Like several other notable German intellectuals of his generation (Ratzinger was born in 1927 and was reluctantly conscripted into the Wehrmacht during the Second World War), Benedict XVI's thinking about the West and democracy unfolds under the long shadow of the Weimar Republic: a meticulously constructed democratic edifice that rested on insecure moral and cultural foundations. The architects of Weimar, including the great social scientist Max Weber, imagined that they were building a rational structure of governance. Weimar's political institutions and their relationship to one another would be the products of reason, not tradition — and certainly not revelation. Yet as Joseph Ratzinger put it to the Italian senate in 2004, "reason is inherently fragile", and political systems that imagine themselves to have solved the problem of democratic legitimacy by relying on reason alone "become easy targets for dictatorships". That, in his view, is what happened in the Germany of his youth: "the collapse of Prussian State Christianity" in the aftermath of the First World War, "left a vacuum" that Weber and his fellow-architects of Weimar imagined could be filled by rationality, but which in fact "would later provide fertile soil for a dictatorship." 

After that dictatorship was defeated at an immense cost in human suffering (and with half of Europe consigned to the suzerainty of another dictatorship), efforts were made to reconstruct Europe on the basis of what the founding fathers of today's European Union — Robert Schuman, Alcide de Gasperi, Konrad Adenauer — believed to be a moral consensus derived from biblical religion. Their efforts, Ratzinger readily acknowledges, produced three generations of a Europe at peace and enjoying unprecedented prosperity. Yet, as he told the Italian Senate, the new Europe still suffers from an idea-deficit, the implications of which were becoming ever more troubling as the 20th century gave way to the 21st. For, as he put it in 2004: "The complex problems left behind by Marxism continue to exist today. The loss of man's primordial certainties about God, about himself, and about the universe — the loss of an awareness of intangible moral values — is still our problem...and it can lead to the self-destruction of European consciousness."

The key to grasping Ratzinger's analysis is to see that he thinks of Europe's contemporary crisis of cultural morale as a matter of self-destruction. Or, as he put it in an earlier version of his address to the Italian Senate, it is impossible not to "notice a self-hatred in the Western world that is strange and can even be considered pathological". For as "the West is making a praiseworthy attempt to be completely open to foreign values...it no longer loves itself. [Indeed], it sees in its own history only what is blameworthy and destructive [and] is no longer capable of perceiving what is great and pure." 

This, it seems to Benedict XVI, is little short of suicidal: for "in order to survive, Europe needs a new — and certainly a critical and humble — acceptance of itself: that is, if it wants to survive". But that will-to-survive (which is not for Ratzinger a will-to-dominate, but a commitment to share with others the truths the West has discovered about the dignity of the human person), will not attain critical mass in contemporary Europe for so long as Europe is "on a collision course with its own history".