0.6 The end of the west

For most of the world’s population, life is easier today than ever before. Far fewer, in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia face famine, war or early death. Conditions have improved even in Africa. We live longer and, by most measures, better than before. All conventional indicators (life span, maternal, infant and child mortality, deaths in war, terrorism or civil conflict) suggest that the world is a safer place. Yet, many in the West feel a sharp sense of uncertainty and the Administration in Washington has felt it necessary to declare a war on terror. What is happening?

For over three hundred and fifty years, since the Peace of Westphalia entrenched the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, a Western paradigm has progressively shaped and defined the global order. This familiar order, defined by interactions between largely secular, principally sovereign, nation states transacting in peace and war on the basis of a Law of Nations that imposes obligations on and grants rights to states, has been dominant for so long that we may be forgiven for forgetting that it was not always the way of the world. But we should not believe that it is the way it must be in the future. It is worth recalling how this order came into being, not least because other forces are shaping different systems.

The empires of the Egyptians, Persians, Chinese and Romans, to take four examples, were very different to what we assume about political life today. None assumed equality between citizens; none was secular; none prioritized the individual or accorded him rights against the state; all emphasised the obligations of each subject or citizen to the monarch and to the community. All lasted for hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of years. The Pharonic civilization in Egypt lasted from 3500 BCE until the Romans conquered Ptolemaic Egypt in 30 BCE. The Persian empire extended over 2500 years until 1979, and in its the Achaemenid period (c. 600-330BCE) included much of Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Caucasus and Central Asia, through Turkey, Bulgaria, a part of Greece, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Arabia and most of South Asia. The Imperium Romanum comprised 2,300,000 square miles at its height, including the Italian Peninsula, Hispania, Gaul, the Greek colonies of Magna Graecia, Carthage and Greece, as well as Egypt. The Western Empire fell to the Goths in 476 CE, though Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor in 800, and the Eastern (Byzantine) Empire surrendered to the Ottomans in 1453. The Chinese Empire extended from the Great Unification in 221BCE under the Q'in until the Qing dynasty lost power in 1911. Under the Ming, in the early 15th century CE, the Chinese fleet sailed the Indian Ocean and the empire spread into Vietnam and Turkestan, but by the 19th century, China was at the mercy of Western, powers, Russia and Japan. The First Opium War in 1839, the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864) and the Boxer Rebellion (1898-1900) sealed its fate.