What is the greatest threat to Western civilization today?

In 2010, a journalist put that question to a leading European official, Herman van Rompuy. It was a crisis moment for Europe: just weeks earlier, anti-austerity insurrections had broken out in Greece and Spain, while in Italy an elected government had been replaced by a set of cardboard technocrats dispatched by Brussels.

In his conversation with the German daily Die Frankfurter Allgemeine, van Rompuy, the former president of the European Council, offered a succinct answer. Not neoliberalism, not plutocracy: “the greatest danger to the contemporary West” he told his German colleagues, “is populism.”