La fin de l'Occident? L'Amérique, l'Europe et le Moyen‐Orient (The End of the West? America, Europe and the Middle East)

Citation

Richardson, J. (2005), "La fin de l'Occident? L'Amérique, l'Europe et le Moyen‐Orient (The End of the West? America, Europe and the Middle East)", Foresight, Vol. 7 No. 3, pp. 61-62. https://doi.org/10.1108/14636680510601986

Review DOI 10.1108/14636680510601986

Formerly director of the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, Heisbourg is now the grand old young man of politico‐military strategists in France. His newest book serves as a lucid chronicle of how the Middle East (if you prefer, south‐western Asia) has become the crucible of the future for much of the world – and what this might augur in the decades to come. The author recounts systematically yet tersely how the world moved, sometimes incoherently, from the fall of the wall to today's undissembled chaos and what this signifies for all of us.

Heisbourg, who currently heads the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique in Paris, sets out to venture responses to a number of critical questions. Does the “democratic militancy” of the American neo‐conservatives, for example, tend to favour democracy's worst enemies? Reply: unfortunately, yes. Does the all‐powerful display seen thus far of US armed might in Afghanistan and Iraq define the limits of such power? Response: undoubtedly so. Are we today at the temporal limit of the “west”, or otherwise launching the world into an age of paradoxes? Answer: more likely the latter, with the remaining superpower behaving little more than as a giant with feet of clay. Is al‐Qaida's terrorism bringing pressure to bear at last on the countries of the Middle East to confront their long‐delayed modernisation socially, economically and politically? Answer: likely, but the transformation will not be easy.

Hyperterrorism, in the eyes of Heisbourg, is without question “a huge challenge to the international system”. The trick, he contends, is not to let today's discontent on the part of demonstrative minorities become a full confrontation between Islam and the Occident (p. 65). To help accomplish this, he calls on increased vigilance and reactivity by Europe – or least by the European Union – to major crises of different kinds, wherever they may happen. Heisbourg reminds that it was, in effect, the US that clamoured in 2004 for coordinated action against the genocide in Darfur (Sudan) while much of the world sat on its hands (p. 133). Also needing close attention are China's emergence as a major power economically and possibly militarily; the nuclearisation of the Middle East; the unalloyed “African disaster”; and the grave problem of global warming (p. 1939).

Heisbourg cautions, however, that the American superpower continues to offend through its crankiness and maladroit measures. A specific preventive, he suggests, might be the creation of a mentoring “secretariat” comprising emissaries of the US, Britain, France, Germany – and Poland – to help prevent the US from straying too far from the cautious traditions of old Europe (pp. 264‐265). Not an unrealistic idea.

My only criticism of Heisbourg's valuable volume is his relative neglect of much of the economics of today's world. He fails to mention, for instance, the falling value of the dollar and what a sharply reduced exchange in international trade might foretell for the economic health by 2010 or 2015 of not only the west but also of China, Japan, India and much of the rest of the globe.

So it might be worth while to read, in conjunction with Heisbourg's fine volume, a perceptive little book of 145 pages just published by Grasset in Paris: Alain Minc's Ce monde qui vient (This World that Will Be Ours), 2004, at €9. Both authors are exactly of the same age (born 1949) and both products of France's elite National School of Administration. Their analyses are intelligently complementary and well worth knowing outside the French‐reading world.