How European history dismantles the claim that shared blood produces shared peace — and what actually holds pluralist societies together
In 1648, after thirty years of war that killed as many as eight million people across Central Europe, the exhausted signatories of the Peace of Westphalia agreed to something genuinely novel: that states would no longer invoke theological authority to justify intervention in one another’s affairs. This was not a triumph of Christian brotherhood. It was an institutional solution to the catastrophic failure of Christian brotherhood — a recognition that shared religion, shared race, and shared language had been insufficient to prevent Europeans from visiting upon one another a devastation that would not be surpassed until the twentieth century. That earlier Europe, and the institutional innovations it produced from desperation, are largely absent from modern narratives of Western civilization. In their place stands a flattering myth: that the West represents a naturally coherent civilization whose values of liberty, reason, and individual dignity emerged organically from a common racial and cultural inheritance.
This essay argues that the myth is not merely historically inaccurate but politically dangerous — and that confronting what actually produced Western stability reveals something far more instructive than any story of natural civilizational unity.I. The Continent That Devoured Itself
The claim that European or “White” civilization possesses an inherent tendency toward peace and rational order collapses when measured against the actual historical record. From the dynastic wars of the medieval period through the confessional violence of the Reformation, the colonial brutalities exported across three continents, and culminating in two world wars within a single generation, Europe was not a civilization in peaceful self-expression. It was, in the historian Mark Mazower’s precise formulation, a “dark continent” — a place where the twentieth century’s worst ideologies were not aberrations but extensions of existing European traditions of nationalism, racial science, and imperial administration.1
The fantasy of racial harmony among Europeans dissolves before a simple list: England fought France for over a century in the Hundred Years’ War. The Thirty Years’ War set Catholic against Protestant across the Holy Roman Empire. The Balkans, famously described by Bismarck as not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier, became the fuse for the First World War — a conflict in which the combatants were overwhelmingly white, Christian, and European. The Second World War produced the Holocaust, which was not an intrusion of barbarism from outside Western civilization but a systematic industrial project carried out by one of Europe’s most educated, cultured, and scientifically advanced nations. If shared racial identity were sufficient to produce civilization, Auschwitz could not exist. That it does exist — historically, irrefutably — is the permanent refutation of the thesis.
“The Holocaust was not an intrusion of barbarism into Western civilization. It was a product of it — carried out by one of Europe’s most educated nations using the continent’s most advanced administrative and industrial tools.”
What the historical record actually shows is that intra-European violence was frequently intensified, not moderated, by proximity of identity. As the political theorist Carl Schmitt observed — and as his own catastrophic political choices illustrated — the logic of the “enemy” is most potent when the distinction between friend and foe is constructed from within a seemingly homogeneous group.2 Religious schism, dynastic rivalry, and linguistic nationalism repeatedly demonstrated that the perception of difference is more politically powerful than any measurable similarity. Europeans who looked nearly identical to one another found sufficient grounds for mass slaughter in differences of confession, dialect, and dynastic allegiance.II. The American Case: Race as a Substitute for Class
The United States inherited these European fractures and added a structural innovation of its own. The racial hierarchy imposed on the American labor market did something that pure economic exploitation alone might not have accomplished: it divided the working class along lines that were visible, legible, and emotionally charged. This is the argument W.E.B. Du Bois made with surgical precision in Black Reconstruction in America (1935), where he introduced the concept of the “psychological wage” — the social status granted to poor white workers that substituted for material advancement and prevented durable solidarity with Black workers who shared their economic condition.3
The result was a political economy uniquely resistant to class-based organizing. In Europe, industrial capitalism produced strong socialist and labor movements in part because the dominant cleavage was economic rather than racial. In the United States, racial identity repeatedly short-circuited class consciousness. Economic anxiety was routed through cultural anxiety. The Reconstruction era, which briefly produced interracial labor and political coalitions across the South, was dismantled precisely when those coalitions threatened the existing order — replaced by the legal architecture of Jim Crow, which restored racial hierarchy as the organizing principle of Southern political economy. As the historian C. Vann Woodward demonstrated, this was not ancient custom but a deliberate political construction — one that had to be built because it was not natural.4
The irony is that this racial fracturing also paradoxically enabled a different kind of integration. Italian, Irish, Jewish, Polish, and Slavic immigrants — groups that had been treated as racially distinct and socially inferior upon arrival — were gradually absorbed into the expanding category of “whiteness.” As David Roediger has argued, this process was not passive assimilation but active identification: immigrant groups sought the wages of whiteness precisely because they understood its political value in a society structured around racial hierarchy.5 The boundaries of who counted as white expanded not from tolerance but from strategic incorporation. Diversity, paradoxically, produced new forms of racial consolidation rather than transcending race entirely.III. Secularism as Institutional Memory
The architects of the American republic were not naive about religion. Several were themselves men of deep faith. But they had studied European history closely enough to understand that Christianity, internally divided among dozens of competing sects, could not serve as the organizing principle of a stable republic. The Constitution’s deliberate silence on theological matters — Article VI’s prohibition on religious tests for public office, and the First Amendment’s dual clauses on establishment and free exercise — reflected hard-won European knowledge: that when religious conviction enters politics as an absolute, theological disagreement becomes total war.
This is precisely why modern Christian nationalism represents not a return to American origins but a repudiation of them. The Founders did not establish a secular constitutional order because they were hostile to religion. They established it because they knew that any attempt to privilege one Christian denomination over others would reproduce in America the confessional violence that had consumed Europe for two centuries. The Constitution was designed, in part, as institutional memory of the Thirty Years’ War.
“The Constitution’s silence on theology was not hostility to religion. It was institutional memory — a structural lesson drawn from two centuries of European confessional war.”
The contemporary appeal to a “Christian nation” founders on the same historical facts that made the Founders cautious. Which Christianity? Whose doctrine? Baptist and Catholic, Evangelical and Mormon, Lutheran and Pentecostal do not simply differ on peripheral questions. They differ on salvation, sacrament, authority, and the relationship between church and state. Europe proved that these differences, when fused with political power, do not remain theological. They become existential. The secular constitutional framework did not suppress religious life in America. It made religious pluralism survivable.IV. Unity Constructed, Not Discovered
The postwar integration of Western Europe tells a similar story. The European Union was not the expression of a latent civilizational unity finally discovering itself. It was a deliberate institutional construction built on the ruins of two self-inflicted catastrophes, sustained by American strategic interest, shaped by nuclear deterrence, and driven by economic interdependence. As the historians Alan Milward and Tony Judt have both shown — from different angles — European integration was a rescue operation, not a homecoming.6 The shared identity that now seems natural to many Europeans was manufactured through institutions, treaties, and the slow accumulation of cross-border economic interest.
This is not a cynical account. It is, in fact, a more hopeful one than the myth of natural unity. If Western stability rested on racial or civilizational essence, it would be both unjustly exclusive and ultimately fragile — dependent on maintaining demographic and cultural homogeneity that was never real to begin with. If it rests instead on institutions — on constitutional law, on secular governance, on economic interdependence, on the deliberate expansion of civic identity — then it is in principle extensible, reformable, and open to populations that European racial mythology would have excluded.
The lesson is not comfortable for any particular political faction. It does not vindicate a simple multiculturalism that imagines diversity as automatically self-organizing toward harmony. Human tribalism is real, historically attested, and politically potent. But it equally does not vindicate the claim that racial or religious homogeneity produces peace. Europeans have been the most devastating refutation of that claim in recorded history. What stabilizes pluralist societies is neither blood nor faith alone, but the institutional capacity to contain the destructive potential of both — to channel tribal impulse into civic competition rather than existential war.The West’s genuine inheritance is not racial. It is institutional and — crucially — it was built in direct response to the West’s own worst impulses. Westphalian sovereignty emerged from religious war. Constitutional secularism emerged from confessional conflict. European integration emerged from continental self-destruction. The rights that modern Western states claim as their proudest achievements were not naturally expressed by Western civilization — they were fought for, often against Western states themselves, by labor movements, suffragettes, civil rights activists, and anti-colonial struggles that the West’s dominant institutions initially opposed.
To claim this heritage honestly is to acknowledge both its genuine achievements and the violence that produced them. It is also to recognize that the institutions which currently embody it — imperfect, contested, always at risk of capture by the tribalism they were designed to contain — are not the automatic expression of any people’s nature. They require active maintenance, intellectual honesty, and the willingness to extend their protections to those who were historically excluded from them.The myth of natural Western unity is not only historically false. It is a distraction from the actual work that stability demands — and has always demanded — of every civilization serious about surviving itself.
Citations
1 Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (Penguin, 1998).
2 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (1932; University of Chicago Press, 1996).
3 W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935; Free Press, 1998), ch. 16.
4 C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (Oxford University Press, 1955).
5 David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Verso, 1991).
6 Alan Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State (1992); Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (Penguin, 2005).