The crisis of European values

Daniel Johnson’s leading article on Friday is  wise, informed by history and prescient. It is also full of foreboding, in a world in which the word “ crisis ” has been devaluated.  

What is unfolding across the eastern domain of Europe is unprecedented in modern European history. You have to go back to the unravelling that contributed to World War 1 to discern that sense of slippage into chaos, and worse. 

We face three intertwined crises: a fourth wave of Covid, an energy crisis and a build up of geo-political tensions. Daniel Johnson is right to point out the appalling lack of moral principle and the absence of leadership. In this context, it is interesting that Poland, reviled by the EU as recently as weeks ago at the October Summit, is defending the front line of Europe — not just in terms of territory but, more importantly, in terms of the values for which Europe once stood and around which member nations coalesced. No longer. And that really is the point. Most readers will not agree with what follows. Even so, the case must be stated.

The banking and sovereign debt crisis was, first and foremost, a moral crisis. I, along with others, have made this case at the time. Political weakness, venal corporate behaviour and regulatory failures were an expression of this moral crisis. The EU didn’t — and still doesn’t — get it. 

The Russian President Vladimir Putin, in an interview with the Financial Times a year or two ago, identified the epicentre of the fault lines that are now fracturing the EU. Namely, the moral decadence of the West. 

More than a generation ago, Solzhenitsyn warned of this moral decadence in unequivocal terms. Nobody listened. Not then and still less today. With the most grounded moral authority possible, he warned that the West was slipping into unprecented decadence: a rejection of God and of all normative values that had once formed and animated “Europe”. It has excised these values from itself, preferring instead the Marxist critical theory which has seeped through Europe’s institutions and its mind-set. 

This is not an apologia for Putin, though it should be remembered that if the West had not lied to an emergent and broken Russian economy about its future military security, the present political tensions might not — might not — have arisen. Trust, once lost, is difficult to rebuild. 

No, it is simply to point out that decadence — in the form of cultural Marxism — has, just like a build-up of C02, inevitable consequences. They are unfolding across Europe and will play out globally. 

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