Is the Decline of the West Reversible?

Abstract

The decline of the West, as pervasive as the argument may be, is not inevitable but is rather a product of the West's own doing. The West, wracked with guilt over the legacy of colonialism and the alleged exploitation of ‘the Other’, has abdicated its leading role in geopolitics. However, this trend is reversible and it requires a concerted effort from those countries labelled ‘the West’ to find new ways to renew its unity and legitimacy.

Introduction

The decline of the West is not inevitable—even if several generations of intellectual debate and, more recently, the vertiginous pace of geopolitical change have persuaded so many people otherwise. It is now almost a century since Oswald Spengler's account of the rise and fall of civilisations and his prediction of the decline of the West. The eponymous book was rambling, abstract and often obscure, but its bold thesis produced an outbreak of soul-searching and self-doubt which resonates to this day, and which the recent displacement of economic power and demographic weight to the East has only intensified.

With hindsight, the surge of optimism following the collapse of Communism and Francis Fukuyama's confident announcement of the end of history can be seen as the briefest of interludes in a largely unbroken narrative of decline. The implications of the West's crisis are not only felt in an erosion of morale and self-confidence; they are already having practical consequences for its relative weight in key fora of international decision-making such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the developing architecture of the G-20. The process of institutional rebalancing has barely begun.

Three questions are posed by this process of decline, which, in Hegelian terms, can be seen as nothing less than world-historical in its significance. First, does it matter? Second, why is it happening? And third, what, if anything, can be done to reverse it?

Why should it be a matter of regret if the West is taking a more modest place amongst civilisations—one more respectful of the multiplicity and incommensurability of values across the world? Would an outbreak of humility and realism on its part not remove a festering source of resentment and tension on our planet?

The proposition is a seductive one: it affords an opportunity to recognise (belatedly, to the minds of many) the compelling claims of other, non-Western cultures to provide the conditions of human flourishing, to command the allegiance of their members and to boast levels of intellectual and artistic achievement as worthy of study and admiration as those of the West. For the West to come to terms with its reduced status in the world would, on this view, seem like proper atonement for the sins of empire, economic exploitation and slavery (even if the West did not invent slavery, and was ultimately responsible for its abolition).

Honesty and self-criticism are indeed in order. But what the world cannot afford is for the West to succumb to ‘the tyranny of guilt’, in Pascal Bruckner's phrase; for the West to be complicit in, and thereby ensure, its own marginalisation. Why so? Because the highest price would be paid not by the prosperous citizens of the old liberal democracies (assuming they do not succumb to the complacency and torpor of decadence) but by the hundreds of millions of human beings whose freedom from hunger, disease and oppression depends on the robust affirmation of their rights and, crucially, on the political will to uphold them. For the moral impulse to rise to that challenge, we are bound to look to the ethical framework which most coherently and most durably has underpinned our understanding of our common humanity: the framework variously described as that of Athens and Jerusalem; the Enlightenment and Christianity; or ‘the Bible and the Greeks’, as the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas put it.

The fact that Western nations have at times departed shockingly from civilised norms (if not, thankfully, since 1945) does not disqualify them from credibly upholding those values on a global scale—not least when so many regimes in the world continue to pay lip service to the principles of human dignity and respect set out in the UN Declaration on Human Rights to which they are signatories, whilst simultaneously depriving their citizens of the welfare, freedoms and standards of government to which a citizen is entitled.

Who, if not the West collectively, will speak with a resounding voice for the Iranian women still threatened with stoning? For the Burmese monks beaten and imprisoned for their silent protests? For the political dissidents still languishing in Chinese prisons? For the homeless victims of the genocidal war in Darfur? For the women schoolteachers in Afghanistan who daily brave intimidation and assaults by the Taliban?

A cursory reading of recent history tells us that only the West has shown a disposition to extend a protective space to those unable to share in its benefits. That protective reflex is, admittedly, a fitful one: it made the difference in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Congo; it was not enough to save countless lives in Srebrenica or Rwanda. The verdict of history on the Iraq campaign may yet be severe. But equally, nothing in the hubris or strategic miscalculations of neo-conservatives absolves the international community of humanitarian responsibility, if exercised with prudence and sensitivity. For we are not talking about evicting other forms of life from the shared ethical space of humanity; rather, we are talking about the upholding of fundamental standards of welfare, consideration and respect, without imposing any substantive version of the good life upon cultures which have long since worked one out for themselves.

Within such an inclusive moral framework, there is no need for an imagined ‘Other’ to buttress a European's, or an American's or an Australian's sense of identity, for we are drawing on a moral inheritance whose European origins are indeed a rewarding subject of study for scholars, but whose ‘European-ness’ ultimately has the status only of a contingent fact. For the force of that inheritance rests on its ability to speak to a common humanity, in which the specific life choices of a Muslim, a Buddhist or a Hindu are as easily accommodated as those of a Christian, an atheist or a Jew.

For all this, the West's universal vocation is now but a pale shadow of the vaulting ambition it projected after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The responsibility for this cannot be laid exclusively at the door of military stalemate in Iraq or Afghanistan, or of the economic surge of East and South Asia. The problem also lies within—in a loss of nerve and a crisis of self-belief which the expansive narratives of ‘soft power’, ‘liberal interventionism’, ‘neo-conservatism’ or ‘ethical foreign policy’ (substantially similar creeds, for all the nuances in tone) managed to conceal for a short while around the turn of the twenty-first century.

Recovering values

The erosion of Western self-belief began seriously in the 1960s, with a frontal and wide-ranging challenge to some of its most foundational beliefs. The dismantling of Europe's empires was achieved with some pain, notably in France, but on the whole without trauma. More insidious and more profound were the effects of an intellectual revolution in some of the West's most prestigious seats of learning and amongst the ‘progressive’ intelligentsia. In the universities, particularly in the US, the new disciplines of post-colonial, cultural, Afro-American and gender studies joined with the new theoretical schools of postmodernism and deconstruction to promote the study of non-Western cultures and societies, cleansed of the alleged biases and covertly hegemonistic agenda of ‘Eurocentrism’.

The first target in the new disciplines’ line of attack was Western civilisation's commitment to the pursuit of truth through neutrality, objectivity, experimental science and critical inquiry—all of which now stood condemned as culturally specific, contingent and, in the final analysis, self-serving and ‘political’. In its place the new disciplines sought to substitute a multiplicity of culturally specific ‘discourses’, all with an equal claim to our attention, whilst denying that it was possible to appraise such cultures according to any objective criteria such as their level of social capital, their capacity to secure human welfare or their ability to promote innovation and achievement. Thus was the great Enlightenment project subverted; to challenge the new orthodoxy was to stand accused of imperialism, racism and political incorrectness.

In principle there was no reason why the (overdue) affirmation and validation of cultural difference should have resulted in a radical moral relativism and the repudiation of the West's normative universalism—but that is what happened. The articulation of universal values in the Western tradition—from the Bible's Golden Rule to Kant's Categorical Imperative—was, it seemed, no more than a cloak in which the former colonial powers of Europe and their former American colony draped their pretensions to global hegemony.

Outside academia, in the public sphere, intellectuals such as Sartre, Foucault, Debray and Baudrillard proclaimed the moral equivalence of the West and the ‘rest’ (or indeed, in the case of Sartre, the West's moral inferiority). In France, lonely voices like Raymond Aron and Jean-François Revel pointed out the rich irony of Western intellectuals fully exploiting their freedom to endorse some of the world's most oppressive regimes; for their pains, they found themselves condemned as American stooges.

But perhaps the most striking—and recent—abdication of the Enlightenment project of human rights, freedom, secularism, science and progress has come on the political Left, where such values had previously found many of their staunchest upholders. The phenomenon, widespread outside the mainstream social-democratic Left, finds an enthusiastic constituency not only in the shrunken remains of the Communist Left, but also in the new radical Left, which abroad drives the anti-globalisation movement and at home fosters ethnic particularity and self-imposed ghettoisation under the apparently benign heading of ‘multiculturalism’. This in turn has spawned some curious ideological bedfellows, including the phenomenon in the United Kingdom dubbed ‘Islamo-Leftism’.

For many on the political Left, internationalism and human solidarity no longer mean participation in shared values; rather, they imply respect for ‘Otherness’ in its most radical form—even where this enables some groups of citizens to place themselves outside the terms of the compact which binds the community as a whole. It is a mindset in which truth becomes, tautologically, a ‘relative concept’, and in which the quest for knowledge becomes a pointless—even presumptuous—exercise.

And so relativism and its sister creed, subjectivism, consolidate themselves across the humanities and the social sciences. In comparative literature, where the influence of French post-structuralism and deconstructionism promoted by the likes of Barthes, Foucault and Derrida has been pervasive, we find the actual intention of the author, the integrity and authenticity of the text and its depiction of reality devalued and marginalised; for there is only interpretation.

The assault on objective knowledge and the Western idea of liberal education eventually elicited some trenchant critiques, most famously perhaps by the late Allan Bloom in his seminal and subversive work The Closing of the American Mind [1]. But the counter-revolution has only just begun.

Another challenge, at least as corrosive, to the idea of liberal education is the threat to the humanities and the social sciences from the prioritising of ‘relevance’ and economic utility over the West's precious intellectual inheritance from the Greeks: critical inquiry, self-improvement and self-discovery, the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, fluency and cogency in argument, sensitivity to complexity and ambiguity and an understanding of the many different ways of being alive—to say nothing of the cultivation of virtue and justice or the pursuit of the common good.

In all advanced industrial societies, the pressure to submit the humanistic disciplines and traditional scholarship to a crude calculus of material benefit for society as a whole has become almost irresistible. Everywhere we see the university ceding precedence to the business school and the technical college. In French schools, even students with a clear aptitude and strong preference for history, literature or philosophy find themselves under enormous pressure to prepare the baccalauréat scientifique rather than the baccalauréat littéraire. Aptitude in mathematics is, in France, increasingly regarded as the benchmark of academic achievement—this in a country whose contribution to the Western literary and philosophical canon is inestimable.

To be sure, the world needs technicians; indeed, for the West, technical superiority has translated directly into economic and political ascendancy. The hopes of billions of the world's citizens rest on the material improvements which only science and technology can bring. But, to flourish as well as to survive, to be fully human, society needs more than just technicians: it needs members who can think, write, criticise and evaluate.

Perhaps the most visible explanation of the West's crisis of self-belief lies in anti-Americanism, whose fully committed political constituency is modest in size but whose influence amongst opinion-formers and educated elites—albeit in attenuated form—is disproportionately large. Quiescent much of the time, recently energised by the invasion of Iraq and the unilateralism of the first administration of George W. Bush and for the time being sedated by Barack Obama's continued popular appeal (at least to non-US audiences), anti-Americanism has provided fertile ground for those partisans of European integration whose hopes for a full-fledged (and historically elusive) European ‘demos’ rest on opposition to an ‘Other'—for the first time located not to Europe's east, but to its west.

Few could have predicted such a bizarre and confused turn in the politics of identity or the intellectual contortions and wish-fulfilment involved in postulating a radical incompatibility between ‘European’ values and ‘American’ values—this in the face of overwhelming evidence that occasional divergences over norms (the death penalty, the International Criminal Court, the need for UN authority) are of marginal significance when set against the plurality of social norms which exist across the Western family (for example, on reproductive technologies) and, at a more fundamental level, the commonality of the values of freedom, law, democracy and human dignity which define the West as an ethical community.

With the recovery of European public confidence in US foreign policy and renewed European recognition of the need for US leadership in a dangerous and uncertain world, a definitive parting of the ways looks neither imminent nor plausible. But, deprived of the glue of opposition to Soviet Communism and challenged from within by the erosion of moral certainty and belief in an absolute good, the West has to find new ways to renew its unity and legitimacy. There is no magic wand: keeping the transatlantic partnership in a decent state of repair will require patient and continuous attention to the policies it shapes and to the institutions which serve it.

Strengthening institutions

The West is an unusual political community: it lacks an executive, a parliament and a judiciary. Its only institutional expression—NATO—therefore assumes special importance. As the guarantor of its members’ collective security, it has been an irreplaceable source of cohesion for the Western family for over 60 years. It successfully delivered on its mission to contain the Soviet Union; now it is uneasily feeling its way towards a new rationale, based on an updated understanding of security in a more volatile and globalised world.

This November, in Lisbon, the NATO allies hope to agree a new Strategic Concept. Its key premises can already be discerned: the increasingly multidimensional nature of security; the centrality of ‘risk’; the need for a comprehensive approach combining military formations and civilian agencies; and the ongoing nature of security provision once immediate military objectives are achieved. Reaching agreement will mean overcoming major differences of strategic analysis. As Coker [2, p. 66] has pointed out, these include Central and Eastern European attachment to the collective defence agency of the Cold War; French and German ambitions for a European concert system; and the Anglo-Saxon sense of global mission.

The outline of a new strategic vision is slowly coming into view: one in which NATO, working with other multilateral and regional organisations, plays a leading role in reducing disorder in a post-American world. But the biggest test of will comes at the level not of strategy or doctrine, but at that of capabilities: are Europeans ready to commit the resources needed to meet their long-standing aspiration for a rebalanced Atlantic partnership and US demands for more equitable burden sharing? With fiscal retrenchment the order of the day in Europe, the implications for defence spending are gloomy. But perhaps the problem runs even deeper: as Raymond Aron put it, Europeans would ‘like to exit from history, from la grande histoire, from the history that is written in letters of blood.’ The problem, he continued, ‘is that others want to enter it’ (quoted in [4, p. 220]).

The need for an enduring post–Cold War narrative for the West is no less urgent for the absence of an existential threat; indeed, it is more urgent for that very reason. The continuing enlargement of the European Union, now precariously poised, should be part of that narrative.

More mundane, but just as pressing, is the need to deepen transatlantic understanding and dialogue and to give the partnership what it currently lacks: a permanent heartbeat. That means thickening transatlantic ties both at a level directly below the discussion of grand strategy and at a level above the myriad exchanges of tourists and investments which form the lifeblood of the relationship. Specifically, it is at the intermediate level of policymakers and opinion-formers that we see a gaping void in the transatlantic architecture—one which neither the annual, one-day EU–US Summit nor the valuable and focused work of bodies like the Transatlantic Business Dialogue, the European-American Business Council or the Transatlantic Policy Network can adequately fill.

At the key level of legislators, lack of substantive transatlantic discussion means that normative divergences on such issues as genetically modified organisms (GMOs) or climate change become a dialogue of the deaf. The infrequency of contacts between members of the US Congress and their national and European Parliament (EP) counterparts means lost opportunities to exchange perspectives, identify trade-offs and compromises and build a better understanding of each other's position.

Bridging the communication divide will mean correcting an asymmetry of interest between the two sides, for whilst the EP is showing keen interest in intensifying the dialogue (with ten of its 20 committees visiting their US counterparts in 2010), it is proving hard to overcome the localism of members of Congress, anchored in their districts, and the political short-termism which Congress's biennial electoral timetable fosters to the detriment of its members’ sense of a global perspective. Another impediment is the mismatch of expectations, with US legislators looking for swift and tangible outputs from political contacts, whilst European parliamentarians favour the slow burn of relationship-building.

Self-belief and political will

On any thoughtful assessment, the balance sheet of the West's standing and influence in the twenty-first century is a sobering one. On the debit side, military overreach, strategic drift, intellectual self-doubt and Europe's relative economic and demographic decline make a superficially attractive case for retrenchment and consolidation. But standing still is not an option for civilisations. A Fortress Europe or isolationist America would be not only a repudiation of the West's own cultural inheritance but an abdication of a universal mission which, shorn of its lingering association with plunder and empire, is uniquely qualified to speak to a common humanity without threatening the ways of life and affective ties which define living communities.

Is this just wistful thinking? Is there a way of reconciling the hopes of the universal with the reality of the particular? There are grounds for optimism: many parts of sub-Saharan Africa are seeing significant improvements in human welfare and standards of governance. The world's family of democracies has been growing steadily for over a generation. In the UN's Responsibility to Protect, the international community now has a legal basis (yet to be invoked) for humanitarian intervention in extremis, even where this would breach national sovereignty. The enlargement of the European Union and the reuniting of the European family have been a resounding vindication of the EU's soft power. Crucially, the world has largely resisted the drift to autarchy and protectionism that the financial crisis threatened to bring.

The reality of interdependence has, if anything, sharpened the sense of responsibility for fellow human beings which is at the heart of both the Enlightenment and the Judaeo-Christian traditions. By turning its back on relativism and reaffirming its universalist inheritance, by rethinking the institutions which serve its collective interests and by crafting a new and realistic narrative which sets out the unique contribution which, in cooperation with others, it can make to world order and security, the West can still avoid the fate of so many brilliant civilisations.