“What a beautiful word, ‘the West’”

“When The Spectator asked me to write an essay on the topic ‘Why we must strengthen the West’, I was both delighted and perplexed,” writes Mathias Döpfner, CEO of the publishing giant Springer. “Why should this even be a matter for debate? The very fact that we have to explain and justify ‘the West’ shows just how weak it has become. It would be better if it did not need strengthening at all, but the truth is that the West has become an invalid. What, exactly, needs to be strengthened? The West is an idea, not a place. It is not a question of geography; it is a way of life. The idea of the West rests on four pillars: Athens – where democracy was born. Rome – the cradle of the rule of law. Jerusalem – where Judeo-Christian values placed the inviolable dignity of the individual at the centre. And finally, the Enlightenment – whose great thinkers in London, Paris and Königsberg established humanism, individual civil liberties, the separation of powers and the division between Church and State.

Herodotus observed a phenomenon following the fall of the Pisistratid tyranny that remains the most vital lesson in political philosophy to this day. He noted that the Athenians had not fought any better than their neighbours whilst they were ruled by tyrants. But the moment they freed themselves from the yoke of tyranny, every individual was motivated to give their all, proving themselves decidedly stronger and more successful in battle. Why? Because they were now working for themselves, not for a master. In that single observation, Herodotus articulated the timeless argument in favour of self-determination and freedom – the central idea of the West. This idea also shapes a vision of humanity articulated by Immanuel Kant. Man is not perfect. Kant wrote that ‘nothing straight has ever been made from the crooked timber of humanity’. In the Western mind, the implication is: nor should it ever be (…) The word ‘West’ has become suspect and has long since been banished from politically correct circles. The prescribed terms in geopolitical discourse are now the ‘Global South’ and the ‘Global North’. For those who use the term ‘Global South’, linking the West to colonial guilt is no accident – it is the very purpose of the narrative. UN Secretary-General António Guterres made this clear in 2020: ‘The Global North, in particular my own European continent, has imposed colonial rule over much of the Global South for centuries, through violence and coercion’. The aim is to undermine the idea of the West by associating it with guilt. Yet this new terminology is intellectually absurd. It possesses neither moral nor geographical logic: what do China and Peru have in common, or Qatar and Haiti, or Thailand and Sierra Leone? Where is the common denominator when it comes to human rights and the rule of law? As a community of ideas, however, vastly different nations such as Japan, Singapore, New Zealand, the United States or those of Europe can easily identify with the concept of the West. Yet in academia, ‘erasing the West’ has become mainstream. Entire movements (‘epistemologies of the South’, ‘decolonising sociology’) are based on the assertion that academic sociology’s focus on the modern ‘West’ is itself the problem. The West is being called upon, within its own universities, to apologise for its very existence. That the West – an open society based on freedom, the rule of law and human rights – is on the defensive is simply a fact. According to data collected over decades by the think tank Freedom House, global freedom declined in 2025 for the twentieth consecutive year. The most disheartening figure is that just 21 per cent of the world’s population currently lives in countries classified as ‘free’, compared with 46 per cent two decades ago. The West is currently under threat and being weakened from both outside and within. Its three major external adversaries are China, Russia and Islamism – in particular Iran and its terrorist networks. China, Russia and Islamist dictatorships share a common goal: to divide the West in order to weaken it. China is now the world’s second-largest economy. Its aim is to become the world’s leading economy by 2049 at the latest – the centenary of the People’s Republic. The combination of communist autocracy and turbo-charged state capitalism has proved extraordinarily effective, not least because the West has played the role of a willing fool in this growth story. With the benefit of hindsight, admitting China as a full member of the World Trade Organisation in December 2001 was the single greatest mistake in Western trade policy. The naivety or short-sightedness lay in granting membership to a large, undemocratic state that was neither able nor willing to abide by the rules of free trade, whilst at the same time bestowing upon it the status of a developing country, granting it all manner of exemptions and preferential treatment. It was like giving the most ruthless bully in the playground special rights to beat up his playmates. It had little to do with fair competition. China was thus able to exploit the principle of free trade to further its rise as a global economic power. The outcome of this experiment was predictable: in the short term, it brought growth and prosperity to all parties; in the long term, it shifted the global balance of power, creating dangerous dependencies in America and Europe. The most tragic example is the German automotive industry. For decades, German industrial giants staked their future on low-cost production and lucrative consumer markets in China. In doing so, they failed to grasp the difference between good business relations and strategic dependence. The friendly collaboration came to an end the moment China acquired the know-how necessary to launch a subsidised assault on German industry, whilst China’s domestic markets were closed off. It stands as a Chinese masterpiece of expansionist geopolitics conducted through capitalist means. ‘Wandel durch Handel’ (‘change through trade’) – the naïve hope of the 1990s – has backfired. Change did occur, but not towards greater freedom; instead, it moved toward diminished liberty, to the detriment of the West. While the United States has recognized this challenge and responded with varying degrees of success, Europe continues to deny the bitter reality. Beneath the EU’s reassuring platitudes, the continent is gradually slipping towards becoming an amusement park for Asian tourists, offering a high quality of life coupled with declining productivity and value creation. The global trend is clear. Democratic economies are becoming weaker, whilst non-democratic ones are growing stronger. In this significant shift, the implications for military power are routinely underestimated. China is still viewed by many as a militarily passive, purely economic power. That image is false. China’s military budget has doubled from $145 billion in 2015 to $281 billion in 2026 – fuelled by its economic growth. The ultimate litmus test will be Taiwan. China will strike as soon as the odds are high enough that America lacks the strength to intervene, perhaps because Western resources have been exhausted in the theatres of conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East. If China were to achieve its objective without effective Western resistance, the global order would be fundamentally altered. Putin’s war in Ukraine plays a useful role in this strategy. Although the war is far from being a military success for Putin, he has achieved two objectives: to divide the West by driving a wedge between the US and the EU, and to deplete American and European military stocks (...) Islamism hijacks religion for terrorist purposes. Article 7 of the 1988 Hamas Charter states: ‘The Day of Judgement will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees, and the stones and trees will say: “O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him”.’ The destruction of Israel and all Jews is merely the first step. The next is the weakening, infiltration and violent re-education of Europe, and ultimately of America. It remains difficult to understand why Hamas’s attack on Israel has not led to a global wave of solidarity with Israel, but rather to a massive rise in anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism has become a pop-cultural zeitgeist, particularly amongst young people. Islamist circles – including strategically placed jihadists – have spent years undermining Western societies and their founding values. Pointing this out is not Islamophobia. Michel Houellebecq provided a dystopian vision of this in his 2015 novel Submission. It depicts a France in which the Muslim Brotherhood has seized power: a frightened country where women wear increasingly long dresses and white men, to no avail, rejoice at being able to enjoy multiple marriages with underage wives without interference, and where news of Islamist terrorist attacks is eventually suppressed so as not to alarm the population. The book depicts the collapse of Western society. Reality seems to be imitating fiction in the most appalling way. The ‘woke’ movement has become the Trojan horse of this anti-Western sentiment. It is the epitome of the anti-freedom triangle, which seamlessly intertwines anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism. It has led to the reversal of Western values with remarkable dexterity. Its stated objectives bear the hallmarks of good intentions. Its methods, however, are authoritarian. Its cultural relativism is toxic. The result is the reversal of every core value and objective of civilisation. Is the West, made complacent and weary, weakening itself out of a guilty conscience? Will we only realise what we were about to lose when it is too late? Or is the crisis in which the West currently finds itself the very stimulus required for its renewal? That would be the best-case scenario: that we grasp in time what is at stake and realise that the alternatives are far worse. Why must we strengthen the West? Otherwise, the tyrants will win.”