ABSTRACT
On 15 September Lehman Brothers nosedived on the stock exchange, heralding a financial storm centred on the United States that was to affect the entire planet, especially Western countries as a whole. This chapter focuses on the notion of power and deals with a minimal argumentational apparatus to see to what extent the decline of the West is real. It seeks to analyse this power in three areas: hard economic and political power, institutional power, and power related to the dimension of values. McCormick J. makes a thorough analysis of European values and the proposal that emanates from the European Union for global governance. Europe, beyond its strict economic and institutional reality, continues to be an ideal of civilization, against the globalization of indifference, homogenization and relativism. Tzvetan Todorov makes a stand against the depersonalizing postmodern relativism that has become the perfect magma on which our globalized capitalism floats.
