The Crumbling Narrative

At UnHerd Philip Pilkington laments that “the West” has “lost the plot”:

For more than a decade, our ability to form a coherent narrative about ourselves has been degrading. By “our”, I mean the West, which emerged in its current form in 1945 after three decades of war, desolation, and economic upheaval. The narrative that it told itself was crystalised during the Cold War: that the West would stand for liberty and freedom against the very live totalitarianism of the Soviet Union.

But this framework crumbled together with the Berlin Wall and the fall of communism. Overnight, a new narrative was needed, and it didn’t take long for one to emerge. The post-Cold War narrative formed in response to the Gulf War in 1990, when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq aggressively attacked Kuwait, principally with an eye to seizing its oil reserves. The United States and a 42-country coalition intervened, the Iraqis were soon pushed back, and Kuwait was allowed to govern itself. Here was the seed of the new narrative: the West, having won the Cold War, would keep the peace in the new status quo.

concluding:

In both the UK and US, then, there is reason to think that we have no real coherent narrative. No one is sure where to go next or what to believe. And as three recent events have demonstrated, this noxious position is already causing serious dysfunction in our political culture.

noting stressors imposed on the present narrative, e.g. COVID-19, the destruction of the Nordstream 2 pipeline, Prigozhin’s brief march towards Moscow, the coup in Niger.

What should we think about each of those? We don’t really know. They’re shrouded in the fog of war.

While I agree with him that it’s darned hard to promote the image of yourself as a peacekeeper while going around starting wars everywhere, IMO the problem is even more basic than that.

The initial narrative is past its sell-by date. “The West” is and always has been a device for pursuing national interest. Although the concept goes back thousands of years earlier, in the late 1930s-early 1940s Britain promoted the us against them notion of “the West” to draw the United States into its war with Germany, an effort which proved successful. After the war “the West” was used to promote American national interest, this time against the Soviet Union.

But it’s a struggle to dredge a notion of “the West” from the euro, always an attack vehicle against the dollar, from the invasion of Iraq, or from U. S.-UK-French support of the removal of Moammar Qaddafi. We certainly weren’t keeping the peace and the images that have emerged from Libya make it difficult to see it as promoting liberty and freedom. Particularly the open air slave markets which did not exist previous to Qaddafi’s removal.

I strongly suspect that the connecting thread among the incidents Mr. Pilkington lists (COVID-19, the destruction of Nordstream 2, etc.) is interest but for the life of me I can’t see whose.

Meanwhile maybe we should return to an idea of U. S. interest that predates the promotion of the Anglo-French view of “the West” to one that is more natively American. We have interests that go beyond those of Europe and European interests are not necessarily ours.