Guardian UK: Britain must learn to decline gracefully

[marmar]

Britain must learn to decline gracefully
Politicians may be too nervous to address Britain's increasing irrelevance on the world stage, but they must

Madeleine Bunting
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 23 January 2011 21.00 GMT


There's an eery sensation of time looping back 30 years. The lineup of news stories echoes those that framed my teenage world: one in five young people unemployed and the relentless flow of stories of individual lives strained to breaking point by contracting state support. Beneath the news agenda, one can catch the reverberations of that narrative of national decline that so gripped 1970s and early 1980s Britain.

We're not alone. Declinology is prompting a publishing boom in doom across Europe and the US. The latest is by the Zambian-born economist Dambisa Moyo, who made a name for herself as an outspoken iconoclast with her book Dead Aid. Now she is offering chilly comfort in How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly and the Stark Choices Ahead. Her work sits alongside books such as Losing Control by Stephen King, chief economist of HSBC, The End of Influence (Stephen S Cohen and J Bradford DeLong) and the Last Days of Europe: Epitaph from an Old Continent (Walter Laqueur). And, if you fancy something even gloomier, there's Decline and Fall: Europe's Slow Motion Suicide (Bruce S Thornton).

If all that sounds grim enough, take a look at France, where declinology has become a national art. We have Jean-Pierre Chevènement's Is France Finished? and Eric Zemmour's French Melancholy. While in Germany, declinology has assumed hysterical proportions in Thilo Sarrazin's bestselling Germany Does Away With Itself and Hans-Werner Sinn's Can Germany Be Saved?

The basic decline arguments are familiar. An ageing European population and high youth unemployment with faltering economic growth in the debt-laden west set against the huge economic growth rates of China, India and Brazil – the rising rest, as Moyo calls them. Within 40 years, the west will represent only 12% of the world's population and Europe a mere 6% compared with its size on the eve of the first world war, when Europe's population was slightly bigger than China's. The French declinologist (if I can coin the term) Dominique Moisi describes this with the phrase "the white man's loneliness". ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/23/european-decline-china-rise-policy

[provis99]

1. europe's been anxious for a whole century.

read Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, written shortly after World War I, where he agonizes over the impending decline of Europe.