A common line I keep hearing from modern Christian conservatives is that “Western civilisation is rooted in Christian values.” Well, fine, yes. But also, no. Mostly, it’s complicated, which is what people who do bumper-sticker history tend to dismiss as mere details. So let’s go into the details.
Christianity is certainly one of Europe’s important civilisational layers, especially in the medieval world. But “the West” most certainly did not begin with Christianity, nor can its foundations be reduced to it.
Long before Christianity arrived in Europe, the Greeks and Romans had already built many of the foundations of Western thought: philosophy, logic, mathematics, law, political theory, republican ideas, drama, history, ethics (and not all of these are exclusively Western ideas). Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, the Stoics, Cicero and others were part of the house well before Christianity moved in and started rearranging the furniture.
Christianity itself emerged from Judaism inside the Greco-Roman world and absorbed and assimilated a great deal from that world. Medieval Christian thinkers and theologians leaned heavily on Greek metaphysics and Roman law. Ideas like natural law, logos, virtue ethics, rational inquiry and civic duty were not Christian inventions. Stoicism was a huge influence.
Later, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment revived and reinterpreted many pre-Christian traditions, often in direct tension with Church authority. Lucretius and Epicurean thought are a useful example: materialist, empirical, suspicious of fear-driven religion, and focused on reducing suffering in this life rather than preparing for some deferred afterlife.
In fact, modern Western thought draws from many different streams simultaneously: Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, Renaissance humanism, science, secular critique, classical republicanism, and yes, Christianity too.
So I find the claim that Western civilisation is “rooted in Christian values” rather silly. Western civilisation is a layered, quarrelsome inheritance, full of argument, borrowing, rebellion and reinvention. It also absorbed ideas from other civilisations and influenced them in return.
I think it is probably more helpful to think of it as a compost heap, rather than as a refined cathedral. As with most compost heaps, quite a lot grew out of it. Some of it quite good. Some of it rather nasty.
History matters, especially in conflicts where national narratives selectively weaponise memory.
Jaffa was a major Arab city before 1948, and many Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled during the war. That is part of its history and should not be erased or minimised.
Yet there are populist and ahistorical narratives that present Jaffa as some timeless “ancient Palestinian city”. Jaffa is one of the oldest cities in the eastern Mediterranean. It has Canaanite, Egyptian, Jewish, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Ottoman and British Mandate layers. In Greek mythology, Jaffa is tied to the myth of Andromeda and Perseus. After Alexander, it passed through the Hellenistic kingdoms before later becoming part of the Roman and Byzantine eastern Mediterranean.
The city came under Arab-Islamic rule after the 7th-century conquest of the Levant. Over time, through settlement, conversion, language change, trade, local continuity and Ottoman-era urban growth, Jaffa became an Arab-majority city. That is its history. It does not make it an exclusively Arab or Palestinian city “from antiquity”.
Framing it this way also erases the actual context of 1947-48: the civil war after the UN partition vote, attacks and counterattacks between Arab and Jewish militias, the rejection of partition by Arab and Palestinian leadership, and then the invasion by surrounding Arab states after Israel declared independence. The Nakba is what emerged from that war. At roughly the same historical moment, ancient Jewish communities across much of the Middle East and North Africa were themselves expelled, destroyed or forced into flight, with many eventually resettling in Israel.
Some people also invoke Jaffa to misrepresent the EU position regarding textbooks. European criticism of Palestinian textbooks is not about Palestinians mentioning Jaffa. The documented concerns are about antisemitic material, glorification of violence, and maps that erase Israel entirely. These criticisms are valid.
Attempts to collapse centuries of layered history and a complex modern conflict into a single uninterrupted morality tale with only one actor and one source of agency are propaganda. History is more complicated than that. And unless one gets the history right, one risks misdiagnosing both the conflict and its possible solutions.
In the latest The Rest Is Politics podcast, Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell had Yanis Varoufakis as a guest.
Varoufakis is charismatic, articulate, quick, funny, and very good at weaving complex economic arguments into simple moral stories. He often speaks as if the fog has lifted, everything is obvious, and everyone else is either confused, cowardly, compromised, or secretly agrees with him.
The episode presented him, implicitly at least, as a well-meaning Cassandra: the economist who warned Europe that austerity would fail, was ignored by unimaginative technocrats, and was later proved right. Ok, there is some truth in that. The Greek bailout architecture was flawed. Greece’s debt dynamics were unsustainable. Austerity in a collapsing economy was destructive. Even the IMF later acknowledged serious failures in the original Greek programme, including delayed debt restructuring, over-optimistic assumptions, and inadequate attention to the politics of adjustment.
But that is only one part of the story.
The real question is not simply whether Varoufakis was right about austerity and the creditors were wrong. The harder question is whether his own strategy in 2015 was credible, responsible, and safe for the Greek people. Greece was insolvent and illiquid without official support. There were no easy solutions.
There is a serious tension between Varoufakis the co-author of A Modest Proposal for Resolving the Eurozone Crisis and Varoufakis the finance minister in 2015.
The earlier proposal, written with Stuart Holland and James Galbraith, was a serious eurozone reform plan. It called for bank recapitalisation through European mechanisms, limited debt conversion, investment-led recovery through the EIB and EIF, and emergency social solidarity measures. It was Keynesian in spirit, but institutionally cautious. It tried to work through existing European institutions and avoided presenting itself as a Grexit manual.
Varoufakis argued convincingly that the eurozone had created a dangerous structure: monetary union without proper fiscal union, national banking crises tied to sovereign debt crises, and creditor discipline without sufficient investment or democratic accountability. Much of what was in that proposal made sense.
But once in office, his posture changed. The 2015 strategy he actually pursued was much more confrontational. It relied on outright rejecting the old bailout logic, threatening default, and forcing Europe to choose between accepting debt restructuring or risking Greek collapse. That strategy might have had more leverage in 2010 or 2011, when European banks were far more exposed to Greece and the eurozone firewalls were weaker. By 2015, the wider euro-area financial system had been largely protected. Greek default would still have been serious, but the immediate damage would have fallen mainly on Greece itself.
That is a key point the interview did not pursue. Varoufakis appears to have treated Grexit, or at least Greek default, as a threat the creditors would not dare allow. By 2015, they were actually much more willing to call the bluff.
Being right about the dangers of debt and austerity does not make brinkmanship with Greek banks, pensions, deposits, imports, and salaries a responsible strategy. It was clear to everyone that some fiscal adjustment was unavoidable. The easily defensible criticism of the creditor programme is that the timing, scale, composition, and lack of early debt restructuring made the adjustment far more destructive than it needed to be.
The interview should have pressed him on the obvious questions. What exactly was the fallback plan if the banks collapsed? How would a parallel payment system have operated? How would pensioners have been paid? How would medicines and imports have been protected? How would deposits have been defended? Was this a credible Plan B, or a way of making rupture sound more controlled than it really was?
Rory and Alastair should also have challenged his claim that people such as Lagarde and Draghi agreed with him. Many serious economists and officials eventually accepted that Greek debt was unsustainable and that Europe’s austerity-heavy approach was badly designed. But accepting the need for debt relief is not the same as endorsing Varoufakis’s tactics, his reading of creditor incentives, or his Plan B. He often turns partial vindication on debt sustainability into much broader vindication of his overall conduct.
In conversation, Varoufakis can often sound pragmatic and common-sensical. But his writings and politics point to a more radical political agenda. He is not merely arguing for reforms, higher taxes and better regulation of capitalism. He has described himself as a Marxist of sorts, has said that capitalism and democracy are structurally incompatible, developed a theory of “technofeudalism,” and proposed radical changes to corporate ownership, finance, digital platforms, and money. One can agree or disagree with that agenda, but it should have been made more visible.
Alastair could have challenged him from the centre-left: yes, austerity was destructive; yes, Greece needed debt relief; yes, the eurozone was badly designed. But why risk a banking collapse without a durable majority, a credible coalition in Europe, and a tested administrative plan?
Rory could have challenged him from the centre-right: if you talk about parallel liquidity, fiscal money, or a public payment system that can be converted into a new drachma, why would depositors keep their money in Greek banks? Why would investors trust the state? How do you protect contracts, pensions, small businesses, and property rights during such uncertainty?
The Greek crisis was complicated, divisive, and deeply damaging. Varoufakis wasn't simply one brave economist facing a room full of cruel technocrats, as he likes to present himself. The important story here is about weak leverage, institutional constraints, political miscalculation, bank runs, default risk, and the dangers of turning economic theory into negotiating theatre.
The missed opportunity in this episode was that Rory and Alastair seemed too impressed by the performance and not sceptical enough of the narrative.
Being right about austerity is not a license to gamble with rupture.
The right to protest is a core civil liberty, and restrictions on it should be narrow, evidence-based, and focused on conduct: violence, intimidation, harassment, incitement, or unlawful support for proscribed terrorist organisations.
Where organisers have demonstrable links to proscribed groups, or where specific conduct crosses into incitement or intimidation, that is a matter for law enforcement. Police can impose conditions on routes, timing, and location. Offences can be investigated and prosecuted. But those cases do not justify blanket bans on political protest.
At the same time, a cumulative atmosphere of intimidation cannot be dismissed. If Jewish citizens avoid parts of their own cities, hide visible signs of Jewish identity, or feel abandoned by public institutions, that is a grave failure. Antisemitism is real, historically deep, and the surge in anti-Jewish hate cannot be explained away as opposition to Israel. Criticism of Israeli policy is legitimate. Harassment of Jewish individuals or targeting of Jewish institutions is antisemitism, and the state must act decisively to protect citizens.
Concern about antisemitism also cannot be used to suppress criticism of Israel or public support for Palestinian rights. Institutional bans, harsh employment consequences, and legal threats can become disproportionate and illiberal. Both evasions should be rejected in a liberal democracy.
The same clarity is needed with Islamism. Islamism is an authoritarian political ideology that seeks to impose a religious order through state power, coercion, or violence. It should be named as clearly as far-right extremism, white supremacy, or any other form of political extremism.
This must be clear: Muslims, Islam, Islamism, and jihadism are not interchangeable. Muslims must not be treated as collectively responsible for Islamist movements. Many Muslims, including reformers, dissidents, secular Muslims, and ex-Muslims, are themselves often targets of Islamist coercion. Anti-Muslim discrimination in employment, housing, policing, and public life is also real and unacceptable.
The cases are not identical, but they do not need to be identical for a consistent liberal standard to apply.
Jews face antisemitism. Muslims face anti-Muslim bigotry. Islamist extremism is real. Far-right extremism is real. Peaceful protest is a right. Intimidation and incitement are not.
A consistent liberal position protects speech, defends protest, polices conduct, names threats accurately, and rejects collective blame wherever it appears.
Civil liberties are not self-enforcing. If we are unwilling to defend them in difficult times, we should not assume we will keep them.
