When the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni met Donald Trump in the Oval Office on 17 April, she said she wanted to “make the West great again”. Obviously, she was trying to speak Trump’s language. But her use of the phrase was more than simply a tactic. It was a clear sign that there is a faction of the transatlantic far-right that does not so much want to destroy the West, but to reshape it.
Meloni was the only European leader to be invited to Trump’s inauguration in January and the first to meet with him since he imposed tariffs on European countries on 2 April. With the possible exception of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, Meloni is probably more aligned with him than any other head of government in Europe.
Yet although Meloni’s party, Fratelli d’Italia, and Orbán’s, Fidesz, belong to the same grouping in the European Parliament, now called Patriots for Europe, it is the Italian prime minister who has a much more harmonious relationship with the European Union. She is close to European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, with whom Trump has not yet met since returning to the White House. So, with the EU and the United States at odds over trade and European security, it is Meloni who is able to function as something of a mediator.
The current rift between Europe and the US is often seen as a threat to, or even the end of, the West. In an interview with Die Zeit on 15 April, for example, Von Der Leyen declared: “The West as we knew it no longer exists.” But it is not so much a struggle between supporters and opponents of the idea of the West than a battle between different ideas of the West. What Meloni and Trump stand for is not so much an “anti-West” as an “alt-West” – that is, a different, more civilisational idea of what the West is and stands for.
The West is one of those terms that is used as if its meaning were obvious but can actually mean many quite distinct things. At its simplest, it is a geographic concept – a shorthand for Europe and North America. It can mean a strategic community – that is, Nato, or more broadly the US alliance system (including countries beyond the geographic West like Japan). It is also sometimes used in a developmental sense to refer to the world’s advanced economies (which, again, includes Japan).
However, the idea of the West also evokes something much bigger, with a longer history. This is often understood as a normative project going back to the European Enlightenment and the Atlantic revolutions, out of which liberal or representative democracy emerged. But some also see this project as having even deeper roots in a distinct “Judeo-Christian” civilisation. In her meeting with Trump, Meloni made it clear that she had this civilisational idea of the West in mind.
In practice, these various distinct concepts of the West are often conflated. In particular, mainstream Atlanticists like to think that Nato is a alliance of democracies that embodies and defends the normative idea of the West – hence the idea of a story that goes “from Plato to Nato”. Some mainstream Atlanticists even conflate the West with democracy completely – as if the only democracies in the world were part of the West and all states outside the West were authoritarian.
This mainstream Atlanticist version of the West that imagines Nato as an alliance of democracies is the one that Von Der Leyen seems to think no longer exists – both because of Trump’s authoritarianism and the way that he seems to be abandoning Ukraine and distancing the US from its European allies and threatening to withdraw its commitment to their security.
However, what far-right figures mean when they talk about the West is something altogether different. They imagine the West as a civilisation that faces multiple internal and external threats – from “woke” ideology to immigration and rising or revisionist powers. Far from seeing itself as opposing the West, the far right thinks it is defending it.
“The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive,” Trump said in a speech in Warsaw in 2017. “Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilisation in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?”
Mainstream Atlanticists tend to dismiss this position as a distortion of the idea of the West – or even as its opposite. But the idea of West always included a civilisational element. The Cold War, for example, was imagined in civilisational as well as ideological terms. In the preamble to the North Atlantic Treaty – the foundational document of the West as a strategic community – its signatories committed to “safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples”.
Meloni does not just mediate between the EU and the US but also between two different ideas of the West: the Atlanticist vision represented by Von Der Leyen and the civilisational vision represented by Trump. She is far more supportive of Nato than Trump, but more civilisational in her thinking than Von Der Leyen. What it might mean to reconcile the civilisational and strategic ideas of the West, as Meloni seems to be trying to, is not so much ending Nato but repurposing it for a clash of civilisations – that is, a world in which conflict takes place along civilisational lines.
[See also: America’s crisis is the UK’s opportunity]
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