ABSTRACT
By the second decade of the twenty-first century it had become the new truth of our age that whatever else might be happening in an increasingly uncertain world one thing had become certain: the West’s best days were behind it. The storm clouds had been gathering for some time. Indeed, even by 2004 it was impossible not to be aware that something serious was up, when that most esteemed of journals, Foreign Affairs, fired a warning shot across western bows. No less a person than its editor, James Hoge (2004), wrote tellingly – and from the West’s point of view rather worryingly – of a ‘global power shift in the making’ which if not handled properly by the West could very easily lead to major conflict. Others soon followed suit. Thus, four years on, the influential writer Kishore Mahbubani (2008) was predicting an ‘irresistible’ shift of power towards Asia; at around the same time, the even more influential Fareed Zakaria (2008) was talking eloquently of a post-American world in the making. Nor did talk of great change end there. In fact, by the time Obama had become president it had become increasingly fashionable to talk of a new multi-polar world in the making, a world in which the USA would be playing a much reduced role. Meanwhile, in Europe, as the economic crisis deepened, it was becoming almost impossible to find anybody of note prepared to forecast a bright future for the Union. On the contrary, book after book and op-ed piece after op-ed piece speculated wildly (but not, it seems, unreasonably) about a Europe that faced a very bleak future: possibly even a collapse of the whole European project.
