What is waning more in the West, civility or democracy? There has been talk for a century now of Western “decline”, understood as demographic and economic, but also the decline of fundamental values such as freedom, democracy and openness. Interpretations have gone so far as to speak of a broad decline in moral values. It can be seen as the beginning of a different perception of the world’s diversities.
Perhaps, rather than decline one could speak of change due to technology or climate; or of crisis, since the world is facing some very serious problems that do not appear to be getting better, at least for now.
These are questions associated with both the inner soundness of Western countries in areas such as health, transatlantic alliance and the integrity of democracies, as well as relations with actors “external” to the Western world. In any case, what they do not point to is a “clash of civilizations”. Clearly, an initial question concerns the West’s moral base. Once upon a time, it was Christianity, but that may have changed by now, assuming, for example, the concept of a centuries-old post-Christian truth – that could trigger dissent, however, at least until its values were defined and agreed on.
Another aspect is the relationship between nationalism and democracy. Historically, the ascent of democracy has been linked with ethnic and cultural identity. An impulse that, far from having abated – witness the resurgence of nationalism –, has increased tensions that threaten the West’s overall soundness. Democracy lags behind in geopolitically complex areas of the world where the West is too weak to contain authoritarian behaviour; and since it has no answers to offer, it is as if there were no longer any belief in what this Western political class does and what it has always represented. This then being an intellectual and international crisis, one thing is certain: that Francis Fukuyama’s historical prediction was wrong. It could be said, somewhat provocatively, that instead of having ended, democracy in the West seems to have stopped somewhere around 1989. Or that, as some suggested, the world has now become a sort of “simulation”, with technology, artificial intelligence, big data, scarce inclusivity and opaque global governance having taken the place of what was once known as democracy.
It was argued that the West appears to be trapped in a self-referential vortex, unable to recognize its own mistakes. Societies are becoming more polarized and inequality is growing; thus, with the added complication of exceptional factors like terrorism and pandemics, current political systems are being threatened.
Worrisome as this scenario may be, however, it is not catastrophic. The question is simply one of acknowledging it, examining what is happening and considering how fluid reality is. The democracy of today seems to have been reduced to a process, a market of politics, goods, ideas, technologies and personal success. The triumph of hyper-individualism, but not that “good” individualism that brought about change in the past and even recently.
Some participants felt the growth of nationalism could be interpreted as a reaction to that hyper-individualism and to the need to find a sense of collective belonging and identity; a deeper explanation could lie in today’s crises of identity and of primary identities. In the former case, close attention must be paid to the internet-assisted manipulation of the West by its “enemies”, who have discovered that sowing internal division offers a way to get in and destabilize the system. The latter, on the other hand, points to a growth without progress that seeps into the general consciousness, obligating renewal and reconsideration in order to gain awareness of the society’s inner conflict.
Education is key to this picture, with regard to science but also to the study of social problems, free from the social media’s not always positive influence. The “decline” of the West can have other interpretations as well. It could be a simple “rebalancing” of power, such as the history of humanity has seen repeatedly with the rise and fall of great powers from the Roman Empire onward. It is also possible to distinguish between absolute and relative decline. The first is “domestic” and regards democracy and the values of the “open society”. The second can be better understood by analysing the West’s economic power and global position. Nevertheless, relative decline prompts consideration of how the West is going to choose to confront the rest of the world and, in particular, that part of the world that is neither Europe or the United States nor Russia or China. Finally, from a strictly social standpoint, this identity crisis could indicate the rise of a post-proletarian society, in which the proletariat is no longer the protagonist since its progress has lost its value as a social principle. That loss raises questions that are going to take some profound reflection to answer.