0.6 The end of the west  (Page 2/19)

Empires and other Great Powers, as authors from Edward Gibbon to Carroll Quigley and Paul Kennedy remind us, rise and fall, their passage marked by efforts to acquire or retain wealth and strength in competition with others. In ‘The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers’, a study of the last 500 years, Paul Kennedy observed that causal relationships were evident between shifts in the economic capacity of states and their resulting position in the international system. He related this, in the context of Western Europe, to the movement in trade from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic from the 16th century, and to the changes in world manufacturing output in favour of the United States at the expense of Western Europe throughout the 20th century. Both shifts prefigured the rise of new Great Powers. The reasons are not hard to find: The exercise of traditional power requires economic capacity, and the possession of economic surplus gives states political and military options they might not otherwise have. As Kennedy noted in 1998, the progressive movement of productive capacity to the states of the Pacific Rim, and more recently, to India also, is not without consequence. Two years earlier, Samuel P. Huntington, reflecting on “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order”, had cited Quigley in suggesting that the West might be “…a mature civilization on the brink of decay.” Is this true, and what might the implications be?

The Origins of the ‘West’

As Kennedy notes, it was certainly not clear five hundred years ago that the West would dominate the world at the end of the second millennium. Europe was a fractured medley of empires, kingdoms, principalities and city states. Venice was fighting Ottoman navies in the Mediterranean; Constantinople had fallen to the Turks in 1453 and Granada, inland on the other end of the same sea, had been wrested from the Nasrid dynasty only in 1492, the year in which Ferdinand and Isabella had financed Christopher Columbus on a voyage to the Indies, on which he would accidentally ‘discover’ the Americas. Bartholemeu Dias had rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, and Vasco da Gama’s epic voyage to India was a decade later, but Ottoman forces held the eastern Mediterranean and most of the Balkans, and would soon advance on Vienna.

The Islamic Realm

An Islamic civilization had dominated the Mediterranean for four hundred years before this. Islam originated in 632 CE on the Arabian peninsula as an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion, based on the Qur’an, a set of revelations from the Angel Jibril (Gabriel) to the Prophet Mohammed (570-632CE). After the death of the Prophet, Islam expanded under the Umayyad Caliph Umar from 634 CE and continued to grow under the Abbasids until the 12th century, when it extended from Transoxania and Sind to the Iberian peninsula. The weakness of the Byzantine Empire, the rivalry between the Greek and Latin churches, the schisms of Nestorius and Eutyches and the failing power of the Sasanian court in Iran, allowed the swords of the Muslim faithful to effect these conquests.