Europe in the Face of Globalization (2004) by Robert Steuckers

Robert Steuckers’ speech, “Europe in the Face of Globalization,” presented at the “Gesellschaft für Freie Publizistik” in 2004, offers a sweeping analysis of Europe’s position and challenges in an increasingly globalized world. Combining geopolitics, economics, and historical insights, Steuckers examines the dynamic interplay between nation-states, empires, and civilizational areas. He contrasts the traditional European ethos, rooted in unique cultural identities and historical memory, with the homogenizing pressures of global neoliberalism, driven largely by American interests. Steuckers critiques the economic and ideological dependence imposed on Europe and underscores the need for an independent, unified European response to globalization. Central to his argument is the balance between preserving Europe’s cultural heritage and fostering innovation, emphasizing the importance of ordo-liberalism, strategic autonomy, and a revival of Europe’s distinct civilizational values. The speech challenges Europe to reassert its sovereignty, drawing from its historical roots, while addressing contemporary global pressures.

Translated by Alexander Raynor

About ~10500 words

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Speech delivered at the podium of the “Gesellschaft für Freie Publizistik” Conference, April 2004¹

My presentation today will, of course, have a geopolitical dimension, but also a geo-economic one, because major routes and communication networks, on land as well as at sea, and the reach of the most modern weapon systems, play a significant role in the current competition between Europe and the United States. The scale of these routes, networks, etc., determines the categories in which one must think: either in terms of peoples or in terms of Empire.

If we speak of peoples, we must understand what is at stake. During the popular uprisings of the 19th century, peoples rose up against multiethnic empires, which they viewed as "straightjackets." Starting in 1848, the Poles and Finns in Russia, the Czechs and Italians in the territories under the sovereignty of the Austro-Hungarian imperial and royal monarchy, the South Slavs and Greeks within the Ottoman Empire, and the Irish in the United Kingdom rebelled or developed their own identity movements. In France, cultural movements among the Bretons or Provençals (the "Félibriges") developed with an anti-centralist and anti-Jacobin perspective.

Where does this widespread cultural revolt come from? Broadly speaking, it stems from Johann Gottfried Herder's philosophy of history, which posits that language, literature, and historical memory constitute, in each people, a bundle of forces that can be considered its identity in action. Identity, therefore, is specific to each people, meaning that every people has the right to possess its own political form and to create a state according to its specificity, tailored to its measure and revisable at any time. The advantage of this perspective is that each people can freely develop its own strengths and characteristics. But this perspective also holds a danger: within the same community of peoples or a shared civilizational space, balkanization looms as a threat. Herder was well aware of this, which is why, under the reign of Tsarina Catherine II, he attempted to outline a synthesis, notably a new political, ideological, and philosophical form to be applied to the intermediary space between Russia and Germany. Herder dreamed of bringing forth a new Homeric-style Greece between the Baltic States and Crimea. Germanic, Baltic, and Slavic elements would all contribute to a return to the oldest and most heroic Greece, which would simultaneously be a return to the oldest and most sublime sources of Europe.

Herder's idea may appear to us today as highly ethereal and utopian. Yet, from this outline and the entirety of Herder’s work, we can extract a fundamental element for our time: a synthesis in Europe is only possible if we return to the oldest sources, that is, to the earliest foundations of European humanity, to the core of our own human specificity, which must be perpetually activated. Archetypes, indeed, are engines, driving forces, that no progressivism can extinguish, for when they are suppressed, culture becomes frozen, a barren desert of dryness and aridity.

The “Nation” According to Herder

The nation, as a concept, was, for Herder, a more or less homogeneous entity, an inalienable unity in itself, made up of a composite of ethnicity, language, literature, history, and customs. For the French revolutionaries, on the other hand, the nation was in no way such a bundle of objective and tangible facts; rather, it was merely the population in arms, regardless of the language spoken by these masses, or, more precisely, it was simply the demos in arms, or the “third estate” mobilized to infinitely expand the space of the universalist republic. Tilo Meyer has provided us with an excellent definition of the nation. According to him, the ethnos—that is, the people, as defined by Herder—cannot simply be placed at the disposal of the demos. Only those political systems that are based on Herder's definition of the nation can be considered truly democratic and popular in the proper sense of the term. The other systems, stemming from the ideas of the French Revolution, are egalitarian (in the sense that they reduce everything to a single standard) and, by the same token, totalitarian. The current project of fabricating a “multiculture” is rooted in this mix of leveling egalitarianism and totalitarianism.

The mass mobilization during the French Revolution was, of course, driven by military motivation: revolutionary armies thus acquired considerable and decisive striking power, allowing them to defeat the well-trained but numerically inferior professional armies of Prussia and Austria. The battles of Jemappes and Valmy in 1792 demonstrated this. The revolution introduced a new way of waging war, which secured decisive victories. Clausewitz studied the reasons for Prussia’s defeats and concluded that the total mobilization of all male forces within a state was the only possible response to the revolution, in order to surpass the armed masses of revolutionary France and avoid being overwhelmed by them.

The example of the rural Spanish populations in their war against Napoleonic troops, where the entire people rose to defend Tradition against the Revolution, proved that masses oriented toward principles of Tradition could defeat—or at least severely hinder—massed armies inspired by the Revolution. The ideas of Jahn, the “Father of Gymnastics,” as he was called in Germany, represent a Germanic synthesis of Clausewitz's theory and the practice of the Spanish insurgent peasants. The mobilization of the people was first realized in Spain before spreading to Germany, thereby enabling the European victory against Napoleon—that is, against the mechanistic principle of the French Revolution.

After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, reactionary forces sought to disarm the people. Metternich’s Europe aimed to retroactively render null the political liberty that had been promised. However, if the peasant or artisan must become a soldier and, when necessary, pay the blood tax, he must receive in return the right to vote and participate in political matters. When every citizen is given the right and opportunity to study, he simultaneously gains the right to participate, in one way or another, in the political debates of his country. This was the claim of the nationalist and democratic student corporations of the time. These students rebelled against a restoration that maintained compulsory military service without granting political freedom in exchange. They intellectually supported their rebellion with an astonishing mix of Herder’s concept of the nation and pseudo-national mechanistic ideals derived from the ideological corpus of the French Revolution.

During this period of revolution and restoration, political thought oscillated between a rebellious perspective, which reasoned in terms of peoples, and a traditional perspective, which reasoned in terms of empires, blurring the ideological boundaries, which were already quite vague. An organically necessary synthesis proved imperative. Such a synthesis never emerged, leaving us today compelled to revisit and reflect on the concepts born during that era.

The Dialectic of “Peoples/Empire”

Let us return to the dialectic of People/Empire or Peoples/Civilizational Areas: at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, on the one hand, there were vast political entities that most people were unable to conceptualize or envision. On the other hand, these large-scale political entities, though poorly understood and rejected, proved necessary to confront the inevitable competition from the great transatlantic power that was beginning to emerge. The Spanish colonies “liberated” themselves, at least in appearance, only to quickly fall under the dependence of the ascending United States. Austrian minister Hülsemann, following the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine, as well as the French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, who had just completed an extensive journey through North America, both issued warnings to Europeans, pointing out that beyond the Atlantic, a power was emerging that was fundamentally different from anything previously known in Europe. International politics had now acquired truly continental, even global, dimensions. The future would henceforth belong solely to powers possessing sufficient territorial expanse and natural resources within their sovereign borders—borders that needed to be compact, well-defined, and “rounded,” not scattered colonial empires dispersed to the four winds.

Hülsemann, and later Constantin Franz, advocated for an alliance of colonial powers lacking colonies, which notably led to treaties such as the “Three Emperors’ League” (Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary) or the implementation of principles like the “Prusso-Russian Mutual Assurance.” At the beginning of the 20th century, the alliance between Germany and Austria-Hungary sought to revive the “sick man of the Bosphorus,” the Ottoman Empire, intending to transform it into a “complementary territory,” a source of raw materials and an outlet for markets. This ambition involved building a modern communication network, specifically a railway line between Hamburg and Baghdad (and potentially extending it to the Persian Gulf coast). This project contained one of the primary causes of World War I: Britain could not tolerate a non-British presence in this region of the world, and Russia could not accept German and Austrian dominance in Constantinople, which the Russians sometimes referred to as “Tsarigrad.”