The West has been in deep crisis politically and morally for years now, and far from its former position of leadership in the defense of freedom and the struggle against totalitarianism. A role that has certainly not been without its dark sides, such as support for dictators solely because they were anti-Communist, despite the fact that Europe and the United States long fostered a vision of world order based on fundamental rights and freedoms. Today, however, this role appears to have lost much of its age-old luster as the result of a multilevel crisis – principal among which is an economic profile that shows Europe and the US as having shifted rapidly from mature industrialized economies to one based on a young information society model.
While in the period following the Second World War industrial capitalism managed to make a social compromise that led to a distribution of wealth based largely on principles such as the welfare State and social protection, globalized financial capitalism has deepened social and economic inequalities that have lowered incomes and, in turn, increased uncertainty about the future. If parents in the 1950s and 60s were able to envision a better life for their children afforded by greater social mobility, that same ambition is today an almost utopian one now that the social elevator has stalled.
Moreover, from the standpoint of fundamental rights, philosophers and political analysts have observed that the platform on which the struggle for them was once based has recently been overturned as the focus has shifted to the all-important individual, and at the cost of political, economic and social solidarity. The sense of belonging to a community is being replaced by an extreme social fragmentation that is aggravating social conflict rather than resolving it.
Finally, from the point of view of governance, the West has long been in a crisis of democracy, i.e. in the capacity for decision-making, owed to an increasingly radical contrast between political forces. This stems, in particular, from the undermining of intermediary entities such as trade unions and political parties, as well as from a loss of values exacerbated by new those technologies – especially social media – that tend to distance people while offering the illusion of uniting them.
Ever since the great modern revolutions of England, America and France, the West has represented the cradle of that illuminist value triad: liberty, equality and fraternity. Liberty understood as protection against despotism and dogmatism, as well as freedom of thought, enterprise, education and science. Equality conceived both formally – all citizens being equal under the law – as well as substantively, as in the struggle against inequality and the awareness that there is true liberty only if it applies as broadly as possible. Fraternity, understood as the sum of those duties to solidarity that bind liberty and equality together.
The most probable consequences in the case that the West is unable to recover from its crisis boil down to two essentially. The first will lie in the decline of the open society, characterized mainly by the rule of law and individual freedoms, since no extra-European society appears prepared to stand up for Western values. The second is that world disorder is destined to spread since the West, despite all its errors and problems, has created a global order based on mutual respect among nations: on the contrary, the leading extra-European powers that would seek to impose an alternative order are for the most part closed societies, and the order they would impose would be based on excessive coercion.
In truth, the West is possessed of the most appropriate instruments for confronting this crisis. The foremost thing needed is that Western peoples and their representatives behave in a manner consistent with the universal values they intend to promote. Conduct that negates the principles of liberty, equality, fraternity and solidarity is hypocritical if the Western model is to be promoted to other cultures. Furthermore, Western governments must defend human rights with greater determination in international forums, and cannot continuously subordinate the protection of pluralism, the defense of minorities and of civil liberties, freedom of expression and the pursuit of scientific knowledge to economic, commercial or political expediency.