Paulo Roberto de Almeida
The Decline Of The West Revisited
Robert Skidelsky
The terrorist
slaughter in Paris has once again brought into sharp relief the storm
clouds gathering over the twenty-first century, dimming the bright
promise for Europe and the West that the fall of communism opened up.
Given dangers that seemingly grow by the day, it is worth pondering what
we may be in for.
Though prophecy is
delusive, an agreed point of departure should be falling expectations.
As Ipsos MORI’s Social Research Institute reports: “The assumption of an automatically better future for the next generation is gone in much of the West.”
In 1918, Oswald Spengler published The Decline of the West.
Today the word “decline” is taboo. Our politicians shun it in favor of
“challenges,” while our economists talk of “secular stagnation.” The
language changes, but the belief that Western civilization is living on
borrowed time (and money) is the same.
Why should this be?
Conventional wisdom regards it simply as a reaction to stagnant living
standards. But a more compelling reason, which has seeped into the
public’s understanding, is the West’s failure, following the fall of the
Soviet Union, to establish a secure international environment for the
perpetuation of its values and way of life.
The most urgent
example of this failure is the eruption of Islamist terrorism. On its
own, terrorism is hardly an existential threat. What is catastrophic is
the collapse of state structures in many of the countries from which the
terrorists come.
The Islamic world
contains 1.6 billion people, or 23% of the world’s population. A hundred
years ago it was one of the world’s most peaceful regions; today it is
the most violent. This is not the “peripheral” trouble that Francis Fukuyama envisioned
in his 1989 manifesto “The End of History.” Through the massive influx
of refugees, the disorder in the Middle East strikes at the heart of
Europe.
This movement of
peoples has little to do with the “clash of civilizations” foreseen by
Samuel Huntington. The more mundane truth is that there have never been
any stable successors to the defunct Ottoman, British, and French
empires that used to keep the peace in the Islamic world. This is
largely, though not entirely, the fault of the European colonialists
who, in the death throes of their own empires, created artificial states
ripening for dissolution.
Their American
successors have hardly done better. I recently watched the film “Charlie
Wilson’s War,” which relates how the United States came to arm the
Mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. At the end of the film,
as America’s erstwhile clients turn into the Taliban, Wilson, the
American politician who got them the money, is quoted as saying “We won a
great victory, but fouled up the end game.”
This “fouling up” is a
continuous thread running through American military interventions since
the Vietnam War. The US deploys overwhelming firepower, either directly
or by arming opposition groups, shatters local governmental structures,
and then pulls out, leaving the country in shambles.
It is unlikely that
US policymaking reflects the grip of some ideal view of the world, in
which getting rid of dictators is the same thing as creating
democracies. Rather, the belief in ideal outcomes is a necessary myth to
cover an unwillingness to use force persistently and intelligently
enough to achieve a desired result.
However much military
hardware a superpower owns, decay of the will to use it is the same
thing as a decay of effective power. After a time, it ceases to overawe.
That’s why Robert
Kagan’s 2003 neo-conservative proposition, “Americans are from Mars,
Europeans from Venus,” offered such a misleading guide. True enough, the
European Union has gone farther down the pacifist road than the US. It
is the weak nerve center of a flabby semi-state, with almost defenseless
frontiers, where humanitarian rhetoric masks spinelessness. But
America’s sporadic, erratic, and largely ineffective deployment of power
is hardly of Martian quality.
The decline of the
West is juxtaposed with the rise of the East, notably China. (It is hard
to tell whether Russia is rising or falling; either way, it is
disturbing.) Fitting a rising power into a decaying international system
has rarely occurred peacefully. Perhaps superior Western and Chinese
statesmanship will avert a major war; but this, in historical terms,
would be a bonus.
The increasing
fragility of the international political order is diminishing the global
economy’s prospects. This is the slowest recovery from a major slump on
record. The reasons for this are complex, but part of the explanation
must be the weakness of the rebound in international trade. In the past,
trade expansion has been the world’s main growth engine. But it now
lags behind the recovery of output (which is itself modest), because the
kind of global political order hospitable to globalization is
disappearing.
One symptom of this
has been the failure after 14 years to conclude the Doha Round of trade
negotiations. Trade and monetary agreements are still reached, but they
increasingly take the form of regional and bilateral deals, rather than
multilateral arrangements, thereby serving broader geopolitical goals.
The US-led Trans-Pacific Partnership,
for example, is directed against China; and China’s New Silk Road
initiative is a reaction to its exclusion from the 12-country TPP.
Perhaps these
regional bargains will prove to be a step toward wider free trade. But I
doubt it. A world divided into political blocs will become a world of
trade blocs, sustained by protectionism and currency manipulation.
And yet, even as
trade relations become increasingly politicized, our leaders continue to
urge us to gear up to meet the “challenges of globalization,” and few
question the benefits of cost-cutting through automation. In both cases,
politicians are trying to force adaptation on reluctant populations who
crave security. This strategy is not only desperate; it is also
delusive, for it seems obvious that, if the planet is to remain
habitable, competition in economic growth must give way to competition
in quality of life.
In short, we are far
from having developed a reliable set of precepts and policies to guide
us toward a safer future. Small wonder, then, that Western populations
look ahead with foreboding.
© Project Syndicate
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