Western civilisation has been ailing for at least the past century. Possibly it is terminally ill. And while there are promising signs of recovery, thanks to a new renaissance, that is not guaranteed. (I do not use civilisation in the Spenglerian sense. As such, the word culture would have been equally suitable.)

There are particularly two main causes of the West's malaise: extreme nationalism and globalist liberalism. The actions of numerous figures – politicians, academics, public intellectuals – in almost all Western nations/polities/countries/cultures are indicative of the malaise. Two telling, drastically opposite symbols of this come from the German world: Adolf Hitler and Angela Merkel.

Western civilisation, especially carried by people from Western and Central Europe, North America, Australasia, and a few Western communities elsewhere in the world such as here in Southern Africa, has the nature of a constitutional civilisation, not so called because it has anything to do with a written constitution, but for a more profound reason. The constitutional nature of its civilisation entails that the West consists of a multiplicity of essential constituent elements, which must constantly keep each other in check and in balance, failing which the West liquidates itself. The historical record proves this.

Two essential components of the West at issue here are that it:

• •is inherently diverse – culturally, linguistically, and politically; and
• •is dedicated to individual freedom.

Put differently, the West is nationalist and liberal.

Cultural Diversity, Individual Freedom (“Nationalist and Liberal”)

Western civilisation is composed of a variety of clearly defined nations, or national identities. The Germanic word volk (plural volkere) is more appropriate because it bears an explicitly cultural meaning. Nation, on the other hand, is a modernist notion, readily identified with the state and too often overlooking the cultural dimension antecedent to the state, which is central here.

Secondly, Western culture cherishes freedom, including individual freedom. It may also be described as liberal, but liberalism, like nationalism, is a modernist ideology, which fails to reflect the more fundamental commitment of Western culture to (individual) freedom.

Cultural Diversity Deteriorating Into Destructive Extreme Nationalism

The cultural diversity of the West finds its most notable expression in its linguistic variety, accentuated by the literary cultures of the various Western peoples. The various volkere live, as it were, through their vernaculars. “Die taal is gans die volk” (the language entirely embodies the people), so the Afrikaans and Dutch saying goes. When a people therefore loses its language, it experiences a fundamental and irreparable cultural loss.

Western peoples primarily recognise themselves in their own languages, which in literary form have a material existence and can therefore be experienced and appreciated in an objective and lasting sense for their particular articulative abilities and beauty.

Italian, Castilian, Portuguese, French (more specifically the Île de France variation), English, and German, dating far back to the 12th century, were the first Western languages to develop into literary languages. Languages with smaller communities, such as Czech and Dutch, soon followed. Afrikaans has made great strides as a literary language since the latter part of the nineteenth century and especially in the twentieth century.

The Western European (nation) states, which over time became the main political actors on the European continent, gave statist expression to various languages with their literature-based national identities. (This led to the suppression of numerous minority languages in several Western European states, not discussed here.)

More importantly for the present discussion, it also led to the various Western European volkere becoming embodied within nation states. Devastatingly, these nation states eventually became embroiled in wars against each other.

The greatest devastation of extreme Western state nationalism, however, was the two great Western civil wars of the twentieth century, which, on close analysis, were what the two World Wars amounted to.

The train of events leading to this was the so-called mounting “German question”: the massive danger that the powerful and potentially aggressive unified Germany posed to its neighbours since the second half of the nineteenth century. The astute Otto von Bismarck understood how to manage this problem by pursuing a constructive foreign policy.

The German leaders in the period that followed lacked Bismarck's wisdom.

Due to mounting state nationalism, which found expression in so-called German world politics (Weltpolitik) and unwise alliances, Germany allowed itself to be drawn into the devastation of the First World War.

In this way, European nationalisms disfigured one another immensely and caused incalculable damage to the character of the West.

Unfortunately, Gustav Stresemann, who had been German foreign minister for a long time and briefly chancellor after World War I, died early. This helped pave the way for Hitler to drive a project of extreme state nationalism and launch Germany into World War II. This second devastating civil war deeply wounded the fabric of the West and her volkere.

Hitler, therefore, symbolises the West's essential building block of cultural diversity being corrupted and turning against the West as a self-destructive force and sending it on the path of self-destruction.

But the globalist liberal reaction to state nationalism after World War II arising from the latter’s social psychological consequences is severely harming the West to this day.

Individual Freedom Deteriorating Into Globalist Liberalism

After the war, individual freedom, which had always been a basic building block of the West’s constitutional civilisation, degenerated into a destructive globalist liberalism.

The West's restless, often daring, and idealistic spirit of discovery, invention, and experimentation (its Faustian spirit in Spengler’s description) was made possible to a significant extent by a passion, and indeed respect, for individual freedom. Individual freedom was, in turn, made possible by the West having had, since its inception almost a millennium ago, a variety of centres of power, authority, and influence.

There were the secular and ecclesiastical centres of power and authority. And the secular authority was divided between the empire, emerging kingdoms, principalities, and lesser centres of political authority. There was the university system with its often-tense relations with the secular and ecclesiastical authorities. The same applies to the merchants and emerging professions who also acted autonomously.

The crux of the matter is that the West, after an admittedly imperfect and bumpy journey, became for the most part incompatible with coercion under the authority of absolutist secular rulers or with theocratic rule. Where these did occur, they were an aberration from the Western trajectory, not in conformity with it.

Since the Enlightenment (and the American and French revolutions), individual freedom has been expounded theoretically as an autonomous value (and right). However, it was not until after World War II that it was advocated as a comprehensive ideology for a new political order, especially in the West.

In place of the extreme nationalism that led to so much devastation in the World Wars, individual freedom was now to provide the cure for the West (and for the world).

Yet it was not the constructive individual freedom that had once formed part of the West’s constitutional civilisation. Now it was combined with egalitarianism into an absolutist ideology of globalist liberalism, failing to balance freedom with diversity.

This manifested in a variety of trends since the Second World War: for example, in the “woke” denial and attempted dissolution of the natural order of sex and gender as well as the denial and rejection of the very existence of Western civilisation as such.

This denial manifests in policies of open borders and allowing and advocating large-scale migration to Western Europe and North America, which disrupts the safety and integrity of the main geographical homes of Western civilisation broadly and of the various Western peoples in particular.

Various European and American governments have been responsible for this over several decades, but it is perhaps most clearly symbolised by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, constituting the diametrical opposite of the extreme nationalism and Adolf Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s.

Merkel and her ideological kin fail to understand that Western Europe (and North America) are the geographical home of Western people as peoples, as volkere. Their globalist liberal error is their disregard for the West’s cultural character and indeed that of people from other civilisations; their erroneous belief that all people are ultimately essentially the same, can be moulded equally by technical, managerial politics, and therefore that anyone could be allowed into the West’s territorial home – at mass scale to boot – regardless of their civilisational identity, language, and culture.

The cultural factor underlying the West has apparently lapsed for Merkel and the globalist liberals. The West – Germany, Britain, France, and all the other states of Western Europe and of North America – can therefore be assimilated into an imagined common humanity, because to their mind there is not and there should finally not be a Western culture and civilisation.

Double Nihilism for the West

There is a verbal equivalence between (individual) liberty and globalist liberalism. That, however, is where the equivalence ends, because globalist liberalism is not a species of individual freedom. It does not stem from it. The opposite holds true. Globalist liberalism corrupts individual freedom; it is a perversion of individual liberty.

Individual liberty is an essential ingredient of the West’s constitutional civilisation. Globalist liberalism is conversely an assault on Western civilisation.

There is no affinity between cultural diversity, which enables the West’s linguistic-based nationalities on the one hand, and extreme state nationalism, as practised among others by Hitler and the national socialists. The former, like individual liberty, is an essential ingredient of the West’s constitutional civilisation. Extreme state nationalism, by contrast, is a complete perversion of cultural identity and diversity, and, like globalist liberalism, is an assault on Western civilisation.

Angela Merkel and globalist liberalism are polar opposites of the extremist state nationalism of Adolf Hitler. Yet both involve equally toxic perversions of the West, its civilisation, and its various volkere.

Extreme state nationalism distorted cultural diversity into an absolutism, even essentialisation, of difference, which engulfed the West in two horrific civil wars.

Globalist liberalism has abandoned the very idea of the West, assimilating it into a nothingness.

Both are destructive, nihilist forces against the West.

The challenge – indeed, the prudent path – is to give individual freedom and linguistic and cultural diversity their balanced place, based on the historical constitutional nature of Western civilisation, beyond the perverse extremisms that have inflicted so much devastation upon our civilisation.