Despite the lofty rhetoric, the Western ruling minorities have only partially and sporadically given priority to the values extolled during the Enlightenment.
Western Values : US Goes Wide and Europe Goes Deep
Though the cause of the current crisis in international relations is the United States’ decision to double-down on unipolarity and refuse to concede to multipolar reality, Europe’s reactions are perhaps more revealing of the hypocritical universalist mindset in the West. In Europe, the values of the Enlightenment express universalism, while in the US they express exceptionalism.
US foreign policy is driven by the desire for geopolitical domination and market access, with the Europeans fervently tagging along wherever Uncle Sam leads and whatever the consequences for their own societies. Since the 1950s, Europe has tended to live its universalist creed vicariously, through the US drive for global hegemony, with only occasional flashes of resistance. Washington is convinced, like the European capitals, that its political system has the highest value and that it is therefore its moral right, nay duty, to spread or even impose Western political values across the world. Yet, such messianism has often been just a pretext, if that, when the US oligarchy lines its pockets through militarism, as in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Yet, European leaders, more so than the US ones, are also driven by something deeper than lucre, as shown recently by the sheer bloody-mindedness of their self-destructive behavior: as if Russia had committed some kind of unforgivable affront to what they are condescendingly convinced is their moral superiority. They are instinctively framing their foreign policy not pragmatically in the interests of their societies but morally in terms of “their” universal values that they must cling on to. It is all they have left, since both economic and political power has drained from them due to their disastrous decisions.
Buried deep inside Western political minds is the idea that certain “universal values” destined for the entire world were discovered by the West, mainly in London and Paris. These values were also implemented for the first time by the West, rather than anywhere else in the world, roughly with the British Glorious Revolution leading to parliamentarism, the French Revolution leading to republicanism, and the 1848 Revolutions leading to democracy.
The problem for the West in general, and for Western Europe in particular, is that there are grave difficulties with this entrenched view of Western-centric “universal values”. The current Western position of moral - let alone economic and military - confrontation is clearly not sustainable. Indeed, the rest of world is now realizing the hypocrisy and the double standards that have always stained these Western “principles”.
Against the Current of Enlightenment Values
In his work “Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder”, Isaiah Berlin retraced the writings of three philosophers who already in the 18th century proposed an alternative view. For them, the Enlightenment values were not as absolute and universal as many in the West think:
“The denial… of absolute and universal values carries the implication, which with time has grown increasingly disturbing, that the goals and values pursued by various human cultures may not only differ, but may, in addition, not all be compatible with one another; that variety, and perhaps conflict, are not accidental, still less eliminable, attributes of the human condition, but, on the contrary, may be intrinsic properties of men as such.
If this is so, then the notion of a single, unchanging, objective code of universal precepts – the simple, harmonious, ideal way of life to which, whether they know it or not, all men aspire (the notion which underlies the central current of the Western tradition of thought) – may turn out to be incoherent; for there appear to be many visions, many ways of living and thinking and feeling, each with its own ‘centre of gravity’, self-validating, uncombinable, still less capable of being integrated into a seamless whole.”
Briefly, Giambattista Vico (1688-1744) did identify universal human patterns, but with the insight that different societies express differently. Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788) argued that truth is always local, particular and rooted in language, arguing against a “universal reason” that exists apart from specific cultures. Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) considered that Humanity rises through the flowering of individual civilizations, followed naturally by the inevitable cyclical withering. All three thinkers rejected the Enlightenment’s universal yardstick, as expressed by 18th century thinkers in Paris and London.
It is obvious that these ideas inform today’s idea of multipolarity, as laid out by China and Russia, but which Western political culture simply cannot accept. These two countries have laid out their view of multipolarity many times, for instance in these words of Putin’s from July 2022:
"I would like to underscore that multipolarity as we see it - is, first and foremost, freedom. Freedom of countries and nations, their natural right for their own path of development, for preservation of own individuality and uniqueness. In this world order model, there is no place for diktat, templates, imposed by someone, ideas of exclusiveness of certain nations or maybe even certain blocs.”
China’s s rise, which remains puzzling to Western politicians since it doesn’t correspond to the Western development template, is a typical example of Herder’s phasing of societal flowering.
In other words, just like the concept of unipolarity is based on Western-centric universalism, the concept of multipolarity was also theorized in the 18th century in the West, namely by these contrarian thinkers. In fact, multipolarity also harks back to the Treaty of Westphalia ending the Thirty-Year War, which implicitly established the principles of sovereignty, non-intervention, territorial integrity and legal equality of all nations. Ironically, it is the Global South today that is defending this international system, first defined in Münster and Osnabrück in 1648, but today represented by the UN Charter of 1948…
The Hypocrisy of Western Values
The hypocrisy of Western universalism is exposed by the great differences that have always existed between Western political thought and Western political action, often following the Latin phrase "Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi". The Western ruling minorities have long claimed to follow the Westphalian Treaty and the founding documents from the Enlightenment, yet often honoring them in the breach. Indeed, the West has long been on a road of giving up on individual rights by undermining property rights:
“The Western world was able to produce such inspiring texts as the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the US Bill of Rights, both from 1789. Their purpose was to guarantee the protection of individual rights and liberty against state coercion. For more than two centuries, these two documents have played a certain role in restraining the most egregious violations of individual rights by Western governments against their subjects.
It must be noted, however, that these documents have not only been quite “liberally” interpreted but also violated, even openly, on many occasions (e.g., forced conscription and confiscatory taxation to name but two). This is unavoidable when such rights are only protected by the willingness of legislators and judges to adhere to old parchments, however “sacred” they are often pretended to be. Considering the relatively poor protection of individual rights that these documents have in fact provided, it is not surprising that these rights—in particular the most fundamental one, the right to property—can be so easily undermined today.”
The Western oligarchies of the semi-democratic but still monarchical and relatively free 19th century violated its own values with their colonial adventures. Then they adopted fascism with the expansion of the modern state abandoning the gold standard for central bank fiat currency.
If individual rights were trampled upon in the West itself, they were easily violated in faraway lands by the West before that. Inevitably, Western “universal values” were used to judge non-Western nations as “primitive” or “backward”, thereby justifying the colonizing missions that followed. The Western powers needed little convincing in spreading these values also to “races” implicitly considered inferior for reasons both of nurture and nature. As the researcher Nel Bonilla writes:
“Colonial liberalism, rests on a hierarchical view of human development: that freedom, civilization, and rational governance unfold along a European timeline, measured by proximity to Western norms.”
Unfortunately, even the painful process of decolonization did almost nothing to weaken the deeply held conviction that Western “universal values” must spread globally. The arrival of the United States on the world stage from 1945, confirmed once again the unhealthy, underlying Western sense of moral superiority of its political values. As French Historian Edouard Husson writes, in the 20th century the Western ruling minority, especially in its Anglo-Saxon and Germanic versions, developed:
“a vision of the inequality of peoples, the ethnocultural obsession, racism, and a eugenicist tendency, a permanent preoccupation with imposing Malthusianism on ‘other races’ and so forth. What also united them was a propensity for perpetual war and the growing subordination of the economy to defense interests.”
This is about as far as possible from the Enlightenment values it is possible to come. The Western worldview was thought once to be inclusive, embracing in its strong arms the variety of mankind’s cultural or historical experiences. An argument could be made that some colonial experiments tended to confirm this view, at least to Western publics. But it is obvious that Western “universal values” are not so inclusive after all. Indeed, Western leaders are to this day often intolerant and condescending towards any society or political system that follows another path than the Western one.
West, Know Thyself
The rise of many nations in the East and South, and particularly China, is disturbing to the Western mind, bred on the conviction that all societies need to follow the political development path of the West. It now seems that the only possibility for peace is for the Western ruling minority to be brought down a notch, to limit its destructive policies. The West needs to start seeing other nations’ particular political developments with acceptance and respect. The West, and particularly Europe, needs to go through a humbling psycho-cultural evolution; by rejecting its twisted interpretation of the Enlightenment values. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn said already in 1978:
“Today it would be retrogressive to hold on to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Such social dogmatism leaves us helpless before the trials of our times.”
The point is not to denigrate the Western world that has contributed so much to wealth of the world. China certainly is not reciprocating the kind of condescension it has received from its erstwhile colonizers, but just taking over the mantle today as the premier contributor to the world.
As the international system moves towards multipolarity, there are inevitably going to be severe political, social and cultural shocks in the West. It will be difficult to abandon the mindset of Western-centered universalism, as the West inevitably will be forced to do. Especially for the Europeans this will mean losing part of their identity no less. The near future looks dark for the West now, but the process of breaking the illusion of “Western universal values” must start, so that it can again see light at the end of the tunnel.
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