Ideas are inferior to pop songs in one respect: they have no top 40 charts. If they did, the hit single to top the charts for global policy debates for three years running would have been entitled “Sunset in the west”. A plaintive, sometimes despairing tune that knocks western self-confidence, its refrain is that the western world has precious little to be confident about. Like all pop songs, it is a gross simplification of reality.
The latest instalment of western declinism comes courtesy of Time, whose last front featured a crimson-tinged image of a masked English hoodie in front of a flaming car, with the caption: “The decline and fall of Europe (and maybe the west)”. The article rolls together English riots, Standard & Poor’s downgrade of US debt, and the eurozone debt crisis in “a new reality impossible to ignore: the West – and most immediately Europe – is in serious trouble.”
If this thesis seems particularly seductive after another bad season in rich countries, it is neither new nor original. A string of recent books propound the idea that the political and economic model developed and pursued by the western world stands little chance in the beauty contest of alternative models – especially those offered by the big emerging nations. Explanations of western inadequacy range from unsubtle (Dambisa Moyo’s How the West Was Lost) to sophisticated (Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order). More and more non-western leaders imply or say flat out that the west can no longer claim to teach others.