Europe Can’t Build Security on Sand
“Rules-based order” versus “power politics” is a false choice. What Europe needs is a strategy that fits the terrain - a civilizational one.
Last week I took part in the Martens Centre Authors’ Conference in Brussels — an excellent and intellectually rich discussion on Europe’s future security architecture. Yet the debate remained trapped in the binary vocabulary of the 1990s: “rules-based order” versus “power politics,” “democracies” versus “autocracies.” I offered a short oral comment that the civilizational view was absent. I have since written some reflections to expand on the point. In brief, Europe’s challenge is not to choose between those tired opposites, but to rediscover the civilizational ground on which its security — and identity — must stand.
Outdated narratives
Europe is still speaking the language of a world that no longer exists. Policymakers in Brussels and national capitals repeat phrases like “rules-based international order vs. power politics” and “defense of democracy against autocracy” as if these mantras could return into existence an architecture that has already collapsed. The result is a debate framed between two false alternatives: rules versus power, democracy versus autocracy. As if the world were divided between those who play by rules and those who don’t, between the virtuous and the wicked.
It was never like that. The “rules-based order” was never rule based. It was based on Western power to enforce its rules. The distinction between “rule-based order” and “power politics” is therefore misleading, an illusion born from a brief historical moment when the West was powerful enough to mistake its preferences for universal norms. The problem today is not that rules-based world is being replaced buy power play, but that the West no longer has the dominance required to enforce the rules it once wrote.
The same confusion haunts the narrative of “democracies versus autocracies.” This framing, popular in Washington and Brussels, moralizes geopolitics into an abstract crusade between good and evil. But democracy is not a universal default—it is a product of a specific civilizational humus, of Christian humanism, Roman law, and the European Enlightenment. Other civilizations have different conceptions of order, authority, and justice. To expect them to adopt liberal democracy in the view of Fukuyama’s End of History is naive.
Beyond Mearsheimer and Fukuyama
The realist school, exemplified by John Mearsheimer, rightly questioned the moral pretensions of liberal internationalism, exposing the power beneath the rhetoric of rules. Yet it made another error: a kind of power cynicism that treats geopolitics as a mechanical contest among indistinguishable players. In this view, power is an end in itself, stripped of moral or cultural meaning. But although all actors engage in power politics, not all play the same game, nor do they play by the same rules. Civilizations wield power in pursuit of different ends: honor, faith, freedom, or security. Realism, in its narrow form, explains how the world fights, but not why.
When Francis Fukuyama announced The End of History in 1992, he captured the mood of the time: the belief that liberal democracy had triumphed not only politically but metaphysically. The future, it seemed, would be managed by economists and lawyers, not generals and priests. But history has returned—with vengeance.
From Bosnia to Gaza, from Ukraine to Nigeria, nearly all major conflicts now occur along the fault lines Samuel Huntington described thirty years ago. These are not random contests of power but collisions of worldviews: different conceptions of God, order, and the human person. The West’s assumption of convergence has given way to a new pluralism of civilizations. The terrain of global politics is not flat; it is mountainous, ancient, and deeply scarred.
Civilizational realism
Civilizational realism rejects Mearsheimer and Fukuyama and adopts Huntington. It accepts the permanence of power but insists that power is always shaped by culture, belief, and historical memory. Civilizations are not interchangeable units and do not even play she same game of power. Western civilization defines success through universal acceptance of its ways; Islam through religious conquest; China through internal harmony and external respect; Russia through security and imperial greatness. These are not merely ideologies, they are deep-seated orientations. Any serious security architecture must begin by understanding them.
Civilizational realism recognizes that Europe is not merely a geographic peninsula, not just a power player that happens to wear a blue T-shirt with yellow stars but a civilizational project: a moral, cultural, and historical community. It explains why the transatlantic bond endures and why alliances such as NATO make sense not just strategically but spiritually: they bind together members of the same civilization. It also clarifies why relations with Russia, China, or the Islamic world will always be limited by incompatible civilizational premises, however skillful the diplomacy. And why relations among those power will always be limited by their civilizational difference.
The civilizational perspective also offers a political advantage within Europe itself. It provides a framework for unity across the fractured Western spectrum. Too often, parts of the so-called far right drift toward sympathy with Russia or isolationism, not because they reject the West, but because they see liberal cosmopolitanism as hollow and decadent. Civilizational realism speaks to them. It reminds conservatives that defending their culture means defending the West as a civilization.
This is something liberal idealism cannot do, and classical realism will not. The civilizational narrative can thus bridge the moral and political divide within the West, renewing allegiance to a shared heritage rather than to bureaucratic abstractions. It explains why Spain and Poland, or Canada and Hungary, belong to the same moral world despite their political differences and geographic distance: they are parts of one civilization whose survival is not guaranteed.
What Europe Must Learn
The choice before Europe is not between idealism and realism, nor between democracy and power. It is between continuing to inhabit a theoretical order that no longer exists and learning to live in the world as it is: plural, asymmetrical, and civilizational.
Civilizational realism proposes a few simple truths. First, pluralism is permanent; no civilization’s values are universally binding. Second, the West must preserve its civilizational identity if it wishes to remain coherent. Third, alliances last when grounded in shared values, not convenience. Fourth, power must serve conviction, or it degenerates into hubris; conviction without power collapses into moralism.
History has returned, and with it the need for courage, clarity, and identity. The age of global liberal management is over; civilizations are back. Europe must once again think of itself as a home of Europeans and not a hotel for everyone. It must build walls where necessary, doors where possible, and foundations deep enough to withstand the storms of history.
Europe is a peace project. But peace depends on strength and strength is drawn from identity.