Here’s just a brief sketch of a thought far too large for a blog post but something that I’ve been mulling in my head for about the last month now.
In the great sweep of history, the wars of religion and the exhaustion they brought to European society were a chief impetus for the following centuries of post-Westphalia political reflection. Those centuries stretched from Hobbes, through Locke, to the French Revolution, terminating in Karl Marx. The wars of religion came to be seen as disqualifying religion from any role in the state.
By analogy, I’ve started to wonder if the wars of the 20th century could eventually be understood as the wars of liberalism. Essentially the idea is that liberty, fraternity, and equality were established, and we’ve had doctrinal wars over them ever since. Very roughly, one could say that national socialism was the extreme excess of fraternity, and communism of equality.
There is a theological conclusion one can come to about World War II in Europe, namely that nationalism had to be suppressed in favor of liberalism, even if the two of them were conjoined in the 19th century struggle against conservative imperialism. The firmness of Europe’s faith is evidenced in the hyper-moralizing tone it takes in disputes with Israel. Because Europe has decided that it was an excess of nationalism that led to the Holocaust, the Zionist project is perceived as historically perverse. And Europeanists of a certain persuasion take a perverse joy in calling Zionists Nazis. Israelis, sensibly conclude that these critiques spring from irrationalism. The modern European may claim to have disarmed himself of nationalism, but he just keeps it locked in his closet. Irishmen and Germans and the French can still access their nation-states and nationalist passions in an emergency. What Israel would give to live in a neighborhood in which it could fool itself the way Europeans do.
Our modern debates about “illiberal democracy” are a form of the same debate. Should democratic peoples have the power to trespass upon liberal arrangements of trade, immigration and migration policy? That is, should nations (fraternity) have any say at all in modern values. Again, this pits formerly allied concepts- democracy and liberalism, against each other.