Europe in Decline

Today, pessimism permeates the Western world. In political, academic and media circles, there is a deep-seated scepticism about the benefits of economic growth and the possibility of social progress, and a great deal of anxiety about the future.

Europe in particular is afflicted by a powerful sense of terminus. Of course, Europe has experienced waves of political pessimism in the past. In the 1920s and 30s, for example, when Oswald Spengler’s 1926 book Decline of the West was a talking point in European salons, words such as ‘end’, ‘decline’, ‘death’ and ‘decay’ were frequently used in the same breath as ‘Western civilisation’. Judging by the title of Walter Laqueur’s recent book The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph For An Old Continent (which I reviewed for the spiked review of books here), this narrative of European decline is making a comeback in public debate. In Britain, there are currently tortured debates about whether there should be a referendum on adopting the European Union’s Constitution, and widespread concern that if Britain embraces the European project too closely, it might inadvertently put itself on the road to decline.