Sergi Rodríguez López-Ros
Vice Rector of the Universitat Abat Oliba CEU of Barcelona
Almost three decades ago, amidst the splendour of the Barcelona Olympics, the Universal Exposition in Seville and the European Capital of Culture in Madrid, the publication of a short essay by Rafael Argullol and Eugenio Trías, one of the only Spanish philosophers of the last 50 years capable of creating an organic and original system of thought, went almost unnoticed. The book was called El cansancio de Occidente (The Weariness of the West). In it, its authors pointed out that, embarrassed by the barbarism of the two world wars and numbed by the seemingly unfathomable welfare state, Western civilisation was in agony due to individualism, nihilism and hedonism.
That false security, derived from Western developmentalism and the axiological transformation of the 1960s, was shaken by the Iranian revolution of 1978, the Yugoslav wars of 1991-2001, the jihadism that began in 2001, the Chinese deployment since 2008 and American withdrawal since 2009, the Europeanist crisis of 2007-2016 (still ongoing) and the pandemic that began in 2020. As the philosopher Angelo Petroni also recently stated in Federalismi, our clock is ticking back to 1949, when the Atlanticist project began. The North American-European axis, despite the fall of communism in 1989, is currently at its lowest ebb.
It would take more space than prudence advises for this article to analyse its causes, which are the three basic ones warned of by Trías and Argullol. If we take them to a practical level, the West has built its political agenda on idealism, has let its middle classes fall, has confused individual and collective freedoms, has made an unrealistic calculation of the cost of the welfare system, has abandoned technological leadership and productive sovereignty, has prioritised particular interests over universal interests, and has transformed cooperation into a new form of colonialism. The result is plain to see: domestic populism and international irrelevance.
Afghanistan, the most paradigmatic case along with Yugoslavia, has been a double defeat for the West. First, it has left the incipient project of guaranteeing human rights in the country, devastated by the Russian (1979-1989) and American (2001-2014) invasions, to its fate. Secondly, it has failed to promote an inculturated model of democracy, limiting itself to imposing a Westernised model. As a result, democracy has been seen in Muslim countries as acculturation. This was the cause of the burning of the Rex cinema in Tehran in 1978, and has also been at the root of the destabilisation of the Maghreb since 2010, with the so-called Arab Spring. Far from starting from the Falsafa or Euro-Islam, which sought an autochthonous synthesis between freedoms and community, Western countries have wanted to bring there not a Greek model of democracy but an Anglo-French model, the same one that has already failed in the Middle East and the Far East, from Indochina to Vietnam. Indeed, the images of these days are sadly reminiscent of the fall of Saigon in 1975.
Jihadism is not a religious phenomenon but a cultural one. It is a by-product of fundamentalism. It stems from a rigorist interpretation of Islam resulting from the rejection of modernity understood as a way of life based, on the one hand, on the three counter-values that Trías and Argullol had already warned were harmful to the West and, on the other, on the maintenance of the prerogatives of a ruling class, the warlords, which some multinationals (and states) have seized in order to continue acquiring natural resources without generating shared wealth. Obviously, not everything is excusable: this fundamentalism, as opposed to the process of ijtihād, of hermeneutics, is a denial of individual freedoms, with all that this entails in terms of imposing ways of life and limiting personal habits. This is intolerable.
Nothing is achieved at a stroke. Revolutions have always brought violence and suffering. Everything must be the product of a process based on a dialogue between human rights and cultural substrata, with clear red lines. In this process, the media, like the education systems, should have played an essential role. A country cannot be transformed by military means alone, but it is essential to create the conditions for peace in which politics, education, the economy and communication can act. The political decision to abandon those who were initiating it to their fate now is not only a disloyalty to them but a failure: the failure of the West, from the United States to the European Union. Sadly, beneath the cobblestones of the streets of Paris, there was no beach but a whirlpool. Those who will now drown in it are those who will not be able to board the last of the planes taking off from Kabul airport.
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