Among the reasons for the ongoing geopolitical revolution, unprecedented rapid change in the global balance of power away from the West and Europe and toward China and Asiaâprofound yet rarely noted shift of the military-political foundation on which world order is ultimately based. The world was âmultipolarâ until the sixteenth century, when Europe started to achieve military superiority that served as the basis of its economic, political, and cultural expansion and its ability to channel global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to its own advantage. This situation began to change after the Soviet Union, and later China, developed nuclear weapons. This increasingly deprived the West of its ability to impose its interests through military force. Seeking to ensure its fundamental security interests, Russia has become a sort of âmidwife of historyâ by largely ushering in the current shift in the global balance of power and by expanding the freedom of choice available to the worldâs countries and peoples.
A Bit of Theory
The most important trend of the modern world is the relative weakening of the Westâthat had long dominated the worldâs politics, economy, and cultureâand the rise of other powers and civilizations, particularly those of Asia. This relative weakening is the main reason for the deepening Cold War-like rivalry today.
The many root causes of this macro-shift are the subject of much discussion in the international scholarly community. What is surprising, however, is how little attention has been given to what seems to me to be the single most important causeânamely, the loss by the West of its global military superiority, which Europe gained in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
A great deal of literature examines how Europe managed to rise from its medieval nadir and come to dominate the world later alongside the U.S.1
Previously, this success was attributed primarily to Christianity and its code of ethicsâand particularly to the Protestant work ethic and the ideology of building up savings and wealth through honest labor. There might be some truth in this explanation, but the Reformation that gave rise to Protestantism occurred only in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and did not cover the whole of Europe.
The strong work ethic was characteristic only of Protestant Europe. In any case, modern Europeâand particularly the formerly Protestant countriesâhas become almost completely a-religious, such that they can hardly be called âChristianâ anymore. Among Western countries, Christian beliefs remain strong in the U.S.âthe country that is also the most successful materially. Whatâs more, many of the other devoutly Christian countries in the world are relatively underdeveloped, and the work ethic in Japan and China or Korea is at least as strong, if not stronger than in the Protestant world. The people of those countries also save more. And, unlike China, Japan, and South Korea, the work ethic is becoming less pronounced in most Western countriesâpossibly due to the relative prosperity they have achieved.
In past centuries, theories of the racial âsuperiorityâ of white people were promulgated throughout most of Western culture, with the exception of Russia, as a way of explaining Europeâs success.
Political correctness and the powerful success of Asian countries have now pushed such theories aside.
The growth of democracy is often cited as one of the reasons for the success of the West. However, when Europe was developing at an especially rapid pace during the Industrial Revolution, most political regimes, even if they had formal elements of democracy, were, by modern standards, harshly authoritarian.
In other articles, I have written off the weakness of democracy (a very comfortable system for most) in terms of development. In fact, one can confidently state that democracy is not so much a tool of development as it is the prize for having achieved it.2 In addition, capitalismâs reliance on inequality contradicts democracyâs emphasis on equal rights.
In his writings, and particularly in his book âCivilization: The West and the Rest,â popular British/American historian Niall Ferguson provides the most complete list of reasons for the Westâs dominance. They include competition, science, protection of property rights, a highly developed medical system, the consumer culture, and the work ethic. Overall, he points to the Westâs standards and institutions as the reasons3 without making any mention of its military superiority. The only correct item on this list is property rights. A legacy of Roman law and the feudal period property rights form the basis of modern capitalism. And where such protections are ineffective, as in Russiaâdue to unsuccessful reforms in both the 1990s and 2000sâthe economy develops slowly.
The other reasons Ferguson cites do not entirely hold water. Extreme forms of competition remain intrinsic to Chinese political and economic culture. Chinaâs meritocratic system of exams for state officials is an obvious example. The Chinese axiom âLet 100 flowers bloomâ largely lies at the heart of the countryâs current economic success: it represents Beijingâs willingness to permit numerous economic and even political experiments at the grassroots. The authorities then encourage and disseminate the successful forms and either deem as dangerous or eliminate the unsuccessful ones. Of the hundreds of âflowers,â only a handful thrive and bloom. Those who have met students from Asia, and especially those of East Asia, know that they are more tenacious and hard-working and that they struggle harder than others to succeed.
It is unlikely that the development of science was the main reason behind the success of the West. In fact, science was far more advanced in Eastern civilizations until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and their scholars occupied a higher position in social hierarchies. Up until about the sixteenth century, much of what we would now call innovations and technical inventions were developed in the non-European worldâby Arabs, Persians, the residents of present-day India and, of course, by the Chinese. These non-Europeans produced most of the worldâs GDP, too. In modern phraseology, it was a multipolar world in the civilizational, political, cultural, and economic sense, with Europe being just one of the poles. Of course, the geographic scope of the world was smaller than todayâs global community, and so that multipolarity also differed from todayâs.
In Europe, relatively unhindered scientific research first appeared only four centuries ago. Recall the Inquisition, the mass burning of heretics like Giordano Bruno. The first universities appeared not in Europe, but in the Arab world. Relatively unrestricted scientific pursuits began developing in Europe only as recently as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The Age of Enlightenment, however, unquestionably played a significant role in strengthening first European, then Western, and from the eighteenth century, Russian civilization. But the accomplishments of the Enlightenment were also the result of these countriesâ ability to invest more in science and education, and were partially based on income received from, among other things, the redistribution of world GDP in favor of Europe. This process had begun in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries largely due to Europeâs ability to use its superior military might to impose its will on others (more on this below).
Similarly, 400â500 years ago, medicine was much more advanced in China, Persia, and the Arab world than it was in Europe.
The ideology of the consumer society apparently played a major role in the development of capitalism, especially in the Protestant, or lesser part of Europe. Catholicism and Orthodoxy, however, officially preached asceticism and detachment from material possessions.
Thus, these and similar explanations for the success of the West are either partially inadequate or entirely incorrect.
Although the combined effect of some of these factors might really have provided an advantage, they do not seem to explain fully how Europe and the West came to dominate the world for nearly 500 years.
This article will not dwell on the numerous reasons for the current weakening of Europe and the West. A vast body of literature already addresses that subject. I will, however, focus on what, as I have said, I believe to be the main reason, and one that is almost never citedânamely, the loss of the military superiority that Europe and the West enjoyed for the last half a millennium.
I will first allow myself to make several simple and almost trivial points. The cumulative power of states, their grouping, and even civilizations are determined by the dynamic combination of a number of factors. They include, though not necessarily in this order, military strength, economic power, their level of technological development, ideological and cultural attractiveness, the quality of leaders and ruling elites and their ability to adopt appropriate and timely policies, the governability of the countries and societies, the size and quality of the population and, most importantlyâtheir will to fight, or what in Russian is referred to as âboldness of spiritâ or ânerve.â
And of course, no country can succeed without a national goal and the willingness to pursue it by military means if necessary. J. Ortega y Gasset, perhaps the most famous Western philosopher of the twentieth century, formulated this idea as follows: âA people not experiencing any shame over the dissolution or poor organization of its armed forces is incapable of staying afloat or surviving.â4
Of course, it is a truism that foreign policy is an art, although such policy should be based on an accurate scientific understanding of trends in world development. Very often, however, it falls short due to intellectual or ideological limitations. Like traditional art, foreign policy is largely subject to the intuition and talent of leaders or ruling elites.
In addition, leadersâ roles vary in accordance with civilizational factors and the age in which they live. European monarchies became leadership democracies and then, in the last few decades, almost leaderless democracies (with countries such as Hungary and the U.S. the exceptions). In Asia, leaders play a much larger role, although the growing influence of public opinion born of the information revolution might limit their freedom of action.5
The great fourth century BC Indian strategist Kautilya (Chanakya) stated, as have many of his European and Chinese colleagues since: âFrom the strength of the treasury the army is born.â6 This is true, and a weak economy or excessive defense, security, and foreign policy expenditures have repeatedly undermined statesâincluding my former country, the Soviet Union.
The role that excessive spending on defense and foreign policy has played in weakening the position of great powers is described in the almost classic works of British historian Paul Kennedy. His primary example is the U.S. of the 1960sâ1980s. He also vividly described how excessive bureaucratization slows innovation and economic activity. In particular, he points to China during the Ming Dynasty (fourteenth to seventeenth centuries), and how the country began to gradually lose its lead in technology.7
In international competition, countries and societies naturally seek to emphasize their strengths.
During the heyday of U.S. economic might in the 1990s, President Clintonâs slogan, âItâs the economy, stupid,â seemed axiomatic. Accordingly, economists at that time occupied a leading position among the âhigh priestsâ of the social sciencesâa standing they are now losing rapidly. For their part, European pundits almost always argued that the strength of the economy, the attractiveness of a high standard of living, and liberal democracy were most important. A great many people did, and still do believe them. Even while China is actually winning the game economically, while Russia, near the bottom of the Top Ten world economies, has managedâwith its tough foreign policy, military might, and largely not liberal values that the overwhelming majority of the peoples of the world supportâto surpass, in terms of aggregate power, all countries except China and the U.S.8
In the 1920sâ1930s, ideologists of the poor and militarily weak Soviet Union promulgated the slogan of communism as the future of humanity. And until the 1950sâ1960s, the country held an enormous influence in the world that far outweighed its economic, military, and even political might.
The theory of âsoft powerâ by Joseph Nye arose during the wave of euphoria over the apparently decisive victory of âliberal democracyâ and the West as a whole and served to underscore its strengths.9 That euphoria then led to a series of terrible failures. The interventions in Iraq and Libya ended in political calamities leading to hundreds of thousands of casualties and the rise of radicalism and terrorism. The NATO operations in Afghanistan also failed because they were based on the unreasonable idea of establishing a modern democracy in a traditional society.
Not only did the âArab Springâ that the West supported ultimately fail, but it also destabilized the Middle East. The economic crisis that began in 2007â2008 also delivered a powerful blow to the ideological influence of the West. It undermined the myth of the infallibility of the Washington consensus model that the West had both offered and imposed on others. With the advent of D. Trump, something akin to a non-violent civil war against him by the majority of the U.S. elite started. The rise of so-called populism in Europe and the unfolding of multi-layered crises of the EU followed. In the process, the West somehow forgot about the ideological influence or its âsoft power.â
Now the âinformation ageâ is being trumpeted, primarily in the Westâone of the main bastions of influence of which is still exactly the sphere of information and mass media. Naturally, elites around t...