U.S. President Donald Trump holds a gavel during a signing ceremony at the inaugural meeting of the 'Board of Peace' in Washington on Thursday.SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images
They want you to think it’s only about the West.
The Trump administration, in its strident messages to Europe and, by implication, to Canada, have portrayed themselves as saviours of an isolated, unique and fragile Western world under attack – not from Vladimir Putin, but from within, by fellow citizens of non-Christian or non-Western background.
“We are part of one civilization – Western civilization,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the Munich Security Conference last week. “We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”
Those words, just for starters, continue a dark history of casting Europe’s Jews as threatening outsiders. And they amplify a speech at last year’s conference by JD Vance, in which the Vice-President urged Europeans to counter this supposed threat from within by electing fascist parties.
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Mr. Rubio drew some criticism. Prime Minister Mark Carney pointed out that this vision of blood-and-soil nationalism runs counter to the civic nationalism of Canada and of most other Western countries.
But the far more serious problem is the “we” being conjured here. For those opposed to Trumpist demagoguery, there is grave danger in building institutions and alliances around the false notion that Europe and some of its former colonies are history’s sole producers of liberty, dignity, morality and accountable government, or that equal citizenship, rule of law, freedom of expression and protection from state violence are specifically “Western values,” and therefore alien imports in other contexts.
They need to be understood, and promoted, as universal human values, their philosophical foundations present in the traditions and beliefs of every successful society.
The first fallacy here is conceptual. The economic and political success of the Western world did not arise from some combination of Christianity and ethnic homogeneity. In fact, it was the rejection of those things that caused the West to take off. First came the Reformation, after 1500, when Europeans first realized that reality, human flourishing and leadership were not divinely revealed but were products of human endeavour. Then, in the Enlightenment, after 1680, religious authority was rejected outright and the secular concepts of individual rights, the constitutional state and democratic institutions arose – the direct products of the mixing of faiths, races and cultures through trade, conquest and constant immigration. The political and economic “West” has never been a closed and pure bloodline; it is an ever-evolving mongrel hybrid.
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The second fallacy is historical. Those revolutions of thought, and the values they produced, were not unique to Europe and the Americas. Europe’s Enlightenment occurred almost simultaneously in the more economically developed capitals far to the east and the south, where the 1700s gave rise to such thought and governance transformations as the Bengal Renaissance, the Arab Nahda, the Ottoman Enlightenment and the flourishing of rational, non-deferential Enlightenment-style values in the neo-Confucian societies of Ming and early Qing China, late Joseon Korea, and Edo Japan.
As historians have concluded, in all parts of the world during past centuries, the abandonment of religious or arbitrary authority and the rise of secular institutions have been the main precondition for economic and human-development takeoffs. Those values aren’t imported or imposed through colonialism; they arise organically wherever societies find a way to flourish and prosper. They are universal, not “Western.”
That’s the third fallacy: That the emergence of those values and institutions in other societies should be called “Westernization.” We’re all guilty of using this sort of language from time to time. Because the West got there early, with unique violence and vigour, and because we’re taught Western history separately from the rest of the world’s, we tend to think those values are ours to give away.
But that framing is strategically reckless, especially at a moment such as this. It hands authoritarian regimes exactly the language they want: Democracy and rights become “Western” tools of interference, rather than universal claims about human dignity. When democrats call their values “Western,” they help autocrats make “anti-Western” a substitute for “anti-rights.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping built his shift from authoritarianism to totalitarianism around a 2012 communiqué known as Document No. 9, which listed the alien “evils” and “false trends” that must be purged from Chinese society and thought. Key among them: “Western constitutional democracy,” “So-called Universal Western-imposed Values,” “Civil Society,” and economic liberalism. Mr. Putin made his own shift into demagoguery after 2007, and justified his attack on Ukraine by portraying democratic and egalitarian values as an oppressive import of Western imperialism.
Yes, the values expressed by Mr. Rubio, Mr. Vance and Mr. Trump are profoundly anti-Western. But it’s better to say they contradict the entire world’s better values.