There was a time when the West knew what an enemy looked like. Armies crossed borders, flags were raised over battlefields, and governments could point to a map and say, "There is the danger."

By Rami Audi
The twenty-first century is less accommodating. China does not need to occupy Paris to challenge Europe. Russia doesn't need to reach Berlin to test the West's political will. Islamist movements do not need to conquer Western capitals to exploit the uncertainty surrounding identity, citizenship and belonging.

The more uncomfortable question is whether the West still knows what it is defending. That is where liberalism reaches its limit.

Liberalism gave the modern West something precious: individual liberty, constitutional government, private property, freedom of conscience and protection from arbitrary power. These achievements deserve to be defended. Much of the political freedom Western societies enjoy is inseparable from the liberal tradition. But liberalism was never the whole of Western civilisation.

That distinction has become urgent.

A political philosophy can protect a society without giving that society a reason to exist. It can tell a citizen what the state may not do to him without telling him what he owes to his country, his family, his ancestors or his children.

It can defend freedom of religion without explaining why a civilisation should preserve the religious inheritance that helped shape it. It can elevate the individual while becoming strangely uncertain about the communities that formed the individual in the first place.

The American founders understood the difference. They built their republic around individual rights and constitutional government, but they did not imagine a nation of isolated individuals negotiating endlessly with the state.

The Constitution entered a society that already possessed churches, families, local communities, state governments, inherited law and civic habits. Freedom depended upon citizens capable of exercising it responsibly.

Europe developed differently, but the same principle was visible there. A Frenchman was not merely an individual protected by law. He belonged to a historical nation. An Englishman inherited institutions older than modern political parties. A German belonged to a language and historical culture that could not be reduced to a legal document.

The West therefore developed through two forces that were never quite identical: liberty and inheritance. Modern liberalism became increasingly comfortable with the first and increasingly suspicious of the second.

This is where the trouble begins.

A society cannot preserve itself indefinitely by teaching every generation that its highest political achievement is liberation from everything inherited from the previous generation. The family becomes negotiable. Religion becomes private. National history becomes embarrassing. Borders become morally suspect. Citizenship becomes increasingly detached from belonging. Patriotism is treated with suspicion while abstract humanity is elevated as the highest possible identity.

But abstract humanity cannot vote, fight, build a cathedral, raise a child or bury its dead.

Actual people do those things.

They do them as Americans, Frenchmen, Italians, Poles, Jews, Christians and members of communities whose histories existed before the modern political vocabulary used to describe them. This does not require a return to the past. It requires admitting that the present cannot exist without one.

The irony is that the liberal order itself depended on many inherited structures that contemporary liberalism sometimes treats as obstacles to liberation. Christianity is one of the clearest examples.

Europe cannot understand its law, art, literature, architecture or political vocabulary without Christianity. America cannot understand its founding culture without the biblical language that shaped generations of its citizens.

The term Judeo-Christian can therefore still mean something, provided it is not reduced to a political slogan. It points to a historical relationship between two distinct traditions that profoundly influenced Western civilisation. That inheritance does not demand religious uniformity. It demands memory.

No constitution can manufacture memory.

A constitution can establish institutions. It cannot manufacture ancestors. A law can protect a family. It cannot make people want families. A passport can establish citizenship. It cannot manufacture belonging. A state can proclaim tolerance. It cannot guarantee that its citizens will consider the civilisation around them worth defending.

There is another historical irony here. After the catastrophe of fascism and the Second World War, the West had good reasons to distrust political power. Europe had seen what happened when the state claimed the right to penetrate every corner of human life.

The postwar liberal order was therefore, in part, an act of self-restraint: power had to be limited because power had proved capable of becoming monstrous.

That achievement should not be underestimated.

But a virtue can become a weakness when it is detached from the circumstances that produced it. Suspicion of state power can gradually become suspicion of political authority itself. Prudence can become paralysis.

The memory of nationalism's crimes can become an inability to distinguish between destructive nationalism and legitimate national loyalty. Fear of propaganda can become discomfort with any common civic story.

The West learned, correctly, that the state must not become a god.

It sometimes forgot that the absence of political confidence does not make power disappear. It merely leaves the field to those who possess more of it.

This becomes especially serious because the outside world has not adopted the West's uncertainty about itself.

China has spent decades building industrial, technological, and strategic power, while much of Europe has focused on regulation, consumption, and internal political disputes.

Beijing does not need Westerners to become Chinese. It only needs to demonstrate the advantage enjoyed by a civilisation that possesses a clear sense of national purpose.

Russia presents a different challenge. The post-Cold War dream that military power and hard national interests had become relics of another age did not survive contact with reality. Whatever one's judgment of Moscow's policies or the war in Ukraine, one fact is hard to escape: sovereignty, power, and national interest did not disappear just because Europeans hoped they had.

History did not end. It merely waited.

Then there is the Islamist challenge, which requires greater precision than either hysteria or denial allows. Islam is not identical with Islamism, and Western societies should be capable of making that distinction. But political movements that seek to subordinate democratic institutions to a religious ideology cannot be treated as simply another expression of liberal pluralism.

A civilisation that cannot distinguish between a religion and an ideology cannot conduct serious politics. Neither can a civilisation so afraid of offending anyone that it becomes incapable of defending its own laws, borders, and political traditions.

The West's problem, therefore, is not that it became too free. It is that freedom was gradually asked to perform a task it was never designed to perform.

Freedom is a condition of civilisation. It is not civilisation itself.

The ancient Greeks had political freedom without modern liberalism. Rome developed law without modern liberalism. Medieval Europe produced universities, cathedrals and legal traditions without modern liberalism.

The American republic emerged with liberal constitutional principles, but also with religion, republican virtue, local loyalties and a powerful sense of historical destiny.

The West did not become Western because someone invented liberalism. Liberalism became Western because it entered an already existing civilisation. That distinction may prove decisive in the century ahead.

There is a useful test for this distinction. Imagine removing the word “liberal” from Western history and then asking what remains. The answer is not an empty landscape. There are Homer and Shakespeare, Roman law and English common law, Jerusalem and Athens, the cathedral and the university, the American Constitution and the scientific revolution. Languages, customs, memories, wars, discoveries, prayers, and political institutions have accumulated across generations.

Liberalism is part of that inheritance. It did not author all of it.

If liberalism is treated as the source of Western civilisation, then every inherited institution must continually justify itself before the ideology of the present. If liberalism is understood instead as one of the political instruments developed within Western civilisation, freedom can return to its proper place: enormously important, but not sovereign over every other form of human attachment.

This does not require authoritarianism, quite the opposite. A confident civilisation can tolerate disagreement because it knows what it is. A frightened civilisation turns every disagreement into an existential crisis.

The future of the West will therefore not be decided only in elections, parliaments or military alliances. It will also be decided in quieter places: in schools where children learn their history, in families where traditions are transmitted, in churches and synagogues where inherited ideas are still spoken aloud, in communities where citizenship means more than paperwork, and in homes where parents still believe that something worth preserving should be handed to the next generation.

China understands continuity. Russia understands power. Islamist movements understand the strength of conviction. The West has all three ideas in its own history, but it has become hesitant to name them.

Its inheritance is extraordinary: Jewish memory, Christian thought, Greek reason, Roman law, European nationhood, scientific curiosity and the political discovery that human beings should possess genuine liberty under law. That inheritance is larger than liberalism.

The answer to the West's crisis is therefore not to abolish freedom, retreat from modernity or romanticise every tradition simply because it is old. It is to put liberalism back inside the civilisation that gave it meaning.

Freedom needs a people. Rights need a political community. Democracy needs citizens who believe their country is worth inheriting.

And a civilisation needs more than the promise that every individual may choose whatever he wants. It needs enough people to believe that some things are worth choosing together.

Liberalism can protect the West. It can restrain its governments, defend its citizens and preserve precious freedoms. But liberalism alone cannot tell the West why the West should endure.

That answer has to come from somewhere deeper: from history, memory, faith, family, nation, responsibility and the stubborn conviction that what was inherited is not merely an accident of the past.

The West does not need less freedom. It needs to remember what its freedom was built upon.

Because a civilisation that forgets what it is may discover, too late, that the philosophy designed to protect its freedom cannot tell it what is worth defending.