Europe Awakened

Reflections on Dominique Venner’s “The Century of 1914”

At the start of the twentieth century, Europeans ruled the world. They constituted a third of its population, governed half of its landmass, and controlled vast territories across Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and even parts of China. Their industry, science, philosophy, and art were unparalleled. The world was theirs by right of achievement and strength.

Yet, just a century later, that dominance lay in ruins. Europeans had dwindled to less than 9 percent of the world’s population. Their homelands were overrun by foreign peoples, their industries and technology ceded to emerging rivals, and their institutions transformed beyond recognition. They teetered on the edge of demographic collapse, facing the unthinkable: the potential extinction of their people and civilization.

This reversal was no accident. To understand it, one must confront the immense forces that reshaped the twentieth century. Dominique Venner, a historian of magisterial scope and clarity, though relatively unknown and untranslated in the Anglosphere, meticulously traces these upheavals in Le Siècle de 1914: Utopies, Guerre et Révolutions (The Century of 1914: Utopias, War, and Revolutions). While this book remains untranslated into English, it serves as a masterful guide to understanding the powerful convergence of forces that brought Europe to this precipice.

For Venner, the twentieth century was born from the cataclysmic rupture of the First World War (1914–1918). Moreover, he examines history not in a linear, chronological fashion, but thematically, highlighting the movements, events, people, and ideas that shaped its trajectory. Far more than a traditional clash of rival powers, the First World War was an event of seismic proportions, tearing apart the very bedrock of Western civilization. It toppled the ancien régime and unleashed a torrent of ideological and cultural transformations that would forever reshape the modern age. Ernst Nolte, a prominent German historian renowned for his analysis of 20th-century ideological conflicts, aptly described this era, spanning from 1917 to 1945, as a “European Civil War”—a series of interconnected struggles akin to a modern incarnation of the “Thirty Years’ War” (1618–1648).

From this chaos emerged four rival ideological forces—American liberalism, Russian Communism, Italian Fascism, and German National Socialism—each vying to remake the fractured Western world in its own image. Venner asserts that the modern dominance of the postwar liberal order is a direct result of this ideological struggle and its decisive victory over its rivals.

Before the world-changing events of 1914, Europe was more than a fragmented collection of sovereign states with distinct political systems; it was a unified people, bound together by a common heritage. This reductionist view, a hallmark of the homogenizing forces of liberal modernity and shaped by contemporary historiography, distorts Europe into a framework of isolated nation-states, erasing the enduring bonds of shared civilization, identity, culture, and spirituality that once defined its essence.

Europe has always been far more than a mere geographical construct situated on the Eurasian landmass. It is a civilization unparalleled in world history, brought into being and made manifest by a distinct people who not only laid the foundations of what we now call the "West" but also built the very groundwork upon which modernity itself was constructed. The achievements of any one European people—be it cultural, material, or otherwise—were never isolated but instead woven seamlessly into the grand tapestry of a shared history, heritage, and destiny. From the ancient stone monuments of prehistory to the rise of Classical civilization in Greece and Rome, from the chivalric ideals of the Middle Ages to the brilliance of the Renaissance, from the scientific and philosophical revolutions of the Enlightenment to the transformative political and social reforms, these milestones formed the threads of a collective identity—one that transcended borders and bound Europe together as a unified and enduring whole.

This unity found its clearest expression in the Westphalian state system of 1648, established at the conclusion of the Thirty Years' War. The system framed Europe’s conflicts as disputes within an extended family, governed by shared customs and tempered by mutual respect, preserving a delicate balance of power and cultural cohesion. The Westphalian order upheld the status quo, ensuring that Europe's intra-rival conflicts remained civilized, its balance of power intact, and its deeper civilizational unity unbroken. Even the revolutionary fervor unleashed by the violent upheavals of the French Revolution and the ensuing Napoleonic Wars (1789–1815), with all their sweeping transformations, could not fracture the timeless bonds that had long held Europe in unity.

The First World War, however, shattered this unity. The Great War, as contemporaries called it, was far more than the devastation of Europe’s physical and political landscape; it tore apart the Westphalian system and decimated the aristocratic classes that had long served as the bedrock of its civilization. These elites, the stewards of Europe’s martial and cultural traditions, were swept aside, leaving a void eagerly filled by the revolutionary ideologies of the twentieth century. The collapse of this aristocratic foundation heralded the dawn of a new age—one marked by ideological upheaval and the radical reshaping of Europe's cultural and political identity.

On the eve of the Great War, the aristocracy still embodied its timeless role as leaders, defenders, and guardians of European civilization. For centuries, it had shaped the continent’s destiny, rooted in a tradition of nobility bound to ancient ideals of honor, duty, and service. This was no stagnant class of inherited privilege, as liberal historians often portray, but a dynamic estate rooted in family, tradition, and rank, constantly renewing itself. To Venner, the pre-war aristocracy embodied the pinnacle of Western civilization: an ever-present, vital force, steadfast and loyal to the highest cultural and spiritual ideals of its people. Nobility was not merely a birthright; noblesse oblige was a solemn duty—a responsibility to prioritize the welfare of the greater good over the destructive pull of unfettered personal ambition.

With the exception of republican France and Switzerland, Europe’s monarchies and imperial states were led by these aristocratic elites. Their ethos, deeply shaped by Prussian values, exalted simplicity, discipline, and unwavering moral integrity, all seen as pillars of a noble and just society. Venner contrasts this with the materialism and self-interest of bourgeois democratic societies, where the never-ending pursuit of wealth and the inflated sense of atomized individuality, born of such excess, eclipsed all other considerations. For him, the aristocracy represented the last bastion of higher ideals, a counterbalance to the forces of mediocrity and homogenization taking root in an increasingly modernized and liberalized Western world. Their downfall, hastened by the Great War, marked the loss of a cornerstone vital to the stability and soul of European civilization. This obliteration of the aristocracy, and with it the old order of the West, recalls the decimation of the Roman Republican elite after the Second Punic War (218–201 BC) and the inexorable slide from republic to empire that it facilitated.

History, with the clarity granted by hindsight, lays bare the full magnitude of its upheavals. In 1914, however, few could fathom the monumental scale of the war that lay ahead. Military strategists across Europe anticipated a swift and decisive campaign, akin to the maneuver-based conflicts of the 18th and 19th centuries. Instead, they faced the grim realities of modern industrialized warfare, vividly immortalized by Ernst Jünger in his seminal work, Storm of Steel. This was a conflict that mirrored the brutal, attritional nature of the later stages of the American Civil War (1861–1865). The First World War introduced devastating new military doctrines: massed artillery barrages to obliterate enemy positions, followed by infantry assaults to claim the shattered ground. Jünger observed that “Modern warfare is a conflict of machines, and men merely serve to feed those machines.” This mechanized and dehumanized process came to define the relentless destruction of modern war, marking the dawn of an era in which firepower and attrition replaced the calculated, strategic engagements of earlier conflicts. Human beings were reduced to mere cogs in a vast, impersonal war machine—a reflection of an increasingly industrialized world, where the cold efficiency of mechanized combat prevailed.

At its outset, the war appeared to be a traditional conflict between rival states. However, by 1917, with the entry of the United States into the fray, it had transformed into something far more devastating: an ideological crusade, pitting so-called “democratic” and “authoritarian” regimes against one another. Unlike the wars of earlier centuries, which were often limited in scope and sought to preserve the balance of power, this conflict abandoned such constraints. The consequences were catastrophic: nine million soldiers dead, the Hohenzollern, Hapsburg, and Romanov dynasties toppled, and Europe left devastated, its wounds sowing the seeds of even greater calamities for the next generation.

Into this vacuum stepped Woodrow Wilson, the American president and self-proclaimed architect of a new order. Wilson’s vision was rooted in what Venner identifies as an anti-aristocratic and anti-European form of “democratism”—a system premised on liberal governance, free markets, and the primacy of individual sovereignty over all that binds: community, culture, and history. Venner argues that this order subordinated politics to economics, allowing the dominion of money-power to reign supreme. Under this framework, the historical and civilizational fabric of Europe—and the broader West—was reduced to facile abstractions, subordinated to hollow ideals of egalitarianism and economic liberalism.

Unsurprisingly, the Wilsonian settlement of 1918–19, based on fragile principles wholly detached from reality, unraveled swiftly. Its inherent ideological fragility and detachment from realpolitik left it defenseless against competing systems of thought. In Russia, Communism presented a radically revolutionary egalitarian alternative to Wilson’s liberal democracy. Although their methods differed—Communists favoring state control over the economy—their Enlightenment-era materialist foundations were remarkably similar. Meanwhile, Germany and Italy responded with movements that sought to reclaim Europe’s cultural and spiritual foundation.

In Italy, Mussolini’s Fascism promoted a vision of the state rooted in authority, order, and justice, uniting citizens in a collective purpose that rejected both the atomization of liberal individualism and the economic determinism of Communism, seeking national unity and strength. In Germany, National Socialism aimed to undo the humiliations of the Wilsonian peace, especially the Versailles Treaty, and to reclaim Germany’s rightful position on the world stage. Central to this effort was the revitalization of the Volksgemeinschaft—an organic, pan-German national community rooted in a renewed and expanded sense of collective strength and unity. Both ideologies, though shaped by the plebeian forces of 20th-century politics, drew upon Europe’s ancient martial heritage, emphasizing strong leadership, physical prowess, power, and a sense of purpose.

These movements, despite their flaws, embodied a defiant rejection of the forces that had subordinated European culture and identity to materialist and universalist ideologies, resisting the homogenized global order. Their rise marked a profound, both existential and metapolitical, clash between the legacy of the past and the tumult of the present, as Europe grappled with the collapse of its old order and sought to forge a new one. Venner’s historical analysis focuses sharply on the ferocious ideological struggles of the interwar years (1919–1939)—a turbulent era marked by the clash of liberalism, Communism, Fascism, and National Socialism in their determined bids for dominance. At the core of Venner’s critique lies Wilsonian liberalism, a doctrine of democratism that promoted American-style capitalist democracy while advancing the geopolitical and economic dominance of the United States. Far from being a benevolent force projected for the good of humanity, as it often portrayed itself, this ideology sought to reshape Europe by undermining its historical and cultural foundations, with particular focus on dismantling its Germanic heritage and the deeply rooted faith and customs of its more traditional Catholic nations.

Wilson’s democratism, Venner notes, has provenance deeply rooted in America’s Puritan heritage. The Puritans, fleeing what they saw as Europe’s moral decay, settled in the New World and redefined their identity through the lens of economic success. Like the ancient Biblical Israelites, they believed material prosperity reflected divine favor and marked their status as the elect, chosen by God. Over time, this ethos transformed into the Lockean ideal of the “pursuit of happiness,” elevating material wealth and individual liberty above historical and communal bonds. This worldview, severed from any sense of inherited patrimony or destiny, instilled in Wilson and his contemporaries an unshakable belief in the moral superiority of their system—a system they saw as not only universally applicable but inherently unassailable.

This ideological clash reflected a deeper conflict between the aristocratic values of Europe and the democratic values of America. Venner draws on Oswald Spengler’s analysis in Prussianism and Socialism to explain this divide. Spengler identified two contrasting expressions of Protestant Christianity: the German Lutheran tradition, which upheld discipline, duty, and the martial virtues of the warrior, and the English Calvinist tradition, which equated wealth with virtue—the hallmarks of the eternal merchant—and thus placed individual freedom above all else. The German tradition fostered an aristocratic spirit, grounded in honor and sacrifice. In diametric contrast, the English-Calvinist mindset, which heavily influenced Anglo-American values, evolved into an economic creed of individualism, materialism, and an unending pursuit of success at any cost.

Venner contends that this all-encompassing materialist worldview, pushed to its logical conclusion, became the driving force behind America’s 20th-century democratism. Cloaked in the rhetoric of humanitarianism and liberal democracy, it sought to dismantle Europe’s aristocratic and historical foundations, supplanting them with a new order rooted in abstract ideals like universal equality and unchecked individualism. This rupture with tradition aimed to erase all cultural, historical, and national identities, rendering the world a blank slate—an empty canvas waiting to be remade. In this vision, so-called progress and universal equality were exalted as the highest virtues, with America positioning itself as the ideological antithesis of Europe—a paradigm of modernity untethered from history.

Armed with these convictions, Wilsonian liberalism sought to dismantle Europe’s ancient empires and aristocracies, striking at the very core of a civilization that had endured for centuries. For Venner, this was not merely the regime change of bygone eras, but a profound and intentional assault on the very heart of Europe. The Wilsonian peace settlement, founded on the faulty premise of German war guilt, left Europe’s traditional order in ruins. Yet its most enduring legacy was not simply political or territorial transformation, but the groundwork it laid for future catastrophes, particularly the Second World War (1939–1945). This conflict subjected Europe to domination by extra-European powers—Soviet and American—stripping it of sovereignty and accelerating a civilizational reprogramming that reduced Europe to a subordinate role under foreign hegemony. European empires were dismantled, historical identities deconstructed, and borders opened to waves of migration, forever transforming the continent. The aristocratic heritage that had long anchored Europe was swept away, leaving the continent vulnerable to the erosion of its spirit and identity.

Before America entered this second great war, the Atlantic Charter of 1941 heralded yet another ideological crusade. It envisioned a postwar order dominated by liberal democracy, global commerce, and the financial interests of Anglo-American elites. This framework became the foundation of the modern liberal system, whose effects continue to shape Europe today. Under the banner of the “United Nations,” the Allied coalition aimed not only to defeat German National Socialism but to dismantle the German nation itself, whose traditions and Prussian values stood in direct opposition to Wilsonian ideals.

The military campaign waged by the Allies, particularly under leaders like Eisenhower, displayed a ferocity unparalleled in European history. Though ostensibly ideologically opposed, the United States and the Soviet Union shared a common goal: the removal of Europe from its previously dominant position of geopolitical hegemony. Their crusade against “fascism” extended far beyond the battlefield, evolving into a concerted effort to delegitimize Europe’s traditional values. The Nuremberg Trials became a symbol of this campaign, serving not only to prosecute “wartime crimes” but also to criminalize the ideals of hierarchy, nobility, and nationalism that had long defined European civilization.

By 1945, Europe lay shattered and demoralized, its spirit ripe for political and metaphysical transfiguration. The victorious Allied powers embarked on a sustained campaign to reshape European consciousness, recasting Europe’s historical achievements as sins against an increasingly nebulous and weaponized notion of humanity. This politically-driven narrative took root particularly in the western half of the continent, where American-led democratism imposed a sense of collective culpability that extended beyond Germany to all of Europe. Europeans were taught to see their past empires, traditions, and identities as inherently oppressive, fostering a deep sense of self-loathing. The combination of military defeat and a secularizing moral framework transformed Europe’s historical confidence into debilitating self-doubt, undermining its capacity to defend its heritage. In this process, we witness the early roots of what would later become the phenomenon of “White guilt,” a narrative deliberately crafted to subdue, chastise, and ultimately facilitate the demographic erasure of European peoples across the globe. Germany became the testing ground for this ideological experiment, a precursor to what would later engulf the rest of the West.

The irony of this manufactured guilt lies in its blatant selective application. The Allies’ own actions—the indiscriminate bombing of civilians, the destruction of great cities, and the horrors of starvation and mass displacement—were conveniently excluded from the moral reckoning of postwar tribunals and largely sanitized in the sycophantic narratives propagated by mainstream historians. These atrocities went unexamined, leaving the victors unscathed while Europe bore the full weight of unilateral condemnation. This selective moral judgment paved the way for the systematic dismantling of Europe’s cultural and spiritual identity in the decades that followed. To replace a people, you must first break their spirit—a process that began with the erosion of their historical confidence and pride.

After the Cold War, during which Europeans were reduced to spectators as their homeland became the stage for ideological conflict, a new narrative of 20th-century history took shape—one meticulously designed to exalt the triumph of liberal democracy while discrediting and vilifying all opposing systems. Liberal democracy, inherently insidious and totalizing, cannot tolerate any rival ideologies or frameworks. This narrative distorted Europe’s past, recasting it as a virtuous struggle for liberal ideals while straying far from historical reality. It celebrated market-driven prosperity, individual liberties, and an idealized, ahistorical vision of multicultural harmony. Yet beneath this polished facade lay harsher truths: military occupation, cultural subversion, and the systematic erasure of Europe’s historic identity.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 did not usher in a utopia, but rather a world shaped by the deleterious forces of consumerism, bureaucracy, and spectacle. Venner observes that the methods of democratism, while outwardly different from those of Communism, ultimately serve a similar purpose: the construction of a global, raceless economic system. To achieve this vision, the liberal order increasingly relies on totalitarian measures, silencing dissent by criminalizing or pathologizing opposition to its agenda. Today, we witness the culmination of this “re-education” process, where any challenge to liberal hegemony is met with the utmost severity, ranging from social ostracism to outright imprisonment.

This new reality aligns closely with Max Weber’s critique of modernity, as articulated in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber described the encroachment of economic rationality into all aspects of life as an “iron cage,” a system that strips human existence of meaning and purpose. It represents the commodification of life: reducing all human interactions to rational, transactional exchanges, with the logic of the market elevated above all other values. Dominique Venner expands on this, observing that this “iron cage” has been forcibly imposed on Europe by Washington since 1945, transforming the continent into little more than a vassal state serving American economic and ideological interests.

This transformation is perhaps most evident in the bureaucratic expanse of the European Union. While the concept of European unification has deep historical roots, the version realized after the Second World War was deliberately crafted to serve American geopolitical and economic interests. Initiatives like the Marshall Plan integrated Europe into a transnational economic framework under U.S. dominance, with figures such as Jean Monnet—an architect of European integration and the European Union—championing this vision. By the time Britain joined the EU in 1972, Europe's political elite had fully embraced the liberal project, placing economic integration above the preservation of its ethno-cultural identity. This redefinition stripped Europe of its historical depth and traditional values, reducing the continent to a mere free-trade zone, beholden to global financial powers. In essence, Europe was transformed from a civilization into a marketplace—an alteration that soon spread and metastasized, infecting the wider Western world.

Venner characterizes this postwar global order as a “cosmocracy,” a cosmopolitan plutocracy that emerged after the fall of Communism. This cosmocracy eradicates the importance of the nation-state, denationalizes elites, and advocates for the mixing of disparate peoples and cultures in the name of creating a homogenized, quantifiable humanity—one that is disconnected from its roots, history, and identity, thus more easily manipulated and controlled. It borrows liberalism's cosmopolitan ethos, blended with Communist internationalism, to suppress opposition to its universalist agenda. Measures like “anti-hate laws” and nebulous concepts of “human rights” are weaponized to target and undermine those who stand in defense of Europe's traditions and heritage.

Europeans, burdened by guilt for alleged yet unsubstantiated "historical sins"—a narrative carefully constructed by the ruling elite—are now pressured into accepting mass immigration from the overpopulated Global South as penance. This demographic shift threatens to erase Europe’s cultural and ethnic foundations. Meanwhile, the political and intellectual elites, entrenched in transnational structures, remain either complicit in or indifferent to this process. Their obsession with globalist ideals, coupled with a vested financial interest, blinds them to the long-term civilizational consequences of uncontrolled migration and cultural displacement.

Despite this, Venner finds hope in the crisis wrought by the cosmocratic system. He draws inspiration from the indomitable spirit of the Iberians, who, against overwhelming odds, launched the 700-year Reconquista of Spain (711–1492) to reclaim their homeland. Venner believes that, like the Iberians, the peoples of Europe may yet find the strength to rise, restore their heritage, and reclaim their ancestral lands. The contradictions within the globalist order, coupled with its failure to address the growing demographic, cultural, and social crises, may ultimately lead to its collapse. Though such a collapse would be disastrous, it may also present Europe with one final opportunity to reclaim its sovereignty, identity, and destiny. Nietzsche, among others, spoke of the need for destruction to give way to renewal, a cycle in which the old must perish for something greater to be born. In this, Venner sees not just peril but the potential for resurgence, should Europe, and the wider West, rise to meet the challenge.

After 1945, Europeans entered what Venner terms a state of “dormition”—a condition of inertia and spiritual amnesia, wherein they lost sight of their identity as a people. Similar to the Germans in the aftermath of the original Thirty Years' War, the years of bloodshed during the "European Civil War" left Europe's peoples drained, both materially and spiritually. This exhaustion pushed them into retreat from the historical stage, leaving them vulnerable to the very forces that now threaten their existence.

Yet dormition is not death. Venner insists that Europe’s current state, though dire, is not one of irreversible finality. The utopian promises of the democratist order are built on increasingly fragile foundations. Its failures are growing harder to conceal, and its contradictions, along with its outright failings, are awakening Europe’s long-dormant peoples and nations. Across the continent, national-populist movements are rising to challenge the crumbling edifice of a faltering liberal order, steadily dismantling the once-immovable cosmopolitan consensus.

Venner reminds us that history is never static—no defeat is ever truly final. Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of liberal democracy’s “final victory” was quickly countered by Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, which foresaw ideological strife leading to even greater cultural and civilizational clashes. Venner passionately asserts that defeat becomes permanent only when the vanquished abandon all hope, surrendering their heroism and their will to fight. A people’s grasp of their past serves as the compass that guides their future, and through a collective reawakening of European consciousness, the continent’s destiny can still be reclaimed.

In this context, Venner looks to Homer’s Odyssey for inspiration. While Achilles embodies the unrestrained martial ferocity and heroism of Bronze Age Greece, it is Odysseus—through his cunning, patience, and unwavering determination to reclaim his homeland of Ithaca—who offers the truer model for restoring what has been lost. Achilles symbolizes Europe’s imperial age, a time of distant conquests and the capturing of far-off Troys. Odysseus, however, represents a different struggle—the yearning to reclaim a forsaken homeland, echoing the fate of Europeans now fighting to preserve their place as the sands of their existence slip away.

Venner rightly asserts that resistance and regeneration are not the pursuits of the masses but the calling of small, disciplined groups, united by a shared mission and an uncompromising will to power—a revolutionary vanguard. Inspired by the spirit of ancient military orders, such groups forge new aristocracies through struggle, for war remains the ultimate and most unforgiving crucible of selection.

As Europe advances into the twenty-first century, one thing is certain: the future will bear little resemblance to the present. The unimaginable looms on the horizon, ready to reshape the world. Though history bends and twists, the eternal forces of identity, culture, and tradition remain the bedrock of a people’s destiny—most of all for us Europeans, who have long been the architects of our own fate. Venner draws hope from this enduring truth: with 30,000 years of civilization as its foundation, Europe still carries the noble spirit of its ancestors, poised to awaken from its slumber and rise once more—like the heroes of legend—to reclaim its destiny with strength and resolve.