Ronald Granieri
Executive Director
FPRI
Center for the Study
of
America and the West

For the FPRI, in The American Review of Books, Blogs, and Bull, Ronald J. Granieri, writing "Whose West is Best?" (July 10, 2017) in response to President Trump's pro-Western speech in Poland, offers some criticism of Western nationalism and some praise for the EU. This excerpt will give you a sense of his argument:

The intensity of the disagreement on the Trump speech obscures a larger point that bears repeating. The difference here is not about the value of the West per se, but rather about which West is best - the West built on a specific Euro-centric Christian vision, which seeks to build walls around itself to preserve its purity, or one based on the Enlightenment principles of individual freedom, secularism, equality before the law and democracy, which is ready to learn from the world and grow stronger with the new knowledge. One could of course embrace both, recognizing the universal appeal of ideas that were originally nurtured in the West, and celebrating the culture that produced them within the eternal triangle of Jerusalem (representing monotheism and the ancient biblical heritage), Athens (representing Greek philosophy and the humanism at the root of Western thought), and Rome (representing the Christian and European political/cultural synthesis). For all the angry rhetorical jabs on both sides, this debate is taking place on terms that are themselves the product of Western civilization - the tension between local identity and intellectual freedom, between the universal and the particular. The West is not on one side or the other in this debate, it is the very arena within which the debate occurs.

I'm also skeptical of European ethnic nationalism. While this nationalism may be a source of strength at our current juncture, Europe's nationalisms will one day turn on each other over historical claims to territory that has belonged to different 'nations' at different times. Remember the Balkans in the early 1990s? That's what it will be like . . .