The War of the World - by Globalist -

Agradecemos, desde já, ao Globalist por nos enviar o resultado do seu trabalho que merece ser lido e meditado com atenção. Esperemos que tenham serviço de trad., porque o português já é a 5ª língua mais falada no mundo. Mas pode agora sofrer um rombo com a cessação da Madeira... O sublinhado é nosso. E que tal o Globalist entrevistar o sr. Al berto João como líder do 1º território que se tornou independente do conjunto porque a ilha "estava farta" de alimentar o "Contnente". Para 1ª anedota internacional não estaria mal.. Fica o desafio ao corpo editorial do Globalist. Mas primeiro têm de visionar umas cassetes do dito cujo, de preferência no Carnaval..E cuidado com os jornalistas que a dir. Editorial do Globalist manda à ilha para a tal entrevista..

Global SecurityThe War of the World

By Niall Ferguson Thursday, November 02, 2006

While the 20th century is widely regarded as the age of Western colonial dominance, the emergence of Asia as a modern economic force suggests this perspective is biased. In "The War of the World," Niall Ferguson portrays the reorganization of the world — the revival of Asian culture and power in response to the decline of Western modernity.

The story of the 20th century has sometimes been presented as a triumph of the West, and 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.'

It was a descent, in the sense that the West could never again wield the power it had enjoyed in 1900

In the last years of the century, the end of the Cold War led Francis Fukuyama famously to proclaim "the end of history" and the victory of the Western (if not Anglo) model of liberal democratic capitalism.

Yet this seems fundamentally to misread the trajectory of the past hundred years, which has seen something more like a reorientation of the world towards the East.

Ruling the world

In 1900s the West really did rule the world. From the Bosphorus to the Bering Straits, 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 the ruled than used to be acknowledged.

Western dominance

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."

This seems fundamentally to misread the trajectory of the past hundred years, which has seen something more like a reorientation of the world towards the East.

What enabled the West to rule the East was not so much scientific knowledge in its own right as 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 modernize 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 of the significant scientific breakthroughs from Newton to Einstein.

European crisis

Historians influenced by Asian nationalism have very often made the mistake of assuming that the backwardness of Eastern societies in the 1900s was the consequence of imperial "exploitation." This is in large measure an illusion; rather, it was the decadence of Eastern empires that made European domination possible.

It is only when the extent of Western dominance in the 1900s 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.

Asian modernization

Gradually, beginning in Japan, Asian societies modernized themselves, or were modernized by European rule.

Most Asian nationalists insisted that their countries modernize by embracing only those aspects of the Western model that suited their purposes, and retaining important components of their traditional cultures.

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 in the 20th century can afford to overlook this huge — and ongoing — secular shift.

If the Orient had simply "occidentalized" itself, of course, we might still salvage the idea of an ultimate Western triumph. Yet no Asian country — not even Japan in the Meiji era — transformed itself into a replica of a European nation state.

Power struggle

On the contrary, most Asian nationalists insisted that their countries be modernized a là carte, embracing only those aspects of the Western model that suited their purposes, and retaining important components of their traditional cultures.

This was hardly surprising. Much of what they saw of Western culture — in its imperialist incarnation — did not invite imitation. The crucial point, of course, is that the reorientation of the world could not have been, and was not, achieved without conflict.

World war

For the Western powers had no desire to relinquish their mastery over Asia’s peoples and resources. Even when they were comprehensively beaten by Japanese forces in 1942, the Europeans and Americans alike fought back with the aim of restoring the old Western dominance — though with distinctly mixed results.

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.

In many ways, it was not until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 that the last European empire in Asia could be said to have fallen. In that sense it seems justifiable to interpret the 20th century not as the triumph but as the descent of the West, with the Second World War as the decisive turning point.

For the death throes of the Occident’s empire in the Orient were as bloody as anything that happened in Central and Eastern Europe, not least because of the extreme reactions against Western models of development that they inspired in countries such as Japan, China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia.

Final descent

It was a descent, in the sense that the West could never again wield the power it had enjoyed in the 1900s.

It was also a descent, however, in that much of what arose in the East to challenge that power was recognizably descended from Western ideas and situations, albeit through a process of cultural miscegenation.

Editor's note: Adapted from THE WAR OF THE WORLD © 2006

by Niall Ferguson. Reprinted with permission by Penguin Press.