All of these discussions, I would argue, are being conducted with a fair amount of optimism, based, among other things, on the fact that in the past the Western world convincingly won wars – both „cold“ and „conventional“ ones, while its most dangerous opponents (which sometimes included countries culturally and historically close to it, but fallen under the influence of crazy ideologies) ended up, so to say, in a major historical recycling. Meanwhile, it seems to me that if a new confrontation occurs, events may evolve another – and not so much because of the greater power of the West’s opponents, but as a result of a significant change inside the Western world itself.
To my mind, at least three groups of factors can be noted that distinguish modern Western societies from those that resisted „the Rest“ in previous centuries – from the onset of Modernity until the collapse of Communism.
The first concerns, I would argue, the attitude to risks. In the last five hundred years, Western civilization and its elites have been the most desperate risk takers the world has ever known. They expanded their „natural“ boundaries, made great geographical discoveries, conquered vast territories and brought them under control [see:Revel, Jean-François. L’obsession anti-américaine. Son fonctionnement, ses causes, ses inconséquences, Paris: Plon, 2002] – and did this with far fewer human resources than their opponents had under their command. The large European nations from the mid-17th century till the beginning of the 20th century remained the centers of outward migration (between 1846 and 1924 they lost for other territories more than 25 percent of those who inhabited Western Europe at the start of this period [see: Nugent, Walter. Crossings. The Great TransatlanticMigrations, 1870-1914, Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 1992, table 8, p. 30; table 9, p. 43], and Great Britain’s emigration losses during this time are estimated at 41 percent of its original population [см. Stalker, Peter. Workers Without Frontiers. The Impact of Globalization on International Migration, LynneRienner Publishers, Boulder (Co.), London, 2000, p. 13]). I would add that the settlers went from Europe to the lands where life was more unpredictable than in their native places – but the European demographic trends compensated for any emigration. Europe itself was in a state of almost permanent wars for several centuries, and as these became less frequent, the number of their victims increased dramatically. Even if war was not a natural state for Europeans, it remained an important social function, with the military elite being an integral part of the high society. The economy and state budgets were seriously linked to meeting the needs of the armies (it can be recalled that on the eve of the French Revolution about half of the royal treasury expenditures were spent on these purposes, and at the beginning of the 20th century this share in Germany, France and Great Britain stood at 28-40 percent [during the World War I it had peaked at 91, 77 and 49 percent, respectively]). The imperial nature of the European powers implied long colonial wars, which allowed Westerners to get acquainted with the way of life of other peoples and to consider the imposition of the European model on them as the only reasonable option [see: Ferguson, Niall. Empire. How Britain Made the Modern World, London: Allen Lane, 2003] (in this context, the past centuries are quite rightly considered a time not so much of globalization as of Westernization [see:Laue, Theodore H., von. The World Revolution of Westernization. The Twentieth Century in Global Perspective, Oxford, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987]). As a result, the West has developed some vision of its historical mission, a sense of the normality of risk was fostered, and a certain attitude towards violence as an acceptable instrument for achieving needed results arose in Europeans’ minds.
But much of this all has changed in the last eighty years. During the Cold War years, with the advent of consumer society, the Western citizens became refocused for rejecting any policy that could lead to a serious decline in living standards, and alongside with collapse of the colonial system, an attitude matured toward the rest of the world as a rogue space that should be left to itself. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the notorious „end of history“ vision radically strengthened such ideas [see: Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and theLast Man, London, New York: Penguin, 1992]: for the first time ever, a victory over a dangerous enemy was gained through peaceful, rather than military, rivalry – and this put its mark on all aspects of Western societies. Between 1985 and 2000, NATO member states’ total military spending fell by more than 30 percent in constant dollars, from an average of 4.70 percent to 2.43 percent of their combined GDP, and the emergence of people with a serious military background leading a European country, which was quite common until the 1960s, becamean unheard-of phenomenon (the President of the Czech president elected last year is almost the only exception). Between 1990 and 2013, twenty-four European countries abolished universal military service, and ironically, it is now retained only in two Western European countries that declared themselves neutral decades ago: Switzerland and Austria. The readiness for risk-taking and mobilization is minimal, while in the main non-Western countries the last decades have been spent in active remilitarization (China’s military spending has grown by 13.2 times in dollar terms since 2000, and Russia’s – by 12.7 times [I won’t even mention North Korea]) and indoctrination of their own populations with the aim of instilling in them the idea that war and violence are normal. Thus, it would not be an exaggeration to believe that if a hundred years ago major confrontations involved countries with relatively similar attitudes toward military conflict, its admissibility and readiness to participate in it, now the positions of the West and its opponents differ radically.
The second group of factors can be called economic. If one looks at the history of the West over the last five hundred years, she or he may find that it has never been dependent on countries and territories remaining outside its political control (such dependence ended with the medieval trading republics). This point is even more noticeable if one looks not at raw materials but at industrial potential: all the major Western countries have remained the largest producers and exporters of industrial products for centuries (by the end of World War II, the United States accounted for more than half of the world’s industrial production). Given that the basis of Western dominance was innovation and technological achievements [see: McCloskey, Deirdre. Bourgeois Equality: HowIdeas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World, Chicago (Il.): Univ of Chicago Press, 2016], the rest of the world could at best hope for catch-up development, which cannot bring sustainable leadership [see: Inozemtsev,Vladislav. „Catching Up“. The Limits of Rapid Economic Development, New Brunswick (NJ), London: Transaction Publishers, 2002]. The vast empires of Britain and France defeated Germany in World War I; the endless resources of the United States ultimately ensured the advantage for the Allies in World War II; the consolidated economic potential of the West left the USSR no chance in the Cold War. Throughout the centuries,the West was the world’s only net exporter of technology and capital; it was responsible for successful industrialization of dozens of countries, while the alternative Soviet model left the world mostly useless industrial ruins. This began to change in the 1960s, when decolonization reduced the Western-controlled resource base and the Soviet Union became an energy superpower – but the real revolution occurred after the end of the Cold War.
From 1970 to 2005, the energy dependence of the United States and European countries on the rest of the world jumped from 20-25 percent to more than 50 percent. The drive for profits also led to the transfer of industrial capacity from Western countries to the periphery and to an increase in dependence on imported industrial goods that happened for the first time ever: during the same years, the volume of such imports from outside Canada and the EU to the United States grew by more than 20 times, to $2.2 trillion annually. The expansion of trade deficits led, in turn, to the accumulation of huge capital surpluses in non-Western countries and lending to the U.S. and Europe. In the last ten to fifteen years, the main factor of dependence has been the technological advance of developing countries, fueled by large-scale industrial espionage and unfair competition from China (the extent to which all intellectual property rights have been neglected in Russia since 2022 reflect how the authorities and businesses of other non-Western countries would like to treat the problem). One way or another, by mid-2020s, the Western world found itself to dependent on its adversaries by an unprecedented degree (even the „green revolution“ initiated by the West for its own self-sufficiency is now producing additional difficulties, since the stock of many commodities critically needed for new technological solutions is disproportionally located at the global periphery). The last important circumstance is the current scale of non-Western markets, which many Western companies cannot afford to abandon. Therefore, whether one likes it or not, it is far more difficult for the West to sever economic ties with even one hostile country than it was in 1914 to halt trade relations with an entire rival bloc – and this significantly reduces not only the ability but also the willingness of the United States and Europe to confront their enemies.
The third set of factors is even more alarming. The end of the Cold War – the last major conflict between „the West“ and „the Rest“ – coincided almost exactly with two important events: one that was commonly considered the „end of ideology“ [see: Bell, Daniel. The End of Ideology. On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, Cambridge (Ma.), London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986] and another that might be called the advent of mass reverse migrations now directed from the rest of the world toward the West. If one looks at the course of both World War I and II, she or he will realize how powerful was the national and ideological unity of almost all the parties in these confrontations. Even if we do not take into account the extreme cases of ideological madness in Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Russia, the military emergencies caused very radical responses: the internment of German and Japanese citizens in the U.S. during both wars, the ban on nationalist parties in Great Britain in the late 1930s, and the anti-communist McCarthist hysteria in the U.S. in the 1950s – all this reflect a powerful (and often excessive) ideological mobilization in all the conflicting countries (socialist ideas in the U.S. during the Cold War were, as everyone knowns, spread on an extremely limited scale and were generally considered hostile to the Western society). Ideological mobilization was complemented by a sense of national unity: by the mid-1960s, no more than 5 percent of the U.S. population was foreign-born (partly a distant consequence of the migrations of the early 20th century), while in Western Europe this share was less than 1percent – and the overall number of immigrants from the non-Western world remained quite limited.
The notorious „end of history“ changed almost everything: first human rights came to the fore, and the „rights“ of ethnic and religious groups followed suit [see: Benhabib, Seyla. The Claims of Culture. Equality and Diversity in the Global Era, Princeton (NJ), Oxford: Princeton Univ. Press, 2002]. Against the backdrop of growing immigration, which increased the share of people from countries whose governments can hardly be called friendly to the Western world to between 7 and 10 percent of the overall population, the social unity of the Western nations is being destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Chinese are considered by many (not without a reason, by the way) to be the „fifth column“ that ensures the outflow of technology and know-how from America to China; a significant cohort of Putinverstehers originating from either the USSR or Russia possess a significant influence on German politics; masses of Islamists resort to unpunished pogroms under Palestinian flags in protest against the Western aid to Israel. The liberal values on the basis of which the modern Western society was created are so systematically uprooted by the adherents of leftist ideology that any attempt of returning to normalcy turns into the condemnation of the supporters of traditional order (as it happened, for example, during the recent parliamentary elections in France). In other words, the influence of illiberal (in its original, not in the recently distorted sense of the word) social groups and non-Western ethnic and religious communities has reached such a degree, and the indoctrination with the theory of human rights, free from any obligations, has reached such a scale, that the internal mobilization of Western countries vis-à-vis the non-Western world no longer seems possible. As sad as it is to note, if in previous global conflicts the dividing line between the Western and non-Western worlds passed along their political border, today it is pushed deep inside the West itself and made it fundamentally unprepared for the struggle that may await it in the near future. Here I would advise thinking about the fact that Ukraine – a country that has experienced all the hardships of „real socialism“ and is not overwhelmed by the new-fangled worship of multicultural values – has not accidentally become the most effective defender of the enlightened humanistic West from the „new geopolitical contenders“.
To conclude, I would say that the modern world is rapidly moving towards a new world war – and the only question is whether it will be the World War III or the Cold War II. The difference between the approaching conflict and the former ones is that the canvas of all previous confrontations was determined by the West itself (the sameJapan, in order to challenge America, eighty years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, adopted many Western practices rejecting the feudal system that had existed for a thousand years, and the Soviet Union was built on the basis of a communist ideologyinvented in the West and around the typical Western ideas of rationality and progress), whereas now the developed countries may be forced to „play on someone else’s field“ with opponents who, in one sphere or another and inone form or another, deny all Western foundations and values. At the same time, the Atlantic societies appear extremely relaxed (whilebetween 1938 and 1941 U.S. military spending increased by 5.3 times,from 2021 to 2024 it went up by only 14.4 percent, andin Germany the budget deficit for 2025 is foreseen at a mere 0.4 percent of GDP, whilein the U.S. in the 1941/42 fiscal year it has reached 12.4 percent of GDP) and unprecedentedly dependent economically, financially and resource-wise on their adversaries (the EU imports from China amounted to €627 billion in 2022, increasing by more than 2.5 times over the last ten years, andSaudi Arabia’s threats to withdraw its money from European banks were enough to shatter plans to confiscate frozen Russian assets). All this, not to mention the voluntary creation of „fifth columns“ composed of non-Western and even anti-Western elements within their own countries, forces me to assume that – despite the seemingly impressive Western technological and military superiority – victory in the new global conflict is not at all guaranteed for the West. Seeing the many parallels drawn by respected experts between the current reality and the events that unfolded fifty or a hundred years ago[see:Luttwak, Edward.The Rise of China vs. The Logic of Strategy, Cambridge, London:Belknap Press, 2012], I must admit that they look less and less convincing...
Vladislav Inozemtsev, Ph.D. in Economics, serves as the Director of Moscow-based Center for Post-Industrial Studies and is a co-founder and Senior Fellow with Nicosia-based Center for Analysis and Strategies in Europe.