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1973 was a fateful year. Inflation was high. Anxious autoworkers went on strike; many were laid off. US President Nixon, having won in a landslide on a platform of law and order, started his second term; later in the year his vice-president resigned and Nixon, facing Watergate probes, assured the country: ‘I am not a crook’. Pinochet took power in Chile. Terrorist groups, for various causes, planted bombs across England, attacked passengers in Greece and even killed the prime minister of Spain.

More hopefully, though not without sad irony, looking back: the UK, Ireland and Denmark joined the European Economic Community, precursor to the European Union. The Paris Peace Accords promised the end of war in Vietnam. The US Supreme Court said women had the right to choose. The World Trade Center opened.  

Instability was chronic. On 6 October 1973 — Yom Kippur — Egyptian and Syrian forces, supported in the end by many countries from the region and beyond, including the Soviet Union, attacked the 25-year-old State of Israel. Ultimately, they were defeated, and the conflict ended after just 18 days.

The war saw US commitment to Israel deepen. In retaliation, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, led by Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal, enacted an oil embargo against the US and US allies, including the UK, Netherlands and Portugal, leading to price shocks and changing virtually overnight the fault lines of the global economy. Efforts to resolve longstanding conflict over the Sinai led, five years later, to the breakthrough Camp David Accords, and then the 1979 peace deal between Egypt and Israel, a deal that still holds firm. For their part, Israelis determined more than ever never again to allow such vulnerability.  

Tumult would mark the decade, and indeed beyond. King Faisal himself was assassinated, in 1975, by a hateful nephew. It was hatred, in 1979, which fuelled the seizure of Mecca’s Grand Mosque and the consolidation, in Iran, of the more enduring Islamic Revolution — a hatred leading ultimately to the rise of Al-Qaeda and its many offshoots. In 1981, Egypt’s President Sadat would pay for peace with his own life.

Israel’s relations with neighbours remained fractious. The Palestinians — including in two major intifadas, or uprisings — resisted an Israeli government they viewed as unjust and illegitimate. Even the September 1993 Oslo Accords, promising the first steps towards lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians, were crippled from the start, being never fully embraced — by either side: Prime Minister Rabin was killed in 1995 by an Israeli Jewish extremist. Israel and Hamas, the party-cum-military winning the last real election the Palestinian Authority has ever held, in 2006, have fought four brutal Gaza Wars. Israel fought two wars with Lebanon, over conflict first with Palestinian and then with Iranian-backed militants.

And yet the Middle East has come a long way since 1973. Jordan joined Egypt, in 1994, in making peace with Israel. The historic Abraham Accords, signed in September 2020, broadened Israel’s network of peace to include Bahrain, the UAE, Morocco and Sudan. Talks with Saudi Arabia are ongoing. There is hope yet for a watershed.

The October 1973 conflict became known as the Yom Kippur War. For the surprise attacks came on this highest of holidays in the Jewish calendar. A day of sacrifice and of shabbat. A day of convocation. A day of atonement. A day of ashes. In a profound coincidence, the Yom Kippur War is also the Ramadan War, inviting us to reflect — in Yom Kippur’s spirit of holy humility — on the tragic ironies of peace and war, life and death, sacred and profane; and on those universal values of freedom and fellow-feeling which run deeper even, are stronger even, than all the hatred filling the world.

And in another irony of life and death, October 1973 is consequential to me for a unique, very personal, reason: I was born. On the 12th of the month, of that very month — in the very middle of the war, as it happened. With a rare congenital disability so severe the doctors advised my parents I could never live as an independent adult. To a Jewish tradition whose faith I do not practice, but whose values of truth-telling, compassion and respect I have always cherished and am committed to passing on to my young daughter.  

It is these values — again, ironically enough — which led me to Sweden’s Kristdemokraterna party, and to its broader, Europe-wide Christian-democratic tradition, and centre-right political family: the European People’s Party (EPP).

And it is these values — of human rights and freedom and democracy, rule of law, equality between women and men, protection for children, fairness of opportunity and fullness of life — which have guided my work as a member of the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Human Rights Committees; and my work, since June, as the convening chair of the European Parliament’s new Abraham Accords Network.

They’re why I continue to demand protection for Christians and other minorities in the Middle East; to fight against the resurgence of right-wing, left-wing and Islamist antisemitism — not just in the region but here in Europe and beyond; and to demand that the EU finally label as terrorist organizations both Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah. And why I am so proud to have nominated for the European Parliament’s 2023 Sakharov Prize Jina Mahsa Amini — a young woman murdered one year ago by the Iranian regime — and the ‘Woman, Life and Freedom’ movement she has inspired.

Yom Kippur calls us to humility and to sacrifice. And to hope on the other side. The Yom Kippur War reminds us how hard peace can be — and yet, too, how much has been achieved in 50 years. In a world in which violence and strife are on the rise, the Abraham Accords offer a different, more promising, path. As my good friend Antonio López-Istúriz often tells our European Parliament’s Delegation for relations with Israel, which he chairs, they may even represent in the wider Middle East the same first framework for cooperation so thoughtfully built, the same first seeds of peace so painstakingly planted, in Europe in the post-War years, following centuries of conflict and ethnic cleansing. That European project has grown, one step of compromise and reconciliation at a time, into the European Union of today: a union constantly striving to be safer and fairer, more prosperous and more peaceful.   

In my own next 50 years, as in the first, I will continue to fight for peace, for freedom from oppression, for protection for minorities — in the Middle East and around the world. So that cries of ‘death to Israel’ no longer echo in any square. So that not only the fasting of Yom Kippur but the feasting of Hanukkah — and of Christmas, and of the Eid — is free from fear. These are the foundational values, this is the guiding hope, of Christian democracy, of our European People’s Party and indeed of our European Union. On this day of reflection, let’s recommit to championing them more than ever.  

In the last few years, a swirl of publications and initiatives have attempted to develop the doctrinal foundations of ‘trumpism’ and to offer intellectual defences of right-wing populism, that most anti-intellectual of doctrines. One way or another, they have all amounted to a variation on national conservatism, the belief that nations are our historically grown ‘homes’ and that it is therefore the primary duty of conservatives to defend their specificities from the levelling encroachment of globalisation and international institutions. According to these apologetic treatments, that’s precisely what Trump and his political mates across the globe are up to.

There has been no shortage of outraged commentaries on such takes, but they have mostly come from the liberal left. It is therefore welcome that a robust conservative and classical liberal like Dalibor Rohac  – a Slovak by birth, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a research associate at the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies – took up the pen to offer a powerful rebuttal from the centre-right of the political spectrum.        

Rohac’s treatment is quite conventional in his belief that the current ‘globalist’ international order has coincided with an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity. This alone should enjoin those right-wingers who now want to overhaul it to show some real conservatism and pursue at most its cautious and gradual reform. However, his book departs in important ways from mainstream opinions on globalism. It understands international institutions not as top-down, enlightened bureaucracies but as bottom-up, evolutionary creations subject to constant adaptations and devised as responses to concrete challenges that transcend national borders. Such challenges include the like of trade barriers, security, pollution and the management of natural resources. For his analytical toolbox, Rohac owes an acknowledged debt to the pioneering work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom on the governance of the commons, federalism and polycentricity. His attempt to apply the Ostroms’ principles to international cooperation and European integration is cutting-edge and fruitful.        

The book also contains a very unconventional reconstruction of what the author refers to as ‘the West’s globalist history’ and I have referred to elsewhere as ‘Europe’s supranational past’. Rohac convincingly contends that ‘international’ integration, and not the national state, has been the norm for most of European history. He reflects on the historical meaning of such polycentric and multinational structures as the Holy Roman Empire, which comprised large swathes of the continent for a millennium, the Hanseatic League and, more recently, the Gold Standard, which acted in everything but name and trappings as a global currency into the 20th century. Although he stops short of openly drawing this conclusion, Rohac’s concise treatment clearly concurs with a reading of the European project as, historically, a restoration more than a radical revolutionary break with Europe’s past. This should encourage conservatives to cherish the principle of supranational integration rather more than they have done lately.

A robust conservative and classical liberal like Dalibor Rohac took up the pen to offer a powerful rebuttal from the centre-right of the political spectrum. 

Rohac’s related effort to revive a tradition of internationalist conservatism inspired by the likes of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Alexander Rüstow and Wilhelm Röpke also seems worthwhile and even urgent. One could add to this group of – mostly liberal – thinkers other figures such as Alexandre Marc, Denis de Rougemont, Richard Coudenhove, Otto von Habsburg and the Christian democratic founding fathers of Europe. The real question, however, is not whether conservatism and supranationalism are compatible. They are, at least since Edmund Burke wrote of the ‘commonwealth of Europe’ and Prince Metternich proclaimed ‘I have taken Europe as my fatherland’. As the author mentions, the problem is rather that there can be different forms of supranationalism, not all of them equally palatable to a christian democratic or conservative taste. Even Hayek and Röpke, who were conservative liberals, would likely have reservations about some regulatory and bureaucratic excesses of today’s EU, not to talk about the postmodernist cultural rhetoric often underpinning its policies.

To rein in the rise of national conservatism, therefore, the centre-right ought to do more than merely develop a more convincing defence of globalism and European integration. It must also articulate a meaningful reform agenda based on stronger subsidiarity, the protection of national and regional identities and a more open emphasis on the cultural foundations of European unity. The book makes some important advances in this direction, for example by insisting on the need to limit the reach of international institutions through narrower mandates, as well as to open them up to bottom-up experimentation and market incentives.

To me, the one limit of the book is the author’s embrace of a liberal internationalist – if not neoconservative – outlook, as opposed to a ‘classical’ conservative one. On the one hand, Rohac defends a polycentric interpretation of international cooperation gradually evolving by trial and error and based on institutional diversity. On the other hand, he adopts a somewhat dogmatic view of the international society that acknowledges only liberal democracies as fully legitimate actors. This contains an element of liberal messianism, is subversive of the existing international order and restricts the range of acceptable institutional diversity and experimentation.

Relatedly, the book presents a limited view of political realism and connects it with a nationalist and Hobbesian outlook: ‘realism’, writes Rohac, ‘posits the existence of self-interested sovereign nation-states as the basic units of analysis, disregarding both the rules that might constrain their behaviour as well as the various governance structures that facilitate their cooperation—providing a perfect starting point for a Trump-like doctrine of unfettered national egoism’. Although this might be a correct characterisation of the ‘structural realism’ of American scholars like Kenneth Waltz and John Mearsheimer, it leaves out the classical realist European tradition of statecraft, which had its masters in figures like Metternich and Castlereagh and more recently found an outstanding epigone in Henry Kissinger. Metternich was perhaps the main exponent of international conservatism in the 19th century, and the chief theoretician and architect of an integrated supranational governance in Europe at the time.

Arguably, this tradition has some advantages over both the structural realism of Trumpians and the liberal internationalism preferred by Rohac. Unlike structural realists, classical realists attach importance to institutions and rules. Unlike liberal internationalists, however, they understand that functioning institutions and rules cannot be designed in the abstract by enlightened planners and based on universally valid principles. They are always culturally and historically embedded. As such, they can only flourish in a specific context and gradually evolve with it. This approach seems more attune to Rohac’s own understanding of globalism as an evolving ecosystem. Combined with his highly innovative arguments, it might not only help the centre-right counter conservative nationalism with a conservative and christian democratic internationalism. It might also contribute to formulating a new EU foreign policy doctrine more adapted to the emerging multipolar (dis)order than the currently prevalent saintly visions of the EU as a ‘civilian power’.

The Eastern Orthodox Church is on the verge of a schism after the decision of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople (PoC) to grant the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kyiv Patriarchate (UOC-KP) ‘autocephaly’ (independence) from the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). The Kyiv Patriarchate is one of the three Orthodox churches in Ukraine, the other two being the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church.

From the perspective of Western Europe, where societies have thoroughly secularized in recent decades, the ecclesiastical feuds of the Christian Orthodox world may seem remote and esoteric. Still, in the East and Southeast of Europe faith stimulates many people, and disputes over the jurisdiction and status of local churches is an important proxy of ethnic, nationalist and political cleavages. The consequences of a potential schism between Constantinople and Moscow will be significant and reverberate throughout Europe.

Contrary to the Catholic world, the Eastern Orthodox Church has no central authority. Τhe Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople ranks as primus inter pares among the heads of 14 Orthodox autocephalous churches, having the authority to call extraordinary synods when needed to deal with ad hoc issues, such as autocephaly rights.

The granting of a Tomos – i.e. independence – to UOC-KP by Constantinople threatens the status of the currently dominant Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) that is under the direct influence and control of the Moscow Patriarchate. As expected, this move was confronted fiercely by Russia, which sees Kyiv as the birthplace of its nation. On 15 October 2018, the Russian Orthodox Church announced angrily that it was breaking off all ties with PoC.

These developments have important religious, economic and geopolitical consequences.

After the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, and during the emergence of the Russian Empire as a great power in the 18th and 19th century, Moscow tried to supplant Constantinople as the “Third Rome”, the guardian of Orthodox Christianity. Additionally, the rise of nationalism and the creation of national Orthodox churches in the Balkans and elsewhere undermined further the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s position. Nevertheless, against all odds, the latter survived until today as the spiritual beacon of Orthodoxy.

The Russian Orthodox Church never stopped to act as the long-arm of the Russian political establishment, even during the Soviet era. In other words, the Russian state, be it Czarist or Soviet, always used its national church and its religious channels as a tool of geopolitical influence and often as a source of pressure within the Orthodox world.

At the same time, UOC-KP’s autocephaly is another episode in the Ukrainian crisis. An autocephalous Ukrainian Church means that the Russian Church is losing not only a big number of adherents – almost 30 million – but also one-third of its total parishes outside Russia. In other words, this development is a great blow to Putin’s idea of a “Russian World” (Russkiy Mir) built around ROC’s religious and cultural influence.

Since the beginning of the war in Eastern Ukraine, many of the UOC clergy openly supported the Russian invasion. This had a negative impact on the perception of the UOC by the Ukrainian people. This in turn made UOC-KP’s need for recognition as autocephalous all the more urgent. Given the previous experience of Russian interventionism in Ukraine, one should not exclude provocations and the outbreak of violence when the newly recognised Ukrainian Patriarchate will claim authority over parishes and religious monuments which now are under the control of UOC.

With its extreme decision of excommunicating the PoC, ROC hopes to create a split inside the Orthodox world and to bring other Orthodox churches under its authority. For now, apart from the Patriarchate in Antioch – which toes Damascus’ line of full alignment with Moscow – and the more conservative Patriarchs of Serbia, Georgia and possibly Bulgaria, the rest 9 autocephalous Orthodox churches do not show any intention of endorsing the decision of ROC.

Constantinople’s decision to recognize ROC-KP was a decidedly high-risk move that can spark an all-out confrontation with Moscow. The first target could be the Monastic Community of Mount Athos, an autonomous polity within the Hellenic Republic. The Russian authorities, through heavy financing of the Russian Monastery in Athos, have tried to increase their religious and political presence in the Balkan Peninsula. Another focal point could be Cyprus and Bulgaria, due to strong cultural and historical ties and a strong Russian presence there.

All of the above-mentioned countries and churches are obviously inside the EU. Therefore, it is apparent that Brussels, the Vatican and the US – which for many years has supported the PoC – should strongly endorse and support UOC-KP’s autocephaly. At the same time, their support for the Ecumenical Patriarchate, which is in a permanent virtual state of hostage of the Turkish state, should be strengthened both rhetorically and practically. It is almost certain that Russia will use Turkey, with whom it currently enjoys good relations, as its proxy in order to exercise immense economic and political pressure on the PoC.

Ukraine autocephaly looks irreversible at the moment. But Orthodox Christianity will come out of this conflict wounded and weakened. At the same time, this is an opportunity for all other established churches of Christianity to support and rejuvenate the prestige of the Ecumenical Patriarchate that is under threat not only by its Turkish guardians, but now by Russia as well.

This is a mission that perfectly dovetails with the West’s interest in deterring Russia’s use of soft-power through religion that aims to destabilize its neighboring countries. The struggle over Ukraine’s religious communities is part of a much larger confrontation that has only begun.

Photo by zet pap on Unsplash

Socialists of all colours would have us believe that government interventions and regulations are the only way to tame the animal spirits of capitalism and give it a human face. As so often with socialist mantras, the very opposite is true: only a ‘conservative economy’ can be truly humane. But what exactly is a conservative economy? First, I define as conservative an economy with minimal government intervention, organised according to the principles of competition and individual freedom and responsibility. Second, I define as conservative an economy that is embedded in a society with solid conservative morals and a wealth of spontaneously developed and organically grown institutions.

The first element was crucial in unleashing the forces of human ambition and creativity that produced what economic historian Deirdre McCloskey called the ‘Great Enrichment’ of the last two centuries. The second element is crucial in order to maintain a sense of moral restraint and community belonging, which channel these wild creative forces to the pursuit of high and worthy purposes, something the rigorous enforcement of free market principles alone cannot ensure.  In the inspired words of Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism: ‘society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.’

Precisely: the progressive agenda has always been about weakening ‘the controlling power within’ (the strict moral discipline of the classical and Christian tradition) in order to strengthen ‘the controlling power without’ (government controls and regulations), with a clear loss of human freedom, diversity and spontaneity; the conservative agenda has been – and should still be – about reviving ‘the controlling power within’ in order to minimise ‘the controlling power without’, thus protecting a societal model that is both more free, more humane and better connected to the great history of Europe’s civilisation.   

In my understanding, this is one of the central themes in the thinking of German economist Wilhelm Röpke, a man who certainly deserves an honourable place in the intellectual pantheon of the European centre-right. Now fallen into almost complete oblivion, except in some ordoliberal circles of his native country, Röpke was once a respected and influential personality. He is rightly regarded as one of the intellectual fathers of the ‘Social Market economy’ and considered as the intellectual mentor of Ludwig Erhard, the man who, as Minister of Economics and then federal Chancellor, engineered the extraordinary rebirth of West Germany’s economy in the 1950s and 60s, and to whom Röpke was a trusted advisor.

Precisely fifty-five years ago, Röpke published a book entitled A Humane Economy, in which he set out to reflect upon ‘the social framework of the free market’ (a free PDF version of the book is available here). The book never became a bestseller and was too focused on the ills of its author’s age to be considered a classic. However, to the extent that the ills of its author’s age are also the ills of our age, there is a great deal we can learn from it.  Here are some of the lessons I retained, although I do not claim that Röpke would have necessarily illustrated them the way I do:

1. In spite of its amazing power of innovation, the market is a conservative institution with precise limits. It is ‘conservative’ because it is, to borrow the expression of Adam Ferguson and Friedrich Hayek, ‘the product of human action but not of human design’. In other words, it is an organically grown institution resulting from the free and spontaneous interaction of human beings. Nobody has either planned it or can control it, and yet its results are infinitely better than anything the smartest planners could engineer because it gives free course to human cooperation and ingenuity. At the same time, Röpke explains, what makes life worthy is ‘the whole unpurchaseable world beyond the market and turnover figures, the world of dignity, beauty, poetry, grace, chivalry, love, and friendship, the world of community, variety of life, freedom, and fullness of personality’. There is no guarantee that free markets will promote the pursuit of these values, in fact they may even discourage it unless they are underpinned by healthy moral foundations. 
2. The European welfare state is one of the major instruments of the progressive plan to weaken ‘the controlling power within’ and strengthen ‘the controlling power without’. As Röpke explains in details, ‘a whole world divides a state which occasionally rescues some unfortunate individual from destitution from another state where a sizable part of private income is constantly sucked into the pumping engine of the welfare state and diverted by it, with considerable friction losses’. In the second scenario (our scenario), the welfare state becomes a bureaucratic machine that weakens individual and family responsibilities, distorts economic incentives, increases economic dependency and tends towards self-aggrandizement and the self-preservation of people who have a stake in it. 
3. An integrated European order that is both free and humane must be built on federalism and on what Röpke calls ‘decentrism’, not on centralisation and progressive planning. Calling himself a ‘European patriot’, this German intellectual who was in love with Switzerland – where he lived and taught for a long time – seems to have had in mind the Swiss model of the immediate post-WWII period when he spoke about Europe. According to him, the continent had to consolidate, recover its self-confidence, revive its political and military power and regain its due place in world politics, but it could only do so by strictly adhering to decentralisation, revitalising local communities and embracing competitive federalism: ‘decentrism is of the essence of the spirit of Europe. To try to organize Europe centrally, to subject the Continent to a bureaucracy of economic planning, and to weld it into a block would be nothing less than a betrayal of Europe and the European patrimony’. We are not very far from the European federalism I recently defended as the best vision for the pro-European right of the 21st century.

Wilhelm Röpke was all at once a Christian humanist imbued with the social doctrine of the Catholic Church, a conservative in the best central and Northern European tradition and a free market economist. He harmoniously combined in his own thinking different intellectual traditions which are now politically represented within the European People’s Party. His work deserves to be rediscovered and pondered. 

The peaceful dissolution of the Czechoslovak federation in January 1993 has been the precondition for the excellent cooperation between Czechia and Slovakia as two independent countries today. This was an agreement among the speakers at the conference ‘Separate, Yet Together’, which I attended on 17 April 2013 in Prague. The conference was the first event that the CES had with our Czech member foundation, the European Academy for Democracy and also the first with one of our Slovak member foundations, the Anton Tunega Foundation. These foundations are affiliated with their respective Czech and Slovak Christian Democratic parties, the Christian Democratic Union (KDU-ČSL; CZ) and Christian Democratic Movement (KDH; SL), and this was the first ever CES event with both the EAD and the NAT.

The conference was very good on content. It included first-hand accounts of some direct participants of the Czech-Slovak constitutional negotiations in the years 1990-1992. For example, the then Czech Prime Minister (1990-1992), Petr Pithart, recounted examples of volatile behaviour of then Slovak leader, Vladimír Mečiar (who later went to install a somewhat authoritarian regime in independent Slovakia). Many Slovaks and Czechs still mourn the common state and regret the split of Czechoslovakia.

Nevertheless, as some participants at the conference put it, had the Czechs and Slovaks stayed together in one state, the relations would not be as friendly as they are, as representations of the respective nations would be engaged in a prolonged struggle over policy competences and the shape of the federal constitution.

The speakers, among them historians, discussed also the causes of the Czech-Slovak split. Among them were uncompromising attitudes and disregard for the issue of Slovak autonomy by some Czech politicians; cultural and historical differences; an absence of constitutional mechanisms to resolve disputes, and arguments over economic policy that culminated after the fall of the communist regime in 1989. I was surprised to hear the results of opinion polls on Czech-Slovak relations, which were conducted as early as 1947.

The politicians present stated that the EU offers a good institutional framework for Czech-Slovak cooperation. Ján Figeľ, the chairman of KDH explained the importance of the EU for Slovakia: Without the EU, Slovakia would have economic and legal problems. Pavel Bělobrádek, the chairman of KDU-ČSL, stated that we need ‘second wave of European integration’ to overcome nationalist passions that are re-emerging in the EU as a result of the European economic crisis. Expressions of solidarity among the EU nations are required more than ever. Jan Surotchak of the International Republican Institute mentioned that the resistance of the Slovak non-profit sector against the authoritarian rule of Vladimír Mečiar up to 1998 serves as a source of inspiration for standing up to authoritarian rulers worldwide.

I was very interested to listen to Petr Pithart, who again proved that he is not only an able politician but also incisive thinker and historian. He spoke about problems with identity that the Czechs now experience. Historically, they were always part of a large state entity. However, after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, they have become, for the first time in history, ‘alone’ in their state, without a significant presence of other ethnic groups. They are weary of the world beyond the Czech borders and are ‘getting on each other’s nerves.’

The conference was also an opportunity for the Slovak and Czech Christian Democratic parties to meet. The currently more successful Slovak Christian Democrats were, in fact, repaying a visit of the Czech party to Bratislava a year ago. The chairmen of the two parties expressed their readiness to continue working together in promoting the common values.