Europe Cannot Defend Its Values by Teaching Them

A recent Danish debate began when Hizb ut-Tahrir urged Muslim secondary-school students to reject what it described as a "shameless and boundless" Danish youth culture and to "stand firm" in their Islamic identity, carrying it "with pride".

The clash exposed the distance between an Islamist movement and Denmark’s majority culture. But it also exposed a problem internal to liberal democracy itself: we say we believe in freedom, equality, democracy. Ask what that requires in practice, and the answers get murky fast.

That is what makes the comparison instructive. What is at stake is not a clash between one set of values and another, but between two different ways of relating to values as such. Hizb ut-Tahrir treats its values as a fixed standard against which reality is measured: where reality departs from the values, reality must change.

Liberal democracy works differently, and pragmatically so. The underlying principle is closer to Groucho Marx’s old line: "Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others." Freedom, equality, and democracy remain fundamental, but their meaning is worked out through political conflict, legislation, and compromise. This has been one of liberal democracy’s great achievements: a society where people can disagree fundamentally. But the achievement has a cost Europe is now confronting.

This Groucho Marx-like pragmatism was woven directly into the institutional grammar of the European Union. When "United in diversity" became the motto, it named something Europe had just learned the hard way.

The 20th century demonstrated the dangers of political orders that claimed to possess a final answer to the organisation of society. Fascism and state communism subordinated political plurality to comprehensive doctrines of this kind. What eventually prevailed in Western Europe was a different political grammar: politics as continuous adjustment rather than the execution of a final answer. Freedom mattered, but so did security; equality mattered, but so did efficiency.

This is exactly where liberal democracies are starting to struggle – as already foreseen by Hizb ut-Tahrir’s founder, Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani. In The System of Islam, he argues that the fundamental flaw of the Western order is that it lets human beings determine for themselves the order they live under, while keeping religion and social life separate. The result, he claims, is that the principle of utility – and with it capitalism’s ideology – ends up ruling society by default. Islam, by contrast, is an ideology that "addresses all of life’s affairs": a system of values to which reality – law, institutions, social conduct – must conform.

Hizb ut-Tahrir thus becomes an uncomfortable mirror, in which Europe’s own problem stands exposed.

The return of the value question

With growing religious radicalisation, war in Ukraine, and pressure from authoritarian powers, Europe is waking up to an old question of values. Tellingly, leaders now talk not only of military rearmament but of civic, moral, even spiritual rearmament.

Denmark is a striking case, precisely because the call came from the Social Democrats – a party that has for decades embodied a strongly pragmatic political tradition, measuring politics by what works, what creates employment, and what is useful. Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, gave the theme its clearest expression in 2025, pairing military rearmament with spiritual rearmament and invoking schools, universities, and the national church, while also sparking a broader debate over whether Danes would still be willing to die for Denmark.

France arrived earlier, with a different model. In January 2024, Emmanuel Macron called for réarmement civique, arguing France needed to relearn a shared culture: "Every generation of French people must learn what the Republic means: a history, duties, rights, a language, a shared imaginary, and a deep sense of respect and commitment."

The two models are rooted in different political traditions. In its Danish formulation, spiritual rearmament has tended towards a version in which external threat becomes an important source of internal cohesion. Rearmament thereby becomes a question of belonging. The contradiction is that values associated with the critique of power – not least those of the Enlightenment – are turned into instruments for producing cohesion around power.

The French response points to a different historical possibility, rooted in the Third Republic’s tradition of the école republican and articulated by one of the Republic’s major intellectual figures, the sociologist Émile Durkheim.

Writing as Christianity was losing its grip on general education, Durkheim argued that modern society must take over some of religion’s old role in transmitting values through school. He pointed to three elements: discipline (regulating oneself by rules rather than impulse), attachment (feeling bound to something beyond oneself), and – decisively – autonomy: modern individuals should not simply submit to a moral order but understand why its rules deserve their assent.

This exemplifies how the republican tradition answers a question that Hizb ut-Tahrir also poses: how do values become active points of orientation in people’s lives? Among the many differences between the two approaches, the most fundamental concerns the source of authority. Hizb ut-Tahrir locates that authority in revealed truth. The republican tradition grounds it in individuals’ understanding and active engagement with the reasons underlying moral obligations and collective attachments. On this view, commitment to a value involves understanding why it ought to bind us.

After the pragmatic century

After Denmark launched its call for "spiritual rearmament", one thing became clear quickly: its institutions were not built for this kind of task. The education system is organised around pragmatic assumptions – relevance, utility, measurable outcomes. Faced with spiritual rearmament, it responded in the way such systems tend to respond: "spiritual rearmament" became a little more teaching about democracy, history, and cultural heritage.

But knowing more about values does not change their status. One can know a great deal about democracy without feeling any duty to defend it. One can know the constitution by heart without feeling bound by it, and pass an exam on European values without those values having any significant bearing on how one lives.

This is not a Danish accident. It is what happens, structurally, once pragmatism has become the default grammar of institutions.

A republican model centred on autonomy is not a call to organise the whole of society – everyday life, politics, business, and family – around one fixed system of values, Hizb ut-Tahrir-style. However, liberal democracy does require institutions governed by standards that cannot be reduced to utility. Research and education are central among them.

In research, whether a claim is true must be allowed to outweigh whether it is useful. In education, the task is to form individuals capable of attachment to a democratic order while retaining the autonomy to judge that order for themselves. Pragmatism’s usual questions – What works? What can be implemented? What pays? – must therefore encounter limits.

Concretely, that means protecting universities and school curricula from short-term political cycles, and maintaining clear boundaries between funding and findings, so that governments and donors cannot purchase preferred conclusions.

Only by building institutions in which rational argument takes precedence over utility can we prove al-Nabhani wrong when he claims that "there are no ethical, spiritual or humanitarian values in Western civilisation. Instead, there are only materialistic and utilitarian ones."