Curtis Yarvin is an American political thinker, essayist, and software engineer known for his concept of the ‘Cathedral,’ his description of the modern West’s informal nexus of media, academia, and bureaucracy. Writing under the name Mencius Moldbug in the 2000s, he became one of the formative voices of the neoreactionary or postliberal movement. Combining historical erudition with irony and intellectual independence, Yarvin argues that Western democracy has ossified into a managerial order and that genuine renewal requires a return to first principles of authority and legitimacy.
In the following section, we present an excerpt from his interview with Filip Gašpar, including his answers to questions concerning the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republic of Srpska. The full interview by its title “Storming the Cathedral” can be found on the website – The European Conservative.
When you spoke in Banja Luka in June of 2025, the atmosphere was tense, but still marked by a kind of resilient dignity. Since then, the elected president of Republika Srpska [Milorad Dodik] has been sentenced to prison—not for breaking any BiH law, but for defying a decree by the High Representative, a foreign official without democratic legitimacy. What did you learn from your time in Republika Srpska—and what do small nations like this reveal about political survival in a world shaped by abstract norms and imperial habits? [Editor’s note: Dodik’s sentence was later converted to a fine. In October, the Trump administration lifted all U.S. sanctions against Dodik, members of his cabinet, and senior officials of the government.]
The ghosts of the 20th century are still barely alive in Bosnia. But everywhere, the political energy has dropped by orders of magnitude. Doubtless even the violence in Yugoslavia in the 1990s seemed casual and desultory by the standards of the 1940s. Both the energy of hegemony, and the energy of independence, are historically feeble today—but they remain, somehow, evenly matched.
The essence of 21st-century politics is that almost no one cares almost at all about almost anything at all. This depoliticization allows the ultimate debasement of nations: population replacement. No student of 19th-century democracy could understand how cavalierly the 21st-century electorates have permitted replacement migration by unrelated populations—especially in countries like Ireland, where this humiliation is the inevitable, yet puzzling, culmination of a quarter-millennium of proud Irish nationalism.
The definitive objective question of a nation’s status in this degringolade is the ‘McDonald’s test’—are food service workers natives of the country, or imported helots? Once the switch to a helot economy is complete, nationalism is impossible. How much political energy does it take to resist this? Not much—but not much is available.
The High Representative’s powers over Bosnia and Herzegovina—including Republika Srpska—have been called a legal ghost from the 1990s. He can remove elected leaders, impose laws, and now even trigger prison sentences—without ever facing a vote. You’ve described this model as a “post-imperial anachronism.” What does it reveal about the Western system’s deeper assumptions—about legitimacy, sovereignty, and the right to rule?
The end of the old European order was the extension of English colonial ideas, not just the classic imperialism of trade and domination, but the missionary imperialism of soft power and human rights, to the Western world itself. It should not be forgotten that Kipling’s “Lesser breeds, without the law” were the Germans, and there are plenty of echoes of colonialism in a document like JCS 1067, the Allied directive for the occupation of Germany.
In a way, Europe was the last place where these elements of hard power were acceptable. When the EU received a colonial mandate to rule over the white savages of Bosnia, it seemed almost natural. No one would try this with Irishmen, who are really persons of color, but Serbs? It seemed like a good idea at the time.
But the test of a legacy system is always whether, if it did not exist, anyone would invent it. And clearly, by this standard, the last remnants of European colonialism in Europe feel like an anachronism.
Source: europeanconservative.com
