By defending, strengthening and reforming the West
Faced with the crises upending our societies, it is necessary to engage in structured reflection to create a movement capable of thinking and building the West of tomorrow, founded on Reason, in respect of our heritage and our history. We must lay down the philosophical and political framework needed to structure our actions, unite our forces, and defend a West capable of innovating, withstanding crises, and preserving its essential values.
To do this, we take a critical look at the causes that led to the current situation, in order to transform what underlies the dynamics leading us toward the abyss. Our approach is above all ideological. It consists of understanding the errors of the past, detaching ourselves from the frameworks that have driven the harmful actions across the entire spectrum of modern politics, and building a new intellectual and analytical body of thought — coherent, rigorous, and suited to the 21st century — to guide our political action of structural reform.
All political action is founded on an observation — one that, before being a simple observation, is a concern, an intimate worry that compels us to act. My observation is that the West is living through the end of a historical parenthesis: its democratic golden age is fading, amid the indifference of a disenchanted world that paradoxically seeks refuge in new forms of obscurantism to find meaning. We can see a series of imminent collapses taking shape on the horizon — which today’s younger generations will likely experience in their lifetime — and which I hope we can, as much as possible, avoid.
These collapses are the symptoms of a deeper malady, whose meaning, origins, and logic we must understand. They impose themselves on us with the force of historical necessity: first, environmental and climate collapse, driven by a predatory and unchecked capitalism, foreshadowing a largely uninhabitable planetary biotope; then, the collapse of democratic governance models, unable to adapt to the crises, mutations, and economic chaos caused by the destabilization of our ecosystem; and finally, the collapse of our Western civilization itself — a civilization that carried an optimistic vision of humanity, an ideal of progress, and a set of values that elevated and celebrated our dignity in order to affirm it, such as freedom, creativity, and the cultivation of our conscience. Our approach is undeniably pessimistic and catastrophist in its observation, but profoundly optimistic in our will to face it.
My concern is not based on a feeling. On the contrary, I seek to ground my thinking in a systemic, scientific approach. As paradoxical or surprising as it may seem, I am not always in agreement with my own conclusions — at first glance. Because rigorous research comes to confront my certainties, which I make it a point of honor to adapt in light of current knowledge. Truth is a process, one that finds its meaning in the complementarity of perceptions and disciplines. I affirm that it is only by understanding the mechanisms that govern our societies and our environment that we can adjust our opinions and orient our actions with relevance. Science, through its rigor and demands, forces us to confront our hypotheses with reality, to test our certainties, and to accept that certain truths may surprise us, or even disturb us. It is dangerous to settle for hasty reactions. We face complex realities, embedded in invisible but real systems, in historical dynamics of cause and effect that the naked eye does not always perceive. The complex problems we face cannot be solved with simple solutions or superficial measures. Putting a bandage on a deep wound will not close it. We must act on the root, understand the system as a whole, and build an ideological framework capable of treating the cause rather than the symptom.
Far from being limited to intuition or passing indignation, our approach is rooted in a proven method. Its durability allows us not to give in to panic, but to transform worry into a plan of action, fear into anticipation, and understanding into collective responsibility. Science, applied to politics and society, then becomes a tool of prevention, a lever for reflection, and perhaps the last rampart before the acceleration of collapses completely overtakes us.
Thus, the work of the Meadows report and the pioneers of systems dynamics have shown that every system — whether ecological, economic, or social — has limits. When a system exceeds these critical thresholds, it does not collapse progressively and linearly: it enters a zone of extreme and sudden turbulence, where adaptation becomes difficult, if not impossible. Conditions worsen faster than our capacity to anticipate, and every delay in action comes at a heavy price. This scientific observation reminds us that crises are not isolated accidents but the inevitable consequences of ignorance or negligence in the face of the system’s laws. We are, today, one minute to midnight before barbarism. The urgency is total.
A succession of crises — environmental, technological, demographic, migratory, and finally political — threatens to erase the legacy of the Enlightenment that carried our democratic and republican consolidations. Each crisis feeds the next, creating a dynamic that could lead to civilizational collapse and the emergence of a relentless neo-feudal technocratic dictatorship. To ignore or poorly study these dynamics is to risk sliding into a regime similar to China’s, where today’s technologies can — in the hands of a providential man, a party, or a supposedly protective State facing chaos — degenerate into total social control, where all opposition becomes impossible. The dangers are therefore manifold. Our biotope is collapsing, our economic system is spiraling out of control, and already the self-proclaimed saviors are rising, impatient and eager to sacrifice everything to impose their laws. They restrict our freedoms, erect a dictatorship “for our own good,” or impose a pious way of life, hoping to convince God to grant us salvation. Reason is under siege. Democracy is faltering. And the Enlightenment no longer shines. It is imperative to organize and act.
We must prepare a Western republican revolution, capable of weathering the crises to come. This means providing a solid framework of analysis, allowing us to act with clarity and anticipate a future that looks bleak. Thus we will be able to withstand the turbulence, preserve our essence, and enable ourselves to face the emerging empires that seek their revenge on History — and which do not in the least share our love of freedom and democracy. Surviving without preserving our essence would have the futility of an empty shell. Surviving by integrating into a new autocratic or totalitarian empire is not surviving at all. We must confront crises, the aspiring dictators within, and the geopolitical adversaries who have sensed the opportunity. This is why I am so attached to our political culture.
Defending the legacy of the Enlightenment is not simply an intellectual battle: it is a civilizational imperative. Since Antiquity, our thinkers have conceptualized, thought through, and experimented with a culture that elevates Freedom as a fundamental principle, through bold experiments that led to the French Revolution and our contemporary constitutional regimes — which, alas, are now but a shadow of the revolution that gave rise to them. We believe it is essential to preserve this intellectual tradition. We are the guardians of a hope and of an optimistic conception of humanity, in which man is a creative, conscious, and exploratory being — an individual endowed with duties, but also with rights arising from an inalienable dignity.
If we let this flame go out, we may never again have the historic opportunity to revive it. To achieve this, we must first undertake an introspection before we can work toward a new era in which the West illuminates and guides. For this, a historical and systemic approach is essential.
I am weary of the left-right dichotomy that governs sterile debates. Contemporary politics is reduced to simplistic reactions: rejection of the rich, rejection of the poor, rejection of immigrants, rejection of conservatives, rejection of modernists — with the illusion that simple solutions like taxing the rich or closing borders would be enough to solve the crises. I am categorical: structural problems require structural reforms. Neither the right nor the left can offer lasting solutions, because they lack a global vision and a systemic understanding of the forces that structure society.
The very concept of left and right appears today as an outdated notion, one that only made sense at a specific moment in history, when, in the wake of the French Revolution, at the Constituent Assembly, deputies arranged themselves into two camps, left and right of the president, according to their vision of power and society: on the right, those who defended order, tradition, and royalist power; on the left, those who carried the spirit of progress, equality, and republican power. They have since recycled themselves, between those who claim to protect our heritage — the right — and those who claim to be the bearers of humanity’s salvation — the left. Let us be clear: they do neither. They remain, above all, frozen in their interpretations, unable to question themselves, betraying the ideals they claim or the goals they attribute to themselves. Worse still, the right and the left have each, in turn and in their own way, contributed to the crises that today threaten our survival, our prosperity, and our culture, all while continuing to sterilely oppose one another, blaming each other, convinced they are History’s chosen ones.
Let us broadly outline our current, contemporary interpretation — one we will explore further in future articles, in its economic and historical aspects. At the heart of the West, and more specifically in its political hyper-center made up of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, and Spain, an ideological power emerged from the capitalist bourgeoisie born of the sister French and American revolutions. Driven by the cult of free trade and productivism, this liberal power shaped a consumerist system blind to its own destructive consequences. In this logic, the cost of production never truly accounted for the cost of destruction: industrial supply chains were built while ignoring the damage inflicted on the environment. The carnage was not limited to nature — it also reached democracy itself. Under the guise of progress, the democratic principle gradually submitted to the primacy of growth and the religion of GDP. In this drive toward social hegemony, inequalities widened, despite a few interludes in which social struggles managed to build a fleeting social-liberal order, offering the system the moral legitimacy it lacked to endure until today.
Faced with the contradictions of the central-liberal system, oppositions gradually formed on its left and right, today undergoing a process of radicalization that has led them to call themselves the far left and the far right. These extremes are even becoming majorities and are shaking our societies. However, let us be clear and lucid: they are not the problem. The extremes are only the consequences of the chaos generated by liberal economic ideology. Political extremisms are attempted solutions that, despite their intentions, hasten the collapse of the system through the fierce opposition they provoke. They present alternative proposals, but these paradoxically contribute to the crisis of governance: these forces define themselves above all by their mutual opposition, to the point that their actions often become absurd and aberrant. They seek less to solve concrete problems than to distinguish themselves from one another, losing sight of the coherence between the question they face and the goal they aspire to reach, in line with the values they claim. We focus here on the critique of these political extremes, because the centrist ground does not challenge the established system, whereas we place ourselves within the same anti-system stance, but as an alternative to today’s political extremes, from which I wish to distinguish myself.
The far right has a dual claim, on one hand economic, on the other cultural. Economically, it rises up against the inequalities created by the central-liberal system, without however challenging the foundations of this system, but rather one of its consequences. It has long opposed immigration, invoking economic and cultural reasons. But these arguments proved insufficient: closing borders is not enough to solve problems deeply rooted in the capitalist system itself. Immigrants did not come to “steal jobs”; on the contrary, liberals encouraged them to come in order to support labor and production. The far right, in its contemporary expression, remains a prisoner of a conservative economic vision: it does not challenge capitalism, but merely seeks to close it in on itself through protectionist withdrawal. This interpretation of reality runs counter to our scientific understanding of the capitalist world-system, which explains the causes of its emergence and — from now on — of its collapse. The risk of aligning with the far right is remaining blind to the ongoing collapse, for lack of grasping the scale and true nature of what is unfolding.
It is in the cultural dimension that the other side of its claim plays out. While the liberal order fostered a bourgeois cosmopolitanism and the arrival of immigrant labor to support the economy, the left, for its part, promoted the opening of societies to immigrants, motivated by principles of humanism and social justice. In this context, despite its economic irrelevance, the far right — or rather the far rights — found fertile ground to develop in reaction to an understanding between the liberal center and the left, which was presented as a pro-immigration axis undermining traditional and national cultures. The far right could not break through without this convergence of economic frustration with the perception of a cosmopolitan culture imposed by a system that regards the individual above all as a consumer or a workforce, rather than as a being endowed with conscience and cultural heritage. My will is to free ourselves from the subordination of the individual as an economic agent, and instead to rehabilitate him as a demiurgic being: a thinker, a sensitive being, a creator.
This conception of innovative Man diverges from conservative currents. I share with the political extremes a common concern about an established system we judge to be destructive, but our paths diverge as soon as it comes to understanding its causes and envisioning remedies. The far right is concerned with preserving an old order, erecting tradition as a bulwark against change. Yet we must innovate. Let us first address this point of cultural divergence with the right, before distinguishing ourselves from the left. The right perceives cultures as fixed entities, to be preserved in a form of original purity. Unlike me, on the contrary, who claims the legacy of the Enlightenment, which erected Reason — against blind tradition — as the driving principle of the new society it called for. That said, I do not seek to negate our history: I recognize that it carried the seeds of our freedom, and it is by rehabilitating it that we will be able to build on a sound and solid foundation, in order to avoid the disasters of communist experiments that sought to artificially and abruptly impose the advent of a new kind of human being. It is no accident that democracy, individualism, or modern science established themselves as structuring principles of European societies, rather than in societies such as China, India, or the Arab world.
This is why I denounce populism, which follows a reactive and emotional reflex, driven by fear and ethnicism. Unable to offer a clear and coherent vision of the future, it merely denounces without building, rallies the masses without thinking: it does not understand history, but instrumentalizes it to reassure us. It would have us change no more, innovate no more, dare no more. Yet behind the discourse of past greatness, right-wing populism betrays a fundamental ignorance of our civilizational heritage, which it reduces to its military conquests or its folklore. Our civilization is not limited to eating pork, drinking wine, or waging crusades; it also expresses itself through the building of solid institutions, support for the arts, creativity, self-expression, and the individuality of its citizens. This is why I oppose the exaltation of force and power by populists, who claim to save democracy while mistreating it. I state it plainly: democratic practice is at the heart of our political culture, as is the capacity to undertake bold transformations.
Salvation will not come from a providential leader, able to save society through an iron fist. It depends on carefully considered reforms that honor our values and our civic history. I recognize that reforming democracy and its institutions is an arduous task, but failing to achieve it, any action will remain in vain. This mission has not yet been accomplished. This is why, for lack of a clear alternative, populism occupies the void and thrives on the inability to offer a genuine collective project. Our project — now become collective — will have succeeded when we have achieved the development of an alternative model to neoliberal capitalism and liberal democracy, in which reason, justice, and creation regain primacy over the merchant and financial aristocracy, lobbying, and corruption.
Finally, let us note that right-wing figures are by no means “Westernists.” Most of them are national sovereigntists, opportunists seeking their fifteen minutes of fame, reactionaries — in the original sense of the term — who respond to events without vision: as if simply guarding against the world would be enough to prosper. I sound the alarm: our dependence as a modern society is such — and the world’s growing hostility toward our models — that we have no choice but to unite and build an ambitious common policy to face it. Let us not forget: if Western states currently represent, according to demographic classifications, up to 20% of the population, our states will represent less than 10% of the world’s population by the end of the century. We must achieve a Western synthesis, rather than falling into disunity under the guise of a marriage of convenience that would supposedly serve the purpose, when in reality it would be exploited and manipulated by foreign powers. Worse than a mistake, nationalist withdrawal is a betrayal that will condemn us.
I believe that the true nature of Western culture lies precisely in its capacity to adapt, to reinvent itself without denying itself: a unifying foundation where, thanks to the freedom and boldness of the mind, society evolves at the pace of our changing understanding of the world, as science reveals it to us. It is therefore a matter of progressing, but never compromising ourselves. I believe that through its creative power, Humanity moves toward a progress of which it remains the master — just as it is, ultimately, the master of its own destiny. As paradoxical as it may seem, it is on this point that I diverge from the left, despite our shared inscription, until recently, in a common intellectual tradition: critical sociology, historical materialism, systems thinking, a secular approach, and political voluntarism. Yet the divergences are now irreconcilable.
The contemporary new left, enamored of grand ideals but weakened by its rigidity and dogmatism, locks itself into symbolic battles that offer no answer to the deep crises upending our world. It has become deconstructionist and relativist, deconstructing to the point of leading to anarchy or nihilism, sinking into the rejection of all authority. Obsessed with rejecting established structures, it relativizes what should constitute our fundamental values, fails to recognize the uniqueness and relevance of our heritage, and confuses compromise with capitulation in the name of the convergence of struggles. It claims to work for emancipation, but in reality weakens democracy, unable to uphold its own values, which it corrupts.
By seeking to unite with all the oppressed, it claims to break with the West, driven by an uprooted purity that could apply to anyone. All historical meaning fades away, reducing reality to a mere superposition of power relations, oppressors and oppressed, where the oppressed, by their very condition, would always be right against the oppressor. Unfortunately, often two evils clash, and neither can be wished for. It is on this point that I affirm a singular and distinct course: I carry the ambition to bring about the West as a political project, rather than working toward its negation. I believe in the possibility of building, adapting, and defending a heritage capable of guiding our societies through crises, reconciling Freedom, Reason and Progress.
La nouvelle gauche contemporaine, éprise de grands idéaux mais affaiblie par sa rigidité et son dogmatisme, s’enferme dans des combats symboliques qui n’apportent aucune réponse aux crises profondes qui bouleversent notre monde. Elle est devenue déconstructiviste et relativiste, déconstruisant jusqu’à mener à l’anarchie ou au nihilisme, sombrant dans le refus de toute autorité. Obsédée par le rejet des structures établies, elle relativise ce qui devrait constituer nos valeurs fondamentales, ne reconnaît pas l’unicité et la pertinence de notre héritage, et confond compromis et compromission au nom de la convergence des luttes. Elle se dit œuvrer pour l’émancipation, mais en réalité fragilise la démocratie, incapable d’assumer ses propres valeurs qu’elle corrompt.
En cherchant à s’unir à tous les opprimés, elle prétend rompre avec l’Occident, portée par une pureté déracinée qui pourrait s’appliquer à tous. Tout sens historique s’efface pour réduire le réel à une simple superposition de rapports de force, d’oppresseurs et d’opprimés, où l’opprimé, par sa condition même, aurait toujours raison sur l’oppresseur. Malheureusement, souvent deux maux s’affrontent, et aucun ne peut être souhaité. C’est sur ce point que j’affirme un cap singulier et distinct : je porte l’ambition de faire advenir l’Occident comme projet politique, plutôt que d’œuvrer à sa négation. Je crois en la possibilité de construire, d’adapter et de défendre un héritage capable de guider nos sociétés face aux crises, en conciliant Liberté, Raison et Progrès.
Why adopt a Westernist approach rather than a universalist one? The world-system is beginning to falter. Ideally, to replace it, a change of global order would be needed, an international revolution on the scale of the upheavals to come. While remaining optimistic, we must refuse to succumb to naivety. The political, social, and historical conditions are not in place for such a global movement to emerge. No universal momentum can today overcome particular divides, dogmas, traditions, bigotries, nationalisms, or religious forces. On the contrary, nations are closing in on themselves: armies are being rebuilt, borders are being reinforced, protectionist instincts dominate. Multilateralism is faltering. Under the pressure of climate disruption and the end of globalization, the transformations of the world-system will inevitably herald an era of hegemonic rivalries, resource wars, and old grudges resurrected. Yet, at the heart of this planetary disintegration, a historic opportunity presents itself. The West is the place where humanity has been able to experiment with Freedom, Secularism, and Reason — where it has learned to free itself from fatalism and to rise through the mind. Building a Western bastion carrying progress and freedom is no longer an option, but a necessity. For upon its survival depends the possibility, after the collapse, of rebuilding a new order that will herald a new humanity.
It is possible to define an alternative current, escaping the fixed dogmas of the left and the drifts of right-wing populism, forging a new Westernism capable of meeting our challenges. Our path would be social, ecumenical and universalist, pragmatic in its choices, aware of the historical roots of the West — from Hellenism integrated into Romanity, to Christianity, to the love of freedom and Reason. A current capable of recognizing all the components that have shaped our civilization, drawing lessons from them, and proposing concrete and considered action, guided by rhetoric and critical thought, rather than by mere reaction or nostalgia.
I am fully aware that pragmatism is essential to success, and that we must escape the illusion of an ideal liberalism, often presented as neutral or universal. In reality, a naive liberalism has never existed: wherever it has taken hold, it has done so by force. The market is intrinsically violent, oppressive, never impartial. It transforms human relations into competitive relations, subjects societies to logics of power and profit, and imposes its rules on those unprepared to conform to them. This reality shows that economic idealism has always been tempered, often contradicted, by a brutal pragmatism. The Arab democratic revolutions provide a striking example. They failed because they were not carried by an organized movement capable of structuring and channeling the energy of the uprisings. Too often, they relied on the hope that the army or existing institutions would take up the people’s demands, or they ran into internal contradictions and opposing forces within the revolution itself. Without coordination, strategy, or long-term vision, passion alone fades, giving way to failure and fragmentation.
This is why we must build an organized, pragmatic and strategic movement, capable of uniting all facets of the West so that it becomes whole, integral and resilient. This movement will not settle for spontaneous reactions or slogans: it will have to articulate Western experiences, institutions, values and traditions into a coherent and operative vision. It will mean combining freedom and reason with structure and discipline, reconciling intellectual boldness with political action, to create a foundation capable of withstanding crises and guiding change.
