What Civilization Are We Talking About?
Twenty-Two Thoughts on Civilizational Confidence and the US-EU Relationship
The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy warns that Europe faces “civilizational erasure” within a generation. The culprits, as they see it, are: immigration, declining birthrates, censorship, and the EU.
I want to take the phrase “civilizational self-confidence” seriously - it’s doing a lot of work in this document, and I’m not sure its authors have thought through what it actually means. I think about this stuff too and my conclusions are very different from theirs.
One way of looking at the “Western Tradition” is as two thousand plus years of working out the philosophical problem of extending moral concern beyond blood and tribe.
The Greeks taught that all human beings share in the logos. Christianity universalized this further: there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free. The Enlightenment secularized these commitments without abandoning them.
America’s founding document makes the most sweeping claim of all: that all men are created equal. This “equal” is a category that the founders understood imperfectly but stated universally, leaving future generations the task of living up to words that exceeded the practice of their authors.
This is what Western civilization, at its best, has been confident about, that which I am proud to inherit: the hard-won insight that moral worth does not depend on blood or soil.
So, when I hear “civilizational self-confidence” invoked to justify closing borders and defining nations by ethnicity, I have to wonder: what civilization are we talking about here?
The American Constitution does not mention Christianity, Anglo-Saxon heritage, or European descent. It establishes no state religion, nor does it require some ethnic qualification for citizenship. This was not an oversight. The founders were creating a nation defined by assent to principles rather than by blood.
Tocqueville, the French observer America in 1835, understood this. What made America exceptional then and now was its civic rather than ethnic nationalism - its capacity to absorb newcomers into a shared political project.
This absorptive capacity was not a weakness. It meant America could draw talent from anywhere while European nations bled themselves white in wars over which ethnic group would dominate which piece of territory.
Try a thought experiment. Imagine two civilizations: the first says “Our institutions are strong. Our culture is compelling. We welcome newcomers because we are confident they will want to join us.” The second says: “We are fragile. Exposure to outsiders will dilute us. We must wall ourselves off.” Which of these is exhibiting self-confidence?
Rome, at its height, was extraordinarily porous. Emperors came from Spain, North Africa, the Balkans, and more. The empire absorbed peoples and gods from across the known world. Rome declined (among other reasons) when it became rigid and defensive, when it could no longer integrate the peoples pressing at its borders.
A document that cannot articulate what the West stands for, only what it stands against, is not confident. It is the brittleness of an identity that has forgotten its own content.
On birthrates: the challenge is real, but the diagnosis is lazy. Low fertility shows up across societies with very different norms. The common denominators are boring and fixable: housing costs, childcare scarcity, and economic uncertainty. You can be pro-choice and pro-child.
On immigration: the liberal argument isn’t “borders don’t matter.” It’s that a confident nation can convert outsiders into insiders if it maintains control of entry and takes assimilation seriously. Capacity matters and creates backlash if exceeded, but openness remains the best norm.
Where I at-least-partially agree with the administration is in its critiques of speech control and hyperregulation in general - not because I think that Nazis and environmental destruction are good, but because a crude cure can create problems beyond the disease. To take a salient example, the knee-jerk rejection of nuclear power is one reason that Europe finds itself incapable of energy independence with respect to Russia.
Here is the most outrageous part of this whole thing for me: the European order that the National Security Strategy frames as civilizational weakness was an American project.
After 1945, American statesmen designed institutions - NATO, the Marshall Plan, the EU’s precursors - precisely to enmesh European nations in cooperation that would make war unthinkable. Marshall, Acheson, and Eisenhower were not soft men. They understood that American security depended on a stable, integrated Europe.
A man with the surname “Eisenhauer” led the American fight against the ethno-nationalist Nazis. If that isn’t a proof of civic-nationalist immigration success then I don’t know what is.
To now celebrate nationalist parties seeking to tear down these institutions is to repudiate one of America’s greatest strategic and civilizational achievements. It is to forget why the postwar order was built in the first place.
It’s rich to have an entity called “the United States” being pro-disintegration.
If we want Europe to “remain European,” we might start by asking what Europe, at its best, has stood for. The left and right both see Western civilization as co-extensive with “White Christian Patriarchy” - the left think this is bad and the right thinks this is good. I disagree with both: the West, at its best, has stood for a liberal ideal, one that belongs to anyone willing to think it.