We are living through a deep paradigm transition — and the question of the consequences of this transition is very much on our mind. For many across what we habitually call "the West", with all the limits of this term, the question strikes with particular force. What this so-called "West" is now confronting is the unsettling erosion of assumptions that were, for decades, taken as self-evident. Chief among those assumptions was the belief that political and economic liberalism were necessarily going together and that their convergence at the global level heralded the definitive (and happy) end of history. Chief also was the taken-for-granted conviction of a rock solid Atlanticist alliance around this particular understanding of liberalism as a virtuous project.
The standing ovation that Marco Rubio received in Munich a few weeks ago illustrates just how difficult it remains for many in Europe to let go of this Atlanticist projection and of the certainties that once came with it. It also shows how challenging it is to confront the gap between the glossy, idealised representation of this part of our history and its far more complex realitiy — a task that demands the kind of hard political courage that Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, urged us to summon in his speech in Davos this year. After all, we should ask ourselves, was liberalism really the default all those years? And if so what kind of definition did we give to that apparently simple term? And who is "we"? Did we all have the same definition, did we all talk of the same thing?
Ideas matter — profoundly. And at this moment, we cannot afford to treat them lightly. To be sure, ideas and ideologies are never fully detached from material interests. Yet, neither can they be reduced to mere superstructures — to use a Marxian vocabulary — simple instruments crafted to defend and legitimise particular economic arrangements. Max Weber’s notion of "elective affinities" offers a far more productive theoretical framework : it underscores how ideas and material structures are not reducible to one another, how their relationship is not unidirectional, and how they may reinforce or challenge each other in ways that are historically contingent rather than predetermined.
So if ideas matter, let me start here with this quote :
The goal of a Trumpist foreign policy in Europe is to withdraw American influence from Europe. This will guarantee the defeat of liberalism on the continent. Here in America, this will show liberals and conservatives alike that liberalism is mortal — with gargantuan effects on the morale of both… now it is Russia’s fate to again restore order in Europe. Since America is stronger than Russia, though, Trump needs to let Putin really know it’s okay to do it… it follows that, just as the old postwar Europe was a laboratory of democracy, the new, post-Trump Europe must become a laboratory of reaction. Once Putin has a free hand on the continent, every old European nation will find a helping bear-paw to restore its traditional culture and form of government — the more autocratic, the better.
Curtis Yarvin, A New Foreign Policy for Europe, Gray Mirror, January 15, 2022.
The author is Curtis Yarvin — and the text was written and published on a blog on January 15, 2022: hence before both the Russian attack on Ukraine and the return to power of Donald Trump. Who is Curtis Yarvin? At first glance, merely a blogger who began writing in the late 2000s, under the pseudonym of Mencius Moldbug. Yet, in retrospect, he is far more than that. What initially appeared as eccentric — not to say outright strange — blog posts and provocations has gradually become a significant strand in the emerging ideological fabric of what may well turn into a new dominant Weltanschauung. This emerging Weltanschauung undeniably evokes a past that many of us had hoped was gone for good. Yet, it also possesses striking novel features. While Mencius Moldbug was in the late 2000s a marginal and eccentric figure, Curtis Yarvin has since become one of the central voices of the neo-reactionary movement in the United States.
The neo-reactionary movement is an intellectual and ideological constellation that self-identifies through the notion of dark enlightenment — and has intellectual roots in the 19th century movement of anti-lumières to use the term coined by the great historian Zeev Sternhell, as well as in the early 20th century integral traditionalism and authoritarian school of thought that includes authors like Carl Schmidt, Oswald Spengler, René Guenond, or Julius Evola. Curtis Yarvin has exerted a significant intellectual influence on Peter Thiel and on what is often described as the broader "Thielverse" — a structured business, intellectual and political ecosystem that gravitates around Peter Thiel. In the process, many of Yarvin’s ideas, including some of the most iconoclastic, appear to have found their way into Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump administration and quite directly also into J.D. Vance’s political positioning — bearing in mind that J.D. Vance’s career would likely not exist in its current form without Thiel’s patronage. Remember J.D. Vance’s infamous speech in Munich in 2025 and compare the following extract with the quote from Yarvin I started with: "The threat that I worry the most vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia; but the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America".
What many of us found profoundly unsettling when listening to that speech was the unmistakable element of Orwellian 1984 doublethink — and the confusion it produced. Was it not, after all, the United States that was distancing itself from the very values that we — Europe, West and later East, and the United States — had at least formally shared since 1945? Values enshrined both in the dynamics of global trade and in the architecture and texts of multilateralism, not least the UN Declaration of Human Rights? Of course, there would be much to say about the consequences of some of those principles and about the inconsistencies in how we upheld them — or not: and there Mark Carney offered us a powerful image and base for reflection in his speech in Davos. Yet, in spite of those flaws and contradictions, we believed that we shared a certain vision of the world. And listening to J.D. Vance and to the new US administration, we were being told that we had changed, when it seemed to us instead that it was the new American administration that was taking distance from this shared Weltanschauung and proposing a new one. To use a term very much à la mode, we felt, at least in part, that we were being gaslighted. Or to say the same thing in a more reflexive and analytical form, let me use this quote from Hannah Arendt in a text she wrote in 1967, Truth and Politics:
The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed.
Hence we find ourselves drawn into a mode of communication that is situated beyond truth — fact and lies — and this is not happening only on the other side of the Atlantic. This is why Science and the University are becoming almost everywhere the enemy. At the same time, we are confronted, often with genuine astonishment, by the emergence of a coalition of the unlikely between the former arch-ennemies of the Cold War era — with increasingly visible elective affinities linking the authoritarian right in Russia, the MAGA movement in the United States, and far-right groups and movements across Europe and beyond.
In the dispute that happened a few days ago between the French government and the US Ambassador to France, Charles Kushner, following what was perceived as undue US interference in French domestic affairs after the death in Lyon of a young far-right activist, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jean-Noel Barrot stated loudly and unequivocally that France had "no lessons to receive on matters of law enforcement or violence" from what he called "the reactionary international".
We need to understand this reactionary international and explore its dynamics — the illiberal wave it is propelling and, by implication, the question of what we mean by this liberalism that may not be the default anymore. What are the defining features of this old-but-new Weltanschauung that is coming our way? In parallel, here in Geneva, this discussion should lead us to ask — what is the alternative Weltanschauung that we wish — and need — to hold on to — what are its defining features? As the cradle of a certain understanding of Humanist Universalism and of international collaboration for peace, Geneva and the Geneva Graduate Institute for that matter, have a particularly important role and responsibility in this context.