THE WESTERN BARBARIANS

On the slow unmasking of the liberal order and the rather inconvenient discovery that the emperor knew all along

There is something almost childlike in the fascination that part of the West has developed for the slogan of the alliance of European nations. Reality, however, reveals it to be rather more a military-financial syndicate trying to preserve a hegemony that has already begun to slip through its fingers.

The war in Ukraine, broadly speaking, merely accelerated a process that had been underway for decades. Europe noticed, somewhat late in the day, that the political, economic, and cultural monopoly constructed after 1945 had begun to show irreversible fractures. China, Russia, India, Iran, and even the middling powers grasped something that Brussels and Davos have never quite been able to bring themselves to admit, namely, that the liberal international order was never universal. It was, rather, the forced universalization of Washington's interests dressed up in the sentimental vocabulary of humanitarianism.

Herein lies the central irony of our age. The same countries that spent decades preaching relative sovereignty, global governance, and international responsibility now frantically rediscover the value of borders, of industrial patriotism, and of strategic autonomy. Globalization served its purpose so long as it consolidated their supremacy. The moment it began to benefit civilizational rivals, it became an existential threat, and lo, the old territorial instinct was promptly resurrected, that same instinct which for years had been treated as a symptom of provincial backwardness and, in graver cases, as evidence of some sort of collective psychopathology.

The present conflict, accordingly, vastly exceeds the military dimension and enters the anthropological terrain, that ground upon which the Davos consultant's spreadsheet explains absolutely nothing. On one side, the postmodern West transformed into a bureaucratic machine of cultural dissolution, a political bloc incapable of defending its own historical memory and yet eager to compulsively export identity politics to the rest of the planet. On the other, countries that have grasped something rather elementary which Aristotle had already described centuries before the invention of the ESG consultant, to wit, that peoples survive by the preservation of identity, historical continuity, and symbolic cohesion.

Russia grasped this early, China earlier still, and both perceived that Western liberalism has ceased to function as an economic model and become instead a sort of negative religion, founded upon the permanent deconstruction of organic bonds. Family becomes oppression, nation becomes prejudice, religion becomes backwardness, masculinity becomes danger, the border becomes moral violence, in an ever-lengthening inventory of those things which must be pulverized in the name of a progress that nobody is quite capable of defining with precision. It is no accident that the contemporary West produces material wealth and spiritual depression with equal industrial efficiency.

And yet, what proves most curious of all is to observe how the international press still insists on narrating everything through the old moral lens of the Cold War. Democracy versus authoritarianism, freedom versus tyranny, civilization versus barbarism, behold the caricature that no longer convinces even the average European or American citizen, that ordinary fellow who looks at London, Paris, or Los Angeles and notices, without needing a Harvard diploma, that perhaps the collapse is coming from within. The European migration crisis is merely the visible symptom, my friend. The real problem runs far deeper, and proves considerably more embarrassing besides, for Europe has wearied of itself, has lost the basic civilizational instinct of self-preservation, has transformed historical guilt into state policy, has replaced identity with technocratic administration, and has traded belonging for consumption.

Meanwhile, the Western establishment responds in the only manner it knows, namely, with censorship, surveillance, and moralizing propaganda. Every dissent becomes a threat to democracy, every critique of globalism becomes extremism, every cultural resistance becomes radicalization, and supposedly liberal regimes have come to depend quite openly on illiberal mechanisms for their political survival, in a spectacle that would make even Carl Schmitt blush. The mask slipped during the pandemic, slipped again with the war, and slipped definitively amid the mounting desperation of the globalist elites confronted with the rise of any force even minimally sovereigntist.

The average citizen, accordingly, has begun to entertain a rather heretical hypothesis, to wit, that the gravest threat to contemporary liberty perhaps comes not from Moscow or Beijing, but from the very bureaucratic-financial apparatus that governs the West in the name of democracy while neutralizing elections, censoring opinions, and redefining the basic concepts of reality through permanent semantic engineering. The new world order, therefore, dispenses with the model of the formal empire. Something rather more sophisticated will suffice, that is to say, a regime administered by financial conglomerates, digital platforms, transnational bodies, and intelligence structures capable of shaping human behavior at industrial scale while preserving the aesthetic of freedom.

And it is perhaps this very thing that accounts for the mounting Western panic. For the first time in decades, the rest of the world has begun to notice that the emperor has no clothes. What is most melancholy of all, however, is that the emperor always knew. He simply counted on no one looking.