Can Gaullism become Europe's Confucianism?
There is little controversy nowadays in saying that Europe - heck, the West as a whole - is spiritually and ideologically dead.
Long gone is the supposed triumph liberal hegemony best illustrated by Fukuyuama’s “End of History” a mere 3 decades ago. It’s not even on life-support anymore: it's in the morgue, awaiting autopsy.
Strangely, many in Europe’s ruling class haven’t yet seemed to realize this (or don’t dare say it out loud). Ironically the last place on earth where you'll hear a full-throated defense of American-led liberal hegemony is not Washington - even they’ve now understood it’s gone - but in Brussels. This doesn’t make the ideology any less dead, it just makes those EU rulers the last faithful of a cult whose guru now openly mocks them for ever believing it (literally, you just need to read the U.S.’s latest National Security Strategy to see it).
The question that logically follows is: what should fill the ideological vacuum?
As I pointed in my recent article “Venezuela killed the U.S.” the death of an ideology isn’t necessarily worrying in and of itself. It can even be excellent news sometimes. What really matters is what replaces it.
In that article I made the parallel with China’s Qin dynasty: a dynasty that was exceptionally effective in that it unified China for the first time, but was also extraordinarily brutal and bloody. Its ruthlessness, among other factors, made it last only 15 years: the shortest-lived dynasty in China’s history. China’s chance is that it had Confucianism waiting in the wings, a coherent moral and governance framework ready to reconstitute the social order. The Han dynasty that followed adopted it and lasted over 400 years, and China has arguably been running on some version of that same operating system ever since - 2,228 years and counting.
Ideologically speaking, the history of Europe is much more chaotic. When Europe goes searching for a new animating purpose - and it undoubtedly will once the realization the current one has been cancelled by headquarters finally reaches Brussels - the rest of humanity has every reason to pay close attention.
Europe's ideological commitments have a way of becoming total: it can be Notre-Dame or it can be Auschwitz. We often picture Europeans as committed to measure and pragmatism but, historically speaking, nothing could be further from the truth: we have a way, like few other civilizations, of taking ideas to their absolute conclusions. Steered in the right direction, this can produce humanity’s most beautiful creations. Steered in the wrong one, we can massacre millions in the most horrific ways and feel righteous doing it.
This is why the present moment is so critical for Europe. In fact it might even be humanity’s most important problem: what will 450 million people with a unique talent for ideological extremism reach for next? Everyone obsesses over black swans - the unpredictable shocks - while ignoring the grey rhino in plain sight: the continent that gave humanity both world wars prepares to go searching for new meaning.
