History As Politics In A Post-Liberal Order – OpEd |
“For us, however, whom a Destiny has placed in this Culture and at this moment of its development our direction…willed and obligatory at once, is set for us within narrow limits, and on any other term life is not worth the living. We have not the freedom to reach to this or to that, but the freedom to do the necessary or to do nothing.” – Oswald Spengler.
“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” – Will Durant.
Historical consciousness is rising in the west. The essence of which is not just about remembering the past but how humanity sees the present. 2026 sees the United States of America—western civilization’s center of gravity—turn 250 years old, requiring Americans to look backwards to judge what the nation has become and how current generations will interact with the bonds codified in the Declaration of Independence. In February 2026, at the Munich Security Conference, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared that Europe’s vacation from world history was over, implying Europe needed to once again become a geopolitical actor and rid itself of its dependency upon the United States.
Now that post-Cold War liberal internationalism has been delegitimized and declared a failed endeavour by the western nations that vigorously advanced it, the western alliance is starting to search for meaning and purpose in the new multipolar world order. Western man’s search for meaning in evolving world order is contextualized by the broader transatlantic socio-political-cultural war defined by competing understandings of liberalism, democracy, the nation, the role of the United States, and contested historical narratives.
While Russian, Chinese, Turkish, and Indian statesmen have been invoking their thousand years’ old histories, and the uniqueness of their historical mission of continuing them, for quite some time now—as a way to assert influence in their environs—as well as to challenge western global dominance, in a certain sense it is only recently when western statesmen started to seriously speak about their place within a much longer history of the civilization to which they belong. While Samuel Huntington predicted a clash of civilizations, the early contours of which we are witnessing manifest, central to this clash is competing historical and eschatological narratives.
This clash of narratives is taking place on the international level where the rising powers of the world are basing their legitimacy not on the nation-state but on their own cultural and historical heritages which the state is supposed to preserve. Within Europe and the United States, we are also seeing clashes within as part of the so-called “culture war,” and contested historical narratives are central to its unfolding.
Oswald Spengler believed in historical relativism in that he saw that truth varied between cultures. However, historical truth also varies within cultures. As Hendriks, Farkas, and Arroque point out, European liberals often charge that “anyone who disagrees with their anti-nationalist macro-interpretation of Europe’s 20th century catastrophes, like national conservatives and many others,........