Abdullah al-Ahsan

[t]he scepticism regarding western progress that was once confined to a very small number of intellectuals in the nineteenth century has grown and spread to not merely the large majority of intellectuals in this final quarter of the century, but to many millions of other people in the West.1

Nisbet recommended a religious awakening or “even a major religious reformation” to revive the faith and optimism in progress. In 1987, Paul Kennedy published The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers with a different approach, but reached to a similar conclusion. He analyzed economic and military changes within European civilization since 1500, and held the view that big powers have always maintained their supremacy in world affairs by keeping a prudent balance between the creation of wealth and military expenditure.

The failure to maintain such a balance in modern Europe had caused the fall from supremacy of Spain, The Netherlands, France, and Britain respectively at different times. This has continued till the middle of the twentieth century. He also warned the cold war rivals at the latter half of the twentieth century, the United States and the Soviet Union, of the same fate.

In 1992, Fukuyama published a more controversial book, The End of History and the Last Man, defending the nineteenth-century European optimism towards human nature and progress. He expressed his firm belief that the last man, aware of his strengths and weaknesses, and aware of his “perfect rights” and “defective duties,” will subscribe to ideas of liberal democracy.

He also expressed his firm confidence in “a liberal democracy that could fight a short and decisive war every generation or so to defend its own liberty and independence would be far healthier and more satisfied than one that experienced nothing but continuous peace.”2 Fukuyama’s view of progress of modern European civilization seems directly in conflict with Nisbet’s views.

Within years, Huntington wrote yet another more controversial book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order and argued that there was a clash of civilizations in our contemporary times; and that there was a need for today’s dominating players in world politics to understand the nature of this clash: Huntington made policy recommendations for the United States.

The subject of interest of all four scholars is modern European civilization and its future. The civilization that originated in fifteenth century Europe, and which has since spread to the rest of the world, is currently facing difficulties, and historians and philosophers of history have expressed their strong reservations about its future. The historian E. H. Carr once complained that “the decline of the West has become so familiar a phrase that quotation marks are no longer required.”3 Nisbet and Kennedy seem to agree with the general impression that this civilization needs some remedy for its survival and further progress.

However, while Nisbet, an intellectual historian, identifies the need fora religious reformation to remedy the situation, Kennedy, a military cum economic historian, emphasizes the need for economic growth to counter the problem of modern civilization. On the other hand, Fukuyama and Huntington, both political scientists, seem to have been more interested in maintaining American supremacy in contemporary world affairs.

Although European thought had already witnessed crises during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the debate over the fate of European civilization began after World War I. This debate reached the level of the common people when Spengler, a natural scientist turned historian, published the first volume of his Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) in 1918. This was a shocking conclusion about the fate of European civilization. Europeans had a very high expectation about the future of their civilization. This pre-war optimism is reflected in one of Toynbee’s profound observations. Toynbee, who was born in 1889, noted that his generation:

expected that life throughout the world would become more rational, more humane, and more democratic and that, slowly, but surely, political democracy would produce greater social justice. We had also expected the progress of science and technology would make mankind richer, and that this increasing wealth would gradually spread from a minority to a majority. We had expected that all this would happen peacefully. In fact we thought that mankind’s course was set for an earthly paradise, and that our approach towards this goal was predestined for us by historical necessity.4

However, this optimism was shattered by the two World Wars. Toynbee concluded his voluminous The Study of History, in which he studied the rise and fall of twenty-one different world civilizations, saying:

If there was any validity in the writer’s procedure of drawing comparisons between Hellenic history and western, it would seem to follow that the western society must, at any rate, be not immune from the possibility of a similar fate; and, when the writer, on passing to his wider studies, found that a clear majority of his assemblage of civilizations were already dead, he was bound to infer that death was indeed a possibility confronting every civilization, including his own.5

Toynbee’s “own civilization” was the European civilization which in various places in his work he identified also as western civilization or western society. As the century progressed toward the end, the debate became increasingly live, as if major changes must occur at the beginning of the new century or the new millennium. The twentieth century had began with the domination of studies about “the world of nations,”6 but gradually turned toward the study of civilizations.7 This article proposes joining this debate and addresses some of the questions raised above.

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