The Folly of Forgetting the West: What the Talk About American and European Decline Misses
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The idea of decline is in fashion — so much so that a so-called “geopolitics of emotions” proposes to map the world around each region’s expectations about its own future: helpless and resigned in the West but hopeful and domineering in the East, and resentful and even vengeful in the South. Yet, it should be clear that the emergence of new powers, which is real, need not be construed as the fall of others. Admittedly, a state no longer needs a Western identity to exert global influence and even seek primacy: That alone represents a compelling change. It suggests that for the first time in quite a while the West is no longer decisive and can no longer remain exclusive. But still, entering this new era, the West stays ahead of the rest because the rest cannot afford to be without the West. This essay is, therefore, a case against the case against the West: Somewhere in the shadow of Francis Fukuyama’s much-maligned forecast of the “endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution” there stands a Western world restored.1
FAREWELL TO YESTERYEAR
Entering the second decade of the 20th century one hundred years ago there were 50 countries at most; few of them were dubbed great powers, and those that qualified as world powers were mostly European states. This was a Western world whose dominance had deepened while India and China far in the East, and Turkey at the margin of the West, fell steadily behind. This was a belle époque — a time when, as Simon Schama wrote, Rudyard Kipling’s “fantasy was potent magic” that helped conquer empires in the morning and gather “home for tea” in the afternoon. This also looked like a good time to be alive — until the summer of 1914 when a horrific and unnecessary war that was to last over three decades made it a good time to die. “We were born at the beginning of the First World War,” wrote Albert Camus of his generation. “As adolescents we had the crisis of 1929; at twenty, Hitler. Then came the Ethiopian war, the civil war in Spain and Munich … Born and bred in such a world, what did we believe in? Nothing.” This, feared (or hoped) the French humanist, was “humanity’s zero hour.”