The western model is broken
The west has lost the power to shape the world in its own image – as recent events, from Ukraine to Iraq, make all too clear So why does it still preach the pernicious myth that every society must evolve along western lines?
by Pankaj Mishra The Guardian 14.10.14
“So far, the 21st century has been a rotten one for the western model,” according to a new book, The Fourth Revolution,
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. This seems an extraordinary
admission from two editors of the Economist, the flag-bearer of English
liberalism, which has long insisted that the non-west could only
achieve prosperity and stability through western prescriptions. It
almost obscures the fact that the 20th century was blighted by the same
pathologies that today make the western model seem unworkable, and
render its fervent advocates a bit lost. The most violent century in
human history, it was hardly the best advertisement for the “bland
fanatics of western civilisation”, as the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr
called them at the height of the cold war, “who regard the highly
contingent achievements of our culture as the final form and norm of
human existence”...
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