Defending European Civilization: A Historian's Case for the Rational Return to Tradition

Europe is not the first civilization to stand at the edge of its own dissolution, and it will not be the last. In a wide-ranging essay for Hungarian Conservative, historian David Engels sets today's continent alongside the Roman Republic of the first century BC, finding in both the same symptoms: mass migration, collapsing birth rates, social polarization, the implosion of the family, the retreat of traditional religion, and the drift of participatory politics into oligarchy. His conclusion is sobering — he struggles to see how France, Germany, or Europe as a whole can avoid the path Rome took toward a conservative, plebiscitary regime as the only remaining mediator between hostile camps.

The Faustian Roots of the West

Engels locates what makes Europeans distinct not merely in the accumulated layers of the Ancient Near East, Greco-Roman antiquity, early Christianity, and the pagan peoples of the continent, but in a 'Faustian' drive toward the infinite that emerged in the early Middle Ages. That same impulse, he notes, produced the Gothic cathedral and the American skyscraper — first directed toward God, later toward matter. Wokeism, in his reading, is the culmination of the materialist, rationalist, universalist antithesis, and it is now approaching the point of absurdity at which it must founder.

Symptoms of a Synthesis

What Engels calls the synthesis phase — a rational, deliberate return to tradition — is already visible, he argues, in phenomena ranging from neo-paganism and so-called illiberal democracies to neo-classicism in art, the trad-wife movement, and young people's enthusiasm for traditionalist Catholicism. At the heart of that renewal, he insists, must be Christianity, the privileged path to transcendence for Europeans. Yet he is candid that such a reversal will first be the work of a small elite, much as the Augustan restoration of Roman religion was — a patriotic and partly opportunistic programme that the masses grasped only superficially.

Neither Brussels Nor Sovereigntism

Engels rejects both poles of the current debate. Brussels-style globalism, he contends, is the worst enemy of a genuine European identity because it erases national and civilizational particularities, while sovereigntism, however psychologically understandable, would fragment the continent into some thirty states too weak to resist interference from the United States, Russia, China, the Gulf monarchies, and soon India and Brazil. His proposed middle course — 'Hesperialism' — would concentrate cooperation on civilizational essentials while returning other competences to nation states, with the Holy Roman Empire as his institutional model: strong and proud abroad, free and subsidiarity-minded at home.

• Reject Wokeism and recover an identity-based vision of Europe.
• Cooperate on borders, defence, foreign policy, and strategic resources; devolve the rest.
• Make European citizenship an achievement earned through loyalty, not a source of guilt.
• Draw on the Sacrum Imperium as a model of unity in diversity.

The stakes, Engels warns, are civilizational survival and freedom alike. Without a renewed European patriotism, he suggests, the continent risks becoming an open-air museum for others and a chessboard for future wars between great powers.

Šaltinis: Hungarian Conservative — https://www.hungarianconservative.com