But it is forfeiting, or is going to forfeit, its dominance, particularly in the context of the rise of China.Įven within the West, there are tensions between the United States and some of its partners and allies. The West has currently outlived Spengler’s book by 100 years. This comeback from the moribund is all the more perplexing as China, in its rise, has been able to take advantage of the liberal order and Western-led globalization. It also doesn’t fit the Spenglerian world view that China, with its Communist party regime and mixed economy, is carving out a place in the modern world that is even more important than it had prior to 1870. The First World War led to the rise of the United States to global pre-eminence and later to its superpower status after the Second World War. He emphasized the transition of what he called the “high cultures” through four essential phases: Youth, growth, flowering and decline. The German thinker rejected the Eurocentric division of history into ancient, mediaeval and modern. The book was first published in 1918, when the First World War was in its last throes.Ī hundred years onward, there is again a widespread sense that we are witnessing the decline of the West – and even more so than that of the relatively liberal world order that it erected. This summer will mark the centennial of the appearance of the first volume of Oswald Spengler’s influential “The Decline of the West” (Der Untergang des Abendlandes).
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