A recent book by Niall Ferguson (author of the popular book "Ascent of Money") admits West is on its way towards a decline.
Here are some excerpts, courtesy my editing of NY Times book review of "CIVILIZATION : The West and the Rest" By Niall Ferguson
"The West is on the defensive, challenged economically by the ascent of China and politically and militarily by a wave of Islamist hatred. Perhaps as great a challenge is internal.
Ferguson pays due respect to the intellectual and scientific contributions of China and Islam, but makes it clear that modern science and technology are fundamentally Western products. He asks if any non-Western state can simply acquire scientific knowledge without accepting other key Western institutions like “private property rights, the rule of law and truly representative government.”
He addresses the interesting and difficult question: “Just why, beginning around 1500, did a few small polities on the western end of the Eurasian landmass come to dominate the rest of the world?”
Ferguson offers six chapters of what he calls “killer apps,” each addressing a major element in his answer to the question of Western domination: 1) competition, both among and within the European states; 2) science, beginning with the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries; 3) the rule of law and representative government, based on the rights of private property and representation in elected legislatures; 4) modern medicine; 5) the consumer society that resulted from the Industrial Revolution; and 6) the work ethic. These, he argues, were crucial to the growth of the West’s power, but weak or nonexistent in other societies
He says, we are experiencing “the end of 500 years of Western predominance,” and he foresees the possibility of a clash between the declining and rising forces.
He wonders “whether the weaker will tip over from weakness to outright collapse.”
What’s worse, Ferguson sees the current financial crisis as “an accelerator of an already well-established trend of relative Western decline.”
He worries that there may come a moment when a “seemingly random piece of bad news — perhaps a negative report by a rating agency” panics investors, who lose confidence in the credit of the United States.
This could cause disaster, “for a complex adaptive system is in big trouble when a critical mass of its constituents loses faith in its viability.”
According to him , The greatest dangers facing West are probably not “the rise of China, Islam or CO2 emissions,” he writes, but “our own loss of faith in the civilization we inherited from our ancestors.”
What does this mean for Pakistan and other Muslim nations ?
Perhaps just like WWII , when British lost its interest & grip over its empire , similarly West, especially US will focus more on fixing its internal problems and leave us alone. That’s my wishful thinking
