First published in French, Le labyrinthe des égarés: L’Occident et ses adversaires (2023) and La défaite de l’Occident (2024) appear simultaneously in Spanish and present opposite versions of the decline of the West. Although both the Lebanese-born French writer and the French demographer and political scientist express sympathy for that Global South often set against the Global North as ‘the Rest,’ their attitudes toward ‘the West’ diverge. Amin Maalouf concedes that the decline is real, but points out that “all those who fight against the West and challenge its supremacy... are even more bankrupt than it is,” so “neither the Westerners nor their rivals have the capacity, today, to lead humanity out of the labyrinth in which it finds itself.” Emmanuel Todd, on the contrary, thinks that “it is a Western crisis, and more specifically an American terminal crisis, that threatens the planet,” and explains why “the rest of the world is rooting for Russia” in its clash with the West in Ukraine.
Le labyrinthe des égarés examines the recent history of three great nations – Meiji Japan, Soviet Russia, and China – that have challenged the supremacy of a West represented first by the Europe of colonial metropolises and since the early 20th century by the USA, which “militarily defeated Japan, came out the winner of the Cold War with the USSR, and is facing up to the rise of China.” Maalouf elegantly sums up the conventional history of the contest between blocs, featuring a gallery of personalities and a collection of microhistories. His narrative closes with the ‘parallel lives’ and the current standoff between China and the US, concluding with the Ukraine war, where the lack of condemnation by many African, Asian, and Latin American countries is attributed to the persistence of anti-colonial sentiment and the perception of a double standard in the conduct of the West.
In contrast, La défaite de l’Occident begins in Ukraine, enumerating the war’s surprises, from the military resistance of the invaded country and the economic resistance of the invading one to the weakening of European autonomy, the industrial limitations of the US, and the ideological solitude of the West. Todd examines Russia’s resilience to sanctions, deplores the assisted suicide of a Europe that has forgone Russian gas, and thinks that the US is run by an irrational, nihilistic oligarchy, as evidenced by its decisions on Gaza. The analyst, who foresaw the collapse of the USSR, now predicts that Russia will win the war in Ukraine, because for them this is an existential matter, which for Washington it is not. In the transition from neoliberalism to nihilism, he sees the world divided between countries with a nuclear, individualistic family structure and those with a communitarian family system which is both authoritarian and egalitarian. The tension between the nuclear family (the foundation of liberal democracy) and the communitarian system (found above all in the Global South) are the main axes of his lucid interpretation of the contemporary world. If the demographer and political scientist is right, ‘the Rest’ will prevail over ‘the West,’ and Kiev will be another Saigon, another Baghdad, or another Kabul.
