On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence, Thibault Mercier (president of the Cercle Droit & Liberté, a Paris lawyer, trainer, and regular speaker at Institut Iliade conferences) addressed the Cercle Royal Gaulois in Brussels as part of the debate “America and Europe: A Civilizational Split?”. The event formed part of the conference “America at 250: Revolution, Liberty, and the Future of the West”, organized by the Mathias Corvinus Collegium of Brussels.

America and Europe: A Civilizational Split?

“I love the Americans because they are good Christians, sincerely Christian. Because they believe that Christ is always on the side of those who are in the right. Because they think that being wrong is a fault, that it is immoral to be wrong. Because they consider themselves gentlemen and hold that all the peoples of Europe are more or less dishonest. Because they think that a defeated people is a guilty people, that defeat amounts to a moral condemnation, an act of divine justice.”

These words are not mine. They belong to the Italian author Curzio Malaparte, who in his novel La Peau (The Skin) describes the liberation of Naples by the Allies in 1943. Yet after this “liberation”, rather than attaining emancipation, the city succumbs to a plague brought in by the liberators — a plague that corrupts not bodies, but souls.

I chose to open these remarks with this passage partly out of a taste for provocation. Above all, however, it allows me to take the opposite tack from the implicit premise of this round table.

Before going further, I would like to thank MCC for its invitation. I also ask the Americans present, in advance, not to take the criticisms that follow as an attack on Americans themselves. One must always distinguish between a people, its leaders, its interests, and the image its partners may have of it. In any case, I am very fond of the United States, which I have visited every year for more than ten years. As we sometimes say in France: “We love to hate the United States, but we hate loving them just as much.” Let us also remember that the history of France and that of the American nation are closely intertwined. Across the Atlantic, Americans have never forgotten the decisive role the Kingdom of France played in their struggle for independence, embodied above all in the figure of the Marquis de Lafayette. The political and cultural influence of the American Republic on France is likewise undeniable. But is this historical and cultural closeness enough to make Europe, France, and the United States components of one and the same civilization?

The premise of this round table is that there exists, or once existed, a Western civilization whose unity is now under threat. For my part, I believe this premise is false.

Yes, convergences are clearly emerging on both sides of the Atlantic among populations attached to their European roots. And yes, it is eminently desirable that these convergences grow into common action to defend an identity trampled by the dominant ideology, in the United States and in Europe alike.

Nevertheless, the West, in the civilizational sense of the term, has never truly existed. From the founding of the United States onward, marked divergences in worldview, political culture, and geopolitical interests appeared between Europe and America.

The United States: A Bloc Apart

To understand this divergence, we must go back to the very birth of the American Republic. The United States is not simply an extension of Europe across the Atlantic. It was built as a distinct project, at times in explicit opposition to the Europe from which it sprang. From the outset, this project sought to emancipate itself from the tutelage of the former mother country in order to pursue, legitimately, its own interests.

The imaginary of the Pilgrim Fathers rests on an idea of rupture: leaving the Old World to build a new society, a “city upon a hill”, a “New Jerusalem” kept safe from the vices and corruptions of monarchical and aristocratic Europe. To the American Puritans, were Europeans not themselves a kind of savage?

This founding moment explains the “Manifest Destiny” that the United States has never ceased to claim, rooted as it is in a profound break with the European tradition. In other words, North America was never conceived by its founders as a European colony. Ever since, it has carried a worldview that is not ours.

To put it in caricature, one might say that America is liberal individualism combined with unbridled capitalism: what the philosopher Martin Heidegger called the “metaphysics of the limitless”.

This worldview is also reflected in America’s conception of law, which differs sharply from Europe’s, as Solzhenitsyn showed in his 1978 Harvard address. In that address, admittedly directed at “the West”, Solzhenitsyn criticized what he saw as one of the fundamental derailments of modern Western societies: the reduction of morality to law. In his view, the West had built a “legalistic” society in which individuals seek less to act justly than to exploit the possibilities the law allows to the very limit. This primacy of law over duty or virtue leads, he argued, to a twofold weakening. On the one hand, the individual is no longer guided by any higher moral demand. On the other, society becomes incapable of protecting itself against harmful behavior so long as that behavior remains legally permissible. The absolute defense of individual rights thus ends by disarming the collectivity in the face of moral, cultural, or social decadence.

These, in brief outline, are the arguments that show, to my mind, that the United States carries a worldview distinct from our own.

The West: A Fig Leaf for America’s Reverse Colonialism

If the United States constitutes a distinct civilization, another question arises: how was this notion of the “West”, which claims to unite Americans and Europeans under one banner, born?

My thesis is that the contemporary concept of the West is more recent than we imagine. It was largely reconstructed during the Cold War in order to organize a political, military, and ideological bloc around Washington, presented as the “free world”. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it has been an American talking point, designed to shape minds so as to justify maintaining a unipolar world order.

Today, in many subtle forms, the concept of defending the West has in reality become the fig leaf of American imperialism. To be provocative, I will draw a parallel with our former African colonies, which we now accuse of physically colonizing us in return. The same goes for our former colony across the Atlantic, with one difference: here the colonization is not physical but moral. The United States would thus be imposing on us a kind of mental Great Replacement. In the end, in 1945, the Americans liberated us from one imperialism only to impose a new one on us. It is surely no accident that the Battle of Normandy bore the name Overlord (suzerain).

Behind this imperialism, this Pax Americana, Europe finds itself vassalized. It follows American directives that run counter to its own interests (take, for example, the dismantling of Serbia). The objection that the United States cannot be considered a rival of Europe because it is not at war with it strikes me as unconvincing.

As the French philosopher Julien Freund, a disciple and contemporary of Carl Schmitt, wrote: “All doctrines that see in the industrial or economic age the peaceful successor of the military age must be regarded as groundless.” Rivalry between powers does not vanish along with the cannons. It shifts into economics, law, technology, and culture. Take a concrete example: under the banner of fighting corruption or enforcing embargoes, the American authorities have imposed colossal penalties on leading European companies such as BNP Paribas, Société Générale, Total, and Technip. Since 2010, these firms have paid several tens of billions of dollars to the United States following proceedings based on the extraterritorial application of American law. This is an eloquent illustration of the economic war the dominant powers are waging against one another today.

Does Defending the West Amount, in Practice, to Defending Europe?

From here, one confusion strikes me as especially dangerous: the belief that Europe’s interests naturally merge with those of the West.

Certainly, there are common battles on both sides of the Atlantic. But I am struck by a certain Westernist conception that tends to reduce Europe to a mere “white world” and to reintroduce race as the principal criterion of political analysis. To conflate Europe and the West on such a basis is, in my view, a double error: historical and ideological.

The concept of the West reduces the complexity of peoples and civilizations to a few abstract categories based on origin, religion, or skin color. Worse still, it tends to legitimize a clash-of-civilizations logic contrary to European interests. I am thinking in particular of the tensions with Iran, or of the war in Ukraine, where one may legitimately question whether American and European interests perfectly converge.

The West, as it is invoked today by the partisans of liberal universalism, seems to me in the end less a solution than a problem: an ideology of European origin from which Europe may one day have to free itself in order to recover its own “Great Health”.1

Why Are We Not Americans?

But criticizing the West is not enough. One must also be able to say what one means to defend in its place. What Europe do we want?

Some claim that Europe exists wherever populations of European origin live, so that Argentines, Brazilians, or Americans would be Europeans living far from their continent of origin. I do not share this conviction. A European is not only the heir of an origin. He is also the heir of a culture, a history, and a rootedness. By leaving their land, these populations developed new historical identities and became something other than European.

This position is obviously not founded on any rejection of the American peoples, to whom we are bound by close ties. It rests instead on the affirmation of the particular genius of the European peoples and of their right to pursue their historical existence, sovereignly, on their own land. Europe has shaped a human ideal founded above all on honor, loyalty, courage, keeping one’s word, and the pursuit of beauty.

By contrast, the Russian dissident Eduard Limonov observed, not without provocation, in his Grand Hospice occidental (The Great Western Hospice), that “the admiration and sympathy of Americans go to men devoted to getting rich quick”, before citing Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy, as his example. Behind the quip, Limonov was pointing to a difference in the hierarchy of values.

No civilization prospers for long if economic interest becomes the sole horizon of existence. Europe has also been, at least in part, a third way between communism and liberalism. Above all, it remains the bearer of a certain idea of the world: that of multipolarity.

Carl Schmitt, in The Nomos of the Earth, explained that every great civilization must be able to unfold its own historical project freely, within a space of its own. Such a conception implies respect for borders, non-interference, and the rejection of universalist pretensions. Europe accepts the imperfection of the world. It understands that not all societies are destined to follow the same political path, nor obliged to converge on an identical model. In this respect, it remains fundamentally foreign to every form of universalism.

I therefore do not believe that America and Europe are now drifting apart. I believe they have long followed distinct trajectories. The real question is whether Europe is still capable of fully assuming its historical, political, and civilizational personality without perpetually defining itself in relation to other powers. For it would be too easy to make the United States responsible for our own abdications. Europeans’ first responsibility is to become themselves again.

Originally published by the Institut Iliade

Translated by Alexander Raynor