The E U R O P E A N
CONSERVATIVE
Issue 13 • Winter/Spring 2016
€10 / $10
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Contents
Europe as a ‘Soft Utopia’
Todd Huizinga .................................................................................................................................................................... 4
Poland & Hungary Under Fire
Filip Mazurczak .................................................................................................................................................................. 8
Reflections on a Political Wasteland
Edwin Dyga ...................................................................................................................................................................... 12
Conservatism Beyond Markets
Anthony Daniels ................................................................................................................................................................ 17
Peter Boettke on the Socialist Calculation Debate
Roland Fritz ...................................................................................................................................................................... 19
Valletta: Portrait of a City
André P. DeBattista .......................................................................................................................................................... 22
The Benevolent Elitist — A review of Chantal Delsol’s Populisme, les demeurés de l’histoire
Edouard Chanot ................................................................................................................................................................ 27
Briefly Noted — Recently published books we should be reading
The Editors ........................................................................................................................................................................ 30
The Power of the Imagination
Alex Catharino .................................................................................................................................................................. 34
Orchestrating a Renaissance
Andrew Balio .................................................................................................................................................................... 37
The Legacy of King John III Sobieski
Miltiades Varvounis .......................................................................................................................................................... 41
Umberto Eco, Nominalist
Roberto de Mattei ............................................................................................................................................................. 43
10th Annual Vanenburg Meeting
Samuel Scruton ................................................................................................................................................................. 45
The University Professor
Leonardo Polo .................................................................................................................................................................. 46
125 Years of Sweden’s Heimdal
Jakob E:son Söderbaum ................................................................................................................................................... 52
Italy’s Thatcher Circle
Alberto Addolori ............................................................................................................................................................... 54
Europe & the Italian Nation
Roger Scruton ................................................................................................................................................................... 55
Editor-in-Chief: Alvino-Mario Fantini
Editor-at-Large: Brian T. Gill • Assistant Editor: Filip Mazurczak
US Correspondent: Gerald J. Russello
Editorial Board: Stjepo Bartulica, Roman Joch, Ellen Kryger, Lorenzo Montanari, G.K. Montrose, Alexandre Pesey,
Matthew Tyrmand, Pr. Edmund Waldstein, Karl-Gustel Wärnberg
Advisory Council: Rémi Brague, Robin Harris, Mark Henrie, Annette Kirk, Roger Scruton
Contact: [email protected]
Donations: ABN/AMRO Account Nr. 60.17.73.993, IBAN: NL71ABNA0601773993, BIC/SWIFT: ABNANL2A
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Winter/Spring 2016
Issue 13
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Winter/Spring 2016
Western Values Under Siege
he refugee crisis in Europe has contributed
to growing tensions between short-sighted
European Union officials, on the one hand, and the few
brave countries that dare to protect their borders from
the human tide and re-assert a bit of sovereignty. With the
recent jihadist attacks in Brussels and Paris, we wonder
whether re-asserting border controls isn’t a prudent idea
at a time when Europe is firmly in the crosshairs of both
Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.
The situation has also highlighted the fundamental
fragility of the whole EU project. And perhaps more
importantly, it has forced Europeans to ask themselves
what kind of political community they want to be part
of—and what sorts of values are required for such a
community to endure.
While it is true, as Richard Weaver once wrote, that
ideas have consequences, it is values that determine
whether a civilization survives. And the values that
are at the core of Western Civilization—what some
prefer to call ‘European civilization’ and others simply
‘Christendom’—must be continually renewed and, if
necessary, defended.
Of course, the precise nature of those values—and
the varying ways they are expressed across different
European societies—is something that political thinkers
and philosophers have long sought to understand. Faced
with this difficult task, some people prefer to look to the
practical outcomes of Western values, pointing to historian
Niall Ferguson’s “six killer apps”: competition, science,
democracy, medicine, commerce, and the work ethic.
Such tangible outcomes are certainly worth keeping
in mind, for they summarize—albeit in a trendy way—
the core contributions of Western civilization. They are
precisely what many immigrants seek when they risk
their lives to come to Europe on dangerous dinghies. It
is important to recognize this; but it is equally important
to understand that there is something deeper behind it
all which gives life orientation and a political community
its identity.
One can begin to attempt to identify these Western
values through contrast—by looking at what they are
not. In 2002, in the wake of growing jihadist threats
worldwide, philosopher Roger Scruton published The West
and the Rest, highlighting the main differences between
the West and Islam. It was a valuable admonition that
despite what the multiculturalists would have us believe,
certain values from abroad are fundamentally inimical to
our core Western values.
There are, however, also internal threats to the West.
In fact, forty years before Scruton, in the mid-1960s, the
American political thinker James Burnham published
Suicide of the West, in which he rigorously tried to
explain the ideas and values that make up the West, and
contrasted them to liberal, progressive values—which he
saw as having fundamentally weakened the West, leaving
it unable to defend itself against any external threats,
and putting it firmly on a path to civilizational suicide.
It is with this in mind that we have begun to think
that perhaps we need to move away from taking too
analytical an approach and, instead, make an effort
to simply accept our civilizational inheritance with
gratitude—and then robustly defend it against both its
detractors at home and its enemies abroad.
But what to do when those enemies operate from
within our own borders? Facilitated by ‘open borders’
ideologues and ‘social justice’ warriors, uncontrolled
immigration now threatens to overwhelm Europe. It
not only challenges the capacity of European nations
to handle such flows, but intelligence reports have
indicated that among the crowds there are untold
numbers of ‘sleepers’ from Al-Qaeda and the Islamic
State infiltrating Europe with ambitious plans to attack
the ‘Crusader West’.
It’s worth noting that, at the same time, the refugee
crisis and a spate of recent attacks across Europe have
produced an extremist counter-reaction by shadowy
groups on the xenophobic right. From Austria to France
to Sweden, they have organized self-defence classes
and formed vigilante groups. They are an unequivocal
testament to the failure of European authorities to
handle the growing uncertainty on the streets of
European cities.
But they are also a reminder that our mission at the
Center for European Renewal, and here at this magazine,
is more important than ever: to remind people that a
truly ‘respectable conservatism’ is needed to ensure the
survival of Western values and the preservation of our
culture—“the best which has been thought and said”, in
the words of Matthew Arnold.
Meanwhile, the flood of immigrants into Europe
shows no sign of abating. Official estimates from the
European Commission predict three million migrants
arriving in Europe by next year. Faced with such a
challenge, there is much work to be done. In the words
of the late L. Brent Bozell, we must guard, cleanse, and
magnify the West—or else we shall all surely perish.
The European Conservative is a non-profit pan-European conservative magazine founded in 2008, which seeks to make available articles, essays,
and reviews representing the different varieties of “respectable conservatism”. It is published twice a year by the Center for European Renewal
(CER). The magazine is written, edited, and designed by volunteers across Europe. We welcome unsolicited manuscripts and submissions.
Back issues are available in PDF format at www.europeanconservative.com. For information about the CER, visit: www.europeanrenewal.org.
About the cover: The “Four Horsemen” (1498), one of the most famous woodcuts from the collection of illustrations about the Apocalypse
produced by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). The riders bring conquest, famine (or pestilence), war, and death unto man.
The European Conservative
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Europe as a ‘Soft Utopia’
Todd Huizinga
A new book, The New Totalitarian Temptation: Global
Governance and the Crisis of Democracy in Europe
contends that the European Union’s radically secularist commitment
to supranational governance is threatening human rights, eroding
democracy, and overriding the sovereignty of EU member states.
This has put it on a collision course with the United States. The
following, made up largely of excerpts from the book, recapitulates
its main arguments.
Before the summer is out, Britain might decide to
leave the EU. Greece has already become a protectorate
of the IMF, the European Commission, and the
European Central Bank. The Schengen Area is in danger
of being abolished. And devastating terrorist attacks have
occurred regularly since the 2004 Madrid train bombings,
with the threat of jihadist terrorism palpable throughout
Europe.
Nevertheless, the European dream is alive. Today, as
ever, the European Union—having risen from the ruins
of two devastating world wars—embodies an enduring
longing for a peaceful and stable world. It is more than
a customs union and more than just an international
organization through which its member states can pursue
their national interests. Rather, it is meant to herald
a new era in which a cosmopolitan and harmonious
Europe provides a new model for a worldwide system of
supranational governance.
In this new world order, power is to be wielded
not primarily by national governments on behalf of
national electorates but by an ever-thickening web of
international organizations administering a growing body
of international law and regulation (purportedly in the
interests of a global citizenry).
The EU is nothing if not ambitious. It is, in essence,
a utopia—albeit a soft, squishy, do-gooders’ utopia. It
is a political construct that seeks humankind’s ultimate
purpose in a better-than-possible world created by
politics. In fact, it puts politics before people, as it seeks
to re-make human beings in the service of its political
project rather than adapt the project to people as they
are.
But as John Fonte wrote recently, ideologies have
consequences. And it is not by chance that the EU’s
‘soft utopia’ has been buffeted by crises. The going
price for the European Union’s pursuit of its globalist
dream is severe economic suffering, the destabilization of
domestic politics in EU member states, Britain’s possible
withdrawal, the migrant crisis and the increased risk of
terrorist attacks in Europe.
The folly of the euro
The introduction of the euro is perhaps the most
momentous example of a policy decision made in pursuit
of the utopia of European political union. It defied basic
economics to introduce a common currency to countries
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with radically varied levels of productivity and economic
development. But the decision was taken because
European integrationists thought monetary union would
force Europeans to accept a politically integrated EU.
That didn’t happen. Instead, an economic crisis hit
the Eurozone like a tidal wave. The common currency
created an artificial boom in the weaker economies, which
both masked and aggravated their structural deficiencies.
This ultimately resulted in concomitant crashes and
expensive bailouts which were granted under stringent
conditions that exacerbated unemployment, reduced
opportunity, and spread misery and unrest.
As Hans-Werner Sinn, President of the Ifo Institute
for Economic Research in Munich, predicts, the outlook
remains bleak. With the economic divergence between
the North and South of the Eurozone persisting, efforts
to bolster the euro are only leading to more economic
“governance”—which has much in common with a
planned economy. This approach has been diverting huge
amounts of financial resources to troubled economies—
and, in the process, has robbed Europe’s more productive
economies of the resources that they could otherwise put
to good use.
The migrant crisis
Likewise, the ongoing migrant crisis is intrinsically
connected to the EU’s utopian supranationalism. In the
‘new Europe’, the misgivings of everyday people about
accepting unprecedented numbers of immigrants—the
vast majority of whom hold a very different worldview
from Europeans—cannot be allowed to stand in the way
of a ‘European solution’.
The result is that EU elites have been flirting with
cultural suicide by accepting virtually unlimited numbers
of immigrants. And they have ignored the fact that in doing
so, jihadism in Europe might be greatly strengthened. As
manifested in this migrant crisis, Europe’s supranational
dream turns out to be little more than a symptom of
cultural exhaustion; and their reluctance to manage the
migrant crisis better is really nothing more than a selfdestructive lack of resolve.
The destabilization of domestic politics
Since the May 2014 European elections, ballots
across Europe have shown that people don’t trust
establishment politicians anymore. Protest parties have
risen virtually everywhere while established parties have
declined in popularity. In Britain, mistrust of the EU has
reached the point of a possible ‘Brexit’. Despite constant
reports about Britain’s desire to reduce benefits for nonBritish EU citizens or protect the City of London, the
heart of the matter is really the British people’s right to
govern themselves.
When he promised an ‘in-out’ referendum on
Britain’s membership in the EU, Prime Minister David
Cameron envisioned an EU “subject to the democratic
legitimacy and accountability of national parliaments
Winter/Spring 2016
where Member States combine in flexible cooperation,
respecting national differences”, as opposed to an EU in
which members relinquish more and more sovereignty to
an ever closer political union.
But it would be a mistake to underestimate the power
of ‘the European idea’. The European project is now
over six decades old and, by now, the EU bureaucracy
has permeated every aspect of life in every member state.
Any attempt to rein in the supranational institutions and
powers of the EU would be a gargantuan task. More
importantly, it would be resisted at every turn by the
global ‘governancers’. Still, an EU without Britain is a
distinct possibility.
The transatlantic clash of visions
For EU elites, the European project is not just about
Europe. Their vision of supranational governance is
a global one—which is why a political and moral clash
between the American idea of democratic sovereignty
and the EU’s agenda is unavoidable.
At its core, the idea of global governance cannot be
but a sworn enemy to democratic sovereignty as practiced
in the American system. This plays itself out every day in
real-world policy. If you look at almost any issue in the
transatlantic relationship—and certainly at the United
States’ main foreign policy challenge in the 21st century:
the global struggle against international terrorist groups
since 9/11—it is apparent that the difference between
the US’s understanding of national sovereignty and that
of the EU has weakened the transatlantic alliance. And,
what’s more, this could eventually put the US and the
European Union on a collision course.
These are some of the kinds of questions in dispute:
What confers legitimacy on foreign policy (or, for that
matter, on domestic policy)? Who best ensures the
security of nation-states and their citizens? Is it the UN
Security Council, with the approval of the ‘international
community’ and under international law (as interpreted
by advocates of a post-nation-state world) that holds
governments accountable? Or should democratic
national governments be allowed to cooperate freely with
any other nations and act in their own legitimate national
interests?
The answers to such questions matter. As American
legal thinkers Lee Casey and David Rivkin have said, if
pursued to its logical end, joining the European cause of
global governance, would, “require the American people
to accept … that they and their elected representatives
must answer to … foreign power[s] over which they have
no control and precious little influence”.
The transatlantic alliance rests upon our common
values. As is clear from the above, though, the US
and the EU affirm fundamentally different visions of
government. One of the central reasons for this is the
disconnect that exists between a Judeo-Christian-tinged
America and a post-Christian EU. In this, it is important
to point out that religion is not just about the afterlife.
It affects every area of life—and certainly one’s political
outlook, given that politics is about ordering society
and world affairs for the good of human beings. This
undertaking is necessarily rooted in basic presuppositions
about human nature, the purpose of life, and the nature
of good and evil. Thus, everyone who engages in politics
starts from fundamentally religious presuppositions—
whether they recognize it or not.
The role of government
In the American system, founded upon principles
derived from the Judeo-Christian worldview, the purpose
of government is to ensure security and freedom so that
people can pursue more important things—such as
faith, work, family, and friends. The ultimate source of
goodness is God, and perfect justice cannot be realized
by humans on this earth. There is an objective truth about
human nature and we are subject to it. Human beings,
while capable of great good, are inherently flawed and
limited. They cannot overcome their fallibility.
It is with this understanding of human nature that
The Federalist Papers, the quintessential exposition of the
American system of government, was written by three
of the ‘founding fathers’ of the United States. The text is
deeply indebted to this Judeo-Christian worldview. “Why
DAVID ILIFF/CC-BY-SA 3.0
The European Parliament’s main debating chamber, the ‘hemicycle’, in Strasbourg.
The European Conservative
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has government been instituted at all?” asks Alexander
Hamilton in Federalist No. 15. He answers: “Because
the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of
reason and justice without constraint.”
There is no hint in The Federalist Papers of any notion
that human nature is malleable in a transformative way.
The authors would have seen it as folly to attempt to
fashion a new kind of human being through a political
project. In fact, the entire point of the US Constitution is
to structure a government that is effective yet limited and
diffuse in its power so as to constrain the irremediable
human lust for power and the tendency to abuse such
power.
The EU’s grounding of government, by contrast, is
the secularist, transformative spirit of global governance.
To see this, one need look no further than the EU’s
pronouncements on today’s foremost exercise in global
governance, the UN’s post-2015 Development Agenda.
These declarations assume human nature is so malleable
that through political effort it can break the bonds of
tradition and truth. The UN’s post-2015 Agenda goes to
the heart of the EU’s entire reason for being: to build the
structures of global governance that are needed in order
to create a world that will be better than anyone dares to
imagine.
The EU Council of Ministers’ declaration of support
for the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs) is emblematic. Reading it, one cannot avoid the
impression that the EU is positioning itself to do nothing
less than save the world:
“The post-2015 agenda should therefore integrate
the three dimensions of sustainable development in a
balanced way across the agenda; ensure coherence and
synergies; and address inter-linkages throughout the goals
and targets. It is also crucial to ensure that the agenda has
a rights-based approach encompassing all human rights
and that it respects, supports, and builds on existing
multilateral agreements, conventions, commitments, and
processes.”
It continues: “The agenda should leave no one
behind. In particular, it must address, without any
discrimination, the needs of the most disadvantaged and
vulnerable, including children, the elderly and persons
with disabilities, as well as of marginalised groups and
indigenous peoples; and it must respond to the aspirations
of young people. We should ensure that no person—
wherever they live and regardless of ethnicity, gender,
age, disability, religion or belief, race, or other status
is denied universal human rights and basic economic
opportunities. We emphasise the critical importance of
quality education, universal health coverage, and social
protection for all, which are central for the achievement
of sustainable development.”
Here, politics (or “governance”) is universal, global,
all-encompassing, and comprehensive. No checks or
balances stand in the way of the good that the global
elite can accomplish. There are no constraints and no
limits, neither geographical nor aspirational. The post2015 Agenda leaves no one behind, no one in the entire
world, and calls for all ‘stakeholders’ at all levels to show
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strong political commitment and undertake determined
actions. There is no end to the ‘coherence’, ‘synergies’,
‘inter-linkages’, ‘universality’, and ‘inclusiveness’ that it
promises. It is hard to deny the religious fervour that
seems to underlie declarations such as these. Thus, global
governance reveals itself through such pronouncements
as a secularist faith—almost calling for a veneration of
‘governance’ as if it had a salvific power of its own.
The new human rights
All of these contrasts—between the post-modern,
secularist worldview of global governance and the West’s
traditional Judeo-Christian worldview, between the global
governance ideology and the commitment to democratic
sovereignty—come together in human rights policy. As is
becoming ever more apparent—especially as secularism
gains the upper hand internationally—what you believe
human rights are depends on what you believe human beings
are. And in this, the transformation of the worldview of
the West, especially in Europe, is readily apparent: in
the anointing of relativism, novelty, and ‘choice’ as the
new foundations of human rights. This phenomenon is
intimately connected with the global governance ideology.
Cursory observance of the human rights-related
activities of the EU reveals a pervasive concern for
women’s rights, children’s rights, and LGBT rights.
There is a profound reason for this: These rights are
all based on the notion of the absolute autonomy of the
individual. They reflect the notion of choice taken to its
ultimate extent. They are transformative and liberationist, like
the global governance ideology itself.
The EU’s view of human rights requires a
transformation of the idea of what people are, redefining
them as radically autonomous individuals who—by
choice—can change their very nature and thus liberate
themselves from traditional familial and social bonds. In
the case of women’s and children’s rights, liberation from
the constraints of the family is a core concern. In the
LGBT arena, the push for ‘gay marriage’ and the concept
of a flexible gender identity aims to transform human
beings completely, liberating them from both moral and
physical constraints, while ignoring the empirical reality
that human beings are either male or female.
This transformative and liberationist model of
human rights, which has already taken root among
most elites in North America and Europe, is a complete
departure from the traditional Western view of human
beings out of which the concept of human rights first
emerged. Classical human rights are based on the
Christian/Enlightenment view of human nature. This
view recognizes that human beings are individuals who
are embedded in communities; and it acknowledges that
it is eminently appropriate for people to live within the
roles they have in those communities—in accordance
with values and rights that promote societal flourishing.
The importance of the family
The keystone of flourishing societies everywhere
is the family. But the family requires considerable
subordination of individual interests and rights to the
Winter/Spring 2016
needs of other family members. This is the traditional
view of family life. But such a view flies in the face of
the transformative and liberationist view of human rights
as promoted by the EU and propagated by the global
governance ideology, which holds that human beings are
radically free to define themselves as they wish, unfettered
by traditional values or family obligations.
The global governancers’ view of human rights
unavoidably undermines the family. Since the only rights
that matter in the EU are the skewed, redefined rights
of women, children, and LGBT persons, they must
necessarily oppose the family. It is the one institution
that militates most effectively against the idolization of
personal choice; and with its preference for local control
and self-government, it stands in the way of the globalist,
top-down view of ‘governance’ that animates the global
governance elites.
Similarly, global governance undermines democratic
sovereignty, especially in a secularist world without truth.
And if truth does not exist, then there can be no restraints
on human institutions—and government power is
unlimited. This means that not only do governments
have unlimited power—in principle—to determine what
human rights are, but it becomes impossible to limit
governance to a certain geographical area or people. And
national sovereignty becomes—again, in principle—
an impermissible limit on the power of global elites to
decide for everyone everywhere what is just and true.
Global governance is thus unmasked to reveal not a
benign effort to improve humanity’s lot but instead as a
voracious power grab—to define truth and justice under
the banner of “universal human rights”.
Liberal democracy or global governance?
At its deepest level, the struggle between liberal
democracy and global governance is a struggle to define
the human person and the purpose of human life. In
broad terms, the ideological roots of liberal democracy
in the West are found in the Judeo-Christian view of an
unchanging human nature embedded in tradition, religion,
and family. But the partisans of global governance come
down on the side of a radically secularist, post-modern
commitment to individual autonomy and the virtually
unlimited malleability of human nature according to each
person’s choice—essentially independent of traditional
institutions and social relations.
We in the West must decide between self-government,
on the one hand, and Fonte’s “slow suicide of liberal
democracy”, on the other. The radical opposition of these
two alternatives goes deeper than garden-variety political
differences—and thus will be harder to overcome. In the
end, the struggle is really about the purpose—the telos—
of politics. It is about opposing worldviews.
The turning away from the Judeo-Christian
worldview to the post-modern secularist worldview
is occurring in the US, too, with political and social
manifestations related to those in the EU. Still, it is not
too late. Reality has begun to force itself upon the EU.
The same goes for the US, although that might not be as
apparent. Providentially, this could end up reinvigorating
The European Conservative
the Judeo-Christian tradition. What is needed in the West
is a reformation, a return to humble respect for the truths
and traditions at the root of Western culture, and thus to
the indispensable foundations of self-government.
In Europe, a reformed EU of sovereign nationstates could be a tremendous force for good. But no one
can build justice, peace, and prosperity on the basis of a
deception. Global governance is a lie, and it will eventually
turn on those who have fallen under its spell. In the end,
democratic sovereignty—based on a humble respect for
truth and recognition of the limits of politics—is the only
basis for realizing the promise of the European idea.
Todd Huizinga is Director of International Outreach at the Acton
Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty in Grand Rapids,
Michigan. He is also a co-founder of the Transatlantic Christian
Council and a Research Fellow at the Paul B. Henry Institute for
the Study of Christianity and Politics at Calvin College in Michigan.
A US diplomat from 1992-2012, he served in Costa Rica and
Ireland, and served as Deputy Chief of Mission at the US Embassy
in Luxembourg, Political Counselor at the US Mission to the
EU in Brussels, Consul for Political and Economic Affairs at the
US Consulates in Hamburg and Munich, and Consul for Public
Affairs at the US Consulate in Monterrey, Mexico. This article is
based on excerpts from his new book, The New Totalitarian
Temptation: Global Governance and the Crisis of
Democracy in Europe, published by Encounter Books.
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Poland & Hungary Under Fire
Filip Mazurczak
If you get your news from left-liberal papers
(particularly German ones), and if you take the
pronouncements of Brussels bureaucrats seriously, then
chances are that you believe that since Viktor Orban’s
centre-right Fidesz took power in Hungary in 2010, the
country has turned into a dictatorship akin to Iran or
North Korea, and that Poland—where Fidesz’s close
ally, the Law and Justice Party, took charge of both the
parliament and presidency in recent months—is on
that same path. In reality, democracy in Budapest and
Warsaw is no more threatened than it is in Washington
or any West European capital. Accusations of
“dictatorship” and “breaching of democracy” are truly
baseless and, upon closer inspection, really reveal fears
Poland and Hungary are running a course independent
of Brussels, coupled with enduring German prejudices
against Eastern Europeans.
The current political situations in Poland and
Hungary are remarkably similar. In both countries,
voters defeated liberals who had become out of touch
with ordinary citizens and were involved in highly
publicised scandals and who often followed EU
dictates when they conflicted with the interests of their
constituents. In Hungary, the Democratic Coalition led
by Ferenc Gyurcsany, a former leader of the Hungarian
Communist Party’s youth wing in the 1980s, had ruled
in 2006-2010. The first major crack in its support
occurred when a recording of the Prime Minister saying,
among other things, that “we have obviously been lying
for the last one and a half to two years”, was leaked to
the public.
In response, a series of anti-government protests
raged across the country. The public media did all they
could to cover up Gyurcsany’s cronyism, and as a result
Hungarian protestors tried setting the national television
station, MTV, ablaze. Police brutality was applied
against the demonstrators. At this time, Orban—with
impeccable credentials as a veteran anti-communist
dissident—led many of the protests. In 2010, Orban’s
Fidesz party gained an outright majority in parliament,
with 52.73% of the vote. At the next national election,
Fidesz’s supported was somewhat smaller—44.54%—
but could still form a parliamentary majority without a
coalition partner.
In Poland, the publication of candid talks among
governing politicians revealing their contempt for their
voters also meant the beginning of the end of liberal
rule. Between 2007-2015, the Civic Platform party
ruled Poland. While the party initially gained power
promising tax cuts, in practice it increased the number
of bureaucrats by one hundred thousand, raised taxes,
seized $51 billion of private retirement funds to lower
the government deficit, and drifted leftwards on social
issues such as homosexual civil unions (which most
Poles oppose and which ultimately failed to pass through
parliament by a narrow margin thanks to a handful of
rebellious conservative Civic Platform deputies). In
2014, the weekly Wprost published a series of secretly
recorded conversations of Civic Platform politicians
in a posh restaurant, where they would regularly spend
A view of ‘Cracovia’ from the Liber Chronicarum (also known as the Nuremberg Chronicle) published in 1493.
8
Winter/Spring 2016
more taxpayer money on food and wine in one night
than many Poles make in a month. Foreign Minister
Radek Sikorski compared Polish-American relations to
oral sex (robic laske ), which in Polish slang is a vulgar
way of accusing someone of submissiveness, and called
Poles “Negroes” (murzynskosc ) with low self-esteem.
Meanwhile, the Minister of the Interior, Bartlomiej
Sienkiewicz, tried to make an illegal deal with the head
of the national bank, asking the latter to stimulate GDP
growth to increase Civic Platform’s electoral success
in exchange for a financial minister more to his liking.
These were just two of the many humiliating taped
conversations in Poland’s “waitergate”. In response,
Polish voters elected the centre-right
Law and Justice party in October
2015’s general elections, giving it an
outright majority, the first time this
has happened in the Third Polish
Republic (1989-present).
Since Fidesz came to power
in Hungary, Orban has become
universally hated by Western leftist
elites. In 2012, then-Secretary of
State Hilary Clinton sent a letter
expressing “concern” about the
defeat of democracy in Hungary.
The then-head of the socialist
fraction in the European Parliament,
Martin Schulz, blasted Hungary’s
new laws adopted by the Fidesz
government, saying that: “We see a
basic democratic value of European
society being threatened.” Schulz’s colleague Guy
Verhofstadt, head of the EP’s liberals, accused Orban
of “not taking advantage of the opportunity to make
Hungary more modern and democratic”. Perhaps the
most disrespectful attack on Orban came when JeanClaude Juncker, president of the European Commission,
directly said to him: “The dictator is coming.” Meanwhile,
attacks in the international press were relentless. The
most disgusting was penned by Bernard-Henri Lévy in
the Huffington Post : “[Hungary] has revived the most
obtuse chauvinism, the most worn-out populism, and
the hatred of Tsiganes [Roma] and Jews, transforming
the latter in an increasingly open manner into scapegoats
for any and all misfortune, much as they were in the
darkest hours of the history of the continent.”
However, these charges are completely unfounded.
When pressed to look closely at Hungary’s changes,
even European bureaucrats couldn’t find anything
questionable. In 2012, the European Commission
launched an investigation into Hungary’s new
constitution. Much to their surprise, they found nothing
in violation of European law, with the exception of the
lowering of the retirement age of judges from 70 to 62.
When pressed on the issue of the accusation of illegality,
Verhofstadt gave a most unintelligent answer: “The real
problem lies not in this or that clause, but in the whole
philosophy of what is happening [in Hungary].” In other
words, he could find no tangible reasons to criticize
The European Conservative
Hungary’s government based in law, and settled with
criticizing it for having the wrong (political) philosophy.
While this probe into Hungary’s constitution ended in
2013, hateful attacks against Orban’s government have
continued, both in the international press and in Brussels.
Poland is now in a similar position as Hungary.
In the months since Law and Justice came to power,
Poland’s government has faced much criticism. Martin
Schulz decided to treat the Polish government with
as much disrespect as he did the Hungarian one. He
spoke of a coup d’état in Poland and refused to apologize
for these comments. In January 2016, the European
Commission decided to launch a probe into Poland’s
new media law and into changes in
its Constitutional Court. If that was
not bad enough, the international
media attacks have been even
nastier. The Washington Post appealed
to President Obama to put pressure
on the Polish government, which
“crossed the line”. On CNN, Fareed
Zakaria warned of a “dangerous
turn” in Poland, with xenophobia
and racism on the rise. As in the
case of Hungary, the worst attacks
came from the German media, as
described below.
While the EU has only started
to ‘study’ Poland, their accusations
are baseless. The biggest criticism
regards the Constitutional Court.
They charge that President Andrzej
Duda, of the Law and Justice party, refused to appoint
justices to the court, who were voted in by the previous
government; and, further, that his party voted in five of
its own judges in December 2015. In reality, the previous
government had violated the Constitution earlier in
2015 when it appointed new judges before the previous
judges’ terms were up. There was no outcry at the time.
What’s more, the previous government had appointed
all 15 of the judges on the court! Criticism has also been
levied at Law and Justice for firing many journalists from
the public radio and television and replacing them with
those sympathetic towards them. Civic Platform did the
exact same thing when it came to power in 2007, and the
EU and Western leftists remained quiet. This is all just
typical post-electoral change in the public media. As far
as Mr. Zakaria’s insinuations that racism and xenophobia
are rampant in Poland, he is absolutely wrong. He makes
a fuss out of the fact that at a rally in November 2015
in Wroclaw, a couple of nationalists burned an effigy
of a Jew. Naturally, this was an ugly case of hateful
‘speech’. However, this had nothing to do with the new
government. Both the Wroclaw city government and
Catholic archdiocese have condemned this public act of
anti-Semitism, and a police investigation was launched
to investigate it. Zakaria is completely ignorant about
Poland; he calls Poland and Hungary “neighbours”,
although the last time the countries shared a border was
in the 1930s.
9
If democracy is perfectly healthy in Hungary and
Poland, then why have there been such hysterical
reactions against the two countries? First, since the
Maastricht Treaty came into effect in 1993 and the
Lisbon Treaty did sixteen years later, the European
Union has turned into a structure that subordinates
national governments. This is in complete defiance
of the fathers of European unification, for whom the
principle of “subsidiarity”—that affairs are best settled
at the most immediate, local level when possible—was
sacrosanct. Currently, 70% of either Polish or Hungarian
legislation is not made in Warsaw or Budapest, but in
Brussels.
Neither Viktor Orban nor
Beata Szydlo, the Prime Minister
from Poland’s Law and Justice
Party, are Eurosceptics. Both have
repeatedly said that their countries’
place is in the European Union.
However, unlike their predecessors,
Ferenc Gyurcsany and Donald Tusk
(Poland’s Prime Minister in 20072014 who for his submissiveness
to Brussels was awarded with the
post of president of the European
Commission), they don’t blindly
follow the dictates of Brussels when
they are at odds with the good of
their countries. For example, the
Polish economy is to a large degree
dependent on coal. President
Andrzej Duda knows this, and he
has openly defied Brussels’ attempts at limiting the use
of coal to reduce CO2 emissions. During the so-called
“migrant crisis”, both Orban and Szydlo—having seen
Charlie Hebdo, the Paris bombings, and other effects of
multikulti naiveté—have refused to allow Brussels to tell
them that they must accept a fixed quota of people with
cultural values potentially hostile to their own.
Finally, both Poland and Hungary have been
solidly conservative on social issues. Hungary’s 2011
Constitution begins with the words “God bless
the Hungarians” and defends life, marriage, and
Hungary’s Christian heritage. Meanwhile, Poland’s new
government has vowed to end the public financing of
in vitro fertilization, instead supporting the more pro-life
NaProTechnology, and the country’s new media law
speaks of the need to respect Christian values. Law and
Justice has repeatedly resisted demands to legalize samesex “marriage” and abortion on demand. Certainly, both
Poland and Hungary are obstacles to Brussels’ secularist
blitzkrieg.
The second reason why the Hungarian and Polish
governments are attacked is because of a German
superiority complex. Indeed, the ugliest attacks against
both have come from German politicians and media.
While German society has overwhelmingly come to
feel shame for the Holocaust, and even muted criticism
of Israel is taboo in Germany, unfortunately the same
cannot be said about Poland. During World War II,
10
three million non-Jewish Poles were murdered by Nazi
Germany, the second-largest group of victims after the
Jews. In Berlin, there’s no monument commemorating
their martyrdom (but there’s one commemorating
Hitler’s much less numerous homosexual victims, for
instance). Meanwhile, anti-Polish prejudices remain
strong, with the stereotype of Poles as thieves still
common. As recently as 2006, for example, a German
television ad for electronics retailer Media Markt
presented Poles as thieves.
The stereotype of backwards Eastern Europeans
who should be unofficially colonial subjects of Germany
remains strong in Germany, and the various statements
of German politicians and media have
confirmed this. Because Poland has a
thousand-year history as Germany’s
neighbour and is the largest excommunist state in the EU, Poles are
most frequently the targets of such
attacks. But these stereotypes also
apply to other East Europeans, such as
Hungarians. A perfect example of this
was when European Commissioner
Gunther Oettinger sent a letter to
the Polish government, warning
that Poland might have to be under
“German supervision”. Oettinger
received an excellent response from
Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro, who
wrote to him that such an expression
had terrible connotations in Poland,
and that his own grandfather had
been an officer in Poland’s Home Army and had fought
precisely against German supervision.
This German contempt for Poles and other East
Europeans was on full display during the attacks on
Hungary and Poland. This has also included a cynical
attempt to decrease German guilt for the Holocaust
by exaggerating claims of Polish and Hungarian
nationalism. Die Welt has, for example, condemned the
“suffocating atmosphere of anti-Semitism reminiscent
of the 1930s in Hungary”. In fact, the majority of
Hungarian Jews were killed by Germans, and Orban
is no anti-Semite: He has enjoyed close relations with
Hungary’s Jewish communities and has apologized for
the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross, which collaborated
with the Germans in killing Jews. That a German
publication should lecture anyone about anti-Semitism
without some recognition of having a plank in his own
eye, is scandalous.
Meanwhile, Die Welt published an article in which
Polish émigré academic, Jan T. Gross, wrote that during
World War II Poles killed more Jews than Germans
(an absurd, baseless claim) and that the real reason why
Poland, Hungary and other ex-communist EU member
states did not want refugees was because they were
complicit in the Holocaust. This is completely illogical
reasoning: In recent months, the Israeli government
of Benjamin Netanyahu also reject demands to accept
Muslim refugees from Syria, so does that mean that the
Winter/Spring 2016
Jews themselves were co-responsible for the Holocaust?
On the contrary, historian Gunnar S. Paulsson (the son
of a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, I may add) has
estimated that about 20-30,000 Jews were directly killed
by Poles during the Holocaust (compared to nearly six
million killed by Germans). That is certainly a tragedy.
However, while puppet governments and SS divisions
that aided the Nazis in killing Jews were formed across
Europe, this did not happen in Poland. By contrast,
the Polish government-in-exile were the first to tell
the United States and England of the Holocaust,
and (unsuccessfully) asked them to intervene. It also
financed the Zegota Council to Aid the Jews, the only
such organization in all occupied Europe. Despite the
fact that the most severe punishment (the death penalty,
often applied collectively) was applied in Poland for
aiding Jews, the country boasts of the most ‘Righteous
Among the Nations’ medals awarded by Israel. The
publication of Gross’s balderdash by a German magazine
is an irresponsible attempt at distorting history.
Certainly, Poland’s and Hungary’s governments are
not without flaws. In Hungary, Viktor Orban has raised
the VAT tax to a jaw-dropping 27%, the highest in
the European Union (even the European Commission
recommends that the VAT not exceed 25%; if you are
more statist and less tax-friendly than the EC, that’s
nothing to be proud of ), although it should be added
that Orban has introduced a flat-rate personal income
tax. Meanwhile, he has nationalized the private pensions
of Hungarian citizens. These actions can only have
terrible consequences for the Hungarian economy. In
Poland, the government is working on legislation to
lower the retirement age, which could have catastrophic
effects on public finances, and it has raised insurance
costs for employees, which won’t help the high youth
unemployment rate. Thus, these governments (like
all governments) can and should be criticized when
necessary. However, the anger of Brussels bureaucrats
and clueless leftist journalists focuses on criticizing
the lack of ‘democracy’, understood as abstractly as
possible and as closely adhering to the pro-EU line. Just
beneath the surface of the media blitz, we can see the
real reason why these governments are a threat to the
EU establishment: They do not want their countries
to be vassals of Brussels, and they are, furthermore,
victims of prejudice and a feeling of superiority still all
too common among German elites.
While these governments are far from perfect, they
are nevertheless an inspiration to those who still believe
in true European values. As the European Union
increasingly becomes devoid of any values, apart from
very abstract ones, Poland and Hungary still believe in
something. These countries have repeatedly defended
the Christian heritage that gave birth to Europe, and
they have asserted themselves into dangerous political
territory. They are not Eurosceptic but instead are
fighting for a Europe in which the nations are truly
partners, rather than the feudal subjects of increasingly
out-of-touch Brussels bureaucrats. Hopefully, they will
pave the way for a Europe more attuned to its own
values.
Filip Mazurczak is a translator and journalist whose work has
appeared in the National Catholic Register, First Things,
The Catholic Thing, and other publications. He is the
Assistant Editor of The European Conservative.
Detail from a “Bird’s-eye View of Budapest” (1617) by Joris Hoefnagel (1542-1600). According to Sanderus Antiquariaat
in Ghent, this is “a view from the East ... of the two cities of Pest and ... Buda .... clearly in the hands of the Turks”—the
former since 1526 and the latter since 1541. “This is indicated by the many mosques depicted.”
The European Conservative
11
Reflections on a Political Wasteland
Edwin Dyga
Australian conservative politics may be
geographically distant from our cousin democracies in
North America, the UK, and Europe, but this relative
isolation ironically emphasises the similarity of political
trends across the Anglosphere, and the extent to which
the same social pathologies dominate a common public
discourse. Two things will immediately strike the
observer: first, how easily a purportedly conservative
government in this antipodean Diaspora of European
civilisation can be stricken into policy paralysis on the
‘national question’; the second is how recent political
volatility has effectively highlighted symptoms which
are common to all Western states that suffer today’s
near-universal crisis of leadership.
No other English speaking parliament can offer
a more turbulent narrative than what Australia has
witnessed over the last decade. In 2007, the government
of John Howard was not only defeated but Howard
himself was ousted from the House of Representatives
by a state media journalist-cum-candidate for the
Labor Party. That was only the second time in federal
history that a sitting Prime Minister was retired so
ignominiously. Then, in 2009, Tony Abbott—vocal
monarchist, unapologetic pro-life Catholic, natural bête
noir of the leftist ‘commentariat’—was elected by one
vote as Opposition Leader in a three way internal party
ballot. One of those contenders would later challenge
him twice for the Prime Ministership, prevailing on
the second attempt—but only after Labor was ousted
from office in 2013 by a revitalised Opposition under
Abbott’s stewardship.
This will certainly be remembered as the era
of embarrassing internecine conflict in Australia’s
modern political history, marked as it is with struggles
that have raged within as much as between the two main
party blocs. Abbott’s 14 September 2015 ousting
by the social liberal Malcolm Turnbull was the fifth
change in the Prime Ministership in as many years.
However, while the coup against Abbott was the cause
of consternation for the party’s right, it also illustrated
just how much support Abbott lost among selfprofessing conservatives during his time as national
leader, and the reasons for this loss.
What one observes in this period is a reflection of
a typical trend that has plagued politicians throughout
the West in recent years, and Abbott’s graceless
downfall is but an echo of the gradual enfeeblement
and ultimate implosion of post-Cold War Angloconservatism in the antipodes; a pathetic but by no
means unavoidable state of affairs for which leaders of
the mainstream right have only themselves to blame.
Party loyalty and political nihilism
I have yet to meet a single conviction activist
involved in centre-right politics who has not rapidly
12
grown cynical—within even one electoral cycle—
about the party-political mechanism or prospects
for its reform. Those who survive two or three such
cycles are often overtaken by a nihilistic outlook, a will
to political power devoid of philosophical purpose.
Others who have not been blessed with a strong sense
of internal moral fortitude become the stereotypical
opportunists that too often personify the shenanigans
of modern public life. Some suggest it is a function
of democratic realpolitik in a rapidly changing world;
others hold that that is merely an excuse for turning
the so-called ‘art of the possible’ into a mere craft of
the politics of fleeting convenience.
As an example, I recently read a feeble apologia by a
young ‘laissez-faire libertarian’—an activist in the ruling
Coalition’s youth wing—in which he wrote that he will
“never understand” people who “somehow think that
they’re above the Party. They are not.” I can certainly
imagine a legitimate critique of an uncompromising
attachment to doctrine, one which may lead to ideology
through reductionist reasoning or a de-contextualised
emphasis on principle, and one that might therefore
lead to a rigid inability to work within a political faction
or party. However, it is disconcerting to see this selfprofessed “small government conservative” speak a
language reminiscent of political Maoism.
Though this is an example from the lowest levels
of party-political life, it illustrates a certain attitude
that has percolated up and poisoned the larger
platoons of the parliamentary system. The substance
of conservative policy has suffered tremendously
when this evident lack of what Roger Scruton might
call philosophical self-confidence is compensated for
by absolutist appeals to what is merely a vehicle for
managerial power: the Party. For at least the last half
century, agitators of the militant left have rejected the
party supremacy advocated by contemporary brandobsessed ‘establishment conservatives’ in favour of a
broad-spectrum assault on the institutions of cultural
transmission; their success can be seen not only across
the cultural and political landscape of the West, but
within the aimless ranks of official conservatism itself.
Party fixation, and the logical reduction of
everything to nationwide popularity contests, has seen
conservatives routinely trumped in the culture wars.
It has also created an environment where advocacy
of an explicitly conservative philosophy is seen as an
obstacle to the establishment conservative’s ultimate
objective: winning office. This nihilistic attitude is
best exemplified by the merger of means and ends
in modern conservative praxis: the drive towards
electoral will-to-power being the only animating force
behind these politicians’ raison d’être. The resulting lack
of substance naturally creates a vacuum among alleged
opponents of Jacobin social-engineering that is too
readily filled with culturally acquired liberal mental
reflexes. The evidence speaks for itself.
Winter/Spring 2016
J.J.HARRISON / CCA-SA 3.0
A view of Parliament House in Canberra from July 2009. Opened in 1988, the building was designed by Romaldo Giurgola..
Failing to engage the culture war
Thus, Abbott’s term as Prime Minister could
not be described as faring well from even a centrist
perspective. After his successful leadership bid
within the party, he invested tremendous energy into
attempts to defuse his image as a ‘right-wing extremist’
(a narrative incessantly reinforced by a hostile fourth
estate). Allegations of his ‘woman problem’ were
met with a policy for paid maternity leave: a violent
departure from both the small-government and socialconservative traditions of his electoral base. Indeed,
he campaigned (often awkwardly) while conspicuously
surrounded by women, and promoted them to the
highest posts within his office. As Prime Minister,
a militant feminist and ardent career opponent was
made “ambassador for women and girls”. When four
‘Australians of the Year’ were to be announced in 2015,
apparently not a single male qualified for the award.
Unfounded claims of his latent ‘racism’ were
countered by championing legal reform which would
acknowledged one ethnicity—the aboriginal—in the
Commonwealth Constitution; this ostensibly ‘antiracist’ initiative would ironically racialize the nation’s
highest legal instrument. Likewise, his perceived
insufficient enthusiasm for all things multicultural was
addressed by targeted ethnic candidate selections in
key (i.e. ‘vibrant’) seats, along with his self-description
as an aspiring “Asia First” national leader.
All that was followed by his colourful denunciation
of grassroots conservatives worried about the continued
Balkanization of society through record Islamic
(legal) immigration, and his government’s financial
subsidising of the Islamic Museum of Australia.
Moreover, Abbott’s painfully jejune reference to
Sharia-sympathising Muslims protesting in Sydney as
“fair dinkum, dinki di Aussies” [colloquial for ‘genuine’
Australians] was enough to turn stomachs, and his
declaration that he was “the sworn enemy of anyone
who seeks to divide Australian from Australian”—a
The European Conservative
reference to those vocal but disenfranchised citizens
in ‘vibrant’ suburbs apprehensive about leaving their
homes after dark—is also not easily forgotten.
Those who still defend Abbott’s legacy point to
his success in border protection. But if this is a mark
of conservative governance then Raúl Castro is more
right-wing than both Abbott and his party’s Prime
Ministerial predecessor ever were. Committed loyalists
also appeal to his reinstatement of the Australian
Knighthood, though the manner in which this
institution was abused under Abbott’s reign rendered
it almost a parody of itself, doing more damage to
the monarchist cause than any republican campaign
could hope to do itself. Finally—notwithstanding the
rhetorical bravado articulated in such elevated fora
as the recent Margaret Thatcher Lecture—Abbott’s
decision to grant thousands of ‘Syrian Refugees’ entry
into the Commonwealth mitigates, to put it delicately,
his image as a defender of Australia’s Western cultural
heritage and national security.
Whether this apparent acceptance of leftist moral
authority assisted in the Coalition’s 2013 electoral win
is debatable, but the post-election return on these
investments was, undoubtedly, nil. Naturally, Abbott’s
opponents never gave him the benefit of any doubt;
political cynics of course doubted his sincerity; those
who saw him as a spearhead within the progressive
mainstream started to question their loyalty even
before the electoral results were announced. In the
eyes of the media, his reputation was unaltered; his
loyalist camp started to fray at the edges from the
day his government was sworn-in and the bleeding
of support continued until the fateful morning of the
leadership ‘spill’ (or vote).
Serious politicians instinctively know any attempt
to ingratiate everyone—especially one’s opponents—
will likely lead to electoral distrust, personal isolation,
and ultimate political failure. Why, then, this constant
desire to be everybody’s candidate, courting the
13
affection of hostile constituencies, instead of
unapologetically advocating the reform mandated by
those who put one in office? It should be no surprise
that those tired of mediocre candidates—who at best
stand athwart history whimpering ‘not so fast’—
continue to grow in number, with charismatic outsiders
increasingly challenging the established centre-right
political monopolies.
Ultimately, the coup against Tony Abbott did
nothing to damage the conservative initiative in
Australia because there was little of that initiative
under his Prime Ministerial stewardship to begin with.
It was almost as if he couldn’t believe that his election
provided a democratic mandate for the politics he
was expected to represent. In this sense, Abbott has
become but another case study of a conservatism that
has fallen victim to its own lack of faith in itself.
The lessons of Abbott’s defeat
Conservative politicians, if they are to distinguish
themselves from ideological progressivism, must
understand that they are fighting a cultural guerrilla
war—one in which responding with gentlemanly
virtues to outright bastardry will be seen as a sign of
weakness and treated accordingly; one in which an
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY / LONDON
An undated portrait of the Scottish philosopher and
essayist, Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) by Sir John Everett
Millais, 1st Baronet (1829-1896).
14
attitude of ‘fair play’ in the face of Alinskyite agitation
will inevitably lead to defeat; one in which alleged
opposition to the left must be proven by a fundamental
repudiation of the opponent’s worldview; one in
which militant calls for apology when that worldview
is offended should be laughed at, not accommodated;
one in which explicitly rightist reforms and tangible
moves to dismantle institutionally entrenched leftist
ideology should be pursued aggressively and without
compunction; and one in which the core electoral base
should never be treated with contempt, even when
strategic compromises need to be made to effectively
implement reforms.
Failure to understand this will reduce conservative
politics to the preservation of the left-liberal status quo,
and render conservative politicians little more than
seat warmers for those sitting opposite and fundraisers
for their programmes. Likewise, conservative voters’
failure to keep their ‘representatives’ accountable
has—and will continue—to produce Thomas Carlyle’s
‘phantasm captains’ instead of the leaders we expect.
Indeed, until we make it clear that our votes need to
be earned, conservatives will deserve the leadership that
they routinely and blindly reward.
While men of the left may recognise similar
pathologies of unprincipled opportunism infecting
their political culture, the underlying liberal
assumptions across the political spectrum renders
them, and not conservatives, more capable of
ideological advance by default. The status quo is always
progressive. Swimming against the current, men of the
right must recognise that a lack of militancy will serve
only to reinforce this leftward drift. It is not enough
to simply declare this protest as political naïveté on
the part of disenfranchised traditionalists who do not
understand the need for compromise. The brutal and
too often ignored fact is this: resigning to and working
within a paradigm that systematically favours a leftliberal order defeats the very reason why one would be
involved in centre-right politics to begin with.
Those who do not understand this have no
business being in politics, and should certainly not
expect the support of conviction conservatives at the
ballot box. Perhaps the only option left to the largely
disenfranchised romantics of the right is to refuse to
participate in the present mediocrity, hoping (perhaps
vainly) that our votes may be courted by politicians
of greater fortitude, who actually value those votes,
in the future. The alternative is to continue down the
same path of incremental defeat: an unsustainable and
therefore unacceptable option for those who reflect
on the present political wasteland with growing and
bitter revulsion.
Edwin Dyga has a background in law and government relations,
and has been published in journals of cultural and political
review in Australia, the US, the UK, and Poland. He is
presently the Convenor of the Sydney Traditionalist Forum, an
association of young professionals who form Australia’s paleoconservative and independent Right.
Winter/Spring 2016
The European Conservative
15
16
Winter/Spring 2016
Conservatism Beyond Markets
Anthony Daniels
R. S. Thomas, the Welsh poet, was curmudgeonly
by nature and when he saw how the Czechs used their
freedom after the destruction of the Berlin Wall he was
appalled, all the more so as he had detested communism.
The first fruits of their freedom were precisely the things
in modernity that he most disliked or despised, such
as a vulgar consumerism and a militant licentiousness.
In the same vein, Generalissimo Franco told General
Walters that after his death there would be everything
in Spain that they (the Americans) liked: democracy,
pornography, etc.
Conservatives are attached both to freedom and
to the preservation of a cultured tradition. There
sometimes seems to be a conflict between the two, in so
far as the exercise of freedom results in the destruction
of a cultured tradition. In this respect, some socialists
have been more conservative than some conservatives:
Their ideal was the extension of the appreciation and
availability of the best of civilization to those who
previously had little access to it, rather than the radical
destruction of that civilization that now seems to be the
main aim of radicals—a destruction that market forces
alone also successfully effect.
With this in mind, the question arises as to the
extent to which the late Mrs. Thatcher could be called a
conservative—or perhaps I should say had a conservative
effect upon her country. Most conservatives around
the world would hold her up as one of the great
conservative figures of the 20th century, and clearly she
was a woman of extraordinary courage, determination,
and self-discipline (the latter quality better qualified as
formidable). There is no doubt, either, that her rhetoric
had an enormous effect, at least on political discussion
throughout the world. She had great personal charm
and was very courteous, a fact which would no doubt
surprise many of those who disliked her and thought
she was strident. She was also modest and likable in
her behaviour, and in a strange way rather motherly to
strangers, at least if they were male.
But in the long run her effect on the country was
far from conservative. She gave the impression (and
impressions become facts in politics) that she was an
economic determinist, indeed a mirror-image Marxist.
According to her economic determinism, at least as it
was perceived both by her friends and her enemies, all
would be well, and all other desiderata would follow as
the night the day, if only our economic relations could
be sorted out—that is to say, if only the minuses of
state intervention could be turned into the pluses of
private enterprise.
T. S. Eliot once said that some people dream of a
society that will be so perfect than no one will have to
be good; Mrs. Thatcher gave the impression that she
believed in an economy so prosperous that everyone
would be happy.
The European Conservative
I do not think that she really believed this. She was a
cultivated woman, well-read in poetry, for example, and
her tastes were conservative. Her idea of being casual
in dress were most people’s idea of formality. No one
could personally have detested more the vulgarity of
modern British culture and its crass materialism (which
is not even very successful in purely economic terms as
judged by the performance of other countries).
Of course, one must not exaggerate the long-term
effect of a single politician on the culture of his or her
country; he or she could have no effect on it that was
not there in potential. But there is no doubt in my mind
that Mrs. Thatcher unleashed a crude commercial spirit
whose idea was that something was right if many people
wanted to do it and it was profitable for someone to
enable them to do so.
Among her ‘achievements’ was the fostering of
the litigiousness which has cost the country dear. Her
attitude to the professions—particularly law, medicine,
and academe—was derived, or at least indistinguishable,
from that of George Bernard Shaw, who famously—or
infamously—said that all professions are conspiracies
against the laity.
No doubt there is an element of truth in this but
only an element. The medical profession, to which I
belong, is jealous of its prerogatives, for example, but
not simply to exclude competition and raise prices. The
legal profession in Britain had long been prohibited
from advertising its services, but Mrs. Thatcher thought
this was an outdated vestige of gentlemanliness and
swept it away, with the result that the British population
is now invited constantly (even in hospital waiting
rooms) to sue, usually in the hope of winning, as in
roulette, a large tax-free settlement. In Liverpool the
buses circulate with invitations to sue on their sides,
an invitation that the population accepts with gusto.
The level of fraud, dishonesty, and virtual blackmail
in which this has resulted is astonishing. It has raised
costs, shortened tempers and destroyed character. It
has created an atmosphere of mistrust and fear.
In similar fashion, Mrs. Thatcher believed in
management almost as a religious person believes
in miracle-working Virgins. She thought that the
managerial disciplines of the private sector—not so very
disciplined, as it often turns out, at least in huge jointstock companies—would solve the problems of the
public service. She sought to introduce the incentives
of the private sector into the public, which she was
sensible enough to know could never in practice be
fully privatised away. What she did not appreciate is
that the incentives in the public and private sectors had
to be different. Nor did she recognise that the goals
of most successful entrepreneurs are often not simply
economic.
When Mrs. Thatcher introduced managerialism
into the public sector on a large scale, she opened
a Pandora’s box. The former bureaucrats-turned-
17
ALTE PINAKOTHEK / MUNICH
The “Great Fish Market” (1603) by Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625).
managers took to incentives all right, and thanks to the
closed nature of their enterprises were easily able to
falsify the evidence which proved that they had earned
their hugely-increased salaries and bonuses. The
dimmest bureaucrat was able easily to run rings round
Mrs. Thatcher and her acolytes: They were as putty
in their hands. The end result was that Mrs. Thatcher
had in effect legalised corruption, though corruption
of a peculiarly insidious sort, difficult to combat once
introduced: a corruption intellectual and moral, and the
means by which increasing amounts of public money
found its way into private pockets. Thanks ultimately to
her, many public servants became millionaires without
ever having to take a bribe or do anything illegal. This
sea of corruption, alas, was the natural environment
for such as her great admirer, Mr. Blair.
Without really intending to, she made profitability
the measure of all things, including in the public
sector—where, however, there was no profit to be
measured and performance could always be obscured.
Moreover, she shrank the preponderant role of the
state in British life hardly at all. The scene was set for
the ugly, corrupt, and inefficient corporatism from
which we now suffer.
Mrs. Thatcher’s fundamental error, I think, was to
mistake the character of the British people. She thought
of them as the thrifty, modest, and no doubt somewhat
repressed petty bourgeois of her childhood, who just
needed economic freedom to prosper but who would
remain thrifty, modest, and somewhat repressed. But
18
they had changed: They were now waiting only for
credit to indulge their consumerist dreams. Even Mrs.
Thatcher’s spearing of home ownership turned out to
be a mistake, for to own a house in an area where you
cannot sell it is to have an economic millstone round
your neck—one of the reasons (but only one) that
Britain had to import labour to do unskilled work at
times of high unemployment.
There is more to conservatism than undoing
economic restrictions and government regulation,
therefore, necessary as these may be: for market
corporatism in a country that has abandoned its cultural
traditions is not a pretty sight to behold, as the case
of Britain illustrates. As the communist poet, Pablo
Neruda, advised it in another context:
Venid a ver la sangre por las calles, / venid a ver / la
sangre por las calles, / venid a ver la sangre / por las calles!
Come and see the blood in the streets, / come and
see / the blood in the streets, / come and see the
blood / in the streets!
Anthony Daniels is the author of The New Vichy Syndrome:
Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism
(2011) and Not With a Bang But a Whimper: The
Politics and Culture of Decline (2010), among others. His
most recent book is Admirable Evasions: How Psychology
Undermines Morality published by Encounter Books in
2015.
Winter/Spring 2016
Peter Boettke on the
Socialist Calculation Debate
Roland Fritz
In December 2015, Peter Boettke, Professor
of Economics and Philosophy at George Mason
University, paid a visit to the birthplace of the Austrian
School of Economics of which he is a renowned
expert. While in the Austrian capital, Boettke delivered
a lecture titled “The Socialist Calculation Debate:
Viennese Origins, London Refinements” at the Insitut
für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Institute for Human
Sciences). His illuminating talk focused most notably
on the Viennese origins—and subsequent ‘London
refinements”—of the Socialist Calculation Debate.
This debate—which has ongoing relevance
today—developed in several stages and included the
contributions of several prominent thinkers. It was,
however, initiated in Vienna by Austrian economist
Ludwig von Mises. With his 1920 essay “Economic
Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth”, and
later in his book Socialism (1922), which is largely a
refinement and extension of his 1920 view, Mises
responded to the assumptions of socialist economic
theory and the increasingly collectivist Zeitgeist. In
particular, he critiqued Otto Neurath’s 1919 book
Through War Economy to Economy in Kind, in which
the author proposed the creation of a moneyless,
socialistic society. Mises tried to shift the discourse on
socialism from disputes about its moral desirability to
the problems of its practicability.
Socialist political theorists had often asserted (and
some still do) that a socialist society not only would be
much more fair, just, and livable than a capitalist one but
that it would also produce a significantly greater output
of material wealth. Mises refrained from countering the
moral argument and, instead, opted to show that claims
about widespread material prosperity under a socialistic
organization of society were inherently flawed. In
order to allocate resources efficiently, he argued, one
has to account for all individuals’ valuations of every
good and service in an economy, as well as their input
factors, and their exchange relationships with each
other. In a market economy, this function is fulfilled
by prices.
When a company is faced, for instance, with the
task of constructing railroad tracks between two places,
it has to decide which metals to use, which route to
choose, and how to deal with natural obstacles in the
way (i.e. whether to tunnel under a mountain, go around
it, or build an overpass). Because the company has
access to genuine prices, it can rationally decide which
of all these options is cheapest (i.e. most economic).
Consequently, not only does the company reduce its
own cost but the outcome is highly desirable from a
societal point of view: Because the most ‘economic’
resources are used for the production of the railroad
The European Conservative
track, all surplus resources are freed up for other
purposes that are valued more highly by the average
consumer.
It was apparent to Mises that no socialist system
could ever properly achieve this task as well as markets
do. Without private property, no exchange between
goods can be facilitated—and prices do only come into
existence during exchange. Now, because socialism
disallows private property in the means of production,
there can be no prices for these goods in a socialist
economy—and, in turn, no real prices for any given
consumer good or service (after all, one needs means
of production to get consumer goods).
Planners, therefore, would not know what goods
and services to supply and, even more important, how
best to produce the products they finally decided to
fabricate. They would be, as Mises put it, left “groping
in the dark”, merely guessing which inputs to use for the
production of various consumer goods. Grave errors
in the structure of production would be unavoidable;
and overall efficiency and wealth-creation would be
seriously impeded in a socialist society.
Mises’s argument was in turn vigorously criticized
by Otto Bauer and Otto Neurath, two eminent
Austro-Marxists, who tried to find ways around the
confounding problem raised by Mises (usually without
much success).
It was interesting to learn from Boettke’s lecture
the origin of Mises’s interest in this topic. Specifically,
it was sparked by a preceding, lively, yet not wellknown debate between the Viennese Austro-Marxist
Rudolf Hilferding, on the one hand, and the Austrian
economist Eugen Böhm-Bawerk himself, on the other.
This debate largely concerned the writings of Karl
IWM
Boettke speaking at the Insitut für die Wissenschaften
vom Menschen, during his recent visit to Vienna.
19
Marx, whose internal consistency had been attacked by
Böhm-Bawerk in his Karl Marx and the Close of his System
(1949), which was met with a passionate rebuttal by
Hilferding.
I don’t have the space here to go into the details
of this preceding debate but suffice it to say that it was
fascinating for me—as a Viennese student—to learn
from an American professor just how rich and diverse
the history of intellectual life in my own city had been
in the past.
During the 1930s, the nature of the Socialist
Calculation Debate shifted, both with respect to
location and its main participants. Friedrich August
von Hayek, Mises’s student and perhaps the most wellknown Austrian economist, who at the time wrote
and taught in London, found himself in his teacher’s
footsteps and tried to carry the debate forward from an
Austrian point of view.
Professor Boettke’s remarks about the ‘London
refinements’ were equally insightful. His account of
how much Hayek was celebrated and admired when he
gave his first lectures, and when he subsequently earned
a professorship at the London School of Economics
in 1931, made an impression on the audience. “In
1932, everybody at the LSE was a Hayekian”, Boettke
explained. “In 1937 however, nobody was a Hayekian
anymore. It must have been—if I may say so—a ‘WTF’
moment for Hayek.”
CENTRO DE ESTUDIO DEL CAPITALISMO / UFM
Hayek as a young man, already a source of inspiration and
a mentor to hundreds of students.
20
The question of what had happened in those five
years between 1932 and 1937 is of utmost importance
for a proper understanding of the history of economic
thought in the 20th century. On the one hand, Hayek’s
lost influence had to do with general changes within
economics, most prominently the rise of Keynesianism.
On the other hand, his position—and, subsequently, his
perceived defeat in the Socialist Calculation Debate—
certainly also had something to do with it.
Hayek found himself confronting the crème de la
crème of contemporary British economists, in particular
Oskar Lange and Abba P. Lerner. However, Hayek’s
British antagonists attacked from a different angle: They
had, in part, accepted Mises’s critique of collectivist
economic planning, and were now looking to find
ways around that problem. They appreciated the way in
which markets allocated resources efficiently and tried
to mimic (and surpass) this behaviour, albeit under
governmental ownership of production. Furthermore,
they purported to work out how a socialist government
could remain democratic and anti-authoritarian.
Hayek’s writings in Economics and Knowledge (1937),
and later in The Road to Serfdom (1944) and The Use of
Knowledge in Society (1945), are articulate refutations of
these arguments. But, at least in their time, they all were
to no avail. By 1937, professional—and even more so,
public—opinion was convinced of both the desirability
and feasibility of socialism. And the economic changes
brought about by World War II only aggravated this
assessment.
It took almost 50 years for Hayek’s ideas to regain
credence. His writings about the inherent complexity
of social phenomena and the crucial importance of
individual knowledge to the workings of any economy,
which represents a serious problem to any effective use
of resources under socialism, still inspire academic work
to this day. And his theory about the incompatibility
of full-blown economic planning with democratic
governance, as well as the famous argument about a
“slippery slope” towards totalitarianism, have been
vindicated by the experiences of the past 60 years.
Today’s commentators interested in the failures of
socialist policy can take a look at Venezuela’s inability to
supply its population with even the most basic goods,
while slipping ever closer to tyranny and dictatorship.
Prior to 1989 and the dramatic downfall of
communism, the professional consensus had been that
Hayek and the other Austrians had lost the Socialist
Calculation Debate. At some point in time, and with
the help of ever more powerful supercomputers, the
problems first put forward by Mises would be able to
be overcome by socialist planners, or so it was thought.
Since then, the professional reputation of Austrian
economists and the interpretation of the outcome of
the debate have shifted significantly. Apart from the
demise of communism, this also had to do with certain
changes in the way economics is viewed at universities.
With respect to the debate, one of the economics
profession’s most problematic aspects was—and to
a certain degree still is—its rigid formalism and the
Winter/Spring 2016
neglect of the influence of political and social forces
on economic outcomes, which is why Boettke refers to
neoclassical economics as “institutionally antiseptic”.
Because neoclassical economics is not interested in
real world phenomena per se, it is quite easy to accept
some sort of formal similarity between two economic
systems and to overlook the vast differences in the
incentive structures created by varying institutional
arrangements.
However, the last 20 to 30 years have brought
promising changes. Not only has the Austrian School
of Economics enjoyed a fruitful and most welcome
revival but so have the Virginia School of Political
Economy and the Bloomington School associated
with Vincent and Elinor Ostrom. And the field of New
Institutional Economics has also emerged. All have
attracted considerable attention and gained influence.
Perhaps most crucially, they have succeeded in shifting
the focus of academic economics away from formal,
highly mathematized theorizing back to real-world
settings that take into account incentive structures—
and the institutional environment that guides and
shapes human behaviour. Mises’s and Hayek’s ideas
have certainly been vindicated over the last two
decades, and today their critiques of socialism are more
accepted than ever.
In a second lecture in Vienna (7 December 2015),
Boettke assessed the importance of economic policy in
the current presidential race in the United States, which
was highly interesting for the European audience.
Boettke showed himself to be a bit frustrated with the
way in which economic policy is usually dealt with:
Too many discussions, he said, can be best described as
populist, rhetorical manoeuvrings, which do not really
take heed of sound economic reasoning.
The way I see it, however, there is still hope:
The story of the Socialist Calculation Debate neatly
illustrates how good ideas can sometimes take a long
time to be understood by professional academics, let
alone by the general public and politicians. In the end,
with respect to the debate, it seems that the better
ideas have finally prevailed. It is to be hoped that a
similar process will eventually take place with regard to
economic policy more generally.
The most severe economic problems facing
most Western countries today—such as overreaching
public debts, heavily regulated industries and firms,
rent-seeking and political privileges to certain market
participants, and an onerous tax burden—could easily
be analysed and resolved using the great insights of
the Austrian School of Economics. Let’s hope that we
will one day experience a profound rethinking of these
challenges along Austrian lines!
Roland Fritz is currently finishing his M.Sc. studies in socioeconomics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business.
He is also a Research Fellow at the Austrian Economics Center
and a Local Coordinator for European Students for Liberty.
A Time for Change
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21
Valletta: Portrait of a City
André P. DeBattista
On the morning of 29 May 1912, the HMS
Enchantress sailed into the port of Valletta on the island
of Malta. Standing on deck was the then-First Lord
of the Admiralty Sir Winston Churchill together with
his wife Lady Clementine and Miss Violet Asquith,
daughter of British Prime Minister Herbert Henry
Asquith. The purpose of their visit was primarily to
discuss Mediterranean security with Lord Kitchener of
Khartoum, who then was serving as Commander-inChief and Agent-General in Egypt.
Miss Asquith described the scene before them in
her memoir about life with Sir Winston: “The Island
we were approaching looked like one vast fortress, a
great heap of battlemented stone built between sky
and sea. We sailed into the most wonderful harbour
I could have imagined or dreamt of—‘harbour of
harbours’—strongholds and fortresses piled up on
ever side, Men of War hoisting their colours with
bugle calls from every deck.”
This was not the first time visitors were left in awe
when looking at the panorama before them; various
artists have immortalised this view in a number of
paintings, including J.M.W. Turner (1830) and Ivan
Aivazovsky (1844). Others saw in this city a safe
harbour and a refuge. The image of the city as a
stronghold, a refuge and a fortress chimes with the
main raison d’être behind the construction of Valletta.
As this city celebrates the 450th anniversary of its
founding in 1566, this essay seeks to look at its origins
and evolution.
Origins
In 1566, the Knights of the Order of St. John
had been in Malta for over 36 years after losing their
island base in Rhodes. Their Maltese sojourn was
initially expected to be brief; Malta proved to be a
disappointing alternative when compared to Rhodes,
for it was, after all, a barren island lacking in fresh
water and with no discernible resources save for its
good natural deep water harbours.
The Order established itself in the old medieval
settlement of Castrum Maris (now known as Birgu), but
it soon realised that this settlement made it vulnerable
to possible attacks. The town was surrounded by hills
and, across the harbour, another uninhabited peninsula
with a small fort at its tip made it further vulnerable to
attacks.
The architect and academic Quentin Hughes notes
that “[w]hoever controlled this peninsula controlled the
entrance to the two harbours and a city on its heights
defended by a strong land front and lateral bastioned
fortifications could be invulnerable. The Knights
realised this from the start, but when they arrived they
were short of money and too impoverished to build a
new large city”.
22
This is confirmed by the Order’s official historian
Giacomo Bosio, who wrote that the Order of St. John
had long entertained the idea of constructing a new
town at the entrance to the harbour. As early as 1562,
the estates of the Order in Europe were instructed to
provide a financial contribution in order to mitigate
the Order’s economic concerns.
The Ottoman raids of 1565, which are now
referred to as “The Great Siege” in the collective
imagination, made the Order more aware of its
relative defencelessness. The peninsula guarding the
entrance to the Grand Harbour, known then as Monte
Sceberras, was seen as the perfect spot for a fortified
town, which would guard both sides of the natural
harbour. The Ottoman ‘Siege’ added urgency to their
claim for the need to construct a new city.
Grand Master Jean Parisot de Valette lodged a
request for help. Pope Pius V (later canonized) obliged
and sent the military engineer and Michelangelo’s
assistant Francesco Laparelli to aid with the planning
and design of the new city.
The new city was officially named Humilissima
Civitas Valletta—the Most Humble City of Valletta.
The historian Desmond Steward states that the new
city was to be both a monastery and a fortress. This
reflects the character of the Order, which was monastic
in that its members took the vow of poverty, chastity
and obedience and took care of ailing pilgrims, and
military since the Order was tasked with the military
defence of Christendom.
Francesco Laparelli arrived in Malta in December
1565; on 28 March 1566, the foundation stone of the
new city was laid with much pomp and ceremony in
the presence of Grand Master de Valette.
The Order of St. John and its new city
The new city was unlike any other existing
settlement in Malta. The architectural historian
Conrad Thake notes that several Maltese towns and
villages were similar to Middle Eastern settlements
with “tightly clustered courtyard houses within a
highly irregular network of narrow, serpentine streets
and dead-end alleys”. The new settlement was to be
planned “according to a strict gridiron pattern and
located on a strategic land peninsula, whose perimeter
was to be fortified by massive bastions that would
appear to rise straight from the sea”.
The plan included various edifices housing
the governing structures of the Order such as the
Magisterial Palace of the Grandmaster and the
Auberges for the different langues that formed part of
the Order.
The new city included a ‘Sacred Infirmary’
constructed in 1574. This was a hospital which served
to fulfil the Order’s religious charism to take care of the
sick. The new infirmary hosted 350 patients who were
attended to by doctors, surgeons, and pharmacists.
Winter/Spring 2016
MUSEI VATICANI
A colorful representation (ca. 1580/1581) of “The Great Siege of Malta” in 1565 with the city plans of Valletta in the inset
(lower left). One of the most famous military conflicts in history, the Great Siege saw a few thousand soldiers—led by
500 members of the Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes, and of Malta—fight off and triumph against
an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 Ottoman invaders and their allies. This painting, which is located in Vatican City, was
the work of the Italian priest and scientist, Ignazio Danti (1536-1586).
The European Conservative
23
Slaves and beggars received free prescriptions, while
lepers had a special clinic which saw to their medical
needs. Each knight was required to serve in the hospital
during his novitiate, and the Grand Master himself
would attend to patients on great solemnities. The
building functioned as a hospital until the beginning
of the 20th century.
The Conventual Church of the Order was to be
another exquisite landmark in the new city. Consecrated
in 1578, the Conventual Church was, in the words of
art historian Cynthia De Giorgio, “intended to be a
landmark and to be seen from almost anywhere on the
island, hence it was strategically placed and built high
on the rise of Mount Sceberras”. Its chief architect was
Gerolamo Cassar, a Maltese native who, according
to Professor Thake, was sent to Italy to familiarise
himself with Renaissance and Mannerist architecture.
Its austere exterior may deceive the unsuspecting
visitor for as one enters this great temple, one’s senses
are assaulted by an elaborate Baroque interior with
ornately carved walls, an exquisite ceiling depicting
the life of St. John the Baptist and eight exquisitely
decorated side chapels, each belonging to the eight
langues of the Order.
The church, now referred to as St. John’s CoCathedral, is still a living church which plays host to
a number of state occasions including the Mass of the
Holy Spirit at the start of each parliamentary legislature
as well as state commemorations and state funerals.
In terms of fortifications, according to Professor
Denis De Lucca, the new “city-fortress” was “intended
to form the strategic hub of a defensive network
calculated to protect the war galleys of the Knights
berthed in the Grand Harbour”. These fortifications
brought to Malta the finest military engineers who
altered these structures according to the “complicated
calculations using the knowledge of Euclid and
trigonometry which was then being disseminated by
so many Jesuit colleges all over Europe”.
The Jesuit Collegium Melitense was established in
the new city in 1592. The new college awarded the
Magister Philosophiae and Doctor Divinitatis degrees in
philosophy and theology while also being involved in
the teaching of grammar and the humanities. In 1676,
a school of anatomy and surgery was established at the
Order’s hospital. These two august institutions were
to form the basis of the University of Malta, which
was established in 1769 following the expulsion of the
Jesuit Order from Malta.
Valletta also provided a number of outlets for
public entertainment and intellectual enrichment. In
1732, a new public theatre was inaugurated, and in
1763, the foundations for a new public library were laid.
During the late 18th century, Valletta saw a number
of new buildings designed in the late Baroque style,
including the Auberge de Castille (which now houses
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS / MALTA
A watercolour of the Grand Harbour of Valletta painted by British artist J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851).
24
Winter/Spring 2016
the office of the Prime Minister), the Castellania, and
Palazzo Parisio (now housing the Ministry for Foreign
Affairs).
Although included in the original plans for the city,
the Order of St. John had to do without two elements
that were previously present in their settlement in
Rhodes. Firstly, Valletta did not have a collachio—a
segregated walled area for members of the Order. B.W.
Blouet has argued, “complete seclusion was difficult
to achieve alongside the Order’s crusading activities,
high living standards and the desire to defend Valletta
efficiently”.
Secondly, Valletta would not have a manderaggio—a
galley pen for the vessels of the Order. An area had
been designated on the northern side of the peninsula,
and excavation works had already began in an area that
was previously a pronounced valley. Blouet argues that
the northern shore was less sheltered and, in rough
weather, the entrance to the Grand Harbour would
have been difficult to negotiate. Shipbuilding and
ship-repair remained within the confines of the Grand
Harbour, across from the city of Valletta in Senglea
and Vittoriosa. The area previously intended for this
project turned into an infamous slum area with poverty
and social deprivation being the order of the day. This
slum was cleared in the post-war era, although some of
the previous social problems exist to the present day.
The French blockade
In 1797, Napoleon Bonaparte sent two spies to
Malta to report on its defences and make contact
with French Knights. They found some willing to
collaborate and conspire against the Order’s rule. In
June 1798, Bonaparte requested to enter the Grand
Harbour to replenish his water supplies. The Grand
Master replied that, as a neutral state, Malta only
allowed four ships from a belligerent nation to enter
the port. Bonaparte’s reply was unequivocal: if he
would not be allowed to replenish his supplies, “he
would take by force what should have been offered
freely”.
The growing sense of dissatisfaction within the
Order, its financial dependence on its properties in
France (confiscated in 1792), and the broad sympathy
with the Napoleonic cause was key to the French
occupation of Malta. French troops landed at various
bays throughout the Maltese islands and encountered
very little resistance. Strategies to defend the island
were undermined by the lack of clear instructions and
leadership.
The Maltese population was less receptive to
French Republican reforms, however. Aided by
the ecclesiastical authorities, a popular uprising
successfully led to a French retreat behind Valletta’s
city walls. The Maltese civilian leaders requested help
from the British Fleet. Admiral Nelson responded,
and a squadron was sent to blockade the French at the
Grand Harbour. After two years, food became scarce
and life behind the city walls became intolerable. The
French capitulated and left Malta in September 1800.
The European Conservative
KARELJ / CCA-SA 3.0
The Main Guard building—Guardia della Piazza—in
Valletta. Built in 1603 as a residence for the personal
guards of the Grand Master of the SMOM, the portico with
the Latin inscription was added later.
The British and Valletta
Initially, plans were made to return Malta back to
the Order of St. John. However, upon realising Malta’s
strategic significance and receiving the request of the
Maltese to remain under British protection, Malta
became part of the British Empire. The Treaty of Paris
confirmed Malta’s Crown Colony status in 1814.
In the Main Guard building, opposite the former
Magisterial Palace (now renamed the Governor’s
Palace), a new portico was added in 1814. Above
this portico, a Latin inscription served to remind
both coloniser and natives of this historic event:
MAGNAE ET INVICTAE BRITANNIAE
MELITENSIUM AMOR ET EUROPAE VOX HAS
INSULAS CONFIRMAT. A.D. 1814. (“To Great and
Unconquered Britain, the Love of the Maltese and the
Voice of Europe Confirms these Islands. A.D. 1814”).
The British administration seemed to have taken
an instinctive dislike towards Valletta’s Baroque
architecture. A number of palace interiors were redesigned, while some neo-Gothic and neo-Classic
buildings began to appear.
One such building indefinitely altered Valletta’s
skyline. After spending the winter of 1838 and 1839
in Malta, Dowager Queen Adelaide complained about
the lack of adequate place for worship for adherents
of the Church of England. She offered to finance
the construction of a new church on the site of the
former German Auberge (residence), which by then
had fallen into disuse. St. Paul’s Pro-Cathedral, with
its neo-Classical elegance and tall spire, was completed
in 1841.
25
During their stay in Malta, the British oversaw a
flourishing of commerce and trade. In the late 19th
century, Valletta had a population of approximately
24,000 individuals. Electric lighting was introduced for
the first time in 1882. The city had two theatres–the
Manoel Theatre and the Royal Opera House. In an
area of just 0.8 square km, the city housed 232 shops,
17 bakeries, six pharmacies, and 21 hotels and lodging
houses. A visitor at the turn of the century remarked:
“Whatever old Valletta may have been, modern Valletta
has totally changed for the better.” Ralph Richardson
praised its excellent shops, comfortable hotels, elegant
houses, and rapidly growing suburbs, which gave “a
general appearance of prosperity”.
The years leading up to World War II saw an increase
in nationalistic tensions and aspirations. In 1921, Malta
was granted a measure of self-government. The new
government met in the former Magisterial Palace, which
also served as the residence of the governor. Political
tensions remained rife and burgeoning nationalistic
fervour was gaining traction. Such tensions were put
aside briefly during these years.
During World War II, Malta was believed to be one
of the most bombed places on earth and Valletta bore
much of the brunt. Some buildings were irrevocably lost;
the neo-Classical Royal Opera House, the Auberges of
Provence and Auvergne, the Greek-Catholic Church
of Our Lady of Damascus, and several sections of the
city’s main thoroughfare—Strada Reale. Other buildings
were extensively damaged. The post-war reconstruction
retained the characteristics of Valletta’s gridiron pattern,
yet the new buildings lacked much of the old elegance
and refinement.
Valletta also experienced significant demographic
shifts. The population began to decrease drastically.
Several families lost their businesses or had their houses
damaged during the war. Some were evacuated to the
countryside and eventually chose to settle there. In the
post-war years, as the population became more affluent,
the small and often crowded conditions (frequently the
result of the partitioning of large palazzos into small
living quarters) in Valletta lost their appeal. However,
although the number of residents declined, the number
of visitors increased as an influx of local shoppers,
employees, and tourists continue to flock to the city on
a daily basis for work, leisure or necessity.
A capital city
Malta was granted independence from the British
Empire in 1964, and Valletta was confirmed as the
capital city of the new state. As a capital city, it would play
host to a number of heads of state, visiting dignitaries,
and international summits. By virtue of this role, it also
began hosting more state institutions and entities. In
the same year, a new design proposed to change the
main fortified entrance to Valletta. The city gate was to
be widened and an arcade hosting a number of shops
was to be constructed. Works began in 1964 and were
completed in 1965. The project was designed by the
Italian architect Alziro Bergonzo and was the source
26
of much criticism. This criticism never abated, and the
future of the entrance to Valletta was to be debated well
into the new millennium. A new project designed by
world-famous architect Renzo Piano was to re-fashion
this entrance. The gate was to be demolished, a new
Parliament House was to stand at land-facing entrance
of Valletta and the ruins of the Royal Opera House
were to be turned into an open-air performance space.
Once again, controversy abounded. Some
complained that the new structure did not belong in a
Baroque city, whilst others did not like the design itself.
Nonetheless, the new structure brings this city in the
21st century; it recognises that urban spaces evolve and
it beautifully blends the old with the modern.
The present and the future
As Valletta celebrates the 450th anniversary of its
foundation, one must recognise that the city is, first and
foremost, a living space shared by residents, visitors,
and workers. It’s necessary to resist the temptation of
treating the urban space and the buildings within as
simply historic or tourist sites; to do so would be to
miss out on the centuries of anecdotes, experiences,
and events, which the locals still recall and cherish to
this day.
Although originally designed as a Baroque cityfortress, Valletta has since changed. It now embraces
a myriad of architectural styles and designs firmly
embedded in the old gridiron pattern. The buildings
themselves have evolved, and former Auberges now
house government ministries and museums. Former
slum areas are now experiencing a slow regeneration.
The continuous exodus of residents to larger houses
in other towns and cities has halted; indeed, a new
generation seems to be rediscovering the charms that
Valletta has to offer. Old palazzos and grand houses,
which had been previously divided into smaller
housing units are now being restored into residences
and boutique hotels. These elements bode well for the
future of the city.
The city is also a quintessentially Catholic city, with
various grand churches giving witness to age-old piety,
which is sadly dissipating. These houses of worship—
once lovingly and carefully decorated by rich and poor
alike—run the risk of being turned into mere museums
devoid of their original context. According to Professor
De Lucca, the building of Valletta signalled the Order
of St. John’s intent to reside permanently in Malta. They
designed a city that provided a cosmopolitan urban
experience which had no precedent in Malta. Visitors
get a rare glimpse of what it must have meant to live
in a city-fortress. Yet they also get to visit a city which,
though designed to keep the enemy out, never stopped
looking beyond its confines to evolve and develop. This
still holds true today.
André P. DeBattista is a visiting lecturer at the Department of
Public Policy at the University of Malta. He is a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Arts and a Member of the Political Studies
Association (UK).
Winter/Spring 2016
The Benevolent Elitist
Edouard Chanot
A professor of political philosophy at University of
Paris-Est and a member of the Institut de France, Chantal
Delsol is undeniably one of France’s most remarkable
contemporary scholars. Her latest volume—on the
controversial subject of populism—reveals much
of her character. It shows her to be a member of an
intellectual elite, who has mastered both political theory
as well as the French language like few others have; at
the same time, it demonstrates her willingness to defend
the legitimacy of the voice of the people.
In the past decade, all European countries have
seen the rise of populist, anti-establishment parties.
For a long time, Germany was the exception; but even
there, the migration crisis has now started to challenge
the structure of the political parties. The problem is
that populism is a controversial and rather undefined
concept. It is used by European elites as an insult
against those who would defend the interest of the
people. But in a democracy, all parties claim to do just
that. As Delsol puts it: “The contemporary obsessive
fear of populism becomes the most pernicious aspect
of contemporary thought”. Indeed, she adds, “[t]here
is a certain strangeness in defining a political trend
by its imbecility—especially in a democracy, where
pluralism and tolerance, in theory, reign despite diverse
opinions”. She then asks: “[W]hy do our democracies
recuse themselves from their founding principles?”
Going beyond this apparent contradiction, Delsol
delves into a well-crafted study of contemporary
populism. And in doing so, she teaches the reader a
few things about the importance of roots (enracinement),
emancipation, and the search for truth.
The idiotès
To better grasp the current populist phenomenon
that now seems to be spreading on both sides of the
Atlantic, Delsol begins with a careful examination
of what the Ancients thought about similar popular
movements. According to the Greeks, “someone
who belongs to a small group and looks at the world
solely from his own perspective, lacking objectivity
and distrustful of the universal”, is an idiotès. In such
situations, the demagogue chooses to flatter the idiotès,
finding ways to nourish the base passions of ‘the many’
instead of aiming at the higher good. In contrast to this,
the real citizen “gazes at society according to a common
[shared] point of view”.
Plato identifies ‘the many’ with chaos, mediocrity,
and the whims of the crowd. Instead, he argues for
the superiority of ‘the few’, for which critics have
accused him of elitism. Aristotle, in turn, bases his
idea of government on phronesis—that is, prudence—
which takes into account popular wisdom. Delsol
argues that Plato’s apparent elitism is quite similar to
the contemporary view of populism. Indeed, she says
The European Conservative
Populisme, les demeurés de l’histoire
Chantal Delsol
Paris: Éditions du Rocher, 2015
that “today, a unique [universal] moral truth determines
the ends of politics”, while those “who would defend
‘particularisms’ against such an imposed universal” are
considered idiots. Thus, like Plato, today’s elites make
no distinction between ‘the many’ who reject the need
to pursue the common good, and on the other hand,
‘the many’ who are, in fact, guided by prudence, but
dismiss the possibility of a priori knowledge—of a
“truth provided in advance”
Enlightenment ideology
Delsol then addresses the powerful shift in
thinking that occurred with the Enlightenment.
Under the influence of Kant, a new understanding
of reason acquired the force of absolute, universal
truth. The fleeting, questioning reason of the ancients
became Reason itself—a so-called truth without any
real questioning. In other words, both ideology and
abstraction prevailed.
27
The Enlightenment made “universal and absolute
reason triumph in the general will [of the people]”.
This was unprecedented. Even Rousseau still thought
that the general will was produced by particular
interests that were neither universal nor absolute.
According to Delsol, Kant went further: he promoted
the existence of a universal truth that could be directly
grasped and reached by all citizens together—without
the mediation of particularisms. There is no longer any
mediation between the universal and the particular;
the universal is called down from Plato’s Heavens into
the actual world.
Delsol concludes that offering a “transcendental
dimension to the truth as discovered by the general will
bring particular truth down to the level of ontological
villainy”. As a consequence, the citizen is no longer
one who cares about the common good—something
which is necessarily particular to the polis (πόλις)—
but rather one who adopts the universal ideology of
reason.
Whereas the Ancient citizen sought the interests
of his polis rather than of his own private interests,
the post-modern citizen must seek the interests of the
world rather than those of his own polis. Thus, thinkers
in the 18th century made liberation from particularism
the new absolute. The Enlightenment can thus be seen,
as Delsol convincingly argues, as having invented the
ideology of emancipation. Emancipation that is, from
the particular, historical, and local.
Populism expresses a reaction against the
development of such universalist concepts. “[T]he
ideology of emancipation”, she says, “… speaks for all
men in time and space, dismisses separations, crosses
borders, despises circumstances … it is a vast rationalist
enterprise which, if necessary, demolishes the diversity
of mores to extend its law as far as possible”.
Intellectuals hubris
“Fed with abstract ideas”, Delsol says, the
intellectual elite lives in a world of illusions. Thinking
they can liberate people, they take actions but cannot
grasp reality. Unsurprisingly, they end up feeling
betrayed by the people.
The Soviets experienced this feeling a century
ago. Hoping to eradicate misery and build the world
anew with the help of revolutionary cadres, Lenin was
confronted instead with a people who simply aspired
to have a decent way of life and preserve their customs.
These desires, according to Lenin, were merely a
reflection of bourgeois ideology. But according to
Delsol, they were actually the reflection of a simple
human need: to be rooted in the reality of life. But
too often for intellectual elites—who are blind to such
concepts—“reality has no legitimacy”.
Most people cannot accept such ideological
experiments. As Delsol writes, “[o]ne does not
know of a people who prefer abstraction over the
reality of existence. That is why their natural reaction
is often rebellion … against the doctrines of the
Enlightenment”.
28
Populist speech
Wanting to understand populism on its own terms,
Delsol analyses rhetoric across Europe. In doing
so, she reveals the true spirit of populism. Defining
populism is a highly challenging undertaking. First of
all, populism is never impartial or objective; rather,
it denounces and takes sides. Delsol also emphasises
the natural tendency of elites to keep power to
themselves. Populism becomes attractive, she says,
because “[t]he people do not always have the feeling
that they are defended by a democracy, although it is
meant to do so”. Hence, populism often appears in
societies or regimes which are perceived to have what
contemporary political scientists call “democratic
deficit”.
Populism also appears to be a way of being. Moreover,
because populist leaders oppose abstract concepts
and are often supported by culturally impoverished
people, leaders are often seen as an example of a
“living theory”. This can be dangerous. Populists,
according to Delsol, also “do not conceptualize their
convictions—and that is why one can easily think they
have emotions and no convictions”. They proclaim
“common things without trying to root them in a body
of doctrines or justify them with some philosophy.
They have no ideology to present and, even more so,
no systems”. Populists believe in some principles but
not in the kinds of concepts that would indicate what
to do in every circumstance.
Delsol also points to populist criticism of modern
individualism, in addition to populism’s antipathy
to the “omnipotent state”. “[I]t is logical,” she says,
“that criticism of the omnipotent state and criticism
of individualism go hand-in-hand since the first
engenders the other while answering it”. Thus, while
the elites are perceived as “responsible for moral
perversions, corruption, and political chicanery”,
populists celebrate the individual. Populists, therefore,
promote family values and civic virtues at the broad
individual level. They grasp onto the concept of
identity and belonging, and condemn the homogeneity
and uniformity caused by, for example, globalization.
Emancipation and enracinement
Still, Delsol does not entirely dismiss emancipation.
She recognizes that it is desirable but difficult. It
requires strength—as well as an effort to become more
‘rooted’. “[I]t is no surprise that we see a defence of
enracinement [rootedness] among people feeling fragile
against the powerful ones”, she says.
However, she regrets both the destructive
tendency of emancipation and the paralyzing tendency
among popular classes who often resist the advance
of progress. This is often expressed in their fear
of experimenting and trying new things. “Both
temptations are excessive and lead to the absurd”,
she says. In her view, communism appears to be the
“monstrous conceptualisation of the Enlightenment’s
emancipation”, while Nazism is the “monstrous
perversion of enracinement in particularism”.
Winter/Spring 2016
Indeed, this enracinement can become a radical
closing off to the koinos (the common). The idiotès can
“idolize particularity to the point of loathing difference
[or otherness]. This is the specific perversion of
Nazism”. Because of Nazism, “Europe currently
rejects with horror any idea that opposes individualism
and limitless emancipation … and describes ‘identities’
as fundamental human requirements”.
The idiotès is highly resistant to time and
space: He is both “against progress” and “against
globalization and Europe”. Resentment stems
from this resistance. According to the “all powerful
ideology of emancipation, it is in the nature of man
to deploy himself on these two levels”. But he who
cannot, “cannot be happy”, she says. Delsol does not
entirely dismiss this language; but she still argues that
the populist is an idiotès—in the Greek sense (not an
‘idiot’ in modern parlance).
Nevertheless, Delsol gives more credit to the
idiotès. Indeed, she says, “one cannot say, like in ancient
Greece, that the popular element leans toward its own
private interest, while the elite gives priority to the
common interest. Everything is more complicated and
is even often inverted”. In my view, we may go further
than Delsol on this point: The individualism that has
been promoted by liberalism decisively contributed to
the destruction of the sense of responsibility among
the elites. With such an ethos, it is no surprise that the
elites have lost sight of the common good.
From the polis to truth
Delsol’s insights are remarkable. First, she says
that in the “popular milieu, people believe that the
citizen is not a universal individual living in some
abstract country but rather a man incarnated in space
and time”. These serve as “bedrocks”, she says, “on
which man can lift himself up towards the common
good”. At a time of “limitless emancipation”, the
people can provide the elites with common sense.
Thus, the former should engage with the latter, instead
of insulting them. This debate should carry on in
mutual respect since “none of the two tendencies—the
love of our roots and the appeal of emancipation—is
meant to win people over”. In Delsol’s mind, both
terms are equally essential and “the West was created
with emancipation as a new dogma”. She concludes
that “[a] well-ordered political regime should “educate
people to work towards emancipation and educate
the elites to work towards enracinement—giving to
both what they lack”. Such a regime could do this, for
instance, “by convincing people of the barbarism of
the death penalty”.
All this requires that people seek the truth in the
manner of the Greeks—that is, without ideology. In
this way, it becomes a personal and philosophical quest,
rather than a collective and political one. All political
communities are by their nature particular. Because
the absolute is always hard (if not impossible) to reach,
intellectuals should make an effort not to give in to
an excess of emancipation. One should realize that
particularisms can point towards universal truth—and
that citizens should devote themselves to the good of
their own political community. In this, Delsol, who
explores all these ideas with verve and nuance, is an
excellent guide.
Edouard Chanot is the Director of the Institut Clisthène in
Paris and a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science.
A. SAVIN / CCA-SA 3.0
A view of the Acropolis of Athens from Philopappos Hill. “[A]t various times throughout its uninterrupted 6,000 yearlong cultural history [it] served as dwelling place, fortress, sanctuary, and symbol” (J. Hurwit, 2004).
The European Conservative
29
Briefly Noted
in collaboration with The
University Bookman*
The Warrior for Free Government
Francis P. Sempa
W
inston Churchill served fifty years in the British
House of Commons, was Prime Minister
twice, served in several British governments in times of
war and peace, and wrote more than fifty books, hundreds
of articles and speeches, and countless letters and official
memos. As a soldier and war correspondent, he fought
in colonial outposts in India and Africa, and served for
a brief time in the trenches of the Western front during
the First World War. He spent a decade in the “political
wilderness” during which time he repeatedly and
prophetically warned his countrymen and the world of
the growing Nazi threat to the global balance of power.
As Prime Minister in the spring and summer of 1940,
he most likely saved Western civilization by resisting
repeated urgings of his colleagues in the war cabinet to
make a deal with Hitler and rallying the British nation and
empire to fight on alone against Germany. In the early
years of the Cold War, he was among the first to publicly
warn the Western democracies about the threat posed by
Soviet communism.
This remarkable record of accomplishment, however,
was marred by many failures and missteps that could have
derailed the careers of lesser men. Churchill for a time
was a political chameleon, switching from Conservative
to Liberal, then back again, and burning political bridges
as a consequence. In the early years of the First World
War, he championed the disastrous Gallipoli campaign
Stalin, Truman, and Churchill in Potsdam in July 1945.
30
and was forced to resign as First Lord of the Admiralty.
In the 1930s, a succession of Conservative governments
refused him office, believing Churchill to be reckless,
unstable and a warmonger. Back at the Admiralty in early
1940, Churchill oversaw the failed naval expedition to
Norway. It was only with great reluctance that the King
offered Churchill the prime ministership on 10 May 1940,
as the German army stormed into Belgium and France.
Churchill, as Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn
points out in his enlightening new book, had a lifetime
of trials, and his response to those trials is instructive and
holds important lessons for the Western democracies. In
Churchill’s Trial, Arnn distills from what he rightly calls
“one of the richest records of human undertaking”,
including several lesser-known essays written by
Churchill, the character traits and guiding principles that
Churchill brought to the greatest political challenges of
the twentieth century: the First World War, the rise of
Nazism, the challenge of communism, and the seemingly
irresistible march of democratic socialism.
Arnn recounts that as a young war correspondent
in South Africa, head of the Admiralty in World War I, a
critic of appeasement in the 1930s, and most especially
as Prime Minister during World War II, Churchill had
the courage born of “a sense of danger” and fear;
“indomitable perseverance” in the face of daunting tasks;
and fierceness and an incomparable will to win when the
alternative was an end to freedom. When the Dunkirk
evacuation was underway and Paris about to fall to the
GERMAN FEDERAL ARCHIVES / KOBLENZ
Winter/Spring 2016
Nazis, Churchill addressed the full cabinet on the issue
of a possible deal with Hitler. “I am convinced,” he told
them, “that every man of you would rise up and tear
me down from my place if I were for one moment to
contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story
of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one
of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”
This same courage and indomitable perseverance, Arnn
notes, manifested themselves in Churchill’s capture by
and subsequent escape from the Boers, the readiness of
the fleet on the eve of World War I, and his persistence
in opposing his own party’s leaders in the Commons over
the issue of rearmament in the 1930s.
Although Churchill is most remembered for his
wartime leadership, he also exhibited prudence and a
recognition that circumstances and necessity “shape the
choices of statesmen”. As both a student and writer of
history, he understood that “there is always more error
than design in human affairs”. He frequently counseled
restraint in international affairs. One of his more famous
sayings, after all, is that “it is better to jaw-jaw than to
war-war”.
Churchill was also a staunch opponent of democratic
socialism and feared that it would eventually lead
to injustice and tyranny at home just as it had abroad
in nations subjected to communist rule. Churchill,
Arnn writes, was “relentless in resisting socialism” and
“rejected the doctrine and its political party root and
branch”. Socialism, he believed, ignored human nature
and would stifle the individual initiative and energy so
essential to producing economic growth. It would also
lead to a “socialist aristocracy” that would act to further
its own interests instead of those of the people.
Yet he also supported and promoted social reforms
and a social safety net, believing that the state’s provision
of help to those who suffer misfortune, in Arnn’s words,
“becomes the free market’s partner” and “breeds loyalty
to the liberal state with its capitalist ways”.
In all of those challenges, Churchill’s overriding
goal in resisting what he called “mass effects” was the
survival of free constitutional government—that is,
limited government subject to the rule of law. Churchill
revered the institutions and laws that comprise the
British Constitution and the governmental framework
established by the United States Constitution. “Churchill
taught,” writes Arnn, that the “greatest statesmen,
willful, ambitious, strong, and artful, work within
[the Constitution’s] bounds and in support of its
continuation.” He opposed foreign totalitarian regimes
that threatened to extinguish free government and fought
against ideologies and philosophies of government that
threatened it from within.
Arnn concludes his book by noting that “[w]e live
in the same modern world that Churchill occupied,” and
therefore “Churchill’s trial is also our trial”. He reminds
us that in Churchill’s only major work of fiction, Savrola,
Churchill’s Trial:
Winston Churchill and the
Salvation of Free Government
Larry P. Arnn
New York: Nelson Books, 2015
the main character “claims that civilizations eventually
become corrupt, lose their virtue, and fall”. Whether
Western civilization follows that same historical pattern
is an open question. Arnn believes that Churchill shows
us the way to the salvation of free government.
Francis P. Sempa is a contributor to Population Decline and
the Remaking of Great Power Politics (Potomac Books,
2011), and the author of Geopolitics: From the Cold War
to the 21st Century (Transaction Books, 2002). He has written
on historical and foreign policy topics for Joint Force Quarterly,
Strategic Review, The National Interest, The Washington
Times, and other publications. He is an attorney, an adjunct
professor of political science at Wilkes University, and a contributing
editor to American Diplomacy. This review originally appeared
in the Winter 2016 edition of The University Bookman.
* The University Bookman was founded in 1960 by Russell Kirk. It seeks to “redeem the time by identifying
and discussing those books that diagnose the modern age and support the renewal of culture and the common
good”. Its Editor is Gerald J. Russello, who also serves as our US Correspondent. For more information about
subscriptions, submissions, or re-publications, visit: www.kirkcenter.org/index.php/bookman
The European Conservative
31
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32
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d e b l au w e t i j g e r
Winter/Spring 2016
The European Conservative
33
The Power of the Imagination
Alex Catharino
Without a doubt, among the greatest intellectual
influences on contemporary conservatives was the
American historian Russell Kirk. Using the methodology
provided by other scholars, we can analyse popular
culture, and mainstream Hollywood productions
in particular, to grasp Kirk’s own idea of the moral
imagination.
Few authors in the 20th century were able understand
the challenge of conveying the human drama as
accurately as Russell Kirk. Throughout a vast intellectual
career, Kirk showed that conservative thought is the
negation of all ideological concepts, forasmuch as its goal
is to preserve the moral principles and the crucial social
institutions of our civilisation, guided by the ideals of
order, freedom, and justice. More than a policy proposal,
Kirkian conservatism is a lifestyle based on education,
culture, and the expression of a certain Christian
humanism sustained by the sacramental view of reality
in which the moral and social institutions are not mere
historical accidents, but necessary developments which
spring from human nature itself.
One of the most relevant themes developed by
Kirk is the notion of a moral imagination, defined by
the author in Eliot and His Age as “that power of ethical
perception which strides beyond the barriers of private
RUSSELL KIRK CENTER FOR CULTURAL RENEWAL
A 1962 press photograph of Russell Kirk (1918-1994).
34
experience and events of the moment” while aspiring
for the apprehension “of the right order in the soul and
right order in the commonwealth”. In this sense, the
moral imagination can be seen as part of an individual
process revealing the meaning and purpose of life and
transcending the natural necessity; for it is not merely
an instinct, but rather an attribute and expression of
freedom, passion, and reason. The moral imagination
presents itself in myths, fables, allegories, parables, and
art. It conveys to future generations the norms that were
internalised by the common sense and traditional customs
of society. According to Kirk in Enemies of the Permanent
Things, these norms “are the practical expressions of
what mankind has learnt in the school of hard knocks”.
In the current cultural context of the Western world,
defined by Nobel Prize-winning Peruvian-Spanish writer
Mario Vargas Llosa as “the civilisation of the spectacle”,
some film productions and television series occupy an
outstanding influence in the formation of our moral
imagination and often play a more impactful role in our
lives than novels and poems, plays and operas.
From an artistic point of view, even the most
crowd-pleasing movies should not be underestimated
as a lower category genre because, as the Canadian
literary critic Northrop Frye has noted, they are cultural
productions that respond better to the yearning for
individuality typical of the modern bourgeois ethos, as
the Shakespearean tragedies and the operas composed
by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart did in their times.
In defence of our civilisation’s traditions,
conservatives must be prudent, avoiding elitist attitudes
similar to those taken by the philosophers Theodor
Adorno and Max Horkheimer, neither of whom
recognised any artistic value in the works developed by
the so-called cultural industry. In many ways, American
art critic Camille Paglia’s conception offers a more
balanced perception of the educational role played by
the mass culture in Western societies, as can be seen, for
example, in her clarifying analysis of the film Revenge of the
Sith in her 2012 book, Glittering Images: A Journey Through
Art from Egypt to Star Wars.
The challenge of mass culture
American literary critic Paul A. Cantor, currently one
of today’s acclaimed experts on William Shakespeare and
other classic works of English literature, wrote two crucial
books for the understanding of the moral imagination
present in mass culture productions: Gilligan Unbound:
Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization and The Invisible Hand
in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and
TV. In the highly praised Gilligan Unbound, two particular
analyses on the representation of the relationship
between individuals and the governmental authority are
made with vast erudition and impressive argumentative
competence.
To address the series Gilligan’s Island and Star Trek,
both produced in the 1960s, Cantor demonstrates how
Winter/Spring 2016
both television productions reassert the democratic
ideology that cultivates the mentality of self-indulgence
expressed by the “American way of life” ideal. In
the defence of the true notion of tradition, real
conservatives—unlike the misperceived idea of what
is conservative nature—have to take a critical stance
against this subservient homogenisation that establishes
a sort of a civil religion.
Through the chapters the book Gilligan Unbound,
Cantor analyses the cartoon The Simpsons and the TV
series The X-Files. Here, he demonstrates how mass
cultural productions in a post-Cold War context tend to
express mistrust in the authority of nation states and the
true agenda of their rulers. A significant proportion of
conservatives in the United States no longer foster the
naive vision of classical liberals or social democrats that
usually accredit the state with main role of maintaining
order, freedom, and justice. Just like the individualist
libertarians, among which Cantor himself is included, a
big part of this new generation of American conservatives
believe that the Judeo-Christian moral principles and
ordered liberty tradition that formed part of the United
States’ national identity are now endangered by the
advance of state centralisation.
In The Politics of Prudence, Russell Kirk places emphasis
on the need to stand against the aggrandisement of
the state and calls forth the courage and imagination
of his fellow conservatives “to advert the triumph of
the centralisers; for that triumph would be followed
swiftly enough by the decay of the American Republic”.
The dramatic obsolescence of the historical political
community—both as a civilizational purpose and as
a habit of mind—is directly related to the twilight of
authority that is increasingly being replaced by centralising
conduct of the discretionary power, as perceived by
the sociologist and American historian Robert Nisbet.
The conclusive bedrock of the nature of this crisis—in
which true authority is replaced by the will to power—is
illustrated in the famous dictum of Lord Acton when
he states that “power tends to corrupt and absolute
power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always
bad men, even when they exercise influence and not
authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or
the certainty of corruption by authority”.
The value of the allegorical
Once again, the allegories provided by the moral
imagination help us to better understand the risks of
corruption brought about by the unbridled desire to
gain or maintain power. William Shakespeare’s classic
warnings in Macbeth and Richard III still vividly echo in
several popular productions, such as the popular TV
series House of Cards. Similarly, the book The Lord of
the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien and its movie adaptation
directed by Peter Jackson clearly convey the impossibility
of fighting power by using power itself. In a letter, the
acclaimed author states that “power” is an ominous and
sinister word in all these tales, except as applied to the
gods”. In Tolkien’s fantastic world, the seduction of
creatures in pursuit of power is a recurring theme that
The European Conservative
has its best representation in the very idea of the “One
Ring”, a maleficent artefact created by the evil Sauron
in order to fully control the will of all other creatures
and finally become a god-king. This seductive appeal of
temporal power is one of the greatest moral problems
that must be faced, since the desire and quest for the
control and power over one’s fellowmen is one of the
hallmarks of original sin in human nature, which, as the
famous Lord Acton demonstrates, primarily affects the
so-called “great men”.
The justifications for the expansion of power by
the state are usually upheld by distorted and deceitful
ideological views, coming from both the political right
and left. Both sides aim to improve human nature and
the dynamics of society by secular and artificial means,
something that always implies a violent social revolution.
By pointing out the mistakes of such ideologies, Russell
Kirk’s conservatism echoed the themes developed by
other great thinkers since the French Revolution and to
the present days. This included people such as Edmund
Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville, as well as other more
contemporary thinkers such as Irving Babbitt, José
Ortega y Gasset, Eric Voegelin, Raymond Aron, Gerhart
Niemeyer, and Thomas Molnar.
The importance of Eliot
Although the aforementioned authors have
made significant contributions to conservatism, no
philosophical or sociological treatise had presented
the struggle between the individual conscience and the
E. KOCZELA / CCA-SA 4.0
A portrait of T. S. Eliot (1988-1965).
35
demonic ideological forces of our time in such depth as
T. S. Eliot’s play Murder in Cathedral.
According to Kirk’s analysis in Eliot and His Age,
Eliot’s theatrical play written in verse utilises the historical
narrative of Archbishop Thomas Beckett’s murder by
knights of King Henry II in 1170 as a representation of
modern struggle between the human soul and the state.
After being tempted with selfish prudence by secular
power and reckless alliances, the only possible way to
redemption, most often, is to “fare forward to the end”,
which, in some cases, leads to the crown of martyrdom.
In a passage from Murder in the Cathedral, the second
tempter states that “rule over men reckons no madness”,
further adding that “power is present, for him who will
yield”. In Eliot’s play, Archbishop Beckett rejects this
tempter by concluding that “those who put their faith in
worldly order / not controlled by the order of God, / in
confident ignorance, but arrest disorder, / make it fast,
breed fatal disease, / degrade what they exalt”.
In popular culture, a fine example of how a hero can
be seduced by a tempter offering promises of unlimited
power, causing him or her to become the villain of the
story, appears in the movie Revenge of the Sith, the third
episode of the Star Wars saga. The relationship between
the characters Palpatine and Anakin Skywalker resembles
that between Mephistopheles and Faust, as shown in
particular in Christopher Marlowe and Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe’s versions. By asserting that “all those who
gain power are afraid to lose it”, the ambitious and
manipulative Palpatine shares the same political vision
of the sophist Thrasymachus, which, as presented in
the debate with Socrates in Plato’s Republic, argued that
“justice is the advantage of the stronger”.
With the tempting offer of being given the power to
save his wife from death and at the same time restore the
order in a society beset by corruption and war, Palpatine
(the tempter) seduces and corrupts Anakin, by proposing
a kind of satanic pact that ends up transforming him into
Darth Vader, a servant of the dark side of the Force.
Darth Vader then destroys the Jedi Order, guardians
of peace and justice of the Republic, allowing for the
implementation of Palpatine’s despotic Empire.
The narrative of Anakin’s defeat can be used as
a metaphor to explain the ideas of Eric Voegelin and
Russell Kirk, according to which the external disorders
of society are but a reflection of internal disorders of the
individual members in a political community. Anakin is
tainted with many characteristics of a tragic hero: his fall
was due to his choice of the wrong means to right ends.
Most of the time, the rise of state power and government
centralisation are the result of people’s naïve trust in
governmental measures that promise to increase their
well-being. This perspective sacrifices liberty in the name
of safety.
The fight against control and decay
In recent years in the United States and Europe, many
state actions have tried to expand government control
over, for example, information content. The justification
for this conduct is the fight against terrorism and/or
36
the demands of political correctness. Interestingly, two
recently released movies allow us to analyse this problem
quite clearly.
The first is Spectre, the latest film about Ian Flaming’s
British spy character James Bond. Compared to previous
Bond movies starring Daniel Craig, Spectre can be
considered to be the best and most faithful to the original
spirit of the series, for it retrieves the character’s virility.
The moral imagination of the narrative is manifested in
his sense of duty, obsessive search for the truth, reliability
of his promises made to the enemy while shielding of his
beloved and friends—virtues that stick to agent 007 until
his self-sacrifice in the name of what it is right.
The second is The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2,
the second half of the final part of Suzanne Collins book
trilogy’s film adaptation. The role of the protagonist
Katniss Everdeen, played by the beautiful and talented
young actress Jennifer Lawrence, once again carries out
presenting the psychological and moral dramas that
outline the actions of this heroic and rebellious woman.
Following the tradition of the dystopian novel, Collins’
narrative presents several philosophical questions about
the importance of moral choices and individual freedom,
giving rise to discussions about various social issues.
The Catholic symbolism presented throughout the plot,
presented most clearly in the book versions, is one factor
that sets apart The Hunger Games as the production with
the highest degree of moral imagination among the
dystopias in the recent years.
There is an important common ground between the
two films that has to be approached, as it is an alert to
the aforementioned political situation. The Hunger Games:
Mockingjay, Part 2 and Spectre both directly examine the
government’s attempt to monopolise and manipulate
information, and they stress that, frequently, apparent
allies are criminals as dangerous as one’s political
opponents.
In this fight against the decay plaguing our Western
civilisation, a prudent conservative cannot count on
government centralisation as a tool for the restoration
of order, freedom, and justice. In the search for a
solution to the crisis of modern times, it is paramount
to rediscover the individual ethical discipline offered by
the moral imagination and the real sense of community
founded on religious sense. For the success of this
crusade, the allegories provided by the popular culture
can be an important ally because, as Russell Kirk said in
his book Enemies of the Permanent Things: “if a man relies
wholly upon his private rational powers, he will lose his
faith—and perhaps the world as well, risking his nature
at the Devil’s chess-game. But if a man fortifies himself
with the lessons of the ages, and so is fit to confront
even a diabolical adversary”.
Alex Catharino is Vice-President of the Interdisciplinary Center
for Ethics and Personalist Economics, Managing Editor of
the academic journals Communio and Mises, and Resident
Researcher for the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal.
His most recent book is Russell Kirk: The Pilgrim in the
Wasteland published by É Realizações Editora in São Paulo.
Winter/Spring 2016
Orchestrating a Renaissance
Andrew Balio
At first glance, the classical music community in
Western Europe and North America appears to be acting
strangely, like a man in a mid-life crisis. The strategies
proposed by its thought leaders in their desperate
attempt to make classical music relevant to the rapidly
shifting currents of popular youth culture remind us of a
60-year-old divorcé who is determined to land a woman
40 years his junior—and whose best ideas to accomplish
that feat involve a flashy new Ferrari and hair plugs.
Hence, Europeans have run out and bought
themselves Jean Nouvel’s gleaming new Philharmonie de
Paris, a concert hall whose audacious curves and rebellious
angles loudly celebrate the brashness and irreverence of
youth. But the Philharmonie is as ridiculously unfitting
a vehicle for classical music as the Ferrari is for our
pitifully ageing divorcé. We know instantly what he’s up
to—and also that it will never work—when we see him
zipping past us, hair plugs blowing in the wind.
That’s what we notice about the classical music
community at first glance. And if that were the
whole story, we might as well shake our heads at the
archetypical follies and pretensions of ageing hipsters
and simply laugh it off.
But there is something more sinister going on,
too, and for this we could also take Paris’s new hall
as a symbol. Banished far from the centre of city life,
assigned to the périphérique in a poor neighbourhood of
mainly North African immigrants, it embodies the nearly
universal, modern expectation that classical music must
be ‘transformative’ for the socially disaffected and that
it must break down class barriers and musical categories.
It must contribute to the causes of multiculturalism,
social justice, and aesthetic relativism in the hope that it
can redeem itself by ending up finally on the ‘left’ side
of history.
Thus, classical music’s supporting structure of
academia, administration, and public opinion has been
relentlessly pushing it to take on the ideologies and
progressive politics that have already so thoroughly
infected and sterilised modern art and architecture. Not
a week goes by when we are not subject to someone’s
petty indictment of the entirety of classical music
because of its association with dead, white, European
men.
The canon, we are told, and indeed the entire
Western tradition, reek of oppression. Orchestras are
being coaxed into a repudiation of their heritage and,
at the same time, are being systematically conscripted
to join the march towards a brave new world. It seems
that the obsession with youth culture goes hand in hand,
perhaps not surprisingly, with the adoption of both a
sophomoric idealism and a churlish rebellion against
all forms of power by adults who really ought to have
accumulated enough life experience in the meantime to
know better.
Adults really ought to have recognised by the time
they’re put in charge of important things like orchestras
that ours is not, in fact, an age when the tide of progress
is finally and inevitably carrying us towards the golden
shores of the Enlightenment’s promised utopia, as many
NICH MARKETING / CCA-SA 4.0
The post-modern work of architect Jean Nouvel, the Philharmonie de Paris, which opened in 2015 and cost €390 million.
The European Conservative
37
NICH MARKETING / CCA-SA 4.0
“Concert with Frederick the Great in Sanssouci” by Adolph Menzel (1815-1905), located in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
seem to believe. Ours is not an age when our greatest
risk is that of being among those justly left behind,
either because we were too stubborn to accept the new
order or else too foolish to perceive it.
No, what we are staring down is a cultural tsunami
that arose from our violent attempt to break with
history. And from its deep and hidden origin it has been
swelling, almost unheeded, into a destructive force that
threatens to swallow up our civilisation.
Rather than running out to frolic with the other
children in the low tide that always precedes such a
deadly deluge, the classical music community should be
running as fast as it can in the opposite direction towards
high ground. It should be prepared to hang on for dear
life—and to hold on to those friends who know how to
survive the ravaging storm that swiftly approaches.
The classical music community is blessed to have
such friends, though it remains generally ignorant of
them. Like the monks who clung to the rocky shoulders
of Skellig Michael in Ireland during the 5th and 6th
centuries, preserving the best accomplishments of
European civilisation in their hand-copied books, there
are among us those who have kept the best traditions
of art and architecture from being washed away by the
floods of modernism. They have survived the storms
of rebellion and ideology that have swept through their
traditions to usher in the renaissance that is the budding
atelier movement in art and the New Urbanism in
architecture.
What’s more, there are many like them in other
fields and endeavours, too—people who have found
ways to overcome the crushing forces of the modern
world in order to preserve non-utilitarian things and
38
“old-fashioned” values. The Slow Food and ‘farmto-table’ movements, for example, have successfully
beaten back fast food and ‘Big Agriculture’ to create a
growing niche for small farmers and traditional, localscale, culinary craftsmanship.
Last year, we launched the Future Symphony
Institute to bring such friends to the attention and aid of
classical music. Our aim was to share their wisdom and
experiences with those who need them, and to eventually
“orchestrate a renaissance for live classical music” based
on the principles of conservation and traditionalism—
and on an honest reckoning of history and human
nature. The Future Symphony Institute functions as
a think-tank, bringing together the best minds from
such seemingly disparate realms as philosophy, art and
architecture, political thought, design, composition, and
business to consider the complicated challenges that
threaten the rich tradition of Western art and music.
We hope others will join us—along with our
esteemed research fellows, the philosopher Roger
Scruton, the composer John Borstlap, and the architect
Léon Krier—in our efforts to preserve the best of our
European musical traditions against the onslaught of
the coming wave. Friends are needed more than ever
who believe in beauty—and who are willing to fight to
support the dawn of a new renaissance tomorrow.
Andrew Balio has served as principal trumpet of the Baltimore
Symphony Orchestra since his invitation by Yuri Temirkanov in
2001. He is former principal of the Israel Philharmonic under
Zubin Mehta and of the Orquesta Sinfonica del Estado de Mexico.
He is the founder and director of the Future Symphony Institute.
Information is available here: www.futuresymphony.org
Winter/Spring 2016
The European Conservative
39
40
Winter/Spring 2016
The Legacy of King John III Sobieski
Miltiades Varvounis
There can be no denying that the Polish King John
III Sobieski (1629-1696) was one of the most prominent
historical figures and warrior-kings in European history.
Sobieski not only changed the European map but also
paved the way for the Enlightenment.
He also saved Europe from the Ottomans,
leading the combined forces of the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth, in cooperation with the Holy Roman
Empire of the German-speaking nations, in battle
against the invading Turks on 11-12 September 1683.
King Sobieski’s heroic leadership in this battle was
decisive and will, in fact, be commemorated on 12
September of this year with the unveiling of a statue
on Kahlenberg Mountain, on the northern edge of the
city of Vienna, the site where the battle took place 333
years ago.
Despite this historic victory and Sobieksi’s critical
role in it, his military triumphs remain largely unknown
outside Poland, and his military campaigns have not
been taught in the curricula of military academies from
École Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr to West Point. What
is the story and legacy of this underrated king, who
dominated his times so profoundly?
The ‘Lion of Lechistan’
Because of his proven military skills, John Sobieski
was elected the King of Poland in 1674 (at this time,
Poland was an elective monarchy). In 1683, Poland,
which had gained the name of Antemurale Christianitatis
(Bulwark of Christendom), entered an alliance with
Austria against a resurgent Ottoman Empire determined
to conquer Central Eastern Europe and spread Islam
into the very heart of the West. In the hot summer of
that year, a colossal Ottoman army of 200,000 led by the
ambitious Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa advanced into
Austrian territory and besieged the imperial capital of
Vienna, wreaking desperation and fear among hopeless
Christians.
At that crucial moment when everything seemed
lost, Sobieski mobilised Polish forces and marched
through Austria, knowing that the Christian world
depended on him. His legendary reputation as the ‘Lion
of Lechistan’ [an alternative name for Poland] made
Sobieski the natural choice for the overall command
of the Christian forces. Leading a combined army
of more than 70,000, Sobieski defeated the forces of
darkness and the Ottoman camp, their grandiose tents,
ostentatious treasures, prisoners, and much of their
weaponry fell into his hands. The Polish king entered
the city in triumph, humiliating Habsburg Emperor
Leopold I who had earlier fled his capital in panic and
played no role at all in its relief.
Such a decisive triumph with no parallel in history
could not have been achieved without determined
leadership, superior military skills, and the deadliest
The European Conservative
A 17th century portrait of King John III Sobieski (16291696) by an unknown artist, located at the Museum of
King John III’s Palace in Wilanów.
cavalry ever known—the Polish Winged Hussars, also
known as “The Angels of Death”.
Sobieski’s pivotal victory halted the Islamic
expansion into the heartland of Europe for good.
Christian forces began to press forward in a long
bloody war that ended only in 1699 with the permanent
expulsion of the Ottomans from Central Europe, thus
preventing French-Ottoman hegemony over the Old
Continent. Never again would the armies of the sultan
threaten the gates of Christendom. Therefore, from
1683 to 1918, when British troops entered Istanbul, it
would be the West that would steadily but inexorably
push the Ottomans out of southeastern Europe.
Nevertheless, not only did this mother of all battles
lead to significant geopolitical changes, but it also left a
culinary legacy. Austrian bakers devised a kind of cake
in the shape of crescents, a figure they had seen in the
Ottoman order of battle. The cake was taken to France
by the Austrian princess Marie Antoinette, becoming a
famous delicacy, commonly known as the croissant (or
kipferl ). Moreover, Franciszek Kulczycki, a Polish spy
and merchant, helped to popularise coffee in Central
Europe by using coffee beans left by the retreating
Ottomans. He opened the first coffee house in Vienna
and one of his innovations was to serve coffee with milk,
a practice that was totally unknown to the Ottomans
and Arabs.
41
The expedition for the rescue of Vienna, which
influenced J. R. R. Tolkien to write the lines on sieges
and reliefs of Minas Tirith and Helm’s Deep in his
Lord of the Rings trilogy, has always been considered as
a symbol of the strength and significance of Poland, a
proud nation that has played a major role in European
history. The theme of saving Europe from the Islamic
diffusion was soon handed down into the sphere of
national myths and legends with which subsequent
generations of Poles were nourished, especially those
who had to live in political slavery and would have to
fight for freedom.
Indeed, the legendary Vienna expedition and its
hero were never forgotten in the collective memory
of the Polish nation. For example, the Nobel Prizewinning Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz—who wrote
historical novels evoking the First Polish Republic’s
greatness when Poland was under foreign rule in the
19th and early 20th centuries—wrote a novel on the
great battle titled On the Field of Glory.
The achievements of Pax Polonica
The centenary of the Siege of Vienna in 1783 was
celebrated in Poland, and, a few years later, in 1788,
Franciszek Pinck prepared a statue of Sobieski that was
erected in a beautiful chamber of the Łazienki Palace
in Warsaw. It was in this very place that a group of
Polish insurgents gathered in November 1830. (The
November Uprising of 1830-31 was an armed rebellion
of the partitioned Poland against the Russian Empire.)
Still earlier, some new centres of devotion to Sobieski
had been established in Poland.
In 1801, in Puławy, Princess Izabel Czartoryska
had opened the first Polish historical museum in the
Temple of Sibyl, the pantheon of Polish glory, where
the Savior of Europe was venerated as a true hero.
Another important place where Sobieski was honoured
was the Society of Friends of Science in Warsaw, which
was formed in 1823. Anniversaries of the Siege were
celebrated in 1883, 1933, 1983, and most recently in
2013.
Yet the legacy of John Sobieski is also one of cultural
developments, artistic achievements, and a prosperous
multinational state united under the so-called Pax
Polonica. Sobieski was a great patron of the arts, whose
rule inaugurated a new era of cultural accomplishment
in Poland. Many magnificent buildings in the Baroque
style were erected in several Polish cities during his
reign. Sobieski commissioned some of them, which were
designed by the royal architects, Tylman van Gameren,
and Augustyn Locci, two renowned architects brought
to Warsaw by the King. Among these buildings is the
Capuchin Church of the Transfiguration, built between
1683 and 1692. Founded by Sobieski in gratitude for his
triumph in Vienna, it has a sarcophagus containing the
heart of the King.
However, it is the Sobieski family palace in Wilanów,
built in the 1680s, which is the symbol of the flowering
of Polish culture that took place during Sobieski’s
reign. It was designed not only as one of the monarch’s
residences, but also as a monument to his military glory
and as a haven of beauty, knowledge, and virtue. All
of the architectural and sculptural decoration of this
splendid palace, surrounded by picturesque gardens,
refer to the figure of the Lion of Lechistan. Moreover,
this palace would be the place where Sobieski spent his
final years.
Sobieski is commemorated in literature, poetry,
painting, and sculpture. Schools, cigarette brands,
alcohol brands, train routes, and even a constellation—
Scutum Sobiescianum, named in 1684 by Polish astronomer
Johannes Hevelius to commemorate the King’s victory
in Vienna—bear his immortal name. What makes John
Sobieski unique is his knightly virtues and submission
to his destiny. He knew that his fate was not to rule
peacefully or to be a patron of the arts but to defend
Christendom during the most difficult moment in its
entire history, thus creating his undying legacy. Indeed,
Sobieski’s legacy is most alive in our continuous search
for freedom, justice, hope, and solidarity.
Miltiades Varvounis is a Greek-Polish historian and freelance writer
and a specialist in the history of Central Europe. He has written
several books in English and Greek, including Jan Sobieski:
The King Who Saved Europe (Xlibris, 2012). This article
first appeared in Visegrad Insight. It appears here by permission.
KONINKLIJKE BIBLIOTHEEK / DEN HAAG
This print by Romeyn de Hooghe (1645-1708) depicts “the triumphant entry of John III in city of Krakow”.
42
Winter/Spring 2016
Umberto Eco, Nominalist
Roberto de Mattei
The essence of the rose (as with all things) is
reduced to a name [a word]; all that we have are names,
On 23 February 2016, the writer Umberto Eco, appearances, illusions, no truth, and no certainty.
who passed away on 19 February at the age of 84, had Another character in the book, Adso, affirms: Gott ist ein
his “non-religious” funeral. Eco was one of the worst lautes Nichts (God is pure nothing). In the final analysis,
products of Turin and Italian culture in the 20th century. everything is a game, a dance about nothing. This
His Turin origins need to be emphasized as Piedmont concept is the same in another of Eco’s philosophical
was a source of great saints in the 19th century—but novels, Foucault’s Pendulum (1989). Behind the metaphor
also of secularist and anti-Catholic intellectuals in the of the pendulum there is a God who merges with the
void, evil, absolute darkness.
20th century.
The true pendulum of Eco’s thought was, in reality,
The “Turin School”, well described by Augusto
his vacillation between the absolute
Del Noce, passed from idealism to
rationalism of the Enlightenment
Marxism, while maintaining an antiand the irrationality of occultism—
Catholic, ‘immanentist’ line, thanks
of the Kabbalah, of gnosis, which he
to the influence of Antonio Gramsci
fought
against but to which he was
(1891-1937) and Piero Gobetti
nevertheless
morbidly attracted. If
(1901-1925). After World War II,
nominalism
empties
reality of any
this cultural line exercised such a
meaning,
the
inevitable
outcome
strong influence that it attracted
is
indeed
a
fall
into
irrationality.
In
quite a few Catholics.
order
get
out
of
this,
all
that’s
left
Umberto
Eco,
born
in
is absolute skepticism. If Norberto
Alessandria in 1932, became a
Bobbio
(1909-2004)
embodies
diocesan leader in Azione Cattolica at
the
neo-Kantian
version
of Turin
the age of 16. He was, as he himself
Enlightenment
in
the
20th
century,
recalls, not only an activist but “a
Umberto
Eco
incarnates
its
neobeliever in daily communion”.
libertine
version.
He took part in the electoral
One of Eco’s last novels, The
campaign of 1948 by putting up
Prague
Cemetery (2010), is an implicit
posters and distributing antiapology
of the moral cynicism which
Communist flyers. He subsequently
necessarily
follows the absence of
collaborated with the presidency
what
is
true
and good. In the more
of Azione Cattolica in Rome while
than
five
hundred
pages of the
studying at the University of Turin,
NATIONAAL ARCHIEF / CCA-SA 3.0
book,
there
isn’t
a
single
passionate
from which he graduated in 1954
The
novelist,
critic,
and
anti-Catholic
ideal
nor
a
figure
moved
by
love or
with a thesis on the aesthetics of
intellectual,
Umberto
Eco
in
1984.
idealism.
“Hate
is
the
true
primordial
St. Thomas Aquinas. This was
passion. It is love that is an abnormal
later published in the only book of
situation”,
Eco
has
Rachkovskij, one of the novel’s
his worth reading: The Aesthetic Problem in St. Thomas
protagonists,
say.
And
yet, despite all the despicable
(1956). It was also in 1954 that he abandoned the
characters
and
the
criminal
acts which fill the book,
Catholic faith.
his
pages
lack
that
tragic
note
which alone can make a
How did his apostasy come about? It certainly was
literary
work
great.
a reasoned, convinced, and definitive decision. Eco has
Rather, the tone is sarcastic—of the type of comedy
said with derision that he lost the faith while reading
where
the author mocks everything and everyone,
Thomas Aquinas. However, one doesn’t lose the faith;
seeing
that
the only thing he really believes in are filets
one rejects it. And the origin of his estrangement
de
barbue
in
Hollandaise sauce eaten at Lapérouse on
from the truth is not to be found in Aquinas but in
the
Quais
des
Grands-Augustin, l’écrevisse à la bordelaise,
philosophical nominalism, which is a decadent and
or
the
mousse
de volaille at Le Café Anglais on Rue
deformed interpretation of Thomistic doctrine.
Gramont,
and
the filets de poularde piqués aux truffes at
Eco remained, to the very end, a radical nominalist
Le
Rocher
du
Cancale
on Rue Montorgueil. Food is
for whom there are no universal truths but only names,
the
only
thing
that
emerges
triumphant from the novel
signs, and conventions. The father of nominalism,
and
it
is
continually
celebrated
by the protagonist, who
William of Ockham, is represented by William of
confesses:
“Food
has
always
satisfied me more than
Basekerville, the protagonist of Eco’s most famous
sex.
Perhaps
an
imprint
left
on
me by the priests.” It is
novel, The Name of the Rose (1940), a book which closes
not
by
chance
that
in
1992,
Eco
was taken to hospital
with a nominalist motto: Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina
and
almost
declared
dead
as
a
result of a colossal
nuda tenemus (“the ancient rose exists in name, the bare
indigestion.
name is all that we have”).
The European Conservative
43
Technically speaking, Eco was a great juggler
because he made a mockery of everyone: his readers,
his critics, and most of all the Catholics who invited
him to their conferences as if he were some kind of
oracle. During the referendum on divorce in 1974,
Eco spoke in jest to supporters of divorce from the
columns of Espresso [the weekly magazine of the daily
La Repubblica] by appealing for an intelligent approach
to their propagandistic campaign, with these words:
“The referendum campaign must be free from
theoretical, reckless, and immediate assumptions, and
from seeking to have a one-time, short-term effect.
Targeted especially at a public which is easy prey to
emotional stress, it will have to sell a positive image of
divorce which exactly overturns the emotional appeals
of the opposing side.... The themes of this ‘marketing’
campaign should be: divorce is good for the family,
divorce is good for women, divorce is good for kids….
For years Italian advertisers have been experiencing a
crisis of identity: Well-educated and informed, they
know they are the object of sociological criticism,
which shows them as faithful servants of consumerist
power…. They attempt free publicity campaigns in
defense of the environment and for blood donations.
Yet they feel excluded from the great problems of
their time and are condemned to the selling of soap.
The battle for the referendum will be the proof of
the sincerity of many, oft-declared, civic aspirations.
All that’s needed is for a group of expert agencies—
dynamic, unscrupulous, democratic—co-ordinate and
self-finance support for this type of campaign. All that’s
needed is a round of telephone calls, two meetings, and
a month of intense work. Destroying a taboo in just a
few months should be a mouth-watering challenge for
any advertiser who loves his job.”
The taboo to be destroyed was the family, which,
for a relativist like him, had no reason at all to exist. The
destruction of the family in Italy, from 1974 onwards,
has continued in successive stages. Eco happily went
along with it, leaving the scene on the eve of the
approval of homosexual unions—the final outcome of
the introduction of divorce some forty years ago. The
natural family is thus replaced by an unnatural one.
Relativism celebrates its apparent victory. Umberto
Eco contributed significantly to the work of desecrating
the natural and Christian order of things. Yet what he
will have to answer for is not so much the evil he did
but the good he could have done if he had not rejected
the Truth. What’s the use of forty honoris causa degrees
and the sale of thirty million copies of a single book
(The Name of the Rose) if you do not earn eternal life?
The young Azione Cattolica activist could have been
a St. Francis Xavier in the mission land which today
is Europe. But he did not accept the words that St.
Ignatius said to St. Francis Xavier, and which God
makes resound in every Christian heart: “What shall it
profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose
his own soul?”
Roberto de Mattei is an Italian historian. He currently serves as
the President of the Lepanto Foundation in Rome. He is also the
director of the monthly magazine, Radici Cristiane. This is an
edited version of an article that was originally published in Italian
in the 24 February edition of Corrispondenza Romana and
which was later translated into English by Francesca Romana
for Rorate Caeli. It is appears here by permission.
ADF International is an alliance-building legal organization that advocates for the right
of people to freely live out their faith. With offices in Brussels, Geneva, Strasbourg,
and Vienna, ADF International is accredited with most and engaged in legal advocacy
at all inter- and supranational institutions in Europe. ADF lawyers regularly act in
significant court cases at the European Court of Human Rights and provide expert
opinion at the European Union, the Council of Europe, and the United Nations.
Through world-class training programs and funding for precedent-setting cases, ADF
International is transforming the legal culture—and helping to preserve religious freedom.
4 place du Marché aux Poissons
Strasbourg, France
www.adfinternational.org
44
Winter/Spring 2016
10th Annual Vanenburg Meeting
Samuel Scruton
During the annual Vanenburg Meetings organized
by the Center of European Renewal (CER), I have often
found myself flitting between tasks through hordes of
listless tourists. This was especially the case last year,
when the meeting was held in Dubrovnik, Croatia,
from 3 to 5 July. There they were, wandering aimlessly
through the old city’s cobbled streets. But I had a clear
purpose: After all, I was the intern for the meeting.
The annual meeting itself aims to wrestle with
relevant issues from various conservative perspectives,
and includes a variety of guests and speakers—around
eighty in total last year. It is held each year during the
summer in a different cultural hub in Europe over a
period of two or three days, during which there are
debates and discussions on a chosen theme. Most of
the days are given over to plenary discussions, seminars,
and debates. Then, in the evenings, the focus returns
to more informal debate. The meeting is formatted in
such a way that all guests are put up in a residence and
dine together. For the duration of last year’s meeting,
guests stayed in an otherwise unoccupied boarding
school run by kind-hearted nuns, with stunning views
of the Mediterranean in the distance.
Last year’s theme was the contrast between
‘civilization and barbarism’. This was something which
I first knew little about. However, Dubrovnik itself
seemed a rather fitting place for such a discussion.
My first encounter was with an old town built and
maintained by some of the civilized races of history but
under siege from a pseudo-barbarian invasion—which
came in the form of tourists.
There was much to do, but my main concern was
first to help the large number of guests settle in. They
came from places which sounded almost exotic to me—
such as Sweden, Ukraine, Holland, France, and Wales. I
was expecting every guest to be some kind of university
professor, but in fact many were active as politicians,
journalists, editors, and clerics.
As intern, I spent more time outside of the
lecture hall than in it, and therefore my knowledge of
the discussions was fairly impressionistic. However,
I did hear a detailed defense of one’s ‘freedom to
discriminate’ by Belgian legal scholar Matthias Storme.
Other notable speakers included French philosopher
Rèmi Brague, who received the First Annual Prize for
European Renewal, and a man who is nearly a paternal
figure to me, Roger Scruton, who received a Prize for
Literary Achievement in the conservative cause. British
journalist John O’Sullivan also spoke about rebuilding
civilization in a post-communist Europe, Agnieszka
Kołakowska helped participants find a definition for
‘barbarism’, and Anthony Daniels lectured effortlessly
on the topic of his 2015 book, Admirable Evasions.
The meeting had many memorable moments—and
the whole ensemble of guests were left feeling rather
confused when, for a cultural excursion, they found
themselves boarding a mock pirate ship headed out to
sea.
The evenings proved to be often the most animated
parts of the day. Everyone returned to the guesthouse
properly fed, and fueled by fine wines—many of which
were Croatian. There the conversation often returned
to more conservative matters. Here spirits were high.
Sometimes we were serenaded by the French contingent;
and although jokes were not strictly forbidden, most of
us decided to err on the side of caution and not laugh
too boisterously.
Overall the conference proved to a very worthwhile
affair for me (the guests seemed to benefit from it as
well). Whilst by all means my school would see it as
a rather unorthodox work experience, I left feeling
better informed and with a greater understanding of
conservative issues in an intellectual register. I look
forward to future gatherings—and again meeting with
friends, old and new.
Samuel Scruton will serve as the Senior Intern at the CER’s
11th annual Vanenburg Meeting later this year.
P. DESWEL
Literature and the arts, as well as politics and philosophy, dominated the conversation during last year’s meeting.
The European Conservative
45
The University Professor
Leonardo Polo
A university professor speaking to university
professors about their work is a bit like selling honey to
a beekeeper. It is an almost redundant communication,
because we all know from experience what it means to
engage in this activity. The only advantage I have over
you is that my experience is more extensive, since I have
been in the university for more than four decades.
The personality of a university professor, the
outline of his figure, has to be approached in different
ways. It could be helpful to consider the university as
a business. And within the business it is common to
distinguish two dimensions or two types of people: one
called the staff and the other called the production line.
The staff consists of people who belong to the business
from the point of view of management. The production
line is made up of those who are involved in achieving
the characteristic result of the business—which is its
product.
Every company produces something. If it produces
little or with poor quality, that is a sign that it is
functioning badly. Although it may have a very good
organizational structure, and even though the managers
may also be very good, if its producers do not give what
they have to give, then the business becomes disfigured
and it ends up ruined.
The disfigurement of a business is an issue that
is thoroughly addressed in the current literature
concerning these institutions. It is often attributed to
the excess of staff over the production line. It is not
enough for the staff to be thriving if the production line
is less so. The businesses that want to survive turn their
attention to improving their ways of doing things. So
the first thing to ask is this: What is the product of the
university? I insist: If one loses sight of the product of
an organization, of an institution, then that institution
fails.
The faculty
The product, I repeat, is the responsibility of the
production line—and in the university the production
line is precisely the faculty. There is no getting around
it; this is simply the way it is. Any mistake with regard
to this disfigures the university and carries with it an
increase in costs that is really significant.
It is useless to count upon large and well-equipped
facilities, to take care of relationships with other
conditioning entities, if by this one forgets to or does
not prioritize the activity of the producer; and the
producer in a university is exclusively the professor. Or,
as we philosophers say, the professor is the university
simpliciter; everything else is auxiliary.
No matter how necessary the functions that have to
be fulfilled are, the important thing is the improvement
of the productive processes. The first consequence is that
the professor (speaking in the singular) is the dimension
46
of the university that most has to be integrated into it.
Professors are the ones that most have to make the
university their own. For this reason, the university
professor is not an ‘upstart’, someone who pops in from
time to time, whose main focus is on another activity.
In certain situations, one must to go to these types of
persons; but the part-time university professor is not a
university professor.
The profession of being a university professor is
incompatible with an eventual or secondary character
precisely because of the radical importance of the
faculty. Being a university professor is a way of being
and builds character. If that character is disfigured, if the
possibilities that follow from it are not developed, then
the university languishes, its existence becomes purely
nominal.
Disfigurement of the university
Disfigurement can come about in several ways.
First, it is clear that a state university has a staff ratio that
is quite notable, and not within it but precisely above it:
It is subject to a state bureaucracy. For this reason, state
universities that are often formed by splendid teachers
do not achieve a well-defined university profile of their
own—precisely because they are subject to an instance
that is not really of the university. Although there has to
be a connection between politics and the university, what
cannot be is a subordination of the latter to former; this
is not something good but rather a disruptive element
for the university.
Something else that can spoil universities is the
profit motive. This is what makes some so-called
private universities—which are entities founded with
the intention of making money—definitively not fulfil
their specific task. It confuses a commercial business
with the university. The university is a business; but its
product, its objective, is not simply to become rich. The
university is characterized by having chosen knowledge
over money. Given the option of making money or
cultivating knowledge, it sticks to the latter. That is why
I often say that being a university professor is almost
like making a vow of poverty.
Money is an indispensable means that the professor
needs for carrying out his tasks at the required level.
The university should not be in a needy state; it must
be able to meet its own needs, those of the family. But
the relationship of money to its professional activity
is not limited to this. The university professor is not
just another professional who studies in order to then
achieve certain results with his studies, results that are
outside of the university; and this is something that one
should think about and draw consequences from.
The activity of the university has to be uncoupled
from public powers, from the powers of parties. Loyalty
has to be gathered together in the search for the truth. But,
on the other hand, neither can one forego the necessary
status for its correct unfolding, which is required by
Winter/Spring 2016
the very dignity of the task that is developing. Money is
not a central issue for this profession. But, on the other
hand, it is indispensable; without money almost nothing
can be done. This is common sense. But the university
professor as such uses money to make possible the
activity whose content I will now try to develop.
The product of the university
I repeat the question: What is the product of the
university? What good does the university bring to
humanity, to society in general? The answer is very
clear: What the university contributes to society is higher
learning.
The development of higher learning belongs to the
university. On this point, confusion should be avoided.
I often tell my Spanish colleagues that the universities
in our country are not really universities because their
product is not higher learning. Instead, they form a final
level of education. In Spain, there is a first level of
education called basic education; a second level which
is the old high school; and a third level which is the
university.
The university would be something like a
continuation of the educational pyramid, a final step
or a final level. But this is not so because there is no
continuity between these levels. It is not just a problem
of hierarchy; it is something much more serious. The
university has higher learning as its product. Higher learning
is not simply a question of instruction. Higher learning
is characterized, in part, by its being the result of a
long and fruitful accumulation of knowledge achieved
through history. And the cultivation of knowledge is
characteristic, above all, of Western culture.
But precisely because of that, higher learning is
inexorably open to the future; that is, it has to be
increased. For this reason I speak of it as a product.
Therefore, the university professor does not function
only with acquired knowledge; he is not limited to
administering knowledge, to imparting it. It is not the
third level of instruction; this is not true.
If the university were to agree to be that, it would
crumble, it would cease being a university, and the
professors would cease being university professors.
They would simply be good professors in the sense of
being related to students. Here is another issue that now
appears: the student body.
The student body
The formation of students is certainly a product of
the university, but it is not the primary one because if
it is considered as such it is not sufficiently achieved.
The first product of the university is higher learning.
Higher learning is the summit of inherited knowledge. But
as always happens in history, what is inherited is never
finished but rather needs to be continued.
Knowledge is increasable precisely from its summit.
To the extent that knowledge enters into the social
current, it makes society function (or can be one more
factor for society to function). But this function of
knowledge in society is not the increase of higher learning.
What must be done with higher learning? The first
thing that has to be done with higher learning is to increase
it. Only in the second place must it be extended. This is
where the student body enters. Inasmuch as the student
body is not strictly speaking a group of disciples, it is
formed by future professionals who will go about their
An undated painting showing the imposition of a biretta during the conferral of a doctoral degree at the Complutense
University of Madrid. (The Complutense was originally founded as a Studium Generale in 1293, and was later expanded
and re-named by Papal Bull in 1499.)
The European Conservative
47
activity outside of the university, taking advantage of this
knowledge.
Clearly, producing well-formed people, successfully
communicating to them what one knows, is very
important for society. But even then it is not what is
primary. What is primary is to increase higher learning.
This can also be said like this: If a part of the university
tradition goes to society, then the other part of university
production goes to history. In my view, this is the most
important part. Seen like this, it seems to me that the
university professor can become aware of what he has
gotten into, on what he has bet his life upon.
The duty of self-formation
It is necessary to realize that being a university
professor does not consist solely in obtaining a title,
getting hired, forming part of, working at the university.
No. Being a university professor means a task of selfformation—because offering services, exercising a
profession, and getting situated are not the same thing
as attaining the summit of knowledge. This can only be
achieved through a long time of study, if one forms the
mind well, and if horizons are expanded.
When will this be achieved? Perhaps when one has
reached their 40th birthday, a certain maturity has been
attained. One must count on five years of the licentiate,
three or four for the doctorate, and thus we are in one’s
30s. Then at least ten years more are needed to attain the
higher level, and from this level to seek to increase it,
even if it be in a small measure.
I repeat that what distinguishes the university
professor from one who was at a university for a few
years and then left, gone to another place, consists in
the fact that the knowledge acquired is the basis for his
activity, as pure application. This is an application that
must also be completed after having left the classroom
because there are practical aspects that often times are
not taught there. For example, a lawyer requires years of
practice to be able to do well in court; the same happens
to a doctor in the hospital.
But this knowledge, this undertaking, belongs to the
university, and for this reason the professor cannot say:
“Now I know and now I am simply going to apply my
knowledge to my teaching; I am simply transmitting the
knowledge that I have acquired.” No. Being a university
professor is not the same as being a lawyer or a doctor at
the hospital. It is not the same because their relationship
with the development of knowledge is different.
The university professor dedicates himself to
being at the cutting edge of knowledge; he has to know
everything that relates to his discipline, which naturally
takes many years. It is not achieved with a degree and it
has to be said that neither is it completely achieved with
a doctorate. It is achieved by studying without end until
one dies. Studying and thinking, academic life, academic
activity, means that nothing must be ignored—at least
with regard to the branch that one is dedicated to, with
regard to what is known about it up to that moment. It
means going deeper into it, since there are always gaps,
and to find a way to fill them.
48
What is the result of this? Until what point does
a tenured university professor continue to increase
knowledge? This depends on many factors. It depends
on his talent, on the opportunities that he has, on the
technical means, on a certain type of research, which
at times might not exist or exists to a small degree. It
also depends on how the library is, since the tradition
of knowledge is gathered together in a library. He who
cannot count on a good library cannot make use of
sources.
This is what a university professor is. For this reason
he is a member of an institution that is characteristic of
the West, one that is justified and which exists for this—
for the importance given to higher learning, to the unfolding
of knowledge.
Defining higher learning
How can higher learning be defined? Higher learning
is the acquisition of knowledge at the highest level that
humanity has acquired at a historic moment. It is clear
for example that higher learning with regard to physics was
different in Aristotle’s days than it is today.
What can be added to higher learning? It would already
be enough to ask that it not be forgotten, that it not
decay. This requires considerable effort. It is not about
being original, not about winning the Nobel Prize. Nor
is it about taking this attained level as a horizontal level.
(This means that the higher learning is the primary product
without which the university is no more than a third stage
of instruction.)
One has to be in on the cutting edge; there is no
other remedy. And what is the cutting edge? Each one
has to know the cutting edge, since it changes with age;
but to the degree that each one can say that they have all
the historical precedents of such a project, from there
he must try to go beyond—and transmit it to other
university professors, not only to the students who will
later develop their activities outside.
For this reason, a university professor has to publish.
Here the following difficulties arise. Often times what
is communicable is little; everything one has to say, the
way it has been assimilated, and how one has made one’s
personal mark on higher learning, can perhaps be expressed
in a 50-page article.
For this reason the journals in which research is
published are indispensable. A university that is growing
must create journals, must have a publishing house,
literature dedicated to a group, to university professors
at other centres. A university professor can also publish
popular books, articles in newspaper; if he has the literary
talent, he can put his thoughts into rhetorical form in
such a way that a less cultivated mind can understand
them. But strictly speaking, included among the audience
of the publications of a university professor are other
university professors. A university professor has to read
what others write; and this is because something called res
publica scientiarum exists.
Science is a public thing. Higher learning is
communicated; higher learning is published. It is published
with one requirement: copyright. One cannot plagiarize.
Winter/Spring 2016
But strictly speaking, intellectual property does not exist
because the destiny of what one knows is that it is known
by others: interlocutors.
One should aspire to enter the universal public res.
Knowledge is res that is common to those who cultivate
it, not to others—not of the university but of all. If this
is not taken into account, if this does not constitute the
foundation, the vital unfolding, of a university professor,
then the teaching activity is ruined, since one teaches
people that know nothing of the knowledge that is
cultivated in the university. Precisely for this reason the
university is not simply the third degree of instruction.
The difference should be experienced strongly. The
student should notice that what is taught at a university (if
it is an authentic university) is taught in a certain way, with
a certain knowledge and with a depth that was previously
unknown to him. This corresponds to what I am saying:
What nourishes university education is research.
The importance of research
The university professor who prepares his classes
with notes, outlines that he himself made and which
are the same every year, and whose paper, after a few
years, which was at first white has turned yellow—this is
a sign that he is not an authentic university professor but
rather someone lazy. This person has “fallen down on his
paunch”, as we say in Spain. He has become embedded in
an institution, lives in it and from it. He can be vested with
university gowns, the insignias, the “doctor’s cap”; but
the question continues being the same: And what about
your class outlines? Every year one must incorporate into
them something—precisely what one has read, what one
has researched, what one has learned.
If this is not done, then the result is badly formed
professionals. This affects the average level of a country,
the activities done by the students who have come from
university centres which rule at the highest level of the
activities of a society. For this reason, the university
professor who falls into routine does harm to society.
But to not to fall into routine it is not enough to think
directly of the social effects of one’s activities; rather, one
must think precisely of the development of higher learning.
If this is thought about, then one will always be in a
position to improve one’s teaching and also in a position
to obtain successors—obtaining successors who are not
inferior but rather superior.
The successor’s own position is one of the most
acute concerns of a good professor which has to grow
naturally as time passes. The successor: If the person
who is going to take my chair is not better than I am,
if the higher learning that I have provided to him is not
a point of departure for him because I have not given
him everything that I know, then he cannot be a good
successor.
That is, in the res publica scientiarum, there is always
more, an increase. There is so much that has recently been
published in every branch of knowledge that exhausting
a bibliography can be overwhelming, even though, as is
clear, some things that are published are really useless—
they are simply a waste of paper.
MULTIMEDIA ARCHIVES / UNIVERSIDAD DE NAVARRA
The late Leonardo Polo (1926-2013) closely reading a text during a break in one of the hallways of the University of
Navarre in Pamplona, where he taught ethics, natural law, the history of philosophy, and psychology.
The European Conservative
49
The reality of truth
It seems to me that the preceding observations are
rather clear; they form an approach that almost does
not need to be insisted upon. In any case, it would be
good to point out that one thing is the true reality of an
institution while the other is its empirical situation. This
is a philosophical question that has to be kept in mind.
Reality is the reality of truth; its empirical specification
is always inadequate.
Hegel put it this way: There are two levels,
experience and concept, and the whole secret of
philosophy consists in elevating experience to concept.
If experience is not elevated to concept, then nothing
is left except experience, which means nothing since
it is not elevated to concept. This happens frequently.
It must be kept in mind that one is not always
in the same phase or state. One can never say that
the product of the university, higher learning, has been
definitively achieved. One is always at some phase.
Totally fulfilling it is impossible within history. This is
one of the reasons why knowledge sometimes becomes
dispersed or branches out too much, the contributions
are small and sectarian.
For this reason we have gone through a long
period of specialization. This period is fortunately
coming to a close. Now, interdisciplinarity—a motto
that is still vague and without clear outlines—is
imposing itself. That which is cultivated in a particular
field has increasingly wider reign. The future is in the
convergence of the different fields of knowledge.
After living an era of specializations, we have moved
on to another era or attempts at inquiry, of unity of
knowledge. There are isomorphisms, as it is said today,
between one branch and another. And it has also been
discovered that some branches complete others. One
cannot put on blinders because even though one knows
that he cultivates something, it is not always cultivated
well.
One must also take into consideration that the
development of the university is both institutional as
well as personal. Both are intimately linked, given that
the key to a university institution is its professors. For
this reason the institution is the result of the professors’
state and vice versa. There are parallels between the
level attained by the institution and what one can do.
For this reason the university is never satisfied, it
knows that the march, the evolution, the institutional
progress is slow. If the biographical time necessary for
attaining a certain maturity is, as I have said, very long,
then the time for institutions is slower. Institutions do
not mature overnight, but they can if they start off well
and stick to the right path; they can progress ever more
quickly.
Hope and patience
For this reason another characteristic of the
university professor is patience. This entails dedicating
oneself to the university for life. The person who has no
patience also does not have tenacity. A great amount of
patience, a never giving up, is required. The university
professor who is disillusioned, who says, “This is going
really slow, it’s stuck or semi-stuck; therefore, I am
going to dedicate myself just to teaching, to transmitting
from one generation to another the same thing, in such
a way that the papers become increasingly yellow; this
is what my life is about”, has discouraged himself. He
has ceased having the tension of a university professor.
The university professor is not measured so much
by what level he has reached but rather by the effort
that he put into getting there. Hegel distinguishes
between two types of passion: the burning passion
and the cold passion: Which is more intense? Clearly
the cold one, because if the burning passion is lost,
the ardour disappears; in contrast, the cold passion
continues despite being cold. What is specific to a
university professor is that he sets very high goals but
with great patience.
It is not specific to the university professor to give
up, to be pessimistic, to become bitter about life, to
become disillusioned, because no matter how strong
the hopes that one has are, their fulfilment is greater.
Hopes can never collapse. But the initial hopes are not
sufficient hopes. One becomes ever more hopeful, the
hope can become colder—but never less intense.
MULTIMEDIA ARCHIVES / UNIVERSIDAD DE NAVARRA
Leonardo Polo with students and colleagues during an academic meeting in Pamplona.
50
Winter/Spring 2016
Another thing that should be noted is the issue
of prestige. The prestige of a university is inseparable
from the quality of its professors, and the quality of its
professors is inseperable from the way the university
functions. Prestige is not a result of ever more abundant
carob trees, excellent weather, the environment. Rather,
it is due to the quality of the professors, and the quality
of the professors is due to the quality of the university.
It is, in turn, important to keep in mind that personal
prestige is inseparable from the institution itself.
One should not seek out personal triumph
based on the institution; it would be a type of unjust
enrichment. Instead, one must seek it out so that the
university be evermore well known. It is not an act of
generosity; rather, it is a consequence of the solidarity
that is inherent to the condition of being a tenured
professor, of a university professor in the strict sense.
What is important is that the institution move
forward, that it be better led; and then one must invest
one’s effort into it, because it is clear that if I publish,
if I am recognized, if I have access to congresses, if
I maintain a dialogue on a world-class level in the
cultivation of higher learning, then in the end these
contribute to the prestige of one’s institution.
It is important to avoid every motive that leads to
division, among which one finds above all disillusion—
the phases of life in which one passes through some
type of crisis. It is almost impossible that clouds not
appear on the horizon at some point in a university
career. Here I would add another idea: He who has not
gone through a crisis during his career does not know
what a university professor is.
And what is the crisis of a university professor?
It is thinking that one is a fool; or thinking that one
knows nothing; or thinking: Now I’ve reached this
point and now where do I go? He who has not at some
point thought that he is a fool is not dealing with higher
learning. What is happening is that one is banging one’s
head against the wall and then they will sometimes say:
“The truth is that I know little. It is evident.” One must
know how to make a diagnosis: I am in a phase and I
am trying to get to a new level; the outlines still cannot
be seen clearly. Tenacity lies in this; patience has to be
exercised with oneself. In Spain it is said that “Zamora
wasn’t taken in an hour.” Passing through a crisis is
unavoidable; they can be identity crises.
Doctoral work
Here at the end I will say something about the
doctoral dissertation. The doctoral dissertation, if it
is an authentic doctoral dissertation, is the first work
done with a certain maturity; and doing one demands
reading, reuniting, presenting things in a suggestive
way, understanding comprehensively, with a critical
assessment. The doctoral dissertation is a complicated
work. But on the other hand, if it is a work of research,
it can be followed by others. But at the level that one
has at this age, the age when one does the doctoral
dissertation, they are at times too monographic and
then the problem of continuity arises.
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A doctor can arrive at the conclusion of how he had
to considerably limit the scope of his considerations
and had to spend a good amount of years on it; at the
end when he has obtained the title of doctor the rest has
been forgotten and he finds himself a bit disorientated.
Then the question arises: “And now what do I do?”
The only advice that can be given in this situation is to
go back and remember what has been forgotten. This
is the first measure that should be taken.
This is, of course, co-natural with human life,
which is not a straight line; living has to do with
rectifying, correcting. The history of knowledge is full
of corrections; many hypotheses have turned out to be
false, others not. There are many mistakes throughout
the history of science, but these errors are a starting
point. Errors are also useful.
On the other hand, pure research has to be
distinguished from applied research. Pure research is
at the heart of scientific progress; applied research has
a useful character and therefore can better be solved,
although pure research is the soul—I insist—of
research. At the very least, one must be aware of what
others are doing because the life of someone in the
university consists in never separating himself from
higher learning.
Love for the truth
The great contribution of a university professor,
his great product, is ultimately to produce elites. These
are completely different across countries, according to
whether the university formation received was a serious
formation or rather a mediocre one. But I repeat, this is
included in or is embraced by research—that is, by the
love for the truth. That is what is most important in the
formation of a human being.
This is how the university fulfils its social function
because this is what is reflected in the teaching. And
this is what makes people who have gone through the
university (and who have not stayed in it) because they
are engaged in useful activities in other social sectors
and have nostalgia for the university. The university
for which they do research will know how to recycle—
that is, it will re-admit them and they will not find
themselves in something foreign.
The love for the truth, I insist, is what is most
important in the formation of a human being. There
is no ethics possible, no right conduct, if one does
not love the truth because wrong conduct consists
in accepting a lie into one’s life. “The truth will set
you free”, says the Gospel. It is in this way that the
university fulfils its great societal task of forming useful
men and women—whose usefulness can be measured,
above all, in terms of the truth.
Leonardo Polo (1926-2013) was a Spanish philosopher and a
professor at the University of Navarre in Pamplona. This essay
was originally published in El profesor universitario (UDEP,
1996). It was translated by Silvia Martino, Eduardo Fay and
Alberto I. Vargas. It appears here, in slightly modified form, by
permission from the Leonardo Polo Institute of Philosophy.
51
125 Years of Sweden’s Heimdal
Jakob E:son Söderbaum
Founded in 1891, Föreningen Heimdal is Sweden’s
oldest political student association. Based in the
university city of Uppsala, the group’s main social
activities consist of Thursday evening meetings, where
invited guests—politicians, academics, ambassadors,
and authors—deliver lectures and have discussions
with students. For the past 50 years, these meetings
have taken place at the association’s own basement
facility—known by members as “The Cave”. (This
is no doubt a reference to the allegedly ‘retrograde’
views of its members, who are often seen by political
opponents as ‘cavemen’.)
Among its other activities, Heimdal also has an
annual white-tie ball called Midvinterblotet, named
in memory of the old pagan blood sacrifices in the
middle of the winter. This year, Midvinterblotet also
happened to be the occasion for the association’s
125th anniversary.
The anniversary ball took place at the Stockholms
The logo of Föreningen Heimdal, which depicts the
‘guardian god’ Heimdal blowing the ‘Gjallarhorn’.
Around the bottom, the association’s motto—“Tradere et
Resistere”—serves as a reminder to pass on traditions to
posterity, and resist rapid and dangerous change.
52
Nation, one of the 13 so-called ‘student nations’
connected to Uppsala University. These ‘nations’
are associations for students, with different ones
for people from different regions of Sweden. They
date back to the Middle Ages, and many of them are
housed in formidable palaces.
Some 220 men and women of all ages gathered for
the anniversary ball. It not only included the requisite
dancing but also inspiring speeches, cheerful singing,
and of course good food and live music. Among the
guests were many people, including many famous
politicians, who had been members of Heimdal for
decades.
For conservatives, of course, observing an event
like this—and realizing that one is a part of a long
chain of tradition linking many generations—is a
terrific experience in its own right. And the fact that
Swedes have a tradition of singing every time one
drinks alcohol at the table helps to further foster such
important social bonds. Typically feasts at Heimdal are
accompanied by a lot of ‘schnapps songs’, wine songs,
and national romantic songs—and the anniversary
ball was certainly no exception.
During the banquet, a number of speeches were
given. One of them was by Ivar Arpi, a famous leader
writer at Sweden’s largest conservative newspaper,
Svenska Dagbladet. He was awarded the annual “Gunnar
Heckscher Prize” by Heimdal for his considerable
contributions to reform-friendly conservatism.
The prize is named after Gunnar Hecksher, who
was chairman of Heimdal in 1930. He later became
a professor of politics, chairman of the Moderata
samlingspartiet (Moderate Party) in the 1960s, and
served as Swedish Ambassador to various countries
in Asia.
Arpi is certainly a splendid writer; but he is also a
courageous, principled conservative—one who sticks
to his views despite being mocked by the left. And
when the moment came when he had to receive the
prize, he received a standing ovation from the entire
audience.
Another speaker during the evening was Göran
Lennmarker, Heimdal chairman during 1965-1966—
and the first chairman when Heimdal started using
“The Cave”. He was a member of parliament for
the Moderate Party during 1991-2010. But in his
speech, he spoke more freely and openly than what
he was probably used to during his time in the
Swedish parliament, the Riksdag. His comments
were courageous, of the kind that you would under
no circumstances ever hear from an established
politician holding office today. It was, in short, very
refreshing—and quite significant for Heimdal.
As a place for conservative students to gather,
Heimdal is truly an important institution in Uppsala.
It is also an important institution in Swedish
politics. During the last 50 years, Heimdal has been
Winter/Spring 2016
KRISTIN WISELL
Friends and former members of Heimdal, like politician Göran Lennmarker (l) and columnist Ivar Arpi (m), gathered in
Uppsala to celebrate more than a century of tradition.
the last outpost of conservatism in Sweden, since
conservatism really has had no political party to call
‘home’ and few organizations other than Heimdal to
promote it. But even when it seemed to have died
elsewhere in Sweden, Heimdal has always stood up for
conservatism as a political philosophy—and has thus
managed to keep conservative ideas alive. Without
Heimdal, conservatism in Sweden may very well have
died out a long time ago.
As of a few decades ago, membership in Heimdal
is actually open to any student or former student who
is a member of any of the centre-right parties; but
there has always been a strong defence of principled
conservatism at Heimdal—and this is a fundamental
part of the association’s identity.
One of the themes in Lennmarker’s speech was
the role and place of Heimdal—and conservatism in
general—in the development of Swedish society.
When Heimdal was first founded back in the late 19th
century, the idea of a “reform-friendly conservatism”
was not only visionary but rather mainstream as
well. But since the counter-cultural revolution of the
1960s, conservatism has been abandoned by many in
Sweden.
Lennmarker, however, says the pendulum
has slowly started to swing back. Now, in the first
decades of the 21st century, it seems to him that the
conditions for a return to conservatism have never
been better.
If Lennmarker is right, then Heimdal may be as
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much a part of Sweden’s future as it was of its past.
Let’s hope that this may be the case.
Jakob E:son Söderbaum is a business consultant and
entrepreneur based in Stockholm. He has been a member
of Heimdal since 2002 and for 15 years he has worked to
strengthen political conservatism in Sweden, publishing numerous
articles and books, and founding the organization Konservativt
Forum, an online platform for conservative intellectuals. He is
also one of the founders of The European Conservative.
KRISTIN WISELL
Conservative Swedes, young and old, celebrated the
contributions of the country’s oldest student association.
53
Italy’s Thatcher Circle
Alberto Addolori
The Margaret Thatcher Circle—known in Italy as
the Circolo Culturale Margaret Thatcher—was founded in
Venice in October 1997. Originally the inspiration of
Tullia Vivante, a life-long activist and Venetian grand
dame, the cultural association has been able to bring
together energetic people—lawyers, journalists, and
businessmen alike—to join in the common cause of
working toward a re-birth of the city of Venice and
the Veneto region.
The Circle pursues various programmatic aims—
all in the best tradition of La Serenissima, formerly one
of the world’s greatest autonomous and free republics.
Under the leadership of Ms. Vivante, who currently
serves as its President, the Circle seeks to support and
spread throughout Italy the classical liberal ideas that
are at the core of Thatcherite conservatism.
In short, it aims at nothing less than the creation
of a viable Italian version of Thatcherism—one
suited to the requirements of the country—in
order to achieve the economic, moral, civic, and
environmental recovery of the nation.
The Circle also seeks to combat all forms of
totalitarianism and, in particular, to destroy all
remaining vestiges of communism around the world.
In addition, it aims to promote a global process to
ensure that all the crimes committed in the name
communism are condemned and that justice against
those who committed them—whether living or
dead—is sought.
Over the years, the Circle has promoted its ideas
through diverse cultural activities, including seminars
and meetings with leading representatives of Italian
and European conservatism.
Last November, it organized an International
Convention with the theme of “Italy-Europe: A New
Birth”. The event—which included a panel discussion
with various Italian intellectuals about British politics,
the freedom of the human person and the social
doctrine of the Catholic Church, the importance of
free enterprise, and a consideration of the future
of Europe—was an occasion for the official launch
of the Confederazione Italiana Thatcher, a nation-wide
group of professionals which will include the Circle
and other partners around the country.
The highlight of the event, however, was
undoubtedly the keynote speech given by British
philosopher Roger Scruton, who has long served as
an inspiration for the Circle. His speech is reproduced
in the pages that follow.
Dr. Alberto Addolori is a Venetian businessman and serves
as the Vice President of the Circolo Culturale Margaret
Thatcher. For more information about the group, please visit:
www.circolothatcher.org
“View of the San Marco Basin” (1697) by Gaspar van Wittel (1656-1736), located in the Prado Museum in Madrid.
54
Winter/Spring 2016
Europe & the Italian Nation
Roger Scruton
All educated Europeans have strong feelings about
Italy. This country is the seat of our inherited religion. It
is heir to the Roman Empire and witness to the Roman
achievements. It is the home of most of the great artists
and architects of the European Renaissance. Its language
is the direct descendent of Latin, and is dear to all literate
people. Its medieval literature and philosophy have been
more influential over the intellectual life of Europe
than any comparable bequest. The future of Italy is the
future of Europe—and the crisis that the country is
now undergoing as a result of mass immigration and the
failure of the political class to respond to it is a crisis that
will affect us all.
If I am to make a contribution to the attempt to
understand this crisis, however, I must speak as an
Englishman, rather than an aspiring Italian. I must draw
on the experience of my country—and also on the legacy
of Margaret Thatcher, whose resolution in the face
of threat is the clearest recent model that we have of
political leadership.
Thatcher’s legacy
First we must remember that Thatcher was a product
of her time. She was presented with problems that shaped
her vision and which, thanks in part to her resolve, have
largely disappeared. Principal among them was the Soviet
Union and the threat that it posed to the democracies of
Europe. This threat was perceived differently in England
and in Italy. Here—thanks in part to Gramsci and his
followers—there was a strong communist party, which
had a secure place in the universities. Italian intellectuals
of the 1960s and the 1970s would as likely as not declare
themselves to be Marxists. Their career would be at
risk if they did not. Italy’s Red Brigades were engaged
in the same anti-capitalist terrorism as the Soviet Union
in Africa and the Middle East—and the legacy of their
treason endures in the form of Antonio Negri.
Thatcher confronted the Soviet Union in a way
that no Italian politician would have dared. She insisted
on installing nuclear missiles to match the Soviet
deployment. She fought off the peace movement. And
she astonished the Soviet leadership by going to war in
the Falkland Islands for no other reason than to defend
national sovereignty. At the same time, she confronted
the trade unions, passing laws that forced them to
democratise and to lose their ill-gotten privileges, and
she refused to give in to the IRA’s terrorist campaign.
All those experiences pushed her in a certain direction,
which was towards national sovereignty and the defence
of the nation-state.
This is very important for Italians today. In recent
years the response of Italy’s Prime Ministers to problems
has often been to pass them on to the European Union.
Whatever the problem is, they say, it is not an Italian
problem but a European problem. This is especially true
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now, with the impact of mass migration, which no Italian
politician wishes to confront for what it is—namely, an
existential threat to Italy.
Thatcher’s response to such problems was entirely
different. It was to affirm the rights of the nation-state
and to make clear that, if necessary, those rights would
be defended by force. I don’t say she was always correct
in her judgment. But the nation was the ground on
which she stood. And it is why she was popular with
the people, just as she was hated and despised by the
intellectual class.
Europe and the nation
And it is in these terms that I would summarize her
vision. She believed that each nation has responsibility
for its own survival. Although we depend on alliances,
and must maintain good relations with our neighbours,
good relations mean nothing if we are not prepared to be
who we are. National identity is therefore the premise of
coherent politics. And alliances, she believed, are useless
if not based on the preparedness to use force in their
defence. That was why she liked President Reagan so
much and why she was so suspicious of the EU. She
saw the EU as a conspiracy to undermine the loyalty
and sovereignty of the nation-state. Nor was she wrong,
since that is exactly what Jean Monnet had intended
when he set the European process in motion. The EU,
she believed, has been designed to take power away from
the nation and transfer it to unanswerable bureaucrats.
Its institutions are therefore more likely to operate in
the interest of the bureaucrats than in the interest of the
people.
Of course, matters are far more complex than that;
and the role of the EU in the peaceful management of
day-to-day relations between the European nations is
something that she largely accepted. But she believed
that it is not day-to-day relations that are the test of
legitimacy. The true test is the crisis in which identity and
survival are at stake. And it is here that she saw the danger
of the EU in its present form. Alliances depend on the
resolve of their members to defend themselves. The EU,
however, seemed, in her eyes, to be undermining that
resolve, telling nations that they did not really exist, that
their disposition to defend themselves was an atavistic
survival from the days of nationalism, that the future lay
with ‘soft power’ and diplomacy and not with force. And
this was, in her eyes, profoundly dangerous, since the
regime of ‘soft power’ provides an opportunity to the
enemy.
Thatcher had a specifically English view of the
nation-state, one that is perhaps impossible to import
into Italy. She saw the nation as a historical community
defined by language and culture, just as the patriots of
the Risorgimento saw Italy. But she also believed that
institutions, law and the offices of government form a
part of the national heritage, since they are the ultimate
guarantee of the freedom of the citizen. In the end, she
55
was an individualist, who saw the nation as a partnership
of free people, each of whom should take responsibility
for his life and happiness. But the individual cannot
achieve freedom alone; it is only through the protection
afforded by shared institutions that freedom arises. That
is why she so greatly admired the British inheritance
of law, parliamentary democracy, and monarchical
sovereignty. It all fitted together in her mind as the ideal
reconciliation of freedom and order. It was the translation
into institutional form of the social contract as envisaged
by Burke: the contract between the living, the dead, and
those who are yet to be born. But of course, with that
vision she had to confront two great questions—and
they are the same questions that face Italy today: the
questions of mass migration and socialist resentment.
Socialist resentment
Her vision of a healthy nation—defending its place
in the world, composed of free citizens proud of their
heritage, and acknowledging their responsibilities—was
founded on the idea of success. She was a self-made
middle-class person for whom failure had no appeal. She
wanted people to get on in life, and she wanted the same
for her nation and for herself. Many people shared those
desires and saw in her leadership an example that should
be followed.
The accumulation of socialist resentment makes it
difficult to revive a country when its economy collapses.
This we have seen in Greece, a country in which the
majority depend on the state for their benefits and
pensions, in which the trade unions and the statecontrolled industries have negotiated privileges that
cannot be paid for, and in which the few active people
are burdened with taxes that remove the incentive
to work. Of course, it was never as bad as that in the
rest of Europe—and it wouldn’t have been as bad in
Greece if the euro had not existed. But by using this
currency, Greece was able to borrow against the German
economy—a convenient way of living without earning.
But it is not only in the economic sphere that the
resentment against success establishes itself. There
is a culture of resentment that offers strange but real
compensation to those who adopt it. This was the major
obstacle that Thatcher encountered, not only in the leftwing opposition to her policies but also in the elite of
her own Party. She was widely seen as someone who
was indifferent to suffering and failure. And though she
spoke often of the ‘enterprise culture’ that she wished to
promote, for this she was dismissed by the intellectual
class as a philistine. She did not sufficiently take account
of the fact that, in the half century since World War II,
the educational system had been taken over by socialists
for whom social equality, rather than the transmission
of knowledge, was the goal. And she clung to national
pride and the legitimacy of distinction at a time when
the surrounding culture was devoted to the exaltation of
shabbiness and the chimera of ‘social justice’.
This difficulty was not peculiar to Britain. On the
contrary, all across Europe since the 1960s we have seen
the spread of a culture of resentment, in which equality
56
has been promoted over liberty, and failure over success.
The Italian education system has been subverted in
the name of equality, just like our education system in
Britain. And those who argue for a reduction of national
debt, for control over welfare spending, for rates of
taxation that provide an incentive to entrepreneurs are
accused of a lack of compassion. The purpose of the
state, according to the socialist vision, is to take charge
of the economy, and redistribute the product. The
goal is equality and the motive compassion. But this
compassion—which involves no personal sacrifice in
the one who promotes it, and which is exercised without
regard for the rights and deserts of the successful—is
another name for resentment. True compassion involves
giving what is yours, not taking what has been earned by
another. But the purpose of the culture of resentment is
to disguise such moral truths and to spread the myth of
an ideal ‘social justice’—which is the true goal of politics.
Mass migration
This brings me to the other, and far greater, obstacle
to Thatcher’s vision for the future—one that has now
hit Italy full in her innocent face: the obstacle posed by
mass migration. Migration to Britain from the former
Empire began in earnest after World War II, and was at
first welcomed on account of a shortage of indigenous
labour, and because the new arrivals were mostly
Christians from the Caribbean, who shared the family
values and loyalty to the Crown of their indigenous
neighbours. Sikhs and Hindus from the Indian subcontinent were also accepted, when it was discovered
that they too fit in to the secular culture of our country.
But things rapidly changed with the arrival of
Muslims from rural Pakistan. Quite suddenly Britain
was confronted with a rival culture: a culture that was
religious rather than secular, and which did not accept
the principle of national loyalty. Of course, there were
educated Pakistanis who fully understood and endorsed
the British heritage. But they were a minority and
throughout the period of Thatcher’s government the
northern cities of our country were steadily colonised by
people who regarded their surroundings as in a certain
measure alien. Although for the most part law-abiding,
they did not accept the principles of secular education
that govern our schools and insisted on sending their
boys to the Madrasah at the start of each day for the
obligatory recital of the Koran. They did not accept that
girls should be educated in the same way as boys and did
not allow their daughters a free choice when it came to
marriage. Although for the most part monogamous, the
Muslim communities have never accepted the English
law that makes bigamy a crime. ‘Honour killing’ has been
widespread, and Muslims from Africa have also inflicted
genital mutilation on their daughters.
The effort to integrate these immigrants was hampered
by the adoption of a policy of multiculturalism—in
effect the ghettoization of the Muslim communities.
This policy was promoted by leftists in the educational
system and it arose from the same culture of resentment.
By ‘multiculturalism’ the left understood the habit of
Winter/Spring 2016
repudiating and ridiculing Britain’s national culture. The
multiculturalists were not particularly pro-Islamic (for
the most part they made no attempt to understand Islam
or its practitioners); but they were anti-Christian, antiWestern, and anti-British. They were especially active
in the schools and would accuse anyone who opposed
them—and anyone who stood up for national values—
of ‘racism’.
Italy today
It is vital to understand this accusation if we are
to address what is happening now in Italy. The most
important legacy of Marxism is to have made it legitimate
to criticize people for faults that they cannot rectify. If I
accuse you of ‘false consciousness’, of bourgeois values,
of ideological spectacles, I accuse you of faults that I—
but not you—can observe and which belong to you as
the thing that you are. Hence, I am justified in despising
you, and maybe even persecuting you, and there is
nothing you can do to deflect me.
After the war the left was given a wonderful addition
to this list of existential sins—and that was ‘racism’. This
was Hitler’s last and greatest legacy to mankind: to have
identified a sin that justified the vehement hatred of the
sinner and which could be attached to someone merely by
accusing him of it. The left in my country leaped to take
advantage of this wonderful invention. Whatever you
said by way of defending your country, its institutions,
and its culture against the customs of the newcomers,
it was proof of ‘racism’. And once accused of this sin
you had no hope of rehabilitation. Schoolteachers who
advocated integrating their Muslim students into the
secular culture and the national curriculum were not
merely denounced; they could also be dismissed from
their positions. And leftists in the universities conducted
witch-hunts, certain that someone, somewhere, was
harbouring forbidden ‘racist’ thoughts.
In the face of this widespread intimidation, it became
impossible for a politician even to raise the question
whether mass immigration was good for the country
or whether there was any coherent response to it other
than ‘multiculturalism’. People were made especially
aware of this by Enoch Powell’s ill-advised speech to the
Birmingham conservatives, in which he quoted Sibyl’s
prophecy from Book VI of the Aeneid, referring to the
Tiber flowing with much blood. It was bad enough to
quote Virgil at a time when Western civilisation was being
actively forgotten. Far worse to speak in warning tones
of a situation that had been encouraged and welcomed
by the left as a way of undermining our national loyalties.
Powell’s speech cost him his career—and also made it
more than ever impossible to criticise the policies that
had caused him to speak out.
In the wake of that great event a kind of orthodoxy
arose. Whenever the topic of immigration came up, you
were supposed to talk about the wonderful addition
to our community made by the new cultures that were
being added to it. You showed you generosity of heart
by extending a welcome to whoever should come, and
by criticising the lack of compassion of those who
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U.S. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
A view of one of the courts in the Doges’ Palace in Venice.
objected to the economic cost of people who came
without the prospect of employment and with no dear
intention of finding it. Any expression of doubt was
dismissed as incipient ‘racism’, and the penalty for this
metaphysical offence was so great that nobody, not even
a Conservative politician, would risk incurring it.
Quite suddenly, however, all this has changed. We
have been directly attacked by our own citizens in the
name of Islam. And we have been presented with proof
after proof that many Muslims in our country, even
those who were born in Britain from second-generation
immigrants, refuse to identify with the nation or its
culture. Instructive have been the cases of organised
abuse of vulnerable girls by Muslim gangs. The very
same people who will ostracize and even kill girls from
their own community if their purity is tarnished will seek
out unprotected indigenous females and subject them to
mass rape, abduction, forced prostitution, and slavery.
This vivid proof that Muslims can live among us
without belonging with us—regarding our females as
legitimate targets for abuse and rape—has given rise to
a great existential anxiety all across our country. I have
written a novel on the theme—The Disappeared. And
of course there have been endless enquiries as to how
it came to pass; the latest in the city of Rotherham in
Yorkshire, leading to no punishment of the leftist city
councillors who encouraged and concealed what was
happening.
Now Italy is facing the problem that we have failed
to solve and facing it in another way: mass immigration
from people who come bringing their strange gods
and foreign customs, and who have no special wish to
integrate or to become citizens of the nation-state. Of
course they want a passport. But for the most part they
have no understanding of what that passport represents,
by way of custom, culture, and loyalty.
What should we do about it? To date, the ruling
elite in Italy has had only one response—to pass the
problem to Europe. Give the migrants documents and
then encourage them to go elsewhere. And here we see
one very powerful illustration of what Thatcher objected
to in the EU. A problem that can be solved only if a
57
nation and its leadership combine in order to address
it remains unsolved because it can be passed out of the
jurisdiction, expelled from the sphere of accountability,
to be circulated like a bomb that is past from hand to
hand by people hoping that it will not explode.
If Italy were the kind of nation-state that Thatcher
wished to forge in Britain, then it would react to what is
in fact a military question in the only way likely to solve
it. Italy would step into the chaos in Libya, arrest the
people traffickers, and confiscate their boats, making
clear—by force—that Libya, too, must close its borders.
This would require courage and resolution. But only a
few Libyans would be opposed to it, once the first brief
shoot-outs had occurred.
Of course, that will not happen since you do not
have leadership of the kind required. Although leadership
is embodied in a particular person at a particular time, it
does not come from nowhere. It depends upon cultural
conditions that are now fragile and under threat. In
particular, it depends on the individual’s confidence in
something larger than himself, something to which he
belongs and for which it is worth making sacrifices. It is
the search for this ‘something’ that is now at the top of
our agenda.
Emasculated Europe
What we have been offered by our political class is
an emasculated Europe, purged of its religion, governed
by abstract principles of equality and rights, and expressly
turned against the traditional forms of marriage and
the family. It may be a viable enterprise; but it is not
something to which the individual can belong—in the way
you belong to a faith or a nation—nor is it something for
which anybody living now would be prepared to make
a real sacrifice. Who has died for a bureaucracy, or set
aside his comforts for the sake of abstract principles that
deny his sense of home?
I do not, however, think the situation is desperate.
The sense of belonging is natural to human beings and
will resurge just as soon as it is permitted. There is no
reason why Italians should not identify themselves again
as citizens of a nation-state, bound by a shared religion
and a secular rule of law, attached to real communities
which control their destiny and foster the attachments
of family life. But a rootless elite has taken possession of
the European machine, and broadcasts a rival vision of
the future—a future without membership, without the
right to exclude, without the traditional attachments that
have been the heart and soul of our civilisation.
It is the intimidating messages broadcast by this
elite, whether through the European Parliament, the
European Courts, or the edicts of the Commission, that
cause Italian politicians to hesitate when it comes to
affirming the traditional values and attachments of the
Italian people. This long-standing intimidation cannot
be overcome from above, since the political class owes
its status to the habit of giving way to it. But it can be
overcome from below.
And it is to this point that I address my concluding
remarks. Everything that I have said in this talk would
58
be censored and condemned by those who now wish
to control the language of politics. I have no respect for
‘political correctness’ and am only interested in saying
what is true, while it is still possible to say it. When people
hear the truth they are moved to agree and to act. The
ordinary people of this country are, in the end, not so
different from the ordinary people of Britain. And they
are quite capable of affirming their traditional values and
forcing their elected politicians to give voice to them.
But two requirements must be fulfilled before that
will happen. First, those traditional values must be
expressed in a language that can be used by the people
and taken to heart. They must no longer be tongue-tied
in the face of the transnational elite. And to provide that
language surely ought to be one of the tasks of people like
me—opinion formers who have explored the avenues
of expression and worked hard to find the words that
convey what they think to be true.
The second requirement that must be fulfilled if
we are to turn things around is that we must oppose
censorship and take the risk of offending those who
make use of it. We must laugh at political correctness and
establish a public forum of debate in which real issues
can be discussed without fear by those with an interest
in solving them. The saddest thing about the current
crisis is that so few people dare to say what they think,
even though the orthodoxies, expressed in all the media
and on the lips of all the celebrities, are transparently
false and unbelievable. As in the days of communism in
Eastern Europe, people are living, as Vaclav Havel put
it, within the lie, learning to repeat slogans that they do
not believe, closing the doors where truth might enter,
uttering ritual formulae with the intention of silencing
argument. And the thought police remain vigilant in
every forum of decision-making.
This leads me to my last remark. One of the marks
of Western civilisation since the Enlightenment has
been the habit of putting truth at the heart of politics.
Before making decisions that affect us all, we have tried
to discover the truth about our situation. We have seen
truth as an essential part of freedom and the pursuit of
truth as necessary if we are to take full responsibility
for our lives. This pursuit of truth is not to be found
everywhere in the world. We have seen how very far it
is from the life ‘in the shade of the Koran’ that Muslim
Brotherhood leader Sayyid Qutb wished to be adopted
by his countrymen. In the end, it is in this matter that
Islamism poses the greatest threat to us—from its habit
of punishing free opinion, and expelling truth from the
heart of our discourse, in order to put obedience and
submission in its place. Let us recognize the virtues of
disobedience, when truth is the goal.
Roger Scruton is a Visiting Professor at Blackfriar’s Hall,
Oxford; a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in
Washington, DC; and a Senior Fellow at the Future Symphony
Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. His most recent book is Fools
Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left
(Bloomsbury, 2015). This article was originally delivered as a
lecture on 23 November 2015. It appears here with permission.
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The Salisbury Review
The liberal establishment gave you the 2008 crash,
the War on Terror, ISIS, the London Bombings, Libya,
Bashar ASSAD, the Ukraine and a million refugees.
Now they want to chain you to the EU.
The leaders of all three of Britain’s political parties
are signed up to Europe under a new King over the
Water, Jean Claude Juncker a founder of the Euro
Project and President of the European Commission.
MEPs are allowed to £125,000 unaudited expenses a
year, paid for by us. For this, as well as huge salaries,
they have given us the mess in Greece which is now
suffering economic collapse, the dismantling of its
frontiers and mass invasion. Spain, Italy and Portugal
are next. Like some rich, daft old uncle, it is Britain
who will pay the final bill, while Germany extends her
economic empire on the back of cheap, imported
migrant labour. Ever heard this before?
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