Tuesday, June 3, 2025

Part I

---

What’s Going On Between the U.S. and Europe? Europe Appears to Be Rethinking Its Relationship with the U.S. and Its Attraction to ‘Traditional Values’

Today I want to bring you something of a report from Europe, and in particular I want to focus on the big concern over here, and that is the ongoing relationship between the United States and Europe and the question of what’s going on in both places. We’ll put the emphasis on Europe. Mark Mazower wrote a really interesting piece for the Financial Times over the weekend. It was entitled The End of the Affair. His point is that Europeans are beginning to rethink their fundamental relationship with the United States of America. Mazower is a professor at Columbia University. I think it’s important to understand that he gives a very good historical background to this analysis. I’m going to disagree with some of the places he goes from there, but when it comes to the historical analysis, I think he’s basically spot on.

In the early American period, of course it was Europe that held the big cards. It was Europe that had the power. It was Europe that set most of the cultural agenda, but all that began to shift even in the 19th century, and by the time you get to the 20th century, American dominance becomes increasingly clear. That’s something very hard for Europe to take, but Mazower points out that in the 19th century there was this giant shift, and in particular when you think about the relationship with the United States on the part of nations like England and France and Spain. Those were imperial nations. They were committed to colonialism, the rise of the United States, and also the fact that these imperial powers had to withdraw from most of what became defined as the new world. This led to a situation in which over time what happened in the United States began to set the pace for what would happen in Europe, or at least it was a matter of European fascination.

As Mazower writes about the 19th century, “As the century progressed, America shook off Europe’s tutelage and it became the model rather than the copy.” He points to Alexis de Tocqueville as a seminal European observer, and of course, De Tocqueville was French, a European observer of the United States, basically himself making the point, I have seen the future and it works. De Tocqueville was not without his concerns when it came to the United States, but clearly he was an admirer and a friend of the United States. He wanted his own nation, France, as well as other European nations to learn from the democratic constitutional experiment of the United States of America. Clearly, it was also a matter of energy as well. 

 

The United States from the very beginning, but certainly by the time you reached the middle of the 19th century, was a magneto of energy. It was a motor, and as European powers observed, they were pretty clear that at some point, given the continental stretch of the United States, given its natural assets and given the fact that it had peaceful nations to the north and to the south and oceans to the east and to the west, it was possessed of enormous creative energies and enormous natural resources. Europe was pretty sure that the United States would one day eclipse it. That seemed a long way off, particularly when you see the British Empire at its height in the 19th century. Famously, the sun never set on the British Empire. 

And the full transition in terms of the shift of power there between Britain being the dominant power and the United States being the lesser power to the situation being radically reversed with the United States being very clearly the global power, the British Empire would continue in some vestigial form, but losing India and then losing other nations, it became very clear that the British Empire was being completely redefined. And as a matter of fact, it’s an embarrassment to discuss it now except in historical terms, even in Britain.

From the beginning, the United States saw itself not so much as a successor to the European nations and their traditions, but the corrective. And the United States of course in the beginning was in general terms, a part of the Anglosphere, that’s the sphere of English-speaking nations. Britain in the 19th century, appeared to be nearly supreme, but the energy was in the United States. And furthermore, the experimentation was here as well, and this was something that caught the attention of Alexis de Tocqueville, but a good number of other Europeans joined him. By the time you get to 1823, then President James Monroe of the United States declared what became known as the Monroe Doctrine, and that warned the European monarchial powers to stay out of the new world. It was a message sent and to a considerable extent it was a message received. 

Fast-forward to the 20th century and the United States appears to be the liberator and defender of democracy, particularly over against two world wars that were basically European in origin. Of course, World War II also involved war with the Empire of Japan, but it was the European relationship that was primary here, and when you get to the second half of the 20th century, you had this coalescence of American leadership in what became the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, which of course represented a joint comprehensive defense of western democracy against Soviet communist tyranny. The United States and Europe moved militarily and also economically and to some degree politically into a much closer alliance that appeared to be permanent. But of course, Mazower’s article in the Financial Times, not coincidentally published in London, does tell us that many Europeans are rethinking that proposition. But then fast-forward to 1988 and then US President Ronald Reagan declared, “These shared standards and beliefs tie us to Europe today. They are the essence of the community of free nations to which we belong.”

So there was a basic understanding of western Democratic legitimate government, and that bound together the western powers in Europe and also the United States. It appeared to be a cemented, permanent, perhaps even etched in stone relationship, but Mazower’s article in the Financial Times is basically underlining the fact that there are many, especially in Europe right now, who are questioning that relationship. Is this close relationship with the United States over? Is it so strong that a single president like Donald Trump can’t single-handedly reshape it? What exactly is Trump’s agenda after all? Well, you look at one aspect of this, and that’s defense policy, and President Trump has called out the fact that so many of these western European nations have been free-riding, so to speak, on the defense spending and the leadership of the United States.

That was not what was intended, at least explicitly in the NATO agreement when it came together after World War II, but it was a state of affairs that many European nations, to put the matter bluntly, took advantage of. But there are other major distinctions between the United States and Europe. For one thing, the United States is, well, just that, the United States. It is 48 contiguous states plus two non-contiguous states. Those 48 contiguous states are both part of the same nation and also separate states when it comes to the powers reserved to the states. But when you look at Europe, you’re looking at something like, well, a similar land mass, but you’re talking there not about states, but you’re talking about independent nations, and that independence has been renegotiated over and over again going back to the 18th century.

It has most recently been reasserted with the development of the European Union, but not without controversy, because all the nations in the European Union are not exactly equal. At the center of it all is Germany and France. Britain’s had an awkward relationship with its European neighbors for years and famously pulled out in what was called Brexit just a few years ago, pulled out of the European Union. And even though it is no longer in the EU, it still is to a considerable extent a European nation. It gets very complicated, but it’s also clear that as Europe looks to the United States, it senses big changes afoot, but it also is worried about what it sees in the United States, and this ought to have our attention as well. For one thing, it fears the assertion of conservative Christian influence in what is sometimes referred to as the religious right.

From a European perspective, well, they just don’t like it. According to Mazower, when the Europeans now look to the United States, they see something new. He writes, “But this is something else. The expression of a right wing culture war with distinctively American roots that implies a reversal of the values Europeans thought the US was preaching and a challenge to the view of the past they thought they shared.” Later in the article he says this. “Polls show that most Americans do in fact still view Europeans as friends, but the fact that disdain for Europe is less the product of a shift in public opinion than it is of the culture warriors running the show in Washington is scant comfort for Europe itself. Mainstream America,” this is Mazower writing, “May not share the obsessions of conservative think tanks, but neither does it really dissent. The attack on the EU is simply one part of the larger anti-elitist mood that powers this administration, bashing allies as another way of targeting the coastal globalists who are its real boogeymen.”

He then writes this. “We are thus confronted with an irony of history. Two centuries on, the tables have been turned. It is Europe that now cleaves closer to the enlightenment values of secular reason, mistrust of organized faith and commitment to deliberation. The US is in the hands of social conservatives dreaming of a return to traditional values.” That’s an amazing statement and it tells us a great deal. In this case, it doesn’t tell us so much about either the United States or Europe. It tells us more about Mark Mazower, the professor who wrote this article, but it does reflect the way many Europeans, particularly Europeans in government, in the elites, how they look at the United States, how they see the equation. They do largely see it this way, but you’ll also notice there’s a very interesting way that Mazower phrased this. He described Europe cleaving closer to the enlightenment values of secular reason, and then these words, “Mistrust of organized faith.”

Well, that’s a big tell. Now, when it comes to the contrast between the United States and Europe, Europe is far more secular. That’s not to say all Europeans are secular, but Europe is far more secular, and even as I’m in Europe right now, I can tell you that as I’m in France for example, there’s something of an embarrassment about a theological spiritual Christian past. You can’t ignore it, but you might say that’s exactly what most elite Europeans have tried to do for the better part of the last two centuries, just ignore the Christian commitments that shaped the entire civilization, ignore the Christian roots of the thought, the laws, even the constitutional orders, and instead just insist that the only possible future and identity for Europe is one that is overwhelmingly secular. I can tell you as I’m speaking now from the heart of Europe, that is something you feel looking just about everywhere, even as we’re going to see when looking at religious monuments, even in Paris looking at a renovated Notre Dame Cathedral.

I wanted to start with the Mazower article because it sets out something else that is of tremendous importance, and that is the fact that in the view of the elites on both sides of the Atlantic, what you see in terms of the progress of history is a moving away from Christian faith, moving away from Christian morality, moving away from national identity. And a part of what we need to understand is that you have had a basically liberal, secular, cosmopolitan, and at least somewhat socialist dream going on throughout much of the European experiment, and there has also been an attempt to try to freeze out conservative elements, to try to define them as the far radical, dangerous, right. That’s exactly what’s going on in so much of the European political discourse right now. As an example, let’s turn to Germany, and in Germany the big issue is that it is a conservative party, a conservative party thus on the right known as the Alliance for Germany, and it is now declared just to be too extreme for democracy.

You have open calls for the party to be rendered illegal even though it came in second in the last elections. There were shenanigans here. You have a center left and a center right, and what we now see in closer analysis from an American perspective, is that there’s not quite as much difference as you might think between the center left and the center right. They have tried to define the party, and the political center, and there are parties on the far left, there’s some parties on what you might call the far right. The problem is what exactly does far right or far left mean? From one perspective, it means someone on the left you don’t like or someone on the right you don’t like. And it’s particularly acute on the right because you have a nation like Germany that declares in the name of national survival, in the national interest, they’re going to freeze out parties that are seen to be extremist, particularly too far on the right.

Okay, that makes sense when you hear it, but then you have to ask the obvious question, who decides what too far is and what exactly has been the consensus? Well, the consensus has been basically to cut out any kind of corrective from a fundamentally conservative direction in so many of these European nations. And so you look at the last German election and you had a shift from one party to the other, but the winner, Friedrich Merz, he does not have an absolute majority. He had to enter into a coalition with another party. He skipped over the Alliance for Germany that came in second and created an alliance with a more liberal party, thus just trying to block the Alliance for Germany from gaining any kind of control. But you know what? It’s not going away. As a matter of fact, it appears that right now something rather fundamental is happening in much of European politics.

This is also seen in Hungary where Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been consolidating power, and who clearly sees what he is doing as an alternative to the cosmopolitan liberalism of much of the rest of Europe.

Part II

---

How Do You Get Rid of a Party Which Came in Second in a Recent Election? Germany’s Attempt to Squelch AfD For Being Too ‘Far Right’

So what exactly does Europe do with a fundamental shift, at least in part, to the right? Well, it’s trying to block it, and it’s trying to block it even by using the means of say, declaring a to be illegitimate and legally banning it. Writing in the Atlantic, Graeme Wood explains it this way. “Germans remember their authoritarian past and they remember too that authoritarianism arrived by democratic means. These memories have led to ambivalence about democracy. Declaring a quarter of the country so extreme that the other three-quarters cannot be trusted to defeat it reflects this insecurity.” Well, that’s an astounding statement, and it’s not being made by a political conservative.

He’s absolutely right. You have those in the left are what you might declare now to be something of a more liberal center, when it comes to European politics, this is with specific reference to Germany, that they fear authoritarianism and they fear democracy because authoritarianism in the middle of the 20th century did indeed, “Arrive by democratic means.” Thus, this next statement’s astounding. “These memories have led to ambivalence about democracy.” So what you have are elites that have tried to control the parameters of what would be acceptable democratic practice, and what you have right now is enormous resentment in many nations, including Germany, including France, including many smaller European nations, there’s a kickback. There’s a resistance now to the elites basically using this kind of fear and political power to shut down any kind of meaningful assertion from the right. Okay, so now understand how they see Donald Trump. They see Donald Trump and the Republican Party as exactly what they want to try to prevent.

The big question right now is whether the German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, will simply declare the Alliance for Germany to be an illegal party, and thus to eliminate it from all kinds of electoral actions being able to function as a party. It would effectively have to go underground. It would render it illegal. How do you do that to a party that came in second? Well, one of the ways you can try to deal with that is by gaining control of the electoral system and rendering the party you don’t like illegitimate. That’s exactly what US Vice President JD Vance was complaining about when he recently spoke to Europeans. He was also talking about the attempt to shut down free speech, but going back to the matter of democracy, in a democratic system of voting, Graeme Wood is exactly right. There are many nations including I would say France and Germany that have memories that have led them to be, in his words, ambivalent about democracy. Ambivalent about democracy.

In other words, they’re all for democracy, but they’re not about a vote that would be in violation of what they see as essential democratic and European values. To put it another way, they want to do anything they can to prevent the election of anyone like Donald Trump. Now, let’s be honest, when it comes to the European context, there have been dangers from what anyone would responsibly identify as the far right. The problem is that by any fair estimation right now, the other parties are trying to use that as a libel, as a slander against parties without, for one thing, even offering a concrete definition of how they defined the part “far” as in far right.

I think what we’re seeing here is that the liberal consensus in much of Western Germany for the last several decades is breaking apart, and that has led so many in the political elites to decide that if they’re going to choose between democratic risk and something else, they’re going to choose something else, and I would argue they’re basically violating democratic norms supposedly to save democracy. And we’ve heard some of the very same things in the United States, and this is not to say that from the left or the right, legitimate dangers, electoral dangers to democratic self-government and constitutionalism don’t exist.

They do exist, but you need to define exactly what they are. Calling parties like the Alliance for Germany simply illegitimate as far right without defining what in the world that means, well, that takes us back to a lot of the discourse we have in the United States right now, and conservatives in the United States have long ago decided they’re not going to take that sitting down. Writing from the United States at City Journal, Heather Mac Donald writes about what she calls the blatant lie of Germany’s elite. She goes on to say, “Parties opposed to the alternative for Deutschland,” that’s the AFD, “Continue to block it from exercising its rights all in the name of stopping ‘fascism.’” Fascism put in scare quotes. That’s what’s going on here. It’s an effort to try to deny legitimacy to the right, to a conservative party like AFD. 

Now, a party could be illegitimate in a democratic system if it is the enemy of that democratic system, but that’s the weakness of the liberal argument here. AFD is not the opponent of the democratic system. It’s trying to gain seats and influence by the democratic system. It’s the democratic system in the hands of a majority that is now trying to deny it the power and influence, and frankly, the function in government that it deserves by the numbers. The voters have spoken. What you have in Germany right now is an effort to say, yes, but those voters made the wrong choice. One of the big issues and flashpoints when it comes to Alliance for Germany, it’s also something in conservative arguments you’re going to find nation by nation throughout Europe. One of the flashpoints is immigration, just like it is also in the United States, a major flashpoint. And even the more liberal observers have to acknowledge that the left has made enormous mistakes, and government such as the government in Germany under former Chancellor Angela Merkel made huge mistakes. 

Similarly, you see nation by nation those mistakes beginning to take their toll. My wife and I are right now in France, and I can tell you right now in France, what won’t work is any argument that this kind of migration leads to assimilation. It doesn’t lead to assimilation. You have entire neighborhoods, entire regions of Paris that are basically now Islamic enclaves. In its cosmopolitan commitments, the leadership of Europe has tried to deny that theology can matter, but theology does matter. Religion does matter, even if their own outlook is overwhelmingly secular, the outlook of many who have come into these nations, especially from Islam, those outlooks are not secular at all, nor will they assimilate with the larger culture, and Europe has done this to itself. I would argue the voters are right to be concerned. 

Tomorrow we’ll talk more about the challenge of immigration and some of the other issues related to, for example, the accusation made by Vice President JD Vance about the fact that many European nations have compromised and violated freedom of speech. We’ll come back to that tomorrow.

Part III

---

The Parable of Notre Dame Cathedral: Once a Wonder of Christian Truth and Transcendence Has Become a Secular Symbol in France

Right now, I want to end with a consideration that was prompted by standing yesterday in Notre Dame Cathedral along with my wife, Mary. We wanted to go to see the renovated cathedral after the horrible fire of 2019 because it affords the only real opportunity for the last several centuries of seeing something like a new medieval gothic cathedral because when it comes to the reconstruction of Notre Dame, that’s exactly basically what it came down to, having to rebuild a medieval cathedral. Let’s just remind ourselves of some history. The cathedral we now know as Notre Dame du Pre, that is a cathedral that was really started in the 12th century, in 1163. There had been other cathedrals on the site, but at that time there was motivation to build a grand new cathedral. Paris was at that point the most highly populated city in Europe.

As in so many other cases, stone replaced wood when it came to the cathedrals and the high gothic replaced Romanesque. The cathedral was completed in one sense. Cathedrals in another sense are never completed, but it was completed in terms of its basic structure in the 14th century in 1345. Now, the history of Notre Dame Cathedral gets really interesting when you think about the giant worldview shifts experienced in France and the modern age, most importantly, the French Revolution in 1789. It was an explicitly secular revolution. It sent to topple not only the monarchy, but also the catholic church. The space known as Notre Dame Cathedral was turned into secular space. The Virgin Mary was removed and the the goddess reason was put in her place.

The extreme secularism and anti-clericalism, the anti-Christianity of the French revolutionaries particularly during the period known as the terror, it set the stage for radical secular extremism in decades and centuries to come. But it didn’t last, and in 1801, Napoleon Bonaparte reestablished the cathedral as a Roman Catholic space, but not exactly, because what Napoleon did was to reclaim the cathedral and tell Catholic clerics they could go back in and hold Catholic services, but the ownership of the building itself was reserved for the people of France, so it is basically secular ownership, and ecclesiastical operation.

It was in that same cathedral in the year 1804 that Napoleon crowned himself emperor. That’s an astounding thing. It’s a secular act in itself. He took the crown and he put it on his own head. It was an incredible statement of self-assertion and political extremism, and for a while he got away with it. And in a certain sense, France has never gotten over Napoleon Bonaparte, because even as there are few presumably who would want to have another Napoleonic age, Napoleon is celebrated as a hero of France. But Europe in general and France in particular have become far more secular, particularly a city like Paris and particularly the political and cultural elites. As you look at the 20th century, a great tidal wave of secularization, and yet Notre Dame became central to French identity, but in a more secular way. And all that came to a head on the 15th of April 2019 when the horrible fire broke out in what was known as The Forest.

Those are the great oak timbers up in the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral, and when they began to burn and when the alarm was misread, and when the firefighters arrived, the flames had spread so rapidly through that space it turned out to be uniquely horrifyingly conducive to the spread of fire that it appeared the cathedral would be lost. The fire rampaged the timber section, what was known, as I say, as The Forest, it began to invade other portions of the cathedral as well. The lead in the roof began to melt, the timbers burned, and eventually the roof caved in, the towering spire fell right almost exactly onto the altar beneath. Now, remember, the characteristic of the high Gothic as you see there in Notre Dame is all the transcendence, all the towering walls, the height of the cathedral. 

The nave is the longest portion of the cathedral, and the height there in the nave is 115 feet, so you’re talking about soaring structure. This required the development of the external supports because of the enormous pressures on the walls. Those external supports became known as flying buttresses, and they’re famous in terms of the Gothic architecture of cathedrals around Europe from the same period. Notre Dame was a wonder from the beginning, and in terms of the architectural pressures and the engineering, it still amazes us that such a structure could be built more than 800 years ago. But as I said, I wanted to see Notre Dame redone. I wanted to see something like a new Gothic cathedral. The stones are very clean. Now, they weren’t bleached as some might think, but they were cleaned, and so all the grime that had existed for all those hundreds of years was wiped away with the restoration of the cathedral. It is as like looking at a new Gothic cathedral. Notre Dame rebuilt at the cost of almost $1 billion, 972 million American dollars.

A rebuilt Notre Dame is a wonder. It is a wonder to see. I commend it to you just to see it is absolutely amazing, but it’s also something that reminds us of how much has been lost because when this cathedral was built, it was during an age of faith, but now we’re living in a very secular age. In particular, France demonstrates that very secular age, and so there’s a sense in which people look at it as a monument to the past, or as an architectural symbol representing Paris. What’s missing is the fact that it was built to reflect transcendence, and it was built as a statement of Christian truth. Sadly enough, so many of the people who were champions of rebuilding Notre Dame, they wanted to do so because of French heritage. They wanted to do so because of French pride. It wasn’t so much in any sense, a statement of an asserted Christianity. That’s long in France’s past, particularly in the view of Parisians and the cultural elites.

As a Christian historian standing in that space, I was filled with a sense of joy, until I considered not so much its meaning then, but its meaning now, and that joy turned to sorrow. So many now see it quite obviously as a symbol of France. That’s not why it was built. It’s as if you have a symbol of the modern age where so many have left the faith, but they want to keep the building.