The Attempt to form a "Globalism of The West"
The rebirth of "European Identity" has been greatly exaggerated
About 12 minutes into his “rousing” speech at the Munich Security Conference last week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio (assuredly a holder of many other titles and roles) said outright the Europe and the United States should remain allied for particularly mercantilist ends: developing space commerce, maintaining western mineral supply chains, and supporting each other in gaining market access to the growing consumer base of the global south.
Further on in his speech, Rubio uses the aphorism of how the concept of cowboys actually comes from Spain - much as it is identified as American. The “Vaqueros” were horseback cattle drivers of old who took methods developed there and brought them to the new world, but so many were of mixed origin - African, indigenous, Caribbean, mestizo, and yes also eventually Scotch-Irish.
It is an interesting historical rhyme that the son of Cuban emigres would find himself in Germany speaking about the need for vitality to return to the West, and indeed presenting many thinly veiled arguments for the West to return to a sort of mercantilist imperialism of old in order to propel itself into the future. Indeed, if one were to extend his perspective on a much more “scaled” timeframe, we would find a sort of subtle unity among people of European origin in that most ancestry depends on the spread of Yamnaya peoples, the mingling of eastern and western steppe herders, the taming of horses and the standardization of dairy as a large portion of the diet. Indeed, in the era of crusades and conquests, these advantages often played out favorably for Europeans - knights and explorers were on average taller, stronger, fitter and more aggressive than their Central Asian, Arab and North African counterparts, which led (following a great deal of consumptive commerce, one might note) to the expansion of European influence following the era of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the reorganization of European life around the sort of industrial rationalism with which it is so strongly identified today.
And yet, that sort of transition is also what has led to the exhaustion of “European Races”, the degradation of the bonds of community, of mutual trust, of feast days and of social reciprocity in favor of markets have ultimately led the West to its “business model” of today: constant importation of new demographics and working classes, eager to achieve some sort of dream that was restricted to the successful workers of previous generations, but ultimately finding themselves in a new land where a deep alienation persists as to the nature of one’s own cultural, national and ethnic identity.
Easily enough, the analgesic for this historically has been the concept of “rugged individualism” or “the frontier”. Indeed, the closing of the frontier (dated to 1890) is what historian Frederick Jackson Turner identified in 1893 as a signal of the declining vitalism of the West. While technology and culture have continued to evolve, the strong motivation, the ambition, the ruthlessness which so markedly defined “European Man” (again in quotes, you see) between 1450 and 1850 also gives way to the need for stability, for familiarity, for community - marked in no little symbolism by the rise of socialism and social democratic movements in those same countries that exhausted themselves on the pyre of imperialism in the centuries before.
Again we are talking about Cowboys in order to convince ourselves of Western Vitalism, but the truth is the west has given up. Indeed Rubio represents a sort of newcomer class to the “West” - previously isolated Latinos who know make up a significant component of both US demography and the more aggressive end of the Republican party - and have returned to Europe to lecture them (more gently this time) on their values.
Just like Kennedy represented the rise of Irish Americans, with his team practicing plenty of the dirty tricks necessary for him to win. He too was forced to buy into the pre-existing “Anglo-Saxon” power structure, and save for the exception of the military industrial complex that probably killed him, his fresh blood did add vitalism to a broader movement, but the aftermath only brought on more decay.
Apocryphally, there are Twitter Race Science™ stories of those in developing nations demanding a sort of recolonization, whether in South Africa or elsewhere, because “white people managed things better”. Unfortunately for both parties, this is an imaginary claim - those white people are long gone, and they were only a measly portion of them to begin with! The decline of a natural aristocracy leads to decay and feeble attempts at revanchism like what Secretary Rubio was practicing last week, and while they may sustain nations in the short run, in the long run, the inevitable remains. Perhaps centuries from now, a new leadership class will arise to reintroduce vitality, but it certainly will be somewhere else on earth, and they certainly won’t be talking so much about cowboys.