Is Europe not the West?

An exclusive translation of Rustem Vakhitov's review of the book 'Endgame Europa'

The Rape of Europa by Paolo Veronese

Boris Mezhuev, in his seminal “World Politics after the Arrest of Pavel Durov” (Landmarks, Sept. 7, 2024), argued that any nation’s choice to become part of ‘the West’ has now taken on a religious, and not simply a practical political, much less a ‘neutral’ character.  Such a conclusion has become unavoidable, Mezhuev argued, now that the logic of secularization (read ‘Westernization’) has invaded such formerly taboo realms as human sexuality and family relationships.  The West's own renunciation of 'openness'  (cf. the arrest of Durov) and its refusal to acknowledge Russian civilization's right to exist as a non-secularized space -- these are the steps that have, for Mezhuev, led to a complete divorce between Russia and the West. This, for Mezhuev, is a tragic denouement to a centuried relationship, albeit one that earlier Russian thinkers have long predicted. 

In what follows, Russian political philosopher Rustem Vakhitov picks up on this same theme of divorce, only now in the form of a rather more enthusiastic embrace of it.   

What is particularly distinctive about Vakhitov’s approach (as, to be sure, one might expect from his earlier writing -- cf. Landmarks, Dec. 31, 2024) is his readiness to re-forge strong ties between Russia and Europe – at any rate, to re-forge them with that part of Europe which is both 'on the left' and philosophically ‘realist’ (in the Platonic sense of the word).  As the title of his essay/book review announces, Europe is by no means the same thing as 'the West.' – The Editors

This past February, at the Eurasian Philosophical Congress in Moscow, I bought a Russian translation of the book Endgame Europe by Ulrike Guérot and Hauke ​​Ritz, which was published by Fortis Press (Yerevan) and Gnosis (Moscow) at the very beginning of the new year. The seller told me that one of the authors, Hauke ​​Ritz, was a participant in the congress and that I could get my copy of the book signed by him. Of course, I took advantage of the opportunity, which is how I found myself in front of a smiling young German professor who wrote, in English, on the inside flap of my copy that he wished me “a good time with this book.” This perfunctory wish of his, to my surprise, came true: I read the book with great interest and wanted to share my impressions with the public, among whom, I hope, new readers of this remarkable text will be found.

My colleagues recommended Hauke ​​Ritz and Ulrike Guérot  to me as well-known German Eurosceptics. As far as I know, in the Federal Republic itself their opponents (and there are so many of them and they are so influential that one of the authors, Ulrike Guérot, was forced out of her job as a result of her speech!) perceive them in exactly the same way.  And yet after having read their book I am convinced of the opposite: the authors are not opponents of the European Union at all. They simply state that the “inflexible” and “pro-American” version of the European Union project which was implemented in the early 1990s has ended in failure.

Today, the European Union is in effect directly involved in a military conflict in the East, the aim of which is the preservation of the nation state. In other words, it is involved in a war whose aim is the preservation of that political form which it was the purpose of European unification to overcome.  Guérot and ​​Ritz call this a “return to the 20th century,” when “they were fighting for Alsace ... or East Prussia.”  Moreover, EU propaganda declares that actions taken by the current Russian president are what caused this conflict.  Guérot and ​​Ritz are by no means what are referred to in Germany as “Putinversteher” [Putin apologists – trans.]. Their position in relation to the Kremlin’s leaders is by no means uncritical. But they also note that the role of the European Union itself and the North Atlantic bloc in creating the crisis is often overlooked.

The EU and NATO have for years now been steadily expanding to the East.  It is obvious that regardless of who was in power in Moscow they would still be concerned about the EU and NATO pulling into their sphere former Soviet republics which border on Russia while becoming increasingly unfriendly toward Russia. As has been already noted, Guérot and ​​Ritz trace the origins of the ongoing catastrophe which has led to so much bloodshed in eastern Ukraine to the choice that the EU leadership made in the 1990s after the end of the Cold War.  At that time, two different EU projects were in competition with one another.  Guérot and ​​Ritz refer to the first of them as the project of a continental and federal Europe open to cooperation with Russia.  Even during the Cold War, the first steps toward building such a Europe were already taken by Charles de Gaulle and Willy Brandt.  All the same, from the perspective of the authors, the name most particularly associated with this project is that of Mikhail Gorbachev —  indeed, he is one of  two politicians named in the book’s dedication. The authors here quote the declaration signed by Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl in 1989: “Europe, which suffered the most from the two world wars, must give the world an example of lasting peace, good-neighborly relations and constructive cooperation.”  The German political scientists go so far as to call this project a “large continental union stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok,” but this approach should not be confused with the rhetoric of those Russian far-right ideologues who pushed the Kremlin toward an alliance with such members of the European far right as Marine Le Pen.

The events of 2022, by the way, have clearly demonstrated the true attitude toward Russia of “right-wing Europe.” Guérot and ​​Ritz write about an alliance of Russia with a democratic and even left-democratic Europe which stands in opposition to American neo-totalitarianism and neoliberalism. I will quote their own words: “Deep within the innermost recesses of Europe there exists an EU-topia which is humanistic, anti-fascist, anti-war, internationalist and anti-capitalist... this Europe is the antithesis of nationalism, militarism and capitalism,” those three "isms" which, according to the German analysts, are the three pillars of the conflict in the east of Ukraine, that conflict which the Americans imposed on Ukraine and Russia. 

In point of fact, these three ‘isms’ are what is embodied in the project of the “false Europe,” which stands as the alternative to the continental and cooperative Europe. This alternative, unfortunately, is the one that has come into being.  It is the pro-American, inflexible and “hard” European Union. Starting with the second half of the 1990s the European Union fell under the influence of the United States and ceased to be an equal player in world politics. The United States, for its part, plays the role of “global policeman,” tramples on international law and the authority of international organizations such as the UN, invades Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and  divides the world into an “axis of Goodness” (which is where the United States puts all its allies and satellites) and an “axis of Evil” (containing all the other countries still seeking to preserve their sovereignty). According to the book’s authors, it is the United States that is guilty of exacerbating Russian-Ukrainian relations and creating a schism between Western and Eastern Europe. After Europe fell under the heel of the Anglo-Saxons, any prospect for a united and peaceful European Union were buried. 

Guérot and ​​Ritz refuse to view Europe as being a part of the West.  From their perspective, ‘the West’ in its latest historical incarnation simply is the United States – a young, two-hundred-year-old, aggressive civilization that hasn’t experienced the tragedies that Europe has gone through and which is therefore ready to ignite military conflicts around the world. Europe is not the West. It is a separate, two-thousand-year-old civilization. Europe has experienced many tragedies, as well as many temptations, and in response it has developed a humanistic tradition that presupposes respect for all partners. It is in line with this tradition that the project of a continental, federal and cooperative Europe is to be found. Such a European project meets not only the interests of the peoples of Europe, but also the interests of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples – such, at any rate, is the conviction of Guérot and ​​Ritz. 

 This is a very unusual position for modern Europeans to take, and it is a very interesting position for those of us who live on this side of the border dividing Europe and Russia. Indeed, there is a difference between Europe and the United States which, in the aftermath of the Cold War, took on the role of “global gendarme.”  Which is not to say that Europe has always been well-disposed towards Russia, as the authors claim. Alas, history has very often testified to the opposite. It is especially alarming that the European nations whose leaders invaded Russia and brought death and destruction to it (we are referring, as will be obvious to everyone, to Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler) were likewise the same nations who took the lead in uniting Europe. 

The fact is that a united Europe has historically been more dangerous for Russia than a disunited Europe.  On the other hand, maybe it is not unification per se that is the issue, but what kind of unification it is?  Guérot and ​​Ritz criticize the “harsh” option that unified Europe by turning it into something resembling a single, bureaucratized, centralized state with its center in Brussels, which is, of course, precisely the option which came into being during the 2000s. It is significant that it was this “harshly united Europe” that eventually became hostile to Russia. Meanwhile, the ideal for the authors of the book is different – ​​a more gently united, federal Europe that takes into account the interests of all its member states and of its neighbor, Russia.  

As I have already stressed, their appeal to left-wing forces within Europe and Russia is also quite interesting. Indeed, it was not the “ultra-right” figures such as Marine Le Pen – who, after 2014, were even given airtime on Russian TV (!) – but the European left that have turned out to be the true friends of Russia and the consistent opponents of Atlanticism. Moreover, we are talking specifically about the “old left,” and not the post-Marxists who have long replaced the struggle for the rights of the working majority with the struggle for benefits for various minorities – to the delight of the bourgeois oligarchy. Guérot and ​​Ritz argue that the worldview of the old left was connected, via Hegel, with the tradition of European humanism, while the new left and post-Marxists are essentially inspired by the Nietzschean spirit of destruction and relativism. It is interesting that, in their own way, they have arrived at the same idea that was defended by the last of the Soviet-era “classical Marxists,” Mikhail Lifshitz. He believed that, under the cries of “a return to Marx,” the neo-Marxist modernists and post-modernists were betraying Marx, in as much as Marx, according to Lifshitz, is a continuer of the classical tradition, the tradition created by the “great conservatives” stretching from Plato to Balzac and Pushkin. 

In sum, it is obvious that Russian intellectuals, especially “enlightenment conservatives” (the movement that is represented here by Boris Mezhuev) and the left-wing conservatives (to which category belongs the author of these lines) have something to talk about with Europe’s “new dissidents,” and this conversation may well turn out to be very useful.

Rustem Vakhitov (Ph.D., philosophy) is associate professor at Bashkir State University (Ufa, Russia) and the author of some 200 scholarly publications. His several monographs include The Dialectics of Totalitarianism (2014), an analysis of the phenomenon of totalitarianism from the perspective of the social philosophy of Platonism. His areas of interest include Eurasianism, education, and philosophical anthropology.

Ulrike Guérot has held research and teaching positions at numerous universities in Europe and the United States and has been the director of several European research institutes and think tanks.  She is currently at the Danube University in Krems, Austria where she chairs the Department for European Policy and the Study of Democracy.  She has worked as a Director of Communication for the Association for the Monetary Union of Europe (AMUE) and as Chargée de Mission for the Paris-based think tank Notre Europe, under the auspices of former President of the EU Commission, Jacques Delors. For her contributions to European integration, she was awarded in 2003 with the French cross of honor, L'Ordre national du Mérite.  Her Why Europe Must Become a Republic (2016) became a best-seller in Germany and beyond.  

Hauke Ritz is a German publicist who focuses on geopolitics and the history of ideas. His writings include two books on the reinvention of modernity and the restoration of Europe.