War & Peace Quote by Rocco Buttiglione

Buttiglione’s line is doing two things at once: narrating the end of the Cold War as a moral victory, and rebranding European identity as explicitly civilizational. The phrasing "has to be taken into account" sounds technocratic, almost like a budget note, but it sneaks in a loaded premise: that Communism didn’t just collapse under economic failure or geopolitical pressure; it was defeated by a spiritual counterweight.

The key move is in "the recovery of Europe's Christian roots". That word recovery implies something stolen or suppressed, not merely forgotten. It recasts postwar secularism and left politics as a kind of amnesia, and positions Christianity as the continent’s default setting. In Buttiglione’s telling, Christian identity isn’t a private faith or cultural residue; it’s an engine of historical agency, the "driving force" that mobilized resistance and restored freedom.

Context matters. Buttiglione is a Catholic conservative shaped by Italy’s Christian Democratic tradition and by the post-1989 scramble to define what Europe is for now that "anti-Communism" no longer unifies it. This is also an argument about the EU’s future: who belongs, what values count as foundational, and whether liberal secularism is a culmination or a detour.

Subtext: European unity should be anchored in a moral tradition that can draw boundaries. Immigration, multiculturalism, Turkey’s EU aspirations, and culture-war fights over sexuality and family sit just offstage. Communism becomes the cautionary tale; Christianity becomes the legitimizing inheritance.