Rise of the Concrete West

The actual, non-declining global hegemon

By Ira StrausJune 2010

I. The Atlantic Perspective and the emergence of a Concrete West

Overview

The West has been organizing itself for a century into a concrete structure. This structure has lacked an overall name; we can name it "the Concrete West".

The Decline of the West has been continually declared since 19181. Yet all this time, the Concrete West has been growing in membership and international role. By 1991 it emerged as the core substructure of the entire global system. In light of its importance, it deserves to be better understood.

There is a perspective -- the Atlantic one -- that can help us with understanding this. It runs, in capsule form, like this:

The Western countries have since 1500 been at the core of the world order, and have since 1900 had enough in common to be able to organize together more closely than most areas of the world. The institutionalization of Western unity has turned “the West” from a cultural expression into an actual entity -- our “Concrete West”. The Concrete West began in the North Atlantic area and has gradually expanded to include other countries, more than doubling its initial size.

This Atlantic perspective deserves also to be called The Western Perspective. Its three propositions above are all fairly obvious, the sort of things that might go without saying. Nevertheless, when stated and taken together, they have far-reaching implications:

1 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), 1918 and 1923. A century earlier, German romantic theorists made similar predictions; and Arthur Herman has traced an ideology of decline going back much further. Nevertheless Spengler marks a new phase of belief in Western decline, a phase widely remarked in terms of the increased aggressiveness and extremism of the anti-Western nationalisms with which it has been connected. What is less widely remarked is that it coincides with the new, concrete form of Western growth that is the subject of this paper.

The belief in Western decline is mistaken. The Concrete West’s expansion has kept its share of the global economy growing. Today it has 73% of world GDP.

The Concrete West can keep expanding, as it always has in the past, on cautious terms that maintain its cohesiveness as well as its portion of global GDP. It is a mistake when it is said it now needs to take in Third World countries as a way of staying relevant. By continuing to absorb only those countries that have come to share its commonalities, it can remain at the core of the world order for an indefinitely long time to come.

The Concrete West’s expansion has no precise limit; it might someday become the world, since Westernization is going on everywhere.

Projections of China’s rise to the top global economic position are an optical illusion, or a confusion of categories. To become global economic leader, China would need to surpass the Concrete West, not America. The Concrete West is too big for China ever to surpass.

The Concrete West’s global leadership can avoid ever getting overturned in the future. The world can henceforth be spared the global conflicts that usually occur when a rising power is replacing the old leader, or when there is “hegemonic decline”.

Western decline is an optical illusion. It is also a dangerous illusion: it leads to miscalculations -- destabilizing withdrawals by the West, destabilizing adventures by emerging powers.

To prevent miscalculation, what the Concrete West really needs to do is to regain reasonable confidence, reinforce its institutions, and make its existence more obvious.

These inferences amount to a reversal of the conventional wisdom on the future of the world order. By making explicit the simplest facts of the Western perspective -- the Western preponderance in the world, rendered consistent by unity, amplified by concretization into expandable institutions -- and putting them together, we have ended up with a far-reaching paradigm shift.

The Atlantic perspective is embedded in the Atlantic institutions, and, through them, is embedded in the world order; but most of the time is left in the back of the mind. Cutting-edge thinking has shifted to anti-Western ideologies. Awareness of

the Atlantic order is strong in countries that want to join it; and among anti-Western ideologists, who depict it as a global dictatorship. In the West itself, there is a lack of consciousness of the Concrete West and its perspective. This has led to major misperceptions, among them the belief in decline.

It behooves us to know better the world order that we humans are operating. Any order functions more smoothly if it has consciousness of itself, and a sound perspective for itself. That is the purpose of these pages.

The Atlantic Perspective

The Atlantic perspective has been in fairly well elaborated existence since the 1890s. It has partially seen itself realized in reality, as the Concrete West; it has thereby become the implied embedded perspective of the Concrete West, or, more simply, "the Western Perspective". It can be expressed schematically by the following set of propositions:

1) The West is, after its modernization and democratization in recent centuries, a single society in the political decisive respects2; its countries share fundamental political and economic structures, and have roughly similar levels of wealth and of freedom. While it still has important national diversities, none of these rise to the level of creating a potential existential opposition of societal interests.

2) Its societies can therefore act freely, without fear -- more freely than most other groupings of societies -- on the fact (in itself not unusual among groupings of countries) that their shared interests are larger than their opposing interests. It is the absence of any mutual potential existential opposition that makes it safe for them to pool their powers and act effectively on their shared interests: it relieves them of the traditional risk from this -- that it might strengthen a potential enemy among them; or, if it becomes “the first step down the road” to a still greater closeness of their societies, might destabilize one of their domestic societies.

3) The West thus could unite in far reaching ways and become a joint actor in world affairs.

2 For definitions of these terms, giving them, not precision, but a degree of precision adequate for the matters being considered herein, see the section, “Defining ‘Single Society’”, in chapter III below.

4) The West has gradually been acting on this fact and uniting. Its self-organization began in the early 1900s, in fits and starts, and has been growing cumulatively since 1940.

5) This self-organization transforms the West from a cultural self-awareness into a concrete entity on the international arena: what we have called “the Concrete West”.

6) “The West” earlier had two meanings: the Civilizational West and the Modern West. The Civilizational West meant all of European-Western civilization, the Modern West meant, initially, the geographically more northwesterly parts of that civilization. The Civilizational usage saw “the West” as one of several civilizations existing on the global plane; thus the phrases “Western civilization”, “Occident and Orient”, “East and West”. Inside this Civilizational West, “the West” developed its second meaning: the more modernized and liberalized sector of Western civilization, bordering on the Atlantic ocean. This second, Modern West started out smaller than the first, Civilizational West, but had a potential to grow up to and beyond the boundaries of the first as modernization spread.

7) The Concrete West begins in this second, Modern West. By building on its socio-political commonalities and shared interests, it gains contemporary practical cohesion alongside its long historical organic roots.

8) Western self-organization begins specifically in the early 1900s with the democracies on the two shores of the North Atlantic.

9) The Concrete West gradually grows institutionally (vertically) and geographically (horizontally) from its starting point.

10) The Concrete West’s institutional (vertical) growth includes: Atlantic alliance (Supreme Allied Councils 1917-20, 1941-present; Supreme Allied Commanders SCAEF-SACEUR 1944-present; alliance treaty organizations NATO 1949-present, along with ancillary alliances and arrangements, U.S.-Japan, U.S.-Korea, ANZUS; NACC-EAPC, PFP, NPA), economic cooperation structures (Marshall Plan-OEEC-OECD, IEA, export control groupings), summits (G-5,6,7,8), and other arrangements formal and informal.

NOTE. Of these institutions, OECD comes closest to defining the group of the Concrete West; but NATO is the strongest and the one that comes closest to carrying the joint identity. This is a source of much confusion; many writers assume that NATO defines the Atlantic grouping, and

describe America’s Pacific links, which in reality evolved within the Atlantic system, as an alternative orientation.

11) The Concrete West’s geographical (horizontal) growth has taken it far beyond its initial Atlantic base area, at the same time preserving its organic cohesion by doing this in carefully limited stages:

a. Past stages of growth i. to the rest of Europe, as the previously undemocratic central,

southern and eastern bulk of Europe is democratized, and as former enemies become allies and are brought into the joint structures;

ii. going beyond the Occident into the Orient to take in Japan, another former enemy;

iii. more recently to a few additional Oriental countries, for example Asian tigers, as they have become sufficiently modernized and Westernized that they too constitute nearly the same single society. NOTE. Most but not all Westernized countries are brought into the Concrete West, through military alliances and economic cooperation organizations.

b. Future stages: to be determined (scenarios are given in Ch. II below).12) The West, defined either way, culturally or concretely, has always since

the 1500s held a core position in the world economy and power structure. a. Its economic position grew to hegemonial proportions by the 1800s

and an absolute majority position in the 1900s. b. The strategic leadership of the Civilizational West worldwide was

uncontested since the 1600s but contradictory, due to conflicts among its own national powers. The emerging strategic leadership of the Concrete West (and its precursor, the western sector of the Civilizational West) was contested sequentially by the other powers within the wider civilizational west. In a series of conflicts, those powers lost; in a series of enlargements, the Concrete West gave them a new anchor. After 1991 the Concrete West was left uncontested, except by actors several orders of magnitude weaker than itself; the old global leadership role of the Civilizational West was finally freed of its former self-contradiction.

13) The Concrete West’s gradual horizontal growth has enabled it to keep its hegemonial position, and increase rather than decrease it with time. Strategically, this is seen in the sequence of absorption of former enemies. Economically, it is seen in the fact that OECD today has 73%3 of global GDP, a share greater than it had in the 1980s, or the 1960s when it was founded.

14) There is no economic decline of the West. Instead there is economic growth of the Concrete West, both absolutely and relative to the non-West. It is a process of non-decline. It provides an element of neg-entropy (sustenance of structure) in the global system. It is also a regenerative or progressive element.

15) There is no reason why this process of non-decline cannot continue in the future. As we have seen, the Concrete West can sustain its relative economic position by a cautious form of continued expansion, limited to countries whose entry would not disrupt its cohesion. It has traditionally disciplined itself on membership selection by two bounding criteria: sufficient openness, and sufficient care for cohesion. The way it can most effectively uphold its role and relevance is by maintaining this dual discipline, bringing in those, and only those, who share enough of its commonalities.

16) Decline is understandably feared as an eventual inevitability for a geographically fixed national state entity, but has no natural necessity for the West as a growing inter-state entity.

17) The modern West has more of universality, less of civilizational particularity, than the pre-modern West; also more than other civilizations.

18) The West’s global predominance has led to a spread of modernization and westernization everywhere. The variations are in the mix, pace, degree, and methods, and in disruptions in some national trajectories by phases of reaction and extremism.

19) The overlay of westernization is everywhere potentially thick. The universal elements of the Western overlay link up with universal elements in each non-Western civilization -- with universal aspirations and norms found in virtually all religions and philosophies; with universal characteristics of social organization (the logic of collective action, the need for organization, for economizing, for accounting, for information...), many of which have

3 The OECD total is rarely mentioned, but is easy to calculate, by adding the figures for the members of OECD. The result, 73%, is the same no matter which source is used -- IMF, World Bank, or CIA. These are the standard sources. Their charts are all readily available on the internet.

been more successfully realized in their Western forms than elsewhere; and with a universal underpinning of common human nature. These link-ups with pre-modern universalist elements serve to “thicken” westernization in non-Western countries. They also thicken modernity in the West itself (the romantics and right-wing declinists failed to notice this, leading them to mistake the modern West as superficial and decadent, declaring decade after decade that it was glittering on the surface but would very soon collapse). Old particularistic elements persist everywhere, in combined and reduced forms; universal civilization is real but not uniform.

20) Some countries with other civilizational roots have become westernized enough to join the Concrete West without detracting from its coherence. There is no known permanent boundary as to which countries can westernize enough to join safely. It is possible that the Concrete West will gradually become the entire world.

Of these twenty propositions, many are simple statements of fact, and others verge on being self-evident, even if only to people who have specialized knowledge. The Atlantic Perspective is thus something fairly objective: it is to a large extent simply an awareness of a set of facts and realities, and an awareness of their systemic implications when taken together.

Systemic implications

a) Non-Decline of the West. Relative decline is neither necessary nor probable for the Atlantic space, in view of its capacity for geographical expansion. In this it contrasts to any single leading nation with a fixed geographical space, which can expect, due to the very nature of catch-up and technology exchange, that some of the more backward economies will always be growing faster than itself.

b) Continued illusion of decline. The widespread belief in Western decline is, on the surface, an unawareness of the relevant statistics; at root, a confusion of categories: given incomplete awareness of the entity “Concrete West” and of its implications, people naturally transpose onto the West the expectations of relative decline that used to make sense for its individual fixed nation-states.

The illusion is exacerbated by using “the West” as the category said to be in decline before China, but “America” as the category that China is

projected to surpass. It is a confusion of categories; a change of category in midstream, so to speak.

This shift of categories is pervasive in Declinist literature; it is like a shell game in categories. Thus the optical illusion. Shell games always create illusions, it is what they are meant to do (when a game).

How to explain that this particular shell game is so widely used, almost by consensus; and not as a game of Illusion but as the most important public Truth? Does the old paradigm make it impossible to notice the loose play with facts and figures? Probably. There are also political motivations for getting excited by declinist prophecies and turning a blind eye to counterevidence.

Consensus illusions are always dangerous things, even the patriotic myth-illusions that can be argued to be necessary for social stability. Declinism is a destabilizing illusion, not a socially necessary one; nor one to be toyed with.

c) Leadership unthreatened by growth of others. The West can encourage global growth, including rapid growth of non-Western economies, without endangering its hegemonic stability, as its total economic growth is the sum of its domestic growth plus its geographical growth.

d) Dynamic Hegemonic Stability. The West’s hegemonial share in the world economy is a stable cornerstone point of a dynamic system. It has continued undiminished through long periods of dramatic growth all around it; and it has held like an invariant through storms and radical transformations in the geopolitical situation -- two world wars, a cold war, peacetime, Communism, fascism, terrorist conflict.

e) Stability through parallel shifts. Growth shifts the economy upward, particularly in non-Western, catching-up countries; the Concrete West shifts its membership wider, through integration of countries that have sufficiently caught up. The second shift more than cancels out the first (the differential in domestic growth rates) in the long run, or in any time span over twenty years. The Western hegemonic share is in this way maintained; relative decline never sets in. The Western hegemon is a constant-in-shift, a sliding hegemony, always genetically the same historical entity yet always changing.4 This can continue for as far into the future as can be pictured;

4 Francis Bacon said “a too forward retention of custom is itself a turbulent thing”, a quote much loved by the Atlanticist Lionel Curtis. The Atlantic hegemon has kept its organic essence stable by frequent adaptation. Advocates of organic conservatism in the East, always thinking in terms of delaying modernizing changes, and often changing things in other directions by constructing barriers to modernization or undertaking counterreformations, have often brought their countries to revolution and ruin. A sensible balance of continuity and change is a good

potentially until the entire world has shifted into the inside-the-Concrete-West category.

f) Ultimate extent of the West. The modern Concrete West, unlike a purely civilizational West, has no fixed limits. The Concrete West’s logical fate would be to continue growing, faster or slower, until eventually the whole world is “West” organizationally, even though never identically western culturally.

g) The evolution toward universality can be accelerated by conscious effort, but only within severe limits. It is rooted in objective facts and tendencies: modernization, westernization, development, assimilation of universal norms to particular cultural traditions -- processes that all required centuries in the original West.

h) Atlantic System. The Concrete West, since it consists of N Atlantic-based set of institutions -- NATO, OECD, etc. -- has also been called “the Atlantic System”. This system exists alongside the global set of institutions or “UN system”, and in many respect acts as its core.

The logic of having two parallel systems of international institutions, Atlantic and global, flows from what was said above about the West’s commonalities. Due to these commonalities, its countries can be organized together more deeply than can the entire world. Western self-organization can in turn impart greater reliability to the world order as a whole.

The two systems are linked, quietly but effectively, by institutions that are officially global but have been built around Atlantic leadership: the Bretton Woods system, the Community of Democracies, G7-8-14-20 ... A Venn diagram of the international institutional order would show three concentric circles: the inner circle for the Atlantic system, the outer circle for the UN system, and a circle in-between for the mediating systems. The concentricity and interlocking of the three levels gives the world order far more efficacy and suppleness than most people realize; it is an under-appreciated source of strength for international institutions.

i) Growing synergy between Atlantic and global systems. Both levels will remain necessary as long as commonalities among Western countries are substantially deeper than commonalities on the global level. The two levels can cooperate, directly as well as through intermediate institutions; and increasingly are cooperating directly since the end of the Cold War. If eventually most countries arrive at First World standards and are integrated

thing, but often it is the wrong question; the more important thing is to make the right changes not the wrong ones: to find the needed changes and make them in good time.

into the organized West, the two levels of organization might then merge. The West would become the world.

Is and Ought in the Atlantic Perspective

The above sets of facts and implications provide the Atlantic “Is”. But they do more than tell us what Is; they also suggest a moral orientation. This is the Atlantic “Ought”, or “Atlanticism”.

An Ought, if it is responsible, must take account of what Is. The widespread unawareness of the Atlantic Is creates a risk of irresponsibility in many present-day Oughts.

Atlanticism tries to overcome this, by giving full account to the central Is of the world order. It holds that, as the West Is the core of world order, and as its relative homogeneity makes it capable of greater unity than the world at large, it Ought to organize its unity and play its core role more responsibly.

This Ought is a matter both of practical self-interest and of universal needs and norms. It is sometimes described as a systemic requirement: the world order cannot avoid chaos unless there is cohesion in its core.

In other words, the West’s potential for unity is both an opportunity and an obligation.

It is a matter of normal self-affirmation, to say that the Western countries should seek, through unity, to better realize their shared interests and values. And it is a normal affirmation within universal morality, to say that they owe some consistency to the world they are leading. The posture is one that would seem to commend itself almost self-evidently to people with an ordinary, moderate sense of loyalty to their society and to the world. If there is anything surprising in it, it is that it is so little known.

The Atlantic Ought follows in the line of the Enlightenment view of enlightened self-interest: normal self-affirmation in a context of affirmation of universal morality, each supporting but also balancing the other, keeping it mild and reasonable, not fanatical or hating, or self-hating. This is perhaps related to the fact

that the Atlantic “Is” has its home base in the countries where the Enlightenment was strongest in the 1700s.

The Atlanticist Ought, like any Ought, cannot be strictly reduced to an Is. It is suggested by, not deduced from, the Atlantic Is. Additional, “Ought” premises are needed to get from the Is to the Ought: the point is a part of the philosophical culture of the Atlantic region, home of the Is-Ought distinction. The distinction was used in the first stage to overcome the traditional authoritarian Is-Ought merger; in the second stage, to undertake scientific sociological investigation of what Is, so as to understand what Oughts the Is would make viable. In line with this approach, the Atlantic Perspective devotes a good half of its attention to the Is factors relevant to its Ought. Research in a number of fields -- international economics, international systems theories, research on the Democratic Peace in the OECD space and its Atlantic roots, sociology -- has provided strong support for Atlanticism on the Is side of things. Relatively minimal accessory premises -- the most general Ought-type premises, such as that we Ought to cherish the existing world and make the best of it -- need to be introduced in order to get from the Atlantic Is to the Atlantic Ought.

The systemic side of Atlantic Is research comes particularly close to generating an Atlantic Ought, although logically a minor premise is still necessary. Suppose that one adds, to the Is propositions, an Ought consisting of an ordinary basket of values and an ordinary constructive attitude toward such order as exists; as in, “the world order is something every one and every value depends on, so we all ought to try to make it work.” 5 Then the rest of the Atlantic Ought follows deductively:

As the West is the core of the world security system and world economic system, the entire world suffers from chaos when the West is not united, or insufficiently united (Streit).

“Sufficient” unity means common policy commensurate with the scope of Western economic and security roles.

5 Perhaps it requires some reminding, in view of the frequency of rhetoric of balancing against whatever power system exists, that the ordinary attitude is not one of negative balancing, but one of fitting in and positively helping the system work. This attitude is upheld by all traditional religions and philosophies. It is also supported by the Enlightenment, which located the foundation of society in fellow feeling and cooperative sentiment, not in negative balancing. There is a widespread misunderstanding that the American Constitution was about creating checks and balances against Federal power; actually it was about forming a “more perfect Union”, i.e. a stronger joint power, by removing the negative State checks against Federal power and giving to the Federal “head” enough body and means to carry out its assigned powers. The attitude that gives primacy to negative balancing is a more radical one than most people realize; it verges on nihilism.

It requires joint structures sufficient to provide such a scope of common policy, organized well enough to keep national actions aligned for the course of long-enduring, complex, costly policies (Monnet).

Churchill gave a more elegant, if less deductively rigorous, phrasing to the same thoughts: only reliable unity from the West can impart stability to the whole and confidence to the weak.

Universalism from a particular base

The Atlanticist Ought has one further feature worth noting: It takes the West as the main base area for its universal values. Having a base area for one’s values is ordinary for any rational actor, the sort of thing that ought to go without saying, yet in today’s world it gives Atlanticism a distinctive flavor.

Atlanticism takes a strategic, sequenced view of universal values rather than uniform, linear view. It rejects both immediate universalism and eternal particularism as oversimplified. It maintains that one has to keep two things in mind at the same time: that modern liberal democratic humanitarian values are universally valid as a matter of principle, and recognized as such globally, in a Universal Declaration and Covenant; and, as a matter affecting practice, that these universal values have not been understood everywhere equally at the same time but have evolved farthest in a particular area, approximated by the West.

It is a long history that has entrenched the contemporary universal values strongly in the West and considerably less elsewhere. This makes the Concrete West also the Concrete Base for the universal values. The strength of the Western Base is essential for the gradual universalization of liberal human values. It would be ruinous to the universal values if the West were, in the name of immediate undifferentiated universalism, to neglect its security and power as Base.

It is only common sense to say that the first priority for universal values is to secure the base that upholds them. Nevertheless this common sense has in recent times come under attack as hypocritical and elitist. Perhaps this is because its natural tendency is to favor the West, which is not a popular thing to do in present-day cultural circles, perhaps because modern democratic rhetoric is heavy on indiscriminate principles. And on the surface, it is indeed contradictory to the pure universality of universal values; as are the double standards employed by every parent, and is the very institution of “minority age”. Successful universalism is

prudent; it employs strategizing, prioritizing, discrimination, delays, maneuvers, mediations.

This is a consequence of the fact that every universalism is deployed on earth by particular persons and groups, in conditions where there is as yet no universal world government, much less a perfect godlike one with universal objective magistracy and a homogenous citizenry that shares the universal norms: and that is what would be needed to provide a bastion sufficient for securing the norms against perverse uses. In these conditions, strategizing is still necessary for universalists, as it always has been in the past. Even a world government would have to strategize, in lesser degree; even in the domestic administration of justice, every government necessarily has its policy priorities for its justice department. In the actual world of multiple sovereign states with some serious variances in norms and standards, heavy strategizing is needed, today as in the past. In the bipolar Cold War, no one denied the need for strategy, but ironically, there was somewhat less need than today, since in most cases around the world, the struggle for democracy coincided with the struggle for the West against the totalitarian East. Today, in a primarily unipolar world with multipolar problems, strategic prudence is more necessary, less recognized.

Imminent universalism is, by contrast, radical; it rejects all discriminations, all delays. There are two opposite radical universalisms in the present period. On the Right, a radical universalism holds that the Western democratic Base cannot be secured unless democracy is quickly achieved everywhere, since every undemocratic space becomes a breeding ground for terrorism against the West; making it necessary to risk everything on a rush to get democracy everywhere, even immediate where elections present-day public opinion is prone to extremism. But shouldn’t there be moral cautions, peace-loving cautions, prudent strategic cautions in these conditions? No, it was said; in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, and during and after the Palestinian elections that brought Hamas to power, all cautions were branded racist, hypocritical. On the Left, a no less radical universalism holds that the Western democratic base is an undemocratic elite on a world scale; only a globally elected government can provide true democracy and secure it, and meanwhile it is necessary to build up non-Western and anti-Western powers for the sake of a multipolar balance. What about the anti-democratic effects of building up anti-Western powers? What about the possible instability of a globally elected government, and its disempowerment of the actual stable Western democracies? Such concerns are dismissed as Eurocentric, imperialist, and again, racist.

It is evident that the imminent universalisms are delusive; a pure universality is not immediately available. Both stabs at radical universalism, Right and Left, suffer from the perversion of serving particular interests on the global stage, no less than does a prudent universalism that favors its particular base; and the radical universalisms, unlike the prudent ones, serve interests that undermine their professed norms. Which is the worse hypocrisy, or biasing motive: one that favors service to the strategic interest of its proclaimed cause, or one the serves the interest of an opposite cause? Service to the opposite cause is what a prudent universalism strategizes to avoid doing. It is what ordinary sincere people have been strategizing for thousands of years to avoid while advancing their norms; it is what has enabled humanity to achieve some continuity and progress in its norms.6

Atlanticism is not a radical universalism. It is an ordinary common sense universalism, one that proceeds from the particular base where its universal values have most embedded themselves. It reinforces that base area by uniting it into a Concrete Base. This ends the internecine power politics that had in the past introduced contradictions into its global role; it enables a cumulative expansion of the base area, and a cumulative expansion of its values through all the twists and turns of strategic policy.

Future prospects

The Atlantic Perspective is rooted in long-standing Atlantic realities. Theorization of it began in the decades after 1865, so as to deal consciously with those realities. It became embedded in the 1900s in Atlantic institutions and an Atlantic-based world order. The world order and the Atlantic Perspective thus mutually adapted to one another.

The Atlantic, once entrenched in institutions, was able to continue its growth even without much consciousness. After the 1960s the Perspective receded in public 6 This is a point on which Leo Strauss and Reinhold Niebuhr, the philosophers most esteemed by the opposite Bush and Obama Administrations, agree: radical, immediate universalism is a false universalism, and an unethical one. Hard moral choices have to be made, with some evil and some good in all choices; only God can choose an untrammeled universal good. On earth all universal choices will be linked to particular agendas and interests, and limited capabilities. “Hypocrisy” is unavoidable; in limited beings, selfless motives are inevitably mixed with selfish ones; limited capabilities positively require double or multiple standards in the use of principles. One should aim, not to eliminate this, nor to avoid hard choices for fear of it, but to restrain its excesses and enlighten it; a balance one can achieve only if one acknowledges it accurately. To be responsible as a moral agent -- to choose the lesser evil and greater good, and restrain and correct for the evils in one’s choice, as practicable -- one has to accept the reality of those evils. The Bush Administration proceeded in practice opposite to Strauss’ cautions; it ran in a straight universal line in the name of avoiding hypocrisy, with consequences that are almost universally deplored. One hopes the present Administration will be truer to Niebuhr than Bush was to Strauss.

awareness; in the mid-1980s there first emerged the near-consensus belief in Western economic decline, tied to calls for abandonment of Western unity. The expansion of the West nevertheless continued, and accelerated. The underlying Atlantic realities proved powerful indeed.

The probable next stages in the growth of the Concrete West are to bring in additional Asian tigers as they become more First World in character, and additional post-Soviet states including at some point Russia. This will bring the entity to still higher supermajority share of global economic throw weight, and to nearly all of global military throw weight. It will also bring it to nearly 2 billion people, more than any other coherent entity in the world. In subsequent stages, probably several decades hence, additional countries in Asia and Latin America will graduate from the Third World to lower First World conditions, and come into the Atlantic institutions. This will further add to the hegemonic position of the Atlantic entity, even as other countries keep growing economically outside of it. Later stages can be expected to bring in the large countries in the South that today are still very far from First World status; with the accelerating progress of technology and investment, they may well get there before the end of the present century. It is thus entirely possible that, in the next century, the Atlantic will be the world.

II. Future of the Concrete West: A projection of the further geographical unfolding of the Atlantic Perspective

Let us now examine how the geographical side of the Atlantic Perspective could play out in practice in the remaining areas of the world.

Two disclaimers, before prophesying:

First. I do not expect my sequence to have the clairvoyance of earlier Atlanticists -- Clarence Streit, or before him Henry Adams.

Adams suggested in 1905 that the “Atlantic system”, an informal strategic union built in his time around America and Britain, would move on to include France; then Germany, even if only after a century of conflict; then the even more difficult problem of including Russia, bringing the entire world into a peaceful combine7.

Streit, in the midst of the very cycle of wars with Germany that Adams foretold, independently projected the same sequence, with one proviso: that a deep institutionalization of the Atlantic system would be necessary, in order to consolidate its past accretions, avoid isolationist backsliding, and enable the further accretions to proceed at the appropriate historical moment, avoiding repetition of the near fatal failure after 1919 to integrate Germany.

The almost precise realization of their projections, going many decades and several geopolitical turns down the road, is uncanny. It shows a deep insight into the nature of things. Or perhaps we should say that it shows the Atlantic Perspective makes for such insight, by bringing out the basic realities of the world and its trends.

Adams personally was not confident in making prophecies; he concluded that it might all happen within sixty years, “but, for the moment, the gravest doubts and ignorance covered the whole field.” The Atlantic Perspective gave him a solid perspective, but it had yet to receive its first verifications. Those have since come in.

Can current bearers of the Atlantic Perspective likewise derive foresight from it? Perhaps not with such brilliance, but it at least gives me reason to hope that my projections may have some validity.

7 The Education of Henry Adams, 1907, 1918; the scenario is offered several times in the later chapters, written 1903-1905 – chs. 28, 30, 34, 35

Second. My projection of the future sequence is tentative and susceptible to change, the more so the farther out it gets in time. Many parts of it are contingent. And all kinds of disruptions to the schedule are possible --

National disruptions. Some countries are likely in coming years to enter a phase of extremist rebellion against the West, as earlier did Germany, Russia, Japan, China; no one knows which ones. Much of the Islamic world is presently in the throes of such a rebellion; no one knows how long it will last, or how it will end, if ever. The pace of economic development will change drastically in some countries, as yet unknown. Each of the developing countries faces a certain percentage probability of instability and overturns; add them up and it is a high probability for at least one major emerging power regime to go under. Perhaps it will be China, whose severe instabilities have been kept building up under a tight lid; perhaps India, with stable instability (its has stabilized by tolerating its instabilities) and with nuclear war risks from Pakistan.

Transnational disruptions. There could be collapse of the world economy. Global instability. Global wars. War over Taiwan, or Kashmir, or Georgia. Proliferation spun out of control. WMDs used in South Asia, or the Mideast, or between global powers.

Cosmic disruptions. An asteroid hits earth. Space aliens invade. Runaway microbes brought back to earth. Acts of God, divine retribution against nations, the Second Coming, the Mahdi.

Technological disruptions. Biotechnology run wild, mutations, biological war agents don’t stop where intended. Global warming transforms the world. Nanotechnology weapons, invisible swords, gray goo.

The numerous accidents of well-intentioned technological research, pursued competitively by myriad persons and institutions, regulated by countries that still have to compete against each other; bear a cumulative probability of bringing down the world, if malicious uses don’t do it first.

Global warming is the one catastrophe on this long list that is widely expected in mainstream discussion, although others are no less worthy and may be harder to prevent. It is noticed because it is not a future accident but a development in progress. Unrestrained past Western emissions are being compounded by unrestrained use of Western technology in the Third World for growth of population, production, and emissions. Environmentalism is a Western movement, spurred by surplus wealth and by Western environmental science, despite the movement’s anti-Western ideological tinges; the call to restrict emissions faces Third World

economy-focused resistance. The West has been unwilling to consider restrictions on Third World use of its technologies, or to place economic pressures such as an emissions tariff, to get Third World countries to agree on global emissions controls. This brings a calculable probability of catastrophic warming, disrupted in turn by chances for scientific breakthroughs on cooling the globe with geoengineering; and brings us back to the importance of the West having sufficient capabilities for joint policy and global leadership, and for a joint discourse that is self-affirming in a normal enlightened way.

With these disclaimers made -- putting now to the side these catastrophic possibilities, real though they are; limiting ourselves, as is usually done in the social sciences, to an analysis based on mundane trends -- it is possible to project a broad outline of the Atlantic geographical future:

a. Past unfoldings: a review

1880- : The main propositions that form the Atlantic Perspective were developed in three phases: 1880-1900, 1914-1919, and 1920-1940. They were systematized by Clarence Streit in the latter phase and and disseminated widely through his book in 19398. They projected two axes of Atlantic growth: institutional concretization of Atlantic unity, and a sequential geographical expansion whose unfolding this institutionalization would facilitate.

1900-1914: “The Atlantic” consisted as yet only of the original Western European and North American democracies, and Australasia. They felt a degree of solidarity, bolstered by the Anglo-American and Anglo-French rapprochements of 1890-1907, but were barely organized together in any form. There was an Anglo-French-Russian entente, but conceived as a part of the traditional European diplomatic checkerboard and balance. There was not yet a Concrete West.

1917-19 and 1941-45: a semi-concrete West comes into existence. In WWI, the Atlantic Alliance of the U.S., British empire, and France, organized with concrete structures, including Allied War Councils. In World War II,

8 Clarence Streit, Union Now: A Proposal for a Federal Union of the Democracies of the North Atlantic (New York, Harper, 1939). See also his article, “Peace through Democracy”, which appeared in 1934 in the New York Times, and in an annual League of Nations volume, Problems of Peace.

organized with a Supreme Council and a Supreme Commander, structures that de facto continued uninterrupted into NATO and continue today.

1947-8, Marshall Plan, implemented by OEEC, an Atlantic-linked European forerunner of EU and OECD, with all European democracies in it.

1949 negotiations for NATO begun among World War II Western allies, adding some of their neighbors; Italy also added by 1949.

1949: The Alliance is institutionalized in permanent form, NATO. From this point on, a Concrete West clearly exists.

1951, U.S.-Japan Security Treaty; 1952, ANZUS

1952, European Coal and Steel Community (beginning of today’s EU)

1954, Germany added to NATO; this is its definitive integration into the Concrete West

1961 OECD. 1956-60, NATO Parliamentarians Conference and an Atlantic Congress both call for creating an Economic NATO; 1961 OECD formed as the economic NATO, through revision of OEEC charter. It includes all Western European democracies, including those that for legal or diplomatic reasons cannot join NATO. 1964 Japan admitted to OECD. 1971, 1973 Australia and New Zealand admitted to OECD.

OECD since 1973 contains the full membership of the Concrete West.

1970s: Trilateralism emerges as an extension of Atlanticism, expressing the need for developing further the unity of all the OECD-Western countries. NATO however remains the strongest institution of the Concrete West and the only one that carries its identity, using the name of Atlanticism9.

1974-5: G5-6 (now G7-8) formed, giving the West a summit-level visibility; IEA formed, supplementing OECD

1999-2004 Eastern Europe (with a few gaps) joins NATO, EU, and OECD

9 This is a source of misunderstanding for those who are unaware of the genetic bond, historical and institutional between Trilataralism and Atlanticism. Thus the many writers who have treated the Pacific orientation as opposite to the Atlantic one, when actually it reinforces the Atlantic one.

What next?

b. Next stages: potential this era joiners

Tigers. A few additional Asian tigers would be logically next on the agenda of countries to be included: Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand. These would add a small percentage of global GDP, but would add politically valuable companionship inside the Concrete West for Japan and South Korea. The Concrete West would become more bicivilizational without become more multipolar. Its role as the core of the international community in East Asia, a role that already exists but is semi-invisible and little understood, would become more instinctively evident; so would its eventual relevance for membership for all countries of the region, and its attractive power in the region.

What about Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau? They are excluded from most formal Atlantic structures, as legal parts of China. Hong Kong may wish it had been included in Western structures when it was a part of the British Empire; Macao similarly, when it was under Portugal; but that is water under the bridge. Taiwan is included informally in Western security arrangements and wishes to join almost any international arrangement that will let it in. There could conceivably be a future diplomatic conjuncture in which it would make sense to include Taiwan in OECD; but it is not a matter to be toyed with lightly. It might be done for adversarial reasons; alternatively, China might realize it makes sense for its own economic self-interest, giving it half a foot in the First World.

Russia . Russia is the largest of the this-era questions for enlargement. The final power on Adams’s agenda, it is the one remaining today.

Russia is, in terms of objective importance for the West, by the most important country on the expansion agenda. It is more important than China, India and Brazil combined. The latter add up to 12% of world GDP, but a 12% addition to OECD’s present 73% would be of minor significance. Russia, by contrast, carries power that is not minor for the West. The addition of Russia to the Atlantic group would raise its share of the world’s nuclear forces from about 60%10 to 98%. Much deeper nuclear reductions would become

10 Russia has more nuclear weapons than the U.S. today, but qualitatively the U.S. has the edge; thus the approximate 60% figure.

possible without denting the Atlantic’s edge over potential rivals. Indeed, the Atlantic’s military margin would leap to a qualitatively higher level, one many times larger than all the potential rivals combined. Russia also would bring a major share of world science and technology, a large military industry and weapons trade, a vast and central geopolitical position, oil and gas reserves that can undercut Islamist challengers, and many other mineral resources; each of these, if added in to the West, would visibly boost its global primacy and security.

Russia is civilizationally related to the West; it is European, with Orthodox Christian heritage. It is intimately related, ethnically and linguistically, to the new Slavic members of NATO. The intimacy is even tighter in the countries in the post-Soviet space that are debated regarding membership in NATO; because of this intimacy, most of them would not in the end decide to join unless together with Russia.

Russia is, however, a huge and difficult task, as Adams well knew. It also, after half a century of Cold War enmity, raises the blood pressure level in Western discussion. NATO in turn raises the blood pressure in Russian discussion. Democratization still has a good way to go in Russia. While the fundamental geopolitical opposition between Russia and the West was ended by Russia’s unilateral abandonment of Soviet positions after 1989, there has not been a two-way resolution of the residual divergences of strategies and interests, or construction of much of a common strategic perspective.

Positively, nevertheless, a common geopolitical interest was recognized in the Afghan war after 2001. Russia has been included in the G8; this helped head off a reversion to strategic enmity during the 1999 Kosovo war. OECD has endorsed the idea of Russian membership and opened negotiations with Russia on it; both sides share this goal, although fulfillment of the criteria or acquis will take some time. NATO in January 1994, in announcing a Partnership for Peace open to Russia, announced also the goal of membership for PFP participants, but gradually drew back from this, saying only that the door is not closed and Russia too can apply to join if it meets the criteria. It has treated the criteria, among them signing onto NATO’s strategic concept, as matters to be fulfilled one-way by Russia. A NATO-Russia Council (NRC) has been formed, in principle a venue fit for the two-way work of reconciling strategic perspectives; Russia has often complained that the West has used it for technical cooperation issues not the broad diplomatic context; the West in turn says that when it tries to discuss the larger issues, Russia isn’t cooperative.

Despite these obstacles, the broad picture is that Russia-West strategic perspectives are far closer than in Soviet times, and consultations continue,

perhaps not creatively enough, on resolving outstanding issues. The door of NATO is not closed, and the central relevant standards are likely eventually to be met, no doubt in the same imperfect way all other new members have met them. In a matter of decades, then, an integration of Russia into the Atlantic space is still probable, as a natural consequence of the end of Communism, and of its happening in conditions of a modernized educated Russia and a concretized joinable West. The specific scenario laid out by Adams and Streit would then be completed.

Former Soviet republics. Alongside Russia, there are also other post-Soviet states, and Mongolia. They too would bring significant strategic accretions, though none comparable to Russia itself. The largest of them, Ukraine, is likely to come in only if Russia is also coming in around the same time: the opposition from Eastern Ukraine will yield only on this condition; polls showed repeatedly in the Yushchenko years that a robust popular majority rejects joining as long as it is without and against Russia. The same holds true for Belarus, and, somewhat more mildly, for several other states the West has been interested in. Their entry is, as a practical matter, bound up with Russia’s: until Russia joins, they will hover in-between, torn both ways and unable to have fully satisfying relations either way; when Russia joins, they will join, too. The total addition to the West from the former Soviet space will then come to about 300 million in population.

c. Stages further down the road

Some Latin American countries . After Russia and the post-Soviet space and Asian tigers, who next? Here -- and we are speaking probably at least 20 years down the road -- it would be appropriate to look at the relatively advanced Latin American countries such as Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador.

In fact Chile has just been let into OECD, on the basis of the mistaken belief that the First World is in decline and the OECD needs to go South and become a mixed First-Third world institution in order to avoid obsolescence and keep its relevance. Mexico and Turkey are also already in OECD, for specific reasons of need due to contiguity and intimate interaction, not for ideological reasons. None of these three, however, can as yet be counted as fully a part of the Concrete West. In 20 years they might be. This assumes continued economic progress in these countries, development of a middle

class based society with a bell curved social structure rather than the longstanding division between a rich elite and an impoverished mass, and continued (or restored) and improved adherence to democratic standards. And -- most important of all, similar to what is most important for Russia -- it assumes a change of mentality, to come to support the First World’s global leadership and participate constructively in that leadership, and convincingly refute and leave behind the mentality of resisting First World leadership.

There will be no urgency in this. An OECD that includes only its present members can still be expected to have, in 20 years, at least as strong a hegemonial role in the world economy as OECD had in the 1960s or 1980s; if Russia is added too within 20 years (and a few other small Asian and Eastern European countries), OECD could be expected to be in an even higher position economically, and in a better position than today in terms of security and energy.

The question of Latin American accretions would be a matter of choice, not necessity. That is to the good: candidates are evaluated in a more objective manner, when pursued with the understanding that it is a matter of discretion.

Some more Asian countries . Alongside Latin America, the time may come for Asian countries larger, and thus far poorer, than the tigers.

Still larger and poorer Asian countries will come later. The largest, India and China, will pose unique challenges of size (discussed below).

Some Islamic countries . The schedule for the Islamic world is unpredictable. It is a kind of new Second World, after the Soviet bloc has vacated that role. Economically much of it could make a claim to First World status sooner than could most Third World countries, but politically, sociologically, and morally the changes will need to be profound, convincing, and stable.

There is much talk of including Israel in NATO, but this would be reckless, absent an ability to include Arab countries simultaneously11. OECD has invited Israel to pursue membership; this is a less politically charged matter, and could make sense given Israel’s First World nature and its contributions to international development efforts.

11 Streit, incidentally, said that the rule of thumb on this, as on other First World democracies deeply entangled in local conflict, is that the West must be able to take in at least one country from the other side of the conflict at the same time. In Israel’s case, he specified it would have to be a neighboring country, such as Jordan or Lebanon, not just a distant Arab country. Of course, there would also have to be a Mideast peace settlement before Israel would meet the most important of the conditions NATO established in the 1990s for new members: otherwise it would mean the West walking into an ongoing war with no good prospect of resolution, little prospect that the West would have the stamina to endure it or keep its balance even as well as Israel does on it, and a real likelihood that it would be treated as a declaration of war by other Arab countries and lead to a major escalation of Islamic warfare against the West as a whole.

Sub-Saharan Africa. It is likely that most of this space will come still later. The social conditions are so distant as to make concrete discussion difficult.

Staggered entries from each region

In all four areas -- Latin America, Asia, Islamdom, Africa -- it will not be a matter “now we bring in the entire region joining as a single phase of Western expansion, then we move on to the next region”; rather, it will be an overlapping processes. Some countries in one region will join early; others will remain outside while countries from other regions are meanwhile joining.

Differential integration with West, not regional unity against West

Differentiation will be the rule in most regions. Differentiation has emerged in practice in Western integration of the former Soviet bloc. Some of it may not have been necessary there; it will be entirely necessary in other regions, and has long since begun in most of them. Developmental conditions diverge radically within each Third World region, far more than they did in the former Sovietized space. Similarly, within each region there are radically different levels of connection to the Western world system.

Geographical regions are not today, and will not become, separate compact regions, to be added together as weights compared against OECD or the West. Parts of each region are already more Western than regional in their connections, character, and identity. More of them will become this way.

This intra-regional differentiation process is well advanced in Asia. Australia and New Zealand were organically Western from the start. Japan was incorporated into the OECD West in the 1960s, South Korea in the 1990s. Both of these are in the military alliance network, and a number of other Asian countries are in other less formal or peripheral parts of the Atlantic system. China remains outside.

It is a mistake when popular writers add up “Asia” as a single region, whose growth is called a “rise” that shows a “decline” of the West. Actually a third of the region by population, two thirds of it by GDP, is more Western than “joint Asian” in its sociopolitical and geopolitical character.

In a lesser way, a similar differentiation process has long existed in Latin America. Mexico is in OECD as an exception to the rule because of NAFTA, and now Chile too is in, albeit for questionable reasons; the bulk of the region remains outside. Additionally, there is a weak indirect Atlantic link through the inter-American security pact and OAS; there are major links to the U.S. and to Spain. Meanwhile the region is divided between anti-American populist leaders and western-style reformers, and has endured several historical seesaws between these as main trends. Free trade area negotiations with the U.S. have been sharpening the lines between those opting for integration, those opting for opposition.

Differentiation has also begun in the Islamic world. Many parts of the Islamic world, like parts of Latin America, are deeply connected, strategically and economically, with the West. Turkey has been included in the OECD from the start, due to its historic participation in the Marshall Plan and before that in the European balance. In those years, it was believed that we knew a lot about how to engineer development and that Turkey would become an organic part of the EU. But it has turned out that Turkey instead remains an exception within OECD, much like Mexico, as distant from being a part of the common First World society as it was in the 1960s.

Since large parts of the Islamic world, of Latin America, of Southern Asia, and of Africa are deeply connected, strategically and economically, with the West, how should they be counted in global balance-of-power sheets? They are not organically connected to the West, in the sense of being part of the common First World society; the connection is far from entirely reliable on a basis of culture and interest. They therefore cannot be counted as part of the West. Can they be added up in their separate regions as constituting potentially a combined weight opposed to the West? Yes, but only hypothetically; that is, only as long as it is understood that this is just one contingent possibility among others, and a highly probable possibility at that; not an established reality, nor an inherent future consequence of economic growth in the region, nor of a presupposed regional character of the region. It is unlikely that any of these regions, much less all of them, will congeal into a solid front against the West; more likely in the long they will all be integrated into the West. For now, each region has to be counted as it is empirically: divided.

China and India

One problem deserves further discussion. China and India are huge. Other countries, as they come into the West individually, divide regions into bite-sized chunks. But will it ever be possible to take in and digest China, or India?

To be sure, Chinese and Indian membership are a distant question. There will be no reason to rush them in.

As long as the West continues to grow carefully, semi-organically, along the pathways we have outlined above, it will find it never arrives at a point of feeling threatened by Chinese or Indian growth. And, for the very reason that the West is likely to continue to grow meanwhile, its relative proportion to China and India will be changed to the West’s favor by the time they become plausible candidates socio-economically. It is probable, thus, that their entry will prove assimilable within the Atlantic system.

In population terms, China presently has 1.3 billion, India 1.2 billion, OECD 1.2 billion. China’s and India’s populations are still growing, but slowing; a leveling-off is projected at 1.4 and 1.6 billion respectively. OECD’s population growth through new memberships. In the future, as China and India level off, OECD’s population growth is likely to be greater than theirs.

Global population is projected to level off at 9 billion. At that distant time -- around 2050 -- China and India would total 3 billion people, the rest of the world 6 billion. In the meanwhile, OECD would have had time to absorb much of that “rest of the world” -- probably most of the former Soviet space, some of Latin America, some additional Asian countries, some of the Islamic world -- bringing OECD up to 2-3 billion people.

Would OECD then be able to absorb India and China, presumably one at a time with a substantial digestion period? The most probable answer is, “yes, with conditions”: it will be difficult but manageable, as long as the West waits until India and China meet reasonably well the standards for being a part of the common First World society.

Fortunately, an OECD with 2-3 billion people could afford to wait as long as needed for this; an economically growing China or India would not be a threat to its global leadership. Even if India or China fully matched OECD economic conditions per capita -- an unlikely prospect, even in 100 years -- OECD would still have by a wide margin the highest GDP of any cohesive unit in the world; its global leadership would remain intact.

In any case, the First World does not wait for perfect per capita equality before letting countries in. The EU and OECD have both safely included countries when they have arrived at a third of the average First World per capita income. India will probably be brought in when it reaches about 50% of First World p.c.i.; which, assuming an OECD First World of 2-3 billion people at that point, means it would have about 30% of total First World GDP -- far less than the level needed for challenging the West for global economic leadership. The same will go for China.

In sum, there are no insuperable obstacles in the non-Western world -- not in its civilizational character, not in its economic growth, not in its size -- to the continuation of the Atlantic Perspective all the way to the end. The Concrete West need only continue cultivating itself, continue gathering in countries, continue limiting its expansion to emerging First World-ized countries. To keep its boat afloat and advancing, it need only look forward, and avoid suicidal impulses and siren songs. If it does this, it can continue maintaining its cooperative depth even while expanding, until it has become an in-gathering of the entire world.

Timeframes for this futur e: universality by 2150?

Stalactites and stalagmites; or, the Atlantic and Global systems

What we have just described is the “stalagmite” side of growth, from the bottom up: the First World is shown growing from below, gradually expanding, potentially becoming the entire world.

At the same time, there is a “stalactite” side: global institutions growing from the top down, gradually increasing their capabilities.12

In nature, stalactites and stalagmites eventually meet and combine. Is this a likely outcome in the present, institutional matter?

To answer this, a different analogy may be more helpful. The Atlantic and the global are two levels of international organization. Both provide a bit of structure to help fill in the vast space of international interdependence; this is their complementarity. Draw them as two circles of the world order, and they are

12 I owe to James V. Martin the concept of the stalagtite-stalagmite dynamic as a model for the dynamics of the global and sub-global levels of international organization.

concentric. As the inner Atlantic circle grows, it increasingly comes closer to the outer global one, as if to someday merge.

In the Atlantic Perspective, global institutions continue to operate alongside the Atlantic ones. The global ones gradually deepen their interface and cooperation with the Atlantic institutions, gradually give more recognition to the Atlantic structures as playing a core role.

This mutual support was already anticipated in Streit’s formulation. Support for global institutions is not concession on the part of Atlanticism, as many thought when it was re-emphasized after 1989, or a contradiction to it as a few have thought, rather it is something that was always there in Atlanticism. It is a necessary supplement for Atlantic institutions, in the condition that the Atlantic grouping, while playing a leading global role, is still a long distance from being the world. From this flows the case for two-tiered organizational effort -- organization of the leading core, whose commonalities make possible strong, deep, reliable organization; organization of the whole, whose diversities limit the strength of organization -- and coordination of the two so the former can lend some of its strength to the latter. This, like so much else that Streit advocated, has been gradually carried out in practice: since 1940, institutions were formed on the two levels of the UN system and Atlantic system; and the coordination between the two, while limited during the Cold War when the Atlantic system was widely mistaken for simply one pole of a bipolar confrontation, has grown since 1989 when its core role in the world system has become more obvious.

Can the West ever become the world? How long would it take?

Our answer to the first question is: No in one sense, Yes in two larger senses. No, in the sense of the world all having the same premodern cultural heritage as the West. Yes, in the sense of the world continuing to absorb much, eventually most, of the same overlay of modern civilization as the West has absorbed. And Yes in the sense of eventually becoming a part of the Concrete West.

No one can know in advance whether, in the end, the global order will be based primarily on the UN system, or on the institutions of the Atlantic system having spread to the entire globe. Will the stalactites swallow up the stalagmites, or the stalagmites engulf the stalactites? Or a combination of the two? Some amalgamation of the two systems is likely in the end, assuming the species endures and makes it there; but such an end-point is still a long way off.

Let us assume for a moment the stalagmite, Atlantic-based ultimate consummation, not because it is more probable, but because it provides a readier possibility of estimating the timeframe. When might all the world become “West” and a part of the Atlantic structures? Predictions range from 40 to 400 years, to never.

The truth is probably somewhere in-between.

Probably it will happen; but the “never” reminds us that it is not likely to take place in a simple form. Westernization is not total, making unlikely a pure swallowing up of the UN system by the Atlantic; yet it is real and often goes deep, making it likely that a point will someday arrive for a merger of the Atlantic and UN systems. Within Atlanticism, there has always been a minority view that it will never happen, on grounds of an intrinsic incompatibility of civilizations. But the incompatibilities of civilizations are shrinking with modernization, and have always been in principle secondary compared to their commonalities in human nature and in the nature of every society; secondary even compared to commonalities in the goals of their religions. The incompatibilities of material interest, based on long differences of historical development, are another matter; many of them are likely to endure for some time, but none of them eternally.

How long would it take?

There are substantive foundations for both timeframe predictions, 40 years and 400; and for their geometrical mean, 125 years: 1 - The 40 year predictions are based on prospects of scientific breakthroughs --

nanotechnology, robotics, biotechnology, and the continued geometric growth of information technology -- which might eliminate manual labor and the First World-Third World distinction.

Extrapolation from a long-term historical chart of acceleration of the spread of democracy led Michael Doyle to a similar projection of democracy in all countries by 2050. However, that was prior to the authoritarian retrenchment in Russia, the rise of global confidence in authoritarian China as an emerging superpower, and the setbacks dealt to peace in Palestine and Iraq by elections held there in 2004.

2 - The 400 year predictions are based on measures of sociological change and arguments against any large acceleration in this sphere. As a subset of this sociological caution, comparative politics scholar Howard Wiarda projected

that it would take three generations to truly assimilate the former Communist spaces in the Balkans and former Soviet Union.

3 - In-between, around 100-150 years, are economic predictions, based on high recent economic growth rates in China and India and the gradual reduction of their population growth rates.

Each of the timeframe predictions has serious reasons, but also serious weaknesses:

1 - Total transformation of the world through new technologies has been regularly predicted for being achieved a few decades out. These predictions have been going on for at least half a century; most of them have not worked out in practice. The one major transformation, not much predicted, has been from information technology.

New technologies will also produce new WMDs, and a proliferation of means of accidental self-annihilation; some argue that nanotechnology will inevitably eliminate all life with gray goo. This leads to an argument that the dangers from technological growth, unregulated or regulated only nationally with weak international coordination, are so great as to mandate much faster movement toward world government, which might already be too late or too weak to manage the problem. In this context, the 40-year framework of globalization of the Atlantic becomes one for which to pray fervently. But imposed social arrangements usually fail, and exacerbate along the way the problems they were intended to solve. It is best to stick with the feasible, which can be determined only as it becomes feasible; for purposes of policy planning in the present, there is only the best guess to work from, which is perhaps 125 years.

2 - Sociological change does accelerate with technological and economic change; the 400 year prediction is too slow. Rapid change can lead to crises and phases of political retrogression, as some aspects of society change faster than other aspects; forced change brings additional crises. But attempts to slow change, often made in the name of a gradual organic development, also lead to crises; international influence is a reality that cannot be eliminated, organic development a myth that never existed.

3 - Economic change has become fast through globalization, as the largest Third World countries have ceased protecting Western workers from the competition of their much larger, much lower paid work forces. But as the poor grow richer,

the comparative advantage of outsourcing will shrink, reducing the growth rates. Projections of a linear growth rate until catch-up are unrealistic to the point of having near zero probability. There may meanwhile also be a Western reaction against outsourcing; and the present strength of Third Worldism within the West, which creates a taboo against protectionism against the Third World, may not be permanent.

There are always countries that are growing faster than the core leading countries of the world; that is the nature of the spread of technology and of catching up. It is also the nature of things that an end is reached to the easy period of rapid assimilation of a batch of old technologies, and the growth spurt slows down.

There is nothing new in the fact that China and India are growing fast today. There was a period of decades when Soviet Russia was growing fast. There was a period when Germany was growing fast. And Japan. Declinist predictions were made with a view to each of them. Yet the decline of the West never actually took place. There was never even a terrible crisis of the West. Rather, it was the latecomers that almost invariably experienced terrible crises, usually of their own making: as a consequence of their temptation to embrace the idea of Western decline, they have waged losing wars against the West; and further, they have often adopted totalitarian domestic forms, believing that this would save them from the predicted crisis of Western individualist decadence, but in fact it brought them to real crisis and collapse.

We are left with a wide range of uncertainty. 125 years is a compromise figure, not a prediction to which one can attach any great probability; the most that can be said for it is that it is more plausible than either extreme.

What, then, is the use of a prognosis of the global timeframe? It can help achieve an accurate sequencing within a perspective. Also, it can provide a basis for policy projections, or timeframes for specific policies; for example, to ascertain which policies could be relevant in this period, or could become relevant in the next decades.

It also helps us understand whether a program of global expansion of the Atlantic institutions would be constructive or destructive in this period: a fulfillment of the institutions, a way of integrating the entire world; or damaging to the institutions, reducing them to the loose non-integrative character of the numerous existing global institutions, eliminating their capability for in the future providing the world with structures for successful global integration. The answer, provided by our timeframe prognosis, is that it would be destructive in the present period. It may

require 40 years before it becomes constructive, it may take 400 years; but in either case, it is not available as a constructive policy in this generation. It is available only for overall perspectives, to guide thinking and provide context; and for long-term contingency planning -- very long-term, for contingent actions of later generations.

At the same time, it shows that a goal of global reach is indeed available in a meaningful way for the Atlantic Perspective. Any of these timeframes, 40 years or 400, is finite enough to still have a meaning. It tells us that the ultimate global endgame of the Atlantic Perspective is not just a throwaway line; it is serious.

III. Definitions

With every new paradigm, there are terms that need definition, points that need clarification, consequences that need elucidation. And there are always many, many objections to be dealt with, emanating from the entrenched assumptions of old paradigms.

The Atlantic perspective can be stated briefly, on a page, as we did at the outset. But it has taken a number of pages to show the implications it has for current beliefs and concerns. Now we need to clarify the most important terms we have used, providing definitions for them and justifying the definitions. We are concerned here, to be sure, not with pure linguistics, but with giving the terms operational definitions, that is, definitions that enable us to ask precise questions and give fairly precise answers to the problems we are facing here, even while also approximating to and clarifying the sense of the ordinary usage of the words. The terms we will clarify are: “West”, “Concrete West”, “First World”, “Atlantic”, “Paradigm”, and “Perspective”. We will also examine the history of the Atlantic Perspective, in order to make sure that our elaboration of it -- in effect, our definition of it in the first section of this work -- is not arbitrary but corresponds sufficiently to the perspective as it has developed over the decades.

What is “the Concrete West” ?

First let us delimit the term by clarifying its place in a series of related terms.

1. “The West” has had, as mentioned earlier, a dual meaning: the civilizational West and the modern democratic West. The civilizational West originated as a term in distinction from other, “Eastern” or “Oriental” civilizations. The modern democratic West began inside the civilizational West, but has been capable of extending gradually beyond the historical boundaries of the civilizational West.

Both meanings are legitimate. Historically they are somewhat intertwined, which is why we speak of a “dual meaning”, not two separate or opposing meanings.

2. The “Concrete West”. The definition used herein is based on the modern democratic West, which has by now absorbed nearly all of the civilizational West and grown somewhat beyond it.

This West became Concrete when it accrued an additional element: joint institutions, providing a meta-level of existence alongside the unit-level existence of its national members. The whole has an evolving existence as an international entity. Defining its membership space is complicated but feasible; it involves both institutional and cultural factors, i.e. the spaces of its several institutions and the space of modern Western practices. More on all this below.

3. The Atlantic. A related term; it essentially means the same thing. It has a similar duality of meaning: the original democratic Western nations on the two shores of the North Atlantic, later gradually including the democratized rest of Europe and the Westernized non-Western countries far away from the Atlantic; and the institutions that unite them.

4. The First World. Another related term; it too refers essentially to the same thing. It is often seen as defined vis-a-vis the Third World; the latter in turn is a term that emerged with “Third Way” thinking in opposition to both the West and its major adversary (formerly the Soviets): thus First World, Second World, Third World. It can be misleading, as there have been countries graduating from Third to First, Third to Second, and Second to First. Indeed, the entire Soviet bloc tried to join the First en masse after 1989, and more or less succeeded, vacating the “Second World” slot; a case can be made that the Islamic world, with its semi-rich yet undeveloped countries, has moved into the slot. The tripartite differentiation has also been expressed in World System theory with the terms “Center”, “Periphery”, and “Near-Periphery”; this has the merit of hinting that the intermediate category is the least stable of the three.

5. The North. Also related, but somewhat broader than West, Atlantic, or First World. The Global North is the First World plus the post-Soviet space. It is defined vis-a-vis the Global South, meaning the Third World. Like the Atlantic, “Global North” and “Global South” diverge significantly from the geographical significance of the words.

Next let us look at the relevance of these several categories for current debate on decline.

Which “West” is relevant for the decline debate?

Presentations on the economic decline of the West assume a fixed set of countries, or a fixed geographical space in Europe and North America. This is an ahistorical conception of the West. It leads to sometimes amusing mistakes, as when a prominent declinist compared the Western share of the world economy in 1500 and later dates by adding the European plus North American shares. There was no “Western” economy in North America in 1500; all economic activity there in 1500 would properly belong in the non-Western category! The Western economy in North America began a century later, with colonization; and did not cover all of today’s Anglo North America until the 1800s.

This example is enough to show that the West cannot be a fixed space over time, nor a fixed set of countries. A meaningful power comparison, the one that is needed for evaluating propositions about decline, is not achieved when simple sets of countries, bunched according to location, are compared. The relevant comparison is of sets of countries that have bundled themselves into being collective actors; and of sets that plausibly could so bundle themselves and are advocated

as bundling. The relevant “West” is therefore the one -- the Concrete West -- that is a set self-bundled as a collective actor.

The West is most accurately defined for comparisons, therefore, as a concrete international entity, the Concrete West. This is an entity that lives and changes in historical time, not a category that lives on paper as a fixed list of countries. It cannot be a rigid category; it has proved capable of growth geographically. Dead categories are invariant over time. Paper lists of countries are capable of growth only domestically within their separate member countries; the Concrete West grows also in its membership roster and in their intertwining.

Now that we see why it is important to understand and define the Concrete West, let us define it more thoroughly.

The Concrete West: membership, structure, nature, history

Membership - There has been debate about the exact membership of the Concrete West at any given time, and about its exact date of origin and original members. The same is true of any evolving entity that is not a single living biological entity but a live grouping of entities: there are ambiguities about where exactly it begins and where are its present boundaries, not to mention its possible future boundaries. It does not contradict the fact of its being a concrete entity. It simply shows that it is alive as a grouping, a real thing not just a paper thing.

Further: there are always varying degrees of depth of belonging to and participating in the West. The West can never be precisely described as any single set of countries. Western Europe and Anglo North America are more “Western” than southern or eastern Europe, and than Japan. Japan is more Western than most of the Asian tigers. Nevertheless, almost all of these countries, and some others beyond them, are primarily Western in their domestic character and global role, and most of them participate in joint Western organizations.

Structure - The Concrete West consists, on its own system level, of the collection of Atlantic and extended Atlantic (Trilateral and pan-European) institutions and arrangements; on the subsystem level, of the national governments of its member states, and sub-Atlantic groupings of them such as the EU. Those member states in turn can be defined through a series of concentric circles. Full membership in the West belongs to those countries that are modern industrial democracies (with a cut off point at a p.c.i. of approximately half the OECD average) and that are members of some of the institutions including a core alliance (NATO, ANZUS, or a bilateral alliance with the U.S.). The other members of the varying Western institutions qualify as partial members of the West. It can be readily calculated who qualifies as full members; the full membership approximates to OECD, plus a few countries that have not been able to join OECD for diplomatic reasons, minus Mexico, Chile, Turkey, and perhaps some of Eastern Europe, which are as yet partial members.

Nature (categories) - To provide a more precise terminology:

The Concrete West is a concrete international entity, with a life that takes place in international history, evolving and most of the time growing in the course of that history. It exists as a society or community on the intercontinental system level; it contains member entities or subsystems on the national and continental levels. It has concentric circles of institutions and of membership; its present group of consolidated members approximates to OECD.

The Concrete West is not, then, a list of countries that meet some specified standards. Rather it is the international entity that has these standards for its national members and candidates. It is a set of system-level institutions, each of which has a list of current members on the sub-system or unit level.

Could the Concrete West be immortal, a “collective immortal” to use a term that has been applied to nations? Yes; Raymond Aron pointed out that a collective societal entity is a potential immortal, unlike a single biological organism (since then, medical science and futurology have raised the possibility that individual biological organisms could also become immortal). Karl Deutsch added that societal entities have not just organic and mechanical characteristics but also cybernetic ones, providing space for flexibility and creativity in growth. The organic concept of society, used by Romantics, implied a deterministic cycle of life and death, and dreams of prolonging the life a little longer through heroic exertions; the mechanical analogy, used by the Enlightenment, implied a gradual running down under the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Cybernetics allowed a chance for something better: cumulative growth, in which capabilities would keep growing faster than problems and death would always seem farther away. Fractal geometry added a further refinement to cybernetics; it showed how society, like an individual organism, naturally tends to grow, through mutual connections and branchings off, but without the death-requirement of individual organisms.

The belief that civilizations must live and die as organisms was an illogical deduction of Danilevsky and Spengler from Darwin; illogical because, unlike Darwin himself, it assumed that civilizations function as biological organisms. That premise came from the romantics. Beneath the scientific veneer of Darwinism, Declinism was the old romantic lament -- that medieval Christendom had been an organic faith-community; that the modern West, having dissipated the organism through individualism and skepticism, was rotting, decadent, doomed.

The actual West has the same elements -- individual and community, freedom and government, beliefs and doubts -- that there have always been. It has them in a better mix and balance in modern times than in medieval times, which is why it has done so much better in modern times. The Concrete West has in the last century half-overcome the worst imbalance that long existed in this mix, namely, the insufficiency of collective governance on the international level; it was the right answer, unlike the romantics’ one of pursuing an organicist consummation of unity on the national level. Thanks to this, the West is in better health today than in most of its long history. The Concrete West is the West today, alive, well, and growing.

The real risks to the West’s immortality are not from its being overtaken by other growing societies, which are in fact learning from it and being drawn into its world system, but from insufficient regulation of its technological achievements, creating ever more means of universal

destruction and ever larger environmental side-effects. Not from death of the organism from age, or loss of an imagined ancient organic unity, but from the very youth of its international structure, which is far from a finished product; it could still be undermined by emotional political tides in its member nations, with their longer histories and loyalties.

History - The history of the Concrete West begins formally with its institutions, a century ago; and most of them are unaware of even this length of history. Fortunately it goes back informally many more centuries. The West was always conceived as a somewhat concrete entity -- “Western civilization”, “the West”, “Europe”, “Christendom” -- not just a collection-list of nations or feudal principalities; but its concreteness was mostly in the mental image of it as a whole, not so much in institutions encompassing the whole. The mental image included a perception of a shared history and development, tracing back to era when there really were strong concrete common institutions in the Roman Empire. An element of institutional unity was perpetuated loosely in the Roman Church and the somewhat mythical Holy Roman Empire, coupled with enormous practical chaos in the medieval era. With the Renaissance, when the West began its predominance in the world, the chaos receded, and so did the Church and Empire; with the Reformation and Enlightenment, “Europe” and “the West” edged out “Christendom” as the ongoing name of the concrete mental image-entity. It was an entity that seemed at times to exist almost solely in the mind, with its borders accordingly defined by each mind; yet there was so much overlap in these mental images that they cannot be dismissed as subjective chimeras. Its mental concreteness had a real significance: “the West”-“Europe” (and to some extent still “Christendom”) formed a meta-portion of the identity of persons and nations. It was appealed to as a norm and organizing principle in some decisions; but it was vulnerable, in moments of hard political choice, to being dismissed as “just a geographical expression”: so Bismarck said of “Europe”, when he wished to disregard its collective norms. Europe at that time actually did have some institutional concreteness, in the form of the Concert of Europe; Bismarck’s bon mot was, like most reductionisms, not entirely accurate, nor so bon. It was easy for a strong subsystem-level sovereign Germany to do this to a weak system-level Europe; in the 1900s it came to be seen as too easy, and unbearable. The insufficiencies of the unconsummated unified image gave rise to recurrent efforts at institutionalization, of which the Concert of Europe was only one in a series; the efforts gradually came to increasing fruition in the 20th century, and after some more fits and starts, the organizational process became cumulative. This institutionalization has enabled a more precise definition of the West as a concrete entity. At the same time it has enabled a more rapid expansion of the West, something that ensures continued fuzziness at the borders. That, in outline, is the history of the definition of the West as a concrete historical entity.

The comparative statistics for the Concrete West -- the only West that is relevant to the question of decline -- show a continued strengthening of Western predominance in the world, not a Western decline. Once the West is thus defined, accurately, as a concrete living international entity, it follows immediately, deductively, that the contemporary writings on Western decline are misconceived. The declinist writings invariably assume a definition of the West that is irrelevant for the issue at hand: a geographically fixed set of separate national or continental entities. Declinist writings vary as to which countries are considered “West”; sometimes it is Western Europe and the U.S., sometimes also Canada, sometimes also Eastern Europe. Reduction of the West to a dead paper list, it turns out, is no cure for determining who to list;

rather it makes the lists arbitrary. The Concrete West is not arbitrary. Its institutions are real; its circles are real; its degrees of membership are natural blurs, not logical contradictions. Living ambiguities are better in the social sciences than arbitrary contradictory lists. It is normal for there to be ambiguity in the definition of a living social phenomenon and its boundaries. It would be a sign of something wrong if there were not.

Valuation of the Concrete West: a normative note

The Concrete West is an historical achievement. It is a union based on positive commonalities which enable its members to perceive similar interests, and to have similar perceptions of friends and foes, in nearly all situations.

Human beings do not unions easily; not national unions, not international unions. The Concrete West was advocated for centuries; it came into being in the course of the last 130 years. Its most important structures were forged only in face of life and death struggle during the two World Wars, and given permanent peacetime form during the Cold War. Many people, shaped by the Cold War and by their opposition to the Western side of it, lack the longer perspective and are prone to dismiss the Concrete West as a “relic of the Cold War”. However, it would be reckless to discard or dilute it. It was built only with great difficulty; a high price was paid for the delays in getting national polities to proceed with the international construction. It is the positive product of the Western effort in the era of those terrible conflicts, as they learned the second and third times around from the consequences of their failure to build earlier. In the 1940s, they had the wisdom to use the emergency atmosphere to forge a consensus for building what they by then knew would have been needed anyway. The Concrete West can continue growing today at much lower cost; but, if frittered away, could not be replaced except at an even higher price. It needs to be valued for the entire outlay that went into it.

What is a “single society”? Defining this-era limits for the Concrete West

What are the limits for a viable union of societies? In Proposition 1 when we first presented the Atlantic Perspective, we described the West as “in many respects” a single society, its nations lacking existential mutual conflicts of interest; therefore capable of safety in union.

How to define “single society”? Or “single enough that its internal conflicts are not ‘existential’”? It is not a trivial question. Here it is necessary only to clarify some aspects of “single society” that are important for Proposition 2: an ability to unite its members without severe or existential risk. That is, after all, the purpose for which we used these terms in the first place: to give us the criteria for delineating which countries can, at a particular time, be united deeply.

A full discussion of the criteria for this would take a number of pages. The classic theorists of international integration -- Karl Deutsch for the consultative communications-channels school, Ernst Haas and others for the neo-functionalist school -- gave useful lists of criteria for integration. However, they failed to organize their lists sufficiently to enable one to determine what are the necessary or sufficient conditions to make integration advisable. They left out some criteria and obscured others. Their work did not go far toward clarifying, for example, what an EU official would need to know in order to decide whether to recommend acceptance of membership in the 1990s for Eastern Europe, or in the present decade for Turkey or Ukraine. They tended to conflate the objective criteria -- what societies are objectively in condition to unite -- with the subjective ones, or which societies are sufficiently interested in uniting. This served to confuse the practical question that the criteria are supposed to answer: for which groups of countries would it be advisable to have deep institutionalized unity? The answer to that question would determine whether to advise it and see if the subjective criteria could be realized; putting the subjective criteria first can lead to running around a vicious circle.

The present writer undertook in 1989-92 to clarify and systematize the various criteria that were put forth by these classic writers, and to survey their implications -- in a period when the entire Soviet bloc was coming on the market for Western integration -- as to who could be united in the world and when13. Rather than treat the subject anew, I will summarize what I wrote then, as it has held up fairly well. The criteria for successful integration were elucidated as follows:

“A. Objective criteria

1. A heavy load of interdependence. There must be major common needs and interests, enough to justify strong common institutions and a common identity.

2. Absence of any conflicts of fundamental non-negotiable societal interests. By “societal interests” are meant interests rooted in the structures or conditions of the constituent societies of the union, as distinct from the opposing power-politics interests that flow

13 Straus, Supranational Norms in International Affairs (PhD dissertation, University of Virginia, Department of Government and Foreign Affairs, 1992). Ch. 4 gives the criteria and discusses them at length; ch. 8 examines the societies of the world to find which groupings could be united in this era.

from the very fact of having separate sovereign states. Opposing power-politics interests are potentially dissolved by political union; opposing societal interests, if superficial, can be compromised for the sake of union, but if fundamental, are exacerbated by union.

What is needed to insure against fundamental conflicts of societal interest.

a. No “existentially unbearable” social or cultural differences; that is, none that create a fundamental moral opposition between the societies as a whole.

Major cultural differences are unavoidable, and are often bearable in a union. However, if they create a fundamental moral opposition between the constituent societies, then they can impel the societies toward a situation of moral enmity or conflict, in which the federation government could not play forever a mutually acceptable mediating role but eventually would have to take a stand. When differences raise a fundamental moral opposition – as slavery did between North and South in the United States – they raise a danger of civil war.

b. Comparable living standards. Living standards need to be on a sufficiently comparable level that labor forces can be safely integrated, internal borders opened, and union citizenship made homogeneous. Empirically that limit seems to be not much more than a 3:1 ratio of per capita incomes.

If differences are too great for immediate opening of borders, some leeway may be allowed for a transitional period. However, the differences in living standards must not be too great to be brought within reasonable bounds during a modest, definable transitional period. Otherwise there would be permanent first class citizens and permanent second class citizens, and the spirit of resentment could grow faster than the spirit of unity. Seven years has not been an offensive transitional period in the EC. Twenty or thirty years would stretch it: it would consign an entire generation to living in transitional status.

If differences were too great and internal borders were opened anyway, the massive immigration would destroy the stability of the wealthier society, ruining in particular its laboring classes whose property is mainly in their exclusive title to the jobs within the territory of the nation. For a worker in a wealthy nation, citizenship in that nation is a piece of property of irreplaceable value. Sociologists have long recognized that anything worse than a modest decline in living standards and employment is likely to cause civil disorder in modern industrial societies. Direct merger of a wealthy labor force with a poor and highly populous labor force would cause a catastrophic decline in living standards and a catastrophic level of unemployment in the wealthy labor force, bringing on a bitter civil-ethnic war within the wealthier society and a rebellion of the wealthier society as a whole against the new union. War not peace, destruction not prosperity: it makes it doubtful that such a union could be urged upon the wealthier society in good faith.

3. Democracy, in the modern Western sense of the word; with pluralism and markets allowing interpenetration of societies, and with representation enabling legitimate political structures on multiple geographical levels.

B. Subjective criteria include:

A will to unite.

A feeling of belonging to a group with common needs, common interests, common ideals, and common purposes.

A feeling of being part of a “common story”, in the sense of past joint efforts, present joint plans, or a vision of a common future.”

Objective criteria have to be mostly met in advance; many subjective criteria can be met in the process of developing the political will to create structures of union. Even the concept of a joint past, the most objective of the subjective criteria, can be filled in retrospectively, if present plans or future vision motivate practical joint construction. Japan, to take the hardest single example for the Atlantic, has an institutionalized joint past with the West since 1945 and a cultural and diplomatic one since the 1840s. That is a fairly long joint past; and the much longer prior history and culture can be searched retroactively to bring out foundations for compatibility and confluence. The failed interludes of attempted isolation prior to Westernization, and of rebellion against it 1931-45, serve as a reinforcing part of the joint past concept; they act as a powerful object lesson against any reversion from the Joint West, much as the isolationist interlude of the 1920s-30s serves as an object lesson reinforcing Atlanticism for America, and the fascist period as object lesson for Italy and Germany. These were all interludes that were based on interpreting the long past of the country as requiring separateness; they brought a searing experience that led to a decisive rejection of that interpretation, a genuine mental block against its revival. Rejected separateness is the most powerful single part of a joint identity. The subjective criteria do have a degree of objective element, requiring evolutionary time to be developed in the full extent needed to sustain a union; but the converse side of that is the fact that in no historical union are they fully developed prior to the establishment of the union: they require union for their further development. This indicates a likelihood of gradualness or multiple stages in establishing a union, which should be distinguished from a deliberate gradualism or holding back, or the circular argument that the subjective criteria must be fulfilled before urging and negotiating structures of unity, which can lead to missing of historical opportunities for it. The subjective criteria are best viewed as subjective: not as preconditions for the effort to unite, but factors satisfied at each stage through the effort at uniting and at sustaining the unity, punctuated for legitimation by the ratification of the joint structures by each member state. The objective criteria, alas, are more objectively necessary as preconditions.

It may be answered that our objective criterion (2) above is not really needed for the Atlantic-level structures, but only for a societal union such as the EU with its opening of borders. The point has merit, but less force than might seem at first sight. In practice it reduces only slightly the importance of this criterion for the Atlantic level. The sense of community on the Atlantic level underpins much of the work of the joint structures. This sense of community is connected with a sense of being a single society: a lack of potential existential societal threat among its members, and a consequent ability to see the borders among them as having administrative technical significance like the U.S.-Canada border rather than an existentially necessary significance like the U.S.-Mexico border or Europe-Turkey border. It depends, then, even if indirectly and unconsciously, on the objective fact that the borders could be opened without the

norms or labor conditions of one member becoming a threat to the norms and conditions of another. If expansion of membership were to detract too much from this sense of community, it would undermine the functioning of the institutions both directly and indirectly: weakening the common spirit, increasing the divergences of interests, and a return of a power politics spirit, a return that would be gradual, quiet, slow, perhaps for a long time only implicit, but nevertheless fatal for integration.

After working over the criteria, I surveyed where the criteria were met, and what practical conclusions could be drawn from this. This led to the following conclusions:

The members of the existing European, Atlantic, and Trilateral groupings met the criteria well. They could move as far with deeper union as they wished. One could sincerely advise it to them as something good for them.

Some sub-continental or semi-continental regions of the Third World meet the criteria, and could integrate regionally. However, it is not a central need for the world order, as it was in the European region half a century ago. Numerous regional integration attempts, and frequent U.S. and EU efforts at supporting them, have thus far produced little result. It may be that Western integration, not regional integration, is the main need for stability in most non-Western regions: many nations are as interdependent with the West as with their neighbors, and sometimes mutual differences are greater than their differences with the West, which is needed as mediator.

The Third World as a whole does not meet the criteria. Often its regions are linked more through their connections with the global civilization of the West than directly with each other. South-South forums exist mostly for diplomatic coalition purposes vis-a-vis the North, only marginally for positive integrative purposes. Some, such as OPEC, are cartels; their activity is, in principle, criminal under international economic law.

The criteria are not met by mixed First-Third World groups of countries; there is an opposition of some fundamental societal interests between First and Third worlds, and it will be generations before this changes. One could not truthfully advise union of First with Third World countries as something safe for First World societies. The World Federalists have implicitly recognized this by paring their main proposal down to “Triad voting”, which would replace national vetoes in the UN with a collective First World veto and collective Third World veto.

What about countries on the borderline of meeting the criteria? I found that transitional arrangements had in some past times made it possible to take in countries that are within “striking range” of qualifying to join a pre-existing union. As I wrote in 1991, the countries of Eastern Europe were near enough to meeting the criteria that the EC and NATO could begin extending to them, with substantial transitional arrangements, without existential societal risks. However, Turkey did not meet the criteria and would not for a long time; transitional arrangements would not suffice. The EC could not take the post-Soviet space, however, because it would destroy the EC’s internal balance; this would be a responsibility of the Atlantic institutions. The greatest challenge the Western institutions would face would be not to get the

criteria met by the East but to get themselves to do the deepening needed for accommodating such a major widening, and do it in time to catch all the post-Communist countries on their westernizing swing.

These problems of enlargement policy were played out in the 1990s and after: insufficient deepening in the relevant directions (flexibility in decision-making, and increased fiscal and foreign policy capability) in the Western institutions; the export of further burdens of adjustment onto the post-Communist countries, to compensate for insufficient adjustment on the Western side; the rigid codification of the criteria, engendering more divisions than necessary between post-Communist countries alongside the integration with the West; considerable delay of the status of membership, on the ground of a generous-sounding slogan of not having any second class membership; and gaps in the criteria. In the EU (as the EC became after 1992), there was also a failure to declare the economic conditions criterion, leading to false hopes in Turkey, ongoing diplomatic tensions, and inflammation of public fears in Western Europe about Turkish membership, leading the public to vote down a Constitutional deepening treaty.

Let us dwell a moment here on the second of the objective criteria: economic conditions. It is helpful for answering the practical question we are posing, for explaining why the European public has been so committed to rejecting Turkish membership, and for explaining the sequence and interim limits in our earlier projection of the Atlantic Future.

We might start by saying that this criterion follows from the very phrase “common society”, which might be elaborated as follows:

The set of societies could, if they wished, operate jointly as a society pretty much the same way they do domestically, with the same rights and freedoms of movement and intercourse among people, goods and information, and the same kinds of regulations but on a common basis, and do this without harm to any of the entering society.

The economic criterion is relevant, no matter whether the societies considering anything near to full merger into a single society, for two reasons. First, it is an indicator of having a harmony of societal interests: its absence by definition means that the societies could in fact harm one another by coming too close together; its presence leaves, as an obstacle to unity, only nationalists habits and raisons d’etat, serious enough obstacles but ones susceptible to political cures. Second, lesser or intermediate forms of union are suspected of being “first steps down the road” to societal union; before taking them, societies want to know if it is safe if it does turn into a first step down such a road.14

This criterion is also useful in a scientific sense. It is more definite and semi-quantifiable than other criteria, and so helps in delimiting which groups of nations could constitute a single 14 In fact such steps are in neofunctionalist theory proposed as first steps down the road, and are analyzed as containing a potential for needing eventual “spill-over” and movement to a common society in order to render their operation consistent and avoid backsliding or “spill-back”. However, pure functionalism maintains that they are separable, as does Deutsch. Experience has shown some validity to both views; the degree of relevance of the “spill-over” dynamic/requirement has varied among different institution, sets of countries, and functional sectors.

society. It has in fact helped in our projection of the sequence and timeframe for expansion of the Concrete West; and in projecting that the West is a nucleus of gradually deeper integration of the world system as well as gradually wider integration.

As we have indicated, among First World societies the criterion is satisfied: were they to eliminate border controls among them, there would be no mass migrations inflaming their publics and labor unions; the consequent problems would be mostly limited to issues of governance of interstate crime and terrorism, i.e. individual deviants not societal incompatibilities. The criterion is also satisfied among closely similar sets of societies within some local regions of the Third World. It is not satisfied for the Third World as a whole, not between First and Third Worlds.

The ratio of per capita incomes (pci) provides a rough indicator (in conjunction with other factors -- size of populations, extent of cultural differences) of which groups of societies satisfy this criterion. The pci ratio is under 2:1 among major states of the U.S., an old Union. It is under 3:1 among major states of the new union, Europe, although often stretching that limit for small recent joiners; arguably stretching it a bit too far for the new members in the Balkans, as their migrants have given rise to some social tensions in the old EU, resentments used by some parties on Right and Left to buttress opposition to the EU itself. The ratio is well under 2:1 among the major parts of the First World: the U.S. as a whole, Europe as a whole, and Japan.

In no instance where the pci ratio is under 3:1 does a union seem to give rise to destabilizing movements of population; although, since unions have rarely been attempted among societies with extreme cultural differences, this should not be taken as meaning that there would be no problems if a near-3:1 ratio were combined with a sharp cultural difference. What it does mean is that, where the ratio is substantially higher than 3:1, problems arise; where it is 10:1, union seems excluded, apart from small exceptions.

An example of a small exception is Puerto Rico. The U.S.:Puerto Rico pci ratio was very high when that border was opened, and the consequent migration was proportionally enormous, reportedly a third of the Puerto Rican population; but as that population was a small fraction of that of the U.S., it did not cause more than local tensions.

The ratio is far over the 3:1 range between U.S. and Mexico, and EU and Turkey, despite long intense relations and border areas with higher incomes; and Mexico and Turkey have large populations with large mobile youth cohorts. This is why open borders are wished for by Mexico and Turkey, and why they are opposed by the respective U.S. and EU publics. It is a passionate opposition, held by a supermajority in all opinion polls.

The opposition to open borders with large Third World countries is motivated by expectation of socially destabilizing migration consequences. It is an opposition conceived as a matter of fundamental societal interest. This is an example of what is meant by an “existential” opposition of societal interests; it is something far deeper than an opposition of national or state interests, and less susceptible to solution by political re-arrangement. It is also a contradiction of rights: Third World countries can claim the human right of free movement, First World countries can claim the right of a sovereign society to control its own borders.

Union in such conditions risks being unsustainable if attempted, leaving conflict and re-division in more bitter and unstable conditions; and for this reason, is rarely likely to be attempted by freely given mutual consent. In exceptional cases, it might get tried anyway, due to passions of national identity: China threatens to attempt it on an unwilling Taiwan, whose shared society lies elsewhere in the First World; South Korea fears it may have to attempt it with North Korea if the latter collapses.

A past Union that flouted the 3:1 ratio was Yugoslavia (we take no position here in the debate as to whether the country truly was formed voluntarily); the pci ratio between Slovenia and Kosovo was well above 3:1. For this reason, migration from Kosovo to Slovenia was restricted despite their being in a Union, with a Union citizenship and a Union government. It was restricted even during the Communist egalitarian phase of the Union. The Union collapsed after 1990, punctuated by civil wars.

The 3:1 ratio is confirmed by these experiences as an approximate indicator of the limits of feasibility of and safety in union.15 It is, as we have observed, safely satisfied within the Concrete West as a whole, where the ratios are under 2:1 between its three continental parts; and a bit less safely but still acceptably within each continental part of the West, where ratios are under 3:1 for the main countries but sometimes over 3:1 between smaller countries.

We can now see more clearly why it was possible to admit Eastern Europe into the Concrete West rapidly; why further expansion into the former European Communist space is also feasible in this period; why Asian tigers can be admieed; but also why other proposed expansions in the immediate future are inadvisable, and the terms on which they might become advisable further into the future.

15 The present writer compiled the information and statistics in this section. Despite much research, and much inquiry of scholars of population and migration, he did not find any sources that had looked into this matter. For further discussion see again Supranational Norms in International Affairs (University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Government and Foreign Affairs, 1992), ch. 4.

What is a “Perspective”? Paradigm, Perspective, Ideology

A perspective is a view of the future, connected to a view of the past and present, held by a conscious moral agent.

Every conscious moral agent, whether individual or collective, has to have a perspective, even if the perspective itself is only half-conscious. It is necessary for the functioning of the mind and for the action of the body; and for the identity and self-affirmation of the agent. There is, then, necessarily an Atlantic Perspective. It aspires to serve as a perspective for the entire Atlantic world as a collective moral agent. Meanwhile the supporters of a united Atlantic world are the moral agents who hold it, plus or minus a few points, as a perspective. It is embedded in the institutions of the Concrete West as their original perspective from their founders and founding programs, and in varying degrees of semi-consciousness, as their continuing or implied perspective.

An envisaged future is sometimes predicted antiseptically, sometimes with desire. If antiseptic, then it provides a basis for expectations positive or negative, and for plans of action or counteraction. If desired, it serves more consistently as an orientation for an agent’s efforts. This is the characteristic of perspectives.

The view of the past and present provides as a basis for the view of the plausible future. Desired futures in turn provide a basis for selecting features to emphasize from the past. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle of thought that is not too dangerous as long as it is viewed in a normal way, as one of many selective views of past and future, but viciously circular when viewed as exclusive -- as the essence of all past history and as foretelling the inevitable future (as in the famous doctrine that “all history is the history of class struggle”, and the class struggle inevitably comes to a final revolution and an end in Communism).

The Atlantic Perspective has elements of both description and prescription. In its descriptive form, it draws upon the facts and tendencies of the past growth of the Atlantic space and its unity and role in the world, in order to project a future, or a plausible range of potential futures, of that space and of its unity and role. In its prescriptive form, it draws lessons from the past and for supporting choices among the potential futures that go in the direction of further unity and continued large roles. The lessons of the past provide reasons for desiring the more Atlanticist of the future scenarios; they justify an effort to facilitate the arrival of that future. This can be readily seen in our original set of propositions.

Perspective and Paradigm. A paradigm differs in a subtle yet central way from a perspective. A perspective is a framework for relating thought to action, meant for a moral agent or rational agent; all such agents have perspectives, conscious or not. A paradigm is a framework for theorization, prediction, and research, not a synoptic view of past-present-future with a view to embedding and guiding an actor’s choices; it is meant for debate and study, and as such, is more prevalent in the academic world. However, there is an overlap. Paradigms and perspectives inform one another. Moreover: Academics are moral agents, not just researchers. They necessarily have a perspective, and more often than not their perspective is intimately bound up

with their paradigm. This is a source of much confusion. We will untangle some of the resultant misunderstandings in Part III.

An ideology is a comprehensive doctrine or perspective that claims too much for itself. An ideology often proclaims the essence of the past and an inevitable future; it poses as an objective factual doctrine, or as an incontestable paradigm for thinking, rather than acknowledging its subjective aspect as a perspective that serves to orient not purely objective scientists but ordinary subjective agents.

Incidentally, Marx, despite being highly ideological by our definition, himself defined ideology as “false consciousness”, meaning a particular interest or subjective viewpoint that pretends to be of universal interest or objective validity, and imposes itself on the public mind for the benefit of its particular interest. It is equivalent to Niebuhr’s definition of sin, in which selfish interest puts itself ahead of the universal interest of God, and goes on to create vicious circularities by claiming to speak on behalf of God.

In a more lax definition, used by later Marxists who admitted having an ideology of their own, an ideology is any doctrine that is connected with a group, exalts it, and serves its interest. Socialism is thus the ideology of advocates of a state- or socially-planned economy (supposedly it belongs to the working class), political liberalism is an ideology of the chattering classes, nationalism is an ideology of a nation. This is a fair usage in the sense of being tolerant, acknowledging that everyone sins, every doctrine has its sin of bias, and that this sin needs to be watched but need not be assumed fatal or counted as disproving the doctrine. By this definition, it would be fair to call Atlanticism an ideology of the Atlantic world, if enough people in the Atlantic world were familiar with it; as things stand, it can at most be called an intended ideology of the Atlantic world, or of the Atlantic institutions.

However, the lax definition misses the reasons why “ideology” is considered a harsher appellation than “doctrine”. Among those reasons are: the systematic character of ideology, its invasion of realms of knowledge where it is not competent, its pretensions to exclusive virtue and exclusive hold on truth, its blurring of Fact with Value, treating the universally valid Ought as deducible from its depiction of the Is, its speaking in the name of God or History, its absolute praise of its side and absolute damnation of critics, its expurgations and sending of deviationists to hell, its creation of vicious circles in the mind -- both the individual minds of adherents and the collective mind of the group that has a sense of ownership of it as “its” ideology. In this sense of the word, which is probably the closest to the intended meaning in ordinary usage, Marxism is a quintessential ideology; so is fascism; so are the political religions or fundamentalisms. Monarchism, liberalism, conservatism are not ideologies, at least not in their main streams; they are ideologies only peripherally, among minority subcultures within them.

In this more precise and damning sense of “ideology”, the Atlantic Perspective is not an ideology. Its pretensions are few. It sticks to a specialized area. It acknowledges itself as a perspective and as a doctrine with an “ought”, perhaps because the Is-Ought distinction is, as we noted earlier, native to the Atlantic area and is pervasive in the political culture of Western liberalism; it does not pretend to be solely a paradigm of the “is”, or deny the fact-value distinction. It is concerned with overcoming the vicious circles of nationalist reasoning. To be

sure, it uses facts, values, praise, and blame; and any such combination creates an opening for circularity, even if it is short on the social support networks that would give rise to a collective circularity of reasoning. Where circularity does exist in the discourse of Atlantic institutions, it is on specific matters of their work (such as the circularities that used to exist in NATO on the Soviet Union, branding all friendly overtures from it as a plot to divide NATO; or the circularities in international economic institutions of hastily branding alternative policies as protectionist); they rarely discuss Atlantic doctrine at all. All institutions praise support for their policies and condemn a bit unfairly any opposition to it; they are all susceptible to group-think circularities; that is the nature of institutions, and should not be assumed the fault of their specific doctrines. All doctrines, no matter how honest, have a potential for being used as ideologies; all perspectives have their cultures or milieus, within which some subcultures are extreme, viciously circular, and ideological. The Atlantic Perspective necessarily also has such a potential for misuse by subcultures among its supporters. But in its main stream, it cannot be counted as an ideology.

History of the Atlantic Perspective : checking its definition by its history

Our list of the propositions of the Atlantic perspective is not arbitrary; except in form, the present author cannot even claim much originality for it. In the 1930s, as mentioned earlier, Clarence Streit elaborated most of these propositions and drew them together as a system -- without the post-1940 facts we mention, to be sure. He did this primarily on the basis of his observations and discussions as New York Times correspondent at the League of Nations, but with the help of earlier, less comprehensive expositions of which he was in varying degrees aware. The League of Free Nations Association expounded some of the same propositions during World War I. Still earlier expositions since the 1880s had developed most of our propositions individually. A school of Atlantic thought was built up by these various expositions, and by the brief but intense wartime experience of Atlantic institutions and unity. Streit consolidated this school of thought. “Atlanticism” emerged as a public movement in the 1940s and 1950s, based largely on Streit’s work. Sociological aspects of the perspective were further elaborated by James Huntley in 1980. He also updated the facts in it to encompass the Atlantic system’s 1940-1980 growth in institutions and membership; his charts and diagrams showed that this growth, projected theoretically by Streit, had since become a measurable systemic reality.16

Our statement of the propositions uses these new post-Streit facts: the existence of permanent trans-Atlantic institutions, the democratization of southern and eastern Europe, the joining to the Atlantic structures of former enemies from Germany and Italy and Japan and Spain to Eastern Europe and in aspiration Ukraine and Russia, the deep Westernization of some east Asian countries and inclusion of Japan and South Korea in the system. Streit had none of these facts available. His work deserves credit, from a social science standpoint of making testable propositions, as a daring prediction of facts yet to come; one that has been validated in an impressive way by these facts.

Particularly he deserves credit for a prediction that was widely opposed by other schools of thought, ranging from neutralism to pacifism to Realism: that the West, if united institutionally, would attract countries through its combination of hegemonic power and liberal norms, and through its institutional capacity for admission of new members, creating a cumulative trend in political-diplomatic development. The other schools were quite sure that Western union would repel other countries and drive them into unions against the West; up to 1989, they argued NATO had inspired the creation of the Warsaw Pact and caused or exacerbated the Cold War. The main perception and description of NATO during those years was as merely one pole of a bipolar world order; rare indeed were those who recognized its factual role as one of the structures of the unipolar core of the mainstream world order. When the Cold War ended, these several schools of thought, all of them prominent both academically and ideologically, were falsified: all the allegedly repelled societies, once free to speak their voice, showed that they were actually enormously attracted to the Concrete West and wanted to join it. Their new attraction was stronger and more consistent than had been their attraction to the material West in previous centuries, when they had been prone to identify with one Western power or another on a contradictory diplomatic chessboard. Streit’s theory was confirmed.

16 James R. Huntley, Uniting the Democracies: Institutions of the Emerging Atlantic-Pacific System (New York: New York University Press, 1980)

While Streit wrote without benefit of the post-1945 examples and statistics, he did gather economic data from the 1930s, at a time when the information was much less readily available than today. The data showed an overwhelming Western predominance. He concluded that the widely believed decline of the West, and “wave of the future” nature of fascism and Communism, was illusory -- despite its being, he found in newsroom chats at the League of Nations, the consensus view among the other journalists, in the 1930s much as today. The one grain of truth he found in the regnant declinism lay not in the objective numbers but in the lack of organized unity among the Western democracies. This made it possible for them to be perceived as separate and opposing national weights rather than as a combined weight; it allowed Germany to miscalculate and hope to win by war against them, even though in the end it would have to face their combined weight.

This demonstration can be counted as a direct precursor of our demonstration of the actual weight of the West; and was directed against the direct precursor of today’s declinists, who make the same mistake now as then -- with less excuse than back then, when the data were less available and the Western powers less united. His prediction was validated by subsequent events, as was the recommendation it entailed; the prediction of the others was proved false, its prescriptions proved destructive. This carries a lesson for us today.

NOTE. Streit’s geographical scenario -- his geopolitical concretization of the Atlantic Perspective was this:

1) Start with a union of the existing core Atlantic democracies, U.S., Britain and its Dominions, France, the lowlands, and Scandinavia

2) next Germany and Italy and Japan, the enemies of the moment, would make a 180 degree geopolitical turn and join the union after they become democracies

3) then a democratized Russia could be expected to come in (with the rest of Eastern Europe implicitly also coming in, in between the German and Russian accessions)

4) then we could begin to think about the Third World as it matures.17

What has transpired fairly closely corresponds to this:

(1-2) The West has by now incorporated every country Streit named in his sequence, except (3) Russia, which is as yet perhaps 25% included (through G8, NATO-Russia Council, and OECD membership negotiations).

17 Union Now, ch. V, “Why Start with the Democracies”, section “Universality the ultimate goal”. In discussing the initial nucleus group, Streit specifically rejected including Latin American democracies or India. When outlining a sequence of anticipated subsequent memberships, he did not name either Latin America or any part of the colonized world; rather, he treated the Union as something that would give the colonized countries an immediate association and upgrade in dignity, and a chance for an evolution that avoids nationalism, and treated their membership as something that would come through gradual “maturation” rather than through a potentially quick overthrow of oppressors, the latter being a matter for the fascist and Communist countries. Decolonization has since then created an independent Third World, changing drastically the sequences, methods, and structures by which its countries might be associated with the Atlantic grouping.

(4) The West has begun looking at the rest of the world, with some discussion of membership, but for the most part building interim arrangements -- partnerships on a wheel-and-spokes system. This fits, approximately, to the evolutionary language Streit used in later years after decolonization; when asked18 to what extent he could specify his perspective southward, he suggested that small and strategically vital countries might be brought in quickly, but he would be careful about larger areas, meanwhile supporting global cooperation with them and regional cooperation among them.

Effects of Atlantic consciousness on history

Atlanticism for a number of years consisted mostly of the people who understood and were motivated by Streit’s propositions and perspective. They constituted themselves into an Atlanticist movement in 1939. A looser Atlanticism, with both idealistic and geopolitical wings, had, as we noted, long preceded this, and continued afterwards as well. Its history was reviewed by Forrest Davis in The Atlantic System19; he saw it as building up to Streit, but also as correcting him somewhat in a moderating evolutionary direction.

The 1880s Atlanticism provided the backdrop for the Anglo-American rapprochement of the 1890s, and for the Atlantic Alliance of World War I. The more elaborated Atlanticism of 1939 formed the backdrop for the development of trans-Atlantic arrangements and institutions: the Marshall Plan in 1947, with its institutional embodiment OEEC, 1948 (becoming OECD 1961) and laying of foundations for European integration (ECSC-EEC-EC-EU, 1951-); the institutionalization of the Atlantic Alliance in NATO in 1949; the formation of an Atlantic Parliamentary Assembly (NPC-NAA-NPA, 1955-); EU-U.S. bilateral institutions and summits (often called “TransAtlantic”), and all the ancillary institutions from IEA to suppliers clubs to NACC-EAPC and NRC.

Once Atlantic institutions were established, Atlanticism consisted also of the personnel of those institutions and all those who supported them, including the national military and civilian personnel who dealt with them. NATO was central in this, both because of its institutional strength and because it had “Atlantic” in its name: it was the identity-bearing institution of the system.

This later Atlanticism, which one might call “official Atlanticism”, grew much larger in constituency than the intellectual Atlanticism of the founders of the institutions. The Atlanticist movement was overshadowed, although a portion of Movement Atlanticism linked itself to Official Atlanticism through a series of national Atlantic Councils.20 As a consequence, most

18 by the present writer, in the early 1980s. Streit died in 1986.19 Forrest Davis, The Atlantic System: The Story of Anglo-American Control of the Seas (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941)20 Streit supporters were found in many an Atlantic council; the US Atlantic Council was formed by a merger of Streit’s Atlantic Union Committee with other Atlanticist groupings, and was led in its first decades by a Streit disciple, Theodore Achilles, who had been the central State Department figure in negotiating NATO’s formation. While this relation is not visibly emphasized in most Atlantic Councils, the Danish Atlantic Council website has traced itself to Streit’s movement.

Atlanticists today are unaware of the Atlantic Perspective. While many of them might welcome it, they do not for now think of Atlanticism as a set of propositions that constitute a systemic perspective, but rather think of it in terms of a commitment to good trans-Atlantic relations and to the existing trans-Atlantic social circles and institutions. In partisan polemics within Europe, it is sometimes reduced even further, equated merely with a pro-American attitude.

All Atlanticism, official and unofficial, suffered decline after the 1960s. There was a turn of the Western intelligentsia to a New Leftism, with a Third Worldist orientation or identification, and a “small is beautiful” doctrine that, unlike the former left socialism and Communism, rejected Western progress altogether. This moral orientation away from the West, while held in consistent form only by a fringe, came in a diffuse way to permeate the ethos in which subsequent generations were brought up. It was not an outlook prone to be supportive of the propositions that the West ought to be united, or stay united, or affirm itself, even if this could be shown logically to be beneficial for the whole world. Official Atlanticism enjoyed a tremendous revival in Eastern Europe after 1989, and a partial revival in Western Europe as it was no longer mortally opposed by the strong socialist and Communist parties there; but the intellectual world had become too far removed from it to provide for revival of the broader Atlanticism that provided earlier generations with an overall perspective.

Effects of Atlantic unconsciousness

Most people today have never considered our list of Atlantic propositions as a simultaneous set of equations, or noticed their systemic implications. It might be called a condition of Atlantic Unconsciousness. A minority, arguably a culturally leading minority, adheres to anti-Western normative imperatives and has a distaste for the structures of the Concrete West as they strengthen the West; a majority is simply unaware of Atlanticism or of the Concrete West.

This is the underlying reason why we are seeing a revival, in new forms, of the old romanticist doctrine of the Decline of the West. It the context in which it has been possible to speak of Western decline as a statistical fact, without ever looking at the statistics for the Concrete West as a whole, which would show a robust predominance and no decline at all. It is the context in which writers can present comparisons of the economic sizes of the various powers in the world -- America, China, EU, India -- without once mentioning the West or OECD as a category for measurement and comparison. Without this context, it would be impossible to claim that the statistics show a decline of the West or a likelihood of eventual catch-up by China. Curiously, declinist writings at this point use the category “the West” to speak of its decline, but never use it or add its national weights together when it comes to making the statistical comparisons. It is another inconsistency, and a telling one.

Without the prevailing Atlantic unconsciousness, it would be impossible for the doctrine of a decline of the West to have become held widely and raised to a near-consensus level. Were the West simply perceived as an entity to be reckoned with -- a concrete living trans-Atlantic entity, not just a flat collection of separate countries -- the statistical falsity of the declinist claim would be seen immediately.

The world order, too, faces this paradox: the Atlantic Perspective is institutionally embedded in the world order, indeed at the core of it, yet is nearly forgotten in discourse on world affairs. How could the world have come to such a pass?

The Atlantic Perspective was developed among elites in the late 1800s and widely held for the next several decades, enabling the Atlantic Rapprochement and Alliance of the first years of the 1900s. It was displaced among elites in the 1930s, when the cutting edge doctrines were fascist and communist, holding that the dictatorships were the wave of the future and the West was in decline. It came back to seize cutting edge status for itself, and win a fairly high level of popular awareness, in 1939 and the decades after.

This heightened consciousness of the Atlantic Perspective was a necessary backdrop for enabling the Alliance to prevail and to evolve permanent joint economic and military structures. The Perspective was in turn embedded by these institutions into the core organized realities of the international system. However, the Perspective took a reduced form in official routine, and was displaced after the 1960s by new cutting edge ideologies of a Third Worldist orientation, entailing Western guilt and a decline of Western morale.

Of our 20 propositions of the Atlantic Perspective, many verge on the self-evident. Yet many can also be seen as “politically incorrect” and risky. Even in the 1930s there was a grain of this spirit; since the 1960s it has become much worse. Mainstream discourse in the West tends to shy away from mention of Western predominance, except to regret its sins; or to mention Atlantic unity in the context of Western predominance; relegating discussion of predominance to writers adversarial to the West21. It is often wise to avoid saying things that draw hostile fire; it is also often wise to take the fire and speak up for reality. Which is wiser? Avoidance has drawbacks that in most contexts outweigh the advantages: It fails to uphold what deserves to be upheld. It has an evasive, unpersuasive feel. It turns discussion of some central realities over to an adversarial subculture; the subculture is then sure it has The Truth since it does in fact discuss suppressed truths. Perhaps worst of all, it leaves mainstream Western thinking to be shaped by intellectual frameworks that are inadequate for comprehending reality, and misleading. The suppressed realities get sublimated into other mental channels; thought is sent flowing in skewed directions. The current Declinism is such a direction; it flows logically from awareness of the global dynamism Western predominance has brought, coupled with unawareness of the organized dynamism of that same West predominance. Finally, avoidance diverts the West from

21 The most widely read and systematic treatments of the Atlanticist realities in fact come from anti-Atlanticists. The Wallerstein school of World System theory is a prominent example; building on Lenin’s theory of Imperialism, it equates capitalism with the West and the Western-centered global economy dating back to early modern times, and identifies with the Third World as a kind of global proletariat. By translating Marxism’s capitalist-proletariat conflict into a global center-periphery conflict, and adding a category of near-periphery, it recognizes and gives prominence, under different and loaded names to be sure, to the basic realities of the world: the West and modernized First World, the Third World, and a second world of countries close enough to First World in their domestic conditions that they might soon join it, but might also embrace extremist ideologies that aim at overturning it. Those extremist ideologies belong to Right as well as Left: a long line of fascist theorists, from Carl Schmitt to Alexander Dugin, also treats Atlanticism systematically for the sake of overturning it. On both extremes, the knowledge of Atlanticist realities is considerably greater than that of most Westerners and Atlanticists, even though in embittered distorted forms that serve for efforts to draw countries into their anti-Western ideologies; efforts that have often succeeded, with considerable damage to the world order, and suicidal damage to the countries that succumbed to the extremist ideologies.

its own further development, depriving people of the perspective needed for indicating sound directions for development. If, despite all this, Western development has continued, it is a testimonial to the force of the objective factors behind it.

Thus we see how we got to the current forgetfulness of Perspective and, with it, of the nature of international reality. Thus the possibility of having a wave of belief in Western decline today, despite the actual statistical advance of the Concrete West; and thus the earlier wave of “America in decline” belief in the 1980s, which endured a decade before nearly everyone realized it was wrong and let it fizzle out.

The declinist belief has political motivation for those on the anti-Western fringe, or cutting edge; there, the wish is quite logically the father to the thought. Among the general public, it is more of a simple logical and factual error, spread by publicity feeding upon fear, destined eventually to fade out like the previous declinist wave. The question is how much damage it will do along the way: how much bad policy it will foster. There are calls for accommodation of some not-benign aspirations of authoritarian powers in the name of the purported declinist reality. Declinism is prone to foster desperation measures: fitfulness of international policy by the West, and encouragement for extremist movements and revisionist powers; this has been the usual historical consequence of expectations of decline. There is a trend toward dissipation of G8 and OECD, two of the Atlantic institutional cornerstones of the international order. The dangers cannot be shrugged off.

IV. Implications for perception of Reality

The reality of Western unity and strength; the persistence of miscalculations that discount it

The Western countries have always ultimately united and won in face of a military challenge, but sometimes late, with a huge price paid for the delay. It was concluded, after two rounds of experience with this in world wars, that it would be less costly if the ultimate unity of the West were immediately present and predictable: that there was a need for concrete structures of unity that would be visible not only to the best-informed scholars and practitioners, but to ordinary people, media, and politicians. Otherwise, short-sighted politicians, fanning national visions and riding the waves of nationalist enthusiasm, could blind themselves to the enduring realities of Western unity and power, and sleepwalk themselves into a losing war against the West; and media could help them blind themselves, by creating false perceptions of reality, exaggerating changes in global power (change sells; studies found that, for years, weather predictions were skewed by exaggerating change compared to the day before; alarmism about decline also sells), and skipping the boring news about continued unity and predominance in the West. Visibly organized, reliable Western unity was the antidote.

As a consequence of this reasoning, the architecture of Western unity enjoyed a major construction period from 1940 to 1960. However, today, despite this architecture, there is once again a belief in Western decline, this time before China, argued on the basis of the old assumption that the West is only a collection of separate nations; and a sequence of increasingly aggressive Chinese postures in 2010, remarked by several media analysts, Chinese and Western alike, to be a consequence of this belief. This indicates that the Western architecture, which has been only slowly improved on since 1960, needs a more rapid renovation and strengthening, to achieve more consistently visibility to media, politicians, analysts, and ordinary people; and to avoid a new cycle of misperceptions and miscalculations on the part of a rising power, such as China, that might still forget that it needs to measure its power vis-a-vis the West as a whole not just vis-a-vis the U.S.

One could argue that, even more than supplementing of the capabilities of the trans-Atlantic structures, what is needed at this time is reinforcement of their visibility and consciousness as a collective reality. This was Huntley’s conclusion already in 1980. Thus his suggestion that the entire series of Atlantic-centered institutions be brought together, not so much to give them new powers, but simply to show that their various powers, thus far dispersed in a variety of institutional locations under different names, added up to a substantial collective reality. For this purpose there was a need also for a name strong enough to sustain the collective identity. His proposed name, Atlantic Community or Community of the Developed Democracies, was meant to parallel the name and elan of the narrower European Community. Had this been done, it would have been impossible for the popular declinists a few years later, such as Paul Kennedy, to have it both ways, treating the trans-Atlantic West as a non-entity but the European Community as a full-fledged state entity like -- and against -- America.

Methodology for calculating the strength of the Concrete West

The West is not a consolidated common state, like its member nation-states. Its common identity is weak; its common institutions are weak. It is strong passively, not as strong actively. Its members coordinate, they do not fight one another, and do not undercut one another in core matters.

They still do plenty of minor undercutting. But it is substantially less than the mutual undercutting of the U.S., Britain, and France in the interwar years 1919-39, when their dis-coordination bungled the handling of Germany and bungled the world economy as well, turning the depression into a truly Great Depression. It has no comparison at all to the mutual undercutting and mutual warfare traditional among great powers, or among countries that are potential enemies and calculate their strategies on all matters, from trade to diplomatic maneuvers, for their relative potential in future war against one another. In this difference, the Concrete West shows its very real existence.

Actively, the Concrete West is more than any single part of it but less than the sum of all its parts. In active military measures, the Concrete West often wields nearly the whole of U.S. power plus some fraction of the power of its other members; in economic measures, it usually wields a majority share of the power of each of its member nations, often nearly the whole. When any one of its powers acts on its own, it usually has the tacit backing of the bulk of the West and the non-opposition of the remainder. All this adds up to considerably more than U.S. power alone, but considerably less than the total of all OECD countries.

A consistent Union, for comparison, would be the full sum of its parts. And then it has some more power as well, due to the presence of the system level interactions that reinforce its other powers. The Whole in this case is decidedly greater than the sum of its parts.

This system-level add-on exists already for the present-day Concrete West, augmenting its power even today. When the NATO-EU-OECD complex attracts countries to wish to join, it is something that the Western national powers alone, without joint institutions, could not do; and were not able to do in the preinstitutionalized past of the Atlantic, with sometimes catastrophic consequences. When today it is often a matter of the U.S. acting almost alone, without any active add-on from the rest of the West, the system-level add-ons are usually significant nevertheless: passive support and endorsement from the other countries lends legitimacy to the U.S. effort, prevents non-Atlantic countries from opposing it as often or as actively as they would otherwise do, and keeps the American political classes and public more supportive and constant in their efforts. The significance is confirmed, negatively, by the consequences when this support is absent, as in Iraq; it reminds us what it was like in the pre-Atlantic era. A full Union, such as Streit advocated, would to be sure provide considerably larger add-ons: firmer expectations, greater consistency, a stronger meta-level consciousness, a higher legitimacy, a Whole with more convincing global normative pretensions.

How much power for the Concrete West does all this adds up to? We can use for the present -- acknowledging its imprecision -- a figure of 75% of the total of all the OECD members’ powers.

The percentage would have been a bit lower, about 70%, during the Cold War years; despite the widespread assumption that that was an era of unity, actually there was actually less Atlantic solidarity on global policies than today22. During World Wars I and II, the figure was temporarily higher: near 100% in critical military respects, but America was also actively undermining its allies’ empires in the midst of war23. From 1929-1939, the figure fell beneath the 50% mark, with more mutual economic undercutting than mutual support: the whole was less than the sum of its parts, perhaps less even than its largest single part taken alone. In the non-crisis times of uninstitutionalized Atlantic unity, 1895-1914 and 1919-1929, it was around 60%; the grand Anglo-American and Anglo-French rapprochements24 provided what turned out to be enduring foundations for growth of diplomatic cooperation. For the “normal” century before the 1890s, the figure was well beneath the 50% mark; mutual undercutting was a part of normalcy, as was mutual public hostility, despite underlying evolving trends of mutual support since the 1820s.

We see that the long term secular trend is thus for the percentage of solidarity, which we might call the “coefficient of joint power”, to increase, with temporary deviations up or down during crisis (war, depression). In the course of 150 years, it has grown steadily, apart from brief crisis zigzags, from under 50% to today’s 75%, and is still growing as allied collaboration evolves on global problems. We might call this the “coefficient of joint power”.

The growth in the coefficient of joint power compounds the effect of the simultaneous growth in the total of national countries and forces involved in the joint power. Effective power consists of the two multiplied together.

This total -- 75% x the sum of OECD national amounts -- yields a huge power, a majority share of the entire power of the world. It is something that no emerging power has a prospect of catching up with, even were the figures to stop growing. And a more realistic projection would not have it standing still, but put it by 2050 around 80% x an OECD about 50% larger than present. The coefficient of total effective power for the Concrete West, compared to the sum of national powers in the present-day OECD, would thus nearly double: to 80% x 150% = 120%, from the present 75% x 100% = 75%. The present 75% is in turn was more than during the late Cold War years, when the West was 15% smaller than today and the mutual support a bit less (85% x 70% = 60%); that in turn more than at the beginning of the Cold War (65% x 70% = 45%); that in turn more than in 1900 (65% x 60% = 40%).

22 The Cold War ideological atmosphere actually disrupted much of the cooperation, outside of defense of Europe and general economic cooperation. The U.S., in competition with the Soviet Union for the global banner of anti-imperialism, undercut its allies’ empires in the first two decades of the Cold War and sometimes joined with the Soviet Union in opposing them. Thereafter, the allies’ tended to stand aside from U.S. efforts in the Third World, and their knowledge industries joined in Soviet and Third World attacks on those efforts for “imperialism”, the Left accusing the U.S. of capitalist imperialism and warmongering, the Right, of having stolen their countries’ empires and making always “mistakes”.23 Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain and the War against Japan, 1941-1945 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978); William Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941-1945 (Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1978)24 Bradford Perkins, The Great Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1895-1914 (New York: Atheneum, 1968).

Let us keep in mind that these figures do not count the internal growth of each national economy, which is an additional compounding factor. We are talking here solely about the growth of Atlantic power in the sense of combining nations more closely and combining more of them. It is a figure that changes in near-proportion to the changes in the share of total world power that they hold as a concrete collective group (but should not be read as the percentage of that total global power). And this change is extraordinary: from a factor of 40 in 1900, and 45 in 1950, to 60 by 1975, 75 today, and a projected 120 by 2050.

We see that we are talking about a collective power that has been growing rapidly for a century, outracing all possible competitors; and, unless self-disrupted, can be expected to continue to do so far into the future.

Is there any good reason for the habit of not weighing the Concrete West collectively?

The Concrete West could still come apart. That is the best reason that can be given for not summing its powers collectively and listing them as a concrete entity; indeed, the only reason ever given. But then, so could China come apart. And so could India, and Russia. On this argument, we should cease to weigh them, too, as whole entities. Only America, Britain, France, Germany, and Japan would remain as fairly solid power-entities by this standard. It is clearly too high a standard; although, applied consistently, it reminds us of an important fact: the Western powers are the most stable ones, the ones most likely to be around in 2050.

The dissolution risk to the Concrete West should in fact be taken into account, but in a different sense than ignoring the category. It should rather be taken to heart by Westerners as a reason for a reinforcing the category, that is, for seeking policies to maintain and reinforce the existence of the Concrete West. Can the risk of dissolution also be used as an argument against counting the Concrete West’s weight as a whole? No, not any more than the risk of China’s coming apart can be used as an argument against counting China’s weight as a whole; or Russia’s, or India’s.

Is the risk even at all realistic that the Concrete West could be dissolved? Yes; the weakening of G8 could continue, it could be completely abolished, NATO could break up over various resentments, America could abandon the alliance in a fit of ally-bashing, OECD could be watered down into insignificance. Honest prescriptions for preventing decline would focus on preventing such developments. Nevertheless the likelihood of the West’s coming apart is not great, given the close commonality of conditions and interests among its members. The greater likelihood is a continued shortfall in the collective use of their commonality of interests, causing the collective power to be somewhat less than the sum total of collective weight; a matter we have already discussed, yielding a collective power discount that, while shrinking over the decades, is still probably 25%.

Is the risk realistic that China would come apart? Its government thinks so; that it why it makes such an effort to repress the Tibetan and Uighur areas. It can be nervous about Mongolia and Manchuria too. The resentments in the Tibetan and Uighur regions are of a much higher order of magnitude than the resentments that exist within the NATO and OECD groupings. There are

differences between the northern and southern regions of China, both economically and culturally; despite being Han Chinese, their dialects are so distinct as to require translation, and the economic differentiation has grown with reforms and global trade. Fear of coming apart has been used for restricting reforms. While this writer views the fears of break-up of Han China as exaggerated, they have had a serious political effect.

Could Russia come apart? It faces chronic rebellion the North Caucasus, and makes a huge effort to suppress it. The fear of the whole country coming apart was the reason Putin gave in 1999-2003 for destroying the autonomy of the provinces and appointing their governors in place of the former elections. Here too this writer views the fears of break-up of core Russia as greatly exaggerated, but they have had their political effect.

Could India come apart? Yes, and along a number of fault lines, not just Kashmir. This is the reason, when territorial integrity comes into conflict with human rights in international crises such as Kosovo, why India supports the territorial integrity side, despite its own decent record on human rights.

Judging from how much these countries invest in trying to hold themselves together -- how much effort, angst, money, and bloodshed -- they have a lot more to worry about in terms of coming apart than does the Concrete West.

And what of the BRIC group collectively? It too could come apart. Indeed, it is likely to come apart sooner or later, unlike the Concrete West. Its internal differences of interest are far larger; its lacks long term shared interests; its immediate shared interests are of the character of a negative coalition, and take the contradictory form of wanting to be united against the West without wanting to be hostile to the West. The BRIC countries are subject to a strong attractive pull by the Concrete West, one that can divide them from their already limited anti-Western unity; the West faces no comparable pull from BRIC. BRIC should be the last and least group to be counted collectively.

Perhaps, then, no collective entities should be counted, only sovereign states? That would be consistent formally, but only formally. It is not be helpful for understanding the balance of the world. And the balance of the world is the subject under discussion, the reason for our counting and comparing of weights.

Then there is the matter of the EU. It often is counted collectively, despite its risks of coming apart as seen in the recent euro crisis, while the other collective entities are not. The only error in this is that the EU is often counted misleadingly, as an entity to be weighed against America on the global balance, without acknowledging the primary locus where it lodges its weight in global affairs, which is as a part of the Concrete West. The EU should indeed be counted collectively; so should the Concrete West.

The actual statistics on the West and Emerging Powers

Present

At present the Concrete West has 73% of world GDP. It has 15 times the GDP of China. It has 8 times the combined GDP of the four “BRIC” countries, Brazil, Russia, India, and China, “emerging powers” that are often cited as making the West and its global leadership obsolete. The U.S. alone has more than 4 times the GDP of China.

That is the main reality: the reality of the present, and the reality of the future in this generation.

But what of long-term projections? They show far less that is different than people presently imagine.

Worst case (for the West) projection: still solid Western hegemony in 2050

Much has been made in the media of projections of China surpassing the U.S. in GDP by 2050. Actually they show a continued robust Western hegemony in 2050 long afterwards, although they failed to provide the requisite categories for noticing this.

Even on their own terms of limited categories, 2050 is a long way off. If the projection were realized, it would still mean 40 years more of preponderance for the U.S. alone, before being overtaken by China as the biggest single country. Historians know that projections of changes 40 years out have a low probability of realization: too many unforeseen contingencies arise in such a time span. Nevertheless, the projection has become popularized as a prediction, the prediction treated as if an achieved fact, and as the foundation for the consensus declinist discourse. What is not understood in this discourse -- not by those who believe in the projection, not by those who have maintained a degree of critical caution about it -- is that, even if the projection were fully realized by 2050, its numbers still show the West as hugely preponderant over China and the BRIC countries at that late date.

But then, the projectors did not bother to add up the numbers for the West. Nor did anyone else in the declinist discussion. Less ink was spilt on the Concrete West, with its long history and substantial institutions, than on BRIC, a newly formed amorphous coalition with almost no collective substance.

This shows, inter alia, the need to start providing figures for the real collective categories when making international projections.

The chart below gives the numbers from a much discussed projection. Let me make clear that I do not view them as likely to be an accurate statement of the size of national economies in 2050. The reason I give them is in order to provide, by adding in the requisite collective categories, a more accurate picture than hitherto of the meaning of the numbers that have been bandied about in the current discussion.

GDP projections 2010-2050

Top ten entities (including top six countries) by Gross Domestic Product, in billions of US dollars, listed by projected 2050 rank. SOURCE: Goldman Sachs (2005) for national figures;25 totals for collective entities added by author26.

2050 Rank

Publicized27 2050 Rank

Brief name

Explanatory name

2010 GDP

2020 GDP

2030 GDP

2040 GDP

2050 GDP

1 Concrete West

2010 Concrete West + probable joiners28 44600 58000 74000 95000 12500029

Concrete West of 2010

The countries that in 2010 were First World and in OECD30

44600 56000 70000 87000 112000

Trilateral West

US + EU + Japan 36000 45000 56000 70000 90000TransAtlantic West US + EU 31700 40000 50000 64000 83000

2 BRIC31 Brazil + Russia + India + China 5440 12000 24000 47000 84000

25 Other statistical sources would give different numbers than these, sometimes significantly different; and Goldman Sachs’ 2010 projection would be somewhat different from its 2005 projection. The most important relative result shown above -- that of the large margin of the collective West over China -- would not be altered by this. However, in terms of the result most people have been thinking about -- the U.S. versus China -- more humble statistical projections, taking into account contingency and instability risks, would not show China surpassing even the U.S. alone by 2050.26 The figures for collective entities, or groups of nations, are based primarily on summation of the figures offered for the national members of these entities. The Eurozone was calculated elsewhere on the internet in this manner (see note to Eurozone); the present author calculated on this basis the EU total, then calculated the totals for EU + US, EU + US + Japan, and First World OECD. As sums of GDPs of present-day groups of countries, these totals do not take into account the likely future growth in membership of these entities (or, in the case of BRIC, a possible loss of some of its members to OECD by 2050). To correct for this in the instance of the Concrete West and allow meaningful comparisons to other evolving global powers, we have added in blue letters the category of “Future Concrete West”. It is inherently speculative; just as, however, are all the other projections in this chart for 40 years out.27 The ranking given by Goldman Sachs; the collective entities were not provided, so not ranked. In this Goldman Sachs was, while misleading, consistent. Media commentary on the figures was less consistent; it weighed BRIC as a group, and sometimes the EU, but not the collective West groupings.28 We use here only the forecast of probable joiners in the earlier section on “the proximate future”, meaning next 20 years or so (tigers, Russia, former Soviet republics), not the joiners some decades farther out. By 2050 some of the latter will probably also have come in, but this is not shown in the figures in the text. Adding probable additional joiners by 2050 would increase the 2050 figure for the Concrete West to anywhere from 130,000 to 200,000 billion dollars.29 To calculate the joint power equivalent of the Concrete West at each date, one would multiply the figures in this row by 75% in 2000-2010, and 80% in 2040-50; this applies the discount percentage estimated in the section above on figuring the effective power of the Concrete West. It yields 100,000 bn for 2050. 30 This is very close to the projection also of the UN’s Economic Commission for Europe (ECE), which calculates a likelihood of an OECD average growth rate 2000-2040 of 2.7% a year. The ECE report simply assumes a constant membership OECD; its calculation is for the average of current OECD members, not for OECD as a concrete grouping that can be augmented by new members. “FORECASTS OF THE ECONOMIC GROWTH IN OECD COUNTRIES AND CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES FOR THE PERIOD 2000-2040, A study prepared for the European Forest Sector Outlook Study (EFSOS),” By NOBE, Independent Centre for Economic Studies, UNITED NATIONS, New York and Geneva, 2002.

3 EU32 European Union 18387 23000 28500 37000 480004 1   China33 2998 7070 14312 26439 444535 2  USA United States 13271 16415 20833 27229 351656 3   India34 929 2104 4935 12367 278037 4   Japan 4601 5221 5810 6039 66738 5   Brazil 668 1333 2189 3740 60749 6   Russia 847 1741 2980 4467 5870

The Concrete West’s total for 2050 is 150% of the BRIC total, 280% of China’s. The Concrete West’s effective power factor for 2050 is 190% of BRIC’s35, 200% of China’s.

These are robust leads. There is no sense in which either BRIC or China is catching up in 2050; not even on numbers that assume unrealistic long-term growth rates in China and India, and unprecedented absence of disruptive crises in their development.

The inattention to these realities is regrettable. It leads to fundamental misunderstandings of the world; to inversions of policy prescriptions; and to gross miscalculations by some great powers.

31 BRIC totals are provided because BRIC has often been cited as so powerful as to make Western leadership obsolete. It arguably lacks sufficient collective substance to be ranked at all as an economic power; it is listed and ranked here nevertheless, to make clear that even the entire combined BRIC will still be far behind the combined OECD by 2050. It would be a mistake to infer that BRIC has cohesion or Collective Actor capabilities comparable to OECD; it has almost none, and a reasonable projection is that it will develop little, due to deep lack of similarity of its societies. The 20-25% discount factor used for calculating the collective strength of OECD would be, for BRIC, a much higher discount factor, around 40-50%. BRIC has almost no collective structure, and its individual countries often align with OECD rather than align with each other against OECD. Compared to OECD’s projected $100,000 bn power equivalent for 2050, after discount for incomplete coordination, the BRIC 2050 power equivalent would be about $40-50,000 bn, barely if at all more than China by itself; and it is likely that two of BRIC’s members would by then have left BRIC and joined OECD.32 Author’s calculation, rooted in a sum total of EU member nations, but more immediately calculated as follows: using a 1.35 : 1 ratio for EU GDP : Eurozone GDP (IMF figures for EU are 18,387 in 2008 -- used in 2010 column above for EU; World Bank figure for Eurozone is 13,565 in 2008), and obtaining the EU figures for the later dates by multiplying the corresponding Eurozone figure by 1.35. One can find at http://www.photius.com/rankings/gdp_2050_projection.html a personal calculation, giving a total approximating the Eurozone total, on the basis of summing Goldman Sachs figures for individual EU nations. 33 Implausibly high long term growth rates, and absence of political disruptions, are assumed by these figures for China: 9%/yr 2010-20, 7.2%/yr 2020-30, 6.4%/yr 2030-40, 5.5%/yr 2040-5034 Implausibly high long term growth rates, and absence of political disruptions, are assumed by these figures for India: 9%/yr 2010-20, 9%/yr 2020-30, 11%/yr 2030-40, 9%/yr 2040-50. 35 This is calculated by using the effective power discount as discussed above. Of the 20-25% range of discount to apply to the Concrete West, we use here the more pessimistic end, taking 25% discount from the West’s raw total economy; of the 40-50% range for BRIC, we use the more optimistic end, taking a 40% discount. Use of the alternative discount figures would yield an even greater disparity in favor of the Concrete West.

The following similar results, more limited and careful, were calculated on a basis of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s projections36:

This shows the reality with graphic clarity37.

36 www.streitcouncil.org , citing Economist Intelligence Unit as the source of the statistics on which the totals are based. I wish this could be used as a basis for saying that the reality is coming to be recognized, but I should acknowledge that this is not much the case, as the use of the OECD, OECD + future members, US + EU, and G20 minus G8, as categories for measurement, was suggested by the present author to the Streit Council, which got its researchers to find the best available projections on the basis of which to calculate the totals for these categories. It seems the sphere of recognition of this central global reality is still for the moment limited to what I have been able personally to prod -- not counting those who are explicitly fighting for power for the Third World against the West for reasons other than the general global good, whether nationally interested writers in the Third World or ideological ones in the West such as the Wallerstein school, who often state the facts fairly accurately. 37 It should be noted, however, that this graph limits its purview of future OECD members to Russia; the present author would recommend instead the category of “probable 2030 OECD membership”. OECD has decided on a goal of Russian membership and the two are negotiating toward this; by 2030 it is on balance probable that Russia will be a well-integrated member of the West, not just through OECD membership but also strategically, which is part of what makes the category relevant; but additional countries are also likely to have become well-integrated by then, making the actual total for OECD larger. This geographical growth of the concrete West is of course uncertain. Should be counted? Yes, as a conditional category; since equally uncertain, sometimes more so, are the rapid economic growth projections for other countries. If the purpose of the projections is to provide policymakers and public with an accurate picture of the probable future geopolitical and geoeconomic distribution, then the most relevant of the categories to use is the probable total of well-integrated OECD members by 2030 (the “well-integrated” proviso meaning, less than 100% of total 2030 OECD members, but probably more than the total for 2010 OECD membership).

Why the persistent promotion of misleading versions of the statistics, in disregard of the relevant facts and categories38?

It is partly a matter of being paradigm-bound. Thomas Kuhn observed that old paradigms always find ways to rule out contrary or falsifying points.

Paradigm-protection is even harder to get through than Password-protection: as Kuhn showed, it sometimes takes a generation or two. This is because paradigms are bound up with social circles that entrenched the paradigms as group habits and group interests; as mental and political commitments; reinforced by group mechanisms of praise and blame (good-evil, goodspirited-meanspirited, right-wrong, intelligent-stupid, sane-insane), inclusion and exclusion (us-them), reward and deprivation (jobs, grades, publication, censure). Thus paradigms come to be perpetuated by vicious circles in society as well as in logic.

The ability to turn a blind eye to facts that don’t fit, and to sincerely make false statements of fact, is well known; Kuhn explains it as a Paradigm-protection-mechanism, Freud as a defense-mechanism for shielding against confronting mental complexes. It is not necessary to suppose it is deliberate mendacity toward others when the international economic statistics are repeatedly distorted; when people are lying, they are usually lying to themselves. The repetition is a sign of the workings of a group paradigm and group spirit. Bertrand Russell once said there was too much of a “party spirit” -- in his own favor! -- in his peer community of academic philosophy; sociological surveys have since confirmed such a spirit to be strong in nearly all academic departments (partly excepting the physical sciences), and in most other intellectual communities including the media, with almost all of these groups spirits sharing the same specific political orientation. This makes Paradigm-penetration more difficult; it enables the formation, in the general world of public thought and discourse, of vicious circles that are almost completed closed off from external penetration.

38 The closest that there comes to being a wider use of these categories in the mainstream West, apart from the present author and colleagues, is when totals for OECD or G8 are given. OECD does get totaled in numerous locations to which little attention is paid, e.g. OECD’s statistical charts, and such other places as the statistics on energy use and energy intensity given by the U.S. Government’s Energy Information Administration (since a major factual dividing line in energy intensity, or efficiency versus waste of energy use, is between OECD and non-OECD, a matter logically essentially for considering what is needed for reducing greenhouse emissions). However, this is almost never done for comparisons from which significant public conclusions are drawn, such as in the global economic power projections that have become famous, or in public discussions on reducing emissions. When the total for G8 is given, it is only for a comparison against the G20, a comparison that is almost invariably, and misleadingly, cited as evidence of the obsolescence of the 8. The Streit Council, notes at the site referenced above (www.streitcouncil.org), that what is more relevant is to compare G8 to the non-G8 members of G20 (more precise, but taking longer to explain, would be the category of “non-G8 non-OECD G20”, that is, the 7 out of the 20 who are not in the G8 or OECD; its adds up to 26.4% still less total GDP than the amount shown in the graph for the G20 minus G8); and to compare G20 to other extensions of the G8, some of them more cohesive than the G20 and more effective for most matters. This shows that the G20 is not the most relevant extension of the 8, from a standpoint of effectiveness; it has value-added practical utility often if used as complementary to the more effective ones, not in place of them. Among the more cohesive extensions of G8 is OECD itself, which is not an organizationally competing extension demanding a G35 alongside or in place of the 8 but an entirely complementary one, with a different, formal organizational structure and ministerial Council; for this Council, the G8 (or more precisely the 7) serves informally as a top-level executive summit, since it has a degree of dialogue unobtainable when all 35 national leaders are brought together for the formal OECD summits.

I am stating the difficulty of Paradigm-penetration strongly, which some people will think accurate others exaggerated, not for its own sake, but in order to underline the responsibility of people to make whatever effort it takes to escape their Paradigm-protection reflexes as they read. After everything they have heard for several years, it is not surprising that many people will have a hard time imaging that what I am saying could possibly be within the range of reality, sanity, good, right. There must be something wrong about it -- or else there is something wrong with nearly everything they have heard and believed, a thought that understandably feels unimaginable.

And so, I admonish you, dear reader: If what I am saying sounds somehow crazy to you, despite its clear factual foundations; if it is the sort of thing for which you feel an impulse to just dismiss it and put it out of mind; if you feel that this would be an easy and safe way in your circles to dispose of it: then for this very reason, you owe society the effort to overcome that impulse and consider the matter at full value.

If the simple statistical calculation of mine breaks through the barriers of Paradigm-protection and restores an awareness of the central realities of the world economic order, it will have served sufficient purpose.

That is the reason why I have made the personal effort at calculating the numbers for the relevant categories. It is not my specialty. Others should have done this work, and could surely do it better than I.

I will be pleased if my effort sparks others to try their own calculations for the collective categories, even if in hope of refuting me. Probably in many cases this is the only way that most Paradigm-protective people could overcome their assumption that this must all be nonsense and allow the truth of the matter to penetrate.

I am in fact pleased to be able to say that the Streit Council has taken up my challenge, in the period prior to publication of this work, and done its own calculation which I have shown above, and its own thinking through of the assumptions and categories. I hope others will next. I am sure my main conclusions will hold up: the ratios are simply too robust to be overturned.

I will be even more pleased if my effort sparks the major GDP assessors and projectors -- IMF, World Bank, CIA, Goldman Sachs -- to start including calculations for the most relevant categories, the collective ones, on their published charts. Then at long last we will have semi-official projections expressed in forms that are not misleading. The policy makers of the world need this.

Dynamic Hegemonic Stability: averting hegemonic challenges and global war

The objective realities of Atlanticism, as long as they are coupled with joint institutions and with a basic awareness of the Atlantic Perspective, make possible an unusual kind of stability-in-dynamism, which we might call “sliding continuity”. We have described the basics of it earlier: the rest of the world keeps growing, by nature gradually catching up in production and technology, but the Atlantic-West also keeps growing as more countries graduate into its ranks. The West retains all along a strong hegemonial position in economic and security affairs, and retains all along its internal coherence as a grouping of sociologically similar and politically likeminded First World countries. This situation can potentially continue until the West becomes the entire world.

This is a remarkably positive situation, far more stable than any other perspective can provide. And it is not just a perspective: as long as it is not refused or thrown in the trash, it is the mainstream evolving reality. It avoids the dangers to world peace that flow from situations where a hegemonial challenger is possible; dangers that other perspectives, in their unawareness of the full extent of the Atlantic reality, treat as inevitable, and can serve to foster.

There is a vast academic literature on “hegemonic decline”. Most of it treats the decline as inevitable, implicitly accepting the normative assumption that hegemony is bad and doomed, yet at the same time regrettable, as it means losses for the world order when the hegemon is no longer able to provide global public goods through the maintenance of international regimes. This entire literature stands or falls -- and in fact falls -- on its assumption that the United States alone is the hegemon that is providing stability and public goods. The result of this unexamined assumption has been to redirect the debate from the real question -- the overwhelming and stable hegemony of the West -- into a secondary question of whether the United States is likely to suffer a measure of relative decline in the foreseeable future.

The real reality is one of a larger hegemon whose hegemony is stable because of its multiple growth dimensions. Within this hegemon, America plays a role as a large minority part, one that has been important for the organization, cohesion, and dynamism of the whole. The gradual reduction of America’s intra-hegemon share over the decades, as the whole has grown, has had no discernible impact on the hegemony of the whole, a hegemony that has continued and increased over the same decades.

It was the perception of this possibility of a stable dynamic hegemony, avoiding the dangers of world wars resulting from challengers for the top, that was probably Streit’s most remarkable intellectual achievement. It was like finding a point of confluence between a series of simultaneous equations that had hitherto seemed unresolvable:

The need for a coherent, reliable core of world order. The need for the core to be large enough as to be hegemonic, allowing latitude for a

relaxed, generous approach and for provision of public goods. The need for the core not to be however so large and diverse as to undermine its

coherence and reliability.

The need for the hegemony of the core to be stable and continue -- avoiding the most predictable cause of war, the rise of a plausible challenger for the hegemony -- and yet also be generous and support the rapid growth of poorer non-core areas.

The possibility of the core retaining its hegemony by expanding its membership to include other countries once they assimilate sufficiently to its characteristics that their membership would not detract from its cohesion.

The need for the core to be attractive enough, through its freedoms and values and wealth, to get others to make an effort to qualify to join.

Remarkably, a “fit” was provided for all these characteristics and qualifications by the Atlantic group of countries. They had a close mutual similarity as modern industrial democracies; and, combined, they had a large margin of economic and military predominance in the world. This Atlantic grouping served as the concrete point of convergence of the simultaneous equations; the value for the variable that, plugged into them, made them all work.39

The Atlantic grouping served also as the point of resolution for another series of simultaneous equations, the equations of world organization. These equations had greatly exercised people in face of the failure of the League of Nations:

A strong global organizational order was needed in face of the depth of interdependence and rush of technology.

But an institutional grouping of all the countries of the world was bound to be weak. Stronger unions were feasible, and were often advocated for fixed geographical regions. But even if a regional union could solve the problems of its own region, it could not serve

as a flexible, expandable core of world order.

By turning attention from strictly regional groupings to the transatlantic grouping, Streit found a point of common ground among these equations, preventing from running off in their seemingly foreordained contradictory directions. The Atlantic grouping had enough organic commonalities to qualify as a region capable of deep integration, and had a solid hegemony in global affairs, yet it was not a fixed intra-continental region. It built its commonalities more on the universalistic societal forms and norms that grew out of its history than out of the past peculiarities of history or location, enabling it to be open for others to join as Western ways kept spreading.

Finally, it answered a third set of equations, or rather, arguments for the impossibility of world government:

The only international Unions that are possible are those of a factional fraction of the world; and they cannot unite the world, but only revise the lines along which it is divided.

Countries can unite into a deep union only on a basis of fighting deadly external threats and enemies, not just internal commonalities. (Carl Schmitt)

39 Streit elaborated the criteria for finding a viable nucleus of world order, in effect seeking one that could resolve all these equations, and showed the Atlantic grouping’s “fit” to the criteria, in his chapter, “Why start with the democracies”, Union Now, ch. V.

Any Union will engender a countervailing Union, restoring the global balance of power on a higher, more intense plane (Reinhold Niebuhr, Leo Strauss).

Unions are never formed on the basis of a multipolar balance among genuinely independent powers such as exist globally, but through leadership of a core area within a fairly homogenous society (Prussia within Germany, Piedmont within Italy), or as a pretended “new Union” that is really only a revival of the unity of a half of a just-sundered larger Union (the American Union, formed during America’s separation from the British empire-union, with Britain uniting the colonies as Enemy after having long united them as their common Government). (Karl Deutsch)

Somehow the Atlantic grouping does not fall victim to these impossibilities. It does have a core area of its own, the Anglo-American core area, and within that, the U.S. core; however, it has been the main core area for the world system, not just for one power or region among others. Its core position has not been one within a multipolar balance, or even one half of the world, but a supermajority hegemonic position, both economically and strategically. And it has more often and enduringly attracted countries to join it than repelled them to unite against it. Its gradual growth has maintained its superhegemony; potentially this can continue until it becomes someday the entire world.

To this needed to be added only that the Atlantic countries already in Streit’s time were acting as a core of the world order; however, they were doing it inconsistently, given their lack of much joint organization in peacetime. Streit said as much about the functioning of the League of Nations, but it had a consequence that Streit underestimated: It made it a matter, not of creating a core Union and a core of the world order ex nihilo, but -- as emphasized by later writers building on Streit40 -- of further consolidating the existing core of world order and getting it to comprehend its significance. And also made it a matter, not of averting the rise of a genuinely equal challenger for the hegemony, but of averting misperception and miscalculation by a vastly weaker would-be challenger, such as Germany. Such a rising power, once it could see things accurately and realize that it is faced with the entirety of Atlantic power, would understand that it has no chance of posing a challenge for the hegemony; a global conflict could be avoided.

Today, decades down the road, facing a rising China not Germany, after considerable institutionalization of the transatlantic relation, the same conclusion holds: it is not a matter of creating a transatlantic entity ex nihilo, it is a matter of further developing the transatlantic entity. A matter of making it stronger and more visible. A matter of making it more conscious of itself, more self-affirming as a permanent reality, more aware of its own Atlantic perspective as the evolving core of world order; heading off the pressures for its suicide as a collective entity, whether they come from forces that dislike its role or from mere misunderstanding and lack of awareness. A matter of making the elites and public aware of it as the true global hegemon with an unsurpassable 73% share of the world economy, dispelling the illusion of Western decline. A matter of heading off a fast-emerging miscalculation on the part of China, egged on by misinformed commentators who keep saying China will soon economically overtake the existing hegemon and be in a position to claim the global leadership.

40 Forrest Davis, The Atlantic System, James Huntley, Uniting the Democracies.

V. Implications for Policy

What specifically needs to be done?

To maintain the global stability whose objective foundations are still in good order, and avoid miscalculation, what policy measures are needed?

Edouard Balladur, former Prime Minister of France has concluded that the West needs to unite in order to avoid miscalculations and overreaching by a growing China, and stabilize a world order that is being shaken by the pace of change.41 The identical conclusion has been reached Richard Rosecrance, a respected leader in international studies42. So has Theo Sommer, a leading German

41 Edouard Balladur, Pour une union occidentale entre l’Europe et les Etats Unis (Paris: Fayard, 2007). Balladur does not, to be sure, present this directly in terms of preserving the imbalance. Rather, in French Gaullist style, he calls it a matter of rebalancing the world, whose balance is being shaken and destabilized; even calls it a matter of establishing stability in a multipolar world that respects all the diversity of civilizations (while adding, almost parenthetically, that it is also for overcoming the paradox of the West’s enormous objective strength and its subjective weakness, preventing miscalculation, and preserving the West’s global systemic influence and the universal values that were developed in the West and are practiced there quite imperfectly but more than anywhere else). The traditional British formulation is similar, and has a similar inconsistency, developed in the style of British understatement; it is to call any Western union a matter of “preserving the balance of power”. The phrase aims at reassurance, as a matter of systemic stability, and as building on the international legitimizing role of the phrase “balance of power” as far back as the 1600s; “a just balance” was formally enshrined in the Treaty of Utrecht in 1714. But it can be misleading unless it is understood that the “balance” that is being preserved is not Utrecht’s temporary multipolar continental balance of power but the highly unequal imbalance that evolved out of it: it is a concrete evolved balance, not the abstract principle of balance. The European “balance” ensured British leadership in the wider oceanic world ever since the 1600s, something that was translated into hegemony outside of Europe in the 1700s while “holding the balance” of Europe, then British leadership within Europe as well after 1815; a leadership that fed after the late 1800s into a collective trans-Atlantic leadership, which gained a hegemonic and then an absolute majority power position. That is the current state of the evolved balance: it is an evolved imbalance. See Adam Watson’s final book, Hegemony & History (NY, Routledge, 2007), for a British treatment of this; similarly F.H. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace and Sovereignty. Watson demonstrates that there is a necessary duality or self-contradictoriness in the legitimizing terms of an international society of sovereign states, and urges the wisdom of continued legitimizing usage of the formula “preserving the balance” while also preserving hegemony, “preserving sovereignty” while compromising it.42 Professor Rosecrance is presently at Harvard; he has been president of the International Studies Association, and author of books and articles too numerous to mention. “[U]nless the Chinese economy implodes or globalization is stunted or reversed for some reason—both could happen, of course, but the odds lean against it—a Euro-American deal of unprecedented scale is the only way the United States can preserve its privileged position atop the global hierarchy... [I]n geopolitical terms, the balance of world power would already be inside the union with 60 percent of world GDP. Others could not balance effectively against it. Japan almost certainly would wish to be associated with it... [A]s the economic magnetism of an economic Atlantic Bridge grew, the size of the political-economic state unit would begin to approach the size of the international market for the first time in world history.” Richard Rosecrance, “Size Matters”, The American Interest, July/August 2008. The theme is developed further in Rosecrance, “Transatlantic Economic and Political Merger as the Ultimate Implication of Technological and Economic Imperatives”, lecture at Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington DC., December 5, 2008

foreign affairs analyst and editor at Die Zeit43. All three perceive the simple reality that, combined, Europe and America are unsurpassable.

The argument was anticipated some years ago in the journal of the World Systems school: Europe and America must form a Union so China will see it cannot surpass them. It was unusual for this to come from a bitterly anti-Western school of analysis. Nevertheless, even from that standpoint, it was possible to understand that the West as a whole is the core of the World System, this Western hegemony nor American hegemony is the underlying long duree reality, it is the Western core that a periphery power such as China would have to surpass, and it would be good for it to avoid miscalculation on the matter.

The problem therefore is really: how much does the West need to be united, and in what ways, to convince the world of this reality?

Rosecrance invokes the ghost of Clarence Streit. And indeed, a consistent federal political Union, as envisaged by Streit, would suffice to convince the world of the reality of the West. But Rosecrance proposes for immediate purposes something far less than this. The problem here is to define the minimum that would suffice. By all odds it can be short of consistent Union but more than exists at present.

A related problem, which helps us define how much more is needed, is: why do people fail to perceive that Europe and America are in fundamentals already united? This reality means that Europe and America are already jointly the unit that a challenger would need to surpass; the problem is almost -- not quite -- reducible to one of perceptions. If Western affirmation of its unity could somehow be vigorous enough, it might suffice to get the reality universally recognized. But it is evident that it cannot be vigorous enough to convince the necessary elites and publics, unless there are also new steps on practical and institutional unity.

Both Balladur and Rosecrance urge a focus on further economic union of Europe and America. This seems the easiest thing to do, now that their economies are already so closely linked and harmonized, and in any event it is an economic surpassing that the declinists are predicting on behalf of China. However, it could be argued that this is yet another optical illusion of the declinist debate. Since the West economy is already in most respects a single economic space, completing this economic unity, while useful in a secondary way, would have only a secondary impact. Why do declinists fail to recognize the existing economic unity of the West? Why do the main declinist theorists, Kennedy and Khanna, count the EU exaggeratedly, as a single unit for international throw weight, just like any a nation-state, but, contradictorily, don’t recognize the institutional Concrete West at all or count the West as a unit in any degree; and further, count the EU against the U.S. rather than with it? This is not a matter of reality, but of perception; and no doubt to some extent a matter of willful illogic, a debater’s necessity, as the goal of their argument is to give up on the West and accommodate more to non-Western powers.

43 Theo Sommers, “Let’s go for ‘Eumerica’”, The Atlantic Times, v. 7 no. 3, March 2010, p. 1. Sommers observes that the U.S. + EU are the only real G2, one that has endured half a century; the ones proposed in line with declinist thinking, such as Chi-merica or China-India, have collapsed in a matter of a couple years due to huge divergences in society, interest, and values. He gives greater attention than Balladur and Rosecrance to the extent to which the existing trans-Atlantic unity could, in principle, suffice to calm the international waters, if it were simply reaffirmed and better recognized.

The crux of the matter is not the total economic weight of the West; it is already more than sufficient. The crux is to give sufficient visibility and conviction to the political reality of Western unity, so that the West will be seen as a single economic throw-weight. This is what determines whether the combined Western weight, or a separate national weight, is recognized as the entity that a challenger could need to match.

This means: the main need is to reinforce the political, diplomatic, and military unity of the transatlantic space (no doubt parenthetically reinforcing the economic side at the same time). The military unity, like the economic unity, is already fairly well organized. That leaves diplomatic unity as the decisive outstanding variable: the one that -- alongside the simple visibility of the West and its élan as a self-proclaimed self-affirming unit -- determines the extent to which the Western national weights are counted as a single weight in the world, or as separate weights.

Western diplomatic unity has made enormous progress since 1900, not to say 1800 when the westernmost powers were still engaging in mutual wars. But it still could go a lot farther. One need mention only Iraq, or Kyoto, to see why people fail to perceive the economic and military weights of the Western countries as a combined weight on the global scale.

To be sure, the Western weights always end up being combined when facing a major threatening external power. Even in more ordinary circumstances, the Western countries agree and act together far more often than they differ; and when they do differ, it is almost always tactically, on how to achieve shared goals, not -- not even on Iraq or Kyoto -- a strategic opposition. With other powers around the world they have differences of strategic goal; among themselves, as among ordinary parties domestically, they have differences in tactic and priority. What tempts external powers to miscalculate, and dream of gaining the global leadership by surpassing some single part of the West, is the frequent failure of Westerners to project a sense of unity and demonstrate in ordinary condition that they need to be reckoned with as a combined force. The dearth of political élan in the Concrete West -- its institutions are usually invisible and are weak on self-affirmation, its Atlantic perspective is nearly forgotten -- reinforces the doubts.

To recover the needed élan, Balladur urges a new institutional departure, to be named a “Union of the West”. To be sure, as a Gaullist realist, he urges only limited near-term substantive proposals: an additional, or refurbished and renamed U.S.-EU consultative channel, and a program of working on further steps in the economic union. He advocates a complete foreign policy union as the logical goal of what is needed for stabilizing the world order and world perceptions; but, seeing little of the heavy political will that would be required for achieving such a result, leaves this for the future, a hoped-for eventual product of the additional consultations.

Here it needs to be noted that, while the will is indeed weak in this period, there are other channels for Western foreign policy unification that are more promising than the U.S.-EU one alone. It is more realistic to move toward the goal by using these other channels for consultation and joint action in foreign policy, particularly NATO and the G7-8. They have both been working on foreign policy unity for decades. NATO since 1991 has been focused on getting more global coordination of the foreign policies and military actions of the Western countries.

NATO’s tasks and efforts have in fact grown more and more worldwide. This is sometimes called “Global NATO”, because it implies a gradual global union of Western foreign policies.44

This process is in a sense a belated playing out of the original Atlantic Perspective, held by Atlanticists from the 1890s to the 1930s, on the need for the Atlantic countries to follow a common policy worldwide in order to stabilize the world order. It was a perspective that kept having to get put off: from the 1890s to the 1960s, because of American opposition to European empires around the world and refusal to share in their burdens45, after the 1960s because of European reluctance to share the burdens of American efforts around the world. The obstacles to common Western policy congealed around the accusations of “imperialism” traded between Europe and America when Western initiatives were under discussion. The symbiotic accusatory tone was reinforced by the global context: there were constant, much harsher mutual accusations of imperialism between the West and the Soviet Union, with Third World as audience and judge.

With the end of the Cold War, the accusatory rhetoric died down. NATO gradually came out of its shell and regained parts of its underlying global Atlantic perspective. The process accelerated after the terrorist attacks of 2001, which for the first time caused NATO to invoke Article 5, in defense of its metropolitan area but with the joint war in a place very far out of area. A century after the need for it was understood, there is gradual progress on achieving joint global policy among the Western countries. This gradualism has gone on, accelerating slowly, for two decades. It can be accelerated further; and it can be declared more loudly and made more visible, which is what a proclamation of “Global NATO” would do.

Here is where progress can most be made on a common foreign policy: that is, on a reality and perception of the West as a unified actor whose entire weight is what would have to be surpassed by a challenger. For this requisite visibility and conviction, the progress needs a name, as Balladur understood. “Global NATO” gives rise to serious confusions. A less confusing, more Balladurian, name such as a “Foreign Policy Union of the West” would make more sense; presumably put forward with Balladurian realism as a goal at this stage, to be proclaimed as an actual Union only after further progress makes it a label that could stick and not get discredited by the remaining internecine differences.

Timing is everything

It can be complained, by proponents of correcting the world’s inequities through World Government, that the Atlantic perspective fails to get remediation out of the West for its wealth

44 It should not be confused with an almost opposite “Global NATO” project, fairly widely advocated in this period of declinism but thus far not underway nor agreed in NATO, that would dilute the West and its unity by globalizing NATO membership to include all democracies everywhere.45 This was why the NATO Treaty limited the boundaries of its Article 5 defense obligations to a defined metropolitan space, relegating to its permissive clauses, Articles 2 and 4, its calls for joint efforts beyond that space. This division into obligatory and permissive clauses is frequently misinterpreted, by opponents of wider joint actions, as prohibiting NATO from doing anything beyond its obligatory space; critics often go to the length of calling such actions a “violation of its own charter” and therewith of “international law”.

and dominance and injustices against the rest of the world. If it ever achieves a world government, it will be done by completing Western predominance, not punishing the West for its predominance. It is a fair complaint, and indeed, a fair statement of the virtue of the Atlantic approach. A viable world government cannot be achieved as a punishment of any major portion of the world; that is the road to world civil war, not world government.

It can be complained, on the other hand, by opponents of any World Government at all as something that would submerge the West, that the Atlantic perspective would lead, in the end, to World Government, even if the end is a long time off. Almost true: it could lead; but continuing with getting there is at each stage an option belonging to free choice, not a preordained consequence of taking a “first step down the road”. And timing is not unimportant. The timing makes a fundamental difference to the meaning of that ultimate perspective for the West, and to the quality of the goal if ever reached. If it someday comes to pass that the West becomes the world on the terms of the Atlantic Perspective and a world government is developed, it will be a final completion of the process of enlargement of the West in a form that preserves and secures the West. While a more rapid enlargement, submerging the West, might be hoped by some enthusiasts to lead to an earlier proclamation of world government, in fact it could only produce another set of formal world institutions, not an effective or sustainable world government. A slow enlargement just might someday get to an effective, sustainable world government. At each stage, the choice will be open as to whether to proceed with further stages of enlargement; proceeding will have to be an active new step, which serves as a guarantor that it won’t be done carelessly. The Atlantic Perspective keeps the option open -- keeps open the chance for humanity to succeed, as world federalists would put it, not entirely without reason. Those who oppose world government will have plenty of opportunities to say no to further steps, plenty of time to argue against the option’s being taken; and plenty of time to consider if they haven’t been mistaken in treating the goal as intrinsically bad.

Finally, it can be said, by those who join in the current advocacy of a radical enlargement of the Western institutions to encompass the Third World, that the Atlantic perspective is in the end just such a radical enlargement, it merely delays it and puts it a long time off before receiving the benefits of it. The present study has opposed that advocacy of a radical enlargement; but what, it may be asked, is the difference, apart from timing?

The answer, again, is that the timing makes all the difference in the world. It is the difference between an enlargement that preserves the West, as the Atlantic Perspective has done and would continue in a natural manner to do, and an enlargement that submerges the West. The difference between an enlargement that maintains the institutions of Western unity and their cohesion, and an enlargement that dilutes them and weakens their capabilities for acting jointly. Between an enlargement that is sober and one that is enthusiastic to the point of inebriation; that helps, or hurts; is self-enhancing, or self-destructive. The radical enlargement strategy would not be truly an “enlargement” of the West at all, but a self-euthanasia of the West.

Western enlargement has been for the past century a true enlargement: a careful enlargement of the West itself, not something that submerges the West. In the next century too, it should remain a genuine enlargement of the West.

Enlargement in some form is all but inevitable in the long run, thanks to the attractiveness of the West. What is at issue in the current rush toward a radical enlargement is, rather, this: whether the West will be preserved or submerged by its future enlargements.

“Timing is Everything”: it is the same as saying, everything should be kept in the right sequence, the right strategic perspective. But this is only to say that Perspective is Everything.

With the Atlantic Perspective presently still relegated to the back of the public mind, there is a growing problem of mistakes in timing. Serious mistakes are being urged, to some extent implemented, on a basis of acceptance of the Declinist perspective -- letting everyone into the Atlantic institutions, reducing them to global fora, within which Multipolarism can reign unhindered. Serious mistakes were also made by the last Administration from Democratic Peace taken as a full paradigm -- Democracy Everywhere Now, the universal solvent for problems of war and terrorism.

With the Atlantic Perspective in the forefront of the mind, it is likely that once again the West will make a practice of getting the timing right, as was done in years of the Marshall Plan and the founding of the EC and NATO. Planning can flow once again in a viable sequence. That, after all, is what a sound perspective is for: it enables policy to fall into place.