A Liberal Vision For Europe
Yes, its identity is based in Christianity. But to meet today's challenges, the continent must look to the Enlightenment.
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I recently delivered the Erhard Busek Memorial Lecture at the Europe’s Futures Retreat held on the island of Cres, Croatia. Some of my arguments here will be familiar to regular readers of this column, but I’m delighted to share them with you in this new form. —Frank.
I want to speak to you today about the question of European identity, which relates to the question of the future relationship between Europe and the United States.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio got a standing ovation at the end of his talk at the Munich Security Conference in February, largely for his assertion that the United States and Europe were all part of a single “Western Civilization.” His listeners were doubtless gratified that he backed away from the aggressive nastiness towards Europe displayed by Vice President Vance the year before, and that he seemed to be anchoring the trans-Atlantic relationship in values, as countless American leaders had done in the years before the rise of Donald Trump. Rubio asserted that “We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”
Hidden within that speech, however, was a subtle distinction that points to the great division today between populists and liberals in both the United States and Europe. For an important group of American conservatives, “Western Civilization” denotes a specifically Christian civilization, and a culture based on active Christian belief. Rubio alludes to this by speaking not of “Christian heritage” but of “Christian faith” in his remarks. His list of shared aspects of common civilization includes the words “heritage” and “ancestry,” which echo Vance’s use of the term “heritage Americans” to imply, it would seem, that our culture is based on a common ethnicity as well as shared religion.
As I have written before, there is no question that Western Civilization is rooted in “Christian heritage.” One of the deepest Christian values is belief in the universal equality of all human beings in the eyes of God. National conservatives mock the liberal belief in universal human equality, and Rubio himself argues that no one fights for an abstraction, but for a particular way of life.
But there’s one important abstract idea that lies at the core of Christianity and of Western culture. It was expressed by the Apostle Paul in Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” This belief in universal human equality forms the basis for the modern view of human rights, as embodied in many constitutional documents across Europe.
But Christian heritage does not mean that Western identity is based on active Christian belief and heritage. Indeed, Western Civilization detached itself from specific religious beliefs from the 17th century. The reason for this was historical: following the Protestant Reformation, Europeans spent the next 150 years killing each other over different interpretations of Christian doctrine, including ideas like transubstantiation or childhood baptism.
As a result of this disagreement over final ends, the Enlightenment founders of modern liberalism agreed to push religion into the realm of private belief, and to focus politics on life itself rather than the good life as defined by a particular religious doctrine. In addition, early natural scientists were engaged in a prolonged struggle with the Catholic Church. It was only with the separation of empirical inquiry from religious dogma that modern natural science, and the economic world that it made possible, emerged.
So, there is in fact a very different understanding of Western Civilization from the one that Marco Rubio advanced—one that is built around liberalism itself and encompasses Enlightenment values such as openness, tolerance, and skepticism about received ideas, and which is rooted in a rule of law that limits the power of governments over citizens.
It seems to me that Europeans today have no alternative but to base their common identity on this second understanding of Western Civilization.
The older understanding of an overtly Christian Western was gradually reconciled with modern liberal democracy in stages. Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum accepted the legitimacy of a market economy and sought to chart a third way between market liberalism and socialism.
Later, the Church’s historical flirtations with authoritarian government were rejected by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. The political expression of this reconciliation was the emergence and strength of Christian Democratic parties all across Europe, which played central roles in the acceptance of democratic values in the years after 1945.
Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Centesimus Annus, issued in 1991 on the 100th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, sought to reconcile, with certain qualifications, Catholic doctrine with both liberal democracy and modern capitalism.
It seems to me that contemporary European identity can therefore acknowledge its Christian roots, but base itself upon Enlightenment ideals of universal human rights and modern democracy. This is what all current member states of the European Union hold in common. This is what Europe also holds in common with the United States: not the United States of Vance or the MAGA world, but the United States built upon the foundation of Lockean liberalism.
This year, the United States is celebrating the 250th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, a document that states clearly in its second paragraph that “All men are created equal,” and asserts the principle that government receives its legitimacy from the “consent of the governed.” These are the kinds of abstract ideas that constitute the American national identity that emerged after the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and are values that Europeans and Americans hold in common.
The problem, of course, is that there are now two Americas, one reaching back to the overtly religious and nativist understanding of American national identity, and the other embracing the Enlightenment version. The second version has now been called into question, particularly during the second Trump administration. What one might call pre-modern America has been authoritarian in domestic policy and unilateralist and arbitrary in its foreign policy. Donald Trump during his second administration has tried to rule by executive order rather than going through the country’s constitutional processes. He has pursued policies that are manifestly contrary to law and even to the plain language of the U.S. Constitution. Similarly, he has declared himself unbound by any external authorities, including both economic and military treaty commitments, not to speak of bodies like the United Nations. His disregard for law is evident in the blatant corruption that he and his family, friends, and associates have engaged in since returning to power.
This lawless posture has direct international consequences. After the capture of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro in January, President Trump explained that he was limited in his international actions only by “my own morality.” He thus felt empowered to make claims on Greenland, the sovereign territory of a longstanding and loyal NATO ally. The United States is today involved in a war with Iran that was not sanctioned by the U.S. Congress, much less approved by international bodies like the UN Security Council or NATO. Indeed, Trump has attacked NATO allies for not helping to rescue the United States from policies that he himself undertook unilaterally.
From a European perspective, the central question is whether NATO allies would ever be able to trust the United States in the future, if for example Trump were replaced by another president who re-committed the United States to its former alliance obligations. The answer, I’m afraid, is no. The Republican Party and Republican voters, who were once the bedrock of support for alliance partners, have been changed beyond recognition. Before 2016, it was a party committed to free trade, limited government, openness to immigration, the strong defense of allies, and a democratic world order.
Since the rise of Donald Trump, it has coalesced around an “America First” agenda that wants to close off the United States to the outside world. Trump has openly favored dictatorships like Putin’s Russia, Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, or Xi Jinping’s China over democratic countries in Europe and Asia. He has visibly eroded trust within the United States, attacking domestic opponents as enemies and traitors, and degraded the quality of discourse through vicious personal attacks on perceived enemies. There is no guarantee that a more Europe-friendly future president would not be replaced by a similarly nationalistic one in another few years.
These problems will be exacerbated by new technological developments, in particular the growth of artificial intelligence. It is of course impossible to predict the speed and extent of AI’s future capabilities. Many industry insiders think that we will achieve AGI—artificial general intelligence—within a few years, while others are more skeptical. Regardless of when that happens, certain long-term trendlines are already evident. They were pointed to in the recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, issued by Pope Leo XIV, which was deliberately positioned as the successor to Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum.
The encyclical points to two separate dangers. The first is that AI will increase inequalities around the world, both within individual societies and between different societies. AI as it is currently developing rewards large scale. At this point, only the United States and China have the ability to build data centers large enough and in sufficient numbers to power the latest frontier models. There is substantial speculation that this disparity will only increase over time, as frontier models are able to modify themselves and “grow” new capabilities in a positive feedback loop. In this race, Europe lags significantly behind. Europe does not host any large technology companies that are competitive with the American and Chinese leaders, and there does not seem to be a path forward to creating any.
The second challenge is one of governance. Unlike previous technological revolutions, AI is not being developed in government labs, but entirely in the private sector. It is being developed by what the encyclical labels a “technocracy,” whose defining values are profit and power, and not any conception of the common good. This technocracy has extraordinary powers both to reshape domestic economies, and to intervene in international affairs directly as well.
Take for example Starlink, a global satellite system that, unlike GPS/GNSS, was developed not by a government, but by a private individual, Elon Musk. That control allowed Musk to become an independent foreign policy actor. In the early stages of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he helped Kyiv by providing Ukrainian forces with internet connectivity, but then took it away when they began to threaten Russia’s position in Crimea. In doing so, he was not working with any government in America or Europe, but simply conducting his own private foreign policy.
In the future, we will face similar challenges from AI. As the Pope’s encyclical notes, it is impossible for AI not to incorporate certain social values. These values are non-transparent, and may not even be knowable by the companies and engineers who are creating the AI systems.
In light of these challenges, it is not sufficient to say that governments need to regulate AI. The United States, which is home to the leading frontier systems, has shown little interest in AI regulation. The geopolitical competition between the United States and China will disincentivize regulation, which will inevitably slow down the pace of AI development.
But it is not clear to me that governments, either in China, Europe, or North America, will even have the ability to control AI if they want to. Our governments do not have the technical capacity to keep up with fast-moving technology, which in the end may not be controllable by anyone. Nationalization of AI will not be a safe solution either, as it will put an incredible power in the hands of the state. Even if that state is democratically controlled, it is not clear that we will be able to avoid the abuses that are likely to emerge from such power.
I want, however, to end on a more optimistic note. Despite the damage to institutions that has occurred over the past decade, I believe that the checks and balances built into modern democracies will continue to operate.
The most important of these checks are elections. The recent Hungarian election showed that voters could make clear choices and reject authoritarian leaders like Viktor Orbán. I do not believe that the fears that many people had last year about a rising populist tide sweeping Europe will come to pass. There is strong evidence that Donald Trump will be repudiated in the midterm elections this coming November, and that the Democrats may retake not just the House of Representatives, but the Senate as well. Donald Trump has not proven to be the unifying glue that holds the European far right together. No party will want to bind itself closely to an aging, mentally deteriorating 80-year-old man who seems to be losing control of events both at home and abroad.
With regard to AI, there is a powerful political backlash growing in the United States against unbridled technological development. Both political parties have wings that are very skeptical of the promised benefits of AI deployment, a movement that is likely to grow over time. So neither democratic backsliding nor technocratic dominance are inevitable. Societies can exercise agency over their futures; they only need to recognize the threats they face and do the hard work of mobilizing against them.
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is Liberalism and Its Discontents. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.
Parts of this talk were adapted from the article “What ‘Western Civilization’ Really Means.”
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