Jean-Marie Guéhenno, former deputy secretary general at the UN, professor at Columbia University, New York Posted on August 17, 2023 at 12:27. Modified on August 17, 2023 at 12:30 p.m.
The Summer Debates of “Time”: The West and the Others
This summer, The weather again entrusts its spaces devoted to opinions to several personalities, each coordinating a week around a given theme.
From “old to new fractures” to “declines and alternations” via “values and measure”: the relationship between the “West and the other” is to be found in the file concocted by Professor Mohamed Mahmoud Mohamedou and his guests
Is the West in decline? Oswald Spengler answered in the affirmative a little over a hundred years ago. Was he right? With the First World War, old Europe had committed suicide, but the United States of America took up the Western torch; the 20th century, for better or for worse, was a Western century, and more precisely, an American one. Is the West now reaching the end of its historic path? The crisis of American democracy, illustrated by the election of Donald Trump and his possible re-election, the remarkable success of China and the rise of the “rest” of the world feed the doubt of Westerners in themselves, and the doubt of the rest of the world to the West.
Let us first recognize that the very idea of the West is a Western concept. This simplifying aggregation, which ignores the multiple differences between countries, is characteristic of a thought that also invented the idea of the world. The West, which was at first limited to Europe, has conquered the world. This conquest is as ambiguous as the relationship of the West to the world. We find there the curiosity of scholars and the universalism of philosophers, but also the violence of the conquistadors and the greed of the colonists. The descendants of those who suffered Western violence – the slave trade, the plunder of resources, the destruction of the planet – are now asking for reparations. Paradoxically, this perspective is situated in a universalist Western logic where the world makes a system and where justice must be assessed at the level of the planet. Like the anti-colonialists of yesterday, who turned the critical thought of the West against the colonizer by appealing to the European Karl Marx, they use and enrich them with concepts born in the West. The last victory of the West is perhaps to provide the concepts which make it possible to put it in its place.
Le Temps publishes chronicles, written by members of the editorial staff or outsiders, as well as opinions and forums, offered to personalities or requested by them. These texts reflect the point of view of their authors. They do not represent the position of the media.
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2023-08-17 10:27:54
#crisis #West #Temps
