Speaking at the Munich Security Conference on 14 February, the US Vice-President, J. D. Vance, said that the ‘threat from within’ to Europe is greater than that posed by Russia and China. The threat, he said, came from the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values. Vance seemed to have in mind the marginalisation of parties of the extreme right from the dominant European political discourse.

No doubt the language was supposed to be provocative, though why the Vice-President of the United States finds it necessary to adopt the antics of a student debating society is more than a little mysterious. However, the rational kernel behind the point is worth considering. What are the fundamental values of Europe and are they being abandoned by its political representatives?

A good place to begin answering these questions is Michael Oakeshott’s 1940 The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe. In this collection, he identified the principal political doctrines of Europe at the time as being those of Representative Democracy, Catholicism, Communism, Fascism and National Socialism. As Oakeshott pointed out, in each of them there is an expression of something in European civilisation, though in some cases a something that was better forgotten and in other cases a something that Europeans had failed to remember.

In fact, the history of Europe since 1945 is one of the construction of a political order built upon the reconciliation of Representative Democracy and Catholicism combined with a suppression through constitutional means of the destructive potential of Communism, Fascism and National Socialism. As Catholicism detached itself from its earlier support for authoritarian regimes and asserted the principle of human dignity in its social teaching, so the traditions of Liberalism, Republicanism, Protestantism and Social Democracy converged on their support for a representative democracy that could accommodate various traditions of thought.

A very early expression of this convergence is found in Article 14 of Germany’s Basic Law, which after asserting that property has responsibilities, a clear expression of Catholic social teaching, went on to assert in the next article that private property could nonetheless by taken into public ownership by due process of law. Christian Democracy joined with Social Democracy.

The construction of the new political order initially took place in Western Europe, and though the national processes were complex, its animating ideas found expression in the establishment of the European Union, as it was to become, in 1957. As authoritarian regimes later fell in Portugal, Greece and Spain, this democratic European space extended. Then as Communism collapsed so the countries of Central and Eastern Europe could embrace the doctrines of the new democracy.

It is only a seeming paradox of tolerance that one cannot create a tolerant and pluralist political order without excluding the intolerant, including those who wish for one-party control of the apparatus of the state. Western Communist parties adapted themselves in Italy and France to the demands of pluralistic political competition. Similarly, parties of the far right could also enjoy the constitutional freedom of political association – provided that they remained within the limits of the law. Doctrines that are better forgotten may nonetheless be tolerated by representative democracies within strict limits. As Prime Minister Meloni in Italy seems to be finding, one way of overcoming those limits is to make a commitment to the defence of democratic values in Ukraine. Those who are committed to constitutional democracy should welcome those on its side. Conversely, if those who now seek to echo those best forgotten authoritarian doctrines of the past do not convince in their democratic credentials, it is hardly surprising.

So Vance’s claim of a retreat from European values is nothing other than a constitutional insistence that the competition for power by different political parties needs to be conducted with a common framework of political legitimacy. The quip that liberals are people who cannot even defend their own side in an argument could not be further from the truth.

It is worth noting one further point. A key European political concept is that of a republic, an idea that through the Atlantic political thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, came to form the basic constitutional principle of the newly independent United States. The term ‘republic’ derives from the Latin res publica, affairs common to a community, and expresses the idea that political authority is a matter of the public, not the private, good. As James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers (no. 51), it is of great importance in a republic to guard society against the oppression of its rulers as well as to guard one part of society against the injustice of the other part. With US political institutions now being colonised by wealthy partisans for their own advantage, it is the political representatives of the US, not Europe, who are retreating from their own values.

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Professor Albert Weale is Emeritus Professor of Political Theory and Public Policy in the UCL Department of Political Science.

For more on European values, see the European Institute’s blog series from 2023

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Note: The views expressed in this post are those of the author, and not of the UCL European Institute, nor of UCL.

Image: black chain by Miltiadis Fragkidis via Unsplash