In 1999, the share of global production consumed by the West reached its highest point ever recorded: one-sixth of the planet's population consumed four-fifths of all the planet's goods and services, which is outrageous. Just a decade after reaching the historic peak, the global financial crisis of 2008 erupted and this spectacular consumption percentage was reduced by a quarter: from devouring 80% of the world's gross product, Westerners went down to 60%. Naturally, this dizzying decline has led us to delve into our ideas about the tragic cycles of history. And it turns out that these narratives have a pattern extremely influenced by the fall of the Roman Empire as narrated by Edward Gibbons in the legendary History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, an interpretation that has taken hold so much in the collective imagination that it returns again and again, from Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, through Samuel Huntington's theory of the Clash of Civilizations, to the rhetoric of Make America great again. With the war in Iran, which many commentators see as the umpteenth example of the West shooting itself in the foot and fostering the inexorable rise of China, the wheels of the decline narrative are turning again.Broadly speaking, the history of the fall of the West has two fundamental premises: that we have corrupted the moral and cultural essences that led us to rise, and that this corruption implodes with the invasion of barbarian peoples. It is a strange mixture of "it is all our fault" and "it is all the fault of others", which works very well to simultaneously obtain the benefits of criticizing the establishment and criticizing foreigners, and which always ends with the same antidote against decline: controlling the borders and tightening our belts in order to recover the martial purity that led us to the original golden age.
It so happens that this story is very old and there is more and more evidence that dismantles it. To do this, I recommend ¿Por qué caen los imperios?, a collaboration between an archaeologist specializing in Rome and a modern macroeconomist, Peter Heather and John Rapley, who use new discoveries from their respective fields to offer a much more convincing explanation than the meme of Western apocalypse that has been circulating since the 18th century.According to the classical Gibbonian narrative, the Roman Empire falls because, after its golden century, civic virtue is lost, there is moral and religious decadence, and a series of tactical and strategic errors by the Romans themselves. In contrast, for Heather and Rapley, the fall is above all the effect of a structural logic: when an empire expands successfully, it not only accumulates wealth in the center, but also, inevitably, creates new abundance in the areas it exploits or integrates. Over time, this peripheral prosperity becomes its own military, political, and technological power (like the Germanic confederations in the case of Rome) and begins to limit, erode, and dispute the initial advantage of the center, so that the relative decline of the empire is in large part a mechanical result and not something that can be reversed with sermons on virtue or calls to return to a pure past when the correlation of material forces has already changed.Then there is the question of the barbarians, who are supposed to have been culturally inferior, violent and incompatible with the values of Roman civilization and, as soon as they crossed the borders, imposed their customs on an excessively refined Roman order that no longer knew how to defend itself. Heather and Rapley, on the other hand, argue that these barbarians are a periphery that Rome has been enriching, arming and sophisticating for centuries through trade, subsidies and recruitment, so that their victories are not the triumph of a completely alien culture, but rather the delayed effect of imperial expansion itself, which ends up generating actors strong enough to dispute its hegemony and who, moreover, have incorporated many Roman ways of doing things and values.
It goes without saying that the situation ends with a parallelism between Rome and the current West, which through globalization would have driven industrialization and the rise of new powers on the periphery, such as China or India, which today compete for the same markets, supply chains, and financial influence that the United States and Europe once monopolized. And it is equally evident that the anti-immigration narratives of the new right repeat the scheme of late Roman tales about Goths and Huns, emphasizing a conspiracy of demographic substitution and supposedly incompatible cultural values, instead of explaining these migratory flows as a byproduct of the asymmetries of Western economic expansion, or pointing out that integration problems may depend more on the volume of these flows and the economic fabric they encounter upon arrival, and that not everything should be reduced to cultural differences.In short, empires do not die from moral corruption, but because their economic success inevitably makes the world they want to dominate grow. And, if one thinks about it for a moment, it is clear that a unilateral dominion of the world as in 1999 should be the exception rather than the rule, and that the most normal thing is for wealth and power to be distributed. This does not mean that culture is not important or that societies cannot betray their values, but rather that perhaps we should scrutinize which values they emphasize and which others do not interest at all those who tell us a certain narrative of decline. I would say that there is nothing anti-Western about assuming the loss of hegemony as inevitable and trying to manage it by strengthening internal cohesion and weaving horizontal alliances with the rest of the rising world, instead of wanting to continue antagonizing them through military and economic wars. Because the dramatization of the narrative of the decadence of the West serves very well to justify all sorts of cuts and permanent states of exception instead of, for example, looking at how power and wealth are organized in our own country.
