Does The West Rule?
“this does not help your cause” - guy who hates you and your cause
International relations are entering a new era, an era where it is not the rule of law, but the rule of strength that is ruling the situation
Ilham Aliyev, president of Azerbaijan, at Davos
One of the most baffling features of the modern right is that, across the planet, leaders claim to be fighting for “Western values” against the left and progressivism. The part that’s baffling isn’t really that people are doing this, but rather, who: Javier Milei, president of Argentina, as well as many of his Latin American peers; the South Korean and Japanese right; politicians in the Philippines, etc. At the same time, Donald Trump has alienated basically every single other core “Western” country: Western Europe is souring on him, Canada is explicitly saying the United States cannot be trusted, Australia is off by itself.
So how come “Western civilization” is now defended by a geriatric lunatic, Israel, a few Asian countries, and the most embarrassing political parties in Latin America?
Us and they/them
We see many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization. They are denying the moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even sexual.
Vladimir Putin in 2013 speech
The most well known definition of “the West”, and the most politically influential one at least, is Samuel Huntington’s. Per Huntington, in his 1993 essay The Clash of Civilizations (later extended into a book), civilizations are defined “by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people” seen in factors such as “the relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife” or “the relative importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy” that are “the product of centuries” and “far more fundamental than differences among political ideologies and political regimes.” All of this is widely rejected by political science and international relations experts: in a 2019 panel about Clash of Civilizations, a professor noted that “even a precocious middle schooler with a flair for pattern identification and a personal history watching Sesame Street might note the units being compared are dramatically unalike”
In particular, Huntington defines the West quite vaguely: by “Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state…”, that is, by its commitment to liberalism, individualism, and the rule of law, which he claims do not have purchase in basically any other culture (with a strange carveout by omission for Latin America) - in fact, he considers the idea of a universal civilization of all men uniquely Western, “directly at odds with the particularism of most Asian societies and their emphasis on what distinguishes one people from another”. Which, of course, is also directly at odds with reality (go ask Iranians if democracy, human rights, and the separation of church and state have any purchase with them) but also with Huntington’s own intellectual project, which is to both support the supremacy of the Western project (he was quite openly a diet white supremacist, saying Hispanic immigration would turn the United States into a third world country) and to highlight the differences between people that made conflict inevitable - citing the Nazi novel The Camp of the Saints.
Despite Huntington being “a clumsy writer and inelegant thinker” per Said, the book was a genuine intellectual sensation; the reason why the book existed was what the If Books Could Kill podcast has defined the early 90s as a time when every political science professor “had to write a book explaining why you still needed to be employed”. His main rival (or at least in the Amadeus version) was Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, which is quite good and quite interesting. Fukuyama and Huntington’s books were both sensations; Fukuyama was (wrongfully) interpreted as centrist triumphalism about democracy and free markets forever. Huntington, meanwhile, is a bit of a stranger beast; the true reason his strange book did so well was precisely the hysterical chauvinism - Fukuyama gave everyone a reason to tune out, and Huntington gave the right a new thing to be angry about.
The idea that The West might define itself negatively against its enemies is not especially new - historically, at least, it’s mostly been used as a bulwark against its enemies (notably Russia, through incredibly funny anti-German racism); during World War One, Walter Lippman noted “the war against Britain, France, and Belgium is a war against the civilization of which we are a part”. In fact Karl Marx himself also associated “the East” with dictatorship and oppression, describing an “Asiatic” mode of production that was all inhuman exploitation and absolute power - that was, by the way, completely wrong and inconsistent with the rest of his theory. Huntington’s ideas reached the peak of their intellectual influence in the early 2000s, with 9/11 and the Iraq War: The Economist cited Huntington by saying that “the world’s billion or so Muslims are ‘convinced of the superiority of their culture, and obsessed with the inferiority of their power”, and influential intellectuals such as Thomas Friedman said basically so as much. Following Huntington’s lead, the War on Terro was understood not as a conflict between the United States and terrorist organizations, but as a conflict between The West as a collective and The Muslims as a collective as well. In an October 2001 essay, Edward Said called Huntington “an ideologist, someone who wants to make “civilizations” and “identities” into what they are not: shut-down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the myriad currents and countercurrents that animate human history, and that over centuries have made it possible for that history not only to contain wars of religion and imperial conquest but also to be one of exchange, cross-fertilization and sharing”. Fundamentally, what Said is saying is that by putting The West and The Rest into hermetically sealed boxes, Huntington is removing the ability of Western concepts themselves to be of any use to understanding their own predicament - in fact, they are engaging in exactly the same logic as the Islamists themselves; Said quotes another writer, Eqbal Ahmad, saying “The modern Islamists, Ahmad concludes, are “concerned with power, not with the soul; with the mobilization of people for political purposes rather than with sharing and alleviating their sufferings and aspirations. Theirs is a very limited and time-bound political agenda.” What has made matters worse is that similar distortions and zealotry occur in the “Jewish” and “Christian” universes of discourse.”
This type of faux universalist chauvinism isn’t exclusive to Huntington, or to his followers who claim to defend the Western values of democracy, human rights, universalism, and secularism by embracing wannabe autocrats, genocide and police states, extreme ethnonationalism, and a tight political alliance with evangelical theocracy. The BJP of India, for instance, claims to be a “civilizational state” while at the same time being led by a man associated with ethnic cleansing in his home state of Gujarat. Turkey’s AKP promotes itself as both the inheritors of Ataturk’s nationbuilding and as the sole protectors of Turkey’s Islamic inheritance. This reaches parodic heights with the European right insisting that Muslims are a threat to liberal values (recently parroted by some “left-of-center” American commentators) on LGBT issues or abortion, values that they themselves… vehemently and vigorously oppose. In fact, this increasingly paradoxical rejection of core Western values of pluralism, democracy, and liberty can be found in even its greatest supporters: the case made by conservatives like Leo Strauss or Allan Bloom against pluralism and multiculturalism is completely indistinguishable from (communist) Herbert Marcuse’s infamous concept of “repressive tolerance”, where some ideas cause so much intellectual self-censorship they ought not to be allowed. In The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom levies identical charges against pluralism that Marcuse does against liberal capitalism: that it allows ideas that challenge the very existence of some people to present themselves freely and openly. For a “subversive” like Marcuse, this isn’t really a problem; for someone who dedicated his life to teaching the Western canon like Bloom, it is.
For people who are so interested in the heritage of The West, its defenders seem to have no interest in learning from its past. The destruction of Athens both as a major power and as a democracy came from its increasingly militaristic and exploitative foreign policy costing it the very structures that made it a great power to begin with. When the Athenians tell the Melians that “the strong will do as they want, and the weak will suffer what they must”, they are engaged in the paramount sin of Greek tragedy, hybris, and the pride that cometh before the fall. The fall of the Roman Republic came from the accumulation of extreme wealth inequality and extreme political polarization coupled with military expansionism; the fall of the Empire, with Rome’s increasing self-centeredness and particularism, losing track of ancient values in favor of defining themselves negatively against the barbarians. Borges once wrote “Plato taught that, at the centuries′ end, all things will recover their previous state and he in Athens, before the same audience, will teach this same doctrine anew”; it seems that today’s students of Plato are most intent on learning this lesson.
Why nations succeed
Let’s take a step back: let’s say that, for whatever reason, we do take Huntington’s position that you can, in fact, define the West via inherently universal concepts like democracy, human rights, and the rule of law, and that they are, in fact, in some way exclusive to the Western world rather than a historical accident. What explains this?
Okay, let’s start by making sense of what, exactly, these “Western values” actually mean. Well, they’re less values and more other thing: institutions. What are these institutions? In economics, the term is notoriously under-determined, but broadly economists use it to mean the legal and informal arrangements that shape economic and civic life - things like the courts, the legislature, regulation, taxes, the free press (like, the concept, not Bari Weiss’s stupid rag), whatever. In particular, Huntington’s whole thing is that The West has inclusive institutions, which protect property rights, the rule of law, and open markets. The term comes from recent Nobel laureates Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson, and Simon Johnson and was popularized by Acemoglu and Robinson’s widely popular 2012 book Why Nations Fail.
Their whole thing is quite simple: inclusive or extractive institutions are set up as the product of elite bargaining with the “working class”. In pure Fukuyama/Kojeve fashion, the working people demand equality, and the elites demand to advance their power within the elite; this means that democratization can occur as a way to compromise on the redistribution of wealth. But it can also mean that the elite is powerful enough to block any democratization or the rule of law or capitalism from existing, because it would challenge their wealth as it is formed. An example the 2012 book gives is Venice: the Venetians formed a society that was whatever passed for a meritocratic democracy in the Middle Ages, but then the Venetian elite got butthurt that all the newcomers were starting to dominate trade and politics, so they drastically reduced and restricted social mobility and political selection. It’s worth noting that Venice is unambiguously Western and yet it still had both inclusive and extractive institutions. And their favorite example are North and South Korea, which are… not Western. There’s also Japan, which is its own massive can of worms because the big economic development push came from the Meiji Restoration, which also wanted to make Japan more Western and have a more Western culture and form of government.
There’s a lot of criticism of the institutionalist economics literature but overall I think it’s at least decent and, broadly, makes sense. But I think the major question everyone has is why Europe and some of its colonies (the US, Australia, and Canada, basically) developed better institutions, then. The theory Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson put together is a weird mix of colonialism and geography: the natural environment faced by some European colonists made them more likely to develop plantations, which is really bad for institutions because the planter economy fosters concentrated wealth, while others focused more on like actual farming and cattle herding (like the United States). Their whole thing extends to Europe because trade with the Americas strengthened and weakened some parts of the preexisting elite (in England, the yeomen and commercial class, and in Spain, say, useless rentier aristocrats).
But this is kind of useless because it doesn’t really explain why England and Spain already had different institutions when they colonized the Americas, for instance. The most important account of why Europe and thus The West had the best institutions (or at least the best economic performance) is Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence, which I’ve owned since COVID and haven’t read. Pomeranz’s case is that, basically, before the Industrial Revolution Europe, China, and India were all equally developed (especially in terms of technology and institutions- and China in particular was also much closer to transitioning to capitalism than England), but that Europe managed to pull ahead because they had the Americas providing labor, crops like cotton and food, and most importantly of all, gold and silver to permit exports to China. Pomeranz isn’t unique in arguing that slavery and imperialism were central for the development of Western prosperity, and at least he makes a plausible case regarding balance of payments and resource constraints and not material transfers of wealth (which are not really true). Slavery and colonialism were a net negative in terms of institutional quality, given the fact that they favored the concentration of wealth, which was extremely economically damaging1.
Of course why Europe conquered the Americas and not China (which discovered them first, also) is another question. The more traditional geographic explanation for European development comes from Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, an extremely controversial book among all academics, particularly historians. Diamond’s case is, TL;DR, that European advantages came from geography, particularly the fact that Europe had more domesticated animals and crops, which gave them an economic advantage they could press over the American natives. At the same time, the Chinese had a country made up by plains, which made it easy to established centralized absolute power (aka extractive institutions) while Europe had mountains that made it hard, thus enabling the sharing and spreading of ideas. So basically it’s Why Nations Fail with more descriptions of isolated tribes in Oceania and Insulindia.
The other big thing people cite is “culture”, usually described as another type of institutions with a sleight of hand of saying that institutions and culture are both an equilibrium outcome of iterated strategic social interactions; basically, that you can figure out what a society is going to think about marriage, religion, the law, work, or what the person who brings presents on Christmas is called based on game theory of its dominant social structures. Some of the most benign stuff is the Joel Mokyr school of European cultural studies: basically, Mokyr believes that the most important thing isn’t institutions, or culture, or geography, or slavery, or any of that, but that Europe basically developed better and nicer ideas about economic prosperity - particularly the idea that the world could be improved with science and technology, which are the true source of European successs according to his other, extremely tedious book. The other type of explanations are basically the ones focused on broader social values, such as therecently released “Two Paths to Prosperity” (who said economists can’t do marketing) by Avner Greif, Guido Tabellini, and Joel Mokyr. Mokyr, Greif and Tabellini’s whole thing is that the divergence between Europe and other countries is caused by cultural factors, particularly the lack of “kin groups” focused on loyalty to the family over following broader social norms, which over time developed into a society with higher social trust than China’s. I mean this is all broadly reasonable, sure, but I do feel like a lot of the cultural studies stuff wants to focus on Protestantism and its theological changes from the Catholic Church when it was Catholicism that introduced universalism and social trust to Medieval Europe. This also gets to the last angle of the cultural turn in economics, which is the really sinister stuff that basically launders race science with econometrics. That one isn’t really as prevalent in the mainstream anymore (much more often, it’s racist charlatans like Richard Hanania using the language of economics on their service), but it is quite influential on political discourse: the language of “culture” is used to basically justify Western racism. Back in the day, Poland was an Eastern country that was culturally incapable of integrating capitalism and democracy; now it’s a member of The West in good standing.
Keep it 100 on the land, the sea, the sky
Who is the most important intellectual for understanding the modern right? If you look at contemporary intellectuals, you could say Curtis Yarvin or Nick Land or Bronze Age Pervert. Most people say Yarvin in particular, but paying close attention to his thought, most of his ideas are just a regurgitation of older right-wing types like Hans Hermann Hoppe; the thing about them, though, is that you can trace their lineage (mainly via their extremely repetitive criticism of liberalism and democracy) back up to the Nazi jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt.
So, what is Schmitt’s most important work? If you ask a philosopher, they’d say The Concept of the Political, which outlines most of his important ideas; if you ask a jurist, they’d say Political Theology, which provided the legal backbone for fascism. Schmitt even influenced economic liberalism with his work on the limits of democracy and the importance of culture. But to the Allies who were setting up the Nuremberg Trials, Carl Schmitt’s most relevant work was the relatively lesser known Land And Sea (which I’ve mentioned in the past). In particular, analyzing the book proved central to answering one question: whether Schmitt would be at the main trials with Goering and the rest (and probably get the death penalty), or whether he’d be tried at an administrative denazification hearing among the likes of Martin Heidegger. The reason is pretty simple: Schmitt introduced the concept of Grossbaum2, the “great space” that a nation must occupy; the Allies wanted to ascertain whether this provided the legal backbone for the notion of lebensraum; that is, whether Schmitt had been the legal architect of Nazi expansionism and subsequent crimes against humanity.
Schmitt successfully argued that Grossbaum was a concept relating to international law and juridical and political categories, not to the biological survival of the nation; the closest translation would be as “sphere of influence”. The book thus sounds pretty interesting: a fascist history of the clash of great powers. But instead of being the fascist version of Clash of Civilizations (which, to be honest, is just Clash of Civilizations), Land and Sea is the fascist version of The World is Flat: a Nazi retelling of the history of globalization - globalization 1.0 (colonialism), and globalization 2.0 (imperialism and market capitalism). Schmitt exposits at length about the history of shipping, whaling, trade, navies, and Benjamin Disraeli (who starred even more prominently in the version of the book where Schmitt hadn’t removed extensive antisemitic tangents), all in that incredibly annoying esoteric style where everything he says actually carries some secret meaning. But the TL;DR is that, in a baffling explanation shared with the Marxist Perry Anderson, economic integration led to Absolutism and Absolutism led to capitalism and imperialism, which made interstate conflict inevitable because of the overlapping Grossbaums between Britain (the power of the seas, the rule of law, navies, trade, and Da Jooz) and Germany (the power of the land, the rule of strength, armies, conquest, and Da Aryan Super Duper Men). He draws up the metaphor of the Leviathan (the rule of law) against the Behemoth (the rule of chaos and power), and pits them against each other to explain not just why Britain and Germany are clashing, but why Germany will ultimately triumph (oops!).
In particular, Schmitt lays out a pretty interesting theory of the world: the nation derives its legitimacy from its occupancy of physical space. The nation (Staat) has the space where it projects its power and carries out its projects (Grossbaum), and this is all framed by a juridical and philosophical organization (the Nomos). In particular, the Nomos of the planet should be organized in order to balance and stabilize a series of great powers that act as top dog of their own “great space” - Schmitt, for instance, cited the Monroe Doctrine as a principle that could organize all three levels of action. The problem is that, in the age of globalization, the Great Space far exceeds the reach of the Staat, hence the lack of a nomos (which means both order, naming, and conquest in Greek) that can organize the Earth. This was Schmitt’s reflection for the age of the sea, but in the final chapter he makes an odd aside: about the age of the radio and the airplane, which is the age of the air. This new age of globalization (globalization 3.0, per Thomas Friedman) would need a new nomos, a new way of understanding the order by which states relate to each other.
This basically prefigures sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of “liquid modernity”: in a world of free and open markets, fully integrated with each other and run by an intense drive to consume, social bonds between people and their location begin dissolving. The age of liquid modernity is an age, not of people in places, but of people between places - the best example is Tim Ferris’s bestselling 1999 book The Four Hour Work Week, where he details a class known as the “new rich”, who are able to leverage the economic flexibility of their lives to just travel around the world at ease and live with flexibility. Another globalized class are David Brooks’s BoBos from his 2000 book BoBos In Paradise, where BoBo means “Bohemian Bourgeoisie”, aka college-educated white-collar workers with a social conscience and a penchant for hard work and material comfort; BoBo norms are homogenous across the world given the cross-pollination of global BoBo elites at BoBo institutions, and that makes cities develop BoBo areas interchangeable with each other across the world.
This deracination of the economy and of society goes from top to bottom. At the top, you have the Epstein Class: a global network of billionaires, top academics, celebrities, and politicians that cloister themselves in extreme privacy and whose main interest is the advancement of their status, power, and influence within their group. It’s not for nothing that Epstein’s major asset was his plane - those people all have somewhere to be, usually far away, and he can get them there. His provision of drugs and (frequently underage) women were another part of his role in that network. But the fact that Epstein was enmeshed in a global network of Western billionaires and elites and their foreign counterparts (frequently in non-democracies like Russia and the Gulf States) is extremely important: these people do not see the world as a world of nations; they see it as a world of their people versus everyone else, and they want their people to remain on top. On a more mundane level, ordinary people are increasingly interconnected; social media and the spread of English language literacy worldwide has built gigantic social and parasocial networks between followers and content creators of different countries. America’s culture war has become a global issue, both as it’s exported to other countries (frequently with disastrous consequences), and when those countries decide to reimport them back to America through engagement bait MAGA accounts. American billionaires and American social media created the extremely radicalized South Korean right, at the same time as the German neonazi concept of “remigration” became the central point in Anglophone and European migration discourse basically out of social media repetition. There is, in short, a global community of brainrot, be it the fascist variety uniting America and South Korea, or the woke variety euthanizing all of global progressivism.
Conclusion
Last week, the Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, gave a speech at Davos about the global geopolitical order. The main metaphor, from Vaclav Hevel, is of a greengrocer under communism: someone who parrots party slogans to not get into trouble. Once enough “little people” stop putting up the sign, the systems stops having legitimacy, and collapses. Hence, Carney says:
For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection. We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
This fiction was useful (…) So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.
This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.
Carney is right about the general idea: the world order of the internationalist West is over. However, he’s a bit naive about what comes after: he calls for the “middle powers” to unite in pushing for a new state of affairs. The important thing is that Carney is saying it openly, more than what he’s saying; it’s obvious to anyone with a pair of eyes that American hegemony is slowly collapsing under its own weight; the United States, increasingly incapable of discharging the basic responsibilities of a global hegemon, has decided to turn the whole thing into an extortionate protection racket to run for as long as an obese 80 year fascist old can keep it going.
The problem with Carney’s point is that he still puts The Nation at the heart of his conception of global and geopolitical affairs. What even the The West jingoists who believe in nothing except hatred of The Other get right is that a nation-based system in a globalized world, not just economically but also culturally and socially, is a totally untenable state of affairs. The idea that The West can be a block of nations allied among common values is completely unsustainable when there is a global transnational elite undermining those values from the top, and a global community of far-right brainrot attacking them at the ballot box at the bottom. The concept of sovereignty is completely alien to this Right Wing West: rather than a partnership of equal nations, it’s a partnership in owning the libs, where complete submission to the United States and its technological culture war machinery supersedes all national pride the nationalist internationale can aspire to, hence Pierre Pollievre and Nigel Farage justifying Trump’s tariffs against their own countries.
In The End of History, Francis Fukuyama pointed out that the titular end of history had come through liberal capitalist democracy permitting all peoples the power of recognition as equals. Fukuyama notes that this desire also relates to living standards, which on a globalized world keep countries from deviating from the capitalist playbook. However, one path forward, for him, is that the desire to be recognized as superiors is reawakened, particularly among the wealthy and powerful - thus, the struggle of the 21st century would not be between liberalism and fascism, but between liberalism and non-liberalism. Fukuyama was, in this regard, broadly right: what is facing “The West” is a strange international alliance of anti-democratic kleptocrats and oligarchs attempting to subvert national sovereignty to advance their own business dealings. The main difference with his prediction is that this alliance would be not between countries, but within them: between a liberal West that embraces its own principles (so far, MIA), and an anti-liberal West that embraces the barbarism that the West attributes to its enemies.
I am not touching the fucking Brenner Debate, which quickly grows like a cancer and swallows up everything of whatever the topic at hand is, but how Europe transitioned from feudalism to capitalism is extremely important
I know that it’s actually spelled with the fancy double S but I don’t respect the German language enough to put in all that work (pasting it like six times)
She never misses
It's Grossraum, not Grossbaum. The latter would mean "great tree", not "great space".
Great post otherwise, especially the point about Herbert Marcuse.