Arabs is that they have lost their place among nations and feel unable to recover it, the tragedy of the West is to have assumed too large a global role, which it can no longer entirely fulfil but from which it cannot extricate itself.
It goes without saying that the West has given humanity more than any other civilisation. Since the Athenian miracle two and a half thousand years ago, and especially in the course of the last six hundred years, there is not a field of knowledge, creativity, production or social organisation which — for better or for worse — does not bear the stamp of Europe or its North American offshoot. Western science has become science
With the end of the Cold War, Western hegemony seemed to have crossed a new threshold. Its economic, political and social systems had demonstrated their superiority and appeared to be on the point of encompassing the whole world. There was even some premature talk of ‘the End of History’, since the whole world was now going to melt peacefully into the mould of the victorious West.
But History is not the wise and biddable virgin of ideologues’ dreams.
And so in the field of economics, the triumph of the Western model has led paradoxically to a weakening of the West.
Freed from the shackles of central planning, China and then India’s economies rapidly took off; these were two peaceful revolutions which were brought about quietly by unassuming people, but they are in the process of permanently changing the balance of the world.
In 1978, two years after the death of Mao Zedong, power fell to Deng Xiaoping, a little 74-year-old man who had miraculously escaped the purges of the Cultural Revolution. He immediately ordered the distribution of previously collectivised land to some of the peasants and allowed them to sell a proportion of their harvest. The results were convincing: productivity increased two-, three- and in some cases fourfold. Going further, the Chinese leader decided that, rather than being told by the local authorities, the peasants could henceforth choose for themselves what to plant. Production increased again. And so it began. By small steps and without earth-shattering declarations or mass demonstrations, the old unproductive system was progressively dismantled, progressively and yet at the speed of light, probably through the multiplier effect resulting from the size of the country’s population. For example, when the authorities lifted the ban on small family businesses in the countryside — such as grocers’, stalls and repair shops — twenty-two million of them sprang up, employing thirty-five million people. When it comes to China, one constantly has the impression of turning the pages of a book of records: for example, the number of skyscrapers in Shanghai in 1988 was fifteen, but within twenty years it had risen to five thousand — more than New York and Los Angeles combined.
But there are phenomena which do not depend on a giant scale, and which may even be made more difficult by it, such as the growth in GDP, which has hovered around an average of 10 per cent for thirty years, enabling the Chinese economy to overtake successively those of France, the UK, and then Germany in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
In India, the dismantling of the planned economy took place just as calmly and with consequences that were equally astonishing. In July 1991, the Indian government had to face a major financial crisis which threatened imminent bankruptcy. In response, the finance minister Manmohan Singh decided to relax some of the restrictions which hampered business. Up to that point, the country had had extremely restrictive laws which obliged businesses to obtain a permit for every transaction: import permits, foreign exchange permits, investment permits, permits to increase production, and so on. As soon as the economy was freed from these shackles, it took off.
What I have described in a few brief paragraphs constitutes a huge and unexpected advance for the whole of humanity, one of the most exciting in history. The two most populous countries on the planet, accounting for half of what we used to call the Third World, are beginning to emerge from underdevelopment. Other countries in Asia and Latin America seem to be following suit. The traditional division of the world into the industrial North and the impoverished South is gradually fading.
In retrospect, the economic rise of these great Eastern nations will probably appear the most spectacular consequence of the collapse of state socialism. Viewing it from the perspective of humanity as a whole, one can only applaud. Seen from a Western standpoint, the joy is mixed with apprehension, for these new industrial giants are not only business partners; they also represent formidable rivals and potential enemies.
We are no longer in the traditional scenario of the South offering cheap but inefficient labour. If Chinese and Indian workers are still less demanding and may remain so in the foreseeable future, they are better and better qualified and highly motivated. Are they less inventive, as is often claimed in the West, sometimes with a heavy hint of cultural or ethnic prejudice? If that is still the case today, the situation is likely to change as the men and women of the South become more self-confident, freer and less hampered by social hierarchies and intellectual conformity. Within a generation or two they could go from imitation via adaptation to innovation. The histories of these great peoples reveal that they are capable of it: porcelain, gunpowder, paper, the rudder, the compass, vaccination and the concept of zero are all testament to that. What these Asian societies once lacked they have now acquired or are in the process of acquiring under Western guidance. Freed from the caprices of power and opposition to change, having suffered the defeats, humiliations and poverty of the past, they seem at last ready to face the future.
The West has won; it has imposed its model. But by its very victory, it has lost.
Perhaps it would be useful to distinguish here between the universal, diffuse and implicit West, which has invaded the souls of all the nations of the earth, and the particular, geographic, political, ethnic West of the white nations of Europe and North America. It is the latter which today finds itself at an impasse, not because its civilisation has been overtaken by others, but because it has been adopted by others, depriving it of what constituted its specificity and superiority up to now.
With hindsight, perhaps we shall say that the attraction exerted by the Soviet system on the countries of the South paradoxically delayed the decline of the West. As long as China, India and many other centrally planned economies of the Third World remained prisoners of an economic model that did not work, they did not represent a threat to the West’s economic supremacy — they in fact thought that they were fighting against it. They had to free themselves from that illusion and resolutely follow the dynamic path of capitalism before beginning to challenge the ‘white man’s’ supremacy in earnest.
The Western nations experienced a golden age without realising it when they were the only ones who possessed an economic system that worked. In the competitive global environment that they did all in their power to create, they now seem condemned to dismantle entire sectors of their economy — almost all of industrial manufacturing has gone, along with a growing part of the service sector.
The situation is particularly acute for Europe, which, to put it simply, is caught in the crossfire between Asia and the US, by which I mean between the commercial competition of the emerging nations and the strategic competition of the US, whose effects are felt in cutting-edge industries such as aeronautics and military technology. To that we can add the further considerable European handicap: its lack of control over its gas and oil supplies, most of which are concentrated in the Middle East and Russia.
Another important consequence of the economic take-off of the Asian giants is that now millions of people have access to a style of consumption from which they were previously excluded.
One can smile indulgently or become outraged at certain excesses, but no one can legitimately deny these people the right to own what people in rich nations have long owned — fridges, washing machines, dishwashers, and all the products that go with them; hot water to wash in, clean water to drink, plentiful food; also medical care, education, leisure time, travel, and so on.
Unless bloody and absurd tyrannies are established across the planet to return these nations to poverty and servitude, I do not see how they can be prevented from doing what for decades they have been encouraged to do: work harder, earn more, improve their lives, and consume more and more.
For several generations, including my own, and especially for those of us who were born in the countries of the South, the struggle against underdevelopment was the logical extension of the struggle for independence. Independence seemed the easier challenge; the hard battle against poverty, ignorance, incompetence, social
