Reclaiming European Identity
by Guillaume Faye
Guillaume Faye explores how Europeans can overcome challenges like racial diversity, cultural erosion, and techno-economic upheaval by embracing a dynamic new tradition, thereby reclaiming their identity and preserving humanity’s highest values.
This is the sixteenth and last part of Guillaume Faye’s essay ‘The New Ideological Challenges’, published in 1988. Also read parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen.
The three major challenges to European identity today, which jeopardise its historical continuity, are racial diversity, the erosion of its own cultures and traditions, and the upheaval caused by techno-economic civilisation, or the ‘technocosmos’. These challenges, posing both internal dissolution and external homogenisation threats, are not insurmountable.
On the contrary, Europeans will only enter a new era in their history by overcoming these challenges. The ‘metamorphic’ peoples, to which we belong, must embrace a fundamental contradiction: to stay true to themselves while transforming and evolving. This transformation, or self-overcoming, requires rejecting the Judaeo-Christian, humanitarian, and universalist aspects of our heritage. In our view, this rejection is essential to overcoming the nihilism that Nietzsche identified as a unique affliction of modern Europeans, originating from the Judaeo-Christian mindset.
Such self-overcoming encompasses exactly what Nietzsche called the ‘transvaluation of all values’. Paradoxically, Europeans are tempted to abolish themselves through withdrawal from history and anthropological or cultural suicide precisely at the moment when today’s techno-science, a product of their own culture, would give them the means to realise once unimaginable aspirations.
European nihilism cannot be explained by external and mechanical factors, such as the generalisation process inherent in technomodern civilisation, but by spiritual and ideological factors, particularly the fact that the thousand-year egalitarianism of Judaeo-Christianity has today reached its highest level of effectiveness and has finally borne fruit, which was not the case as long as Christianity had not become secularised: driving Europeans to deny themselves as peoples and to disappear into a unified ‘humanity’. We will reclaim a cultural personality and stop the surging wave of American-Western infrastructure, not by nostalgically fleeing into a petrified past but by building a neo-European culture from all available elements. We have shown that true traditionalism opposes the reactionary cult of the past. It is the progressives and the undertakers of European specificity who want to turn us into harmless simpletons and therefore simultaneously support mummification, Americanism, and ‘multiculturalism’.
In the affirmative project of building a neo-European civilisation, the first phase must focus on overcoming the current order and detaching from the present culture, essentially forming a counter-culture. Throughout this process, it is crucial to preserve the spirit of European tradition. This spirit, essentially pagan in its dynamic and transformative nature, is exemplified by periods such as the feudal era, the Italian Quattrocento, French classicism, the romantic movement, and the futurist enterprise.
This spirit can assert itself as a form of energy — inner work and spiritual power — if it reconnects with early-twentieth-century futurism. The underlying spirit of European culture, often tamed, censored, and neutralised over the centuries, is characterised by a deep awareness of divine order and strong self-confidence. It involves elevating humans to divine status, transferring the ‘miracle’ from the supernatural to the realm of human will. The Faustian spirit of the old European civilisation, marked by the youthful renewal of the phoenix, aligns with the virtues praised by Homer: pride and noble courage.
If today — replacing the dying religions — a ‘new paganism’ were to be defined, it would have to be sought both in the overcoming of ‘belief in the divine’ and in the rejection of atheism, i.e. in the assertion of transcendence within immanence, in the replacement of the divine by the superhuman. The gods can come down to us, and we, their new lords, will be the ones to summon them. It is also possible that the elevated figure of the engineer is actually what will formulate the appeal.
A second paganism, should it emerge, will likely place the pantheon of demigods above the gods. Medieval man might have sensed this. His cathedrals were not built to the greatest honour of ‘God’, as the ‘modernist’ Christians (the only authentic ones) who emerged from Vatican II completely understood, but to the greatest honour of the builder himself, i.e. to the greatest honour of the building people. The cathedral does not praise Christ, who is merely a symbol at the end of the choir, but the ship that sovereignly surges towards the empty sky, symbolised by the gesture of the builder. The reforms — dominated by the sad figures of Luther, Calvin, and the ‘normalising’ popes — darkened the great purity of the Middle Ages, just as in the 20th century the Western consumer society and technomorphic ecologism darkened the great Apollonian sun of futurism. For now, we are still unsure how to emerge from this darkest period. We do not know if we have reached what Nietzsche called the depths of nihilism. As the era of the fish continues to struggle with death, we are caught between despair and hope, searching for our own identity and true self. Despite this uncertainty, we observe new groups of people asserting their will to power, which may inspire us to do the same in the future.
Europeans who seek to rebuild their identity in the context of a multiracial society or Western civilisation stand in solidarity with those fighting for their own cultural identities, such as Indianness, Negritude, or Arabism. The era is over when advocating European land, culture, and independence could be dismissed as ‘imperialism’ or, even more scandalously, as ‘racism’. Today, as new divisions emerge and the distinctions between ‘right’ and ‘left’ blur, a true conflict of values and civilisation projects has begun. This conflict is between those promoting human downfall (advocates of the humanitarian, egalitarian, Soviet-American world state, driven by bourgeois materialism and the dissolution of belonging) and those defending identity, rootedness, and the inherent differences among groups, which ultimately guarantee the spiritual quality of humanity.
By bearing witness to European identity and resisting for the sake of our people, we will help protect Homo sapiens sapiens and uphold the few high values that humanity has managed to assert and impose on the indifferent, blind flow of life.
(translated by Constantin von Hoffmeister)