In the contemporary West, an interesting and revealing phenomenon is unfolding.
After decades of radical liberalism, individualism, and the dismantling of every tradition, a new current of thought is beginning to emerge — one described as “post-liberalism.” Among its principal exponents are Patrick Deneen, John Milbank, and Alasdair MacIntyre.
Western thinkers themselves now openly acknowledge that a society without moral bonds, without community, without a sacred center, collapses. When man deifies the individual, he loses all meaning. Freedom cannot survive in a society that has dissolved every moral tie, every tradition, and every sacred cell — such as the family. Liberalism, in attempting to liberate man from his roots, has left him defenseless, stranded in a life devoid of substantive meaning.
What the West (Europe and the broader Euro-descended world) today baptizes as “post-liberalism” is not a new wisdom. It is the awkward admission of its failure. Having dismantled community, family, and faith, it now seeks — even unconsciously — the very Romeike roots it lost through the centuries, primarily under the weight first of Frankish domination and subsequently of Papalism. It seeks the roots that we have known for centuries as Romeosyne.
Romeosyne is neither an ideology nor a political current. It is the living mode of existence of our Genos (sic) — our historic peoplehood.
For Romeosyne, freedom is not license but virtue and purification of the heart. It is liberation from the passions. It is the fruit of ascetic life and divine Grace. It is not the removal of every limit, but the voluntary self-binding of man to the good. What Western thinkers today rediscover as the need for a “moral framework” and self-restraint, our tradition has lived for centuries as philotimo — the inner impulse to do what is right not out of fear of the law, but out of love for God, for one’s neighbor, and for the Genos.
Romeosyne has never known the isolated individual, the autonomous self of modernity. It knows only the Person — and the Person exists only in relationship: in the family, the parish, the ecclesial community, the Genos. There, man does not merely “connect” sociologically; he communes existentially. What the West now calls “the search for community” is simply a belated discovery of a truth we have lived for centuries. The freedom of the Romeos is a freedom of love, service, and sacrifice — not of selfish isolation.
The economy must serve the needs of the community, not the reverse. What some Western thinkers today formulate as a “new principle,” the Romeike tradition always regarded as self-evident. Production and wealth exist to sustain the family, the parish, and the Genos — not to subjugate them. A contemporary, realistic patriotism must translate this principle into action. Thus, for example, the complete tax exemption of large families and the stable support of households with many children are not mere social policy; they are elementary justice. The Romeike tradition understands the family as the foundation of society, and the economy must protect it, not crush it. The economy exists to safeguard the hearth, not to liquidate it.
Our homeland today needs a true return to its roots. It needs a Romeike rebirth — a spiritual and ecclesial awakening that will first free us ourselves from the dead ends of modernity’s ideology and, at the same time, illuminate the path for the West, which increasingly finds itself searching.
Romeosyne does not propose theories. It generates a way of life. From this way of life, the necessary political orientations naturally emerge, structured around four main axes:
a) Economy as service to need, grounded in the Gospel and in the example of our Saints — men and women who lived love and communion in practice. Not accumulation, but sharing. Not treasures on earth, but treasure in heaven.
“He who has two coats, let him share with him who has none…” and “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth…”
b) Education with roots — not mere transmission of information, but initiation into truth, the cultivation of ethos, faith, and living historical memory.
c) Productive self-sufficiency — for a people is free only when it can feed itself, shelter itself, and create by its own labor, without dependence on foreign powers. The economy serves man and community, not the reverse.
d) Sovereignty and dignity — the protection of the homeland, of borders, and of strategic structures is not a technical administrative matter but a sacred trust and a duty toward both our ancestors and our children.
The West, exhausted by its spiritual and social decay, gropes awkwardly for a way out. Yet we have no new ideology to offer it. What we offer is the witness of our way of life — our Romeosyne: our faith, our philotimo, the love and the freedom born of communion with God, which unites the Genos.
This inheritance must once again become the ground upon which not only tomorrow’s Greece, but all those — personally or collectively — who seek truth already lived and embodied in practice, may stand.
Christodoulos Molyvas
Head of the Development and Investment Policy Department of NIKI
Ioannis Kon. Neonakis
Head of the Romeosyne Policy Department of NIKI
Notes: (a) The term “Romeosyne” was preferred over “Romanitas”, as it better expresses the culture of the Roman Empire after the prevalence of Christianity.
(b) For reasons of more accurate phonological rendering and simplification, the term “Romeos” was preferred over “Rhomaios” and “Romeoi” over “Rhomaioi”
(c) romeike (adjective): of the Romeos/Romeoi
