The Case for Continentalism
Allow me to offer the case for continentalism, one that is, unfortunately, still awfully theoretical for Europe.
From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:
New World Order
Steve Sailer
July 16, 2025
Here’s a speech I gave in Germany at an annual conference of European conservative philosophers. It’s not a secret symposium, but these days it’s best to keep a low profile.
I’m not sure what the assembled sages, who mostly reason from what Socrates said to Phaedo, thought about my practice of reasoning largely from gossip column anecdotes about Malibu celebrities, but they laughed politely.
Hi, I’m Steve Sailer. I’m an American opinion journalist from Los Angeles.
I was asked to give a talk on borders and nations, which sounded like something I could manage to opine on, until I remembered that my speech ought to have something to do with Europe, about which I know shamefully little. So I’ve been asking the assembled experts what’s been going on around here since Merkel’s Mistake in 2015. But don’t blame them for my mistakes.
I’m sometimes denounced by The Guardian and The Atlantic for being a wild-eyed extremist who shouldn’t be allowed to speak in public. But I can never quite see why.
One of my beliefs is incredibly boring: that there are trade-offs between larger and smaller polities, so none are perfect for all purposes. Bigger entities, like the United States, can get pushed around less, which is nice. But the residents also have to put up with sharing decision-making with more people with whom they have less in common, which is not as nice.
Hence, there are advantages to localism, regionalism, nationalism, civilizationism, internationalism, and even globalism. As Ronald Reagan tried to explain to a puzzled and wide-eyed United Nations, he and the Soviet premier would work out their differences pretty damn quick if we were facing “an alien threat from outside this world.”
Read the whole thing there.
Steve, great picture of you giving your speech, how was the cocktail?
Theoretical tradeoffs between big and little polities is all well and good, but it was not lost on the architects (Founding Fathers) of the US continental nation that they were getting a nation and a continent together in part because of their shared culture and language.
This is what Europe lacked ever since the Romans stopped enforcing Roman law and Latin language in the prior millennium.
Yeah contiguity is relevant, but if you don't have the language and the rules of those on the opposite bank of the river, the continentalist task is at best an uphill battle. The ancient Romans did quite literally wage that uphill battle and—after wading through blood—did enjoy the fruits of continentalism for a few centuries. More recently, Napoleon and Hitler tried to repeat the Roman feat, but after the uphill-wading-through-blood part, their respective continental moments were both astonishingly fleeting, (and arguably both were done in by perfidious Albion's competing Noncontiguous Imperial scheming).
Ironically, the misdeeds of the past may have inadvertently set the stage for a rebirth of the European continental nation. The British Noncontiguous Empire is now dismantled and discredited, but Anglophone dominance resulting from the World Wars has created a foundational trans-European language and culture once more.* And Merkel's Mistake and its ongoing consequences has provided every European town and village with a concrete, visceral demonstration of the threat to Europeans from aliens, fulfilling Ronald Reagan's formerly bafflingly sci-fi prophecy.
The table is now set. The question (as commenter SJ averred) is, is there a New Napoleon or European Trump who will grasp the chalice and drink to the New Europe? Or will the banquet be devoured by the invaders?
Or will it be a century-long Neo-Roman slog to rebuild, one bloody uphill battle at a time?
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* Yeah, it's a crappy culture, but it's a continentally SHARED crappy culture.