TIME FOR THE NEXT VERSION OF THE WEST:

The End of the West? (THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, 11/02/03, NY Times)

Well, the numbers are in and the numbers don't lie. At the Madrid aid conference, Saudi Arabia pledged $1 billion in new loans and credits for Iraq — and Germany and France pledged 0 new dollars. Add it all up and the bottom line becomes clear: Saudi Arabia actually cares more about nurturing democracy in Iraq than Germany and France. [...]

What I'm getting at here is that when you find yourself in an argument with Europeans over Iraq, they try to present it as if we both want the same thing, but we just have different approaches. And had the Bush team not been so dishonest and unilateral, we could have worked together. I wish the Bush team had behaved differently, but that would not have been a cure-all — because if you look under the European position you see we have two different visions, not just tactical differences. Many Europeans really do believe that a dominant America is more threatening to global stability than Saddam's tyranny.

The more I hear this, the more I wonder whether we are witnessing something much larger than a passing storm over Iraq. Are we witnessing the beginning of the end of "the West" as we have known it — a coalition of U.S.-led, like-minded allies, bound by core shared values and strategic threats?

Mr. Friedman makes a fairly elementary error here, treating the concept of the West as a geographical and historical matter rather than as what it really is: a set of ideas including but not limited to monotheism with the resulting Judeo-Christian morality and liberal democratic protestant capitalism. Thus, it would be absurd to argue that the recent iteration of the West--which stretched so far that it included South Africa (at least pre-Mandela), Taiwan, Chile, the United States, Australia, Israel, etc., but conspicuously did not include places like France--was a geographical entity. And just as most of those nations came late to the West but became integral, so now some nations that were Western (most of Europe that was not part of the Soviet Bloc) are leaving the group because they certainly don't share the religious ideas anymore and can barely be said to share the political ones. But these countries are expiring, unable/unwilling to replenish their own populations, dependent on the State to care for the aged but unable to produce a native workforce to foot the bill, they'll be forced to allow such massive immigration that they'll no longer be ethnically European, never mind ideologically Western. And because they're dying they're no real strategic concern of ours.

Instead, our future lies with the nations and peoples of the next Christianity, which even now is transforming swathes of Asia, Africa, and Latin America and, somewhat counterintuitively, with Islamic nations. The Shi'asphere appears ripe already, but even the Sunni may fall in line once they undergo the Reformation. The point being that they will share the moral basis that the West requires for liberalism to survive, while Europe no longer does.

MORE:
-New Friends for Old (Karl Zinsmeister, December 2003, American Enterprise)

[I]n the more privileged lands that have traditionally been our allies, trends have been running in a different direction. - In the opening article of this issue's feature section, the great French writer Jean-Francois Revel warns (seconded by Fouad Ajami) that a poisonous anti-Americanism has taken root in Western Europe. His argument will remind many TAE subscribers of the cautionary we published exactly one year ago in our issue "Continental Drift: Europe and the U.S. Part Company"(December 2002).The conflicts sketched there erupted into full-blown fracture just three months later, when the French and Germans quite nastily blocked Security Council resolutions on Iraq.

Revel and Ajami note that, these days, foreign animosity toward the U.S. is rarely something that can be corrected or negotiated away--because it is a psychological side effect of America's galloping success. The deepest anti-Americanism is built on ideological bile and envy. This suggests Americans will need to be steelier in dealing with other nations in the future. The writers in our final feature, "Goodbye to the U.N.," counsel that the U.S. may also need to put less stock in international diplomacy (which has increasingly become a mirage and a charade), and instead be prepared to act independently, with the courage and confidence of our convictions, recognizing that world leadership can be a lonely position.

Allies--including many fervent ones like the Eastern Europeans, and emerging ones in the Persian Gulfand Asia--will rise to make common cause with the U.S. as it pursues universal ideals of human liberty over coming decades. But these future friends will often be new ones. And some of our previous compatriots will only be obstacles in the years ahead.

America has always been a much more dynamic, roiling, and risk-taking nation than the Western European countries that first colonized our shores. As prior global elites and their international bureaucracies become increasingly infirm, reactionary, and economically sluggish, America's future lies more and more with younger, emerging nations.

Australia, Poland, and democratic Iraq: Here we come.

-Sacred mysteries (Christopher Howse, 25/10/2003, Daily Telegraph)

More people go to church than to football matches, William Langley pointed out in The Sunday Telegraph the other day. That has always been true. But one kind of church is growing faster than others - black majority churches. Bishop Joe Aldred, an evangelical pentecostal leader, says there were an estimated 440,000 ethnic minority Christians in Britain in 1998 and, on the findings of the 2001 census, 1,793,858 now.

Bishop Aldred's own denomination, the Church of God of Prophecy, was established in Bedford in 1953 with 13 members. Now it has about 6,000 in 86 congregations, mostly thanks to Caribbean immigration during the 1950s and 1960s. They are among 3,000 churches listed in the Black Majority Churches directory, just published by the African and Caribbean Evangelical Alliance.

-A second Reformation? (JAY AMBROSE, October 27, 2003, Scripps Howard News Service)

Something huge is happening in the world, something that is getting relatively little attention, but something that I recently encountered in watching and listening to two different people visiting the Washington area, one a German journalist, the other an Anglican bishop in Uganda.

Let's start with the German, a fresh-faced young man with a doctorate degree and a job as Berlin correspondent for a TV network. I am not using his name because he was not speaking for attribution, but can tell you he spoke with a small group of people in the top-floor restaurant of the Hotel Washington in Washington and that his message was that Germany has given up the faith.

His native land, he said, is nonreligious, a nation where church attendance is rare and the people have handed over their lives to materialism and leisure seeking. Talk about faith makes most Germans uneasy, he told us, contrasting that state of affairs with what he experienced in the United States during a yearlong stay here. America, he believes, is filled with a great many God-seekers firmly wedded to Christianity.

The picture he painted of Germany was one of decline, and I asked whether Germans were not still an industrious, disciplined people. That image, he said, is no longer deserved in an era of 35-hour workweeks and six-week vacations. While he predicts economic disaster as Germany tries to cope with an aging population, he has a greater concern, and that is widespread, enervating spiritual emptiness.

Switch now to Henry Orombi, affectionately known as Bishop Henry by parishioners at Christ Church in Alexandria, Va., which he has been visiting once a year. He was a guest just a couple of weeks ago, but may not get back again soon, and when he does, we won't be able to call him by the same title. He will soon have major new responsibilities. He will be archbishop of the Anglican church in Uganda. That will make him the leader of 8 million souls. The Anglican province in America -- the Episcopalian church -- has less than a third that many members, just 2.3 million, down more than a million from 20 years ago.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 1, 2003 9:14 PM