Florence Gaub: Russians aren't Europeans

Florence Gaub is a Franco-German political scientist who works for the World Economic Forum and who advises various governments on international security issues. She works in a field that emphasises "foresight" in politics.

She made some controversial comments in a TV interview, when she argued that Russians were not really to be considered Europeans:

She says in the interview:

We should not forget that even if the Russians look European, they are not European in a cultural sense. They think differently about violence and death. They have no concept of a liberal, post-modern life, a concept of life that each individual can choose.

(A more exact translation of the last part might read "a life as a project that each person designs individually for themselves".)

This is not a good way to think about what makes a European. First, there are distinctions in national character across Europe. If, for instance, you have an Anglo background, then the character of, say, Dutch or German women will seem remarkably blunt and undiplomatic. Who, then, gets to claim to be more European? Thought of in terms of character traits, there would be no unified category of "European", but rather distinctly national, or even regional, peoples.

Second, once you base identity around values alone, then boundaries become porous. If, for instance, you claim that adopting liberal values of a self-choosing individualism is what makes you a European, then anyone, anywhere can be a European, the more so given the dominance of liberal institutions in much of the world. In fact, you could logically argue that some Japanese people were more European than some native Swedes, if those Swedes happened to be conservative or traditionalist rather than liberal. 

Third, if you really had to choose a value as a marker of belonging and identity, then making it the liberal one of an individually self-chosen life is not a great decision. Yes, having some considerable scope to make decisions about your own life is obviously a human good. But the principle cannot work by itself; it is ultimately dissolving of human society and of the human personality. After all, the principle says nothing of what kind of life is worth pursuing. Is a woman opting to make money on Only Fans really as equally valid as a woman opting to marry and have children? According to the liberal principle, the answer is yes - as long as she is choosing it without coercion, it becomes a moral good.

In a society based on liberal values, there is a loss of what was once a notable feature of Western cultures, namely a distinction between the noble and the base within human nature. There is a loss, too, of the Western moral culture that once defended the integrity of the human personality, by rejecting behaviours or influences that were dissipated, or profligate, or incontinent, or dissolute - moral terminology that seems old-fashioned now but which recognised that our moral choices might either uphold or undermine the integrity of our personhood.

Liberal values are also radically individualistic, in the sense that they acknowledge only the life we might design as an atomised individual. What we derive as a person from our membership in larger bodies, such as families or peoples, is neglected. Liberal values, therefore, also undermine what was once a core aspect of Western culture, namely an emphasis on fidelity and loyalty - on being "true". Western cultures are slipping from being high trust to low trust societies as a result, this being most evident in the current state of relationships between the sexes.

Finally, liberal values make it difficult to uphold prudence, this being one of they key virtues in both the classical and Christian West. Prudence is lost because the emphasis in a liberal society is on the freedom to choose in any direction, rather than on natural limitations imposed by the given reality we inhabit. If we can self-define, or self-author, according to our own will, then prudence will be relegated in significance, as increasing numbers of people come to believe that they themselves get to decide their own subjective reality, so that society and the larger world should simply conform to whatever they choose to do or to be.