in Japan is less than half the American rate,” it summarized. “The infant death rate in the nation’s capital, and in Detroit and Baltimore, is humiliatingly close to a Third World rate. Nothing that happens in Bangladesh should be as interesting to Americans as the fact that a boy born in Harlem today has a lower life expectancy than a boy born in Bangladesh.”38 Rich coastal Democrat America sometimes replaced the backward communists with narrow-minded rural deplorables. Rich and Republican America often replaced the backward communists as their principal enemies with backward poor.39
Many of these backward communities consisted of immigrants. Hence, doubts grew about the image of Western society as a multicultural melting pot. The idea of such cultural blending originated from the time of Henry Ford. During an opening ceremony of a school for migrant workers in 1917, Ford let foreigners in native dress descend into a large black vessel named “The American melting pot.” That was a little more than 70 years earlier, when the United States felt confident and strong. By the 1980s, the melting pot was no longer melting.40 This was also the case in Europe. Throughout the West, immigrants lagged behind in terms of education and prosperity. The frustration about the failing integration of immigrants was enforced by a growing fear of Islam. “The Muslims are Coming!” a magazine ran as a cover story.41 Next to the title, whose initial version was titled “Out Go the Commies, In Come the Muslims,” was a picture of a dozen Arabs riding camels in a desert. As the far right gained ground, center politicians panicked. The French presidential candidate Jacques Chirac claimed to understand the feelings of workers who were tired of the smell and noise of immigrants.42 After the clash with communism, the Western world was brewing its own internal clash of civilizations.43
It was also feared that unrestrained capitalism would be catastrophic for the environment. Economists lamented the fact that prices of products in supermarkets did not include external costs.44 While companies tried to compete by pricing products as cheaply as possible, they transferred the cost of pollution to tax payers. Private investors took the profits of capitalism; society was expected to pay for its problems. Such a distorted market, the criticism went, discouraged producers from innovating, from implementing more sustainable technologies, and from reducing the waste of precious resources. Raw materialism, it was called. This concern was not new. The Club of Rome, a group of political and corporate influencers, had concluded that there were limits to growth. It derided the mismanagement of the world economy, including the diffusion of toxic substances, the acidification of lakes, the cutting of forests, and global warming.45 At the Rio Summit in 1992, its secretary-general said: “One part of the world cannot live in an orgy of unrestrained consumption where the rest destroys its environment just to survive. No one is immune from the effects of the other.” A real free market would redress these market failures. This concern occupied the public at large. In different surveys, the environment was identified as a priority.46
The end of the Cold War was not a victorious period. There were concerns about the state of Western society, its economy, and its democracy. The West was seen as being on a slippery slope, a slippery slope down. A first critique that resonated through the Western world at the beginning of the 1990s was that the capitalist system had flaws. Inequality could become as problematic a misallocation of production factors as the forced misallocation that brought communism to a collapse. The consequent question that many asked was whether the West still had the moral leadership to solve that problem or whether it had already grown too complacent. Either way, it could not afford paralysis. The Soviet Union might have disappeared; the unipolar moment of almost uncontested power could be very brief in a world where new competitors continuously tried to improve their position. Barely had the cheers about the collapse of the Soviet Union subsided, or opinion makers predicted that Western power was set to decline, than preponderance would soon make way for a new stage of competition. Complacency, consumerism, and persistent provincialism would make matters worse.
Challenges on the horizon?
Concerns about the internal problems thus led to concerns about the position of the West in the world. The United States had the power resources to lead. Trade and investment made countries more dependent on one another. But interdependence required Americans to have an open attitude toward the world, to invest in international institutions.47 It was questioned whether the United States was able to act like a leader, not so much because of its natural penchant for isolationism, but because internal uncertainty aggravated a tendency to introversion.48 Books whose covers promised American leadership carried sobering analyses inside, monodies about America’s economic fragility and how it all crippled its capability to compete with new economic challengers.49
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD, echoed this concern. “It is alarming,” it remarked, “at least for anyone living in Western Europe or North America, in that the focus of world economic power will shift inexorably . . . towards the Far East.”50 It was no moment for self-satisfaction when Western households were falling for Asian ingenuity: Nintendo’s Gameboy, Sony’s Walkman, and Toyota SUVs. In spite of Japan having entered a decade of slow growth, manufacturers remained strong. On the one hand, it sourced from cheap countries like China. On the other hand, Japan demonstrated that, confronted with competition and a mature home market, rich countries could upgrade instead of relocating, by investing in technology, quality, and automation.51 Instead of running trade deficits, Japan preserved modest surpluses. And in Japan’s wake followed other markets: South Korea, Taiwan – and China.
The fall of the Iron Curtain reinforced the idea that communication would bring commerce and cooperation. Soft power, or the ability of a state to attract, would grow more important. Virtual power, the ability to innovate, to establish strong brands, and to profit from the resources and cheap labor elsewhere was presented as an efficient way for the West to continue to lead. Confidence was drawn also from European integration. A dozen countries kept going further in economic integration. They were ready to pass sovereignty on matters like customs to supranational institutions.52 Some saw the European experience leading to a deeper transformation, a transformation of the mind. Instead of being fixated with sovereignty, citizens came to see themselves as Europeans. Identities changed and so did the very nature of power politics. The predators, who bloodily fought each other for centuries, had become herbivores. Anarchy is what states make of it.53 If Europe could do it, why could the rest of the world not follow?
This optimistic notion, however, was criticized. Had the Europeans truly become herbivores? Member states retained sovereignty on matters like security and foreign policy. And while they had become more civilized toward one another, they were still seen as predators elsewhere. In the United States, diplomats cautioned that in spite of the swollen language about values, its moral credibility was limited. While the world looked benign through the lens of economic liberalism and the constructivist idea of world citizenship, the existing order also meant inferiority and exploitation to others. Hence, friction would be inevitable. “The West should not expect the world to become a more peace loving or free place,” wrote an academic. “The future does not promise to be more tranquil. . . . The day of the dictator is not over and many nations are ruled by repressive governments. . . . We still live in an anarchic international order.”54 While the Central Intelligence Agency was criticized for having failed to predict the fall of the Soviet Union, it did provide intelligence assessments about the risk of instability in the Middle East and Africa, and uncertainty about China and Russia’s future.55 The Department of Defense drafted an internal vision document that stated the need for “convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.”56
Western societies were aware that the unipolar moment was shaky. But was the West ready to act upon it? The most skeptical assessment was that the Western world was set to follow the fate of declining empires in the past. Had the United States not arrived at the point where Venice was around 1500, Holland around 1660, and Britain around 1873? The watershed between rise and fall. Declinists
