The West's Triumph

I had a letter published in The Economist magazine a few years ago. It was in response to what I thought was a negative article about the the West. This is how it went: I am bothered by your assessment that the West’s triumph might not endure in light of the astonishing ascent of Japan and its neighbors. On the contrary. Even if Asian economies overtake those of the West, the West will still have triumphed. The context and principles on which Asian economies are based have been devised and developed in the West.

That same year, 1999, The Economist had an article commemorating the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. That event marked the end of the Cold War and the triumph of the West and Democracy over Communism. This left Democracy the sole form of government in the world, an extraordinary outcome The Economist acknowledged.

However, I also was bothered by that article because it implied another failure with the West. It believed that the West, which espouses universality, hadn’t invented a new form of government to include those who have found it impossible to embrace Democracy. It felt that the West could have devised a gentler, more broadly based form of human governance. My feeling was that it wasn’t the West’s fault that there were those who had problems with Democracy. They would have to change and adapt to Democracy not the other way around.

By believing that a new form of government should have emerged, it’s obvious that The Economist didn’t subscribe to Francis Fukuyama’s argument that the triumph of Democracy marked an “end point” in human governance. He posited this idea in his book “The End of History. He couldn’t imagine any alternative to it since humankind already had tried every other form. Fukuyama made a pretty good case as to why Democracy could very well be the end point, because it essentially satisfied all the basic needs and aspirations of humankind. Here was the system, Fukuyama said, humankind had been striving for, a governance that was both universal in nature and mutually beneficial. In his view Democracy was the epitome in human governance. One couldn’t do better. Perhaps there were other alternatives, but not for this world.

The way The Economist made it sound, the West is in decline because it is being economically eclipsed by the East and because it hadn’t developed any new methods in human governance. If that’s true, which I don’t believe, one thing is certain, the West is leaving a lasting legacy that the rest of the world will benefit from. It is leaving a legacy like past civilizations have. The Greeks left the notion of democracy; the Romans, our legal system; the Arabs, mathematics and the means to quantify things; the Britons, a constitution and the work ethic. The great thing the West has done for the world is to bring together the best aspects of human ingenuity and molded them into a single coherent workable, humanistic force. The modern West improved on past contributions and has created the political and economic systems that sustains us today. The greatest legacy the West has pasted onto the rest of the world is one of general security and egalitarianism. Apart from inventing Democracy, the West invented the notions of progress, something I notice the rest of the world has not shunned but found appealing and irresistible

The West is not declining. Instead the rest of the world is rising to it. The world is leveling out. The West knew it had something unique in Democracy and has encouraged the rest of the world to partake in it. The rest of the world has heeded the West’s advice and is slowly becoming to resemble it and do as well or better than it. The Economist should celebrate this, not see it as a death knell for the West. What the West truly discovered is the holy grail of human government and now the rest of the world - China, India, etc. - are slowly moving towards it.

If the West has failed it’s because it has wrongly assumed that those who have never participated in Democracy would readily and naturally accept it. Nations that are full fledge democracies have taken centuries to become so. The Economist has not considered this and generally has misplaced its criticism of the West and its stewardship. Instead it should think of ways the West can improve on the selling and implementation of