JD Vance Was Right, Europe Needs To Save Itself
A few days ago, U.S. Vice President JD Vance delivered a momentous speech in Munich, which was both timely and honestly blunt.
I just think that people care about their homes. They care about their dreams. They care about their safety and their capacity to provide for themselves and their children.And they’re smart…. Contrary to what you might hear, a couple of mountains over in Davos, the citizens of all of our nations don’t generally think of themselves as educated animals or as interchangeable cogs of a global economy….I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns or worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections or shutting people out of the political process protects nothing. In fact, it is the most surefire way to destroy democracy.
Vance’s speech reminded me of two prior examples of powerful oratory, which profoundly impacted subsequent events.
When Cicero undertook the prosecution of Verres, the corrupt and tyrannical governor of Sicily, he prepared several orations. Verres had abused his gubernatorial position and terrorized the citizens of Sicily, who implored Cicero to protect their rights. Cicero’s rhetoric was so compelling that he only needed to deliver the first of his prepared speeches to remove Verres from office.
Verres was advised that his best choice was to go into voluntary exile to avoid further lawful punishment. Although his job was done at the first hearing, Cicero nevertheless published the entire material he had prepared. To this day, it remains a testament to his exquisite prose, the in-depth research he had conducted, and the superb strategy he had devised against Verres’ famous and handsomely paid defense lawyers.
Likewise, in his speech commonly known as “We Shall Fight on the Beaches,” Churchill persuaded the British Parliament that Britain should valiantly oppose Nazi Germany at a significant risk and sacrifice. He harnessed the vigor of words so magnificently that journalist Edward Murrow exclaimed, and was later quoted by President Kennedy, “He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.”
Powerful speeches can serve as a crystalizing catalyst for momentous choices in history. Hopefully, Vance’s recent speech could stimulate an honest introspective discussion, which could bring about a much-needed reform in the European Union.
In its early years, the EU was primarily considered a free travel and trade zone, beneficial for economic prosperity. It gradually morphed into a massive, centralized bureaucracy with a globalist agenda. This elite-controlled superstructure keeps enacting leftist, anti-Western policies, which hurt the interests of the various nation-states in the EU and their population.
The Eastern European members of the EU, whose wounds are still fresh from surviving communism and whose citizens have retained a healthy dose of commonsense conservatism, disagree with the disastrous green policies, uncontrolled influx of migrants, or transgender absurdities that the Western EU members consider a matter of political and moral virtue.
“What I worry about,” Vance noted, “is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values: values shared with the United States of America.”
Europe, like the United States, faces both external and internal dangers. It needs secure borders and viable security strategies to defend itself from external threats. These external threats include hostile and aggressive governments such as those of Russia and China as well as the large-scale immigration of groups with anti-Western ideology.
External dangers, however, are most likely to succeed when there is internal strife and demoralization. While outside forces do pose a grave threat to Europe’s civilizational survival, nothing is as weakening as the internal danger of self-erosion—the deep lack of morale, historical pride, and cultural continuity.
In the Introduction to his somber analysis of the current European predicament, Douglas Murray stated:
Europe is committing suicide. Or at least its leaders have decided to commit suicide. Whether the European people choose to go along with this is, naturally, another matter.When I say that Europe is in the process of killing itself … I mean that the civilisation we know as Europe is in the process of committing suicide…. For even the mass movement of millions of people into Europe would not sound such a final note for the continent were it not for the fact that … at the same time Europe lost faith in its beliefs, traditions, and legitimacy….More than any other continent or culture in the world today, Europe is now deeply weighed down with guilt for its past. Alongside this outgoing version of self-distrust runs a more introverted version of the same guilt. For there is also the problem in Europe of an existential tiredness and a feeling that perhaps for Europe the story has run out and a new story must be allowed to begin…. [T]he fact that a society should feel like it has run out of steam at precisely the moment when a new society has begun to move in, cannot help but lead to vast, epochal changes.
The leftist attack on Western values, which has plagued both the European and American intelligentsia and elitist circles for decades, has left Europe tired, demoralized, and torn. Unlike the United States, created as a cohesive embodiment of shared values under one new identity, Europe represents a variegated canvas of often contrasting cultural identities. Margaret Thatcher remarked (p. 328):
“Europe” in anything other than the geographical sense is a wholly artificial construct. It makes no sense at all to lump together Beethoven and Debussy, Voltaire and Burke, Vermeer and Picasso, Notre Dame and St. Paul’s, boiled beef and bouillabaisse, and portray them as elements of a “European” musical, philosophical, artistic, architectural, or gastronomic reality. If Europe charms us, as it has so often charmed me, it is precisely because of its contrasts and contradictions, not its coherence and continuity.
If we want this fascinating legacy to endure, Europe must respect and safeguard the national sovereignty and cultural traditions of the separate countries that comprise it. That is why the European Union would be best reformed as a free trade and travel zone, with secure external borders and confidence in its values and heritage, devoid of heavy bureaucratic regulations and globalist ideology.
Such a union cannot endure as a transnational superstructure that rejects Western values. It could flourish, however, when it draws upon the Western moral and civilizational tradition while honoring the political will and protecting the interests and security of its sovereign member states. As Vance concluded,
Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters…. Europeans, the people, have a voice. European leaders have a choice….Embrace what your people tell you, even when it’s surprising, even when you don’t agree. And if you do so, you can face the future with certainty and with confidence, knowing that the nation stands behind each of you.
Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.
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