The mode of the Western withdrawal is not everywhere identical, nor is the resultant condition of the abandoned territory. Where the communist enterprise takes fully over, it inflicts an outright defeat on the West and destroys or drives out the representatives of Western power. It then consolidates the territories, resources and peoples inside the counter-system of its own embryonic civilization.
But in many of the regions breaking away from the West, communism has not had the sole or major direct role, at least in the early stages. In some of these, too, the West has been defeated in outright military struggle. In most—perhaps indeed in all—military battles have been a secondary factor. In some of these regions, the withdrawal of the West is still not total: in parts of the vanished British Empire, for example, and even more notably in what was France’s sub-Saharan empire. It is still conceivable that such regions are not altogether lost to the West. Though the political interrelationship has now sharply changed, their internal development may, conceivably, be such as to make them part of the West in a deeper sense than in their colonial past. However, that would alter only details and fragments of the moving picture.
As in every great historical turn, the symbols are there to be seen by all who are willing to look: the Europeans fleeing by the hundreds of thousands from Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria; the British Viceroy’s palace in Delhi taken over by a Brahman mass leader posing as a parliamentarian; the crescent replacing the cross over the cathedrals of Algiers and Constantine; the mass rape of European women in central Africa, the elaborate killing of European men, the mass feasts on dismembered bodies of European seminarists and airmen; the ostentatious reversion of non-Western leaders, in public, to non-Western clothes; the Western warships abandoning Dakar, Bombay, Suez, Trincomalee; the many conferences and palavers from which the representatives of the West but not the communists are excluded; the deliberate public insolence to soldiers, diplomats and wandering citizens of the West.
MODERN RESEARCH INTO PAST civilizations and its systematization into theory or poetry, as by Spengler and Toynbee, have made us familiar with this flow and ebb, the growth, climax, decline and death of civilizations and empires, whose morphological pattern, unclouded by the abstractions and metaphors of the theories, can be so plainly seen by turning the colored pages of the atlas. From precedents and analogues we learn that the process of shrinking, when once it unmistakably sets in, is seldom if ever reversed. Though the rate of erosion may be slow, centuries-long, the dissolution of empires and civilizations continues, usually or always, until they cease altogether to exist, or are reduced to remnants or fossils, isolated from history’s mainstream. We are therefore compelled to think it probable that the West, in shrinking, is also dying. Probable, but not certain: because in these matters our notions are inexact, and any supposed laws are rough and vague. Even from the standpoint of perfect knowledge the outcome might be less than certain; for it may be dependent, or partly dependent, on what we do about it, or fail to do.
I have, perhaps, been putting too heavy a burden of adornment on the modest premise which it is the business of this chapter to lay down. The premise is itself so very simple and makes such a minimum assertion that I would not want it called into question because of possible implications of the elaborating gloss. For the past two generations Western civilization has been shrinking; the amount of territory, and the number of persons relative to the world population, that the West rules have much and rapidly declined. That is all the premise says.
I would like to state this proposition in language as spare and neutral as possible, so that it cannot smuggle any unexamined cargo. To speak of the “decline” of the West is dangerous. It calls to mind Spengler, via the English translation of his title; and almost unavoidably suggests a psychological or moral judgment that may be correct but is irrelevant to my purposes. It is not self-evident that in shrinking quantitatively the West is morally deteriorating. Logically, the contrary might equally well be the case. There are similar confusions with words like “ebb,” “breakup,” “waning,” “withering,” “decay,” “crumbling,” “collapse” and so on. It may be of some significance that nearly all words referring to quantitative decrease have a negative feel when applied to human beings or society. But let us try to be neutral.
Let us say only: “Western civilization has been contracting”; and speak of “the contraction of the West.”
Reduced to so small a minimum, my premise would seem to be so easily verified, so much a part of common knowledge, as to be unquestionable. Yet I know, from the experience of many discussions and debates on these matters, that it is questioned; or, more exactly, is avoided. As soon as it is formulated, someone (I mean some Westerner; non-Westerners have no difficulty with this premise) will say: “Isn’t it a good thing that the West should put an end to the injustice, tyranny and exploitation of colonialism?” And another: “It is deceptive to put things as you do because actually the West has become stronger by liquidating its overseas empires.” Still another will add: “Surely the West is much better off dealing with non-Western peoples on the basis of freedom, equality and friendship.” And again: “Colonial oppression and exploitation were in reality not an expression of Western civilization, but a betrayal of Western ideals, so that the West has not truly lost anything but in fact gained by getting out of Asia, Africa, etc. And as for Eastern Europe, communism is just a temporary excess that will soften in good time, to permit Poland, Hungary and the others, and Russia itself, to take their place within a broadened Western framework.” Or in still another variant: “That purely quantitative way of putting things misses the important factors. By basing its relations with the rest of the world on concepts of equality, mutual respect, the rule of law, the search for peace, etc., and by dropping the old ideas of Western superiority and rightful domination, Western civilization has in reality improved its standing and increased its global influence in spite of superficial appearances.”
Maybe so. Later on there will be occasion to examine more closely comments of this sort, the ideas and attitudes that give rise to them, and the functions they fulfill. Whatever their merits, they do not negate the assertion that, in the simple, straightforward atlas sense, the West has, for two generations, been contracting.
So much, then, for my structural premise.
II
WHY HAS THE WEST BEEN contracting? This is a question that I shall not try to answer, now or later. I raise it here only to reject two answers that are surely false.
The contraction of the West cannot be explained by any lack of economic resources or of military and political power. On the brink of its contraction—that is, in the years immediately preceding the First World War—the West controlled an overwhelming percentage of the world’s available economic resources, of raw materials, of physical structures, and of the physical means of production—tools, machines, factories. In advanced means of production it had close to a monopoly. And the West’s superiority in politico-military power was just as great, perhaps even more absolute. In terms of physical resources and power there just wasn’t any challenger in the house.
Even today, when the Western dominion has been cut to less than half of what it was in 1914, Western economic resources—real and available resources—and Western military power are still far superior to those of the non-Western regions. The disparity has lessened—though not nearly so much as masochistic columnists would lead us to think—but it is large enough to define a different order of dimension. In sheer power, the ratio in favor of the West was probably at its height long after the contraction started: in the seven or eight years following the Second World War, when the West had a monopoly of nuclear weapons.
So it cannot be the case that the West is contracting because of any lack of physical resources and power; there neither was nor has been nor