Editorial

Citation

Coleman, J. and Rankin, A. (2003), "Editorial", European Business Review, Vol. 15 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2003.05415daa.001

Editorial

EditorsJohn Coleman andAidan Rankin

In the mid-1980s, the historian and Vice Chancellor of Southampton University, John Roberts, published a book called The Triumph of the West, in which he argued that the civilisations of Europe – especially Western Europe – and North America were successful because of certain underlying characteristics. Chief among these are the belief in individual freedom, the spirit of scientific inquiry and the capacity to invent. These features of the Western mentality are closely related to one another and derive from both the Graeco-Roman and the Judaeo-Christian heritage of modern Europe. Not many years after Roberts's book, the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed – a triumph for Western values, it was claimed, although the displaced Communist ideology was profoundly Western in origin. At that time, Francis Fukuyama, the Japanese-American intellectual, published his famous essay "The end of history" in which he effectively argued that the Western liberal model of economic freedom, reinforced by democratic institutions, was the ultimate goal of any human society, the zenith of human progress. Shortly after this treatise came the first Gulf War, then the Balkans crisis and the rise of fundamentalist Islam as an ideological challenge and politico-military threat to Western power.

History, therefore, certainly was not over. Fukuyama has wisely moderated his thesis, realising that the communitarian values of the East have much to teach a West that is increasingly atomised and morally dislocated. While the spirit of Western triumphalism persists in politics and economics, and especially the mass media, there is about it these days a tremulous and sometimes angrily defensive note. It is as if the West must not only be "triumphant", but prove it, to itself as much as others, and by force of arms where necessary. For in the real as opposed to idealised West there is an underlying sense of doubt that we really have progressed at all, and a questioning of what "progress" means in the first place. It is in that spirit of questioning (itself arguably very "Western") that Roy Kerridge invites us to take a fresh look at London's Natural History Museum. Kerridge notes with regret that the treasure trove of flora and fauna that he recalls from his boyhood is being transformed increasingly into a hi-tech nightmare for the visual aid and soundbite generation. At a deeper level, he views the Museum as a kind of cathedral to the secular rationalist certainties of British – and European – civilisation in the age of industry and empire, certainties that can now be questioned once again. Kerridge is one of the most original and talented of English writers, and with his conclusions he manages both to surprise and delight.

Jeremy Seabrook is one of the foremost writers of the UK left. The weakness of left-wing politics in the UK has been, and remains, its blind faith in socially engineered progress, its intolerance of those who disagree and its treatment of people as nameless, faceless members of groups or categories, not individuals who think, feel and experience life in unpredictable ways. Seabrook has none of these characteristics – which is why he is more heavily criticised by fellow-leftists than by conservatives or genuine liberals. His is a humane form of socialism that admits of the value of tradition and continuity and does not take human society as a tabula rasa to be legislated into perfection. That, indeed, is the charge that he rightly levels against the neo-liberal hegemony associated with transnational corporations and triumphalist Western politicians (along with their local lackeys). The pattern of "development" being imposed on Asia, Africa and Latin America derives from a form of free-market ideology that rides roughshod over local traditions in the name of "progress" and at immense human and ecological cost – just like the most extreme variations of Marxist ideology in the 1960s and 1970s. Seabrook is an expert on South Asia and he asks us to understand the growth of fundamentalism, Muslim or Hindu, as at once a product of and a reaction to the crass interference of the West.

Seabrook's conclusions lead us logically to Dele Oguntimoju's critique of another "new world order" shibboleth, the free movement of people. Oguntimoju himself straddles two societies, Nigerian and British. In Nigeria, he is a pro-democracy campaigner, in the UK a successful lawyer. He therefore can describe with great clarity the problems, as well as the benefits of immigration. Cultural exchanges are enriching, and waves of immigration have given great vitality to countries like the UK. However, the neo-liberal idea that people are rootless, interchangeable economic units to be moved at random is not only dehumanising but also ultimately impractical. This is because at its worst mass immigration perpetuates global iniquities and deprives poorer countries of valuable skills; the import of nurses from Africa to Europe is a good example. Also, the indiscriminate movement of people creates new forms of intolerance and ethnic or communal strife, and sets back steady moves towards racial harmony. Oguntimoju gently criticises those liberals in the West who balk at criticising this aspect of globalisation for fear of seeming "politically incorrect".

The theme of economic imbalance continues in the report by Sir Julian Rose and Jadwiga Lopata, campaigners for the Polish family farm, which survived both Nazism and Communism but is now threatened by the "one-size-fits-all" approach to European integration. Within the enlarged EU, countries of Eastern Europe feel a sense of great vulnerability as well as opportunity. It would be a tragedy if the process of integration worked only one way, for there is much we could learn from Poland about sustainable agriculture. A more constructive approach than "one-size-fits-all" is needed and it is in this constructive spirit that Luise Hemmer Pihl reports on two conferences, the first on regional power blocs in international relations, and the second on decentralised models for European co-operation. At one level these are more realistic and pragmatic, but they also better express the European ideals of tolerance and co-operation: real progress, rather than blind faith in progress.