Collapse of the West and Global Chaos

How would the collapse of the West impact the global system? This is the question that is preoccupying intellectual circles around the world.

Recently, a Chinese analyst told the BBC that Europe had arrived at the point where it was “a museum for tourists arriving from developing countries.” The prediction has become that India will assume a pioneering global role in the most interesting topics on the discussion table. In Tehran, the official news agencies broadcast reports almost daily about “the impending end of the biggest Satan,” and President Ahmadinejad adds some excitement to his speeches by signaling with his hand that America is over.

At a time when discussion of the collapse of the West has produced an entire industry known as “the collapse,” television channels in the United States and Europe are broadcasting talk shows with the stars of that new culture. Known as the “collapsers,” some recommend that the West resign, while others suggest that the West search for a marginal role in the future. Books with titles like “A Post-American World” and “The End of the West” occupy the shelves of libraries in Western capitals. Yet when it comes to building a system, the “collapsers” have only a few original new ideas: They talk of a new multipolar world in which India and Brazil become permanent members in the United Nations Security Council. But before examining the solutions that the “collapsers” offer, let's take a look at their theories.

The concept of collapse is a Western invention with a long history. The historian Thucydides witnessed its emergence during the Peloponnesian War, and the Roman historian Tacitus thought that the West had arrived at its peak in the age of Emperor Augustus; then the German philosopher Schopenhauer observed the beginning of the collapse of the West in the 19th century. But the explanations that the ancient “collapsers” used were less amusing than those that the current ones are repeating. (An American “collapser” of Indian descent insisted that the reason for India's increasing domination and the collapse of the United States is the greater number of cell phones in India.)

Is the West really in a state of collapse? The question remains.

If the “West" is defined as a way of life, as the civilization that carries out capitalism, democracy and the rule of law, then the term "the West" will apply to several nations outside Europe and North America, particularly nations like Japan, India and Brazil. Nations like Russia and China, then, would be considered to have begun a long journey towards cultivating the Western way. As a way of life, the West now has no competitors outside of North Korea. The other closed state, Burma, is trying to adopt the Western model at the same time that we find Iran combining a society that lives on the Western model with a political system that resembles a Soviet system using religious terms.

Then the West is completely distant from the phase of collapse, as it is living at the peak of its history in terms of popularity. So tyrants and rulers of all different types consider the West an enemy, and they hope for its demise and collapse.

On the other hand, we can also challenge the theory of the “collapsers” if we look at the West geographically, meaning the European Union and North America. The two regions represent 10 percent of the world's population but 60 percent of the global economy. Ninety percent of patents for new inventions are found in the West, as well as 80 percent of scientific and technological innovations. And despite the cultural flourishing in many regions in the world, Western literature and the arts show no sign of collapse.

Although the world is currently witnessing an economic stagnation, the West is still able to achieve a small amount of average growth, though it is true that several Western countries suffer from huge debt that in some cases approaches 100 percent of their GDP. One of the reasons for this probably goes back to the desire of individuals to lend to the West, while Iran has failed to attract foreign investment despite the fact that the interest it offers is several times larger.

From a demographic standpoint, the West does not suffer from collapse. It does not suffer from the huge average birth rate that developing countries do, which sometimes forces those nations to establish laws to limit the population explosion, such as the One Child Policy in China and forced sterility in India. And in contrast to Russia, the West doesn't face the threat of a drop in its population numbers.

Correspondingly, we find that the West seems to be in the best condition from other perspectives. It is a place nearly free of political prisoners and achieves general progress that surpasses the global average in social justice and equality of opportunity. Though the situation of women in the West is not ideal, the fact remains that there is no segregation between the sexes.

What about the solutions that the “collapsers” offer for a problem that does not exist?

The discussion of multipolarity of power seems more logical in politics than in geometry, since by the definition of a “pole,” it is impossible to find more than two poles that oppose each other. It is possible for the global system to be centered around one center of power, as happened in the Vienna summit and later in the Congress of Berlin. In both cases, European powers demanded control over the world and attempted to divide it between them, and it became possible to imagine that battling developing powers would resort to war to achieve local or global ambitions. That was the situation between the two worlds when the United States was pursuing a policy of non-alignment, Russia was Soviet, Germany was Nazi, Italy was fascist, Japan was militarized and imperial Britain and France fought to protect or increase their regions of their influence.

The world was split during the Cold War into two competing blocs, led by the United States and Russia. What we have now is an absence of global leadership, not the collapse of the West.

The United States is trying to play a marginal role under President Barack Obama, which is partially reinforced by Obama's supporters confusing a leadership role for the United States with the concept of imperialism. It also goes back to the fact that the Americans have become weary of the wars they have fought in places scattered across the world for over an entire decade in the name of America's leadership role. Even the strongest sports teams need a rest between rounds.... The question is this: How much time will the break take? A long break might mean that the world will face chaos, which will lead to a war to establish a new global balance of power.