This article was originally published in Vol. 6 No. 1 of our print edition.

Introduction

This paper examines the political, economic, and moral implications of the Russia–Ukraine War as a crisis not only of European and global security, but of European governance and identity. It argues that the EU’s response to the conflict reflects a deeper, existential dysfunction in the EU’s self-understanding, manifested structurally through the erosion of subsidiarity, increasing centralization of power, managerialist modes of leadership, and the displacement of the Christian Democratic ethos that shaped the trajectory of post-war European integration. The paper contends that the erosion of moral foundations, and of the normative frameworks that once gave them institutional expression, has contributed to strategic misjudgement, policy incoherence, and the weakening of solidarity between member states, with far-reaching geopolitical, economic, and demographic consequences. The paper concludes that rebuilding the EU will require more than institutional reform. It will demand a civilizational re-anchoring that restores trust, subsidiarity, and moral coherence through a renewed Christian Democratic framework, while rejecting hegemonic and purely technocratic models of governance. Such a recalibration is presented as a necessary condition for restoring legitimacy, social cohesion, and strategic stability in a post-war European order.

Overview

The governance of the EU is caught in a dysfunctional mindset; trapped in a geopolitical ‘Groundhog  Day’. Its  central institutions increasingly lack direction, and there is a palpable crisis of leadership—a tragedy for all who once looked to Europe as a shared civilizational home grounded in history and moral inheritance.1 The epicentre of this crisis is the Russia–Ukraine War and its humanitarian and geo-political consequences. These include large-scale loss of life and injury, escalating strategic instability, and a sustained movement toward a non-zero risk of nuclear confrontation.

There is a wretched, drawn-out movement towards a cessation of hostilities—brokered not by the EU but by the United States—and at times contested by pro-war positions within the Union itself. Europe, once regarded as the lodestar of reason and stability, now finds itself destabilized by strategic and fiscal outcomes that were widely foreseeable and, in important respects, avoidable. This prolonged strategic stasis reflects the political equivalent of a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, characterized by groupthink and an uncritical adherence to leadership assumptions that have repeatedly failed, both morally and strategically.

There are, of course, divergent interpretations of the war’s root causes. However, the EU has insufficiently interrogated the strategic risks of aligning itself uncritically with Ukrainian negotiating positions, particularly where such positions elevate existential risks for Europe that extend far beyond Ukraine’s legitimate national interests. In their first meeting in the White House, President Trump warned that President Zelensky’s approach to the conflict risked escalation toward a wider war, including the possibility of global confrontation. Whatever one makes of the tone of that exchange, it highlights a substantive concern: the growing gap between Ukraine’s legitimate national objectives and the broader strategic risks borne by Europe and its allies. President Zelensky’s sustained international visibility may reasonably be understood as a wartime diplomatic necessity, yet it has also contributed to a political environment in which moral urgency risks displacing strategic restraint.

President Trump’s subsequent criticism regarding a perceived lack of gratitude by the Ukrainian leadership for US support, while contentious, points to the same underlying imbalance: a dynamic in which allies are placed under continuous moral and political pressure to escalate commitments, even as the strategic costs and risks are disproportionately externalized. The failure examined here is not one of moral sympathy, but of governance: the EU’s inability to distinguish solidarity from strategic subordination, and moral commitment from unexamined escalation.

‘The Russia–Ukraine War exposes a deeper existential crisis of European governance and identity’

The EU needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Its cultural and intellectual coherence has been eroded by an assertive secular relativism that has displaced shared moral and philosophical foundations. The core principle of subsidiarity has long been subverted by increasingly centralized governance exercised from Brussels. The EU economy is scarred by stagnation. A war aimed at defeating Russia—a conflict the EU was neither structurally prepared to sustain nor strategically positioned to shape—has diminished and divided the Union. This erosion of trust was evident at the December 2025 Summit, where member governments rejected the European Commission’s legally problematic and institutionally flawed proposal to sequester Russian assets frozen at the outset of the conflict. The Commission, evidently, did not sufficiently think through the assumptions on which its strategy was premised, or the associated fiscal burden. The political ‘noise’ is deafening: debates over conscription in Germany and the UK, rhetorical slogans such as ‘punish Putin’, and a policy repertoire largely confined to sanctions and continued military financing.

All of these factors reflect a dysfunctionality that is unique in the EU’s history. Europe’s social and economic fabric is being strained to breaking point by a cult of militarization. Unprecedented financial resources are being diverted away from national and EU budgets towards armaments at a time of demographic decline, deindustrialization, and intensifying fiscal pressure across the EU. At the same time, the EU has been marginalized in diplomatic efforts to resolve a war on its own continent, sidelined by the US, whose peace initiative it initially obstructed. It has now, after four years of conflict, raised the prospect of direct talks with Russia, which were always an option. If the EU is to endure as a legitimate political community, a foundational reconstruction of its moral, institutional, and strategic framework is imperative.

From this overview, three conclusions follow and are further developed in the sections below. First, the present European Commission, having prioritized the funding and provisioning of war over engagement and diplomacy, should have no hand in the process of reconstruction. It failed to protect what was entrusted to the EU’s care. It obstructed the peace initiatives of the US and Hungary. Second, any renewal of EU leadership must prioritize the rebuilding of trust, as articulated by philosopher Onora O’Neill in her BBC Reith Lectures.2 For a Union in crisis, this requires a return to Christian Democratic principles, a social economy shaped by subsidiarity and social responsibility, and a pragmatic re-engagement with international trade. Third, reconstruction will require a rebalancing of power away from excessive centralization by restoring meaningful national sovereignty and autonomy. The framework of relational autonomy provides a constructive lens for reanimating the EU by understanding autonomy not as isolation or veto power, but as a relationally fostered capacity through which nations ‘become themselves amongst others’ within shared institutions that respect national narrative, legitimacy, and democratic ownership rather than coercive centralization.3

The Russia–Ukraine War: Root Causes

The Russia–Ukraine War4 is both a consequence of, and a metaphor for, a profound crisis of truth in Europe. Truth refers not simply to abstract moral claims, but to the erosion of intellectual honesty in policy formation, historical memory, constitutional identity, and democratic accountability. It has become the primary casualty of the ideological capture of EU governance, including universities, by mediocre leadership and a self-destructive hierarchy of political priorities. What was once a European project grounded in moral purpose, cultural confidence, and a shared political imagination has progressively become a technocratic structure marked by anxiety, defensiveness, and moral uncertainty. A political ‘community’ cannot sustain legitimacy or cohesion when it normalizes systematic deception, disregards ethical responsibility in governance, and pursues policies corrosive to its own social fabric. Nor can it remain stable amid structural demographic decline and escalating dependency ratios that undermine economic resilience, intergenerational solidarity and the viability of social institutions. At the same time, and not unrelated to this, an aggressive secularism has ‘crowded out’ transcendence: the recognition of meaning, moral accountability, and human dignity grounded beyond the state, beyond economic utility, and beyond technocratic management. The loss of such transcendence has hollowed out political purpose and weakened institutional integrity.

Strategically, the war emerged from a post-Cold War security architecture shaped by US hegemony and NATO expansionism.5 More specifically, it was propelled by Western strategic ambition and a persistent insensitivity to Russian security anxieties. Over subsequent decades, this posture was enabled by an increasingly self-reverential EU. The resultant tensions between NATO and Russia were re-ignited across the intervening decades by NATO’s search for a role and relevance in a post-Soviet world, by the vested interests of the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) and by Ukraine’s subjugation of Russian minorities. However, the Rubicon was crossed at the 2008 NATO Summit, where adversarial posture was all too evident in its press releases, and in the speech of US President George Bush, proposing to fast-track Ukraine’s membership. This trajectory culminated in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.6

Concurrently, the EU has become more centralized, coercive, and autocratic. These tendencies were already visible in the Troika’s displacement of democratic governments during the austerity era following the banking and economic crisis, and, also, were confirmed by the 2024 electoral outcomes across Europe, which revealed deepening alienation from EU authority.

The EU has thus evolved into a supranational project increasingly estranged from both its foundational values and its voters, while entangling itself in covert, and now open, confrontation with Russia. Its credibility has become strained by war. Grandiose initiatives in areas such as migration, energy, and other ‘hot button’ issues have been quietly walked back by member states. The structural problem is not simply centralization, but a drift toward managerial governance that lacks democratic accountability, resists critique, and increasingly treats dissent as a pathology rather than an expression of democratic participation.

More broadly, the EU finds itself in a ‘conflict landscape’ whose strategic dynamics it neither fully understands nor controls. Policy formation has been driven less by rigorous geopolitical assessment than by a combination of ideological certainty, institutional groupthink, and a persistent underestimation of Russian strategic resolve. This failure was not primarily military; it was conceptual. The EU misread the moral, historical, and civilizational dimensions shaping Russian strategic identity and failed to articulate a distinctive European mode of global engagement. Militarization has gradually become the default response, accompanied by a failure to anticipate the scale, duration, and possible humanitarian consequences of this posture—particularly after 2014.

In losing sight of a larger truth, Europe also lost sight of history. J. K. Galbraith, with a lifetime experience of analysing US military expenditures through the lens of social economics, observed in his final book: ‘Wars are a major threat to civilized existence, and a corporate commitment to weapons procurement and use nurtures this threat. It accords legitimacy, and even heroic virtue, to devastation and death…’7

Political conflicts blind to moral and cultural realities—the US invasion of Iraq is an obvious example—repeatedly misjudge the geopolitical consequences of their actions. Regrettably, this includes the EU. There is a real danger that an agreement to end hostilities will find the EU as unprepared for what the process of rebuilding peace actually entails as it was in pre-empting the war in Ukraine in the first place. Rebuilding will necessarily involve physical infrastructure and economic recovery, yet the political economy of post-war reconstruction risks being structured in ways that disproportionately benefit external financial and corporate interests. The paradox of war is that the most obvious beneficiaries of rebuilding are not the soldiers, the people, or the nation itself, but rather what may be termed the emerging European Industrial Military Complex, and global financial behemoths. That is where the current EU leadership has positioned the Union.

The more important task of rebuilding will be to reanimate a decadent EU by re-connecting it with its own values and by having the courage to foster a reconciliation between Russia and Ukraine within a wider European framework of cooperation. International Trade 101 alone demands this.

‘This moral and institutional erosion has produced strategic misjudgement, policy incoherence, weakened solidarity among member states’

So, a significant aspect of the present crisis lies in the displacement of Europe’s identity. EU political leadership has long distanced itself from the Christian foundations that shaped Europe’s political imagination and institutions.8 As a consequence of systematically decoupling from its identity, the EU lost its sensitivity to the cultural, moral, and civilizational dynamics that frame geopolitical reality. It failed to see that an aggressively secular, increasingly technocratic and undemocratic ‘European Project’, together with NATO’s organizationally driven impulse to justify its own survival, would inevitably generate existential anxieties for Russia.

The irony is striking: while the EU positioned itself as a rational and moral actor, it simultaneously resisted self-critique and marginalized dissenting voices. Hungary’s advocacy for dialogue and diplomacy as opposed to war during its presidency of the EU council exemplified this. Indeed, Hungary’s advocacy was met with condemnation by Brussels, rather than engagement.

The EU has serious lessons to learn about what rebuilding from the ground up will entail in the wake of the war. As Alasdair MacIntyre has argued, political and institutional renewal ultimately depends on the recovery of shared moral practices and virtues capable of sustaining truth and trust within communities.9 These are not rhetorical assets of democracy; they are the conditions for its possibility. The legacy of Schuman and Adenauer embodied this reality in post-war Europe, grounding rebuilding and reconstruction in a moral anthropology rooted in dignity, community, responsibility, and the primacy of the common good. In societal terms, love of God and love of ‘neighbour’ encompasses marriage, children, and the priority of the natural family, all bonded within political freedoms enabling human flourishing and the public good. These were at the very heart of Adenauer’s vision of Christian Democracy in the service of peace and rebuilding. Past tense.

The displacement of these leaves a cultural void, but also a structural weakening of Europe’s capacity to sustain its moral legitimacy, political coherence, and strategic wisdom. The implications of this loss for understanding what rebuilding the EU will entail cannot be overemphasized.

‘Civilizational Collapse’

When President Trump pointed to Europe’s ‘civilization collapse’, it stung the EU and British political mainstream into reaction.10 Denial, rather than openness to critique, was precisely what might have been expected of the EU’s political leadership, increasingly disconnected from cultural reality and from public sentiment. This is contributing to a widening credibility crisis.

At its most basic, ‘civilizational collapse’ refers to the breakdown of the shared moral, cultural, and epistemic foundations that allow a society to recognize and respect truth, reason, and legitimate authority. When political systems cease to anchor decision-making in objective standards of truth—historical, moral, legal, or empirical—they gradually lose the capacity to deliberate rationally, act with integrity, or command public trust. Political life then becomes governed less by principle than by expediency, narrative control, and power.

The consequences are cumulative. Public discourse fragments, accountability weakens, moral judgement is relativized, and coercive instruments—particularly constraints on freedom of speech—begin to replace democratic consent. The result is structural rather than accidental: power displaces principle, narrative management supplants accountability, and coercive mechanisms increasingly compensate for the absence of legitimacy.

History and political theory alike suggest that when truth and moral order are eroded in this way, instability, repression, and eventually conflict follow—not as dramatic metaphors, but as structural outcomes of a political culture that has lost its ethical and rational coherence. As the philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan once wrote, ‘a civilization in decline digs its own grave with relentless consistency. It cannot be argued out of its self-destructive ways’.11 In Troikanomics, the authors argued that the EU’s survival required openness to critique. A Union that rejects self-reflection, and rejects the moral and spiritual sources from which it drew its strength, cannot sustain coherence.12

An overview of today’s EU compared to that of its foundational generation shows how, lie by lie, directive by directive, the leadership of the EU has built what the philosopher Roger Scruton called ‘a false Europe’. It has helped clear the way for the current leadership to default to war and militarization.13

This merits reflection. In its initial formative stage, the question of whether Europe was Christian would have made no sense.14 It was a given that the EU was Christian, with a Christian anthropology, aesthetic, and history. That changed. In framing a draft Constitution for Europe in 1984, a reference to God and Europe’s Christian identity was intentionally excluded. This reflected and reinforced the EU’s slide into relativism and what Pope Benedict XIV called an ‘apostasy of itself’.15 In the classical European tradition, truth is not merely a political instrument but something grounded in moral reality, beyond state power. Increasingly, however, European governance has embraced relativism: the belief that there is no objective truth and that reality can be constructed, managed, and enforced in a wholly relativist political structure. In rejecting Christ’s self-identification with the truth, the EU knocked away the guardrail of its own identity. Everything else followed, notably ‘Woke’ and war.16

The governance of the EU has thus drifted into an era that might fairly be described as one of ‘no truth’. This goes beyond the proliferation of lies or propaganda—though these have been amplified by new technologies, including AI. It rests on a more radical premise: that there is no objective truth at all, only competing narratives. Such a premise can be sustained only by immense institutional power and punitive enforcement. In the end, it suffocates public life by depriving it of the oxygen of trust, integrity, and shared meaning.

Christianity and Christian Democracy

The Russia–Ukraine War has brought Europe, and particularly the EU, into a security environment in which the risk of nuclear escalation can no longer be dismissed as hypothetical. It has turned Ukraine into an arena of proxy conflict and advanced weaponry and tactics. As part of this process, the EU has weaponized ‘sovereignty’ and ‘nationality’ in order to justify its war—concepts in which it is no longer invested. This is far removed from the vision articulated by figures such as Robert Schuman, who believed that Europe, emerging from war, must ground its political life in moral responsibility, human dignity, and reconciliation.

Peace, as opposed to the cessation of hostilities, will require the reanimation of Christian Democracy, understood not as a party-political project but as a governing framework rooted in moral responsibility and the common good. Christianity pivots around the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is, a person who self-identifies as ‘the way, the truth and the life’, not a hegemonic state, a business model or a technological nirvana built by global behemoth. Schumann and his contemporaries understood Christianity not as a theocratic programme, but as a moral and civilizational framework grounded in the life and witness of Christ—a lived ethic. That is, one shaped by leadership aptly defined as ‘humility with fierce resolve’, service, the experience of suffering and redemption, and, perhaps most importantly, fidelity to truth. These principles sustained European nations through total war, guided political reconstruction after 1945, and helped shape the institutional and cultural foundations of the early European Community. Christian Democracy was not about religious sentiment; it was a disciplined political philosophy informed by Christian virtues that underpinned policy, shaped institutions, and provided a moral horizon for European integration.

That is, until Christian Europe was systematically repurposed to serve an ideological purpose. Christian Democracy, the beating heart of European civilization, was not overrun by the barbarians from outside its borders. It was subverted by lies from within its own institutions and its socio-political interventions. Most of all, it was subverted by an EU ‘leadership’ invested in the kind of lies about which Solzhenitsyn warned the West in the 1970s, and that Pope John Paul II witnessed in his early life and during his pontificate.17 Christianity’s distinctive political contribution in Europe lay in the formation of character and leadership through lived virtues—duty, restraint, sacrifice, and responsibility to others—providing a durable framework for institutional renewal, social trust, and the common good. This is not theoretical: Europe’s own history demonstrates it. In the aftermath of the collapse of Rome, St Augustine articulated a moral and intellectual framework capable of sustaining meaning and order amid civilizational war, political exhaustion, and fragmentation. The City of God neither retreated into private spirituality nor proposed naive optimism; it confronted political fragmentation by distinguishing transient earthly power from enduring moral order, insisting that truth, justice, and virtue must remain the reference points of public life even when empires fail.

A view of a building destroyed by a Russian rocket strike as the war between Russia and Ukraine continues in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine, 26 January 2024 SOURCE: AFP News

Augustine’s work demonstrates that cultural decline need not inevitably lead to nihilism or chaos; it can become the moment in which political imagination is purified, moral purpose clarified, and renewal prepared through disciplined thought, humility, and fidelity to truth. King St Stephen of Hungary embodied a synthesis of political authority and moral responsibility, demonstrating how governance can draw upon transcendent moral reference points while remaining pragmatically engaged with temporal realities. St Catherine of Siena, writing in a Europe fractured by conflict and a crisis in governance demonstrates how conscience-driven leadership could speak credibly to power, advocating natural justice, reconciliation, and moral responsibility in political life. Her abiding example and writings remind us that a leadership grounded in conscience and responsibility can cut through cynicism and paralysis, summoning rulers and institutions back to moral responsibility and justice.

Together, these figures demonstrate that Europe has already navigated crises of legitimacy, identity, and conflict by drawing on a moral and intellectual tradition capable of forming courageous, accountable leadership. They show that renewal is possible where Europe is willing to recover a sense of moral purpose, accept critique, and cultivate leadership rooted in responsibility rather than ideology or expediency.

Policy Dissonance and Strategic Failure

EU fiscal transfers to Ukraine to date exceed €200 billion. These transfers have imposed substantial fiscal, social, and political costs on the EU and member states while yielding limited strategic gains. Ukraine will not join NATO in any foreseeable peace settlement. Had the EU resisted pressure in 2008—particularly from NATO and the Bush administration—to fast-track Ukrainian membership, the likelihood of large-scale war in Europe would have been significantly reduced. The tragedy lies not only in the outbreak of war, but in the way European policymakers demonstrated no imagination in seeking diplomatic off-ramps before conflict hardened into a prolonged and destructive stalemate.

Then there is the policy incoherence and dissonance related to the EU’s prospective fiscal profile, which is unsustainable. This incoherence is exemplified in the Commission’s extraordinary attempt to sequester Russian assets as a means of funding the war, which member states refused to endorse at the December 2025 Summit. The assets were part of a global utility for clearing and settlement systems. The EU leadership proposal was not only acting contrary to international law, but also exposing the EU and the euro to market and reputational risk. The emergence of BRICS had already pushed the global economy toward autarky in a way that will take two generations to reverse. Even so, the Commission still insisted on extending additional extraordinary funding to Ukraine secured on the EU’s own budget, which is surely unprecedented. This is policy incoherence writ large.

Successive rounds of sanctions—widely characterized as a negative-sum instrument—were repeatedly expanded despite limited progress toward key political objectives. They have imposed significant economic costs on Europe as well as Russia, including higher energy prices, inflation, and constricted growth. While sanctions have clearly harmed the Russian economy, they have also contributed to a substantial economic disruption and to the deindustrialization of Germany and the wider EU.

Policy dissonance on this scale has exposed an unprecedented failure of leadership within the EU Commission and other EU institutions. They bought into the fallacy that the EU was ‘too big to lose this war’. It is a bitter reality that Russia’s leadership, particularly President Putin and its veteran Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, has brought a depth of strategic experience and diplomatic continuity that contrasts sharply with the EU’s fragmented and short-termist leadership—without conferring legitimacy on their conduct.18 In an extensive interview with the Financial Times in 2019, President Putin critiqued what Europe had become.19 He demonstrated a depth of knowledge of European culture that Germany, France, the UK, and the Commission had long discarded, as well as, importantly, an understanding of the consequences for a ‘Europe’ that displaced the wisdom and aesthetics of its Christian identity. The political turmoil of multiple elections across Europe and globally in 2024 confirmed the extent to which EU leadership was out of sync with democratic sentiment. It is widely perceived by voters as overly centralized and oppressive.

The Moral Collapse Behind the Policy Failure

The trauma and collateral damage of the war, like the breakdown of personal relationships, is driven by actions, reactions, and the need for justification. Wars can only be sustained through fiscal resources, which are inevitably limited, and which impose direct costs and even greater opportunity costs on protagonists. The EU leadership has in effect ‘bet the farm’ on a war that was predictable and avoidable, and which has pivoted Europe away from its origins and destiny. In this process, the root causes of conflict are often obscured. Truth gets buried in the turmoil of conflict, just as it does when relationships implode. Lies become calcified. Protagonists lose office. They sometimes die. They seldom learn.

The importance of a moral, as opposed to an ideological, infrastructure underpinning a political vision is that it is holistic, goes deep, and will carry narrative, even in the face of shocks and setbacks. Christian Democracy is such a moral infrastructure. When the EU turned its back on it, its ‘progressive narrative’ had neither the integrity nor the resilience to substitute for something older, wiser, and unmistakably European than ideology. It never resonated with countries like Hungary who had experienced the ideology that colonized what once was Europe.

Analogous to breakdowns in relationships, it is nearly impossible to stop war once it has started, not least because political actors and populations alike are tempted to cloak violence in misplaced virtues and narratives of moral necessity. Denunciations by political adversaries pivot around ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. But they lack substance when they are decoupled from the moral foundations of those norms, rapidly degenerating into psychological games, propaganda, and lies where one or both parties no longer believe in the values they invoke, still less live them out in their constitutions and policies, which are after all the moral infrastructure of nations.

In such a climate, the intent of denunciations is less to pursue truth than to signal allegiance, manage perceptions and expectations, and manipulate public opinion, with lying treated as a trivial and inconsequential political instrument. In equal measure, the intent is directed towards incentives aimed at different ‘constituents’ and vested interests who have ‘skin’ in the game of war. These dynamics are often encapsulated in empty political slogans—perhaps most memorably the ‘Coalition of the Willing’—that function as rhetorical cover rather than substantive moral or legal justification. Meanwhile, to return to the metaphor of a relationship breakdown, lies are told, pain inflicted, plates thrown, the scale of damage increases, and the consequences often slip out of control.

These consequences are not inert. They become intergenerational. Ideology is a toxin in the body politic that metastasizes over time. All of this has unfolded in Ukraine against the tectonic implosion of global governance. The idea of natural justice is hollowed out when morality and political accountability are reduced to arbitrary, selectively enforced positions. When one or both parties reject the moral authority on which reconciliation must ultimately be based, governance based on natural justice becomes untenable.

Conclusion

The political project that became the EU secularized decisively from the 1980s onward. In doing so, it distanced itself from its Christian Democratic inheritance and gradually constructed an inverted political reality, increasingly estranged from the moral and cultural foundations on which it once depended. Europe—once the custodian of Western civilizational memory and meaning—has, in Scruton’s terms, become a ‘false Europe’: a political construct moving against the grain of its own history. The EU now requires rebuilding from the ground up. It will not recover coherence through institutional reform alone. Rebuilding demands a civilizational recovery: the restoration of intellectual honesty, moral seriousness, and cultural grounding capable of sustaining trust.

This cultural dissonance has not remained abstract. It has overflowed directly into governance. The impulse to control, to censor dissent, and to enforce compliance sits uneasily with the EU’s founding spirit, yet it has become an increasingly defining feature of the Union. What began as a community that respected the cultural richness and sovereign dignity of its member nations has too often resorted to punitive enforcement mechanisms—financial sanctions, disproportionate penalties, procedural coercion, and political marginalization—to discipline those who diverge from the prevailing orthodoxy.

If Europe is to recover coherence, legitimacy, and purpose, it must rediscover the cultural humility, moral seriousness, and intellectual honesty that animated its beginnings. The alternative is an increasingly brittle project: strategically uncertain, democratically strained, and estranged from the sources of meaning that once gave it strength. Genuine renewal will therefore require a rebuilding of the EU as thorough, systemic, and principled as its original foundation.

NOTES

1 Rémi Brague et al., ‘The Paris Declaration: A Europe We Can Believe In’, Paris, 7 October 2017, https://thetrueeurope.eu/.

2 Onora O’Neill, ‘A Question of Trust’, BBC Reith Lectures, BBC Radio 4, 2002.

3 Ray Kinsella, and Maurice Kinsella, ‘Autonomy within the European Union: A Relational Perspective’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 108/431 (Autumn 2019), 275–287, doi:10.1353/stu.2019.0056.

4 Within Western political and media discourse, the conflict is most commonly designated the ‘Russia– Ukraine War’. This framing has shaped, and in many respects constrained, the dominant Western narrative. While NATO is, in practical terms, a de facto participant in what is widely understood to be a proxy war in Ukraine, it is not formally recognized as a belligerent party under international law. It can nevertheless be argued that future historians may judge the conflict more accurately described as a ‘NATO–Russia War’, given the extent of NATO’s strategic involvement. In a widely cited article published in Foreign Affairs in 2014, the American political scientist John Mearsheimer advanced precisely this argument. He wrote: ‘According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukrainian crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression…But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis…The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement—the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West…The West had been moving into Russia’s backyard and threatening its core strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly.’ See John Mearsheimer, ‘Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault. The Liberal Delusions that Provoked Putin’, Foreign Affairs (September/October 2014), www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2014-08-18/why-ukraine-crisis-west-s-fault. Mearsheimer’s article, published in what is widely regarded as the leading journal of international relations, together with his subsequent scholarly contributions elaborating this thesis, provides a substantive basis for reconsidering how the war is designated. It suggests that an alternative terminology may better capture the structural realities of the conflict than the formulation now in common usage, and which is adopted in this article.

5 Mearsheimer has noted that NATO expansion proceeded despite explicit warnings and internal dissent from senior figures within US foreign policy, who characterized the strategy as destabilizing and strategically reckless.

6 See NATO, Bucharest Summit Declaration (2008), para. 23. Although no immediate accession timetable was agreed, the declaration’s commitment that Ukraine and Georgia ‘will become members of NATO’ marked a decisive political signal. President George W. Bush strongly supported this position in his remarks at the summit, framing enlargement as central to NATO’s post-Cold War strategy.

7 John Kenneth Galbraith, The Economics of Innocent Fraud: Truth for Our Time (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), Chapter 7 (‘The Economics of the Arms Race’). Galbraith argues there that war poses a fundamental threat to civilized society, and that institutional and corporate commitments to weapons production and deployment confer moral legitimacy, even a sense of virtue, upon destruction and death.

8 See Olivier Roy, IsEuropeChristian?(Hurst & Company, 2019).

9 See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, 1981).

10 See Donald J. Trump, campaign remarks at the New Hampshire Republican Primary (January 2024) and subsequent media interviews, where he warned that Europe was experiencing a ‘collapse of civilization’ driven by cultural disintegration and weak political leadership.

11 Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Method in Theology (DLT, 1972), 55.

12 Ray Kinsella, and Maurice Kinsella, Troikanomics: Austerity, Autonomy and Existential Crisis in the European Union (Springer/Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

13 See Roger Scruton, Where We Are: The State of Britain Now (Continuum, 2010), and related essays in which Scruton critiques the construction of a ‘false Europe’ detached from historical truth, cultural inheritance, and moral responsibility, warning that such abstraction weakens political judgement and accountability.

14 See Olivier Roy, Is Europe Christian? (Hurst & Company, 2019).

15 Sandro Magister, ‘An “Apostate” from Itself: The Lost Europe of Pope Benedict’, chiesa.espresso.repubblica (28 March 2007), https://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/129525%26eng%3Dy.html.

16 Ray Kinsella, ‘A Woke Europe Now Confronts Two Threats: Ideological and Military’, Hungarian Conservative (22 January 2024), www.hungarianconservative.com/articles/politics/relational_autonomy_patriotism_alternative-to-woke_europe_world_essay/.

17 See Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ‘“A World Split Apart”, Commencement Address’, Harvard University, 8 June 1978.

18 See, for example Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, ‘Interview with “60 Minutes” television programme (Rossiya-1)’, Moscow, 25 December 2024.

19 ‘Vladimir Putin Says Liberalism Has “Become Obsolete”’, Financial Times (27 June 2019), www.ft.com/content/670039ec-98f3-11e9-9573-ee5cbb98ed36.

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