Chrenkoff kicks off the week with a discussion of a document called Outline of a Doctrine of French Policy, which can be summarized as promoting the position that France should be the leader of a Latino-Catholic force in the world as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon and Slavo-Soviet power blocks in existence at the time when the doctrine was formulated by Alexandre Kojeve. From today’s vantage point it isn’t hard to fathom that the current French leaders have applied Kojeve generously in recent years in positioning France as a very distinct pillar of the western world, assuming a leadership role in the European Union and challenging the Anglo-Saxon, or American, supremacy following the end of the Cold War. Arthur Chrenkoff summarizes some of the diverging paths of the Western World and concludes:

Regardless, however, it is wise to remember today that our common roots in Athens, Rome and Jerusalem don't necessarily make for our common interests in Washington, Brussels or Baghdad.

So the Cold War period was a unique period where the interests of the Judeo-Christian World briefly converged. Up to that point there was too much that differentiated them, but with the advent of two successive evil empires it wasn’t that hard to unite what came to be known as the western world. The enabler for that was neither religion nor economy, these were really often dividers, no, it was the ability to adopt the principle of a liberal democracy with guaranteed rights for the individual as a sustainable model for the modern state. Ironically, apart from France and Italy, at the time Kojeve launched his ideas the Latino-Catholic world was still mired in dictatorship and regression and was a somewhat uneasy partner of the free West. But with democracy and economic reform taking hold in Spain, Portugal and Latin America the West from a liberal market perspective today is far more homogenous than ever. However in the face of Islamofascist terror and threats of chaos imposed from wayward third-world entities the West should, in theory, be far more unified than it is today. Only two weeks ago I pointed to Garton Ash whose new book centers around the premise that “there’s more that unites than divides us”.

If that’s the case, then attempts that seek to end the post Cold War convergence by trying to build a new pillar of power in a time when western liberal democracy faces one of its most lethal threats are extremely dangerous. They not only end a unique alignment of the free world, they negate the basic values on which that alignment was built. It doesn’t come as a total surprise that this is coming from a European nation that missed the reformation, came late to empire and was a laggard when it came to economic reform and embracing free markets.

UPDATE: David Warren weighs in:

But power politics are more calculating and cynical than that. The whole project of building a united Europe depends on replacing the old intra-European national antipathies with a new common antipathy. The public demonization of America thus serves the interests of Europe's new bureaucratic order, as George Jonas and others have argued.

An unapologizing European, who wants a Europe bound up with America in the cause of spreading freedom through the world, Mr. Garton Ash often writes as if sweet reason were bound to prevail. It seldom is, and to defeat the enemies of freedom, her friends must be willing to get ugly.