The War of the World
Introduction
The descent of the West
The story of the 20th century has sometimes been presented as a triumph of the West; the greater part of it has been called the ‘American century’. The Second World War is often represented as the apogee of American power and virtue, the victory of the ‘Greatest Generation’.
In the last years of the century, the end of the Cold War led the American neo-conservative philosopher and economist Francis Fukuyama famously to proclaim ‘the end of history’ and the victory of the Western (if not Anglo-American) model of liberal democratic capitalism. Yet this seems fundamentally to misread the trajectory of the past 100 years, which has seen something more like a reorientation of the world towards the East.
Ruling the world
In 1900, the West really did rule the world. From the Bosphorus to the Bering Strait and beyond, nearly all of what was then known as the Orient was under some form or another of Western imperial rule. The British had long ruled India, the Dutch the East Indies, the French Indo-China. The Americans had just seized the Philippines; the Russians aspired to control Manchuria. All the imperial powers had established parasitical outposts in China.
The East, in short, had been subjugated, even if that process involved far more complex negotiations and compromises between rulers and ruled than used to be acknowledged. This Western dominance was remarkable in that over half the world’s population were Asians, while barely a fifth belonged to the dominant countries we have in mind when we speak of ‘the West’.
Backwardness
What enabled the West to rule the East was not so much scientific knowledge in its own right as it was its systematic application to both production and destruction. That was why, in 1900, the West produced more than half the world’s output and the East barely a quarter. Western dominance was also due to the failure of the Asian empires to modernise their economic, legal and military systems, to say nothing of the relative stagnation of Oriental intellectual life. Democracy, liberty, equality and, indeed, race: all of these concepts originated in the West. So did nearly all the significant scientific breakthroughs from Newton to Einstein.
Historians influenced by Marx have very often made the mistake of assuming that the backwardness of Eastern societies in around 1900 was the consequence of imperial ‘exploitation’. This is in large measure an illusion: rather, it was their backwardness that made European domination possible.
Reorientation
It is only when the extent of Western dominance in 1900 is appreciated that the true narrative arc of the 20th century reveals itself. This was not the ‘triumph of the West’, but rather the crisis of the European empires, the ultimate result of which was the inexorable revival of Asian power and the descent of the West.
Gradually, beginning in Japan, Asian societies modernised themselves or were modernised by European rule. As this happened, the gap between European and Asian incomes began to narrow. And with that narrowing, the relative decline of the West became unstoppable. This was nothing less than the reorientation of the world, redressing a balance between West and East that had been lost in the four centuries after 1500. No historian of the 20th century can afford to overlook this huge – and ongoing – secular shift.
