{"id":14510,"date":"2015-11-17T08:34:12","date_gmt":"2015-11-17T13:34:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=14510"},"modified":"2015-11-17T08:34:12","modified_gmt":"2015-11-17T13:34:12","slug":"the-decline-of-the-west-revisited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=14510","title":{"rendered":"The Decline of the West Revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Decline of the West Revisited<\/a><\/h3>\n

LONDON \u2013 The terrorist slaughter in Paris has once again brought into sharp relief the storm clouds gathering over the twenty-first century, dimming the bright promise for Europe and the West that the fall of communism opened up. Given dangers that seemingly grow by the day, it is worth pondering what we may be in for.<\/p>\n<\/header>\n

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Though prophecy is delusive, an agreed point of departure should be falling expectations. As Ipsos MORI\u2019s Social Research Institute\u00a0reports<\/a>: \u201cThe assumption of an automatically better future for the next generation is gone in much of the West.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1918, Oswald Spengler published\u00a0The Decline of the West<\/i>. Today the word \u201cdecline\u201d is taboo. Our politicians shun it in favor of \u201cchallenges,\u201d while our economists talk of \u201csecular stagnation.\u201d The language changes, but the belief that Western civilization is living on borrowed time (and money) is the same.<\/p>\n

Why should this be? Conventional wisdom regards it simply as a reaction to stagnant living standards. But a more compelling reason, which has seeped into the public\u2019s understanding, is the West\u2019s failure, following the fall of the Soviet Union, to establish a secure international environment for the perpetuation of its values and way of life.<\/p>\n

The most urgent example of this failure is the eruption of Islamist terrorism. On its own, terrorism is hardly an existential threat. What is catastrophic is the collapse of state structures in many of the countries from which the terrorists come.<\/p>\n

The Islamic world contains 1.6 billion people, or 23% of the world\u2019s population. A hundred years ago it was one of the world\u2019s most peaceful regions; today it is the most violent. This is not the \u201cperipheral\u201d trouble that\u00a0Francis Fukuyama<\/a>\u00a0envisioned in his 1989 manifesto \u201cThe End of History.\u201d Through the massive influx of refugees, the disorder in the Middle East strikes at the heart of Europe.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Decline of the West Revisited LONDON \u2013 The terrorist slaughter in Paris has once again brought into sharp relief the storm clouds gathering over the twenty-first century, dimming the bright promise for Europe and the West that the fall of communism opened up. Given dangers that seemingly grow by the day, it is worth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[2255,196,10642,259,281,4672,9589,2559,522,10641,8402,10643,965],"class_list":["post-14510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-clash-of-civilizations","tag-decline","tag-decline-of-the-west","tag-empire","tag-europe","tag-francis-fukuyama","tag-imperial-decline","tag-islam","tag-middle-east","tag-oswald-spengler","tag-project-syndicate","tag-samuel-huntington","tag-west"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14510"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14510\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14511,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14510\/revisions\/14511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}