The Nation State as the Irreducible Element of the Westphalian Model

Kissinger argues that the international order today can, and should, arise from the universal application of what he refers to as the ʻmodernʼ Westphalian system. In his view, such a system would make the extremely difficult task of calculating national interest effectively calculable because it would harmonize thinking on self-interest among the states in the system. This, in turn, would facilitate the emergence of a balance of power emanating from the interaction of power and legitimacy. The Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, signed by a number of then important European powers at the end of the Thirty-Years War, outlined agreed rules and principles of sovereignty for international relations among states. Kissinger maintains that this peace treaty reflected a ʻpractical accommodationʼ to a situation where a multitude of political units had fought to a draw and none had prevailed against all the others. Fundamental to the accommodation was that each political unit, that is to say a ‘nation state’, was assigned sovereign power over its own territory. Kissinger maintains that the Treaty of Westphalia ʻreserved judgement on the absolute in favour of the practical and the ecumenical; it sought to distil order from multiplicity and restraintʼ (Ref. Reference Kissinger1, p. 4). The concrete reality of the Westphalian system of world order is illustrated through four different assessments of international relations, with associated criteria of national interest, by leading statesmen of European history who operated within said system: Richelieu, Metternich, Bismarck and Palmerston. Kissinger refers to these in World Order. The four assessments, based on actual experience, provide real-world applications by leaders of nation states of the core element of the system Kissinger promotes. What becomes evident is the incompatibility of many of the strategies used within the Westphalian system.

Of Cardinal Richelieu, Kissinger says that he ʻcited his duties as a minister to a temporal, yet vulnerable, political entity. Salvation might be his personal objective, but as a statesman he was responsible for a political entity that did not have an eternal soul to be redeemed.ʼ Kissinger drew three conclusions from Richelieu’s career. First, a successful foreign policy requires a long term strategic vision that takes into account all factors. Second, the ambiguous, conflicting pressures facing a statesman need to be shaped into a coherent purposeful direction. Third, foreign policy is about the possible, which requires reconciling a society’s experience with its aspirations. Metternich’s notion of the national interest, as expressed by Kissinger, is that ʻorder arose not so much from the pursuit of national interests as from the ability to connect it with that of other statesʼ. Or, as Metternich put it: ʻThe great axioms of political science derive from the recognition of the true interests of all states; it is in the general interest that the guarantee of existence is to be foundʼ (Ref. 1, p. 75, emphasis in original). The deployment of the general interest is achieved, according to Metternich, through ʻthe application of the principle of solidarity and equilibrium … and of the united efforts of states … to force a return to the common law.ʼ Kissinger says of Bismarck’s definition of the national interest that ʻBismarck rejected the proposition that power could be restrained by superior principle. His famous maxims gave voice to the conviction that security could be achieved only by the correct evaluation of the components of power.ʼ Or, as Bismarck himself put it: ʻA sentimental policy knows no reciprocity … Every other government seeks the criteria for its actions solely in its interests, however it may cloak them with legal deductions … The only healthy basis of policy for a great power … is egotism and not romanticism … Policy is the art of the possible, the science of the relativeʼ (Ref. Reference Kissinger1, pp. 22, 75/76). In order to solve the same puzzle of the Westphalian system, we have here radically different strategies and notions of interest and power. While Metternich argued for principles of solidarity and equilibrium, Bismarck rejected these in favour of power calculations, and Richelieu championed and embraced a subtle cerebral approach to achieving national interests.

As Kissinger sees the United States playing the balancing role that the United Kingdom did in earlier centuries, his assessment of Palmerston is of particular note here. Palmerston maintained that a threat to the balance of power arose from ʻAn attempt of one Nation to seize and to appropriate to itself territory which belongs to another Nationʼ because ʻsuch an attempt leads to a derangement of the existing Balance of Power, and by altering the relative strengths of States, may tend to create danger to other Powers.ʼ Palmerston said of national interest that ʻWe have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.ʼ Palmerston continued: ʻWhen people ask me … for what is called a policy, the only answer is that we mean to do what may seem to be best, upon each occasion as it arises, making the Interests of Our Country one’s guiding principleʼ (Ref. Reference Kissinger1, pp 29/30, 67). Like Metternich, Palmerston looked to stability and certainty as a guarantor of national interests, and like Richelieu, Palmerston took a long-term strategic approach, tactically applied, to achieve perennial national interests. Within the Westphalian system, multiple strategies were utilized, some of which were conflicting and antagonistic, thus explaining the system’s instability.

These four assessments demonstrate the options these statesmen viewed were open to them in the Westphalian system and the challenges these options presented to others. In part, they reflect the circumstantial situation each nation found itself in, in relation to other nations. There is no strategy that could be applied by all nations in all circumstances. Rather, each strategy is contingent on specific circumstances; for example, geography or resources. Underpinning the Westphalian system is pragmatic power and an assessment of national interest determined on a case-by-case basis. This can lead to a self-fulfilling dynamic with its own logic based on the power principle arbitrarily used, as was seen with devastating effect at the outbreak of the First World War. It can also lead to the use of power when a nation’s assessment indicates power will achieve its interests more fully than adhering to the agreed upon rules. Moreover, each approach can be defeated, or at least stymied, in certain circumstances, revealing a certain similarity to the game of paper/scissors/rock. This means that the term ‘superpower’ can be seen as a weapon of mass destruction which lures the unsuspecting to undertake activities that may eventually be defeated by the very weaknesses of others that led to the original decision to deploy power by the superpower in question. The Chinese term ʻmajor powerʼ offers a less hubristic expression that includes within itself the reality of the weakness of power that Chinese tradition has always recognized.

The arbitrary use of power and its fragile and fluid nature are evident. Common rules, intended to regulate these power relations, are agreed among those whose power necessitates that they are listened to if a balance between power and legitimacy is to be sustained. Power calculations can mean that these commonly agreed rules are more honoured in the breach than the observance, with nation states working around the explicit rules to influence events and achieve interests. The moral and ethical considerations based on absolute universal criteria, such as God as the highest good, may play a role for some nations in the five assessments Kissinger identifies as determining national interest, but it is power, and the nation’s ability to deploy power effectively to achieve its objectives, that is the crux of the system he advocates. Indeed, Kissinger maintains in Diplomacy that Richelieu’s assertion in Political Testimony that the state that has the power has the right to use it, and that the state that is weak has difficulty in not being seen to be in the wrong in the eyes of the majority, has rarely been proved wrong.Reference Kissinger ² Such is, however, an affirmation of power and the existing order that power produces at any given time.

There is a sense in Kissinger’s approach that while he acknowledges the Westphalian system as an accommodation between certain states at a certain moment in European history, at the same time he holds it up as the system, one could nearly say as an achievement of freedom by the nation states of Europe in 1648: the freedom and interests of the nation state, devoid of pre-political foundations, became almost a form of ‘secular’ religion. The novelty of this system and the tactics of Richelieu and those who followed in his footsteps, however, are far from unique – the Catholic French king Francis I struck an alliance in 1536 with the Turkish Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Suleiman, to protect his country from the ambitions of the equally Catholic Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who himself sought an alliance with the Persian empire to counter that between France and the Ottomans. Machiavelli had outlined such thinking and tactics in The Prince, a treatise addressed to the Florentine De Medici family, and a summation of the political thinking and tactics of the Italian city states.Reference Machiavelli ³ Still, neither Machiavelli nor the Italian city states invented this kind of thinking and the associated tactics: these can be seen at work throughout the annuals of history. Power and the ability to deploy it are constants within the historical variations of international relations and order. Attempts to impose order on power are eminently sensible. The challenge is to answer the questions of what order and why? And how is power to be funnelled constructively rather than arbitrarily and destructively?

Power in Relation to Human Dignity, Freedom and Democracy

Kissinger is not advocating that the world today adopt the Westphalian system. Rather, he is in favour of what he refers to as a modern Westphalian system. The difference between the two is the addition of the aspirations of individual dignity, freedom and democracy as elements of the political units that make up the system. Importantly, these are not elements of the system itself, which remains dominated by power and commonly agreed rules. But these aspirations raise questions around the prioritization of each element of the system and how they fit together. The notions of legitimacy and justness of the system likewise are affected by these aspirations. Ultimately, the issue centres on who or what these elements refer and relate to: every nation state, every person, the powerful? Kissinger is aware of the tensions inherent in the dynamics of the system and the vision he advocates. He insists that the structure of international rules and norms constructed today, if the system is to be successful, ʻmust be fostered as a matter of common convictionʼ (Ref. Reference Kissinger1, pp. 367, 370). A significant tension exists in Kissinger’s thesis between the necessity of a world order based on a balance of power arising from commonly agreed rules and legitimacy, and the vision he aspires the world to achieve.

The power principle and the balance of power (dis)equilibrium that underpin the Westphalian system sit uncomfortably with the ideals of human dignity, freedom and democracy. The latter appear contingent upon the assessment of national security, and are easily dispensed with when national security and economic growth are seen to be threatened. The history of Latin America since the declaration of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 and the addition of the Roosevelt Corollary in 1904, as well as the history of the Middle East since the end of the Second World War are cases in point. The latter example demonstrates that democracy does not necessarily lead to the adoption of liberal progressive attitudes as some in the West had been expecting. Kissinger acknowledges that the United States struggles to define the relationship between power and principle that these scenarios reflect (Ref. Reference Kissinger1, p. 8). The contingent nature of the aspirations of freedom and democracy in relation to the primacy of national security, including economic interests, mean that the modern nuances of the Westphalian system Kissinger advocates remain a weak influence on that system. Indeed, they can seem at times to be policy tools to achieve interests. The question Kissinger leaves open, then, is how can the aspirations that he outlines be harmonized with the system of order he advocates? Arbitrary rules constructed to serve the needs of the nation states that exist at a given time, and their assessment of their and others’ interests, make fragile foundations for a system of order. How the arbitrariness of the building blocks of the system can lead to anything but contingent conviction is difficult to envisage

In order to hope to see his vision of a modern Westphalian system fulfilled, Kissinger needs to work through the tensions and contradictions contained within its core components of power, commonly agreed rules, legitimacy and justice, freedom and democracy. A lack of clarity on the nature of some of the components adds to the tensions within the system. For example, Kissinger provides no criterion to ensure that freedom and order means freedom and order equally for all, rather than simply for the strong and powerful. The freedom of the strong can destroy the freedom of the weak; where power is the source of freedom no true freedom exists. Equally, where freedom is understood as a political or economic freedom alone, freedom itself is misunderstood and diminished. The core problem of the (modern) Westphalian system arises from the arbitrariness of the key components of the system. The fixed aspect, the nation state, is the irreducible element upon which all else is dependent, and complex assessments of its interests can turn on individual preference and aspiration. A system that is ultimately about the nation state can be a hostage of circumstance, particularly if power is used to pursue its (arbitrary) interests based on potentially arbitrary national constructions. Nation states’ interests and calculations, and power’s arbitrariness, leave little if any room for the justice and freedom of the highest good because the nation is erroneously placed in the role of the highest good. The nation state is the totality of the (modern) Westphalian system. The human – the universal – is secondary. The power principle combined with the nation state as the highest good by its very nature reduces humanity to a component part of the system.

Kissinger’s vision of a modern Westphalian system, with the nation state at its core and beneficiary, seeks to universalize a system of international order from which Europe in fact is attempting to extract itself. The EU has sought to transcend the vagaries of nation states, and their potential nationalism, through a system that also acknowledges, and attempts to respond to, the changing dynamics of geopolitics and economics. European history has continually been violently disturbed by the deployment of military power. Military power is a commodity that is an essential component of the relationship between states and the international order; thus, it is an essential component of any solution managing power in the international order, soft power alone will not suffice. Nonetheless, the EU is an attempt to circumvent the primacy, or at least the omnipresence, of the power principle so that it is an aspect of the totality rather than the dominant, determinative aspect of the latter. Kissinger doubts that the power principle truly can be circumvented on a credible and sustainable basis because power can impose its will until other forces and circumstance combine to oppose and usurp it. A response to the power element is what Kissinger sought to answer in his World Order Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History. Post-war leaders of Europe arrived at a different answer. The European project, a settlement among the nations of Europe, was arrived at after over three decades of war and instability. Its purpose was to enable the nations of Europe to live in peace and prosperity by transcending the nation state and its potentially destructive nationalism, a transcending achieved through law, based on international treaties, and shared economic interests. The system established at the Peace of Westphalia was rejected in favour of a new system of governance for Europe, an evolutionary step prepared for by the graveyards of the First and Second World Wars.

International Relations as the Management and Control of Power

Managing power, that is, controlling and taming it, is the crux of the issue. Managing power in a manner that reflects the values aspired to must be the goal. Yet, without clarity on the nature of those values – what do we mean by freedom, justice, democracy, legitimacy? – and who they apply to, managing power descends into an arbitrary power game of paper, scissors, rock. Striving for common rules that are underpinned by absolute and universal values and that inform the management of power and international order is a task that remains open and incomplete. Absolute universal values have no nation state and no tools of power except the power of the truth and conscience. Military power cannot be replaced by universal absolute values, as universal absolute value can only form and inform that power. This is reflected in the Christian tradition, which has always recognized the reality of Just War. Indeed, representing Pope John Paul II, Ratzinger speaking in France on 6 June 2004, at the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings, said that the Second World War is a clear example of a Just War and that the totalitarian aggression of Nazi Germany demonstrated that an absolute pacifism is untenable.Reference Ratzinger ⁴

The objective of the management of power must be the formation of power into a constructive, positive dynamic that recognizes the primacy and universality of the dignity of the human being. True peace, freedom and justice are the goal of all people of goodwill, they constitute the hope of the world. Critically, true peace, freedom and justice cannot be achieved by political, military, economic or social means alone. This hope is a human hope, a human reality that goes to the heart of the reality of the human being and to absolute, universal human dignity and rights. Something more is required as the foundation for this hope, and of the work to achieve that true peace, true freedom and true justice, than raw military or economic power. Only in the universality of the humanity of each human being can we find the constants for that hope. Something more fundamental, something prior to the political is required to fully grapple with the challenges confronting Europe and the world. A pragmatic response to these challenges fails to provide a coherent response. Without solid underpinnings for the political relations between states, relations can descend into continuous circuitous calculations of power and interests leading nowhere, achieving little other than sheer survival. The pre-political foundation that orientates political entities is the topic we turn to now.

The Structural Necessity of Truth for Reason to be Rationality rather than Irrationality

Ratzinger maintains that Europe is a historical and cultural concept that came into existence with the Carolingian and Byzantine empires (Ref. Reference Ratzinger4, pp. 129, 134). Europe, he argues, is the idea that biblical faith and Greek rationality emanate from the same source – the logos, the truth and ground of all being – and that Europe is based on the synthesis, but not a hybrid, of biblical faith in God and the rationality of Greek thought.Reference Ratzinger ⁵ Christianity’s equation of Christian faith in Jesus Christ with the One, the absolute of the God of the philosophers, means that God is not simply pure thought – as the Greeks deduced through reason alone – but also relationship and love: the divine is thought and love.Reference Ratzinger ⁶ Europe is the reality that faith enlightens reason and reason enlightens faith, and that reason, in its origin in the absolute, is truly rational. Europe then is a very specific reality that, although it arose in a specific geographical location, is not dependent on, nor indelibly linked to, that geographical location (Ref. Reference Ratzinger4, p. 129). Rather, Europe simply happens to be where this synthesis exists.

The development of Enlightenment self-understanding as autonomous reason – that is, a reason without faith or some intelligent organizing agent, which is prevalent today – is radically at odds with the idea of the logos, the absolute, as the origin and ground of all being, the foundation of biblical faith and Greek rationality. To explain what this radical change means, Ratzinger draws on Max Horkheimer’s and Theodore Adorno’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Before considering how Ratzinger develops this argument we will first consider Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s critique of the Enlightenment. They argue that, for the Enlightenment, as per Kant, the scientific system is truth. The existing order is described and expressed through abstract symbols, which make like and unlike equivalent and comparable.Reference Adorno and Horkheimer ⁷ In this, consideration of a thing’s in-itself, as well as the capacity for self-reflection on what thought is doing, are capabilities thought no longer holds: blind sequences describe the movement of the natural world; it is detectable, describable and verifiable, and as such it deems it real and true. Horkheimer and Adorno contend that when thought as a scientific sequencing tool operates without measure or criteria of the truly human to guide its activities, that tool, in the service of interests – economic, national or otherwise – becomes power without orientation, a tool of mass domination. Where thought is a tool that, having dispensed with the truth, services the interests of bourgeoisie self-preservation, society is based on power and the struggle for power which is, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, the struggle of fascism.

Ratzinger’s specific interest in Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s critique is their analysis of reason and the structural pattern necessitating truth for reason to be rational. The origin of reason and how that affects the very nature of reason, and by extension the nature of reality and the human being, is his concern. Ratzinger in response asserts that:

Ratzinger underscores that where reason is a by-product of chance it is an accident with no binding nature, with nothing upholding it and giving it form. Floating without meaning in an empty vacuum, reason cannot solidify into an absolute: Reason as a by-product of chance development is irrational in its nature. Indeed, Ratzinger highlights the peculiarity that those that assert the irrational autonomous nature of reason then consider irrationality through the standard of reason, which ʻimplicitly reintroduces nonetheless the primacy of reason’.Reference Ratzinger ⁸ Conversely, reason, with its origins in the truth of the absolute, is underpinned, upheld, by truth and can offer a coherent intellectual framework. What Ratzinger has in mind is the Greek logos, mirrored in the Word of the Judeo-Christian tradition, creative reason, meaning, the God above all powers who encompasses everything: truth is the origin of all being. For the logos this is being-thought and for the Word it includes relationship – a word is spoken to someone from someone. The logos, the Word, is ʻthe uttermost depthʼ of existence making existence intelligible.Reference Ratzinger ^{9 ,} Reference Ratzinger ¹⁰ The importance of this reality, that reason is truly rational because of its origin in the truth of the absolute cannot be overestimated in Ratzinger’s own thinking. More saliently, for our considerations on the idea of Europe, the consequences for modern thinking in which a reason without origin is taken as the sole criteria of critical, rational – reasonable – thought are profound and far-reaching. The rationality of an autonomous reason arising from chance, necessity – an accident – cannot be absolute. This is the dilemma and challenge of reason in every era: for reason to be ʻa permanent standard, a final court of appealʼ truth must be absolute (Ref. Reference Ratzinger5, pp. 148/150).

The Human Being as the Irreducible Element of the Idea of Europe

Reason for Ratzinger is much more than simply a reason made rational by the absolute truth. Reason, in its origin in the divine, is thought and love. He contends that because it is thought as well as love, it is creative freedom. Love, Ratzinger contends, gave ʻthought the freedom of its own existence … released it into distinct being’. The logos, the being that upholds everything, is thought, love and freedom. There are two implications of this for Ratzinger. First, freedom, rather than cosmic necessity or mathematical logic, is the fundamental structure of the world. Second, the human being is unique and unrepeatable, not a reproduction of an original (Ref. Reference Ratzinger6, pp. 159, 151–161). In the modern era, the belief in progress and technology is pre-eminent, such that what can be done is the criteria for what is done (Ref. Reference Ratzinger10, pp. 129–132). The result, as Ratzinger sees it, is that a concern for truth, or in other words for what is truly human, and for what is moral, has now been eclipsed. As a result, Ratzinger contends that Europe has become ʻempty from withinʼ (Ref. Reference Ratzinger4, pp. 139/140). The problem that must be confronted today, he insists, is the abolition of man, humanity itself, which is driven by the empirical, reductionist intellectual approach of modern society. This approach culminates in ʻthe denial of the natural ethical law and the reduction of the world to “mere” factʼ. Ratzinger, in contrast, insists that God’s creative act provides objective values expressed in being, and that, unless there is truth in being, nothing can be right or wrong, true or false, leaving us only with calculation and utility. Truth is the basis of the common dignity of humanity (Ref. Reference Ratzinger10, pp. 35/36, 175; Ref. Reference Ratzinger8, p. 193; Ref. Reference Ratzinger4, p. 145).

In order to do justice to this truth, moral reason, a reason open to humanity and thereby God, is the necessary method of reflection. Moral reason, Ratzinger argues, opens humanity to ethical insights into the essential character and being of humanity and enables us to penetrate the real mystery of reality. Creative reason enables humanity to explore the moral and ethical nature of existence and humanity, which ensures morality can respond to ever new challenges and is not static nor culturally or time bound. Ratzinger underscores that moral reasoning allows for ʻan open form of law that must attain ever anew the synthesis of universality and particularity, so that it remains open to future history and its challenges, while yet opposes every arbitrariness with the immovable criterion of the truthʼ (Ref. Reference Ratzinger10, p. 81). It is because of this that Ratzinger insists that morality is not a prison but the defence of human dignity; it is the true liberation of the human being as morality raises the human being above the level of a machine or ʻmere thing’. Without ethics, the capacity for insight and conscience, the humanity of the human being is denied (Ref. Reference Ratzinger10, pp, 37–46; Ref. Reference Ratzinger4, pp. 46–52, 54–57). This is the cost when the empirical reductionist approach is viewed as the one and only approach to considering humanity. Conversely, the human being and the true dignity of the human being are the core components, the irreducible elements, in Ratzinger’s idea of Europe and in the vision he espouses.

This idea of Europe is not a static idea from one single point in time, but an idea that contains within itself the ability to develop and deepen itself through the very creative reason that is the origin of faith and reason. Four aspects of Europe – the Greek, Christian, Latin and Modern heritages – make up what Ratzinger describes as ʻthe inner stratification of the complex structure of Europeʼ. Each stratum contributes to the historical cultural idea of Europe that develops continually throughout the movement of history and refines itself in the interaction and mutual purification of faith and reason (Ref. Reference Ratzinger5, pp. 215–219). The democratic idea of modernity is integrated into the historical and cultural idea of Europe that Ratzinger posits and, along with all other forms of societal governance, it is provided with specific orientation by that historical cultural idea through the inclusion of three specific features. First, the state is not the totality of things: ʻThe state is not the whole of human existence and does not encompass all human hope.ʼ Because the state is not the totality, politicians are freed from the irrational political myth of the divine state. Hope is orientated correctly to heavenly things and promise, and not to the creation of a perfect world which, due to the inherent freedom of each human being, can only become tyranny. Second, Christianity recognizes the authority of the state and that Christians are bound to build up the state. For, as Ratzinger maintains, ʻonly the good can be a preparation for a turn for the betterʼ. Christian resistance is only required when the state demands the rejection of God and God’s commandments. Third, the objectivity of moral reason, in its origin in the objectiveness of absolute truth, is the basis of the state (Ref. Reference Ratzinger5, pp. 143–147).

The duality of the Church and State is essential to the historical cultural idea of Europe that Ratzinger articulates. This duality creates space for the humanity of the human being within and in relation to society, by acknowledging that the human being is not contained by the state. In parallel, it creates space for society in relation to individual human beings through the responsibilities the freedom provided by the duality places upon them. The issue here is the structural basis of freedom: where this duality of Church and State is lacking, the state regulates the whole of human life, including religion; the state is the totality. Freedom, conversely, arises from moral law, not power; only moral law provides justice without discrimination and an order of freedoms as moral law is applied equally to all regardless of rank. This is the very opposite of arbitrary power, whose criteria are interests and the power to enforce those interests. Freedom and justice, Ratzinger argues, emanate from an ʻordered system of law determined by universal moral criteriaʼ, which transforms the pragmatic rules and calculations of a group, which can be nothing other than a robber band, into a state (Ref. Reference Ratzinger5, pp. 239–255; Ref. Reference Ratzinger10, pp. 79–80, 142–146). Similarly, we can say that freedom is but power when freedom is understood as the pursuit of one’s own interests without due regard for the humanity of society.

At its core, the historical cultural idea of Europe that Ratzinger articulates acknowledges God as summum bonum, the highest Good. God as the highest Good is the measuring stick for moral ethical law, and it is this that is the basis for justice for all because it provides an order of freedoms, which is freedom: arbitrary use of power destroys freedom. For Ratzinger, then, there exist pre- and non-political foundations of the state that the state cannot generate and which must be respected for society to be other than a band of robbers. The structural necessity of pre-political foundations for political entitlement was rejected at the French revolution. As a result, Ratzinger argues, the divine foundations of the state and of history were set aside and the state became a secular entity based on autonomous reason and the will of the citizens. God became a private matter, no longer summum bonum, the highest Good; the absolute no longer provided the norms for conduct and God came to be seen as a mythical idea of the past. The consequences are profound: not only does ʻGod and his will lose their relevance to public lifeʼ but the nation replaced God as the highest good, a potentially anarchic situation that opens the door to tyranny (Ref. Reference Ratzinger4, p. 137; Ref. Reference Ratzinger5, pp. 213/4). Ratzinger’s expression of the idea of Europe, and with it the human being as the irreducible element, responds to the erroneous placement of the nation state as the highest good.

Reviving the Idea of Europe

In light of his analysis, Ratzinger offers a fourfold approach to reviving the idea of a Europe based on an open society with reciprocal responsibilities and rejecting the notion of Europe, or any society, as solely a centralization of economic and legislative jurisdiction that aims at increased consumption, or an enlarged GDP. In Ratzinger’s vision, the moral ideal must be synthesized with concrete political content; the political is not the totality of life but only one aspect of life that is transcended and informed by the moral and ethical. He argues that, ʻOnly when the term “Europe” represents a synthesis of political reality and moral ideality can it become a dynamic force for the future.ʼ To achieve this synthesis, Ratzinger proposes the adoption of four theses for societies, whether located on the European continent or not. The first thesis is that there is an intrinsic correlation between democracy and eunomia, laws that cannot be manipulated by a majority. The arbitrary rule of the powerful, whoever he or she is, is rejected and law is based on moral reason such that ethics informs law. The second thesis is intrinsically linked to the first: where eunomia is the prerequisite for democracy, the prerequisite for eunomia is the common respect for moral values and for God. Ratzinger argues that democracy cannot function without conscience, and that conscience only functions when it is aligned with the fundamental moral values of Christianity. However, such fundamental moral values, Ratzinger insists, can be deployed in the context of a non-Christian religious context, through conscience alone. Nonetheless, eunomia, laws that cannot be manipulated by a majority, and its prerequisite, a public common respect for moral values and God, are essential for the correct operation of democracy and freedom. The third thesis is that God is acknowledged as the summum bonum, the highest Good, which in turn means the rejection of atheism, the nation (particularism), and the world revolution (centralism), as the highest goods. Furthermore, while governmental institutions remain necessary for international order, these are not the basis to revitalize Europe. Instead, it is non-governmental cultural and religious institutions and forces that are required to revitalize Europe, a revitalization that will occur through ‘open exchange and unity in variety’ on a regional, national and supranational level. Ratzinger argues that governmental and economic institutions require cultural entities such as the university and religious orders to have a positive effect. Fourth, and dependent on the three previous theses, the revival of the idea of Europe must recognize and preserve freedom of conscience, human rights and academic freedom (Ref. Reference Ratzinger5, pp. 209/10, 219–222).