Realpolitik in the Decline of the West

In: The review of politics, Band 21, Heft 1, S. 131-150

Abstract

Decline can be defined as the disruption of an established order, and if so defined, does not exclude the possibility of the simultaneous rise of new order. The "Decline of the West," Spengler's term, is substantiated in the history of Western civilization, though not according to Spengler's theory, in the successive disruption of the community of belief, Christendom, through the Protestant revolution of the sixteenth century, of the community of reason, or the Concert of Europe, as it was afterwards named, through the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, and of the community of fear, the balance of power, through the totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century. A revolution, in every instance, is the overthrow of an established order. Whether the new order, if any, was better than the established order does not matter in deciding whether or not there has been a decline. Whether, for example, during the decline of the West there has been the rise of a scientific and technological community that has spread from the West to the world, giving substance to the slogan "One World," does not alter the fact that there has been a gradual disintegration of the established order in the West itself.