008. Interregnum II: Euro-babylon

"Fallen, fallen is Babylon the Great." The announcement in Revelation 18 has been read as triumph for two millennia — the persecuting empire brought low, the martyrs vindicated, the cosmic ledger balanced. René Girard read it differently. For Girard, the fall of Babylon is not a celebration. It is a warning. When the machine that maintained order through sacrifice breaks down, what follows is not the Kingdom. It is everything the machine had been containing.

The European Union was built to make Babylon impossible. It may have built it instead.

I.

Babylon appears three times in the Western theological imagination, and each appearance is a different face of the same structure.

The first Babylon is Babel. Genesis 11: one language, one people, one project — a city and a tower whose top reaches heaven, lest we be scattered across the earth. God confuses the languages. Dispersion follows. The dream of universal unity through a common tongue ends in the irreducible plurality of tongues that cannot translate into each other.

The second Babylon is the empire. Nebuchadnezzar's armies breach the walls of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, burn the Temple, and carry the people into exile. This Babylon is the power that destroys the covenant community — that takes the particular sacred body and breaks it against the universal imperial project. It is the wound-producing machine. The Psalms register its affective residue: "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept." The wound does not close. Seventy years of exile, and when the people return, they return as the community constituted by what was done to them. Babylon created Jewish identity in its mature form by attempting to dissolve it.

The third Babylon is the apocalyptic city of Revelation 17 and 18. The great whore, drunk with the blood of the saints and the martyrs of Jesus. The city whose merchants grew rich from the abundance of her luxury. The system — commercial, imperial, religious — that sustains itself on sacred blood, that requires the production of victims to maintain its coherence. This Babylon is not merely a historical empire. It is a structural description: the civilization organized around the consumption of sacrifice.

Girard's contribution is to show that these three Babylons are one. The tower of Babel — the project of universal unity — fails because human community cannot sustain itself without the mechanism that generates it: the surrogate victim, the scapegoat, the body whose sacrifice temporarily resolves the mimetic crisis that common life inevitably produces. Babel wants unity without sacrifice. It cannot have it. What it gets instead is dispersion — which is, paradoxically, the only mechanism that reduces the mimetic pressure that makes sacrifice necessary. If you cannot communicate, you cannot desire the same objects with the same intensity. The confusion of languages is not punishment. It is mercy.

The Babylonian empire attempts what Babel could not: unity through conquest rather than voluntary convergence. It works, temporarily, because it channels mimetic violence outward — against the peoples on the periphery who are broken and absorbed, against the internal minorities whose sacrifice maintains social cohesion. The drunk whore of Revelation is the logical completion of this project: a civilization so thoroughly organized around the production of victims that it has become the consumption of sacred blood in administrative form.

II.

Girard argued that the biblical narrative performs a unique operation in the history of human culture: it progressively reveals the innocence of the victim. From Genesis through the prophets to the Gospels, the scapegoat mechanism is incrementally exposed. The myths of other civilizations encode the mechanism while concealing the victim's innocence — the sacrificed god is guilty, monstrous, deserving. The biblical texts begin, haltingly and with many reversals, to insist that the victim did not deserve it. Job did not deserve it. The suffering servant did not deserve it. Jesus, whose crucifixion is the mechanism's fullest exposure, demonstrably did not deserve it.

This revelation is irreversible and catastrophic. Once the victim's innocence is visible, the mechanism cannot fully close. The scapegoat's designation as guilty is the precondition of its efficacy: the community must believe the victim is monstrous to achieve the unanimity that makes the sacrifice work. When the innocence is declared, the unanimity fractures. The mechanism continues — human communities cannot simply stop producing victims by intellectual fiat — but it operates under increasing pressure, in increasingly baroque forms, generating increasing instability.

Girard called the endpoint of this process the Apocalypse. Not in the popular sense of nuclear catastrophe or divine intervention, but in the literal Greek sense: the unveiling. The moment when the mechanism is fully exposed and can no longer maintain even the appearance of the order it once produced. What the Apocalypse reveals is that civilization has been built on a lie — that the victims were guilty, that the sacrifice was just, that the order was legitimate. When the lie is no longer sustainable, the order it sustained collapses. And the violence that the sacrifice had been resolving returns, uncontained, without a victim that can absorb it.

Babylon falls. The merchants weep. The sailors stand at a distance, watching the smoke of her burning. And then — the text does not say, but Girard's logic requires — the violence that Babylon had been organizing turns back on itself, with no imperial architecture to channel it toward managed victims.

III.

The European Union is the most ambitious attempt in human history to construct a post-Babylonian political order. The founders understood, with the lucidity that only catastrophe produces, that the prior European order had been Babylonian in the precise structural sense: it had maintained itself through the systematic production of victims — the Jews, the Roma, the disabled, the political opponents, the peoples of colonized territories whose sacrifice subsidized European civilization's self-understanding as civilization. The Holocaust was not an aberration. It was the Babylonian machine running at full capacity, with modern industrial efficiency applied to the oldest political logic.

The response was institutional. Human rights. The rule of law. Supranational oversight. The prohibition of war as a legitimate instrument of policy between member states. A framework designed to make the victim-producing machine structurally impossible — to create, for the first time, a political order that did not require sacrifice to cohere.

This is the project's genuine grandeur. It is also the precise location of its fatal paradox.

Girard's logic is merciless on this point: you cannot build a post-sacrificial order without the order's construction itself becoming sacrificial. The communities that do not conform to the universal framework must be designated as deviant. The peoples whose political grammar organizes itself around the particular sacred body — whose identity is constituted by their wound, whose political theology is martyrological rather than universalist — must be named. And the naming is the designation. "Populist." "Illiberal." "Enemy of democratic values." "Threat to the rule of law." The post-Babylonian project produces its own taxonomy of the monstrous, its own category of the irredeemable — and in doing so, reproduces the foundational gesture of every Babylonian order that preceded it.

The scapegoat mechanism does not disappear when you declare your intention to abolish it. It migrates. It becomes more sophisticated, more procedural, more legible as something other than what it is. The explicit sacrifice of the Aztec altar becomes the administrative exclusion of the Brussels conditionality mechanism. The form changes. The structure does not.

IV.

Here the reversal occurs that Girard's framework makes visible and that no secular political analysis can adequately explain.

The Sacred Wound communities — Poland, Hungary, the post-Ottoman Balkans, the post-Soviet periphery — designate Brussels as Babylon. This is not hyperbole. It is the Sacred Wound community's theologically precise response to the Singular Truth institution's sacrificial gesture toward it. Viktor Orbán's rhetoric about Brussels as an imperial power threatening Christian civilization is structurally identical to every prior instance of the Sacred Wound community naming its persecutor: the early Christian community naming Rome as Babylon in Revelation, the Jewish community naming every subsequent empire that attempted to absorb or eliminate it as Babylon.

The mechanism is mimetic. The Sacred Wound community was designated monstrous by the Singular Truth institution. It responds by designating the Singular Truth institution as Babylon. The scapegoat points at the scapegoater and applies the same logic of designation. Both gestures operate within the same sacrificial grammar. The victim-producing mechanism circulates between the poles, gathering momentum, with no fixed victim to absorb it.

And this is precisely what Girard means by the escalation to extremes. In mimetic conflict, each party mirrors the other's gestures with increasing intensity. Brussels issues a rule of law framework; Warsaw dismantles judicial independence in response. The Commission withholds cohesion funds; Budapest vetoes Ukraine aid packages. Each move justifies the next. The mimetic doubling accelerates. The enemies become identical in their logic while remaining irreconcilable in their content. The doubles, as Girard called them — the parties locked in mimetic rivalry who come to resemble each other perfectly while insisting on their absolute difference.

The European Parliament condemns Hungary as a hybrid regime. Hungary hosts CPAC Budapest and positions itself as the defender of authentic Western civilization. Both are performing the same operation: designating the other as the monstrous deviant whose exclusion would restore the community to health. Both have found their Babylon.

V. What happens when Babylon falls?

Yugoslavia answered this question at reduced scale. Yugoslavia was a baroque institution — Tito's elaborate federal architecture, the ethnic rotation of power, the self-management ideology — designed to contain irresolvable Sacred Wound communities within a common procedural framework. It held for four decades on the basis of external pressure (Soviet threat), economic subsidy (Western credit), and the charismatic authority of a single figure. When all three dissolved simultaneously, the Sacred Wound communities came into direct contact without institutional mediation.

What followed was not war in the conventional sense. It was the mimetic crisis unleashed. Each community's claim to sacred victimhood became the justification for making the other the victim. The Serb Sacred Wound — Kosovo as Jerusalem, the memory of Ottoman subjugation, the Second World War Ustasha massacres — generated the logic that made Srebrenica possible: we are the victims, therefore our violence is self-defense, therefore it is not violence. The Croat Sacred Wound generated the same logic with different historical content. The Bosniak Sacred Wound generated it again. The wound does not make communities pacific. It makes them feel cosmically authorized.

Srebrenica was not an aberration from European civilization. It was European civilization's Babylonian logic operating without the institutional architecture that normally contains it, in a space where the post-sacrificial pretense had been stripped away, leaving the mechanism naked.

The European Union is the institutional architecture that replaced the containment Yugoslavia attempted. Its collapse would not reproduce Srebrenica directly — the nuclear deterrent, the economic interdependencies, the decades of institutional habituation create friction that Yugoslav federalism lacked. But Girard's logic does not require exact repetition. It requires only that the removal of the sacrificial containment mechanism releases the violence it had been organizing. The form of release is historically contingent. The fact of release is structurally guaranteed.

VI.

The deepest irony, which neither the architects of the European project nor its critics have been willing to state, is this:

The beast the EU was built to cage was not fascism. Fascism was the symptom. The beast is the sacrificial logic that fascism merely industrialized — the logic that runs through every empire, every inquisition, every ethnic cleansing, every humanitarian intervention that leaves the designated monstrous dead. The EU was built to cage a logic that is constitutive of human community as such. That is not a project that can succeed. It is a project that can only produce increasingly sophisticated forms of the thing it is trying to prevent.

Girard was a Christian. He believed the revelation of the innocent victim was ultimately salvific — that the mechanism, once exposed, was in the process of being transcended, however violently, toward something that human history had never seen: a community that did not require a victim to cohere. He was not optimistic about the timeline. Battling to the End, his last major work, written in response to the First World War's centenary, concluded that the apocalyptic moment — the period of maximum mimetic violence as the old sacrificial mechanisms collapse without replacement — was the condition of the present, not a future to be avoided.

Babylon has not yet fallen. Its procedural architecture still functions, after a fashion, absorbing the tensions that would otherwise produce open conflict, multiplying its baroque complexity in proportion to the irresolvability of what it contains. But the absorption capacity is not infinite. The mimetic pressure between the three political-theological grammars is not stable. And the communities that have been designated monstrous are not reconciling themselves to the designation.

When the announcement comes — fallen, fallen — it will not come as a surprise to anyone who read the structure correctly. The question is not whether Girard was right about what Babylon is.

The question is whether he was right about what comes after.

Works Cited

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