The Future of the West,‘old’ and ‘new’

The question of decline

The question of decline is not new. Its genealogy in European philosophy and literature is outside the scope of this paper. From a geopolitical point of view, that is, from a study of the combination of spiritual with material factors, it is important to hearken back to two major geographers of the previous century, coming from the two historical pioneers of the West: England and France.

The first geographer, Halford Mackinder, presented his geopolitical thesis for the first time at the turn of the century, in 1904, in a lecture published under the title ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’ [2]. At the highest point of British power, Mackinder was anticipating its decline. Trying to imagine the possible origin of a challenge, he drew from History and Geography, outlining a fascinating panorama of the evolution of Europe since the Middle Ages. For Mackinder, geographical mobility was the major explanatory factor in the destinies of the West. It resulted from the combination of the features of the Earth with the technologies available at each time to overcome its obstacles. The steppe starting at the centre of Asia and ending in Hungary explains the capacity of nomadic populations to strike Europe again and again during the Middle Ages. The West constructed itself by a combination of the will to resist and a physical geography that hindered nomadic mobility. For Mackinder, the power of his country came from the mastery of the sea, the major factor in mobility during his era. He saw the threats in technological changes. The extraordinary development of railways was shifting the scale of power from sea to land. The enormous continental masses of Europe and Asia could now become integrated through a dense railway network and project their concentrated power against the maritime West. The struggle between East and West would start again, in unfavourable terms for the West. In times of Eastern weakness, the Eurasiatic power would be able to retreat inside its unapproachable Siberian hinterland and survive; while the West had no such possibility when the winds of History changed direction.

This pessimistic geopolitical diagnosis led to a diplomatic and military prescription. The states bridging Europe with Asia should be kept divided, to avoid the emergence of an ambitious continental Eastern power. Maintaining the antagonism between Germany and Russia and hindering the domination of the one by the other became the strategic Western principle throughout the twentieth century, to a large extent under the influence of Mackinder's ideas. Even the rejection of Gorbachev's concept of a ‘Common European Home’ is not unrelated to the geopolitical visions inspired by Mackinder's ideas. Whether a self-fulfilling prophecy or a prescient anticipation of the future, an analysis of the ‘geographical pivot of History’ offers an interesting viewpoint for interpreting the major European confrontations of the past century.

The second great Western geographer to address the question of decline was Albert Demangeon. His ideas, quite different from Mackinder's, were based on a less materialistic approach and offered a broader view of the challenges to Western supremacy.

In 1920, a few years after the devastations of the First World War, Demangeon, a prominent member of the famous French geographical school, published a book with the title Le déclin de l'Europe (The decline of Europe). The idea of the West changes from Mackinder to Demangeon: from the maritime western outposts of the British Isles and their colonial global extensions, we turn to a more continental interpretation of the West. Demangeon's Europe remains maritime, however. Throughout his book, the essence of Europe is its capacity to innovate, to invent, to project itself outside its narrow geographical boundaries, essentially through the sea. From Mackinder's more traditional geographical scope the analysis moves to an intricate anthropogeographic approach, where culture and economy are at least as important as military capacity.

However, Demangeon's diagnosis is as pessimistic as Mackinder's, as the title of his book clearly indicates. He sees Europe as an extraordinary source of ideas, techniques, population, capital and inventiveness. Those resources explain its triumphant rise during the nineteenth century. However, the Western domination of the world led to its unification. By disseminating to this world—which was globalised already at the end of the nineteenth century—its people, its ideas, its models, Europe created the forces that challenged its primacy. Weakened demographically, morally and economically by the Great War, Europe would not be able to resist the rise of new extra-European powers or the reaction to European rule on the part of the dominated populations. Thus, Demangeon's fear was that Europe would lose its central position and become peripheral.

Seen from the perspective of a century later, the predictions of both geographers have proven true, at least partly. The continental powers, Germany and Russia, did challenge, again and again, the maritime West. However, through an extraordinary mobilisation of unimagined material and spiritual resources, the West prevailed in each confrontation. At the beginning and in the midst of the two World Wars, as well as during the Cold War, the defeat of the West seemed much more probable than its victory. Surprised by its own success, the West did not make a real effort to understand the causes. After victory, nations tend to become intellectually lazy.

What is the West?

Demangeon's analysis offers a very interesting perspective for answering this question. The two challengers to European primacy were, in his mind, the US and Japan. These two rising powers were not only dangerous competitors of the European nations, but at the same time, they were creating their own spheres of influence. The first period of globalisation, organised by Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, was threatened by a renewed fragmentation of geographical space. If Germany and Russia were Mackinder's anti-West, for Demangeon this role belonged to the powers of the Pacific.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union became the opponent of the West. The world was divided into East and West according to strict ideological and geopolitical criteria. In the Western sphere belonged not only the maritime Western European powers, but also their previous challengers. Germany and the US were the major partners of Western Europe. Japan, the most eastern country of Eurasia, was also part of the West!

The study of the fortunes of the West in the previous century seems confusing. What is the West really? Its forms and perimeters have changed again and again. This academic query offers an answer to the previous, geopolitical, question. The surprising victories of the West can be attributed to its protean nature. By constantly changing form, the West has managed to adapt and to efficiently respond to new challenges. Even great minds like Mackinder and Demangeon were not able to perceive the extreme flexibility of the West and therefore its capacity to survive; hence their deep pessimism.

Should we therefore draw the conclusion that the present crisis of the West will be overcome, that our worries are exaggerated? Should we refuse to follow Mackinder and Demangeon in their pessimism about the West?

Pessimism partly confirmed

Although the world has not been dominated by a continental semi-Asiatic power as Mackinder feared, and although Europe has not been marginalised on the world scene as Demangeon predicted, the geopolitical and geoeconomic entities to which those two geographers belonged have declined and suffered. The power of the United Kingdom today is but a shadow of that of the British Empire before the Great War. European unification has given new breath to Europe, which, however, is no longer the centre of the world as it still was between the two World Wars.

Its success is therefore relative. In addition, maintaining a certain level of influence and limiting the rate of decline has led to wars, with enormous suffering for the populations. Mackinder's and Demangeon's pessimism was not completely unfounded. For the two pioneers of the West, England and France, their best hour was already behind them when these two geographers were making their worries public.

Today again, the answer to the question of the future of the West depends on how one understands the meaning of the term ‘the West’. It is a question of geographical scale. The West's victory in the Cold War has again unified the world under US hegemony, under what Hubert Védrine called its ‘huperpuissance’. In this strongly polarised environment, the diffusion of Western values and ways has accelerated. Now, however, the pendulum of history is moving again, in the opposite direction from that of two decades ago and in the way described by Demangeon in 1920:

During the Cold War the three spheres—the European, the American and the Japanese—were integrated to form a renewed West. The end of the Cold War brought humanity back to globalisation. The ‘Empire’ was re-established; however, ‘Europe’ was extended to include its previous enemies. A new circle is starting today with the rise of new challengers: China, India and probably a few more. Demangeon's explanation for the emergence of economic challenges to European supremacy is still valid:

The new powers that compete with the West today are able to do so because they are rapidly adopting its ways; because they are becoming Westernised. Even the most radically anti-Western movements, like al-Qaida, are deeply Western in their methods. The new polycentric world which is emerging is not the negation of the West but rather its extension. The scale of the West changed once in the past when the Triad (US, Japan, Europe) replaced Europe. Now the West tends to integrate old civilisations, like the Indian and the Chinese, incorporating enormous potential in a new technological environment emphasising intellectual and cultural adaptability.

Francis Fukuyama described this trend in his ‘End of History’ thesis, drawing the conclusion that the world would become more and more peaceful through the diffusion of Western values. However, the essence of the West is not peaceful. The extraordinary capacity to innovate and to create, developed in Western Europe and extended to larger and larger parts of the world, is founded on polycentric and therefore highly antagonistic structures. France's and England's development was stimulated by their competition and by their wars.

If competition is a major factor in progress, it is also at the root of conflicts, wars and aggression. Contrary to the imperial model which sacrifices progress to stability, the Western model privileges change and innovation, often at the cost of peace and humanity. The difference between the two models did not come about by decision or by design, but was the result of a long historical process that started with the barbarian capture of the Western part of the Roman Empire. Ironically, the two past decades, during which the world has been dominated by the US and, therefore, unified in the extreme, have been an exception to the Western principle of dynamic competition. From a geopolitical point of view, Clinton and Bush have been anti-Western leaders of the West! As new powers challenge American hegemony, the world is moving closer to a Western geopolitical regime.

The extension of the West to new powers has two major consequences for the ‘old’ West; that is for Europe, the US and Japan.

First, it will lead to social destabilisation. Globalisation, that is the unification of geographical space, frees up circulation in all its forms: capital, goods, ideas, people. The generalisation of circulation leads to homogenisation. Although social inequality may become more acute, geographical inequality tends to vanish. Theoretically, the difference between the salaries of workers in Germany and of those in China should therefore disappear. Although this is hardly imaginable, to the extent that the trend does exist, the social destabilisation inside the ‘old’ West will become unbearable. Western political systems have tried up to now to shift the stresses to the future, through the growth of public and private debt. The present economic crisis has made clear the limits of this method.

Second, the extension of the West will lead to geopolitical destabilisation. The replacement of the American imperium by a Westernised polycentric system reintroduces geopolitical instability on a global scale. The new rising powers are struggling to secure a stronger position in the international arena. The new, emerging polycentric world is thus more unstable than the bipolar world of the Cold War or the unified world of the past two decades. Contrary to Fukuyama's prediction, the threat of the ‘return of history’ is very real. Therefore, if the future of the West, in the sense of the global triumph of the Western model, seems guaranteed, the old core of the West is justified in worrying about its future. Of the West's three components, Europe is the part most threatened by internal and external instability.

Polycentric itself, Europe finds it much more difficult to organise its security against outside dangers than do the US or Japan. Its geographical position at the crossroads between different worlds, in contact with North Africa, the Middle East and the Russian sphere, makes Europe much more vulnerable than the two other components of the West.

Internally, Europe's worries are even worse. The social model on which it founded its internal peace under the Communist threat, a model strongly supported economically for geopolitical reasons by the US during the Cold War, is no longer economically viable. The cultural shock to European populations that are unprepared psychologically for this realisation could lead to dangerous political developments, with serious consequences for the European Union and the international community.

Conclusion: History repeated?

The world of today combines elements of Mackinder's and Demangeon's visions. An era of change is in view, with its positive and its negative aspects. In the new, fascinating and dangerous world in front of us, humanity as a whole can hope for more liberty and progress with the extension of the Western model and as a result of the acceleration of innovation, through the input of fresh energy from peoples with a great civilisational heritage, excluded until now from Western dynamism.

For the ‘old’ West, however, the new period will be a difficult trial, as it will have to abandon a large part of its privileges, in the same way that France and England lost their previous status after the Second World War.

The major responsibility of the political leadership of the world, of both the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ West, is to manage the new stage of westernisation in such a way as to avoid the horrors of the previous stage—of the two World Wars. Much effort will be needed to convince ‘old’ Westerners to work more and earn less. It will be almost as difficult to persuade ‘new’ Westerners to control their impatience to attain the living standards and the political prestige of their predecessors.

Change is the only certainty in History. It has to be accepted with humility by those who fear it and with wisdom by those who hope for it. Only under these conditions can the pace of change be regulated, in order to avoid disastrous explosions like those of the nineteenth and, even more, of the twentieth century. Let us hope that the twenty-first century will be both more humble and more wise than the previous. The past record of the West does not inspire much optimism in that respect. However, the integration of old civilisations into the Western sphere may introduce some of the moderation that is needed. In that sense, the triumph of the West may be combined with the return of some imperial principles: of less competition and more equilibrium. The synthesis of the values of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ West might thus bring about a real ‘end of history’.

However, if this happens, it will not be the result of historical necessity operating mechanically, as understood by philosophers of History. Only through politics, that is, through the mobilisation of free will, can the worst be avoided.