalists like her from speaking freely about matters of the day. A fierce opponent of political correctness, Lévy, along with other journalists like Eric Zemmour and Robert Ménard, has been labeled a “neo-reactionary” for having the temerity to take down France’s sacred cows. But she refuses to be told how to think. In this book, she accuses the media of stifling free speech and the French establishment of willingly ignoring reality: the reality of Muslim immigration, failed multicultural policies, and feminist groupthink. As she says in the beginning, Lévy (paraphrasing Voltaire) vigorously defends the right of others to speak even when she disagrees with their views.

THE EUROPEAN CONSERVATIVE

3

Adhémar, cont’d.

Etica & Democrazia: Il contributo dei cattolici alla política Paola Binetti Torino: Lindau, 2012 It is commonly observed that many Europeans today have forgotten the values on which their civilization and traditions are rooted.

In this book, Binetti— an Italian psychiatrist and surgeon, and a member of Italy’s Camera dei Deputati (Chamber of Deputies)— attempts to diagnose the reasons for this “amnesia” and tries to remind readers that without religious roots, Europe cannot survive.

Binetti first underscores the importance of recognizing the existence of eternal and immutable “first principles” (or “transcendent truths”) and then offers a polemic on the importance of returning to them. She addresses social justice, human rights, and the dangers of today’s ethical relativism. The book also includes an introduction by Italian philosopher-turnedpolitician Rocco Buttiglione.

4

Cornelian dilemma: It can neither win without the FN, nor can it win if it allies itself with the FN. But fundamentally it is a question of principles and UMP leaders should be courageous enough to break through the artificial fence around the FN—and propose a “union of the right.”

Such a union of the French right should also meet the expectations of conservative French people.

However, they have many reasons to feel exasperated: ongoing economic problems, three million unemployed people, growing insecurity and concerns over immigration, the imminent legalization of “gay marriage,” and a media class that seems very disconnected from the concerns of the average French person.

While the French right continues to flounder, the Socialists have been able to consolidate a lot of power.

Across the country, many French legislators seem motivated by a terrible desire to destroy traditional France; some have even been involved in legislative efforts to deny the country’s cultural roots and denigrate its glorious history. And they have largely succeeded because Zecchi, cont’d.

the economic crisis under Obama, the Tea Party organized numerous demonstrations defending private property, resisting tax increases, and calling for limited government.

The Tea Party is a movement that we Europeans cannot ignore, especially in the so called “PIIGS” countries (i.e. Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain), as we continue to try to find ways to respond to the debt crisis. In Italy, the importance of the American Tea Party phenomenon was not lost on people and an inspired young lover of liberty, David Mazzerelli, proposed that Italians should respond in the same way. The Italian Tea Party (Tea Party Italia) movement was thus founded in May 2010 in Prato, an industrial town in Tuscany.

Mazzerelli’s idea for an Italian Tea Party spread across Italy through

of the absence of any anti-socialist thought in the public sphere.

Politicians of France’s authentic right must face these challenges and vigorously oppose this socialist group-think. But a quick glance at the current jabbering political class suggests that any such efforts may be in vain. Not one courageous and visionary French politician seems to exist. They all either have been condemned to silence or were eliminated long ago by the French political system.

In his 1811 letter to M. le Chevalier, the French conservative thinker Joseph de Maistre said that “every nation has the government it deserves” (“toute nation a le gouvernement qu’elle mérite”). This has been and continues to be painfully apparent in today’s France. But in the meantime, la France éternelle still awaits the providential man it deserves—that principled leader who will be courageous enough to lead a conservative counterrevolution.

Mr. Adhémar is a Paris-based writer. He studies at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris and is a member of the Institut de Formation Politique (IFP).

the internet and in the media.

Hundreds of people took part in the first Italian Tea Party event to listen to conservative and pro-free market speakers. These included Italian scholar and writer Marco Respinti, Leonardo Facco from the Movimento Libertario, and Andrea Mancia, founder of Tocqueville.it.

After this initial enthusiastic response, requests were received by the organizers of the fledgling Italian Tea Party from like-minded people around Italy. They wanted to hold similar events all over the country. Since then, over the past two and a half years, about one hundred Italian Tea Party rallies have taken place in different towns, reaching almost all of Italy’s regions and attracting thousands of people.

According to preliminary figures from international surveys, Tea Party

www.europeanrenewal.org

Italia is now the largest group of its kind outside the United States. It represents the voices and concerns of Italian taxpayers and freedom fighters, while maintaining political independence from the country’s established political parties.

But there have been numerous obstacles to the spread of the Tea Party movement in Italy. These include the left-wing media’s slanted portrayal of American politics, a general public consensus on public spending (and tacit acceptance of high levels of debt), and widespread indifference to economic freedom and ignorance of the whole tradition of Austrian economics. In 2010, when American Tea Party candidates successfully stormed the mid-term elections, to the surprise of many observers, Italians were absorbed and distracted instead by personal scandals among party leaders. Rather than consider the looming Greek financial crisis and other important public policy issues, Italian public officials seemed preoccupied by the sordid.

The request of the European Central Bank (ECB) in July 2011 for Italy to cut public spending and to start market liberalization, as well as the appointment of a ‘technocratic government’ under the leadership of Prime Minister Mario Monti the following autumn, resulted in a sudden spike of public interest in economic freedom (or the lack thereof). The debate then (thankfully) shifted from the personal affairs of Italian politicians to the debt crisis.

But due to the inability of Italian policy-makers to cut spending and introduce liberalization measures, the immediate response to the ECB’s request—in both the Berlusconi and Monti Administrations—was simply to raise taxes.

Tea Party Italia was the only political group to object to this. In response, officials and left-wing media began to consider members of the Italian Tea Party as synonymous with “tax antagonist.” Accusations were especially shrill during the fight over the new property tax proposal introduced by Monti. Tea Party Italia introduced motions in local

councils urging administrators to reduce rather than raise property taxes. These motions were discussed in about 150 local councils. Dozens of towns eventually voted to reduce property taxes.

It is worth remembering that Italy, until only recently, was listed among the “Mostly Unfree” countries in the Heritage Foundation’s “Economic Freedom Index,” a dubious distinction. This was primarily due to the country’s labor taxes and the many obstacles to starting a new business. In fact, a lack of market liberalization, heavy taxation, a large welfare state, and wasteful government spending (which has risen to 51.8% of GDP) are the fundamental problems of the Italian economy. Small businesses and the average worker both seem to be aware of these problems; but they remain generally unknown to—or ignored by—most public sector workers, who have traded in liberty for a sort of fake safety net. Moreover, public debate on economic issues generally supports and justifies profligate public spending in the name of an abstract, government-provided common good.

Given this consensus on public spending and big government in Italy, efforts to introduce American-style conservative issues and policy discussions have required some modifications. The ideas that animated the American Tea Party have had to be translated and adapted to the Italian political framework. In fact, there are other Italian political movements which have a clear populist character; but their goals remain confused (and confusing), with some groups combining anti-establishment sentiments simultaneously with demands for more government intervention.

The largest of these populist groups is the Five Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle or M5S), which has one main target in its crosshairs: former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Unlike Tea Party Italia, however, M5S has recognition as a formal political party in local and national elections.

On February 24 and 25, Italy will face rather uncertain elections with regard to both candidates and coalitions. This uncertainty is a considerable problem for a grassroots movement, which must try to get pledges to specific policies from candidates while maintaining political independence. The hope is that the public debate, influenced by increasingly American-style campaigns, will center on questions of economic freedom—with big, “European-style” government on one side and free-markets, fiscal responsibility, and limited government on the other.

There are some optimistic signs that free-market political organizations will be involved in these elections. Regardless of the parties and the candidates, the Italian Tea Party will be active around the country to promote freemarket ideas and convince voters of the virtues of smaller government.

It will use its growing popularity among frustrated voters and disgruntled Italian conservatives to focus on these issues, and will also reach out to individual candidates and try to influence the policy platforms of political parties.

The differences between Italy and the United States, which are primarily historical and constitutional, are clear to the Italian Tea Party movement. For example, the Italian Constitution does not have the same clearly defined points about individual liberty, private property, and free markets that the US Constitution has enshrined; in Italy, free markets are merely “allowed” or permitted by the government. But things can change.

What is necessary is to learn more about American points of view— both conservative and libertarian— which could be applied to our social and political reality. In this, the practical contributions of American think-tanks continue to be vital tools for the Italian Tea Party and its growing number of supporters.

Ms. Zecchi is a writer and a co-founder of the Italian Tea Party.

THE EUROPEAN CONSERVATIVE

5

Against Barroso’s Federalism Sara Skyttedal On September 12 of last year, José Manuel Barroso, the Chairman of the European Commission, delivered his State of the Union speech to the European Parliament. In it he described a vision for the EU that is difficult for European conservatives to accept.

Barroso—like the Swedish Christian Democrats and the Swedish Moderate Party—belongs to the same conservative panEuropean party (the European Peoples’ Party or EPP). But speaking as Vice-Chairman of the EPP’s youth wing (YEPP), I have to say that Barroso and people like him make it difficult for anyone in the EPP to be pro-EU. All across Europe there are crises and many countries are in need of help. But Barroso—and other Eurocrats like him—mostly see it as an opportunity to demand an extensive transfer of power, for greater centralization. In his speech, Barroso suggested the creation of a banking union across Europe and argued that in the end the EU must become a “federation” of nation states.

This is a frightening development.

Even though Barroso himself says that a superstate isn’t really the end goal, it is it hard to interpret his vision in any other way.

The banking sector in Europe could certainly use more transparent rules and could also benefit from better policy coordination. Those particular discussions must continue if we are to tackle any of the challenges facing Europe and address the vast array of problems that exist within the Euro-zone. At the same time, it’s important to remember that there are many different reasons for the fiscal crises in Europe; and different problems must be handled in different ways.

Large budget deficits, unsustainable pension systems, and a lack of pro-growth policies are all fundamental problems that have created

6

today’s crises. A common denominator among political elites, large banks, and ordinary citizens across Europe is that they all have chosen to live well beyond their means, and none of them seem to have correctly assessed the risks they have undertaken. Today we are living with the consequences of these mistakes.

The fact that the Chairman of the Commission himself (Barroso) considers greater centralization the only reasonable solution to the crises is an indication of the problematic mindset that hounds all European policymakers. The only solution that many Brussels-based politicians can envision is centralization—or, as it often euphemistically referred to, “more Europe.”

Of course, there are many problems that European member states have in common: aging populations, crime, youth unemployment.

But just because Europeans have problems in common does not mean that more centralization is the solution. On the contrary, in many cases, it can make the situation worse.

The euro is a good example of this. In those nations which share the common currency, it’s harder to fight the economic crisis than it is in those nations which have chosen to retain their own currency.

It would be wrong to blame all the problems now facing Europe on the euro; but it certainly hasn’t helped.

The monetary union was created on a framework that wasn’t really built to handle a crisis like the one Europe faces at present. And any attempt to pursue more coordination or “deeper” cooperation—which is the policy preference among the Brussels crowd—is a serious threat to the EU. It is not a part of the solution.

A principle that could lay a solid foundation for wide-spread reform of the entire European community is the forgotten principle of subsidiarity. This is the idea that decisions should be made at the smallest, lowest level of authority able to effectively address a given

matter. But time and time again, European politicians have shown that they are not interested in being restrained by such a principle.

In theory, every EU member state does have the option of informing the European Commission if and when they believe that a given EU proposal violates the principle of subsidiarity. But even if a majority of EU member states were to inform Brussels that they prefer to decide on something at the national level, the Commission can still override them and justify their decision in the name of “European unity.”

Thus, “subsidiarity,” when used by Eurocrats, means that they get to decide what the proper level is for any given problem.

The EU’s disdain for local or national authority has been evident since Sweden’s own entry into the EU in 1995. Lately, we have been once again reminded of this fact, with the growing chorus of voices in Brussels clamoring for proposals such as gender quotas for the boards of all publicly traded companies; the introduction of EU taxes on all financial transactions; a wholesale ban of snus (snuff or smokeless tobacco) in all countries (other than Sweden); and, of course, the introduction of Barroso’s centralized banking union.

However, we at the national level are not entirely blameless. It is true that the EU has made it difficult for its member states to resist the centralization of power; but by not doing more to defend their autonomy, European member states themselves seem to have ended up as willing collaborators. In fact, it should be entirely possible for Sweden to choose to exit the EU if the EU were suddenly to move radically in an undesirable direction.

This should be Sweden’s right.

That’s why Sweden’s Young Christian Democrats want to repeal the requirement in the Swedish Constitution that stipulates that Sweden must belong to the EU. Those of us who are active in the

www.europeanrenewal.org

EPP—which includes Christian Democrats as well as Moderates— must take more responsibility for the center-right family in Europe. We must dare to bring up the problems that exist and be bold enough to propose alternatives.

Large parts of the parties within the EPP were once active in the “Yes” campaigns in support of EU membership and adoption of the euro. But perhaps it’s now time to swallow our pride and take up the fight against supra-nationalism. It is time to show that it is possible to have a more realistic attitude towards the EU—without necessarily arguing in favor of leaving the European project altogether.

The EPP family is the largest center-right political party at the European level. But unfortunately it includes some members (like Barroso) who are working in opposition to the vision of EU that many of us would like to see realized. What we think the EU needs is less supra-nationalism, as well as less centralization and less political interference—and most of all, definitely not a federation.

Ms. Skyttedal is the Vice President of the Youth of the European People’s Party (YEPP). A version of this article previously appeared in 2012 in Sweden’s Svenska Dagbladet. It has been translated, adapted, and re-published with the author’s kind permission.

Europe’s Missing Constitution Jerome di Costanzo Do we really need a European Constitution?

On January 1, 2013, the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union—the TSCG or Fiscal Compact, for short— will take effect. It doesn’t sound too ominous, but in fact it will be the first time in the history of the European Union that part of a nation’s sovereign rights and power will be explicitly transferred to the EU. The roots of the TSCG can be traced to Germany and France.

In 2011, the German government asked for extensive reform of the draft European Constitution during the finest hours of the Euro-zone’s crisis. Then, in October of last year, French President François Hollande asked for new transfers of funds to the EU from its member states based on a revised social and political agenda.

So, is Europe now a federation of nations? Not at all.

As the MEPs Daniel CohnBendit and Guy Verhofstadt argue in their 2012 book, For Europe!

Manifesto for a Postnational Revolution

in Europe, Europe needs a federal revolution—and an end to the obsolete concept of the ‘nation.’

Surely now is the time when the EU most needs a proper constitution, to find a way to discover its true nature and to define the terms and conditions of supranational European authority.

But the EU seems to have been built by default; and each prior failure or mistake becoming a good opportunity for “more Europe.”

This is reminiscent of the statements of the old Soviet apparatchiki, who in the mid1980s continued to ask for ‘more Communism’ to save the USSR, without any apparent awareness of the reality that the Soviet state was bankrupt.

The euro provides a good example of this kind of blind allegiance to a concept. In the mid-1990s, at the euro’s creation, no monetary expert could really believe that a joint currency without the control of a central bank authority would be viable.

But it went ahead anyway.

And so, too, with regard to the 2004 draft constitutional treaty, which was initially overwhelmingly

Europe: The Shattering of Illusions Václav Klaus New York: Bloomsbury, 2012 Klaus, the second president of the Czech Republic— and prime minister from 1992 to 1997—is known as a harsh critic of the EU and a stalwart defender of national sovereignty. In this book, he accuses European institutions (especially the unelected Commission) of betraying European citizens. In his characteristic blunt manner, Klaus says the administrative, bureaucratic, and paternalistic European superstate is undemocratic, and has increasingly centralized fiscal and monetary policies to the detriment of its member states. The democratic beliefs and individual liberties of Western Europe—and the future of Europe itself— are all under threat. Klaus prescribes widespread systemic change and argues for a return to intergovernmental cooperation based on the basic building block of the nation-state.

Continued on p. 8

THE EUROPEAN CONSERVATIVE

7

di Costanzo, cont‘d.

Common Law: El pensamiento político y jurídico de Sir Edward Coke Elio A. Gallego García Madrid: Encuentro, 2012 English barrister and Judge Sir Edward Coke (15521634) played an important role in the development of the Whig tradition in England. But he is also widely considered to be the “founding father” of the common law tradition.

He heroically resisted the absolutist and centralizing tendencies of the Stuart monarchy and, later, was a key proponent of the “Petition of Rights” of 1628, which was a direct precursor of the Bill of Rights promulgated in 1689. In this clearly written book, Gallego, an expert in the Anglo-American legal tradition, provides a critical assessment of Coke, his life, work, and contributions to legal and juridical thought.

8

rejected by referenda in Ireland and France. But then Europeans were given the Lisbon Treaty, which was presented as—and confused with—a constitution, even though it is really merely a compilation of treaties (and represents nothing more than an agreement to establish a relationship, a deal, or a process).

A proper constitution instead should give a definition, set limits on authority and be “owned” by the people. It should be Europe’s crowning achievement.

Instead, what we have had is an assortment of treaties, with increasingly anonymous and atomized citizens, and a Europe characterized by confusion and member states burdened with deficits.

So where is Europe? More importantly, what is Europe? Who are the Europeans? We still don‘t know. There is no definition of “Europe” and, apparently, no limits have been established to determine what is included— or, more importantly, what is excluded—in the idea of Europe.

“Europe” seems to be nothing more than an ever-changing entity, just like its political borders.

Dominated by such relativism, transferring any kind of rights to such an abstract and amorphous structure (which, incidentally, also seems wholly destitute of virtue) could be dangerous. The EU could easily become a refuge for all kinds of obsolete national bureaucracies.

One important question to ask is: What might the difference be between the role of the EU and the role of any other national bureaucracy? The very construction of the EU was based on a criticism of the nation-state and the wish to transcend it. But the nation also supplies education, health services and, ultimately, guarantees personal freedom.

The desire to get rid of something deemed “archaic” can be dangerous if there is nothing concrete to replace it. If you simply transfer sovereign national rights to a bigger political entity

without taking any precautions or establishing limits, you will end up building a superstate under a European flag, not a federation.

Where is our Europe?

In ancient Greece, the Athenian Constitution described the basis of its democracy.

In the American Constitution, the first words specify, “We the people.”

In Britain, the crown itself is identified with its people.

In each case, the fundamental virtue of the political system— of each sovereign authority—is rooted in its identification with its people.

In the Lisbon Treaty, however, the people of Europe are merely a collection of abstract nouns: “The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.

These values are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail.” Such language suggests that those in the EU are invited to nothing more than an exercise in civility.

The Lisbon Treaty is as meaningful to a European as it would be to a South American or an African. It illustrates just how the idea of a dignified, virtuous citizen from each European nation can be transformed into an insipid, happy-clappy, corporate citizen, fearful of any sort of discrimination, definition, or limitation. But an authority cannot be for “all” or in support of “everything.”

The political virtue of a European constitution must be defined in order to preserve the freedom of each European citizen.

But right now all we have is an amorphous European continent with no identity (political or cultural), no clear vocation and certainly no “European people.”

So what must Europe do?

www.europeanrenewal.org

If we were to apply the principle of subsidiarity, then we could define the prerogatives of the nation (and recognize the virtues of having a federation). From such a perspective, the nation is no longer a problem but, rather, a solution. Given its sovereign independence and its autonomy over each aspect of society, it becomes the basis on which local democracy can function.

But subsidiarity—and democracy, for that matter—are wellknown deficits of the EU. That is why Europe must be defined distinctly from the nation, and not as something above or beyond it. The EU can be neither a constructivist utopia nor the result of a spontaneous generation of treaties if it does not first have proper ends or clearly defined goals.

There must be a Europe that develops from an engagement with fundamental questions about what people want and don’t want, and constructed on the basis of explicit principles that are written down and implicit ones that are derived from commonly held assumptions and values. In short, we need a new institutional understanding of the role of the nation-state and of the European federation.

The EU must be a work of definition; it must be the product of a process of limitation, of classification, of separation; and it must be rooted in the two millennia of common history shared among its member states—and cherished in the heart of every European family.

For the moment, though, Europe remains nothing more than a continent waiting to be discovered. And with this in mind, I myself am tempted simply to call for a modern Magna Carta to bring together free European nations within a proper federation.

Mr. di Costanzo is a journalist and commentator for several British publications, including Open Democracy, The Catholic Herald and The Salisbury Review.

The Economics of Liberty Robin Harris Anyone who wants to learn what it is to be a conservative Englishman—and, incidentally, to enjoy one of the greatest literary feasts in the English language— should read James Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Samuel Johnson in the 18th century wrote the first notable English dictionary and Boswell wrote what can be considered the first modern biography. But the real reason to read Dr. Johnson’s conversation, which the book records, is to relish his way with ‘home truths.’

For instance, Johnson was largely right about authors when he said: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”

And Johnson was also right to dismiss the way in which intellectuals—he was one, but like any conservative he distrusted them—turn their noses up at trade.

Dr. Johnson once said: “There are few ways that a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.” It may seem odd to quote any of this today. People around us are, after all, obsessed with money—or, more specifically, obsessed with the flashy acquisitions they can get by earning, borrowing, or stealing it.

The Pope condemns what he calls consumerism and he is right.

Not so long ago, the politicians were also in on the act (always a bad sign).

Thus David Cameron, Britain’s not very conservative Conservative Party leader, urged that we should stop bothering about GDP— Gross Domestic Product—and concentrate on GWB—General Well Being.

Since the financial collapse and the recession, he and others have changed their tune. Now they are desperate for GDP, and they can’t get it.

The political class today once again wants to see wealth created, because people want money more than ever and they currently

don’t have it, and they blame the politicians—along with the bankers. The trouble is that there is very little understanding left of the system that created wealth in the past and that alone can do so in the future—that is, capitalism.

Capitalism is treated as if somehow it’s a grubby, immoral affair. A nod in the direction of competition, and a grudging agreement not to tax tycoons so much that they leave— unless you’re French, at least—is more or less the limit of what you can get out of the ruling elite.

Tony Blair was widely praised for convincing the British Labour Party that it had to drop its commitments to nationalise industry because after seeing the success of the Thatcher reforms in the 1980s, as he put it, “we know what works.” But he and his successors didn’t grasp why it works. They didn’t, and don’t, think it ought to work. They really regard it as providing the resources they need for policies to corrode the economic freedom that sustains it, and so threaten the wider structure of freedom too.

This schizophrenia about wealth and liberty isn’t a recent phenomenon. It’s built into our culture. Which brings us back to Dr. Johnson and the intellectuals.

There are any number of problems from which we suffer which are the result of the long-term influence of intellectuals. But two of them are relevant to our subject today.

First, because intellectuals earn their keep from speaking and writing, they are usually much more interested in the liberty to express opinions than in most other liberties. Yet, if you think about it, this aspect of freedom—the freedom to communicate, often inaccurately described as freedom of speech or freedom of thought— is not of much importance to the population at large. Most people are more interested, for example, in the liberty to sell their skills, labour,

THE EUROPEAN CONSERVATIVE

Continued on p. 10

9

Harris, cont’d.

services, and products for as much as they can get for them; the liberty to live where they choose and eat and drink what they want; the liberty to go abroad without hindrance; the liberty to bring up their children as they wish; and, above all, perhaps, the liberty to live without fear of violence.

Secondly, intellectuals—and here I want to extend the term beyond its usual meaning to include prominent clerics, journalists, and opinion formers, what the English Victorian poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge termed the ‘clerisy’—are, by and large, extraordinarily ignorant about economics. Even though many become personally wealthy, and even though they all directly or indirectly depend on the success of enterprise, they still look down their noses at the business of wealth creation.

More generally, our society has mixed feelings about wealth itself.

Riches corrupt (or so I’m prepared to believe, having little personal experience).

There are, though, sound answers, even to these worries. St. Paul, we recall, warns that the “root of all evil” is the “love of money” and not just (as is often misquoted) “money” itself. John Wesley’s great sermon on “The Use of Money” provides further qualifications. Wesley urges: “Gain all you can; save all you can; give all you can.” And he adds: “Do not impute to money the faults of human nature.” So, I suggest, we shouldn’t.

There is here an important distinction to be made between what happens when an individual gets rich and what happens when a nation gets rich. Individual human beings are autonomous moral, and morally accountable, entities. Nations are not. If we suggest otherwise, we are using metaphor—and we should be aware of it. Nations are made up of individuals, who behave well or badly individually. It is not the fault of one person in a generally rich society if another misbehaves. Nor, one should add, does any moral credit accrue to one person in any society if someone else acts virtuously.

In the case of economic

10

growth, we can make a further distinction, which is not always grasped.

Without economic growth, especially in conditions where people have become used to improving living standards, you run into enormous trouble.

GDP, remember, is just one large, imperfectly determined aggregate figure. It conceals a myriad of activities, is fought over by interests, and is the subject of dreams, fears, and ambitions. Without a growing GDP, economic and to some extent social life becomes a zero-sum struggle. With it, the advance of one individual or group can be secured while avoiding setbacks for others.

Without growth, we are constantly resentful rivals. With growth, we are constantly collaborating competitors.

Being ashamed of economic growth is tantamount to being ashamed of Western civilisation itself. After all, it was the West— by its religious and cultural values, its emphasis on the rights of individuals, its respect for property and the rule of law, and its tolerance of competition—which alone created the conditions for growth to occur.

China may be doing very well today. But while in earlier centuries the Chinese invented the wheelbarrow, the stirrup, the rigid horse collar, the compass, paper, printing, gunpowder and porcelain, they couldn’t generate sustained economic growth. They had to borrow from our system to do that.

Despite the crudities of Early Modern Christian Europe, the West overtook the more sophisticated Muslim world. Despite the crudities of Late Modern Europe today, we would be mad to decry the system which alone in human history allows each new generation to have the reasonable hope that its living standards will be better than the last.

But let’s get back to the question of liberty. Economic liberty is just as important an aspect of liberty in the wider sense as are any of the other rights frequently listed, and much less troublesome or obscure than

many of them. It is also important in a further way. This is because— second only perhaps to physical liberty of movement and alongside the maintenance of public order— economic liberty is a pre-condition for all other aspects of liberty. When we are economically un-free we are, inevitably, dependent upon others for our livelihoods.

You may say, of course, that when we depend on someone as an employer to pay our wages we are in a sense dependent on them.

This is true. But as long as we have control over our own labour we have something to offer some other employer if we tire of our present one and this in turn limits the scope for any employer to tell us how to behave.

Two things can stop this happening. First, we may be prevented from trading our labour (and our skills) because a trade union through the closed shop (that is, a monopolistic grip on the labour supply) or some other restrictive practice stops our negotiating a contract with a new employer.

Second, there may be only a single employer, or at least only two or three employers, in other words a cartel. Then our freedom cannot be fully exercised.

In some primitive societies, where almost all wealth and power is in the hands of a single individual or family or clan or group, such dependence can become very nearly total. Nowadays, this only happens when government fills that role.

In the fully developed socialist state, government is our employer.

It is our landlord. It educates our children. It guarantees us welfare and pensions. It provides us with news via state owned broadcasters and/or newspapers. If we are lucky it will even see we are buried (and nowadays rather quicker than we might wish, if our hospital treatment costs too much).

Moreover, by preventing us during our lives from building up savings and so acquiring property— perhaps by inflating the currency but always by imposing high taxation, often including capital taxation—

www.europeanrenewal.org

it prevents our ever breaking out of government’s clutches. This economic dependence encourages psychological dependence.

It promotes by uniformity of conditions a uniformity of outlook.

It rewards those who fawn and flatter and fit in with bureaucracy.

It has over the years an effect on a nation’s character which is more difficult to alter than any particular government policy is to reverse. It is why Britain, despite the Thatcherdominated 1980s, is in certain respects still an instinctively socialist country—because of the previous thirty years of state dependence.

This effect is not everywhere completely the same. The degrees to which government exercises these functions may and will differ. But what is clearly and unalterably true is that where we are not economically free—where we do not ourselves decide what we shall produce and consume and what we shall do with the our income and property— the state or, more specifically, the governing elite will determine affairs rather than the citizens. This will be true whatever provisions are made for elective democracy.

All that elections will determine is which group will control the rest.

The actual degree of control will be unaffected.

Reducing the scope for individuals to decide through the operation of markets and maximising the scope for government intervention has a further effect. This is that it encourages corruption.

Human nature being what it is, if some people cannot get on and get rich by one means they will do it by another. Every superfluous control is thus an invitation to cheat the system more energetically and resourcefully. After a certain point, cheating the system becomes not just a pragmatic response, but a way of life. Moreover, leaving aside morality for a moment, this makes perfect sense. If government is large and offers security and opportunities, whereas the private sector is relatively small and offers risks and few rewards, it pays to join the government. If it is the actions

of government that decide whether you go up or down in the world, it make sense to satisfy what those in government want. It then becomes the perfectly logical thing to do for those in government to work with those dependent on government to advance their own mutual interests.

This is why although talk about gangs, mafia, and criminal families hits the headlines, all systematic and endemic corruption turns out in the end to be government corruption.

If you want to stop it you mustn’t just organise police investigations (after all, the police may be corrupt as well). If you want to stop corruption, you need to reduce the opportunities for it, which means reducing the scope of government.

I began by saying that a lot of the problems we face stem from the attitude of intellectuals. But it is also true, paradoxically, that government, policy making, and politics are plagued by intellectual incoherence.

Perhaps because of the dominance exercised by technical experts and the willingness to defer to them there is often no over-arching philosophy from which different laws and other measures flow. We should be more intellectually selfconfident. We should assume that if we form a right judgement about human nature and the way the world works it will be applicable generally.

One economist who did think like this and who, consequently, treated economics as an integral part of liberty, was Adam Smith.

Smith was arguably the most important member of what is called the Scottish Enlightenment. He was a scholar with a wide-ranging interest in philosophy, history, and economics. His first major work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), was, indeed, a book about ethics. This is significant. He based his later (1776) and more famous economic analysis, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (usually simply called The Wealth of Nations), on an analysis not of national accounts but of human behaviour.

Continued on p. 12

Die globale sexuelle Revolution: Zerstörung der Freiheit im Namen der Freiheit Gabriele Kuby Kißlegg: Fe-Medienverlag, 2012 This book examines the global sexual revolution. Exhaustively researched, it focuses on the subversion of man’s sexual identity by governments and special interest groups across Europe—all in the name of freedom. Kuby, a German sociologist, considers the philosophical origins of the sexual revolution, examines the policy of “gendermainstreaming,” and analyzes the deregulation of sexual norms. The revolution is driven by an ideology that is fundamentally incompatible with Christian anthropology— and which is fueled by the pornography business, a hyper-sexualized mass media, and the homosexual ‘marriage’ lobby. The book, which is already being translated into other European languages, includes a preface by renowned German philosopher and ethicist Robert Spaemann.

THE EUROPEAN CONSERVATIVE

11

Harris, cont’d.

Über Gott und die Welt: Eine Autobiographie in Gesprächen Robert Spaemann Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2012 This is an autobiography by one of Germany’s most important philosophers. With the relentless clarity of thought and expression for which he is known, Spaemann, professor emeritus at the University of Munich, provides moving anecdotes about his family’s socialist roots, the Nazi era and how he came to love philosophy after the war. He speaks of the pleasure of thought and the philosopher’s obligation to pursue truth regardless of the zeitgeist. Spaemann is one of the few contemporary philosophers to still ascribe to human reason the ability to know the truth. With reflections on his struggles with Heidegger, the 1968 student revolt, and his friendship with Pope Benedict XVI, this is a fascinating look at the life of one of the greatest minds of the 20th century.

12

Smith’s views have often been misrepresented. He is sometimes portrayed as a cynic who had no appreciation of unselfishness. This is simply not true. For example he writes in The Theory of Moral Sentiments: “To feel much for others and little for ourselves ... to restrain our selfish and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature.”

The problem is, however, that such benevolence is not reliable and that, anyway, in the extended order (the theme that Austrian thinker Friedrich Hayek later famously developed), it is not generally applicable. To quote one of Adam Smith’s most famous observations: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”

Yet Adam Smith is an optimist.

He notes that the operation of applied self-interest, though it leads to the enrichment of a few, also leads to the material advancement of all. There is, in fact, he grasps, something in man’s nature which is able to turn liberty to good use. Man is capable, unlike any other creature, of striking a bargain and keeping to it. He has what Smith calls “the propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another.”

Adam Smith’s main target in his writing is the economic and political system known as “mercantilism.”

This is the view—one that prevailed in the 17th century and has never fully been extinguished—that trade is a zero-sum game, aimed at accumulating bullion (or reserves) by the state, a process that involves promoting exports and prohibiting or discouraging imports. This state policy is the counterpart to—and often has been the preparation for—war. Adam Smith’s vision of free exchange within and between nations is, of course, the opposite.

It is pacific.

Smith’s insights were in due course influential in British policy.

From the mid-19th century to the early twentieth century Britain pursued a policy of broadly free trade. In the 1890s economic globalisation was already a reality, with larger world exports of capital, in relative terms, even than in the 1990s. Significantly, both World Wars were preceded by a return to economic nationalism.

Because Adam Smith was concerned with the follies of mercantilism rather than those of socialism—whose stupidity he could not even have imagined—he has less to say about the concept of property than you might think.

He just assumed property to be natural and the rights to possess and dispose of it as essential— thus following the classical liberal intellectual tradition.

Property is, though, the pivot upon which both the free economy and the free society turn.

During my years working for Mrs. Thatcher, I came to understand the centrality of property rights in every aspect of domestic policy.

She believed this and she acted on it—for example, by allowing usually poor public sector tenants to buy their homes at knock-down prices and by promoting wider share ownership. She also encouraged people to build up savings and leave them to their children. She used to attack what she called “the one generation society,” that is a system of fecklessness where people just leave their children’s future to the state.

The work of the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has more recently provided insights into how the lack of defined and secure property rights keeps people poor—particularly in the Third World. Informal possession rather than official ownership discourages people from improving their assets; and it prevents anyone raising loans on them to invest elsewhere. He estimates that the assets accumulated—but unused or misused—by the poor in Egypt, for example, are worth five times as much as all the foreign investment there.

www.europeanrenewal.org

If the Arab Spring actually tackles that cause of under-development it may even yield benefits.

There is no longer any room for serious argument about how to generate economic growth. Other things being equal, the freer a country’s economy, the faster it will grow, and the wealthier it will become.

Any cross-section of economies at a particular time will always be distorted somehow—today, by the uneven impact of the financial crisis.

But over the longer term, the freer they are, the richer. This is what is shown, year after year, by the Heritage Foundation’s and The Wall Street Journal ’s “Index of Economic Freedom.”

If you look at the ten freest countries on the list you will see that they are prosperous. Freer is wealthier.

But other countries need serious reforms. They have to break out of their way of doing things—by reducing state spending, lightening regulation, cutting marginal tax rates, encouraging investment, and so restarting growth.

This really is possible—even in difficult conditions. It has been done in Chile. It has been done in the US. It has been done in the UK. This wheel need not be reinvented.

But, to return to my opening theme, will increased wealth—more growth, higher incomes, if and when we get them—threaten our culture and pollute our values? They needn’t.

Nobody said that living in a free, changing, improving society was riskfree. It’s just better than the opposite.

Progress and prosperity bring temptations, it’s true. The answer, especially in a self-confident Christian country, isn’t to restrict economic freedom. It is to cultivate the virtues.

But I leave enlarging on that matter to those more virtuous than I. Dr. Harris is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Heritage Foundation. In the 1980s, he was director of the Conservative Research Department and a member of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street Policy Unit. He is the author of The Conservatives (2011) and Dubrovnik: A History (2006).

Why Conservatives are not Liberals Elio A. Gallego The quarrel between liberals and conservatives occupied much of the history of the 19th century. But it was only tangential to the history of the 20th century and is, so far, perhaps even less important to the present century.

What has happened?

Well, quite simply, the social and political hegemony of socialism today in its various collectivist forms (from fascism to today’s social democracy) has made the differences between conservatives and liberals seem, in perspective, increasingly irrelevant.

But, if this is so, is it worth spending time and making efforts to try to clarify the distinctions between them? Would it have any importance or practical applications beyond the merely academic? We think so, and not only for scholarly reasons. If, as many expect, the era of socialism is drawing to a close, thanks (paradoxically) to its triumph over other ideologies and its worldwide hegemony, Western countries will have to find inspiration and seek the criteria with which they may regain their former civility and taste for life. This will be an essential task. Thus, with countries resolutely facing a post-socialist future, it is clear that re-examining the debate between liberalism and conservatism is justified.

On this quest for the nature of the difference between liberalism and conservatism as alternatives to socialism, I will refrain from considering those in the United States who call themselves “liberals”; it is obvious that beneath this label is nothing more than a thinly disguised form of social democracy.

Nor will I dwell on those currents of liberalism that Professor Dalmacio Negro Pavón has called “constructivist”: inheritors of the crassest rationalism of the 18th century from which, in fact, socialism in general is derived.

Nor will I even dwell on one of the key figures in what has come to be known as “neo-liberalism”: Ludwig von Mises. This is because his position on many essential points is so far from conservatism that very little time is required to demonstrate its conflicting nature.

In fact, the recurring appeal of Mises to the most extreme form of rationalism and utilitarianism distance him completely from the conservative tradition, leaving no room for any confusion.

Suffice it to say that, for example, in his great work Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (1922), which is otherwise full of excellent points, he time and again resorts to classic rationalistic prejudices against religion. Thus, Mises says: “Simple faith and economic rationalism cannot dwell together”; or he affirms that the liberal knows that “neither God nor veiled destiny determines the future of the human race, but only man himself.”

His claim is such that one can legitimately wonder how Mises arrived at such a degree of certainty.

Did he receive a message from the Heavens that said ‘I do not exist’?

If not, his certainty is difficult to understand.

Rationalism, of course, doesn’t just attack religion but all major social institutions as well—including property. For example, writing in a style that seems like something taken from Marx during his early period, Mises affirms: “Judged from the old standpoint, property was sacred. Liberalism destroyed this nimbus, as it destroys all others. It ‘debased’ property into a utilitarian, worldly matter. Property no longer has absolute value; it is valued as a means, that is, for its utility.”

From there, Mises asserts that “[t]he systems [i.e. socialism and liberalism], in fact, differ not in their aims but in the means by which they wish to pursue them.” A little

THE EUROPEAN CONSERVATIVE

Continued on p. 14

13

Gallego, cont’d.

earlier, he indicates what this shared end is: abundance. There is certainly nothing stranger (or more foreign) to the conservative tradition than such crass materialistic utilitarianism.

However, the liberal author par excellence, in whom the differences between liberalism and conservatism seem to get diluted, is undoubtedly Friedrich A. Hayek. And perhaps this is precisely the reason that he felt obliged to write a short essay with the expressive title, “Why I am not conservative,” which he added as a postscript to his great work The Constitution of Liberty (1960).

In the following reflections about Hayek’s thought and his proximity to conservatism, I will focus on this small essay and on what turned out to be his last work, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988), which in some ways can be considered his intellectual testament.

The first reason that Hayek gives for rejecting the use of the label “conservative” is the inability of the term to embrace change, and the evolving nature of man and of society. Hayek says: “It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing.”

In one way or another, this same charge is repeated throughout the essay as his main objection to conservatism.

On this matter, Hayek certainly touches on one of the great difficulties that any reflective attitude must respond to—namely, whether everything truly is in a state of flux or, conversely, whether there is anything that remains (and, if so, what does it consist of).

An old Whig (a denomination that Hayek seems to like), Sir Matthew Hale, speaking in the context of the development of the English common law tradition, illustrated the question like this: Odysseus and his fellow Argonauts on their return home after spending many years traveling, having a variety of adventures and experiencing many dangers. In all that time, countless repairs must have been made to their vessel and, over time, all the rotten or damaged wood must have

14

been replaced, along with the tired or worn out sails. In this way, when they finally got home, there must not have been a single original piece of the ship left—and yet the boat was the same. It had not changed.

The ship had changed materially; but its form or shape had remained the same. Similarly, we know that a human being changes all of his cells every few years; yet it is obvious that he remains the same. (Yes, these are the old Aristotelian categories of “matter” and “form”.)

The conservative knows that everything changes, materially speaking, and therefore he does not seek immobility or permanence.

The fight in which the conservative is engaged is, thus, not one over the material immutability of things but over the survival of the form. The conservative knows that the loss of form does not simply mean change; it means destruction, death, the end.

The question now arises: What is the form for which the conservative fights? Our answer to this question simultaneously provides a response to the second of the objections raised by Hayek.

Unlike the liberal, says Hayek, the conservative lacks any real goals worth fighting for; and yet nothing could be further from reality. In fact, on the contrary, the conservative has very precise goals which translate into an attitude of vigilance and sacrifice, an attitude that is consistent with the vital need to preserve the form of our civilization—Western Christian civilization. To consider this form is to consider what the old Whigs called the “ancient constitution.”

The starting point for all conservatives is the conscious assumption that our civilization was born back around the 11th and 12th centuries through the fusion of Greco-Roman, Christian and Germanic elements—and that this was, in essence, good and just.

The conservative recognizes that in the origins and form of this civilization exists a high degree of civility and reason—that is to say, justice, beauty, and freedom—along with the defects and deficiencies

that are inherent in any human endeavor.

The conservative believes that, like the ship of the Argonauts, this civilization requires permanent efforts at renewal, change, restoration, correction, improvement— precisely so that it may continue existing, so that it may retain its original form, so that it may conserve its ancient constitution.

The old Whigs—as well as Edmund Burke—fought to preserve this form or ancient constitution.

We are inextricably united in this form; we form a whole out of the confluence of faith and religion, limited government, local and individual liberties, parliaments, the idea of representation, respect for private property, the rule of law, and the existence of a natural law.

It is everything that Montesquieu, in his The Spirit of the Laws (1748), called the “Gothic constitutions of Europe”—which, in his opinion, were “the best species of constitution that could possibly be imagined by man.” They were certainly perfectible but definitely not replaceable.

Only the conservative is aware of how, at this moment, the struggle is one over form. And with this in mind, it is easy to see Hayek’s misunderstanding of the true political philosophy of Aristotle.

In The Fatal Conceit, Hayek suggests that Aristotle has misunderstood the self-organization of an open and commercial society—what Hayek calls an “extended order.” In his view, under the strictly closed societal vision of Aristotle, “their city [Athens] would rapidly have shrunk into a village” and would have “led him to an ethics appropriate only to, if anywhere at all, a stationary state.”

But Hayek here is confusing “stationary” for “balance”; balance is always dynamic, active and in tension. What Aristotle proposes is an idea that all conservative thinkers are sympathetic to: not the rejection of free trade but rather its balancing—not through bureaucratic or state artifice but through the existence of other

www.europeanrenewal.org

contiguous orders, such as political or religious bodies. This means that along with the “extended” order that arises in an open and commercial society there should exist other “intensive” orders—in the same way that in the days of Aristotle there was the phratry, the family or even the polis itself.

Any preponderance of one of these over the others is a kind of hubris, a sign of excess and a cause of imbalance, which sooner or later will end up destroying not only the weakest elements but also the dominant element. Aristotle points out that commerce left unchecked—without moral, religious, and political counterbalances—is not only destructive to the intensive orders, but is itself self-destructive.

Hasn’t modern socialism shown us the dangers of a disproportionate expansion of the economic and the commercial without the necessary counterweights from the intensive orders of religious, familial, and political bodies?

In any case, Hayek is correct when he says that it was Aristotelian philosophy which most influenced Saint Thomas Aquinas—and, along with him, the Low Middle Ages. But he is entirely wrong about its meaning.

How could modern banking, bills of exchange, trade and exchanges, commercial law, special courts for merchants based on equity, traffic safety, and speedy processes, all have emerged at precisely the same time as the flourishing of commerce, the emergence of cities supportive of independent work (instead of slave labor)?

How could this commercial and productive resurgence have taken place in such a religious age, with so much influence by the Catholic Church?

To say that all this occurred despite the Church seems unsatisfactory. Rather, an appropriate reply can be found in the reconciliation of opposites that so well characterizes the Church. The truth is that the Church favored commerce and the growth of

prosperity in general; on the other hand, it was also fully aware of its other function as a necessary counterweight—to balance the natural tendency toward excess and greed on the part of men. It was the Church’s responsibility to remind men of that time—as it is its responsibility to do so today— that money is not everything, that the pursuit of wealth without constraints is bad, and that when man is greedy, he ends up with nothing but unhappiness.

Western civilization was established as a form of checks and balances of very different natures—strong and delicate at the same time. And throughout the 20th century, conservatives did not oppose either industrial and commercial expansion or the imbalance—the hubris—that it caused.

The delicate nature of any social order—the complexity and subtlety of its balance, the diversity of the elements that comprise it—are things that to the rationalist often go unnoticed. In his mind he uses one paradigm to judge all reality—and in the case of today’s neoliberals, this paradigm is the market. This is far from the thinking of a Burke or a Tocqueville.

All his life, Hayek himself sought to transcend his initial rationalist position and, as he confesses in “Why I am not conservative,” to become an old Whig. He got to the point of disliking the epithet of “liberal” for this very reason. But did he succeed? Was Hayek able to overcome the rationalism he inherited from his teacher, Mises?

We think not. He never managed to get rid of all of his initial rationalism, which is why he never understood what it meant to be a conservative—and, thus, become one.

Prof. Gallego teaches legal philosophy at CEU San Pablo University in Madrid.

His last book was Sabiduría clásica y libertad política (Classical Wisdom and Political Freedom) published by Ciudadela in 2009.

The Classical Revolution: Thoughts on New Music in the 21st Century John Borstlap Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012 Since the 1960s, new “classical” music in the West has been dominated by atonal modernism as conceived by Austrian composer Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951) and his followers.

This is not because they are popularly appreciated but because government-funded art establishments have decreed tonal composition outdated and passé. In this wonderfully eloquent book, Borstlap, a Dutch composer, describes how the modernist break with tradition and its rejection of the mimetic nature of true art has resulted in a tremendous loss—of musical competence and beauty.

But in the same way that we are witnessing a modest resurgence of traditional realism in painting and classical architecture, Borstlap suggests that the “pre-modern” tonal tradition in music is ready for a comeback as well.

THE EUROPEAN CONSERVATIVE

15

More Populism—Please!

Melvin Schut

Cattolici e Risorgimento: Appunti per una biografia di don Giacomo Margotti Oscar Sanguinetti Crotone: D’Ettoris Editori, 2012 Don Giacomo Margotti (18231887) was a famed theologian and writer who, today, remains largely forgotten. He was also a journalist and edited two of the most influential Catholic publications of the 19th century, L’ Unità Cattolica (Catholic Unity) and L’Armonia (Harmony), using them to oppose, among other things, the Risorgimento (unification) of Italy and to argue against the abolition of Papal temporal power. This book is a much-needed contribution to the history of Italian conservatism and is, in the words on one contemporary scholar, a “sound, worthwhile and useful work” about an Italian conservative worth remembering. This book is the first volume of a new collection to be called the Library of Conservative Studies.

16

The word ‘populism’ has become almost a profanity these days. Upon even cursory reflection, this is very strange.

According to the dictionary, ‘populism’ means support for the interests of the people rather than for the interests of a privileged elite. This renders it different from ‘demagoguery,’ which refers to the manipulation of the emotions and prejudices of the people.

Populism, therefore, almost by definition, should really command widespread appreciation. Indeed, Western constitutions are liberal democracies, which is to say that they form ‘popular governments,’ respectful of equal individual rights. The widespread disdain for populism is hence a double paradox.

The negative, demagogic overtones of populism, so common today, find their origins with Plato and other ancient thinkers, who warned against the foolhardiness of the people. In their view, the influence of the undisciplined and ill-informed ‘ordinary Joe,’ who merely desires boundless freedom and equality, had to be tempered by virtuous aristocratic and decisive monarchical institutions.

The alternative was a democracy without moderation, which would quickly descend into anarchy or the tyranny of the mob, culminating in calls for a dictator.

This distrust of democracy, further fueled by the memory of fascism, is reflected in the European elites’ fear of popular movements today. And, without doubt, Plato’s analysis was powerful, fitting hierarchical, pre-modern polities such as his own.

But can it also help us understand our current, egalitarian societies?

A negative answer to that question was formulated by Alexis de Tocqueville, the great 19th century French aristocratic liberal, well-known for his classic work

on democracy, De la démocratie en Amérique (1835/1840).

Modern society, he suggested, no longer consists largely of a proletariat and does not contain an independent, self-conscious aristocratic class exempt from labor and informed by the leadership experience of generations. Instead, equal rights render everyone a member of the middle class. Each person engages in commercial activities in order to survive, whether this is as an employee or as an entrepreneur. Each is, hence, subject to the vicissitudes of the market.

Tocqueville argued that the uncertainty of this existence encouraged citizens to turn to the state to further their personal interests, since this was the only institution strong enough to rise above the mass of relatively weak, plodding individuals. Some do this by applying for benefits. Others become ‘place hunters,’ finding status in the public sector. Yet others create interest groups that help centralize administration in order to more effectively harness their disaggregated, unorganized fellow citizens by means of the state.

This insight is important in judging populism today.

Tocqueville warned that the traditional association of democracy with anarchy—a line of thought seemingly confirmed by the French Revolution—no longer applied. Rather, because of their egalitarian, commercial character, modern democracies tend on the contrary to social conformism and political apathy. Revolution and popular uprising are less of a threat to our type of society than apathy and stagnation. To remain free, democracies need vigilant citizens and genuinely independent associations without ties to the state, supported by a plethora of independent publications.

The real worry, then, is not that citizens will stir themselves into

www.europeanrenewal.org

action but that they will not.

Tocqueville’s fear seems to have come to pass in Europe. Frustrated citizens are conspicuous by their silence and inactivity, now that their governments have shamelessly adopted the Lisbon Treaty (even though the virtually identical European Constitution had earlier been rejected by referenda in the Netherlands and France).

Mass immigration, too, has taken place without too much protest or outcry, even though a majority of the population in European countries have always opposed it.

In addition, citizens remain quietly unmoved despite a very high overall tax rate. If they do respond at all, it is usually by ‘kicking the can down the road’—if need be, by relocating to another country— rather than by taking responsibility and becoming more politically engaged.

Current European societies thus require more, not less, populism; but it should be an energetic and more engaged kind of populism, organized bottom-up, like the Tea Party in the United States. It should not be politician-led or top-down, as populism exists in Europe today.

Not coincidentally, Tocqueville considered freedom of association and freedom of speech our greatest goods. In this respect the opportunities offered by the internet would certainly have filled him with hope.

Moreover, Tocqueville also warned against the conflation of semi-aristocratic institutions— such as an independent judiciary, an indirectly elected Upper House and universities—with a traditional aristocracy.

Democratic elites in administration, media, and business may be necessary to the well-being of modern democracies, but they do not essentially differ legally, economically, or culturally from the rest of the population. Like everyone else, they sell a product.

For intellectuals this consists of ideas and for technocrats it consists of expertise.

Only in the literal meaning of

aristoi—the best—are intellectuals and technocrats a type of ‘aristocracy of the mind’ and CEO’s an ‘aristocracy of money’.

Businessmen, however, tend to lack an eye for the public interest; technocrats tend to tunnel vision and the smothering of individual initiative; and intellectuals tend to think in abstractions and lack practical experience (often causing them to lose touch with reality).

Like other citizens, such elites have the tendency to abuse the state for their own profit (the main difference being that they are more successful at it). As a result, they can function well—and for the common good—only in balance with the rest of the population.

Ultimately, the popularity of using ‘populism’ as if it were a profanity is really the result of the political influence of particular citizens self-interestedly profiting at the expense of others.

Opposition to taxpayer-funded bailouts for ailing euro-zone economies is called ‘populism’ because bankers would otherwise have to pay for their imprudent investments themselves.

Opposition to mass immigration is called ‘populism’ because the immigration industry owes its very existence to the problems involving migrants.

And opposition to public broadcasting and other subsidized services is called ‘populism’ because the free market is not really interested in their products.

Amid all this name-calling, European elites are guilty of the most base demagoguery: If we do not support the European Union, there will be another world war!

Criticizing Islam is the new antisemitism! Without art subsidies high culture will die!

Really?

Plato suggested democracy was vulgar. But things could hardly get more vulgar than the anti-populism of our European elites.

Mr. Schut teaches law and philosophy at Amsterdam University College and at Leiden University.

Menéndez Pelayo: Genio y figura César Alonso de los Ríos, Aquilino Duque & Ignacio Gracia Noriega Madrid: Encuentro, 2012 The Spanish historian, Menéndez Pelayo, is considered to have been the patriarch of conservative thought in Spain and one of Europe’s most brilliant thinkers. Unfortunately, his life and work have long been neglected by academics, and today he has been forgotten by most Spaniards and removed from school curricula.

This collection of essays sets out to remedy this situation, reminding readers that the situation today (both in Spain and across Europe) might be different if only those calling themselves “conservatives” were a bit more sophisticated—and had a better grasp of history, literature, and philosophy. The authors argue that Menéndez Pelayo offers today’s conservatives someone in whom they might find inspiration—and perhaps even a little more courage.

THE EUROPEAN CONSERVATIVE

17

A View from Down Under Alexander Burton

Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England Roger Scruton London: Atlantic Books, 2012 As Scruton himself says in the preface to this book, this is not an academic history of the Church of England but rather a very personal meditation on what the Church has meant in his life and in English national life. Written with great warmth and his always incisive insights, Scruton’s book contains comments, observations, and themes that are no longer popular: He praises the unrivaled artistic and literary riches that the West inherited from the Church, reminds readers that the strength of English national identity was derived from her, and, more generally, warns us that the future of Western civilization itself depends on a recognition of the role of religion.

18

In the Southern Hemisphere, things can sometimes get a little confusing. Perhaps this is because, in contrast to our colleagues in the Northern Hemisphere, we in Australia are standing upside down.

The term “liberal”, for example, often requires further definition. On the one hand, our understanding of the word is similar to that of the United States: It brings to mind left-wing ideologues such as Barack Obama. On the other hand, the Liberal Party of Australia, despite its name, is currently considered the most conservative party in the country. This can be confusing; but what is clear is that conservatism is alive and well in Australia.

The Liberal Party has joined the conservative National Party to form the “Coalition”, the largest political grouping in the Australian Parliament. Recently, they celebrated an important political victory when an effort to legalize same-sex marriage— the “Marriage Amendment Bill 2012”—was overwhelmingly defeated by a vote of 98 to 42 in the House of Representatives. But to what extent does this indicate a broader conservative trend in Australian society? One must first consider Australia’s main political parties.

There are three large parties— the Liberal Party and the National Party (which form the Coalition), and the Labor Party. There are also a small number of Greens and some Independents. Although the Coalition is the largest group in Parliament, the slightly smaller Labor Party has formed a minority government with some of the left-wing Greens and Independents.

Prior to the last election in 2010, both the Coalition and the Labor Party publicly stated that they did not wish to see a change in the definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman. But soon after forming a minority government (and presumably to appease the more radical Greens) the left wing of the

Labor Party gathered enough support to change the Labor Party’s official stance on marriage. They then stated they would allow their members a ‘conscience vote’ on the issue of same-sex marriage.

Conversely, despite having an influential left wing within its own ranks, members of the Coalition did not change their policy on traditional marriage. Tony Abbott, the Leader of the Opposition Coalition in the House of Representatives, stated that the Coalition did not allow conscience votes on matters of party policy. It was the Coalition’s duty, he said, not to renege on a stance that they had been elected to uphold.

Thus, when time came to vote on the bill in Parliament, liberal Coalition MPs were not allowed to ‘cross the floor’ and vote against the Coalition’s platform; but conservative and traditionalist Labor MPs were free to vote their conscience. and go against their Party’s more liberal position.

This was the main reason behind the resounding defeat of the same-sex marriage bill.

Although other same-sex marriage bills are still in the pipeline, their proponents think it is futile to bring these bills forward as long as there is no change in the status quo. This is why the agenda of current leftwing politicians—of all parties—is to try to undermine Tony Abbott’s authority and leadership, in order to push for changes within the Coalition so that eventually its more progressive members may be allowed to vote freely.

Even so, this would not necessarily guarantee a victory for proponents of same-sex marriage. Many Coalition MPs keep their cards close to their chest on the issue of same-sex marriage. It is, therefore, unknown how a same-sex marriage bill might fare if a conscience vote were allowed by the Coalition.

There are a number of Coalition MPs who are personally against same-sex marriage but who represent electoral districts where same-sex marriage is popular. A refusal to

www.europeanrenewal.org

allow a conscience vote within the Coalition works in their favor, and prevents them from facing a potential moral and political dilemma. It is presumed that these MPs would be unlikely to support a move towards a conscience vote—even if their electorate demanded it.

Proponents of same-sex marriage often quote opinion polls if data appear to support their cause.

Nevertheless, they never strongly advocate bringing the issue to the public for a definitive popular vote.

They know the instincts of voters are generally traditional, and perhaps they fear the large numbers of elderly and retired people (all conservative) who would undoubtedly vote against their agenda.

Same-sex marriage activists may also lack enough trust in the results of the online polls they cite to really want to put the issue to a democratic test. Avoiding a popular vote on the issue, however, does fit in well with the modus operandi of the left-wing activists who always cry “democracy!” while simultaneously subverting the will of the majority by imposing minority (i.e. radical) views on them.

In other words: They talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.

Although the marriage bill was defeated, the left in Parliament is desperate to push its agenda because recent opinion polls indicate that the current government—and its marriage of convenience between Greens and Labor—would likely suffer a catastrophic defeat at the next national elections, which must be called in 2013.

So time is running out for the extreme left to achieve its objectives.

The Greens and Labor have not only exhausted the financial coffers of Australia—turning a budgetary surplus inherited from the previous conservative government into a record deficit—but the patience of mainstream voters as well.

If by some political arrangement the Greens were to succeed in introducing same-sex marriage before the next election, it is not likely to go over well with the electorate. On the whole, the electorate has chosen to move towards more conservative

policies on a variety of issues.

This recently has resulted in conservative victories in various local council elections in New South Wales (NSW) and in other state elections across Australia. This has not escaped the notice of Australia’s political far left. When explaining why the tide turned dramatically against the Greens in local council elections, one Green MP admitted that “the electorate’s mood was clearly conservative.”

An alternative explanation may be that those swing voters who previously considered the Greens as a legitimate mainstream party are now wholly disappointed with them.

Their intransigence, their inability to make any compromises, and their abuse of the balance of power within the Parliament have disappointed and infuriated many of their former supporters. While traditional Green voters love the influence that the Greens have over the parliamentary balance of power, swing voters do not; and they have had enough.

It would be an understatement to say that many Australians are unhappy with the performance of the current Green-Labor minority government.

Their recent lackluster results in local and state elections confirms that a growing part of the electorate now perceives them as being out of touch with the mainstream on many issues. In areas such as economic policy, agriculture, forestry and water resource management, as well as health, housing, indigenous rights, population control, immigration and multiculturalism, voters are at odds with the position of the Green-Labor government.

The Australian electorate has also woken up to the extreme left-wing agenda being pushed by the Greens.

Indeed, recently, evidence of their extreme views—and the often bizarre philosophical ideas behind them— has emerged. When the Greens were a fringe party, they largely escaped public and media scrutiny; but now, as a party of considerable political influence, the public is realizing what kind of people are in power. The Greens, in short, are in the public spotlight and more vulnerable to criticism.

Earlier this year, for example, the founder and former leader of the Greens, Bob Brown, delivered an especially peculiar speech in which he publically addressed his colleagues as “fellow Earthians”—before going on to espouse the ideological virtues of a one-world government.

This infamous speech resulted in an outpouring of commentaries questioning the Greens’ grasp of reality—and whether they were really any longer relevant to everyday mainstream Australian life.

This situation was exacerbated by the recent leak of a document from an internal strategy meeting in which Green MPs from NSW were encouraged to explain their political aspirations and philosophies—to extraterrestrial aliens. (It is worth noting, too, that despite covering an entire day of meetings, not one specific policy was mentioned in the leaked document.) This drew sharp criticism from both Liberal and Labor politicians. One Liberal NSW politician, Dr. Peter Phelps, the Liberal Whip in the Upper House of NSW, was particularly scathing. Phelps was quoted in the NSW Hansard as saying, “the fact that this document has come to me indicates the massive rifts and divisions currently within the Green movement. It is a further example of why they are completely unsuitable for government.”

Phelps went on to say: “I speak about this remarkable document, which fortunately fell off the solar-powered bicycle into my hands yesterday…. The document asks, ‘What are the strengths and weaknesses of our MP team?’ By way of advice ... I suggest that one of the weaknesses of their team is that they talk to imaginary space aliens. That is generally considered by normal voters to be a fundamental weakness.”

Phelps continued: “I would be worried if members of the Greens’ parliamentary team were to have a conversation with aliens because they would immediately recognize them as being inferior life forms and might well decide to invade us.”

Labor’s response to the leaked

THE EUROPEAN CONSERVATIVE

Continued on p. 20

19

Burton, cont’d.

Green document was no less disdainful. Labor’s NSW Secretary, Sam Dastyari, was quoted in Australia’s Daily Telegraph as saying, “[t]hey should get out and spend some real time with people rather than having imaginary discussions with Martians.” The same article then quoted former Green Party leader Brown dismissively replying that the big political parties just can’t handle the fact that the Greens were destined to be Australia’s “third political force.” In contrast to Brown’s dismissive response, another Green MP, presumably embarrassed by the contents of the leaked document, admitted “cringing” when she first saw it: “[I]t was as bizarre to me as anyone else.”

Unfortunately, no one from the Greens has to date provided any satisfactory explanation as to why such an item was even on their official agenda in the first place, or what its purpose or meaning was. This embarrassing silence has provided more political ammunition to Australia’s conservative activists, bloggers, and politicians—and has further disenchanted Green and more liberal voters.

It is thus fair to say that the recent victory against same-sex marriage in the Australian Parliament was not an anomaly; it was a sign that the power and influence of political liberals and the left wing in Australia are on the wane. With a growing disconnect from mainstream positions, and amid increasing reports of internal bickering and factional infighting, the Greens and Labor both seem to be rotting from within.

If, as the polls suggest, voters in 2013 decide to remove the Greens from power, they will be doing the Australian body politic a favor—by cutting the Greens off from the Labor party stump onto which they have been inopportunely grafted.

Dr. Burton received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of New South Wales in 2009. After working as a postdoctoral scientist for many years, he entered politics.

He currently serves as political advisor to the Honorable Paul Green, a NSW Upper House MP and member of the Christian Democratic Party.

20

Cultural Renewal in Croatia Stephen Bartulica The Zagreb-based Center for the Renewal of Culture, a non-profit organization focused on forming future leaders in Croatia, held its third annual summer school this year in the Dalmatian city of Zadar.

The one-week event was attended by 50 graduate students and young professionals from a wide variety of backgrounds. Topics discussed ranged from bioethics to law and economics.

Since Croatia is expected to join the European Union in July 2013, more and more attention is being given to developments in Brussels.

With this in mind, the main goal of the annual summer school has been to provide young leaders with a conservative vision of how to approach contemporary problems in Europe.

This year’s summer school had four prominent faculty members.

Professor Rémi Brague, who teaches religious philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the University in Munich, delivered a series of lectures on European history, focusing on the relationship between culture, politics, and religion. As is his style, Brague’s

contributions were witty and highly original. His participation this year was particularly noteworthy, since the areas he discussed have never before been part of the curriculum.

Brague, who is the recipient of the 2012 Ratzinger Prize for Theology, gave a splendid overview of European history, explaining how the self-understanding of European identity arose. He examined the linguistic roots of modern concepts and dilemmas, and explained how the principle of separation of church and state is an original— and particularly European— contribution.

Dr. Robin Harris, British historian and former adviser and speechwriter to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, gave a series of lectures about the conservative and classical liberal tradition in Europe. He also discussed current threats to the idea of limited government within the European Union, and spoke of the tradition of Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, and others of the British and Scottish Englightenments.

The temptation to yield everincreasing powers to a centralized bureaucracy, he warned, must be resisted.

Stephen Bartulica introduces Professor Rémi Brague at the start of the 2012 summer school.

All photographs courtesy of Ellen Kryger Fantini.

www.europeanrenewal.org

Chilean economist Dr. José Piñera, architect of his country’s pension fund system, spoke passionately about the importance of free enterprise and market-based reforms.

Harris is no stranger to Croatia; he has strongly advocated for the country’s independence since 1991. He has also published an excellent history of the city-state of Dubrovnik and, more recently, a history of the British Conservative party.

The eminent Chilean economist, Dr. José Piñera, also served on this year’s summer school faculty, giving a series of lectures on economics with an emphasis on the emerging crisis of the welfare state in Europe.

Piñera stressed that the current policies of state spending are unsustainable and will eventually lead to a fiscal crisis. He warned Croatia not to adopt the same policies as the older EU member states but rather to chart a more open, free-market course.

Otherwise, he said, there will be anemic growth, permanent high levels of employment, and a dramatic brain drain, with many young educated Croatians leaving the country.

The final member of the summer school faculty was Sophia Kuby, executive director of European Dignity Watch, a Brussels-based NGO. She delivered several lectures on the subject of human rights and the idea of human

dignity, focusing on current practices and policy developments in the European Union.

Kuby warned participants that the notion of “human rights”— while generally put to good use—can easily be abused in order to promote a liberal or leftwing agenda. This can be seen at the European level in recent discussions on the nature and meaning of marriage, as well as in ongoing policy struggles over the legality of abortion.

Kuby urged participants that Croatia, as a young and maturing democracy, should not abandon its own ethical and moral traditions in order to appease the so-called “EU establishment.”

The previous two summer schools organized by the Center for the Renewal of Culture were also occasions for similar themes to be discussed among Croatian students and young leaders working in the public sector concerned about the future of Croatia.

Over the years, the Center for the Renewal of Culture has held many other high-profile events in Zadar and throughout Croatia.

Founded in 2009, the Center has organized events promoting free Continued on p. 22

La belle mort de l’athéisme moderne Philippe Nemo Paris: PUF, 2012 This brief collection of essays and lectures is a challenge to modern thinkers who proclaim time and again that Christianity is dead.

Each chapter starts from the assumption that the central claims of Christianity are true and that modern atheism has failed to prove them otherwise. In this his latest book, Nemo (a member of France’s nouveaux philosophes) offers a sound defense of the Christian roots of Europe and a polemic against recent attempts to deny or minimize these roots. He also examines different forms of liberalism, some of which are not necessarily inimical to Christian belief. This is also a hopeful book in that it predicts the eventual end of nihilism and a return in the West to belief in the transcendent—and the true, the good, and the beautiful.

THE EUROPEAN CONSERVATIVE

21

Bartulica, cont’d.

The Pleasure of Thinking: A Journey through the Sideways Leaps of Ideas Theodore Dalrymple London: Gibson Square, 2012 This is a wonderful book about a man’s love of—perhaps obsession with—books. With no real structure or purpose (other than to share the pleasure he derives from the world of books), Dalrymple provides meandering reflections on the various discoveries he’s made on dusty bookstore shelves over the years. As might be expected of a retired prison doctor and psychiatrist, Dalrymple’s literary interests draw him toward unusual medical works, criminal trial proceedings, and bound volumes of homicide reports. But this book’s greatest pleasure is how Dalrymple, despite the apparent obscurity of a given bookstore find, always seems to find a connection with some forgotten work or historical figure. Full of personal reflections, the book also gives the reader a glimpse into Dalrymple’s own inclinations, predilections, and habits of mind.

22

Dr. Robin Harris speaks to participants of the summer school after one of his lectures on the conservative and classical liberal traditions in Europe.

enterprise, market economics and entrepreneurship, and has also hosted other cultural events. In December 2009 the Center hosted a conference commemorating the 20th anniversary of the collapse of Communism in Europe. The keynote speaker at that wellattended event was former Polish President, Lech Walesa, who spoke of the spiritual roots of modern conflicts.

The Center is involved with a variety of other activities as well.

But its main purpose is to educate, form, and train future leaders in Croatia and elsewhere—guided

by the belief that if the culture can be renewed then the political landscape can be healed.

Dr. Bartulica is founder and president of the Center for the Renewal of Culture.

He teaches political philosophy at the Catholic University of Croatia in Zagreb and serves as Special Advisor for Religious Affairs to Croatian President Ivo Josipović. He previously served for 12 years as a diplomat in the Croatian foreign service. He received his doctorate in philosophy from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. For information about the Center for Renewal of Culture, please visit: www.cok.hr.

Sophia Kuby, executive director of European Dignity Watch in Brussels, speaks summer school participants during a break.

www.europeanrenewal.org

The 6th World Congress of Families Ignacio Arsuaga The 6th meeting of the World Congress of Families (WCF VI) took place 25-27 May 2012 in Madrid, Spain, with the Spanish pro-family non-profit organization HazteOír (“Make Yourself Heard”) serving as the local organizer. More than 3,200 participants from all over the world registered for the event. There were 145 speakers at the event, which included plenary sessions, small-group seminars and break-out sessions, as well as an exhibitors’ fair and cultural events related to the Congress’s themes.

Despite the success of the WCF VI, the underlying message was clear: Around the world, the natural and central place of the family in society is in peril. There is a need for greater collaboration and more vigorous efforts on behalf of the family and in defense of human dignity.

The challenges faced by the traditional family are various. Some of the conference themes included, for example: the breakdown of the traditional understanding of human nature; the lack of any serious thought about the role of sexuality; the ideological and technological forces in society that promote a distorted view of human beings; and the long-term, ethical implications of contemporary practices such as contraception, in vitro fertilization (IVF), abortion, same-sex “marriage,” and euthanasia.

One of the most important topics initially addressed by conference participants was the demographic challenge faced by the industrialized countries of the West. Europe, as it is well-known, has an average fertility rate that is far below the necessary replacement rate of 2.1.

This is especially the case in Spain, some local speakers pointed out, where current birthrates are the lowest in the nation’s history— substantially lower than even those achieved during the worst year of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 (when Communist armies took over the

eastern third of the country). The US faces similar challenges, though the situation there is not yet as dire as it is in Europe.

There also seems to be a growing bias against families with many children. In many cases, according to case studies presented during various discussions at the conference, large families are increasingly facing societal pressure: Sometimes families with many children are deemed “grotesque” by observers; or they are looked upon with displeasure and disgust. At other

times, the many children of large families are seen as nothing more than mouths to feed—that is, mere consumers of the earth’s limited natural resources. This offends radical environmentalists and population control advocates, who worry more about the contribution of large families to the global carbon footprint than about their potential contributions to humanity.

Few people, however, see the sacrifice often made by large families in the name of their children; and fewer still seem to see the way that large families often work together, help each other out, share material resources, often with little public assistance.

In terms of sexual morality and the growing sexualization of children in Western societies, various speakers took up the cudgel. Speaking about the growth in the trafficking of young girls and women by prostitution rings

around the world, Babette Francis from the US, a consultant to the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), pointed out that market fundamentals seem to be at play: Male demand for promiscuous and illicit sex is exceeding the supply of women ready and willing to have sexual relations out of wedlock.

This has resulted in huge business opportunities for the nefarious around the world. Similarly, pornography—especially of the sort targeting children—has grown as a global business.

Similarly, in vitro fertilization has been working in the same negative, anti-family direction: The net result of IVF efforts is that it sacrifices several (or many) children in order to fulfill the desire of parents who just want one baby. As Jaroslaw Szymczak of Poland stated in his presentation, in addition to this trade-off, the other big problem with IVF is that it does not represent or imply a search for the underlying cause of the infertility in the couple (as Natural Procreative Technology, for example, does). Rather, IVF foregoes healing and seeks to circumvent the natural process by simply enabling a childless couple to have a baby.

The practice and growing availability of euthanasia in Western nations also marks a societal change.

Like human trafficking—as well as contraception, abortion, and IVF—euthanasia violates people’s fundamental rights.

Research indicates, that in countries where it has been legalized, it is even practiced on patients that have never even asked for it, said Dr. Gordon Macdonald, public policy officer for Care Not Killing and the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition of the UK. Euthanasia seems to be one last desperate attempt to enforce one’s will over the human dignity and will of others.

All these practices have been elevated to the category of “rights,”

THE EUROPEAN CONSERVATIVE

Continued on p. 24

23

Arsuaga, cont’d.

Macdonald said, even though they often violate the rights of those most unable to defend themselves (i.e., the sick and the infirm). This means that many people, acting under the banner of “freedom,” end up crushing the fundamental rights of others. Such “rights” are widely considered manifestations of freedom but are really based on a distortion of the idea of human nature.

Other conference themes focused on forms of persecution—against traditional families and lifestyles, and against religious believers, more generally. Gudrun Kugler of the Vienna-based Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians noted that there is plenty of evidence of religious intolerance around Europe—varying from crude vandalism, to personal insults and attacks, to insensitivities in the arts, to attempts to remove religious symbols and the exclusion of Christians (or Christian symbols) from the public sphere.

Similarly, Duke Paul von Oldenburg, Director of the Brussels bureau of the Pro Europa Christiana Federation, spoke of another, more insidious form of persecution: that of the supposed moral superiority of “tolerance.” This, he explained, can lead people to consider all things equal in their importance, validity or worth—and give up the idea of the primacy of beauty, goodness or truth.

The spread of this “hyper-tolerant” mentality—intimately related to rampant moral relativism—has produced a climate in which it is acceptable to discriminate against those with traditional religious beliefs. In fact, it has gotten to the point where an individual may now feel compelled to remain completely silent about his ethical beliefs (and thereby give in to falsehood) rather than being true to his conscience— and risk being accused of intolerance.

In Sweden, for example, Pastor Åke Green faced criminal charges a few years ago after having given a sermon—from the pulpit of his own church—about the Gospel’s message on sexual morality. More

24

recently, in the US, Julea Ward, an honors student at Eastern Michigan University, was kicked out of her graduate program in counseling after she asked her supervisors to refer a potential client (who wanted advice to improve his same-sex relationship) to another counselor because of a conflict with her religious convictions.

Christians in Europe are also being discriminated against in other ways. During various sessions at the conference, there were discussions about the status of religious schools in various European countries.

Many of them have been finding it increasingly difficult to get the same aid that public schools receive from state agencies.

Religious or faith-based schools have also been accused of being elitist. In this respect, Anne Coffinier, Director-General of the Fondation pour l’École in Paris said, “If all minds are shaped in the unique mold of one education system, then where shall we find the plurality of ideas and convictions on which all democratic life needs to be based? Freedom of education is a prerequisite for any true democracy.”

Unfortunately, there seems to be dwindling support for schools that subscribe to religious values. Instead, many Western governments, under the aegis of the UN and the EU, are implementing sexual education programs, particularly across the developing world. Such programs often seem to consist of simply facilitating sexual relations—and thereby promoting certain high-risk behaviors and lifestyles. Of course, as various speakers pointed out, the UN and its agencies simultaneously promote abortion in developing countries as a means of controlling population growth; they see this as an effective way of reducing poverty and hunger.

In addition, many international organizations are also guilty of a form of blackmail against the very developing countries they are supposed to be helping: With the support of Western governments, the UN and the EU have threatened to cut off all foreign aid to any developing

country that does not change its laws to allow gay “marriages,” according to Theresa Okafor, Director of the Quality Assurance and Research Development Agency of Nigeria.

Some developing countries, however, have been courageous enough to resist this pressure; they have accused the UN and other organizations of “cultural imperialism” and have remained faithful to their religious beliefs—and banned same-sex marriages.

Against such a complex international backdrop, the future of the traditional family in the world today is highly uncertain. As Spanish historian, lawyer, journalist, and philosopher César Vidal suggested in his closing remarks, the only way to respond to the myriad threats faced by the family today is through education—of individuals, communities and, most importantly, entire societies. Only a society that knows its roots, respects its cultural traditions, and is aware of the threats to its core values can even defend itself, he suggested. And this is precisely where many societies in the West have abdicated their responsibility.

While the traditional family and the idea of human dignity have already suffered one dramatic defeat after another at the hands of Western governments and international organizations, it could be even worse in the future. As many participants recognized during the conference, now is the time for defenders of the “culture of life” and supporters of the traditional family to do more. The chance to save Western civilization from the self-destructive path it seems to have chosen is in their hands.

Mr. Arsuaga is the founder and president of HazteOír in Spain, whose aim is the promotion of citizen participation and the defense of human rights. He holds a law degree from the Universidad Pontificia de Comillas and a Master’s degree from the Instituto de Empresa, both in Madrid, as well as an LL.M. degree from Fordham University School of Law in New York. HazteOír published the WCF’s most significant papers at: http://congresomundial.es/en/

www.europeanrenewal.org

Islam & the West: An Interview with Robert R. Reilly You recently wrote a best-selling book entitled The Closing of the Muslim Mind, which raises the question: How do we re-open the Muslim mind?

I had the opportunity of asking one of the premier intellectual Muslim reformers the question: “If I could give you all the resources you would need, personnel and money, and a 20-year period, tell me what you would do to turn around the Muslim world.” And he paused and thought for a minute, and then he said “I would re-Hellenize it.”

And that, of course, is the message in Pope Benedict XVI’s [2006] Regensburg Lecture.

This man, who was from a very prominent Syrian family—deeply learned both in Islam and Western philosophy—knew exactly the nature of the problem and there are any number of other Muslim intellectuals like him who do as well. The problem is they’re mostly living in exile because it’s too dangerous for them to propose doing that in their own societies.

What is your assessment of the so-called Arab Spring? Does it offer any hope—or reasons to worry?

I was just discussing this with an Egyptian the other evening … and he’s very optimistic about the Arab Spring. I was very pessimistic precisely because it doesn’t seem that the culture in the Middle East is going to allow for the development of genuine democratic constitutional rule, precisely because it hasn’t been re-Hellenized, precisely because it has not restored the integrity of reason, precisely because majority Sunni Islam still denies the existence of natural law—without which it is impossible to develop sound constitutional theory. As I expressed to him, the problem is a deformed theology that has

produced a dysfunctional culture.

None of the intellectual currents in the Middle East are headed in the right direction. They are headed in the Islamist direction. This is an “Islamist Spring”. The Muslim Brotherhood’s offshoots have so far either won these elections or gained a large plurality in them. The signs are not good. But they are perfectly logical in terms of the principals on which these Muslim Brotherhood organizations operate. So they’re headed backwards. Backwards is where they want to go.

As the Arab Spring has toppled regimes in the region, it has created a situation of instability and great uncertainty in many countries. There is a power vacuum slowly being filled by new groups. What’s coming next?

Ideas have consequences and you have to pay attention to the ideas of these people. What these new groups have done for a period of 84 years since the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 is develop a highly disciplined, Leninist cadre that has succeeded in taking over the network of mosques and dominating the teaching of Islam in their country.

It is to their ideas that we must look for a sign of what the future is going to be like since they’re the beneficiaries of the Arab Spring. They are the single best organized element of society to take advantage of it.

People did not notice the size of the crowd in Tahrir Square [in February 2011] when Yusef al-Qaradawi was allowed back after 30 years of exile. He was the most popular preacher in the Muslim world.

He was greeted by several million people in Tahrir Square. He had a military escort. That’s what’s really happening in Egypt. The strength of the Muslim Brotherhood from years of effort is now manifest.

Photograph courtesy of the American Foreign Policy Council.

Mr. Reilly is a Senior Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council. He has taught at the National Defense University and has written for The Wall Street Journal, National Review, Claremont Review of Books, and The Washington Post. He has served in the White House as Special Assistant to the President (1983-85) and was Senior Advisor for Information Strategy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (2002-06). He is a former Director of the Voice of America and is a member of the board of the Middle East Media Research Institute. Mr. Reilly is the author of Surprised by Beauty: A Listener’s Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music (2002). His most recent book, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis, was published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in 2010.

There was a very interesting statement made by the Islamist Azzam Tamimi [director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought in London]. What he said is: What you have to understand is that the future is a matter of who is Islamist and who is more Islamist, not between who is Islamist and who is secular.

The secular liberals are out of it.

They don’t have any possibility of gaining any kind of political traction

THE EUROPEAN CONSERVATIVE

Continued on p. 26

25

Reilly, cont’d.

because they don’t have any organization, they don’t have any effective parties. … We know of the profound weakness of these liberal secular forces, not just in Egypt but in most of these countries. So this is a very dangerous time.

How did you become interested in learning more about Islamic thought? And what have you learned?

My background really was in the Cold War and I am a student of political philosophy. Most of that was applied to 19th and 20th century Western ideologies. It was only after 9/11 that I wondered whether what I knew could apply to the situation we were facing.

So for more than 10 years now I have been studying mainly Muslim theology—and what passes for philosophy and metaphysics and epistemology—to try to get to the source of why things have gone so wrong there. And I traced it back to an enormous intellectual drama in the 9th century in Baghdad between those who wished to give primacy to reason and those who wished to give primacy to pure will and power. So you had, on one side, the first theological school in Islam that said, “God is rationality and justice,” and the other side which said: “No, God is pure will and power. Rationality has nothing to do with Him and whatever He does is incomprehensible to us and He cannot be confined to what is thought to be reasonable or unreasonable.”

You’ve talked about Islamic metaphysics, which conceives of the movement of an object across a desk as a process in which that object is being destroyed and reconstituted a million times every second. Is this not in direct contradiction to the Greco-Roman or Western understanding of reality?

Yes, absolutely, because it’s a denial of natural law and because of this

26

almost perverse concentration on God’s omnipotence. The theological school in Sunni Islam called Ash’arism, which is the majority theological school, even today says that God is the first and only cause of everything and there cannot be secondary causes (such as natural law) because that would be a challenge to God’s omnipotence.

So for God to be omnipotent, nothing else can be even so much as potent. Therefore, gravity does not make the rock fall; God does.

Fire doesn’t burn cotton; God does. There is, therefore, no cause and effect in the natural world.

This teaching has destroyed the Sunni Muslim world.

And their metaphysics that you referred to is: How do they explain how things are constituted if they have no essence or a nature (which they deny)? They are constituted by these time/space atoms which God, in an instant, agglomerates into certain shapes or things like a plant or a tree or a person. And why that tree should remain a tree in the following instant has absolutely nothing to doing with having the nature of a tree; it has no nature. It is only for reasons we will never know that God wishes to reconstitute it as a tree in the next instant—because things are constantly passing into and out of existence, and they seem to be the same thing; but they are not.

Everything is made new almost instantaneously.

This, of course, means everything is miraculous. All nature is miraculous and all miracles are natural, as one thinker put it.

The problem with this is that if everything is miraculous, it becomes incomprehensible. That’s the quality of a miracle—that it is temporary suspension of natural law for which you can give no account.

But if everything is that way, then you can’t give account of anything.

And this is how world escapes the Islamists and why things become

incomprehensible to them—and why they become subject to the wildest and most absurd conspiracy theories.

And you can’t dialogue with such an ideology. Is there any response that can be made to that way of thinking?

Even though this bizarre metaphysics is asserted, it doesn’t abolish reality; reality is still there, even if they are incapable of recognizing it as it is. So, you still have reality on your side. If somebody wishes to cook their meal, they still have to light the stove, even though they deny the relationship between lighting the match and the gas igniting.

In fact, as the denial of reality is getting more profound, the sharper the crisis [within Islam] becomes.

Through the profusion of these satellite channels throughout the Middle East, they’re having the West shoved in their faces on a daily basis and the sense of their own inferiority in comparison becomes more acute.

How do they respond to this?

They respond by becoming even more Islamist. Their only recourse is their religion and therefore they become more extreme in it. That’s not the direction in which things need to go for things to improve there. It’s in the opposite direction of a re-Hellenization.

This re-Hellenization would benefit not just Islam but the West as well.

As the Pope’s Regensburg Lecture put it, the West needs to reHellenize itself because it, too, has been denying the integrity of reason though moral relativism and other such philosophical—or anti-philosophical—thinking. So the integrity of reason needs to be restored within the West. But our memory of it is much more recent than in Islam; Islam has a much harder job to do.

www.europeanrenewal.org

Are some Muslims aware of the limitations and dangers of the current Islamist approach?

The Muslims with whom I talk and work have re-Hellenized themselves.

They are aware of the Hellenic past of their own faith. … You can’t have this idea of this tyrannical God and have accountable constitutional government. You have some people who realize the problem here is not sociological, economic, or psychological; it’s theological and it has to be addressed at the level at which it exists.

The other problem in Islam is in its revelation. I would say the foundation of our civilization is in the [Book of] Genesis: that we are made in the image and likeness of God. That image and likeness is in our rationality and our free will, and I believe that that revelation, and the theology that developed from it, is what allowed the notion of popular sovereignty to be developed in the West. It is not against that theology to say: “man is sovereign.” In Islam, sovereignty belongs to God alone.

Man is not sovereign because he is not made in the image and likeness of God and to suggest that he is, is blasphemy. … for which the punishment is death?

It can be, in a Sharia state. So if man is not sovereign, how is he going to exercise sovereignty?

And if the mind is incapable of knowing good and evil from moral philosophy because there is nothing to be known, because things have no nature and are therefore neither good nor evil in themselves, [it is only because] God says so. [In Islam,] you can only know right and wrong through revelation, through divine law, and it’s only divine law that has legitimacy. Human law has no legitimacy, strictly speaking, in this dominant theological school.

So these are enormous barriers.

It’s easy to understand the emotion of this situation when you so wish

for these people genuine freedom and constitutional rule. Who would not wish that for them? But then you see statistics from Pew Research that something like 84% of the people in Egypt believe apostasy should be punished with death. How can you have a democracy in a culture that denies freedom of conscience? And how many people in Egypt would agree that all people are created equal, including men and women and Muslims and non-Muslims, to say nothing of Muslims and Jews?

The question answers itself. So the preconditions for democratic development in their own society are simply not present.

Are there specific cultural and theological preconditions?

Absolutely. I was asked: “Is Catholicism compatible with democracy? How can you tell whether a religion is compatible with democratic constitutional development or not?” I think the answer is very simple but very profound: In that religion, is God logos (reason) or isn’t he? Is reason part of God’s essence and not simply an attribute? If He is logos, then you can develop such a constitutional theory. In fact, it was in the medieval Catholic Church that constitutional theory developed. If God is not logos—if he is not reason—then you can’t because there’s no foundation in your theology that would allow for that development.

That’s the whole point of the Pope’s Regensburg Lecture: Behaving unreasonably is wrong because it’s against God. That can only be true if God is reason. If he’s not reason, then acting unreasonably is not wrong.

How do you get this message across to most people, whether in America or in Europe?

I tried by writing a book, but it’s a difficult book and you need some background in order to understand it. My experience in speaking around the United States and in

Europe is that this is all news to most audiences. Almost without exception they have never heard this before, so they’re startled and at some point they wonder: “Is this guy crazy? Could this really be true?” And that’s why in the book I put so much from Muslim documents from the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries—so you can see again and again and again that this is a consistent teaching at the heart of their theology.

This is something that within the West people find very hard to understand: How anyone could believe such a thing? And until you understand the theology from which it comes, you can’t. The problem is you can’t understand their writings unless you have some background in theology, epistemology, philosophy, logic— otherwise you won’t understand the significance of what they’re saying.

It’s like the “Common Word” document [in 2007] that the Muslim intellectuals and Imams addressed to the Pope and other Christian leaders.

If you don’t know anything about Islam and you read this document, you would think: “Well, this is a very warm, inviting approach to us for dialogue.” But if you understand … the mental universe in which they live you understand that some of the words there do not mean what you think they mean. You have to decode this material to understand what’s really being said. That’s hard.

I couldn’t have done this without ten years of study.

But many people argue that Islam is a religion of peace?

Well it is—except when it’s not. And anyone who examines its history is exceedingly naïve to say that. Does it have peaceful elements? Certainly it does. Does it have bellicose part to it? Yes. That’s how they conquered most of the world in the 7th, 8th, and 9th centuries, and more recently in other jihad conquests.

THE EUROPEAN CONSERVATIVE

Continued on p. 28

27

Reilly, cont’d.

You’ve spoken many times in Europe. What is your assessment, based on your conversations with people, about how Europe is doing?

I recall an experience from several years ago at a seminar with mostly European economists. I was asked to talk about this, and the people there sort of went into a state of shock when I was finished speaking and said: “This is worse than we thought it was!” They asked: “What should we do?” And I said: “The first thing you should do is recover your own faith.” … faith in your religion, your culture and your civilization?

Yes—and I think in that order because what you’re confronted with here is another faith [Islam] and if you don’t have one, you’re not in a very good situation to engage or defend. So the first thing you should do is recover your faith. That is, of course, the enormous problem in Europe today: the loss of faith.

I go to Europe fairly often and most of my education was oriented toward Europe, and I love it; but the problem in a place like Great Britain today is not the number of Muslims—it’s a very small portion of the population, it shouldn’t be a problem. The only reason it is a problem is that there is nothing left to assimilate into.

So if you’ve caved into cultural relativism, which is at the base of multiculturalism, there is nothing left to assimilate into. And into that vacuum is their insistence on living by their own rules and installing Sharia rule in their own areas.

Islamists are not the problem; we’re the problem. Were we still a healthy culture, this wouldn’t be a problem. We need to recover some sense of ourselves based upon our faith; and it is our faith that ultimately undergirds the integrity of reason—which Benedict XVI

28

is the greatest champion of in the world today.

Perhaps it’s a question of which civilization declines the fastest?

… because they would be absorbed by the broader culture?

Well, you know that was the story during the Cold War, too. It was kind of a competitive decay. As it turns out, the Soviet Union decayed faster than we did, plus we had that temporary resuscitation under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and the great John Paul II that enabled us to create sufficient pressure on that evil empire that it collapsed inwardly without a major world war. So we’re in competitive decline again, except in this case the Muslim world has no real means of challenge here other than terrorism or weapons of mass destruction—and their possession of such a significant portion of the world’s energy supply.

Or not allowed. One or the other.

This crisis of self-confidence in the West is due to the disintegration of belief, which leads to this lack of will. So, Islam shouldn’t be a problem.

The Middle East is a highly dysfunctional place and, yes, there can be terrorist threats; but does anyone really think they are going to reconstitute the Caliphate?

No. The level of competence to undertake anything at that level is simply not there. Islam is in a profound crisis and what we may be observing really, is a dying culture or civilization. And civilizations don’t necessarily die peacefully.

Isn’t the West dying, too? Consider Europe’s demographic implosion.

My wife is from Spain and she came from a family of nine children.

Each branch of the family on both sides came from comparably large families. Now her peers back in Spain are sort of shocked that she has four children because none of them have more than one or two. So in the space of basically a generation, or a generation and a half, the demographics of Spain have collapsed as they have in Italy and most of Europe.

I go to Slovenia for a conference mostly every year and here is this cute little country—like a version of Switzerland—with only a million people and they’re disappearing because they’re way below the replacement level. So, the will to even generate, to sustain, to pass on, is gone.

It’s staggering to contemplate this willful self-dissolution of yourself and your culture and your civilization.

So, the first thing that is necessary is to sort of regain control of our own “oxygen supply.” If someone else can control your oxygen supply, you’re dependent on them and you basically have to do what they tell you to do. Oil is the oxygen of the industrialized world and we have the opportunity now in the United States to dramatically transform that because of the enormous reserves that have been discovered here, particularly of natural gas that can fuel a great deal of our industry and growing oil reserves.

Obviously, the Obama Administration is not interested in that, but the less we are dependent on the Middle East, the better for us and for everyone else—particularly in respect to Saudi Arabia, which has the single most retrograde form of Islam that exists and which has out-spent the United States by tens of billions of dollars on its form of public diplomacy in spreading the Wahabi retrograde form of Islam.

If you’re hoping for a reHellenization of the Muslim mind, give up all hope when you confront the Wahabi strain. It is the single most anti-rational form of Islam.

www.europeanrenewal.org

Report from the 2012 Vanenburg Meeting The Editors

Session II focused on “Public Institutions: EduThe 7th Annual Vanenburg cation and National IdenMeeting took place last year, from tity.” Dutch academics Thursday, June 28, to Sunday, Emma Cohen de Lara and July 1, at the Royal Agricultural Melvin Schut gave a joint College in the town of Cirencester presentation on the failin Gloucestershire, England. ure of education, followed Sponsored by the Center for by Polish parliamentariEuropean Renewal, the Meeting an Ryszard Legutko who focused on the question: spoke about national sov“Will Europe Survive? The ereignty and national idenNew European Conservatives tity.

Confront a Continent in Crisis.”

Session III was The annual gathering once on “Economics” and again brought scholars, writers, included a presentation lawyers, and philosophers from German political together for three days of philosopher Harald presentations, discussions, Bergbauer and Swedish and debates about the many scholar Jakob Soderbaum challenges facing Europe. The on the failures and future evenings were reserved for of the European welfare ‘hospitality,’ fellowship and wine state. tasting.

Finally, Session IV in the As is customary, the first evening dealt with “Elites The main entrance of the Royal Agricultural College. evening was reserved for and Masses.” Amsterdam The College was established in 1845. members of the Vanenburg city councilman Diederik Society. Welcome remarks on Boomsma spoke first and importance of elites and described that first evening were given by examined how to distinguish the kind of elites we need. the Secretary of the Vanenburg between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ forms The second day of the Society, Jonathan Price, followed of populism. He was followed meeting began with Session V on by comments by conservative by Hungarian academic Attila “Manners, Morals and Moeurs.” scholar Mark Henrie, and Polish Molnar who spoke about the Dutch legal philosopher and parliamentarian ethicist Andreas Ryszard Legutko.

Kinneging spoke This was followed first about Europe’s by three days of emasculation and formal sessions the nature of men open to members, and women. He was non-members and followed by Scruton invited guests. who spoke about the These days were need for moeurs in a structured around civilization. eight main sessions.

Next, Session VI The first day focused on “The began with a welFamily and Private coming Session I Institutions” and had in which Henrie Spanish businessman spoke about Euand scholar Jorge rope’s identity crisis.

Soley speaking about He was joined by the crisis of the British philosopher family and Belgian Roger Scruton who lawyer Frank Judo addressed the quesThe driveway leading to the main entrance of the Royal Agricultural College. speaking about the tion, “What are we to legal status of private All photographs courtesy of Dr. Harald Bergbauer unless otherwise noted. make of Europe?” institutions.

THE EUROPEAN CONSERVATIVE

29

Dr. Harald Bergbauer gives a presentation on the unsustainable nature of the welfare state during Session III on Economics. Participants later had a chance to discuss the merits and limitations of having European governments provide health, education, and welfare to their citizens.

During the afternoon of the second day of the meeting, participants went on a tour of the medieval town of Malmesbury.

The town was the home of 16th/17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil (1651). Malmesbury also boasts a somewhat ruined but functioning abbey originally founded as a Benedictine monastery around 676.

At tea-time, participants were invited to the home of Roger Scruton and his wife for a bit of country hospitality before returning to the College to taste wines generously donated by the Scrutons.

Session VII on the final day was a panel discussion on Europe, its challenges, hopes and its future.

It was followed by Session VIII which offered a wrap-up of all the discussions and provided a glimpse at the agenda for the 2013 Vanenburg Meeting.

There were various opportunities during the three days to also listen to individual Country Reports given by members of the Vanenburg Society and other European participants.

Some of these included recent economic and political developments in Spain, the position of conservative parties in Norway and other parts of Scandinavia, an overview of recent attempts to undermine the traditional family at the European Commission in Brussels, and a look at prospects for American conservatives during the 2012 presidential elections in the United States.

30

A view of one of the inner courtyards of the Royal Agricultural College.

The College is located in the town of Cirencester in Gloucestershire.

During the traditional wine-tasting, held on the evening of the first day of the Vanenburg Meeting, participants get a chance to introduce themselves to each other or catch up with old friends.

www.europeanrenewal.org

About the Vanenburg Meetings The annual Vanenburg Meetings are organized by the Center for European Renewal (CER) based in The Hague. The first Vanenburg Meeting was held at the Kasteel De Vanenburg in Putten, The Netherlands, in the Spring of 2006.

Since then, Vanenburg Meetings have been held in Vienna (2007), Madrid (2008), Budapest (2009), Tyniec (2010), Leuven (2011), and Cirencester (2012).

About the CER Founded in 2007, the CER is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan, educational and cultural organization dedicated to the Western ideal of a civilized, humane, and free society. To this end, the CER seeks to nurture in successive generations of Europeans an understanding of and devotion to the truth and wisdom embedded in the Western intellectual and moral tradition.

The CER is organized as a charitable foundation (stichting) under the laws of the Netherlands and is headquartered in The Hague. It is active in all of Europe and hopes to appeal to all friends of Western civilization throughout the world.

The CER is an independent research and educational organization, and does not receive or accept monetary support from any government. Thus, donations are critical to help the CER advance its key initiatives: the annual Vanenburg Meetings of European conservatives, book publishing, student outreach and initiatives to strengthen local organizations in all European countries.

All donations and financial contributions made to help sustain the CER come entirely from people who share the commitment to “strengthen the Western tradition in Europe.”

For more information about how to help support the CER’s work, or to find out more about becoming a partner, please consult the contact information on the back page of this newsletter.

During Session II on Public Institutions: Education and National Identity: Emma Cohen de Lara and Melvin Schut speak about the failure of education.

The traditional after-dinner ‘hospitality’ in one of the College’s meeting rooms, with Jorge Soley of the Fundación Burke giving a country report on Spain.

On Saturday, participants toured the medieval town of Malmesbury and its Abbey, which dates back to the 7th century. The town was the home of philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679).

Photograph courtesy of the Center for European Renewal.

THE EUROPEAN CONSERVATIVE

31

Group photograph of participants at the 2012 Vanenburg Meeting in Cirencester.

Photograph courtesy of the Center for European Renewal.

ANNOUNCEMENT The 2013 Vanenburg Meeting The 8th Annual Vanenburg Meeting will be held Friday, July 5, to Sunday, July 7, in the city of Prague, Czech Republic. The exact venue will be announced soon. (Vanenburg Society members should remain through Monday, July 8.)

The theme of this year’s meeting is “Literature and the Conservative Cause”. Invited speakers will discuss literature, both classic and contemporary, and how it has served through the ages to advance—or undermine, as the case may be—political order and the cause of conservatism.

The conference registration fees will be €125 for participants without a regular income, and €250 for those with a regular income. Regional differences in income will also be taken into account.

Vanenburg Society members who have paid their annual dues will receive a discount on their registration fee. The fee includes lodging in a double room and all meals. Single rooms are available at a surcharge. Please RSVP as soon as possible.

Payment information is provided in the masthead below. Contributions and donations to help offset the costs for a student or someone without a regular income would be greatly appreciated.

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

32

www.europeanrenewal.org