Educating for Liberty in Old Europe

The West’s heartland is facing a crisis of historic proportions. American conservatives who have committed themselves to “the defense of the West” cannot be indifferent to Europe’s fate.

One of the distinguishing features of ISI has long been its commitment to the view that America is best understood in strong continuity with the Western tradition. Russell Kirk famously characterized the “roots of American order” as a “tale of five cities”: Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia. In other words, what is best and most to be cherished in the American experience is what we have inherited from what is best in the European patrimony. Consequently, the “defense of the West,” a rubric under which the Cold War was prosecuted, meant—from ISI ’s point of view—not merely the defense of capitalist economies or the defense of America’s allies against Soviet military aggression: it meant the defense of our civilization as a whole—strategically, intellectually, spiritually. As a result, ISI programs have traditionally included a sizable admixture of European thinkers. For many years, for example, it was ISI that organized the annual U.S. lecture tour of the Austrian polymath and National Review contributor Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. ISI publications have also highlighted the work of numerous émigré intellectuals—Karl Wittfogel, Gerhart Niemeyer, John Lukacs, Thomas Molnar, Stanley Jaki, and Claes Ryn, to name a few.

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, ISI took an active role in reaching out to the newly free nations of Eastern Europe. Friendly relations were developed in particular with the Občanský Institut (Civic Institute) in Prague, a think-tank led by two young men, Michal Semin and Roman Joch, who had read many ISI authors in samizdat under communism. Large numbers of free books were shipped, and continue to be shipped, from ISI to the Civic Institute’s superb research library. Numerous ISI students and Weaver Fellowship recipients also took part in the “Centesimus Annus and the Free Society” seminars (now the “Tertio Millennio and the Free Society” seminars) sponsored by Michael Novak, George Weigel, and Richard John Neuhaus, first in Liechtenstein, now in Poland. Many of the young leaders of the “new Europe” in the East felt a strong moral and intellectual kinship with American conservatism, recognizing the role that the movement’s arguments played in dismantling the Soviet empire—and many American conservatives reciprocated this goodwill with concrete assistance. In the early 2000s, ISI began to encounter something new: young, entrepreneurial Western European activists and public intellectuals who were working to build up in their countries the institutional rudiments of an American-style “conservative movement.”

In each case, the principals in these endeavors understood Europe to be at a crisis point with respect to several pressing concerns: the undemocratic and stifling bureaucratic regulatory regime of the European Union; an entrenched leftist relativism in the universities so powerful as to dwarf any American concerns about our own political correctness; demographic decline; and a widespread loss of contact with the West’s moral and spiritual traditions, as well as an active undermining by the E.U. of particular national traditions. All of these had long been protracted problems for Europe: they were recognized to have reached a crisis point in light of the unprecedented challenge of Islam. Sensing that the tides of history were running against them, Europe’s “new conservatives” found inspiration in the American conservative movement. After all, ISI ’s first president, the founder of National Review William F. Buckley Jr., had famously proclaimed in the first issue of NR the intention of his magazine to stand “athwart history, yelling Stop.”

Of the groups and individuals who approached ISI, the three below merit special mention.

L’Institut de Formation Politique
Paris, France
Founded in 2004 by Alexandre Pesey, the Institut (IFP ) organizes programs to train conservative political activists. Also, each year IFP sponsors six “Tocqueville Fellows,” select French university students, for a three-week tour of the institutions of the American conservative movement. The goal of this program is to introduce high-achieving students to what is possible in civil society, “outside the state.” While this tour is almost entirely a Washington affair, the fellows make a special day trip each year to ISI , where they participate in a program of lectures and seminars, have lunch with ISI staff, and are sent away with as many ISI books as they can carry.

Fundación Burke
Barcelona, Spain
Modeled explicitly on ISI and founded in 2005, Fundación Burke organizes summer schools for students and engages in other educational initiatives. They also maintain on their website a feature, “American Review,” that translates into Spanish articles from the American conservative press so that their countrymen will be able to read for themselves what American conservatives— so diabolized in the Spanish press—have to say for themselves. ISI’s Mark Henrie serves on the academic advisory board of Fundación Burke. The founders of Fundación Burke have also founded a publishing company, Ciudadela Libros, and ISI Books has entered into a formal relationship with this firm whereby Ciudadela Libros has privileged access to the Spanish translation rights for ISI Books. Several titles have already been translated and published under this agreement. In 2005, Spanish students selected by Fundación Burke were also invited to participate in the ISI Honors Program in Cambridge, England.

Edmund Burke Stichting
The Hague, Netherlands
Also modeled explicitly on ISI and founded in 2001, the Burke Stichting (i.e., Burke Foundation) organizes summer schools, university lectures, and university reading groups dedicated to exploring conservative classics. Its executive director, Bart Jan Spruyt, also writes frequently in the Dutch press and is interviewed regularly on Dutch radio and television. ISI has been particularly supportive of the Burke Stichting’s efforts. In 2004 and 2005, Dutch students selected by the Burke Stichting were invited to ISI’s Honors Program in England, and in the same years, ISI officers Mark Henrie and Darryl Hart traveled to Holland to lecture in the Burke Stichting’s summer school. ISI has also made available to the Burke Stichting large quantities of its Student Guides to the Major Disciplines series for distribution to Dutch students. And beginning in 2006, ISI has invited select Dutch students associated with the Burke Stichting to weekend colloquia in the United States.

In each of these cases, ISI was contacted out of the blue. The institute had no prior knowledge of these individuals and groups. Alex Pesey of the IFP had spent time in Washington, D.C., researching his doctoral dissertation on American conservative think-tanks, and so became aware of ISI in that context. The leaders of Fundación Burke and the Burke Stichting had done careful research from afar, mostly by Internet, and had concluded that the ISI model was the one they wanted—and needed—to emulate in their countries’ current circumstances. It was uncanny to discover young Europeans—all are under forty-five, and many are barely thirty—who have found in the postwar American conservative intellectual movement a world of arguments, insights, and institutional approaches that they find powerfully pertinent to the problems Europe faces at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Above all, these Europeans “get” ISI. Understanding that if you merely change public policy, it can always be changed back, they are focused instead on changing minds—in particular, reaching young people in the university who are at the time in their lives when they are thinking through their deepest commitments. If students can be helped to see through the ideological mystifications of multiculturalist relativism, if they can be presented with an honest account of the true achievements of Western civilization, then Europe may yet have a future. In the midst of these and other encounters, ISI also came to realize that none of these European groups were aware of one anothe Each had found its way to ISI, but each pursued its mission in isolation. Therefore, when the leaders of Holland’s Burke Stichting proposed a pan-European meeting of conservative activists and intellectuals, ISI readily facilitated the event. As was reported in last fall’s issue of the Canon, a meeting was held at Castle Vanenburg in the Netherlands in July 2006, with thirty participants from fourteen countries. The theme of the meeting was “Towards the Restoration of the Western Tradition in Europe: Possibilities and
Strategies.” Mark Henrie represented ISI. This preliminary meeting had several goals.

The first goal was simply to introduce these “new European conservatives” to each other and give them an opportunity to socialize together so that bonds of affinity and mutual trust could begin to develop. The second goal was to exchange information concerning the political and cultural situation in each of the countries and the structure of conservative activity there—particularly with respect to educational questions. The third goal was to begin considering the possibility of a pan-European umbrella organization that might undertake on a Europe-wide basis the kinds of educational activities that have long been the hallmark of ISI .

The July 2006 meeting was a great success at a human level. A remarkable degree of intellectual commonality was discovered: similar moral commitments, similar diagnoses of Europe’s pathologies, and similar strategies for addressing those pathologies. New friendships were formed. Concrete steps forward did not immediately materialize, however. The 2006 meeting
therefore ended with a resolution for the group—provisionally dubbed the “Vanenburg Society”—to meet again in a year’s time.

A second meeting of the Vanenburg group took place in July 2007 in Gumpoldskirchen, Austria, just outside Vienna. Since such meetings are costly and the resources of the European groups are not great—there is no tradition of private philanthropy for such activities in Europe, and just like ISI, Europe’s new conservatives naturally refuse state funding—ISI partnered with the Dutch Burke Stichting to underwrite the expenses. The conference theme was “Challenges for European Conservatism.” Many of the participants from 2006 returned, together with a number of new participants, bringing total participation once again to thirty. One notable newcomer to the group was Ryszard Legutko, a longtime professor of political theory at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, now an elected senator in Poland and the education minister of that country. The English philosopher Roger Scruton, who participated in the 2006 meeting, was prevented from coming to Vienna when his flight was cancelled owing to a terrorist bomb scare
at Heathrow Airport: his absence therefore served to highlight the urgency of Europe’s plight.

The program in Gumpoldskirchen witnessed wideranging discussions on subjects as diverse as economics, aesthetics, and the E.U. Most importantly, the meeting ended with a resolution to move forward institutionally. As a result, in early September the “Center for European Renewal” (CER ) was incorporated in the Netherlands. The legal form of the Dutch stichting, or foundation, was chosen since this legal status provides for maximum freedom, an advantageous tax status, and minimal reporting requirements, while also allowing for an international board. Andreas Kinneging, a Dutch professor of legal philosophy at Leiden University, serves as chairman of CER . Other members of the board of trustees include Mark Henrie of ISI ; Michiel Visser of the Burke Stichting; Jorge Soley Climent of the Fundación Burke; Alex Pesey of IFP ; and Roman Joch of the Občanský Institut.

The annual Vanenburg meetings will continue under the auspices of CER , providing a regular opportunity for Europe’s conservatives to come together to assess common problems and develop new arguments and approaches. David Gress, a Danish academic who writes for Jyllands Post, the newspaper now famous for having published the Mohammed cartoons that generated violent reactions, commented in Gumpoldskirchen that he could scarcely remember when he had last had such helpful conversations anywhere in Europe. In an ideological climate of stifling leftism, with conservatives in each of the European nations feeling isolated, the Vanenburg meetings represent a breath of desperately needed fresh intellectual air. But the CER will also begin implementing an ambitious agenda of ISI-style programs. A summer school will be held in Madrid in July 2008, offering an introduction to conservatism to students from throughout Europe. CER is also committed to the publication of a short monograph for students surveying modern European conservative classics—a project inspired by ISI’s Student Guides series, and in particular by the ISI pamphlet “Ten Books that Shaped America’s Conservative Renaissance.” Europe, of course, has not had a “conservative renaissance”; indeed, on the old continent, the general view is that conservatism is either a thing of the dead past or a thing peculiar to Americans. This monograph therefore will re-introduce European students to their own conservative tradition and show how that tradition is relevant today. Chapter drafts are now in preparation, and the publication should be available before the end of the 2007–8 academic year.

It is clear that Europe, the West’s heartland, is facing a crisis of historic proportions. American conservatives who have committed themselves to “the defense of the West” cannot be indifferent to Europe’s fate. ISI was founded in 1953 as America was just beginning to grapple with the crisis of Soviet communism. ISI’s mission was to foster the growth of an intellectual class equipped with the knowledge, insights, and dedication to rally the country against a well-entrenched leftism that doubted there was anything to fear in communism (“the New Deal in a hurry,” it was called). Europe’s situation today is similar. An entrenched elite fiddles while Paris burns, and the intellectual class merely rehearses leftist multicultural platitudes. The difficulty in Europe is even more extreme, for there the force of law is sometimes brought against those who dissent from leftist orthodoxies, and there are very few platforms for political speech outside the control of the state.

The extraordinary groups and individuals with which ISI has come into contact, however, are a tremendous sign of hope. While ISI cannot maintain a permanent operating presence in Europe, ISI can serve as a catalyst, bringing together like-minded thinkers who can undertake common projects to win a hearing in their respective countries. ISI can provide expertise and experience from its long years of “educating for liberty” in the U.S. to help the Europeans develop analogous models of para-university educational activity. ISI can assist in building up the development and communication capacities of these nascent organizations. Acting as a transatlantic bridge, ISI also can make available a generous supply of its Student Guides and other published material. ISI can provide a program of American conservative speakers for lecture series across the continent. ISI can invite select European students to appropriate programs in the U.S. And the bridge can work both ways. Through our cultivation of these transatlantic ties, ISI can uncover new conservative voices and new conservative perspectives that may enrich our own publications and educational programs here in the U.S.

Five centuries ago, the roots of Western civilization were transplanted in the New World. Now is the time for the New World’s defenders of the West to transplant those same roots in the Old.